The American Pile

Bringing Things Back To Earth

• Last year's literary smash hit (one of them, anyway) was The Bridges of Madison County, a tender, romantic tale of a lone wolf fella who stopped in Iowa to photograph covered bridges and there met, by the most incredible of coincidences, a married woman with whom he had a brief but flaming affair, a Halley's Comet, once-in-a-lifetime encounter which touched his, her, and our souls. Real-life reporters descended on Madison County, Iowa, the setting of the novel, and began interviewing people. Here's what Kim Howell, a 35-year-old Madison County wife and mother, said about the novel's destiny-struck housewife: "I'd never have gone out with a strange man, shown him the (covered) bridges, and had him stay for supper. This is the '9Os; people are afraid of serial killers." (January 1, 1994)

Two Reasons Chelsea Probably Won't Think Of

• Chelsea Clinton, age 13, has a school assignment to write a theme titled "Why I Feel Guilty About Being White." Hmmmm. Aside from the preposterosity of the theme topic and the idea that an adult would seriously put forth such claptrap, I can think of two reasons why she ought to feel ashamed and neither has anything to do with her honkyness.

Feelin' Competitive. . .

• A piece of junk mail came over the transom this morninq at work. An offer from Business Week magazine, a very special offer, obviously. "Dear Mr. Paul Kratchlow," it began. "Many of the sharpest executives you're competing with are being briefed each week by Business Week. . ." I have the powerful feeling that Jack Patten, Publisher (as the thing was signed) doesn't really know me as well as he thinks he does. The only time I feel competitive is in the race for the elevator at the end of the day.

No Harm Done, Surely

• I've stumbled onto a new "bit" to entertain myself. When calling people or places using telephone answering systems, I wait for the instructions and the "tone" and then I say, in a gravelly-voiced coot persona I'm growing fonder of each day, "You have reached (here I make up a telephone number, any number). . .I'm having a seizure and am unable to take your call. You may leave a message at the sound of the beep. Here comes the beep. . ." And then I hang up. What do you suppose it all means?

Settling Back In My Winged Armchair

• Mogo and I watched The Accidental Tourist Sunday night on video. I'd forgotten how touching and tender a film it was. William Hurt played Macon Leary with a decidedly minimalist approach. The portrayal of the Leary family--Rose and the two brothers--was priceless, and Geena Davis really nailed the Muriel Pritchett part, too. Me, I love that winged armchair logo. Probably soon be time to go back and read the book again.

• Questing for excellence is a full-time job with me, and so today's lunch hour found me busily rooting through the Journal, Business Week, The Economist, and several newspaper business sections searching for career-building ideas.I chanced across a column by Excellence Guru Tom Peters, offering tips for the savvy ladder-climber. My interest perked up as I noted these (among many other) ideas and thought-provoking questions: Update your resume every six months at a minimum. Document all projects initiated and completed and record their measurable results. If you're not noticeably more marketable each 180 days, you're in trouble. Manage your Rolodex. Is that list of contacts growing by the month? Do you have an effective plan to stay in touch? Ten percent improvement isn't enough! Tenfold is needed! Constant improvement is not enough! Somebody wrote a play about this, didn't they? It was titled Stop The World, I Want to Get Off! I can guarantee you I want no part of the one that confronts me. The trick--and thinking about it occupies most of my waking hours--is how to sneak out without being discovered.

• Gillette Co. announced that although earnings and profits are at record levels, it will cut 2,000 jobs in the coming year. GTE said Thursday it would be eliminating 17,000 jobs over the next couple of years as its quest for excellence continues. A Chicago-based consulting firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., said this week its surveys show U. S. companies have already announced 41,000 job cutbacks in the first 15 days of the new year. Are we supposed to feel good about the direction this great nation of ours is going? Let the questing continue. (January 11, 1994)

JAMA Editors Shoveling Euphemisms With Both Hands

• A correspondent has forwarded an item from the Journal of the American Medical Association (January 19, 1994 edition) offering a hint that even the medical profession is struggling with the sensitivity issues which concern us all. A recent article about the spread of AIDS in northern Thailand noted that "commercial sex workers" were an important component in the epidemic. That prompted Dr. James Marks of Dallas to write in wondering why the authors didn't speak plain English and use a fine old term like "prostitutes" to describe the goings-on. The authors replied that "prostitute" bore a "decidedly negative connotation," had a "moralistic tone" and didn't accurately describe a situation where poverty left these peasant women with limited opportunities for gainful employment. This has the potential for a Phil Donahue special, I think. (January 28, 1994)

• Saw Mrs. Doubtfire over the weekend. Robin Williams is manic, brilliant, and good enough that he probably has fans who'd go see any movie he's made, just to see what he'll do next. The scenes where Williams does a quick-change from his disguise as an elderly woman to his male persona border on hysterical. Several other moments--as a divorcing father moving out of the house, his weekly visitations with his children, pleading his case before a divorce court judge--are a stab of pain in the heart, the pain of recognition in anyone who's ever gone through a divorce. All in all, a fine movie offering both laughter and tears.

Worst News Of The Week

• USA Today has finally reported a profit for 1993 after 11 years and $600 million of losses. This will only encourage them to keep publishing.

• Spent a day at home alone Thursday the 27th. An ice storm north of here, so I spent the day piddling with taxes, writing, shuffling papers, reading, listening to music: Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, Marty Robbins, The Herbie Mann Trio, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Wes Montgomery, Duke Ellington. A grey, rainy afternoon with Lightfoot singing The Pony Man, Minstrel of the Dawn, Me and Bobby McGee, Sundown, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Don Quixote, me sipping hot coffee, singing along. Life hardly gets any better than that. Good therapy.

Ah, Sweet Respite. . .

• Saw a few film clips of the Kevin McHale farewell Sunday in Boston Garden. I noticed he wore a nice suit, white shirt and tie for the occasion, instead of cutoffs stained with unimaginable precious bodily fluids, combat boots, a fishnet strap-undershirt and nine days' grizzle. How refreshing to see something like this on the American Stage, if only briefly. (January 30, 1994)

• New passwords: Creeper. Mudhole. Hocker. Niblets.

Bidding Adieu To Claude Akins

• The pride of Bedford, Indiana, actor Claude Akins, turned in his chips last week at age 75. The Big C. The obits noted all the big stuff: his film debut in From Here to Eternity, Rio Bravo with John Wayne, The Rose Tattoo, the Sheriff Lobo character in TV's B.J. and The Bear, and more comma more comma more. But overlooked was a bit role Akins had in one of producer Blake Edwards' lesser-known films, a 1967 Western slapstick spoof titled Waterhole No. 3. Akins played a corrupt Army cavalry sergeant, Henry J. Foggers, who conspired to steal a shipment of gold in Foggers' custody. He was joined by an all-star cast of Carroll (Archie Bunker) O'Conner as Sheriff "Honest John" Copperud, James Coburn as gambler-con man-seducer-thief Lewton Cole, Bruce Dern as deputy sheriff Samuel P. Tippin, James Whitmore as Army Captain Shipley, and bit actor Timothy Carey in one of the weirder roles of the mid-twentieth century as Hilb, a moronic dirtbag tramp who smoked horrendous, stinking, fat cigars, spoke mostly in guttural snarls, and looked as if he was soaked in used crankcase oil and rolled in dirt for each day's filming. Bizarre-o, and I loved it. The late and wonderful folk singer, Roger Miller, warbled a memorable title song, The Ballad of Waterhole No. 3. Awesome stuff. Adios, Claude.

Tonya Harding Fits In Just Fine

• Tonya Harding's Olympic future is up in the air, but I'll say this: the Olympic pooh-bahs are going to reach new levels of hypocrisy if they kick her off the skating team. This great nation is already on record sanctioning and glorifying personal conduct every bit as odious as anything Tonya Harding's guilty of. This, after all, is the organization that embraced Charles Barkley, whose public career and private life have been marked by assaults and fights and scrapes with the authorities almost annually, and America's AIDS poster boy himself, Magic Johnson, on the same team. The Olympics have welcomed scumbags and worse before Tonya, and American sport at all levels offers daily examples of worse conduct and lower character and morals. So let Tonya skate her steel buns off for America, and let's drop the crap about how her presence sullies the Olympic ideal.

• If you tune in quickly this week you can catch Country Music Television's Top Eight videos from 1993, including these award- winners: No. 7, Prop Me Up Beside The Juke Box (If I Die) by Joe Diffie; No. 4, Every Little Thing, by pretty little miss Carlene Carter; Tracy Byrd singin' Someone to Give My Love To; and No. 1, Chattahoochee, by Alan Jackson (". . .down by the river on a Friday night, a pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight, talkin' about cars and dreamin' about women. . . ."). All-American stuff, guarantee you. Music till the cows come home.

• Coming Soon on Network Television and Home Video: Docu- dramas, specials, TV news-magazine exposes, perhaps even a mini-series on the Tonya Harding-Jeff-Gillooly-and-Appalling-Circle-of-Friends, Bodyguards-and-Hangers-on Sleaze Expo. Bet on it!!!

Those of Us With Children Will Want to Rush Out And Buy This One

• The New York University Press has published The Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Students' Guide to Colleges, Universities, and Graduate Schools. (February 3, 1994)

• We die one molecule at a time, in microscopic decrements, I suspect. And what passes for human civilization is coarsened, cheapened, degraded, eroded similarly. What happens is either too small or too large to comprehend. One day we have a moment's flash of insight, though, and we acknowledge something terribly sad has happened on our watch. Two such small insights came to me lately. First, I've been struck by the enormous amount of public ridicule that rains down upon many in public life. I'm thinking of Slick Willie particularly. He's had quite a run of bad news and bad publicity: nominees for high office who turned out disappointments, swirling and ongoing rumors of sexual promiscuity, hints of a fast-buck scam of some sort back in Arkansas (Whitewatergate), and, overall, continuing doubt about his character and moral fitness for public trust. True or not, the stories and the public talk about Slick have a strong flavor of sleaze, suggesting a man of unusual amorality, even by modern standards of moral relativism. I thought: how sad this all is for our country, our people. Many of us have actually lived at a time when the idea of publicly branding the President of the United States a con man, a philanderer, a draft-dodger, a liar, a womanizer, and a sleazeball would have been unthinkable. No man or woman marked by such deficiencies of character could have had any chance for success in public life, let alone ascent to the Presidency. That isn't true today. What have we come to? What's happened to us? And secondly, similar thoughts about the language and sights , making up so much of life on the American Stage today. I've been listening a lot in the last few months to a sports talk radio show from Chicago, WSCR-820 AM. In just the last few weeks, I've heard either the show's hosts or its callers use the following terms over the air: pissed off, pain in the ass, bastard, ass, butt, butthole, butthead, sucks, screw (you/him/them), dorks, shove it, stuff it where the sun don't shine, pissing all over the place (referring to people in the infield during the Indianapolis 500 race), crap, poop, who you crappin'?, boobs, dump. The Bob & Tom Show out of Indianapolis is likewise filled with scatalogical references, endless sniggering comments about tits (by dozens of different names), testicles, severed peckers, assorted bodily fluids, sexual acts, and just about anything the lewd mind can conjure up. It's startling to realize that most of us coots have lived in and can remember a time when the use of such language in public was unheard of, and not even that common in private. Anything more than a casual glance at what's on television, in the movies, and in some popular song lyrics will show that this stuff is everywhere. I don't think it's encouraging. (February 8, 1994)

• Products The World Does Not Need Department: Crystal Pepsi and all other "New Age" clear colas.

• Snapshot of America Department: Percentage of all American births in 1960 that were out of wedlock: 5%. In 1991: 30%. (February 9, 1994)

Shalala Gets Judgmental

• U.S. Health and Human Services Department Secretary Donna Shalala, recently quoted: "I don't like to put this in moral terms, but I do believe that having children out of wedlock is just wrong." Spoken like a true Religious Left wacko. How horrible her suffering must be to have to get "moral" about anything. It's so. . . judgmental.

Criminy! How'd I Ever Miss This??!!

• East Coast shock radio jock Howard Stern was paid $16 million to do a pay-TV New Year's Eve special that featured, among other things, a woman eating maggots.

A Headline My Poor Wife Can Relate To

• Girl, 8, Dies After Breathing Garbanzo Bean Fumes --Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1994, datelined Royal Oak, Michigan).

• Chick McGee of WFBQ-95 FM-Indianapolis got right to the core of things on his Monday a.m. sports show when he said "Nancy Kerrigan has a great ass." (February 12, 1994)

Mark This Down in The Events You'll See in Your Lifetime Department

• NBC-TV this week will air Witness to the Execution, a story about how a hard-pressed TV executive promotes the idea of broadcasting a live execution from the local prison to goose sagging ratings. So far, this is just a "story line," but I believe we'll see this for real in our lifetime. Cannibalism, live murders, other unspeakable degradations, all will become "live TV" spectacles. It's inevitable in the endless search for ratings and the endless quest to keep the rabble stimulated, titillated, glued to that tube. (Footnote: A May 7, 1994, newspaper headline read: "Donahue Seeks to Televise Florida Execution").

• Some good news, too (and a bit of an eyebrow-lifter). ABC-TV has announced it's turning down an opportunity to buy scripts for movies about the Menendez Brothers (recently acquitted by a California jury though they admitted they slaughtered both their parents with shotguns) and John Wayne Bobbitt (who lost his wang to his wife's knife), despite their "enormous Nielsen ratings potential." ABC Entertainment prexy Ted Harbert was quoted saying "It's a question of commerce or conscience" and admitting that the TV-movie system "is not really set up well (to do) good, thoughtful, original, non-crime-related movies." The down side of this is that some other network will snap these up.

Chewin' That Funny Money Cud. . .

• Stocks of two major American companies--Sears and Ford Motor Co.--declined this week despite, in the case of Sears, record earnings. Sears announced fourth quarter profits of several billion and full-year earnings of over $4 a share (compared to a loss of $10 per share last year), and its stock dropped $3.75 or 6% the same day. Ford, a day or two later, reported fourth quarter profits of $719 million ($1.30 per share) compared to an $840 million loss a year earlier, and its stock dropped $1 immediately. Why? the naive soul might ask. In each case, according to the Wall Street Journal, it was because earnings, though robust and strong and quivering and marvelous, were not as high as "analysts" had predicted. These stories touch on an aspect of American public life I find amazing, namely that the reality of a thing all too often counts for nothing: the perception, the image, the expectation is all. Thus we have Wall Street "analysts" projecting earnings, then driving down stock prices when their expectations aren't met. My experience in the business world proves conclusively to me that "profits" and "losses" and budgets and projections--the hourly and daily grist of American business life--are, shall we say, flexible. That is, they are or become whatever management wants them to be. They're fudged and bloated and inflated, compressed and shoe-horned and down-sized to whatever the dream or the fraud of the moment calls for. They're the fraudulent "funny money" cud that business people chew continually, obsessively, to stave off reality. The unspoken code in business is that each month, each quarter, each year must produce another record dividend or profit. Never mind reality, which sometimes tries to intervene with less-than-record performances. It's the "shrieking nothingness" William Holden spoke of in the movie Network. And, like Faye Dunaway in the film, if we ever looked in the mirror and saw the truth, the reality, we'd sprint screaming into the night. (February 13, 1994)

Paddy Chayevsky Bores Clear Down To The Sub-Atomic Nature Of Things

• I want to quote now from Chapter 8 of a short novel by Paddy Chayevsky, Network. In the movie of the same name, Ned Beatty plays Arthur Jensen, the CEO and Board Chairman of the UBS network, and the late Peter Finch is the mad anchorman, Howard ("I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more!) Beale, who near the end of the story is machine-gunned to death on his own prime-time news show as the network bosses take another shot at boosting those ratings. In this scene, Jensen takes Beale into the UBS conference room, 44 stories above Manhattan, a cathedral vastness paneled in rich, dark wood, hung with enormous drapes, and boasting a conference table a quarter-of-a-mile long and lined with long rows of those green-shaded banker's lamps, each casting a pool of soft golden light upon the table. Jensen ascends to the podium and. . ."a shaft of white light shot out from the rear of the room and fastened on Jensen, a sun in his own galaxy. . .Jensen wheeled on his audience of one (Beale) and roared out: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it. Is that clear? You think you have merely stopped a business deal--that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they must put it back (by buying a controlling interest in UBS, which Beale had thwarted in a one-man on-the-air crusade). It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no Third Worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multinational dominion of dollars! Petrodollars, electrodollars, multidollars, reichsmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature and you WILL atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, Mr. Beale, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. These are the nations of the world now.. . .We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. . .our children will live to see that perfect world without war and famine, oppression and brutality--one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale." "Why me?" Howard whispered humbly. "Because you're on television. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week." Howard slowly rose from the blackness of his seat so that he was lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light shooting out of the rear of the room. He stared at Jensen, spotlighted on the podium, transfixed. "I have seen the face of God!" Howard said. Jensen considered this curious statement for a moment. "You might just be right, Mr. Beale." (February 14, 1994)

• I've run across a cartoonist I think will rival Gary (Far Side) Larson. Fella's name is John McPherson. He draws a one frame cartoon like The Far Side. It's titled Close to Home. His characters have a lumpy, slack-jawed, chinless, slope-shouldered look of defeat about them. Hard to describe. I just know that looking at the cartoon makes a wave of something--grimace? skin-crawling?--pass over me. The guy has really nailed it. Take a look, see what you think.

• Professors at our beloved Indiana University have voted overwhelmingly to draft a proposal giving fringe benefits to "non-married partners" (code for: homosexuals and lesbians: why don't they just say it?) of IU staff. The vote was 44-1 at a meeting of one of Coach Knight's favorite organizations, The Bloomington Faculty Council.

Rules For Living: Belt Buckles

• Mogo and I have stumbled on some good advice for our daughters: Don't ever date (or marry) a man whose belt buckle is bigger than his head.

We Talk Pro Talk, But The Collar's Blue

• New York University and Northwestern researchers have completed a study of young managers in American business and report in the Academy of Management Journal that "employees grow much less loyal after two years on the job. . .and experienced workers feel they deserve faster promotions and high pay." This is the sort of thing anyone in a management-personnel- ownership position realizes intuitively after only a short period observing and dealing with employees. My observation is that no matter how much we talk about professionalism and careers, about 95 percent of us are purely blue-collar/unionist in our mentality and attitude toward our employment. And from what I've seen of "management," I can't say they can be blamed for it. I don't admire that kind of attitude, just feel it's reality-based. It also is self-defeating. (February 20, 1994)

Steaming Floaters

• I picked up the Journal one day last week and here's what greeted me: the bulls were chasing second-tier oil futures, bottom-fishers were stirring ominously, bonds were drifting, gruntballs advanced against the yen, wheat's unchanged, steers were up a buck, SynOptics went from a "buy" to a "hold" and promptly lost 1 and 3/8ths, a barge loaded with inverse floaters was spotted steaming up the Potomac, the Nikkei was taking a near-term pummeling. What's a fella to do? (February 21, 1994)

Monkey See, Monkey Do

• "Robert in Manhattan" sent Ann Landers a list of 1993's unusual events and one caught my eye, a story out of Guyana where, Robert wrote, "several amazed police officers had to step in and curtail the activities of a monkey which had been breaking into homes, putting on lipstick and upsetting people with its rude gestures and lewd dancing. No word about where he got his idea." I'll bet the monkey watched the Democratic Party's national convention.

• Somehow, my deep titanium Probe's radio antenna got broken off. Took it to Mr. Goodwrench. The antenna, about 36 inches long and made of cheap metal (no more than a dollar's worth of raw material) cost $68, plus $34 of labor to install. Total $102. Amazing! A coat-hanger would have worked just as well.

• Big retailer Dayton Hudson has announced a major venture into "lifestyle-appropriate greeting cards" that should make it easier for all of us to sleep at night. Four of its stores--two in Minneapolis and two Marshall Fields stores in Chicago--will be rolling 'em out for test-marketing soon. The cards may be sent homosexual-to-homosexual or between homosexuals and straights. "It's the first (greeting card) line that really works with the alternative lifestyles of these people and puts together a really nice, fresh sentiment," says Mary Joseph, senior Dayton Hudson stationery buyer.

• Let's see if I've got this straight. The Menendez brothers murder their parents, claim it was not their fault because their parents abused them, and a jury lets them off. The Bobbitt woman hacks off her husband's wang and is found innocent by reason of insanity. The guys who beat Reginald Denney nearly to death and were filmed doing it are found innocent because it wasn't their fault. Jeff Gillooly arranges for someone to hit Nancy Kerrigan on the knee with a stick and gets a $100,000 fine and two years in prison.

Blasting Away On Indy Interstates

• Heavy pressure down Indianapolis way. Four incidents in the last four days of gunshots being fired at vehicles on Interstates 70 and 465. Each case appears to have involved one driver cutting in front of or passing another vehicle, with the aggrieved other driver responding with rifle, shotgun, or handgun blasts. Indiana State Police are warning motorists to go easy, be careful out there, back off and get outta there if they sense somebody in another vehicle is the least bit lacking in self- esteem or feels badly about him- or herself. (February 26, 1994)

• Another Product The World Does Not Need: a Nancy Kerrigan doll.

Losing Their Legs. . .

• And speaking of Price Waterhouse. . .I had a brief afternoon visit Feb. 28 from The Assassin (or Dr. Doom, as he is known about the office). With the office shrinking the way it is, Paul (he said), we can't afford your position any more. We're going to have to let you go. . .

• Has anyone seen my legs? I seem to have misplaced them.

• Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, far, far away last November, out in Greenfield, Massachusetts, T-Model Tommy was seated in his teak- and walnut-paneled office with a visitor from corporate headquarters, there under the guise of a top management visit and tour of the plant facilities so that 1994 capital expenditures and budgets could be planned, who said--and here is the book title if Tommy ever writes it--You Have Been Almost a Perfect Publisher, Tom. . .We Have Decided to Make a Change Here, Effective Monday.

• Tommy said he thought there was something odd about the man carrying one arm behind his back all morning. But then, in the hushed elegance of his office, alone with the man, it became clear when he slowly brought his arm around and reached toward Tommy, handing him, across the polished gray granite desktop, a small sterling silver covered tray. A barely perceptible movement of the man's head suggested Tommy lift the domed lid. He did so, and found himself looking at his own testicles. (March 1, 1994)

Pointless Human Activity Department

• The Wall Street Journal reports (March 1) that almost 1,000 new cookbooks are published annually in the United States.

• Another Reason to Go On Living Department: A new national magazine targeting people who are HIV-positive has been launched. Plus Voice published its first edition in February and distributed 50,000 free copies in 31 states.

Equal Hostility Climate

• Meantime, Donald Straszheim, chief economist for Merrill Lynch, offers this: "California has a tax climate that is hostile to both business and individuals." It's only fair, isn't it? (March 3, 1994)

New Horizons In Customer Service

• A Scottish bank has become the first to provide two photo-ID cards to its transvestite customers--one showing them dressed as a man, the other as a woman.

• Every once in a while I use "White-Out" to cover up or partially obscure the bar codes on business reply envelopes, or use a black ink pen to draw in an extra line or two, or lengthen one, in the fond hope of confusing the machine at the other end of the line, if only briefly. It's a terrible thing to admit, this defying of our citizen's duty to submit to these things without a peep. Who do I think I am, anyway? (March 5, 1994)

• One fine sunny afternoon last week, a fella called WSCR- Radio 820 AM in Chicago during the sports talk show's "Go Ahead and Hit Me" segment, where listeners are urged to call and tell our boys--co-hosts Dan McNeil and Terry Boers--what they don't like about the program, and delicately addressed the matter of the foul lanquaqe, cursing, and profanity that spews down 820's airwaves daily. He mentioned, gently, that he didn't really think the "kids out there" in WSCR's audience needed any additional filth in their lives. . .but at this point was interrupted by Dan or Terry, who observed that "we don't say anything on this program that a kid doesn't hear every day on the playground or at school." Later another caller defended Dan and Terry and said the cussing is OK because it's in the context of talking about sports, then wondered aloud what was wrong with the other guy, anyway, complaining about swearing and stuff? Was he some kind of sissy or something? Dan and Terry never got the point their sheepish listener struggled to make, the fact that the kids and all the rest of us " hear it every day" is the problem; that our society has been coarsened, cheapened, degraded immeasurably by the Niagara of filth that showers us daily, that maybe Dan and Terry could light just one little non-filth candle, consider making a decision not to participate in it, and that humankind might be elevated just a millimeter or so out of the slime if they did that. I suspect that concept's too subtle for Dan and Terry. And sure enough, the next day when I listened to them, e'body was poopin' and crappin' and damnin' and hell-in' and ass-in' and sucks-in' and bitchin' and pissed- off-in' to their heart's delight. How sad. (March 10, 1994)

• Price Waterhouse has published a lengthy monograph on healthcare reform discussing, in remarkably even-handed terms, Slick's plan and several others (despite the fact that Slick's been on network television telling us his program is "the only one out there"). Buried deep in the narrative is, I believe, a New Horizon in The English Language. The Price Waterhouse writer asks, rhetorically, "Is it more efficient to incent employers and employees to limit benefits?" To incent. Hmmmm. (March 10, 1994)

Fleet's Reinforcing The Machine Gun Emplacements, Just In Case

• New England's largest bank holding company, something called Fleet Financial Group, Inc., has announced a 5,500-job "right-sizing" that promises to get everybody involved, from little shots, whose jobs will be destroyed, to big shots, who'll be evaluated on how many jobs they eliminate. Fleet, according to the Wall Street Journal, isn't taking chances on any "adverse reactions" from fired employees. "It has installed electronically controlled glass doors (at a cost of thousands, no doubt) at its executive suite and hired an armed security guard to sit opposite the door. And so it goes in the down-sizing slaughterhouse, where the knife meets the payroll," said the Journal. Aptly worded.

But, Hey! There's Work To Be Had Out There!

• And while Fleet's downsizing casualties walk the streets looking for new jobs, they can bitterly envy Joey Buttafuoco, just out of jail for statutory rape and already a classic American success story. Buttafuoco's pondering a smorgasbord of career opportunities, including Geraldo Rivera's offer for a boxing match between the two on pay-per-view-TV, a lucrative offer to publish his jailhouse diaries, a movie offer, and a $100,000 fee for an interview on A Current Affair.

• While Joey rakes in the goodies, consider this sobering tidbit about doctors: the median income for a family care physician in the U.S. is $98,000, the lowest of any doctor group. Orthopedic surgeons lead the race with a median gross income of $234,000.

200 Years May Get It Back Under Control

• A couple of falls ago James L. Sears of Indianapolis was driving by the 4th tee at Coffin Golf Course in Indianapolis, saw some golfers there and decided to rob them. A scuffle ensued and Sears shot and killed a 69-year-old duffer. Last week Sears was brought to a sentencing hearing in Indianapolis. He apologized to the dead man's family and said the "whole situation got out of control." Superior Court Judge Publius Ironicus Miller, though, got things back under control when he sentenced Sears to a cool 200 years in prison. Good! (March 13, 1994)

Imagining The Unimaginable

• A front-page story in the (March 11) Wall Street Journal dealt with rental rates for retail space around the world. Hong Kong's the most expensive at $647 a square foot (on tony Pedder Street), followed by Tokyo's famed Ginza and Gotham City's Manhattan shopping districts at $500, Kaufinger StaBe in Munich at $254, and Budapest's Vaci Utca at $l90 (in Mudwench, Price Waterhouse rents prime space at $l5-$l8 per square foot). The writer interviewed Michael Creamer of the big London-based consulting firm of Healey and Baker, who noted that the growth of discount shopping isn't likely to hurt the world's high-end stores. "There are still people," he intoned, "who want to spend $l25 on a tie." But who, dear God, can imagine such a person? Not I.

Is There A Wazoo In My Future?

• As I scan employment ads pondering my new career, my eyes fall on an ad for dispatchers for an Indianapolis company called Wazoo Delivery Express. That name. . . surely they're kidding. (March 15, 1994)

Terrible News for Bleeders and Columbus Bashers

• Tuberculosis has been found in the body of a 1,000-year-old woman excavated in Peru (South America), suggesting strongly that this lethal disease was in the New World long before Columbus and the rest of those evil Reaganoid-Bushite Honky Exploiters/Greedsters ever got here and was not, therefore, yet another "plague brought by Europeans" and inflicted upon yet another innocent native nonwhite people.

English Language Evolution Department

• In the beginning, people were "fired". Later, clever company PR types changed the terminology to layoffs, then furloughs. Reductions-in-force came along, and the 1980s produced "downsizing." Then it became "re-engineering." Recently, a Price Waterhouse mogul was heard to say, "We're not 'downsizing,' we're 'rightsizing." And finally, just a few weeks ago, a memo from higher headquarters floated past me which described a planned elimination of certain administrative jobs in the Great Lakes Region as "rationalizing our staff levels." And so the quest for obfuscation continues. Where, indeed, would we be without it?

• NPR's Morning Sedition this morning reported on the upcoming convention of the Anti-Golf Course Society, whose 300 delegates are meeting in Japan. The group is opposed to the spread of golf courses and the chemicals they use. (March 22, 1994)

• The always-roving camera showed Michigan guard Ray Jackson's parents at courtside last Thursday night for the Pepperdine game. There was Mr. Jackson, wearing a big cowboy hat indoors. Have you noticed how many males wear hats indoors nowadays? I can remember when nobody with manners did such a thing. But to impose manners today would be to stifle self-esteem and freedom.

• Does it bother you to see them crush a new Geo Prizm automobile in their latest TV ad? Such a waste.

Drifting Downstream

• Recent stories about hazing in college fraternities take me back to the days of my youth on the plains of central Indiana and my brief (and thoroughly inexplicable) fling at pledging Xylem Alpha Phloem at Indiana University. I can still see Danny Oyler, an "active," down in the house basement where pledges were summoned for "lineup". . . old Danny going over me like a Marine drill sergeant, yelling, screaming, little flecks of spit flying out of his mouth as he pushed his contorted face up close, a blood-rage causing the ropey tendons in his neck to pulse angrily, Danny swearing, taunting, daring me to "go outside with him" to settle whatever real or imaginary grievance was consuming him at the moment. Back in the shadows (spotlights pinned the pledges to the stage like laboratory specimens) the actives gurgled and muttered and barked as each awaited his turn with us. Try as he might, Danny never could get me riled up enough to fight back. It drove him to near apoplexy. My pledgeship lasted about three or four weeks before I finally let the word leak back to the house(I was living in a dormitory) that old Paulie was turning in his hymnal and pledge manual and was gonna let it (and himself) drift on downstream, adios to the brotherhood, I just couldn't measure up, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, actually. . .

Life's Ultimate Horror

• A near half-page ad screamed out from the Journal at me this week. Ameritech, hawking its exclusive AccessLine, said: "They tried you at the office. They tried you on the pager. They tried you on your cellular. They tried you at home. Then they tried your competition." Playing, obviously, on the worst nightmares of us hard-driving, hard-charging, self-starting business dynamos. . .the horror, the horror of being. . .unreachable. . . out of touch, if only for an instant. Although Ameritech provided an 800 number to call to sign up, I did not call. (March 25, 1994)

• The day will come, bet on it, when miniature signal-sending and -receiving devices will be implanted in us at birth, so that for all our lives there'll be no place we can go where we're not instantly reachable by our tormentors.

Toast

• I was talking recently to Dr. V. L. Mungo, Dooley Womack Fellow Emeritus in Accountancy at Bates College, about my Feb. 28 visit from The Assassin. You're kidding, said VLM. Nope, I'm being phased out, rationalized, re-engineered, rightsized, I told him. No kidding. "So you're toast," he said, matter-of-factly. Precisely, I replied, snorting and chortling at his priceless economy of words. Toast. Exactly that.

• Blue Chips arrived at the Mimes Theater in beautiful downtown Enema Falls about a week after its world premiere in Frankfort, Bloomington, and wherever else. Mogo and I raced down to see it. The basketball scenes were spectacular. Shaq's acting was natural, believable. Nover was O.K., ditto Nolte. Some high-minded critics panned the effort, of course, as if they expected Chips to be some arty foreign film full of deep meaning and piercing insight into the human condition. I don't think we need to demand that much. Can't a movie be just simple fun? I think so, and enjoyed Chips on that basis.

Yeah, Dad. . .

• My youngest daughter, Frey, stopped by unexpectedly Friday evening on her way home from college for the weekend. I was playing some Bob Dylan (the Freewheelin' album, the vintage stuff) and couldn't resist asking her to listen to North Country Blues, Talkin' World War III Blues, and, finally, Masters of War. He was the Rebellious and Angry Troubadour of Our Age, I told her. Never heard of him, she said. I asked her to listen to the words of Masters of War. This stuff drove parents and adults crazy in our day, I told her. That's pretty mild compared to today, she said. I'll bet she's right.

• Little moments like this make you feel old, out of touch, irrelevant.

• An article in the Chicago Tribune covers the latest Agony of Our Age: The Drudgery of Exercise. Companies are now springing up to make exercise entertaining. People are--the horror, the horror, the horror--bored with their exercise equipment. Imagine that.

• Back in Scorched Corners, Indiana, in the days of my youth, an essential item for the kid with his first car was the J. C. Whitney Co. catalog. You could order anything for any model car. Then we grew up and the catalog slipped downstream with a lot of other stuff. Just this week I ran across an ad for J. C. Whitney (1917-19 Archer Avenue, P.O. Box 8410, Chicago 60680). Comforting to know they're still in business. A little connection to the past. (March 26, 1994)

Packin' Heat In Sixth Grade

• A 12-year-old sixth grade student in Cassopolis, Michigan, has been charged with carrying a concealed weapon and having a firearm at school as part of a plot to kill her teacher. Little Priscilla Wardlow had a .45 caliber automatic pistol with one bullet in the chamber. The teacher, Phillip Staulter, was quick to assure us he didn't want to be judgmental and he certainly bore no animosity toward the child. "I saw it (the death plot) more as a call for help," he said. Priscilla had 17 days of unexcused absences in the first semester, was failing all seven of her classes, and had 19 in-school suspensions so far this school year. Staulter added that Priscilla had a "verbal style that demands attention." This is code for: the child is incorrigible and should be institutionalized. School officials immediately activated a crisis plan, sending swarms of counselors into the schools to talk to the non-gun-toting youngsters. Truth is, this "crisis" began early in the school year, long before the Recent Unpleasantness, when school officials allowed the child to continue polluting the school environment unchallenged. All in all, a perfectly Nineties day in Cassopolis. (March 27, 1994)

• Say adios to Pete Runk of Manicfield, Indiana, who died earlier this year at age 53 of undisclosed cause. I played high school basketball and summer league baseball against Pete. He was a pretty fair pitcher, and went to Indiana University on a baseball scholarship. When the obits feature your peers and people your own age, it's sobering. If you listen closely, can you hear the sound of wings rustling, flapping?

Acedia, By The Trainload. . .

• "There is a coarseness, a callousness, a cynicism, a banality and a vulgarity to our time. There are too many signs of a civilization gone rotten. And the worst of it has to do with our children: We live in a culture that at times seems almost dedicated to the corruption of the young, to ensuring the loss of their innocence before their time. Pop culture plays a role here. Through it we have seen a terrible debasement of music. . .on daytime television talk shows, indecent exposure is celebrated as a virtue. . .(recent shows) dealt with cross-dressing couples, a three-way love affair, a man who. . .sleeps with women and fools them into thinking he is using a condom, prostitutes who love their jobs, drug dealers. . . Specifically, our problem is what the ancients called acedia, or sloth. . .an undue concern for external affairs and worldly things, a spiritual torpor. . . (arising) from a heart steeped in the worldly and the carnal. It eventually leads to a hatred of the good altogether. . .In America the only respectable form of bigotry is bigotry against religious people. . ." --William Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues. (March, 1994)

This Would Be Called Unbridled Capitalist Greed, Except These Are Lawyers. . .

• Forbes magazine (February) features a husband-and-wife team who've uncovered a gold mine for themselves. The wife got mad when her credit card company imposed a $6 fee for every transaction over her card's spending limit. Obviously another one of these The Rules Don't Apply To Me types, she sued, based on an arcane distinction in California law forbidding "penalty clauses" in contracts. She won a $300,000 settlement from the card company, then the outraged couple began filing class action suits on behalf of other aggrieved victims of these credit card charges. The lawyers, Patricia and James Sturdevant, have won over $20 million in various suits since 1986, about $3 million of which represents their fees and expenses. California's banks are now lobbying the state legislature to legalize the fees. Shakespeare was right when he suggested "the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (March 27, 1994)

• Time magazine last fall ran an article about America's Top 100 Cultural Elite and "how their values are shaping all of us." Among the icons listed--is your heart thumping already?--were Woody Allen, Robert Bly, William F. Buckley, Jr., Michael Kinsley, Spike Lee, Madonna, Bill Moyers, Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, Oliver Stone, Garry Trudeau, George Will, Oprah Winfrey, Arsenio Hall, Pat Buchanan (dubbed by Time "the scourge of sodomites and all-around fun guy"), Ted Koppel ("worst haircut on TV"). . .and so on.

Why Stop At 25?

• The Chicago Tribune took a shot at listing its 25 Most Annoying People of the Year and came up with: Alan Dershowitz (Mike Tyson's lawyer), Barney (a TV character, rumor has it) Billy Ray Cyrus, Sharon Stone, Shannon Doherty, Lynn Martin (former secretary of Labor and shill for then-President George Bush), Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, Rush Limbaugh, Britain's royal family (a group entry), Kim Basinger and Alex Baldwin, Demi Moore, Isiah Thomas, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, Donald Trump, Roseanne Arnold, George Stephanopolous, Marla (Would You Lookit the Size o' Them Things!) Maples, author Philip Roth. . .I don't know about you, but I think the Tribune's effort was fairly uninspired. I'm working on my own list.

Frank's Dead But The Name Lives On

• This just slipped past me, somehow. Rocker Frank Zappa died last December. Good! Anybody who'd name his children Dweezil and Moon Unit ought to die.

• Press reports say Denver's new $3.2 billion airport is probably already obsolete, though it hasn't opened yet. This may be some sort of record for planned obsolescence. It could be just boredom, I suppose. (March 28, 1994)

• Boredom. Isn't that why CNN gives me the weather forecast 100 times per day?

• Teams in a high school sports league in Ventura County, California, are now forbidden to shake hands with opposing team members after athletic contests. Increasing violence at sports events prompted officials to enact the ban in all sports, for boys and girls alike.

• Speaking of The Angry and Rebellious Troubadour of Our Age, I spent the day at home and had a lot of Bob Dylan music playing while I puttered about, worked on tax returns, enjoyed a blustery March day. It refreshed my enjoyment of Dylan's sometimes deeply-touching lyrics. The early Dylan, at least, sang of lost loves, of a girl he once knew (". . .please see she has a coat so warm/ to keep her from the howlin' winds/ please see for me that her hair's hangin' long/ that's the way I remember her best"), of our indifference to suffering and our self-destructive impulses ("How many roads must a man walk down?/How many times must the cannonballs fly?/How many times can a man turn his head?/and pretend that he just doesn't see?/ The answer, my friend/ is blowin' in the wind"), of lost friends and lost youth ("While riding on a train going west/I fell asleep for to take my rest/I dreamed a dream, it made me sad/concernin' myself, and the first few friends I had/...we thought we could sit forever in fun/ but our chances, really/was a million to one. . .I wish, I wish, I wish in vain/that we could sit simply in that room again/ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat/I'd give it all gladly/ if our lives could be like that."), of the fear of nuclear war ("The whole thing started at three o'clock fast/it was all over by a quarter past/I was down in the sewer with some little lover/when I peeked out from a manhole cover/ wonderin' who'd turned the lights on us. . .I was feelin' kind of lonesome and blue/ I needed someone to talk to/so I called up the operator for the time/just to hear a voice of some kind/she said 'at the beep it will be three o'clock'/she said that for over an hour and I hung up"), of breaking up a relationship ("It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe/if'n you don't know by now. . .look out your window and I'll be gone/you're the reason I'm a-travelin' on/but don't think twice, it's all right"), of the soul-wrenching despair of joblessness and ruin in the crumbling mining towns of northern Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula ("Come gather 'round friends/and I'll tell you a tale/of when the red iron outfits run a-plenty. . .now there's cardboard in the windows/and the old men are on the benches/tell ya now that the whole town is empty"), of corrupt judges and sheriffs, of schemers and shysters and rip-off artists, of gentlemen murderers gone unpunished, of sad, shuffling losers who are always "one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind." About the worst thing Dylan ever said in a song was in Masters of War when he said he hoped the war-makers and war-profiteers would die, and that when they did, "I'll follow your casket on a pale afternoon/I'll watch while you're lowered into your death-bed/and I'll stand over your grave till I'm sure that you're dead". . .sentiments most of us have probably felt about someone, at least once in our lives. Nowhere in all this did I hear old Bob mentioning disemboweling family pets, raping four-year-old girls, sex with farm animals, cannibalism, ritual killings of our neighbors, bosses, school teachers or random kidnap victims, satanism, torture and mutilation, murdering parents, holding babies by their feet from a speeding car's window and slamming them into mailboxes, beheading girlfriends or boyfriends who displease us, or any of the other vile behavioral monstrosities which make up so much of the tapestry of our present age. Dylan was considered something of a subversive in those days, and he certainly made some adults uneasy. He seems bland and innocent now. (March 29, 1994)

Our Chances, Really. . .

• Would I pay money to get together with some of my old friends to sit around a campfire or an old stove, to sing songs and laugh and talk and joke and reminisce and get away from the world outside? Yep. And the more I live the more convinced I am that friends, family, a sense of belonging, connection, and place, being kind to and honoring the old folks in our midst, music, reading, the presence and appreciation of "nature" and trying to pass on something of substance to the young ones are what matters. Jobs, careers, work are all bullstuff; they're what interrupts or interferes with your real life.

• I stumbled by accident upon a little story tucked away in the newspaper with only the word "weird" in a headline to catch my eye. . .it was about a London-based magazine named Fortean Times, which is "dedicated to the study of all things bizarre." My interest is piqued, my friends, and I'm going to see if I can't find a way to subscribe. Stay tuned.

Does Anyone Know, Where The Love of God Goes. . .?

• Gordon Lightfoot is singing now. . . ."The lake it is said/ never gives up for dead/ when the skies of November turn gloomy/with a load of iron ore/twenty-six thousand tons more/than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty. . .the wind in the wires/made a tattletale sound/as the waves broke over the railing/and every man knew/as the captain did too/'twas the witch of November come stealin'. . .does anyone know/where the love of God goes/when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" An absolutely awesome song; indeed, an epic poem. I never hear it but I feel a sorrow that's difficult to explain.

You Never Know Who's Packin' Heat Out There. . .

• Country singer Tracy Lawrence has revealed in a Wall Street Journal interview that he wore a bullet-proof vest for the first time last year when appearing at the Texas State Fair in Dallas, and says he wears one at all big, open-air concerts now. He's concerned about fan violence.

Rubber Gloving All The Way To The Bank

• I have an aunt in a nursing home. Incontinence has become increasingly a problem. She's been in the hospital a couple times in the last three years for broken bones. She has pretty much a permanent catheter. "Urological supplies" have become a regular item on her monthly bill. Starting in December 1993, I noticed she was being billed for about four boxes of "Gloves comma latex comma pair" each month, at $30 per box. I called to get the lowdown. The billing office tells me there are 50 pairs of gloves in a box. That means my aunt is being rubber gloved about 200 times a month (four boxes times 50) or better than six times (pairs) a day. A certain vagueness clouds their explanation of how that could be happening, though the clerkette makes nervous references to "gub'mint regulations" requiring rubber gloves to be worn on all kinds of occasions (but not, inexplicably, at Slick Willie's Inaugural Ball), and certainly any time the nurses go in my aunt's room to mess with her or her urological gear, and how sometimes it must take two nurses to accomplish the tasks, what with germs, beelers, viri, critters, that sort of thing being what they are. All this means one thing: in the nursing home's ceaseless questing for profit, rubber gloves have now become a profit center.

Our Masters, Not Our Servants Department

• Today's Chicago Tribune had a story about assorted bigshots at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services running up 96 unpaid parking tickets totaling $5,035 while using state-owned cars. The matter came to light when the latest ticket was issued and a computer check revealed the unpaid ones. Directors at the DCFS were all backing and filling furiously when reporters called. Nobody knew a thing about it. (April 5, 1994)

Madonna Mighty Happy With Herself

• I somehow missed this, but that supernova scumbag, Madonna, apparently appeared on David Letterman's show last week and caused a bit of a stir when she uttered the F-word at least 12 times (somebody counted) and made numerous scatalogical or otherwise witless and foul-mouthed comments. Her spokesidiot said Monday that "She was happy that she made (Letterman) squirm a bit."

Once, Twice, Three Times a Seed Pod

• A third version of one of the all-time sci-fi greats, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, is now playing at Hell Plaza Octoplex theaters across this great land of ours. I saw the original, in 1956, the remake in 1978 (starring, appropriately, Donald Sutherland), and will go see this one, too. Scary stuff, about aliens in the form of seed pods that take over the bodies of sleeping human beings in a one-night metamorphosis. Cures you of any inclination to ever again doze off near a green vegetable.

No, One Don't

• "It's always wise to say of novel constitutional issues what Fats Waller said of life in general: 'One never knows, do one?' " --Cox News Service writer Tom Teepen, in an article about the National Rifle Association and its Second Amendment interpretations. (April 10, 1994)

Worth Braving A Little Gunfire For

• Earl Courtney, 51, took the stand in Kalamazoo to testify that his wife shot him in the chest because he had eaten a bowl of macaroni and cheese she had saved for herself. I'll bet it was Kraft brand. God, that stuff's good!

Full Frontal Vomiting

• I don't know what I was doing, but I missed the episode of Roseanne that featured a five-second full-lip kiss between Roseanne and guest star Mariel Hemingway. I'll do better next time, promise.

Pumping, Strapping, Trembling. . .

• I thought losing a job was disappointing. Now this. Today's Wall Street Journal digs into the horror, the horror. . . of sagging sneaker markets. "The price canopy for sneakers in the U.S. is falling," it quotes John Horan, publisher of Sporting Goods Intelligence (I'll have my subscription mailed in by nightfall.). He means that sales of shoes costing over $100 are declining. Manufacturers apparently have hit a price barrier: this was discovered when shoe makers came out with inflatable shoes in the $200 range. Nike's sales dropped, and so did Reebok's and others. This ominous development occurs just as new competition is appearing, in the form of high-tech sports sandals equipped with extra cushioning and elaborate strapping systems. These new models, per the WSJ, are "the rage" and selling like, well, hotcakes, but at $50 to $80 a pair. "What makes them fashionable is something we haven't quite figured out yet," offers a puzzled June O'Reilly in the April Gentleman's Quarterly. "Hip" hiking books aimed at the ecologically-sensitive consumer are selling rapidly, as well. We mustn't overlook Reebok's new Instapump sneaker with a special carbon dioxide cannister for inflating, or Adidas's Tubular Technology shoe with its built-in pressure gauge. I noticed I had an elevated heartbeat and trembling hands when I put down this article. That evening at home I got out my Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars and sat in my BarcaLounger and just held them close. (April 14, 1994)

• A federal judge in Chicago has ruled that the Good Friday holiday recognized in Illinois public schools for over 50 years is illegal and unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Ann Williams used 29 pages to explain that the holiday sends the "impermissible message that Christianity is a favored religion within the state of Illinois." Can Christmas be far behind?

• The sympathy for American vandal Michael Fay's predicament in Singapore is overdone. Singapore isn't afraid to make value judgments about crime and punishment, and our society is. Singapore's willingness to punish offenders seems barbaric to some of us. Fine. We're entitled to our opinion. But we also pay a staggering price in America for our tolerance. Fay's caning may be the first time in his young life that actions have had consequences. Compare and contrast, too: if Fay had murdered someone in the United States, he'd be hosting his own talk show and walking the streets free on bond today, though perhaps wobbling a bit under the weight of his movie, television, and book contracts. Our view of this depends on what we take seriously. (May 20, 1994)

• While we're trudging about our daily business, believing our institutions to be in good hands, clever, cunning, adult men and women are ceaselessly circling the Chicago Mercantile Exchange dreaming of the day they can obtain a "seat" there. In mid-May, a successful bidder paid $695,000 for a seat on the Merc's International Monetary Market (a record price, of course; the old mark was $640,000, set in mid-April--a mere 7% (a cool 45 grand) gain in a 30-day period). Holders of seats in that market may trade currency, interest-rate and stock-index futures and options, where the potential profits are so great that adults swoon at their mere contemplation.

Molding, Bonding, Shaping Young Lives In The Barber's Chair. . .

• Haircuts have been a struggle during my years in Mudwench. In olden times you walked in the barber shop, sat down, read Field and Stream, Argosy, Sports Afield, Coronet (one of the first "titty-teaser" features on the legendary Raquel Welch appeared in this magazine, now long defunct), Sport, Baseball Digest, the auto mechanics magazines and an occasional J. C. Whitney & Co. catalog while you waited. The barbers kept up a yakking commentary on local life and the universal man-talk of those days: the local high school athletic teams, poontang (were you gettin' any? they'd ask with a yuck and a leer), off-color jokes, local gossip. One barber, George (The Golden Gobbler, we called him) Gerlach, told us boys he saved the hair clippings on his floor and wove them into little wigs--muckets--for bald female private parts. We'd all guffaw in a manly way. One episode of local legend involved one of the town dentists who walked into a crowded barber shop one weekday morning and urinated in a sink, to the amazement of all present. The barbers frequently slipped into the back room for a nip of whiskey. You tried to get your hair cut in the morning, before there'd been too much drinkin'. Otherwise you'd leave the place with an assortment of scalds, dings, and bare patches where the clippers had bored clear through to your gourd, sometimes with sideburns of different lengths or a flat-top with hills and dales or a bit askew. Wildroot Creme Oil, Bryllcream, talcum powder, and flat-top cement--a fragrant, pink, waxy stuff--Southern Rose Butch Wax, wasn't it?--flavored the air. A haircut cost 75 cents, later a dollar. You left feeling crisp, clean, strong, the sun shining down to your scalp, the breeze sweet on your face, all right with the world. That's mostly gone now. Unisex hair salons and hair styling emporia have supplanted old-fashioned barber shops. I've drifted from one place to another in Mudwench, and nothing's ever come close to those golden days. Not Alex, a wheezing man in the advanced stages of lung cancer, who briefly operated a shop two blocks south of our office. Not the fern bar unisex places in the mall, not the Chicago Hair Cutting Salon, places done up in chrome and black and white and red plastic, with bizarre-looking employes in fuschia hair and leather clothing, finger-snapping, gum-chewing androids. Not even old Joe Kobar, a semi-retired barber who cut hair three days a week in a small shop across the street from the office and was always good for stories about his harrowing D-Day adventures in the glider landings in France. Nothing's ever come close to the genuine original.

• Two no-account dirtbags from Wyoming picked Indianapolis and a Denny's Restaurant at random this week, then grabbed and shot up a few hostages (one fatally) before surrendering after five hours of high drama. Within two days an Indianapolis Star columnist was speculating about the legal defense the young men and their lawyers will offer, that it's someone else's fault, that the criminals themselves are the real victims. The writer noted that American juries were increasingly accepting this line of defense. So who'd be surprised? Juries today are increasingly made up of people whose adult lives have been shaped in a society where victimhood is a major growth industry. Is it any wonder juries lap it up?

Their Suffering Must Be Beyond Our Power To Comprehend. . .

• NPR's Cokie Roberts hectored me Monday morning (June 6) on the Morning Sedition program with another of her wacko left-liberal investigative reports, this one covering the angst and the agony of Women Who Felt Left Out of D-Day Ceremonies. (June 6, 1994)

• The June issue of Money magazine had a major article about Generation X'ers who, Money was at pains to convince us, were not the simpering, sniveling, perpetual adolescents so often presented as the X'er stereotype. These, Money suggested, were throwbacks to a happier day in America: bright, cheerful, hard-working, family-values-oriented, loyal, monogamous, clean-cut, All-American youngsters, just ordinary citizens like the rest of us. Then some trouble-making reader claimed that the four Northwestern University graduates profiled were hardly typical at all: each came from a family with at least one practicing physician parent, with all the privilege and glory that implies. What! You mean these kids weren't ordinary, just like you and me? What a letdown!

• TV and the print press served up a slew of D-Day Commemoratives. . .Dan Rather on the beaches of Normandy, Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf interviewing D-Day survivors, and more, more, more. . .One of the survivors I saw interviewed, a man named Chuck Hurlbut, appeared on the verge of crying during his interview. His lips trembled and twitched as he relived the invasion. Others actually did choke up. It was gripping, deeply moving stuff. I felt a mix of emotions--relief that I wasn't at risk in my adult life of being killed in military operations, and a puzzling, strange sense of regret that I'd never been involved in one. It occurred to me that there's something much, much larger involved than one's mere life when one contemplates events of such magnitude as The Korean War, World Wars I and II, The Vietnam War, D-Day, probably any massive armed conflict. . . what comes through so strongly when you see military veterans interviewed is that there's something transcending about such an experience, on a scale of heroism impossible for a non-participant to understand. Most of us, of course, are never tested this way, never know what we'd have done, how we'd have responded. The paradox is that one can be simultaneously grateful for being spared, yet feel a part of one's life is empty for never having been put to such a supreme test.

Vomitoreum Time

• Daily events tend to blur together unless one takes notes. Here's a sampler. . .The June 22 Indianapolis Star carpet-bombed me at breakfast with a Niagara of greasy offal, stunning even by today's standards. . . an article about one of the vilest human beings ever to walk this earth, the late Sam Kinison, who was a local nightclub and police blotter favorite in Naptown. . .a huge four-column picture of a pierced human nose was the Star's "attention-grabber" for a feature on the latest rage--body piercing. The layout also included a photo of a teen-age girl getting her navel pierced (the "surgeon" in this scene, about 14 years old, sported a dark blue bandanna around his head, while a sallow, torpid-looking young woman in bib overalls, presumably the surgical assistant, stood nearby in what looked like someone's seedy trailer park family room). . .on the same page was "Column One" by the absurd Lynn Ford, who complained about not being able to watch Soul Train as often as he wanted these days. Columnist Erica Patterson had written "Column One" the day before, a simple-minded lament about how bored she was and how boring Indianapolis is, under the title "Chairman of The Bored." Well, Erica got that wrong: she's Chairman of the Insipid. The editorial page had two articles on O.J. Simpson, and an editorial about another Clintonista (Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy) under investigation by the authorities. The mind reels at moments like this. I spun away from the breakfast table for a quick vomitorium break before getting on with the day's serious business. (June 22, 1994)

Time To Face The Music

• Insiders" are being quoted in the papers saying Slick's "in trouble" politically. I don't think so, not at all. Within the last few days polls have shown that 60-70 percent of the people aren't in the least bit bothered by Slick's sleazy morals or character or by rumors of extramarital affairs. His approval rating is around 43 percent, the same percent he won the Presidency with, so he hasn't lost any support at all. Slick is far more representative of our society than I like to admit. His Vietnam Era hippie/protester/anti-authority generation is now taking over American gub'mint, business, and institutions. People like me--and this is the cruelest blow to face--are increasingly outnumbered and irrelevant.

• Northwestern University's annual job survey reports the average starting salary for B.A. degree-holders last year was $27,700, which is lower than the 1968 salary adjusted for today's dollars. . .predicts 30 percent of all college graduates between now and 2005 will be either unemployed or under-employed. . .says one of America's icons, long term secure employment with a big company, is gone forever (big bidness, says the survey, has discovered it's more efficient (code for cheaper) and profitable to have work done with part-timers, temporary employees and out-sourcing). . .and that high-paying jobs are being cut everywhere and replaced with low-paying jobs (it tracked a group of 2000 "down-sized" RJR Nabisco workers and found that 72 percent of them had found other jobs but at less than half--47 percent--of their former salary level). And so it goes. . .

• Even Bryan Davis of Radio 1000-WMVP Chicago salts and peppers his daily banter with "hell" in situations where there's not the remotest rationalization for swearing. This from a man whose public persona (as heard on the radio, anyway) seems sweet, polite, articulate, caring, sincere. Bryan, Bryan.

Banks Love ATMS, Even If We Don't

• As it becomes increasingly difficult to conduct business with an actual human being in America's banks, owing to the dramatic increase in the number of automatic teller machines (ATMs), a study by the Consumer Federation of America offers a clue why: banks annually save over $2 billion in teller costs and make over $2 billion in profits by using machines instead of humans. And guess what? ATM fees are rising steadily as banks struggle just like the rest of us to eke out a meager survival. Seems to me the smartest strategy is not to have an ATM card in the first place. I said that about telephones, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the wheel, too, in earlier incarnations.

Tackling The ‘Heavy Book' Crisis In Georgia

• The Effingham County (Georgia) School Board has come up with a brilliant stroke in the never-ending battle against the crime, drugs, weapons, back pain and general angst which afflict so many concerned parents and young people: it's voted to spend over $110,000 to buy local junior high and high school students an extra set of books--one set for the kids to use at home, another to use at school. School superintendent Michael Moore says the move will save teachers aggravation caused by kids leaving their books at home and will cut down on contraband drugs and weapons being smuggled into the schools in book bags, which will no longer be needed. Books should now last longer because they won't be carried back and forth, and the day is foreseen when schools can be built without lockers since the kids won't need them to store books. Another school official noted that parents and students had been complaining "about the weight of books being carried on students' shoulders" and the new program should help address that problem. (August 20, 1994)

Tom Turns WIBC Upside Down Looking For A Niche

• In an Indianapolis Star August interview, Tom Durney, general manager of WIBC-1070 AM, provided a surprisingly candid peek inside the radio business. The station's been in turmoil the last couple of years as it's changed formats, fired people, poked around for its niche. "We only need two of ten listeners to be the No. 1 station in town," said Durney, in explaining his belief that radio stations must polarize the audience to be successful, "so if it takes upsetting six of the remaining eight, it's worth it." He gutted WIBC's news staff, cut out "fluff lite" music, and dumped one of the city's most popular broadcasters. He says the old WIBC was trying to offer something for everyone, a no-no in today's world. Durney believes survival requires finding a niche and avoiding an "older" audience (in radio advertising jingo, anyone over age 50 is dead). Durney brought in Rush Limbaugh and other "talkers" and changed the news to a "friendlier presentation--Jane Pauley as opposed to Walter Cronkite." WIBC's ad rates have more than doubled (from $100 per 60 seconds to $220) in Rush Limbaugh's time slot. Drives liberals crazy, too.

He May Be Dead But Somehow I Think He'll Live On Department

• Actor Peter Cushing died August 12 in Canterbury, England, of cancer. Cushing's 50-year acting career spanned such roles as Osric in Laurence Olivier's film of Hamlet (1948), Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the evil Death Star commander Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977). I've seen just about every Dracula film made and for my money nobody did those roles better than Cushing and another British actor, Christopher Lee. Cushing's obituary in the Indianapolis Star closed with this appropriate, if not slightly sinister, comment: Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced. I prefer to believe that within moments of "death" Cushing's corpse was being borne wildly along in a horse-drawn black carriage through a deeply forested Carpathian Mountain road toward--where else?--Castle Dracula. (August 12, 1994)

Mobocracy

• Newspapers are caught up these days in frenzied fawning as pressures mount to find new readers and keep current ones. Savvy editors have carved the audience into ever more bizarre segments, special sections proliferate like mushrooms after spring rain, and each day seems to bring a new "reader poll" or victim hotline. They want to know how we feeeeeeeeeel about everything--and the sleazier the topic the better. One Indianapolis paper this summer offered a phone-in hotline for us to vote whether boxing champion Mike Tyson should be let out of prison early or made to serve his full term. The judge hearing Tyson's motion for a reduced sentence turned him down, so the nays must have carried the day. Radio talk shows are into these call-in polls, too. Apparently sizable numbers of people believe we should conduct the nation's business by the high-tech mobocracy of opinion polls. Now that the technology is available, it's irresistible.

• You've got to like the impishness of Democratic voters in Berrien County, Michigan, who in August gave Harry Caldwell a 176-158 primary election victory over incumbent James Martin in a county commissioner race. Caldwell, the tennis coach at Benton Harbor High School and owner-operator of a radio show-producing business, could not campaign for the office or spend any money on the race because he was in jail for non-payment of child support. He attributed his victory to the publicity he received for not paying $34,975 in support, opining that "free publicity, regardless of whether it is negative or positive, is a good thing." He also was rumored to have had strong support from a politically active "parents advisory council" which has involved itself in local school and political issues. Caldwell is confident he'll whip Republican Ron Smith in the November general election. After that, he'll probably pop up in the Clinton Cabinet somewhere, wouldn't you think? (August 25, 1994)

• Make book on this: no jury in America is going to convict O. J. Simpson of anything. It wouldn't make the jurors feel good about themselves, and it would damage O. J.'s self-esteem. Sorry, can't have that.
• After wrangling five years with the Army and federal bureaucrats, Lake County, Illinois, officials finally thought they had an agreement on what would be done with the 600 lakefront acres of Fort Sheridan, a military post being shut down by the Pentagon: options included an upscale housing development featuring homes in the $300,000 to $1 million range, a university, a forest preserve, commercial buildings. . .but--surprise! surprise!--they hadn't counted on the U.S. Dept. of Human Services' last-minute ruling that no deal gets federal approval unless it includes. . .homeless shelters. Local county commissioner Colin McRae allowed as how it might be difficult to market million dollar homes across from a homeless shelter. So, it's back to the trough for everybody. I've got faith they'll work it out. (September 26, 1994)

A Heavy News Day

• Indianapolis News readers had to be true sleuths to locate a story about Slick Willie's llth-hour settlement offer to Paula Jones, who's sued Slick alleging sexual improprieties in an unjustly alleged 1991 episode in a Little Rock hotel room. While denying everything publicly, Slick, according to the Associated Press, is privately offering to release a public statement conceding he would "now not challenge" Jones's claim that the two met in the hotel room even though Slick has "no memory" of the meeting, and that Slick "may very well have met her in the past." This rather intriguing story was buried by the News's editors on the fifth page of a Local News section, between obituaries and the agate-type public legal notices. I suppose, given the torrent of more important stories of the day--about cockroaches who've been taught to compose piano concertos; a special pull-out section on Roadkill Recipes You Can Microwave At Home; reviews of TV's new sitcoms; the arrival in Indianapolis, on its national tour, of the new four-acre square "Piss Christ" quilt; and the usual press conference parade of wackos, mutants, crack cocaine addicts and professors of victimology--that was the only spot they could find for the story. At least they got it into print. (October 5, 1994)

• Discovered while foraging in the dictionary: pantisocracy. . .noun, "a classless, utopian society in which all are equal and all rule (coined by Coleridge, 1794, from the Greek. . .). And here I thought it would be a place where everybody wore nothing but panties. Oh, well. . .

• Ever'body got their O. J. Simpson Hallowe'en mask ready? They seem to be sold out locally, but I'll spare no expense in hunting down mine, bet on it. Meantime, in a story about the brisk business in Simpson masks and related O. J. paraphernalia, the Lost Angeles Times quotes a sociologist, Gordon Clanton of San Diego State University, who finds this sales trend "disturbing" for what it says about American society. "This reminds me," said Clanton, "of people cheering O. J. from the overpass during his infamous Friday night drive. As society becomes less and less clear about right and wrong, people are more swept up into entertainment generally. And these days, people live through entertainment in a powerful way." Precisely, Doc, precisely.

Packin' Heat On Kirkwood

• A brief skirmish last week featuring a little gunplay was sobering for those whose memory and experience in Bloomington, Indiana, go back to earlier, more civilized times. Three or four men in their 20s got in an argument on Kirkwood Avenue, for years a friendly, charming street of shops, book stores, bars, and eateries on the west edge of the IU campus--a popular gathering place for students and townspeople alike. This altercation apparently began in a small park area with an attempt to buy some marijuana; then came accusations that somebody was an undercover policeman. Yapping and snarling ensued, somebody showed a handgun. There was a chase, a scuffle. One man tackled the other. They fought for the gun, which went off. Somebody called the police. The guy with the gun attempted to shoot it four or five more times, but it apparently jammed. A bystander was also later arrested when he got mouthy with investigating detectives. The local paper interviewed several shopkeepers who said they weren't all that surprised, since they'd noticed that more and more of their customers or Kirkwood denizens were packing firearms. Police confirmed that. A Taco Bell manager told the reporter that only last week he'd noticed a customer sporting a 9-millimeter pistol. Just a matter of time, it was agreed, before somebody gets blasted fatally on this idyllic little campus street. Times have changed in River City.

Packin' Heat In Kindergarten

• School officials in Monroe, Louisiana, "quickly disarmed" a five-year-old boy who showed up in kindergarten packing a loaded .22 caliber pistol. School board member George Cannon was quick to dismiss any fears the child's self-esteem might be damaged, though. "We're not going to expel a five-year-old," he said. "I mean, he's just starting out, and it isn't his fault." He said he expected the child back in school in a couple days.

• Marion County (Indiana) Sheriff's Dept. Sgt. John Jackson has been suspended 15 days without pay for kicking a police squad car. Jackson was leaving his late shift late one July night and found a police car blocking his in a parking garage. He did what we've all dreamt of doing: he gave that thing a good kick in the fender. The resulting dent was worth $500, the police bureaucracy determined, and the ensuing disciplinary procedure took over two months to play out. Of course we citizens can't know all the subtleties of this case, but it sounds like an episode that in a simpler time could have been settled a good bit more easily, with a supervisor just telling the fella to pay for the repair and that would be the end of it. Not today, though. It's more the rule than the exception that today's organizations and institutions are strangled and suffocating at the hands of the rule-makers, bean-counters and bureaucrats.

• Having worked 20 years in a classical business organization, I think I know why this evolution occurs: because in every group of people there are a few, always, who will not, cannot, "play along," with minimal organizational rules. Instead, these individuals are ceaselessly questing, reaching, stretching, pushing against existing rules. Management's response, inevitably, is to feel forced by these few individuals to write new regulations as a kind of organizational self-defense. This is why company policy manuals expand endlessly.

Nothin' Quite Like The Big Flush

• The secret, if you're involved in organizational hiring, is to figure out how to spot this human type early in the interviewing process and avoid employing them. I wrestled with this dilemma for 20 years and found no foolproof way to identify this creature. Few pleasures, though, exceeded those occasional times when I was sure I had one in my sights--and sent him flushing.

• Mogo and I went to an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concert recently and were treated to the spectacle of a young man in a red Indiana University jacket sitting in a box seat close to the stage. He wore a baseball cap through most of the performance. I suspect we're witnessing a fashion breakthrough for the ISO, which still, amazingly enough in this day and age, draws a crowd which dresses up for the evening. . .suits, ties, dresses, tuxedoes, you know, that sort of thing. Can the grunge look be far behind? One suspects that if the situation were reversed--a tuxedo-clad gentleman in a roadhouse, perhaps--he would have been pelted with rotten fruit.

Oh Man, How'd This Story Ever Leak Out?

• The October 18 front page of the Bloomington Herald-Times served up a picture of members of a new group called the Lesbian Avengers displaying picket signs calling on the new president of Indiana University, Myles Brand, to "Wake Up and Smell The Queers." This was part of the paper's aggressive and ample coverage of a campus dispute involving the University's plans to fund with tax dollars a Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Student Support Center. Differently sexual-preferenced students and marchers were plenty upset about what they saw as a betrayal by the University. "All we're asking for," said Michael Burton, executive director of Queers United for Equal Social Treatment (QUEST--get it?), "is a measly $50,000. We've been pushed too far, we're not going to take it any more." Another foot-stamper, Sally Green, president of OUT, IU's biggest gay, lesbian, and bisexual group, fumed right through the week's most unfortunate choice of words, telling an eager H-T reporter and all within hearing range that "We're tired of being jerked around. We want what's ours and was promised us." The resulting public furor caused the University to back off the use of tax money, but President Brand quickly was able to raise "private funding" to keep the project on track. The search is on, though, for the traitor who let this story become public.

• Meantime, tuition at America's four-year colleges continues to increase annually at 6 percent, twice the inflation rate, according to College Board statistics, and Indiana University's rose 8 percent this year. The ongoing, ceaseless questing for excellence is the culprit, surely.

• Bloomington, Indiana, got national media attention in October as the site of a sexual assault which caught the attention of the big city press. A woman was attacked in her apartment by a man--since captured and charged--who demanded and got an act--only partially completed, but a good bit more than he'd bargained for as it turned out--of oral sex. The woman chomped down hard on the offending member, inflicting a wound authorities described as "serious." Bloomington Police Captain Bill Parker, who led the investigation, has a future in stand-up comedy if he wants one. Parker told reporters the man's injury was severe enough that "it would be difficult to hide. This person is badly injured and he's going to have to have medical treatment. He's probably at least going to be walking funny." Turns out the man was convicted of rape six or eight years ago, but got out of prison early, and is now accused in a series of four additional rapes and assaults in the Bloomington area over recent months. When is our society going to have the will to do what's needed in such cases: lock up these people permanently?

• Bread, circuses, virtual reality. The latter has reached the dentist's office, thanks to the creative folks at Virtual I-O of Seattle, who've introduced a device for dentists to fit over their patients' eyes so they can see three-dimensional VCR tapes during dental procedures. The machine sells for about $700 and demand is expected to skyrocket as citizens break new horizons in the flight-from-reality that's taking up increasingly larger portions of our daily existence. (October 31, 1994)

If You're Lookin' For Me, Try The Gourmet Pet Drink Aisle

• Dogs and cats now have their own gourmet bottled water. "Thirsty Dog!" and "Thirsty Cat!" are now offered in 33 states for about $1.90 a liter. The original Pet Drink Co. in Ft. Lauderdale can be thanked for this. The dog potion is "crispy beef" flavored. Cats get "tangy fish flavor." Original Pet Drink spokesidiots say their beverages are made of "triple-filtered" water, and contain vitamins and minerals not found in plain old tap water. Sounds like another product this great nation has been crying out for.

Meanwhile, Over At The Synthe-Poop Kiosk. . .

• . . .it's handshakes all around for two Kimberly-Clark researchers, scientists Richard Yeo and Debra Welchel, who've invented synthetic human excrement to help the company blaze new trails in baby diaper technology. Yeo and Welchel came up with a dry mix of starches, natural gums, gelatins, fibers, and resins which, when water's added, duplicate human waste in every important way but the stench. This is a thrilling breakthrough for K-C's research staff, certainly. They've had to use real feces for diaper research, which made for a fairly revolting day in the lab and presented a serious hazardous waste disposal issue as well. Is there a chance Kimberly-Clark and The Original Pet Drink Company could get together for some beef- and fish-flavored gag products for practical jokers like me? I've called, but I keep getting a busy signal.

The Lines Are Busy At BRS Ltd., Too

• Two San Antonio, Texas, Entrepreneurs for The Nineties, Alan Sharp and Scott Shaheen, say business is booming for the new company they founded six months ago, Bullet Resistant Systems Ltd. The firm is in the home bulletproofing business. Four levels of protective paneling can be installed anywhere on a home, and can be covered with paint, wallpaper, wood paneling, brick, stucco, vinyl siding or other materials. The material ranges from "Level 1" which will stop bullets from small handguns or shotguns, to Level 4 which can take anything, by golly, your neighborhood friends can throw at you--Uzis, AK-47s, submachine guns, .44 Magnums, high-powered rifles. Expensive stuff, sure, but what family would want to be without it? Sharp and Shaheen expect to have a nationwide dealer network set up within the year. Keep your gourd ducked low till then, ya hear?

• Joseph Heller, 80 years old and famous as the author in 1961 of Catch-22, has just finished a new book, Closing Time, which revisits, via flashbacks and reflections, some of the legendary heroes of his original best-seller: Captain Yossarian, Lt. Milo Minderbinder, Chaplain Tappman, and others. Interviews with Heller reveal a man not optimistic about what lies ahead. "Many people," says Heller, "don't want to face the fact that there are problems that don't have solutions. I don't think democracy has the means to arrest its own decline." (October 31, 1994)

• Twice in the past five months I've mailed deposits to Teachers Credit Union (about 10 miles from my house as the mandrill flies) which took six days to arrive. Not a confidence-builder.

• A mere change of address from Enema Falls to Hard Cheese raised our car insurance premia by $330 per year, a 22.5 percent increase. This is apparently our penalty for moving to the big city.

• A September, 1994, survey of 500 Generation X'ers and 500 senior citizens indicates that "young people are convinced that the social contract between the generations has been dissolved." Young Americans, furthermore, are more likely to believe UFOs exist than that the present Social Security system will exist when they retire: 46 percent of the X'ers surveyed believe in UFOs, but only 25 percent of them think Social Security will be around and only 9 percent think it will have any money to pay their retirement benefits. Sounds a little cynical, but who can blame the kids, given decades of fiscal irresponsibility by the federal government as their instructor?

• I'm not sure I believe in UFOs, but I know I devoutly hope they exist. And I'd pay money to have one land in my back yard.

• A few youngsters in our neighborhood got a good bit more than they bargained for Monday night when they came trick-or-treating at our house. Ever the soul of frivolity, Mogo and I got out some costumes and suited up ourselves. I opted for a familiar role, Darth Vader, complete with mask, shiny black gloves, cape and that ever-so-distinctive mechanical breathing sound of Darth's. Mogo donned a gigantic rat's head mask. Little tykes ringing our doorbell were greeted by the two of us playing it for all it was worth. The older kids, better able to distinguish fantasy from reality, tended to be dazzled ("Hey, c-o-o-o-o-l!!"). The younger ones, ages four, five, six tended to freeze up when the door opened and Darth and a huge rat materialized dark and ominous in their little faces. . .they drew back their eyes widened, mouths dropped open, and a couple of them whirled and ran screaming across our lawn back to waiting parents. Mogo and I ventured outside on several occasions, lurked in the shrubs, at times peering silently through an arched window in our little courtyard wall--that shook up a few of 'em, too. Most of them, give 'em credit, stood their ground and thrust out their sacks for the goodies, as though training for adult life in Bill Clinton's America. As Jonathan Winters says, "They all try to tell their own story. . ." Just entertaining ourselves. No harm done, surely. (November 1, 1994)

• Things are getting testy in Bloomington, Indiana, where local school board members are accusing school administrators of "dragging their feet" on an expanded program for gifted and talented students the board wants enacted. Newspaper accounts of the October board meeting indicate pockets of resistance from some principals and teachers. Some opposition seems to center on the concept of "inclusion," whose adherents seem to believe that gifted and talented programs, where they are to be offered at all, should only be offered if students of "mixed abilities" (code for: non-gifted, lesser-talented) are included. I suspect the board has underestimated the fervor of these equality-of-results zealots.

A Thoroughly Peculiar Morning At Denny's

• Patrons at Denny's Restaurant on North Michigan Road in Indianapolis were treated to an unusual sight the morning of Saturday, November 5th. Seated in Denny's lobby was a 39-year-old Bogtrot, Indiana man, dressed in casual slacks and a turtle-neck sweater bearing the Indiana University logo. He was, however, wearing a pair of red ear muffs, and intently studying a color photo of the 1994-95 IU basketball team. He was seen to draw a circle around both of Sherron Wilkerson's lower legs, and hurriedly scribble notes in the margin. At precisely 8 a.m., a tall, grey-wigged figure dressed in slacks and a corduroy sport jacket strode through the door, his otherwise unremarkable face adorned with a grey rubber elephant-nose mask which dangled about 8 inches below his own, reaching below the chin and presenting a surprisingly realistic first-glance impression. "You must be The Bogtrot Slasher," said the Elephant Nose Man, dipping his right shoulder and leaning in, hand extended jauntily in the classic college fraternity man pose. "I'm Peewilly Lockjaw, and I've got the old elephant skin on. . ." The Ear Muff Man had simultaneously risen, extended his hand and said, between choking bursts of laughter, "Yes. . .I'm the Slasher--and I've got the old ear muffs on! I'm callused, and I'm ready to suck 'er up and get in there and swing away!" And so the two creatures stood in mini-bedlam for long minutes there in front of the Denny's cash register, howling in laughter, slapping knees, choking, faces purple with amusement. The restaurant hostess moved a hand closer to the telephone, as though to be better prepared to dial 911. The two were shown to an out-of-the-way booth, where they commenced to spend two-and-a-half hours in in-depth interviews and IU sports analysis. Closer inspection of the Slasher's IU team photo revealed that Wilkerson's calf and shin on the right leg (the normal leg) were noticeably smaller than the same area on the left leg, the one he broke last spring in the NCAA tournament. The Elephant Nose Man was body-wired going in; thus the entire meeting was beamed to a Norad satellite positioned 114 miles overhead in deep space, then transmitted live to the Deerfly, Hard Cheese, and Mudwench homes of The Gang of Six. Early word from the Denny's area indicated the Slasher had tested positive and left the area in his vomit-colored 1992 Honda Accord LX with a leg-up on a coveted opening in the brotherhood. Stay tuned.

• A television advertisement touting the benefits of a college education shows four teen-agers in a '57 Chevy convertible yapping teen-talk as they cruise along. The two girls are fairly rhapsodizing on a theme of "Golly, if you go to college you can be anything you want." One of the girls taunts one of the fellas, who's indifferent, it is obvious, to anything but scoring on his date on this starry 1950s night. "Don't you want to meet new people?" she chides him. "Don't you want to see what's out there (in the big wide, wonderful world)?" Nothing wrong with encouraging young people to "be all they can be," but I think these teensters would be better served if the ad offered a dollop of reality and told 'em that it's fine to dream but you'd better brace yourself for the statistical probability that your life will be a good bit less than endless starry nights, and that the truth is you can wish all you want but you can't be anything you want. Sorry, kids.

• A Story For Our Times is unfolding in the Indianapolis courts. The players include 37-year-old Donald Martin, who was indicted by a local grand jury last summer and charged with sexually molesting four female patients, aged 67 to 94 years old, at a local nursing home where Martin had worked as an aide; Nadine Crayton, a nurse at Miller's Merry Manor, the site of the alleged criminal deviate conduct, who according to court records turned in written reports and notified her supervisors of the Unpleasant Incidents and then helped Indianapolis police in their investigation; and so-far faceless Miller's bureaucrats who are speaking only through their attorney. Crayton was fired two weeks after the Unpleasant Incidents and claims her dismissal was for talking to police detectives. Miller's Merry Manor denies everything, of course, and claims the nurse was fired for unrelated reasons. Crayton's suit claims she knew when Martin came to work at Miller's that Martin had been fired from another nursing home that suspected him of molesting patients there. She claims she warned her superiors but was told by them that Miller's could not act (against Martin) because they were afraid he would sue them if they did. We'll have to trust in the legal system to ferret out the truth here, but the story's not an uplifting one at this stage. The nursing home has also been sued on behalf of one of the elderly molestees.

• My own feeling is that the nursing home should be sued for calling itself a "merry manor." What kind of deluded buffoon thought up that one?

• If there's a better interviewer loose in medialand than C-Span's Brian Lamb, I haven't seen him. Subject hardly matters. He's as adept doing book reviews as he is talking to politicians. This week he had an hour-long interview with Bill Thomas, former Roll Call staffer and more recently author of a new book, Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill. Thomas quotes Tony Coelho, who resigned from Congress in 1989 in a junk bond scandal, went into New York investment banking, and most recently has been hired by the failed Clinton Administration as a paid adviser, that politics is "all about money and access to money." Congressmen, Thomas said, have to raise $17,000 per week for their re-election campaigns. "Truth in Washington is always fluid," said Thomas, ". . .truth here is 'whatever works'." He confirmed for Lamb what any careful Congress-watcher knows in his gut, that it's a private club run for the benefit of its members, and any good that comes out of it for the country is coincidental. . .he spoke of congressmen who confessed to him that hadn't even read legislation they were voting on, said that about 40 percent of 1992's Congressional retirees went straight into lobbying positions, that ex-members have the lifetime right to return to the House or Senate floor anytime they want ("People assume that lobbyists are chasing down Congressmen. It's the other way around, congressmen are chasing lobbyists. . ."), that electing "reform" candidates doesn't produce reform because the newly-elected quickly become a part of the system. There are (philosophical) differences between the two parties, Thomas said, but the bottom line is that all of them "are there to preserve a system which keeps them in office." He described Congress as a "charade," citing as an example its behavior during the 1993 Mississippi River flood crisis. . ."it took Congress two-and-a-half weeks to pass an emergency relief bill because they were fighting among themselves over special interest unrelated spending bills which the members wanted attached to the flood relief legislation." Thomas has been around Wonderland, D. C., many years, but said, "I'm forever amazed by the ability of members of the Congress to 'act their way through' any scandal, personal or institutional, to go out the next day as though nothing has happened." Thomas and Lamb didn't explore this further, but Thomas has touched here upon a particular human personality type I believe is found in unusually high levels in politics--the sociopath, defined by psychiatrists as a person who looks and sounds completely normal but who is missing a key component of the human character: a conscience. . .and one of their distinguishing characteristics is an astounding ability to lie convincingly and the ape the normal emotions of other people. . .Thomas added that "only two things capture the attention of Congress: money and fear." Lamb's interview closed with the somewhat prophetic observation from Thomas that he has been "stunned" by the level of anger in citizens he encounters on his trips outside the Washington Beltway lately. (November 8, 1994)

• ". . .government at all times and everywhere is the enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man, and . . .democracy is bound, sooner or later, to succumb to its own dishonesty and incompetence." --H. L. Mencken, writing in the 1930s, and quoted in his memoir, My Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.)

Goin' Postal At TV-13

• Tom Cochrun, news anchor for WTHR-Channel 13 television in Indianapolis, had no idea what he was getting into when he aired an October segment of Street Sweep, a feature publicizing local crimes and criminals which encourages citizens to contact police agencies with information to help track down and arrest the perpetrators. Cochrun described several of the featured assailants as "thugs," "crooks," or "animals." The Indianapolis Star's media critic, Steve Hall, who, oddly enough, doesn't criticize the most obvious target, the absurd Star, went ballistic and attacked Cochrum in an October 27 column alleging racism, judgmentalism and other offenses. Then the equally absurd Lynn Ford, a Star feature writer and himself a person of color, weighed in November 9 with a hysterical piece expressing his practiced outrage and screaming the standard litany of racism, conspiracy, labelism, media manipulation, and even howling about the fact that whenever he turns on the TV to watch newscasts, the President is white and so are the Mayor and the Governor and, more often than not, so are the news anchors. Even Cochrun's boss at WTHR, news director John Butte, felt the heat and joined in, attacking Cochrun for attaching "judgmental" labels to drive-by shooters, rapists, drug dealers and sodomists. Some balance has been provided by a rising tide of letters to the editor, apparently running heavily in favor of Cochrun's use of "judgmental" language in describing criminal dross and against the strident screeching of the thin-skinned politically correctoidians. Do you get the feeling we're suffering a collective national nervous breakdown? Have you ever known a time when so many of our citizens were so touchy about things? (November 9, 1994)

It's In The Bag

• Was I hallucinating, or did I hear that the the O. J. Simpson Acquittal Trial jury of 12 includes eight blacks, a couple of Hispanics, someone of what was described as "mixed race" and an Indian, with only a token honky or two? If this report is true, Simpson's attorneys have already won the trial before it begins.

Bleeders Silent

• Speaking of the Simpson jury, how come I don't see Maxine Waters, George McGovern, Carol Mosely-Braun, Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Michael Kinsley, George Mitchell, Howard Metzenbaum, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Pat Schroeder, Christopher Dodd, Ellen Goodman, Jesse Jackson and the rest of the bleeders from the Religious Left marching in the streets protesting disproportionalism, racism, and all the other outrages infesting the jury selection results? Never mind, I think we know.

A Conspiratorial Wink. . .

• My deep titanium-colored Ford Probe was recently hospitalized briefly for replacement of a leaking head gasket ($761.27) at the 122,500-mile mark, and during the procedure Mogo and I engaged one of the mechanics, a fella named Drogo, in friendly banter about Probes in general, and how they'd evolved since the first one rolled out in 1988. Drogo gave us a conspiratorial wink and confided, in a low voice, that on the 1995 Probes the entire front bumper had to be removed in order to replace a burned-out turn signal light bulb. At a cost, we can well imagine, that'll make your knees buckle. It's not a confidence builder. Design technology marches on, though.

Burt Butterfly Kisses The Mrs., Conducts, Says Adios

• I just read an article about the last day of actor Burt Lancaster's life. He died in late October at his home at age 80. One of Lancaster's unpublicized loves was the symphony orchestra. He and his wife attended concerts together, and often listened to music in their home. At the end of his life when Lancaster was weak and bedridden, Mrs. Lancaster shooed away the round-the-clock nurses caring for her husband and spent several hours alone with him, listening to a symphony concert on the radio. Burt, his wife said, "loved to conduct" and so he did on that last afternoon, propped up in bed, "directing the orchestra" with a radiant smile on his face. Mrs. Lancaster said that on that last day her husband, as he had throughout their long life together, gave her "butterfly kisses," gentle touches of his lips to her hair, her face, as soft as a butterfly landing, fluttering there, before sighing and falling asleep. A few hours later, he died. I'd pay money to be lucky enough to go out that way. (November 18, 1994)

• If anybody's ever done a better imitation of Burt Lancaster than Frank Gorshin, I'd like to see it.

Buckin' For A Doobie!

• Kenneth Whatley, 26, of Indianapolis, won't be enrolling at Oxford anytime soon, but he will be a candidate for an Esquire magazine 1994 Dubious Achievement Award. Whatley and Tyrone Zak, 28, got in a fight over a woman Friday night in an Indianapolis apartment. Police were called, but left when neither man would press charges. Whatley told officers "he'd take care of it himself." He sure did. The newspaper account of the incident said that several hours later Zak came back to the woman's apartment and spoke to her as she stood at her second-story window. Whatley, it turned out, also returned, with three loaded guns, and lurked in the alley behind the apartment. Whatley ambushed the other fellow and emptied all three weapons--a shotgun, a small-caliber automatic pistol, and a large-caliber revolver--into the victim. Then, just to finish it off, Whatley got in his car and ran over the dead man, "really flooring it," according to police. The police were again summoned and while they were there investigating, who drives up but Whatley himself, who'd come back to pick up the guns he'd inadvertently left behind. Whatley was arrested and faces murder charges, police said. (November 21, 1994)

Confirmed New Vermin Sighting Department

• One day last week in my local barber shop I glanced at a magazine and saw a headline about a new talk-show hostess, someone named Ricki Lake. "Smart, Sassy at 26--Is She A Threat to Oprah?" or words to that effect, the headline screamed. I was not sufficiently interested to read on, but the information was filed away. A few days later in the newspaper I saw a short note in the "People" section about TV talk show hostess Ricki Lake's leading a guerrilla band of 14 fellow "anti-fur activists" into a midtown Mannhattan salon operated by "mega-designer Karl Lagerfeld," on a search-and-destroy-and-let's not-forget-publicity mission. Alas, no fur was to be found. So Lake and her merry band of megamoralists smeared anti-fur stickers on anything they could find made of leather (handbags, shoes, dresses), and on Lagerfeld's walls, then handcuffed themselves together. Police said they seemed to be having a wonderful time, laughing and joking, and screaming the anti-fur mantra ("Fur is Murder!" and "One for the money, Two for the show, Three to get ready, and Fur to go!") as they were hauled to jail. Damage was estimated at $3,500, about the cost of one of Lagerfeld's purses. Ricki is a rising star in the celebrity firmament, it seems obvious.

Let's Hope This Starts A Tsunami-Sized Trend Department

• The parents of 12-year-old Eve Bruneau, a sixth-grader in South Kortright, New York, have filed a federal lawsuit charging sexual harassment against their daughter. The local school board, the school superintendent, an assistant superintendent, and a teacher, William Parker, Jr., have been named defendants. Eve is seeking unspecified money damages (we can bet the amount will be an eye-popper) and required sensitivity training for teachers and administrators. The suit claims the girl was subject to continuing taunts, bra-snapping, unwelcomed touchings and gropings, name-calling and other obnoxious behavior by various puberty-frenzied boys in the school, that school authorities and teachers did not do anything to stop it, and that as a result the girl's grades suffered and she had to transfer schools. The girl's mother said that when she and her husband complained to the girl's teacher, William Parker, his response was, "Don't worry, the guys will be all over her in a couple years. Eve is always going to be called names in her life and she just has to deal with it." Parker said the charges were "very exaggerated" and said he "never" tolerated harrassment in his classroom. The school's attorney said the allegations were untrue. Based on what I've heard over the years from my wife about life in the public schools, this story has an unmistakable ring of truth. I often ridicule suits of this type as frivolous and insipid. This happens to be an area where I am not only strongly inclined to believe the story, but wholeheartedly support and encourage legal action by the parents. The day is long past when females should be subject to this sort of insult and degradation. And since many teachers and administrators are paralyzed by a national unwillingness to be judgmental and to impose discipline and behavioral standards, I applaud lawsuits as a way to get their attention and help them find the courage to do the right thing. This will be a story worth following.

Adios, Jerry, It Was Fun Knowing You

• Jerry Rubin, probably the most famous radical of the 1960s, died November 28 in Lost Angeles. He rode the anti-Vietnam War movement to fame and was a celebrated member of the "Chicago Seven" who were tried in Chicago following outbreaks of violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He had been hospitalized at UCLA Medical Center in intensive care since being struck by a car November 14 while jaywalking. It is not without irony that Rubin, who spent much of his adult life as an inveterate rule-breaker, died as a result of breaking one. (November 30, 1994).

Waiting For Gene To Turn In His Chips

• The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News published their first-ever "joint edition" at Thanksgiving and fell all over themselves justifying and explaining it in terms of a ceaseless quest to better serve their readers. Great and noble-sounding stuff, but in reality it's just code for the first incremental step toward merging the two newspapers. The economics of two daily newspapers in Indianapolis have to be as silly as they've proven to be in other American cities which used to boast print competition. The smart money says the Star and the News will merge as soon as founding patriarch Eugene Pulliam dies, if not before. (December 4, 1994)

Fellow Inmates Do The Job For Us

• Jeffrey Dahmer's murder last week in prison by a fellow inmate stirs mixed reactions and--inevitably in this society--earned Dahmer a People magazine cover story. I'm struck by the irony that it took convicted criminals to provide us justice in the Dahmer matter. Any society with self-respect and an operating value system would have pronounced capital punishment on this vile, evil creature. His fellow inmates did it for us. Good!

Somewhere In All This Is A Unifying Theme--But What Is It?

• Indiana ranks first in the nation in per capita attendance at public libraries and 50th in the filing of lawsuits. These and almost a billion other fascinating statistics can be found in the latest issue of Gale State Rankings Reporter, compiled by Gale Research of Detroit(what a great Chritmas gift this would make!). Indiana's first in number of workers employed in casket-making, 17th in suicides per 100,000 population, 12th in the number of used car dealers, 41st in the percentage of residents holding college degrees, 25th in the use of hamsters for "animal experimentation" and ninth in the number of people who walk to work. (December 6, 1994)

Holiday Lighting: The Ceaseless Struggle For Self-Respect

• We've been feeling the heat here in our new neighborhood in the undeclared (but bet your life there is one) Christmas lighting contest. A notice appeared in our mailbox in November urging us to join the neighborhood in decorating sidewalks and driveways with luminaries, the little candles placed in small paper bags with an inch or two of sand in the bottom. The memo suggested a standard 30-inch gap between them. Our neighbor, a retired "double-dipper" (a pension from the gub'mint and one from private industry) and near 70 years old, was one of the first into the fray. I spotted him early in December on a tall ladder, stringing lights around the roof and sides of his house. He triggered a frenzy of competitiveness up and down Dog Log Drive. Houses, shrubs, garages, trees, cast-iron sleighs and Santas, welded-wire wise men, lambs, reindeer, snow critters, all festooned with festive lights, soon blazed brightly, some around the clock! We put out a modest few piddly strings of cheap lights in our courtyard, and waited. We held our ground, steady, for about a week, but as one neighbor after another escalated the effort, we had to add to our own. The capper for us--and perhaps for the entire neighborhood--came when we erected on our rooftop a huge, cream-and-sincere blue enameled Price Waterhouse logo, rimmed in white chaser lights. It blinked each night for three weeks leading up to Christmas Eve, sending out the company's (and the eternal company man's) message, our family's equivalent of the Star of Bethlehem. We took a walk around the neighborhood Christmas Eve, alert for tackiana and the cruising Light Police, and made notes on ways we can give a better account of ourselves next year. I have a hunch that our trump card, the PW logo, furrowed many a brow up and down our street, and earned us the kind of respect we'd been seeking. (December 1, 1994)
• I'll Bet We Didn't See What We Saw Department: Sassy, chic, a talk show hostess and supernova class dorkette at age 26, Ricki Lake has pleaded not guilty to all charges stemming from her arrest last month on a vandalism and anti-fur foray into the offices of one of Gotham City's finest fashion designers. Lake and her band of merry recta were videotaped during her Nov. 14 protest. She later went on The David Letterman Show to yack about it. No matter. Now she says it never happened, the film lies, and so do the witnesses and police records. Judge Michael Gross has scheduled a January 5 hearing. Stay tuned.

Isn't This The Way Life Usually Works Out?

• Word leaks out of Great Britain that an oil deposit worth about $1.6 billion dollars has been pinpointed beneath Windsor Castle. With Queen Elizabeth II's blessing, exploratory drilling has begun in a private garden just 35 yards from the castle wall. No word on who'll pocket all this money, but I wouldn't bet against the royal family. Bet they'll greet the news with a roar of applause in the country's soup kitchens and skid rows.

That Fourth And Final Shot Proved A Bit Too Judgmental

• Edgar Knapp, a 35-year-old assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University, was sentenced to 50 years in prison for murdering his wife.Testimony indicated Knapp shot his wife three times during an argument in their home last summer and then, about five minutes later, while she was still alive, pumped a fourth and fatal shot into her. Knapp wept a lot during the trial and said he never meant to kill his wife, but that he "simply lost his composure and used poor judgment." Knapp's attorney argued that the judge should be lenient because the defendant had a "high-status career and was not the kind of person one usually finds in trouble." The amazing thing is, people actually believe this stuff. Sometimes judges, too. Remember this next time you read about some poor dumb bastard at the bottom of the social ladder getting slammed into jail for contempt of court (something we all ought to have a bit more of) or disorderly conduct.

Anti-Death Penalty Hysteria Seizes Star

• The State of Indiana found the courage to stand for something just past midnight on December 8 when it fried convicted murderer Gregory Resnover in the electric chair. As expected, the local media saturated us with anti-death penalty coverage in the days leading up to the long-overdue (Resnover gunned down two people in the early 1980s) event. The Indianapolis Star assigned a hysterical, racist, and incompetent black reporter, Lynn Ford, to the story (since only a person of color could fairly cover the execution of Resnover, a murderer of color), and backed him up with a photographer and several other writers who wrote heart-wrenching features and death-watch wailers on Resnover, Resnover's family, Resnover's friends, and various others taking the wacko liberal view that the state has no right, ever, to take the life of any man (this pronouncement is always uttered in stentorian tones). There was coverage of protest marches locally and at the Michigan City prison. Personal agony columns were written before and after by agonized Star columnists. Resnover's family and a mob of supporters picketed the governor's house, yelled and screamed and threatened vengeance if their boy wasn't spared. Resnover's life of criminal savagery, dating back to his childhood, was duly mentioned, then quickly dismissed as being society's fault. The morning after the execution, the Star devoted almost the entire top half of its front page to two sprawling stories that spilled onto inside pages and totaled about 185 column inches. The wailing and gnashing of teeth went on for several days afterward, then finally subsided. Callers to local talk shows and letters to the editors of the Star and News, however, took a different tack, one overwhelmingly critical of the newspapers' downright silly and embarrassing spectacle. The editors doubtless congratulated themselves on their balanced coverage, while furrowing their brows in puzzlement over polls continuing to show widespread public distrust and contempt for the media. Do they ever make the connection between those poll findings and the way they choose to cover the news? Truth is, they stand convicted by such performances as theirs on the Resnover execution. (December 10, 1994)

• Opponents of the death penalty always frame the issue in terms of morality, claiming state-sanctioned executions do not deter crime. For my part, the death penalty has little to do with deterrence, though it does clearly deter the convicted from committing any more crimes. It has to do with society's willingness to stand for something, to draw a line and declare that certain behavior is intolerable in a civilized society, that there is a line no citizen may cross without paying the supreme penalty. It is about society's saying: life is sacred and he who takes it unlawfully forfeits his own. Period.The morality argument is similarly unconvincing. A society which allows the taking of human life without exacting a supreme penalty is itself immoral and fails in its moral duty to all citizens.

Jesse Gets Another Free Pass

• The Rev. Jesse Jackson has accused the Christian Coalition of being a "strong force" in Nazi Germany and of being historically and ideologically linked to anti-Semitism and white supremacy. I've contacted my spotters in various American cities, done my online research, and discovered no trace of Al Sharpton, Pat Schroeder, Barney Frank, Ron Dellums, George McGovern, Michael Kinsley, Ellen Goodman, Ted Kennedy, Maxine Waters, Nina Totenberg, Howard Metzenbaum, Mel Reynolds, Carol Moseley-Braun, Laurence Tribe, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Al Hunt, Connie Chung, Tom Brokaw, Jane Fonda, Dan Rather, Norman Mailer, Alan Alda, Mario Cuomo, the ACLU or any of the I-feel-your-pain-crowd of lefties--not even the Indianapolis Star's Buffoon Ascendant, Lynn Ford--marching in protest. (December 8, 1994)

Stupid Pet Tricks Department

• A four-year-old Indianapolis boy was saved Nov. 4 by police and firefighters summoned to his home to free him from the death-grip of a 14-foot pet python. The snake had coiled itself around the boy's chest and legs after somehow escaping its cage and going down to the family basement where a group of youngsters were playing. According to newspaper accounts, police had to cut off the snake's head to free the boy, who was "losing circulation" and had already been bitten on the leg when rescuers arrived. Four men had tried but failed to unwrap the critter. No word in the story about where Mom and Dad were while all this was unfolding. And so it goes. . .

• A front-page headline in this morning's Indianapolis Star noted the latest episode of gunfire on the White House, and this subhead caught my ever-eagle eye: "Gunshots at 2 a.m. startle Secret Service, while outraged citizens ask if anyone is safe." I thought: the normal inquiry this headline implies would be to ask if anyone was hurt. Here, though, they're asking if anyone is safe. (December 18, 1994)

• Cleveland-based American Greetings, Inc., thinks it's onto something with its new CreataCard machines, 9,500 of which are already out there in America's malls, pumping out synthetic personalized greeting greeting cards for desperate consumers. I ran into one of the clunky, videogame-like machines during a pre-Christmas horror show at my local Target store. It yapped insistently at me, urged me to reach out, touch someone with an up-close-and-personal message. You stuff in your money, choose pre-printed personal messages and type in the names. American Greetings expects $45-50 million or so in CreataCard sales this year and is shooting for $200 million annually by the end of the decade. George Lazarus, the Chicago Tribune's marketing writer, sang CreataCard's praises in a December 9 column, noting that the cards cost only $3.50, "not a high price in cards these days, especially considering that CreataCards afford the opportunity to personalize messages." Apparently George has never heard of a now revolutionary alternative: buying one's own greeting cards at discount prices (easily done) and--get ready for a really c-r-a-a-a-a-z-y concept now, George--handwriting one's own personal messages on them. (December 11, 1994)

• This story was only a brief blip on my news-o-meter in December, and quickly disappeared: Some fella filed a lawsuit against the Bible, charging it is hearsay and oppresses blacks and homosexuals. Soon after, the suit was dropped for lack of funds. I suspect we haven't heard the last of this.

• Indianapolis area parents who care had better be tuned in around February 1, 1995, when a new radio station dedicated exclusively to kids comes on the air locally. The Children's Broadcasting Corporation, also known (inexplicably) as "Radio AAHS" (investigation will probably reveal that these call letters are a secret code for a planned worldwide Children of the Corn revolution and kids around the globe have been alerted to rise up and slaughter their parents and all adults when a secret code word is broadcast), will be a "full-service network" on the air from sunrise to sunset (they just want us to think it goes off the air at sunset; more likely, they'll change then to a pre-arranged secret frequency only the kids know about) offering kids' talk-shows, music, information, all aimed at children, and upscale children at that, according to Ernie Caldemone, head honcho at Continental Broadcast Group, Inc. in Indianapolis, which has signed the deal. His will be the first station in Indiana to offer the kids their own network.

• Can the day be far off when someone demands separate houses of Congress for kids? Separate homes and public facilities? A Children's United Nations? A Kids' Supreme Court? And a kids' President?

To The Bunkers! To The Bunkers! Holiday Horrors Everywhere!

• I was all set for a relaxed, fear-free Christmas season, and then the inevitable happened: the Indianapolis Star alerted me to the ever-sprawling list of dangers out there. "Happy Holidays? Perhaps, But There's Still Reason for Concern" wrote the Star's resident hand-wringing headline writer. The story listed these lurking horrors: 1) snow flocking spray that may contain cancer-causing chemicals, 2) the pretty string necklace that might strangle a child, 3) a Dr. Barbie doll wearing stilleto heels which "sends the wrong message" to young girls about what constitutes "sensible shoes," 4) Christmas trees that will clog our landfills, 5) wrapping paper containing toxic materials, 6) violent toys that promote violent behavior, 7) vanilla and almond extract which contain high levels of alcohol which could harm small children who swallow them, 8) poisonous parts of holly and poinsettia plants which could be eaten, 9) nativity scenes in public places which might send atheists, non-Christians, and church/state separationists into a tizzy, 10) politically incorrect Christmas cards which might offend exquisitely sensitive recipients, and (11) all the butter and fat and sugar which make food taste so good. Holiday scams, mall parking lot thugs, drunk drivers, home burglars, fireplace color salts, eggnog, inactivity, stress, depression, and family conflict drew passing mention. I immediately wrote my Congressmen and Senators and demanded legislation to stop these threats to our American way of life.

Gunning For Gun Control

• My brother, Squack, and I had an earnest discussion last summer about gun control. Squack's in favor; I'm opposed. I believe it fair to say Squack favors more government regulation in general, and specifically in areas such as business, the environment and gun control. I'm at the other pole: I believe in extremely limited government. I favor less regulation, less government intrusion in our lives. I believe government is our enemy, not our friend, if for no other reason than human nature (i.e., any time you have three human beings together, two will be plotting to take advantage of the third; it is "the nature of things" that this happens). I can agree that the level of crime involving guns, and its toll, is appalling. But where a gun control advocate sees this as a problem with guns, I see it as a problem with people. I don't know the solution, but I do know that deep down in my reptilian core, at a fundamentally molecular level, I am simply not comfortable with the idea of a disarmed populace. . .I do not trust the government to behave benignly. I know, I know, liberals snicker when someone talks like this. The liberal view is that man is innately good and will behave benevolently toward his fellow man just as soon as we eliminate racism, exploitation, discrimination, and the vast and ever-expanding pantheon of -isms afflicting society. I don't even own a gun, though I can sense that's going to change. The bottom line for me is trust: do I trust my government to act benignly? Nope. That is why, for me, citizens should never surrender the right to own and bear arms. Self-protection from marauding criminals is another compelling reason, and will be more so as our society continues to disintegrate.

Slick Caves On A-Bomb Stamp

• The government has caved in and canceled a planned postage stamp featuring the World War II atomic bombing of Japan, one of a series of stamps commemorating World War II events. Japanese officials protested when the stamp design was announced in November, and others howled their alarm, too.The post office's governing board held several meetings to discuss the controversy and left the final decision to Slick Willie, who then expressed concern, said he could feel Japan's pain, and asked that the stamp be changed. Curiously, no outrage was heard from Japan or anywhere else when a stamp depicting Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was issued. Are Blame America First'ers on the loose again?

Now We Know Why Dad Stayed Up Christmas Eve

• There was heavy pressure all around on Christmas Eve at WRTV-Channel 6 in Indianapolis. Sportscaster Kenn Tomasch, during an 8:30 p.m. promo for the late news, urged viewers to tune in to the 11 o'clock broadcast and promised them a special treat--a peek at meteorologist Elissa Lynn's breasts--if they did. No word on how many sets bazoomed in on WRTV's late news hoping for an answer to that cosmic question, "Is There Really A Boob Tube?" but Lynn and station manager Larry Pond found no humor in the pronouncement. "We take this incident very seriously," Pond told an inquiring Indianapolis Star reporter, then declined further comment. Lynn said it was "a very disturbing matter." Somebody must and will pay for this. (December 23, 1994)

Variations on a Name

• Mogo's daughters, Puffy and Allison, have a particular talent for word play, puns, and coined phrases, many of which find their way into our mailbox when letters and cards come addressed to a variant of Paul and Mogo Kratchlow. The file bulges with references both obvious and obscure and includes such offerings as: Readlow, Hooflow, Wooflow, Tootlow, Candlelow, Jinglelow, Turkeylow, Grannylow, Rumblelow, Toastlow, Rockerlow, Blastlow, Bulletlow, Wonderlow, Antlerlow, Sidelow, Pumpkinlow, Roadlow, Lowbunny, Chickenlow, Heartlow, Windlow, Reunionlow, Floodlow, Dadlow, Sunlow, Plaquelow, Molelow, Steamlow, Burgerlow, Riplow, Snifflow, Elflow, Fiftythirdlow, Pitcherlow, Maylow, Shoelow, Loinlow, Slowlow, Lowpundit, Beanlow, Anniversarylow, Daylow, Van Hoselow, Chililow, Fiftyfourthlow, Cowlow, Needlelow, Weedlow, Gooflow, Crazylow, Taxlow, Shavelow, Jetlaglow, Springlow, Catlow, Fiftyfifthlow, Loaflow, Moonlow, Retirelow, Turdlow, Frostlow, Noodlelow, Smurflow. . .with no hint that the U.S. Postal Service finds anything at all unusual about all this.

A Knee-Trembling Moment: Cruise Missile Highballin' Eastward

• Moments ago I glanced out my office window onto my backyard, bordered by a woods, a small creek and a high embankment, and heard a tremendous racket--a whooooosh sound coupled with the crackling and snapping of small branches. This was immediately followed in exquisite slow-motion by the emergence, at a height of about 15 feet off the ground, of the gigantic, black, brushed titanium nosecone and then the sleek, dark, tubular body of a Cruise missile entering my view from the right and passing eastward, bulling its way down the tree line in imperious, cloudlike majesty, up and out of the woods, questing onward, trailing utter silence with fall's last remaining leaves fluttering to the ground in its wake. When I played back the film from the monitoring camera I was able, at slow speed, to detect on the missile's body, up near the nose, a remarkable adaption of a famous Grant Wood painting, in poster-size about two feet wide by three feet high, showing Slicks Willie and Hillie standing in front of an old church or farmhouse, she in bib overalls, he in a dress and apron and holding a pitchfork, the title moronically scrawled in yellow crayon: "American Pathetic." I walked down into the woods and peered down the tree line, down the scorched, bored-out tunnel through the branches and limbs where the big critter had passed, enroute, I'm convinced, to Wonderland, D.C. I stood there, knees trembling, aware in my very molecules that I'd participated in a rare Kodak Moment. . . (December 31, 1994)

• I went into the Hard Cheese Post Office a day or two before Christmas to buy some "make-up" stamps (three cent-ers and one cent-ers) to use when postage rates increase January 1st. They had threes, but no one-cent stamps for postcards. I asked why not, in view of the widely publicized rate increase looming over us, said it seemed a bit odd they wouldn't be ready for requests like this. Are you having trouble with your supplier? I asked. The postal employee just shrugged and said she didn't know. In the six months since we've moved, I've noticed the mail is delivered anytime between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m., and there's not a shred of predictability to it. It might arrive at 1:30 Tuesday and 4:30 Wednesday. I also discovered in the pre-Christmas mailing flurry that it costs more to mail a package by third-class/parcel post than it does to send it first class. A new concept has crept into the post office dialogue, too: thickness. A particularly sour-faced clerk has kneaded and pinched my envelopes with her fingers and mumbled something like, "I don't know, this may be too thick." Perhaps they're just having fun with me. Perhaps thickness is a new postal service profit center. Weird. I can't figure it out.

Warren's Ears

• Next time you see Secretary of State Warren Christopher on television, check out his ears. They appear to measure about 10 inches top to bottom.

Powering Down WOWO

• Who among us Hoosiers doesn't recall being in some unlikely place such as Florida, South Carolina or Georgia at night and--well I'll be darned!--coming across the booming voice of radio WOWO from Fort Wayne, Indiana (1190 on your AM dial)? WOWO's 50,000-watt clear channel signal reached the eastern seaboard all the way south to Florida at night and was a lifeline to many of us on always perilous journeys to and beyond the frontier. Well, modern progress is about to claim another of our friends. WOWO will soon be "powering down" at night, since it's been bought by a New York company that's going to give its Gotham City station on the same frequency all that power, plus access to a wider audience of rubes west of the Hudson. So, bid goodbye to the big boomer, and pass the tea and sympathy. (December 31, 1994)

• Have you noticed how increasingly difficult it's become to call any business establishment and get a human being to answer? All our representatives are busy, they say. If you are using a touch-tone phone. . .if you are using a rotary dial phone, please stay on the line. . .please press 1. . .our representatives are still busy, please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order received. . please press 5. . .thank you for your patience. . .please press 37. . .please stay on the line. The tin robot voice drones on and on. . .and the line blurs between fantasy and reality. One gets the feeling that business absolutely loves these newfangled devices, phone answering systems. What I see, as a bubble-butted buffoon out here in the weeds, is a technology that gives businesses an easy way to hide from their customers and not answer their phones, and to get by with fewer employees to boot! Perfect! The logical extension to all this is a day when a citizen can dial any number in America and no one will ever answer. Ever. As in On The Beach never.That would be an improvement.

• "Hell: A place where the weather forecast is always for fire." --Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune columnist, writing in the Summer 1994 issue of Notre Dame Magazine.

New Frontier For The Victimhood Industry?

• Paul Hill, the former minister on Florida's death row for the July 29, 1994 shotgun slayings of an abortion doctor and his volunteer escort outside a Pensacola women's clinic, has advanced a novel new concept in America's burgeoning aggressive growth industry, victimhood. . .it's the entire nation's fault. Hill, interviewed on ABC's Good Morning America in mid-December, said he would consider appropriate an appeal from President Clinton for Hill to "pardon the nation for causing me" to kill people, adding that his victims' families ought to be thanking him for stopping more "innocent deaths." The 40-year-old former pastor in the Presbyterian Church of America and Orthodox Presbyterian Church said, "There's no question that what I have done is a relatively new concept. It's going to take a while for the concept to mature, but someday it'll be commonplace and generally accepted as normal." Quite apart from the preposterosity of all this, isn't there a hint, a reminiscence in there somewhere of the days of the Crusades, when the saintly galloped out a-hunting for heathens they could save by killing them? Hill's "concept" is anything but new and novel. True Believers have been killing others since man crawled out of the primeval pudding.

Valuable New Word Discovered

• Paraphasia, defined as "a pathological condition in which the person affected uses words other than those intended." Perfect for politicians, for starters; suitable for all of us from time to time.

Back to top