Don't steal from others, give them a hand up

Are we really so flawed, so underevolved, that we see logic in the idea of getting what we need by taking it from someone else by force or tricking them out of it?

It's a big question, maybe even a silly one.

We are what we are and we'll never be any better. At least that's what we tell ourselves, and if we convince ourselves, the world will never be much better than an abattoir. We speak of Survival of the Fittest, and we say that Only the Strong Survive, but that doesn't mean that those of us who are strong should survive by hurting the weak.

What sort of people do you admire?

People who succeed no matter what they have to do, no matter who they have to hurt? Or people who understand that they are not the pinnacle of creation and that we live most nobly when we put the needs of others ahead of our own?

Is it really so difficult to understand, when every religion known to man except for Satanism is built around the law of reciprocity, a law we also know as the Golden Rule?

I hold no brief for anyone who succeeds by knowingly hurting others.

I accept the fact that there are people who get rich at the expense of others, but don't ask me to like or respect them. I'm always going to admire Mother Teresa before I admire Donald Trump. I'm always going to admire Warren Buffett more than I admire all the Kochs and Waltons there are in the world.

I do believe that we are our brothers' keepers, and I could even include Trump in that category, but only if I owned a zoo.

Wherever you live, housing prices pretty much always going up

Location, location, location.

That's the mantra of successful real estate agents, that property in good locations is desirable and appreciates more than other properties. Apartment rents are an outstanding example of that.

It's hardly stunning to know that apartments in the Washington, D.C., suburbs cost a lot, but the rents have appreciated far more than the Consumer Price Index over the last 30-40 years.

When my first wife and I moved into our first apartment in Herndon, Va., in 1975, Stuart Woods was a brand-new development. Our one-bedroom apartment with a built-in washer-dryer rented for $230. That same apartment today, according to the Stuart Woods Website, goes for $1,409.

Dolley Madison Apartments

Three years later, we rented a two-bedroom apartment in the Tysons Corner area. The Dolley Madison apartments were older and not as nice as Stuart Woods, but the location was much more impressive. Our two-bedroom apartment in the summer of 1978 rented for $300. That same apartment now rents for $1,695.

On the other hand, when I was living in Gastonia ("Armpit of the Carolinas"), N.C., in 1983, I rented a very nice and modern garden apartment in the Quail Woods Apartments. My one-bedroom apartment was $260 a month. It's 31 years later and that same apartment now goes for $555 a month.

The last apartment I ever rented was in Southern California in 1991. The Beachwood Apartments were in west Anaheim, a neighborhood that turned out to be a little more marginal than I thought. I was driving an old Datsun 280ZX that year, and I had the T-tops stolen twice and the battery stolen once.

The apartment itself was nice. My one-bedroom unit was $590 a month, not bad for a place where a 15-minute drive down Beach Blvd. to the ocean at Huntington Beach.

That same unit now goes for about $1,300 a month, not too much of an increase for 23 years, but there are a lot of apartments in Southern California and maybe it's all the market will bear.

When I remarried in 1992 and moved into the lovely house my wife owned, I didn't really expect that I would ever live in an apartment again.

But when the housing market started slipping in 2008, we decided that since we were only a couple of years from our planned retirement, we would sell while we could still get a good price.

The Falls at Montrose

We were fortunate. We sold our house to a family who rented it for one year and then closed the sale in August 2009. We did very well, but we wound up living in a lovely apartment complex for our last two years in California. We paid $1,800 a month for a two-bedroom unit in The Falls at Montrose and lived there until we left for Georgia in November 2010.

And then, for only the second time in my adult life, I learned how wonderful it is to live without paying rent or making a mortgage payment. The first time was 1976-78, when my first wife and I were in Vienna for two years and had our housing paid by the government.

This time we used the equity from selling our house in California to buy our retirement home in Georgia for cash. If all goes according to plan, we'll never have to pay for housing ever again.

Looks like we found a good location.

Lots of questions and plenty of answers, some of them new

Editor's note: This is a reworking of a piece I did three years ago. A few of the answers are different. I'm hoping it's maturity.

 I was reading Vanity Fair in the doctor’s office and I came across the leading man interviews with George Clooney, Matt Damon and Daniel Craig. What fascinated me were the questions, apparently an interview format developed by Marcel Proust. So I thought I would interview myself, using those questions.

Here goes:

Q. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A. My children and grandchildren.

Q. What is your greatest fear?
A. Hurting the people I love or seeing someone else hurt them.

Q. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
A. H.L. Mencken.

Q. Which living person do you most admire?
A. My daughter Pauline.

Q. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
A. I give up too easily.

Q. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A. Self-righteousness.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. My collection of movies on DVD.

Piazza San Marco, Venice

Q. What is your favorite journey?
A. Ten days in Venice with my wife in 2003.

Q. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
A. Patience.

Q. On what occasion do you lie?
A. To spare someone’s feelings.

Q. What do you dislike most about your appearance?
A. Wild fluctuations in weight.

Q. Which living person do you most despise?
A. Dick Cheney.

Q. What words or phrase do you most overuse?
A. "I’ll tell you what …"

Q. Which talent would you most like to have?
A. Being able to sing well.

Q. What is your current state of mind?
A. Frustrated.

Q. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
A. My work ethic.

Q. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
A. I would make my wife healthier, both in spirit and in body.

Q. What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?
A. Playing the small role I did in helping my children grow from wonderful kids with great potential into high-achieving adults.

Q. If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?
A. Someone who works very hard and perseveres despite average talents. Or maybe a kangaroo.

Q. What is your most treasured possession?
A. The love of my family and friends.

Q. Where would you like to live?
A. Wherever my wife Nicole is. Or maybe northern Canada.

Q. What is your favorite occupation?
A. The five years I spent as a newspaper columnist.

Q. What is the quality you like most in a man?
A. Unselfishness.

Q. What is the quality you like most in a woman?
A. Kindness. A good sense of humor. Also large breasts. Just kidding.

Q. What is your greatest regret?
A. The fact that I probably won’t live long enough to see how things turn out as adults for my grandchildren.

Q. What do you value the most in your friends?
A. The wonderful history that we share together.

Q. Who are your favorite writers?
A. Pat Conroy, Robert B. Parker, Bob Greene, Dan Jenkins.

Q. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
A. Atticus Finch, Jonathan Kent, Billy Clyde Puckett.

Q. Who are your heroes in real life?
A. My wife and children.

Q. What is it that you most dislike?
A. People who carry water politically for the mega-rich.

Q. How would you like to die?
A. Peacefully, with the people I love close at hand.

The greatest minds are without honor in their own time

Editor's note: This was a piece I wrote for another website 10 years ago. I still think it's funny. I hope you do.

Now you’re really going to have to listen to me.

I received a letter from Cambridge, England, notifying me that I had been selected as one of the 2,000 outstanding intellectuals of the 21st century.

"we bad, we bad."

"That’s right, we bad. We bad."

 Sorry, but I couldn’t help channeling Richard Pryor in “Stir Crazy” for a minute there.

Seriously, here’s how the letter started:

"The Oxford English Dictionary defines intellectualism as the ‘doctrine that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason’ and it follows by saying that an intellectual is 'a person possessing a good understanding, enlightened person.’ Therefore, this definition is the reason for your selection to be included in this prestigious publication which is due for release in late 2004.”

Well, gosh.

Now I’m no slouch. I read two newspapers every day, I finish the crossword puzzle more often than not and I can usually beat the contestants on “Wheel of Fortune” to the correct answer. Sometimes I don’t even need to buy a vowel.

But intellectual? I’m not even the leading intellectual in my own family.

My wife has doctorates in astronomy and geophysics, my daughter has two bachelors degrees – both with honors – from UCLA and my son just finished his first semester of college at Cal State Northridge with a 4.0 average.

In my house, I’m the freaking village idiot.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If Bill Cosby, Elayne Boosler, Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin all lived together, one of them would have to be the least funny guy – or girl – in the house.

Duke, Mickey and Willie

And if Willie, Mickey and the Duke lived together – when they were all living – one of them would have been the least athletic. I’m thinking Duke.

 No competition at all.

So it’s all a matter of comparison. Put me in a phone booth with Gee Dubya and I’d be the first one to find my way out.

Yeah, I know he’s got degrees from Yale and Harvard, but my guess is the names “Pierce” and “Bush” – momma’s and daddy’s family names – had more to do with that than any grades he actually earned.

If Dubya had a brain, he’d be outside playing with it. Put me up against ol’ Dub in a battle of wits and I’d refuse to fight. There’s no honor in beating an unarmed man, even if it would be soooo much fun.

Anyway, I’m no dope. Just ask the folks in Cambridge. Those limeys know brains when they see them. We’re talking about the land that gave us Billy Shakespeare, Bert Russell and Monty Python.

Not in the book.

I’m part English myself, on my mother’s side and way back on my natural father’s side. Of course, I’m part German too, and the Germans have a fine intellectual tradition of their own — Goethe, Nietzche, Goebbels.

Oh, never mind.

Every nationality, every ethnic group, has its great thinkers and its morons. For every Benjamin Franklin there’s a Benny Hill, for every Apostle Paul there’s a Pauly Shore. And for every Mike Rappaport, well, there’s a Mike Rappaport.

Like most people, I’ve got my smart side and my goofy side.

But hey, Cambridge likes me. Cambridge thinks I’m one of the finest minds of my generation. Cambridge figures I might do something great someday.

Uh, Mike … Isn’t this another one of those books where they’ll put your name in a book with a few thousand other wannabes as long as you pay $300 or $400 to buy the special leather-bound edition?

Not at all. If you want the book, you can buy it for whatever they’re selling it for – in pounds, not dollars – but they stress that you don’t have to buy the book in order to be listed in it. They love me for my mind. Not my money.

But didn’t you buy the book when they put you in “Who’s Who in America?”

Sure, but that was because I wanted to donate a copy to the public library. I didn’t want to be one of those prophets who was without honor in his own small city of 24,000 people.

Uh, yeah. Whatever.

Yeah, I bought the special leather-bound edition and looked inside at my bio once or twice. Then I donated it to the library. Dang book wouldn’t fit in the bookcase, and I needed more space in the bottom of my closet for my shoes.

That’s not the point, though. It’s one thing to be in “Who’s Who in America.” They’re not particularly selective. I think Dubya, Pee Wee Herman and the guy who mows my lawn are all in there. But if someone thinks you’re one of the “2,000 outstanding intellectuals of the 21st century,” that’s really something.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Vanna White is calling.

Editor's note: I wasn't in the book. I never replied to the request. Just happy to get a funny column out of it.

While soldiers were dying at Ia Drang, most of us were blissfully ignorant

"Some had families waiting. For others, their only family would be the men they bled beside. There were no bands, no flags, no Honor Guards to welcome them home. They went to war because their country ordered them to. But in the end, they fought not for their country or their flag, they fought for each other."
 -- "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young"

The battle of Ia Drang started on a November Sunday in 1965. I was a junior in high school, a month from my 16th birthday. I didn't know much about Vietnam other than the Tonkin Gulf incident from the previous year, and I'm not sure I had ever had a discussion about it with anyone.

Maybe it was the fact that I attended a conservative, homogenous high school. When I look in my high school yearbook, the Class of 1967 was pretty close to 99 percent white. Our only Asian student was an exchange student from South Vietnam. I never met her.

I don't know how good a high school we were then. We were part of a good school district, and we were the biggest school in the state of Virginia.  I had some great teachers, some good teachers and a couple of truly awful ones. But there wasn't a whole lot of questioning of authority going on. I was a pretty timid kid, at least by the standards of what I wished I was.

But on the other side of the world, there were kids only two or three years older than me fighting in a war that would never make any sense. I doubt that more than a handful of kids in our school had any idea what was happening in Ia Drang, and this was a school with a very large number of military brats.

Two weeks after the battle ended, CBS News did a half-hour special on the first major battle in Vietnam involving American troops. If you watch it, you'll notice two things. First, the degree of professionalism and the lack of opinion in the piece. Second, how sanitized it is.





We never really saw Vietnam on the news, but what we did see had a lot to do with turning Americans against a war that was a mistake from the start. But we lacked the subtlety to see the difference between the politicians who got us into the war and the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who did their duty serving in the war.

Then the movies started coming, and even though some have been highly regarded, most of them Hollywoodized the war. One of the first might have been the worst. John Wayne's "The Green Berets" got the war so wrong, he actually had a scene in which the sun set slowly into the South China Sea -- in the east.

Wayne's movie may have been the cinematic equivalent of Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets," which was the second-worst song of the '60s only because of a real horror called "An Open Letter to My Teenage Son," in which Victor Lundberg told his son it was OK to have long hair or a beard, but if he ever burned his draft card, he might as well burn his birth certificate.

Mel Gibson as Hal Moore

There were certainly good movies made about the war, but one of the ones that really got it right was Randall Wallace's "We Were Soldiers," which was mostly about Ia Drang and the first three days of the battle.

Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, who collaborated with journalist Joe Galloway to write "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," was pleased with the movie made from his book.

The website Ranker has a list from first to worst of 76 movies about the Vietnam War, and it's not bad. The only real problem is that it's done by people coming to the page and voting, and I've certainly got a hard time with "Green Berets" and "Forrest Gump" being top 10 Vietnam movies.

But Ranker has "We Were Soldiers" fourth behind "Full Metal Jacket," "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now." Not terrible.

I don't remember much about November 1965. I was 15 going on 11 in some ways. Most of my greatest pleasures came from music, either playing in the symphonic band or listening to the radio. I had one of my best teachers for American History and maybe my worst ever for French I.

Vietnam was never on my mind.

I'm pretty sure I never had a conversation on the subject till my first year of college. When I think back 49 years, all I recall is a kid who seemed to be sleepwalking through his own life.

I was scared of everything, although not on a conscious level, and my parents were afraid I would do something to hurt myself or foreclose my future.

So of course I did both.

I certainly can't say I would have been better off if I had served in the military. I think I might have been one of the unfortunate ones who stepped off the plane in Vietnam only to find a bullet my first week there.

But I do know I never got the chance to be part of something bigger than myself. I never got the chance to take pride in being unselfish or brave.

Yes, I might have died.

But there is also a good chance that I would have turned out to be a much better person.

It might have been worth the risk.

"We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young."
-- "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young" 

A long search for the middle ground still an ongoing one

I wrote the following manifesto more than seven years ago, with the help of a dozen or so other contributors in the search for a political party that could find a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans.

If you read it, you will see that issues that have become much more prominent since 2007 aren't even mentioned. Same-sex marriage, Wall Street corruption, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are addressed only by the statement that "we ask only that people come to their conclusions for reasons that exalt our common humanity rather than abase it."

We were searching for a common ground, and if some of our solutions lean slightly left, we certainly tried to be fair and reasonable in our conclusions.

Perhaps our most important statement was this:

"We reject the politics of fear and hatred on either side."

I hope you'll read this and see some sense in it. I'm farther to the left now than I was when I wrote this, but I still think the platform for what we called the Western Independent Party makes sense.

***

There are times in history when groups established to further the aims of people either become unresponsive to those aims or inconsistent with the legitimate objectives they were conceived to pursue.

This has happened before, but few have become so distorted or misdirected as in the modern two-party system. We believe both the Democratic and Republican parties have been corrupted to the point where their only real value is to the large contributors who finance their operations and those who hold office under their banners.

We are convinced that while there are good people in both parties, the organizations themselves are corrupted beyond redemption and utterly unsuited to serving as vessels for change to benefit society at large.

It is because we as Americans are guided first and foremost by love of our country that we seek to find a middle ground where all men and women of good will can work for the common good.

We do this in the belief that in a successful political system, whether broken or healthy, no one is exempt from the effort to find common ground. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

We recognize today, as Jefferson did in 1776, that men and women cannot choose to surrender these rights, and that as Benjamin Franklin said, people who would yield their freedom in hope of gaining security deserve neither.

It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens, but it must do so in a way that respects our rights as Americans.

A career full of choices, the second half of the story

My life got really weird in the fall of 1985.

My boss at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat ran out of money and stopped paying us. Oh, we kept getting paychecks but they bounced and bounced and bounced. There wasn't a bank in St. Louis that would accept our checks for anything other than collection.

Anyone who threatened not coming to work unless he was paid was told that missing work meant he would go to the bottom of the list when money came in for payroll. We learned that entrepreneur could be a truly obscene word.

Our owner, Jeffrey Gluck, filed for bankruptcy and locked the doors in early December. He owed me five weeks in back pay and seven weeks in vacation and comp time. I got 48 cents on the dollar for the pay five years later and never saw dime one on the other seven weeks.

We were out of work for nearly eight weeks until a new owner decided to try again. Taking a "won't get fooled again" attitude, I started job hunting. I flew to Los Angeles and interviewed for a non-existent opening at the Herald-Examiner in May, and tried for a great job covering the Seattle Seahawks for the Tacoma News-Tribune in June. It was the closest I ever came to the brass ring. I was told there had been 99 applicants and that I was the second choice. The guy who got the job moved to ESPN a few years later as a pro football reporter. His name is John Clayton.

Woulda, coulda?

In October I applied for two jobs and got both of them.

Just in time, because the last week in October, the Globe went down again.

1987 in New Orleans without me.

I had applied for jobs in Greeley, Colorado, and Syracuse, New York. Greeley was a much smaller paper -- smaller than all but one of my previous employers -- but the job was sports editor and I fell in love with Colorado as soon as I stepped off the plane in Denver.

The Syracuse job was what I had been doing in St. Louis -- college basketball -- and meant covering the Orangemen. They went all the way to the NCAA championship game in 1987, but I was watching the game on television from my home in Greeley.

That was one choice I never second guessed. I loved my two years in Colorado, and while I certainly can't regret the way my life turned out, the perfect life would have been having my family and my Colorado life.

I made more bad decisions in 1988 than I had for a long time, mostly based on the promise I had made to a wife I no longer even knew. I had told her we would live in California someday, and I wanted to prove I could do it.

In January I came in second for another great job, covering the San Francisco Giants for the Marin Independent Journal. In the late summer, I applied for job that didn't even sound real -- sports columnist for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Yes, that Honolulu, and the editor told me I was the one he wanted for the job.

So how come I never went there? How come I didn't live happily ever after in the land of surf, sun and luaus?

Well ...

The first problem was that he didn't have the budget to hire in 1988. He said he was pretty sure he would have the money to hire me in 12 months, but he couldn't promise me anything. I told him if I was still available in 1989, I'd be interested.

My interview in Marin had brought me to the attention of Gannett Newspapers, and I got an offer that summer to cover high schools for the Reno Gazette-Journal. I said I wasn't interested, but if something better came along, they could call me.

They called again in late September to see if I would be interested in covering University of Nevada-Reno basketball.

That was when things got weird. I flew out for an interview, and when I saw the paper and the fact that I would be getting a $5,000 raise, I was interested. They didn't exactly offer me the job right away, so I went back to Colorado and waited to hear from them.

One day the next week, the Reno sports editor called and offered me the job. I accepted, and about two hours later the Marin sports editor called me. He said he heard I had accepted a job in Reno.

I told him he had and he said that was a shame. They had another vacancy -- this one covering the San Francisco 49ers -- and he would have offered me the job except that I had accepted the offer from Reno.

I was horrified. I said I would much rather work for him and I would call and turn down the other job. Sadly, he said, I couldn't do it. Since they were part of the same chain, he couldn't offer me the job anymore. And that was pretty much the last chance I ever had to move to San Francisco.

I worked in Reno for 18 months and covered two seasons of UNR basketball. Then I finally got my shot at California, although it wasn't the part of the state I wanted. I took a $100 a week pay cut to work in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, the part they call the Inland Empire. The paper was no bigger than Reno, but I was going to spend all my time covering college and professional sports in L.A.

My plan was to get into the market, get noticed by the big boys and wind up at either the Times or the Orange County Register.

It didn't work. Almost from the time I got to Southern California, the job market for sportswriters went into the tank and never came out.

Even worse, after I had been working at the Daily Bulletin only two years, budget cuts eliminated most of the downtown coverage I was doing. In the spring of 1992, I started applying for jobs back East to be closer to friends and family.

Before anything happened on the job front, though, I met my second wife and fell in love almost overnight. All of a sudden, I had nowhere to go. I worked at the Daily Bulletin until 2008, and had some of the highest highs and the lowest lows of my career.

But no more choices.