[To suggest an essay topic, email us at Writeon@RoyKlein.com.]

Jose, Can You Stay? 

In the tortured, half-century history of the New York Mets, the Amazins’ have won two whole World Series championships.  And that’s the good news.

The bad news?  Well, they’ve made it to the playoffs in just just five other seasons (meaning they’ve been regular-season also-rans a whopping 86% of the time). They’ve never had a no-hitter pitched for them.  None of their players has ever won an M.V.P. award.  And, until this past season, none of their players had ever won a batting title.

This latter indignity came to an end in 2011, when shortstop Jose Reyes captured the National League batting crown by finishing the season with a robust .337 “average” (in quotes because it’s not really an average at all but, rather, a percentage comprised of base hits divided by official times at bat). 

So, is a hearty “woo-hoo” in order?  Nope!  Remember, these are the Mets we’re talking about. And, as usual, they managed to turn what should have been a big-time positive for the franchise into yet another, angst-filled negative for its beleaguered fans.

For one thing, Reyes is now an unrestricted free agent.  Which means he can auction his services to the highest bidder for the next fice or more years.  This puts the Mets – who are widely rumored to be in serious financial trouble due, in large part, to their owners’ involvement with Bernie Madoff – into a no-win, damned-if-they-do-damned-if they-don’t situation.  They can take a big risk and keep Reyes (whose history of leg injuries raise questions about his value and durability going forward) by overpaying him.  Or they can take a big risk and let him walk (gingerly) to another team – possibly even to the hated Phillies – where he’s liable to stay healthy and be spectacular for years to come.  No wonder Mets fans are wringing their hands.

What may be worse, though, is how Reyes secured his batting title.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not like he backed into winning his race against the Brewers’ Ryan Braun.  After all, going into the final game of the season, Reyes had pulled ahead of Braun by getting eight hits – including two homers – in the three previous games, as well as staling a couple of bases and making a few extraordinary defensive plays during that span.  The problem was how Reyes handled that final game.

As widely reported, Reyes approached Terry Collins, the Mets’ manager, before the team’s last game, told him that he planned to try a bunt when he led off for the Mets in the bottom of the first, and said that, if he succeeded in getting a hit, he wanted to be removed from the game.  Collins agreed to accommodate him.

Sure enough, Reyes bunted for a single, and Collins immediately removed him for a pinch runner.   Because it was a day game, many of the fans – most of whom were there for the sole purpose of watching Reyes win the batting title while playing what might be his last game as a Met and eventually honoring him with a long ovation when he was removed late in the game – had not even settled into their seats before Jose already was gone.  Talk about your anti-climax!

So, yes, the Mets finally have their batting champ.  But, somehow, the team’s average remains way below the dreaded “Mendoza Line.”      

Death, be not Proud

At almost exactly the same time that Georgia was temporarily postponing its execution of Troy Davis Wednesday evening, Texas was executing Lawrence Russell Brewer.  But, aside from this macabre scheduling coincidence, the circumstances of the two cases couldn’t have been more different.

Unlike the Davis case, the Brewer execution caused little controversy.  There was no general hue and cry for clemency.  No passionate pleas for mercy from politicians or religious leaders.   No crowd of protestors participating in a candlelight vigil (although long-time capital-punishment opponent Dick Gregory was there).  And no wall-to-wall media coverage. 

The comparative lack of sturm and drang surrounding Brewer’s execution should come as no surprise.  Because, if anyone ever “deserved to die,” it would be Brewer.  An avowed white supremacist, Brewer was convicted of participating in one of the most heinous, shocking crimes in recent memory – the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., an African American.

Despite the stark differences in the circumstances of Wednesday’s two executions, Troy Davis’s case actually may have provided the strongest argument to date for sparing the life of Lawrence Brewer.  Because Davis’s plight – where doubt about his guilt arose years after his trial – has helped put a human face on those dry, scholarly statistical studies highlighting the number of  death-row inmates who were unjustly convicted due to such issues as erroneous eyewitness identifications, false confessions, police misconduct and incentivized testimony (paid informers or snitches).

And humanizing the issue has compelled many Americans to ask this question:  How can we ensure that wrongly convicted people are not executed in the future?  The answer is simple:  Outlaw capital punishment altogether.  Even for people like Lawrence Brewer!  After all, it’s better to spare a thousand Brewers than to execute a single Troy Davis.

If this reasoning sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard something like it before.  It was the 12th - century philosopher, Maimonides, who said, "It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death."  Maimonides based his logic on an even more venerable source – the Old Testament, in which God assured Abraham that He would not destroy the city of Sodom so long as any righteous people lived there (Genesis 18:23-32). 

Ultimately, whether we impose the death penalty as a punishment should not turn on a case-by-case evaluation of the awfulness of a particular crime, the identity of the perpetrator or victim, or any post-conviction doubt about the defendant’s guilt or innocence.  Rather, it should depend on a much more fundamental inquiry:  As a free, democratic society, are we willing to sacrifice the lives of people who may be innocent just so our government can exercise its “right” to execute a Lawrence Brewer?  Unless the answer is “no,” we’re not nearly as free and democratic as we think.

Crossing the Rubicon. . .or  Maybe Not

After defeating an insurrection in Gaul, Julius Caesar and his legions traveled south, toward Rome.  As they reached the river Rubicon, though, Caesar was faced with a major decision.  The river marked the boundary between the Roman Province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper.  And it was a capital offense – punishable by death – for a Roman general to lead his troops into Italy.  So, if Caesar chose to cross the Rubicon, the inevitable result would be armed conflict – a civil war.

Despite these risks and consequences, Caesar decided to go for it. “Alea iacta est,” he famously said.  Which means “the die is cast.”  Or, possibly, “Roll me a seven, baby, ‘cause papa needs a new pair of shoes.”   Regardless, Caesar didn’t crap out by rolling snake eyes.  To the contrary, he hit the jackpot – becoming sole leader of the Roman Empire.  Of course, he was assassinated a few years later, proving once again that gambling doesn’t pay (eventually, the “House” always wins).

In any case, Caesar’s bold act created a time-honored metaphor; “Crossing the Rubicon” has come to mean reaching the point of no return.

Caesar’s decision was featured in an article that appeared recently in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.  Written by John Tierney, the piece is about a phenomenon called “decision fatigue.”  According to scientific research, each decision we make during the day slowly saps our strength to continue making decisions as the day goes on (something akin to what Freud called “ego depletion” and what we commonly refer to as will power) until – by the end of the day – we no longer have the energy or ability to make smart decisions.  At that point, we either act impulsively and make poor decisions or we make no decisions at all (which, of course, is itself a decision). 

We justify this latter behavior by convincing ourselves that we’re acting prudently – keeping our options open until we get more information; never reaching that point of no return. Alas, this kick-the-can-down-the- road mentality can lead to paralysis by analysis and/or its evil twin, procrastination.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t need a scientific study to tell me about decision fatigue.  I experience it every day.  In fact, I suffer from CDFS (Chronic Decision-Fatigue Syndrome).  Chances are I was born with it.   I can lead my horse to the river Rubicon, but I can’t make it put on a Roman tunic.

Is there a cure?  Yes! Believe it or not (according to Tierney’s article), the researchers think that glucose is the answer.  So, if it’s late in the afternoon, you’re on a diet, you’re starving and you can’t decide between donuts and carrot sticks, go for the donuts.  That will give you the will power to eat the carrots.

Because of my high blood sugar, glucose may not be the best solution for my decision fatigue.  Plus, when I go to the local, gourmet Italian-ices store for my daily fix, I can never decide:  Pineapple or peach?  A quart or a galloon? So I’d first have to eat super premium ice cream to give me the energy to make a decision on the Italian ices.   But, first, I’d have to eat a few of those donuts so I can decide what flavor ice cream to eat.  And so on.  I might become the most decisive person in the world.  But I’d also weigh 500 lbs.  So, like Caesar after his Rubicon-crossing decision, I wouldn’t be around much longer.

The best bet for me is to forget the Rubicon altogether and listen to Yogi Berra.  Next time I get to a fork in the road, I’m going to take it. Or maybe not.

Perry-lous 

The First Amendment isn’t the only provision of our Constitution guaranteeing the separation of Church and State.  There’s also the last clause of Article VI:  “[B]ut no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Pretty cut and dried, isn’t it?  It means that a Muslim can be elected President (Allah  be praised!).  So can a Jew (Holy Moses!).  Even an atheist, for Chrissakes (God forbid!).

Which brings me – kicking and screaming – to the latest declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination: Texas Governor Rick Perry.  He’s been in the race for five minutes, and he’s already testing my faith in Article VI.

Like every other person ever to serve as our president, Perry is a Christian.   In fact, like every other president besides JFK, he’s a Protestant.  But, at least based on his recent Prayer Rally, it looks like Perry’s particular brand of Christianity is . . . um. . .well. . .different.

As Rachel Maddow reported last week, Perry’s rally featured a bunch of leaders of a religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).  According to Forrest Wilder, author of an article about the group published in the Texas Observor, whom Maddow interviewed on her show, NAR pastors see themselves as modern-day prophets or apostles, directly linked to God. They believe that they and their followers are destined to stealthily climb to the tops of what they call the “Seven Mountains” of society – which include such institutions as our civilian government, the media and the world of arts and entertainment – so they literally can lord over everything and prepare (i.e., “cleanse”) us for the coming Rapture.  Yikes!

The first step in their plan for world domination is to use an “army of God” to infiltrate and commandeer our government.  And it appears they’ve chosen Rick Perry to lead the way.  Double yikes!

Wait.  It gets worse.  Some of their wacky ideas include a belief that Oprah Winfrey is the anti-Christ (or, at least, his precursor).  And a belief that the Statue of Liberty is an idol representing a pagan, anti-Christian Goddess.  Triple yikes!

Okay.  I know what you’re thinking:  It’s just as unfair to paint Perry with the NAR brush as it was to paint Obama with the Reverend Wright brush.  Maybe you’re right.  Ultimately, it could depend on whether Perry distances himself from these nuts (as Obama eventually did with the not-so-good reverend) or whether he continues to embrace the NAR-ly philosophy.  And I’m betting on the latter.  After all, Perry’s Prayer Rally was funded by an organization that thinks – among other really scary things – that the First Amendment’s religious freedoms apply only to Christians (yes, that’s a rare quadruple yikes).  If it turns out that Perry continues to make nice with the NAR folks then, as far as I’m concerned, his religious beliefs would disqualify him from being president, regardless of what Article VI says.

In the meantime – NAR aside – Perry’s political philosophy is also pretty damned crazy.  For example, I’m not even sure he thinks there ought to be a federal government at all.  He’s on record as saying that the 16th Amendment (authorizing a federal income tax) and the 17th Amendment (providing for the direct election of U.S. Senators) are unconstitutional.  He’s threatened to have Texas secede from the Union.  He’s impliedly suggested that Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke is a traitor who ought to be lynched.  And he’s impliedly accused President Obama of not loving America.

I’m out of yikes (sorry, but a quintuple yikes is so dangerous that it’s never even been attempted in an Olympic essay-writing competition).  It’s almost enough to make Michele Bachman sound like a moderate.  Her only really wacky statement this week (at least so far) was to wish Elvis Presley a happy birthday on the anniversary of the King’s death.

So, when it comes time to select the GOP candidate for president, I hope Republican voters are Perry, Perry careful.  Regardless, though, it all should make for a wildly entertaining campaign over the next 15 months.

The Flap Over Circumcision

In case you haven’t heard yet, San Franciscans will be voting this November on whether to adopt a law criminalizing the circumcision of males under 18.  According to Jewish Week, the ban is being spearheaded (caution: more bad puns to follow) by a San Diego-based advocacy group called MGM Bill (with MGM standing for male genital mutilation), which has drafted anti-circumcision legislation for 46 states.  MGM Bill is using San Francisco as a testes case. So the San Francisco vote may just be the tip of the iceberg.

The group’s founder, Matthew Hess, is reported to have said that he is trying to protect boys from what he considers a barbaric mutilation of their bodies. Hess became an activist after deciding in his 20s that his own circumcision as an infant resulted in diminished sexual sensitivity as an adult.  In other words, this guy has some set of balls.

Whatever Hess’s motives are (he sounds like a bit of a putz to me), there may well be an anti-Semitic thrust to the proposed ban. For example, a comic book called Foreskin Man gained notoriety recently for depicting a handsome hero battling against a hook-nosed "Monster Mohel" to prevent a baby boy's circumcision.

I’m pretty confident that any circumcision ban – whether enacted in San Francisco or elsewhere – would be nipped in the bud.  Any way you slice it, such a ban should be held unconstitutional as a blatant violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion.  After all, Jews and Muslims alike practice circumcision, which is mandated in the Bible itself (Genesis 17). 

In fact, opponents of the ban already have filed suit to have the proposal stricken from the November ballot.  And Congressmen Brad Sherman of California (a Jew) and Keith Ellison of Minnesota (the first Muslim elected to Congress) are co-sponsoring a bill preventing localities from banning the practice.  So Matthew Hess and his misguided crusaders will probably be given the shaft sooner than later.

Still, the whole controversy has aroused my intellectual curiosity about the practice.  Sure, I’ve been involved in a handful of circumcision ceremonies myself (once as the circumcisee, which I was too young to remember, though I’m sure it was nothing more than a glans-ing blow).   But, I realized, I didn’t know all that much about it.  So I did a little research on the subject (albeit barely enough to prick the surface).  Here are a few of the tidbits I discovered.

The ceremonial Jewish circumcision (called a bris or brith) actually consists of three separate procedures.  As Jay Michaelson recently wrote in The Jewish Daily Forward, there’s the milah (removal of the tip of the foreskin); the periah (tearing and removal of the entire foreskin, also known as the prepuce); and metzizah (removal of the blood from the wound).

According to Michaelson, at one time some construed the Bible as requiring only the milah (a bris-ket, if you will), which explains Michelangelo’s depiction of David’s genitalia.   As for the metzizah, mohels traditionally performed that procedure by directly sucking the blood out of the wound.  I’m guessing that they probably use a glass tube these days, except perhaps in the shtetls of the Transylvanian mountains. 

Circumcisions, of course, have been around for millennia, which raised this question for me:  Was Jesus (who, after all, was a Jewish kid) circumcised? 

Yep!  At least according to Luke 2:21.  As a result, some Christian churches still celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on January 1.  What a way to ring out the old and ring in the new!

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, a few hundred years after Christ’s death, relics purporting to be Jesus’s foreskin began to show up all over Europe. According to author David Farley, as many as 18 Holy Prepuces were in various European towns during the Middle Ages, all of them with magical powers.  The Baby Jesus must have been really well-endowed; it’s good to be the Son of God!

Alas, most of the Holy Prepuces were lost or stolen during the Reformation and the French Revolution.  In fact, the earliest known specimen – which Charlemagne gave to Pope Leo III in 800 when the pontiff  crowned him Emperor – went missing during a 1627 battle called (I kid you not)  the Sack of Rome.. (You can’t make this stuff up).  Luckily, it was rediscovered in 1557, in the village of Calcata (not to be confused with Cal-cut-ta). So many miracles ensued – like perfumed fog enveloping the village – that the Church officially approved its authenticity.

Things were quiet for a few centuries.  But, in 1856, a workman at the abbey of Charoux found a long-lost piece of the Holy Foreskin that Charlemagne (who must have been the world’s leading purveyor the Lord’s prepuce) had given to the monks. This led to a heated theological debate over which of the two competing foreskin relics was legit.  The Church didn’t exactly resolve the issue in a Solomon-esque way; rather, it ruled in 1900 that anyone writing or speaking of the Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated.  That didn’t end the controversy, though.  So, in 1954, the Church imposed an even harsher version of excommunication – vivandi (shunning). Finally, during the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, the Church removed the Feast of the Circumcision from the Latin church calendar altogether.

These little snippets are more than just interesting lore.  They re-confirm what we already knew:  Circumcision is an integral part of the fabric of the Judeo-Christian tradition that is the very linchpin of America’s value system.   Barbaric mutilation?  Hardly!

Matthew Hess probably should see a sex therapist.  But criminalizing circumcision? That would be the unkindest non-cut of all.Plus, it could lead to generations of unruly boys.  You know what they say:  “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

“Happy” Fourth

When Jefferson was enumerating humankind’s inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, he simply could have parroted John Locke’s trio – life, liberty and property. He didn’t, of course.  Instead, he chose to replace “property” with the “pursuit of happiness” (which meant, in 18th Century parlance, the practice of happiness).

Why did Jefferson do this?  Don’t ask me; I didn’t even know the man.  But, based on what some Jefferson scholars have said, here’s one theory:

Jefferson understood that true societal happiness could exist only in a democracy.  And that, for any democracy to work, society needed a strong middle class. To be sure, property ownership was essential to the development of a middle class back in 1776 (one of Jefferson’s motives for the Louisiana Purchase may have been to make more property available for upwardly mobile – and westward-bound -- Americans).  But perhaps Jefferson recognized that, because land is a finite resource, property ownership wouldn’t always be Americans’ main road to middle-class status.  So he eschewed “property” for a broader – albeit seemingly ethereal-sounding – inalienable right. 

What Jefferson was saying, then, was that Americans have the inalienable right to engage in any practice that will enable them to join the middle class, thus strengthening our democracy and assuring our long-term happiness. 

Turns out that Jefferson was right.  As our agrarian economy was replaced by a manufacturing economy, land ownership gave way to factory work (with employees protected by industrial and trade unions) as America’s principal gateway to the middle class.  And when a service economy later supplanted manufacturing, it was government service (with workers protected by public-employee unions) and office work that became the main entrees to the middle class.

As we celebrate America’s 235th birthday, though, our middle class is in jeopardy.  Democrats and Republicans each have opposing proposals for saving it.  Time will tell whose policies are best (spoiler alert – it’s the Democrats’; in my humble opinion, Republican proposals actually will accelerate the middle class’s decline).   

We simply can’t afford to get this one wrong.  The collapse of America’s middle class would make it increasingly difficult for us as a society to exercise our inalienable right to pursue happiness and, thus, would threaten the very future of our democracy.

So it’s not enough for us to celebrate our nation’s birth today.  We also need to support those politicians whose policies will ensure that America has many happy returns.

U.S. – Open?

An old, framed plaque hangs on my office wall.  Dated December, 1941, it contains two sections:  A quote from FDR’s declaration of war against Japan and an inlaid depiction of the American flag.

The flag is accompanied by the Pledge of Allegiance, as follows:  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

If you’re paying attention, you probably noticed the absence of that magical phrase, “under God.”  Is this a typo?  Nope!  The phrase wasn’t in the original pledge, which Francis Bellamy (a Christian minister) wrote in 1892.  Nor was it in the version that Congress formally adopted in 1942. 

In fact. Congress didn’t add those two words to the Pledge until 1954.  For the 62 years before then, the Pledge worked just fine without them, thank you.

So what prompted the feds to try to fix something that wasn’t broken?  The Red Scare.  Or, more accurately, our government’s grossly flawed analysis of the threat that the Soviet Union posed to America. At least that’s my theory.

The reasoning went something like this: The Soviets banned religion.  Therefore, all communists were atheists.  Therefore, all atheists must be communists.  What better way to root out communist traitors at home than by expressly mentioning God in the national loyalty oath?

There was just one problem with this syllogism.  It ignored the fact that many patriotic Americans – folks who embraced freedom, justice, equality and other Judeo-Christian core values every bit as much as their God-fearing neighbors and who were willing to fight and die for their country – didn’t believe in God.  It was a tremendous insult to these loyal Americans (whom I like to call secular humanists or ethical culturists) for Congress to insert “under God” into the Pledge. 

Which brings me (kicking and screaming) to NBC’s television coverage of the U.S. Open Golf Tournament last weekend.  The event was held at the Congressional Golf Club in Bethesda, Maryland, and NBC decided to capitalize on the patriotic setting.  It began its coverage of Sunday’s final round by interspersing video of a group of children reciting the Pledge with video of U.S. Marines engaged in ceremonial drills.  Nice touch.  Except, somehow, the network managed to inadvertently edit out three words from the Pledge – “under God, indivisible.”   Oops!

NBC was flooded with so many complaints for its gaffe that it made a live, on-air apology just a couple of hours later.  I’m guessing that the complaining callers, emailers, Facebookers, YouTubers and Tweeters weren’t all that upset about the missing “indivisible”; I’m probably being biased here, but I see them as intolerant types who are perfectly happy to foster divisiveness.  It was the AWOL “under God” that irked them.

In the meantime, patriotic, loyal American secular humanists and ethical culturalists now have been waiting 59 years for Congress to apologize for marginalizing their U.S. citizenship by adding the phrase in the first place.  If I were them, I wouldn’t hold my breath.    When it comes to God, the U.S. isn’t so open. 

Damn Yankees

No, this isn’t about the baseball team.  Although, as long as I’m at it, damn them, too.  And it’s not about the Broadway musical about the baseball team, either.  It’s about the word “Yankees” itself.  Because the word has so many different meanings to so many different groups of people that it’s damned confusing.

I’m certainly not the first person to notice all the confusion.  An aphorism attributed to E. B. White was particularly clever.  My far-less clever offering is this:  To Mexicans, a Yankee is any American; to Southerners, a Yankee is any Northerner; To Northerners, a Yankee is any New Englander (hence, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court); to New Englanders, a Yankee is any Mainer (yes, that’s what people from Maine are really called).

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Mainers refer to Canadians asYankees, that Canadians refer to Nova Scotians as Yankees, that Nova Scotians refer to Laplanders as Yankees and that Laplanders refer to North Polers as Yankees.

I decided that researching the etymology of “Yankees” would be the best way to end this geographic confusion once and for all.  But the origin of the word has itself been the subject of much confusing debate.  In fact, there are as many different theories about the word’s genesis as there are different meanings for it.  Damn Yankees!

So I synthesized all the theories – cherry-picking the best parts from each – to come up with the following official explanation:

The most likely source of “Yankee” is the Dutch name Janke, meaning "little Jan" or "little John," a nickname that dates back to the 1680s.  Dutch settlers of the New World used the word as a derogatory term for English colonists, whom the Dutch considered to be pirates stealing their territory. 

By the time of the American Revolution, the British contemptuously called all Americans Yankees (or its abbreviation, “Yanks”).   American soldiers then adopted this term of derision, converting it to one of national pride by calling themselves Yankees and even using the name in patriotic songs (how dandy!).  

But derisive use of the word nevertheless remained alive.  And it intensified in the South during the Civil War, when it was used in the Confederacy to refer to those Americans who were loyal to the Union.

By the early 20th Century, “Yankees” again referred generally to all Americans.   Whether the word was used derisively or as a compliment depended on the location of the user.  In the Americas, where the United States had employed the doctrine of manifest destiny throughout the 1800s to inexorably expand its sphere of influence, folks weren’t too happy with us:  “Yankee go home,” they chanted. 

On the other hand, over there in Europe, the Allies couldn’t wait for us to join them in World War I.  “The Yanks are coming,” George M. Cohan wrote, and people cheered.  

In short, just like beauty, Yankee may be in eye of the beholder.

Which still doesn’t explain the New York Yankees (damn them!).  Are they named for English colonists?  Revolutionary War soldiers?  Union soldiers during the Civil War?  Occupiers of Mexico?  World War I doughboys?

This isn’t a multiple-choice question.  But if you answered “None of the above,” you’re right!

Believe it or not, the team famously known for the past century as the New York Yankees entered baseball’s fledgling American League in 1901 as the Baltimore Orioles.  After a couple of disastrous seasons in Baltimore, the struggling franchise moved to New York, taking up residence in Hilltop Park in the Washington Heights section of The Bronx (now the campus of world-famous Presbyterian Hospital) and changing its name to the Highlanders.   Following another decade of ineptitude (ah, the good old days!), the Highlanders moved to Manhattan’s Polo Grounds, sharing the cavernous ballpark with the National League’s venerable New York Giants.

To distinguish between the Giants and the Highlanders, New York newspapers – following the practice being used in other cities where new American League teams had joined existing National League teams (like Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago) – began occasionally referring to the Highlanders as the New York Americans.  But “Highlanders” and “Americans” both were pretty long words for newspaper columns, so the papers started abbreviating the team’s name by using a nickname – a synonym at the time for Americans:  the Yankees, which became the team’s official name in 1913.

Hmmm.  So it looks like this piece turned out to be about the baseball team after all (damn Yankees!).  And the team’s history tracks that of the word “Yankees” itself.  Because, just as the English Jankes pushed out the Dutch, the New York Yankees eventually pushed out the rival Giants.  Just as Yankees came to dominate the Americas, the New York Yankees eventually dominated Major League  Baseball.   And just as the meaning of “Yankee” is in the eye of the beholder (largely dependent on geography), so is allegiance to the baseball team.      

Yet another instance of baseball as a metaphor for etymology.

Winning Isn’t Everything. . .

. . .And, with sincerest apologies to Vince Lombardi (who, by the way, should have succeeded Jim Lee Howell as coach of the New York Football Giants in 1959, but that’s a different story), it isn’t the only thing, either.  In fact, it sometimes may be the wrong thing.  Or, more accurately, the wrong word to describe something.  At least that’s what the bald, Swedish man of Hungarian descent told me during the baseball game.  And I think he’s right.

I guess I’d better explain:  I recently visited Citifield to witness a rare occurrence – a double header, courtesy of a rain-out two days earlier.  My party included the Swede, to whom I was explaining the many subtleties of the great American pastime.  In the fourth inning of the first game, with the score 4-2, I remarked that the Mets were winning.  “How’s that possible?”, the Swede asked, “The game’s not over yet.” 

I’d never thought of that before.  But the Swede was absolutely correct.  As an adjective, the word “winning” is defined as describing a successful or triumphant effort.  Like the winning entry in a contest.  So a team technically isn’t winning a game until it’s been won.  Up to that point, a team is merely “ahead” or “leading” or “has scored more runs so far than the opposing team.” 

Conversely, of course, a team can’t be losing until the game is over, either.  It can only be “trailing” or “behind” because it’s “scored fewer runs so far than the opposing team.”

In other words, Yogi knew whereof he spoke when he noted that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

As if to demonstrate the Swede’s point, the Mets wound up losing the first game, despite their early lead.  Then, after being ahead in the opening  innings of the second game, they managed to lose that one, too.  For the record, that made five losses in a row in which they had led at some point. 

Just like the poor miner in the Grateful Dead song, Cumberland Blues, the Mets can’t win for losin’.   Jeez, what a bunch of losers!

For die-hard Met fans like me, whining isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.

Bizarroville

That’s not the name of the private, gated community where I live.  But it certainly could be.  Because its rules and regulations are so arcane and, occasionally, downright draconian that they seem to have been written by a three-man committee – Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka and George Orwell.

Take our traffic code (Please!).  The community’s speed limit is 20 mph.  And, to discourage residents from exceeding that speed, stop signs are everywhere, including in the middle of non-intersected straight-aways.  So far, so good.

Despite these measures, though, there is more speeding going on here than in one of those Vin Diesel movies.  Why?  Well, for one thing, our rent-a-cop security company (or, more accurately, our rent-an-old guy-at- $8.25-an-hour-who-always-dreamed-of-being-a-cop-but-could-never-pass-the-tests-and-thank-God-he-doesn’t-have-a-gun security company) patrols the community only from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. 

Yes, you heard me right.  From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., when the community’s streets are filled with cars, delivery trucks, school busses, pedestrians and children, no one is around to enforce the rules of the road.  It’s only in the middle of the night – when the deserted streets of the community make it look like a ghost town – that the very occasional driver is subject to a fine for committing a moving violation.

But at least any night-time lead-foots (or is it lead-feet?) and drag-racers will be fined for speeding, right?  Wrong! Our security company doesn’t have any radar equipment and, therefore, has never issued a speeding ticket even while on active patrol in the dead of night because it can never “prove” that a violation’s been committed, and the community doesn’t want a violation to be based on “he-said-she-said” testimony.

Except, apparently, when it comes to stop-sign violations.  Because security regularly issues those (but, of course, only from 10 pm to 6 am), even though there are no traffic cameras at our stop signs to record activity and, therefore, it’s always just a case of the security officer’s word against the resident motorist’s word.  

To avoid potentially nasty confrontations between security officers and residents, security doesn’t stop the vehicle and issue a ticket at the time of the alleged infraction.  Instead, security submits the ticket to the community’s office.  Then, several days after the fact, the resident is notified by mail that she failed to obey an unspecified stop sign several nights earlier, making it virtually impossible for her to refute the charges (unless she can prove that she and her vehicle were elsewhere at the time).  

Wait, it gets curiouser.  Let’s return to the day time:  In the absence of security, why can’t a resident – in the interest of everyone’s safety – report that he saw a fellow resident speeding or blowing past a stop sign?  Well, we can’t have that!  We don’t want residents snitching on each other.  Except, of course, there’s an exception.  If a resident sees a fellow resident walking his dog anywhere except in the middle of the street, he can lodge a complaint against the offending dog-walker, leading to a fine.  And, just for inconsistency’s sake, security personnel are forbidden from issuing tickets for dog-walking violations.

Where does all this leave us?  You can drive around at 80 MPH all day and all night as long as, from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., you remember to come to a screeching halt at each stop sign along the way.  But if you’re driving at 10 mph at 2:00 a.m. and come to an admittedly oxymoronic “rolling stop” before turning right at a stop sign, you’re liable to get a letter in the mail  a few days later fining you $50.00.

And if you happen to hit a dog walker – catapulting the helpless pedestrian and his unsuspecting pooch onto the community’s common-area grass – while speeding in broad daylight in full view of a bunch of eye witnesses, have no fear.  You won’t receive a speeding ticket.  But the dog-walker will be fined for ending up in a restricted area. 

You can’t make this stuff up (unless you’re Huxley, Kafka or Orwell).

Like I said, it’s Bizarroville. 

Rest Assured

I’ve always needed a lot of sleep (10 or so hours per night seems to work best for me, often supplemented with a nap or three during the day).  And I’ve always felt guilty about it. 

After all, we’re taught at an early age that “too much” sleep is a sign of laziness.  If you overslept by just a few minutes on a school day, your mom was likely to wake you with, “Rise and shine, lazy bones.”  When you got to school, you learned that “the early bird catches the worm.”  And Ben Franklin reminded you that “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

The implication couldn’t have been clearer:  Early to bed and late to rise would make me sick, impoverished and stupid.  So stupid, in fact, that I wouldn’t even be able to come up with an adage that rhymed.  To hell with Poor Richard!  What about Poor Roy? Why couldn’t I have been a girl, to whom Franklin’s truism apparently didn’t apply?

And then there was my cub-scout troop’s visit to Thomas Edison’s place in New Jersey.  I learned that the Wizard of Menlo Park barely slept at all.  More proof that sleep prevented you from becoming a genius.  It was clear that I’d never reach my goal of having an electrical-utility monopoly named for me.  Who cares, I decided.  “Con Klein” sounded pretty silly.

As an adult, I’ve searched in vain for experts who would validate my theory that 10 hours a night represents the optimal amount of sleep for a healthy, “normal” human being.  The best I could come up with was the occasional study claiming to show that we “need” eight hours of sleep a night.  Eight hours?  That’s a cat nap for me. 

So I was delighted to watch a piece on TV recently that vigorously extolled the virtues of sleep.  The show was Sunday Morning on CBS.  And the commentator was – of all people – Ben Stein!

As a liberal pundit, I’ve never agreed with Stein on anything.  But here we were, seeing shut-eye to shut-eye.  Go figure!  I guess it’s true that snoozing makes strange bedfellows.

Anyway, Stein attributed his life-long devotion to sleep to Frank Knight, a friend and colleague of Stein’s own father, whom Stein identified as a famous economist.  But I’d never heard of Knight.  I guess I must have slept through any discussion about him in my college Economics course.  Come to think of it, I may have slept through that entire semester.

So I Googled him.  Turns out Knight was one of the founders of the “Chicago school,” a neo-classical approach to macroeconomics that rejected the Keynesian philosophy of FDR’s New Deal.  Sounds pretty conservative to me, and not something I’d ever embrace.  But I didn’t research it further.  I fell asleep instead.

I doubt that Knight would have minded.  Because he summarized his philosophy of sleep this way:   "Never waste any time you could spend sleeping."  Ah!  Words to snore by.

In fact, I’m going to take 40 winks right now.  Good Knight!

Bowling for Dollars

It’s right out of Marketing 101:  There are really just two ways for a TV commercial to get consumers to buy a product:  (1) Explain how/why the advertiser’s new product is something that you absolutely must have or (2) Explain how/why the advertiser’s existing product is better than the competitors’.   Which brings me, of course, to bowling balls.

No, not commercials for bowling balls; I’m not even sure there ever were TV commercials  for bowling balls, although I do recall somewhat spirited debates back in the day down at Falcaro’s Lanes in Inwood, Long Island, over whether Brunswick or AMF made the better bowling products.  (I was a Brunswick man myself, although I have no idea why).  I’m talking about commercials for vacuum cleaners.

Remember those?  One advertiser’s machine actually could pick up a bowling ball!  Who wouldn’t want that kind of power? In contrast, of course, the competitor’s vacuum failed miserably in its feeble attempt to do so.  How lame!

I admit it.  The commercial sucked me right in.  I couldn’t wait to go out and buy the world’s most powerful, bowling-ball-lifting, vacuum cleaner.

It wasn’t until I’d been using it at home for a few weeks that this revelation hit me:  I’ve never actually had to employ a vacuum cleaner to pick up a bowling ball.  In fact, the only bowling balls I’ve ever had to pick up were at a bowling alley.  Sure, they were a tad heavy.  But they conveniently had three holes drilled in them for my fingers, which made it relatively simple for me to lift one.  And, once I did, I walked a few feet, threw it down the lane and waited for it to be automatically returned to me.  No muss, no fuss.

What I routinely did need my vacuum cleaner for was to pick up small, lightweight objects like lint, dust, cat hair and pieces of string too small to throw out.  These items were all over my carpet.  In fact, they were so deeply imbedded in it that they appeared to have been glued directly into the carpet’s pile.  In other words, these sundry bits of unseemly shmutz were completely impervious to my bowling-ball-munching monster.

What’s more, none of these tiny, taunting, messy mites came equipped with pre-drilled finger holes, making it virtually impossible for me to pick them up manually, although I nevertheless tried mightily while crawling on my hands and knees, throwing my back out in the process and thus ending my career as a mediocre, wildly inconsistent bowler.  I ranted and raved, unable to keep my mouth out of the proverbial gutter.  And I went out on strike, refusing to use any vacuum for years.

Spare me the lecture.   I know what the advertiser did to me.  To quote the Dead, I was “set up like a bowling pin.”

But wait.  Have you seen the commercials for the Dyson vacuum?  The pitchman is the dashing inventor himself.  He’s British, which somehow makes the product seem more high-tech and sophisticated.  And it’s a completely new technology:  Ball™ technology, to be exact (although I have no clue how Dyson managed to trademark the word “ball”).

Anyway, they’ve done away with wheels altogether. The upright machines ride on a ball so they turn on a dime; no more back and forth around corners and obstacles.  And get this:  Inside the ball is the motor, giving the machine a lower center of gravity and improving maneuverability even further.

Yes, you heard me right:  Instead of the machine being able to lift a bowling ball, the machine pretty much is a bowling ball. 

Suspiciously absent from Dyson’s marketing material is any claim that the vacuum will be able to ingest lightweight objects like lint, dust, cat hair and pieces of string too small to throw out.  But who cares?  This new product is something that I absolutely must have!

Dead Presidents

When I was a kid, by fifth grade we were all expected to be able to recite the names of every U.S. President, in sequence.  No small feat, since there were 35 of them (34, if you counted Grover Cleveland only once).  It was some kind of academic rite of passage.

For good measure, most of us also could name all 50 U.S. states in alphabetical order, together with their respective capitals.  And just for fun, I made sure to know the names of all nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justices, all members of the President’s Cabinet, both U.S. Senators from New York and my congressman, state senator, state assemblyman and N.Y. City councilman.  (Then, again, I liked to show off).

I’m not here to indict our current educational system, our modern parenting skills or American culture’s priorities.  But I suspect that very few kids growing up today know any of the above information.  And I attribute this sad slide into societal civic somnabulance to a single celebratory event:  The creation of Presidents’ Day.

Now, no one needs to know that Lincoln was born on February 12 and Washington on February 22.  Instead, all our presidents have been lumped together into one day for one purpose – The Annual Presidents’ Day Sale!!!!!!  An entire generation of Americans has grown up believing that Washington and Lincoln were buffoons whose main contribution to the United States was hawking Japanese cars. 

Well, at least they both actually served the country as President.  Because some advertising agencies apparently don’t even know that much.  A radio commercial for Lowe’s gushes that it’s Presidents’ Day sale will save us “Washingtons” and “Benjamins.”  Just guessing, but my bet is that Lowe’s isn’t talking about Benjamin Harrison (whose countenance doesn’t even appear on any U.S. currency).  And, while Benjamin Franklin is on the $100 bill, he was never a president.  Neither was Hamilton ($10) nor Salmon Chase ($10,000).  Don’t believe me?  Then you can look it up.

So, if Lowe’s wants to do a radio ad mentioning the money its shoppers can save during its President’s Day sale, it should stick with Washington ($1), Jefferson ($2), Lincoln ($5), Jackson ($20), Grant ($50), McKinley ($500), Cleveland ($1,000), Madison ($5,000) and Wilson ($100,000). 

Of course, if people are saving Madisons and Wilsons at the Lowe’s sale, the company may have a bigger problem with its business model than with its radio ads.

Smitzy?

The holy alliance among the feminist movement, political correctness and word Nazis has succeeded in largely eradicating virtually every example of sexist language in the American lexicon.  An admirable achievement indeed, even though describing a first-year college student as a “freshperson” still may be a tad awkward-sounding.

But one vestige of linquistic sexism remains, like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island who continues to fight World War II, refusing to surrender even though it’s 1950.  Let me explain:

When Mr. Chief Justice Klein shows up in court wearing one black wingtip and one tassled cordovan loafer,  the assembled minions smile, shake their heads, roll their  and call him an absent-minded professor.  That’s not a criticism; it’s actually a compliment:  The great jurist is so preoccupied pondering the weighty issues of the day that he can’t be expected to worry about such mundane details as his footwear.

Okay.  Fair enough.  But what happens when Madam Justice Jones arrives for the day’s oral arguments with mascara on only one eye?  Well, no one calls her an absent-minded professor.  Instead, despite her tenure, she’s dismissed as a ditz.

Not exactly a compliment.  To the contrary, this brilliant judge is being stuck with the same label as a stereotypical dumb blond just because she may act a little scatterbrained from time to time. 

The stark, sexist distinction we use in describing brilliant but occasionally goofy men from brilliant but occasionally goofy women is unconscionable.  And I’m frankly surprised that it’s managed to escape the holy alliance’s scrutiny.

Fortunately, though, it’s not too late to rectify this oversight.  I have a gender-neutral word to describe a brilliant individual whose head is sometimes lost in the clouds.  A smart ditz, if you will.  Mr. Chief Justice Klein and Madam Justice Jones are both “smitzy”!   

Black(out) Sunday

Things were looking up.  After all, man had just walked on the moon.  Woodstock had just happened.  The Mets were in the midst of their miraculous run toward an improbable world championship. Yes, Nixon was president, but it was only his first year on the job and he hadn’t really screwed up the country yet, In fact, Watergate was nothing more than an anonymous hotel.

It was the fall of 1969.  Why am I waxing nostalgic about it now?  Because it was the last time I had to listen on radio to an untelevised New York Giants football game.   Until today.

That’s right.  Thanks to the dispute between Long Island’s Cablevision and News Corp., Fox 5 has pulled its programming, including today’s battle between the Giants and the Lions.

Back in ’69, I didn’t mind listening to the games on radio.  To the contrary, thanks to the NFL’s rule blacking out all teams’ home games to foster ticket sales, it was a regular Sunday tradition.  Seven times during each 14-game season, I sat with my dad in my living room, staring at our old Grundig-Majestic radio console as legendary broadcaster Marty Glickman – whom Avery Brundage had banned from participating in the finals of the four-by 100 relay at the 1936 Berlin Olympics because he didn’t want to embarrass Hitler by having a Jew win a gold medal – colorfully described the action.  Good times!

But I guess I’ve gotten spoiled over the past four decades.  I attended college outside the NFL’s blackout area, enabling me to watch all Giants games.  And then the League revoked its rule, making the team’s home games available on TV throughout the New York metropolitan area.  By the mid-‘70s, I took it for granted that I’d be able  to watch my beloved Giants every week.

So I was extremely upset when I couldn’t watch today’s game.  Who was at fault?  Who knows?  Cablevision’s propaganda claims that News Corp. is demanding fees of $150 million – its current arrangement is apparently for $70 million – to return Fox to Cablevision’s air.  According to Cablevision, this is more than the combined total it pays several other networks.

I’m certainly no fan of Cablevision.  But I’m happy to demonize News Corp. for the current fiasco because it’s the parent of Fox News – that shill for the radical right posing as a “fair and balanced” news network.  What’s more, it recently made millions of dollars in political contributions to the Chamber of Commerce and the National Governors’ Conference.  When asked about these payments at News Corp’s annual shareholders’ meeting, the company’s Chairman, Rupert Murdoch (aaargh!), said they were good for the shareholders and good for the country.  Yikes!

Anyway, the contributions might help explain News Corp’s efforts to shake down Cablevision for $150 million.  The media giant may need the money to help it with a short-term cash-flow.

Whatever.  At least the Giants won (or so the radio announcer told me).  And, lest you non football fans (football non-fans?) ridicule me for my snit, keep this mind:  Unless a deal is reached soon, you won’t be able to watch “Glee” Tuesday night.  And that’s not something you can listen to on radio.

Junk Mail

My computer’s spam filter is amazing.  It quarantines all questionable incoming email messages in virtual purgatory, where – as God of my own little digital universe – I can review them to decide whether to admit them into Inbox Heaven or banish them to Trash Hell for eternity.  Take that, Dante!

This process has enabled me to make a remarkable discovery:  Almost all of my spam mail consists of ads for one of two products, both of which relate directly to my – ahem – junk.  No wonder they call it junk mail!

The first product is a pill to ensure that my junk stands up, takes notice and performs well in response to the appropriate stimuli.  The second product promises to lengthen my junk by “up to 3-4 inches.”  I guess there must be some FDA and/or FTC regulation governing this size range – less than three inches might be considered statistically insignificant; more than four inches may be either medically unsafe or physically impossible.  Although wouldn’t all that depend on the initial size of the junk in question?

Anyway, my first reaction to this discovery was one of profound gratitude: How kind and thoughtful of these total strangers to be so concerned with my junk! 

But then my paranoia set in:  What exactly have these strangers been hearing about my junk that would prompt them to target me for their products?  And from whom have they been hearing it?  In other words, is there junk circulating around the internet about my junk?

To rectify the situation, I looked into subscribing to that “Reputation Protector” service.  But their website promised that they’d enable me to have “better control.”  Oh my God. . .they’d obviously heard the rumors too!  That’s when I realized I’d have to take matters into my own hands.  Metaphorically speaking, of course (I wouldn’t want Christine O’Donnell to accuse me of adultery).  So let me set the record straight once and for all:

My junk is just fine, thank you.  Okay, so maybe it doesn’t work quite as well as it did when I was 17.   But neither does any other part of my body.  And, besides, who would want an erection to last for four hours? 

As for size, I haven’t actually measured it since I was an adolescent.  But I’m pretty confident it’s within one standard deviation of the mean.  After all, it’s always managed to get everywhere it’s needed to go in life.  Including those annoying, hard to reach little nooks and crannies.

In short, it’s time for all of you to leave my junk alone and return to more productive endeavors, like searching for President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. 

Power Foods

In Woody Allen’s 1973 film, Sleeper, the protagonist awakens 200 years after having been cryogenically frozen to discover, among many other things, that all the foods he’d been told were bad for us – like ice cream sundaes – actually were good for us.

Alas, it was only a movie.  In the real world, nutrition hasn’t changed all that dramatically over the past four decades.  Oh, sure, there have been a few renovations made to the food pyramid.  The bottom line, though, is that the healthiest diet still consists mostly of fruits, nuts and vegetables.  Rabbit food!

(By the way, despite eating rabbit food, the average life-expectancy of a rabbit is only 8-12 years.  I’m just saying.  Although it must seem like forever to the little fella, given his boring diet.)

But wait! A recent list of power foods includes two items that I actually eat regularly.  And both are foods that my mother stopped me from eating when I was a kid because they were “bad” for me.

The first is watermelon.  That’s right.  It was the only fruit I ate as a young lad, much to my mother’s chagrin.  “It figures,” she complained, “that you’d like the only fruit with no nutritional value, just sugar and water.”  “What’s worse,” she added, “it fills you up so you can’t eat healthier foods.”  So my watermelon consumption was always closely monitored and severely restricted.

Well, mom, it turns out that watermelon is good for me.  Really good.  In fact, it’s chock full of lypocene, a carotenoid with antioxidant properties that may help prevent heart disease and some types of cancer and is also believed to support prostate health.  If that weren’t enough, watermelon’s super low in calories (about 50 calories a cup), it contains zero cholesterol and it’s ultra low in fat & sodium.  But it does have Viitamin C, Vitamin A and beta-carotene, as well as some of that all-important fiber.

As a bonus, it fills me up, so I can’t eat unhealthier foods.

But there’s always room for my second power food -- dark chocolate.  Boy, did my mother ever give me a hard time about that one when I was a kid! After all, it would rot my teeth, cause constipation and give me acne and diabetes.  She rationed it so strictly that I once actually snuck into a kitchen cabinet to steal a bar of baker’s chocolate, not realizing that it was unsweetened.  Yuck!

What my mother (and most other folks) didn’t realize back in the day is that dark chocolate is good for you.  It contains a high concentration of stearic acid (a saturated fatty acid with a neutral effect on cholesterol), essential minerals (including magnesium, copper, potassium, manganese) and, most significant, flavonoids, which – like the lypocene in watermelon – are powerful antioxidants.

I’d love to explain all this in greater detail. But my daily heaping bowl of watermelon and dark chocolate awaits me.   And I don’t even need to freeze myself and travel into the distant future to enjoy it.

Irreconcilable Similarities

I’m still not exactly sure what the Tea Party stands for, but I think it’s something like this:  (1) Fiscal restraint (except when it comes to government spending for war); (2) More freedom (except when it comes to a woman’s right to choose and a Muslim’s right to pray); and (3) Less government (except when it comes to checking everyone’s papers to make sure we’re not illegal aliens).

Beyond that, we should carefully examine the Party’s candidates to get a better sense of the Movement’s specific policies and ideals.  So let’s look at the Tea Party’s two newest darlings.

In this corner, from Buffalo, we have New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Palladino, who apparently thinks that sending pornographic emails to friends and business colleagues is okay.  How’s that for freedom? In that corner, originally from New Jersey, we have Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, who is vehemently against pornography because, in her view, it encourages masturbation, which she equates with adultery.  Hmmm.  Maybe she’s confusing fiscal restraint with physical restraint!

Back to Palladino’s corner, where some of his pornography collection involves bestiality.  And what does O’Donnell think about this?  Well, here’s a hint: She opposes stem-cell research because, she says, scientists have used it to cross-bread humans and animals, thus creating mice with human brains.  Yes, she really did say that.  And she said just a few years ago.

It’s hard to imagine how the Tea Party’s platform possibly could accommodate these diametrically different planks.  So the Movement needs to examine their poster children more closely to find some commonality. 

Here’s something:  Apologists for Palladino, including the candidate himself, excused his tasteless, pornographic, sexist and racist emails by noting that he’s in the construction industry and that the recipients thought the emails were funny. Apologists for O’Donnell, including the candidate herself, excused her dabbling in witchcraft during college by noting that we all do stupid things during our youth.

So, it seems, Tea Partiers are a forgiving, live-and-let-live bunch.  Except, of course, when it comes to President Obama who, as a nine-year old living in Indonesia, apparently had no excuse for attending school in Indonesia. 

Wait.  Now I get it.  What Palladino and O’Donnell have in common with each other and the Tea Party movement in general is hypocrisy, along with a heavy dose of intellectual dishonesty.  Vote for them at your peril.

Not Obama’s Cross to Bear

So a whopping 20% of Americans now believe that President Obama is a Muslim.  That’s a big increase from last year (the “new” people must think the president converted in the past 12 months, perhaps in a ceremony in the Oval Office).  And I have just one question for these folks:  What the f*** is the matter with you people?

No need to answer; it’s a purely rhetorical question.  Because I know exactly what’s the matter:   You’re the product of two great American traditions – Politics and Ethnocentric, Xenophobic Fear-Mongering (“EXFM” for short).

The Politics part is pretty self-evident.  The mid-term elections are coming up, and the Republicans naturally want to do everything possible to defeat the Democrats.  Which may explain why more than 30% of Republicans now think Obama’s a Muslim.

But why would practicing Islam be a bad thing for an American politician?  Ah, that’s where EXFM comes into play.  Because Muslims are America’s demons du jour.  The latest in a long line of bogeymen that include, in chronological order: Native Americans;  former Slaves; Irish and Italian immigrants (a/k/a Catholics or Papists);  Coloreds; Jews; Negroes; Japanese-Americans (we didn’t round up and intern German-Americans during WWII even though we were at war with Germany);  Blacks; suspected Communists (a/k/a more Jews); African Americans; and Latinos.

These groups all had something in common with each other (and with Muslims):  “Real Americans” perceived them to be threats to our way of life because they weren’t Protestants and/or because (except for the Irish) they were brown (or, at least, suspiciously swarthy).

We heard the tired refrain again during Glenn Beck’s recent gathering at the Lincoln Memorial:  We need to bring America back to its “Christian roots.”  Never mind that those “roots” might vary depending on who gets to decide who is a true Christian.   Beck apparently forgets that followers of his own Mormon religion were forced to flee America and settle in the Spanish territory that later became Utah in the face of harassment from American Christians who considered Mormonism to be a dangerous, sacrilegious cult. 

This “Christian roots” idea (which sounds to me more like a euphemism for “white Protestant roots”) stems from the premise that America was inspired by the Bible.  But this premise is a myth.  For one thing, the Constitution doesn’t contain a single reference to God.  What’s more, a reading of the minutes of the Constitutional Congress shows that our founders relied on the city states of ancient Greece and the writings of Locke, Hobbes and Aristotle (who was a pre-Christian pagan, for Christ’s sake!) – not the Bible – as inspiration for our fledgling country’s charter.

No, I’ve never read these minutes myself.  I’m basing my conclusion on an op-ed piece in the September 5, 2010 edition of Newsday, co-authored by a constitutional law professor and a practicing attorney.

The article went on to point out that the pointedly Godless constitution was markedly contrary to the “Suffolk Resolves of 1774” (the precursor to the Declaration of Independence), which listed as a grievance against the British the fact that Great Britain had allowed Catholicism in Canada.  Hoy cow!

The U.S. Constitution also was in sharp contrast to the charters of many of the states of our new union.  Some of those expressly barred anyone besides Protestants from holding public office.  Others required office-holders to take an oath pledging allegiance to Jesus Christ.  In fact, at the time of the Revolution every colony had a government-established official religion, usually Congregationalist or Episcopalian.  Believe it or not, it wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that all states finally abolished official religions.  Oh my God!

Given this historical framework, our founders’ progressiveness in drafting the Constitution is as remarkable as it is telling.  And the First Amendment isn’t the only place in the Constitution where the separation of church and state is expressed.  Just check out Article VI, which ends with this:  “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or Public Trust under the United States.”  No wiggle room there!

Which brings me back to President Obama.  He’s not a Muslim.  But even if he were, that would have no bearing whatsoever on his legal eligibility or fitness for reelection.  Which is why the people now using it as an accusation actually intend it to serve as an EXFM code word for “Injun-Wop-Mick-Kike-Jap-Commie-Traitor-Terrorist.”   Not very Christian of them.

Practice Makes Perfect

We’ve heard it since we were little kids.  And it makes sense.  In fact, it’s pretty self-evident that the more you work at something, the better you get at it.

But I’ve always been about efficiency and economy of effort.  So I’ve always wanted to know exactly how much effort I really needed to put into something before I became an expert at it.  After all, why spend a second more than necessary?

In other words, precisely how much practice makes perfect?  No one’s ever been able to quantify this critical part of the equation for me.  Until now.

In his book, The Outliers, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell postulates that it takes a person 10,000 hours of practice to truly master something.  I’m not quite sure how he arrives at this metric because I haven’t actually read his book.  I mean, Jeez, who has the time to read with all the practice I now have to do for every aspect of my life?  But someone told me during a break in my daily drills that Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule is based on a practice regimen of three hours a day, every day, for ten years.  I’d do the math myself, but I haven’t come close to spending 10,000 hours on arithmetic in my life, so I no longer trust my own calculations.

Come to think of it, based on Gladwell’s formula, I’ve probably managed to attain expertise in life only in a handful of skills and disciplines: sleeping (and the ancillary specialty of snoring); eating; going to the bathroom; watching TV; day-dreaming; and irrational, obsessive-compulsive anxiety.   Not the most impressive resume.

Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule also explains why I’ll never be an expert in any of the following:  playing a musical instrument; writing poetry;  shooting  a basketball;  pitching (or hitting) a baseball (or a softball); golf; tennis; bowling; brain surgery; speaking a foreign language; cooking French haute cuisine; and splitting an atom.

What’s not clear to me is whether logging the requisite 10,000 hours guarantees perfection.  I think not.  Because there are plenty of things that I’m still no good at even though I’ve spent way more than 10,000 hours on them.  Like being a good husband.  Or driving a car, which I seem to be getting worse at every day.

And then there’s my profession.  I’ve probably spent 100,000 hours over the years plying my trade as a litigator.  You’d think I’d be pretty good at it by now.  But people still insist that I’m just “practicing” law.  When do I get to do it for real?

I’m starting to think that “practice makes perfect” is a better truism for kids than for adults.  Same goes for “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  Once we hit 50, we need a different slogan to motivate us.  Like “you can’t teach experience.”  

The Mosquerade

I have a solution to the whole Islamic-center-near-Ground-Zero controversy:  Let’s repeal the First Amendment.  That way, the government can stop the project once and for all without worrying about those annoying, inconvenient clauses guaranteeing folks their free exercise of religion and promising that the government won’t establish an official state religion.  I mean, everyone already knows that America is – and always has been – a Christian country.  Why else would Christmas be a national holiday?

As a bonus, repealing the First Amendment will help keep the liberal media in check and stop all those dangerous community organizers from organizing.

And it’s not like my proposal is revolutionary or anything.  After all, we’re already fighting the good fight to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment so we can solve the illegal-immigration-anchor-baby crisis.  Oh, and by the way, eliminating that most un-American Amendment comes with an extra, added attraction:  It will also rid us of the Equal Protection Clause, which is the main legal impediment to laws banning gay marriage.  

Come to think of it, most of the constitutional amendments between the First and the Fourteenth also need to go.  Way too many accused criminals avoid prosecution and/or conviction because of stupid procedural technicalities, so we ought to repeal the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments.   Other obviously guilty defendants are acquitted by stupid juries, so we have to repeal the Seventh Amendment’s guarantee of trial by jury.  And the ban in the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment is just a tad anachronistic.  We have so many civilized ways to kill people these days that capital punishment should be expanded, not restricted.

Once we eradicate the arcane Bill of Rights, we’ll be free.  Free to round up the illegal immigrants and suspected Islamic terrorists and put them all in internment camps, making America safe for us real Americans.  Or, at least, safe for whatever subset of real Americans happen to be in power.

On second thought, maybe we should keep the Second Amendment.  With the rest of the Bill of Rights eviscerated, we’ll all need guns to protect ourselves against our own government.

A Bigger Haystack

I never win anything.  So I was tickled pink when the TSA agent announced that I had been selected at random for additional airport-security screening.  Woo-hoo!

He escorted me to a special area where he wiped both my palms with a chemically-treated pad of some kind.  Wow!  This was terrific.  What kind of high-tech exam would I be subjected to next?  A computer scan of my eyeballs? A Rorschach test?  Waterboarding? 

As I stood there in anxious anticipation, the agent looked at me like I was completely crazy.  “You’re done,” he finally said.  “Get back in line.”  What?  That’s it?

Dejected, I shuffled back into the regular security line with all the ordinary passengers.  Sure, my detour had enabled me to cut past a bunch of folks, like I’d been driving in the HOV lane on the expressway.  But I just didn’t feel special any more.  And neither did the handful of other passengers who’d been pulled aside for extra screening. 

Since 9/11, we’ve all been subjected to an ever-changing array of searches and seizures in the name of safety and security.  Maybe these procedures make our government feel like it’s doing something proactive to stop terrorism.  Maybe they even make us feel more secure.  And perhaps they’ve occasionally deterred a prospective terrorist from trying to board a plane.

But the success of these policies seems as utterly random to me as the palm-swabbing I underwent.  After all, despite all our efforts, terrorists still have managed to get on planes from time to time.

We civil libertarians have a saying:  You don’t find a needle in a haystack by building a bigger haystack.  But that’s exactly what our government has been doing for the past eight years.  And, while we’re being inconvenienced, the needles are becoming harder and harder to find.  

Far From Perfect

Today’s pop quiz:  What do Armando Galarraga, Kathy Lee Gifford and Jesus have in common?  Here’s a hint – Kathy Lee is a television personality; Jesus was either the son of God or a prominent Jewish preacher, depending on what you believe; and Armando is the guy who almost pitched what would have been the 21st  perfect game in major league baseball history (and the third this season) the other night, except that umpire Jim Joyce (who apparently was lost in a “Portrait of the Umpire as a Young Man” stream-of-consciousness moment) inexplicably called what should have been the game’s last batter safe at first when everyone else in the world could see that he was clearly out.

It was Jim Joyce’s bad call that brought our odd trio together.  (And you thought politics made strange bedfellows!).  Because, like every other TV personality in America, Kathy Lee just had to put in her two cents about the bizarre incident.

Unlike most commentators, though, Kathy Lee didn’t focus on the missed call itself.  Or whether Joyce should have asked the other umpires for help.  Or whether Major League Baseball should have reversed the call after-the-fact.  Or whether video replay or some other appeal system should be instituted in the future to minimize umpire error.  Or even whether first baseman Miguel Cabrera made a mistake on the play by fielding the ball instead of letting the second baseman handle it, which might have made it a much simpler (more routine) play in the first place and thus avoided the entire mess.

Rather, Kathy Lee – as co-host of the final hour of the seemingly endless daily Today show – chose to concentrate on Galarraga’s reaction in the immediate aftermath of Joyce’s gaffe.  As she aptly pointed out, he didn’t jump up and down, curse, scream or argue with Joyce.  He simply briefly stared at the ump in disbelief, smiled, walked back to the pitching mound and completed his imperfect game by quickly retiring the next batter.

Kathy Lee described him as a hero for his classy, dignified conduct.  Fair enough.  But then she committed a miscue far more damaging than Joyce’s blown call.  I can only paraphrase her because I was watching TV at the time while furiously pedaling a stationary bike in a gym: “I bet we’ll find out that he has a strong faith, because only someone with a deep belief in a higher power could conduct himself so well in such circumstances.”

I nearly fell off the bike.  Because the inference drawn from Kathy Lee’s remarks couldn’t have been clearer: Only a devoutly religious individual (preferably a Jesus-loving Christian, given Kathy Lee’s own beliefs) would have been able to handle the situation as well as Galarraga did. 

Talk about a bad call!  Kathy Lee impliedly dissed both those people who follow non-Christian religions and – especially – those ethical culturists/secular humanists whose values do not stem from any belief in some supreme being. God forbid any atheist or agnostic is ever deprived of pitching a perfect game by an umpire’s bad call; he’ll probably kill the umpire in a faith-less rage.  

Jim Joyce apologized for his mistake.  I doubt that Kathy Lee will apologize for hers.  But – being a devout secular humanist – I of course forgive her.  After all, nobody’s perfect.        

Dybbuk-tive Reasoning

Five seconds after A Serious Man ended, my friend asked me this:  “So, Roy, what did you think?”  Are you kidding?  I was totally dumbfounded; I needed some time to reflect. 

Since then, I’ve come up with a zillion different interpretations of this multi-layered, deeply nuanced movie, which I now want to see again.  Alas, despite my best efforts, most of my interpretations are cynical and depressing.  Here’s one of them:

Each of us has the capacity both to fail to see the genuine dybbuks in our lives (like the husband in the film’s opening scene) and to confront dybbuks that may not really be there (like the wife in the opening scene).  Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what we do.   We’re screwed either way because God really doesn’t seem to care. 

The movie’s protagonist epitomizes our damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t fate.  For the most part, he’s obviously been ignoring the many dybbuks in his life.  He’s oblivious to (or, at least, paralyzed by) his wife’s infidelity, his daughter’s stealing from him, his son’s experimentation with drugs (and why can’t the kid climb up on the roof and adjust the TV antenna himself if he wants to watch “F-Troop” so desperately?), his brother’s demons and his neighbor’s shotguns. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for him or to slap him in the face to wake him up (metaphorically, of course, since I technically wasn’t in the movie).

 But despite this apparently fatal character flaw, he still manages to get the one thing he really wants in life – a tenured professorship.  What’s more, he even gets to experience an interesting interlude with his hot neighbor (no, not the guy with the guns).   Go figure! 

In contrast, take his wife’s lover (please!).  Here’s a man who has no problem stabbing his dybbuks – real and imagined – right in the chest. And what happens to him?  He’s so anxious to play golf that he can’t wait for the line of oncoming traffic to abate before making the left into his country club.  The crash kills him.  So much for being proactive!

Lest you think that the moral of the film is that it’s better to be a dybbuk-denier than a dybbuk-confronter, let’s go back to our protagonist.  Being oblivious, he’s not sure when (or even if) the Korean student gave him an envelope of cash to change his grade from F to A.  He can’t confront the dybbuk by returning the money because the boy and his father won’t take it back (or even acknowledge that they gave it to him in the first place).  He can’t confront the dybbuk by accusing them of offering him a bribe because they’ve threatened to sue him if he does.  And he can’t ignore the dybbuk by pocketing the money without changing the grade because that would be wrong (even if uses the cash to try to help his brother).  Quite the conundrum.

Except that our not-so-intrepid hero has apparently come to the conclusion that God doesn’t care.  So he decides to accept the bribe and change the student’s grade.  After all, what more could go wrong in his life?

Well, for starters, there could be a killer tornado.  Because it may not matter to God whether you deny real dybbuks or confront imagined dybbuks.  But He certainly cares if you allow the ones that live inside your head, heart and soul to take control of your actions.

Choose wisely.

Dear Barack. . .

. . .Is it okay for me to call you Barack?  I assume so, since the 38 emails that you and Joe Biden have sent me in the past week are addressed to “Roy.”  Anyway, I’m extremely flattered that you’re trying so hard to solicit my support for Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court.  I had no idea that I was the key to her confirmation. 

Unfortunately, Mr. President, while I really wish I could help you out here, I just don’t think Ms. Kagan is the right person for the job.

Please don’t get me wrong.  You can’t have too many New York women on the Supreme Court (two of them Jewish, no less!).  It sounds like she has a terrific legal mind. And I’m sure she’s a very nice lady.  There’s even a rumor circulating that she’s a fellow Mets fan!

And My qualms have nothing to do with Ms. Kagan’s lack of judicial experience.  After all, 40 of the previous 111 judges who have served on the Supreme Court had no such experience.  This group includes two of the last four chief justices – William Rehnquist and Earl Warren – both of whom were nominated by Republican presidents, as well as such luminaries of the high court as Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis and John Marshall, who was known as the "Great Chief Justice."  So I have no doubt that Kagan is well-qualified.

What’s my problem, then? Well, I’m concerned that – given the Court’s current composition – we don’t need a skilled consensus-builder.  What we need is a staunch progressive to counterbalance the conservative ideologues on the bench.

Let’s face it, the Supreme Court has become way too conservative.  A couple of years ago, two pragmatic conservatives – Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and William Landes, a law professor at the University of Chicago – published a paper, “Rational Judicial Behavior: A Statistical Study," which analyzed the high court.  As reported at the time in U.S. News and World Report, Posner and Landes used a database that contained the political backgrounds and voting records of Supreme Court justices over the past 73 years – including which President appointed each justice and how the justices decided every case – to come up with a ranking, from most conservative to least conservative, of all 43 justices who have served on the Court since 1937.

The authors concluded that four of the five “most conservative justices” to serve on the Supreme Court in the past 73 years are sitting on the bench right now – Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. And Justice Kennedy, who many consider to be a moderate and the Court’s key swing vote, is actually ranked as the tenth most conservative judge.  In sharp contrast, Justices Ginsburg is the only currently sitting Supreme Court Justice ranked among the ten “least conservative” justices.  And she’s only ninth on that list.  Yikes!

Your appointment of Sonia Sotomayor certainly didn’t help to level this increasingly right-leaning jurisprudential playing field.  And Elena Kagan’s appointment won’t do so, either. 

So, what’s the answer?  Well, I have a humble suggestion:  Appoint me!  After all, we’re already on a first-name basis with each other.  And, once I shut down my website, there will be no publicly available paper trial showing just how liberal I really am. Yes, I know my parents were acquainted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg back in the day but, what the hell, most young New York Jews were commies in the ‘40s (allegedly including Judge Posner’s parents).

Plus, you kind of owe me; I spent five weeks in autumn, 2008, working as a full-time volunteer for your presidential campaign, and I didn’t even get a lousy t-shirt.

Who knows?  I could wind up being the next Louis Brandeis.  Just imagine what a legacy that would be for your presidency!

Okay, I know I’ve given you a lot to think about.  Sleep on it and get back to me at your earliest convenience.

Humbly yours,

Roy

The Reality of Mock

As an adjective, the word “mock” connotes something fake or phony, right?  Of course it does. Like a mock turtleneck.  Or mock horror.  At least that’s what I’d always thought.  Until I experienced the powerful reality of “mock.”

I’m talking about the New York State Bar Association’s annual High School Mock Trial tournament.  Because, despite its name, there’s nothing simulated or feigned about it. To the contrary, the tournament is about as real as real can get.  Certainly more real than, say, Reality TV. 

Here’s how it works: Teams of student lawyers and witnesses compete against each other by trying a case in a real court room, presided over by a real judge, governed by real rules of evidence,  based on a complex set of facts and sophisticated (and real) legal principles.  This year’s case involved the criminal prosecution of an alleged Ponzi scheme purportedly perpetrated by a securities investment firm that specialized in the trading of derivatives.  How’s that for mock imitating life? 

I’ve had the privilege of coaching the Plainview-Old Bethpage/JFK High School team in the tournament for the past seven years.  Each year has been rewarding for me.  But this season was truly special because of the extraordinary students on my team.

To put it in perspective, consider this:  Unlike with some schools in the tournament where mock trial participation is part of a graded, year-long course, Plainview student participation is purely voluntary.  In other words, it’s just one of many extra-curricular activities available to the students.  What’s more, the seniors submit their college applications before the tournament even starts; many receive their acceptance letters during the course of the tournament.  So it’s not like they’re using their participation to beef up their resumes.  If anything, you’d think that they’d be in the throes of serious senioritis.

But this season’s team treated the tournament like it was a matter of life or death.  They practiced.  And practiced.  And practiced some more.  They practiced on weekends.  They even had a four-hour practice the Saturday after their spring break had begun.  How’s that for real passion, real focus and real commitment?

Not surprisingly, all their hard work paid off.  The Nassau County tournament was the largest in the State this year, featuring 44 schools and 500 students.  Plainview made it to Nassau’s Final Four, one of only two public schools remaining, before losing its close, tense, hotly-contested semi-final match this week against a talented yeshiva.  There was crying afterwards.  And some unwarranted but predictable self-recrimination. Until one of the students wisely pointed out that obsessing over the “what-ifs” just wasn’t worth it. 

So let’s focus on the positives, all of which are very real:  The students learned many valuable skills that will serve them well in life even if they decide not to pursue careers in the law -- reasoning, analysis, writing, persuasive argument, public speaking, thinking on their feet, working collaboratively, accepting constructive criticism, dealing with inconsistent/arbitrary/unfair authority figures. I practiced law for years before I had the opportunity to learn these skills.  Really!

They also learned a painful real-life lesson:   No matter how competent and prepared you are for a particular challenge, there may be times when even doing the best you can just won't be good enough to "succeed" or "win."  But that doesn't make you a failure. Sometimes, your opponent is just a little better.  And, sometimes, life just isn’t fair.

I learned something, too:   Mock me if you must but, if my team is at all representative of America’s teenagers, then our country’s future will be in good hands. 

In short, coaching Plainview’s 2010 mock trial team has been one of the most rewarding, inspiring experiences of my life.  In fact, it was downright unreal!    

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Paranoid conspiracy theories long have been a staple of America’s reactionary right.  In the ‘30s, for example, Father Coughlin claimed at rallies and in radio broadcasts that FDR was a communist and – even worse – that he secretly was a Jew (God forbid!) whose real name was “Rosenfeld.”  In the early ‘50s, Joe McCarthy asserted that communists had infiltrated our Army and State Department.  By the late ‘50s, the John Birch Society insisted that fluoridation of our water supply was a communist plot. It also described President Eisenhower as a "conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy.”

This rich, patriotic conservative tradition continues today, with wild allegations that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and that he’s secretly a Muslim (God forbid!).

But there’s a fundamental difference between the previous paranoia and the current craziness:  In the past, responsible, mainstream conservatives stood up to the nuts.  Father Coughlin and Senator McCarthy eventually were discredited and disgraced.  And William Buckley – the father of the modern American conservative movement – excommunicated the Birchers.

In sharp contrast, no one on the right seems to be challenging today’s lunatics.  To the contrary, at best, they’re remaining silent, thus acquiescing in (and tacitly encouraging) the lunacy.  At worst, they’re enthusiastically embracing the psychopaths.  The John Birch Society even has been brought back into the conservative fold; it had an active, high-profile presence at this month’s annual CPAC convention.

The latest bit of silliness involves the new logo for a U.S. missile defense agency.  Right-wing hysterics are complaining that the emblem looks suspiciously like the logo for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign because it’s circular and is red, white and blue. But what really bothers them is that the logo has markings that look like an Islamic crescent and star.  Hmmm.  Obama obviously has turned over America’s missile defense systems to Muslim terrorists!

Predictably, the story was all over Fox News.  Less predictably, it was also covered by mainstream news outlets, including CNN.  But the investigative journalists simply took the paranoiacs’ ravings at face value; none bothered to ask the missile agency itself about its new logo.  Had they done so, they would have learned that the logo was re-designed in 2007 – by the Bush Administration.  The impetus for the new design was cost; the three-color emblem is cheaper to manufacture than its five-color predecessor.

I suspect that neither John Boehmer, Eric Cantor, John McCain nor any other Republican “leader” will step up to set the record straight on the logo controversy.  So it’s up to the Democrats to present the facts.  Not that doing so will help much.  After all, you can’t reason with crazy people.  Chances are the psychos will respond like this:  “It’s worse than we thought.  At least as early as 2007, Obama and his Muslim allies apparently had infiltrated the Bush Administration and brainwashed the President!”

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad.           

You Don’t Need a Weatherman. . .

First they applauded the news that the IOC hadn’t awarded the Olympics to Chicago.  Then they gloated upon hearing that a terrorist with a bomb had managed to board a plane bound for Detroit.  They’ve hijacked our federal government, holding its legislative process hostage.  And, now, they’re celebrating some of the worst winter weather we’ve had in years.

Who are these people?  Muslim extremists out to destroy our way of life?  Nope!  They’re allegedly patriotic Americans.  Many of them are even sitting members of Congress.  That’s right. . .  They’re Republicans! Men and women who have eschewed substantive policy in favor of politically partisan expediency.  Which means just one thing:  They feel compelled to criticize and oppose everything that the Obama Administration says and does, regardless of how ridiculous their opposition and criticism may seem.

But they’ve reached a Monty Python-esque level of absurdity with their contention that blizzards in February belie the existence of a world climate-change crisis and, therefore, refute the need for any legislation addressing the issue. 

I’m not a scientist (I don’t even try to play one on the Internet).  But there certainly seems to be empirical evidence to support the fact that the Arctic glaciers are melting and that the oceans are warming and rising.  And it makes sense to me that these changes could wreak havoc on the earth’s weather patterns, causing increasingly severe conditions.   Like hotter summers with bigger hurricanes.  And colder winters with bigger snowstorms.

In other words, the Great Blizzard of 2010 doesn’t disprove the climate change crisis; rather, it confirms that the crisis is real.  Hardly a reason for the Party of No to rejoice.

What’s more, the Obama Administration’s proposed energy policy is advisable even if the naysayers are right about climate change.  The policy would make us less reliant on Persian Gulf oil, with obvious foreign policy benefits.  And investing in the development of alternative energy solutions will stimulate America’s economy, create jobs and make us better equipped to compete in the global economy of the 21st Century.

So, we have a clear choice:  We can enact bold, far-reaching, innovative climate and energy legislation.  Or we can let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.  Sounds like a no-brainer to me.  Kind of like the thinking behind the Republican strategy these days.

Finally Showing Their True Colors

Defenders of the nascent tea-party movement have portrayed its members as genuinely patriotic Americans whose primary concern is what they perceive as government’s increasingly intrusive interference with their every-day lives.  And the party’s poster children certainly seem relatively harmless enough – like the wacky men decked out in Revolutionary War attire and the sweet ladies with the funny hats and dangling tea-bag earrings.

But the group’s first national convention being held this weekend in Nashville is painting a much darker picture of the movement.  And we need to look no further than the speech that former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo delivered there yesterday.

Tancredo argued that because “we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote. . .  People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. . . Barack Hussein Obama.”  His message couldn’t have been clearer:  People who aren’t really Americans elected a foreigner to be our President who’s destroying our American way of life; we need to take our country back from them.  And the crowd loved it.  Because it’s their raison d’etre.

That’s right.  The real impetus for the tea-party movement isn’t a belief in conservative or libertarian political philosophy. Instead the party is predicated on good old-fashioned xenophobia and racial hatred.  The only things missing from the room during Tancredo’s speech – besides factual accuracy and human decency – were a confederate flag, a burning cross and some white hoods.

Tancredo’s speech is wrong on many levels.  For one thing, I worked for the Obama campaign as a deputy field organizer in Allentown, Pennsylvania.  And every one of the hundreds of supporters I met could spell and say ‘vote’ in English.  They each could pass a “civics literacy test,” too; frankly, I’m not sure that Tancredo could say the same about all the folks who applauded his speech.

Equally important, President Obama’s done nothing to suggest that he’s a “committed socialist ideologue.”  FDR probably pursued a more “socialistic” agenda during his first-term as president.  And the people re-elected him three times.  Of course, there’s one big difference between FDR and Obama as far as the tea-partiers go:  FDR was a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant from an old-line American family; Obama is a brown guy with a foreign-sounding name.

Tancredo aside (please!), the tea-party movement itself has some fundamental philosophical problems.  Its purported commitment to the libertarian tenet of less government interference in individuals’ lives is belied by its support for legislation that would interfere in individuals’ lives – like banning abortions and prohibiting gay marriage.  And its opposition to “politics as usual” is inconsistent with its love affair with Sarah Palin.  Because, despite all her anti-privilege, anti-government  waste rhetoric, it’s appearing more and more as if Palin ran Alaska like some old-school Tammany-Hall boss on crystal meth.  Records released just yesterday suggest – among other things – that, as governor, she covered up the cost of installing a tanning bed in the Governor’s mansion and looked for state-business justifications for using the state’s jet to transport her family.

Of course, these philosophical contradictions and inconsistencies shouldn’t be surprising now that we know that the whole “smaller government” thing is just a pretext for the tea-party movement’s real purpose – attacking the president over everything because his name is Barack Hussein Obama and he’s brown.

Look, it’s easy for me to criticize the tea-party movement.  After all, I’m a liberal Democrat.  But coming out against the tea-party’s message of racial hatred and fear really shouldn’t be a partisan political issue.  So I’m calling on Republicans and conservatives to disavow the tea-party, too.  It’s time for everyone to show their true colors.  Which, I’m hoping, will turn out to be red, white and blue.        

Another “Scopes” Trial?

ABC News reported recently that a Michigan-based defense contractor with a half-billion dollar contract to furnish scopes for rifles that our military uses to train Iraqi and Afghani troops in the Middle East imprints each of its scopes with a citation to a Bible passage.

Yes, you heard me right.  Rifle sights used at Middle Eastern training sites contain biblical cites!

As usual, Rachel Maddow’s commentary on the story was right on target.  For one thing, she pointed out, the biblical imprints run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to our Constitution.  After all, putting religious slogans on our military’s weapons violates the good old separation-of-church-and-state doctrine every bit as much as teaching creationism in our public schools.

Moreover, Maddow reasoned, using such weapons to train Muslim soldiers is, shall we say, pretty short-sighted given America’s stated policy of convincing the Muslim world that we are not fighting a holy war against them.  All a terrorist needs to do is circulate a few of these rifles around and . . . Voila! . . . a whole new generation of Islamic extremists will  be born.  Score another bulls-eye for Rachel!

When the company was first confronted about its scopes, it took a pretty myopic view, saying that it had no intention of stopping its practice.  But, apparently under pressure from senior U.S. military officials, the company has now agreed to stop imprinting the cites into the sights.  It will even be sending out tools to enable the existing cites to be removed from the sights right on-site.  I just hope it doesn’t charge the government extra for this “scope change” (that’s a little inside government contracts claims litigation humor).

I wish I could say that’s the end of the story, but it’s not.  Because our friends at Fox News couldn’t help but weigh in on the story.  One Fox commentator took aim at the issue by opining that the biblical cites were okay because the terrorists always chant “Allah be Praised” as they engage in their acts of destruction.  In fact, the commentator actually said, “They started it!”  Yeesh!  That argument doesn’t even hold water in a schoolyard fight between two seven year-olds, let alone on the world stage.  Come to think of it, it’s about as silly as arguing that “Intelligent Design” is something different from creationism.

When it comes to the scopes (and, I suspect, to Scopes), Fox’s hindsight isn’t exactly 20/20.        

Cheney of Fools

The Party of No has been treating the aborted “Underwear Bombing” more like a welcome Christmas present than an attempted terrorist act.  Republicans aren’t condemning the act or announcing support for the Administration’s investigation of it or response to it.  Instead, they’re using the incident for political gain; some Republicans even have cited it in fund-raising letters that blame the Obama Administration for being weak on terrorism.

Given their giddy reaction to the incident, one has to wonder whether some Republicans secretly wish that the bomber had succeeded in blowing up the plane and killing 300 innocent people.  Imagine how much political hay (and campaign contributions) they could have made from that!   

And who’s been leading the charge?  One of the principal architects of the most flawed, unsuccessful foreign policy initiative in American history – former Vice President Dick Cheney.

To their credit, Democratic spokespersons have not responded to the Cheney-led attacks.  Hopefully, that’s because the Obama Administration is taking the high road; it recognizes that the life and death elements of our national-security policy should not be trivialized by political finger-pointing. But since I’m neither an elected official nor an Administration spokesman, there’s nothing to stop me from responding to Cheney and his foolish minions.  So, here it goes:

Shame on them!  Their criticism of The Obama Administration in the aftermath of the attempted Underwear Bombing is inappropriate, cynical, unfounded and grossly hypocritical.  Just look at some of the absurd things they’ve been saying.

They’ve complained that Obama waited until three days after the incident before commenting on it.  But President Bush waited six days before commenting on the 2001 attempted shoe-bombing incident.

They’ve complained that the Obama Administration plans to prosecute and incarcerate the Underwear Bomber in U.S. courts in accordance with U.S. criminal laws rather than in a military tribunal.  But that’s precisely what the Bush Administration did with the Shoe Bomber and numerous other terrorists.

They’ve questioned how someone on the terrorist watch list could have been allowed into the country.  But they ignore the following key facts:  It was the Bush Administration that issued him a visa; it was the Bush Administration that created a watch list with 500,000 names – so large and unwieldy that it’s virtually worthless (you don’t find a needle in a haystack by making a bigger haystack); and it was the Bush Administration that “reformed” the nation’s various intelligence agencies so poorly that they still don’t effectively communicate or share information with one another.

They’ve continued to question the proposed closing of Gitmo.  But it was the Bush Administration that released from Gitmo the prisoners who became the masterminds of the most recent plot.

They’ve criticized the Obama Administration for not stopping the spread of terror cells to places like Yemen.  But it was the Bush Administration that enabled the expansion of Al-Queda to such countries (and by allowing it to flourish again in Afghanistan) by diverting American resources to the war in Iraq.

Some of them even have been saying that no terrorist attack ever took place during the Bush Administration.  Apparently, 9/11 only matters to Republicans when they can use it as part of a fear-mongering campaign.

Speaking of 9/11, in its aftermath Democrats stood behind the Bush Administration.  They supported the Patriot Act (which many of them later admitted to stupidly not having read).  They even voted in favor of the Iraq invasion.

I’m not suggesting that Republicans have no right to disagree on the merits with the Obama Administration’s policies.  But, having been personally responsible for the mess we’re now in, Dick Cheney should keep his mouth shut.  At the very least, he shouldn’t be attacking President Obama for the mistakes, failures and shortcomings of his own administration.  His insistence on continuing to do so is foolish.     

Who is a Jew?

It was 1988 when Tom Hanks hosted the game show parody 'Jew, Not a Jew' on Saturday Night Live. The skit lampooned the number-one pastime of modern American Jewry:  Obsessively speculating about, researching, confirming and documenting public figures – especially those in the entertainment and sports industries – who are fellow members of The Tribe.  Hilarious!

In the real world, though, deciding who is a Jew is no laughing matter.  To the contrary, it’s been the source of much serious debate and controversy for centuries, sometimes with significant individual and societal consequences. Too often, it’s been a matter of life or death itself (take the Holocaust – Please!).

The classic test seems so simple – You’re Jewish if your mother is Jewish.  Makes sense, doesn’t it?  After all, in ancient times, before DNA testing was possible, you could never be 100% certain who one’s real father was. But you could always identify one’s mother; she was the lady who gave birth to one.

Thus, for example, Jesus was Jewish because Mary was Jewish.  It didn’t matter that the identity of His father might have been open to speculation. (Although Joseph was Jewish and so was God, since it was the Jews who invented Him in the first place).

Unfortunately, the matrilineal test is far from perfect because religion in general – and Jewishness in particular – is ultimately more of a philosophical choice than an accident of biology.  There are also all those complications of modern life, like adoption, step-families, surrogacy and embryo implantation. And then there’s the problem of conversion.

Oy. . . So many different Jewish sects! The Ashkenazim alone have Chasids, Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, Secular Humanist, Messianic (Jews for Jesus) and, quite possibly, Universalist Unitarian.  And many of them have their own unique procedures for admitting converts. 

So it was inevitable that the age-old question of who is a Jew would become the subject of another great American pastime – litigation.  Except the lawsuit wasn’t commenced here.  It was commenced in merry olde England. Go figure!

As reported in The New York Times, the case concerned the efforts of a 12-year-old boy to be admitted to J.F.S., one of Britain’s best-performing Jewish secondary schools. Though the boy is an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, the school rejected him.  Its rationale was that the boy was not a Jew because his mother wasn’t a Jew; and his mother wasn’t a Jew because she had converted to Judaism in a progressive, not Orthodox, synagogue.

England’s Supreme Court found the school’s action to be illegal. In his majority opinion for a sharply-divided court, Lord Phillips, president of the court, wrote, “One thing is clear about the matrilineal test; it is a test of ethnic origin.” And, under the law, “by definition, discrimination that is based upon that test is discrimination on racial grounds.”

So, now that the matrilineal test for Jewishness has been thrown out, what standard should we use?  J.F.S. has already changed its admissions policies.  Applicants now must prove their Jewishness according to a “religious practice test” in which they’re awarded points for things like going to synagogue and doing charitable work. But one parent wants to defer to a higher authority.  “God can work it out,” the parent said. “He’s a big boy; he’s been around for a long time. He can decide who’s Jewish and who isn’t.”

I don’t like either of these tests.  I mean, I know that we’re the Chosen People and our admissions policy should be selective.  But, last time I checked, the Jews made up only 0.2% of the world’s population. We’re becoming an endangered species.  So maybe our definition of Jewishness needs to be expanded.

How about this:  A Jew is anyone who wants to be one and: (1) understands and appreciates sarcasm; (2) spends the Christmas holiday going to the movies and eating Chinese food; (3) can properly pronounce the Hebrew/Yiddish “ch” without actually spitting up phlegm; and (4) obsessively speculates about, researches, confirms and documents public figures – especially those in the entertainment and sports industries – who are Jewish.

How Do I Persecute thee?  Let me Count the Ways

Jeez!  The radical right sure seems angry at the Obama Administration.  I mean, regardless of the policy being examined – the stimulus package, health-care reform, climate-change legislation, which turkey to “pardon” for Thanksgiving – the conservative fringe always has the same response:  “Fascist!”  (Or some clever totalitarianistic permutation thereof, like “Nazi,” “Communist” or “Stalinist”).  Chances are you’ve seen tapes of those tea-party rallies, with protestors proudly carrying signs depicting our president as Hitler, complete with the obligatory swastikas and –occasionally – even concentration-camp photos.

Well, they’re certainly entitled to their opinion.  After all, we’re in America, where dissent is patriotic and its  expression is free.  But that begs the question – four questions, to be precise:  Are they right?  Is the Obama Administration in any way fascistic?  Is the determination of totalitarianism an inherently subjective judgment that’s in the eye of the beholder?  Or is there an objective test to measure fascism?

Luckily for us, the answer to that last question is “Yes,” and that makes the answer to each of the first three questions “No.”   Let me explain.    

Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, has carefully examined the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and several Latin American dictators.  Based on this analysis, he published an article in 2003 identifying the 14 signs of fascism.  With apologies to Robert Browning (and no, all you gun nuts, he’s not the guy who invented the Browning Rifle), here they are:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a unifying cause.
4. Supremacy of the military.
5. Rampant Sexism.
6. Controlled Mass Media.
7. Obsession with National Security.
8. Religion and Government are intertwined.
9. Corporate Power is protected.
10. Labor Power is suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption.
14. Fraudulent Elections.

Sounds pretty comprehensive to me!

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, Dr. Britt – like me – apparently is a secular humanist (a/k/a a “Godless, bleeding-heart, tree-hugging leftist” to some of our more conservative friends).  And to be fair, a few of his 14 signs may be just a tad subjective.  Still, I defy even the most caffeinated tea-bagger to find more than a couple of these signs that they could seriously argue apply to the Obama Administration.  In sharp contrast, I counted at least ten that pervaded George W.’s presidency.

So, come on, all you conservatives out there:  Remove the mustache from Obama’s photo and, if you disagree with his policies, do so on their merits. It also might be helpful if you came up with your own alternatives to address the problems we face, keeping in mind that “No” is not a substantive policy.

Shhh!. . .You’ll Frighten the Children

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard critics of climate-change activism call environmentalists Nazis, fascists, communists, Stalinists, socialists, even anti-Semites.  But Anne Applebaum takes the cake.  Her December 15 article in the Washington Post ("Anti-climate change, anti-human") actually accuses the environmental movement of needlessly scaring children.  Her proof?   One nine year-old she knows apparently has decided that doing his homework is a futile exercise because, by the time he's grown, everyone will have drowned due to melting ice caps.

Well, I know some nine year-olds, too.  They do their homework every day.  They also play sports, take dance lessons and generally enjoy life.  And they're enthusiastically looking forward to growing up and contributing to society.  They're happy and excited because the adults in their lives care so much about them that they're actively committed to making the world a better, safer place for future generations.  .A world where we won't have to worry about being drowned by melting ice caps.

Let’s face it.  The world is – and always has been – a scary place for kids.  I was nine during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  For years after, I worried so obsessively about a possible nuclear holocaust that I had trouble sleeping at night.  After all, neighbors were building fallout shelters in their basements; we even participated in “take cover” drills in school, as if kneeling under our desks somehow would keep us safe in an H-Bomb attack. 

But I didn’t stop doing my homework, watching my favorite TV shows or enjoying sports and music.  Eventually, I studied history, politics and law so I could better understand – and try to make sense of – this crazy world. 

Ultimately, of course – thanks to people committed to making the world a better, safer place for future generations – the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended.  And the threat of a nuclear showdown between America and the Soviet Union – which had dominated our society for a generation – vanished.   Only to be replaced by other threats, risks and challenges.  Such is life.  

Speaking of threats, the same people criticizing environmentalists for needlessly scaring our children are themselves warning that terrorists will attack New York again because the Obama Administration has decided to bring KSM to justice here.   Hmmm.  I guess fear-mongering is in the eye of the beholder.     

Anyway, kudos to Ms. Applebaum's nine year-old for coming up with a unique excuse for avoiding his homework.  But let's not turn typical childhood procrastination into an indictment of the environmentalist movement.  If anything, it's the naysayers – those who either deny climate change altogether or claim there is nothing we can or should do about it – who are creating a generation of nihilists.

Attention Must be Paid

Poor Willie Loman must be rolling over in his fictional grave.  Because Arthur Miller’s iconic salesman just realized that he was born too soon.

Willie, you see, believed that one’s success in business was mostly a function of one’s popularity and likeability, and that both he and his son, Biff, epitomized those traits.  Yet he was such an abject failure that he committed suicide so his family could collect on a $20.000 insurance policy. 

Perhaps Willie Loman miscalculated his own popularity.  And, just maybe, he didn’t grasp what it really took to succeed in business in post-World War II America.  But America’s changed in the 60 years since Willy Loman’s tragic death.  The Willie Lomans of the world now have a veritable bevy of ways to get the attention that they believe equates to success.

For starters, the 21st –Century version of Willie of course would have his own email address, blog, website and twitter account.  He’d also have his own pages on Facebook and all the other on-line social and business networking communities.   But so would Willie’s competition, so he’d need to come up with more creative methods of distinguishing himself through shameless self-promotion.  No problem!

For example, he could send up a trial balloon and then, as it aimlessly floated in the sky, falsely claim that his son, Biff, was trapped inside.  That would be good for some free publicity.  Or Willie and his wife, Linda, could crash a state dinner at the White House and then circulate photos of themselves with the President and other dignitaries.   Not that anything like that could really happen (our Secret Service is way too good to permit such a breach of security).  But imagine the media frenzy if it did? 

In a pinch, multiple births would also be a marketable concept for the Lomans.  How about “Willie and Kate plus Eight”?  Or “Octo-Willie”?  There’s no bigger attention-getter than reality television.  In fact, it’s unreal.  Forget about 15 minutes of fame.  That was so Seventies.   Nowadays we’re all looking for at least one, 13-episode season of fame.

So, is all this attention for attention’s sake a good thing?  Not as far as I’m concerned.  Then, again, I’m no Willie Loman.

You Gotta Have Friends?

I have around 30 Facebook “friends.”  For any of you still unfamiliar with the wildly popular social-networking Internet site, that may sound like a lot.  But it’s not.  In fact, it’s an embarrassingly miniscule number.  Most people I know have hundreds of Facebook friends.  Some have thousands.

But don’t cry for me.  Because my paucity of virtual pals is entirely my choice – the logical product of my three simple Rules of Facebook Engagement. 

Rule Number 1 – Never invite anyone to be your friend.  Who needs the stress and suspense of having to wait to see if your invitation is accepted?  Or, even worse, the ignominy of being ignored or rejected?  My self-esteem is fragile enough as it is.  And I already worry every day that any one of my existing contacts might suddenly “unfriend” me (a verb, by the way, that’s just been added to the Oxford English Dictionary).

Rule Number 2 – Never accept an invitation of friendship from someone you don’t really know.  Sure, it may be tempting to agree to become a friend of your co-worker’s cousin’s co-worker, Adolph, just to pad your stats.  But, remember, accepting that invitation also sort of makes you a friend of all of Adolph’s friends.  Because whenever Adolph comments on some random photo that one of his friends has posted on Adolph’s Facebook page, the photo, Adolph’s comment and the responses from Adolph, his friend and their respective friends all show up on your Facebook page.  Despite my own careful vetting process, I seem to spend hours a day looking at photos on my Facebook home page of people I’ve never even heard of.  

And then there are those annoying right-wing rants that Adolph  and his friends are always exchanging on my page, which I’m of course compelled to rebut.  With strangers like these, who needs acquaintances?

Rule Number 3 – There’s really no reason to “friend” anyone with whom you have an actual relationship in the real world.  Because you don’t need Facebook to stay in contact with a true friend or relative.  For example, even though my wife and I are Facebook friends, we never use the site to communicate with each other.  Rather, when we need to get in touch with each other we use email, like any other married couple would do.

By following these rules, I succeed in keeping my Facebook “friends” close, and my real friends closer.

Terror-izing

Tragically, it’s become as American as apple pie.  And prevalent enough to earn its own pop-culture moniker – “Going Postal.” 

I’m talking about the horrific scenario where a troubled, disgruntled current or former employee walks into his workplace and opens fire on his colleagues.  Or where a troubled, disgruntled student walks into his school and guns down his classmates.

It happened again last week. At Fort Hood, Texas.   An obviously troubled, disgruntled Army psychiatrist, apparently distraught after learning that he was to be deployed to Afghanistan, lost it.  He went on a shooting rampage, killing and injuring scores of fellow soldiers.

Unlike in past tragedies, though, some conservative politicians and their media brethren have been quick to label the Fort Hood attack an act of terrorism.  Why?  Because the alleged shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, is a Muslim.

Maybe they’re right.  After all, news reports indicate, among other things, that Hasan had made some extremist statements; he’d also been in contact with a radical Islamist cleric in Yemen.  But, for purposes of U.S. law, “terrorism” is defined as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”  That’s a tough standard to meet.

Perhaps that’s why, at least so far, Government investigators don’t seem to think that Hasan was acting as a terrorist.  Because they’ve decided to prosecute him via court martial in a military court.   And, if there were evidence of terrorism, they’d almost surely be proceeding against Hasan in U.S. District Court instead.

So, why then have conservatives been so quick to pin the terrorist tag on Hasan?  Politics, of course! For one thing, labeling Hasan a terrorist feeds into conservatives’ world view that all Muslims are inherently dangerous enemies of America who need to be monitored closely.  Moreover, conservatives are anxious to be able to say that an act of terrorism took place on the Obama administration’s watch, which would justify their contention that the president is soft on national security. 

Such premature, fear-mongering rush to judgment for political gain in the face of a national tragedy is unseemly.  But, alas, it’s also become standard operating procedure for the right.  In fact, conservatives are using the same tactic in response to the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute the alleged 9/11 mastermind in federal court in New York.  And then, of course, is their hysteria over health care reform.   Seems like the conservatives’ principal propaganda strategy is to scare us.

FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  Be afraid, America.  Be very afraid.

The Blame Game

Forget about the weather!  If Mark Twain were around today, he'd wryly note how everyone always talks about personal accountability, but no one ever seems to do anything about it.  And he'd be right.  What's more, the people who talk about it the most are the ones most likely to point their fingers at others as soon as anyone tries to hold them accountable for anything.

Take, for example, my friend "Jim" (not his real name).  He's forever preaching the importance of taking personal responsibility for one's actions.  But he's forever blaming everyone else for his problems; nothing is ever his fault. 

During a recent visit to Jim's office, I noticed a framed sign hanging on the wall.  In bold, upper-case letters, the sign said this: "If you are not made accountable to fix your mistakes, there is no incentive to do it correctly."  I tried to ignore the error. But I just couldn't help myself.

"Um, Jim," I began, pointing to the wall, "your sign is grammatically incorrect."  "What?," Jim asked, though it sounded more like an accusation than a question.  So I explained how, although the article "it" in the sign presumably was intended to relate back to the noun "mistakes,"  "it" was singular while "mistakes" was plural.  Jim's response was instantaneous:  "I didn't write it.  I saw it in a magazine.  My secretary cut it out and enlarged it for me.  The framing store mounted and framed it.  No one noticed there was a mistake.  And, anyway, I think you're wrong about it being wrong."

Yeesh!  In the space of a few a seconds, Jim had exonerated himself from any responsibility for the grammatical error in HISs sign hanging on HISs wall preaching HIS philosophy of personal accountability and, instead, had pointed his finger at the magazine, his secretary, the framing store and even me for the mistake. I was going to point this out to him.  But it was such a minor mistake that I decided to let it go.  "Well, Jim," I said, "you know best.  After all, the buck stops with you." 

Jim puffed out his chest and raised his chin up high.  "Yes it does," he said.  Then he peered out his window and suddenly grimaced at the leaden sky.  "Looks like rain," he sighed, shaking his head.

And so it goes.  

To Have. . .and to Hold

A tenement, of course, is slum housing.  But that wasn't always the case. Derived from the Latin tenere, meaning "to hold" (its Spanish cousin is tener, meaning "to have"), the word "tenement" originally applied to any non-ownership interest in real property, even fancy-schmancy estates.  The occupants of such property were called "tenants" (literally, "holders").  The word didn't take on its modern negative connotation until the nineteenth century, when waves of immigrants flocked to America's cities and took up residence in over-crowded, low-cost apartment buildings.

This is just one of the fascinating factoids I learned during a trip last summer to New York City's Tenement Museum.  Located on Manhattan's Lower East Side (Orchard Street, to be exact), the museum features a guided tour of an actual tenement, along with the histories of the immigrant families who lived there in the early 1900s.

During this era, I learned, the Lower East Side was the most densely-populated place on earth (with the possible exception of Calcutta).  And, incredibly, just about all of America's clothing was manufactured in the tenements that lined its narrow streets.  The cramped quarters were a breeding-ground for disease, which is why tuberculosis was called the "Tailor's Disease."  Some people even blamed Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe for bringing the disease to America and spreading its germs through the clothes they made.

The tenement I saw consisted of three rooms -- a bedroom, kitchen and sitting room -- TOTALING 350 square feet.  The family who lived there circa 1915 included five children.  And the husband ran his small garment-finishing business out of the front room, where four workers toiled daily.  There was no bathroom.  Rather, all residents of the four-story walk- up (12 families) shared a communal out-house in the "backyard."

As I absorbed all this data, my mind couldn't help but wander a few blocks away.  To another tenement, on East Ninth Street and Avenue C, where another immigrant family with five children lived circa 1915.  My father was born in that tenement (who knew from hospitals?), delivered by a non-English speaking midwife (who knew from doctors?) who put both the wrong name and the wrong birthdate on my father's birth certificate.

My father's "home" must have been virtually identical to the tenement on Orchard Street in which I now stood.  He shared the tiny bedroom with his three brothers (two per bed), while his parents and sister slept in the front room.  His father didn't work in the garment industry; he made his living driving a bus and serving as a handy man.  So the Tailor's Disease didn't visit my father's household.  Still, when my father became ill during the great flu epidemic of 1918, his family changed his name so the angel of death wouldn't  be able to find him.

It was hot that day in the tenement on Orchard Street, and the fans the guide handed out to us provided no relief.  As I stood there sweating, I remember my father telling me how he used to walk east on summer days during his childhood, past the horse and buggy stables, to take a refreshing dip in the East River.

The family who lived in the Orchard Street tenement eventually managed to save enough money to move to Brooklyn.  So did my father's.  But, like all families of that era, surviving the slums of the Lower East Side was just the beginning.  Because then came the Great Depression, followed by World War II. 

The museum guide didn't know what happened to the Orchard Street family after they left the tenement.  But I know what happened to mine.  My father became the first one in his family (and the only one of his siblings) to go to college.  He went on to get a master's degree before joining the Army during WW II and winning the Bronze Battle Star for valor during the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest in Belgium.  Then he was transferred to the Philippines where, while preparing for a land invasion of Japan that was averted when we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he contracted tuberculosis (even though there were no Jewish tailors around).  He was in and out of V.A. hospitals for years.

Eventually, he went to law school at night under the G.I. Bill while working full-time during the day, graduating as valedictorian at age 38.  He learned that he had passed the bar exam the day before his mother died.

I knew all of this before I went to the Tenement Museum.  But standing in that apartment that day gave me a completely different perspective on my family's history.  I kept thinking about it as I drove my air-conditioned car home to my well-appointed, 1,700 square-foot, air-conditioned condo (including two full bathrooms) in a private, gated community that features, among other niceties, a man-made lake, outdoor swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts and clubhouse with a restaurant, ball room, card rooms, spa, salon, gym and indoor swimming pool.

My family, I realized, has come a long way in the past three generations.  And, while I may not own its past, it’s nevertheless a part of me.  Something for me to have. . .and to hold onto.

A Call for Niceness

I'm not surprised that it went largely unnoticed.  After all, America has so many other urgent challenges on its plate these days -- like fixing our economy, reforming our health care system, restoring our credibility in the world court of public opinion and keeping us safe from terrorism without compromising our constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms.  Still, the challenge that President Obama issued during a recent appearance on "60 Minutes" may be just as vital to our society's long-term survival as these hot-button issues. 

In case you missed it, the President called upon us to make civility interesting.  And that's a daunting task.

His point was that -- in this age of computer technology-driven, mass media-generated, 24-hour news cycles -- it's the squeaky wheels that get the oil.  And, let's face it, day-to-day civility isn't particularly squeaky.  Especially in comparison to the ever-escalating nasty confrontations and seedy controversies that pervade our daily lives.

Take the health care-reform "debate" (please!).  There's been precious little coverage of civilized discourse about the substantive issues.  But there's been plenty of coverage of citizens behaving badly at town-hall meetings, demonstrators behaving badly at tea-party protests and a congressman behaving badly during the President's address to a joint session of Congress. Ugh!

Health care reform isn't the only issue being dominated by bad behavior.  What sticks in your minds most about the IOC's recent decision to award the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio?  That's right!  Americans loudly and publicly "celebrating" their own country's failure to win the bid. And what happened when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Obama?  We heard "patriotic" Americans obnoxiously ridiculing their president as if he had just done something terribly wrong.

Unfortunately, this climate of ugliness isn't confined to the political arena.  It dominates the entertainment industry, too.  Or, more accurately, what passes for the entertainment industry these days. I'm talking, of course, about reality television. Most of which involves "celebrities" and plain old folks like you and me acting like jerks in public.  "Jon & Kate Plus 8"? Puh-leeze!

The mass media's mantra used to be that sex sells. But it's beginning to look more and more like incivility sells even better than sex.  And that's scary.

But there's another problem with being nice besides the fact that it's not particularly interesting. People seem to misinterpret civility as weakness.  I see this in my own law practice all the time.  Faced with obnoxious adversaries who equate nasty and rude litigation tactics with effective advocacy, some clients express disappointment when I refuse to respond in kind.  They want me to be just as aggressive (i.e., nasty and rude) as my opponents.  They don't understand that the best way for me to zealously represent their interests in court is by applying the law to the facts of their cases in the most persuasive, compelling way possible.  Incivility is irrelevant -- and, indeed, counterproductive -- to this goal.

So, what's the answer?  Are we doomed to become a nation of mean-spirited pricks?  Not if Shakespeare was right when Antonio proclaimed in "The Tempest" that what's past is prologue (a phrase, by the way, that is carved into the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.). Because there is a historical precedent for national civility defeating national nastiness.  It happened in 1954, during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy, you see, had been holding America hostage for years with his cruel and reckless crusade against purported communists in government.  His modus operandi was to use conjecture, innuendo and guilt by association to accuse his targets of having communist ties. For example, when Army Special Counsel Joseph Welch demanded that McCarthy produce his list of alleged communists working at the Defense Department, McCarthy predictably tried to turn the tables on Welch. If Welch really were so concerned about individuals aiding the Communist Party, McCarthy said, then Welch should check on a lawyer at Welch's own law firm in Boston who once had belonged to the National Lawyers Guild (which was then being investigated as a possible communist-front organization).   

Welch didn't respond uncivilly to McCarthy's uncivil bully tactics.  But he didn't back down, either.  "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator," Welch said. "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Welch's rhetorical questions struck the chord of civility in America.  For all intents and purposes, the scourge of McCarthyism was over. 

Could it happen again today? Could civility rise up and vanquish the forces of rudeness?  Now THAT would be interesting!              

It's Not My Cross to Bear

"It's erected as a War Memorial," the man said, clearly annoyed.  "What would you have them erect?. . . Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"

The man was responding to a complaint about a wooden cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built some 75 years ago atop some rocks in the Mojave National Preserve in California.  The complainer was a Jew, and he was trying to explain to the man how non-Christian Americans might feel excluded by having such an overt symbol of Christianity displayed on public land.

"I've been in Jewish cemeteries," the complainer continued, trying to drive home the seemingly obvious point that the cross -- being the veritable trademark of Christianity -- is typically found at Christian grave sites.  "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

But the man would have none of it:  "I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that the [Mojave National Preserve] cross honors are the Christian war dead," he said.  "I think that's an outrageous conclusion."

If this exchange had taken place in some bar, perhaps we could excuse the man's abject insensitivity to the Jewish complainer's concerns.  After all, America -- culturally, socially and demographically -- always has been (and continues to be) a Christian nation.  Hell, Christmas itself -- which, after all, is a Christian religious observance -- is one of our national holidays.  So it's no surprise that an "average" American man in a local bar -- who probably equates American patriotism with the Flag, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Church (as symbolized by The Cross) -- wouldn't be able to grasp a non-Christian American's feeling of alienation over the presence of a cross on public land.

But the exchange didn't take place in a bar. It took place in the United States Supreme Court.  On October 7, 2009.  The complainer was Peter Eliasberg of the ACLU. And who was the man who couldn't grasp that a 5 to 8 foot-high cross at a WWI war memorial on U.S. Government-owned property was a problem? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  That's scary.  Because he ought to be held to a higher standard than a guy in a bar.

At the very least, Justice Scalia should be familiar with the plain language of our Constitution.  He should know that the first ten words of the very first amendment to that document couldn't be clearer: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."  Not much wiggle room there!  And what possibly could be more of an "establishment" of Christianity than the U.S. Government featuring the religion's logo on its property?

There's a catch, of course.  Congress decided a while ago to transfer the land on which the cross sits to private ownership. The good news (and I don't mean gospel) is that the lower courts nevertheless found a constitutional violation.  They weren't persuaded that the land transfer avoided the First Amendment problem.  To the contrary, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals viewed the land transfer as an effort to end run the Constitution's absolute ban of government-endorsed religion.

The bad news?  The Obama Administration argued before the Supreme Court that the transfer obviates any constitutional concerns, and several conservative justices seem open to that line of reasoning.  The worst news?  Regardless of the case's outcome, Justice Scalia doesn't get it. 

In the meantime, the cross has been covered with plywood pending a final decision in the case.  Which is fine by me.  Because, as a secular Jewish humanist, crosses freak me out.  And, as a supporter of our Bill of Rights, crosses on government property freak me out even more.   

The Career of Living Dangerously

I'm a dare devil.  A thrill seeker.  A risk taker. An adventurer.  I live on the edge.  I thrive on the adrenaline that comes with danger.

But I don't race fast cars.  Or jump over canyons on motor cycles.  Or run with bulls in the streets of Pamplona.  Or hunt wild animals on safari with a bow and arrow.  That stuff is for rank amateurs.  My derring-do is far more perilous.

I'm a lawyer who doesn't back up his computer data.

I know!  Crazy, right?

Twice in the past five years, my computer has crashed, trapping my client files, email correspondence and financial records inside it.  Each time, I frantically waited for four excruciating weeks to see if forensic information-technology consultants could rescue and restore my precious data.  It was a real rush, man.  Like teetering on a high wire, with no net to catch me.  And, each time, the professionals succeeded in saving my sorry butt.

For those of you keeping score at home:  New computer -- $2,000; Rescue/Restoration of data -- $3,000; Relief upon learning that my legal career wasn't over after all -- Priceless.

Whew. . .That was a close one!  But I think I’ve finally learned my lesson.  I promise to be more careful from now on.  Maybe I’ll take up a safe hobby.  Like sky-diving.  

The Curse of Bill Buckner

[Ed.’s Note: To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it got late early this year for the Mets. So there’s no point in waiting for the official end of the 2009 baseball season for my annual “State of the Mets” message.]

It was the furthest thing from any Mets fan’s mind that Saturday night 23 Octobers ago.  But, as Mookie Wilson’s seemingly harmless dribbler miraculously squirted between Bill Buckner’s legs and rolled down Shea Stadium’s right field line while Ray Knight scored the winning run – capping the Amazin’s improbable game-six comeback win and setting the stage for the franchise’s second World Series championship two nights later – the Gods of Baseball already were convening somewhere up in Valhalla.

Their purpose?  To determine the price the Mets would have to pay for Buckner’s unexpected largesse.  Because there are no free rides in the world of baseball.  And payback is usually a bitch.

For the Mets, that payback began even before the 1987 season started.  That’s when star pitcher Dwight Gooden went into drug rehab.  Doc would never be the same.  And neither would the Mets. 

Oh, sure, they managed to win the NL East again in 1988, but then lost the League Championship Series to a Dodgers team they had dominated during the season when light-hitting catcher Mike Scioscia somehow homered against Gooden in the ninth inning of the pivotal fourth game of the series.  They didn’t return to the playoffs again until 1999, when they lost to the hated Atlanta Braves.  They made it all the way to the World Series in 2000, only to suffer the ignominy of watching the rival Yankees celebrate that storied franchise’s 26th World Series championship on Shea Stadium’s pitching mound.  And they dominated the 2006 season, but were upset by the Cardinals in the League Championship series when another light-hitting catcher hammered a series-winning homer in the ninth inning of the deciding seventh game.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s four post-season appearances (and just one World Series appearance) in the past 23 years.  Not so good!  

As for the other 19 years. . .Oy!  It was bad enough whenthe team acquired a series of established stars – like Bret Saberhagen, Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman, Carlos Baerga, Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn – who all failed miserably.  It was worse in 2007 and 2008, when the team collapsed down the stretch and missed the playoffs.  But nothing can compare to this season.

After all, we expected great things from the 2009 Mets.  Sports Illustrated (speaking of curses) even picked them to win the 2009 World Series.  And they’d be playing their home games in their new world-class ballpark, Citi Field.  What could be better?

Once the season started, though, the Mets began to suffer injuries.  Series injuries.  More injuries than you’d expect from a team in an over-50 softball league.  More injuries to more key players than anyone had ever remembered seeing in the history of Major League Baseball.  So many injuries that the Mets’ disabled list began to look like a fantasy baseball league player’s dream roster.  By mid-summer, the team on the field was more like a minor-league squad than a world-series contender.  And the Mets slowly, agonizingly dropped out of contention, rendering September completely irrelevant, even to their most ardent supporters.

So, when will the Gods of Baseball revoke their curse?  No one knows.  The Gods of Baseball  don’t publish minutes of their meetings.  But, if past history holds true, Met maniacs may remain frustrated for years to come.

Take the three most famous curses in baseball history (please):  The Curse of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal kept the Chicago White Sox from winning a World Series for 88 years.  The Curse of the Bambino plagued the Red Sox for 86 years.  The Curse of the Billy Goat has prevented the Chicago Cubs from even making to a World Series since 1945 (the Cubbies haven’t won the Series in more than a century!).

And then there’s the Double Curse of ’54.  You may not have heard of this one because I just made it up.  But think about it:  The 1954 World Series featured a Cleveland Indians team that had gone an incredible 111-43 during the regular season.  The payback for such unprecedented excellence?  The Giants swept the Indians in the Series, and the Indians haven’t won a world championship since.

And the payback for the Giants’ upset victory?  They haven’t won another World Series either.

Compared to these, the Curse of Bill Buckner is just a baby hex.  Which means it could go on for decades.   It already doesn’t bode too well for the immediate future that the Mets’ farm system is depleted and the team’s owners are now reportedly on austerity, having allegedly lost $500 million to Bernie Madoff.

So Mets fans need to take radical action.  We need to appeal directly to the Gods of Baseball.  Tell them, “Baseball Gods, tear down this Curse!”  (I hear the Gods are big fans of Ronald Reagan).  And there’s a perfectly logical rationale for our pleas.

You see, Buckner’s error didn’t give the Mets Game Six.  They’d already succeeded in tying the score.  Even if Buckner had cleanly fielded Wilson’s grounder, Mookie still might have beaten it out for a hit. And even if Buckner had succeeded in recording the third out of the inning, the Mets nevertheless might have won the game anyway.

In other words, Buckner’s muff was never as big a gift to the Mets as everyone’s always made it out to be.  So, Baseball Gods, shouldn’t 23 years of hell on earth be payback enough?

I hope the Gods of Baseball are both compassionate and reasonable.  Otherwise, “Wait ‘til Next Year” might as well be “Wait ’til Next Century.”   

Jack and Jill’s Wardrobe Malfunction

Like most married men, Jack rarely gets to clothe himself.  Because Jill treats her husband like a living, breathing Ken Doll. 

In Jill’s defense, Jack will never appear on the cover of GQ or as a judge on Project Runway.  He’s more like “Beau Jest” than Beau Brummel.  He can “clean up pretty good” when he wants to.  It’s just that he rarely wants to.  Because he typically opts for comfort and ease (i.e., sloppiness) over style and fashion.  And, anyway, Jack’s usually too preoccupied (i.e., lazy) to spend the time needed (i.e., 30 seconds) to put together an outfit that meets Jill’s exacting standards.

A few weeks ago, Jack was about to leave home for an appearance at a friend’s annual golf outing when Jill bade him this all too familiar fond farewell:  “You’re going dressed like THAT?,” she asked, although it sounded much more like a criminal indictment to Jack than a question.  “What’s wrong?,” Jack responded incredulously. 

Jill replied with her usual diplomatic aplomb:  “You look like a horse’s ass!”  While Jack usually appreciated such constructive criticism from his wife, he frankly didn’t understand this particular comment.  After all, he was resplendent in khaki shorts, a solid green polo shirt and sneakers. What else would one wear to play golf?  In fact, Jack was absolutely convinced that his fellow golfers all would dress in a similar manner.  

Jill, on the other hand, remained equally convinced that Jack was dressed inappropriately.  Even though she had never so much as set foot on a golf course in her entire life.  “Your friends will all make fun of you,” she warned as Jack left.

When Jack arrived at the golf course’s clubhouse, he uncharacteristically took inventory of his fellow duffers’ attire.  And he was delighted to see that they were all dressed pretty much like him.  If anything, Jack actually was dressed better than most of them.  Feeling vindicated, Jack decided to take a photo of his friends, to show Jill later.  Then he realized that he had no idea how to use his cell phone’s camera  (And he subsequently discovered that his cell phone – which he’s owned for four years – didn’t even have a camera).  He also realized that – when it came to his fashion debates with Jill – discretion was always the better part of valor.  So he decided to drop the issue.

Until the following morning, when Jill and he were getting ready to leave for the hospital to witness the birth of their first grandchild.  “I don’t mean to criticize,” Jill began, “but this is a special day in our lives.  Pictures will be taken.  I can’t let you go dressed like a slob.”  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked incredulously.

For this sultry August day, Jack had chosen olive shorts and a beige-patterned, short-sleeve madras sport shirt.  “Why wear an old shmata [Yiddish for rag] when you have an amoire full of  nice polo shirts?,” Jill asked, although it sounded more like an accusation to Jack than a question.

So Jack removed the apparently offensive sport shirt and donned a red polo.  “Now you look like a frickin’ Christmas tree,” Jill remarked.  So Jack removed the apparently offensive red polo and replaced it with a black one. “You can’t wear that, Jill said.  “It’s all wrinkled.  No wonder,” she added, attacking the shelves of the amoire as if it were the clearance rack at Marshall’s, “this is a complete mess.”

Jack couldn’t take it any more:  “I was the best-dressed golfer there yesterday!,” he screamed.  Jill shook her head in disbelief.  “Just put the madras shirt back on,” she finally said.

All was quiet on the wardrobe front for the next week or so.  Until the couple was about to leave home one morning to attend their new grandson’s bris.  “Aren’t you proud of me?,” Jill asked, though it somehow sounded more like a criticism to Jack than a question.  “Why?,” he responded.  “Well, I didn’t even comment on your outfit,” Jill said.  “Actually,” Jack said, “you just did – what’s wrong with it?”

Jack actually had given some forethought to his ensemble for a change. He was wearing Ralph Lauren khaki pants, a rich blue short-sleeved, silk Calvin Klein dress shirt, cordovan Ecco lace-tied shoes and a matching cordovan belt.

“I just thought you’d be dressed more casually,” Jill explained.  “Maybe loafers and no socks.”  For once, Jack somehow had managed to dress too well for his wife’s tastes. 

And so it goes.  

Like Falsely Shouting “Fire!” in a Crowded Theater

Ninety years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes used this simile to illustrate the limits on Constitutionally-protected free speech.  But, as Keith Olbermann noted on “Countdown” last week, it also aptly describes the strategy that opponents of health-care reform are using today.  Indeed, much of the “loyal” opposition’s rhetoric is based on scare tactics and the Big Lie.   So it’s no wonder that – armed with misinformation and frightened to death – people showing up at town-hall meetings to debate the issue are angry and frustrated.   

By now you’ve probably heard some of the shouts of “Fire!” Whether or not you fled the theater in panic, let me assuage your fears by dousing those ersatz blazes:  Reform won’t cause a rationing of health care services, break the federal budget, limit veterans’ access to health care, burden small businesses, cut Medicare benefits, force people to change doctors or insurance companies or give the Government control over your bank accounts.

What reform will do is: prohibit insurance companies from refusing you coverage because of your medical history (including pre-existing conditions) or from dropping or reducing coverage if you become seriously ill; impose annual caps on what insurance companies can charge you for out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles and co-pays, and prevent insurers from placing annual or lifetime caps on your benefits; require insurers to fully cover regular checkups  and diagnostic tests that help prevent illness (such as mammograms) ; and extend family coverage benefits to “adult children” through age 26.  Nothing there to make anyone evacuate the theater!

As for the biggest false flame of all, health care reform certainly won’t require, encourage or even suggest euthanasia for anyone.  I know it’s hard to believe but – contrary to the screams of “Fire!” from Sarah Palin (that beacon of credibility and truthfulness) – there will be no Obama death panels deciding who will live and who will die.  Rather, the proposal merely provides that, for seniors who want to consult with their physicians about end-of-life decisions, the law will help cover such voluntary, private consultations.

Ironically, this provision was added to the bill by a Republican.  And groups as diverse as AARP, the AMA and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization are in favor of it.  So it’s one of the few measures that actually has broad, bi-partisan support.  Which may be why even staunch critics of the reform bill as a whole – like Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski – have told fire screamers like Palin to quit making things up. In other words, stuff a sock in it!

Why do people falsely scream “Fire!” in a crowded theater?  There are two reasons.  For one thing, the strategy works.  Indeed, in the face of the furor over those fictional death panels, the Senate Finance Committee apparently is dropping the end-of-life-consultation provision from the version of the bill it’s now working on because it’s become too controversial. What a shame!  And the Obama Administration is even considering replacing the “public insurance” option with a private cooperative plan. 

Second, fire-screaming enables critics of health care reform to avoid discussing the actual merits of particular provisions of the bill.  Every time I ask an opponent of reform to explain what substantive concerns he has over specific measures in the bill, I get answers like, “It’s socialism!”  Makes me want to spray him with a fire extinguisher.  Or, at the very least, dump a bucket of water over his head.

My favorite criticism of the bill is this:  “Why should hard-working people like me have to pay to provide health care to people who can’t afford it themselves?”  The critic usually says this shortly after frothing at the mouth about how Obama is a closet Muslim who’s unpatriotically destroying our Christian country.  Strange!  Because – while I’m no expert on religious philosophy – I always thought that one of the basic tenets of our Judeo-Christian value system was for the “Haves” to help out the “Have Nots.”  Oh, well.  What do I know?

The bottom line is that it’s going to be hard for the Obama administration to put out the anti-reform conflagrations.  Because, sadly, we didn’t start the fire; resistance to change has been always burning since the world’s been turning. 

Fore!

If you’re a duffer looking to eliminate your slice, please look someplace else.  Because, despite its title, this piece isn’t about golf.  Rather, it concerns two topics that are as inextricably intertwined as Love and Marriage, Peanut Butter and Jelly, or Siegfried and Roy.  I’m talking, of course, about Baseball and Circumcision.

Huh?  Don’t worry.  I didn’t see the connection at first, either.  Until a prophet showed me the way.  His name?  Luis Castillo.

It all started on a recent Saturday morning, when my first-born son – who is getting ready to welcome his own first-born son into the world – telephoned me.  “Remind me again,” he began, “why I should make my son a Mets fan.”

I immediately knew exactly what he was talking about.  Because, the night before, the aforementioned Castillo – the Mets’ second baseman (and a former Gold glove winner, no less) – had inexplicably dropped a routine, two-out pop up in the ninth inning, instantly turning what should have been an inspiring victory over the hated Yankees into one of the most devastating losses in the 47-year history of the franchise (and that’s saying a lot).

I gave my son a philosophically-profound response:  “It’s his destiny.”  I explained.  “It’s who we are as a people.”  This off-handed remark led me on a two-stage journey of self-discovery.

Stage One didn’t last very long.  In fact, it took me just a few seconds to give up trying to figure out whether I should have said “It’s whom we are” instead of  “It’s who we are.”   Stage Two, on the other hand, was a different story altogether.

Speaking of stories, there’s no better novel in the world than the Old Testament (which used to be called the Bible, until some Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah decided to write a better-selling novel called the New Testament).  And, like all great fiction, the Bible relies on such literary devices as symbolism, irony, conflict and foreshadowing.

Take, for example, God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17:1-14).  God promised to give Abraham land and to bless and redeem his descendants.  Sounds pretty good for the Jews so far! And, in exchange, what did Abraham have to give God in return?  A sack of gold?  A few goats every now and then?  No.  Abraham had to agree that every Jewish baby boy ever born would be circumcised.  (God sure drives a hard bargain!).  Talk about foreshadowing.  You knew right then and there that things wouldn’t be easy for the Jews.  And, sure enough, the next 5,000 years haven’t exactly gone too smoothly for the Chosen Ones.

Still, though, each generation of Jews dutifully – indeed, joyfully – continues to participate in the ceremony of the bris.  We’re either hopeless optimists, gluttons for punishment or fans of the underdog.

Which brings me, of course, back to the Mets.  Despite nearly a half-century of failure, disappointment and frustration, each generation of Mets fans dutifully brings its offspring into the Amazins’ fold.  We’re either hopeless optimists, gluttons for punishment or fans of the underdog.

In other words, being a Jew is a lot like being a Mets’ fan.  And vice versa.  Which is why baseball and circumcision are interrelated (I foretold you so!).

At some point during my grandson’s upcoming bris (probably at the very moment of the unkindest cut of all), I expect my son to look at me with an expression on his face that asks “Why?”   I might answer with, “Because it’s our destiny.” Or I might just say, “Castillo.”  Either way, my message will be clear:   Whether it’s the foreshadowing ritual of the foreskin or foregoing the Yankees in favor of the Mets, at least we know exactly what we’re getting into.  And forewarned is forearmed.

. . .To the Moon, Alexei!

Contrary to popular belief, The Cold War didn’t end with the fall of the Soviet Union.  Or when that B-movie actor playing the role of his career as U.S. President told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.  No, The Cold War ended years earlier when – during the same summer that brought us such iconic events as Woodstock, the Miracle Mets, “Midnight Cowboy” and Chappaquiddick – the astronauts of Apollo 11 walked on the moon.

In retrospect, the significance of the lunar landing is largely one of form over substance.  After all, claiming the coveted piece of extra-terrestrial real estate didn’t give us any tangible tactical or strategic military advantage over the evil empire.  Nor did our exploration of the moon’s surface yield any significant, concrete scientific data to give us a technological  leg up on the red menace.

Rather, in fulfilling President Kennedy’s 1961 promise, the moon shot loudly re-affirmed the superiority of the American way of life – our individual and collective spirit, ingenuity and resourcefulness, fueled by a free and open society blossoming under a democratic form of government – over that of our communist adversary’s.  It was this idea of America – epitomized by our winning the space race after falling behind in the years immediately following Sputnik – that ultimately captured the hearts and minds of those living behind the Iron Curtain.  Which, in turn, led them to re-decorate their own countries with more transparent window treatments.

Stated simply, The Cold War ended because Eastern Europeans – based on cultural watersheds like the Apollo 11 mission – decided once and for all that they wanted to be like us. 

The unique American spirit of freedom and rugged individualism that landed us on the moon two score ago is still alive and well today.  It remains our greatest strength and our most valuable natural resource.  Ironically, it’s also our Achilles heel.  Because it’s the reason that Muslim extremists have declared holy jihad against us; the American way of life is anathema to their way of thinking.  And the reason that such extremists have been able to wreak havoc inside our non-police state.

And all of it – the good, the bad, the ugly – can be traced back to that day 40 years ago when America, like some gigantic Ralph Kramden, said this to the Soviet Union:  “Pow! Zoom!. . .”.              

Requiem for a Weirdo

The national mourning period for Michael Jackson is now well into its second week, with no end in sight, and I have just one, simple question – Why?

I mean, sure, he was an extraordinarily gifted performer with unique, perhaps unprecedented, talent.  And he entertained us for decades.  But he didn’t exactly lead the kind of exemplary personal life that we Americans tend to expect from our heroes.

For example, there was – in no particular order – his alleged drug use, his alleged pedophilia, his alleged multiple plastic surgeries (possibly stemming from a rare psychiatric disease called body dysmorphic disorder) and his pretty obvious general creepiness and weirdness.  Should we be empathetic toward him?  Sure.  Should we forgive his sins and indiscretions?  Okay, I guess. 

But given his utterly bizarre personality and behavior, I can’t imagine even his most ardent fans ever telling their kids to “be just like Michael Jackson when you grow up.”  Yet we’re acting as if he wrote the Constitution, freed the slaves and won World War II single-handedly.  Shameful!

In fact, there’s only one thing worse than the public’s posthumous adulation for Jackson:  The two reverends – Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson – embracing him as an African-American role model and icon.  Are you kidding me?  If there’s one thing that Michael Jackson’s behavior made crystal clear, it’s that he was ashamed of being black.  Every face-altering procedure he allegedly underwent had one goal:  To make Michael look whiter.

It being July 4th, I have a revolutionary idea:  Let’s declare our independence from the out-of-control Michael Jackson love-fest and pay tribute where tribute is due – to the men and women who have fought to make and keep this country, in the words of Lincoln (speaking of someone worthy of our hero-worship), “the last, best hope on earth.”

Thanks for listening.  Now, please pass the hot dogs.

Death, Be Not Numerological!

Predictably, I heard it again this week.  Multiple times, in fact.  That’s right.  In the aftermath of the deaths of Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, everyone seems to be reciting that time-honored, age-old truism.  Probably the dumbest truism of all.  So dumb, in fact, that it ought to be called a falsism.

You know the one I mean.  As listeners soberly nod in silent agreement, a speaker sighs, shakes her head and quietly but authoritatively explains, “Well, death comes in threes.”

I hate to break the news to everyone, but. . .NO, IT DOESN’T!!!  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  Stated bluntly, death comes all the time in all sorts of different quantities. Today’s local newspaper, for example, carried some 22 death notices.  It also had several obituary articles, including one for a 51 year-old mountain-climbing, ultra-marathoning personal trainer who dropped dead from a heart attack while at the gym.

Death certainly didn’t come in threes at Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg or Pearl Harbor, or on D Day or September 11.  (Don’t even think about checking whether the total number of deaths is divisible by three).   And it didn’t come in threes that horrific weekend in November, 1963.  I counted just two deaths then – President Kennedy on Friday and Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday.

Don’t get me wrong.  You can always make it seem like death comes in threes:  “Great Aunt Sadie, my co-worker’s best friend’s dog and the guy who played Bozo the Clown.”  Just like you can always make it seem like death comes in two, fours, fives, eights and twenty sevens.   And, let’s face it, sometimes – by coincidence and the law of averages – death does come in threes.  Take January 2, 2007 – James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein!  But that same law of averages also gives us death on other days in many other numerical combinations and permutations.  

So where did this ridiculous truism come from?  Well, at least according to my exhaustive Google research, no one seems to know.  How odd!

But here’s one thing I do know:  There’s a New York Lottery TV commercial in which three famous announcers – Ed McMahon, the movie-trailer voiceover guy and the “Let’s Play Jeopardy” guy – are sitting in a coffee shop exchanging their most famous lines when the lottery announcer says “the New York Lottery jackpot is now” whatever millions of dollars, prompting everyone in the coffee shop to race out and buy a lottery ticket.  Since the commercial began to air, the movie-trailer guy and Ed McMahon have died.  If I were the Jeopardy guy, I’d make an emergency appointment to see my doctor.

June 19

One question kept tugging at me as I stood in a Manhattan hospital room, watching (and listening to) my comatose father’s belabored breathing:  “How will I know when he’s in his final death throes?”  Finally, I decided to call my sister in California, just to let her know that the time seemed to be drawing near.

I couldn’t have been gone for more than five minutes.  But as I was about to re-enter my father’s room, his private-duty nurse came out and stopped me in my tracks.  “He’s gone,” she said.  And that was that.  The date?  June 19, 1980.

No one had told my father that he was dying.  But I’m sure he knew.  The last time we’d spoken before he went back into the hospital and lapsed into that coma – on Father’s Day, no less – he seemed to apologetically suggest that he was giving up.  “Son,” he said, “I don’t think I can take much more of this.”

He even expressed his desire to be cremated.  “I don’t want to take up a lot of room,” he explained.  This made perfect sense to me.  After all, my father frequently had expressed his belief that cemeteries and golf courses wasted land that could better be used for subsidized housing for the working poor.

We inurned his ashes in a niche on an outside wall at Pinelawn Cemetery on Long Island.  As luck would have it, I ended up living and working just a few minutes away, making it easy for me to visit the site each year on the anniversary of his death.  Which I’ve now done some 29 times – more years than I’d even been alive on the day he died.

A few years ago, I learned that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were buried in one of the cemeteries adjacent to Pinelawn.  Hardly surprising, since thousands of New York Jewish families own plots there.  Still, it struck me as an intriguing coincidence, given my father’s connection to the Rosenbergs.

In the ‘30s, you see, my father and the Rosenbergs – like many other young, educated,  intellectual New York Jews – believed that Marxism might help end the Great Depression and solve the problems associated with America’s growing social, economic, political and racial divides.  According to unsubstantiated family lore, my parents and the Rosenbergs traveled in the same social circles, and even may have had dinner together. 

But that’s where the similarities ended.  My parents joined the army during WWII to help defeat fascism.  My father won the Bronze Battle Star and, after the war, went to law school on the G.I. bill and spent his career fighting for workers’ rights, civil rights, civil liberties and social justice.  The Rosenbergs, on the other hand – at least according to the jury that convicted them of espionage – spied for the Soviet Union.

During the Rosenbergs’ trial, many radicals became apologists for them, while many Jews (fearing an anti-Semitic backlash) were harshly critical of them.  But my father took neither view.  He simply believed that, even if they were guilty, it was wrong to execute them.  For one thing, in his view capital punishment was both unconstitutional and immoral.  Moreover, to him the Rosenbergs’ execution didn’t serve justice but, rather, reflected the worst elements of McCarthyism, the Red Scare and anti-Semitism. 

I agree with my father.  After all, the Rosenbergs were the first (and, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the only) U.S. civilians ever executed for espionage.

This year, as June 19 approached, I started toying with the idea of stopping by the Rosenbergs’ graves after visiting my father’s niche.  So I did a Google search, just to refresh my recollection about the specific cemetery in which they were interred.  I quickly confirmed their location.  But I also learned something new that threw me for a loop.  I’d always known that the Rosenbergs had been executed in 1953 – the same year I was born.  It turns out, though, that their executions took place when I was 78 days old.  The date?  June 19.

The office staff at Wellwood cemetery wouldn’t tell me where the Rosenbergs’ graves were located.  They’re still concerned about vandalism, 56 years after the executions.  And the Rosenbergs’ own children took the surname of the family that adopted them after their parents’ deaths.

I have no desire to change my surname. To the contrary, I was proud to name my first son after my father.  And he’s now about to have his first son, guaranteeing that – unlike the Rosenbergs – my family name will continue for at least another generation. 

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!  See you next June 19 (when I’ll probably try again to find the Rosenbergs’ graves).

Jack and Jill Spin Their Wheels

Ah, springtime! Blossoms bloomin’. Sparrows singin’.  Baseballers battin.’  But not for Jack and Jill.  No, for our intrepid duo springtime means just one thing:  The Bike.

It all started innocently enough a few years ago.  When, on a lovely spring Saturday, Jill suddenly announced, “I want to buy a bike.”  This took Jack by surprise.  “But we just sold a bike at our garage sale,” he reminded her.  “Remember? The one you insisted on buying at a garage sale a couple of years ago.  You never rode it.  Not even once.” 

“I didn’t like that bike,” Jill explained.  “It was old.  And its tires were always flat.  I want a brand new bike.  Toys-R-Us has them on sale.  Let’s go.”

Jack learned long ago to carefully pick his fights with Jill.  This one wouldn’t be worth it.  So off they went to Toys-R-Us.  Where, after carefully considering 100 or so different models over a period of around four hours, Jill finally settled on a floor sample.  Being a floor sample, it was offered at an especially low price. Which Jill negotiated down even more by pointing out that the kickstand was broken.  Plus, since the bike already had been assembled, Jill realized that she wouldn’t have to pay an additional assembly charge.  In short, The Bike was a steal.

There was just one problem:  Jack now would have to schlep the assembled Bike home in the couple’s car, with Jill yelling helpful instructions like “Don’t rip the car’s leather.”   Thanks to this encouragement, Jack succeeded in getting The Bike from the store to the couple’s garage, suffering only a few bruises and cuts in the process, experiencing merely minor lower back spasms and leaving just a small tear in one of the car’s leather seats.

Once in the garage – which also serves as the couple’s basement, attic and general storage area – The Bike lay unused in the middle of its floor (remember – no kickstand), blocking Jack’s access to anything he might need. Until November.  That’s when Jill asked Jack, “When are you going to clean up the garage so I can get my car in there for the winter?”  It was a rhetorical question.  She was actually telling Jack to clean the garage by yesterday. 

Jack dutifully complied.  But the only way he could succeed in clearing sufficient floor area to accommodate Jill’s car was by putting The Bike in the corner and covering it with a few of Jill’s favorite things.  Like old clothes too frayed to give to charity.  Empty boxes too oddly shaped to discard (they might come in handy some day to ship oddly shaped objects).  And bags and bags of plastic clothes hangers too numerous to fit in the closets.  Jack secretly hoped that, with The Bike hidden from her view under this morass of junk, Jill would forget about it.

No such luck.  “When are you going to get my Bike out so I can ride it?”, Jill asked Jack the following spring.  It was another rhetorical question.  She was actually telling him to get The Bike out yesterday. 

Jack dutifully complied.  There was just one problem:  The tires were flat.  “I can’t ride it like this,” Jill said. “When are you going to put air in the tires?”  “Yesterday,” Jack answered.

As Jack schlepped The Bike to the car – cutting and bruising his arms en route – his wife gave him some advice:  “Don’t rip the car’s leather,” she said. 

Jack drove around for a while, trying to find a gas station with air pumps that worked and were free of charge.  He finally succeeded and triumphantly returned home with The Bike, which now was fully functional.  Jill greeted him warmly: “What took you so long?”, she asked.  “It’s too late now for me to go for a ride today.”   So Jack laid The Bike in the middle of the garage.  Where it stayed unused until November.  When Jill told him to put it away for the winter.

Like the very changing of the seasons themselves, Jack and Jill have now performed their ritual of The Bike biannually for years.  Jack’s torn the leather seats of three different cars, suffered multiple abrasions and contusions, and experienced increasingly severe lower back spasms.  Jill, for her part, has never once gone for a ride on The Bike.

Just last week, she asked Jack when he was going to take The Bike out.  He complied.  The Bike’s tires were flat.  Jill has asked him every day since when he’s going to put air in them (they have a new car that hasn’t had its torn-seat christening yet).  He will, soon.  First, though, Jack’s going to the gym to ride the stationary bike for a while.  Just so he can feel that he’s getting somewhere for a change.

Editor’s Note: Jill has asked that I remind readers of two things: (1) she is a purely fictional character and (2)the facts have been embellished and exaggerated to enhance their comedic value.   

Putting the “Diss” in Disability Insurance

As everyone knows, our health-care insurance system is seriously sick.  And it looks like, with the ongoing economic crisis, the patient’s taking a turn for the worse.  Because our nation’s financial woes give those bean-counting petty bureaucrats who run the system even more incentive to cover their asses with red tape.  Often with downright  Kafka-esque consequences.

Take, for example, my wife’s recent efforts to navigate through her employer’s short-term disability rules and regulations during a post-surgical leave of absence.  It seemed so simple:  All she had to do was have her surgeon provide information to her short-term disability insurer (to which she paid premiums) explaining that – since she would be unable to walk for six weeks – she couldn’t work for six weeks.  Then the insurer, in turn, would confirm to her employer that my wife was, indeed, disabled.  What could be easier?

Well, about half-way through her six-week leave, my wife received an ominous letter from her employer.  The insurer had approved her leave for only three weeks.  If she didn’t return to work then, she’d be deemed AWOL, and would be subject to discipline, including termination.  There was just one little flaw in the insurer’s ruling:  Since she still couldn’t walk, how could my wife possibly work?

So my wife asked her doctor to explain her situation to the disability insurer in greater detail.  No problem!  Except that – as she later learned from her doctor – the insurer was less than sympathetic:  “She can’t walk? So what?  She has a sedentary job!  She can’t drive because she’s taking prescription painkillers?  Big deal!  Tell her to take a cab.  Or public transportation.”  And so on.

The insurance situation was still unresolved when her doctor finally gave her clearance to return to work (six weeks after surgery – exactly when the doctor had initially said she’d be able to walk).  Nevertheless, with her release in hand, my wife dutifully went to her office, only to be turned away.  The doctor’s release, you see, contained two “restrictions” – my wife wasn’t permitted to stand for long periods and was required to wear sneakers.  Neither impacted on my wife’s job performance; she spends her work day sitting at a desk in a back-office facility where she has no face-to-face contact with customers.  But her employer nevertheless concluded that, because of these restrictions, she was disabled.

Let’s recap for those of you keeping score at home:  The powers that be decided that my wife wasn’t disabled when she was on medication and couldn’t walk, but that she was disabled when she walked into her office several weeks later ready, willing and able to perform her job.  Sure, that makes sense.

Eventually, after much buck-passing and finger-pointing among the various “deciders,” everything was resolved (at least as far as we can tell).  But my wife ended up spending more time trying to fix the mess than recuperating from her surgery.  By the time she returned to work, she needed a vacation.

More evidence, in case we needed any, that fixing our health-care insurance system won’t be easy.           

All You Need is Love

When I was in my late teens, my grandfather suffered a stroke that left him both demented and aphasic, forcing my mother to put him in a nursing home.  I was away at college at the time.  But whenever I came home, my mother took me  to visit him.  After all, Poppy and I always had been close.  He’d even been my regular baby sitter when I was a kid.

My visits to the nursing home invariably included the following exchange: “Do you know who this is, Pop?”, my mother asked as she pointed at me.  Poppy studied me intently, gazing into my impassive countenance while he scrunched up his own wrinkled face as if he were trying to decipher some complex code.  After what seemed like hours, the old man gave up trying to solve the puzzle.  “I don’t know who he is,” he finally said with a dismissive wave of his hand, belying what had to be deep-seated feelings of frustration, consternation and resignation.  “All I know is that I love him.”

Every time this ritual repeated itself, my reaction was this:  How sadly sweet (or, maybe, I thought it was sweetly sad; I don’t recall which).  And that was that.

Now, though, blessed with the perspective of a half-century’s life experiences, I have a different view of my grandfather’s proclamation:  How profound of him! Because he was actually solving one of life’s great mysteries – What is this thing called “love”?

Love is so mysterious because society – in its obsessive need to define, label and compartmentalize everything – developed a convoluted maze of Draconian rules governing the emotion (the “Book of Love”).  The rules are way too complicated to be repeated in detail here.  But I’ve boiled them down to their basic essence:  (1) You can have romantic feelings for your life-partner who, ideally, should be a person of the opposite sex in generally the same age group as you and  (2) You can have strong feelings of kinship for anyone who is related to you by blood or marriage. 

Now I’m no sociologist/psychologist (although I often play one in my essays).  But, in my humble opinion, the problem with the Book of Love is that it completely ignores the myriad other human relationships where strong, positive emotions may develop.  What’s worse, it impliedly suggests that it’s wrong just to have strong positive feelings in these other human relationships. So we’re taught at an early age to repress such feelings.  And we’re so good at repressing our feelings that we end up losing touch with them altogether.   Which leads to depression, anger, hatred, self-loathing, divorce, alcoholism, suicide, even war.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit.  But you get the point.  We’d be a lot happier – and the world would be a better place – if we simply gave ourselves and each other the permission to love “outside the box.”  Or, as John Lennon once put it:

It matters not
Who you love
Where you love
Why you love
When you love
Or how you love
It matters only that you love.

Which is pretty much what my grandfather was saying in the nursing home all those years ago.  I guess Poppy wasn’t demented after all!

Pandemically Incorrect

I’m all for political correctness.  I mean, if short people now want to be described as height-impaired (“vertically challenged” is so last year), that’s fine by me! But society has a way of ruining perfectly good concepts by taking them to their absurdist extremes.  Like, for example Marxism.  Or, for that matter, laissez-faire capitalism.

And that’s exactly what’s happened with political correctness.  As evidenced, most recently, by the Swine Flu. 

In case you missed it, we’re not supposed to call the Swine Flu the Swine Flu any more.  Because that name unfairly besmirches the noble reputation of America’s pork industry (the other white meat).   We’re now expected to call it the H1N1 Virus.  Kind of sterile sounding, if you ask me.  Not very flu-ish at all.  In fact, I can no longer take the disease seriously.  

Scary diseases ought to have scary names.  Or, at least, catchy ones.  How else are we to know that they’re dangerous?

Just imagine if political correctness had been around in the good old days.  There wouldn’t have been a Bubonic Plague.  The groin lobby (“bubonic” comes from the Greek word for groin) instead would have demanded that the disease be called something like “the plague that attacks our lymph systems.”  No sex appeal at all.

The “Black Death” would have been verboten, too. Why defame a perfectly respectable color?  Oh, sure, It could have been called simply “The Death.”  But then how would we have distinguished the fatal microbe from any of the zillion other things that might have killed us back then.

And I’m sure livestock-rights activists would have objected to monikers like “Cow Pox” and “Chicken Pox.”  A pox on both their houses!

As for geographical diseases, forget about it.  No more West Nile Virus, German Measles, Hong Kong Flu, Lyme Disease or Coxsackie Virus.  Legionnaire’s Disease?  No way!

I could ham it up a little more, but you get the picture.  And, anyway, I don’t want to boar you.   The bottom line is this:  Calling the Swine Flu the H1N1 Virus is like putting lipstick on a pig.

Volunteers of America

I’m not talking about the old Jefferson Airplane song.  Nor do I mean the Salvation Army spinoff organization.  What I’m referring to is President Obama’s call for all Americans to engage in community service.

I’m proud to say that I’m way ahead of the presidential curve on this one; I’ve been performing community service for years.  But I’m ashamed to say that my volunteerism hasn’t always been motivated by the most noble of purposes.

Don’t get me wrong.  Of course I volunteer because it’s the right thing to do.  In fact, I was brought up to believe that it’s more important in life to do good than to do well.  To value principles and interests over principal and interest.  As Abe Lincoln said when he was asked about his religion, “When I do good, I feel good.  When I do bad, I feel bad.”  Me, too!

But I have an ulterior, selfish motive for my actions as well.

Like many people, you see, I crave being loved, respected and appreciated by my fellow human beings.  And I’ve come to realize that nothing evokes such feelings of admiration in others more than my donating my professional services.  Simply stated, everyone loves a volunteer.

“You’re doing this for nothing?”, people ask incredulously when they hear that my involvement in a particular task, organization or cause is pro bono publico. “How absolutely wonderful of you!”  From that moment on, I can do no wrong.  I can arrive late.  Leave early.  Even screw something up (although I never do).  I’m revered just for showing up. 

This is a refreshing change from my life as a paid professional. Where, despite my never arriving late, leaving early or screwing up, it is not uncommon for clients to express unhappiness and dissatisfaction with me:  “Why is this taking case dragging on?  You’re not doing enough to move it along.”  Or, “Why is this case costing me so much? Stop doing so much to move it along.”

Which brings me to a basic rule of human behavior:  We all tend to gravitate toward things that make us happy and to avoid things that make us unhappy. 

And this explains why one of my “work weeks” last month consisted of the following: attending a monthly meeting of the board of directors of a non-profit organization on which I serve; attending a meeting of the executive committee of a non-profit organization on which I serve; judging the submissions made to an annual high school essay contest sponsored by a non-profit organization on which I serve; as a courtesy to a client, giving a free legal consultation to a potential client with a possible sexual harassment claim against her employer; judging an annual high school mock trial tournament (which I’ve done each of the past fifteen years); in my capacity as a court-appointed mediator, successfully settling a complex federal case; attending a monthly meeting of the legal committee of a non-profit organization on which I serve.

The good news is that I was busy all week.  The bad news?  Not a minute of billable time.  And probably not the greatest long-term business plan.  After all, why would anyone buy the cow when they can get its milk for free?  Or, as a sitting judge once said to me when he learned I was handling a lawsuit pro bono:  “If you devalue your own services too much or too often, you’ll have trouble finding clients willing to pay you for them.”

He may be right.  But for one week at least, I did good.  And everyone loved me.       

The Google Gulag

Recently, in preparation for an initial meeting with a prospective new client, I did something that I’d never done before:  I Googled his name.  Not for any nefarious purpose.  I just figured it might expedite our consultation if I had some background information about him before the fact.

Since he had a pretty uncommon name, I found him almost instantly, and it took me less than five minutes to learn my potential client’s entire life story – where he grew up, his educational background, his work history, his friends and family, seminars at which he spoke, even a recent photo.  Wow!

This got me wondering: Exactly how easy is it to find information about people on the Internet?  So, as an experiment, I let my mind wander and – as names of people from my past randomly popped into my head – I Googled them.

The results were startling.  I discovered, for example, that one of the people had contributed $500.00 to the Republic National Committee a decade ago.  Another had sponsored the adoption of a cat from a rescue agency in 2002.  A third had lost his securities license for improper conduct.  And so on and so on.

Thanks to the Internet, our lives are fast becoming open books.  And we have no one but ourselves to blame for this insidious, inexorable assault on our privacy.  After all, driven by our desire to be social-network butterflies, we’re compulsively eager, active participants in the public dissemination of our personal information. 

It’s time to face(book) the facts: MySpace is impinging on our space.  LinkedIn is shackling us. We’re getting tangled up in the very World Wide Web that we weaved ourselves.  In other words, the information technology that was supposed to liberate us – featuring powerful, super-fast search engines and massive computer databases – is, instead, imprisoning us.   

What’s the answer? Well, I have a few ideas.  But I can’t go into them right now.  Because I need to add some new details to my Facebook profile.  And check to see whether I’ve made any new “friends” today. 

“DUMBO”—Dumb?

Back in the old days, when neighborhoods were neighborhoods, you didn’t need to be a genius to understand the three rules of real estate.  They were simple: (1) Location; (2) Location; and (3) Location.

Just take Manhattan (The Bronx and Staten Island, too).  People lived in communities like Harlem, Morningside Heights, the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side (Yorkville), Murray Hill, Gramercy Park, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side.  The rest of the island was pretty much reserved for commerce.  How nice, neat and tidy!

Until someone decided to take a bunch of rundown lofts and warehouses, turn them into apartments, boutiques and art galleries, and give the area a hip name.  Just like that, SoHo (south of Houston Street) was born.  And everything we thought we knew about real estate went down the drain.  Because location has given way to slick marketing and funky names.  Yet another instance of form over substance in our society.

Before too long, we had such “communities” as TriBeCa (the triangle below Canal Street).  And Alphabet City. Which, I’m pretty sure, is the same thing as the Lower East Side, except with Yuppies replacing the immigrants and bars and restaurants replacing the pushcarts.

It was only a matter of time before the acronymization of neighborhoods crossed the East River and into the outer boroughs of New York.  Which explains why, on a recent Saturday, my wife, daughter and I found ourselves exploring DUMBO. 

No, not the animated Disney movie about a flying elephant.  What I'm talking about is more like a white elephant.  It’s a trendy new Brooklyn neighborhood.  In other words, it’s a dilapidated old Brooklyn neighborhood (Fulton Landing, to be precise) that’s been given a catchy new name – an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass – so it can be gentrified.  If you haven’t been there yet, don’t worry.  Because you’re not missing much.

The area consists of just a few blocks of abandoned, old warehouses and industrial buildings (what a surprise!) that have been converted into over-priced boutiques, over-priced restaurants and over-priced apartments.  It’s unique charm?  The deafening roar every few minutes as a B, D, N or Q train rumbles across the century-old bridge.  How delightful!

Kind of reminded me of my childhood in Far Rockaway, when a jet would fly directly over my house 300 times a day en route to or from Kennedy Airport.   

Come to think of it, The Rockaways are in dire need of a makeover.  In fact, they have been for the past 35 years or so.  Hmmm.  How about Bali (Bayswater adjacent to Long Island)?  Penjambay (Peninsula in Jamaica Bay)?  Fabela (Far Rockaway beneath Lawrence)?  Rockawerock (Rockaway west of East Rockaway)?   Wawabe (Wavecrest west of Atlantic Beach).  The possibilities are endless. And clever marketing may even make people forget that the peninsula is just a nine-hour subway ride from mid-town Manhattan.

I think I might be on to something here.  Maybe we should just forget location.  Because, when it comes to real estate, funky names could be a concept whose time has come!   

Recruiting Violations

Have you noticed how few Jews there are in the world?  Less than one percent of the population.  In contrast, there are a lot of Christians out there.  And even more Muslims.

Why is this?  Well, it’s not because of the three great religions’ doctrinal differences.  Because, stripped of their silly rituals and mumbo jumbo, they pretty much believe in all the same general stuff.  In fact, Christianity and Islam both came from Judaism.  Jesus, of course, was Jewish.  And Abraham (patriarch of the Jews), begat Ishmael (patriarch of the Arabs), whose descendant was the Prophet Mohammed. See? We’re all just one, big happy family!

So the stark difference in the numbers must be caused by something else.  And I’ve figured out what it is:  Each religion uses its own, very different, recruiting policies.

The Jews are highly selective.  They’re like the Ivy League of religions.  As a general rule, you don’t choose them; they choose you.  Or, more accurately, God chooses you to be one of them.  After all, they’re His/Her/Its Chosen People.

There are a couple of exceptions to the Jews’ non-recruiting policy.  For one thing, Jews are perfectly delighted when a Gentile who marries a Jew decides to convert.  And some Orthodox Jewish sects – like the Lubavitchers – actively try to recruit other Jews.  Kind of like Yale trying to steal students from Harvard.

Given their lack of systemized recruiting over the past two millennia, it’s no wonder there are so few Jews.  Especially when you consider how the Nazis systematically exterminated most of them during the Holocaust.   

In theory, Christians aren’t supposed to be that big on active recruiting, either.  Jesus tells them to love non-believers because Christians are going to heaven and Jesus wants the non-believers to join them there.  Through this unconditional love, non-believers often decide to become Christians themselves. 

The problem is that this theory hasn’t always translated into practice very well.  Through the ages, some Christians have interpreted “unconditional love” just a tad broadly to include such practices as raping, pillaging, burning at the stake, torturing and expelling.  Like during the Crusades, the conquests of South America and Africa, and the Inquisition.  Not very Christian-like.  But a very effective recruiting policy.  Which helps explain the large numbers of Christians in the world today.

To its credit, Christianity seems to have self-regulated its recruiting practices, which is a good thing.

I have to admit that I don’t know much about the Koran.  But I suspect that Islam’s recruiting policy is, at least in theory, probably a lot like Christianity’s.  Like the Christians, though, Muslims have sometimes bent the rules.  Consider the Moors’ march west through Africa.  And the Ottomans’ expansion into Europe.

Unlike Christianity, though, Islam hasn’t done such a good job recently at self-regulation.  Some current Imams and Muslim clerics have declared jihad (holy war) against infidels, guaranteeing a place in heaven to any Muslim who kills one.  And who is an “infidel”?  Any non-Muslim. 

So the Muslim message to the non-Muslim world is this:  Join or die.  Can’t really argue much with it as a recruiting strategy.  Similar to how inner-city American street gangs recruit their members.  No wonder Islam has so many followers.  And, apparently, is the fastest-growing religion in the world today.

But, if you ask me, Islam is engaged in a great big recruiting violation.  It should be sanctioned by the governing body responsible for regulating religious recruiting.  Maybe put on probation for a few years and banned from appearing in any bowl games.    

So who is this governing body?  The NCAA?  No, of course not.  It’s a group appointed by God.  Consisting of three of His/Her/Its most trusted advisors – Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed.  Okay, Gentlemen, do your thing.  And please hurry, before it’s too late.

Wanna Vet?

President Obama’s had a tough few first weeks in the White House, what with all those high-level appointees of his having to bow out for various transgressions.  But his problems pale in comparison to those of a fellow world leader.  I’m talking about Pope Benedict XVI.

In case you somehow missed it, on January XXI the Prussian Pontiff revoked a MCMLXXXVIII ex-communication of one Richard Williamson, a former Bishop who’d been consecrated without papal consent by the founder of the ultra-conservative “Pope Benedict X Society.”  I’m not sure what the official term for His Holiness’s act of revocation was – Re-communication? Un-excommunication? Ex-excommunication?  Just plain communication?  Whatever, it seems to be somewhat akin to a presidential pardon.

There was just one little problem with the Pope’s act of magnanimous forgiveness:  It turns out that the aforementioned ex-excommunicatee is one of those nuts who claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen.  This isn’t just a huge personal embarrassment for the Pope who, after all, himself heils from the land of swastikas and has been extremely vocal about healing the relationship between Catholics and Jews.  It’s also a public relations nightmare for the Roman Catholic Church, which has been trying for a generation to atone for the fact that – at least until the Nazis came along and moved in on its action – it had been the number one institutional purveyor of anti-Semitism in the history of the world.

The Church’s official explanation for the gaffe was that the Pope personally didn’t know about this moron’s beliefs when he un-excommunicated him.  Sounds like papal bull to me. I mean how could the Holy See not see this coming?  Well, just like with the Obama White House, there appears to be a problem with the Vatican’s vetting process.

For the record, the verb “to vet” actually comes from “veterinarian.”  Back when we were an agrarian society that bought and sold livestock, buyers would have vets examine chickens, cattle, horses, etc. before finalizing their deals to make sure the animals were what the sellers advertised them to be so that the buyers weren’t getting tainted goods.  Hence, “vetting.” (Of course, this wasn’t done when an animal was given as a present; it’s not proper etiquette to “look a gift horse in the mouth.”)

Anyway, over time the word “vetting” came to describe any careful examination to ensure quality and genuineness, even when no livestock or animal doctors were involved.

So neither President Obama nor Pope Benedict had to hire Dr. Doolittle to vet their people.  In fact, in today’s high-tech, instant-information age, the Church probably didn’t have to do much of anything to learn about Williamson.  It just needed to surf the Internet for a couple of minutes.  Which is exactly what I did to discover the origin of “vetting.”

The Vatican could have started simply by Googling “Richard Williamson.”  That would have led it to his Facebook and/or MySpace pages, articles he wrote, videos of speeches he made (on YouTube), maybe even the website address for the Society of St. Pius X, which opposes the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including its outreach to Jews.  Just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes and they would have learned that – as later reported in newspapers around the world – Williamson had been seen on Swedish television just a few days before his un-excommunication saying that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed" during World War II.  He added that only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed during World War II, and none was gassed.

The young, computer-savvy cleric who discovered this information then could have made his career simply by saying, “Oh-oh, fellas, we have a Holocaust denier on our hands; Better tell the Big Guy before he re-communicates him.” 

But nobody bothered to do any of that.  So now the Church has a big fat mea culpa on its hands.  One that it hasn’t handled too well so far, by the way.  It’s merely told the newly re-communicated Williamson to recant his views or he won’t be given full priestly privileges. Williamson’s answer?  He’s pretty much thumbed his Nazi-sympathizing, anti-Semitic nose at the Pope.  Oh, sure, he apologized to the Pope for stirring up controversy.  But he’s refused to repudiate his earlier comments.

Oy, vey.

To solve its problem, the Church needs to take a page from Cool-Hand Luke.  Because what we have here is a failure to re-excommunicate.

As for the Obama Administration, it had a tougher job than the Vatican.  Searching the Internet probably wouldn’t have uncovered the appointees’ various tax and nanny problems.  That’s not the type of thing people “tweet” about Twitter or put in their Internet profiles.  So the President gets a pass for now.  But he’d better start vetting better.  And soon. 

Trouble at the Sausage Factory

Congress thinks of itself as the greatest deliberative body in the world.  And it’s probably right.  After all, America’s representative democracy is the worst form of government ever tried, except for all the others.

Still, our legislative process has been described as sausage making.  And that’s an apt metaphor for Congress’s efforts so far to pass the urgently-needed, mis-named stimulus package.  (Which, really, ought to be looked at as a spending and jobs bill.) 

So let’s go into the kitchen and see what our government’s been cooking up.

President Obama could have started by stuffing a big, juicy, flavorful sausage down our throats.  After all, he’d just won the election and had extremely high approval ratings.  Hot dog! But he was worried that such a sausage wouldn’t be kosher.  Because he’d be violating his promise of bipartisanship.  So he backed off and proposed a watered-down version of his package in the House to satisfy the bland palates of the Republican opposition.  In other words:  Chicken sausage.

But this still didn’t make those finicky Republicans happy.  “Too much pork,” they complained.    Meanwhile, some Democrats’ stomachs were grumbling.  They hungered for real change they could sink their teeth into.  “Where’s the beef?,” they asked.  And the sausage that wound up being sent to the Senate satisfied no one.  It was half-baked (or half-grilled, as the case may be).

The Senate certainly hasn’t spiced it up. To the contrary, it removed even more of the meat, replacing it with filler and by-products. Still not enough hunks of infrastructure.  And still too many cuts of taxes.

By the time the Senate approves its version and the bill goes through the joint-committee process, gets passed by Congress and is presented to the President for signature, who knows if the bird will even fly.  That’s right. We could end up with a great big turkey sausage.

I don’t know about you, but the whole process is giving me a tummy ache.  And I’m starting to feel queasy, and maybe a tad nauseous.  If Upton Sinclair were around to write a muckraking expose, it could force the FDA to shut down the sausage factory altogether.  It’s almost enough to turn me into a vegetarian.  Yuck!

By the way, do you know what those vegetarian frankfurters are called?  “Not dogs”!   Double yuck!

I guess we’ll be stuck with whatever sausage ultimately comes out of the federal government’s grinder.  I just hope it has enough nutrients in it to keep us away from bread lines and soup kitchens.

. . .And WE Were There

I guess it’s human nature for us to want to be part of history.  It makes us feel important.  Gives us some gravitas.  And, in some small way, a sense of immortality.

Take, for example, famous sporting events.  So many people have claimed over the years to have been at the Polo Grounds to witness Bobby Thompson’s “shot heard ‘round the world” homerun in 1951 that the old ballpark would have had to have accommodated several hundred thousand spectators.  Similar claims have been made about key moments at Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, etc.  No harm done, really.  Just innocent little lies that make the liars temporarily feel better about their boring lives.

But our desire to participate in history recently took a truly bizarre turn, courtesy of the most famous pyramid builder since the ancient pharaohs.  That’s right.  I’m talking about Bernie Madoff.

Bernie’s pyramid was more expensive than any the Egyptians built.  And it didn’t last nearly as long as theirs.  But he had one thing in common with the pharaohs.  Like them, he used Jews to build his pyramid.  And that’s where the story gets interesting.

Since word first broke about Madoff’s crumbling pyramid, just about every fellow Jew I speak to claims either to have “lost everything” with Bernie or to know someone who did.  Based on my unofficial calculations from these daily tales of woe, Madoff squandered  a whole lot more than the reported $50 billion.  At least a few trillion dollars.  And maybe as much as, I dunno, infinity bucks.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not making light of the Madoff fiasco.  I’m just suggesting that there are lots of folks out there falsely claiming to be victims.  Or, at the very least, exaggerating their losses.  And, moreover, boasting about the whole thing.

Incredibly, they actually seem proud of it.  Like it’s some kind of badge of honor.  And the more money they claim to have lost, the more they seem to gloat:  “You lost a million?  What a shame!  My brother-in-law lost five million and may have to sell one of his homes in the Hamptons.  Poor guy.”

Some of this probably can be attributed to one-upmanship.  And some to the braggadocio of the nouveau riche: “Look at me. I’m wealthy enough to have lost millions with Bernie.”  But I’m convinced that some of it is just our natural desire to be part of history.

What convinces me?  Well, I’m not the type of person to have invested with Madoff, even if I had the money to do so.  But I still found the need to get into the act somehow.  So I’ve bragged to anyone who listens to me that Bernie Madoff and his wife are both graduates of my high school.  Yes, indeed.  I was there!  

Tickets to Heaven

Back in the bad old days, when the Roman Catholic Church controlled what Roman Catholics considered to be the “civilized” world, wealthy sinners actually could purchase absolution.  Imagine that!  Through a system called “Papal Indulgences,” the sinner merely needed to make the requisite payment to the Church and – Voila! – Eternal Forgiveness.  No muss/no fuss. How civilized!

Except that some folks took exception to the practice.  And they began to protest against it.  In fact, the protestors (which History called “protestants”) waged a revolution (which History called a “reformation”).  And a whole new religion was born (or, more accurately, 3,000 slightly different denominations of Protestantism were born).  And Papal Indulgences became a mere footnote to History.

Or did they?  Because here it is, half a millennium later, and they’re still around.  Well, sort of.  Let me explain.

In 2009, wealthy sinners concerned over the size of their carbon footprints can acquire ecological absolution through their purchases of “carbon credits.” No environmental muss or fuss.  How civilized!

In fairness, I’m not sure exactly how carbon credits work.  Maybe the sinners’ payments go toward the research and development of alternative energies, which would make the concept more palatable than those erstwhile papal indulgence payments, which mostly went into the already over-flowing coffers of the Church. 

Still, the idea of carbon credits rubs me the wrong way.  It lets the wealthy off the global-warming guilt-trip hook way too easily. If the rich sinners really want to assuage their guilt, they should drive Priuses (Prii?).  Or live in smaller homes that operate entirely on solar energy.  Or do what rock icon Neil Young recently did:  Retrofit a 1959 Lincoln Marquis – the mother of all gas guzzlers – so that it could get 100 mpg.

And, anyway, at least in the immediate future, carbon credits won’t help prevent the direst consequences of our addiction to oil: Whenever we drive our cars or fly our planes, we put money into the hands of the Arab oil merchants, who –as Tom Friedman points out in his latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded – use it  to fund "schools" that  turn  innocent Palestinian children into Jew-hating Jihadists.

Despite my concerns, I don’t see any anti-carbon credit reformation anywhere on the horizon.  To the contrary, the carbon-credit idea is becoming more and more popular. Starting this spring, in fact, an experimental program will make San Francisco International the first airport in the nation - possibly the world - to offer fliers the opportunity to purchase carbon offsets. 

According to an article last month in the San Francisco Chronicle, a San Francisco firm that sells renewable-energy and carbon-reduction investments is teaming up with the airport and the city on a project to install kiosks where the offsets could be purchased.  The general idea, officials said, is that a traveler would approach a kiosk resembling the self-service check-in stations used by airlines, then punch in his or her destination. The computer would calculate the carbon footprint and the cost of an investment to offset the damage. The traveler could then swipe a credit card to help save the planet. Travelers would receive a printed receipt listing the projects benefiting from their environmental largesse. How civilized!

In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Rich sinners will always be trying to buy themselves tickets to heaven.  At least that’s what they think they’re buying.   

Only 180 Shopping Days Left Until Christmas. . .2007!

In December, 2008—during the very same week in which the Pope gave a special shout-out to former-heretic Galileo (sort of like a presidential pardon) – modern scientists studying the astronomical phenomena reported by several alleged eye witnesses to Jesus’s birth announced two extraordinary findings.  Although both have enormous significance in today’s world, society apparently has decided to ignore them. 

The astronomers’ first finding was that Jesus was born in June, not December. So much for dreaming of a white Christmas.  Unless, of course, “white” refers to the sand at area beaches.  The only things we should be roasting on an open fire are marshmallows over our barbecue pits.  The weather outside is frightful?  Late afternoon thunderstorms!

So the holiday shopping season should officially begin on Memorial Day.  Post-Christmas sales should end on July 4.  Santa should travel the world on water skis pulled by nine dolphins (including everyone’s favorite, “Flipper, the Aqua-Nosed Dolphin”).  Santa’s progress should be tracked by nuclear submarines rather than by Norad.  Instead of “Ho, Ho, Ho”, he’d chant “Hot, Hot, Hot.” And he’d enter the homes of Christian children via their central air conditioning ductwork systems.

The number one flip-flop stuffer (because stockings are way too heavy for June)?  Sun screen, of course. Pina coladas instead of egg nog.  Long Island iced tea instead of hot toddies.

Carolers will have to learn some new songs.  Like “June is Busting out all Over”, “Hot Town, Summer in the City,”  “Summertime” (so that George Gershwin will replace Irving Berlin as Jewish composer of the best Christmas song), and “See You in September.”   The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree will be a mighty oak.

Of course, we could continue to celebrate a holiday in December in honor of the winter solstice.  In other words, the same festival that pagans celebrated for centuries, until the Roman Catholic Church turned the celebration into a birthday party for Jesus.  We could even continue to call the winter holiday “Christmas” so as not to confuse folks.  To differentiate it from Jesus’s real birthday, though, we’d have to post these messages on billboards everywhere each December:  “Remove Christ from Christmas.”  And “Remember, Christmas is NOT Christ’s Birthday.”

Okay, I can see that there’s some resistance to these changes among you Christians out there.  But consider this:  Jesus’s June birthday celebration wouldn’t interfere with any other major religious or secular observance.  So you could say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” without being politically incorrect or worrying about that stupid, annoying First Amendment (separation of Church and State?  Bah, humbug!).  At least until those stupid, annoying American Jews find some obscure June holiday that’s been in existence forever and decide to make it a major celebratory event of their own.  Like Shavuot (which commemorates God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses around 5,000 years B.C.).  Oy!

Speaking of which, how did people living in 5,000 B.C. know they were living in 5,000 B.C. if no one knew if/when Jesus would be born?  That’s a rhetorical question.  But it’s also a nice segue into my intrepid astronomers’ second finding:  Jesus was actually born in 2 B.C. (using the Gregorian Calendar, which was adopted in 1582).  And this actually may be even more significant than the whole Christmas in June nonsense.  Not just because it explains why our computers didn’t crash on what we thought was the dawn of Y2K.  But because it changes the names of some famous songs, books and movies.

Would you even bother to read George Orwell’s 1982? Listen to Beethoven’s 1810 Overture? Dance to We’re Gonna Party Like it’s 1997? Or go see 1999 – A Space Odyssey?  I didn’t think so.

Almost as important, the finding also requires us to change the date of every historical event.  For example, the Battle of Hastings – 1064; the Magna Carta – 1213;  the Gregorian Calendar – 1580; U.S. Independence – 1774;  the War of 1810;   the Berlin Olympics of 1934; Roe v. Wade – 1971.  God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses – around 4,898 B.C.

And December 7, 1939 would be “a date which will live in infamy.”

But wait a second (and, by the way, the world’s official timekeepers are doing just that when they stop the world’s official clock for a second before the end of the year formerly known as 2008 because the year’s exactly one second too short). We can’t just turn back the clock two years on everything.  Because that would also change the day of the week on which each event occurred.  And some events were planned for particular days.  For example, the Japanese wanted to attack Pearl Harbor on a Sunday.  Which, in 1939, would have been December 10 (because 1940 – er, I mean, 1938 – had been a leap year).  So December 10, 1939 is really the “date which will live in infamy.”

I’m sorry.  That just doesn’t seem an infamous enough date to me.  I guess we’re really not ready for such a sea change.  No wonder we’ve decided to ignore these astronomers.  Probably the same reason they snubbed Galileo back in the day.

Oh, well.  Merry Winter Solstice Festival. And have a happy and healthy 2007.

What’s in a Name?

Recently, during one of my many, daily conversations about nothing, I made this observation:  “Nobody names their baby Adolf anymore (or Adolph, for that matter).”  I meant it as a joke.  But someone responded that the name is actually banned in France.  Someone else said the name’s also verboten in Germany.  To which I had an ambivalent, decidedly non-joking reaction.

On the one hand, I was relieved and comforted to hear what I considered to be a “Never Again” policy about the Holocaust.  On the other hand, the policy offended my civil-libertarian sensibilities.  After all, should a government really be permitted to tell us what we can name our own offspring?

Then, again (back to my first hand), there ought to be some reasonable regulation of names.  Otherwise, what would stop parents from saddling their bouncing baby with a moniker representing anything from a bodily function (Fart Farnsworth) to a racial epithet (N***er Woods) to an outright curse word (Motherf***er Goldstein)?

My ruminations (and hand-switching) abruptly ended when I suddenly came up with an obvious answer to this rhetorical question:  Common sense prevents parents from giving socially inappropriate names to their progeny.   Of course!  No need for my crisis of conscience.  The issue was purely hypothetical.

Until the Campbells came along.

In case you somehow missed it, the Campbells are the couple from western New Jersey who walked into a local Shop Rite supermarket with a seemingly routine request:   They wanted to buy a cake inscribed with their son’s name to celebrate the boy’s third birthday.  But the store refused.  Why?  Well the toddler (who, by the way, is cute as a button) happens to be named Adolf Hitler Campbell.  So much for common sense!

And so much for my question about governmental baby-name regulation. Because the clerks at the local bureau of vital statistics had presumably let this abomination slip by.  They also approved the birth certificate for little Adolf’s younger sister, who’s named Aryan Nation.  And for his baby brother, who’s named something like Heinrich Hinler (I guess mom and dad didn’t know that the Fuhrer’s aide was “Himmler”). 

The parents’ explanation for these names was just a tad muddled.  Dad insisted that he wasn’t a white supremacist; there even had been multi-racial kids in attendance at Adolf’s birthday party.  The Campbells simply have a preference for unusual, distinctive names.  Hmmm. I guess that swastika on dad’s forearm was an accident – the tattoo artist’s hand must have slipped while trying to etch the peace sign.

In any case, the couple tried to turn Shop Rite’s refusal to write “Adolf Hitler” on the birthday cake into a civil rights/civil liberties issue (even having the audacity to invoke Barack Obama’s election as a reason for greater baby-naming tolerance).  But it’s not.  For one thing, people named Adolf Hitler don’t constitute a recognized protected class of citizens under our civil rights law.  And a super market isn’t a government entity whose refusal to print something on a cake might violate the First Amendment’s right of free speech.

So, were the Campbells out of luck?  Nope!  They were saved by that bastion of free expression – Wal-Mart!  That’s right.  The same company that banned Dixie Chick CDs from its shelves because of the group’s political statements had no problem writing “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” on a cake.  And they probably did it at a fraction of Shop Rite’s price, thanks to predatory business practices that have enabled the chain to corner the market on cake mix. 

Wal-Mart’s intervention made it a happy ending for the Kooky Kampbell Klan.  But, like the Nazis after their invasion of France, they might have won the battle only to eventually lose the war.  After all, what’s going to happen when Adolf starts school?  Applies for a driver’s license?  Goes to college?  Runs for political office? 

I feel bad for the kid.  He looks so happy, peaceful and angelic.  Like a toddler version of Jesus.  He  has no clue what he's in for.  Speaking of which, nobody – except Latinos – names their baby Jesus.  Is there some unwritten rule about that?  If I walked into a Shop Rite and asked them to write “Happy Birthday Jesus Christ” on a cake, would they refuse?  Even on Christmas?  That really would be the icing on the cake! 

917 Hamilton

Who was I kidding?  Despite my pronouncements to the contrary – which I compulsively recited to anyone at Camp Obama who’d listen – my reluctance to commit to a month-long stint as an out-of-state campaign volunteer had nothing to do with concerns over taking a leave of absence from my law practice.  Or, for that matter, with missing a chunk of the Giants’ football season.  Or even with abandoning my beloved dog (not to mention my wife of 31 years).  No, there was just one obstacle in my way:  The New York Mets.

As a season-ticket holder, I didn’t want to miss any of the team’s playoff games, especially since I’d already shelled out $2,600 for the tickets.  Sure, I probably could sell them for a nice profit.  But that wasn’t the point.  After infamously choking down the stretch in 2007, the team and I were out for redemption.  And – I’m embarrassed to admit now – that seemed more important to me in late September than electing Barack Obama president.

So, as I left the Teamsters’ Union Hall on Manhattan’s West 14th Street on Sunday, September 21 – having completed my two-day Camp Obama training course and having received my “degree” as a Deputy Field Organizer – I figured I’d never get to use my newly-learned skills.  After all, with just a week remaining in the baseball season, the Mets seemed safely in possession of a playoff berth.  And they couldn’t possibly collapse two years in a row.  Right?

Wrong! Incredibly, just a week later, my team’s season again ended unceremoniously (although, bizarrely, there was a post-game ceremony marking the impending demise of Shea Stadium).  And after a brief mourning period, I became metaphysically philosophical:  I took the Mets’ failure as a sign from above.  One door had closed to me so another could open.  Someone, somewhere, wanted me to volunteer  for  the Obama campaign. 

Actually, the “someone” pulling the strings was hardly a mystery to me.  As always, it was my dead father, who’d spent his life as a community organizer and civil rights activist.  I suddenly realized that it was my manifest destiny to work in the Obama grass-roots campaign.  So I sent an email to the Camp Obama folks (I would have called, but I’m phone-a-phobic) and received my assignment, which was to begin on Sunday, October 4, and continue through Election Day.

The door that opened for me turned out to be the front door of 917 Hamilton Street, the campaign’s drab and dingy storefront office in Center City Allentown, Pennsylvania.  As Billy Joel informed us some years ago, Allentown is an economically depressed – and, therefore, emotionally depressing – area.  And, as I drove to the office that first day, Hamilton Street struck me as the epitome of that dual depression.  A place where, at first glance, the pawn shops appeared to out-number retail stores and restaurants.

In theory, my job as Deputy Field Organizer (or DFO in the jargon of campaign-speak) was to help the two paid staffers in charge of the office (FOs) run the place.  In practice, though, no one’s title mattered.  Everyone working in the office pretty much did everything.  In fact, every long-term volunteer was called a DFO.  By the end of the campaign, there were so many of us deputies that we probably could have captured Jessie James.

“Everyone,” by the way, described an olio so deliciously diverse that it made Moynihan’s melting pot seem like a glass of homogenized, pasteurized milk.  There were Men and Women.  Teens and Senior Citizens.  Whites, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.  Heterosexuals and Homosexuals.  Jews and  Gentiles.  Street People and Professionals.  Locals and Out-of-Staters.  All working side by side.

The work itself wasn’t exactly rocket science (although several volunteers had engineering or physics degrees from such institutions as MIT, Stanford  and Cornell) or brain surgery (although one volunteer leaving for college next year plans on becoming a neurosurgeon).  To the contrary, the work was exhaustingly repetitive and tedious.  Based on computer-generated lists of targeted voters, we made thousands of phone calls and knocked on thousands of doors trying to persuade people to support Obama.  When we finished our lists, we entered the information we’d obtained into a database, waited for revised lists of targeted voters and went through the process all over again.

Based on other computer-generated lists, we made thousands of phone calls to potential local and out-of-state volunteers, trying to get them to commit to work at the office for particular shifts.  When we finished our lists, we entered the information we’d obtained into a database, waited for revised lists of potential volunteers and – you guessed it – went through the process all over again.

We performed these tasks ad nauseam, which is legal Latin for “until you’re so sick you want to barf.”  To my knowledge, though, no one actually threw up.  At least not in the office.  Because the bathrooms were way too dirty for any sane person to use, even though (or, more likely, because) one of the regular volunteer tasks was to clean them (and the rest of the office) from time to time.

During the week, we trained our new local volunteers on how to do this same boring work.  On weekends, we trained our out-of-state volunteers (which the campaign called “Day-Trippers” and “Weekend Warriors” because clever titles make boring work sound interesting and romantic) to do door-to-door canvassing.  I did so many trainings that I began to sound like a broken record (for those of you born after 1980, a “record” was something we used in the old days to listen to music).

To vary the drudgery, each Friday we prepared canvassing packets for the invading hordes of those Day-Trippers and Weekend Warriors.  This required an assembly line of volunteers that likely would make Henry Ford (who, as an alleged anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer, probably wouldn’t be an Obama supporter) roll over in his grave.   And it constituted a veritable decathlon of mindless, clerical tasks – printing, photocopying, sorting, collating, stapling, paper-clipping, assembling, labeling, envelope-stuffing, clip-boarding and the ever-popular redoing (when something had to be added to or removed from the packets, a task that invariably arose only after we’d competed them).

What’s that you say?  This wasn’t a decathlon because I listed 11 tasks?  Okay, then, It was an eleventhlon.  So shoot me.

Speaking of shootings, there was a gun death one Friday night in the parking lot where all the volunteers parked our cars, a couple of blocks away from the office.  The area was in lock down until the police finished their investigation.  So we were stuck in the office even after all our assembly-line packets had passed their final inspections.  I’m guessing the shooter wasn’t a sportsman using a hunting rifle that he was legally carrying pursuant to his Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Casey Stengel once said something like this about the baseball games his fledgling, inept 1962 Mets played:  “They may be bad, but at least they’re long.”  In that spirit, I’m pleased to report that we spent 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week, performing the work I just summarized.

And we often had to improvise, either because we ran out of supplies or because we lacked sufficient cell phones, computers, printers and photocopiers.   What more could we have expected?  After all, $500 million in campaign funds can only go so far.

Then there was the food.  Thanks to generous donations from local volunteers, we had practically an infinite supply of donuts and pizza.  Just about every day.  For 30 days.  Much to my surprise, I didn’t feel like I was in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong.  Donuts and pizza are my two favorite food groups.  But the donuts were mostly from a local bakery and, while quite delicious, they were just a tad sweeter than the omnipresent Dunkin Donuts variety.  Indeed, they appeared to be comprised of fried sugar, filled with liquid sugar and topped with glazed or frosted sugar. 

As for the pizza, the best we had could be described as almost as good as average New York pizza.  As the urban legend goes, neither New York pizza nor New York bagels can be replicated elsewhere because of their secret ingredient – New York City tap water.

On Saturday, November 1, we moved our operation to a new location – the basement warehouse of a semi-abandon