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.