Welcoming the grandkids back to America for a year or so at "home"

Welcome to Georgia.

The picture shows four -- well, three -- of my favorite people in the world.

My daughter Pauline is pushing the massive cart of luggage and car seats while also carrying little Albanie, nine months old today, on her back.

Next is Madison, the former Amazing Baby who starts second grade in September and will be 7 years old on Sept. 19th. On the right in the Spiderman shirt is Lexington, who will be four in November.

They're emerging from International Arrivals at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, marking the end of a three-year tour in Jamaica.

They are pretty much racing for the next few days. Sunday they leave again for Seattle, for doctor visits and schmoozing with the other side of the family. At the end of August, they'll hop on a plane to take them to the other Washington -- D.C., that is -- where they'll be living for the next nine months or so while Pauline learns to speak Spanish.

This is my daughter's third time through the language program, and it should be the easiest. Her previous two visits were to learn Mandarin Chinese and Indonesian. After those two, Spanish should be a breeze.

"Que pasa?"

It's an exciting life, but a tough one for families. Maddie was born in Beijing, Lex was born in Seattle during the Surabaya tour and Albanie was born last Halloween in Jamaica.

Pauline's next tour will be the first in a long time that doesn't include time off to have a baby. Three, she says, are definitely enough.

The next year or so will be very different for the children. The only year Maddie spent in this country was from age 1-2. Lex has never really lived in the U.S.

Even though they will be nearly 700 miles away in Northern Virginia, I'm happy to have them so close. If things work out, we'll visit them two or three times between now and next May, when Pauline will be getting ready to go to Guatemala for three years.

Her life is definitely more interesting than mine.

Why isn't this a better world? Because we don't do 'difficult' things

"Imagine there's no heaven ..."

As the story goes, when John Lennon wrote "Imagine," he wasn't setting out to write an anthem. He just wanted to write a good song about all the things that stand in the way of people being truly happy and then ask people to consider what the world could be like without those things.

For a period of about four years, millions of young people in the United States, Canada, Europe and all around the world really believed we could build a world based on those principles.

No heaven.

No religion.

No countries.

No possessions.

"No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world ..."

People laugh at that attitude now and sneer at all the "naive" people who would work toward that sort of world. Too many bad people, they say. Too many predators. Human nature would never accept that sort of world.

Besides, we didn't care enough to fight for it. Some people tried, and some people are still trying. They're still fighting the good fight against racism, sexism, corporatism, militarism and all the other -isms.

What do we do? We call them old hippies and laugh at their naivete. Can't they understand, we say, that people can't make a difference anymore?

But our voices barely matter and can hardly be heard anymore. If you look at the generation now beginning to retire, we didn't just give up on changing the world. We put the worst among us -- the greediest, the meanest, the most sociopathic -- in charge of things.

We may not be to blame for Richard Nixon. Most of us couldn't vote in 1968, and 1972 was a whole different story -- they called it "All the President's Men."

But only the very last of the boomers were too young to vote in 1980, so we have to take responsibility for Ronald Reagan, and there's no way anyone else was to blame for George W. Bush in 2000.

The worst thing of all is that we are in complete denial about the fact that between 1981 and 2009, for 16 years of that time we had presidents with no intellectual curiosity, no subtlety in their thinking and not enough basic intelligence to grasp the difficult issues.

In Will Bunch's fascinating book "Tear Down this Myth," he quotes an aide who said that early in Reagan's time in the White House, he was having a meeting about a complex issue. As the discussion went on around him, it was apparent Reagan couldn't keep up and had no idea what they were discussing.

He wasn't a details guy. He had three basic beliefs -- anti-communism, smaller government and lower taxes. As long as the people working for him kept that in mind, they could pretty well do what they wanted.

Bush was actually worse. He pretty much left everything to his subordinates, and the neocons in his administration trashed our economy and our reputation in the world.

Did we care? Not much. We were rolling along in our careers, hitting our peak earning years and hey, how about that Viagra.

Stephen King pretty well summed up our generation in "Why We're in Vietnam," a novella inside his outstanding "Hearts in Atlantis":

"We never got out. We never got out of the green. Our generation died there.

"We're the generation that invented Super Mario Brothers,  the ATV, laser missile-guidance systems, and crack cocaine. We discovered Richard Simmons, Scott Peck and Martha Stewart Living. Our idea of a major lifestyle change is buying a dog.

"The girls who burned their bras now buy their lingerie from Victoria's Secret and the boys who f***ed fearlessly for peace are now fat guys who sit in front of their computer screens late at night, pulling their puddings while they look at pictures of naked 18-year-olds on the Internet.

"That's us, brother. We like to watch. Movies, video games, live car-chase footage, fist fights on the Jerry Springer Show, Mark McGwire, World Wrestling Federation, impeachment hearings, we don't care. We just like to watch. But there was a time ... don't laugh, but there really was a time we had it all in our hands.

"When did we lose it? When did we settle for a ridiculously materialistic lifestyle that is so over the top sometimes we just have to laugh our asses off at ourselves?"

 I figure it was sometime in the late '70s.

So you're blaming it on disco? 

Nah, I figure it was mostly Nixon's fault. The more papers and tapes that are released, the more we learn about what really was happening in his White House, the more Nixon starts looking like some political version of an American antichrist.

He killed our national spirit, and neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter could bring it back. Carter talked some sense about things like energy, but he wasn't saying anything we wanted to hear.

 So America voted for Reagan after a campaign that was little more than "U-S-A, U-S-A!" repeated again and again.

A month later, Lennon was killed in New York City, and a world of "Imagine" was pretty much gone.

No heaven? Don't tell Jerry Falwell.

No religion? The '80s were pretty much the time religious tolerance started to die and fundamentalists of all sorts went to war with each other.

 No countries? None that mattered except for the USA.

No possessions? Don't make me laugh. The '80s were the decade we started spending and never stopped.

In 2014, we're all about our possessions, baby. We've got more gadgets than we could possibly have imagined 40 years ago. Remember when big screen TVs first came along and you wanted one? Now if you're like a lot of us, you have more big screen TVs than you have people in your house.

Imagine no possessions isn't just ridiculous, it's all but impossible.

Did we change? Actually, the problem is that we didn't. When we had the chance to evolve and really change the world, we sat back and said one thing:

"No, that's too difficult."

Sad, but true. It's probably a good thing Lennon didn't live to see it, although we still have his wonderful song to remind us of how things could have been.

If we were better people.

We used to be able to laugh, but now we're the punchline to the joke

Note: This is a reworking of something I wrote six years ago, something that seems more and more appropriate 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.

In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky wrote what at the time seemed like an apocalyptic view of television news. These days "Network" just seems like something else we would find if we whipped through our 500 channels fast enough.

Yes, Walt Kelly, we definitely have met the enemy and he definitely is us.

Network

We're dumber than dirt, fatter than pigs and we elect people to office we'd love to share our pallet-sized nachos and oil tanker-sized beer with.

Whatever happened to being better off when people smarter than we were ran the country?

These days we're ready to turn the keys to the Ship of State over to Goober, who's only in the show because Gomer left for the Marine Corps when they told him about Show Tunes Night at the local Officers Club.

We've torched our economy so badly that we may have to settle for 8-9 percent unemployment for the near future, but hey, no problem. Your cable company is about one good jump away from giving you a new feature -- Virtual Sex.

Max Frost

And when you can sit in your recliner -- or recline in your sitter -- and make love to Megan Fox or Britney Spears 24 hours a day, all they've got to do is hook up an IV and a catheter and you, sir, are no longer a problem.

So what can we do about it, assuming that enough people still give a shit?

I'm figuring if we still want to be anything more than a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutschebank, we probably need to write off everyone ever 30 years old.

Oh, I know that's not fair, that certainly some older folks could be part of the solution, but it's too late. We need to go Max Frost on their asses and set up those camps where all the old folks can sit in the sun, stay high on LSD and get out of the way.

Of course, we probably need to write off about half the folks under 30 too. I'm thinking the deciding factors there will be body mass index and how many hours a week they play video games.

Let the ones with lean and hungry looks run things, and I'm betting they could get us back to the days when men were men and sheep were very nervous, the times when the only thing Chinese we had to worry about was whether our chow mein was any good.

John Prine, "Sam Stone"

When people looked at America and saw Audie Murphy and Amelia Earhart, that was one thing. When they look now, they see Rush Limbaugh and Rosie O'Donnell, and that's another thing entirely.
People around the world laugh knowingly when they see Americans spend thousands of dollars to "upgrade" from a 60-inch television to a 66-incher. When they see us super sizing everything from Freedom Fries to Cialis.

Is it any wonder that Europeans look at us and call us the teenagers of the world?

In his wonderful song "Sam Stone," the legendary John Prine wrote that "there's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes." He was writing about heroin, but our holes are in our hearts and minds and we try to fill them with food and toys.

Once we were the envy of the world, for our freedoms and our dedication to preserving them. Now we argue over whether Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien should have the "Tonight Show."

They're not laughing with us anymore.

That's because we are the punch line.

We might be better off dropping the term "middle class" for the truth

Middle class ... or working class?

Ten years or so back, when I was working in Southern California, I attended a conference for media covering business entitled "The Middle Class on Life Support."

Its premise was that it was becoming impossible in many parts of California to live a middle-class lifestyle -- the so-called "American Dream" -- on a middle-class income.

Conferences like that always have to begin with defining terms, because if you were to ask 100 random Americans where they fit in financially, 90 would say they were middle class.

Well, let's define some terms.

On a scale of 0-100, those folks in the 41st percentile up to the 60th would be considered middle class. We can call 21-40 lower middle class and 61-80 upper middle class. Those between 1-20 would be lower class and those from 81-100 would be upper class.

More than anything else, America is now a consuming society

Farmers have known for a long time that you should never ever eat your seed corn.

When the food starts to run out, when hunger pangs get stronger, there is a temptation to reach back into the pantry and start eating the corn that was held back to plant in the spring for the next crop.

But if you do that, even in part, you start yourself on a downhill slide that is difficult to reverse.

Eventually, you will starve.

It's when I consider the example of eating the seed corn that I find it impossible that more people don't see our nation is in a state of decline. We Americans have been eating our seed corn for so long -- both literally and figuratively -- that we are both fat and starving at the same time.

Look at our infrastructure, collapsing around us. That's part of the seed corn of our society, but we have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars in military adventures around the world while failing to keep up our roads and bridges.

Look at our culture. Culture is how we pass on our values from one generation to the next, and in many way's it's our moral seed corn.

Yet instead of using our culture to build strong, confident children who become strong, confident adults, we're feeding our children the moral equivalent of excrement.

You don't think we're in decline?

Look at all the cities that are dying.

Look at all the states that are overwhelmed with debt.

A long way to go to get back to our American dreams

I wrote this as a warning five years ago September. The situation has only gotten worse since then.

I'm getting sick and tired of the way this country has changed in the last 20 years or so, and not the least of which is that we seem to revel in wallowing in the past.

Today was the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and of course there were ceremonies in plenty of different places honoring those who died and swearing eternal enmity against those who committed the attacks.

So what?

This used to be a country that looked to the future. This used to be a country that shrugged off its failures and mistakes and said that it was all right, that tomorrow would be better -- because we are Americans and we believe in the future.

America the pitiful

Hell, I can't find anyone who really thinks about the future anymore. The future in this country is so damn frightening that conservatives want us to go back to the '50s and liberals want us to go back to the '60s.

Politicians still lie to us when they say they believe our greatest days are ahead of us, but that's only because -- as Jack Nicholson so famously said in "A Few Good Men" -- we can't handle the truth.

The truth is that we got fat, stupid and lazy. We were content to stop making things. We convinced ourselves that the future was all about the information economy, and we started paying people fabulous sums of money for doing nothing more than moving money around.

We turned into the damn Eloi, and it says plenty about our country that a lot of you will have no idea what that means.

Facebook has its goofy side, but it's still a source of human contact

There are times I find myself thinking Facebook is a colossal waste of time.

During the last few years I was working, I wasted a lot of time on the Internet, and that was before I even joined Facebook.

In those days, I was spending a lot of time on baseball sites and also on Huffington Post doing my part to hold back the right wing.

I can't remember who got me to try Facebook, but I do recall that most of my time was spent playing Mafia Wars, Zombie Lane and some interactive war game whose name I can't remember.

I really didn't post very often and I rarely commented on other people's posts.

It was just another way to kill time.

Then Chris Miller came along. And Joyce Lundeen. And Leslie Eglin, Tara Hagenbrock and Donna Sizemore. Each of those people were friends -- some closer than others -- who I hadn't seen or been in contact with for 20-30 years.

All were on Facebook.

So were former colleagues, acquaintances and even a few relatives. Not to mention my closest friends in the world, and this gave me another way to keep in touch with them. I really wish that was all I did on Facebook, along with maybe promoting the other writing I do, but I get snaked into far too many political discussions with far too many people I don't respect.

Facebook? You bet.

Ask yourself a question. Have you ever been involved in a political discussion on Facebook where you changed someone else's mind? Or where someone else changed yours? Seriously, have you ever posted something that said "Wow, I never thought of it that way" and really looked at an issue differently?

In fact, I think if I were going to curse someone, I would say "May you always be 100 percent certain of everything you believe."

That's why issue-oriented posts really do tend to waste our time, especially if they result in a pro-con debate on an issue. Global warming? Climate change? This is an important issue to my friend Mick -- I have no idea why; he's not the outdoorsy type -- and he argues the unpopular side of the issue.

Responses to issue posts usually end up being either "You da man" or "You're an idiot," although most are milder versions of those two. Mick is different in that respect. He usually posts long, convoluted responses filled with an amazing amount of detail. When that doesn't work, he accuses you of not understanding the issue the way he does.

I'm actually convinced that political discussions and related arguments are actually the most useless part of Facebook. Although all the stuff people post about how important coffee is to them isn't much better, and if you need Facebook to learn about Jesus, you probably have other problems.

I love dogs, and I'm not much of a cat person, but all the stuff posted about dogs and cats eventually wears on you. Actually everything becomes repetitious if you spend enough time online.

Facebook? Uh huh.

What do I enjoy about Facebook. I mentioned my long-lost friends earlier, but it has also been nice to be able to keep in closer touch with my daughter Pauline, who regularly posts photos of her three wonderful children -- my three wonderful grandchildren -- on Facebook.

Here's the oldest -- 6-year-old Madison -- swimming like an eel underwater. Between Facebook and Skype, I can actually keep track of them when they are thousands of miles away on the other side of the world.

I can keep track of my only two nephews -- Jacob and Nathan -- through Facebook.

Maybe the nicest surprise of all, though, was seeing that Billie Johnson and Red Jenkins were on Facebook. The last time I saw Billie was in June 1967. She was my 12th-grade government teacher, one of the very best teachers of my high school years. Red was the basketball coach at my high school and my phys ed teacher in both ninth and 11th grade.

I actually had some contact with him in 1981, when my first newspaper job brought me back to my old school to cover a basketball game. I'm pretty certain it was the only time in the last 48 years I actually set foot inside the school.

Both of them are retired now, and the age difference between us means a lot less to me at age 65 than it did when I was 17.

So yes, Facebook has its good points.

I just have to learn to stay out of the arguments. After all, it's a lot like wrestling with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.