1996 | The American Pile

Is There Hope For The Republic After All?

Talk show legends Phil Donahue and Dick Cavett both have announced they'll call it quits at the end of their current contracts. Both promised they'll hang around the media and entertainment business, to work on new and special projects.

In the frozen food trough at my local hypermarket I encounter the following: Crinkle Cut Potatoes, Golden Crinkles Potatoes, Crispy Crowns, Potato Nuggets, Hash Brown Potatoes, Shredded Hash Brown Potatoes, Country Hash Brown Potatoes, Pixie Crinkle Potatoes, Shoestring Potatoes, Potato Tri-Patties, Tater Babies, Tater Puffs, Tater Tots, Long Branch French Fried Potatoes, Fajita Fries, Curley Q Fries, Zesty Fries, Fast Fries, Country Fries, and Steak Fries. No nation needs this many choices.

The business pages are littered with stories about the decline of Apple Computer, which faces an uncertain future because of declining market share. Apple, surely by mere coincidence, announced February 5 that it may award more than $4.26 million in "severance pay" to its former chief executive, Michael Spindler, fired last week for failing to increase Apple's market share. Meantime, across this great nation of ours, thousands lose their jobs daily in downsizings, mergers and reorganizations. There's something screwy abut a society which parcels out its rewards this way.

Oh, So That's Why They Look So Awful

". . .the 'edgy' look in fashion is as much a matter of hair (disheveled) and attitude (mean, never smiling) as it is about clothes. . . (it's about). . .pushing the envelope to the edge, edging into bad taste, edging into dangerous territory. . .As Calvin Klein described his spring collection: "It's about intentional near misses and jarring mistakes that add up to an approach to dressing that's entirely modern." Translated into clothes it means too-tight sweaters worn over skirts that hang slightly off kilter, black tights with see-through gingham checks. . .questionable color combinations such as a lavender sweater over a turquoise dress with black opaque pantyhose and yellow patent sling-back pumps." --Marylou Luther, fashion editor and columnist, answering a reader's question about the word "edgy" as it applies to current fashion, in the December, 1995, issue of United Airlines' inflight magazine, Hemispheres.

And Somebody's A 100 Percent Idiot

An Indianapolis jury verdict today shows how far down the road (90 per cent) to complete denial of individual responsibility this great nation has gone. The facts were these: a small group of 12- and 13-year-olds went to a birthday party at a friend's house. The parents of the youth whose birthday was being celebrated allowed the youngsters to go out after dark for a scavenger hunt. One of the partygoers, a 13-year-old boy, was walking down the middle of Moller Road, a heavily traveled westside street, when he was struck by a car and killed. His parents then sued, claiming the host parents were guilty of failing to "take care of" the youths who attended the party. The verdict declared the parents were "70 percent responsible" for the lad's death. The car driver was ruled "20 percent responsible" but he was, for reasons not revealed (but readily guessed at--how about: he had no insurance?), not sued. The dead child was deemed 10 percent responsible for his own death. (February 12, 1996)

My oldest daughter, Frigga, called to ask for help on a college discussion question: Name the three most influential white people in 20th century American history. I was hard-pressed to think of even one. I struggled and came up with these: Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, who developed polio vaccine in the 1950s; Rush Limbaugh, for his role in the meteoric rise of talk radio (which has broken the iron grip on information and communication long held by the three TV networks and a few major media outlets); Jonathan Winters. Who else is there who's mattered a whit? I could use help on this. Honky males are so out of fashion these days.

I Hear Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch Cheering For. . .

. . . the Wayne County (Michigan) judge who ordered local attorney Stephanie Watson to appear this week in court on charges of failing to pay 954 city parking tickets totaling over $30,000 in fines. An assistant city attorney described Watson as "the No. 1 scofflaw in the city" and promised her that the city's lawsuit to collect the fines is "not going away." Watson has contended that on all 954 occasions she either never received the tickets or someone else was driving her car when the ticket was issued. Sure.

Human Civilization Marches Onward and Upward Department

A ram that served as mascot for the University of North Carolina's athletic teams has been found stabbed to death and disemboweled near Chapel Hill, N.C. Ramses XXVI was the latest in a succession of rams that had served as mascot since 1924.

I took a first pass at writing my obituary today. It'll take some thought. Best to be prepared, ready to go.

Writing that letter to Jonathan Winters is still on my to-do list. It's an intimidating prospect.

There was almost big trouble down in Richmond, Virginia, last week, but--whew!--the Bonnie Blue Ball went off without violence. The February 24 dance was sponsored by the Museum of The Confederacy as a birthday party for the institution and a way to attract new members. The event quickly became controversial when blacks and civil rights leaders criticized the museum for staging the event during Black History Month. Cries of racism and "white defiance" erupted. Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder went on NBC's Today show to denounce the event and compare people wearing Confederate costumes to "jackboooted Nazis." Strangely enough, none from the big media glitterati, the wacko Religious Left or the exquisitely sensitive American cultural elite could be heard chastising Wilder for his racist remarks. The New York Times News Service apparently sent a reporter, for its account of the ball noted that "the only black people among Saturday night's crowd of 500 were at the catering stations, pouring bourbon and dishing up black-eyed pea salsa and sweet-potato biscuits." Martha Boltz, a fourth-generation member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who knows very well why, was quoted by the Times saying, "I don't see why pride in heritage has to be limited to one group." The part I liked best, though, was this: The ball's organizers, who had been worried about breaking even, sold out of tickets shortly after Wilder's NBC diatribe.

There's A Darwin Award Nominee In Here, Somewhere

Miguel Gonzales of Honolulu was sentenced to an anger-management class after he assaulted his girlfriend. It turned out to be a death sentence. He showed up drunk for one class, and his instructor allegedly got angry and beat him, leaving him brain dead. The instructor, Charles Mahuka, was on parole for attempted murder." --Charles Oliver, writing in the "Brickbats" column of Reason magazine, January 1996 edition.)

Latest Job Opportunities in America: Counseling victims of Internet addiction. Suport groups are springing up around the country and social scientists are already at work writing books, interviewing victims, lobbying for funds. What a great country!

I was looking forward to a beautiful day March 6, one filled with excitement, challenge, and opportunity. All was well till the Indianapolis Star alerted me to the latest horror stalking the American people: dirty dishrags. Writer Patti Denton dragged this one into the light. Even day-old dirty dishrags, she warned, can hold enough bacteria to cause salmonella food poisoning and urinary tract infections. Washing hands regularly with antibacterial soap, using paper towels to wipe surfaces, and daily changing of dishrags were recommended. Another day ruined.

But Nobody Asked For Spelling Lessons

About 1,000 angry protesters screamed, waved Mexican flags and signs (one of which read "Racist Fibune"), and demanded a front-page apology--but not spelling lessons--from the Chicago Tribune March 1 following a Mike Royko column the howlers claimed insulted Mexicans. Royko said the column was a satire. The angry crowd tore up copies of the Tribune and demanded that Royko be fired and that more Hispanic reporters be hired. The Tribune offered a soothing apologetic editorial in later editions. Mayor Richard Daley said Royko "has to be much more understanding and sensitive to the community." Saul Garcia, a protest organizer from Latinos United, said, "We are not against freedom of speech. What we are against is freedom of speech that promotes racist stereotypes." Like Saul said, he is against freedom of speech.

This alert, just in from a renowned Indianapolis proctologist and annotator: keep an eye peeled for America's newest euphemism. . . commercial sex workers. This is code for: prostitutes. He spotted the term in an article in American Journal of Public Health.

All Hail Judge Milton Shadur!

A truly nineties entitlement dance appears for the moment to have played out in Chicago. It began in February when Larry Jackson was suspended from his Oak Park High School basketball team for shoving his coach. Jackson promptly transferred to Farragut but Chicago school officials ruled he was ineligible to play. Jackson filed a federal lawsuit claiming his rights were violated because he hadn't been notified in writing and given a hearing. He asked the court to rule him eligible to play immediately. U.S. District Senior Judge Milton Shadur rejected that bid. Jackson's lawyer amended the lawsuit and claimed he had the right to play basketball because he met eligibility standards. On March 8, Judge Shadur responded again. This time he piled lawbooks high on his bench and read the attorneys a list of cases holding that--and here, by golly, is the big shocker--high school students don't have a constitutional right to play sports. Judge Shadur turned down the lad's request for a restraining order, ruled the suit has no federal issues, and tossed it out of court. We can be sure Jackson's attorney knew all along that no such constitutional right existed, and that there were precedents saying so. Instead they went trolling for a judge who'd entertain their damned nonsense. Luckily for us, they picked the wrong one. Bet money the lad and his attorney will re-file the case in another court. These people never stop.

Two More Reasons To Go On Living

March is Frozen Food Month. . .Courtside seats to New York Knicks home games now cost $1,000 each.

Snapshots of America Department: About 97,700 federal tax refunds worth $81 million could not be returned to Americans last year because of illegible handwriting on the tax return or errors in the addresses provided.
Little Known Facts Department: Not only is there a Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) but it plans to launch within the year its own new publication, the Journal of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. Sign me up!

Our Lives Will Be Forever Emptier If We Miss This

The syndicated TV news magazine show, Day & Date, was to broadcast a 20-minute videotape this week of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his girlfriend, Carolyn Bessette, quarreling and making up in New York's Central Park. According to wire service reports, the lovely young couple was seen eating, walking, talking, pouting, crying, and making up, after which Bessette tried to bum a cigarette off a stranger. The show paid "more than $5,000 and less than $1 million" for the rights to the tape.

My wife, Mogo, and I were reflecting on the joys of our youth last night and in the Life As We Remember It Department came up with the following (incomplete) College Freshman Chemistry Student's Table of The Elements: Beer. Lightning. Ear Wax. Farts. Cigarette Ashes. Yellow Snow. Spit. Pubic hair. Skidmarks. Are there others we missed? Neither of us was very good in chemistry.

American Society's Spin Down The Toilet Continues Department: A fourteen-year-old girl at a junior high school in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, has filed a lawsuit seeking to overthrow a decision by school officials to ban backpacks from hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms on the grounds they are a safety and health hazard. Local taxpayers will now get to spend thousands of dollars defending themselves from another insipid twit in their midst. Look for local rights activists and the ACLU to be smirking proudly at the plaintiff's side as this absurd case unfolds.

Save The Last Dance (And Clip of Ammo) For Me (Just In Case)

Adult authorities at Indiana State University in Terre Haute may end a moratorium on late-night events on campus by the end of March and switch to metal detectors to prevent dances and other campus gatherings from turning violent. The moratorium was instituted last October when two campus police officers were assaulted after a sorority dance. A week later, two students were shot at a Homecoming dance. Ain't college the time of our lives!?

The tension is rising as the March 25 Oscar awards ceremony draws near. USA Today, in a pre-Oscar feature about "Oscar fashion" competition, noted that the Hush Puppy Shoe Co. has sent custom-made dress shoes to each best actor and supporting actor nominee in an effort to get its product seen. . .and the article quoted actress Sandra Bullock explaining why she preferred Calvin Klein clothing over all other types: "I like his clothes because they're so uncomplicated and easy to figure out." Most people just put clothing on; there's nothing to "figure out." Not Sandra, apparently. And while America holds its breath to see if Kevin Spacey wears his free Hush Puppies, millions around the world will be starving and without shoes. And this is merely a prelude to what will happen if Bob Dole is elected president and the Republicans extend their control of Congress. (March 22, 1996) ]

I'll confess. I'm the guy dancing and sliding down the bannister in the latest Wyndham Hotels ad running on CNN. It was, as viewers can tell, a nearly indescribable thrill being in the world of business.

Westinghouse Electric Corp. has revealed it gave chief executive Michael (No Relation to Air) Jordan a 61 percent pay increase (to $2.52 million) as Westinghouse's annual income fell 80 percent. Meantime, Republicans are starving children and evicting old people from nursing homes. Who are you gonna vote for in November?
Get Ready To Say Adios to Tammy Faye Department: The legendary Tammy Faye Bakker Messner is being treated for colon cancer. Her second husband, contractor Roe Messner, has just been sentenced to 27 months in prison for bankruptcy fraud. Her first husband, televangelist Jim Bakker, was freed in December of 1994 after serving 4.5 years for fraud.

He Must Have Mistakenly Taken The Idiot's Cove Exit Off The Evolutionary Freeway

John Haley, 18, of Shreveport, Louisiana, suffered a minor head wound while out strolling in March when, alarmed by approaching police cars, he threw his gun on the ground to get rid of it and it went off. His uncle, Ron Lavell Dotson, 24, then drove Haley to the hospital and crashed through the emergency room doors, injuring a hospital employee, according to an Associated Press report. You couldn't make this stuff any more absurd if you made it up.

A Possible Hallucination

I picked up an old compadre at the Indianapolis airport the other night. I put on my pig nose for this special occasion, and introduced myself as Dr. Maynard G. Golo. We yucked it up and he said he was plenty impressed. Off at the edge of my view, though, I more than once thought I saw someone move closer to a phone, or motion discreetly to an armed policeman nearby. I could have been hallucinating, of course.

"Scared of all that frosting on Kellogg's frosted mini-wheat cereal?" That's the question Kellogg's is asking millions and millions of Americans lucky enough to receive by mail a sample box of its latest marketing niche strategy, mini-wheats frosted on only one side. After struggling unsuccessfully to commit suicide by putting the plastic mailing bag over my head--ignoring the government warning, for which I may be sent to prison--I called Kellogg's' 800 number to express my heartfelt gratitude for this new product. Reading directly from the mailing bag, I told them, somewhat breathlessly, I thought, that, "Hey! One side's sweet, but the other side's wheat!" I said I really dug the "surprisingly delicious sweet but not too sweet taste." My call was forwarded to the marketing department where I was offered a job as an advertising copy writer. You just live for days like this.

The fate of the popular TV program, Murder, She Wrote, is instructive as to where our civilization is headed. CBS has announced the program will end its 12-year run in May. Though it was a dominant ratings force for a decade, CBS this year moved it from its longstanding Sunday time slot to Thursday. There, according to a March 27 USA Today account, "it withered against NBC's comedy juggernaut." The problem? Murder She Wrote failed to attract enough young viewers. Market analysts have long known that younger viewers spend their money and are easy prey for advertisers. Older viewers are busy saving money, a cardinal sin in our frenzied economy. It hardly requires much imagination to foresee the day when advertisers will arrange legislation legalizing the killing of old people who fail to buy a specified minimum amount of products annually. (March 27, 1996)

Jesse Jackson's protest that Hollywood doesn't nominate enough blacks for Academy Awards rings hollow. I've checked, and there's no record of Jesse protesting at NFL or NBA games where blacks comprise far more than their proportionate share of professional rosters. Unless he's ready to be consistent he ought to shut up. Unless of course it's a race thing. (March 30, 1996)

Call Sally Jessie! Call Phil and Oprah! Call Jerry! We Can Still Put Together a Special Weeklong Series on This! Department: Out of Patterson, Missouri, comes this beauty. . .two teen-agers and a young man who hoped to get on national television news by taking over their boarding school at gunpoint killed a classmate because they thought he'd get in their way, according to wire service reports today. Will Futrelle, 16, was found dead March 25 in the woods at Mountain Park Baptist Academy, a school in the Ozarks for "troubled youngsters." He'd been beaten with a club and a brick, and his throat had been slashed with a pocket knife. Anthony Gene Rutherford, 18, and two 15-year-old boys from California have been arrested in the case. Let the questing for celebrity continue.

That Unholy Duo Again

I fishtailed over to my neighborhood Kohl's department store Saturday and added to my fine wardrobe the following: a Bugle Boy brand short sleeved shirt made in Bangladesh, a Croft & Barrow brand white Oxford cloth dress shirt made in Honduras, a Sonoma knit polo shirt made in Guatemala, a Croft & Barrow polo shirt made in Guatemala, and a C&B Sport brand poplin lightweight jacket made in Korea. The unholy duo of Republican greed and unbridled capitalism is doubtless the reason there's nothing made in America anymore.

Best News I Heard in March: A federal appeals court panel has upheld a ruling that the University of Texas improperly denied admission to four white students on the basis of their race while admitting minorities with inferior scores and qualifications. Angry UT Law School officials temporarily suspended their admissions processing and vowed to appeal the decision. The issue may drag on for decades in appeals, but it's encouraging to see courts begin to stand up to the fraud of affirmative action. (March 31, 1996)

Competition seems to have sharpened minds at Ford Motor Company, where bold new cost-cutting initiatives were announced in early March. Ford researchers discovered the company offers 14 different cigarette lighters in its vehicles. It's decided to use just one, and projects savings of $1 million annually as a result. Further sleuthing revealed that Ford now offers 18 air filters (meaning, among other things, 17-1 odds against a customer getting the right filter) and seven different kinds of trunk carpeting. The company has decided to reduce those to five filters and one trunk carpet, and to stop painting the insides of vehicle ashtrays. These and many more years-overdue common sense decisions will enable Ford to save an estimated $11 billion. Will the prices on Ford vehicle prices go down as a result? Nope. The larger question is how a company drifts into such absurd situations as 18 air filters and 14 cigarette lighters in the first place.

I have in mind a series of special Christmas cards based on a work of art I saw in the Tate Gallery in London, titled "Self-Burial (1969)" by Keith Arnatt. It consisted of nine photographs in a sequence. The first showed the artist standing on a patch of ground. Succeeding pictures showed Arnatt "sinking" into the earth. In the first he was buried upright halfway to his knees; in the next, to mid-thigh; and so forth, proceeding gourdward to chest, shoulders, neck, mouth, forehead, then. . .nothing. Grass grew over the spot in the final picture. All neatly done, no trace of dirt piles or disturbances of any kind. There are a few logistics to be worked out, of course, but I have a hunch this one will prove irresistible to me.

Also in the Tate Gallery that summer was an entire room devoted to paintings by Mark Rothko. They were mostly huge, gloomy things, squares and rectangles of muddy greys, blacks and reds. The leaflet handed out to visitors indicated Rothko had committed suicide. He made the right choice.

The British have a charming way with words. When British workers are fired or laid off permanently, the press says they were "made redundant." I discovered another colorful phrasing while chatting on a London-to-Dover train ride with Marian, a 67-year-old retiree. She was going to Deal, a seacoast town, to visit her daughter. She said her government pension was 44 pounds (about $65-70) and she supplemented it with interest on her savings. She bought a one-bedroom apartment in Buckinghamshire in 1986 for 44,000 pounds. She considered the space so cramped "you couldn't swing a cat in there."

This "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip is something special. Today's version shows a corpulent Ted Kennedy floating in a Palm Beach swimming pool, reflecting. . .here are the captions: "Life is good. . .I treat women like dirt but support feminist causes. And I get away with my extravagant lifestyle by insisting that the middle class do more to help the poor. . .Wow! Having a 'social conscience' sure beats having a personal one." The artist, Bruce Tinsey, has a brilliant future if he keeps his edge. But "Mallard" should be on the editorial page beside "Doonesbury," just to be consistent, don't you think? (April 2, 1996)

The New York Times reported March 29 that pay for chief executives at America's largest companies rose nearly 15 percent in 1995, the highest increase since the mid-1980s, the period known as the Reaganite-Bushite Decade of Greed. The paper noted that raises for corporate pooh-bahs have increased an average of 11 percent since 1988, a period during which pay for working people has never risen by more than four percent, and while these same corporations eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Times didn't suggest it, but doesn't consistency demand that we label this present period the Clintonista Decade of Greed? That is, if we want to be fair about these things.

The Wilbert burial vault company has submitted a new word for the English language. In a large ad in the April 2 Chicago Tribune promoting its vast range of vault options, Wilbert says, "During the funeralization process. . ."

U-G-L-Y! Ugly, Ugly, Ugly!

I don't normally pay much attention to automobiles, but one night this week enroute home on Old South Friendly Road, I pulled up at a stoplight behind a car I thought particularly ugly. It was a 1996 Ford Taurus. The geniuses at Ford have radically redesigned the car, heavily rounding its contours. The rear window is an oblong shape that reminds me of windows in a bathysphere or deep-sea aquarium. They jacked up its price last fall when the new models came out, too, thinking customers would slavishly line up anyway. After all, Taurus has been the No. 1 selling car in America the last couple of years. Instead, sales dropped sharply and Ford had to rejigger things to eliminate the price hike on at least one model. The boys in Detroit still have trouble getting it. (April 5, 1996)

The pickup truckload of illegals who led police on an hour-long chase in California that ended with their arrests and the beating of two of them by police have--whatever else happens--won America's national lottery. They'll be able to sue for millions in damages. Two lawsuits for over $10 million were filed within days of this Most Recent Unpleasantness. Talk about a land of opportunity! (April 7, 1996)

Don't you think it's time to ditch those backwards baseball caps and find a new ashion statement reflecting the pain, the agony, and the angst of today's youth?

The New York Times reports the price of North American wood pulp has declined 40 percent since last fall. Surely this means local newspapers, which have relentlessly jacked up prices over the last two years using the skyrocketing cost of newsprint as a prime justification, will be calling soon to notify us of a price reduction. Nope. They'll do what any self-respecting business would do: screw the customer and keep the windfall. (April 8, 1996)

Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin is expected to plead not guilty in a Recent Unpleasantness in Dallas. Irvin and another man were found in a hotel room with two topless dancers and certain quantities of marijuana and cocaine. Everybody's basically throwing up his hands and saying the drugs didn't belong to them and they had no idea how they got in the room. Dallas authorities face what other communities across this great nation face: trying a case where defendants deny facts and evidence, and a near-certain not guilty verdict if it goes to a jury. I have a solution. Why don't we resurrect the O.J. Simpson panel and create a permanent, traveling jury on national tour? They could go from city to city performing jury nullification and distributing not guilty verdicts in streamlined sham trials. One of the big television networks--several, probably--could do all-day programming of the proceedings with viewer call-in shows and celebrity pre- and post-trial analysis. Each juror would be given book contracts, his or her own primetime TV show, movie rights, and a line of personal clothing, snack products and self-help videos. This would save communities millions by speeding up trials. It would provide productive and profitable lives for the Simpson jurors, and allow citizens to get on with their own lives, providing they have them.

Say adios to one of my favies, actor Ben Johnson. He died April 8 at age 77. The Chicago Tribune obituary noted his best-known role as Sam, the owner of the movie theater in The Last Picture Show (which earned him an Academy Award for best supporting actor), and cowboy roles in Shane and The Wild Bunch. He appeared in more than 300 films. Johnson uttered one of the greatest (to me) lines in all filmdom when he starred with Marlon Brando and Karl Malden in One-Eyed Jacks. In that movie, Johnson played an unctuous, insincere conniving suck-up who had betrayed the Brando character earlier in the movie. Later, the two characters again crossed paths and Johnson carefully brought up the earlier episode. He told Brando, ""You know me, Rio--if I thought I coulda helped you, I'da been in there like a streak." Ben's honey-smooth cowboy drawl was a sound for sore ears. What a guy!

Say goodbye to novelist Richard Condon, who died April 10 at age 81. His best-known book was The Manchurian Candidate, Published in 1959, it was made into a movie in 1962, barely a year before President Kennedy was assassinated. The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, and Laurence Harvey, the latter an American soldier captured and brainwashed during the Korean War. When he returned to the United States, Harvey was used to assassinate a powerful politician. The film was withdrawn from circulation for many years following the Kennedy assassination, though Condon's Associated Press obituary gave no clue as to why. Condon once said he felt very strongly about the abuse of power by elected officials, a theme coursing through many of his books. "I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians are wronging them." He was right about that part.

Another Dirty, Rotten Trick

Casual Days" are apparently the latest trick played on Generation X'ers. Their self-obsessive whining in the mid-1980s produced casual and "dress down" days in corporate America. That's turned to sniveling at the discovery that "casual days" are "a hoax and a trap"--this from no less than America's fashion and manners arbiter, Judith (Better Known As Miss Manners) Martin. She was quoted in a lengthy Chicago Tribune article April 12 warning readers: "Don't be fooled by that polo shirt your boss is wearing. There's nothing laid-back about casual day." Martin said the trap is the pretense that on casual days your bosses--the big shots, the pooh-bahs, the people you bitterly resent and don't trust for one damned second-- "suspend reading you symbolically." Martin and others interviewed by the Tribune's writer, Lisbeth Levine, agreed that no matter how much the big guys tell you it's O.K. to dress down, the workplace is hyper-competitive and others are judging you by how you look and what you wear as, alas, humans have done since time began. Although 42 percent of America's offices now allow casual dress, many on a daily basis, some research and anecdotal evidence suggests that casual dress means casual attitudes about work. And companies are constantly being pressed by whining employees pushing the envelope to further relax existing casual standards. The Tribune's experts concluded that "clothing has gone about as far as it can go and is enroute to a neater look." What bitter news: appearances still count. The good news, though, is that the new trend is sure to nourish one of America's major growth industries, resentment.

Christ, Magic Tied For 'Triples' Lead

Time magazine reports (April 15) that the recent Easter season saw Jesus make the covers of three major newsweeklies at once, tying Him with Magic Johnson for first place in that department. The news couldn't have come at a better time, and surely made The Saviour feel a good bit better about Himself.

Talk show host Montel Williams, in Chicago last week to promote his autobiography, Mountain, Get Out of My Way, told the Chicago Tribune he thinks he knows why so many people are willing to go on TV shows and expose their darkest, dirtiest secrets to audiences of millions. Being on television proves they exist. I am on TV, therefore I am. "For 20 years, TV has been the great validator," says Montel. "It's the only place in America where you can go and feel like you've been listened to. People feel they have a right to that." Well, some of us, certainly.

A Life Event

I attended my first Gordon Lightfoot concert April 11 in the Murat Theater in Indianapolis. Though Gordon no longer resembles the pensive, tanned young man on his album covers, this was still a Kodak Moment. These images get frozen in one's mind, I suspect. Had I met him on the street, I'd have thought it was just another skinny, slightly gaunt-looking man in his 50s or 60s. The crowd appeared a near sellout, and the applause was warm and sustained and loud throughout the show. Sometimes the clapping began with just the first few notes of one of his signature songs: Pony Man, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Rainy Day People, If You Could Read My Mind, Sundown, For Lovin' Me/Did She Mention My Name? and Don Quixote. Voices in the audience hummed and sang the words of some of the quieter ballads. Lightfoot is no showman. His presentation skills are amateurish. There was almost no repartee with the crowd, no fancy fireworks, no biting the heads off live chickens, no disemboweling of family pets or parents onstage, no self-mutilation, no laser lights. Many songs ended and began with no word spoken to the audience. He stood bowlegged and nearly motionless before the microphone and sang without flourish or bombast. Either because of something wrong with the sound system or--more likely--the effects of age, his voice is no longer the mellow, rich baritone sound on his major albums. Instead, it sounded "tinny," as though the treble was turned up way too high on a stereo. None of this detracted from the overall solemnity and wonder of this occasion for me. Many of Gordon Lightfoot's songs have a deep, soul-stirring impact. He has a unique way of writing about love and loneliness and friendships, about working people and the majesty of green, dark forests and blue whales, and about the sometimes excruciating pain of the human experience (Don Quixote so well embodies that last idea that I want it played at my funeral). I spent much of the evening with tears trickling down my face in the dark. This was like going to the mountaintop. This was a Life Event, as the corporate human resources touchy-feely folks say. Thanks, Gordo.

The Minnesota Timberwolves have announced they've fined Isaiah Rider for missing a team flight to Washington last week. . .a reminder of this truism about the human species: even if you announced an event, a meeting, a flight 5,000 years in advance, X percent of us would still be late. It's in our genes. (April 15, 1996)

The tragic death of the poor little seven-year old in a Wyoming plane crash--surely we all know by now that Jennifer Dubroff was flying the overloaded Cessna and taking off in a rainstorm--was a uniquely American publicity stunt. And when all the insipid blathering from the surviving parent and pundits is over, the bottom line is simple. This was a little girl who should have been allowed to be a little girl. There would have been plenty of time for her to fly an airplane when she grew up (but less time, then, for the parents to feed their egos on it). Jessica was the offspring of what was described as a "New Age spiritual healer" mother and, we may deduce, an equally insipid father. Judging from news reports, she had no chance for a normal childhood. The parents were and are idiots and the child is dead because of them. They ought to be strung up.

This Would Be Great, Except That Her Daughter's 'Position' Is Driven Into The Ground Like a Nail Department

Lisa Blair Hathaway, New Age faith healer and mother of Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-old girl who died April 11 when the Cessna airplane she was trying to fly plunged to the ground nose first attempting a takeoff at Cheyenne, Wyoming, killing Jessica, her father and her flight instructor, offered this dumbfounding comment to eager reporters after the tragedy. . ."I did everything so this child could have freedom and choice and have what America stands for. Liberty comes from. . .just living your life. . .I couldn't bear to have my children in any other position." (April 16, 1996)

Dressing For Success, or Perhaps That's Why My Price Waterhouse Career Foundered Department

The cover story in the April 14 Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine highlighted two up-and-coming Chicago artists, Jeffery Roberts and Nick Cave, who may unwittingly have solved one of the central mysteries of my life: why I didn't achieve greatness in my Price Waterhgouse business career. The answer, I suspect, is tucked away in this seemingly innocuous paragraph by writer Kathy Kaplan: "Cave is an elusive artist, a free spirit whose fascination is mixed media and the juxtaposition of unexpected objects. He recently designed a collection of 20 "sound suits"--suits made of materials like twigs, bottle caps and sisal--that create sound when he performs in them." Determined not to make the same mistake twice, I called Cave--somewhat breathlessly, I thought--and ordered the entire collection of 20. Topped off--somewhat floppily, I imagine--with my stylish snap-brim fedora made from lunchmeat, this new wardrobe could spell home run for me in the job interviewing and career-rebuilding department.

On Gordon Liddy's recommendation, I watched the movie, Braveheart, starring Mel Gibson in the role of William Wallace, a 13th century Scotsman who led a rebellion against the English throne and King Edward. The film was heavy on the ugliness of the average person's life in those times, and loaded with much gore and savagery in the brutal hand-to-hand combat. Severed heads and limbs flew, skulls, faces and chests spurted blood as axes, pikes, machettes, broadswords, clubs and maces flailed wildly at close range. Wallace came to a sad end, of course. He was betrayed by his own countrymen, a clique of nobles more interested in protecting their own wealth and sinecures than in obtaining their country's freedom from the English. Wallace was tortured and beheaded. His body was hacked to pieces and taken to "the four corners of the kingdom" as a warning to the rabble. Robert The Bruce, whose name--for reasons not made clear in Braveheart--is immortalized in Scottish history, is portrayed as a venal, cowardly, gutless conniver in this film. When I remarked afterward to my wife, Mogo, how much the betrayal and brutality aspects of the film upset me, she agreed and noted that Braveheart was an age-old story, the story of people savaged by their conquerors and jailers throughout human history. It is the story of American blacks, of Cambodians, Chinese, Kurds, American Indians, Jews, gypsies, Poles, enslaved African blacks, peasants and kulaks slaughtered by Stalin, and countless other victims of uniquely human bestiality. Only humans kill and torture for the sheer joy and fun of it. And William Wallace was just one among hundreds of millions of victims in this sad tableau, which continues to the present moment.

I think I had dinner last night with a table full of lesbians. Musta been 10 of them. Funny thing, they acted just like the rest of us, perfectly normal, respectable human beings. (April 21, 1996)

One More Reason to Go On Living

Cancer-ridden American baby doctor-kook-celebrity doper Timothy Leary has revealed to friends that he is contemplating committing suicide while logged on to the Internet. Leary's friend, author Ken (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) Kesey recently revealed this breathtaking possibility to the Portland Daily Oregonian. This revives an interesting Zen question relating to a more primitive technology, telephones: If you call someone and are put on hold, and you die, does your little blinking light go out at the other end? What happens if you commit suicide on the Internet? Does the machine automatically log you off? Do you instantly zap to a cyberspace heaven and float free there, able to appear and butt into any Internet "chat room" that strikes your fancy? America needs to know! I'm logging on and staying on until the Leary suicide vigil is over!

Here's the latest lawyer joke: Michael Donahoe, attorney for Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski, has already said that all charges must be dropped because of pretrial publicity. And we wonder why this is among the professions ranking lower than whale manure.

Must Have Been Absorbing Too Much American Culture

A 31-year-old Liverpool, England, pedestrian was waiting at an intersection when another motorist slowed to allow him to cross. He crossed but "failed to indicate his gratitude" to the driver, who promptly got out of his car and attacked the ingrate with an iron pole. The victim's cheek was broken. Police said the attacker was heard screaming "Next time, say thank you!" as he drove off. I have better advice for the pedestrian. Next time, pack a sidearm and several extra clips of ammo.

The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta reports the number of people in the United States diagnosed with AIDS in 1995 declined by 7 percent from the prior year. Now there's some news that'll drive the AIDS lobby up the wall. Millions and millions and millions of dollars in federal grants are at stake here. We've got to figure out some way to get that number back up there. I'd start by suing the CDC for falsifying data. That should prevent funding cuts but still allow cost of living increases while the litigation drags on for decades. There appears to be profitable territory to mine in some CDC statistics, particularly the one showing blacks are six times more likely to have AIDS than whites and twice as likely to have AIDS as Hispanics. This is prima facie discrimination. You could step outside and throw a rock and hit a court willing to rule favorably on that one.

What ever happened to Flip Wilson?

I'm convinced there's a clue in our advertising about the state of our civilization. For me, it's in ads such as Burger King's "Sometimes You Gotta Break The Rules" campaign. . .The Outback Steakhouse chain's "No Rules! Just Right!" theme, and Nike's mantra, "Just Do It!"

Technology is dangerous. Some troublemaker ran a Nexus computer database search of an entire year's issues of the San Francisco Chronicle and discovered this shocker: the words "right wing" appeared 568 times, "left wing" 86 times. Sorry for peeking. (April 22, 1996)

And Worth Ever' Daggone Penny of It!

Overheard in The Board Room: Ringo Starr, former Beatles drummer, was paid $1 million last winter by a Japanese advertising agency to state his name in a beer commercial.

Snapshots of Our Times

The May, 1996, issue of Harper's magazine reports that according to Graef Crystal's book, In Search of Excess, the average American CEO's after-tax compensation has risen by more than 300 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1974, while the average American worker's pay fell 13 percent. . .the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay in the United States is 120 to 1. In Great Britain it's 33:1, in Germany, 21:1, and in Japan 16 to 1.

Bumper sticker reported seen on a Houston expressway: Fight Crime! Shoot Back!

A six-year-old boy and two eight-year-olds are accused of beating a four-week-old baby nearly to death in the San Francisco area and the youngest of the three assailants has been charged with attempted murder. The lads were on a mission to steal a tricycle, found the infant in the apartment they were burglarizing, and apparently thought it would make them feel good about themselves to trash him. This Most Recent Unpleasantness has provoked handwringing, furrowed brows, and consternation all around. News magazines and pundits are asking: how could it happen? The answer's simple. This is our harvest, the fruit of American society's long descent to the present day's "Just Do It" cesspool. Better get used to it, because more's on the way.

Sounds Like The Girl I Took To The Senior Prom, Part II

Actress Margot Kidder, best known for her co-starring role with Christopher Reeve in Superman, was hospitalized at the end of April after being found crouched in the bushes in a Glendale, California neighborhood. Police said Kidder "was dirty, frightened, paranoid. . .was wearing disheveled, cast-off clothing" and had apparently cut off ragged chunks of her hair with a razor blade. She was also missing her front dental bridge when taken into custody.

And Worth Ever' Daggone Million of it!

Best Investment Never Made Department: Waterworld, produced and directed by actor Kevin Costner, was originally offered to Roger Corman's production company which balked at the film's $5 million budget. The Costner version ended up costing $175 million, or $1.3 million per minute. --Spy magazine, January/February 1996 issue.

Rumer's Probably Better Off Not Understanding What Mom Does

When last we heard from the bashful Demi Moore and her husband, Bruce Willis, they were telling breathless reporters how they'd moved to Sandpoint,Idaho, to get their children away from the sleaze and pernicious influence of the Hollywood scene, even though Sandpoint video stores have available all the couple's movies. Now the troublemakers at Spy magazine report that Demi, who was paid $12.5 million to "shake her flubbery floppers" in the film, Striptease, cast her seven-year-old daughter, Rumer, as her on-screen daughter in the movie so the child would have the "opportunity to understand what I do." In the movie, the child spends a lot of time at the strip club and watches her mother dance naked.

And Then Of Course There's The Old Classic Middle-Digit

This tidbit stumbled across in a New York Times book review of In Contempt, by Christopher Darden, the assistant prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial. . ."In the great Russian Orthodox schism of the 1600's, for example, people were burned at the stake over such questions as whether you should extend two or three fingers when making the sign of the cross." I fear a similar schism is developing between supporters and critics of The Mentor, Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight. (May 3, 1996)

And Worth Ever' Daggone Thousand of It!

The New York Times reported April 30 that Ralph Clark, a leader of the Freemen, an anti-government group involved in numerous confrontations with authorities, has taken $676,082 in federal farm subsidy checks over the past 10 years. Give the Times credit for digging out the hypocrisy here, but let's not forget that these are wacko right wing kooks and extremists they're exposing, not liberals, who would never do such things in the first place.

Bobby Johnson Strikes A Mighty Blow For Mankind

Bobby Johnson of Indianapolis played surrogate avenger for all of us when he chose how to deal with his frustration over the meager choices on his cable-connected television set. The 27-year-old loading dock worker was home watching a little TV, sipping a little booze, and--it's not much of a stretch to imagine--idly twirling the chamber on his personal handgun. He told police later he was unhappy with his viewing choices. His big 27-inch Zenith, he said, "had 41 f------ channels. . .and nothing to watch." Johnson did what we've all dreamed of doing. He grabbed his .357 Magnum and blazed away, pumping six bullets into the set. The ruined set was still smoking when police arrived. They arrested Johnson on charges of criminal recklessness, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Johnson allegedly wrestled with officers and had to be subdued with a chemical repellent. In a jailhouse interview with Ruth Mullen of the Indianapolis Star, Johnson said, "Reckless, hell! I hit it right where I was aiming! I don't see why a man can't shoot his own TV if he wants to. I paid for it." Johnson told the reporter that "I just said, 'What is this stupid s---?' (a truly cosmic question, when you think about it) and pulled the trigger." He conceded that he thought the episode "had a lot to do with that Jack Daniels I was drinking." Reckless, unruly, drunk, profane, testy, whatever--for one brief, shining moment, Bobby Johnson was one beautiful guy. (May 3, 1996)

The phone rang this morning and it was Allison Frobish or one of those pestiferous phone bank androids who hector us relentlessly. She said she was doing market research on restaurants and wondered if I had two minutes to answer some questions. In a rare moment of quick, seamless thinking, I said, "You've reached the Stepford Home for The Criminally Insane. I doubt if there's a soul here who could talk to you intelligently about anything. Thank you," and hung up. I just love moments like this! (May 9 ,1996)

A half-mile wide billboard's just been hoisted on West 38th Street to trumpet the Miller Brewing Company's latest product. "New Miller Beer!" the thing screams at me as my hurtling Probe approaches, "Reach for What's Out There!" Sorry, I reply, the glistening string of drool from my mouth halting its steady descent. . . What's Out There is a lunatic asylum with all the cage doors wide open. I believe I'll pass on that.

The Speck Wheels Are Turning

Clever people are already at work figuring out a way to make a television series, a blockbuster movie, and a stunning array of ancillary products and spinoff industries from the fairly amazing Dick Speck video broadcast this week. The videotape was made while Speck was alive in prison and featured Speck's cavorting in blue panties with a gay lover inside prison, as well as Speck himself musing on the great times, great sex, and great drugs he was having behind bars. The film was apparently smuggled out and later purchased by Bill Kurtis, an independent television producer, who turned it into a special on American Justice, an Arts & Entertainmnt Network program broadcast May 18. USA Today printed a grotesque photo made from the videotape which showed Speck naked from the waist up and sporting a truly amazing pair of breasts, whose size was sufficient to produce stunned silence on the ordinarily relentlessly raucous Bob & Tom Show Friday morning when host Tom Griswold turned to page 12-A and showed his co-hosts the evidence. There's big money to be made here, so prudes best step aside. Ain't this a great civilization!?

Al Was A Unabomber Favie!

FBI agents taking apart the Montana cabin of suspected Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski found a copy of Vice President Al Gore's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance. Many sections were underlined and copious notes filled the margins. Somehow Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and the other media big hitters didn't zero in on this obvious connection to the wacko Religious Left liberal movement. Had it not been for the intrepid American Spectator (June, 1996), this anecdote probably would never have seen the light of day. All concerned have apologized for peeking.

Another Great Idea And Constitutional Right Whose Time Has Come

New Tork Times writer Max Frankel, in a May 5 column, proposes that the government provide universal electronic mail service to all citizens. He reasons that the government once did this to assure universal mail and telephone service, so why not e-mail? Otherwise, Frankel posits, millions of Americans will be denied their right to share in this expanding technology. He cites a Rand Corporation study which says that absent coersion, the free market is likely to deliver e-mail to only half the American population. The cost--a few billions here and there--would be no problem, according to Frankel, if government will just get in there with subsidies, encouragements, challenges, arm-twisting, new taxes, whatever it takes to get the private sector to pony up with the cash.

Wouldn't be any wars, I suspect, if upon their being declared presidents, commissars, senators, congressmen, premiers, party chairmen, high priests, ayatollahs, cabinet members, field marshals, joint chiefs of staff, dukes, kings, queens, princes, princelets, pooh-bahs, governors, chancellors, princesses, high commissioners, imperial wizards, mullahs, lodge captains, Lions of Judah and all the rest of them were snatched from the safety of their parlors, rammed into front line trenches and compelled to start shooting at each other, with the promise that they'd be shot down immediately if they turned around to head for the rear areas. Yep, that would fix 'em, all right.

Have you ever noticed how you can stop anywhere in a supermarket and within 15 seconds someone will come up behind you with a cart and begin sighing and harrumphing to let you know you're blocking the path? This is one of the laws of the universe. There is nowhere you can go in a supermarket and not be in someone's way, even if the store is empty when you enter.

Authorities apparently counted it a victory over the forces of evil that only about 200 people were arrested in connection with the Indianapolis 500 Race. Most of the arrests were for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Police said no one was shot or stabbed, and no rapes were reported. One man was arrested for trying to sell l00 quarter-sticks of dynamite. What's the big deal here? Everyone I know who goes to the race wouldn't be caught dead without their satchel of dynamite. Don't the police need to lighten up a bit?

Alert motorists on U.S. 31 south of Kokomo will spot, just as they cross over the Howard County line into Tipton County, a truly inspiring sight. . .on the west side, out close to the highway, is a huge (but, alas, not Navarrone-caliber) naval gun battery, painted a fading battleship gray, with two barrels poking, probing from a capsule big enough to hold several grown adults. Odin only knows what military surplus yard they came from. I only know that I will be compelled to stop and investigate, seek out an owner, inquire where I might get my own pair. Could this be a newly-emergent outpost of the Bogtrot Slasher? (June 1, 1996)

Timothy Leary is finally dead, thus sparing the nation further of his drivel. He told eager reporters he had contemplated having his body frozen and returning to life in the future, but he didn't want to return during a Republican administration. This is another reason why Republicans must win control of the White House and hold it for the next 100 million years.

Hurtling westward along U.S. 40 toward Indianapolis the other day I drove through the towns of Charlottesville, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Gem, and Cumberland. Odd place names for Indiana, I thought. U.S. 40 used to be a major four-lane route from Saint Louis eastward. Today it's going to seed, along with the many small communities along its path. Interstate 70 replaced it. The trip reminded me of a wonderful 1980s paperback I chanced across last winter, Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon. It's an account of his months-long trip in a pickup-camper truck around the country on back roads. Moon wrote touchingly about dozens of little towns like those I saw on U.S. 40. The title comes from the fact that blue was the color used on highway maps in those days to designate secondary or non-major routes.

It's Pronounced The Same, Worldwide

Newsweek magazine noted in its June 10 edition that a Swedish appeals court had upheld a lower court's ruling that a five-year-old Swedish child's name was "unacceptable." The parents, who were not identified, legally named their child "brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprx11116" and testified in court that it was pronounced "Albin." I have a sneaking hunch the parents' name is qpttmmqwenccyyy3333mqgfphh. Pronounced "Assholes." Just a hunch.

Come To Think Of It, We Do Have One More Question, Your Honor

Spiece, a big sporting goods retailer in Indianapolis, ran a full-page ad in the June 8 Indianapolis Star advertising "364 different Nike shoe styles available. Need we say more?" Well, yes. Someone might try explaining why any civilization needs 364 different styles of athletic shoes, and those from only one company among many manufacturing them. America has a right to know.

A Father's Day Plan (Drool Cup Not Provided)

Whatever uncertainty I had about how to spend Father's Day disappeared this morning when I saw a full-page Indianapolis Star ad inviting me to come over to Incredible Universe, the gargantuan, 75,000-square-miles-of-products-under-one-roof electronics retailer, and spend Father's Day in a 15-HOUR FRENZY all-day sale. I'll be there early. I'll sip coffee in my car and read the morning papers--especially the sale ads--and work out a plan of attack. First, burst through the door pumping fists in the air clenching a thick sheaf of credit cards, screaming at the top of my lungs, "Get out of my way! Get out of my way! I want it! I want it all and I want it now!!!" Once inside, I'll become a hurricane of elbows, grunts, snorts, cursing, barrel-rolls, slides and dives. Climbing over the backs of rival shoppers, knocking over displays, punching, gouging. Around 9 a.m. rainbows coalesce in the floating foam of spittle backlit by rays of sunshine streaming through the skylights. By then I'll be shaking uncontrollably, red-faced, drooling. Who knows how long I'll last? It won't matter. Buying product, consuming is all that matters. Possessing. I'll have messages duct-taped to my body telling the caretakers where to deliver my merchandise, what to do with the body in case I can't be revived. Dad. What a guy!! (June 15, 1996)

Mispronunciation Corrected

"Boisterous Freemen Disrupt Court Hearing" said the page 3 headline in the Indianapolis Star. The article, datelined Billings, Montana, told of a Friday hearing for the freshly-apprehended Freemen in U.S. District Court. Appearing before Judge Robert Holter, various Freemen yelled, interrupted, protested and stamped their feet, claiming the courts and the government have no authority. Writer Tom Kenworthy of the Washington Post noted that "among the most unruly of the Freemen was Rodney Skurdal, a former Marine and White House chauffeur," who objected, among other things, to the judge's referring to him as a person. . . The Post article was silent as to the judge's response, but here would have been Judge Kratchlow's: I'd have immediately entered a court order changing the pronunciation of Skurdal's name to "Asshole." In perpetuity. So ordered. Case dismissed.

Back To You, Louis

When black rabblerouser and religious leader Louis Farrakhan was criticized earlier this year for visiting Sudan despite claims that slave trading occurred there, he went ballistic. Puffed up and angrily harrumphing, he challenged the press to find proof, one lousy, stinking shred of proof, that there was slavery inside Sudan. Gilbert Lewthwaite and Gregory Kane, two reporters for the Baltimore Sun, went for the challenge. They entered southern Sudan illegally with the help of a Zurich-based humanitarian group and were able to buy two children for $500 each from slave traders. The lads had been kidnapped in 1990 and forced to work in the fields for six years. The reporters, having proved their point, returned the children to their father, and returned to the U.S. No word from Louis on this. (June 18, 1996)

Justice Department spokesman John Russell was quoted in the Chicago Tribune June 26 saying that lying to any federal agency is a crime punishable by up to five years in jail and $250,000 in fines. Great. But how come it's not a crime when a federal agency or employee lies to us? (June 26, 1996)

Thirteenth Month? Department: MacMillan Publishing Co., in thanking me profusely for the resume I sent in response to an ad for a job opening, sent me a postcard bearing this notation on the Indianapolis postmark: Den 14'96. Have they added a new month--Den--to the calendar while my attention lapsed ever so briefly?

Most Of Us Guys Know The Feeling

Interest in the Wimbledon tennis tournament in England perked up in July when a comely young woman wearing nothing but a smile and a skimpy white apron bolted from the sidelines and streaked across center court during a match between Richard Krajicek and Malivai Washington. Wimbledon officials huffed and harrumphed, whisked the lass into custody, and gave a typically English shrug of the shoulders. USA Today printed a picture of the nude prancer and quoted Washington as follows: "I looked over and I see this streaker. I see this, this. . .wobbling around. She smiled at me and I think she was wearing an apron. She lifted it up, and was still smiling. I got flustered, and three sets later I was gone."

Working at the Clowes Hall box office at Butler University taught me another of the iron laws of human behavior, namely that no matter how much publicity is given to an event and no matter how long in advance tickets are on sale. . .X percent of the population will delay trying to buy tickets until the event is sold out and no more tickets are available. . .another X percent will call to buy tickets after the event has occurred (in the case of the blockbuster Broadway smash, Phantom of the Opera, people were still calling to order tickets three weeks after the show had closed and moved on to Tulsa). . .and 100 percent of these individuals will express amazement, bafflement, or anger that no tickets remain.

Summing Up American Civilization in Fourteen Easy Words

"I just want to go have fun, be young, drink Pepsi, and wear Reebok." --Basketball center Shaquille O'Neal, at a July 18 press conference announcing his signing of a seven-year, $121 million contract with the Lost Angeles Lakers of the NBA.

It WAS About Money Department, Revisited

"It wasn't about money. . .money was not the main factor." --Shaquille O'Neal in denial at a July 18 press conference announcing his $121 million contract with the Lost Angeles Lakers.

Summing Up American Civilization in Eleven Easy Words

(Lamm's). . .candor is bold, bracing, and will probably doom him politically." --Newsweek magazine, July 22 issue, in an article about the just-announced presidential candidacy of former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, known for his blunt, no-sacred-cows approach to public issues.

About 200 people gathered on the Mall in Wonderland, D.C., on a mid-July Saturday (although a federal lawsuit will doubtless soon be filed by demonstration sponsors to get the "official" headcount increased, since the organizers had predicted at least 25,000 would show up) to march, sing, stamp their angry little feet, and demand that a new "multiracial" category to be used in the federal census in the year 2000. Backers claim this new category is needed so that "racially mixed" children and adults can "establish their own identity." The census already lists black, white, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Hispanic or Spanish, and Other categories. According to an Indianapolis Star editorial, the new category is opposed by the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Council of La Raza, and possibly other groups. This, friends, isn't about personal identity. It's about federal money and the treasured front-row spots at the public trough that such federal designations insure.

Snapsots of America

A study by the University of Michigan's School of Nursing indicates that 46 percent of 5th graders and 55 percent of 8th graders at two low-income neighborhood schools surveyed had already engaged in sexual intercourse. The schools were not identified. The survey was reported in the June issue of Journal of Research in Nursing and Health. Not a confidence-builder.

The latest local rage is coin-counting machines. Radio ads point out that everybody has a big old jar of coins stashed away and by, golly, isn't it time to turn them into real cash? Who wants to spend hours at the kitchen table counting out all those coins, anyway? Citizens are urged to save hours of time and come on in to the coin counting machine where in moments the machine will do all that work for us. The ad doesn't mention the 7.5 percent commission the machine charges for its trouble, but this is a small price to pay, don't you think, to save hours and hours of work?

Debit cards are growing in popularity. Users seem to love them. Banks love them much, much more. And why not? The debit card instantly removes funds from your account, eliminating the float which favors the consumer. I can't figure out why a consmer would fall for this.

California's attorney general is suing to stop convicted murderer Richard Davis from profiting by selling the rights to his story to a TV program, Hard Copy. Davis was found guilty of murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas after kidnapping the girl from her home. He had only recently been released from prison on another murder conviction. His trial drew national attention. The jury recommended the death penalty. "This is absolutely disgusting," said Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, according to an August 20 Chicago Tribune account. This is not the first such case, and the ante seems to be creeping upward. How long before some fella negotiates a deal with a big TV network, a publishing house or a press syndicate to kill someone live on film for a hefty advance and all broadcast and ancillary product rights? We'll see it in our lifetime. Bet money on it. (August 20, 1996)

More Reasons to Go On Living

New videos, CD's and cassette tapes have been released on the lives of bloated dead drug addict Jerry Garcia and shriveled dead hippie acid freak Timothy Leary. All of them can be ours for less than $30 apiece, if we act now.

I've spent a few days recently working in Dayton, Ohio, and staying in a Holiday Inn just off I-75 south of the city. On the evening of August 15, I ordered chili and a sandwich from room service. It arrived with no spoon for the soup. Brackow, the delivery lad, cheerfully went to get one. On August 22, I ordered chili, a hamburger, fries and a soft drink. The order was delivered with no onion for the sandwich. On August 23, I ordered a Cajun chicken sandwich, fries, chili and a soft drink. I specified that onion be on the sandwich and watched as the waiter wrote it down in large letters on the order slip. The meal was delivered with no spoon for the chili, no onion on the sandwich, no soft drink, no salt, and no pepper. I asked Brackow if he could retrieve the missing items and he manfully said he'd be back in "two or three minutes." He was back in 17 minutes. On September 6, I ordered a hamburger medium well with onion, fries, and chili. The order arrived with no onion on the sandwich and the hamburger cool and pink in the center. I suspect our national descent into the maelstrom has begun.

Separated at birth? Authoress/celebrity Camille Paglia bears a striking resemblance to Carl (Billions and Billions and Billions) Sagan.

Good Question

"Some days I ask God," Bullock told me, his voice dropping to an impassioned whisper, "'If You were there, why didn't You stop it?'" --Hitler biographer Alan Bullock, quoted by writer Ron Rosenbaum in a May 1, 1995 New Yorker magazine article in which Bullock discussed the problem of understanding a God who allowed The Holocaust.

I daresay one of the most interesting letters to the editor of my lifetime was published August 28 in the Chicago Tribune. It came from James Padar, a retired Chicago Police Department lieutenant, and was apparently triggered by the flood of news publicity leading up to the Democratic national convention. No news outlet worthy of the name could overlook the obvious: the Democrats were returning after 28 years to the site of their infamous 1968 convention marked so indelibly in the public eyeball by violence. We all remember the scenes, surely: hippie protesters versus a rogue police force in the streets and lakefront parks, protesters everywhere screaming and marching, legendary mayor Richard J. Daley mouthing vile epithets from the convention floor at Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff who from the lectern was harshly attacking Chicago police tactics. . . Padar's letter noted how frequently the Tribune and others now use the term "police riot" to characterize the actions of police during the 1968 gathering. The term, he said, "has been quoted frequently and attributed to the findings of the Chicago Study Group commonly known as The Walker Commission (after then Governor Dan Walker) in its report entitled "Rights in Conflict." According to Padar, though, the term "police riot" does not appear even once in the commission's report. Padar says the term was coined by Governor Walker in his foreword to the report, and that study group members strenuously objected at the time to its use, saying it sullied an otherwise objective account of what had happened. Padar noted one of the painful realities of the media age: inaccuracies such as this are seldom corrected and even if they are the correction never quite catches up to the original. He chided the Tribune for using the term while citing "federally commissioned studies" but refrained from even suggesting that any sort of press bias might be in operation. This is a fine illustration of how "history" is made, though. All in all, Padar's was a calm, rational, reasonable, nonjudgmental expression of opinion from a reader. And what a surprise, coming as it did from one of the rioting police officers from those evil days of rage. (August 29, 1996)

McDonald's will open 2,500 more restaurants around the world this year, or one new restaurant every three hours.

Holed up in a Holiday Inn south of Dayton, Ohio, last week, I glimpsed a familiar face while channel-flipping on TV and lingered a moment on an old Bonanza program. There were Hoss, Ben, and Little Joe having supper with a grizzled, wall-eyed drooler, the then-much-younger actor Jack Elam. You know what? He was ugly as sin then, too. Jack's one of my favies.

Lighting One Little Candle Department

A federal district court judge in Oklahoma has thrown out a lawsuit filed against the manufacturers of a fertilizer that may have been used in the April, 1995, Oklahoma City federal building bombing. The suit was filed by none other than that relentless quester after truth and justice, Johnny Cochran, of O. J. Simpson trial fame, on behalf of over 250 plaintiffs who obviously saw a chance to win the national lottery. Judge David Russell ruled that the companies could not be held responsible for what terrorists did with their product. He wrote that it defies "all logic and common sense" to suggest that by manufacturing fertilizer the companies were inviting terrorists to make bombs from it, as the plaintiffs had artfully alleged. Cosmic Question: since when has logic and common sense gotten in the way of America's legal predators or anyone else on the make? Cheers for Judge Russell, anyway.

USA Today reported August 29 that football would be more violent if it were up to 211 women randomly surveyed across the country by Betsy Berns, founder of the Women's Institute for Football Education. A hint of the need for such an institute appeared in the 51 percent of the group who didn't know that a touchdown was worth six points. Among the suggestions to "improve the game," according to USA Today, was: Increase the violence. We can't be far from the day, can we, when the savvy marketers who run the National Football League will modify a concept immortalized in the then-futuristic movie, Rollerball, and allow players to be pack firearms on the field and to kill a specified number of opposing players with impunity during each contest? Gotta admit, friends, it'll be boffo for the ratings!

Author Joe (Fatal Vision) McGinniss made news when he announced he was forfeiting a $1.75 million publisher's advance to write a book about the O.J. Simpson trial. McGinnis had a permanent front-row seat at the months-long trial, which he described as an "utter farce." In a letter to his publisher released August 8, McGinnis said he doubted the wisdom of his ever agreeing to write the book in the first place. He said the trial was "very expensive therapy" for him and hinted at disillusionment over Judge Ito's "total loss of control over the proceedings," "ludicrous witnesses," and "that nauseating group of cretins" who made up the Simpson jury, according to an Associated Press story. Why did he let them off so easily?

And then there's the church member interviewed Sept. 13 as part of a CNN pop culture segment on the latest tidal wave sweeping America, the "megachurch." CNN's breathless correspondent told us how different the megachurches are from traditional churches, then stuck a microphone in a woman's face who agreed and said, "They're not all brimfire and stone."

I've added an item to my list of reincarnations. I'm going to come back as the string bass player in Gordon's Lightfoot's backup band. I'd be content to pluck those strings, tap my feet, and hum and sing along with Gordon for forty years or so.

I received an America Online gift catalog in the mail. It offers me a chance to own a complete line of AOL merchandise. Here's an America Online polo shirt, and T-shirts in six different colors! There's an AOL sports watch, an embroidered sweatshirt. There are jackets, umbrellas, caps. Whose life could be so empty that they'd want to wear clothing with an America Online logo?

Freshly declassified documents show that the United States government knew that hundreds of Americans were held captive by the North Koreans even after the official "prisoner exchange" marking the armistice signed in July, 1953, but kept that information secret from the American people. Translated into plain English, the New York Times News Service stories about this most recent revelation of government lying to its subjects show that the U.S. abandoned the over 900 Americans to a lifetime of captivity for political expediency. This story followed by only a few weeks another Times revelation that the Pentagon, White House, CIA and State Department knew in November, 1991, that chemical weapons (code for: poison gas) had been stored in an Iraqi ammunition dump blown up earlier that year by American troops in the Persian Gulf War. The report was kept hidden even while the Defense Department said it had no evidence American troops might have been exposed to chemical weapons, and the report was not shared with the troops. This fundamental truth about the state--that it has no greater interest than self-preservation and will willingly sacrifice any or all of its subjects in pursuit of that end--is worth remembering as we contemplate our own duties and loyalties as citizens, and our relationship as individuals to our government. Only the naive believe that our nation will be loyal to us if forced to choose. (September 19, 1996)

One-class high school basketball in Indiana has its death sentence. High school principals have voted 220-157 to support an earlier state high school athletic association board's decision to go to multiple class competition in basketball and other sports effective with the 1997-98 season. A trodlodyte campaign to save the old system proved fruitless before the tidal wave of feel-goodism and anguished concern for self-esteem that's the animating principle of 1990s American society. Just as with the acknowledgment that Slicks 'R' Us, we one-class basketball wacko Religious Right extremists must be good sports and bow to the inevitable here, too. Gather 'round, lads, and hoist one last flagon of grape! Trophies and championships for everyone, I say!

John Littleheart. Grinelda Thurmer. Speed Davis. Senator Winglow. Sally Sweetwater. Allen Gooliddy. Friar Tuck. Red Dawson. Scratchy. Chief Crying Trout. Allison Frobish. Billy Bigbody. Princess Mary Louise Louise. The Black Knight. Coach Bayner. Clyde Deevers. Oscar Devling. Maynard G. Golo. Price Boothcourt. Terry Thai. Lance Loveguard. Rip Randell. Chick Bailey. Walter Treppling. Tick Bitterford. Daniel Douglas Diddle. Chester Honeyhugger. Maude Frickert. Gunnery Sergeant Grider. The Maverly Brothers. Paul Kratchlow. Chester A. Arthur. Willis Mumfert. Howard Ganglinger. Silver Bear. Gene Fondlinger. First Lieutenant Matthews. Father Duffy. Tiger Elliott. Lamargene Gumbody. Elwood P. Suggins. Dr. Faversham. Brackow. (Parial list of legendary characters created by comedian Jonathan Winters.)

Noted in Passing Department: Of the four innocent victims involved in the famous Bernard Goetz Unpleasantness on a New York subway a few years back, wherein Goetz pulled a gun and fired on his four alleged assailants. . .the only one who hasn't subsequently been convicted and sent to prison for other crimes is the one Goetz shot in the back, leaving him permanently wheelchair-bound.

Shrines I've Got To Visit Department

A rosary--perhaps the world's largest--made of bowling balls is part of a permanent shrine honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary now drawing large crowds to the front yard of Linda and Bill Stage in Knox, Indiana. The multicolored bowling balls--approximately 15 of them--are mounted permanently on plastic pipe set in cement, and are linked together with plastic chain. Adding to the phantasmagoric scene is a shrine complete with a four-foot statue of the Blessed Mother, a chained stairway and fresh flowers all in a gazebo. Each September since 1989 when it was dedicated, the Stages have held a celebration "for world peace." The Associated Press reports that crowds of 500 people have attended.

The Insurance Information Institute estimates that the "civil liability system" (presumed by me to be the sum of "damages collected or paid" in all the civil liability cases filed in American courts in a given year) equalled 2.3 percent of the American gross domestic product, or about $132 billion, in 1991, the latest year for which statistics are available. Only 43 percent of that money, says III, was received by plaintiffs. Lawyers got the rest as fees. (September 20, 1996)

It's Right There In The 28th Amendment, Your Honor! Wal-Mart Has To Sell Sheryl's Records!

Singer Sheryl Crow's latest album contains a lyric saying that Wal-Mart sells guns to children, who then use them to kill each other. As we might imagine, the big retailer isn't happy about the allegation. A Wal-Mart spokesman, Dale Ingram, announced Sept. 10 that as a result the company would not carry Crow's album in its 2,000 stores nationwide. Crow's flacks, including Al Cafaro, chairman of A&M Records which produced the Crow album, immediately screamed "censorship" and accused Wal-Mart of sinister behavior and motives. "Wal-Mart is choosing guns over music," he said, darkly, and promised that A&M would not "bow to this censorship." Al and the rest of them are packed full of it. This isn't censorship. Wal-Mart, despite what a confused Cafaro might think, is not required by the constitution to sell Crow's records or anyone else's. Crow has a right to say or sing whatever she wants, but the rest of us have a right not to buy or sell it.

Newspapers nationwide this week began running a multipart series about America's economy and foreign trade by James B. Steele and Donald Bartlett of Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Steele was interviewed last week on CNBC. He said we've been sold a bill of goods by national politicians who've told us for decades that the more American goods we can sell overseas the better life will be for American workers. This was the mantra accompanying the NAFTA legislation passed by Congress in 1994. Steele and Bartlett say it's a cruel joke, that most of the "millions and millions of jobs created by exports" are in fact low-wage jobs, and that millions and millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs are being lost in the shuffle. While the net gain in jobs is there, the American blue collar worker is a terrible loser in the game. This is what Ross Perot's been saying for several years, to howls of ridicule from the intelligentsia. Corporate profits, stock prices and dividends have soared, though. Steele and Bartlett cite the Colgate-Palmolive Co. as an example, and offer a detailed account of the company's 71 percent downsizing and restructuring of its domestic workforce. . .while hiring thousands of additional workers overseas to make products it then imports to the United States to sell to Americans. In 1980, U.S. workers comprised 45 percent of Colgate's total workforce in 1980. Today it's 17 percent. The joke, Steele and Bartlett seem to be saying, is on us. This sort of heresy has already brought out the attack dogs, including a Newsweek column by Robert J. Samuelson in the September 23 issue ridiculing the Knight-Ridder series as "junk journalism lacking integrity and competence." Samuelson even wonders why "a reputable newspaper publishes it." Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. The intensity of the attacks such stories generate is intriguing, though.

Now that high school class basketball is assured for Indiana, how long can it be before lobbyists demand that the all-star team which plays Kentucky twice annually must include proportional representation from each of the four classes. . .and that the coveted Mr. (and Miss) Basketball titles be rotated annually from class to class, or that one from each class be mandated? It is patently unfair--and somewhere out there lurks a shyster who'll gladly argue it's illegal and unconstitutional as well--to deny athletes from smaller schools a chance to feel good about themselves and enhance their self-esteem by being declared Mr. or Miss Basketball or having their fair share proportion of all-star team slots. And how long will only four classes be enough? As The Mentor once famously said, we may as well sit or lie back and enjoy it.

Oh No! Another Hobgoblin: Gun Ranges!

Gun control activists have another nightmare following a brief flurry of suicides at target practice ranges in California last month. In the latest episode of sheer guts and determination, 62-year-old Arthur Kampf paid $18 to rent a pistol at a San Rafael target range, calmly listened to the safety instructions and signed the necessary forms, and even joked and laughed with range owner Mark Baradat. A few minutes later Kampf put the pistol to his head and shot himself. He was the third suicide at gun ranges in San Francisco since August. Anti-gun forces are now demanding gun rental restrictions, and Assemblyman Louis Caldera, a liberal Democrat from Lost Angeles, is hinting he'll introduce appropriate measures when the California legislature convenes in January. (September 26, 1996)

A Truly Fatal Error Has Occurred: I Am Shutting Down Now. . .

But while California is trying to close off suicide options, an enlightened Australian province is opening them up. The Northern Territory legislature became the first in the world to pass a voluntary euthanasia law in 1995. It took effect July 1, 1996, and Bob Dent, 66, a retired carpenter suffering from terminal cancer, became the first to celebrate on Sept. 22 when he tapped the word "Yes" on a computer. This was his final instruction to medical attendants to go ahead and flip the switch releasing a lethal mix of drugs into intravenous tubes. Dent went out peacefully and smiling, observers said. Activists (code for: people who don't have a damned thing better to do than pester the rest of us night and day) are feverishly at work trying to repeal the law. Here's hoping Northern Territory legislators have the courage to resist.

Passing It On To The Big Cheeses

I happened to be in a gigantic Barnes & Noble Bookstore on Indianapolis's east side yesterday and decided to have a little fun. After verifying that it wasn't on the shelves, I went whimpering to the nearest sales clerk for help in finding Emmett Tyrell's new book on The Slicks, Boy Clinton: The Political Biography. It's the latest in a seemingly unending series of exposes on the Slicks, I said, and I've gotta have it. She looked in the computer said it was in hardback, and knit her brow in concern. "Hmmm," she sympathized, "I don't know why we wouldn't have it." I told her it was also available in "trade paperback" as well. She suggested I go look in the political science section and if it wasn't there they'd be glad to order it. I looked. No Tyrrell book, though the section offered such blockbuster best-sellers as The Noam Chomsky Reader, a collection of essays by the famous left-winger, and two other Chomsky titles, plus Karl Marx's The Theory of History, something called Extremism in America, and the New Republic Guide to The Issues for the 1996 campaign. Tyrrell's absence was just an oversight, I felt sure. I told the clerk I thought it would sell like hotcakes if they just had a pile. She promised she'd let the big cheeses know of my interest, and maybe, by golly, they'd get some.

Still Another Reason To Go on Living Department: September is Healthy Aging Month, according to a sign in the Hard Cheese, Indiana, post office.

Billions of years from now, when they're trying to explain the essential lunacy of late 20th century American uncivilization, one of the central mysteries they'll have to grapple with is the astonishing level of hostility to religion found in the popular culture.

Make of this what you will. A Roper Starch worldwide poll shows the number of people who think work is more important than leisure is declining. In the U.S., those who feel that "leisure is the important thing and the purpose of work is to make it possible to have leisure time" are predominantly parents of young children, white-collar workers, people between the ages of 18 and 29, and Democrats. (Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, September 1996 issue)

The summer of 1996 was the first in approximately 49 years, except for two summers when I was overseas in the military, that I did not eat a single ear of fresh Indiana sweet corn. This is one of Hoosierland's defining rituals, by which we measure the seasons, the passing of time, and begin the long wait till the next corn season. Worse, it never even occurred to me until today, long after the corn season had passed. This is a sure sign I've begun my final descent. (September 29, 1996)

Slick And The King: Together At Last

The African nation of Chad is issuing a limited edition postage stamp featuring Elvis Presley and Slick Willie. A nearly breathless ad in USA Today provided details. Each stamp is about four times the size of a regular U.S. postage stamp. They feature Elvis with his guitar and Slick with his saxophone. The two are together on one commemorative sheet. They're available at only $9.95 plus--ironically enough--postage and "handling" (not a word I like to use in connection with either of these Giants of Our Age) of $3. A Certificate of Authenticity (capitalized, to add fake importance) is included. I've sent in my order. How about you?

Meantime. . .when a six-year-old boy kissed a classmate in a North Carolina elementary school, the child was immediately expelled from school, lawyers from 43 states chartered Concordes to North Carolina to seek justice and recompense for all the aggrieved parties, presumed to include every citizen of North Carolina and perhaps the entire eastern seaboard. . .and when a 13-year-old honor student in Humble, Texas, was caught with a bottle of Advil, a common pain reliever sold over the counter, she was immediately suspended from school and the next Concordes out were jammed with attorneys headed for Texas. . .while Roberto Alomar plays blithely on and the game of baseball is paralyzed by the fear that Alomar won't feel good about himself if he's penalized. Sports Illustrated quickly honored Alomar with a full cover photo, and God knows how many movies, TV talk shows, book contracts, clothing lines and other ancillary deals Alomar will rake in from a worshipful nation.

General Electric has announced it's going to charge its credit card customers who pay off their bills monthly and thus avoid paying interest an annual $25 penalty fee for not carrying a balance on which GE can charge them interest. Robert McKinley, president of RAM Research, a credit-card research company, defends the GE move, calling those who pay off their balances "freeloaders" on the system. A GE spokesturd said that a few people had canceled their cards in response to the new policy but said "we certainly hope there aren't a lot more." Any GE cardholder who doesn't cancel on principal doesn't have any.

Add to the list of All-American first names. . .Iduma. . . as in Iduma D. Yeater, in a Scorched Corners Peeper obituary Sept. 25, 1996.

Dick Clark has an extensive TV advertisement promoting a CD and cassette collection of 1950s music. It features film clips of many rock musicians from that era, much of it on old, grainy black and white film: such legendary rockers as Bill Haley & The Comets, The Spaniels, The Commodores, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Fats Domino, The Platters, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Danny and the Juniors, The Dell Vikings, The Coasters, The Diamonds, Little Richard, The Marcels, Bobby Darin, Richie Vallens, Dion and the Belmonts, Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. All but Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis were wearing suits and ties when they performed. Rather a far cry from the way today's popular music figures slither onstage.

A sports brief in Sunday Indianapolis Star noted that a referee collapsed and died while officiating a high school football game in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and revealed how far we have yet to travel in the euphemism department. The article said that "sudden cardiac death" was listed as the cause. In the olden days, didn't we used to call that a heart attack? The puzzling thing is the use of the word "death" in the latest euphemism. Surely we can find a way to disguise that, can't we? Heart episode?

Guy's The One!

Actor Dennis Hopper, answering pop culture questions in the November, 1996, Vanity Fair magazine, responded this way to one about "who is your favorite hero of fiction?": Guy Grand from the Magic Christian. That makes at least two of us on this earth who rate Guy No. 1. (October 17, 1996)

A Last, A Case Is Made For Discrimination

Actor and TV star Bill Cosby refused to pose for a photo with Wonderland, D.C., mayor Marion Barry at a recent gala in the nation's capital. His publicist allowed as how Cosby was "not a fan of the mayor." Good!!! (October 17, 1996)

Driving The New York Times Crazy Department

Emmett Tyrrell's new book on the Slicks, Boy Clinton: The Political Biography, has catapulted itself onto the Times best-seller list for the week ending October 6, and as of October 14 former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's expose of the Slick White House, Unlimited Access, has been on the Times list for 14 weeks.

Early in September a local high school suspended a star football player, Raymond Jackson, after he was arrested and charged with forgery and theft. Lawrence Central High School officials obviously didn't know what they were getting into. The boy's mother got angry as a hornet and obtained a lawyer, who also has worked up a lather over the grievous injustice. They sought and obtained a court order blocking the school from enforcing its own longstanding policies and standards governing participation in athletics and extracurricular activity. Jackson has been ordered reinstated to the team. He has accepted a full football scholarship to the University of Michigan and his attorney assured the Indianapolis Star this week that the scholarship was not in jeopardy. The mother was quoted muttering about "due process" and "mistakes" the lad might have made, about being "betrayed" by the school system which persuaded her four years ago to enroll her learning-disabled-but-obviously-ready-for-the-University-of-Michigan son at Lawrence Central. "How," she demanded to know, "can you be a discredit to a school system in one season or because of one incident?" The Star's October 17 account did not reveal if anyone informed her of the obvious answer: by using stolen credit cards in local shopping malls and getting caught doing it. Young Jackson's attorney, Reginald Bishop, meanwhile is stamping his feet and screaming about his client's constitutional rights, and has accused the state high school athletic association of "piling on" requirements for Jackson's return to scholastic football competition by requiring a medical clearance and a minimum number of practices for players before they're allowed to play again. It doesn't matter that such regulations have been in place for 40 years or more, apply to all students, and are used by high schools all over the country. It's unfair, it's unconstitutional, it makes Jackson feel not very good about himself,and it's not going to be allowed. A Lawrence Township Schools spokesman said weakly that he felt the school had acted responsibly, but the rest of this script is ordained: the lawyers will dawdle, the aggrieved gridder will play under court order, the season will end, eventually the case will be dropped so that young Jackson can get on with his life and career, and perhaps the school system will learn an important lesson about the foolhardiness of trying to have any rules or standards. A post-script: Raymond Jackson's mother was indicted in late October on some 30 charges of tax fraud, failing to report income, and failing to file federal tax returns. Perhaps attorney Bishop can provide group rate discounts.

I had two encounters with Power Players last week at Clowes Hall. A male voice announced he was calling from Congressman Dan Burton's office and wanted "front and center" tickets for the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha. No such tickets existed, since they'd been on sale for nine months. I explained that but the lackey was insistent. He demanded to know who he should talk to about "VIP tickets." The arrogance in his voice suggested he was used to getting his way and that no was not an acceptable answer. He became even more agitated when I calmly repeated--my own mantra--my initial comment, that there were no more "front and center" tickets available for any show at any time for anyone. Finally I suggested he contact the show's producers, a local company, and talk to them about VIP tickets. He hung up in a huff. Later the same day, a woman called and said she wanted us to set aside four tickets down front and that she would send over her "house man" to pick them up. She apparently didn't believe it when I told her that we could not "set aside" or "hold" tickets for anyone over the phone and in fact were not even allowed to sell tickets by phone for her particular event. She became rather combative about it, wanted to know who set such policies and, of course, who we thought we were, anyway. Four times--I counted them--she dropped the phrase "my house man," obviously hoping to make it quite clear that she had slaves and was not used to having rules apply to her. I remained steadfast, patiently explained the procedure for obtaining tickets. She at last relented and said that she'd send her "house man" over to the box office to pick up four tickets. These episodes brought back a fond memory from last winter when a caller imperiously introduced himself as an aide to Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, who wanted at the last minute some prime seats to Phantom of the Opera. All the good tickets had long since been sold, of course, and I told him we didn't have any "front and center orchestra" seats. "Not even for the governor?" he said. I could imagine him offering that sly, knowing wink these people are so good at. This was another person obviously used to having the seas part in his path at the dropping of the governor's name. "We don't have any left even for Jesus Christ Himself," I replied. I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but there's something deeply, perversely satisfying about encounters such as these.

Vile, Empty, Gory, Stupid, Demeaning, Degenerate, Contemptible, Trashy, Repellent--Any Further Questions?

We missed the world-acclaimed film, Pulp Fiction, when it debuted in movie houses around this great nation. We missed the Broadway spinoff. We missed the book, the musical, the TV miniseries, the Passion Play, the designer fragrances, the automobile, the diorama, the historical reenactment, the Disney cartoon, the oratorio, and the designer clothing line. We read the reviews, though, and knew that the critics had raved about its deep meaning and its noble exploration of the human condition. The cognoscenti had raved, too. And so had the glitterati, and the chic and the hip. Now, finally, two or three years after all that, we've watched the Pulp Fiction video. The movie is vile, empty, gory, stupid, demeaning, degenerate, and contemptible. It is a depraved, trashy, surpassingly repellent film populated by depraved, trashy, surpassingly repellent characters. Like much of American pop culture, it is without redeeming social value. We must be the turderati.

Anoher Potential Victim Group Spotted By The ABA

Hammacher Schlemmer is offering a product I'd kill to own: a "Correct Posture Dog Feeder." This contraption is a simple bench made of plastic and elevated on four legs to 10-inch or 16-inch heights. Stainless steel food and water bowls nestle in recessed areas on top. The ad copy boasts that this elevated feeding stand "allows your dog to maintain proper muscular and skeletal alignment while eating. . .(and) unlike ordinary dog bowls (on the floor) this feeder's raised stand allows your pet to stand upright in a more relaxed, healthier position." It's ours for $39.95 or $44.95 plus shipping and handling. Shame on all of us for forcing our dogs to lower their heads to eat! (November 2, 1996)

In late October on a Continental Airlines flight to Atlanta I discovered a new frontier. All the seatbacks in the airplane were outfitted with a small (about four inches by six inches) viewing screen, on which endlessly throughout the flight appeared messages urging passengers to play computer games, make air-to-ground phone calls, send faxes, obtain stock quotations or sports scores, or buy products by using the device. A small message offered a false promise of relief: "To Turn Off Screen," it read, "Remove and Return Headset." I did, but in two or three seconds the messages defiantly reappeared. Numerous passengers joined in the fun. Another repeating message on the screen was "You Can't Afford to Be Out of Touch." This seems a fair enough summation of American life in the late 1990s.

But just when you're noticing a shortage of reasons to go on living, you discover one more: a new magazine aimed at girls aged 15 to 19 is coming out next year. It'll be called Jump. It will cover such uniquely fresh topics as fitness, psychology, beauty, and sports. But most importantly, "Jump will tell readers how to feel better about themselves," according to Michael Carr, president and CEO of Jump's parent, Weider Publications.

Goals, You Need Goals, They Say

O.K. Here are some. I want to: 1) Retire; 2) Live long enough to see Bob Knight replaced as IU basketball coach; 3) Live to see the Slicks indicted (and a mess of Clintonistas, too); 4) See assholes no longer end up at the head of the table. I think that about sums it up.

An Army officer and a drill sergeant are accused of raping and sexually harassing female soldiers in a scandal erupting at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Army brass are promising a full investigation. The episode ought to make those concerned with fairness ask this cosmic question: is it fair to expect military personnel to conform to a higher standard of behavior than the nation expects of its commander-in-chief, Slick Willie?

Forbes magazine reports that Mike Tyson earned $75 million last year, making him the highest paid athlete in the history of the known universe. Final proof that crime pays, so to speak--but then we all know that intuitively, anyway.

Another American Legend Goes To Ground

Singer and sideshow freak Tiny Tim died November 30 after falling ill while singing his signature tune, Tiptoe Through The Tulips, at a Minneapolis Women's Club benefit. Born Herbert Khaury in Gotham City, he became an American celebrity in the late 1960's. His 15 minutes of fame culminated in his marriage to a person known as Miss Vickie on the Tonight Show Dec. 17, 1969, an event seen, to our nation's everlasting shame, in 21.4 million American households. Tiptoe reached No. 18 on the pop charts in 1968. By the end of 1970 Tiny Tim's popularity wave had crested. He was divorced in 1977 and was little heard from since. In his earlier years as a performer, he used the names of Larry Love, the Singing Canary, as well as Darry Dover, Rollie Dell, Julian Foxglove, and Emmett Swink. There may be a clue in there to his modest career. That and the voice, the clothes, the personality, the wife, the ukulele, the dog, the cat, the goldfish, the shoes, the car, the house, the eyeglasses,and the hair.

The bleeders wasted little time finding a wacko Religious Left liberal judge to stop California's Proposition 209 from going into effect. The new legislation forbids discrimination against or special preferences for anyone based on skin color. Judge Thelton Henderson, a Jimmy Carter appointee in 1980 and a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union in California, quickly issued a restraining order and said the antidiscrimination law may be discriminatory, adding that--and this is classic left-wing activist mantra--the "courts must look beyond the plain language of an enactment." This is code for: words mean what Judge Henderson says they mean. This is Alice in Wonderland stuff come to life. This, friends, is not about fairness or discrimination. It's about political power, constituencies, and front-row seats at the trough.

Comparison-shopping for homeowners insurance, I had this encounter with Lonnie, who was shilling for Prudential Insurance at the time. She mentioned that the policy included $148,000 of coverage for "personal belongings." Wait, I said, Wait, wait, wait. This is many, many times the actual value of all I own. Why such a high amount? Why can't I just have coverage for the real value of my possessions? Lonnie said the personal belongings coverage was yoked to the coverage on the value of the house, and could not be lowered. The policy also included $18,500 of coverage on "Other Structures." But Lonnie, I said, I have no "other structures"--no swimming pool, no outbuildings, no detached garages, no fencing, no gazebos. Why, in view of that, had she included "other structures" coverage? She hemmed and hawed, backed and filled. Give her credit, though; she fairly smoothly went into her Emergency! Emergency! Someone's Caught On To The Scam speech. Relax, I told her, I'll say it for you: I can't just buy insurance for my house, I've got to pay for your scam stuff in order to get what I do need. Isn't that it? I asked jovially. She seemed relieved, and admitted that, yep, that was it. I chuckled and told her not to take it personally. I said that she and I would just agree to share a wink and a nod and acknowledge there was a little scam going on, and then we'd move on to the rest of our lives without further ado. No harm done, surely. Right? She laughed, agreed and seemed eager to move on. I love moments like this!

It's great to be 55 years old. You can finally see darkness at the end of the tunnel.

Country and western singer Faron Young, one of my favies, came to his senses and committed suicide December 10. He was 64 years old. He performed for many years with the Grand Old Opry in Nashville. One of his better known songs was Hello Walls. Adios, Faron. (December 11, 1996)

So There IS A God After All, And Its Name Is Money

Famed American atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair's mysterious disappearance at the end of September, 1995, has taken a delicious twist as reports have surfaced in San Antonio, home base of a nest of atheist organizations founded by the O'Hairs, that at least $625,000 of the organizations' funds are missing, along, coincidentally, with O'Hair, her son, Jon, and his adopted daughter, Robin. Tax documents filed with the IRS say the missing funds are "believed to be in the possession of Jon Murray, former secretary" of the organization. The reports hint that the O'Hairs may be hiding in New Zealand.

Sign of Our Times Department: Walt Disney Company has licensed over 17,000 different "101 Dalmatians" products so far. And somewhere out there is an American family that owns every one.

Phone bills are beyond comprehension now. I get mine each month from Ameritech, which used to be Indiana Bell, I think. The bill runs nine or 10 pages. Each contains a dizzying array of information. There are charges from Ameritech, charges from MCI. And lately it's included charges from things named Telco, USBI, L.D. Wholesale Club, and U.S. Billing, Inc. Five or six separate billing entities. I get things in the mail continually urging me to dial special digits before dialing my numbers, to sign up for this or that, send in the names of friends, enemies, pets, winos under the bridge, teenage runaways, so I can get special discounts. MCI alone lists four separate categories of "special savings" available: Friends and Family Discounts, Friends and Family Christmas Day Savings, December Fanfares, Personal Number Savings. Life and my damned phone bill are too complicated.

Near the end of the year, My wife's employer her a notice which said the school district was "pleased" to advise employees that it was replacing the existing prescription drug insurance coverage with a "new pharmacy plan through Anthem Prescription Management." The letter extolled the many benefits of the new program and matter-of-factly noted new co-payment amounts for various brand-name and generic drugs. No mention was made of any increases associated with the marvelous new provisions. A few calculations revealed, however, that what management was announcing with such pleasure was a 67 percent increase in the co-payment for brand-name drugs and a 40 percent raise for generic drugs. Yes, yes, we know how tough it is to squeeze out a living wage these days, but why would the school district use the word "pleased" in announcing the changes? Why would they be pleased to do this? Shouldn't they be sorry instead?

Down There With Lawyers, Car Dealers And Child Molesters

These are not uplifting times for journalists. A Harris poll at year-end shows widespread public dissatisfaction with our ink-stained wretches. First the obvious: Local TV remains the most popular source of news for most folks (34 percent). Newspapers came in third. Seventy-five percent of those questioned said they felt it very important that the news media expose corrupt public officials. Seventy-five percent said political bias infests the media, and the majority felt the bias was "liberal." Now the more subtle findings: One out of four persons polled said he felt the press "hurts American democracy." Only 51 percent felt reporters "got the facts straight" and a huge majority--84 percent--indicated they'd support government requirements for balanced reporting, to the point of imposing fines for inaccurate or biased reporting. Over half the respondents felt journalists should be licensed to practice their professions. The public, according to Harris pollsters, believes journalists are arrogant, cynical, and biased, and only one in four felt they were "intelligent." The qualities which journalists say they highly prize in themselves--honesty and compassion--barely registered in the Harris poll. (December 31, 1996)

	Scoundrels, Knaves & Fools American Pile Whoops & Squawks Splinters From the Bench Indiana University Sports Lists & Other Minutiae Contact the author	2009 \| 2008 \| 2007 \| 2006 \| 2005 \| 2004 \| 2003 \| 2002 \| 2001 \| 2000 \| 1999 \| 1998 \| 1997 \| 1996 \| 1995 \| Pre-1995 The American Pile Is There Hope For The Republic After All? Talk show legends Phil Donahue and Dick Cavett both have announced they'll call it quits at the end of their current contracts. Both promised they'll hang around the media and entertainment business, to work on new and special projects. In the frozen food trough at my local hypermarket I encounter the following: Crinkle Cut Potatoes, Golden Crinkles Potatoes, Crispy Crowns, Potato Nuggets, Hash Brown Potatoes, Shredded Hash Brown Potatoes, Country Hash Brown Potatoes, Pixie Crinkle Potatoes, Shoestring Potatoes, Potato Tri-Patties, Tater Babies, Tater Puffs, Tater Tots, Long Branch French Fried Potatoes, Fajita Fries, Curley Q Fries, Zesty Fries, Fast Fries, Country Fries, and Steak Fries. No nation needs this many choices. The business pages are littered with stories about the decline of Apple Computer, which faces an uncertain future because of declining market share. Apple, surely by mere coincidence, announced February 5 that it may award more than $4.26 million in "severance pay" to its former chief executive, Michael Spindler, fired last week for failing to increase Apple's market share. Meantime, across this great nation of ours, thousands lose their jobs daily in downsizings, mergers and reorganizations. There's something screwy abut a society which parcels out its rewards this way. *Oh, So That's* Why They Look So Awful ". . .the 'edgy' look in fashion is as much a matter of hair (disheveled) and attitude (mean, never smiling) as it is about clothes. . . (it's about). . .pushing the envelope to the edge, edging into bad taste, edging into dangerous territory. . .As Calvin Klein described his spring collection: "It's about intentional near misses and jarring mistakes that add up to an approach to dressing that's entirely modern." Translated into clothes it means too-tight sweaters worn over skirts that hang slightly off kilter, black tights with see-through gingham checks. . .questionable color combinations such as a lavender sweater over a turquoise dress with black opaque pantyhose and yellow patent sling-back pumps." --Marylou Luther,** fashion editor and columnist, answering a reader's question about the word "edgy" as it applies to current fashion, in the December, 1995, issue of United Airlines' inflight magazine, Hemispheres. And Somebody's A 100 Percent Idiot An Indianapolis jury verdict today shows how far down the road (90 per cent) to complete denial of individual responsibility this great nation has gone. The facts were these: a small group of 12- and 13-year-olds went to a birthday party at a friend's house. The parents of the youth whose birthday was being celebrated allowed the youngsters to go out after dark for a scavenger hunt. One of the partygoers, a 13-year-old boy, was walking down the middle of Moller Road, a heavily traveled westside street, when he was struck by a car and killed. His parents then sued, claiming the host parents were guilty of failing to "take care of" the youths who attended the party. The verdict declared the parents were "70 percent responsible" for the lad's death. The car driver was ruled "20 percent responsible" but he was, for reasons not revealed (but readily guessed at--how about: he had no insurance?), not sued. The dead child was deemed 10 percent responsible for his own death. (February 12, 1996) My oldest daughter, Frigga, called to ask for help on a college discussion question: Name the three most influential white people in 20th century American history. I was hard-pressed to think of even one. I struggled and came up with these: Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin, who developed polio vaccine in the 1950s; Rush Limbaugh, for his role in the meteoric rise of talk radio (which has broken the iron grip on information and communication long held by the three TV networks and a few major media outlets); Jonathan Winters. Who else is there who's mattered a whit? I could use help on this. Honky males are so out of fashion these days. I Hear Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch Cheering For. . . . . . the Wayne County (Michigan) judge who ordered local attorney Stephanie Watson to appear this week in court on charges of failing to pay 954 city parking tickets totaling over $30,000 in fines. An assistant city attorney described Watson as "the No. 1 scofflaw in the city" and promised her that the city's lawsuit to collect the fines is "not going away." Watson has contended that on all 954 occasions she either never received the tickets or someone else was driving her car when the ticket was issued. Sure. Human Civilization Marches Onward and Upward Department A ram that served as mascot for the University of North Carolina's athletic teams has been found stabbed to death and disemboweled near Chapel Hill, N.C. Ramses XXVI was the latest in a succession of rams that had served as mascot since 1924. I took a first pass at writing my obituary today. It'll take some thought. Best to be prepared, ready to go. Writing that letter to Jonathan Winters is still on my to-do list. It's an intimidating prospect. There was almost big trouble down in Richmond, Virginia, last week, but--whew!--the Bonnie Blue Ball went off without violence. The February 24 dance was sponsored by the Museum of The Confederacy as a birthday party for the institution and a way to attract new members. The event quickly became controversial when blacks and civil rights leaders criticized the museum for staging the event during Black History Month. Cries of racism and "white defiance" erupted. Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder went on NBC's Today show to denounce the event and compare people wearing Confederate costumes to "jackboooted Nazis." Strangely enough, none from the big media glitterati, the wacko Religious Left or the exquisitely sensitive American cultural elite could be heard chastising Wilder for his racist remarks. The New York Times News Service apparently sent a reporter, for its account of the ball noted that "the only black people among Saturday night's crowd of 500 were at the catering stations, pouring bourbon and dishing up black-eyed pea salsa and sweet-potato biscuits." Martha Boltz, a fourth-generation member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who knows very well why, was quoted by the Times saying, "I don't see why pride in heritage has to be limited to one group." The part I liked best, though, was this: The ball's organizers, who had been worried about breaking even, sold out of tickets shortly after Wilder's NBC diatribe. There's A Darwin Award Nominee In Here, Somewhere Miguel Gonzales of Honolulu was sentenced to an anger-management class after he assaulted his girlfriend. It turned out to be a death sentence. He showed up drunk for one class, and his instructor allegedly got angry and beat him, leaving him brain dead. The instructor, Charles Mahuka, was on parole for attempted murder." --Charles Oliver, writing in the "Brickbats" column of Reason magazine, January 1996 edition.) Latest Job Opportunities in America: Counseling victims of Internet addiction. Suport groups are springing up around the country and social scientists are already at work writing books, interviewing victims, lobbying for funds. What a great country! I was looking forward to a beautiful day March 6, one filled with excitement, challenge, and opportunity. All was well till the Indianapolis Star alerted me to the latest horror stalking the American people: dirty dishrags. Writer Patti Denton dragged this one into the light. Even day-old dirty dishrags, she warned, can hold enough bacteria to cause salmonella food poisoning and urinary tract infections. Washing hands regularly with antibacterial soap, using paper towels to wipe surfaces, and daily changing of dishrags were recommended. Another day ruined. But Nobody Asked For Spelling Lessons About 1,000 angry protesters screamed, waved Mexican flags and signs (one of which read "Racist Fibune"), and demanded a front-page apology--but not spelling lessons--from the Chicago Tribune March 1 following a Mike Royko column the howlers claimed insulted Mexicans. Royko said the column was a satire. The angry crowd tore up copies of the Tribune and demanded that Royko be fired and that more Hispanic reporters be hired. The Tribune offered a soothing apologetic editorial in later editions. Mayor Richard Daley said Royko "has to be much more understanding and sensitive to the community." Saul Garcia, a protest organizer from Latinos United, said, "We are not against freedom of speech. What we are against is freedom of speech that promotes racist stereotypes." Like Saul said, he is against freedom of speech. This alert, just in from a renowned Indianapolis proctologist and annotator: keep an eye peeled for America's newest euphemism. . . commercial sex workers. This is code for: prostitutes. He spotted the term in an article in American Journal of Public Health. All Hail Judge Milton Shadur! A truly nineties entitlement dance appears for the moment to have played out in Chicago. It began in February when Larry Jackson was suspended from his Oak Park High School basketball team for shoving his coach. Jackson promptly transferred to Farragut but Chicago school officials ruled he was ineligible to play. Jackson filed a federal lawsuit claiming his rights were violated because he hadn't been notified in writing and given a hearing. He asked the court to rule him eligible to play immediately. U.S. District Senior Judge Milton Shadur rejected that bid. Jackson's lawyer amended the lawsuit and claimed he had the right to play basketball because he met eligibility standards. On March 8, Judge Shadur responded again. This time he piled lawbooks high on his bench and read the attorneys a list of cases holding that--and here, by golly, is the big shocker--high school students don't have a constitutional right to play sports. Judge Shadur turned down the lad's request for a restraining order, ruled the suit has no federal issues, and tossed it out of court. We can be sure Jackson's attorney knew all along that no such constitutional right existed, and that there were precedents saying so. Instead they went trolling for a judge who'd entertain their damned nonsense. Luckily for us, they picked the wrong one. Bet money the lad and his attorney will re-file the case in another court. These people never stop. Two More Reasons To Go On Living March is Frozen Food Month. . .Courtside seats to New York Knicks home games now cost $1,000 each. Snapshots of America Department: About 97,700 federal tax refunds worth $81 million could not be returned to Americans last year because of illegible handwriting on the tax return or errors in the addresses provided. Little Known Facts Department: Not only is there a Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) but it plans to launch within the year its own new publication, the Journal of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. Sign me up! Our Lives Will Be Forever Emptier If We Miss This The syndicated TV news magazine show, Day & Date, was to broadcast a 20-minute videotape this week of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his girlfriend, Carolyn Bessette, quarreling and making up in New York's Central Park. According to wire service reports, the lovely young couple was seen eating, walking, talking, pouting, crying, and making up, after which Bessette tried to bum a cigarette off a stranger. The show paid "more than $5,000 and less than $1 million" for the rights to the tape. My wife, Mogo, and I were reflecting on the joys of our youth last night and in the Life As We Remember It Department came up with the following (incomplete) College Freshman Chemistry Student's Table of The Elements: Beer. Lightning. Ear Wax. Farts. Cigarette Ashes. Yellow Snow. Spit. Pubic hair. Skidmarks. Are there others we missed? Neither of us was very good in chemistry. American Society's Spin Down The Toilet Continues Department: A fourteen-year-old girl at a junior high school in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, has filed a lawsuit seeking to overthrow a decision by school officials to ban backpacks from hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms on the grounds they are a safety and health hazard. Local taxpayers will now get to spend thousands of dollars defending themselves from another insipid twit in their midst. Look for local rights activists and the ACLU to be smirking proudly at the plaintiff's side as this absurd case unfolds. Save The Last Dance (And Clip of Ammo) For Me (Just In Case) Adult authorities at Indiana State University in Terre Haute may end a moratorium on late-night events on campus by the end of March and switch to metal detectors to prevent dances and other campus gatherings from turning violent. The moratorium was instituted last October when two campus police officers were assaulted after a sorority dance. A week later, two students were shot at a Homecoming dance. Ain't college the time of our lives!? The tension is rising as the March 25 Oscar awards ceremony draws near. USA Today, in a pre-Oscar feature about "Oscar fashion" competition, noted that the Hush Puppy Shoe Co. has sent custom-made dress shoes to each best actor and supporting actor nominee in an effort to get its product seen. . .and the article quoted actress Sandra Bullock explaining why she preferred Calvin Klein clothing over all other types: "I like his clothes because they're so uncomplicated and easy to figure out." Most people just put clothing on; there's nothing to "figure out." Not Sandra, apparently. And while America holds its breath to see if Kevin Spacey wears his free Hush Puppies, millions around the world will be starving and without shoes. And this is merely a prelude to what will happen if Bob Dole is elected president and the Republicans extend their control of Congress. (March 22, 1996) ] I'll confess. I'm the guy dancing and sliding down the bannister in the latest Wyndham Hotels ad running on CNN. It was, as viewers can tell, a nearly indescribable thrill being in the world of business. Westinghouse Electric Corp. has revealed it gave chief executive Michael (No Relation to Air) Jordan a 61 percent pay increase (to $2.52 million) as Westinghouse's annual income fell 80 percent. Meantime, Republicans are starving children and evicting old people from nursing homes. Who are you gonna vote for in November? Get Ready To Say Adios to Tammy Faye Department: The legendary Tammy Faye Bakker Messner is being treated for colon cancer. Her second husband, contractor Roe Messner, has just been sentenced to 27 months in prison for bankruptcy fraud. Her first husband, televangelist Jim Bakker, was freed in December of 1994 after serving 4.5 years for fraud. He Must Have Mistakenly Taken The Idiot's Cove Exit Off The Evolutionary Freeway John Haley, 18, of Shreveport, Louisiana, suffered a minor head wound while out strolling in March when, alarmed by approaching police cars, he threw his gun on the ground to get rid of it and it went off. His uncle, Ron Lavell Dotson, 24, then drove Haley to the hospital and crashed through the emergency room doors, injuring a hospital employee, according to an Associated Press report. You couldn't make this stuff any more absurd if you made it up. A Possible Hallucination I picked up an old compadre at the Indianapolis airport the other night. I put on my pig nose for this special occasion, and introduced myself as Dr. Maynard G. Golo. We yucked it up and he said he was plenty impressed. Off at the edge of my view, though, I more than once thought I saw someone move closer to a phone, or motion discreetly to an armed policeman nearby. I could have been hallucinating, of course. "Scared of all that frosting on Kellogg's frosted mini-wheat cereal?" That's the question Kellogg's is asking millions and millions of Americans lucky enough to receive by mail a sample box of its latest marketing niche strategy, mini-wheats frosted on only one side. After struggling unsuccessfully to commit suicide by putting the plastic mailing bag over my head--ignoring the government warning, for which I may be sent to prison--I called Kellogg's' 800 number to express my heartfelt gratitude for this new product. Reading directly from the mailing bag, I told them, somewhat breathlessly, I thought, that, "Hey! One side's sweet, but the other side's wheat!" I said I really dug the "surprisingly delicious sweet but not too sweet taste." My call was forwarded to the marketing department where I was offered a job as an advertising copy writer. You just live for days like this. The fate of the popular TV program, Murder, She Wrote, is instructive as to where our civilization is headed. CBS has announced the program will end its 12-year run in May. Though it was a dominant ratings force for a decade, CBS this year moved it from its longstanding Sunday time slot to Thursday. There, according to a March 27 USA Today account, "it withered against NBC's comedy juggernaut." The problem? Murder She Wrote failed to attract enough young viewers. Market analysts have long known that younger viewers spend their money and are easy prey for advertisers. Older viewers are busy saving money, a cardinal sin in our frenzied economy. It hardly requires much imagination to foresee the day when advertisers will arrange legislation legalizing the killing of old people who fail to buy a specified minimum amount of products annually. (March 27, 1996) Jesse Jackson's protest that Hollywood doesn't nominate enough blacks for Academy Awards rings hollow. I've checked, and there's no record of Jesse protesting at NFL or NBA games where blacks comprise far more than their proportionate share of professional rosters. Unless he's ready to be consistent he ought to shut up. Unless of course it's a race thing. (March 30, 1996) Call Sally Jessie! Call Phil and Oprah! Call Jerry! We Can Still Put Together a Special Weeklong Series on This! Department: Out of Patterson, Missouri, comes this beauty. . .two teen-agers and a young man who hoped to get on national television news by taking over their boarding school at gunpoint killed a classmate because they thought he'd get in their way, according to wire service reports today. Will Futrelle, 16, was found dead March 25 in the woods at Mountain Park Baptist Academy, a school in the Ozarks for "troubled youngsters." He'd been beaten with a club and a brick, and his throat had been slashed with a pocket knife. Anthony Gene Rutherford, 18, and two 15-year-old boys from California have been arrested in the case. Let the questing for celebrity continue. That Unholy Duo Again I fishtailed over to my neighborhood Kohl's department store Saturday and added to my fine wardrobe the following: a Bugle Boy brand short sleeved shirt made in Bangladesh, a Croft & Barrow brand white Oxford cloth dress shirt made in Honduras, a Sonoma knit polo shirt made in Guatemala, a Croft & Barrow polo shirt made in Guatemala, and a C&B Sport brand poplin lightweight jacket made in Korea. The unholy duo of Republican greed and unbridled capitalism is doubtless the reason there's nothing made in America anymore. Best News I Heard in March: A federal appeals court panel has upheld a ruling that the University of Texas improperly denied admission to four white students on the basis of their race while admitting minorities with inferior scores and qualifications. Angry UT Law School officials temporarily suspended their admissions processing and vowed to appeal the decision. The issue may drag on for decades in appeals, but it's encouraging to see courts begin to stand up to the fraud of affirmative action. (March 31, 1996) Competition seems to have sharpened minds at Ford Motor Company, where bold new cost-cutting initiatives were announced in early March. Ford researchers discovered the company offers 14 different cigarette lighters in its vehicles. It's decided to use just one, and projects savings of $1 million annually as a result. Further sleuthing revealed that Ford now offers 18 air filters (meaning, among other things, 17-1 odds against a customer getting the right filter) and seven different kinds of trunk carpeting. The company has decided to reduce those to five filters and one trunk carpet, and to stop painting the insides of vehicle ashtrays. These and many more years-overdue common sense decisions will enable Ford to save an estimated $11 billion. Will the prices on Ford vehicle prices go down as a result? Nope. The larger question is how a company drifts into such absurd situations as 18 air filters and 14 cigarette lighters in the first place. I have in mind a series of special Christmas cards based on a work of art I saw in the Tate Gallery in London, titled "Self-Burial (1969)" by Keith Arnatt. It consisted of nine photographs in a sequence. The first showed the artist standing on a patch of ground. Succeeding pictures showed Arnatt "sinking" into the earth. In the first he was buried upright halfway to his knees; in the next, to mid-thigh; and so forth, proceeding gourdward to chest, shoulders, neck, mouth, forehead, then. . .nothing. Grass grew over the spot in the final picture. All neatly done, no trace of dirt piles or disturbances of any kind. There are a few logistics to be worked out, of course, but I have a hunch this one will prove irresistible to me. Also in the Tate Gallery that summer was an entire room devoted to paintings by Mark Rothko. They were mostly huge, gloomy things, squares and rectangles of muddy greys, blacks and reds. The leaflet handed out to visitors indicated Rothko had committed suicide. He made the right choice. The British have a charming way with words. When British workers are fired or laid off permanently, the press says they were "made redundant." I discovered another colorful phrasing while chatting on a London-to-Dover train ride with Marian, a 67-year-old retiree. She was going to Deal, a seacoast town, to visit her daughter. She said her government pension was 44 pounds (about $65-70) and she supplemented it with interest on her savings. She bought a one-bedroom apartment in Buckinghamshire in 1986 for 44,000 pounds. She considered the space so cramped "you couldn't swing a cat in there." This "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip is something special. Today's version shows a corpulent Ted Kennedy floating in a Palm Beach swimming pool, reflecting. . .here are the captions: "Life is good. . .I treat women like dirt but support feminist causes. And I get away with my extravagant lifestyle by insisting that the middle class do more to help the poor. . .Wow! Having a 'social conscience' sure beats having a personal one." The artist, Bruce Tinsey, has a brilliant future if he keeps his edge. But "Mallard" should be on the editorial page beside "Doonesbury," just to be consistent, don't you think? (April 2, 1996) The New York Times reported March 29 that pay for chief executives at America's largest companies rose nearly 15 percent in 1995, the highest increase since the mid-1980s, the period known as the Reaganite-Bushite Decade of Greed. The paper noted that raises for corporate pooh-bahs have increased an average of 11 percent since 1988, a period during which pay for working people has never risen by more than four percent, and while these same corporations eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Times didn't suggest it, but doesn't consistency demand that we label this present period the Clintonista Decade of Greed? That is, if we want to be fair about these things. The Wilbert burial vault company has submitted a new word for the English language. In a large ad in the April 2 Chicago Tribune promoting its vast range of vault options, Wilbert says, "During the funeralization process. . ." U-G-L-Y! Ugly, Ugly, Ugly! I don't normally pay much attention to automobiles, but one night this week enroute home on Old South Friendly Road, I pulled up at a stoplight behind a car I thought particularly ugly. It was a 1996 Ford Taurus. The geniuses at Ford have radically redesigned the car, heavily rounding its contours. The rear window is an oblong shape that reminds me of windows in a bathysphere or deep-sea aquarium. They jacked up its price last fall when the new models came out, too, thinking customers would slavishly line up anyway. After all, Taurus has been the No. 1 selling car in America the last couple of years. Instead, sales dropped sharply and Ford had to rejigger things to eliminate the price hike on at least one model. The boys in Detroit still have trouble getting it. (April 5, 1996) The pickup truckload of illegals who led police on an hour-long chase in California that ended with their arrests and the beating of two of them by police have--whatever else happens--won America's national lottery. They'll be able to sue for millions in damages. Two lawsuits for over $10 million were filed within days of this Most Recent Unpleasantness. Talk about a land of opportunity! (April 7, 1996) Don't you think it's time to ditch those backwards baseball caps and find a new ashion statement reflecting the pain, the agony, and the angst of today's youth? The New York Times reports the price of North American wood pulp has declined 40 percent since last fall. Surely this means local newspapers, which have relentlessly jacked up prices over the last two years using the skyrocketing cost of newsprint as a prime justification, will be calling soon to notify us of a price reduction. Nope. They'll do what any self-respecting business would do: screw the customer and keep the windfall. (April 8, 1996) Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin is expected to plead not guilty in a Recent Unpleasantness in Dallas. Irvin and another man were found in a hotel room with two topless dancers and certain quantities of marijuana and cocaine. Everybody's basically throwing up his hands and saying the drugs didn't belong to them and they had no idea how they got in the room. Dallas authorities face what other communities across this great nation face: trying a case where defendants deny facts and evidence, and a near-certain not guilty verdict if it goes to a jury. I have a solution. Why don't we resurrect the O.J. Simpson panel and create a permanent, traveling jury on national tour? They could go from city to city performing jury nullification and distributing not guilty verdicts in streamlined sham trials. One of the big television networks--several, probably--could do all-day programming of the proceedings with viewer call-in shows and celebrity pre- and post-trial analysis. Each juror would be given book contracts, his or her own primetime TV show, movie rights, and a line of personal clothing, snack products and self-help videos. This would save communities millions by speeding up trials. It would provide productive and profitable lives for the Simpson jurors, and allow citizens to get on with their own lives, providing they have them. Say adios to one of my favies, actor Ben Johnson. He died April 8 at age 77. The Chicago Tribune obituary noted his best-known role as Sam, the owner of the movie theater in The Last Picture Show (which earned him an Academy Award for best supporting actor), and cowboy roles in Shane and The Wild Bunch. He appeared in more than 300 films. Johnson uttered one of the greatest (to me) lines in all filmdom when he starred with Marlon Brando and Karl Malden in One-Eyed Jacks. In that movie, Johnson played an unctuous, insincere conniving suck-up who had betrayed the Brando character earlier in the movie. Later, the two characters again crossed paths and Johnson carefully brought up the earlier episode. He told Brando, ""You know me, Rio--if I thought I coulda helped you, I'da been in there like a streak." Ben's honey-smooth cowboy drawl was a sound for sore ears. What a guy! Say goodbye to novelist Richard Condon, who died April 10 at age 81. His best-known book was The Manchurian Candidate, Published in 1959, it was made into a movie in 1962, barely a year before President Kennedy was assassinated. The Manchurian Candidate, starring Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, and Laurence Harvey, the latter an American soldier captured and brainwashed during the Korean War. When he returned to the United States, Harvey was used to assassinate a powerful politician. The film was withdrawn from circulation for many years following the Kennedy assassination, though Condon's Associated Press obituary gave no clue as to why. Condon once said he felt very strongly about the abuse of power by elected officials, a theme coursing through many of his books. "I'd like people to know how deeply their politicians are wronging them." He was right about that part. Another Dirty, Rotten Trick Casual Days" are apparently the latest trick played on Generation X'ers. Their self-obsessive whining in the mid-1980s produced casual and "dress down" days in corporate America. That's turned to sniveling at the discovery that "casual days" are "a hoax and a trap"--this from no less than America's fashion and manners arbiter, Judith (Better Known As Miss Manners) Martin. She was quoted in a lengthy Chicago Tribune article April 12 warning readers: "Don't be fooled by that polo shirt your boss is wearing. There's nothing laid-back about casual day." Martin said the trap is the pretense that on casual days your bosses--the big shots, the pooh-bahs, the people you bitterly resent and don't trust for one damned second-- "suspend reading you symbolically." Martin and others interviewed by the Tribune's writer, Lisbeth Levine, agreed that no matter how much the big guys tell you it's O.K. to dress down, the workplace is hyper-competitive and others are judging you by how you look and what you wear as, alas, humans have done since time began. Although 42 percent of America's offices now allow casual dress, many on a daily basis, some research and anecdotal evidence suggests that casual dress means casual attitudes about work. And companies are constantly being pressed by whining employees pushing the envelope to further relax existing casual standards. The Tribune's experts concluded that "clothing has gone about as far as it can go and is enroute to a neater look." What bitter news: appearances still count. The good news, though, is that the new trend is sure to nourish one of America's major growth industries, resentment. Christ, Magic Tied For 'Triples' Lead Time magazine reports (April 15) that the recent Easter season saw Jesus make the covers of three major newsweeklies at once, tying Him with Magic Johnson for first place in that department. The news couldn't have come at a better time, and surely made The Saviour feel a good bit better about Himself. Talk show host Montel Williams, in Chicago last week to promote his autobiography, Mountain, Get Out of My Way, told the Chicago Tribune he thinks he knows why so many people are willing to go on TV shows and expose their darkest, dirtiest secrets to audiences of millions. Being on television proves they exist. I am on TV, therefore I am. "For 20 years, TV has been the great validator," says Montel. "It's the only place in America where you can go and feel like you've been listened to. People feel they have a right to that." Well, some of us, certainly. A Life Event I attended my first Gordon Lightfoot concert April 11 in the Murat Theater in Indianapolis. Though Gordon no longer resembles the pensive, tanned young man on his album covers, this was still a Kodak Moment. These images get frozen in one's mind, I suspect. Had I met him on the street, I'd have thought it was just another skinny, slightly gaunt-looking man in his 50s or 60s. The crowd appeared a near sellout, and the applause was warm and sustained and loud throughout the show. Sometimes the clapping began with just the first few notes of one of his signature songs: Pony Man, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Rainy Day People, If You Could Read My Mind, Sundown, For Lovin' Me/Did She Mention My Name? and Don Quixote. Voices in the audience hummed and sang the words of some of the quieter ballads. Lightfoot is no showman. His presentation skills are amateurish. There was almost no repartee with the crowd, no fancy fireworks, no biting the heads off live chickens, no disemboweling of family pets or parents onstage, no self-mutilation, no laser lights. Many songs ended and began with no word spoken to the audience. He stood bowlegged and nearly motionless before the microphone and sang without flourish or bombast. Either because of something wrong with the sound system or--more likely--the effects of age, his voice is no longer the mellow, rich baritone sound on his major albums. Instead, it sounded "tinny," as though the treble was turned up way too high on a stereo. None of this detracted from the overall solemnity and wonder of this occasion for me. Many of Gordon Lightfoot's songs have a deep, soul-stirring impact. He has a unique way of writing about love and loneliness and friendships, about working people and the majesty of green, dark forests and blue whales, and about the sometimes excruciating pain of the human experience (Don Quixote so well embodies that last idea that I want it played at my funeral). I spent much of the evening with tears trickling down my face in the dark. This was like going to the mountaintop. This was a Life Event, as the corporate human resources touchy-feely folks say. Thanks, Gordo. The Minnesota Timberwolves have announced they've fined Isaiah Rider for missing a team flight to Washington last week. . .a reminder of this truism about the human species: even if you announced an event, a meeting, a flight 5,000 years in advance, X percent of us would still be late. It's in our genes. (April 15, 1996) The tragic death of the poor little seven-year old in a Wyoming plane crash--surely we all know by now that Jennifer Dubroff was flying the overloaded Cessna and taking off in a rainstorm--was a uniquely American publicity stunt. And when all the insipid blathering from the surviving parent and pundits is over, the bottom line is simple. This was a little girl who should have been allowed to be a little girl. There would have been plenty of time for her to fly an airplane when she grew up (but less time, then, for the parents to feed their egos on it). Jessica was the offspring of what was described as a "New Age spiritual healer" mother and, we may deduce, an equally insipid father. Judging from news reports, she had no chance for a normal childhood. The parents were and are idiots and the child is dead because of them. They ought to be strung up. This Would Be Great, Except That Her Daughter's 'Position' Is Driven Into The Ground Like a Nail Department Lisa Blair Hathaway, New Age faith healer and mother of Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-old girl who died April 11 when the Cessna airplane she was trying to fly plunged to the ground nose first attempting a takeoff at Cheyenne, Wyoming, killing Jessica, her father and her flight instructor, offered this dumbfounding comment to eager reporters after the tragedy. . ."I did everything so this child could have freedom and choice and have what America stands for. Liberty comes from. . .just living your life. . .I couldn't bear to have my children in any other position." (April 16, 1996) Dressing For Success, or Perhaps That's Why My Price Waterhouse Career Foundered Department The cover story in the April 14 Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine highlighted two up-and-coming Chicago artists, Jeffery Roberts and Nick Cave, who may unwittingly have solved one of the central mysteries of my life: why I didn't achieve greatness in my Price Waterhgouse business career. The answer, I suspect, is tucked away in this seemingly innocuous paragraph by writer Kathy Kaplan: "Cave is an elusive artist, a free spirit whose fascination is mixed media and the juxtaposition of unexpected objects. He recently designed a collection of 20 "sound suits"--suits made of materials like twigs, bottle caps and sisal--that create sound when he performs in them." Determined not to make the same mistake twice, I called Cave--somewhat breathlessly, I thought--and ordered the entire collection of 20. Topped off--somewhat floppily, I imagine--with my stylish snap-brim fedora made from lunchmeat, this new wardrobe could spell home run for me in the job interviewing and career-rebuilding department. On Gordon Liddy's recommendation, I watched the movie, Braveheart, starring Mel Gibson in the role of William Wallace, a 13th century Scotsman who led a rebellion against the English throne and King Edward. The film was heavy on the ugliness of the average person's life in those times, and loaded with much gore and savagery in the brutal hand-to-hand combat. Severed heads and limbs flew, skulls, faces and chests spurted blood as axes, pikes, machettes, broadswords, clubs and maces flailed wildly at close range. Wallace came to a sad end, of course. He was betrayed by his own countrymen, a clique of nobles more interested in protecting their own wealth and sinecures than in obtaining their country's freedom from the English. Wallace was tortured and beheaded. His body was hacked to pieces and taken to "the four corners of the kingdom" as a warning to the rabble. Robert The Bruce, whose name--for reasons not made clear in Braveheart--is immortalized in Scottish history, is portrayed as a venal, cowardly, gutless conniver in this film. When I remarked afterward to my wife, Mogo, how much the betrayal and brutality aspects of the film upset me, she agreed and noted that Braveheart was an age-old story, the story of people savaged by their conquerors and jailers throughout human history. It is the story of American blacks, of Cambodians, Chinese, Kurds, American Indians, Jews, gypsies, Poles, enslaved African blacks, peasants and kulaks slaughtered by Stalin, and countless other victims of uniquely human bestiality. Only humans kill and torture for the sheer joy and fun of it. And William Wallace was just one among hundreds of millions of victims in this sad tableau, which continues to the present moment. I think I had dinner last night with a table full of lesbians. Musta been 10 of them. Funny thing, they acted just like the rest of us, perfectly normal, respectable human beings. (April 21, 1996) One More Reason to Go On Living Cancer-ridden American baby doctor-kook-celebrity doper Timothy Leary has revealed to friends that he is contemplating committing suicide while logged on to the Internet. Leary's friend, author Ken (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) Kesey recently revealed this breathtaking possibility to the Portland Daily Oregonian. This revives an interesting Zen question relating to a more primitive technology, telephones: If you call someone and are put on hold, and you die, does your little blinking light go out at the other end? What happens if you commit suicide on the Internet? Does the machine automatically log you off? Do you instantly zap to a cyberspace heaven and float free there, able to appear and butt into any Internet "chat room" that strikes your fancy? America needs to know! I'm logging on and staying on until the Leary suicide vigil is over! Here's the latest lawyer joke: Michael Donahoe, attorney for Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski, has already said that all charges must be dropped because of pretrial publicity. And we wonder why this is among the professions ranking lower than whale manure. Must Have Been Absorbing Too Much American Culture A 31-year-old Liverpool, England, pedestrian was waiting at an intersection when another motorist slowed to allow him to cross. He crossed but "failed to indicate his gratitude" to the driver, who promptly got out of his car and attacked the ingrate with an iron pole. The victim's cheek was broken. Police said the attacker was heard screaming "Next time, say thank you!" as he drove off. I have better advice for the pedestrian. Next time, pack a sidearm and several extra clips of ammo. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta reports the number of people in the United States diagnosed with AIDS in 1995 declined by 7 percent from the prior year. Now there's some news that'll drive the AIDS lobby up the wall. Millions and millions and millions of dollars in federal grants are at stake here. We've got to figure out some way to get that number back up there. I'd start by suing the CDC for falsifying data. That should prevent funding cuts but still allow cost of living increases while the litigation drags on for decades. There appears to be profitable territory to mine in some CDC statistics, particularly the one showing blacks are six times more likely to have AIDS than whites and twice as likely to have AIDS as Hispanics. This is prima facie discrimination. You could step outside and throw a rock and hit a court willing to rule favorably on that one. What ever happened to Flip Wilson? I'm convinced there's a clue in our advertising about the state of our civilization. For me, it's in ads such as Burger King's "Sometimes You Gotta Break The Rules" campaign. . .The Outback Steakhouse chain's "No Rules! Just Right!" theme, and Nike's mantra, "Just Do It!" Technology is dangerous. Some troublemaker ran a Nexus computer database search of an entire year's issues of the San Francisco Chronicle and discovered this shocker: the words "right wing" appeared 568 times, "left wing" 86 times. Sorry for peeking. (April 22, 1996) And Worth Ever' Daggone Penny of It! Overheard in The Board Room: Ringo Starr, former Beatles drummer, was paid $1 million last winter by a Japanese advertising agency to state his name in a beer commercial. Snapshots of Our Times The May, 1996, issue of Harper's magazine reports that according to Graef Crystal's book, In Search of Excess, the average American CEO's after-tax compensation has risen by more than 300 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1974, while the average American worker's pay fell 13 percent. . .the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay in the United States is 120 to 1. In Great Britain it's 33:1, in Germany, 21:1, and in Japan 16 to 1. Bumper sticker reported seen on a Houston expressway: Fight Crime! Shoot Back! A six-year-old boy and two eight-year-olds are accused of beating a four-week-old baby nearly to death in the San Francisco area and the youngest of the three assailants has been charged with attempted murder. The lads were on a mission to steal a tricycle, found the infant in the apartment they were burglarizing, and apparently thought it would make them feel good about themselves to trash him. This Most Recent Unpleasantness has provoked handwringing, furrowed brows, and consternation all around. News magazines and pundits are asking: how could it happen? The answer's simple. This is our harvest, the fruit of American society's long descent to the present day's "Just Do It" cesspool. Better get used to it, because more's on the way. Sounds Like The Girl I Took To The Senior Prom, Part II Actress Margot Kidder, best known for her co-starring role with Christopher Reeve in Superman, was hospitalized at the end of April after being found crouched in the bushes in a Glendale, California neighborhood. Police said Kidder "was dirty, frightened, paranoid. . .was wearing disheveled, cast-off clothing" and had apparently cut off ragged chunks of her hair with a razor blade. She was also missing her front dental bridge when taken into custody. And Worth Ever' Daggone Million of it! Best Investment Never Made Department: Waterworld, produced and directed by actor Kevin Costner, was originally offered to Roger Corman's production company which balked at the film's $5 million budget. The Costner version ended up costing $175 million, or $1.3 million per minute. --Spy magazine, January/February 1996 issue. Rumer's Probably Better Off Not Understanding What Mom Does When last we heard from the bashful Demi Moore and her husband, Bruce Willis, they were telling breathless reporters how they'd moved to Sandpoint,Idaho, to get their children away from the sleaze and pernicious influence of the Hollywood scene, even though Sandpoint video stores have available all the couple's movies. Now the troublemakers at Spy magazine report that Demi, who was paid $12.5 million to "shake her flubbery floppers" in the film, Striptease, cast her seven-year-old daughter, Rumer, as her on-screen daughter in the movie so the child would have the "opportunity to understand what I do." In the movie, the child spends a lot of time at the strip club and watches her mother dance naked. And Then Of Course There's The Old Classic Middle-Digit This tidbit stumbled across in a New York Times book review of In Contempt, by Christopher Darden, the assistant prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial. . ."In the great Russian Orthodox schism of the 1600's, for example, people were burned at the stake over such questions as whether you should extend two or three fingers when making the sign of the cross." I fear a similar schism is developing between supporters and critics of The Mentor, Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight. (May 3, 1996) And Worth Ever' Daggone Thousand of It! The New York Times reported April 30 that Ralph Clark, a leader of the Freemen, an anti-government group involved in numerous confrontations with authorities, has taken $676,082 in federal farm subsidy checks over the past 10 years. Give the Times credit for digging out the hypocrisy here, but let's not forget that these are wacko right wing kooks and extremists they're exposing, not liberals, who would never do such things in the first place. Bobby Johnson Strikes A Mighty Blow For Mankind Bobby Johnson of Indianapolis played surrogate avenger for all of us when he chose how to deal with his frustration over the meager choices on his cable-connected television set. The 27-year-old loading dock worker was home watching a little TV, sipping a little booze, and--it's not much of a stretch to imagine--idly twirling the chamber on his personal handgun. He told police later he was unhappy with his viewing choices. His big 27-inch Zenith, he said, "had 41 f------ channels. . .and nothing to watch." Johnson did what we've all dreamed of doing. He grabbed his .357 Magnum and blazed away, pumping six bullets into the set. The ruined set was still smoking when police arrived. They arrested Johnson on charges of criminal recklessness, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Johnson allegedly wrestled with officers and had to be subdued with a chemical repellent. In a jailhouse interview with Ruth Mullen of the Indianapolis Star, Johnson said, "Reckless, hell! I hit it right where I was aiming! I don't see why a man can't shoot his own TV if he wants to. I paid for it." Johnson told the reporter that "I just said, 'What is this stupid s---?' (a truly cosmic question, when you think about it) and pulled the trigger." He conceded that he thought the episode "had a lot to do with that Jack Daniels I was drinking." Reckless, unruly, drunk, profane, testy, whatever--for one brief, shining moment, Bobby Johnson was one beautiful guy. (May 3, 1996) The phone rang this morning and it was Allison Frobish or one of those pestiferous phone bank androids who hector us relentlessly. She said she was doing market research on restaurants and wondered if I had two minutes to answer some questions. In a rare moment of quick, seamless thinking, I said, "You've reached the Stepford Home for The Criminally Insane. I doubt if there's a soul here who could talk to you intelligently about anything. Thank you," and hung up. I just love moments like this! (May 9 ,1996) A half-mile wide billboard's just been hoisted on West 38th Street to trumpet the Miller Brewing Company's latest product. "New Miller Beer!" the thing screams at me as my hurtling Probe approaches, "Reach for What's Out There!" Sorry, I reply, the glistening string of drool from my mouth halting its steady descent. . . What's Out There is a lunatic asylum with all the cage doors wide open. I believe I'll pass on that. The Speck Wheels Are Turning Clever people are already at work figuring out a way to make a television series, a blockbuster movie, and a stunning array of ancillary products and spinoff industries from the fairly amazing Dick Speck video broadcast this week. The videotape was made while Speck was alive in prison and featured Speck's cavorting in blue panties with a gay lover inside prison, as well as Speck himself musing on the great times, great sex, and great drugs he was having behind bars. The film was apparently smuggled out and later purchased by Bill Kurtis, an independent television producer, who turned it into a special on American Justice, an Arts & Entertainmnt Network program broadcast May 18. USA Today printed a grotesque photo made from the videotape which showed Speck naked from the waist up and sporting a truly amazing pair of breasts, whose size was sufficient to produce stunned silence on the ordinarily relentlessly raucous Bob & Tom Show Friday morning when host Tom Griswold turned to page 12-A and showed his co-hosts the evidence. There's big money to be made here, so prudes best step aside. Ain't this a great civilization!? Al Was A Unabomber Favie! FBI agents taking apart the Montana cabin of suspected Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski found a copy of Vice President Al Gore's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance. Many sections were underlined and copious notes filled the margins. Somehow Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and the other media big hitters didn't zero in on this obvious connection to the wacko Religious Left liberal movement. Had it not been for the intrepid American Spectator (June, 1996), this anecdote probably would never have seen the light of day. All concerned have apologized for peeking. Another Great Idea And Constitutional Right Whose Time Has Come New Tork Times writer Max Frankel, in a May 5 column, proposes that the government provide universal electronic mail service to all citizens. He reasons that the government once did this to assure universal mail and telephone service, so why not e-mail? Otherwise, Frankel posits, millions of Americans will be denied their right to share in this expanding technology. He cites a Rand Corporation study which says that absent coersion, the free market is likely to deliver e-mail to only half the American population. The cost--a few billions here and there--would be no problem, according to Frankel, if government will just get in there with subsidies, encouragements, challenges, arm-twisting, new taxes, whatever it takes to get the private sector to pony up with the cash. Wouldn't be any wars, I suspect, if upon their being declared presidents, commissars, senators, congressmen, premiers, party chairmen, high priests, ayatollahs, cabinet members, field marshals, joint chiefs of staff, dukes, kings, queens, princes, princelets, pooh-bahs, governors, chancellors, princesses, high commissioners, imperial wizards, mullahs, lodge captains, Lions of Judah and all the rest of them were snatched from the safety of their parlors, rammed into front line trenches and compelled to start shooting at each other, with the promise that they'd be shot down immediately if they turned around to head for the rear areas. Yep, that would fix 'em, all right. Have you ever noticed how you can stop anywhere in a supermarket and within 15 seconds someone will come up behind you with a cart and begin sighing and harrumphing to let you know you're blocking the path? This is one of the laws of the universe. There is nowhere you can go in a supermarket and not be in someone's way, even if the store is empty when you enter. Authorities apparently counted it a victory over the forces of evil that only about 200 people were arrested in connection with the Indianapolis 500 Race. Most of the arrests were for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Police said no one was shot or stabbed, and no rapes were reported. One man was arrested for trying to sell l00 quarter-sticks of dynamite. What's the big deal here? Everyone I know who goes to the race wouldn't be caught dead without their satchel of dynamite. Don't the police need to lighten up a bit? Alert motorists on U.S. 31 south of Kokomo will spot, just as they cross over the Howard County line into Tipton County, a truly inspiring sight. . .on the west side, out close to the highway, is a huge (but, alas, not Navarrone-caliber) naval gun battery, painted a fading battleship gray, with two barrels poking, probing from a capsule big enough to hold several grown adults. Odin only knows what military surplus yard they came from. I only know that I will be compelled to stop and investigate, seek out an owner, inquire where I might get my own pair. Could this be a newly-emergent outpost of the Bogtrot Slasher? (June 1, 1996) Timothy Leary is finally dead, thus sparing the nation further of his drivel. He told eager reporters he had contemplated having his body frozen and returning to life in the future, but he didn't want to return during a Republican administration. This is another reason why Republicans must win control of the White House and hold it for the next 100 million years. Hurtling westward along U.S. 40 toward Indianapolis the other day I drove through the towns of Charlottesville, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Gem, and Cumberland. Odd place names for Indiana, I thought. U.S. 40 used to be a major four-lane route from Saint Louis eastward. Today it's going to seed, along with the many small communities along its path. Interstate 70 replaced it. The trip reminded me of a wonderful 1980s paperback I chanced across last winter, Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon. It's an account of his months-long trip in a pickup-camper truck around the country on back roads. Moon wrote touchingly about dozens of little towns like those I saw on U.S. 40. The title comes from the fact that blue was the color used on highway maps in those days to designate secondary or non-major routes. It's Pronounced The Same, Worldwide Newsweek magazine noted in its June 10 edition that a Swedish appeals court had upheld a lower court's ruling that a five-year-old Swedish child's name was "unacceptable." The parents, who were not identified, legally named their child "brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprx11116" and testified in court that it was pronounced "Albin." I have a sneaking hunch the parents' name is qpttmmqwenccyyy3333mqgfphh. Pronounced "Assholes." Just a hunch. Come To Think Of It, We Do Have One More Question, Your Honor Spiece, a big sporting goods retailer in Indianapolis, ran a full-page ad in the June 8 Indianapolis Star advertising "364 different Nike shoe styles available. Need we say more?" Well, yes. Someone might try explaining why any civilization needs 364 different styles of athletic shoes, and those from only one company among many manufacturing them. America has a right to know. A Father's Day Plan (Drool Cup Not Provided) Whatever uncertainty I had about how to spend Father's Day disappeared this morning when I saw a full-page Indianapolis Star ad inviting me to come over to Incredible Universe, the gargantuan, 75,000-square-miles-of-products-under-one-roof electronics retailer, and spend Father's Day in a 15-HOUR FRENZY all-day sale. I'll be there early. I'll sip coffee in my car and read the morning papers--especially the sale ads--and work out a plan of attack. First, burst through the door pumping fists in the air clenching a thick sheaf of credit cards, screaming at the top of my lungs, "Get out of my way! Get out of my way! I want it! I want it all and I want it now!!!" Once inside, I'll become a hurricane of elbows, grunts, snorts, cursing, barrel-rolls, slides and dives. Climbing over the backs of rival shoppers, knocking over displays, punching, gouging. Around 9 a.m. rainbows coalesce in the floating foam of spittle backlit by rays of sunshine streaming through the skylights. By then I'll be shaking uncontrollably, red-faced, drooling. Who knows how long I'll last? It won't matter. Buying product, consuming is all that matters. Possessing. I'll have messages duct-taped to my body telling the caretakers where to deliver my merchandise, what to do with the body in case I can't be revived. Dad. What a guy!! (June 15, 1996) Mispronunciation Corrected "Boisterous Freemen Disrupt Court Hearing" said the page 3 headline in the Indianapolis Star. The article, datelined Billings, Montana, told of a Friday hearing for the freshly-apprehended Freemen in U.S. District Court. Appearing before Judge Robert Holter, various Freemen yelled, interrupted, protested and stamped their feet, claiming the courts and the government have no authority. Writer Tom Kenworthy of the Washington Post noted that "among the most unruly of the Freemen was Rodney Skurdal, a former Marine and White House chauffeur," who objected, among other things, to the judge's referring to him as a person. . . The Post article was silent as to the judge's response, but here would have been Judge Kratchlow's: I'd have immediately entered a court order changing the pronunciation of Skurdal's name to "Asshole." In perpetuity. So ordered. Case dismissed. Back To You, Louis When black rabblerouser and religious leader Louis Farrakhan was criticized earlier this year for visiting Sudan despite claims that slave trading occurred there, he went ballistic. Puffed up and angrily harrumphing, he challenged the press to find proof, one lousy, stinking shred of proof, that there was slavery inside Sudan. Gilbert Lewthwaite and Gregory Kane, two reporters for the Baltimore Sun, went for the challenge. They entered southern Sudan illegally with the help of a Zurich-based humanitarian group and were able to buy two children for $500 each from slave traders. The lads had been kidnapped in 1990 and forced to work in the fields for six years. The reporters, having proved their point, returned the children to their father, and returned to the U.S. No word from Louis on this. (June 18, 1996) Justice Department spokesman John Russell was quoted in the Chicago Tribune June 26 saying that lying to any federal agency is a crime punishable by up to five years in jail and $250,000 in fines. Great. But how come it's not a crime when a federal agency or employee lies to us? (June 26, 1996) Thirteenth Month? Department: MacMillan Publishing Co., in thanking me profusely for the resume I sent in response to an ad for a job opening, sent me a postcard bearing this notation on the Indianapolis postmark: Den 14'96. Have they added a new month--Den--to the calendar while my attention lapsed ever so briefly? Most Of Us Guys Know The Feeling Interest in the Wimbledon tennis tournament in England perked up in July when a comely young woman wearing nothing but a smile and a skimpy white apron bolted from the sidelines and streaked across center court during a match between Richard Krajicek and Malivai Washington. Wimbledon officials huffed and harrumphed, whisked the lass into custody, and gave a typically English shrug of the shoulders. USA Today printed a picture of the nude prancer and quoted Washington as follows: "I looked over and I see this streaker. I see this, this. . .wobbling around. She smiled at me and I think she was wearing an apron. She lifted it up, and was still smiling. I got flustered, and three sets later I was gone." Working at the Clowes Hall box office at Butler University taught me another of the iron laws of human behavior, namely that no matter how much publicity is given to an event and no matter how long in advance tickets are on sale. . .X percent of the population will delay trying to buy tickets until the event is sold out and no more tickets are available. . .another X percent will call to buy tickets after the event has occurred (in the case of the blockbuster Broadway smash, Phantom of the Opera, people were still calling to order tickets three weeks after the show had closed and moved on to Tulsa). . .and 100 percent of these individuals will express amazement, bafflement, or anger that no tickets remain. Summing Up American Civilization in Fourteen Easy Words "I just want to go have fun, be young, drink Pepsi, and wear Reebok." --Basketball center Shaquille O'Neal, at a July 18 press conference announcing his signing of a seven-year, $121 million contract with the Lost Angeles Lakers of the NBA. It WAS About Money Department, Revisited "It wasn't about money. . .money was not the main factor." --Shaquille O'Neal in denial at a July 18 press conference announcing his $121 million contract with the Lost Angeles Lakers. Summing Up American Civilization in Eleven Easy Words (Lamm's). . .candor is bold, bracing, and will probably doom him politically." --Newsweek magazine, July 22 issue, in an article about the just-announced presidential candidacy of former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, known for his blunt, no-sacred-cows approach to public issues. About 200 people gathered on the Mall in Wonderland, D.C., on a mid-July Saturday (although a federal lawsuit will doubtless soon be filed by demonstration sponsors to get the "official" headcount increased, since the organizers had predicted at least 25,000 would show up) to march, sing, stamp their angry little feet, and demand that a new "multiracial" category to be used in the federal census in the year 2000. Backers claim this new category is needed so that "racially mixed" children and adults can "establish their own identity." The census already lists black, white, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Hispanic or Spanish, and Other categories. According to an Indianapolis Star editorial, the new category is opposed by the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Council of La Raza, and possibly other groups. This, friends, isn't about personal identity. It's about federal money and the treasured front-row spots at the public trough that such federal designations insure. Snapsots of America A study by the University of Michigan's School of Nursing indicates that 46 percent of 5th graders and 55 percent of 8th graders at two low-income neighborhood schools surveyed had already engaged in sexual intercourse. The schools were not identified. The survey was reported in the June issue of Journal of Research in Nursing and Health. Not a confidence-builder. The latest local rage is coin-counting machines. Radio ads point out that everybody has a big old jar of coins stashed away and by, golly, isn't it time to turn them into real cash? Who wants to spend hours at the kitchen table counting out all those coins, anyway? Citizens are urged to save hours of time and come on in to the coin counting machine where in moments the machine will do all that work for us. The ad doesn't mention the 7.5 percent commission the machine charges for its trouble, but this is a small price to pay, don't you think, to save hours and hours of work? Debit cards are growing in popularity. Users seem to love them. Banks love them much, much more. And why not? The debit card instantly removes funds from your account, eliminating the float which favors the consumer. I can't figure out why a consmer would fall for this. California's attorney general is suing to stop convicted murderer Richard Davis from profiting by selling the rights to his story to a TV program, Hard Copy. Davis was found guilty of murdering 12-year-old Polly Klaas after kidnapping the girl from her home. He had only recently been released from prison on another murder conviction. His trial drew national attention. The jury recommended the death penalty. "This is absolutely disgusting," said Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, according to an August 20 Chicago Tribune account. This is not the first such case, and the ante seems to be creeping upward. How long before some fella negotiates a deal with a big TV network, a publishing house or a press syndicate to kill someone live on film for a hefty advance and all broadcast and ancillary product rights? We'll see it in our lifetime. Bet money on it. (August 20, 1996) More Reasons to Go On Living New videos, CD's and cassette tapes have been released on the lives of bloated dead drug addict Jerry Garcia and shriveled dead hippie acid freak Timothy Leary. All of them can be ours for less than $30 apiece, if we act now. I've spent a few days recently working in Dayton, Ohio, and staying in a Holiday Inn just off I-75 south of the city. On the evening of August 15, I ordered chili and a sandwich from room service. It arrived with no spoon for the soup. Brackow, the delivery lad, cheerfully went to get one. On August 22, I ordered chili, a hamburger, fries and a soft drink. The order was delivered with no onion for the sandwich. On August 23, I ordered a Cajun chicken sandwich, fries, chili and a soft drink. I specified that onion be on the sandwich and watched as the waiter wrote it down in large letters on the order slip. The meal was delivered with no spoon for the chili, no onion on the sandwich, no soft drink, no salt, and no pepper. I asked Brackow if he could retrieve the missing items and he manfully said he'd be back in "two or three minutes." He was back in 17 minutes. On September 6, I ordered a hamburger medium well with onion, fries, and chili. The order arrived with no onion on the sandwich and the hamburger cool and pink in the center. I suspect our national descent into the maelstrom has begun. Separated at birth? Authoress/celebrity Camille Paglia bears a striking resemblance to Carl (Billions and Billions and Billions) Sagan. Good Question "Some days I ask God," Bullock told me, his voice dropping to an impassioned whisper, "'If You were there, why didn't You stop it?'" --Hitler biographer Alan Bullock, quoted by writer Ron Rosenbaum in a May 1, 1995 New Yorker magazine article in which Bullock discussed the problem of understanding a God who allowed The Holocaust. I daresay one of the most interesting letters to the editor of my lifetime was published August 28 in the Chicago Tribune. It came from James Padar, a retired Chicago Police Department lieutenant, and was apparently triggered by the flood of news publicity leading up to the Democratic national convention. No news outlet worthy of the name could overlook the obvious: the Democrats were returning after 28 years to the site of their infamous 1968 convention marked so indelibly in the public eyeball by violence. We all remember the scenes, surely: hippie protesters versus a rogue police force in the streets and lakefront parks, protesters everywhere screaming and marching, legendary mayor Richard J. Daley mouthing vile epithets from the convention floor at Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff who from the lectern was harshly attacking Chicago police tactics. . . Padar's letter noted how frequently the Tribune and others now use the term "police riot" to characterize the actions of police during the 1968 gathering. The term, he said, "has been quoted frequently and attributed to the findings of the Chicago Study Group commonly known as The Walker Commission (after then Governor Dan Walker) in its report entitled "Rights in Conflict." According to Padar, though, the term "police riot" does not appear even once in the commission's report. Padar says the term was coined by Governor Walker in his foreword to the report, and that study group members strenuously objected at the time to its use, saying it sullied an otherwise objective account of what had happened. Padar noted one of the painful realities of the media age: inaccuracies such as this are seldom corrected and even if they are the correction never quite catches up to the original. He chided the Tribune for using the term while citing "federally commissioned studies" but refrained from even suggesting that any sort of press bias might be in operation. This is a fine illustration of how "history" is made, though. All in all, Padar's was a calm, rational, reasonable, nonjudgmental expression of opinion from a reader. And what a surprise, coming as it did from one of the rioting police officers from those evil days of rage. (August 29, 1996) McDonald's will open 2,500 more restaurants around the world this year, or one new restaurant every three hours. Holed up in a Holiday Inn south of Dayton, Ohio, last week, I glimpsed a familiar face while channel-flipping on TV and lingered a moment on an old Bonanza program. There were Hoss, Ben, and Little Joe having supper with a grizzled, wall-eyed drooler, the then-much-younger actor Jack Elam. You know what? He was ugly as sin then, too. Jack's one of my favies. Lighting One Little Candle Department A federal district court judge in Oklahoma has thrown out a lawsuit filed against the manufacturers of a fertilizer that may have been used in the April, 1995, Oklahoma City federal building bombing. The suit was filed by none other than that relentless quester after truth and justice, Johnny Cochran, of O. J. Simpson trial fame, on behalf of over 250 plaintiffs who obviously saw a chance to win the national lottery. Judge David Russell ruled that the companies could not be held responsible for what terrorists did with their product. He wrote that it defies "all logic and common sense" to suggest that by manufacturing fertilizer the companies were inviting terrorists to make bombs from it, as the plaintiffs had artfully alleged. Cosmic Question: since when has logic and common sense gotten in the way of America's legal predators or anyone else on the make? Cheers for Judge Russell, anyway. USA Today reported August 29 that football would be more violent if it were up to 211 women randomly surveyed across the country by Betsy Berns, founder of the Women's Institute for Football Education. A hint of the need for such an institute appeared in the 51 percent of the group who didn't know that a touchdown was worth six points. Among the suggestions to "improve the game," according to USA Today, was: Increase the violence. We can't be far from the day, can we, when the savvy marketers who run the National Football League will modify a concept immortalized in the then-futuristic movie, Rollerball, and allow players to be pack firearms on the field and to kill a specified number of opposing players with impunity during each contest? Gotta admit, friends, it'll be boffo for the ratings! Author Joe (Fatal Vision) McGinniss made news when he announced he was forfeiting a $1.75 million publisher's advance to write a book about the O.J. Simpson trial. McGinnis had a permanent front-row seat at the months-long trial, which he described as an "utter farce." In a letter to his publisher released August 8, McGinnis said he doubted the wisdom of his ever agreeing to write the book in the first place. He said the trial was "very expensive therapy" for him and hinted at disillusionment over Judge Ito's "total loss of control over the proceedings," "ludicrous witnesses," and "that nauseating group of cretins" who made up the Simpson jury, according to an Associated Press story. Why did he let them off so easily? And then there's the church member interviewed Sept. 13 as part of a CNN pop culture segment on the latest tidal wave sweeping America, the "megachurch." CNN's breathless correspondent told us how different the megachurches are from traditional churches, then stuck a microphone in a woman's face who agreed and said, "They're not all brimfire and stone." I've added an item to my list of reincarnations. I'm going to come back as the string bass player in Gordon's Lightfoot's backup band. I'd be content to pluck those strings, tap my feet, and hum and sing along with Gordon for forty years or so. I received an America Online gift catalog in the mail. It offers me a chance to own a complete line of AOL merchandise. Here's an America Online polo shirt, and T-shirts in six different colors! There's an AOL sports watch, an embroidered sweatshirt. There are jackets, umbrellas, caps. Whose life could be so empty that they'd want to wear clothing with an America Online logo? Freshly declassified documents show that the United States government knew that hundreds of Americans were held captive by the North Koreans even after the official "prisoner exchange" marking the armistice signed in July, 1953, but kept that information secret from the American people. Translated into plain English, the New York Times News Service stories about this most recent revelation of government lying to its subjects show that the U.S. abandoned the over 900 Americans to a lifetime of captivity for political expediency. This story followed by only a few weeks another Times revelation that the Pentagon, White House, CIA and State Department knew in November, 1991, that chemical weapons (code for: poison gas) had been stored in an Iraqi ammunition dump blown up earlier that year by American troops in the Persian Gulf War. The report was kept hidden even while the Defense Department said it had no evidence American troops might have been exposed to chemical weapons, and the report was not shared with the troops. This fundamental truth about the state--that it has no greater interest than self-preservation and will willingly sacrifice any or all of its subjects in pursuit of that end--is worth remembering as we contemplate our own duties and loyalties as citizens, and our relationship as individuals to our government. Only the naive believe that our nation will be loyal to us if forced to choose. (September 19, 1996) One-class high school basketball in Indiana has its death sentence. High school principals have voted 220-157 to support an earlier state high school athletic association board's decision to go to multiple class competition in basketball and other sports effective with the 1997-98 season. A trodlodyte campaign to save the old system proved fruitless before the tidal wave of feel-goodism and anguished concern for self-esteem that's the animating principle of 1990s American society. Just as with the acknowledgment that Slicks 'R' Us, we one-class basketball wacko Religious Right extremists must be good sports and bow to the inevitable here, too. Gather 'round, lads, and hoist one last flagon of grape! Trophies and championships for everyone, I say! John Littleheart. Grinelda Thurmer. Speed Davis. Senator Winglow. Sally Sweetwater. Allen Gooliddy. Friar Tuck. Red Dawson. Scratchy. Chief Crying Trout. Allison Frobish. Billy Bigbody. Princess Mary Louise Louise. The Black Knight. Coach Bayner. Clyde Deevers. Oscar Devling. Maynard G. Golo. Price Boothcourt. Terry Thai. Lance Loveguard. Rip Randell. Chick Bailey. Walter Treppling. Tick Bitterford. Daniel Douglas Diddle. Chester Honeyhugger. Maude Frickert. Gunnery Sergeant Grider. The Maverly Brothers. Paul Kratchlow. Chester A. Arthur. Willis Mumfert. Howard Ganglinger. Silver Bear. Gene Fondlinger. First Lieutenant Matthews. Father Duffy. Tiger Elliott. Lamargene Gumbody. Elwood P. Suggins. Dr. Faversham. Brackow. (Parial list of legendary characters created by comedian Jonathan Winters.) Noted in Passing Department: Of the four innocent victims involved in the famous Bernard Goetz Unpleasantness on a New York subway a few years back, wherein Goetz pulled a gun and fired on his four alleged assailants. . .the only one who hasn't subsequently been convicted and sent to prison for other crimes is the one Goetz shot in the back, leaving him permanently wheelchair-bound. Shrines I've Got To Visit Department A rosary--perhaps the world's largest--made of bowling balls is part of a permanent shrine honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary now drawing large crowds to the front yard of Linda and Bill Stage in Knox, Indiana. The multicolored bowling balls--approximately 15 of them--are mounted permanently on plastic pipe set in cement, and are linked together with plastic chain. Adding to the phantasmagoric scene is a shrine complete with a four-foot statue of the Blessed Mother, a chained stairway and fresh flowers all in a gazebo. Each September since 1989 when it was dedicated, the Stages have held a celebration "for world peace." The Associated Press reports that crowds of 500 people have attended. The Insurance Information Institute estimates that the "civil liability system" (presumed by me to be the sum of "damages collected or paid" in all the civil liability cases filed in American courts in a given year) equalled 2.3 percent of the American gross domestic product, or about $132 billion, in 1991, the latest year for which statistics are available. Only 43 percent of that money, says III, was received by plaintiffs. Lawyers got the rest as fees. (September 20, 1996) It's Right There In The 28th Amendment, Your Honor! Wal-Mart Has To Sell Sheryl's Records! Singer Sheryl Crow's latest album contains a lyric saying that Wal-Mart sells guns to children, who then use them to kill each other. As we might imagine, the big retailer isn't happy about the allegation. A Wal-Mart spokesman, Dale Ingram, announced Sept. 10 that as a result the company would not carry Crow's album in its 2,000 stores nationwide. Crow's flacks, including Al Cafaro, chairman of A&M Records which produced the Crow album, immediately screamed "censorship" and accused Wal-Mart of sinister behavior and motives. "Wal-Mart is choosing guns over music," he said, darkly, and promised that A&M would not "bow to this censorship." Al and the rest of them are packed full of it. This isn't censorship. Wal-Mart, despite what a confused Cafaro might think, is not required by the constitution to sell Crow's records or anyone else's. Crow has a right to say or sing whatever she wants, but the rest of us have a right not to buy or sell it. Newspapers nationwide this week began running a multipart series about America's economy and foreign trade by James B. Steele and Donald Bartlett of Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Steele was interviewed last week on CNBC. He said we've been sold a bill of goods by national politicians who've told us for decades that the more American goods we can sell overseas the better life will be for American workers. This was the mantra accompanying the NAFTA legislation passed by Congress in 1994. Steele and Bartlett say it's a cruel joke, that most of the "millions and millions of jobs created by exports" are in fact low-wage jobs, and that millions and millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs are being lost in the shuffle. While the net gain in jobs is there, the American blue collar worker is a terrible loser in the game. This is what Ross Perot's been saying for several years, to howls of ridicule from the intelligentsia. Corporate profits, stock prices and dividends have soared, though. Steele and Bartlett cite the Colgate-Palmolive Co. as an example, and offer a detailed account of the company's 71 percent downsizing and restructuring of its domestic workforce. . .while hiring thousands of additional workers overseas to make products it then imports to the United States to sell to Americans. In 1980, U.S. workers comprised 45 percent of Colgate's total workforce in 1980. Today it's 17 percent. The joke, Steele and Bartlett seem to be saying, is on us. This sort of heresy has already brought out the attack dogs, including a Newsweek column by Robert J. Samuelson in the September 23 issue ridiculing the Knight-Ridder series as "junk journalism lacking integrity and competence." Samuelson even wonders why "a reputable newspaper publishes it." Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. The intensity of the attacks such stories generate is intriguing, though. Now that high school class basketball is assured for Indiana, how long can it be before lobbyists demand that the all-star team which plays Kentucky twice annually must include proportional representation from each of the four classes. . .and that the coveted Mr. (and Miss) Basketball titles be rotated annually from class to class, or that one from each class be mandated? It is patently unfair--and somewhere out there lurks a shyster who'll gladly argue it's illegal and unconstitutional as well--to deny athletes from smaller schools a chance to feel good about themselves and enhance their self-esteem by being declared Mr. or Miss Basketball or having their fair share proportion of all-star team slots. And how long will only four classes be enough? As The Mentor once famously said, we may as well sit or lie back and enjoy it. Oh No! Another Hobgoblin: Gun Ranges! Gun control activists have another nightmare following a brief flurry of suicides at target practice ranges in California last month. In the latest episode of sheer guts and determination, 62-year-old Arthur Kampf paid $18 to rent a pistol at a San Rafael target range, calmly listened to the safety instructions and signed the necessary forms, and even joked and laughed with range owner Mark Baradat. A few minutes later Kampf put the pistol to his head and shot himself. He was the third suicide at gun ranges in San Francisco since August. Anti-gun forces are now demanding gun rental restrictions, and Assemblyman Louis Caldera, a liberal Democrat from Lost Angeles, is hinting he'll introduce appropriate measures when the California legislature convenes in January. (September 26, 1996) A Truly Fatal Error Has Occurred: I Am Shutting Down Now. . . But while California is trying to close off suicide options, an enlightened Australian province is opening them up. The Northern Territory legislature became the first in the world to pass a voluntary euthanasia law in 1995. It took effect July 1, 1996, and Bob Dent, 66, a retired carpenter suffering from terminal cancer, became the first to celebrate on Sept. 22 when he tapped the word "Yes" on a computer. This was his final instruction to medical attendants to go ahead and flip the switch releasing a lethal mix of drugs into intravenous tubes. Dent went out peacefully and smiling, observers said. Activists (code for: people who don't have a damned thing better to do than pester the rest of us night and day) are feverishly at work trying to repeal the law. Here's hoping Northern Territory legislators have the courage to resist. Passing It On To The Big Cheeses I happened to be in a gigantic Barnes & Noble Bookstore on Indianapolis's east side yesterday and decided to have a little fun. After verifying that it wasn't on the shelves, I went whimpering to the nearest sales clerk for help in finding Emmett Tyrell's new book on The Slicks, Boy Clinton: The Political Biography. It's the latest in a seemingly unending series of exposes on the Slicks, I said, and I've gotta have it. She looked in the computer said it was in hardback, and knit her brow in concern. "Hmmm," she sympathized, "I don't know why we wouldn't have it." I told her it was also available in "trade paperback" as well. She suggested I go look in the political science section and if it wasn't there they'd be glad to order it. I looked. No Tyrrell book, though the section offered such blockbuster best-sellers as The Noam Chomsky Reader, a collection of essays by the famous left-winger, and two other Chomsky titles, plus Karl Marx's The Theory of History, something called Extremism in America, and the New Republic Guide to The Issues for the 1996 campaign. Tyrrell's absence was just an oversight, I felt sure. I told the clerk I thought it would sell like hotcakes if they just had a pile. She promised she'd let the big cheeses know of my interest, and maybe, by golly, they'd get some. Still Another Reason To Go on Living Department: September is Healthy Aging Month, according to a sign in the Hard Cheese, Indiana, post office. Billions of years from now, when they're trying to explain the essential lunacy of late 20th century American uncivilization, one of the central mysteries they'll have to grapple with is the astonishing level of hostility to religion found in the popular culture. Make of this what you will. A Roper Starch worldwide poll shows the number of people who think work is more important than leisure is declining. In the U.S., those who feel that "leisure is the important thing and the purpose of work is to make it possible to have leisure time" are predominantly parents of young children, white-collar workers, people between the ages of 18 and 29, and Democrats. (Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, September 1996 issue) The summer of 1996 was the first in approximately 49 years, except for two summers when I was overseas in the military, that I did not eat a single ear of fresh Indiana sweet corn. This is one of Hoosierland's defining rituals, by which we measure the seasons, the passing of time, and begin the long wait till the next corn season. Worse, it never even occurred to me until today, long after the corn season had passed. This is a sure sign I've begun my final descent. (September 29, 1996) Slick And The King: Together At Last The African nation of Chad is issuing a limited edition postage stamp featuring Elvis Presley and Slick Willie. A nearly breathless ad in USA Today provided details. Each stamp is about four times the size of a regular U.S. postage stamp. They feature Elvis with his guitar and Slick with his saxophone. The two are together on one commemorative sheet. They're available at only $9.95 plus--ironically enough--postage and "handling" (not a word I like to use in connection with either of these Giants of Our Age) of $3. A Certificate of Authenticity (capitalized, to add fake importance) is included. I've sent in my order. How about you? Meantime. . .when a six-year-old boy kissed a classmate in a North Carolina elementary school, the child was immediately expelled from school, lawyers from 43 states chartered Concordes to North Carolina to seek justice and recompense for all the aggrieved parties, presumed to include every citizen of North Carolina and perhaps the entire eastern seaboard. . .and when a 13-year-old honor student in Humble, Texas, was caught with a bottle of Advil, a common pain reliever sold over the counter, she was immediately suspended from school and the next Concordes out were jammed with attorneys headed for Texas. . .while Roberto Alomar plays blithely on and the game of baseball is paralyzed by the fear that Alomar won't feel good about himself if he's penalized. Sports Illustrated quickly honored Alomar with a full cover photo, and God knows how many movies, TV talk shows, book contracts, clothing lines and other ancillary deals Alomar will rake in from a worshipful nation. General Electric has announced it's going to charge its credit card customers who pay off their bills monthly and thus avoid paying interest an annual $25 penalty fee for not carrying a balance on which GE can charge them interest. Robert McKinley, president of RAM Research, a credit-card research company, defends the GE move, calling those who pay off their balances "freeloaders" on the system. A GE spokesturd said that a few people had canceled their cards in response to the new policy but said "we certainly hope there aren't a lot more." Any GE cardholder who doesn't cancel on principal doesn't have any. Add to the list of All-American first names. . .Iduma. . . as in Iduma D. Yeater, in a Scorched Corners Peeper obituary Sept. 25, 1996. Dick Clark has an extensive TV advertisement promoting a CD and cassette collection of 1950s music. It features film clips of many rock musicians from that era, much of it on old, grainy black and white film: such legendary rockers as Bill Haley & The Comets, The Spaniels, The Commodores, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Fats Domino, The Platters, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Danny and the Juniors, The Dell Vikings, The Coasters, The Diamonds, Little Richard, The Marcels, Bobby Darin, Richie Vallens, Dion and the Belmonts, Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. All but Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis were wearing suits and ties when they performed. Rather a far cry from the way today's popular music figures slither onstage. A sports brief in Sunday Indianapolis Star noted that a referee collapsed and died while officiating a high school football game in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and revealed how far we have yet to travel in the euphemism department. The article said that "sudden cardiac death" was listed as the cause. In the olden days, didn't we used to call that a heart attack? The puzzling thing is the use of the word "death" in the latest euphemism. Surely we can find a way to disguise that, can't we? Heart episode? Guy's The One! Actor Dennis Hopper, answering pop culture questions in the November, 1996, Vanity Fair magazine, responded this way to one about "who is your favorite hero of fiction?": Guy Grand from the Magic Christian. That makes at least two of us on this earth who rate Guy No. 1. (October 17, 1996) A Last, A Case Is Made For Discrimination Actor and TV star Bill Cosby refused to pose for a photo with Wonderland, D.C., mayor Marion Barry at a recent gala in the nation's capital. His publicist allowed as how Cosby was "not a fan of the mayor." Good!!! (October 17, 1996) *Driving The New York Times* Crazy Department** Emmett Tyrrell's new book on the Slicks, Boy Clinton: The Political Biography, has catapulted itself onto the Times best-seller list for the week ending October 6, and as of October 14 former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's expose of the Slick White House, Unlimited Access, has been on the Times list for 14 weeks. Early in September a local high school suspended a star football player, Raymond Jackson, after he was arrested and charged with forgery and theft. Lawrence Central High School officials obviously didn't know what they were getting into. The boy's mother got angry as a hornet and obtained a lawyer, who also has worked up a lather over the grievous injustice. They sought and obtained a court order blocking the school from enforcing its own longstanding policies and standards governing participation in athletics and extracurricular activity. Jackson has been ordered reinstated to the team. He has accepted a full football scholarship to the University of Michigan and his attorney assured the Indianapolis Star this week that the scholarship was not in jeopardy. The mother was quoted muttering about "due process" and "mistakes" the lad might have made, about being "betrayed" by the school system which persuaded her four years ago to enroll her learning-disabled-but-obviously-ready-for-the-University-of-Michigan son at Lawrence Central. "How," she demanded to know, "can you be a discredit to a school system in one season or because of one incident?" The Star's October 17 account did not reveal if anyone informed her of the obvious answer: by using stolen credit cards in local shopping malls and getting caught doing it. Young Jackson's attorney, Reginald Bishop, meanwhile is stamping his feet and screaming about his client's constitutional rights, and has accused the state high school athletic association of "piling on" requirements for Jackson's return to scholastic football competition by requiring a medical clearance and a minimum number of practices for players before they're allowed to play again. It doesn't matter that such regulations have been in place for 40 years or more, apply to all students, and are used by high schools all over the country. It's unfair, it's unconstitutional, it makes Jackson feel not very good about himself,and it's not going to be allowed. A Lawrence Township Schools spokesman said weakly that he felt the school had acted responsibly, but the rest of this script is ordained: the lawyers will dawdle, the aggrieved gridder will play under court order, the season will end, eventually the case will be dropped so that young Jackson can get on with his life and career, and perhaps the school system will learn an important lesson about the foolhardiness of trying to have any rules or standards. A post-script: Raymond Jackson's mother was indicted in late October on some 30 charges of tax fraud, failing to report income, and failing to file federal tax returns. Perhaps attorney Bishop can provide group rate discounts. I had two encounters with Power Players last week at Clowes Hall. A male voice announced he was calling from Congressman Dan Burton's office and wanted "front and center" tickets for the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha. No such tickets existed, since they'd been on sale for nine months. I explained that but the lackey was insistent. He demanded to know who he should talk to about "VIP tickets." The arrogance in his voice suggested he was used to getting his way and that no was not an acceptable answer. He became even more agitated when I calmly repeated--my own mantra--my initial comment, that there were no more "front and center" tickets available for any show at any time for anyone. Finally I suggested he contact the show's producers, a local company, and talk to them about VIP tickets. He hung up in a huff. Later the same day, a woman called and said she wanted us to set aside four tickets down front and that she would send over her "house man" to pick them up. She apparently didn't believe it when I told her that we could not "set aside" or "hold" tickets for anyone over the phone and in fact were not even allowed to sell tickets by phone for her particular event. She became rather combative about it, wanted to know who set such policies and, of course, who we thought we were, anyway. Four times--I counted them--she dropped the phrase "my house man," obviously hoping to make it quite clear that she had slaves and was not used to having rules apply to her. I remained steadfast, patiently explained the procedure for obtaining tickets. She at last relented and said that she'd send her "house man" over to the box office to pick up four tickets. These episodes brought back a fond memory from last winter when a caller imperiously introduced himself as an aide to Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, who wanted at the last minute some prime seats to Phantom of the Opera. All the good tickets had long since been sold, of course, and I told him we didn't have any "front and center orchestra" seats. "Not even for the governor?" he said. I could imagine him offering that sly, knowing wink these people are so good at. This was another person obviously used to having the seas part in his path at the dropping of the governor's name. "We don't have any left even for Jesus Christ Himself," I replied. I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but there's something deeply, perversely satisfying about encounters such as these. Vile, Empty, Gory, Stupid, Demeaning, Degenerate, Contemptible, Trashy, Repellent--Any Further Questions? We missed the *world-acclaimed film, Pulp Fiction,* when it debuted in movie houses around this great nation. We missed the Broadway spinoff. We missed the book, the musical, the TV miniseries, the Passion Play, the designer fragrances, the automobile, the diorama, the historical reenactment, the Disney cartoon, the oratorio, and the designer clothing line. We read the reviews, though, and knew that the critics had raved about its deep meaning and its noble exploration of the human condition. The cognoscenti had raved, too. And so had the glitterati, and the chic and the hip. Now, finally, two or three years after all that, we've watched the Pulp Fiction video. The movie is vile, empty, gory, stupid, demeaning, degenerate, and contemptible. It is a depraved, trashy, surpassingly repellent film populated by depraved, trashy, surpassingly repellent characters. Like much of American pop culture, it is without redeeming social value. We must be the turderati. Anoher Potential Victim Group Spotted By The ABA Hammacher Schlemmer is offering a product I'd kill to own: a "Correct Posture Dog Feeder." This contraption is a simple bench made of plastic and elevated on four legs to 10-inch or 16-inch heights. Stainless steel food and water bowls nestle in recessed areas on top. The ad copy boasts that this elevated feeding stand "allows your dog to maintain proper muscular and skeletal alignment while eating. . .(and) unlike ordinary dog bowls (on the floor) this feeder's raised stand allows your pet to stand upright in a more relaxed, healthier position." It's ours for $39.95 or $44.95 plus shipping and handling. Shame on all of us for forcing our dogs to lower their heads to eat! (November 2, 1996) In late October on a Continental Airlines flight to Atlanta I discovered a new frontier. All the seatbacks in the airplane were outfitted with a small (about four inches by six inches) viewing screen, on which endlessly throughout the flight appeared messages urging passengers to play computer games, make air-to-ground phone calls, send faxes, obtain stock quotations or sports scores, or buy products by using the device. A small message offered a false promise of relief: "To Turn Off Screen," it read, "Remove and Return Headset." I did, but in two or three seconds the messages defiantly reappeared. Numerous passengers joined in the fun. Another repeating message on the screen was "You Can't Afford to Be Out of Touch." This seems a fair enough summation of American life in the late 1990s. But just when you're noticing a shortage of reasons to go on living, you discover one more: a new magazine aimed at girls aged 15 to 19 is coming out next year. It'll be called Jump. It will cover such uniquely fresh topics as fitness, psychology, beauty, and sports. But most importantly, "Jump will tell readers how to feel better about themselves," according to Michael Carr, president and CEO of Jump's parent, Weider Publications. Goals, You Need Goals, They Say O.K. Here are some. I want to: 1) Retire; 2) Live long enough to see Bob Knight replaced as IU basketball coach; 3) Live to see the Slicks indicted (and a mess of Clintonistas, too); 4) See assholes no longer end up at the head of the table. I think that about sums it up. An Army officer and a drill sergeant are accused of raping and sexually harassing female soldiers in a scandal erupting at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Army brass are promising a full investigation. The episode ought to make those concerned with fairness ask this cosmic question: is it fair to expect military personnel to conform to a higher standard of behavior than the nation expects of its commander-in-chief, Slick Willie? Forbes magazine reports that Mike Tyson earned $75 million last year, making him the highest paid athlete in the history of the known universe. Final proof that crime pays, so to speak--but then we all know that intuitively, anyway. Another American Legend Goes To Ground Singer and sideshow freak Tiny Tim died November 30 after falling ill while singing his signature tune, Tiptoe Through The Tulips, at a Minneapolis Women's Club benefit. Born Herbert Khaury in Gotham City, he became an American celebrity in the late 1960's. His 15 minutes of fame culminated in his marriage to a person known as Miss Vickie on the Tonight Show Dec. 17, 1969, an event seen, to our nation's everlasting shame, in 21.4 million American households. Tiptoe reached No. 18 on the pop charts in 1968. By the end of 1970 Tiny Tim's popularity wave had crested. He was divorced in 1977 and was little heard from since. In his earlier years as a performer, he used the names of Larry Love, the Singing Canary, as well as Darry Dover, Rollie Dell, Julian Foxglove, and Emmett Swink. There may be a clue in there to his modest career. That and the voice, the clothes, the personality, the wife, the ukulele, the dog, the cat, the goldfish, the shoes, the car, the house, the eyeglasses,and the hair. The bleeders wasted little time finding a wacko Religious Left liberal judge to stop California's Proposition 209 from going into effect. The new legislation forbids discrimination against or special preferences for anyone based on skin color. Judge Thelton Henderson, a Jimmy Carter appointee in 1980 and a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union in California, quickly issued a restraining order and said the antidiscrimination law may be discriminatory, adding that--and this is classic left-wing activist mantra--the "courts must look beyond the plain language of an enactment." This is code for: words mean what Judge Henderson says they mean. This is Alice in Wonderland stuff come to life. This, friends, is not about fairness or discrimination. It's about political power, constituencies, and front-row seats at the trough. Comparison-shopping for homeowners insurance, I had this encounter with Lonnie, who was shilling for Prudential Insurance at the time. She mentioned that the policy included $148,000 of coverage for "personal belongings." Wait, I said, Wait, wait, wait. This is many, many times the actual value of all I own. Why such a high amount? Why can't I just have coverage for the real value of my possessions? Lonnie said the personal belongings coverage was yoked to the coverage on the value of the house, and could not be lowered. The policy also included $18,500 of coverage on "Other Structures." But Lonnie, I said, I have no "other structures"--no swimming pool, no outbuildings, no detached garages, no fencing, no gazebos. Why, in view of that, had she included "other structures" coverage? She hemmed and hawed, backed and filled. Give her credit, though; she fairly smoothly went into her Emergency! Emergency! Someone's Caught On To The Scam speech. Relax, I told her, I'll say it for you: I can't just buy insurance for my house, I've got to pay for your scam stuff in order to get what I do need. Isn't that it? I asked jovially. She seemed relieved, and admitted that, yep, that was it. I chuckled and told her not to take it personally. I said that she and I would just agree to share a wink and a nod and acknowledge there was a little scam going on, and then we'd move on to the rest of our lives without further ado. No harm done, surely. Right? She laughed, agreed and seemed eager to move on. I love moments like this! It's great to be 55 years old. You can finally see darkness at the end of the tunnel. Country and western singer Faron Young, one of my favies, came to his senses and committed suicide December 10. He was 64 years old. He performed for many years with the Grand Old Opry in Nashville. One of his better known songs was Hello Walls. Adios, Faron. (December 11, 1996) So There IS A God After All, And Its Name Is Money Famed American atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair's mysterious disappearance at the end of September, 1995, has taken a delicious twist as reports have surfaced in San Antonio, home base of a nest of atheist organizations founded by the O'Hairs, that at least $625,000 of the organizations' funds are missing, along, coincidentally, with O'Hair, her son, Jon, and his adopted daughter, Robin. Tax documents filed with the IRS say the missing funds are "believed to be in the possession of Jon Murray, former secretary" of the organization. The reports hint that the O'Hairs may be hiding in New Zealand. Sign of Our Times Department: Walt Disney Company has licensed over 17,000 different "101 Dalmatians" products so far. And somewhere out there is an American family that owns every one. Phone bills are beyond comprehension now. I get mine each month from Ameritech, which used to be Indiana Bell, I think. The bill runs nine or 10 pages. Each contains a dizzying array of information. There are charges from Ameritech, charges from MCI. And lately it's included charges from things named Telco, USBI, L.D. Wholesale Club, and U.S. Billing, Inc. Five or six separate billing entities. I get things in the mail continually urging me to dial special digits before dialing my numbers, to sign up for this or that, send in the names of friends, enemies, pets, winos under the bridge, teenage runaways, so I can get special discounts. MCI alone lists four separate categories of "special savings" available: Friends and Family Discounts, Friends and Family Christmas Day Savings, December Fanfares, Personal Number Savings. Life and my damned phone bill are too complicated. Near the end of the year, My wife's employer her a notice which said the school district was "pleased" to advise employees that it was replacing the existing prescription drug insurance coverage with a "new pharmacy plan through Anthem Prescription Management." The letter extolled the many benefits of the new program and matter-of-factly noted new co-payment amounts for various brand-name and generic drugs. No mention was made of any increases associated with the marvelous new provisions. A few calculations revealed, however, that what management was announcing with such pleasure was a 67 percent increase in the co-payment for brand-name drugs and a 40 percent raise for generic drugs. Yes, yes, we know how tough it is to squeeze out a living wage these days, but why would the school district use the word "pleased" in announcing the changes? Why would they be pleased to do this? Shouldn't they be sorry instead? Down There With Lawyers, Car Dealers And Child Molesters These are not uplifting times for journalists. A Harris poll at year-end shows widespread public dissatisfaction with our ink-stained wretches. First the obvious: Local TV remains the most popular source of news for most folks (34 percent). Newspapers came in third. Seventy-five percent of those questioned said they felt it very important that the news media expose corrupt public officials. Seventy-five percent said political bias infests the media, and the majority felt the bias was "liberal." Now the more subtle findings: One out of four persons polled said he felt the press "hurts American democracy." Only 51 percent felt reporters "got the facts straight" and a huge majority--84 percent--indicated they'd support government requirements for balanced reporting, to the point of imposing fines for inaccurate or biased reporting. Over half the respondents felt journalists should be licensed to practice their professions. The public, according to Harris pollsters, believes journalists are arrogant, cynical, and biased, and only one in four felt they were "intelligent." The qualities which journalists say they highly prize in themselves--honesty and compassion--barely registered in the Harris poll. (December 31, 1996) Back to top
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