In 2016, they just kept dying and dying and dying

The whole thing about deaths in 2016 is getting kind of creepy.

Especially when folks get so worked up over someone who was in a show they liked.

Beloved 'Star Wars" hero dies.

Yes, Carrie Fisher is no longer with us, but was she even the most beloved "Star Wars" star to die this year? Kenny Baker was one of the only people to appear in all the "SW" movies, and he died in 2016.

Yes, Gene Wilder died, but so did the guy who was second-billed to "Punky Brewster." Debbie Reynolds died, and Grizzly Adams became Grisly Adams.

Alan Rickman died hard.

Prince died, but so did Frank Sinatra, Jr.

Maybe Republicans don't fear Russia, but Trump needs to step up

"All, all had gone wrong for the president of the United States
And not from evil intentions.
But from good intentions, foolishly applied.
And so America in her turn learned the lesson:
Great states are brought down, great nations are humbled, great dreams are destroyed.
It can happen here.
No one had ever really believed it.
Until now."

-- ALLEN DRURY, 1973

One of the best political series of the Cold War era was Allen Drury's six-book opus that began with "Advise and Consent" and ended with "The Promise of Joy." Drury's narrative deals with the battle between those who believed the best way to maintain peace with the Soviet Union was to stand tough and those who thought finding areas of cooperation was best.

Nikita Khrushchev

Every day isn't all that special, but three in a row were

How many people have three calendar days in a row that are significant in the story of their life?

I do, even though they happened in 1949, 1990 and 1969. The first two both happened in Southern California -- my birth on Dec. 11, 1949, and the auto accident that was the closest I ever came to dying on Dec. 12, 1990.

The third one came on the other side of the country, as close to halfway between the two as possible. It was Dec. 13, 1969, in Washington, D.C., when I met the first girl I thought I would marry.

Most people who know me are aware I was one of the founding brothers of the Virginia Mu chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon when I started at George Mason in 1978.

It's one of the real prides of my life.

Some days are great memories, others are ones that never go away

Yesterday was my birthday.

Oh, not exactly. December 11th was actually the 67th anniversary of my birth. It's why the French saying Bon anniversaire, or "happy anniversary of your birth," is actually more appropriate.

Actually, other countries seem to say things a lot better. Take the English, for example. While I can say, "My name is Michael," and be reasonably accurate, the fact is there are lots of other Michaels and they aren't even all men.

From 1967 to age 67, what a long strange trip it's been

Sixty-seven has always been an important number in my life.

I graduated from high school in 1967, and for many years the favorite memories of my life came from that year. I was on television for the first two times in my life, I went away to college and actually enjoyed the first couple of months and I started dating the first girl in my life I was completely crazy about.

It was quite a year, and until the last three weeks of it I was 17. I had skipped a grade in elementary school in Ohio, so I was a year younger than nearly all the other kids in my class. At least chronologically. If you figure in social skills, confidence and just about everything else, I was really two or three years younger than my contemporaries.

At 17.

That wasn't a complete disaster when I was in high school, but once September came and I was in a dorm room at the University of Virginia, I might as well have been a space alien. I had had four dates up to that point, and my roommate from the Tidewater area informed me that during his last two years of high school he had had sex 200 times.

Needless to say, he had I were from different worlds. My only sexual experience up to that time was a solo endeavor.

But 1967 was such a fascinating year in so many ways. It was the year music became incredible, with bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors and Buffalo Springfield exploding on the scene.

It was the year of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a Beatles album that was unlike anything we had ever heard before.

It was the year of the Summer of Love, the year we all wished we could be going to San Francisco with flowers in our hair.



It was the last year everything seemed possible. Then in the first six months of 1968, they killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In the next six months, Richard Nixon became president and nothing was ever the same.

By the way, the sign is fake. There is no Interstate 67.

 So what's the deal?

I just needed a good-looking 67.

You see, today is my 67th birthday.

Fifty years later.

I'm old.

If you're a kung fu shopper, today is a really good day for you

What's the very worst day of the year?

Certainly there are people who would say April 15th, the day income tax is due.

A lot of kids would say it's the first day of school, the end of summer's freedom and the start of nine months of tedium.

Not me.

Walmart, 2015

To me, the worst day of the year is, well, it's today.

The day after Thanksgiving.

Black Friday.

The day lower middle class America gets up in the middle of the night, gets in line at Walmarts from coast to coast and looks for Christmas shopping bargains.

The day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the season, and the term "Black Friday" supposedly came because it was the day many retail businesses went into profit -- "into the black" -- for the year.

We're not the ones telling the joke anymore; we're the punchline

Note: I'm more than a little ashamed of myself for doing this, because this is a column I wrote more than seven years ago and then reworked and reprinted it in July 2015. All I can say about it is, it's getting scarier all the time.

I can't believe I used to take politics seriously.

Now I don't know if there's anyone left in Washington I can take seriously at all except for my younger brother, and he's too intelligent to be a politician.

 Ever since I saw Newt Gingrich shut down the government because he didn't get to sit up front on Air Force One on the way to Yitzhak Rabin's funeral, ever since I watched Bill Clinton ooze sincerity (at least I think it was sincerity; the dry cleaners got it out) saying he never had sex with that woman, it has been harder and harder to look at politicians as anything but entertainers.

Consider this: Who's the guy who seems to take being a senator the most seriously right now? Yup, it's Al Franken, D-SNL, who actually used to be an entertainer.

Or maybe we jumped the national shark when Sonny Bono, R-Cher, got elected to Congress.

Actually, we have also elected Fred Grandy, R-Love Boat, and Wilmer Mizell, R-Pittsburgh Pirates, not to mention Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Alzheimers. One gopher and two baseball pitchers.

A wonderful philosophy that could make it a much different world

I know someone who hasn't voted for a Democrat since 1980. He voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and still considers the Geezer, er, Gipper, to be a great man.

He didn't think much of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, and the only possible candidate worse than Donald Trump was Hillary Clinton, who he called "the embodiment of evil."

So where would you figure a person like that would be politically?

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?"

Maybe not. He won't vote for Democrats, but this is what he tells his conservative friends:

***

I advocate nationalizing all the banks, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and the energy companies -- and having a not-for-profit regulatory board operate them.

'Good old days' can come when you need them most -- and stay around

"And stay right here, 'cause these are the good old days ..."
-- CARLY SIMON, 1971

Were there ever good old days, at least within our lifetime?

Good old days?

Were there times when working hard and being diligent meant you would have a good job and be able to support your family in a middle-class lifestyle?

Were there times when being frugal, saving money and living within your means gave you the opportunity to be happy?

Were there times when life was fair, when the people who did the right things succeeded and the ones who didn't failed?

Things certainly have changed. For most people in the work world now, the idea of having a career doing work you enjoy for one employer has become less and less possible all the time.

Can people learn the difference between freedom and license?

We have a big problem in this country.

No, not him. He's an entirely different story.

We have lost the distinction between liberty and license.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that half the country doesn't even know the meaning of the word, especially if you tell them it isn't preceded by the words "fishing" or "driver's" or followed by the words "plates" or "to kill."

No, the license that needs to be considered here is this one from Google:

"LICENSE -- Freedom to behave as one wishes, especially in a way that results in excessive or unacceptable behavior.
 As: "The government was criticized for giving the army too much license."
 Synonyms: permission, authority, right, a free hand, leave, authorization, entitlement, privilege, prerogative.

Free speech used to mean standing up for unpopular points of view.

Now it's lunatics picketing funerals and and people spreading lies about where the president was born.

Freedom of the press used to mean newspapers could take political views in opposition to power and tell the truth about the powerful.

Now the press is almost gone and blow-dried morons lie about anything their owner wants to attack.

Freedom of religion used to mean the right to worship God as you saw fit, and the right to be left alone if you didn't believe in a Supreme Being.

Mobocracy, great music and a truly wonderful brother

Random thoughts from a journey through a disorganized mind:

TRUST THE VOTERS! HECK NO -- I missed a bet yesterday when I wrote about the problems with the Electoral College. It wasn't about large states and small states at all, although one could argue that at the time it was regional.

If you look at the writings of the time, and even just at the history books, you'll see that most of the Founders had little use for the common man and little trust in letting him elect the president. In addition to fearing a mobocracy, they were concerned that as the nation moved inland, voters in newer states wouldn't be able to be intelligent, educated voters.

And they didn't even have talk radio or 24-hour cable news.

***

TOO EASY TO JUDGE -- Bill Clinton was a pretty good president ... but he cheated on his wife.

Thomas Jefferson probably had the greatest mind of the 18th century ... but he had sex with his slaves.

How long do we let the little states make the rules for the big ones?

We have a problem in this country that we are not going to be able to solve.

We have a Constitution that was written 229 years ago for a nation that no longer exists. It was a nation in which the vast majority of people lived in small towns and on farms or plantations. A nation in which more than 90 percent of free people worked for themselves.

Thirteen states and every one of them was a coastal state, as long as you're willing to fudge a little with Pennsylvania. Despite what planters in the Carolinas may have thought, they had far more in common with each other than they had separating them.

Nations weren't yet a big deal. Up until the War of Northern Aggression (just kidding, but I do live in the state where W.T. Sherman was the Antichrist), when people talked about the United States, they said "The United States are ..."

After the war, it was "The United States is ..."

In 1800, there were 5.3 million people in the U.S., nearly 1 million of them slaves. There weren't as many as a million people in any single state.

To regain American optimism, we need to stop hating each other

I wonder if anyone not named Dylan wrote more and better songs evoking the zeitgeist than Paul Simon.

As the '60s unfolded, he gave us "Sounds of Silence."

"... and the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls ..."

And as they ended, with the horror of assassinations, a futile war and Richard Nixon in the White House, there was "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

"When you're weary, feeling small, when tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all. I'm on your side ..."

It was only a few years later, with things getting worse and worse and with a nasty boil growing on the American psyche, that he gave us a song that resonated so well with what we were feeling as Americans.

He called it "American Tune."



Simon wrote the song in 1973, less than four years after we went to the moon. I'm not sure there was anything that evoked the attitude of "can-do America" better than John F. Kennedy saying in 1961 that we would put men on the moon and bring them back safely before the end of the decade.

Cohen's classic 'Hallelujah' an amazing evocation of pain and loss

I remember 40 years or so ago when "Saturday Night Live" came on the air and more than anything I remember what a phenomenon it was.

I was 25, and Saturday night was the big night to go out, either to the movies or to a nightclub. The bars in D.C. were open till 2 a.m., but it was amazing how many times we went home early -- or didn't go out at all -- so that we could see SNL.

Voter suppression laws are about far more than proper ID

I used to have a pretty good mind.

Sometimes lately, it doesn't seem either good or pretty.

For the last 15 years or so, the party of old white people has been working harder and harder to prevent anyone other than old white people from voting. Especially since the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and set Southern states free to return to Jim Crow days.

North Carolina may be the best example.

With the stated goal of attacking in-person voter fraud, something seen only a little more frequently than flocks of passenger pigeons, the state legislature and the Republican governor passed a law doing everything other than putting Klansmen as poll watchers to limit African-American voting.

Which is where my no letter pretty or good mind comes in. I focused on the wrong part of the law and left myself open to arguments.

I said it was discriminatory to disallow many of the forms of identification used primarily by black people. And of course the response was, "Why are you against making people prove who they are in order to vote?"

The answer is I'm not.

Elections aren't what they once were and neither are we

You want to know how old I am?

I'm old enough to remember presidential elections where those on the losing side didn't think their candidate's loss meant an apocalypse of sorts. I can remember when folks losing elections would smile and say, "We'll win next time."

There were certainly elections that frightened people, most of them involving a man named Milhous. But the stakes went way higher when the right wing decided that God was a Republican.

1980.

That's when the Moral Majority and the Rev. Jerry Falwell jumped into the political pool and told America that Ronald Reagan was God's choice to be president of the United States.

He also said it was impossible to be a liberal and a good Christian.

Now the purpose of this isn't to go after poor Jerry.

Poor dead Jerry.

The only purpose of putting poor dead Jerry is to establish when -- and why -- the stakes got so much higher. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter edged President Ford in the first post-Watergate election, there weren't that many people who thought the world would come to an end when Carter won.

Sadly, that was the last election about which I can say that. The 1988 Bush-Dukakis race wasn't a huge deal, but that was largely because neither man really inspired much passion one way or the other.

But 1992 was when things got really nasty. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and now Hillary Clinton became out-and-out villains to the right, and the 40 percent or so of the country that will always vote Republican put them right up there with Adolf, Uncle Joe and Chairman Mao.

It's not like this is new to anyone, but it got much worse this year with the unscrupulous Donald Trump overwhelming the regular Republicans. Instead of the standard campaigning, Trump attacked Hillary by saying he would put her in jail if he were elected and encouraged raucous audiences to scream "Trump that bitch!"

He did something far more dangerous than that when he insisted that if he lost, it would only be because the election was rigged against him.

Once was the time elections happened and people on both sides accepted the fact that we all loved the same country and there would be other elections in the future.

I don't think either side feels that way this time. I think both feel for different reasons that the country they love is slipping away if it isn't already gone.

This one is a big test for us.

It may be the one that tells us whether the country we leave our children and grandchildren will still be around in 50 years.

Take it from me.

It's not a foregone conclusion.

We're going to have to work to get past this one.

Old comes later than it used to, but it still comes around

"What a drag it is getting old ..."

When Mick Jagger sang "Mother's Little Helper" in the summer of 1966, he was lamenting a young mother in her 30s who couldn't make it through her day without the help of pills.

I was 16 that summer, and there's no way I can explain how or why we considered 30 ancient in those days. But we did, and we figured we would live 50 years before we turned 30.

That was a long time ago, though. The first baby boomers turned 30 in 1975, the year before the Bicentennial. The last ones made it there in 1994.

A generation ago.

Now the oldest of us are 71, the youngest 52. And we live in a world where even being 52 puts you on the critical list as far as employability. It used to be that people could work as long as they wanted, or at least as long as they were still productive.

Not anymore.

In many parts of the economy, if you're out of work and over 50, you might as well be 80. Nobody is looking to hire you. Any job you can do, they can hire somebody just out of school who will do three-quarters as well as you for half the price.

And a young kid is a lot less likely to replay "Why?" when the boss says "Jump."

In fact, I'm reminded of the older man going in for a job interview. The boss interviewing him asks, "What's your greatest flaw?" The old man replies, "Honesty." The boss says that he doesn't think honesty is a flaw.

The old man says, "Who gives a shit what you think?"

Yep, that's us.

I have one friend who's 63. He has interviewed for more than a hundred jobs, and in the last 30 years he's had one full-time job permanent enough to have benefits. That job lasted a year a little less than 20 years ago.

I have another friend of the same age who has been working in the lower levels of radio, small city stations where the work is fun but the pay is in the just-enough-to-get-by category.

Both of them have at least fudged their age on applications when they apply for jobs.

One was coloring his hair 25 years ago. I don't think the other one ever has. I never did until today, and I didn't do it for a job. It has been nearly nine years since I (involuntarily) retired, and my last few years of nearly 18 on my last job were so unpleasant I realized after a while that the only boss I could tolerate in the remaining years of my life was my wife.

Nov. 5, 2016

I was fortunate enough to have a wife who made plenty of money and who had worked with me to plan our retirement some years before. We had enough money and enough equity in our California home to move to Georgia, buy a house for cash and retire.

We've been here six years and haven't touched her 401(k) yet.

I'm pretty sure I'll never apply for a job again. I'll be 67 next month and as I mentioned earlier, it has been nearly nine years since I had a job.

Over the last few years, I've grown a beard two or three times, and as you can see from the one picture, most of the beard is almost completely white. The mustache is mostly brown and what would be mutton-chop sideburns without the beard are brown too.

My lovely wife hates the beard, mostly the white part of it. So we made an agreement. I could keep the beard as long as I colored the white out of it. I had no idea how to do that, so when I went to the drugstore, I looked and after a while found small boxes for hair dye aimed specifically at the coarser hairs on cheeks and chin.

Nov. 6, 2016

I actually had it for a week or so before I had the nerve to use it. I mixed the dye and combed it into my beard. At first it didn't appear to be having any effect, but when I looked at it after five minutes, it looked like it did 20 years ago.

At first it embarrassed me. I've never been self-conscious about aging. In fact, for most of my life people have guessed my age 5-7 years younger than it really is. That was embarrassing when I was 12, but not so bad by the time I was approaching 40.

So yeah, it's still a drag getting old.

I can no longer make 20-foot jump shots, roll six strikes in a row and shoot 222 or slash line drives up the middle. My golf game is getting seriously better, although for the last year or so I've been hitting from the green tees instead of the white ones. On Friday I pulled up to the first tee, turned off my iPhone after a conversation with my friend Bill and hit my very first shot 230 yards right down the middle of the fairway.

Maybe I'll do even better now that I look 20 years younger.

A drag getting old? Maybe, but it does have some benefits.

Small changes won't help; step aside and let the kids fix it

It's strange to find a strong argument in favor of reducing people's "freedom."

And surprise, surprise. I'm not talking about guns, although every time a toddler takes daddy's gun and takes a life, the angels weep.

No, safe and sane gun policies will have to wait for more intelligent legislators who are less seduced by lobbyists.

Actually, that leads us into what we need to change.

The way we do our elections.

We need to stop wasting so much time on them. It's not only a huge waste of time and money, but it's even more destructive to our national psyche and the way we look at each other.

My closest friend in the world has always been conservative, and not really in a normal way. I think the last time he voted for either of the two major party nominees was 1984, but I think this year was the first time he referred to one of the nominees as the "embodiment of evil." And he says he doesn't like Donald Trump either.

If you look at almost any Website that has anything to do with politics these days, you'll see how much anger there is out there. My friend certainly isn't alone in thinking Hillary is evil, and Trump is pretty much a magnet for negative comments.

Here's the problem. We have elections every four years, and we have reached the point where talk about the next election begins nearly as soon as the votes are counted in the last one.

It may be hard to believe, but in 1960, John F. Kennedy didn't announce his candidacy until after the first of the year.

And in 1968, Robert Kennedy didn't announce his doomed run for the White House until the middle of March.

That was the year civility went away. Richard Nixon made his career as a politician about "us vs. them," and he won in 1968 and 1972 by painting his opponents as less than good Americans.

From there it was a short step to 1980 and the entry of the Religious Right into national politics. Since then, politics has become pretty much an all-the-time thing.

This particular cycle was the worst of all. Not only did 17 candidates go after the Republican nomination, at least 4-5 of them completely unqualified, but there were actual debates in the calendar year before the election.

If that isn't goofy enough, the candidates below a certain level had a separate debate. Of course the media made the connection between that and the traditional "kiddie table" at Thanksgiving dinner. And the candidates did their level best to live down to it.

Nearly a year and a half of slugging it out left the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower with Trump as the nominee. A man who never even ran for office before, let alone held office. A man who never served in the military. A man who claims to be worth $10 billion, but won't release his tax returns.

A man who has declared one form or another of bankruptcy six times.

A man who has been sued more than 3,500 times.

A reality television performer.

There's an old expression that if you have too much time to make a decision, you'll talk yourself out of doing the right thing. There's really no other way to explain Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

But ...

*****

I was in the process of writing about how we could benefit from mandating shorter campaigns, using the British model of 5-6 weeks from start to finish.

I know so many people whose only reaction four days before the election is, "Oh, God! When will it be over?"

Actually, I'm beginning to think it is over.

Not just this campaign, but I think we're getting pretty close to the end of our political system.

Has there ever been a campaign in our lifetime in which one party essentially said they would not allow the other party to govern?

It's still four days until Hillary Clinton learns whether she'll be elected, but Republicans in Congress already have been saying they will start impeachment investigations as soon as she takes office.

Remember when presidents actually had to do something bad after they were elected to be impeached?

Republican senators are saying they will not vote for any Supreme Court nominees Clinton would try to put on the Court.

When they win, they tell us elections have consequences.

When they lose, they deny there are any consequences.

H.L. Mencken wrote in 1922 that he thought the U.S. republic would fall within 100 years. He gave two reasons -- ignorance and greed. Amazingly, he said that before television and before even widespread network radio as entertainment.

Once was the time television wasn't such a horrible thing. In the 1950s, there was no 24-hour programming, most everything was aimed at the whole family and most households had just one set, so everyone watched together.

Now we have 24-hour programming and hundreds of channels, some providing truly vile programming. Some families practically have TVs in every room, so entertainment becomes isolating instead of bringing people together.

Ironically, instead of improving, programming gets worse and worse. Maybe the worst trend ever was so-called "reality" television. Now people get hooked on things that don't even require scripts, actors or talent.

Want to fix our country?

How about less watching?

More reading?

More doing?

Less talking and more listening?

Less taking and more giving?

Now that would be a fine country.

Time for us to get out of the way and let our kids fix things. They can fix it in time for our grandchildren. They really are better than we are.

Learning some things I didn't know about the 'bathroom' issue

I rarely learn anything from Facebook.

Oh, I have been exposed to lots of information about what a wonderful place Sarasota, Florida, is. My longtime friend Christine Miller works for the city's PR department and she does an excellent job.

I'll definitely visit someday.

Except for that, though, most of what people seem to be posting these days is about the presidential campaign and how horrible Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump are.

It's not really worth it to argue that particular topic. I can spend hours explaining to someone why Trumpers would be a disaster as president and all I'll get in response is that Hillary is worse. It's like arguing climate change and hearing just "Al Gore is fat" in response.

But last night I saw a wonderful argument from a surprising source. It isn't that I was surprised by her intelligence. She's one of the smartest people I know, but it's the first time I can remember her checking in on an issue on Facebook.

Farewell to the greatest broadcaster in baseball history, Vin Scully

It's very strange for me to think there is someone in the world who essentially has done their job for the entire time I have been alive, give or take a couple of months.

Queen Elizabeth

I always figured the one who came closest was Queen Elizabeth II, who became sovereign of the United Kingdom in 1952, when I was 2 years old.

She's still hanging in at age 90, and is the longest reigning monarch in British history.

I was born in December 1949, and it's not like I was aware of what was going on across the pond, even though I've got English ancestry I can trace back to the middle of the 14th century.

As it turned out, though, there is someone who started doing his job before the beginning of my life who is still showing up for work for another week.

Vin then

Vincent Edward Scully was born later in the same year my mother was born, and they graduated from different colleges the same year as well. He had only one job offer out of college, and he started working as a fill-in announcer for WTOP radio in Washington in 1949.

Legendary announcer Red Barber hired him to do some college football coverage on Saturdays, and Scully impressed him enough for his work at a cold November game at Boston's Fenway Park that he hired him as the No. 3 man on his team broadcasting Brooklyn Dodgers games.

Barber gave Scully three pieces of advice -- don't be a homer, don't listen to other announcers and keep your opinions to yourself.

Two new films you won't find in theaters, but you ought to see them

I saw two movies today that won't show up in many American theaters.

It's a shame. Both are fascinating movies, although one leaves me wondering why it was made.

"Ithaca" is an American film, a low-budget remake of a World War II movie. MGM's "The Human Comedy" (1943) was one of the very best home-front films. It starred Mickey Rooney, one of Metro's biggest stars, as a teenage boy whose older brother is in the Army and getting ready to go overseas.

It's difficult for us to realize, 70 years later, how good Rooney was. We know him as the little guy who was in movies in 10 different decades and was married a couple of dozen times. Or at least it looked that way.

But for a time in the 1940s, he was the most popular movie star in the world.

Mickey Rooney in "The Human Comedy"

In a movie based on William Saroyan's novel "The Human Comedy," Rooney plays Homer McCauley, a 14-year-old boy living in fictional Ithaca, California (possibly Fresno).

His father is dead and his older brother Marcus is in the Army getting ready to ship out.

It's a movie that was overly sweet even for its time, but it gives us a reasonably accurate look at what things were like at home when the boys marched off to war.

Some wonderful baseball movies, but 'The Natural' isn't one of them

In 1952, a writer named Bernard Malamud came out with a great book about baseball.

In 1984, with the '80s at flood tide, Barry Levinson made a film of the book and ruined the story.

Maybe it was the difference between eras, the difference between Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan, the difference between the Red Scare and Morning in America.

Malamud wrote the book in an era when people still remembered Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

When it came to hitting, Jackson might have been the closest ever to a real "natural," but the story Malamud told included another one as well.

In 1949, Eddie Waitkus was a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies. During spring training in Florida, an obsessed fan shot and wounded him. While this is an element in Malamud's book, essentially it only sets up the story.

It seems silly to have to say this for a book published 64 years ago and a movie released 32 years ago, but if you're going to read and further, I'm going to tell the ending of both, so ...

Spoiler Alert:

What makes the book so wonderful is that in baseball, even the best hitters fail 70 percent of the time. so when the protagonist, Roy Hobbs, comes to bat in the climax of the story, he is trying his best to thwart the gamblers who tried to bribe him.

Ol' Gee Dubya missed his chance to be a truly great president

A reprint and reworking from 9/11/14.

***

Look at the headline on the Sept. 12, 2001, issue of Le Monde.

The leftist French paper, one of the most respected daily newspapers in the world, included in its wall-to-wall coverage of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., a story titled "Nous sommes tous Americains."

For the linguistically challenged, that translates as "We are all Americans."

At that point, most of the civilized world was on our side. Ironically, this came just three months after a dinner I had in Paris with some French friends and relatives, a dinner in which numerous people wanted to know how America could have elected a man like Gee Dubya Bush as its president.

This may be difficult to remember, but that summer, after Bush had been in the White House for half a year or so, pundits were already speculating that he would serve only one term. He had been that unimpressive in his first year as president.

It's time to stop letting the right wing demonize the word "liberal"

One of the things that fascinates me is how many people seem to see "liberal" as a dirty word.

I can't say I blame them. For the last 35 years, the right has been hammering away at the word, doing its best to equate "liberal" with "libertine" in people's minds, and completely ignoring the fact that there are shades of difference in those left of center on the spectrum.

One of the tactics squawk radio hosts and media whores like Fat Man, Little Boy and Loofah Guy have used for years is basically saying that liberal, socialist and communist are all pretty much the same.

Mike, who are Fat Man, Little Boy and Loofah Guy?

Three great heroes of right-wing media who never let facts get in the way of their arguments. Throw in Rabid Annie and you've got the foursome from Hell.

On the other side, there really aren't that many people except on the lunatic fringe who try to equate conservative with fascist and Nazi.

Well then, what have liberals done for America?

First and foremost, even though they were Republicans at the time, they fought to end slavery.

They fought for women to have the right to vote, and for a whole myriad of workplace rights from child labor to minimum wage to workplace safety.

They busted trusts and created the inheritance tax that at least limited the creation of a permanent American oligarchy.

Up to that point, most of the progressives were in the Republican Party.

They created Social Security and Medicare, and they led the fight for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

Two days before 15 years on, 911 attacks changed America

Exactly five years ago today, just before the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., I wrote this. Two days before the 15th anniversary, it doesn't seem as though much has changed.

***

In two days, it will have been 10 years since our world changed forever.

Sept. 11, 2001, began like any other Tuesday in late summer, but by mid-morning, two planes had struck the Twin Towers, a third had hit the Pentagon and a fourth had crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania.

Just like that, we were at war.

Ten years later, one thing is fairly obvious. Osama bin Laden accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish, and we lost.

If that sounds harsh, consider a few things:

We can start with that old proverb from Benjamin Franklin about how people who are willing to surrender some of their freedom to gain a little security deserve neither.

That one sort of speaks for itself.

But let's look at the country in which we lived on Sept. 10, 2001.

Our economy was strong, although it had gone through a slight slowdown after the Dot-Com Crash.

Some technological advances are definitely mixed blessings

Has there ever been a technological advance that was in widespread use that was later abandoned?

If so, it would have to be something that turned out to have unforeseen negative consequences, and at this point I can't think of one. I certainly think of things that have been far more mixed blessings than we originally thought, but they haven't been abandoned.

More often than not, progress comes in the form of mixed blessings. In the play "Inherit the Wind," set in the 1920s, the Clarence Darrow character tells the audience"

"You can fly in the air, but the birds will lose their mystery and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

Before the invention of the airplane, millions and millions of Americans lived their entire lives within 50-100 miles of where they were born. As recently as the end of World War II, nearly half of American soldiers being discharged said they wanted nothing more than to return to their home town.

But progress got in the way.

Watching A-Rod's last game brings out feelings of sympathy in me

I just finished watching the pregame ceremonies at Yankee Stadium honoring Alex Rodriguez on his final game.

I was really surprised to realize that I felt a great deal of sympathy for him.

Earlier this week

Sure, he cheated. But so did hundreds of other ballplayers, many of whom undoubtedly got away with it. Barry Bonds sits at the top of the home run list and he cheated too. Rafael Palmeiro cheated and the fact that he was one of only five players ever to top both 500 home runs and 3,000 hits is all but forgotten.

Sammy Sosa hit more than 60 home runs three different times and played with a joy everyone loved. Whatever happened to him?

Yep, he cheated. But do you ever wonder why three guys who were arguably the three best players in the game -- Rodriguez, Bonds and Roger Clemens -- all felt the need to cheat? Ken Griffey Jr. didn't, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame this year with the highest percentage of votes ever.

That'll never happen for the steroid guys. They'll eventually get in, but it will be years down the road and they'll just barely reach the 75 percent threshold. A-Rod will forever hear the name A-Roid from those who dislike him, and people will always wonder what his numbers would have been like if he hadn't cheated.

So long, farewell ...

He didn't cheat in 1996. He was 20 when the season started, and he hit .358 to win the American League batting title.

Two years later he hit 42 home runs and stole 46 bases.

And he kept getting better. If he had played 30 years earlier, he might have spent his entire career in Seattle and finished his career as a beloved hero. Instead he went to Texas for the biggest contract ever and then on to New York for the biggest stage of all and an even bigger contract.

Actually, he never had the big steroid numbers. Bonds had never hit 50 home runs in a season before hitting 73 in 2001. Rodriguez hit more than 40 three times by the time he was 25 and then hit 52 and 57 the next two years.

I only saw him play once in person. It was a 1997 weekday afternoon game in Boston, the only time I've been to Fenway Park. The goofy thing is that I was so wrapped up in Fenway that I wasn't paying much attention to the game.

It wouldn't have bothered me if A-Rod had reached 700 home runs ... or 715 ... or 756 ... or even if he had topped Bonds with 763. Once Bonds beat Aaron, there was nothing special about the list.

There was one funny thing for me. Both the single-season record holder, Roger Maris with 61, and the career leader, Aaron with 755, were guys I had the pleasure of sitting alone with and watching minor league games in 1982 and 1983.

They were both real guys.

Different times, but I guarantee it was more thrilling to sit and talk with either of them than it would have been with Barry Bonds.

A-Rod, I'm not sure.

But I know I don't really dislike him, and I was happy to see him rip an RBI double to right center field in his first time up Friday night.

Good on you, man.

Losing a lifelong friend is very sad, but not all that shocking anymore

Life can be very strange.

Three weeks ago, I learned that one of my oldest and closest friends had an aneurysm in his brain rupture. I looked it up and saw that if he made it to the hospital, there was a pretty good chance of a full recovery or at least a partial one.

For the next two weeks I eagerly awaited the daily reports. At first they were hopeful, but after a while the doctors were disappointed that he wasn't showing more signs of recovery. They went back in for a second surgery and found there was more wrong than they had previously thought.

At that point, it was fairly obvious that he wasn't going to recover.

Tom Kensler, 1951-2016

Eight days ago, on July 22, 2016, my friend Tom Kensler died.

What's strange about that? I have three close friends that I have remained in contact with on a regular basis. I have others who have come in and out of my life for many years, but I'm not as familiar with the details of their lives.

But of my three close friends, one recently underwent surgery for throat cancer and the other has had so many medical problems he could star in training films for doctors.

The third was in pretty good health.

The third was Tom.

I don't think I'm insulting my friends when I say Tom was the best person of the four of us. So of course he was the one who died first.

A short take on what people want when they support Donald Trump

So you like Donald Trump.

What does that say about you? Is there any one thing in particular that can be predicted about you based on your support?

Yes, but we'll get to that in a minute. First I'd like you to answer four questions posed by pollster Matthew MacWilliams in Politico that will tell us an awful lot.

The questions are about child rearing.

1. Is it more important for your child to be respectful or independent?

2. Is it better for your child to be obedient or self-reliant?

3. Do you want your child to be well-behaved or considerate?

4. How about well-mannered or curious?

Even the Nice places in the world getting caught up in Muslim madness

A little more than seven years ago, my wife and I went to Europe.

It was far from our first trip and it wasn't our last. We spent most of the first week in London for a scientific conference and then flew to the Cote d'Azur for three or four days. Our son Virgile was 24 that summer and was competing in his first Ironman Triathlon -- in a city called Nice.

If I remember correctly, an Ironman starts with a 2.2 mile swim in open water, transitions to a 115-mile bicycle ride and then finishes with a 26.2 mile run. Think of how difficult that would be, and then think of running into the water with several thousand other starters at the same time.

Imagine running into the Mediterranean at 6 a.m. Then once you're in the water it's nearly impossible to move your arms or legs without hitting another person.

But he did it, and moved on to the next two stages, each of them including a thoroughfare known as the Boulevard des Anglais.

Yeah, that Boulevard des Anglais.

Virgile in Nice, 2009

When I learned of the terrorist attack July 14th in Nice, it made me very sad to think that it had happened in a place that had yielded some wonderful memories for my family. It wasn't the first place I had been where terrorists later attacked. I had lunch in Windows on the World on the 107th floor of WTC 1 in 1979, and I have been in the London Underground numerous times.

Foreign interventions hardly about promoting freedom and democracy

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag."

Who on Earth would say something like that?

I'm sure at first glance, it looks like something George McGovern ... or Cindy Sheehan ... or some filthy hippie might have said.

Actually, the man who said it was one of the greatest military men America ever produced, one of only a handful to win the Medal of Honor twice and the kind of general Dugout Doug MacArthur only dreamed of being.

Smedley Butler served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1898 to 1931, and if you look at that quote again, he pretty well nailed what we're doing in Afghanistan and Iraq these days.

In the eight years we have spent in those two countries, American businesses have made tens of billions of dollars in profits "supplying the army with the tools of the trade," as Country Joe McDonald put it.

Maybe I'm naive when it comes to big money, but shouldn't there be a point at which Blackwater or Halliburton or the other suppliers say "OK, we've made enough money in Iraq?"

We're certainly not there for altruistic reasons. The chances of turning Iraq into say, New Jersey, are pretty much slim and none. If we leave and let the Iraqis decide their own destiny, they'll say "Islamic republic" faster than you can say "Joyce Kilmer Rest Area on the Jersey Turnpike."

Afghanistan is even worse. We've kicked the crap out of the Taliban and chased almost all the Al Qaedas into Pakistan, so what the heck are we still doing there?

Afghanistan is even less a candidate for New Jerseyhood than Iraq. Probably the best we can hope for there is to turn it into South Central Los Angeles.

But there's money to be made, and a good chunk of that money winds up in campaign funds for both Republicans and Democrats.

I felt kind of sick when President Obama justified his "surge" in Afghanistan as he picked up his Nobel Peace Prize by saying sometimes you have to stand up against evil.

Who exactly is "evil" in this scenario? Who is the modern Adolf Hitler?

Osama bin Laden gave two reasons for 911, and only one of them might be considered evil. He said America should stop its support of Israel (OK, evil) and should withdraw its troops from the holy land of Saudi Arabia.

Saddam Hussein was a pretty bad guy, but he might not have even made the top 10 of evil foreign leaders. There were -- and still are -- plenty of really bad guys running countries in Africa and Asia who never get more from us than tough words.

But Saddam had the misfortune of being out one day shooting at some food when up through the ground came a bubblin' crude.

Oil, that is.

Black gold.

Texas tea.

The next thing you know, ol' Saddam was swinging from the end of a rope and Dick Cheney was bathing every night in 10w40.

Don't kid yourself. America might once have been an altruistic nation -- the Marshall Plan, Point Four, etc. -- but these days we have a new national motto.

"It's all about the Benjamins."

Smedley nailed it.

A story of a man who really was too good for this world

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
-- JOHN 15:13, King James Version

What's the greatest possible form of heroism?

Risking one's life to save others would be pretty high on the list. Many of us would risk our lives to save our own children or other family members, some would add close friends to that list.

It's pretty noble.

But risking is one thing, sacrificing another thing entirely. Jumping into raging waters to save a drowning child is heroic, more so if you can't swim very well. More so if you don't know the child.

What if you can't swim at all, though? What if you jump into the water to save someone knowing you'll probably never make it out?

A true hero

Najih Shakir Al-Baldawi didn't go anywhere near water last Thursday night, but he saved numerous lives while sacrificing his own at the Sayyid Mohammed shrine in the Iraqi town of Balad. A suicide bomber with Daesh was trying to get inside the shrine so he could set off his bombs. Shakir apparently saw him, ran over and grabbed him, hugging him tightly against his own body and absorbing much of the impact when the bombs went off.

Two people died -- the bomber and Shakir.

Many others lived.

A fellow Muslim posted on Twitter that "an honourable man from Balad, Najih Shakir, holds the suicide bomber & attains martyrdom, preventing many more deaths."

It's wonderful to see the word "martyrdom" used properly, instead of describing a criminal who kills other people in the name of a demented God. We've had the same problem here with so-called Christians saying God told them to kill doctors who performed abortions.

I don't think Dennis Miller is particularly funny anymore, but I remember that back in the day, he said anyone hearing God telling them to kill someone is getting a garbled message.

The thing I like about this is that if you figure not all Muslims are terrorists, and that plenty of people are good and want to raise their children to be both happy and good, Shakir is a terrific role model. Not just because he made a sacrifice and saved people, but because he also stood up to the misguided zealots who have turned the world into a charnel house in the name of their conception of God.

We need a lot fewer jihadists and a lot more Najih Shakirs.

After the top 100 songs, here come the bottom 12 (plus one good one)

"We had joy, we had fun. we had seasons in the sun ..."

-- LEGENDARILY BAD SONG

Some months back, a friend of mine asked me to compile a list of what I thought were the best songs ever. I put a great deal of time into it and picked a top 100. It was tougher than I thought, mostly because there are so many good songs.

Well, there are plenty of horrible songs too.

It's not worth a top 100, but it could be worth a bottom 12. And of course, it's highly subjective. Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets" was a million seller, but in 1968, radio station WUVA in Charlottesville called it the worst song ever. I'm going to leave that one out, but there's another song from around that same period I can't ignore.

Sometimes the losers are remakes. The song quoted at the beginning was one of the worst of the late 60s without question, but it was a reworking of a lovely song by Jacques Brel called "Le Moribund."

Then there are songs like "Havin' My Baby," by Paul Anka, which became a weapon in the abortion debate in the mid 70s.

The real enemies of our society aren't just foreign invaders

"You control our world. You’ve poisoned the air we breathe, contaminated the water we drink, and copyrighted the food we eat. We fight in your wars, die for your causes, and sacrifice our freedoms to protect you. You’ve liquidated our savings, destroyed our middle class, and used our tax dollars to bailout your unending greed. We are slaves to your corporations, zombies to your airwaves, servants to your decadence.

"You’ve stolen our elections, assassinated our leaders, and abolished our basic rights as human beings. You own our property, shipped away our jobs, and shredded our unions. You’ve profited off of disaster, destabilized our currencies, and raised our cost of living. You’ve monopolized our freedom, stripped away our education, and have almost extinguished our flame. We are hit… we are bleeding… but we ain’t got time to bleed. We will bring the giants to their knees and you will witness our revolution!"
-- JESSE VENTURA

*** 

In many areas, there is at least room for debate on whether a proposed action will have a positive or a negative effect on the way we live. I certainly wish we had had more foresight in the years directly after World War II, when unprecedented prosperity resulted in some unfortunate decisions.

Family farms

Up to the period between World Wars I and II, a majority of Americans lived in small towns and rural areas. When soldiers, sailors and marines were discharged at the end of WWII, 55 percent of those from farms said all they wanted to do when they went home was to live the same lifestyle they did before the war.

But with the postwar demand for consumer goods -- automobiles, refrigerators, televisions and the like -- and the fact that mechanical advances had made farming much less labor intensive, many would-be rural residents found themselves in cities.

Life's great truths do not always have to sound profound

Six years ago, on a site that no longer exists (All Voices), I wrote about people's opinions about what really matters in the world.

I came across it today, and with some minor additions and corrections, here it is from June 2, 2010.

***

I was going to wait longer to write this article, in hopes of getting still more comments. But I had the most amazing experience today, one that changed my life completely, and I figured I ought to write about it.

I'm going to bury the lead, though. I'm going to start with the basic truths of life other people have given me and then tell you about my own.

Once was the time when a funny column wound up being embarrassing

In nearly 29 years in the newspaper business, my greatest enjoyment came from writing columns.

Commenting on things that interested me, sharing my bounteous wisdom with the world. I only had two jobs in which one of my primary duties was writing a column, but if I included the other jobs where I wrote one weekly, I probably wrote 2,000 or so between 1980 and 2001 (I didn't write columns at all after 2001).

I won awards. Best in the state in Colorado, best in Inland Southern California, and once even a first-place in a national competition that was mostly small papers.

Some were poignant.

Some angry.

Some funny.

One was just, well, weird.

I was working at the Reno Gazette-Journal in 1989, with the biggest part of my job as the beat writer covering University of Nevada basketball. In the off-season, I did a lot of different things. In the fall of 1989, I covered three games at Candlestick Park as the San Francisco Giants won the National League pennant by defeating the Chicago Cubs.