About "About"

As a “newsie,” I notice trends in language. I can’t help it. I spend a lot of time reading newspapers and surfing web sites for news, and as I have pointed out in this space before, the one thing journalists do best is imitate each other. One of them starts doing something and pretty soon they’re all doing it.

And then the next thing you know, we're living in perpetual tape-loop. Since journalists love to imitate each other, certain words and expressions are always becoming "trendy," the definition of which in this case is that we all then get promptly beaten to death with them. To the point where I, anyway, am ready to grab my head and scream.

Yes, I have examples. You knew I would.



Have you noticed, for instance, the way that in recent years everything seems to “resonate” with this or that segment of the public? “This tax proposal resonates with homeowners.” “The senator’s question will surely resonate with African-Americans,” etc.

Why don’t you go “resonate” on the freeway?

If I hear one more thing described as a “wake-up call,” I think I’ll take two Sominex and go to sleep so I don’t have to hear anything called a “wake-up call” for a while.

And then there’s the super-irritating disappearance from daily English of the word “problems.” I can’t figure this one out, but I suspect it’s a hangover from the politically-sanitized 1990s. For some reason the under-30 crowd has decided that nobody has “problems” anymore. They now have “issues” instead. “Ashley had issues with Bob’s gambling.” “I have issues with people who use cell phones in restaurants.” “So-and-so had software issues.”

No he didn't and no, you don’t. You have problems. Not issues. For God’s sake, children, there is nothing virtuous or democratic about calling a spade a diamond!

And now, from our fingernails-on-the-chalkboard department, ladies and gents, I present the latest drive-me-nuts trend in the arts and opinion pages: it’s the disappearance of the word “about,” specifically with regard to the activity of thinking. Nobody thinks “about” anything anymore. They just think the noun, proper or otherwise.

“Think Rachael Ray.” “Think Barry Bonds.” “Think Enron.” “Think Ovaltine on steroids.” “Think Acapulco in the winter.”

“About” took a hit a long time ago with regard to the act of talking. Remember? “I’m talking money.” “I’m talking results.” “We’re talking sports here.” It was a bit of tough-guy shorthand, a way of making clear that you meant business and weren’t beating around the bush. You heard “I’m talkin’ results” and you pictured a guy who looked like Alex Karras on your TV screen, assuring you that some snake oil called Grapefruit 45 really would take 40 pounds off you in three weeks.

But “Think this” and “Think that” doesn’t even have the tough-guy cachet. It smells of journalists trying to sound hip and cutting-edge. The problem, as usual, is that they’re all doing it now, so it no longer smacks of anyone’s personal style, like the late Mike Royko saying “Sez Who? Sez Me!” It’s the latest verbal antenna ornament. Every smartass movie reviewer and columnist has got to have one, and they’re all whipping in the breeze, the same size and color.

This is the most aggravating trend in language since the disppearance of the word “said.” Under-30’s don’t, and have never liked, the word “said” for relating a past conversation. When I was in high school, young girls, including my own younger sister, used to substitute “go” for “say,” hence reducing people from human beings who spoke words to animals who make noises. I’d hear her on the phone, “And then I go, ‘What’s the answer to that question?’ And then he goes, ‘I don’t know.’ And then I go, ‘Well, if you can’t answer the question, what are you doing here?’ And then he goes, ‘Well, you asked me here.’ And then I go…” Ooh, that used to set my teeth on edge.

But not as much as its later replacement, starting around the beginning of the first Clinton administration and still persisting today: “Go-for-say” has been replaced by “Like-for-say.” You know what I’m talking about. “And then I’m like, ‘What’s the answer to that question?’ And then he’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ And then I’m like, ‘Well, if you can’t answer the question, what are you doing here?’ And then he’s like, ‘Well, you asked me here.’ And then I’m like…” Ooh, that sets my teeth on edge now, and has for about 15 years.

What is the matter with “I said” and “He said??” Do we absolutely have to talk stupid among ourselves?

Think Cindy Crawford. Think moron. And knock it off, okay?

I knew he was a barbell boy, but I didn't know he was a boor...

On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, bored in the early afternoon while my wife Valerie was out showing real estate, I decided to go for a walk.

Took the Metro to Foggy Bottom and started hoofing it around the corner from 23rd Street to M Street in Georgetown. On the way, who do I encounter walking along the sidewalk but…Arnold Schwarzenegger? That is correct. Governor of California and Hollywood movie joke Arnold Schwarzenegger, scarf around neck, was walking (dashing is more like it) along M Street. I don’t know what he was doing in Washington, but evidently he was shopping in Georgetown, which is what anyone would be doing there on the day after Thanksgiving.

We were going in opposite directions. I stopped and did a double-take. He’s not as tall as one might think. He saw me recognize him and winced, with a bit of a smile. But when I said, “Aren’t you Governor Schwarzenegger?” his bodyguard immediately dashed up and interposed himself between me and Ah-nold, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was to “respect” the governor’s “privacy.” Hey, celebrities who want “privacy” shouldn’t be roaming Georgetown in the middle of the afternoon on the day after Thanksgiving.

Nonplussed (as this gorilla grasped my arm) I simply said, “Hey, I’m from California. I just thought I’d say ‘hello.’” By this time Arnold was half a block away, still charging in the general direction of K Street. “Hey!” I shouted after the gov. “Brett Davis is a friend of mine! He knows you!” “Yes, he does!” Arnold yelled over his shoulder, not slowing his pace one bit. End of encounter.

When I got home I wrote him such a nasty letter. Imagine a politician pulling this Greta Garbo routine, and with a constituent, no less. So another marketing-based illusion is shot to hell. Arnold Schwazenegger, whose web site calls him "the people's governor," and who makes such a big show of being a populist, an anti-politician, and despite a slew of regrettable movies displaying the acting talent of a garage door opener, a regular guy, turns out to be no different from any other obnoxious celebrity who goes out in public with a bodyguard nearby to ward off autograph-seekers.

And I didn't even want his autograph. I just wanted to say a friendly "hello" to the governor of my home state.

I'd like to think the photo above was taken in a crowded Georgetown boutique at the very moment some unlucky shopper decided to challenge Ah-nold for the last scarf on the bargain table. Now there would be a picture of a regular guy.

"Vanity" press? Why the hell not?

I had an idea this morning in the bathroom, where many of my most illuminating thoughts come to me.

All my life I’ve been agonizing about my failure to become the kind of “professional” writer that it was my goal to become when I was about 17. In my youth I dreamed of becoming the next Hemingway. But with the death of Norman Mailer recently, we have all pretty much acknowledged that there aren’t going to be any more Hemingways; the age of the celebrity novelist is over. Yes, there are still a handful of serious writers around, but I would bet you a double soy latte that if Cormac McCarthy or Don DeLillo walked into Starbucks, nobody would recognize them. Philip Roth maybe, but even he wouldn’t be recognized by anyone under 40.

For decades it has been a source of head-bashing frustration to me that I could never get past the gate, never get anything I wrote in book form published by a legitimate publisher, paid for and marketed by that publisher. In other words, that I have never in all these years of writing been able to gain access to “the country club.”

I’ve discussed the reasons for this in my journal ad nauseum: I majored in the wrong subject at college. I didn’t attend graduate seminars in creative writing. I didn’t do the networking necessary to make the connections in the publishing industry that you need to get a book published. Publishers and agents receive 10,000 manuscripts a day. They’re not going to look at all of them. Naturally they’re going to gravitate toward the ones that come from people they already know, or come recommended by people they already know. A manuscript by an unknown author, unless it comes with the imprimatur of John Updike, has about as much chance of getting published as a fourth-year student in a state university dramatic arts program has of landing a leading role on Broadway.

But it suddenly hit me this morning…so what? What if, at age 52, I change my whole attitude and decide to regard writing as a hobby? Sound silly? At first blush, yes. Jejune? Certainly. Unserious? Perhaps. But if I ratchet down my expectations and regard my writing – and, by the way, the self-publishing of my writing – as a weekend activity that I pursue purely for my own amusement and that of a few friends, that puts a whole new complexion on the subject. If I’m no longer striving to become the next Saul Bellow, what the hell do I care if so-called “legitimate” publishers look down their noses at me for publishing my books through iUniverse.com or one of its clones? Let ‘em get their noses hooked on tree branches.

Yes, publishing by on-demand services (P.O.D.s) is more expensive than it used to be. iUniverse charges about $600 now, roughly six times what they charged when I published my novel Tower-102 through them in 2000. But if I’m bringing out a book every year to 18 months, that’s certainly a cheaper hobby than say, skiing. And there are historical precedents for such things. William Blake printed his own books. Walt Whitman hawked Leaves of Grass door-to-door. And had it not been for the succes de scandale of Tropic of Cancer, who knows how much longer Henry Miller might have gone on selling his “mezzotints” on the street?

In 2001, when a fellow named Charlie and I joined forces briefly to see if we could whip up a few sales for our self-published novels, I found Charlie extremely bitter. He had gone to great lengths to try and get his novel accepted by a “real” publisher, even spending a considerable amount of money on an agent, (when anyone could have told him that an agent who charges you a fee is, ipso facto, a charlatan) and he had bought into the rhetoric of the so-called “real”publishers and of the sniffers you encounter at book fairs: if you published your book through iUniverse, Author House or any other P.O.D. service, it was just “vanity” publishing and you weren’t a “real” writer. I, more sanguine I suppose because all I had spent was about $100 and I was trying to regard the whole thing as a lark, tried to convince him that we didn’t need the approval of the extended-pinky snotbuckets. We were doing our own thing and to hell with them. My friend Lucia told him, over a lunch the three of us shared, that she came from a part of the world (South America) where there was absolutely no stigma attached to publishing your own book.

But Charlie wouldn’t be convinced. Deep down, he felt that he had no right to call himself a writer because someone else hadn’t published his book for him.

And deep down, I could see his point. Because, in all honesty, part of me felt the same way. I knew I was good enough for Scribner’s, and I’m sure Charlie believed he was too. But there comes a time when you have to face facts. If you haven’t gotten into the country club, you haven’t gotten into the country club, and there’s no point in banging your head against the wall because you’re never going to see yourself interviewed on Oprah or see your book written up in the New York Times Book Review. Eventually you have to make a decision as to whether you’re doing this for love or doing it for ego. (And what delicious irony, by the way, in being able to think of so-called “vanity” publishing as a repudiation of doing it for ego and an affirmation of doing it for love. But it is, in fact, possible to see it that way.)

Oh, it’s not that I’ve been entirely unsuccessful as a writer. I’ve written plenty of journalism, been paid for it, even won an award or two. But I’ve been unable, so far anyway, to make the transition from the newspaper-or-magazine page to the book between covers. The truth is, the age of the journalist-turned-novelist was pretty much over by 1945. I’ve discussed this in my notebooks, and if I had been aware of that historic fact when I graduated from high school in the 1970s, I probably would have majored in something other than journalism in college. But in 1973, the year I started college, my thinking about the writer’s profession was still back in the James T. Farrell era.

You can’t go back and undo the past. And even if I were to get into some university MFA program in creative writing, (I’ve been turned down for two of them in the past 18 months) at 52 I’m too old to become a “promising young writer.” So my choices are: (1) Bag it all and start keeping bees, (2) Resign myself to writing “for my desk drawer” or (3) Go ahead and make use of a P.O.D. service when I finish a book, post it for sale on my web site and those of whatever friends will do me the favor and just not worry about whether I ever become an accepted member of the “literary community,” which in any case is dissolving as the world goes digital and becomes increasingly compartmentalized by the Internet, the iPhone and 500 channels of satellite TV.

Samuel Johnson might have said that anyone who writes for anything other than money is a fool, but it could easily be counter-argued that anyone whose primary interest is making money had better be in some other racket besides writing, unless they happen to be John Grisham. There was a time when the word “amateur” (derived from the Latin “amat,” meaning love) had a positive ring, not a negative one. So what if I decide to just abandon the oak-and-calf routine and settle for treating the writing and publishing of my fiction and memoirs as a hobby, and to hell with the fact that I get ignored by the Washington Post Sunday book section? I don’t even read the Washington Post Sunday book section anymore. If I don’t read them, why should I care if they read me?

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

Norman Mailer died this morning. Too late to make the Washington Post print edition, but the news was all over the Internet when I got up. He was 84 and died of renal failure.

In a way, it’s an end-of-era moment. Mailer was frequently a clown and almost always wrongheaded politically, but he was also something much more important to his century: he was probably the last living writer who aspired to write the Great American Novel. In the 1940s that was something every young writer wanted to do. But today’s young writers aim to write movie screenplays and journalism; the idea of the Big Novel is pretty much dead, and as a matter of fact shortly before he died, Mailer conjectured in an interview that the novel itself, as a form, is on the way out. Could be; in another context he lamented declining interest in serious fiction in the country at large, and Mailer’s lifelong antagonist Gore Vidal has estimated the audience for serious literary fiction in America these days at something like 4,000 people. There will be no more aspiring young Hemingways, the thing Mailer himself was in his youth, along with so many others.

In the spring of 1995, Mailer came to Washington, D.C. on a tour to promote the book he had just published about Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. I was in the audience at Olsson's Books, Metro Center that day (Olsson's Books is now long-gone), and I raised my hand and asked him if there was going to be a sequel to Harlot's Ghost, his 1991 novel about the CIA. My reason for asking was because Harlot's Ghost had concluded with the words, "To Be Continued." "Time, energy and money permitting, yes," Mailer answered my question. "I think the story of Harlot's Ghost is an important one that deserves to be continued." No sequel ever appeared, and I'm not surprised. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American life; there were few if any sequels in Mailer's. Married six times, the father of nine children, and with a Manhattan rent to pay, he churned from one big-money journalism project to the next, with fiction squeezed in between gigs. He was primarily more journalist than novelist anyway, just as Hemingway was, in my opinion, more short-story writer than novelist.


It's not surprising that Mailer failed to write the Great American Novel, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered much if he had; it would no longer have been recognized as such once the Newsweek front cover had faded, and would have been on remainder tables within 12 months. Yes, we still have our serious writers, the Cormac McCarthys and Don DeLillos, but they play to small audiences and no one would recognize either of them if he walked into Starbucks. Mailer was the last American author who conceived of the writer’s role in society as a big one, who openly boasted that he wanted to be as big as Dostoevski. Such bravado often made him look silly and certainly brought its share of ridicule on his head, but I already miss the world in which someone could aspire to be as big as Dostoevski to begin with. These days everyone wants to be as big as Paris Hilton or Tupac Shakir.

When he published Ancient Evenings in 1984, Mailer told an interviewer that he had written a novel set in ancient Egypt because he felt so completely a stranger in Ronald Reagan’s America. I doubt that that was the real reason. I always suspected that he wrote that novel because he wanted to prove that he could "do" historical fiction as well as his old rival Vidal. But the remark had a certain prescience, given the fact that America became progressively more and more a strange land in the years after Reagan to someone with Mailer’s youthful dreams and priorities, and I had those same dreams myself when I was young; as late as 1976 I, too, dreamed of being the next Hemingway. “He who dies on Thursday is quit for Friday.” If the novel is indeed on the way out, Norman Mailer won’t have to watch the final streaks of its particular dusk. R.I.P.

That was, uh...Shostakovich. No?

I was sorry when I heard that Dave Barry had decided to retire from the Miami Herald and quit doing his column. I was one of his biggest fans. I had a “hit parade” of favorite Dave Barry columns, as one might with popular songs. And one of my all-time favorites was a column he wrote, circa 1990, that actually displayed a dash of prophecy.

The target of his ridicule that week was Nielsen families, those lucky people chosen by the A.C. Nielsen company to keep a log of their TV viewing habits for the purpose of helping the television networks know who's watching what, and therefore, how much they might charge for advertising in this or that time slot.

Well, of course, the most obvious vein of humor Dave could mine in talking about Nielsen families was the basic dishonesty of TV viewers, their reluctance to admit what they really watch as opposed to what they want people to think they watch. Chances are, in our current age of Dancing With The Stars and American Idol, such a sense of shame has totally vanished from our culture. People nowadays watch garbage and are happy to admit they watch garbage. But it wasn’t always so. Many years ago I read an interview that the late Johnny Carson gave to TV Guide magazine. “People are hypocrites,” he remarked. “If you ask them what they want to see, they’ll tell you they want more quality programming, more documentaries. And then what do they watch? Gilligan’s Island.”

Well, precisely. And in his humor column about Nielsen families, Barry posed the logical question as to whether, if you were to see a program listed for this evening called Eat Bugs For Money, would you admit to watching it? Sure, you’d want to watch it, but would you own up to having watched it? In the little cartoon that accompanied this column, a TV viewer is enjoying Eat Bugs For Money, but over his shoulder we see him writing down “Masterpiece Theater” on his A.C. Nielsen log.

Now you see why I said this was prophetic. In 1990, the very idea that there could be such a program as Eat Bugs For Money was the stuff of major yuks. A decade or so later, the hottest thing on TV was Survivor, which was essentially Eat Bugs For Money On An Island Somewhere.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s blog posting: guilty pleasures. For some years now we’ve been hearing about these things, which supposedly we all enjoy in one form or another, our shamelessness about watching Dr. Phil notwithstanding. When the late Anna Nicole Smith returned to the airwaves after her own reality TV show had been canceled and then revived, the hype read, “America’s favorite guilty pleasure is back!” If you got a kick out of watching an overweight blonde bimbo whose main claim to fame was having married and then buried a 700 year-old oil tycoon feed pizza to her dog, well, more power to you, but (wink) we all know you probably watched the show with your living room curtains drawn. (And, if you were a Nielsen viewer, probably wrote down “The Discovery Channel” for that hour, right?)

If you’re into whips-and-chains sex, and like to surf the BDSM web sites, my guess would be that you keep CNN.com minimized at the bottom of your computer screen, so that if you hear anyone coming, (no pun intended) you can, with one quick click, switch from Mistress Jade in latex corset and hip boots, wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails as she humiliates a slave in her dungeon, to something more wholesome, such as rioting in Myanmar.

I have my guilty pleasures, believe me. How many men in their fifties do you know who still like to watch The Flintstones? Guilty. Ditto the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. (My favorite is Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, and my favorite character in that one, the villain Snidely Whiplash. I just keep picturing Hans Conreid, who voiced that character, having the time of his life as he did so.)

But I have an even guiltier pleasure than cartoons. It involves music.

Since I was in high school, I’ve been a classical-music buff. Classical music is the closest thing I have to a hobby, although I do not, and never have, played an instrument. It was just something I kind of stumbled into. My mother played the piano, but more importantly, I had a couple of friends in high school, one of them a pianist, who were very much into Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and I picked it up by osmosis, from associating with people who liked that kind of music. By the time I was 16 I had left the Top 40 listening habits of my childhood entirely behind. My radio listening by then centered around the local classical music station, through which I was acquiring a protracted education about composers and their music. I would hear something I liked, jot down the composer’s name and the title of the piece, then scrape together a few dollars and head for the Wherehouse to see if I could find that record. My collection of classical records mushroomed. Then records were replaced by compact discs, and I went that way. By the time I’d reached middle age, I had maybe 1,200 classical LPs pre-dating the CD revolution, and then maybe 500-600 CDs on top of that. I could have started my own classical radio station, and my taste in music was one of the first things people learned about me when I made new friends. How could they not, walking into my apartment and being assaulted immediately by the strains of Arthur Rubinstein playing Beethoven’s Appassionata on his Last Concert for Israel album, or Luciano Pavarotti belting out Di quella pira from Verdi’s Il Trovatore? Well, they couldn’t. Over the years the classics have become part of who I am.

So imagine how I feel about having anyone find out that there are times when I really enjoy what used to be called Easy Listening, or sometimes, Beautiful Music? I’m not talking about the kind of stuff you hear on Easy Listening stations now, which resembles smooth jazz more than anything else. I’m talking about Easy Listening as it was defined in my own youth by pre-stereo FM. The sort of stuff my parents used to tune in at dinnertime to aid the digestion. The sort of stuff that used to be called “elevator music.” The sort of stuff that was once fodder for New Yorker cartoons: “The Homogenized Strings Present ‘Greatest Hits From The Dentist’s Office.’” Mantovani. Andre Kostelanetz.

Embarrassment be damned. I’m coming out. Sometimes I like this stuff. If I’m in the right kind of mood, (already depressed) the sound of a thousand violins sighing out Moon River can almost make me puddle up with tears. But if I’m not depressed, but merely stressed, those same violins can be the same sort of balm to the nervous system that is the main theme of the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The difference is, there’s no dark side to Mantovani, whereas Beethoven’s Ninth is a totally conceived work of art that takes you from the murky depths to the celestial heights. Sometimes, as when I’m stuck in traffic on New York Avenue in Washington, D.C. on a 95-degree summer day, with a bobtail truck in front of me obscuring my view so that I can’t even see how far the goddamn traffic jam extends, I don’t want to be mentally and spiritually taxed by great art; I just want to be sedated. The homogenized strings are good for that. The 1950s understood this, which is why the likes of Mantovani, Kostelantez and Percy Faith were so popular back then. America’s nerves were still a bit shot from World War II. Somnolent FM deejays offering up Charmaine and Autumn Leaves in arrangements for an army of strings with no brass or percussion were performing something of a public service to frazzled Levittown residents commuting back from the city, who moreover knew all too well that when they got home they were going to be bombarded with the strains of Elvis Presley singing Hound Dog emanating from 45-rpm record players in their children’s bedrooms.

For me this stuff conjures up childhood memories, such as my mother tuning in San Diego’s KITT-FM at dinnertime in the mid-1960s so that she and my father could (try to) enjoy “the music of Cloud Seven” while huddled around the kitchen table trying to have a pleasant meal in the presence of three kids aged 11, 9 and 7 respectively, at least two of whom would rather be listening to the Beatles. (FM radio trafficked largely in this kind of stuff in those days. AM was where you found popular music. This changed abruptly around 1970 when it was discovered that FM could broadcast in stereo, which AM could not. Pop music promptly began migrating to FM, where it pushed the homogenized strings off the dial and forced AM to turn to news, sports, and yakety-yak in order to survive.) There was no Internet in those days, nor was there compartmentalized cable TV or satellite radio. If my parents didn’t want to listen to Top 40 or country-western, wanted some other choice besides the Rolling Stones or Porter Wagoner, then the strains of Kostelantez on the local FM snoozer were their obvious choice. We kids rolled our eyeballs of course. We couldn’t wait to bolt the table, get back to our six-transistor sets and escape Cloud Seven in favor of Get Off My Cloud.

That was then, this is now. I’m 52 and life has beaten up on me the same as it does on everyone else. I don’t like to take Valium; it makes me depressed. But once in a while I like to take a little breather on Cloud Seven. I keep the CDs in the car. If anyone climbs in to ride with me somewhere, I quickly whisk Mantovani into the glove box and toss The Goldberg Variations or Schumann’s A minor Piano Concerto on the passenger-side seat so my guest rider can see the sort of stuff I leave carelessly strewn around. But I would never, ever write down Masterpiece Theater while watching Eat Bugs For Money. I’ll stick to Dudley Do-Right, thank you.

Thoughts on another classic about to turn 50 (no, it isn't me)

Yesterday, to Darcars in New Carrollton, Maryland to get the PT Cruiser serviced.

While waiting for the car, I re-visited a little classic, Goodbye, Columbus.

The older Philip Roth gets, the more he depresses me. I don’t think I even want to read his latest, Exit Ghost. But going back to this brilliant little allegro from his literary youth was something else altogether, a short bicycle ride down American literature’s memory lane to the time when Roth was one of his generation’s rising young stars, rather than the award-draped book factory he became later, turning out roughly a novel a year, or the curmudgeonly 74 year-old he is now, whose works I tend to avoid in the autumn because that’s when I tend to get depressed anyway, and everything he’s done, since the 1970s anyway, is so dark. From what I read, Exit Ghost sounds like some literary equivalent of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, or perhaps a better comparison might be Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out Of Mind. In any case it doesn’t sound like something it would be healthy for me to read right now. (I think the last of Roth’s books I read was I Married A Communist, and I didn’t finish it.)

This year has been one for literary 50th anniversaries, (On The Road, The Alexandria Quartet) and more are coming: 2009 will mark the 50th year of Goodbye, Columbus, and the following year Rabbit, Run turns 50.

Interestingly, these last two remind me of each other, or I should say, re-reading Roth’s novella made me think of Updike’s first entry in the Harry Angstrom series. Both are so obviously of their time, and hence, quaint in 2007. Which doesn’t make either of them any less a masterpiece, but both were published very early in my life and give me a sharp perspective on what life in America was like about the time I was attending nursery school and kindergarten. It was still the brick-and-mortar world of the late industrial revolution: guys worked in factories, stores and libraries; their girlfriends’ fathers sold sinks and appliances. Their wives generally stayed home, did the ironing and watched The Edge of Night at three in the afternoon. No Internet, no cable television, no wireless anything unless you were talking about the walkie-talkies the Army used. Telephones were strictly rotary-dial, mail meant only what went into the metal box on your porch, and people still called the refrigerator “the icebox.”

But of course technology isn’t the only chasm between that world and this. While it’s not hard for me to fathom a world in which a 26 year-old guy feels constrained to put on a necktie and hold down a respectable job because he and his wife have just had a baby and that’s what responsibility demands, I can just barely brush elbows with a world in which two 23 year-old adults can’t casually sleep together without scandalizing the girl’s family; can’t even check into a hotel together without one of them putting on a fake wedding ring and the other signing the register “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The 1960s and ‘70s sent that world to its grave, with Roth, Updike and a host of others liberated by the 1962 court decision lifting the ban on Tropic of Cancer acting as pallbearers in the funeral rites. Overnight, arguments in editorial meetings at book publishing firms about whether “fuck” should be rendered as “f***k” or “f—“ became as obsolete as the Negro Leagues became the week after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947. From now on the formerly forbidden word wouldn’t even have to be disguised. It would be honest, straightforward “fuck,” and a lot more. A whole lot more. By 1981, the year I turned 26, Jamie Hartshorn and I could openly live together out of wedlock and even have my parents come visit, which they did, for my 26th birthday in fact. I’m not saying there weren’t still a few rumblings of disapproval, chiefly from surviving members of the WWII generation like my Aunt Jessie, but there wasn’t very much they could do about it except mutter “shame on you;” the battle was won. (And my father, by the way, who was 67 in 1981, tut-tutted at Aunt Jessie for her Church Lady- primness: “Now, Jessie, young people these days don’t do things the way we did when we were kids...”)

It’s not even the combination of technology and the sexual revolution of the 1960s that creates a veritable Utah desert between the world of 1959 and that of 2007. Goodbye, Columbus was social satire that actually stung in 1959 — ten years before the uproar over Portnoy’s Complaint, it already had some sectors of the Jewish community expressing outrage at its unflattering treatment of upwardly-mobile Jews; Roth was already being called a “self-hating Jew.”

Old stuff. Jewish assimilation into the American mainstream, with its concomitant eddies and tides of snobbery running both ways, (gentile-on-Jew and Jew-on-Jew) was good for yuks in the late 1950s, but it’s not something anyone thinks too much about now. Nobody would write about the Patimkins and the Klugmans today, if only because Neil and Brenda are in their seventies now and their parents are long dead. Who really cares about such things anymore? The postwar era depicted by Roth, Saul Bellow and other Jewish writers who flourished around midcentury is gone. I’m talking about the era of serious young Jewish intellectuals who had enjoyed the benefit of college that their immigrant fathers had not, fighting cultural battles with bourgeois, sometimes nouveau-riche fathers and uncles who made their fortunes selling plumbing fixtures, light bulbs and zippers, who still used Yiddish syntax when speaking English, (“Tomorrow, don’t tell me tomorrow. Tomorrow the world could blow up”) killed themselves giving their children comfortable lives and then didn’t comprehend why their sons didn’t want to go into their fathers’ businesses with them. Didn’t comprehend why so many of them, like Goodbye’s Neil Klugman, who calls himself a “liver” as opposed to a “planner,” (“I’m a pancreas,” Brenda retorts) don’t seem to have much ambition, or at least much money ambition. Commerce was often the only profession open to the pre-war Jewish immigrants who hadn’t had the educational advantages they would insist upon for their children. It marked them of course, and all too often embarrassed their children, as parents have been doing since the first neanderthal father grunted “ogg” rather than the more fashionable “ogg-ogg” in front of his son. Ten years after Goodbye, Columbus, perhaps with his own father in mind, the author of Portnoy’s Complaint would generously, even gratefully, note the “self-annihilating” way that Jewish men of his father’s generation “gave themselves to their families,” and then take the compliment back with an every-bit-as-dated anecdote about Portnoy giving his father a gift subscription to the snooty-tooty Partisan Review, only to discover to his infuriated disgust that the old man isn’t even looking at it.

Just how truly gone that era is, was illustrated for me recently when I was reading an essay about yet another cultural artifact that just had its 50th birthday, West Side Story. I learned from this article that Jerome Robbins, years before he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on the final product, had cooked up a New York-based adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but had initially planned to call the show East Side Story, with the two rival street gangs depicted as Jews and Catholics rather than Puerto Ricans and Anglos. The author of the article observed drily that such a thing sounded "less like Romeo And Juliet and more like Abie's Irish Rose - The Musical." The transition to the west side of Manhattan, away from the older, pushcart world of European Jewish immigrants and into the more contemporary world of Puerto Rican immigrants, was judged fortunate, fortuitous, insightful…and canny. Abie’s Irish Rose was already very old hat by the time WWII broke out. The Latino-vs.-Anglo tensions of West Side Story are still with us.

But I was talking about the parallels, nay similarities, that I saw between Goodbye, Columbus and Rabbit, Run beyond the coincidence that they were published around the same time. Here’s an obvious one: they share the similar plot device of a youthful character, Ron Patimkin in Roth’s case, Harry Angstrom in Updike’s, who was a basketball star in school and now has to confront being an adult. The one-dimensional, dim-witted Patimkin, who is only a minor character in any case, cheerfully solves the problem by getting engaged and duly going into his father’s business, something a more thoughtful young man such as the story’s narrator would never do without at least agonizing over it first. How big a dope is Ron Patimkin? Roth makes a point of having Ron’s father, Ben Patimkin, shake his head and express profanity-seasoned disbelief that a boy so adroit on the basketball court could be so inept at managing a crew of black employees unloading porcelain sinks from a truck.

In Updike’s novel of course, the I-was-a-star-on-the-basketball team thing is the core element in Harry’s interior crisis. In high school he was a genuine star; now he’s just another twentysomething guy who had to marry his girlfriend because he knocked her up, (another quaintness from our perspective) and is thus forced to settle down, get a job and become an adult. That he isn’t at all sure how he feels about that is one of the themes that will run through not only Rabbit, Run but the three-novels-plus-a-coda that would continue its story over the next four decades. In other words, Harry Angstrom is the conflict-ridden character that Ronald Patimkin would have been had he been anything but a happy moron.

Well, here’s my coda: Roth's Neil Klugman and his negligible Ron Patimkin, as well as Updike’s Harry Angstrom, were highly relevant figures to their generation and even to mine. We baby boomers, so vilified for the past decade and a half, were still to some degree and according to our lights trying to come to grips with the necessity of becoming grownups. We didn't, and still don't, want to get old, but we were willing to start careers, get married, have children and struggle with trying to be responsible adults, even if our collective memory of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show prompted us a generation ago to force Detroit (through our sheer numbers) to invent the SUV because we didn't want to drive the station wagons our parents drove, and even if, at this late date as AARP begins to absorb us, we are trying to come up with another term to replace "senior citizen." Today’s twentysomethings aren't having such dark moments of the soul — most of them are still living with their parents and have no plans to leave anytime soon. “30 is the new 20” is what we’re hearing now.

God, I wish that had been true 22 years ago. Because "50 is the new 30" doesn't help much. Do you mean to tell me I could have stayed in my parents’ granny flat in California for a few more years? That instead of joining the Foreign Service in 1985 and going off to see the world, I could have stayed close to our next-door neighbors the Van Nostrands, who by the way had been our next-door neighbors since I was a baby, and had a basketball hoop over their garage door? You might have seen me, aged 29, over there at sunset on an October night, shooting some hoops. But I was working by then, as I had been for years already. Still, pushing 30, trying to grow up. Like Neil, wanting to be a liver, not a planner, and yet still aware that to be pushing 30 meant that Shakespeare's admonition "to thine own self be true" was acquiring a new urgency. And by the way, I was born on Columbus Day, 1955. Goodbye, Columbus.

My Least Favorite Year

Every year, when my birthday begins to draw down on me, (it’s next Friday) I find myself flirting with an old affliction of mine – nostalgia.

I’m one of the most unabashed nostalgia buffs I know. My late younger sister shared this trait with me. We could talk about the old days endlessly, the “old days” being of course the days of our shared childhood. Now that she’s gone, I don’t really know anyone who shares this vice, not to the extent I do, anyway. There must be a community of nostalgia buffs out there somewhere, though; otherwise how would you explain the proliferation of classic TV websites on the Internet, or the existence of magazines like Reminisce, which by the way was a favorite of my sister’s?

Each year, when the autumn leaves begin to blow around, (and the older I get, the worse it gets) I, born on the 12th of October, start getting a little misty. (And actually, I have to monitor this tendency carefully, because I am prone to bouts of clinical depression, and have found over the years that a sudden, crippling surge of nostalgia, brought on, say, by a weekend marathon of Laverne and Shirley on TV Land, is often a bellwether of depression’s approach.)

But I’ve found that a dependable, if not exactly surefire, remedy for getting too sniffly about the good old days is, not surprisingly, remembering the bad old days. If I catch myself looking back with a bit too much wistful melancholy about the grand days of my youth, when I had a full head of hair, a 35-inch waistline and a lifetime that was still mostly ahead of me rather than behind, all I have to do to get the rose-colored glasses off my nose is to remember a time when things weren’t so good. Hence, just this morning, while sitting in the bathtub pondering the big Five-Two, which comes up this week, I tried to think of what year would qualify as the worst year of my life.

2002 comes to mind. How many years can you point to in your life when you were laid off, and then fired, in the same year? Both happened to me in 2002. I was laid off by one company in April, quickly found another (miserable) job, and was fired by that second company in September. As that year ended, I was 47, unemployed and living alone in Wheaton, MD. Not a good year, 2002. But it doesn’t quite qualify as worst, because the first three months of it weren’t so bad. I had a good job and a nice apartment until that layoff came along.

No, 2002 comes in second place. If there is one year in my entire life for which I cannot, try as I might, summon so much as a whiff of wistful, not one single, solitary glance back “smiling through tears,” that year is 1978.

Ooh. I still get depressed just thinking about 1978. To think of all the things that were rotten about that year, all you have to do is think of all of the things that were rotten about the ‘70s generally. Disco was king. Jimmy Carter was President. The Yankees won the World Series. Bob Dylan released Street-Legal, one of his worst albums. Sylvester Stallone released Paradise Alley, probably his worst movie. Women were dressing like Annie Hall. Cars were in gas lines. The Sex Pistols were in People magazine. Battlestar Galactica premiered on ABC. People still had CB radios in their cars and were saying dumb things like “breaker-breaker, good buddy.” The streets were full of Ford Pintos. (My father had one.) Donny and Marie Osmond had a TV variety show. Slack-jawed middle-aged males were drooling over Charlie’s Angels. I could go on.

When 1978 began, I was going nowhere. When it ended, I was still going nowhere.

You know how everyone’s complaining these days about the twentysomethings who go on and on living with their parents? I was a pioneer of that, though God knows it wasn’t something I wanted. I did try to leave home in 1978, but my attempt backfired, like just about everything else I did that year. I was like America itself, stuck in neutral and unsure of how to get out.

People who remember the seventies will probably remember that it was a period in which you heard the expression “lowered expectations” a lot. We suffered a military defeat in Vietnam. We were collectively disillusioned and made cynical by Watergate, and we responded by sticking an impotent, goober-picking moron in the White House. The above-mentioned Sylvester Stallone won an Oscar in 1977 for Rocky, a movie about a man who settles for second-best. Bad taste and blandness reigned everywhere: radios were filled with Fleetwood Mac when they weren’t blaring forth The Village People and the endless thump-thump-thump-thump of Studio 54. The world seemed to be striving for the second-rate and the dull. For it wasn’t just America. Our cold war dance-partner, the Soviet Union, was in a similar state of malaise that year. Leonid Brezhnev was alive and sclerotic, as was his government. Years later the Russians themselves would refer to this period as “the era of stagnation.”

It was for me, too.

When 1978 opened, I was five months out of college, and a walking cautionary tale from those hardnosed pragmatists, of which the seventies had plenty, (in contrast to the wooly-headed, idealistic sixties) who would insist that going for a liberal-arts major was a colossal waste of time and money. If you were smart in the seventies, you majored in business administration, which might conceivably lead to a lucrative job. If you were dumb, you majored in English and wound up flipping hamburgers. That was the logic of the era. And when I was a student at San Diego State University between 1975 and 1977, I had plenty of classmates who were going for business administration majors, usually with a certain amount of reluctance. They would rather be studying something they enjoyed, but few wanted to face the prospect of taking a Bachelor of Arts degree and then moving on to a career at Wendy’s.

I tried to hedge my bets. I double-majored. History was the subject I loved, so I majored in that. But I had also heard plenty of “Gee, what can you do with that?” from various people when I owned up to pursuing a B.A. in history, so I also majored in journalism. If anyone were to ask, I was studying history because that was what I loved, and journalism because that’s what I hoped to do for a living.

But with all of the shortsightedness that youth is so good at, (plus an inherent laziness that’s always been one of my biggest shortcomings) I didn’t bother doing a student internship in journalism during my senior year at State. Hence, when I graduated, I had no hands-on experience in journalism and therefore no prospects. I interviewed at a couple of newspapers, but when they found out I had no experience I was shown the door. After an abortive attempt to leave home that lasted about six weeks in the late summer of 1977, my money ran out and I was back at my parents’ place. I turned 22 that fall, and took the only job I could find: working the graveyard shift at a 7-Eleven store in El Cajon, CA.

And that’s where I was at the beginning of 1978. Dragging myself off to El Cajon at 11 p.m. each night, then dragging myself, bleary-eyed, back home to Chula Vista in the harsh morning light. Even at 22 I could see that this was no way to live. For this I had spent four years in college? Clearly, I had to do something else. But what? I had no work experience at anything except, now, punching a cash register and pushing a mop. I thought about it, and decided that if I wasn’t setting the world on fire professionally, the least I could do was go back to school. I re-enrolled at San Diego State as a continuing student, figuring that if I had to work at 7-Eleven, pursuing a graduate degree — even in good old, useless history — might at least give me some purpose. (I didn’t even consider going for an M.A. in journalism; to me that sounded too much like wanting to become a PhD in welding.)

It didn’t work. What tripped me up was the very thing about night work that was turning me into a physical wreck that winter. I’m just not a night person. I couldn’t make the adjustment to working all night and then trying to go to school in the daytime. I can’t sleep in the daytime, so I was constantly exhausted. In a perfect world, the thing to do would have been to quit the 7-Eleven job and just go to school. But my parents, if they would not exactly have forbidden that, would at best have expressed disapproval by way of sighs and eyeball-rolling. They were lower-middle class people whose attitude was that education was all well and good, but once you had that sheepskin in hand, you were supposed to go out and start bringing home paychecks, end of discussion. “Graduate school” sounded to them like some thinly-disguised euphemism for loafing. I dropped the history seminars and stayed on at the 7-Eleven.

In March of that year things improved by about as small a degree as they could. I took a job at another 7-Eleven store, but with two significant differences. One, the store was in Chula Vista, just a few blocks from home as opposed to the 22 miles I was driving to get to El Cajon every night, and two, I would be off the graveyard shift. The work was strictly 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Back to sleeping nights. Aaaah.

Well, that gig lasted exactly two weeks. On a very busy Saturday night, when I had a line of customers at the checkout counter, two creeps from the California State Alcoholic Beverage Control Board who hadn’t yet racked up their monthly quota of busted convenience-store clerks, sent in a 19 year-old shill with instructions to try and buy some beer. I was extremely busy trying to move people out the door, (the ABC creeps waited for such a moment of course) and I took one look at this guy and figured he had to be at least 24 or 25, so I sold him his sixpack of Loewenbrau, and the next thing I knew, through the door came these two state slimeballs, flashing their little badges at me. Only an idiot would have believed it wasn’t a setup, but the Southland Corporation, which owned 7-Eleven, had a company policy that anyone caught selling beer to a minor, set up or not, was automatically fired. The next day I was out of work, and the following month I had to go to court and pay a $55 fine.

Now, your average glass-is-half-full person might have taken a sanguine view of this development as being nature’s way of telling me it was time to move on from working at 7-Eleven stores. But my father was a passionate partisan of the glass-is-half-empty school. My father, who had come through the Depression with only a high-school diploma, was a firm believer in the idea that every silver lining has a cloud. His thinking was hopelessly mired in 1933, and to him, getting fired from any job, even a job pushing a mop at 7-Eleven, was a life-threatening catastrophe. After all, this is 1933 and 30 million people are out of work, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Like most not very open-minded people, my father was convinced that the way he did things was the way everyone should do them. And he personally had escaped from the ravages of the Great Depression by joining the Coast Guard in 1935. If the military had been his solution to the problem of unemployment, it naturally stood to reason that it should be mine, too. My father started putting pressure on me to go down and join up. Well, naturally I didn’t want to. What seventies kid did? The Vietnam war had been over for three years by then, the draft had been abolished in 1973, the year I turned 18, and in general the military’s stock was pretty low in 1978. The runner-up for Best Picture at that year’s Oscars was a snotty Jane Fonda anti-war film called Coming Home. Even the movie that won Best Picture, The Deer Hunter, was hardly an advertisement for joining the people who’d joined the Army.

But my father was insistent. One might even say exasperated. He just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t embrace such a common-sense idea as joining the military to escape unemployment. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of the military?” he demanded. I had to remind myself that he was still living in 1933, and thinking that way too.

With parents like mine, coming up with compromises was a regular feature of life, so I came up with one. The San Diego area, where I grew up, is hugely Navy. There’s a big naval base there. Many of the kids I went to school with, including my best friend in high school, were the sons and daughters of sailors and naval officers. The indirect result of all this was that the only branch of the service I was even willing to consider entering was the Navy. The Army was out. Marines? Forget it, I’m no masochist. Air Force? Nah. I don’t like to fly, and anyway in those blue uniforms they all look like mailmen. The Navy, on the other hand, was somewhat familiar, and at age 22 the idea of living and working on a ship rather appealed to the romantic in me, with its overtones of Conrad, Melville and Eugene O’Neill.

But, and it was a big “but,” there was no way in hell I was going into the Navy as a bell-bottom-wearing swabbo. I had gone to the trouble of getting a four-year college degree, and therefore had the option of going into the Navy as an officer. If you had a college degree, it didn’t matter in what subject, you could apply directly for Officer Candidate School. I told my father that this was the only way I would consider going. Since I had a college degree, I would apply to the Navy, but only as an officer. I would go in as an officer or not at all.

To my surprise, my father thought this reasonable. And I went down to the Naval Recruiting Center in San Diego and talked to a recruiter. I learned that there were four career “cones” available to would-be naval officers: aviation, supply, surface warfare and nuclear submarines. Of the four, only the nuclear submarine service was closed to me, because to qualify for that one you had to have majored in science or math. But any of the other three were possibilities. I didn’t hesitate; I chose surface warfare, what the Navy calls “ship-driving.” After all, the Navy is about ships and if I were going into the Navy, a ship was where I wanted to be.

I flunked the aptitude test for OCS. It was in two parts: verbal and mechanical. I spiked the verbal part with ease; it was on the mechanical part that I went down in flames. I’ve never been comfortable with gadgets of any kind. I even have problems with vacuum cleaners and can openers. I did fine straightening out the grammar in test sentences and matching up the right word with the right clause, but when it came to looking at Diagram A and telling which way Cogwheel F will turn if Cogwheel B is turning counterclockwise, I was out of my depth.

The recruiter told me I could come back and try again in six months, but I never went back.

So it was back to looking for a job, and my resume was still that of a 22 year-old. It would fill maybe half a page. Education, followed by six months of cash-register punching in convenience stores. Since that sort of work was the only thing at which I had any experience at all, it was natural that I should gravitate back to it. So it was that in June of that year, while poring over the newspaper classifieds, when I spotted an advertisement announcing that some guy right over the hill in Bonita was looking for a “store manager,” I sat down and typed out a letter to him on my Smith-Corona portable typewriter, still the accustomed way of sending business correspondence in those days. I learned later that my having typed the letter instead of writing it out in longhand was one of the reasons I got the job. So much has the world changed in 30 years.

If ever there was a doomed enterprise, it was The Bonita Wine Cellar. My new boss, a pus-gutted slob whom I’ll call “Bill” because he might still be lurking out there somewhere, fancied himself a very savvy businessman but didn’t know the first thing about running a store. He was an insurance salesman who had once played jazz guitar in a band. He was now “diversifying” by opening a store, and clearly thought he was on his way to riches. He wore polo shirts and sandals all the time, drank too much and when his store failed to make money, blamed me. The truth was that he started out with two strikes against him and from there things just got worse. He rented an empty store in a tiny, poorly-lit strip mall down the street from a golf course. It had been a liquor store previously, but liquor licenses are expensive and Bill didn’t have one, nor was he inclined to try and come up with the $50,000 that a new one would have cost. No, he had some notion that all he had to do was fill that store with beer, wine, soft drinks, milk, bread and a few sundries, toss a flunky in there to handle the cash register, and watch the money pour in. Anyone could see that this business was neither fish nor fowl: it wasn’t a liquor store because he had no license to sell hard liquor, and it wasn’t quite a convenience store either, because he didn’t carry enough grocery items to make it one.

Then, to make matters worse, a brand-new Albertson’s supermarket opened that same summer about half a mile around the corner and down the street. Naturally they could undersell us on just about everything. Then, to make matters even worse yet, the State of California gave the go-ahead that year for supermarkets like Albertson’s to sell hard liquor in addition to beer and wine. So, even if we had had a hard liquor license, there still would have been a supermarket around the corner underselling us on everything. Bill’s little store consistently lost money, and he just couldn’t understand why. He came to the startling conclusion that it had to be because I was being surly to the customers. It couldn’t have been anything he was doing!

Well, come to think of it, there was one group of customers to whom I was being very surly, and if Bill wanted these customers, he was even dumber than I thought he was. I’m talking about little pointy-headed teenage pukes who would hang around after dark and then come in and try to buy beer. Because the strip mall was poorly lit, I guess they figured they could get away with it. Or maybe it was because the liquor store that had been there previously had let them get away with it. All I knew was, I had already been busted once, that same year, for selling beer to a minor, and if it happened again I was going to be in some serious trouble. So I wasn’t pleasant to the little teenage pukes. When they would try to buy beer, I would run them off. And they didn’t like that. Not a bit. And since the strip mall was so poorly-lit, they were emboldened to take little acts of revenge. I came out one night after closing up and found that the passenger-side window on my car had been smashed. Then one afternoon I came to work and found a crew replacing the glass front door. Someone had pulled up when the place was closed and pumped a few .22 slugs through the window.

It was obvious who had done it and why. Adults don’t shoot up closed stores; they walk through the front door and demand the cash in the register, then start shooting. No, clearly my zit-faced friends who couldn’t get Coors on my watch were behind this. But Bill didn’t want to hear that. His store was failing and it had to be my fault, therefore the person who had shot up the front window had to be an adult customer angered by the surliness that Bill believed I was ruining his business with.

By Halloween I had had enough. He was working me 52 hours a week (eight hours a day Monday through Friday and 12 hours on Sunday) for $600 a month, and now he was accusing me of ruining a half-assed business enterprise that any idiot could have told him was doomed from the start. Meanwhile, I had decided to give independence and education one more try. I turned 23 on October 12, and a few days later I rented a one-room studio in a house in east San Diego from which I intended to go back and forth (again) to San Diego State, making one more attempt to pursue that graduate degree. The fall of 1978 was a busy time for me. I was attending history seminars in the morning and early afternoon, then punching in to work at the Bonita Wine Cellar, returning at night to my little bug-infested garret a few blocks from the SDSU campus after closing up the store.

But the bullets-through-the-window incident, and Bill’s insistence on blaming me instead of the armed pimple-faced pukes whom I knew to be behind it, had torn it as far as I was concerned. I still had no work experience outside of retail, but down the road a short distance from Bill’s not-quite-a-convenience-store was the Brookside Winery.

Brookside has long since gone out of business, and it’s too bad in a way, because it had a very unusual, should-have-succeeded business model. This company, headquartered in Old Guasti, California, sold wine, but the wine it sold was the wine it made. Since Brookside had a “grower’s license,” it was allowed to operate “tasting rooms” in its stores, each store being designed to look like an old Spanish mission. Customers could come in and sample the wines before buying. Brookside always had a huge surge in business during the holidays, and they were looking for someone to fetch, carry, move crates, sweep floors and even help run the tasting room. The job paid minimum wage, but that was just about what I was making at Bill’s store anyway, so I abruptly quit him one afternoon and went to work at the Brookside Winery the next day. Bill got angry of course, at my not giving him any notice, but I really didn’t think I owed him anything. By the following spring Bill and his big gut were gone and the Bonita Wine Cellar was just an empty store again. The property is still there, by the way, but for the past 25 years or so it's been a dry cleaning establishment. Somebody had better sense than "Bill."

The Brookside Winery was managed by a middle-aged couple who are probably dead and gone now, but just to be on the safe side I’ll call them “Richard and Lorraine Curtis.” They had ten children, Richard and Lorraine, and the reason they held the Brookside franchise was because one of their elder sons was a middle manager with the company. They did a good-cop, bad-cop routine with their employees. Richard made a show of being affable and easygoing while Lorraine made no bones about being a bitch. In fact her own kids didn’t like her. I heard one of her sons actually refer to her as a bitch once. If your own kids are calling you a bitch, well, that’s some testimonial is all I can say. Lorraine had red hair, which is apropos of nothing except I knew from my studies of history that in the Middle Ages, redheads were considered trouble. Her youngest son, “Tommy,” had his mother’s red hair and also his mother’s personality. Rotten kid. The same son who called Lorraine a bitch also once referred to Tommy as “a little asshole.” Yes, the Curtises were quite a family. The day I was hired, Lorraine pulled no punches. “The job is seasonal, and it pays minimum wage. There’s no question of incremental raises or anything like that.” But I’d had enough of Beer Barrel Bill, so I accepted the Curtises’ offer and spent the next few weeks being cajoled by Richard and yelled at by Lorraine. I once dropped a case of half-gallon jugs of claret about an inch too far from the cement floor and they smashed. Wine went all over the place. I heard about that of course. I spent much time sweeping and moving crates around with a hand truck. But the job had a good side too; sometimes late in the day when business slowed down a bit, I’d be allowed to slip behind the tasting bar and play bartender for a while. And sometimes at closing, a few of us would pour ourselves a glass of wine and relax a bit before going home.

While I was doing this, the Shah of Iran was deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini took over as ruler of that country. See what I mean about 1978? It was just one good thing after another. In San Diego, too. That September, on a hot, dry morning which I remember well because I was driving to school, had the radio on and then saw the smoke, a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 collided in mid-air with a single-engine private plane practicing instrument landings at Lindbergh Field. The PSA 727 went down in the residential neighborhood of North Park, killing 132 people on the plane and 12 on the ground.

By the time that stinky year came to an end, I was pretty much ... right where I’d been when it started. I was still doing menial work in low-level retail, still pursuing the dim prospect of a graduate degree, a class here and a class there, (I never got it, by the way) and, having made my second attempt since college graduation at living away from home, was trying to hold things together and pay my little garret-rent on a minimum-wage job sweeping floors, pushing crates and getting yelled at by Lorraine “PMS-is-my-Game” Curtis. At 23 I was obsessed with ideas of self-improvement. Hence, incredibly if you consider all of these other things that were going on, when I heard an advertisement on the radio for The International Guitar Shop, saying that they offered guitar lessons, I decided that my self-improvement should have another cultural facet to it besides studying the history of 16th-century Europe, and I signed up for guitar lessons. Somehow I even managed to scrape together 80 dollars and buy a classical guitar from a pawn shop. So there I was, as 1978 wound down to its close, practicing “Malagueña” in my one-room digs when I wasn’t sweeping out the Brookside Winery, attending history lectures or writing notes in my wire-bound journal about how I was going to be flat broke in a few weeks.

I was, too, because the moment the holiday rush ended, I lost my job at the winery. My money and means were gone, and as 1979 got to an auspicious start in San Diego, with 16 year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opening fire on a group of children playing in a school playground, injuring eight of them, killing two adults and then offering “I don’t like Mondays” as her explanation, (later to be a song by the Boomtown Rats) I pulled out of my garret and was back once again in my old room at my parents’ house.

Fortune was about to effect a slow-turning change, however. In February, 1979 I managed to get on with a tiny independent news service in San Diego, and by the end of that year I’d racked up enough experience and made enough connections to land my first newspaper job. I wouldn’t live at home again for almost 25 years, until I returned in 2003 partly to help take care of my father, who was pushing 90 by then. But 1978 was a year in my life that might as well not have happened. The surest cure for nostalgia I can think of is to imagine living through that year again. The only good thing I can think of that happened in 1978 was the debut of the Garfield comic strip, which ceased being funny about 20 years ago. Looking at the larger picture, I think 1978's having just been canceled in advance would have been as good for the world at large as it would have been for me. I’m always hearing people say that the world is such a rotten place that we shouldn’t bring children into it. But looking back at that one year, I can safely say that the world is no worse now than it was then. In some ways it’s better (Brezhnev’s gone, and so are the Boomtown Rats.) Drink up. Have children. How bad can it be? At least we don’t have to live through 1978 again. For me, bring on the Big Five-Two. The rest of you over-50's, go get those disco albums out of the attic…and smash them.

So...when does Windows 95 come out?

I feel like I’ve stepped into a time machine and it’s 1995 again. How 'bout that Cal Ripken Jr., beating Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played? Clinton vs. Gingrich, the federal shutdown. What a circus that is, huh?

O.J. Simpson, after all these years, is back on CNN, this time for armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and whatever the heck else it is that he's accused of. He got into a rhubarb in Las Vegas over some sports memorabilia that used to be his, apparently, and which someone was attempting to sell. He tried to grab all of it, breaking into a hotel room with some accomplices, some of whom were brandishing firearms. Simpson was in jail for several days, but posted $125,000 bond and is free for now. They're still trying to sort out who actually had the guns.

The funny thing is, last fall a judge handed the rights to Simpson’s cutesy-coy little literary fan dance, If I Did It, to the family of Ron Goldman, one of the two people Simpson murdered in 1994 and then beat the rap when his lawyer managed to get hold of an audiotape of a dumb-ass, obviously-bigoted L.A. cop throwing what today's sanitized speech requires that we call "the n-word" around. (Visitors from Mars, line up over here for the explanation. Takes at least 20 minutes.)

Everyone knows what happened next. With that as a springboard, Simpson’s lawyer, the late Johnnie Cochran, got Simpson off the hook for a murder that only a moron with abalone for brains would believe someone else committed.

Didn’t matter. By the time that trial went to the jury, Cochran had accomplished his miracle. Simpson was no longer on trial for murder, the Los Angeles Police Department was on trial for racism. With two dead bodies in the morgue, blood all over Simpson's tight-fitting gloves, and no other possible suspect within a thousand miles, the jury was nonetheless buffaloed into returning a not-guilty verdict because some jurors were afraid they would be branded “racists” if they didn’t.

I wish I believed in divine judgment, so I could believe that Cochran had been called to account before God for playing the race card in such a repellent manner, pettifogging a courtroom into throwing out a murder charge against an obvious killer, and substituting for it a racism charge against the police who apprehended him, all based on nothing more than a recording of one cop talking like a dumb cracker. Yes, I realize that it's a defense attorney's (highly paid) duty to get his client off by any means at hand. So Cochran was merely doing his job, and very well I might add. But the whole thing brought back to my mind a line from Bob Dylan's 1975 song "Hurricane," something about how he felt "ashamed" to "live in a land where justice is a game." And if you know that song, we will now pause 10 seconds for a silent blast of irony.

Oh, but now, with Simpson in the limelight again (and once again for nothing good) sales of his little book, which he had hoped would line his pockets, are soaring, but none of the proceeds is going to Simpson—they’re all going to the Goldman family. When Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995, “African-American community leaders,” who have a habit of adopting a circle-the-wagons mindset when one of their own gets into trouble, even if he’s both guilty and a total Oreo, as Simpson was and is, crowed triumphantly that his acquittal was just the chickens coming home to roost, meaning of course that it was high time a guilty black man got away with murder for a change, rather than an innocent one being lynched from a tree, as so often happened in the bad old days.

Well, if you subscribe to the “two wrongs make a right” theory of justice, I suppose that’s true. But I don’t subscribe to that theory, and this, what’s going on now, is the true chickens coming home to the true roost. Simpson’s murder trial was the most symbolic and defining event of the Clinton era, a man guilty as sin getting off scott-free because he happened to be the right color to qualify for membership in a grievance group. Clinton didn’t only make his cabinet “look like America,” his era made travesty of justice look like America as well. To make injustice democratic is true justice according to some people.

But now the man who stabbed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, then spent the next 12 years playing golf every day, might go to prison for 30 years after all. Now that’s justice. Not the kind that comes from hiring a clever lawyer, but the kind that comes from those good old, slow-grinding mills of the gods.

On The Road At 50 -- My $.02

Last week, a great deal of bookchat was being generated by the 50th anniversary of On The Road (although five years ago, Jack Kerouac’s 80th birthday got scarcely a mention anywhere.) Numerous essays appeared on Arts & Letters Daily.com, and in various periodicals and newspaper book review sections. A new book about Kerouac, Why Kerouac Matters, by John Leland, is getting a lot of attention. The "original scroll" of On The Road has been published and is available at Amazon.com. (For those few out there who haven't heard the story, Kerouac wrote an early draft of this novel in a caffeine-fueled three week outburst, in one long paragraph, on a 125-foot continuous "scroll" made of sheets of paper taped together so that he wouldn't have to be interrupted changing sheets of paper in his typewriter. In 2002, the "original scroll" was auctioned off for close to $2 million.)

I myself have been re-reading On The Road and The Dharma Bums before lights-out for nearly two months now. Both are definitely “light” reading, so un-demanding of the attention span that they’re acceptable for the post-cocktail hour, unlike, say Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, which also sits on my nightstand but requires a clearer head.

One of the Kerouac retrospectives I’ve read this week was couched in the form of a review of Leland's new book by Anthony Daniels which appeared in The New Criterion . I usually agree with what I read in The New Criterion, but not this time. Daniels’ piece was a sniffy, schoolmarmish dismissal of Kerouac as a poor writer and a stubbornly immature person who refused to grow up.

Well, first of all, didn’t we have that debate 50 years ago when the book first appeared? John Updike created Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run as an answer to Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. And Rabbit, Run was published in 1960, when Eisenhower was still president.

As for Kerouac’s being a “poor writer,” he was a poor writer in the same sense that Thelonious Monk was a poor pianist, and with the same end in mind, a freeformish, improvisational feel meant to recreate the rhythms of jazz, which Kerouac and his friends saw as emblematical of their era in the same way that fox-trots were to Fitzgerald’s. If Kerouac’s prose is sometimes “banal,” well, so what? Monk deliberately hit wrong notes for effect. I’ll go along with Daniel on only one point, that Kerouac’s prose in On The Road set a bad precedent, in that it convinced the younger generation that unformed, spontaneous spilling-of-your-feelings on paper equalled good writing. Even when I was in college, 18 years after On The Road was published, kids were still justifying their bad poetry by saying “It expressed how I felt.” Kerouac had a lot to do with that.

But other writers can also be accused of setting bad precedents, including, if you ask me, Eliot and Joyce. It was thanks largely to them that we got stuck with academia’s little ongoing tumor, what Gore Vidal called “the U-novel.” The U-novel is the novel that’s written not to be read, but to be studied. Ulysses and The Waste Land stand at the font of that, and therefore can also be said to have set “bad precedents.”

But Daniels also goes to great lengths in trashing the characters of On The Road for their failure to be upstanding, middle-class citizens. Dean Moriarty is a rogue through-and-through, Daniels argues, and therefore we must also adjudge Kerouac’s book a failure because he never brings that out. Sal Paradise admires and is willingly led by Moriarty through adventure after adventure, usually of a rather sordid kind, until he finally becomes disillusioned when Moriarty abandons him in Mexico. Up until that point Sal has been enraptured with Dean to the point of accompanying him all over the North American continent in one crazy high-speed drive after another. Sal never seems to notice that Dean’s past and present behavior is almost uniformly immoral: he lies, cheats, steals, abuses women and never expresses a twinge of remorse for any of it.

He is, in short, a criminal and not much else, the fact that he can quote Schopenhauer notwithstanding, and Daniels finds it shocking, shocking that Kerouac’s Sal Paradise keeps resolutely ignoring the obvious truth about Moriarty's character, preferring instead to hang upon Dean’s ongoing, often not-very-coherent blather as if it were a string of wisdom’s shiniest pearls.

But Daniels utterly misses the point. On The Road stands firmly in the same tradition that generated not-too-factual folk songs about Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Dean Moriarty is the romantic outlaw type, compelling to the somewhat mousier Sal Paradise precisely because of his amoral behavior, his restlessness and his seemingly-boundless energy. Sal is fascinated by Dean because he’s the embodiment of an energy-charged dark side that many of us have, but in most of us never gains the upper hand.

In Dean the energy and the darkness are everything, and Sal is “riding the whirlwind,” as I once mentioned in an Internet-based discussion of precisely this same book. To Sal, who would like to be more adventurous than he is, hanging out with Dean is like taking a long, thrill-packed roller-coaster ride. And as we all know, adrenaline can be addictive.

Is Sal uncritical of Dean? Yes, of course, at least until the moment of truth in Mexico City when Dean goes off and leaves him sick and alone. But that has to be expected. Sal, a stand-in for Jack Kerouac, represents the artist gaining experience that he will later try and transform into art, as well as the young man trying to figure out how to live and also how not to. In that sense the novel is a bildungsroman, despite Daniels’ sneering at that very notion.

Daniels dismisses Kerouac because Sal fails to learn any moral lessons from hanging out with Dean outside of his discovery that he longs for a traditional family life after all, the conclusion Sal reaches at the end of the book. What Daniels doesn’t seem to get, or misses, is that the artistic temperament is, for better or worse, essentially egotistical. To Sal, Dean is grist for his mill. If Sal fails to criticize Dean for stealing cars and stealing gas and lying and beating his women, it’s because, for the moment anyway, Sal is not prepared to take a critical look at Dean. He’s absorbed in the experience of being around Dean, which will result later in a book called On The Road.

He has this idea in mind even if he doesn’t consciously acknowledge it. In other words, Sal is experiencing Dean for the sake of the experience itself. One might level the accusation at On The Road that Sal’s experience of Dean didn’t get enough processing, that the book should have had a more traditional dynamic in which Sal gradually comes to realize what a scoundrel Dean is, and that he most decidedly does not want to be like Dean. But that would rob the book of its essential energy, the rifflike feeling of the tumbling recollections, not always accurate, the feel of watching a home movie perhaps sloppily edited but moving rapidly from scene to scene in an attempt to recreate the feel of constant motion, of restlessness, that has made On The Road a compelling read for two generations.

I’ve read On The Road perhaps five times in the past 30 years, and I don’t read it for any moral lessons it might teach me. Even when I was young, I never viewed it as a blueprint for how to live. I read it, and still enjoy it, as a snapshot of another era, pre-interstate highway, when in towns and villages across America you could get a hamburger, a milkshake and fries for 85¢, hitchhiking was still a safe way to travel and jazz blared from car radios on two-lane highways in the middle of the night. And yes, I read it the way many of us read Huckleberry Finn when we were young, to play furtively with the fantasy of chucking it all and floating downriver on a raft.

Okay, so this might dovetail with Daniels’ assertion that the importance of On The Road is sociological, not literary. At the right place and time, the two things sometimes converge. Certainly The Sun Also Rises , with which some critics drew parallels when On The Road appeared, and In Cold Blood which appeared a few years later, are almost as important as sociology as they are as novels. Those books are classics. This one is, too, even if its characters are neither of them exemplars of how to behave. Sal could honestly say, along with Christopher Isherwood’s doppelgaenger in Goodbye To Berlin, “I am a camera.” Cameras aren't role models, but there is something to be said for them.

Shark attack, anyone?

Barry Bonds has been this summer's version of the shark attack.

Does anyone remember the great summer of the shark attacks? Probably not, because that was the summer of 2001, and what most people remember from that summer, if they remember anything from it at all, is 9/11, which occurred right at the end. But up until the very moment those airplanes slammed into the twin towers, the Pentagon and that field in Shanksville, PA, the news media had been regaling us all summer long with stories about one shark attack after another. Things reached the point where a Martian planning to spend his vacation on earth might well have looked around and concluded that beach resorts were competing for his business by seeing who could claim the most shark attacks.

Come to think of it, that same Martian, during that same summer, could also have become an expert on Chandra Levy by watching CNN.

Everyone knows that the one thing journalists do best is imitate each other. It's to be expected; they're lazy and they're always on deadline. Not much room for creative thinking there, but much, much room for copycat bullshit that fills space quickly. (They also imitate each other in their choice of words. One journalist uses -- or misuses -- a certain word, and the next thing you know they're all doing it, which explains why nobody "sympathizes" anymore but always "empathizes;" why anything and everything under the sun suddenly "resonates" with this or that segment of the population and why nobody has problems anymore; now everybody has "issues.")

So this summer every sportswriter in the country has been going on and on and on about Barry Bonds and his pursuit of Hank Aaron's lifetime home run record. It's the shark attack story of the summer. Not that it isn't noteworthy, mind you. I'm a baseball fan, and any time someone starts getting close to setting a new baseball record, I'm interested. I would probably be interested even if Bonds' pursuit of home runs #755 and #756, both of which he attained this week, had been an honest effort unaided by juicing. Unfortunately it wasn't. Bob Costas is absolutely, 100 percent right. No athlete suddenly becomes exponentially better at his sport as he approaches retirement age. It always -- not "usually," -- ALWAYS, goes the other way. David Wells was a hell of a pitcher in his day, but that day is reaching dusk. He's 44 and his ERA has crept above 14 this summer. It might be time for Boomer to hang up his glove and go open a restaurant or start working the phones for a job as a pitching coach somewhere. If Wells should all of a sudden begin throwing 100 mph fastballs at this stage of the game, I'd say the commissioner of baseball had something to investigate. Barry Bonds was always a superlative hitter, but don't tell me that his suddenly becoming a superHUMAN hitter at age 40-plus was the result of prayer and fasting.

I know he tested negative for juicing recently. Everyone knows that. It proves nothing. Look back further, and keep in mind Bonds' ego, which, if you could put it in a bottle, you'd have to use a giant redwood tree for a cork. Back in the late 1990s when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa dominated the headlines with their genial home-run derby, Bonds must have been grinding his teeth. Imagine, these two guys getting all the public attention that Bonds assumed was rightfully his! He promptly did -- well, whatever it was he did, it made him able to follow Sosa's 66 and McGwire's 70 home runs with 73 of his own in 2001.

Is anyone out there gullible enough to think that this "just happened?" McGwire and Sosa both ended up under a cloud when the steroid rumors started. We're supposed to believe that Bonds did it all on nothing more than protein shakes? Or more incredibly, that he "didn't know" what he was taking? As the poem goes, "And I am Marie of Roumania."

And the juicing issue is only part of the farce. There's something else you're not going to convince me of, and that's the "slump" Bonds supposedly went into in late July, when he "sat on" home run 754 for days and days. That was no slump, folks, that was marketing. Bonds could have hit home run #755 on July 31, Aug. 1 or Aug. 2 if he had wanted to. But here was the problem: his team, the San Francisco Giants, was playing a three-game stand against their hated rivals the Los Angeles Dodgers, in Los Angeles , during that three-day period. Now, anyone old enough to remember April 8, 1974, when Hammerin' Hank, the great Henry Aaron, broke Babe Ruth's lifetime record of 714 home runs, also remembers seeing the videotape of the great moment. Over and over. I was 18 that spring night, and I've seen that piece of tape at least 100 times. I would bet my next vacation that there was a meeting between Bonds, his manager Bruce Bochy and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig. The videotape of Barry Bonds hitting #755 -- and especially #756 -- is going to be viewed into eternity. I'm sure none of them wanted such a "great moment" to be greeted with a shower of garbage and beer bottles, as it would have been had it occurred at Dodger Stadium. San Diego is a slightly less hostile environment for Bonds -- only slightly -- so I would bet they gave him the green light to hit Number 755 in Petco Park, as he did, off Clay Hensley, last Saturday. That could only look better on film than the shower of half-eaten hot dogs and plastic syringes that Dodger fans would have given him. Then, of course, giving Bonds Monday night off was Intermission time in this vaudeville revue. It allowed him to hit Number 756 on Tuesday, against the Washington Nationals, in the only ballpark in all of America where Bonds' 756th would be greeted with confetti and cheering instead of catcalls and trash: AT&T Park in San Francisco. There's no doubt in my mind that Bonds would have gone along with this, since he thinks he should be greeted with showers of confetti everywhere he goes anyway.

Roger Maris did not deserve the asterisk he got in the record books when he broke Ruth's 60-home-runs-in-one-season record in 1961. That was Commissioner Ford Frick, a big fan of the Bambino, being a poor sport. So what if Maris played a 162-game schedule instead of Ruth's 154? Everyone was playing that same schedule and no one else made a genuine run at Ruth's record that year, not even Maris' injury-plagued teammate Mickey Mantle. The point is, Maris did what he did without any chemical help outside of the cigarettes he was always puffing to calm his frazzled nerves. Bonds deserves an asterisk the size of a frisbee. But don't kid yourself. Even if he's found guilty of perjury regarding the steroid scandal, he won't get an asterisk. He probably won't even get a slap on the wrist. The lily-livered Lords of Baseball aren't going to kill the goose that juiced himself into laying golden eggs.

The classiest, most laudable gesture made by any media outlet this summer regarding Bonds and his new "record" was made by Sports Illustrated magazine, which I don't normally read. You've heard of damning with faint praise? SI had the courage to damn the Bonds travesty not with faint praise, but with praise directed where it should have gone. Late in July, as Bonds approached the big number, SI ran a cover story ... about Henry Aaron. "The Heart of 755," the cover proclaimed, with a photo of Aaron during his salad days as a player. I bought that issue as a gesture of solidarity with those who value fair play and honesty in sports, two commodities in rare supply these days. I read that Aaron didn't want to speak to Bonds especially, and that Commissioner Selig, while obliged to publicly acknowledge Bonds' quest, was more-or-less keeping his royal distance from the tainted slugger.

I won't make a secret of it: I don't like Barry Bonds. His whole life has been something of a baseball fairy tale. Son of Bobby Bonds, godson of Willie Mays; yes, it would appear that the angels, bearing hickory and horsehide, appeared at his cradle. It does seem to have been written in the stars on the day he was born that Bonds would be a force in baseball. The fates just seemed to like him somehow. Which makes it that much more unconscionable that he should have become the archetypal sports prima donna, the haughty, self-absorbed, arrogant, pampered, overpaid, whining brat that the public increasingly identifies (and incredibly, continues to reward) with professional sports. Bonds has even mastered that familiar Bill Clinton trick of making himself out to be the poor little victim of his mean old persecutors. Yeah, I feel real sorry for poor, misunderstood Barry Bonds, don't you? I never cried my eyes out so thoroughly for a spoiled-rotten multi-millionaire in my life. It's galling enough that we watch him go to the plate as artificially bulked-up as Lou Ferrigno in the old Incredible Hulk TV series. Let's also remember that Babe Ruth didn't even wear a helmet when he batted, while Bonds steps up to bat wearing so much body armor he looks like a member of a SWAT team. Nit-picking? No. His being that armored-up takes the inside of the plate away from the pitcher to begin with, giving Bonds an enormous, some would say (pitchers, for instance) unfair advantage. And we're supposed to take this guy's home run record seriously?

If there's a bright spot in all of this, it's that baseball players only get into the Hall of Fame if they're voted there by the sportswriters. Bonds has been so consistently hateful to the press that he's going to have a problem getting into the Hall of Fame before every sportswriter he's ever been nasty to has retired. May they all have the longevity -- and the memories -- of Shirley Povich.

Bring on the next Henry Aaron, should our children's children do anything to deserve him.

As for Barry Bonds, never mind the sports media that he's always whining about. Bring on the sharks.

Can we have a legal limit to the show, dear?

I’ve been humming the tunes from Camelot all weekend.

I ordered tickets yesterday for my wife Valerie and me to see a new production of Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical, starring Michael York, which is coming to Wolf Trap in about two weeks. Moving back to Washington, D.C. at the worst possible time of year, the beginning of the hot, sticky D.C. summer, I figured we might just as well make the best of it and avail ourselves of some of the cultural offerings of the nation’s capital by way of a consolation prize, a reminder that, if one must endure the steambath of June, July and August in the mid-Atlantic region, (after the delightful, mountainous dryness of Spokane, Washington) well, there are at least Washington’s famous theaters, museums, restaurants and venues for musical performance. And Wolf Trap is an outdoor amphitheater. There might even be a breeze!

Camelot is a perennial favorite of mine. I was much too young for its original Broadway run, which coincided nearly day-for-day with the John F. Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, and which has come to be identified with it partly for that reason. The media have been referring to the Kennedy years as “Camelot” ever since. The show opened on Dec. 3, 1960 and ran for 873 performances, closing shortly after Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. For me these were the years of kindergarten through third grade. But I’ve always been a fan of Richard Burton’s, and many years ago I had a girlfriend who owned the soundtrack album from the show. Of course I saw the disappointing film version with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. I have the CD of the Broadway production and sometimes listen to it in my car.

But there's more to the association of this show with the Kennedy years than chronological congruence. Camelot, adapted from T.H. White's The Once and Future King, centers around dashing, handsome, mythical King Arthur and his unutterably gorgeous bride, Queen Guinevere. Their doomed love, (by the show’s end Guinevere has run off with Lancelot) a metaphor for the kingdom of Camelot itself, is referred to as “one brief, shining moment” in the show’s lyrics. Also, it was reported that Kennedy himself was fond of the original cast recording, often playing it at the White House. The leap was easy: for decades now, we have been been told repeatedly that the Kennedy years were similarly “one brief, shining moment,” with JFK and his unutterably gorgeous bride Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy as the real-life embodiments of Arthur and Guinevere, etc.

And, coincidentally, just as I’m ordering tickets for a revival of this show here in Washington, TIME magazine is presenting us with a cover story, What We Can Learn From JFK. The cover of the magazine features that famous portrait of JFK that has been paraded before the public’s eyes on a regular basis ever since I was eight years old. (And no, I’m not going to share a reminiscence about where I was when I got the news of his murder in Dallas. Every American over the age of 50 does that.)

TIME, the official newsletter of the Upper-West-Side lefties and of course an acolytic keeper-of-the-flame in the JFK hagiography business, dedicated this week’s issue to a sermon about how today’s politicians could learn from all the wonderful things JFK did, which, if you’re churlish enough to actually examine the record, don’t really amount to much. But he was good-looking, died young and said the correct things about civil rights often enough that there has been an ongoing attempt to obfuscate the facts around his assassination and make him a martyr of the Civil Rights movement, even though the evidence that he was killed by a lone Communist in protest over his policy toward Cuba is overwhelming. (And by the way, Kennedy's vaunted civil rights legislation actually got nowhere during “Camelot” and had to be pushed through Congress later by the cloddish, decidedly un-glamorous Lyndon Johnson.) Still, if you have good looks, youth and a legend going for you, your posthumous reputation is not only going to be protected, but it and your grave will be kept clean one way or another, no matter how many dark revelations about your real past and true character the media have to ignore. So TIME lectures us this week, as it has been doing since 1963, about how wonderful JFK was and what a wonderful world this would be if he were running it.

Stuff n’ nonsense, I say. And it sure would be nice if we could move on from all of this. Every year since the 1960s ended, (and the 1960s ended in 1973 with Watergate) the crowd of mourners who show up at the Eternal Flame in Arlington Cemetery every 22nd of November has dwindled, and as long ago as 1995, NPR marked the occasion with a report that included an interesting statistic: most Americans alive in 1995 had not yet been born in 1963. To them the JFK years were as remote as the Harding Administration to the rest of us. And that was 12 years ago. Can we move on?

Not bloody likely, I’m sorry to say. Not until the last baby boomer is in his/her grave. Because by now this is as much about nostalgia as it is about anything else. On November 22, 1963, the people who now run TIME magazine were earnest adolescents clutching their copies of Peter, Paul and Mary's In The Wind or Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' when they weren't tuning in Top 40 radio to hear the Crystals singing Da Doo Ron Ron or The Chiffons doing He's So Fine . They were worried about social injustice then. Now they’re worried about colonoscopies. They dreamed about world peace then. Now they dream about paying off their own kids’ college loans. At this stage of the game, Kennedy-olatry is all about the good old days, the days when we all wore our hair long, attended Joan Baez and Lou Reed concerts, flipped the peace sign at each other and sipped brews as we smoked pot, not the Metamucil we sip now. The Kennedy years were the wonderful old days when we were young, strong, healthy and full of future. The George W. Bush years are the years of our dotage, which is just one more reason to hate George W. Bush.

Can we can the ‘60s nostalgia? Can we put away the tie-dyed T-shirts, the lava lights, the Procol Harum LPs and the cannabis posters? Because the ‘60s really weren’t such a great period, in all honesty. Even the supposed radicalism of that decade was largely a veneer. Here’s a fact (look it up): in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the summer riots at the Chicago Democratic convention, the top-rated program on American television was…The Beverly Hillbillies. Even Bob Dylan says he doesn’t like to think about the ‘60s. Grow old gracefully, you fools. And quit telling us (after 44 years) that John F. Kennedy was some combination of Jesus Christ, Santa Claus, Mahatma Gandhi and Elvis. We know better. Even if you don’t. (And by the way, if Kennedy were still alive, he’d be turning 89 this year. No longer a movie star, and way past When I’m 64.) Got it? Okay?

Now excuse me, I have two orchestra seats for Camelot.