Better not believe the American system could never fail

It can't happen here?

Don't count on it. If Americans were ever exceptional, we've reached a place in 2013 where exceptionalism centers on things like how fat we are and how ignorant we are about the way the world works.

For all the attacking from the right on implementation of the Affordable Care Act, are people in this country aware of the fact that we're the only free society in the world that doesn't have single-payer, universal health care for its citizens? If we are to believe the yammering from opponents that we already have the finest health care in the world, there are a couple of questions worth asking:

-- If that's true, how come there are no other countries in the world that emulate our system?

-- If that's true, how come we spend twice as much per capita on health care as other countries and still rank pretty far down the line on most health care metrics?

-- If that's true, how come 50 million Americans aren't covered for any sort of health care?

On a related subject, why is it that deficits are skyrocketing and the public debt has reached a point where it may never be repaid, but no one seems to question why taxes on the megarich are so low?

Famed critic H.L. Mencken wrote in the early 1920s that the American republic would fall in less than 100 years. That's something I have mentioned numerous times before. Mencken said the two reasons this would happen were greed and ignorance -- the massive greed of the rich and the ignorance of average people.

Ever since 2001, our politics has slipped further and further into demagoguery. To me there are three examples that I would have thought would never happen in this country.

First, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, all of a sudden people were talking about "Homeland Security." Russians have long called their country Mother Russia or the Motherland, and Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany talking about the Fatherland. Did we become so confused, so frightened after the attacks that we forgot how we don't look at our country?

We're not anybody's "homeland." We are the United States of America.

Second, we let people tell us that slashing taxes on the wealthiest among us would be good for all of us. It was never true before. It wasn't true when Ronald Reagan did it, so why should we not only do it but have the Republicans continually pushing for lower and lower taxes for the rich?

The irony of it is that these same rich people have become incredibly arrogant. Robert Benmosche, the head of bailed-out AIG, told the Wall Street Journal he was upset that people had the nerve to complain about the massive bonuses AIG paid during the bailout. In fact, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote, Benmosche compared the backlash to the old days in the South when people were lynched.

Third, so much of what we see, hear and read in the media is designed for one purpose -- to keep us worked up about meaningless things so that we won't pay attention to what is being stolen from us. In the 1950s, the top 1 percent among us had 7 percent of the wealth. The most recent numbers, from 2011, show that 7 percent has grown to 19 percent.

There's no reason to admire someone just because they made a lot of money, and there's certainly no reason to admire someone because someone left them a lot of money. Four of the richest people in America got their money when Sam Walton died and left it to them, and what they're best known for is spending millions on political donations to people who want to abolish the estate tax.

Our country is starting to look like France before 1789 or Russia in the last days of the czars. We have a self-created aristocracy that is living way beyond reality and a large working class that is barely getting by.

Where do we go from here? The irony is that the only people really worked up are the teabaggers, and they have been manipulated into attacking the wrong targets. We could eliminate every dollar the government spends on the poor and the working class and it wouldn't make a dent in the deficit with taxes on the rich as low as they are.

The problem is that the megarich -- many of whom aren't even American -- are going to milk the country for everything they can until everything falls apart.

And my guess is that when it does, we're not going to see old-time America or even some sort of misguided Libertarian paradise. When push comes to shove, we're going to see someone in charge who can keep order, who can keep the trains running on time, who can protect the rich from the rest of us.

Worst case scenario, an American Hitler.

Best case, an American Mussolini.

It isn't too late yet, but it's getting later all the time.

If they aren't our presidents, then this may not be our country

I came of age during a turbulent time in America, and I saw at first hand the terms of two of the most controversial presidents ever.

In fact, you might call them the two presidents who changed everything and left us where we are today.

Nixon in 1974

Ironically for two men who turned out to have so much of an effect, it's very possible neither of them would have been elected at all except for the turmoil of their times. In 1968, Richard Nixon gave America its outlet for a backlash against crime in the streets, riots in the ghettoes and college students in protest against the war. In 1980, Ronald Reagan essentially won because Jimmy Carter's effort to rescue the hostages from Teheran in the spring came up short.

Between the two of them, they taught the country that you couldn't trust the president (Nixon) and that the government was basically useless (Reagan).

But as much as their opponents disliked or even despised them, they accepted the fact that they were president.

You see, at that point we were still in either the first or second of the four stages of disagreement, stage one being "I disagree with you," and stage two being "You're wrong."

But with the ascendancy of hard-core conservatives under Reagan, we moved into stage three, which is "You're stupid (or weak)."

Along with that, as Thomas C. Frank wrote in his wonderful book The Wrecking Crew, there was a conscious decision by Jack Abramoff's Young Republicans and others like them to make conservatism much more macho and in-your-face and to make Democrats look like wimps.

Add to that the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christians, and we slipped over into stage four of disagreement, the one in which you look at your opponent and see them as evil.

It started when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. For the first time, there was no honeymoon from the other side. The right wing noise machine attacked him relentlessly before he ever took office, saying his 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race made him an illegitimate president. Rush Limbaugh was attacking him with an "America Held Hostage" countdown during the transition period.

But it was Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell who went far beyond the pale in promoting a book and video -- "The Clinton Chronicles" -- that purported to prove Clinton had been responsible for more than two dozen murders of people who got in the way of his ambition.

The radical right never accepted Clinton as their president, and did everything but try to kill him to keep him from governing. The endless Starr investigation, which finally uncovered something -- the affair with Monica Lewinsky -- that hadn't even happened when the investigation started.

Most of the overt "he's not my president" talk started with George W. Bush in 2001. For one thing, he lost
the popular vote by 500,000 votes. For another, the election came down to Florida, where Republicans controlled the election apparatus and Bush's younger brother was the governor.

In the end, the Supreme Court intervened, stopping the recount and awarding the election to Bush.

That was when the "he's not my president" talk started, and for eight years it never really stopped. Democrats in Congress did work with Bush on things like education reform, which was more than Clinton had gotten out of the GOP while he was in office.

But when everything fell apart for Bush in his last year in office, Democrat Barack Obama was elected by the widest margin in 20 years, an election in which Obama carried such hard-core Republican states as Indiana and North Carolina.

All of a sudden, we had a president who was a Democrat, who had the middle name "Hussein" and who was half African-American. While many people who had supported Obama saw the election as a giant step forward for our country, there were those on the far right for whom we might as well have elected Osama bin Laden.

Not all of the opposition to Obama was based on racism, but it did seem as if every racist in America with an Internet connection used the election as justification for recycling every stupid racist remark they had ever heard. In addition, publicity hounds like Donald Trump insisted that Obama had not been born in this country and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Republicans decided that they would not work with Obama on anything, even when he proposed things that had been Republican ideas. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said his only goal was to make sure Obama was not re-elected.

Of course he was re-elected, and ever since his second inauguration in January, he has received no co-operation at all from Republicans.

After all, he is not their president.

So we have a country where when the Democrats are in power, Republicans opt out. And vice versa. Each side refuses to accept the other as legitimate or even as American. I'm as guilty as anyone. After the debacle of December 2000, I never saw Bush as a legitimate president.

Still, if you don't accept a legitimately elected president, it's just a short step from there to saying it isn't your country.

And with talk in certain states like Texas about secession, I find myself wondering something. If Texas or any other red states wanted to secede, who would be the Abraham Lincoln who would believe that it mattered to hold our country together?

I'm afraid I don't see one on the horizon.

King's sequel to "The Shining" ought to be very interesting

Some authors don't write sequels.

Others write nothing but sequels, at least to the point where each novel is a further adventure in the life of the author's primary character.

With the exception of his seven-book "Dark Tower" series, and two books on which he collaborated with Peter Straub, Stephen King hasn't been a big sequel guy. We never learned about the later lives of the kids in "It," or what happened in Boulder after the apocalyptic showdown in "The Stand."

"The Shining" was one of the few books that really seemed ripe for a sequel. It was King's third novel and perhaps the first one that was fully realized, and it had been adapted twice for movies.

The first time, of course, was the great Stanley Kubrick directing the great Jack Nicholson, and the result was a movie King fans mostly hated and Kubrick fans thought was pretty wonderful.

I didn't much care for it, mostly because I thought Kubrick left something very important out of his adaptation. One of the key plot points was that supernatural forces caused Nicholson's character gradually to lose his mind as the story evolved. But Kubrick had Nicholson acting maniacal almost from the first time we see him.

King himself reportedly hated the adaptation, and 14 years after the original came out, he helped make the book into a three-part television miniseries starring Steven Weber in the role Nicholson made famous.

Now I'm pretty sure even Weber doesn't put himself in the same league as Nicholson, although his portrayal is far closer to what King intended for Jack Torrance to be. And anyone who wouldn't rather watch Rebecca DeMornay as Wendy than Shelly Duvall, well, they're probably a big "Popeye" fan.

Of course Danny Torrance, the kid with "the shining," survives the book and both movie adaptations, and King himself says he gets a lot of correspondence from readers asking what happened to that little boy when he grew up.

Which brings us to "Doctor Sleep."

More than 35 years after "The Shining" was published, 16 years after the second movie adaptation, King presents the story of the adult Danny Torrance, who has never really gotten over what happened to him when he was 5 years old and staying at a remote hotel in Colorado.

The book comes out tomorrow, and I'll have it on my Nook soon after midnight. I don't care for everything King writes -- there are three or four of his books I never bothered to read and a half dozen others that never did much for me.

But when he's in the zone I like -- books like "Under the Dome," "11/22/63" and others -- there is no one I would rather read.

And as for "Doctor Sleep," I'm glad he finally got around to the sequel.

Without any sort of consensus, America has nowhere at all to go

"I don't know a soul who's not been battered, don't have a friend who feels at ease. Don't know a dream that's not been shattered or driven to its knees. But it's all right, all right, We've lived so well so long ..."

Do you think the Romans knew that Rome was falling?

When it comes to history, I wouldn't consider myself a scholar, but I have done more reading on the subject than most people. I do know that the decline and fall of Rome lasted for hundreds of years, far longer than it will take for our country to lose almost everything that made it great.

We had a pretty good thing going for quite some time, but we slipped off the tracks when we forgot what it was that made our country great.

We forgot the meaning of the American Dream.

We forgot that the American Dream had nothing to do with getting rich, that comparing our rich people to the wealthy in other countries said nothing good about America being a land of opportunity.

The Dream, such as it was, said that people could come to this country and be free, and that if they were willing to believe in the system and work hard, they could have the kind of lifestyle that was possible even for blue-collar workers in the 1950s and '60s. They could own a home, raise a family and live the good life. They didn't have to be worried that medical bills would wipe them out, or that they would never have enough money to retire.

In fact, if you want to know the year the American Dream peaked, it was 1965. That's the year we had the greatest income compression in our country, the year the gap between the wealthy and the working class was at its smallest.

We have been in decline ever since.

Even in 1965, there were people on the far right who hated the idea of Social Security. There were people who fought as hard as they could to stop the implementation of Medicare. And why? Because providing these services for average people meant that the extremely wealthy had to pay more taxes.

And just as rust never sleeps, the extremely wealthy never stop lobbying to have their taxes lowered and spending on the middle and working classes cut. When we call them on it, they call it class warfare, but they are the ones who never stop fighting for their class.

Ever since 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, the rich's share of our national wealth has been increasing. In 1965, the top 1 percent controlled 7 percent of our wealth. Now they have more than twice that, and the middle class is dying.

Now we have reached a point where a small minority of Americans who hate the idea of any government have been able through misdirection and obfuscation to elect a vocal minority in Congress. Because the rules of Congress are highly protective of the rights of the minority -- usually not a bad thing -- these people have been able to hamstring Congress from acting at all.

In the late 1980s, conservatives bragged that there would never be another Democrat elected president. They qualified that by saying that if one were elected, they would be able to prevent him from governing as a Democrat, and they have been very successful in that respect with two Democrats in the White House.

They are killing our country.

Or maybe we all are. I can't think of a time in this country -- or in many others for that matter -- where the country has been so divided between two opposing points of view that could not be reconciled.

At least since 1860, and we fought a war over that.

Would we fight another Civil War to keep 21st century America together?

I doubt it. As Paul Simon said in the wonderful song quoted at the beginning of this piece, "... you can't be forever blessed."

I think it's going to get really ugly.

At this point, AAA means more than just road assistance for automobiles

When I hear the acronym "AAA," the first thing that always comes to mind for me is the American Automobile Association. The Triple A has been coming to the assistance of motorists for decades, and when I owned my first car in 1974, one of the first things I did was join Triple A.

Of course, there are other groups using the same acronym. Check Google and you'll find the Amateur Astronomers Association, the Association of Accounting Administrators and the American Academy of Audiology. If you know the right people -- or maybe the wrong ones -- you might know of the Anal Adventurers of Alabama.

It was just today that I learned of something else that uses the acronym AAA, , something that will have an effect on the way I live the rest of my life.

I have been having some health problems recently that required tests, and among the anomalies that showed up on my CT scan was yet another AAA -- an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Aneurysms are scary. Most of the time we hear about them is when someone has one that bursts in the brain. Those have a tendency to be fatal, and in fact, without prompt treatment, nearly any burst aneurysm has a high degree of fatality associated with it.

In a way, I suppose I was unlucky. The biggest group susceptible to abdominal aortic aneurysms is men 65-75, and I'll be 64 in December. Close enough for government work. But the other biggest risk factor is that 90 percent of the people with this problem were smokers at some point in their lives.

I never was.

My doctor says it's not a large aneurysm, so it appears that I'll be taking a watch and wait approach, losing some weight and getting my blood pressure down. It's entirely possible it will never have any real effect on the remaining years of my life.

Just the same, I'm not going to go anywhere near Alabama.

Here we are again, and nothing has changed at all

Here we are again.

The venue changes, the situation is different but basically the same. Someone has taken a gun and started shooting people, and the only question is how many will be dead or wounded by the time the shooter is stopped.

Of course we are horrified.

"Again?" we ask, even though we know deep down that there will always be an "again" as long as we continue along the same path.

For we have made choices in the way we live, and one of those choices is that it's too difficult to stand up to the fanatics and get anything done when it comes to keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have them.

We paint the Second Amendment as an absolute right, when even the National Rifle Association didn't see it that way until 1968, when they realized that people who weren't white were getting their hands on guns.

They paint the Founding Fathers as men who wanted everyone armed, so that they could rebel against an oppressive government, when nothing any of them wrote at the time suggested that fact. In fact, the idea of having guns in the hands of a citizen militia was so the country would not be required to have a large standing army.

At the Navy Yard.

That was something the Founders feared far more than another King George.

And of course, they lived in a far different country than the one we now inhabit. A nation of 3 million people living along the Atlantic coast was a nation in which someone who couldn't succeed could head for the frontier and try again.

In a nation of 300 million, with opportunity seemingly vanishing for millions of people, there aren't a lot of second chances. People find themselves in bad situations and don't see good options. They may not be able to pay their bills, but they've got a gun.

So whether it's a school, or a theater or a political rally or a military base, somebody starts shooting and people die. And almost before the bodies are cold, the forces of the right are marshalling their forces to stand against any changes in the way we deal with guns.

Think about this if you will: These people don't even want to require people selling guns to check the terrorist watch list to make sure they're not selling guns to enemies of our country.

It would be an inconvenience to buyers and sellers to require that.

Consider one more thing. There are a lot of other countries in the world where people are free, including some where people have more freedom than we do in our country. But there are no other free countries in which these shootings happen.

Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany ... The list goes on and on.

What's the difference between them and us?

It isn't the frontier, as many say. Canada had a frontier and so did Australia, and they don't kill each other like we do.

Nobody does.

It seems to me we ought to be thinking about that.

Vampires and zombies, just like real life in 21st century America

It Fascinates me that over the last 15 years or so, vampires and zombies have become such a big part of our popular culture.

The beginning

I've had this discussion before -- with people who disagree with me -- and yes, vampires and zombies have been around nearly as long as we've had popular culture. Vampires go all the way back to silent movies and the first film made, 1922's "Nosferatu," is still one of the scariest movies ever.

In fact, it was so frightening that people thought lead actor Max Schreck might actually be one of the undead. When Tod Browning made "Dracula" in 1931, he made a movie that set the tone for all the rest, even if 80 years of bloodier movies and impersonations have left people giggling at Bela Lugosi.

But vampires  became much scarier when they crossed over into modern times. When Stephen King brought vampires into modern-day America in 1975 with "Salem's Lot," all of a sudden the undead weren't guys in capes with funny accents. Joss Whedon added humor to the mix with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," as a movie in 1992 and as a television series from 1997-2004, but there were enough times in the series that things were very serious and very scary.

Buffy

Whether it was King or Whedon, Dracula or Buffy, vampires have always been about the strong preying on the weak. It might be a stretch to call it a metaphor for the way banksters and financiers have preyed on people in this country over the last 30 years, but it wouldn't be that much of a stretch.

Which brings us to zombies. Until George Romero came along, zombies were sort of arcane figures, mostly connected with Haiti and/or voodoo.

But when Romero made "Night of the Living Dead" for $20,000 in 1968, everything changed. All of a sudden, the dead were climbing out of their graves and killing the living in, of all places, Pennsylvania.

Romero was successful enough that he made three sequels and eventually created an entire genre -- zombies in the modern world. And they became something of a metaphor for H.L. Mencken's "great unwashed," people who seem to stagger through their lives without ever thinking very much.

Romero's classic

What Romero started has grown into a cottage industry of sorts, from all sorts of low-budget imitations to the current series "The Walking Dead" on AMC that is starting its fourth season this fall.

"Walking Dead" came from a series of comic books -- sorry, but I refuse to call them graphic novels, even though I read them -- and has gotten rave reviews.

It's far bloodier and more, well, graphic than Romero could ever have been, and it does get a little tiresome after a while to see yet another hatchet sunken into yet another head. Still, the story is compelling.

You can agree with me or not about the metaphors of vampires and zombies in our modern world, but every time I see right wingers yammering about makers and takers, and every time I see people who are convinced that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are sharing the wisdom of the ages, I think about vampires and zombies.

The only question how is who wins in the end.

I'm betting on the zombies.

The best Americans are the ones battling to get ahead

Who are the best Americans? Who are the people among us who best exemplify what America was meant to be?

Let me clarify one thing at the beginning. I'm not talking about individuals. If I were, the list would start with my two kids. Both of them are good, caring adults and high achievers who are definitely going to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

That's not what I mean, though, and I'm not going to talk about politics or religion either.

Perhaps the best way of looking at it would be economics. The most simplistic way of dividing people is by quintiles. Those in the bottom 20 percent would be considered poor, 21-40 would be lower middle class, 41-60 would be the true middle class, 61-80 would be upper middle class and 81-100 would be wealthy. That doesn't really work because of the top quintile, which would group people making $75-80,000 a year with billionaires.

That's all right, because those aren't the people we'll be talking about anyway.

No, by numerous measures, the best Americans would be the people in that 21-40 group, the ones we call lower middle class but who are actually working class.

They're the ones who work the hardest just to get by and have less security than almost anyone. They don't get the benefits that go to the people on the bottom, and they don't have the income -- or the good jobs -- that go to the people above them.

When they're active, it's more likely to be in church groups or local charities than in political groups. Most of them would say they don't have time for politics, and it doesn't much matter who's in power because they can't get their attention.

The most surprising thing is that the people in this group donate a higher percentage of their income to charity than any of the others. True, much of it is to churches, but very little is going to donate buildings that will be named after themselves at universities and hospitals.

These are the people who still believe in the American Dream, whether rightly or wrongly. They're still hoping their children will have better lives than they do, and if they buy a few too many lottery tickets, there's nothing wrong with gambling on a short cut.

If there's one thing we need to do in this country, it's to rebuild the idea of upward mobility. We're got far fewer people making the move to the middle class and upward than we used to.

More than anything, that's the real beauty of the way this country once was and the way it needs to be again.

With 911, we lost something we have never been able to find

I really wasn't going to write about what happened 12 years ago today.

Yes, it was terrible. Yes, many innocent people lost their lives. And yes, police officers and firefighters showed amazing courage, many of them making the ultimate sacrifice and giving what President Lincoln called "the last full measure of devotion."

For a month or so after the attacks, we stood united against the world.

Then all that changed.

Without blaming either side, the two parties now find themselves in such opposing places that for the first time in my lifetime, there doesn't seem to be any willingness to find middle ground.

Indeed, those on one side don't even think there should be a government, a position that goes far beyond Ronald Reagan and other conservatives of the modern era.

Neither side seems willing to accept that the other is operating in good faith.

Neither seems willing anymore to accept their opponents as good Americans, or even as reasonable people.

I can't help but wonder that the police and firefighters who rushed into the burning buildings to try and save lives would think of us if they were alive today.

I somehow doubt they would be proud of us.

Everyone has their own image that says 9/11 to them. For some it's the iconic shot of the three firefighters with the flag, for others it's President Bush on the bullhorn.

The picture that won't leave my mind is of the people who gave up on being rescued and decided to die on their own terms. They jumped, some alone and some together, and they fell all the way to the ground. Someone asked me how long I thought it took. I said it took a very long time. It took the rest of their lives.

And it has stayed with us ever since.

I honestly don't know if we can ever get back to where we were on Sept. 10th, 2001, but I do know one thing.

We damn well better try.

'Star Trek Into Darkness:' Great characters overcome same old story

Once was the time it really mattered to me to see a big movie on the first day of release.

Sometimes that was difficult. Until I was past 30, movies didn't open at 3,000 theatres the same day. I remember that to see "The Empire Strikes Back" in 1980, I had to go to the Uptown Theatre way up on Wisconsin Avenue in D.C.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

But when I saw "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" in 1984 in St. Louis, it was at any number of suburban multiplexes.

Still, I made the effort. I think I can even remember the last time I made a special effort to see something the first day it was out was in 1993, when I saw an early matinee of "Jurassic Park" in Upland, Cal.

It's hard to believe that 20 years have passed since then. The fact is, I don't even go to the movies anymore, although I still see pretty much everything I want to see. We've lived in Georgia for nearly three years, and the only time I saw something in a theatre was in the summer two years ago when I saw the last Harry Potter movie.

I'm not sure exactly why that is, but I have a feeling the fact I have a 47-inch HD television and a Blu-Ray player has something to do with it, and the idea of being able to watch at my own speed makes it more pleasant to stay at home.

I'm still sort of a first-day viewer. I pick up the DVDs of the big movies I want to see as soon as they go on sale, and I come home and watch them right away. That's why I spent time this afternoon watching a movie I have awaited with mixed feelings -- "Star Trek Into Darkness."

Mixed feelings? Well, I really loved the 2009 reboot with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Kirk and Spock. I thought that completely rejuvenated a franchise that has been around since I was in high school. On the other hand, I was definitely disgusted to learn that they were recycling Khan Noonien Singh was the villain and that they were reworking the classic death scene from that 1982 film.

Of course death scenes of that sort are false drama. A book I read long ago that analyzed the original "Star Trek" television series said it was silly whenever an episode had Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock or Dr. McCoy supposedly dying. Those three were the heart and soul of the show, so you knew they weren't really going to die.

There were actually numerous things wrong with this movie, if you follow "Star Trek." One of the most basic rules of the show was that the Enterprise cannot land on a planet, but the opening sequence in the new movie has the ship hiding in an ocean and then coming out.

No point to it, just a cool CGI shot.

I suppose I should be glad that in an era of amazing effects and crummy screenplays, the story was as good as it was. In a way, it's almost as if the characters Gene Roddenberry created are so good they can overcome all sorts of garbage.

This is my last "Star Trek," though. I'll keep watching the movies made with Pine and Quinto, but when those two move on and some future director decides to "reboot" the story, I'll move on too.

No movie theatres, no DVDs.

Maybe I'll finally watch the set of Akira Kurosawa movies I got a couple of years ago.

Kasdan's 'Grand Canyon" gap is beginning to look understated

When Lawrence Kasdan made "Grand Canyon" in 1991, a lot of people accused him of being overly preachy in making his point.

Kasdan's "grand canyon" was the massive -- and ever growing -- gap between the rich and the poor in modern Los Angeles. At the time, there were few places in the world where people who were incredibly wealthy and grindingly poor lived so close to each other.

The same year "Grand Canyon" was released, Hollywood producer Aaron Spelling completed his dream house, a 56,500 square foot mansion in Holmby Hills that included a bowling alley, a wine storage and tasting room, gift-wrapping room, a humidity-controlled silver storage room, China room, library, gym and media room and a screening room. The 17,000 square foot attic included both a barber shop and a beauty salon.

The estate -- calling it a house just seems ridiculous -- also included a parking lot that would hold 100 cars.

Spelling's widow Candy finally sold it in 2011 to a British heiress for $150 million.

Only a few miles to the south and east, hundreds of thousands of black and Latino Angelenos live in total poverty and have little hope of ever escaping it. It's so expensive even to live badly in Los Angeles that very few people are able to climb the ladder the traditional way.

And of course, there are so many people of questionable ethics and non-existent mortality ready to prey on folks trying to get ahead that it's even more difficult than it should be.

I have a friend in Los Angeles whose income has ranged from lower middle class all the way up to six figures over the years, but he and his family have lived in the same beat-up apartment for nearly 25 years now.

Los Angeles is just the best example of what's happening here, and it isn't just about the rich and the poor anymore. The rich have sailed so far beyond what even the middle class can imagine that the middle class itself is suffering.

Steve Martin's producer character sums it up in "Grand Canyon:"

"The point is there's a gulf in this country; an ever-widening abyss between the people who have stuff, and the people who don't have shit. It's like this big hole in the ground, as big as the fucking Grand Canyon, and what's come pouring out is an eruption of rage, and the rage creates violence, and the violence is real."

When I was in my teens in the 1960s, it was still a big deal to be a millionaire. I think there was maybe one billionaire in the U.S.

In 2013, Forbes magazine said there were 442 billionaires in this country, and that number keeps growing. Something like nine of every 10 dollars of new wealth in our country is going straight to the top.

That can't continue. If you keep attacking the middle class, eventually even the most passive people will strike back.

Of course, by that time the gap may be less like the Grand Canyon and more like the Pacific Ocean.

For working class, the promise of America is slipping away

Some years back, my late father was having a conversation with my sister about how much more stressful life had become for the generations that followed his.

My dad was born in 1926, and he worked primarily for one employer for his entire adult life. He didn't have to worry about whether he would have health care and he didn't have to make major decisions about how to finance his retirement.

His generation was pretty much the last one where a significant percentage of adults spent their whole lives working for the same employer. And even then, many of the folks at the blue-collar end of the spectrum found themselves out of work and looking for jobs in their fifties.

Through the '50s and '60s and even into the '70s, pretty much all the sectors of the American economy were working full-tilt, and it was possible for a guy with just a high school education to have a home, a family and all the other accoutrements of middle-class life.

If I can repeat something I have used numerous times before ...

One of my favorite pictures, one that says so much about the good in mid-century America, is the bridge across the Delaware River in Trenton, N.J.

"Trenton makes, the world takes"

An awful lot of men and women made good livings making things that were sold all around the world, in Trenton and in hundreds of other American cities and towns.

They worked hard and they reached a certain level of success in life.

Most of those jobs are long gone, though, and plenty of folks like the earlier Americans now work two or three part-time jobs and can't have anywhere near a middle-class lifestyle. They're lucky to have benefits at all, and if they do, they're at a lower level than before. Something like a quarter of American workers can't even think about taking vacations, let alone plan for retirement.

So life becomes more and more stressful, and folks who are a little weaker emotionally sometimes snap. Look at all the cases we're hearing about where someone just sort of snaps and shoots someone else. Call it "Stand Your Ground" or whatever, we have more and more people who only feel empowered in their lives when they can show how tough they are.

The shooter

Tuesday evening in Dallas, a 46-year-old man -- seemingly for no reason at all -- shot an 8-year-old boy in the face. Yes, the two were of different races, but I'm not willing to out and out say the man just wanted to shoot a black kid because of racism.

I don't want to justify this in any way, but I think it's at least possible that his life had taken such a turn for the worse that he just snapped and struck out at someone, anyone.

There are too many guns in the hands of too many of the wrong people, and too many right wingers seem only to want to make it easier for people to get guns and to use them. If a guy has a messed-up life, something like Stand Your Ground can give him a feeling -- false, yes -- of control.

We have to find a way to make people matter again. We have to find work for people they can take pride in, and that can remunerate them honestly for their efforts. We can't give people jobs that force them to apply for food stamps just to get by and expect them to take pride in themselves.

If they can't take pride in their lives, they leave themselves wide open to demagogues like Glenn Beck who tell them it's all the fault of progressives and we should hunt them down and kill them.

Sinclair Lewis said it in the 1930s:

"It can happen here."

And if you leave 70 percent of families just getting by and with no hope for truly better lives, then ...

"It will happen here."

A look back at a wonderful trip to some great places

People who know me know that I worked 17 years as a sportswriter, from 1979-96. If the paper I worked for hadn't gone all bizarro about what they were covering, I might have kept on doing it longer. But I had been hired to cover pro sports, and by 1996 they were asking me to cover local high schools and small colleges.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Of course, in the end I let them fool me badly four times and I still wouldn't have left if they hadn't fired me.

But I digress.

As usual.

For some reason, though, I've been thinking about the truly memorable places I covered sporting events, whether in baseball, basketball, football or hockey. I'm not going to count places I saw games as a spectator, so that leaves out places like Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.

But just for the heck of it, let's do a top 10, and after I'm finished I'll throw in some other memorable ones as honorable mention:

Duke

10. CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM, Durham, N.C. -- One of four basketball arenas on this list, I covered a couple of games at Duke early in the Blue Devils' years as a powerhouse, and yes, the Cameron Crazies live up to their reputation.

Duke edges out UNC's old Carmichael Coliseum, where I saw a truly amazing game in 1983. No. 1 Virginia led No. 2 Carolina 62-47 with about nine minutes to play. Carolina won, 63-62, with the final points on a Michael Jordan breakaway dunk.

9. LOS ANGELES MEMORIAL COLISEUM -- Not great games, per se. I didn't cover USC. I covered the Raiders their last two years in Los Angeles. Still, there aren't many places in the world that have hosted the Olympics (twice), a Super Bowl and a World Series.

Kansas

8. CANDLESTICK PARK, San Francisco -- This one might seem controversial, but I saw some great 49er games in the Joe Montana years and also the 1989 NLCS where the Giants beat the Cubs. It's a better stadium for football than for baseball.

7. ALLEN FIELD HOUSE, Lawrence, Kan. -- One of the real cathedrals of college basketball, I saw Larry Brown's Kansas Jayhawks beat Norm Stewart's Missouri Tigers, one of the great rivalries in the college game. This may not have been where basketball was invented, but they sure do play it well.

6. ROSE BOWL, Pasadena, Cal. -- I covered two Rose Bowl games in the '90s and quite a few UCLA home football games. It's a great stadium, but it really only comes into its own on television on New Year's Day when the rest of the country is freezing.

5. RUPP ARENA, Lexington, Ky. -- Adolph Rupp never coached in this building, but Kentucky is another of the great powers in college basketball, and the weekend I saw three games there was the 1985 Final Four. I got to see what some people call the greatest game ever, Villanova's 66-64 shocker over heavily favored Georgetown.

4. PAULEY PAVILION, Westwood, Cal. -- College basketball's Valhalla. No one was ever as good or will ever be as good as the UCLA Bruins under John Wooden -- 10 national titles in 12 years. I wasn't there for those years, but I covered some decent Bruins teams in the early '90s, and Coach Wooden was in the stands. No place better for basketball.

3. RFK STADIUM, Washington, D.C. -- The stadium itself was kind of a dump, but when the Redskins were playing, the atmosphere was almost as good as it gets. I covered Joe Gibbs' first season, the year they went 0-5 and finished 8-8. The next two years they went to the Super Bowl.

2. DODGER STADIUM, Los Angeles, Cal. -- I never covered games at Wrigley or Fenway, but I'm not sure there is a more heavenly place in the world than a summer night game with the Dodgers going good. I covered two full seasons -- 1990 and 1991 -- and I was never happier as a sportswriter. Tommy Lasorda calls it Blue Heaven. I'm not going to disagree with that.

1. MILE HIGH STADIUM, Denver, Col. --  This may sound goofy, but autumn evenings covering the Broncos at Mile High were almost like a religious experience. Games started at 2 p.m. MST, and by the end of the game in late fall, the sun was down. Sportswriters were allowed on the sideline for the last two minutes, and looking up and seeing a sea of orange and looking down the field and seeing John Elway lead another comeback, well, I never had it better. If I wanted to have my ashes spread in places I had worked, half of them would go here and the other half to Dodger Stadium.

***

Those honorable mentions?

For baseball, Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

For football, Sanford Stadium in Athens, Ga., Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., and possibly North Carolina and Oklahoma.

For basketball, Carmichael and the Dean Smith Center at UNC and the Fabulous Forum in Los Angeles.

For hockey, just the Forum.

Hey, I really had a blast.

Was there ever anything better on TV than Serling's 'Twilight Zone?'

I'm not one of those people who believe that only the good die young, but there sure have been plenty of people who cashed in their chips in the prime of life.

Rod Serling was certainly one of those. Serling was one of the very best writers in the so-called Golden Age of Television, and his masterpiece -- "The Twilight Zone" -- should be on anyone's short list for the greatest television series ever. It ran from 1959-64, an era in which censorship was so restrictive that a performance of "Judgment at Nuremburg" couldn't mention the Nazis had used poison gas in concentration camps because the Gas Company was one of the sponsors.

Serling was brilliant, and he was able to slip the messages between the lines with shows that attacked racism, anti-semitism, jingoism and nearly any other -ism that mattered.

The show was never a big hit. It was an era of westerns and family sitcoms, and CBS never really knew quite what to do with the show.

In the fourth of its five seasons, the network actually changed it from its 30-minute format to an hour-long show. It didn't work, and the fifth season went back to half-hour shows.

In the end, I think Serling got tired of fighting with the network and gave up. He wrote several memorable screenplays, and he came back with another series -- Night Gallery -- later, but he had been suffering from heart trouble for a long time and died at age 50.

Of course Serling lives on through his work and the many people who loved it.

"Twilight Zone" itself was remade after his death, and four well-known directors made a movie version which really only showed how difficult it is to emulate Serling. The movie was essentially four episodes, two that were new and two that were remakes of original episodes.

Time Enough at Last

I didn't see many of the shows when they were on originally. I was 9 when the show started, and I was never a big TV watcher. But I've seen many of them in the 50 years or so since, and my plan is to see all 156 episodes now that I have the entire series on Blu-Ray.

In the last 15 years or so, I have heard a lot of people rave about new shows as if they were the best thing ever on television. I saw every episode of "The Sopranos," and it was very nice. I liked "Six Feet Under" and "The West Wing," and if I don't quite see the greatness of "Breaking Bad," I'll give it another try.

One thing people forget, though, is that it's a lot easier to write a series when you are essentially telling one story in chapters. Writing 156 different stories for an anthology as Serling did (he didn't actually write all, but most of them) is an entirely different proposition.

The other thing difficult to imagine is how many truly great actors appeared on the show. Many were already stars, but others -- like Robert Redford -- were on "Twilight Zone" before they ever appeared in films.

When we look back at the early days of television, back when we all liked Ike and Davy Crockett was the king of the wild frontier, a lot of the best shows have been lost to time. They weren't saved, or they were taped over. "I Love Lucy" was a wonderful show, but the fact that it's still so well-loved has a lot to do with the fact that all the episodes still exist.

Walking Distance

By 1959, when "Twilight Zone" came on, shows were being saved. They were also being cross-marketed. I read paperback books the summers when I was 10 and 11 that were anthologies of "Twilight Zone" episodes.

The wonderful fifth episode of the show starred Gig Young and was called "Walking Distance." It was the story of a man whose life had gotten too fast for him. Through a fluke that is never explained, he walks into his home town in 1959 and finds himself in 1934, the summer he was 11 years old.

He would love to stay and be a kid again, but he knows he can't.

None of us can, but that doesn't mean we can't watch -- and dream.