At last, a chance to watch Ken Burns' wonderful 'Civil War'

I don't think I saw any of Ken Burns' wonderful projects on PBS in first run.

When his first great project -- The Civil War -- came out in 1990, I was still working nights as a sportswriter. My only option would have been to record it on my VCR and watch the episodes later.

I didn't. I was never a big television viewer. The only two series I tried at all to keep up with were "LA Law" and "Dallas." The latter was mostly habit. I had been watching the adventures of J.R. Ewing since 1978.

I didn't watch much else. Everyone I knew told me how wonderful "Civil War" was, but I never did see it.

When his next project came along, one more ambitious in scope than "Civil War," I really wanted to watch it. I think I actually did watch the first night of "Baseball," but I was sharing a television and a bedroom with my wife by then, and there was no way I could watch or tape the next eight nights in a row.

I finally did watch "Baseball" all the way through on video cassettes and twice more in the ensuing years on DVDs. I saw a lot of things I had already known about the game I loved, and I saw a lot more that was new to me.

Burns had won me over.

I didn't watch his 10-part "Jazz" in 2001, but my wonderful son Virgile -- at the height of his love of music -- watched it all the way through.

His next massive project was "The War," his 2007 miniseries about America's involvement in World War II. I didn't catch it on television, but I bought and watched the DVDs later.

I never did get around to "Jazz" or "The Civil War" until just recently. Both sets were available from Amazon at really good prices, so I ordered them. They arrived today, and I am watching Part One of the nine-part "Civil War" as I write this.

When I'm done with that, I'll watch "Jazz."

Ken Burns really is an American treasure.

Of all the 'might have beens,' think of Jan Berry

The summer of 1966 was one of the most idyllic times in my life.

It was the summer before my senior year in high school. I was 16, and I spent part of the summer as a camp counselor. It wasn't a paying job, but I had a great time. I played a lot of baseball with my friends and I listened to a lot of music.

My favorite song that summer was sort of a novelty, the last hit from Jan and Dean. I don't remember if I had heard about it or not, but Jan Berry had been in a horrific accident on April 12th when his Sting Ray rammed into the back of a parked truck. He was in a coma for several months, and may have still been comatose in mid-June when the group's last hit record made the charts.

"My phys ed teacher's got me working too hard ..."

Jan Berry

Jan had movie-star good looks and a lot of ability as singer, songwriter and producer. Some of the most memorable songs to come out of the California scene in the '60s were his and Dean's -- "Surf City," "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena," "Ride the Wild Surf" and "Dead Man's Curve" among them.

But what they were, first and foremost, was clown princes of the surf scene. There was their anthem to skateboarding, "Sidewalk Surfing," with its chorus of "bust your buns, bust your buns now." Then there was "One Piece Topless Bathing Suit" about the French sensation, but of course the woman wearing it was the 94-year-old granny from "Little Old Lady."

Then there was "Popsicle."



And that was it. Jan and Dean never had another hit record. They reached the charts 14 times between 1959 and 1966, and they had a national No. 1 hit in 1963 with "Surf City," whose line "two girls for every boy" painted a wonderful picture.

Only it wasn't over. Jan never fully recovered from the brain injuries he had been lucky to survive in 1966. He had to learn to walk again and he had to learn to talk (and sing) again. But he returned to music as a producer in 1973, and by 1979 he was touring with partner Dean Torrence on summer oldies tours.

It wasn't easy. Jan's brain injuries damaged his memory to the point where he had to relearn the lyrics to his songs every day to be able to perform them at night.

Writer Bob Greene toured with Jan and Dean numerous times in those later years, and his book "When We Get to Surf City" gave us a backstage look at the last 15 years they performed together. Greene is a writer people seem either to love or hate, but he is on the top of his game here.

What appeals to Greene so much -- what he makes so appealing to readers -- is the idea that growing up doesn't necessarily mean you have to give up all the things you loved when you were young.

Mick Jagger may have said when he was young that he didn't see himself singing "Satisfaction" when he was 50, but he's 70 now and still performing with the Rolling Stones. Paul McCartney is 71, and Mike Love of the Beach Boys will be 73 in March.

No, rock 'n' roll will never die.

Concert footage exists on YouTube of Jan and Dean performances from the '80s and '90s, and there is a certain poignancy to watching Jan try so hard to be what he was. His voice is flatter and you can hear him working so hard to enunciate words.

In a show from the late '90s, Jan's face is puffier and he performs while sitting. But he still seems to be enjoying himself.



One thing that meant a lot to him was that he put together an album of his own and got it released in 1997. "Second Wave"  is a mixture of new songs and reworking of some old ones, and while it wasn't a big hit -- or even a hit at all -- showing that he could still function as singer, arranger and producer was definitely a victory.

Jan was performing to the end, and in March 2004 he had a seizure and died at the age of 62.

But it's important to remember that he wasn't just some plucky survivor who provided an inspirational story about battling long odds and winning. In April 1966, before he got into his car and had the accident, Jan Berry was on top of the world.

He and Dean were negotiating for a weekly television show as well as a movie, and they were making hit after hit. Jan had even more to look forward to; he was completing his second year of medical school. When he finished and earned his M.D., he has going to leave the music business and be a surgeon.

But he could sing and he was a star. Instead of leaving you with the image of an older Jan Berry, here he is from 1963, performing the group's biggest hit.

Yeah, he definitely had something.

His friends were great writers, but he was a wonderful family man

When my dad came home from World War II, he went to the University of Michigan on the GI Bill and got a great education.

Slote

He also made two lifelong friends, men who became very successful writers. Al Slote has written more than 30 books for young readers, and Josh Greenfeld has been an amazingly versatile writer, with movies, plays, novels and non-fiction books to his credit.

My dad was also a very talented writer, but he decided that if he wanted to have a wife and family, he couldn't afford to live the chancy life of a freelance writer. He went to work for the Air Force and spent his entire career working in the Pentagon.

Greenfeld

I never met Slote, but I came into contact with Greenfeld at least three or four times, the last in 1976 at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., for a performance of his play about Dr. Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream." Two years earlier, he had written the film "Harry and Tonto" for Paul Mazursky and had earned an Academy Award nomination.

He also wrote three non-fiction books about his autistic son Noah, one of which was named by the New York Time Review of Books as one of the 10 best non-fiction books of the year. He'll be 86 this year (my dad would have been 88) and he's still going strong. A week from this Sunday, there will be a staged reading of his new play, "Art and Gadg and Marilyn," by Theatre Palisades in Southern California.

The really amazing thing is that his son Karl has become a wonderful writer in his own right. He wrote for Time and Sports Illustrated for many years and has gone on to write wonderful books. His "Boy Alone" is a memoir about growing up with Noah. "Triburbia" is an outstanding novel about living in modern-day Manhattan, and just recently he co-wrote "Dr. J," Julius Erving's autobiography, with the basketball great.

I've got all three of those books in my library and I hope to read more of his work as well. As for his father's play, it's about Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and Marilyn Monroe in the era of the blacklist and the HUAC hearings.

I'd love to see it. It's the first time since we left California in November 2010 that I found myself wishing we were still in Los Angeles.

Thinking about Josh also makes me think about my dad, who died in March 2008. My dad had a very good career and also worked very hard in the credit union movement.

He never had the time or opportunity to do much writing, which I always thought was something of a shame. I remember my mother telling me once that his two friends had told her he had been the best writer of the trio.

My parents

But I know one thing. He wouldn't have traded the life he had for anything he didn't do.

He was a family man in the best sense of the word, and that's why all of us who loved him will miss him for as long as we live.

It seems to me that's a pretty fair tradeoff.

'Old folkie' Pete Seeger dies at 94; we celebrate his life

No one would ever have called Pete Seeger a violent man.

That's why the story of his reaction to Bob Dylan going from acoustic to electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is so interesting, although it turned out to be apocryphal. When Dylan started playing "Maggie's Farm" and then went on to "Like A Rolling Stone," many of the more traditionalist folk fans booed.

Seeger reportedly said, "If I had an axe, I'd chop the microphone cable right now."

He later admitted he had said something of the sort, although for an entirely different reason. He said that the amplifiers had been turned up so loud for the guitars that no one could hear the words, and the words needed to be heard.

Now that sounds like Seeger, who died Monday at age 94 as one of the greatest Americans of the last 100 years. From the 1930s up to the present decade, Seeger stood for every underdog, every cause that could benefit the common man. As folk singer Harry Chapin wrote in his tribute song, "Old Folkie:"

"He's singing us the songs that tell us who we are. When you look in his eyes, you know that somebody's in there."



"The world may be tired, but Pete's still going strong ..."

Which he did into his nineties. One of his last songs was "God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You," a response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. There's a certain sweetness to the song, which rather than being anti-anything (except oil spills and trickle-down economics), is more of a positive statement about getting involved.

He co-wrote the song with Lorre Wyatt, one of 14 collaborations that make up the album, "A More Perfect Union."

The version on this video was re-recorded in 2012, with Seeger (now 92), Wyatt, Bruce Springsteen and children's choir.

The line that jumps out of the song as classic Seeger:

"What we do now, you and me, will affect eternity ..."




A few months ago I was talking with my son-in-law -- who is about 30 years younger than I am -- about Woody Guthrie. He wasn't that familiar with Guthrie, and when I explained who he was and then said he was a great man, he suggested I might be exaggerating.

How could a singer be a great man?

How? Maybe by standing tall for the underdog for his entire life, whether it was attacking those stomped on the common man, or by standing up against Charles Lindbergh and the America First crowd.

Or two dozen other causes. His guitar had a famous slogan attached to it:

"This machine kills fascists."

Woody Guthrie never got rich, but he never wanted to be rich. It was the same with Seeger, whose own instrument -- a five-string banjo, was decorated in a slightly different way than Guthrie's.

"This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender."

Seeger lived most his life in Beacon, N.Y., with Toshi, his wife of 60 years who died last year. They started in a trailer, but then built a cabin using instructions they got from library books.

He was the last of an amazing generation of folk singers, and he influenced people three and four generations behind him. He stood for everything that was good in our country, and unlike some other singers, there was never an issue where he had to come back later and say he was wrong.

He was blacklisted in the 1950s for his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Acitivities Committee and answer questions about friends and acquaintances. He even showed grace in the way he did that, saying these weren't the kind of questions Americans should be asking or answering.

Like Woody, he never got rich. But he will be remembered long after most of the rich people of his time are long forgotten. And songs of his -- "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn Turn Turn" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" -- will be remembered and sung long after more trivial fare has been forgotten.

A few years back, I bought the five-CD set released by the Smithsonian Institution of Seeger singing traditional American folk songs. I'm happy to have it, and I also have several CDs of him singing his own best songs.

To me there is no question of his greatness. He never stopped fighting for those who needed his help. As Harry Chapin wrote:

"Whenever somethin's burning, or a lesson needs some learning, or a tide that needs some turning to a better world somewhere, Yeah, the Old Folkie's there."

I was going to end this post with a video of Seeger singing "Where Have all the Flowers Gone," which many people consider his greatest song. But I stumbled across something better, Pete singing a wonderful song somebody else wrote.

Vaya con Dios, Pete.

You have earned your rest, although I'll bet if the angels are mistreating anyone, Pete will find a new banjo and start one more crusade.

Bad weather even coming to Deep South in the next few days

All right, right wingers, get it out of your system.

"Al Gore is fat!!"

OK, now let the grownups talk.

If there's one thing that never fails to amaze me, it's how inept some people are at picking names that will help people come to terms with issues. Some years back, when environmentalists began warning people that the way we live is hurting the planet, they called it "global warming."

If they had simply been more accurate and used the term "climate change," it would be obvious what is happening. The weather is getting weirder and wackier, from San Diego to Bangor, from Seattle to Key West. Summers are hotter, winters are colder and when the big storms come, they seem to do more damage.

When Sandy hit New Jersey in 2012, it didn't even have hurricane status, but it was one nasty storm that pretty much tore up the Jersey Shore.

How could they tell?

Come on now. It isn't California or Florida, but generations of people in New York and Pennsylvania grew up spending many happy summer weekends at the Jersey Shore.

Anyway, the weather has been getting rougher and rougher, to the point where the winter storm expected to hit much of the Southeast Tuesday is being called a "once in a generation" event. WSB-TV in Atlanta is saying the south suburbs -- where we live -- may get as much as three inches of snow.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not whining about the "storm." I spent four winters living at altitude in Colorado and Nevada, where our once in a generation storm would be called snow flurries. On the day after Christmas in 1987, I had to drive from Colorado to Sioux Falls, S.D., and there was already a foot of snow on the ground when I left with another 10 inches or so on the way.

Now that's entertainment.

Winters here in Georgia are strange. When we moved here in November 2010, we got a colder than normal winter and we actually had snow on the ground once. Then the next two winters the temperature rarely even got down to freezing.

This winter has been colder, although without much in the way of precipitation.

No matter how cold or wet it gets here in this week, we would still be a better site for the Super Bowl than New Jersey.

Why?

Well, we have had two Super Bowls in Atlanta, in 1994 and 2000, and conditions for the game were quite pleasant indeed.

In Atlanta

The Dallas Cowboys beat Buffalo, 30-13, and the St. Louis Rams beat Tennessee, 23-16. Neither was among the most memorable games, and neither was among the best halftime shows. We had Rockin' Country Sunday with Travis Tritt, Tanya Tucker and others in 1994 and Tapestry of Nations with Tina Turner, Phil Collins, Christina Aguilera and others in 2000.

But it was a very pleasant experience for the fans.

Why? Because the stadium had a roof over it. If you're not going to play the game in Miami or Southern California, indoors is the place to be.

In the Georgia Dome.

Let's stop letting CEOs play by different rules than we do

When George Orwell wrote one of the most famous books of the 20th century, he took on a major target.

Orwell was a democratic socialist, and his novel "Animal Farm" served to educate the world about the difference between the ideals of socialism and the reality of Russian totalitarianism. It isn't the novel that most remember him by, but it was every bit as effective as the better-known "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

The book is an allegory about Russia, from Max to Lenin and Trotsky to Josef Stalin.

It begins with the animals overthrowing the farmer and declaring a list of seven rules, of which the most important is that "all animals are equal."

Eventually, of course, the more intelligent pigs set themselves above other animals and the seven commandments become one:

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Now at the time, that was seen as a perfect example of the hypocrisy of Russian communists, but the world has changed a great deal since 1945.

The animals who are now "more equal than others"are the people who run major banks and multinational corporations. They don't play by the same rules as the rest of us. In fact, what they have done is create an environment in which profits operate under capitalism and risk under socialism.

And when it comes to losses, they are definitely more equal than others. J.P. Morgan Chase had to make settlements in the London Whale and Bernie Madoff scandals totaling billions of dollars, but at the same time, CEO Jamie Dimon awarded himself a 74 percent pay raise.

Dimon

Dimon also said that paying out the settlements wasn't really an admission of guilt, just an acknowledgment that fighting the charges in court for three or four years would have been "bad for business."

It used to be that captains went down with their ships, but these days they not only get to leave the ship, they take along everything of value with them.

Look at how many businesses have failed in the last 10-15 years, and look at how many of them allowed their CEOs to walk away with golden parachutes while wiping out employee pensions and health care.

Some animals are more equal than others.

It certainly seems to me that executives, and particularly CEOs, should be responsible for the things their companies do. I'm not saying they should go to prison, but they certainly ought to pay at least as great a price as rank and file employees do.

One thing that infuriated average Americans in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse was that so much of the bailout money went to pay inflated salaries and bonuses to executives.

People talk about oligarchies, but we have gone past that and appear to have settled into plutonomy. Recent statistics released by Oxfam International show that the richest 85 people in the world control as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people (half the world).

In addition, seven of every 10 people in the world live in countries where income inequality has increased in the last 30 years.

There may be no solution to this other than worldwide cataclysm, but even if we can't reverse the process, we ought to be able to slow it down some. Maybe we could stop giving so many breaks to the rich. Maybe we ought to at least give them a chance to make it on their own.

Hey, that's what they want us to do.

'Inconvenience' isn't a valid reason to prevent background checks

As I write this, some patriotic American is expressing his love of the Second Amendment at a mall in Columbia, Md.

We don't know the death toll or even if there is one, but we know two things will happen. A lot of people will talk about things that should be done, and nothing at all will happen because our political leaders are terrified of that tiny minority known as the National Rifle Association.

This isn't about taking anyone's guns away. It isn't about preventing anyone from buying and owning the most obscene weapons, weapons the founders would never have envisioned. It isn't even about those poor, sad men who believe they need state-of-the-art weaponry if the time ever comes to overthrow the government.

It isn't about registration and/or licensing, even though I believe those would be very sensible steps to take.

It's about just one small step, a step that surveys show a large majority of gun owners support.

Universal background checks.

Before anyone buys a gun, they should have to provide identification to the seller, who then would check to be sure he wasn't selling the gun to a criminal, to someone who is mentally ill or to a child.

Look at the graphic. Fully 85 percent of NRA members support at least some form of background checks. The numbers of people against checks is ridiculously small, but that doesn't matter to the NRA. To those worthies, any step -- no matter how small, no matter how sensible -- puts us on the slippery slope toward a time when jackbooted thugs from the United Nations will confiscate their guns, ban country music and make Jane Fonda's birthday a national holiday.

Of course, they're more subtle than that. If you listen to the NRA, you'll hear what an inconvenience it would be for someone only exercising his right as an American to have to wait for a background check.

Inconvenience? God forbid anyone should ever have to be inconvenienced.

Do you know where else we inconvenience people? We don't allow them to drive under the influence of alcohol. In 2010, there were 32,885 deaths in this country due to automobiles, with 10,228 due to drunk drivers.

It's actually fascinating how similar the numbers are. In 2010 and 2011, roughly 32,000 Americans died because of guns. If we subtract the 19,000 where the gun supposedly made suicide easier, that leaves about 13,000 dead as a result either of homicides or accidents.

Yet we have no problem inconveniencing honest, sober drivers by occasionally making them stop at checkpoints designed to catch drunk drivers. And even then, the police will arrest someone who has had too much alcohol even if there has been no problem coming from it.

As much as I hate to admit it, there were times when I was younger -- more than 30 years ago -- when I went out with friends, consumed alcoholic beverages and drove home with blood alcohol levels definitely above 0.08 percent (the legal limit in many states). I didn't drive erratically and I never had an accident or caused anyone else to, but if I had been stopped at a checkpoint, I would have been arrested.

Those checkpoints are basically no different than background checks for gun purchases in the way they inconvenience law-abiding citizens.

And before you say that gun ownership is a protected right, remember that the type of people who would be prevented from owning guns would be people who for one reason or another have surrendered the right. Criminals and crazies.

I can throw amendments around too. Four and five -- unreasonable search and seizure, and self-incrimination.

None of our rights are absolute anyway. You cannot advocate the violent overthrow of the government, you can't incite to riot and you can't yell "theater" in a crowded fire.

So if your argument against background checks is inconvenience, too bad.

If you're afraid of the government knowing you own a gun, I don't see anything about that anywhere in the Constitution. If we Americans ever did have the right to live secretly, it has been gone for a long time.

A really long time.

After a late start, some fun collecting baseball memorabilia

Baseballs are overpowering my office.

In fact, I think they may be reproducing in the dead of night, even though I have only two balls signed by women. And I'm pretty certain the women who signed those balls are well past child-bearing age.

Another eBay addict ...

The first time I ever bought anything off eBay was nearly nine years ago, when I purchased an old photograph of my friend Walter Masterson from the Washington Senators 1949 yearbook.

Walt Masterson

I sent it to him, he signed it for me and I have had it framed and on my wall ever since.

I covered baseball in the minors and majors for the better part of 16 years, and I didn't collect memorabilia for all that time.

All I have from back then are season credentials from when I covered the Los Angeles Dodgers and the (then) California Angels, a media pass from the St. Louis games of the 1985 World Series and a photograph of me in uniform as the (one night) manager of the Gastonia Cardinals.

I didn't collect autographs -- it would have been totally unprofessional -- and the only one I wish I had was from the night I sat and talked with Roger Maris for an hour in 1982.

I have two pieces of football memorabilia, both connected with John Elway. You can see the jersey in the photograph, and I also have a picture of me interviewing the Denver quarterback that appeared in Sports Illustrated in January 1987.

Once I stopped being a sportswriter, I started collecting balls. I had some very impressive ones -- Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Duke Snider, Warren Spahn, Johnny Bench and Willie Mays, among others -- but good ones were too expensive through stores and mail-order and the Internet hadn't really blossomed yet.

Then eBay came along ...

Then eBay came along, although it had been a big deal for a long time before I began using it. When I started looking for baseballs online, I saw that two types of sellers were operating on eBay -- professionals and amateurs. The ones from professionals cost more, but nearly always have better certification of their authenticity. Amateurs might give you a real bargain, but you're taking a chance that your Babe Ruth ball might actually have been signed by Babs Ruthie.

Bill Terry

I've actually done reasonably well on eBay. It always surprises me that some of the most overpriced balls are from players who may be signing for another 20-30 years. I've been pretty lucky finding balls that must have been signed very later in the life of the player, and I've managed to get signatures from players who were active as far back as the 1920s for half of what Mariano Rivera would cost me.

Bill Terry hit .401 in 1930 and he didn't die until 1989, so I have a signed ball from the last National Leaguer to hit .400.

I have made an effort to collect big moments from the World Series, so I've got Don Larsen (perfect game, 1956), Bill Mazeroski (home run, 1960), Kirk Gibson (home run, 1988), Mickey Lolich (three wins, 1968) and Reggie Jackson (Mr. October, 1978).

Rudy and Joe

I also like some odd ones. Willis Hudlin gave up Babe Ruth's 500th home run  in 1929, Virgil "Fire" Trucks pitched two no-hitters (and has the same first name as my son) and Johnny Vander Meer is the only pitcher to throw back-to-back no-hitters. Take that, Nolan Ryan.

But some of my favorites didn't actually play. Peter Gammons is in the Hall of Fame as a great baseball writer, Scott Boras is Super Agent and Chris Berman was ESPN's first big star. I've also got a ball with a 911 connection -- New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Yankees Manager Joe Torre.

As for the women, I love my ball from filming of "A League of Their Own" in Evansville, Ind. It only has four signatures -- director Penny Marshall and actresses Lori Petty and Madonna. There's a guy on the ball, too -- Tom Hanks.

Jane Fonda

Still, the one that's got to be my biggest oddity is another woman who didn't play the game. In fact, her only real connection was that she was married to a team owner for nearly 10 years.

Of course, Jane Fonda has always been a lot more controversial than that.

I love it when I have a chance to pick up balls that are out of the ordinary. Hey, I'm never going to get that 1918 World Series ball some guy was selling on eBay for $176,000.

Not without my wife and kids committing me.

It's going to take hard work to save American working people

I wish I weren't so angry at my country.

I wish I didn't see so much bad in our political system or so much greed in our economic system. I wish I didn't see so much disrespect between those on one side of the divide and the other.

I'm not sure half of our country even considers the other half Americans, from either side. Folks on the left see those on the right as backward and bigoted, and those on the right see those on the left as trying to destroy what has always been special to them.

Do we provide for the long-term unemployed? It seems very simple to me, but there are plenty of people on the right who tell us that providing anything to them makes it less likely that they will look for a job.

Over the last 30 years or so, poverty has become much more of a moral question to the right, and the word "poor" seems to have acquired an adjective in front of it.

Undeserving.

Forty years ago, my friend Mick and I used to argue about the concept of welfare. He didn't want the government giving anything to anyone who had the mental and physical capability to take care of himself or herself.  I said it was cheaper to educate, train or feed someone than it was to imprison him. I said then -- and I still believe now -- that leaving someone without hope is just about the most dangerous thing you can do.

I've quoted this before, but in Lawrence Kasdan's 1991 movie "Grand Canyon," Danny Glover's character is trying to get his nephew to give up on gang life. He asks him if that's what he wants to be doing when he's 25. His nephew gives him a strange look.

"Shit, I'm never going to live to be 25."

It isn't just young black kids having a tough time of it either. Try being on the far side of 50 and losing your job. You may never get another one, and if you do, the chance of it even being a lateral move is slim indeed.

From the New Deal to the end of the '60s, the middle class grew and income inequality shrank. For the first 20 years or so after World War II, the average working man had never before had it so good. At peak, a third of private sector workers had the protection of union membership, and most of them had good benefits, including health care and retirement.

But that third has fallen to 6.6 percent in the most recent numbers, and a country that once made and sold to the world now makes almost nothing except money. Most of what had been good blue-collar jobs vanished, and many of the biggest companies were no longer American-owned but multinational.

Worst of all, starting in 1968 with Richard Nixon's second campaign for the presidency, Republicans began using subtly divisive language to get blue-collar workers to vote against their own economic interests. And ever since then, through Ronald Reagan, the two George Bushes and on up to today, America has been a house divided against itself.


Even something that should have been a matter of great pride for this country -- becoming the first country ever to freely elect a leader from a minority of 15 percent or less -- turned out to herald a return to more overt racism. Whether it was postcards of the White House lawn planted in watermelons or truly nasty bumper stickers, the election of Barack Obama began an era of bad feeling that continues to this day.

We hear about red states and blue states, and we're reaching a point where folks on either side tend to see their opponents as somehow less than true Americans.

Maybe we've gone too far down the wrong road, or maybe we have just become too big a country and too diverse, but we really don't feel like one country to me. Too many people aren't making it, and too few people control far too much wealth. To make it worse, people on one side of the divide refuse to do anything to make it better.

There seems to be no sense at all of a national family, the way some other countries manage.

The late Peter Allen wrote a lovely song about Australian expatriates all over the world and their love of country. In the last verse:

"But someday we'll all be together once more when all of the ships come back to the shore. Then I realise something I've always known. I still call Australia home."

Joshua Black

Meanwhile, Republicans both white and black keep getting quoted as saying someone ought to kill President Obama. This week it was actually a black candidate for the Florida legislature who said we were past impeachment as a remedy and that "It's time to arrest and hang him high."

Joshua Black calls himself an evangelist, so what we apparently have working here is both crazy politics and crazy religion, both of which are dragging this country somewhere it doesn't want to go.

Republicans seem to have only one goal these days -- strip government down to nothing in every area other than so-called national defense. And along the way, cut taxes on the rich. All that succeeds in doing is make income inequality worse and worse.

As of 2010, the top 100th of one percent of Americans had an average annual income of $23.85 million. The bottom 90 percent, which is really almost everyone, had an annual income of $29,840.

Those are Third World numbers, and there isn't anything good that can possibly happen to this country if that trend cannot be reversed. Average Americans are so deep in debt that their options in moving forward are almost non-existent. Students have amassed so much debt earning degrees that are nearly useless to them, and other people have run up massive consumer debt to buy crap that doesn't improve their quality of life at all.

H.L. Mencken wrote in 1922 that he thought the American republic would fall within a hundred years and that the two things that would cause its demise would be greed and ignorance. The greed of the rich and the ignorance of the masses.

Seems to me we're right on target, and that's what makes me angry.

The things that could save us are things we can't get the government to do. Return our income tax to the more progressive levels of the '50s and '60s. Conservatives have argued that lower tax rates result in greater investment, but it hasn't worked out that way. When income was taxed at a top rate of 70 percent, it made sense to re-invest. But with the top rate down at 35 percent, the folks keeping two-thirds of their income just pack it away.

Higher tax rates can also help cut the deficit and the overall debt, and of course help finance the safety net for the people who most need it.

It may be that the only way to save the working class is with some sort of debt forgiveness jubilee. Of course that's unfair to those folks who don't have massive debts, who played the game the right way, but a collapsing economy and a faltering country will hurt them every bit as much as the others.

That's pretty much it. No matter how far apart the two sides are, no matter how little use they have for each other, this ought to be a country worth saving.

Easy Rider, 1969

I'm not sure why, but I always keep coming back to "Easy Rider," to the drunken attorney who was a young Jack Nicholson's first memorable film role. After watching some guys mistreating Billy and Wyatt, Nicholson speaks perhaps the best line of the movie.

"This used to be a helluva good country."

Yes, it did.

As we age, we can feel our memories start fading into the past

"Let us go to the banks of the ocean where the walls rise above the Zuiderzee, long ago I used to be a young man but dear Margaret remembers that for me ..."
-- "THE DUTCHMAN," Michael Peter Smith

For the last few days, I have been listening to at least a dozen versions of this song on YouTube. For some reason, it is a song that is resonating with my heart and mind in a way only a few others have touched me.




You see, there are times I feel my own memory is starting to fade, and I don't have anyone to remember the first 40 years or so for me. Oh, I still remember freakish things ...

"Come and listen to the story of a man named Jed. ..."

That and a half dozen other TV theme songs from the '50s and '60s must have been permanently jammed into my frontal lobe, but aside from two or three things, I hardly remember anything at all about the five years I spent in elementary school. I cannot picture in my mind my bedroom that was my inner sanctum from 1957 until nearly the end of 1961.

I still have a feel for the living room, dining room and kitchen. I can see them in my memory, but I cannot remember my own bedroom.

It's not difficult to remember my room in our home in Virginia. We moved there when I was 13 and my mother still owns the house. I visited just three years ago. But there are plenty of things I have all but lost about the years I was growing up there.

I'm 64 years old.

When I was 24.

I'm never going to be 54 ... or 44 ... or 34 ... let alone younger than that. In fact, one of my two children will be 34 this year.

When Pauline was 24, she started her career with the Department of State. When Virgile was 24, he competed in an Ironman Triathlon in France.

When I was 24, I bought a Pinto.

And that was the high point of the year. Probably one of the high points of my twenties. Is it any wonder my memories are vanishing into the ether?

It isn't just the past either. At least half the time I leave the house to run errands, I forget at least one of the things I'm supposed to be taking with me. As for remembering other things, like phone numbers, I can't think of any other than my own that I just remember without help anymore.

Oh, I remember two or three phone numbers that were useful to me 40 years ago. I even remember the Social Security number of someone I haven't spoken to in 32 years.

That's the way things are. It's like that old Rodney Dangerfield joke about appealing only to people who could do him absolutely no good. My memory is great of useless stuff, useless on stuff that matters.




"He's mad as he can be, but Margaret only sees that sometimes. Sometimes she sees her unborn children in his eyes."

Twenty years ago tomorrow, a whole lot of shakin' going on

It was 20 years ago tomorrow, a Monday morning after an uneventful weekend.

I was still working nights then, covering sports for a paper in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, and I wasn't getting up all that early.

At least I thought I wasn't. At 4:31 a.m., I was awakened by what felt like a giant shaking our house with both his hands. I had never felt anything like it in my life.

Of course it was the Northridge Earthquake.

It wasn't the first time I had felt a California earthquake. In fact, the first one I felt, I wasn't even in California. It was just past 5 p.m. on Oct. 17, 1989, and I was sitting at my desk at the Gazette-Journal in Reno, Nev. All of a sudden, we felt some fairly strong tremors. We found out fairly soon what it was, because the television in our department was tuned to the pregame show of the World Series game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

I-880

It was the Loma Prieta earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter Scale, and it was more than 200 miles away from our office. It was incredibly dramatic. Part of the Bay Bridge collapsed, and the upper level of I-880 through Oakland pancaked onto the lower level. Quite a first quake.

Three years later, in April 1992, I was awakened shortly before 5 a.m. when my waterbed developed a wave pattern. At was another quake, this one out in the desert near Joshua Tree. My Orange County, Calif., apartment was more than a hundred miles west of there, but I felt the 6.1 shaker.

1994

By then, earthquakes were becoming sort of a ho-hum thing for me. I'd feel one that was in the 3-4 range and shrug it off.

But by January 1994 I was living in the foothills north of Los Angeles, less than 20 miles away from the epicenter when the Northridge quake awakened us. The actual strength of 6.7 wasn't outrageous, but it had an extremely high ground acceleration as well as two 6.0 aftershocks, one of them just one minute after the original quake.

It could have been a lot worse. Despite the shaking, we had very little damage. We did have something that we didn't realize until six years later. In 2000, we put a lot of money into remodeling our home, and one of the contractors pointed out that the upper part of our chimney had several major cracks in it. So we wound up spending another $3,000 on our remodel.

Still, what I remember was the day of the quake. The shaking awakened us right away, and 13-year-old Pauline felt it too. But the funniest part of it all was that Virgile, two weeks away from his ninth birthday, slept through it all. We actually had to awaken him to come outside with us in case there were more aftershocks.

Somewhat of a disaster for a lot of people, but 20 years later, it's sort of a sweet memory of when my kids were younger.

Are there better memories than that?

From filmmaker to troubador, Michael Moore leads the way

Sometimes the easiest way to judge the effectiveness of an advocate is to see how much people on the other side hate him.

1989

When it comes to representing ordinary working people against the elite 1 percent, there aren't many people more effective than Michael Moore. Every since 1989, when his debut film "Roger and Me" chronicled his efforts to meet with General Motors CEO Roger Smith, he has been an extremely effective voice for the left.

GM's downsizing in the '80s had caused severe economic damage in Moore's home town of Flint, Mich., and while Moore wasn't able to bring those jobs back, he did shine the spotlight on how good working-class jobs were beginning to disappear from this country.

He was active in numerous projects in the '90s, but his real breakthrough came in 2002 when his movie "Bowling for Columbine" won the Academy Award for best documentary.

2002

Moore used the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado to shine his light on America's love affair with guns. Add to that the fact that he used his acceptance speech to attack George W. Bush's war in Iraq and it was the night he became a full-fledged demon to the American Right.

His next film, "Fahrenheit 911," wasn't as successful critically, but it became the first documentary ever to make more than $100 million at the box office.

After that he went after health care in "Sicko" (2007) and "Capitalism: A Love Story" (2009). Those last two completed his ascension to the role of No. 1 target of the right-wing media.

Of course, the first thing they always say about him is that he's fat. To be fair, his counterpart on the other side -- Rush Limbaugh -- always seems to attract the same criticism. Of course, Limbaugh has a criminal record for drug use and has been married four times. You can certainly tell which side I'm on.

Over the last few years, Moore has been working to help the Occupy movement, and when they put together an album to raise money ("Occupy This Album"), Moore himself was a pleasant surprise with his rendition of Bob Dylan's legendary "The Times They Are a-Changin'."



How about that?

I'll bet Limbaugh can't sing like that.

Are Republicans really 'enemies of the poor' in our society?

"There are 47 percent who are ... dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

By now nearly everyone in America knows the preceding quote is part of the statement Mitt Romney thought he was making in private, the quote that might have cost him the 2012 election.

This isn't about Romney. What it is about is the attitude conservatives have toward those Americans who aren't making it.

Many of these people never had to struggle just to get onto the bottom rung of the success ladder, and some of those who did then wanted to prevent others from succeeding the same way. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas admitted he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but said it should be eliminated because it left him wondering whether he had really succeeded on his own.

The debate over extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed has also shown what ought to be called a "sympathy gap." Despite the fact that there are far more unemployed men and women than there are job vacancies, conservatives are claiming that paying unemployment benefits makes it less likely that people will look for jobs.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is blunt about it when he says Republicans in 2014 are enemies of the poor with policies designed essentially to double down on supply side economics. Since they're not about to raise taxes on the wealthy, all their budget cuts come from programs that help the middle class and working class.

It really all comes down to one question. Are people who are rich and successful somehow better people -- or harder workers -- than people who are struggling to get by?

It's a real simple answer.

No.

Actually, it comes down to individuals. Some are better and some aren't, and just as there are rich people who succeeded strictly through luck and connections, there are poor people who are talented and hard working.

The one point at which the entire philosophy of forcing the poor to make it on their own falls apart is when you think about children.

It's one thing to be self-righteous and say that people who don't work shouldn't eat. It's another thing entirely to say that little children should be punished because they were unlucky in their choice of parents. The whole "makers and takers" thing fails to address people who have no way of making anything.

If there's one thing that is truly disgusting about the self-love these people seem to exude it's the other side of the coin. If you look at the Romney quote again, it comes down to someone who grew up fabulously wealthy saying that people who weren't as lucky see themselves as victims.

Sadly, some of them are victims -- victims of people like Romney and the others who get far more from the government than any of them do.

Christie's 'explanations' just seem to make things worse for him

I don't know why I thought of Marion Barry when I watched film from Chris Christie's press conference the other day.

Well, maybe I do. In an attempt to distance himself from the outrage against lane closures in Fort Lee, N.J., that made the morning commute into New York more difficult, Christie fired aide Bridget Kelly and blamed her for the closures.

"She lied to me," he said.

And of course that reminded me of the hotel room scam in which Barry, then the mayor of Washington, D.C., had been caught using cocaine. His response:

"Bitch set me up."

I'm not sure how much of a suspension of disbelief it requires to believe Christie -- a tough guy and a hands-on governor -- didn't know exactly what his aides were doing. There were certainly inconsistencies in his statement. For example, he said he had just learned about the problem the day before, but he also said he had suffered through several sleepless nights over it.

Apparently Kelly is expected to take the brunt of the blame, and an e-mail she sent to Port Authority executive David Wildstein (a Christie appointee) looks particularly bad.

"Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

Wildstein was less wordy.

"Got it."

Wildstein and Kelly

That exchange makes it obvious the "traffic study" that ostensibly caused all the problems wasn't for the purpose of actually learning anything. Even if we take a giant leap of faith and assume Christie was not involved, it is apparent the lane closings were political retaliation against Fort Lee officials who had not supported Christie for re-election.

So Christie spent the better part of two hours playing the victim, insisting that he had nothing to do with the lane closings. As if he didn't have problems enough, he made a statement that probably will not go away for a very long time.

"I am not a bully."

If the governor is as smart as he is reputed to be, my guess is he regretted that sentence as soon as it had left his mouth. You don't get anywhere in politics by telling people you are "not" something or other.

Ask Senator Christine O'Donnell of Delaware.




Oh, wait. She lost, at least in part because of "I am not a witch."

It's difficult to imagine she would have won anyway, but when you find yourself parodied by late night comedians, you're in a heap of trouble.

Then of course there is the one that never will be forgotten, from a press conference President Richard Nixon held during the Watergate scandal.



Say one thing for Nixon. He will be remembered when our world is a frozen ball of ice orbiting a burned-out cinder of a sun.

People were calling him a lot of things, but the word "crook" rarely entered into the conversation -- until he put it there. There were plenty of people saying, "Hey, maybe he is a crook."

As for Christie, it's silly these days to write anyone off politically. Voters seem to forgive and forget everything when they like someone, just as they also refuse to give someone credit for anything if they don't like him.

"I am not a bully."

I don't know if all that's true, but it certainly looks as if he is something else.

A liar.

It's one thing to oppose something, entirely another to sabotage it

Every time I think politics can't get any worse, I am proven wrong.

Ever since Barack Obama won the 2008 election and became president, Republicans eschewed their role as the Loyal Opposition and decided to compromise as little as possible on as few things as possible.

Despite the fact that Obama defeated John McCain by 9.5 million votes and drew 52.9 percent of the vote -- the best showing by a candidate since Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign -- Republicans chose to treat him from the beginning as if he was an illegitimate winner.

When the Senate opposition leader says his only priority is to prevent the president's re-election, and then does everything he can to obstruct anything that might make the president look good, you have a whole new level of obstruction.

It's easy to argue Obama's priorities in devoting most of his first two years to health care reform, and Republicans used it against him quite effectively in recapturing control of the House of Representatives in 2010, but conservatives had been blocking health care reform for more than 70 years.

Things had reached the ultimate level of ridiculousness when Bill Clinton made an effort during his first term and insurance companies had spent millions in misleading advertising to shoot down his proposed reforms.

But 15 years later, the amount of money people were spending on health care had gotten so much worse that medical spending had become one-sixth of the economy. And even with that, there were more than 40 million Americans with no insurance at all.

When Michael Moore came out with "Sicko," his documentary on health care, in 2007, all of a sudden the people who had been saying the U.S. had the best health care in the world weren't going unchallenged.

Numbers from the World Health Organization rated us 38th, just behind Cuba and just ahead of Slovenia.

So Obama made it a priority, and there was meaningful health care reform for the first time since Medicare in 1965.

Of course, because Obama wanted reform to be bipartisan, so he tied himself in knots to make it palatable to Republicans and wound up with essentially the same idea the conservative Heritage Foundation had championed during the Clinton years.

Yes, there have been problems with the implementation, but most of those problems have come in Republican-ruled states that have refused to implement ACA reforms.

The irony is that Republicans have done everything they can to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, including calling it Socialism when the biggest beneficiaries of it are the insurance companies. In fact, they've reached the point where they're lying about it.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of the first Tea Party senators, has repeatedly told voters about his baby daughter's reconstructive heart surgery in 1982. He always ends the story by saying if "Obamacare" had been in effect then, his daughter could not have had the life-saving surgery.

Of course, that's not true. The doctor who performed the surgery explained it quite differently, and said Republican attacks on the new law were unfair and dishonest. He also said such reform that happened -- and it wasn't enough -- was of the sort that Republicans should love.

The fact is, their opposition to anything Obama proposes is almost pathological. It's only a little bit of a stretch to say that if Obama proposed making the U.S. a Christian nation, the GOP would come out in favor of Islam.

They're entitled to their own opinions.

They're not entitled to their own facts, and calling something Socialism doesn't mean that's what it is. The ACA has been a Godsend for many Americans who didn't have insurance before. I would imagine they are wondering why Republicans don't want them to have insurance.

Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's that good

I used to be annoyed when old-time sportswriter Dick Young used to refer to my generation as the "Gee Whiz" generation.

What he meant -- and where I didn't fit in -- was that an awful lot of younger writers acted as if the world started the day they were born, and the players they had seen were of course far better than any old-timers.

I don't know if all that's true, but one place where fans certainly are of the "gee whiz" variety is movie fans. Look at the Internet Movie Database's top 250 films of all time, which is selected totally by the fans. Six of the top 10 have been released in the last 20 years, hardly a golden age of cinema.

If you listen to IMDB fans, "The Dark Knight" and "Fight Club" are among the 10 best movies ever made, not to mention "Pulp Fiction," the third "Lord of the Rings" movie and "The Shawshank Redemption."

Gee whiz.

It gets worse. All three LOTR movies are in the top 17. "Good Will Hunting" ranks just above "The Maltese Falcon." And "The Wizard of Oz," one of the most beloved and most influential movies ever made, ranks 178th, two spots behind "The Avengers."

Vertigo

If you want a more accurate look -- a more intelligent list -- look at the British film magazine "Sight & Sound" and its 2012 list selected by film critics.

Only five of the top 10 are American films, and the newest one on the list was released in 1968.

Gee whiz.

It's an impressive list, and all 10 are films that have stood the test of time. Here is the list, with each film's correspondent standing on the IMDB list.

1. "Vertigo," 1958. (66 on IMDB); 2. "Citizen Kane," 1941. (62); 3. "Tokyo Story," 1953. (--); 4. "La Regle de Jeu," 1939. (--); 5. "Sunrise," 1927. (--); 6. "2001: A Space Odyssey," 1968. (109); 7. "The Searchers," 1956. (--); 8. "Man With a Movie Camera," 1927. (--); 9. "Passion of Joan of Arc," 1927. (--); 10. "8 1/2," 1963. (191).

Gee whiz.

Ice without snow, but it has been very cold here in Georgia

When we moved to Georgia a little more than three years ago, I don't know exactly what I expected.

Ice City Peachtree

It wasn't this.

I was expecting we would actually have four different seasons, and that the temperature would drop below freezing -- especially at night -- in the winter months.

I certainly never thought temperatures would drop so low that the waterfall out at the entrance would freeze completely solid.

The waterfall was turned off a couple of times that first winter, and I imagine they would have turned it off this time except that the cold weather apparently took them by surprise.

Earlier this week, the overnight temperature got down to single digits. Nearly everything froze, although the little pond waterfall up the street from us apparently kept running. Oddly enough, today the temperature reached the high forties in the late afternoon but the fountain remained frozen.

Tomorrow it's supposed to rain -- and reach the fifties -- so the ice will probably be gone. My guess is it won't get this cold again for the rest of the winter. Still, it's nice to have had at least a little real winter weather.

***

If there's a place in the world I had never heard of, and will never visit, but would love it, it has to be Hammerfest, Norway.

It's a seven-hour flight from Paris, and I learned about it in one of Bill Bryson's wonderful travel books. "Neither Here, Nor There" found Bryson retracing a trip he had made 20 years earlier as a student, and he went to Hammerfest because he wanted to see the Northern Lights.

The only problem with the Aurora Borealis is that it can't be scheduled. There is no way of knowing for sure when and where it will happen, and despite being in the northernmost city in Europe, at 70 degrees north latitude, he had to wait more than three weeks before they made an appearance.

Actually, though, there's a good chance that people far south of Hammerfest will get to see the Northern Lights tonight. There was a massive solar flare Tuesday that sent millions of charged particles toward the Earth.

According to some reports, the Lights could be visible as far south as Boston or Cleveland tonight. When I heard this, I thought of my daughter Pauline. She has told me one of the things she wants to see most in the world is the Aurora Borealis. She's in Jamaica, so she won't see them this time. Knowing her, though, shewill find a way to see them someday.

Baseball Hall of Fame has to answer lots of questions

Baseball has put itself in an unenviable position.

Of all the sports played in this country, baseball had the most enviable history. It grew with the country and its highs and lows often corresponded with the mood in the general population.

In W.P. Kinsella's wonderful nook, "Shoeless Joe," which was made into the movie "Field of Dreams," James Earl Jones' character Terrence Mann tells Kevin Costner's Ray Kinsella what baseball means to America.

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again."



And yes, that's all true. To people who go to the trouble to learn it, the game has wondrous gifts. But for a period of about 20 years, from the mid '80s till about 2005, an enormous number of players were cheating and owners essentially looked the other way.

Most of it was nothing more than poor judgement. Owners didn't trust the balance of the game and some believed that opening up to more offense would attract young fans, especially after the disastrous lockout of 1994-5 that resulted in the cancellation of the World Series for the first time ever.

So when they realized that many of the top power hitters in the game were using anabolic steroids, owners winked and looked the other way.

In the short term, it paid off. Fans loved it in 1998 when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa assaulted and then shattered Roger Maris' single-season home run record. McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sosa 66, the two greatest seasons in baseball history to that point.

In fact, Sosa hit more than 60 home runs in a season three times in four years, and McGwire backed up his 70 home run season with 65 the next year.

Then in 2001, Barry Bonds came out of nowhere and hit 73 home runs. It wasn't as if he wasn't great. Bonds was pretty much considered the best player in baseball for much of his career, but the most home runs he ever hit before or after 2001 was 49.

He was named the National League's Most Valuable Player four consecutive seasons starting in 2001, and when he stopped playing after the 2007 season, he was the all-time home run leader with 762.

But when the dust cleared after the steroid era, when baseball finally began cracking down on abusers, the record book was something of a shambles. Very few fans want to recognize Bonds as the all-time home run leader, or the single-season record holder for that point.

And in the last couple of years, things have become very complicated. Most of the best hitters and pitchers of the steroid era have become eligible for the Hall of Fame. And in 2013, no one was elected. This despite the fact that three players were on the ballot for the first time who without steroids would have been certain winners -- Bonds, catcher Mike Piazza and pitcher Roger Clemens.

The only one not directly connected to the scandal was Piazza, and he had nearly 58 percent of the vote. That's well short of the 75 percent required, although it's far better than Clemens (37 percent) or Bonds (36 percent) and even farther ahead of holdovers McGwire (17 percent) and Sosa (12 percent).

Baseball is still a wonderful game, and when the 2014 voting is announced Wednesday, it's a pretty good bet two pitchers untouched by the steroid era -- Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine -- will be elected, as well as maybe one or two other players.

The Hall is nice, and it's clearly the best of all the various professional sports Halls of Fame. But the questions fans will have are getting more and more common, and more and more great players won't be honored there.

Maybe it can be straightened out someday, but the time will come when visitors will be asking about all the greats who aren't there. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose and a host of others.

Lots of questions.