We lost something very important when John F. Kennedy died

When I was 13, I entered a period of weirdness that lasted a long time.

At Fourteen

In fact, it may never have ended.

I'm certainly not saying anything about it was unique -- sometimes I think most young adolescents are barely civilized -- but for a period of a few years, what seemed to make me happier than anything else was to be left alone. Every time my family was going somewhere, my greatest joy was to be allowed to remain at home by myself.

Yeah, I was a strange kid.

I missed out on a lot of family outings, and being left home alone peaked in the summer of 1970 when my family took a combination vacation/business trip for my Dad's job that lasted six weeks and took them all the way to California and back. I was going to summer school that year.

I missed out on a lot of things staying home, but most of them have disappeared from my memory. One that I do remember -- and I'm not sure I had a choice in the matter -- was the last full weekend in November 1963.

That Friday afternoon at school -- I was a freshman at Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va. -- the principal made two announcements over the public address system. At about 2:40 p.m., he told us President Kennedy had been shot. Twenty minutes later, he told us the president was dead.

I went home from school to see that all three television networks were on the story full-time and that done of them were breaking for commercials. Talk about strange. That continued all through the weekend, and the nation watched live on Sunday as Jack Ruby shot alleged presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Waiting in line to pay last respects.

On Sunday, my parents drove downtown to get in line to view President Kennedy's casket in the Capitol Rotunda. I didn't go with them. I don't remember if they asked. I seem to recall having a bad cold that weekend, but as I said, I was weird then.

The capitol was supposed to close at 9 p.m., but as the "Washington Post" recounts in a wonderful piece about the weekend called "50 years later: Four shattering days," when 9 p.m. came, the line of people waiting to pay final respects to the murdered president was still more than two miles long.

They kept the Capitol open all night.

My mother told we they had spent nine hours in line on a really cold Saturday, and she told me it was amazing how quiet and well-mannered people were. No one tried to jump the line to save time. One man was walking ahead and people were jeering at him, but he repeated over and over, "I'm going to the drugstore."

The next day, we all watched on television as they buried the president.

A month later, I did go with my family to the Lincoln Memorial for some sort of commemorative service for President Kennedy. President Johnson spoke. I don't remember much about it, except that it was the only time in my life -- before or since -- that I saw the president of the United States in person.

We didn't know it, but everything changed in November 1963.

Since then, the New Frontier became the New Nixon. Johnson's War on Poverty became Reagan's War on the Poor. And the compassion shown toward the least fortunate among us by presidents from FDR through LBJ ultimately became Mitt Romney's remarks about the "47 percent" who won't take responsibility for their own lives.

But if you really wonder how much things have changed, try to find an old-fashioned liberal Democrat. When Bill Clinton was in the White House, he used to say, "We're all Eisenhower Republicans now."

One thing we're hearing a lot of as we approach the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's death is that he was a phony. We're told that his father was a crook with Mafia connections and he bought his son the presidency. We're told he cheated on his wife and we messed up the Bay of Pigs.

But what they don't say is the tradition of public service of the Kennedys. Joe Kennedy told his children he didn't want them living off the family's money or working to expand the fortune.

They served. Even the youngest of them -- Edward Kennedy -- served for 40 years as a U.S. senator after Chappaquiddick pretty well destroyed his chances of ever being president. And he will be remembered as a great senator, one of the true lions of the Senate.

One thing that truly has changed since JFK was president is that we no longer seem to attract the best minds to work for the public good. Government was the place where it was possible to do the most for the common good.

Twenty years later, right-wing hero Reagan was pretty well ridiculing that idea. With his usual simplistic way of looking at the world, Reagan said "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."

I'm not sure I've ever heard anything more cynical. It's an old-fashioned "Show me the money." Well, my father had one of the best minds I ever knew, and he worked for the Air Force for nearly 40 years. He made it up to GS-15, the highest of the regular Civil Service ranks, and he was offered jobs several times by defense contractors who would have doubled or tripled his salary.

My dad believed that at least some good people who believed in our country should put country ahead of money. There weren't many like him, and that's one reason things changed ... and not for the better.

Me? I guess I'm still weird.

Dystopian fiction almost like utopia to many young readers

It was more than 15 years ago that kids started reading again.

British author J.K. Rowling came out with her first book about an 11-year-old boy who learned he had magical powers. By the time her seventh book about Harry Potter came out, Rowling was a billionare, the books had been translated into 67 languages and there were more than 400 million copies of them in print.

Well, seven Harry Potter books and eight movies are in the past now, and the kids who grew up reading about him are now in their teens and twenties.

They're still reading, and what's fascinating about it is that there is a whole new genre growing up -- or at least expanding vastly -- for young adult readers. Starting in 2008 with "The Hunger Games" trilogy from Suzanne Collins, moving on to Michael Grant's six-book "Gone" series and more recently Veronica Roth's "Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant" trilogy, young adult readers seem fascinated with dystopian fiction.

Of course there's dystopia and then there's dystopia. Grant's series -- to me the weakest of the three -- opens with everyone 15 or older disappearing from a small California coastal town. Then those remaining are cut off from the rest of the world by some sort of dome.

Not a terrible idea -- ask Stephen King -- but Grant starts getting a little too weird when he gives some of the characters special mental powers. "Gone" is the only one of the three series cited here that didn't hold my interest enough to finish it.

For one thing, it wasn't really dystopian. Once the dome came down, the kids of Perdido Beach would just rejoin the real world.

Roth's books are actually the most dystopian. They're the only ones in which the society that came before is essentially gone.

Everyone growing up in the city -- which once was known as Chicago -- is assigned to one of five groups based on predominant personal characteristics. There's Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless and Erudite.

The problems are with people who are divergent, people who have the qualities of two different groups. Some might be brave (dauntless) and smart (erudite), or loving (amity) and self-sacrificing (abnegation).

The problem with these books is there isn't enough back story. We don't know how the society became the way it was, and there really isn't any central authority to rebel against. I have yet to read the third book, but it'll take a pretty big comeback to salvage.

So far, at least, "Hunger Games" seems to be the best. The 2012 movie grossed more than $400 million just in the U.S., and the second one -- "Catching Fire" -- opens this Friday.

My guess is it will do as well or better as the first, and the only real disappointment to me is that they've already decided to milk the series for everything they can. Just like Harry Potter, the final book in the series will be split into two movies.

Dystopian fiction is hardly new. Books like "Earth Abides" from 1948 are timeless, and King's "The Stand" is a modern classic.

But if you look at the recent dystopian series that have been so popular, they seem to have come along at a time when young adults are at their most pessimistic about the future. Kids coming out of college with massive student loan debt, kids looking at millions and millions of jobs that have vanished never to return, you can understand why they might not like our idea of the future.

If I were 22, I might feel the same way.

Celebrities like Palin make even less sense than a good comedian

Back in 1992, when I was working in Southern California as a baseball writer, I covered a charitable event in Pasadena called "Baseball Relief."

It was the era of Comic Relief, and the idea behind it was to raise money for indigent ballplayers. Performers went on stage and did their thing; then they came backstage and spoke with the few reporters who were covering it. I don't remember who all the performers were, but I did meet Sharon Stone up close and personal, and comedy was provided by Garrett Morris of "Saturday Night Live," Rita Rudner and Elayne Boosler.

Elayne Boosler

I was excited at the opportunity to talk to both Rudner and Boosler, who were two of my favorite comedians at the time. Rudner was a huge disappointment. When I tried to interview her, she stayed in character and sort of blew me off. But Boosler was great.

She was funny and human, a great combination.

In her most popular period -- the late '80s -- she said some hilarious things, one of which turned out to be totally prescient about the way out culture has gone.

She was talking about Donna Rice, whose claim to fame was having an affair with Sen. Gary Hart while he was running for president.

"I don't think you should be allowed to be famous just for taking your clothes off or having sex with someone famous. I think if you want to be famous, you should actually have to do something."

By that standard, Paris Hilton and the entire Kardashian family would still be living in obscurity.

Of course, things have gotten much worse than they were 25 years ago. Joe the Plumber and others like him don't fit into any of the categories, good or bad. These days almost anyone can be famous as long as they are ruthlessly self-promoting. There are so many TV channels now seeking cheap programming that as long as you've got a gimmick, you can have a show.

Snowbilly

Then of course there's the Queen of All Media, aka Sarah Palin.

At one point, she actually did something. She was elected governor of Alaska and was John McCain's running mate in the 2008 election. But ever since they lost that election, Palin has been all about the Benjamins. When it comes to publicity, she's the female Donald Trump.

I'm not sure Palin could have been this successful in an era other than this one. Fifty years ago, she would have been laughed at. These days they laugh, but she cashes their checks.

It's hard to believe Palin would ever run for office again. She seems to be satisfied with being the poster girl for the disaffected far right. She has compared the growing federal debt to charttel slavery, and when the new pope started saying the church should be more concerned about the poor, she accused him of being a liberal.

When the heat got a little too much on that last one, she did apologize.

You betcha she did.

It amazes me that some people actually do take her seriously. Me, I think she makes a lot less sense than Elayne Boosler.

It takes more courage to say no than it does to fight

Today was the day on the calendar when World War I -- the war people called the war to end wars -- ended -- November 11th at 11:11 a.m. was when the armistice was signed. Goofy numbers like that used to matter. I'm not sure why.

WWI veteran

For years after the war, November 11th was known as Armistice Day. In Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire, it was known as Remembrance Day.

Back in the '70s, the celebration in this country was shifted to the fourth Monday in October as part of the plan to make more holidays three-day weekends. That lasted only seven years; the date of November 11th had a totemic quality to those who really cared about it, so we returned to 11/11 in 1978.

My grandfather served in World War I, my father and my mother's brother served in WWII. I would have been proud to serve with them, but I can't think of one war since then that was worth the cost, either in treasure or in dead soldiers. It sounds ridiculous now, but in the '50s and '60s, people actually used to believe that if we didn't fight the Commies in Vietnam, eventually we would be fighting them in California.

Dominoes.

I always thought it was a boring game.

Of course we all know now what it was really about. As Country Joe McDonald said, there was plenty of good money to be made supplying the Army with the tools of the trade.

When we were done there, 58,000 American boys were dead and the Communists ruled all of Vietnam. Of course, the war machine had made billions in profits.

58,000 names on the wall ...

And they never really stopped. When the Soviet Union fell, leaving us without a real enemy in the world, some of us thought there might be a peace dividend and we could stop spending so much on guns and bombs.

Were we really that naive? We spend more than double what we spent in 1989, and a lot of it is going to keeping our own people in line.

The real scandal of it is that for all the money we spend on the military, our soldiers and sailors are worse off than ever. They no longer have a full G.I. bill, and thousands of enlisted personnel make so little that they qualify for food stamps.

When America was gearing up for World War II, President Roosevelt had some strong words for the people who were going to make the weapons. FDR said he didn't want to see any new millionaires created because of the war.

Now we create billionaires.

And we fight wars that never end. We have been in Afghanistan for 12 years and have accomplished virtually nothing other than losing more and more young Americans.

It really is time to start saying no. Republicans take us to war and Democrats stand with them because they're afraid of being called cowards. Well, it takes a lot more courage to stand for the right thing against the crowd.

It's time to stand in the gap and tell soldiers that if they won't fight, they won't die. It's time to tell them that if they really want to save our country, the work to be done is here at home.

Time to find a way to get better people back into public service

What's the real problem with politics in our country?

Completely apart from the issues, and the lack of common ground between the two parties, there's one thing that ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone who's paying attention.

The people running things aren't the people running things.

Sometime around 1980, people who had been going into public service, people who were inspired by John F. Kennedy, those people stopped working for the common good and started looking to make lots and lots of money.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House and everything got glitzy. All of a sudden, conservatives were acting as if public service was only for losers. Even though he has been misquoted ever since he said it, Reagan told the country that its problems when he was inaugurated in 1981 could not be solved by government.

It was pretty obvious that Reagan admired businessmen -- particularly successful ones -- a lot more than he admired people who worked for the government.

Capitalism had worked pretty well under government supervision in the postwar era, but conservatives believed it would work even better if government got out of the way.

Part of it was a switch from Keynesian economics -- in which the government had a role to play -- to the completely laissez-faire philosophy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. When Reagan took office, most of the people behind him were Friedman disciples. All of a sudden, every other government department was being hollowed out and everything that could be deregulated was being deregulated.

In 1981, the richest 1 percent of Americans held 7 percent of the country's wealth. Instead of trickling down, or a rising tide lifting all boats as Reagan predicted, more and more wealth flowed to those who already had plenty. For the next three decades, while middle class income remained flat at best, the rich benefited to the point where in 2013, that same 1 percent controlled 19 percent of America's treasure.

Along the way, as the salaries of people running companies soared, the difference between private industry and high government office made it much more difficult to attract top talent to public service. Senators and representatives were making in the low six figures, and no one in the government had a higher salary than the president's $200,000. Meanwhile, CEO salaries in the private sector had climbed into seven, eight and eventually even nine figures.

Add to that the way conservatives were denigrating public service, and at least among politicians, both winning and losing candidates were becoming more and more mediocre with every election cycle. Men who would have been laughed at in previous generations were running for president and being taken seriously. Eventually, women too.

As difficult as it was to imagine someone like Dan Quayle as president, the thought of a Sarah Palin or a Michelle Bachman seemed like something out of a bad Monty Python sketch.

It is truly appalling how bad the choices are on both sides in important races. This week in Virginia, voters were left with a choice between a Democrat who had never been much more than a fund-raiser and a Republican so far to the right that he wanted to outlaw oral sex between married couples in the privacy of their own homes.

Meanwhile in Washington, Congress is packed with mediocrities without an ounce of statesmanship. One Republican representative said if the people in his district wanted slavery to be legal, he would vote for it.

There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, so it was usually possible for the parties to find common ground for the good of the country. But there's a lot less common ground when each side sees the other as evil. And when voices on talk radio and 24-hour cable television networks are constantly hammering away, what happens is that people listen to the loudest voices.

Even the so-called intellectuals turn out to be just glib speakers. Paul Ryan is called a great thinker by Republicans, but all he really wants to do is dismantle government entitlements and privatize everything. As much as he has walked it back recently, he's basically a disciple of far-right author Ayn Rand.

So what's the solution?

There isn't an easy one. A big step in the right direction would be for terms like "evil," "un-American" and others like them to disappear from the debate. Another would be for both sides to remember that there aren't many issues on which one side gets everything they want and the other gets nothing.

In the end, we've got to make government service respectable again. We've got to attract the best people, because the problems we face as a society matter a lot more than making lots of money.

Really.

I happen to know the happiest guy in the whole world

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be completely happy and to have nothing at all to worry about?

I can't remember the last time my life was like that, but I do know someone who fills the bill. He's my grandson, Lexington Wesley Kastner, and he celebrated his second birthday yesterday.

Birthday boy

I haven't spent a whole lot of time with Lex in his first two years, but the miracle of modern-day communications -- particularly Skype -- has made it possible to see him and hear his voice every weekend even though he lives in Jamaica.

Our other grandchild, our lovely granddaughter Madison, is 5 now. She was born in Beijing and has already lived in China, Virginia, Indonesia and Jamaica. Lex was born in Seattle, and from there went to Indonesia and back to the States across Europe and the Atlantic, spending a little time back in Seattle in July 2012. Amazingly, he circumnavigated the globe before he was nine months old.

As long as my daughter Pauline continues her career in the Foreign Service, Lex and Maddie are going to be true citizens of the world. My two closest friends have never traveled outside North America, but these two kids are going to be extremely well-traveled.

Maddie, Lex and Pauline

I always thought I was reasonably adventuresome because on six different occasions during my career as a journalist, I accepted jobs and moved to places I had never lived before.

On most of those occasions, I didn't know anyone at all at my new location.

Big deal. My daughter -- and my son Virgile -- have both accepted jobs and moved to entirely different countries where they had to learn brand-new languages.

Pauline has learned Mandarin Chinese and Indonesian, and Virgile has learned Greek and Spanish for his two postings.

The closest I've come to learning a different language is picking up Southern.

I know that it's "y'all," not "you all," and I know it's never singular. There is of course the bigger plural, which is "all y'all." Seriously, I've never been fluent in a foreign language, and I admire my kids so much for the effort they have put into languages.

At some point soon, we will spend a couple of weeks in Jamaica with our daughter's family. The plan is to go for Thanksgiving, and health willing, we will do it.

I doubt I'll have nothing to worry about while I'm there, but I have a feeling some of Lex's happiness will rub off on me.

I am really looking forward to watching those two kids continue to grow.

There are some blessings to retirement.

Why November 2nd is the best day of the whole year for me

When you live long enough, you wind up with a lot of dates that have significance to your past.

I was born on December 11th in the final month of the 1940s, I started dating the first girl I fell in love with on Dec. 13th in the final month of the 1960s.

As far as I can recall, that's the last time a date in December really mattered to me.

I started dating each of the two women I married -- consecutively, not concurrently -- in September (29th and 12th), and my first marriage -- aka "Dawn of the Dead" -- began on April 19th.

We got married a year before the Peanut Farmer was elected, and we split up a year before he lost to Ronnie. There's some significance there, but I've never been able to figure it out.

One other important thing happened that year. My daughter Pauline was born August 3rd, 1980, but since that was still 12 years before I met her mother, I wasn't aware of it. Ditto with my son Virgile being born on January 30th, 1985.

Nicole, November 1992

There were several other dates in the '80s that would have mattered a lot if the relationships they were involved with had worked out, but I'm getting old and dates are getting more and more difficult to remember.

December 12th, 1990, was one that mattered. That was the day my two-seater car was crushed by an 18-wheeler on the Santa Ana Freeway heading through Los Angeles.

By all rights, I should have died that day. The passenger side of my car was stomped so badly that the roof over the right-hand seat was roughly even with my waist. I was truly blessed that day, though. After my car was hit by two trucks, spun about 720 degrees and slammed against the guard rail, I opened my door and stepped out of the car.

That day pretty well cured me of complaining about my luck.

I figured I had been spared for something, and exactly 21 months later I met Nicole. She answered an ad I ran in a singles magazine, which is pretty much the only way a sportswriter was going to meet a world-renowned planetary scientist in the L.A. dating scene.

We met that day, were engaged by the end of the month and married at City Hall in Los Angeles exactly 51 days from the day we met.

Which brings us to the most important date of all -- November 2nd.

Today.

It took us 51 days to meet, get to know each other and get married. Today is our 21st wedding anniversary. I look at the picture from 1992 and I feel so damn old. When December 11th rolls around this year, I will be 64 years old.

I have picked up a couple of other dates that matter. My grandchildren's birthdays (September 19th and November 3rd), and my son- and daughter-in-law (end of May, beginning of June. Those I need to look up).

But November 2nd is the special one. We've made it through four presidents, three of whom served two terms. That's pretty good compared to the first one. Whenever I think about that, I'm reminded of a scene from "The Way We Were." Robert Redford's character is talking to his friend, played by Bradford Dillman. Dillman's marriage has ended, and when Redford commiserates, the friend says it's no great loss.

Then he points to Redford's marriage to Barbra Streisand's character and says, "Losing her, now that would be a great loss."

I know exactly what he meant.

You don't have to be great to be part of something great

Very few people have the chance at some point in their lives to be part of something truly wonderful.

Most people who play on sports teams never win championships, whether at the state, national or world level. Even among the athletes who qualify for the Olympics, far more fail to win medals than those who do.

I think I could argue, though, that just qualifying for the Olympics is to be part of something wonderful. Even if you're the last one out of the pool in a swimming event, you're still recognized as one of the best in the world at what you do.

Sometimes, though, you can be part of something wonderful without being all that wonderful yourself. Every time I hear Leonard Bernstein's "Overture" from Candide, it reminds me of that time in my life.

When I was in school, I played a musical instrument. I have to say that loosely, because my playing an instrument was about as close to being a wonderful musician as my playing baseball was to my being Babe Ruth.

Trumpet embouchure (not me)

I played cornet for five years, and through the suggestion of a wonderful band director and teacher, switched to tuba for my last three years at W.T. Woodson High School. My teacher, E.C. Buskirk, was maybe the best band director I ever met. He told me I was never going to be any good as a cornet player due to problems with my embouchure, but my problems would lessen on an instrument with a larger mouthpiece.

We had three bands in high school, and I had been in the worst one in ninth grade. Mr. Buskirk promised me that if I switched to tuba and worked hard at it, he would put me in the second band (as a beginner) and then move me to the top band for my last two years of high school.

That was how it happened, and that was how I got to be part of the best high school band in the state of Virginia for two years.

That's not an exaggeration. We had so many wonderful musicians, like trumpet player Paul Gasparides, flutist Nancy Redfearn, clarinetists Ibrook Tower and his brother Joff and first chair tuba player Pete Carlson, to name a few in my mind after nearly 50 years. Each of them was an all-state musician. I wasn't all-anything, but it was a wonderful time.

We played some amazing music too, and the one that has stayed with me since 1967 more than anything else is the Bernstein piece.



It was so difficult, particularly the last minute or so, for a kid who had barely reached the point on the tuba where he wasn't faking it.

I used to have a record album -- actually a double album -- of the best stuff we played in my senior year, but a well-meaning friend lost it.

He didn't actually lose it. He knew where it was. He took my album, and without my knowing about it, gave it to a friend of his to make a CD of it. The friend took it to work, and while it was there, his employer went bankrupt, the business was padlocked and nothing could be removed.

Anyway, that was my brush with greatness. I didn't own my tuba, so I stopped playing at all after high school, and sad to say, I would have to have a refresher course -- at least a brush-up -- even to be able to read music again.

But there is a happy ending. When my son Virgile was in fifth grade, he started playing the saxophone. He not only became the best at his school, he was in the top band all four years of high school and was the drum major of the marching band as a senior.

And one more thing. He was named to the all-state band as a senior -- in the biggest state of all.

Pretty great, huh?