Schadenfreude 101

Last week I violated one of my own blog rules: I wrote on a political subject.

Usually I avoid politics like I avoid boiled cauliflower, but I think one and all would agree that this political season has been just too entertaining to pass up. I never paid any attention to the primaries before, did you? But this primary season has been more exciting than some general-election seasons I've known.

On the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton's campaign is starting to look like Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937.

For those out there whose knowledge of history extends back no further than the Monica Lewinsky scandal (that would be everyone in the country under 35) I'm referring to the day the Hindenberg went down.

Just six or seven months ago, Hillary was using expressions like "When I'm president." On the front page of yesterday's Washington Times, at a campaign rally in Texas, there was a picture of her looking much less cocksure. In fact she has the expression on her face of a poker player who's just laid the deed to her house on the table because it's all she has left to bet with, and suspects her opponent has drawn to an inside straight.

Obama. A skinny, smiling newbie no one had heard of a year ago, is outmaneuvering the savvy and ruthless Team Clinton. Who'da thunk it?

The GOP side has been scarcely less interesting. Last summer, Rudy Giuliani was the undisputed front-runner for the Republican nomination, while John McCain's campaign was wheezing on its deathbed, unable to raise two nickels.

Now Giuliani's gone, and McCain's gained so much momentum that the New York Times, the official newsletter of the Democratic Party, has gotten frightened enough to try a sleazy sex-scandal hatchet job on him. Meanwhile McCain's only remaining challenger, Mike Huckabee, reminds me of no one quite so much as Tex Cobb when he fought Larry Holmes, staying on his feet only because he was too stupid to fall down.

My friend Jim Provenza and I never argue. We've known each other for 41 years and counting, and I think the last argument we had was when we were in the sixth grade. How long ago was that? Lyndon Baines Johnson was president, that's how long. (For you under-35s, LBJ ((1908-1973))was President of the United States from 1963 to 1968, and no, that wasn't before Pearl Harbor. Oh, sorry. Pearl Harbor was when the Japanese attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941, drawing the U.S. into World War II...oh, what's the use? Go back to watching VH1, you morons.)

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. Jim and I never argue. That might be surprising to some, because Jim is an ardent liberal and I'm just as ardent a conservative, and we're living in an age in which political discussion is routinely conducted on the level of, "I hope you get cancer and die, you low-life, scum-sucking piece of dog vomit!" God bless the anonymity of the Internet, huh? But Jim and I pre-date the Internet by quite a few years, and our political conversations are always affable. I think we've gotten to the point where we know we disagree, so we just shake hands and take it from there. Also there's no anonymity here. You don't call someone you love like a brother, someone who stood up as best man at your wedding, someone who sat next to you at your mother's funeral, a low-life scum-sucking piece of dog vomit.I'll leave that to the VH1 crowd, who by the way couldn't write that nasty sentence without misspelling at least three words.

Jim and I have been having some very interesting e-mail exchanges this winter, precisely because this political season has been such a roller derby. Jim likes Obama. I liked Giuliani; since he dropped out I've become more of an observer than a participant. I might vote for McCain, but only because I think there just might be an outside chance that he might make Rudy G. attorney general or homeland security czar, giving Rudy a leg-up to run again in 2012, when McCain, if he becomes president, will be 75 and I would hope ready to step down.

Our discussions have been even more affable than usual, Jim's and mine, because Jim just happens to be one of those Democrats who is sick to death of the Clintons and wants to see them gone. Needless to say, I've always loathed the Clintons. Giuliani had a reputation for being a relatively liberal Republican, so Jim, if he had any objections to Rudy, soft-pedaled them in his discussions with me.

And on my side, Jim's enthusiasm for Obama has provoked little objection for the screamingly obvious reason I just mentioned. I loathe the Clintons.

We conservatives are in a very odd position indeed this year, as baseball spring training gets started and we begin making plans for St. Patrick's Day. It's generally conceded on the center-right, where I stand, that if the general election were held tomorrow, John McCain would have a much better chance of beating Hillary than he would of beating Obama.

But somehow that's not enough to make most of us hope she pulls out of her nose-dive and grabs the nomination. There's just too much finger-licking schadenfreude in watching Barack Obama bring down the Clinton Zeppelin.

Don't get me wrong; I think Barack Obama would make a terrible president. He'd be another Jimmy Carter, the worst president of the 20th century. Totally, utterly useless. So far Obama has given me no reason to feel otherwise. His whole campaign so far has been like a concert of the old seventies rock band Kiss. Take away the dry ice, the flashing lights and the wild costumes and there wasn't much to Kiss -- they were just another bar band.

By the same token, once you get past all the generalities about hope and audacity, there isn't much to Obama except his grin. On policy matters, (and you have to look at the record because his speeches don't say anything) Obama is just another old-style lefty-liberal, not much different from Hillary herself. He promises the same snake-oil that the Democrats have been selling since Vietnam, to wit:

1. Government is good and free-market capitalism is evil.

2. The best military strategy is surrender.

3. Creators of wealth are bad, greedy people. It is the right and proper function of government to confiscate and redistribute wealth to whoever government decides should have it.

4. America is a bad, racist, imperialist country guilty of little but crimes against humanity, and therefore has no right to criticize Fidel Castro's or anyone else's regime. All of the world's problems are bad old America's fault.

If these are your core beliefs, Obama is your guy. Or Hillary.

But these are not my core beliefs. For one thing, I can't help but keep asking myself this question: if America is such an evil, racist, imperialist, homophobic, misogynist, ageist, able-ist, species-ist, intelligence-ist nightmare of horrific oppression, why does so much of the world keep trying to come live here, sometimes at the risk of its life? I don't recall anyone ever risking his or her life to get into Castro's Cuba, (although plenty of Hollywood celebrities have made the arduous, dangerous journey there on private jets to kiss Castro's ass) but I can recall plenty of people risking their lives to get out of Castro's Cuba. I repeat: if America is as evil as both Hillary and Obama's more glamorous supporters assure us it is, (while balancing glasses of Pinot Grigio in their hands and slices of brie on their paper plates) why do so many people want to come live here?

No answer. I thought so.

Still, as I've said to Jim more than once this winter, given the choice of spending the next four years looking at Barack Obama and spending them looking at Hillary Clinton, there's no choice. Give me Obama. And the bottom line is, I suppose, that if I have to look, day after day after day, at the smiling mug of some politician, I much prefer his smile to hers.

Okay, well, if we're going to have a campaign that's all style and no substance, we might as well be honest about the particulars: this one comes down to smiles. He smiles like one of your lodge brothers serving up pancakes at a Rotary Club breakfast. She smiles like Bela Lugosi looking at somebody's jugular vein. I wrote to Jim just last week that if Obama didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Why? Because it's bad enough that Bill and Hillary Clinton think they're entitled to anything they want. They have also, up until now, seemed to assume that getting anything they want should also be easy. That's too much. That's intolerable.

Give her what-for, Barry. Wipe the smirk off that vampire's face. We'll worry about your vision of turning America into Sweden later.

I may not be lovin' this, but I'm sure as hell likin' it.

Oh, before I forget. For you under-35's, schadenfreude is a German word meaning "taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others."

German. That's the language they speak in Germany, which is a country in Europe, which on the map is that big thing on the right side of the Atlantic with a thing sticking out the bottom that looks like a boot. Got it?

Huh boy.

Hillary & Barack: opera or boxing?

Back in the 1970s there was a commercial for a brand of audiotape that asked the consumer, "Is It Live, Or Is It Memorex?"

I usually steer clear of politics on this blog, outside of occasionally mentioning a political figure in the context of a cultural discussion, e.g. "I suspect that the current vogue in academia for atheism has something to do with President Bush. He's an evangelical Christian, and he's widely hated among the leather-elbow crowd. Therefore it is just possible that there's a connection between Bush-hatred and the current vogue for atheism."

This stepping-around political issues is probably the main reason that my excellent, thought-provoking and in general wonderfully-written blog has practically no readers. These days if you're not screaming "racist!" "homophobe!" "fascist!" "misogynist!" " or "poo-poo head!" at somebody, you don't get much attention.

And I'm not about to start doing that now. But at long last I think I have finally found a political question that it's worth my time to ask:

Just who the heck is Barack Obama, anyway? (And is he LIVE? Or is he Memorex? Somehow that question from the dark days of the 1970s is echoing through the hallways of media coverage these days.)

Because more and more people, including media people, are asking the first of those questions, and maybe the second as well. A year ago there were only two political questions on the table in the United States: how soon would She have the nomination locked up and who could the Republicans possibly come up with who might challenge Her Inevitableness?

Okay, I'm putting it on the table. I was a Giuliani man, primarily because I was convinced more than a year ago that only Rudy G. could save us from a fate worse than disco: eight more years of looking at....(insert picture here of myself smelling cauliflower cooking) Her, which, if anyone still doubts it, meant THEM.

Well, now Giuliani's out of the race, but surprise, it looks like this junior upstart from Illinois might do it for us instead. He's now leading slightly in delegate count, and although that doesn't necessarily make him into her as regards the quality of Inevitableness, it does throw things into a new shade of afternoon light, doesn't it? Even James Carville, the Clintons' pet attack hound, whose teeth it required the Jaws of Life to remove from the rear end of more than one Clinton critic during the 1990s, is now saying that if she doesn't win both Texas and Ohio on March 4, well, she can go home and start learning how to bake those cookies she was always so proud of not knowing how to bake. (I bake great cookies, by the way.)

Incidentally, apropos of Hillary and that cheeky whippersnapper who seeks to deny her what she clearly thinks is her rightful entitlement, "the ultimate alimony," as one pundit called it, I have a sports metaphor to invoke, and I'm surprised no one else has.

Don't these two, all of a sudden, remind you a bit of Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston? That is, if you're old enough to remember Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston.

For those of you who aren't...It was 1964, and Ali, still named Cassius Clay at that juncture, was getting his first shot at the world heavyweight boxing title against Liston, who in turn had won it by dethroning Floyd Patterson in 1962. Liston was a much-feared hard-puncher, heavily favored to win when he climbed into the ring with the brash young loudmouth (who later evolved into a brash, somewhat older loudmouth) who had won the Olympic gold medal for boxing in Rome four years earlier.

What followed was the beginning of a new era in boxing. Ali vanquished Liston, then did it a second time a few months later, and that was the end of Liston. But what astonished everyone was how he did it. Liston could punch like a Sherman tank. Ali couldn't. What he did instead was live up to his motto, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." Ali danced and jabbed, danced and jabbed, as we would get so used to seeing him do in years to come, and in short order Liston was on the mat with Clay-Ali standing over him yelling (for the cameras) "Get up!" That was the touch of genius that augmented Ali's talent in the ring: he was the first prizefighter in history with a sense of the theater. Putting on a show came naturally to him, as anyone who rolled their eyeballs through the 1960s will remember.

Ali never punched hard; he couldn't. Ali wasn't a power-puncher of the Sonny Liston-Rocky Marciano-Joe Frazier type. What he did instead was drive his opponents crazy, wear them down and get them tired, dancing around just of out their reach, flicking jabs at their heads with arms that seemed to be about eight feet long. Usually it worked. Sometimes it didn't. On two occasions Ali met men tough enough to "get inside," and they both beat him because they could hit harder. Joe Frazier knocked him on his butt in 1971. My fellow San Diegan Ken Norton broke his jaw two years later.

Well, this winter it seems to me that Barack Obama is playing Muhammad Ali to Hillary Clinton's Sonny Liston. She clearly has hard-hitting power behind her; until recently she had the ability to raise a football stadium full of cash by snapping her fingers, for one thing. And until the strategy backfired, she was keeping her hands clean by sending her husband out to do the attack-dog work on those in her way. And let's face it, she's Hillary. Inside the Beltway that's like saying, well, like saying "Sonny Liston" in the boxing circles of 1963.

So who is she up against? A light puncher who charms audiences with his good looks and audacity. Sound familiar? This has to be making her bonkers. As another talking head put it recently, what was supposed to be a stately march to the coronation has turned into a high-school election between the hardest-working girl and the coolest guy. There aren't enough policy differences between them to make a good fight: they're both basically old-fashioned tax-hiking liberals more interested in expanding the welfare state than in protecting our borders or our bodies from whoever might be out there shopping for C-4 and bazooka parts on the Internet.

And Obama, like a smart boxer toying with a dangerous opponent whose weakness he has managed to find, is taking full advantage of that. All he has to do is AVOID substance, and what can Hillary do? They're both lawyers, but she's much more of a policy wonk (I always hated that term) than he is. He knows that. So he's conducting a campaign, at least so far, that's the equivalent of Ali's dance-and-jab style, by which I mean it's a whole lot of flash and not much substance, and I'm certainly not the first to notice this. Pundits on the right and even on the left are pointing it out every day lately.

Obama's shtick thus far has been more rock and roll tour than presidential campaign. He shows up, the crowd goes wild, he performs his general-term spiel about hope and change and the future, the crowd goes wild again and he's on his way to the next venue. It's like he put together his campaign playbook watching old films of Up With People. (They actually came to my high school once. I ran and hid.) Even far-left bloviators like the New York Times' Paul Krugman are beginning to feel a little ooky about this. Krugman recently commented that the Obama campaign was "dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality."

Well, maybe. But at this point we're still talking more Hannah Montana than Kim Il Sung.

Still, the questions lead to other questions. Like, underneath all of that hope for the future and the engaging smile and the books he's written about his struggles and so forth, who are we dealing with here? I'm sure Hillary would like to know.

Once, after seeing Wagner's Lohengrin at the San Francisco Opera, I remarked to my companion that evening that the piece could have been subtitled What Do We Really Know About This Guy?

In Lohengrin, a young German maiden, Elsa von Brabant, has been accused of murdering her younger brother, the evidence against her being simply that he has vanished. Actually, he's been turned into a bird. (Don't ask.) And by the way the story takes place in 10th-century Germany, pre-habeus corpus. This being the Middle Ages, such questions could be settled by combat, and a hero promptly appears from nowhere to fight for Elsa's innocence. His name is Lohengrin, and he arrives in a rowboat towed by a swan. (Again, don't ask. It's opera.)

Cut to the chase. Lohengrin engages in some swordplay with Elsa's chief accuser and beats him, thus establishing Elsa's innocence according to the level of evidence required by 10th century German justice. (A similar level would be applied years later to O.J. Simpson.) There's great rejoicing and, this being an opera, Elsa and Lohengrin immediately fall in love and get married. He admonishes her of only one thing: she must never ask anything about his past or where he comes from.

The rest of the plot involves the bad guys (Elsa's chief accuser Telramund and his equally slimy wife Ortrud) scheming to get Elsa to break her vow and ask Lohengrin the fateful question about who he really is.

To switch from boxing metaphors to opera metaphors, (just to dazzle one and all with the breadth of my erudition -- come on, you're impressed, admit it) Hillary, if she wants to stay alive, (and believe me, no one ever wanted that more, probably in all of history) has to quit playing Sonny Liston to Obama's Muhammad Ali and start playing Ortrud to his Lohengrin. I know she's perfectly capable of playing this role. Indeed, if there's one role in all of opera, outside of the female lead in Verdi's Macbeth, that I would consider tailor-made for Her No-Longer-Quite-So-Inevitableness, it would be that of Ortrud in Lohengrin.

A helpful hint for Hillary: Ortrud started out by working on Elsa. Maybe you should invite Michelle Obama over for a friendly game of...oh, I don't know. Maybe you could show her a few tricks, you know, like how to make a poisoned apple, or how to turn kids into aardvarks. Well, I'm sure you'll think of something. In fact I'm sure you already have.

Take me out to the ballgame, where my enemy's enemy is my friend...

You know the old saw about politics making strange bedfellows?

Well, forget about politics. When it comes to strange bedfellows, politics are as nothing compared with baseball.

The MLB Countdown To Spring Training clock is ticking merrily away, and we're down to three days and some-odd hours before those magic words that we fans so love to repeat to each other in the iron-gray chill of bleak midwinter become reality: "Pitchers and catchers report!"

They report this coming Wednesday, the Grapefruit League (eastern U.S.) to Florida and the Cactus League (western states) to Arizona. We fans are already in a dither. The Mets have acquired Johan Santana! Will Manny Ramirez stay with the Red Sox after 2008? Check the sports page, quick...Did the Padres reach an agreement with Kahlil Greene?

Will the respective sorry asses of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens end up in jail for lying about steroids?

All of that aside, it's the time of year when we're all checking our team web sites and picking out season ticket packages, or just picking out the individual games we might try and make it to over the long, glorious summer.

I'm a San Diego Padres fan, and I live in Washington, D.C. Now where does that leave me? The Friars don't have a game scheduled against the Nationals in Washington until September. I can go to that, but what do I do in the meantime? Yeah, sure, I watch games on ESPN and Fox and all that jazz, and I follow the day-to-day stuff on the Internet. But I don't want to wait until September to go out to the brand-spanking-new ballpark that's about to open here in the nation's capital. So I have to pick which Nationals games might interest me enough to attend. After all, it's not much fun paying to go to the ballpark if which team wins is a matter of complete indifference to you.

And that's the subject of today's post: the shifting sands of baseball loyalty.

This is where logic twists and turns like the L.A. freeway system.

Let's look at the schedule. I see that the Baltimore Orioles will be here for interleague play at the end of June. Now, I understand the whole rationale for that interleague idiocy (the official story, anyway) was to create "regional rivalries." Yeah, right, like there's ever going to be a "regional rivalry" between the Seattle Mariners and the Los Angeles Dodgers. That interleague crap was cooked up so that the owners, respectively, of the Yankees, Mets, Cubs, White Sox, Giants, A's, Dodgers and Angels can line their pockets scheduling "crosstown" games between the American and National League teams in those large markets. Period. Greed and cynicism, the most honored and venerable of all baseball traditions.

But the Washington Nationals vs. The Baltimore Orioles? There you have a "regional rivalry" that might actually fly. The presence of the Orioles in Baltimore has long been one of the few things Baltimoreans could point to, aside from crabs and the Inner Harbor, that makes their city actually cooler than D.C. Now D.C. has baseball, so it's a question of kid brother swinging at big brother. And since the Orioles have truly stunk for the last season or two, the matchup might actually yield some suspense.

So who do I root for when I go to see the Nats play the birds?

That's actually a toughie. I lived in Baltimore for a while, and though I never became an O's fan, my heart actually inclines more toward Charm City than the Swamp On The Potomac. Of the two cities, I really prefer Baltimore.

On the other hand, the Orioles' owner, Peter Angelos, is generally adjudged to be the biggest son-of-a-bitch in all of professional sports. He fought like hell to keep the Nationals out of Washington, on the perfectly reasonable assumption that all territory within a 100-mile radius of Baltimore was his personal ranch, you know, like John Wayne in Red River grabbing a chunk of Texas and chasing everyone else off it. Major League Baseball had to bribe Angelos to quit bucking the deal that finally brought big league ball back to Washington after an absence of 34 years.

Decision: Nationals. I root for the home team. When the game's over I'll take my wife to Baltimore for a romantic dinner and a stroll around Camden Yards.

How many times over my life as a baseball fan have I grappled with the question of which side to root for in a game in which my team isn't actually playing? Plenty. When my Dad was alive, he and I danced around this mulberry bush through plenty of World Series contests, since the Padres, in nearly 40 years as an MLB franchise, have gone to the Series exactly twice, and lost both times.

Now, there is a small handful of teams for which I harbor a special hatred or a special liking, so the choice is easier. Cardinals: thumbs-up, thanks to such great players as Stan Musial, Curt Flood and Bob Gibson. Braves: thumbs-down, if only for having the unmitigated gall to think that being broadcast on a Superstation makes them "America's Team." Yankees: thumbs-down, always. I think the Yankees' team motto is "Commitment to Excellence," whereas it ought to be, "We're entitled to win every year because we play in the largest media market and have more money than the gross national product of most Third World countries." Red Sox: thumbs-up (especially if they're playing the Yankees.) Yeah, I know they're a big-budget team too, but somehow they wear it better. This rivalry divides America like Republicans vs. Democrats, and no, I am not going to stretch that simile any further.

Here are just a few samples of baseball contests in which my loyalty was decided by something other than pure team loyalty: (to keep things simple, I'll restrict myself to the World Series):

1986: New York Mets vs. Boston Red Sox. I was for the Red Sox, because the media had already declared the Mets to be World Champions on Opening Day.

1989: San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland A's. I was for the earthquake.

1990: Cincinnati Reds vs. Oakland A's. Dad and I rooted for the Reds, who won. Why? Because Jose Canseco played for the A's, (see 1989, above) and he was just about the most obnoxious, howitzer-mouthed butthead in all sports that year. There was also the fact that in 1990, based on Oakland's appearing in its third Series in a row, the media were hollering "dynasty." Yeah, that was some dynasty all right. They lost in '88, won in '89, lost in '90 and haven't been heard from since.

1992: Toronto Blue Jays vs. Atlanta Braves. Dad and I rooted solidly for the Jays. This was easy: I hated Ted Turner and Dad hated Jane Fonda.

1995: Cleveland Indians vs. Atlanta Braves. I rooted for the Indians because (a) They hadn't won a series since 1948 and (b) See "Ted Turner," above.

2000: New York Mets vs. New York Yankees. I turned the TV off.

2001: Arizona Diamondbacks vs. New York Yankees. As a Padres fan I'm not inclined to root for Arizona at any time, but look who they were playing. Let's just say that when Luis Gonzales got that little walk-off bloop hit in Game 7 that sent the Pinstripes home in tears, I was pleased enough to light a cigar.

2002: San Francisco Giants vs. Anaheim Angels. I was for the Angels. In any game involving Barry Bonds, I'm going to be for the other team. (See you in horizontal stripes, Barry.)

2005: Chicago White Sox vs. Houston Astros. My Dad had just died, so I wasn't too interested in this one, but I enjoyed seeing the White Sox win, if only because they hadn't won a Series since Woodrow Wilson was President. (Also, when I think of a benighted swamp as a place to live, Washington, D.C. comes first, with Houston a close second. And the Astrodome was in SUCH poor taste!)

Okay, let's get everyone on those planes for Arizona and Florida! After all, we can't start playing the game of miasmic loyalties until there's actually something to watch. Play ball!

A Valentine for V-Day

No, this is not going to one of those rants about how the Valentine's Day decorations go up at the CVS Pharmacy before the New Year's toasts have even been made, the Whitman's Samplers nudging aside the chocolate Santas before most people have even had a chance to throw away the Christmas wrapping paper.

But the annual celebration of hearts and flowers is just about upon us again, and as a B-list blogger (okay, B minus) I would be truly remiss if I were to let the romantic holiday pass without shooting off my mouth at least a little bit about it.

For one thing, would someone tell me when in the heck this thing became "V-Day" rather than "Valentine's Day?" Don't tell me some officious doofus decided that saying "Valentine" might offend some professional victimhood group. And by the way, so what if it does? I'm sick to death of professional victimhood groups. Let 'em eat chocolate Santas. "V-day" is like calling Thanksgiving "Turkey Day." In fact it's worse. Everyone in the USA associates Thanksgiving with turkey, but what the hell does "V" have to do with anything? It sounds like we're celebrating a novel by Thomas Pynchon, or the end of World War II, or worse yet, that idiotic movie that came out two or three years ago in which some guy wearing a getup that made him look like a cross between Zorro and Batman's Joker ran around blowing up things.

Okay, now that I have that off my plate, I do have one rather sage, if I do say so myself, sentiment to offer in this season, which comes too quickly on the heels of the one we just finished cleaning up the mess from.

Actually, before I get to that, I have one thing I want to say to all you women out there: appreciate how tough this is for us guys. No, no, it's not what you're thinking. It's not that we have trouble telling you we love you. What we have a hard time doing is coming up with original ways to express it on a day that's set aside especially for that. Ways that won't have all of you rolling your eyeballs and saying, "Not another bottle of Chanel No. 5! You give me that every year! Can we at least make it Chanel No. 6 for a change?"

At Christmas time, we don't have any such problems. We're bombarded from all directions with gift ideas from merchants trying to sell everything from lingerie to snowmobiles. Department stores even have special booths set up where you can go and seek gift suggestions. Come Valentine's Day, we're on our own. Candy, roses, perfume, a dinner out, a bracelet or maybe a new watch ... Okay, I'm out of ideas. Most of us are at that point. Valentine's Day is tough. I don't think my wife Valerie wants a snowmobile, but I can't think of a blessed thing to give her for Valentine's Day that I haven't given her before. I do have a little surprise planned, don't worry about that. But I still have to come up with a gift. Suggestions, anyone? And DON'T say, "Cook her a meal." I do nearly all the cooking at our house already.

Okay, here's my pearl of wisdom for Valentine's Day this year. And it is a pearl of wisdom, if you define such things as insights that result from great pain and difficulty, truths that emerge from the fog of day-to-day life only after one has gained a view sufficiently panoramic to distinguish the mountains from the hills.

It's simply this: I don't know how happy or unhappy you are in this joyous month of February. Some people find February profoundly depressing. But consider: if the biggest problem you have right now is one related to your love life, then I'd say you actually have it pretty good. This is one of the hardest lessons life has ever taught me, and I mean to share it. If you just got dumped, or you have no date for the big day, and that's all that's bothering you, don't let it. Much, anyway. I know precisely how you feel. I've been dumped. Who hasn't? In fact I'll get brutally honest here and tell you that I've been dumped plenty of times. In fact I'll be even more brutally honest and tell you that more women have dumped me than I've dumped them.

Let's see you beat that on the humble meter.

But consider once again. If a broken heart or a lonely heart is your biggest problem of the moment, think about all the things that probably aren't happening to you. You're not being investigated by the IRS. Your doctor didn't just tell you that there's a suspicious dark spot on your X-ray. You're not five and a half months unemployed, with no prospects, and standing next to the mailbox holding your final unemployment check. (There's a place I've been.) You aren't mourning the death of a loved one. (One year I got dumped by a girl named Diane, and then my mother died. Believe me, of the two experiences, losing my mother was by far the worse.) You aren't sleeping on a steam grate somewhere, using newspapers for blankets.

You get my point. Near the end of Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam, the ghost of Humphrey Bogart, who has been doling out romantic advice to Woody Allen's schlemiel character throughout the picture, finally puts things in perspective: "The world is full of dames," he says, "but there are more important things than dames."

If you have a sweetie, do something for them on the 14th. If you don't, go do something for somebody else. Or for yourself, if it comes to that. Once, upon being told by my pal Charlie, who lived alone in New York, that he had not been invited anywhere for Thanksgiving, I asked what he would do with the day.

I've never forgotten his reply. It was downright inspiring.

"Oh, I'll do something that makes my soul feel good," he said.

Words to live by. To love by, too.