Go, Raul, Go

Fidel Castro wasn't just a lousy human being. He was a lousy ruler. Cuba went to hell under his "leadership." Michael Moore went down there to slobber all over him because his government provided a modicum of "free health care," but I'll bet Old Fat Stuff never got too close a look inside a Cuban hospital. Lousy service was a hallmark of communism, and I know what I'm talking about because I got a glimpse of its legacy, and not while being squired around by government stooges carefully managing what I saw, as I'm sure was the case with old "Krispy Kreme" Moore. Once, when serving at the American embassy in Moscow a short time after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I went to the hospital to visit a Russian friend. My pal Sasha had gone in for surgery to have a hemorrhoid fixed. I imagined him lying around with nothing to do but look at the ceiling, so I went to see him and by the way took along a little radio I had to lend him, so he'd at least have something to listen to while lying around.

Here I was seeing a snapshot of what was left of the famous Soviet "free health care." The wallpaper was dirty. I saw a cockroach near the elevator. Sasha's roommate was a man clearly moribund. ("He's a goner," Sasha remarked) The man was lying in his not-too-clean bed, wheezing out his last breaths. There was no oxygen, no IV, no ICU for him. Just a guy alone in a bed in a corner, dying.

This is the kind of "free health care" I would wish on Michael Moore.

But back to Cuba. Free shitty health care aside, check out the rest of the pretty picture. No automobiles from later than 1959 on the roads. Jails full of souls locked up for daring to say anything critical of "Fidel." Crumbling infrastructure. Crumbling buildings. Havana was once one of the most beautiful cities in the western hemisphere. Castro turned it into a mass testing ground for blight.

But now his younger brother is in charge. Don't get me wrong, I'm not cheerleading for this guy. Cuba is still a dictatorship. But, as National Review magazine recently put it, if Cuba can move from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian one, well, at least that's a step in the right direction. Better to imitate China than North Korea if you must wrongheadedly cling to mouthing Marxism.

So I've been reading little things in the paper. Cubans can have cell phones now. They can shop in stores formerly open only to foreigners. Farmers can acquire partial ownership of the land they till, and former government employees can bequeath land to their heirs. Raul Castro is gradually instituting a laundry list of these "little reforms," no doubt aimed at increasing foreign trade and investment. Fair enough.

I have a personal stake in all of this. Some of us cigar aficionados are whispering among ourselves words to the effect that if Raul loosens things up in Cuba sufficiently, perhaps the nearly-50-year-old U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba might be lifted. And we'd be able to get Cuban cigars. Legally, not by having a friend go down and buy them in Tijuana, then smuggle them past Customs by stuffing them into the bottom of a bag of dirty laundry in the trunk of his car.

But there's a problem here, too. Among the many things Fidel Castro managed to wreck with his big, fat collectivist fingers was that very legendary Cuban cigar industry that for so many years defined the island nation in the eyes of the world as surely as there are Swiss watches, French cheese and Colombian coffee. During Fidel's enlightened rule, a lot of Cuban farmland that had been dedicated to the cultivation of cigar tobacco was converted to sugar cane cultivation. (We sixties kids remember our muddle-headed older brothers and sisters, the love-beads-and-thrush crowd, idealistically traveling to Cuba to "help with the sugar cane harvest," thinking they were doing their bit for The Revolution. Today they live in Fairfax or Montgomery County, drive Volvos and bore their friends to death with talk about their carbon footprints.)

The sugar cane industry set Cuban cigars back a good many years, because even when some of that land was re-planted with tobacco, it nevertheless takes years for the residual chemicals from sugar-cane farming to leach out of the soil, and those chemicals adversely affect cigar tobacco just as surely as putting a fine Pinot Noir in the refrigerator will render it worthy of the kitchen drain and not much else.

A cigar-industry pundit put it quite bluntly about 25 years ago: "Let's get this in perspective. The Cubans made some great cigars and they also made a lot of crap."

I can speak to that. In Moscow, for instance, I once got the bargain of a lifetime, or so it appeared at first glance. I was there during the chaotic early Yeltsin period, when the Russian economy was imploding and the market on the streets was a free-for-all. Kiosks were everywhere, and you could buy almost anything in the kiosks. One day I managed to buy a box of Cuban cigars at one of the kiosks for the equivalent of 40 U.S. dollars. Joyfully I spirited my treasure back to the embassy, where, with trembling hands, I opened the box, took out one of these legendary beauties, inhaled its aroma, savored its texture, made some fresh coffee, cut off the tip and lit up.

Ho-hum. It was okay, but no better than some of the Honduran and Nicaraguan smokes I'd enjoyed in the past. Nothing to write home about. And there you have it: socialism, after all, is about the triumph of mediocrity, and here it was, in spades.

So I say, you go ahead and keep reforming away, Raul. We cigar buffs will wait and hope. But I, for one, don't expect a whole lot for a while. Maybe for as many years as it takes the chemicals from sugar cane farming to leach out of what was once damn fine tobacco land.

A Heartbreaking Work of Stumbling Genius

My book is out! Buy it, world!!!

Three Flies Up:
My Father, Baseball and Me
By Kelley Dupuis

Copyright© 2008
Outskirts Press Inc.
ISBN: 9781432721558

$15.95 Softcover

Available at Amazon.com,
Barnes&Noble.com and
Borders.com

In Three Flies Up, Washington, D.C. author and award-winning journalist Kelley Dupuis explores two themes, one universal and one uniquely American. The perennial theme of fathers and sons forms the backdrop for the story of the author’s long, usually-troubled relationship with his own father, a career Border Patrolman who grew up both poor and largely without a father in his own life, and as a result had no role model for being a father himself. As the author grows up in the 1960s and ‘70s, father and son are at loggerheads more than often than not.

But they share one very important, very American thing: a mutual love for the game of baseball, one of few things capable of bridging the cultural, generational and emotional gap separating father and son. Baseball is their chief, often only, common ground. When the author is in his late forties, after years of estrangement from his father and following his mother’s death, he returns home to California to assist in caring for his dad, now approaching 90 and gradually falling victim to dementia. Eventually, when the author becomes his father’s primary caregiver, baseball is more important than ever.

A few minutes of happy talk

Call this an exercise in self-brainwashing. Self-hypnosis?

Oh, speaking of hypnosis, anyone catch the broadcast yesterday on the radio, the Metropolitan Opera's production of Philip Glass' Satyagraha? Non opera-fans may skip down, but I caught about 20 minutes of it. Glass wrote this opera about 30 years ago when he was in his "minimalist" period. For those of you who were unaware that anyone's music had had a "minimalist" period, or indeed of what a "minimalist" period might involve, Glass in the 1970s was trying to keep it simple, big time. In a typical Philip Glass piece of that period, he'll glom on to a melodic and harmonic figure, repeat it for 15 minutes, then switch to another figure, repeat it for 15 minutes, and so on. This will give you some idea of what Satyagraha sounded like. (It's an opera about Gandhi, by the way.) Listening to it in the car, it occurred to me that Glass could have assembled the original score at Kinko's -- write out a figure, run off 500 copies, write out another figure, run off 500 copies, etc., then Scotch-tape 'em all together.

But what do I know? I'm not a composer. The only reason I bring the subject up is because during every break, the announcers kept telling us how "hypnotic" the effect of all this was.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that "hypnotic" is a polite way of saying "boring." I have trouble staying awake through the first act of Tristan and Isolde, (I suspect because Tristan, like so much of Wagner, is usually performed in the dark.) If I'd been at the Met yesterday, the guy behind me would have had some serious problems with the guy in front of him, the one with his head tilted back, snoring just like he snored through most of the movie Titanic, whose music was similarly "hypnotic."

But enough of that kind of talk. Enough of that negative, sneery, grumpy-old-man stuff that bloggers are always dishing out. It's not nice. (As a former boss of mine once said about insulting people, "It's FUN, but it's not nice.")

I recently undertook a new project, editing a weekly newspaper here in the Washington, D.C. area. I had a short "editorial conference" the other day with my boss, Abraham. Abraham is an entrepreneur, not a journalist, but he knows what kind of product he wants to put out. He's tired of picking up newspapers and seeing nothing but flood, fire, famine, crime, war, earthquakes, disease, poverty and Hillary and Obama getting into mashed-potato fights. While he granted that bad news sells, and we certainly can't ignore the bad stuff going on all the time, he wants me, in my capacity as editor, to accentuate the positive. Look around for stories in the metro area that highlight people doing good stuff rather than what they usually do. Just kidding, Abraham!

Seriously, I, and whatever freelance writers I end up working with, will be on the lookout for stories about people doing upbeat, positive things; creative things, helping-your-community things, artistic things, empowering things and funny things. It's not that we're going to ignore drive-by shootings, it's just that we're in general going to be more interested in the guy who won the wheelchair marathon because he spent the previous nine months pumping iron to the point where his arms got to look like Wile E. Coyote's legs in that Road Runner cartoon where he's popping "muscle pills" to make himself run faster.

On that note, I will now embark upon my version of one of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Let's call this Thinking About Good Stuff 101A.

With a tip of the hat to Julie Andrews singing "My Favorite Things" in The Sound Of Music, here is a short list of stuff that makes me happy, or happier, anyway:

1. I love the smell of bacon and eggs in the morning. You smartasses are substituting "napalm" for "bacon and eggs," aren't you? Ha! I thought of it first! (Note to myself: bad dog.)

2. Ditto the smell of freshly-ground coffee before it's brewed.

3. A flawless, not-too-hot summer afternoon at the ballpark, with my team winning.

4. The sound of doves very early in the morning.

5. Bicycles. I am goofy for bicycles. If I were as rich as Bill Gates I'd have a dozen of them. I'd probably look at them more than I'd ride them, but hey, a fetish is a fetish.

6. Radios. And radio. There are three radios in the room where I'm sitting. I could easily become a radio collector, but in general I think hobbies of that sort are kind of silly. And I'd rather listen to the radio than watch TV any day.

7. Cigars. You prissy, self-righteous non-smokers out there can go stuff tofu up your noses. There's nothing quite as delightful as a good Havana with a cup of strong, black coffee.

8. Since he just passed through town last Thursday, I will say that I'm rather impressed with Pope Benedict XVI. Everyone thought he was going to play Larry Holmes to John Paul II's Muhammad Ali, you know, the guy who came afterward whose name nobody can remember. But he's made a good impression on the world in general. I've read a couple of his little books and he's not a bad writer either.

9. Any movie that has Ava Gardner in it.

10. My wife Valerie's dimpled smile.

11. My own meatloaf.

12. All of my pets. Tick 'em off: Dogs: Alexandra, Fulbright and Stanley. (all three miniature schnauzers.) Cats: Humboldt, Cyrano and Rageuneau. My family.

13. Books. Do I love books! And all of this Amazon Kindle nonsense aside, I snap my fingers at the digital doofuses joyfully predicting that the age of paper-and-ink is over and that soon we'll all just be lugging around our Sony Readers. The compact disc revolution, which was more about convenience than anything else, nevertheless took something away from the experience of listening to recorded music. I miss the days when I would take a shiny black vinyl disc out of its beautiful cardboard sleeve, put it on a turntable and place the needle on it, then watch it spin as the music played. It was a more tactile, more participatory, in general a more aesthetic experience than clicking the button that says "download." By the same token, holding a hunk of plastic and batteries in your hand is not going to measure up to the experience of settling down with a beautifully-bound example of the publishers'-and-printers' art. And here's my trump card that the digital doofuses can't trump. No matter how convenient they make their book-download-doodads, they are always and forever going to need juice. Books don't require juice. If I'm flying from New York to Paris, reading The Brothers Karamazov on my Amazon Kindle, and the battery dies all of a sudden, I'm stuck for the rest of the flight reading the hotel and fragrance ads in the airline's in-house magazine. But if I have a paperback copy of Dostoevski in my pocket, I'm good to go, batteries be damned.

14. Rioja wine from Spain. I developed a taste for Spanish wine during a visit to the Costa Brava in 1995. There is nothing better with a steak.

15. Listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony on a rainy autumn night.

16. Chess. Without any false modesty, I am the world's worst chess player. If you can't beat me in eight moves, you're having an off day. But I love the game, don't ask me why. Maybe I was better at it in a previous life.

17. The poetry of Dylan Thomas, read out loud.

18. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball.

19. Certain of Hemingway's short stories. By and large his novels don't impress me that much, but he was one of the greatest short-story writers of all time.

20. Anything and everything written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

21. Something I don't do anymore: sit on the Novi Arbat in Moscow and watch the Russian women go by. To this old globe-trotter Russian women are the most beautiful women on earth, and by the way I don't know what they see in Vladimir Putin. He looks like he was weaned on a dill pickle and he has all the charisma of a parking meter.

22. The quiet of the early morning, when I manage to be up for it.

23. The good memories I have of my late sister Lynn, my one-and-only, honest-and-for-truly, now-and-forever bestest friend in the whole wide world.

24. Scotch.

25. That moment in the movie Mister Roberts when Capt. James Cagney has sounded general quarters because Lt. Henry Fonda just threw his palm tree overboard. In the ensuing chaos, Chief Ward Bond catches two sailors hoisting a rubber life raft over the railing. "Put that raft back!" he shouts. "He didn't say 'Abandon ship!'"

Bullet points

Driving around this morning, the following ideas all occurred to me, in no particular order:

--Since we are now returning to Daylight Savings Time two weeks earlier than we used to, and going off it two weeks later than we used to, that means we're only on Standard Time for five months out of the year. That means Standard Time is no longer standard. We ought to call it something else. I suggest "George."

--To fund anti-smoking programs by slapping more taxes on cigarettes is idiotic. Give this one just a moment's thought, if you please. (INSERT LONG PAUSE)... That's right! In order for there to be more money for anti-smoking programs, people have to smoke MORE. You go, government!

--The movie "Brokeback Mountain" added a new dimension to the term "cowpoke."

--I wish Rachael Ray would go away.

--Why do people talk about "free gifts" and "new records?" A gift that isn't free isn't a gift, and all records are new at the time they're set.

--And while we're at it, all you dopes out there who are in the habit of saying "I could care less" are saying the opposite of what you mean.

--Has anyone thought of starting a "Vegetable Rights" movement and demonizing vegetarians as plant-killers? I think I'd be willing to pay $7 to watch some sleazy lawyer representing artichokes in a class-action suit against Whole Foods. And don't you think you wouldn't find a lawyer willing to take that case, either.

--Why does northern California passionately hate southern California, while southern California simply ignores northern California? (I think I may have just answered my own question.)

--If dogs are so loyal, why is it that they'll drop you like a hot potato the moment somebody walks into the room carrying food?

--Would someone tell me why in the heck I can remember, word-for-word, a Ford Motor Company jingle dating from 1961, but I can't remember where I put my car keys?

--Since we all know that a police car with lights flashing will always attract a crowd, why don't the police turn their lights off when they arrive at the scene of an emergency? It would save them having to say "Come on folks, break it up."

--My wife assures me that watching ballplayers grab their crotches on TV is not a turn-on. Maybe they ought to quit doing it, or is this something the Player's Union has already made part of their contracts?

--Most opera singers are ordinary-looking people. A glamorous figure like Anna Netrebko is the exception, not the rule. So why do opera telecasts give us so many close-ups of people who are no more attractive than the rest of us? It adds new meaning to "warts and all."

--What possible difference does it make if my airline seat is inclined six-and-a-half percent, which is about as far back as they go, at landing? Yet flight attendants patrol the aisles like storm troopers on final approach, insisting that you "bring your seat to the upright position." It already almost is.

--Child-proof pill bottles are also adult-proof. Anyone care to dispute that?

--Here's one I've brought up before: how come books are shipped mummified in bubble-wrap as if they were breakable?

--I work part-time at a job where I go to work at 2:30 p.m. So how come they gave me a parking permit that's only good after 3:30? (Hint: it's a government agency.)

--Whose stupid idea was it to give the Nobel Prize to Al Gore? As if he didn't already have a big enough head.

--We Americans are always taking heat for being the last nation on earth that still hasn't gone metric. Why doesn't anyone give the Brits a bad time for driving on the left side of the road?

--Would someone tell me why in hell we're supposed to care what Hollywood celebrities think about Iraq? Why are their stupid, ill-informed opinions more valid than anyone else's stupid, ill-informed opinions?

--I don't care what anybody says: computers do have a will, and their will is to do evil.

--If the Devil is so smart, why is it that throughout the Bible and even in legends like Faust, he keeps making those sucker bets with God that he has to know he's going to lose?

--The chase scene in the Michael Caine movie The Italian Job, involving three Mini-Coopers, is the only chase scene in all cinematic history that's truly laugh-out-loud funny.

--Why doesn't pianist Naoko Takao have her own website? I've never heard her play, but if her playing is as gorgeous as she is, she ought to have a website. She could have groupies.

--Chevy Chase's old line, "I'm Chevy Chase and you're not," wasn't funny. Ever.

--George Will's classic quip that football combines two of the worst features of American life, violence and committee meetings, has been repeated too often. And that's too bad, because it's a truly great quip.

--The truest thing Bill Cosby ever said was, "There's nobody more wide-awake at 11:00 in the morning than a bunch of five-year-old kids."

--My friend Debbie Therrien has never considered herself attractive, and I've never understood why. She's drop-dead gorgeous and so are her daughters.

--"Vanity publishing" shouldn't be called that. If you're willing to pay out of pocket to get your book into print, you're obviously doing it for love, not profit. On the other hand, if you persuade a "legitimate" publisher to publish your book for you by giving some snot-nosed editor a blow job, well, that should be called "prostitution publishing." Frankly I'd rather cough up the 600 bucks.

--Why do football players smack each other on the ass? If you or I did that at the office, well, as they say, let's not go there.

--And finally, most guys own three pairs of shoes, tops. So why is it that women persist in asking us which, out of the 47 pairs of shoes they own, would look best with the outfit they have on?

Name That Tune

My wife Valerie gave me a new iPod last Christmas, the swoopy, black 80GB model. Evidently 80 gigs enable you to upload a lot more than just music. You can upload...movies! Yay! Isn't technology great! It grants a new boon to stupidity every week! Now you're going to see morons on the subway watching Johnny Depp on a 2-inch screen for no other reason than because they can. You know, like you see morons conducting telephone conversations at the very same moment the supermarket cashier is trying to ask them if they have any coupons to redeem, while the five people waiting in line behind them fume at the delay they're causing by exercising their right to multi-task. Because they can.

But I didn't sit down this morning to grumble about the ubiquitous modern phenomenon of nitwits armed with cell phones. I sat down to grumble about something else.

I've noted on this blog before that my wife Valerie sweats the big stuff, while I sweat the small stuff. She got upset last year when our house in Spokane, Washington nearly burned down. I looked around, heaved a sigh and started cleaning the black soot off my CD collection. I haven't finished that job yet. But she wants me to stop grumbling about cell phones. I can't. She lets little things like house fires get her down. I'm bugged by stupidity. Especially when some manifestation of it keeps coming back, like a pesky mosquito buzzing around your ear at 3 a.m.

To call me a music lover would be like calling Tiger Woods a duffer, Mikhail Baryshnikov a hoofer or Pope Benedict a guy who happens to be Catholic. My life is awash in music, at all times, and there is not very much music I don't like. I generally don't care for country music, but like it now and then. I usually find R&B just annoying, but not always. I dislike Gospel because of its pretensions, but that doesn't mean there aren't beautiful gospel tunes out there. Bob Dylan would go along with me on that, I'm sure. I won't say anything about rap or hip-hop because I don't consider barnyard noise to be music, and speaking of barnyard noise, I waited years for heavy metal to go away, and I see that the three patron saints of music, Cecilia, Louis Armstrong and Mozart, have finally granted my wish. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Musicum.

Just about everything else is fine. Or better than fine. From Russian liturgial chant to the 1990s band The Bo-Deans. From Harry James to Wagner. From Miles Davis to Giovanni Paisiello. It's all great.

But forms of musical expression are like vases: they come in all shapes. And it REALLY bugs me that the age of the digital download has decided to apply one word to every form of musical expression on earth. In a facile act of pandering to the dumbshit under-30 crowd with its horseblindered, sound-bit, channel-surfing, text-messaged view of the world around it, iTunes and its clones have decided that everything in the universe is a "song." The iPod generation knows of no other form of music except the "song," and iTunes is only too happy to accomodate its breathtakingly broad ignorance.

My iTunes library currently contains what iTunes insists on calling "3,917 songs." That's perfectly okay if you're talking about "Love Me Do," "One For My Baby," "Help Me, Rhonda" or "Closer to Free," all of which are on my computer and much more.

But I have news for all of you pod-wearers out there. (I won't use pods, by the way. They keep slipping out of my ears. I stick to old-fashioned headphones.) The first movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 in C minor ("Resurrection") is NOT a "song." Neither is the prelude to Act I of "Parsifal," nor the Prelude, Toccata and Fugue in C major by J.S. Bach, nor the "Adoration de la terre" section of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

To call everything a "song" is to slight much of the greatest music ever written. It's as if they're saying, "We'll grudgingly make room among Mariah Carey and Miley Cyrus for all that highbrow stuff, but we're going to call it what WE call music, and we only have one word for it, because pop music is the only kind we know or care about." Troglodytes.

People Magazine, which I'm proud to say I haven't looked at since 1996, used to get my goat by doing this same thing. Their weekly music column was entitled "Song," as if they were refusing to even acknowledge that there's any other kind of music except the kind that spews out of VH1 all day long. I wonder what Vladimir Horowitz would have thought of seeing his picture in People magazine in a section called "Song." I don't think he had much of a singing voice, but gol-dang, could he play the pie-anna.

A simple compromise would have saved the download universe having to listen to this rant. Why in the world couldn't they call these things "tracks?" That's what they are. That's what they're called on CDs. I have no problem with the word "tracks," because it covers anything and everything on a CD, an LP or even an old-fashioned cassette tape. A track is a track, whether it's the "Liebestod" from Tristan and Isolde , some nasal idiot in a cowboy hat whining that he's off to git drunk 'cause his wife dun left him or Ice-T screaming that he wants to kill the whole police department. Trax is trax.

But trax ain't "songs," just as all horses may be quadrupeds, but not all quadrupeds are horses.

Now excuse me, I gotta make tracks.

The Persistence of Memory

I usually avoid controversial topics on my blog. Since no one reads my blog, I don't know why I do this.

So I'm going to say some things here that might be controversial. But they're things I've been thinking for a long time and by-God I'm going to say them.

Why not? Everyone else pops off on their blogs, and damn the flaming e-mails they might get in response. I've been blogging for three years and have received only so many e-mails as I could count on the fingers of one hand. So here goes:

Today, April 4, 2008, is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. So this is the most appropriate day (this year anyway) to make the following statement:

Liberals have been "dining out" for more than four decades on the fact that they were right about one -- and only one -- thing.

That is correct. Liberals have never been right about anything. They're always wrong. Except for that one time that they won't let anybody forget about.

Items:

1. They told us we were losing in Vietnam, so we did. Only problem was, we were winning when they said it through their official mouthpiece, Walter Cronkite. Unfortunately in 1968 network TV news carried a lot more influential weight than it does now, and people were inclined to believe whatever Uncle Walty told them. So when Cronkite declared the Vietnam War "unwinnable" after the Tet Offensive in 1968, never mind the fact that the Tet Offensive was an act of desperation by the communists; never mind the fact that we had the North Vietnamese basically on the run at that point; everyone believed Uncle Walty and communism's triumph in that corner of the world was assured.

2. As W. Emmett Tyrell pointed out in this morning's Washington Times, when the stock market crashed in 1987, Liberals began marching around the block in lock-step, whacking their washtubs and proclaiming that President Ronald Reagan "sounded like Herbert Hoover" when he insisted that the economy was fundamentally sound. Depression, disaster and mass unemployment were all around the corner, they sang in chorus like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. "This debacle marks the last chapter of Reaganomics," Michael Kinsley crowed, no doubt feeling his oats after tap-dancing to work that morning with visions of Democrats re-taking the White House in 1988 dancing through his head. Anyone remember the Great Depression of 1988? I don't either. Wrong again, babies.

(By the way, I don't understand why anyone would take seriously anything any liberal Democrat says, ever, on the subject of the U.S. economy. Our economy is based on free-market capitalism, and it is a basic tenet of the liberal faith that free-market capitalism is evil and must be punished whenever it dares to create prosperity. (Liberals call prosperity "greed.") Why should people who think that way be trusted running a free-market economy? It's like the cliche about putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.)

3. Liberals hooted and jeered and made jokes about "Star Wars" when President Reagan proposed a missile defense system in the 1980s. When people didn't laugh at their jokes, they started shouting that a missile defense system would bring about global nuclear holocaust by frightening the Russians (liberals were always more concerned about the Russians' feelings than they were about those of any of the millions and millions of people oppressed by Soviet communism) into launching a pre-emptive nuclear "first strike." Anybody remember that first strike? And by the way, where is the Soviet Union these days? (Cue sound of crickets chirping.) Wrong again, lefties.

4. When Rudy Giuliani dared to clean up New York City in 1993-94, a chorus of lefties began screaming their usual favorite words, "fascist" and "Hitler." They wrung their hands in despair that Adolf Giuliani was threatening the civil rights of muggers and rapists. And, by the way, interfering with the first amendment by mopping up the peep-show booths and porn shops on Times Square. People who would try and change the subject if you mentioned Castro locking up Cuban dissidents would pound the table and shout their lungs out defending the rights of muggers, rapists and pornographers. They even had the brass balls to try and sell the idea that crime, graffiti and garbage were part of New York's charm and must be protected against the incursions of Rudy the Fascist. Let's all vote Democrat, folks!

5. Violence in Iraq is down, like it or not. (Conservatives like it. Liberals don't; too much of their campaign strategy for 2008, laid out in 2007, depended on the situation in Iraq getting worse, allowing them to beat their breasts and wail about "quagmire.") No, Gen. David Petraeus' "surge" has, all-in-all, worked. Listen to those crickets chirping on the left. Nostalgic for the good old days of Vietnam, when hating America was a mark of hipness and worldly sophistication, liberals have been trying to sell the idea that Iraq is another Vietnam, and by the way using the same language: "unwinnable," "quagmire," "these people are not ready for democracy," etc. I'd dismiss them with a laugh as the Toothless Who Remember Being At Woodstock But Weren't, were it not for the fact that they have enough clout to intimidate the front-runners in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination into kowtowing fearfully in their direction. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are afraid enough of the left-wing nutjobs on the Stalinist side of their party's bullring to mouth defeatist rhetoric about Iraq in fear of alienating them. Let's get this in perspective, folks. 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq. To declare defeat and walk away now in the hope of keeping that jerk-off who runs the Daily Kos happy, would be a supreme disservice to the memory of those 4,000. Yes, the war in Iraq needs to end. But not in the U.S. surrender that liberals wearing Che Guevara T-shirts want.

These are just five things. I could go on and on and on. LBJ's "War on Poverty" created urban housing projects that later had to be dynamited when they turned into 10-story slums. FDR's New Deal did NOT end the Depression. It extended it by repeatedly preventing the free market from correcting itself. Don't believe liberals when they tell you that FDR ended the Depression. World War II ended the Depression. Period.

The same people who a generation ago were trying to sell the idea that nuclear holocaust was imminent are now trying to tell us that global warming is going to destroy the planet unless we turn all power over to Al Gore and let him bullyrag all the governments of the world into regulating business and industry into the ground (the left's wettest wet dream -- remember? Free-market capitalism is evil and must be punished) in the name of "saving the planet." Pardon me if I'm skeptical. This all just sounds too familiar to me. Remember Cabrini Green. Remember "The Day After" -- an eminently forgettable 1983 TV movie that nevertheless got the advance publicity of a Beatles reunion tour because it was about the nuclear war that the media were trying to convince everyone Reagan was going to start. Remember Uncle Walty telling us that Vietnam was unwinnable when we were in fact winning.

"Left is right and right is wrong?"

Hah. THE LEFT HAS NEVER BEEN RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING.

Except once. Yes, they got it right, in the 1960s, on civil rights. William F. Buckley Jr. had the wrong take when he mistook the civil rights movement for the triumph of lawlessness.

Well, at least he had the balls to admit, years later, that he had made a mistake. I can't remember a recorded instance of a liberal ever admitting he or she was wrong about anything, even in the face of an avalanche of evidence. (Not unless, like David Mamet, they've just committed the apostasy of becoming conservatives.) Even now, 17 years after the implosion of the USSR, I have yet to hear one single voice on the left admit that they were wrong in having a soft spot in their hearts for communism. Bring it up; they'll try to change the subject. I guarantee it. They'll stick their fingers in their ears and start humming. Watch.

So here's my point. On this, the 40th anniversary of the villainous murder of Martin Luther King Jr., the liberal left in America is marking more than 40 years of exploiting that one single issue. They got that one thing right, 45 years ago, and ever since have been telling America, through their panting running dogs in the news media, that they have sole possession of the moral high ground and should be entrusted with all and everything. The message is loud and clear: "We're the good guys. Remember? ("Remember" is the key operative word here -- they want people to remember pretty far back.) Remember how we all held hands during the "I Have A Dream" speech? (1963, before half the current U.S. population was born.) That should remind you that only we are the friends of the poor, the downtrodden, and the enemies of those evil "special interests!" (Yeah, right. Last year Democrats took more money from rich contributors than Republicans did.) And besides, we all know -- you should know, because we've been telling you for 40 years -- that those mean old Republicans are all ... racists! ("Racist" is the second favorite name-calling staple among liberals. The first is "fascist.") And don't forget to remember!

I remember this, which you will never, ever, catch the mainstream media remembering: for 100 years (that's a century, folks) the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

Okay, you're never going to read that anywhere else, so I'll say it again: For 100 years, (that's a century, folks) the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

I want you to understand the ramifications of that. When you look in horror at those gruesome photographs of lynchings in the South from the 1920s and '30s, that is NOT a group of Republicans you're looking at. Those lynchers are Democrats, folks. All of them. Today Democrats are forever calling Republicans "racists." It was Democrats who actually lynched black people. That is not my opinion. That is a fact of history.

Nobody in the mainstream media wants anyone to remember that. But it's true. Abraham Lincoln, who for reasons of political expedience issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, was a Republican. For that reason alone, for a century after the Civil War, the South was solidly, firmly, unsplittingly Democrat. No southerner would vote Republican to save his children from drowning. The original "Yellow-Dog Democrats," who boasted that they would "vote for a yellow dog" before they would vote for a Republican, were NOT, as their present-day co-religionists would like you to believe, Woodstock-attending, Birkenstock sandal-wearing, up-with-people, down-with-capitalism types. They were die-hard southerners, often members of the Klan, who were nursing a "mad" at the party of Lincoln. Civil Rights: 45 years. KKK: 100 years. But it's the longer of those two legacies you'll never, ever see mentioned in the Washington Post, where E.J. Dionne is no doubt still celebrating the Bear-Stearns meltdown by smothering his picture of John Kenneth Galbraith with wet kisses.

My old friend and fellow Mason Howard Freelove, a self-described "Yellow Dog" Democrat, proud of his opposition to "injustice," is invited to think about this.

See ya around, y'all.

Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't?

I don't know who I drive crazier, my atheist friends or the God who may or may not be there.

My atheist friends would like to write me off as some sort of religious-right wingnut, I'm sure. The problem with that is, I haven't been anywhere near a church in more than 25 years.

If there is a God, my relationship with him could best be described as adversarial. You see, I decided years ago that if there is a God, he (a) doesn't like me, or (b) has a decidedly juvenile sense of humor. (For example, he seems to get hand-rubbing glee out of ordering traffic signals to turn red the second they see me coming. Moreover, he seems to have issued a blanket command to any and all things mechanical that they should figure out some way to malfunction the moment they smell me in the room.)

On the other hand, I really can't make up my mind who I like less: God or the people who go around telling us that he doesn't exist. Really, I'm hard put to decide who's more insufferable: the man upstairs or his dismissers.

This thought came to mind in the past week due to two events: the death of science-fiction author Arther C. Clarke at age 90, and my own experience just yesterday of stumbling across the website of some atheist in Scotland.

Since Clarke's death came first, I'll address it first.

I was a huge fan of Arthur C. Clarke when I was a boy. The reason was easy and obvious: I was 13 when 2001: A Space Odyssey hit the theaters. The film overwhelmed me, and I immediately became a fan of sci-fi in general and of Clarke in particular. At 14 and 15 I was reading everything of his that I could get my hands on. I aspired to be a science-fiction writer myself. That lasted until, at age 16, I discovered Hemingway and my enthusiasm switched tracks, from the sci-fi genre to mainstream fiction. By the middle of my junior year of high school I was pretty much over the science fiction craze. That was okay, though; I'd read just about everything of Clarke's by then anyway. Oh, I came back once or twice. Rendezvous With Rama (1974)I thought clever, even if, by age 19, I was beginning to find Clarke's prose tiresomely pedestrian. Much later I dipped into the various sequels to 2001, ultimately deciding in the name of charity that he was only fulfilling contractual requirements by writing these clunky things. In the last one, 3001, he'd gotten so careless as to have one of the astronauts on a 2001 space mission born in 1996!

As much as I admired Clarke's writing in my youth, in television interviews I found him about as compelling as a common brick. His occasional attempts at humor were...British, which is to say not very funny. And of course he was always espousing his proud atheism, which I suppose was supposed to make us think he was a bold, brave, unflinching advocate of pure science. Cool. But he also made, in the name of atheism, one of the stupidest remarks I ever heard. He was on Dick Cavett or Merv Griffin or one of those talk shows in the mid-1970s, and of course when someone brought up the subject of religion he became very dismissive, saying that while he didn't consider it inconceivable that a personality might somehow resurface after death, the idea of a soul surviving the death of the body made as little sense as -- get this -- "thinking the symphony still exists after the grammophone record has been destroyed."

Now, take a deep breath and think about that statement for a moment. Clarke was telling us that, if he were to pick up a record of Beethoven's 5th Symphony and break it into pieces, that meant Beethoven's 5th Symphony no longer existed.

An unfortunate analogy? No, I don't feel charitable this morning; Let's leave it at "stupid."

I have found that my atheist friends not only often make unfortunate analogies, but they're very good at bandying around cliches that have beards as long as Bill Clinton's nose when he talks about "that woman." And all the while they want us to believe that they're uttering profound, original and above all, brave wisdom. "If there's a God, why is there suffering in the world? Why were there Nazis?" Well, I don't know. But I'll tell you this much. The great Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn endured much worse at the hands of Stalin's henchmen than most of you atheists ever endured from Nazis, and he didn't lose his faith. In fact he rediscovered it and it was strengthened by his experiences. Who's right, you or him? (Hint: I have more respect for him than I do for you, and for obvious reasons.)

An atheist web site got a lot of publicity recently when it encouraged young people in particular to declare their bravery by blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. The Bible apparently says somewhere that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only unforgivable sin. Blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, reads the message, in fact do it loudly! Challenge God to strike you down with a thunderbolt. If he doesn't, you've proven the truth of atheism! Well, maybe. Then again, maybe God just looks at these bold little blasphemers, (most of whom think "lol" is a word, by the way) rubs his hands in glee and tells the traffic signal to turn red when they're already 15 minutes late for class. Why not? He does that kind of shit to me all the time, and I've never blasphemed against the Holy Spirit in my life. I don't even know who the Holy Spirit is. Do you?

Since I mentioned Stalin, let's talk about him for a minute. My atheist friends who go around humming John Lennon's "Imagine" want us to think, as Lennon did in that unbearably juvenile song, that if only we could ditch all this silly religion stuff the world would become a big warm bath of peace and brotherhood. Uh-huh. John Lennon and Josef Stalin would have gotten along splendidly. Stalin took a real, genuine shot at creating the godless utopia Lennon praises so fulsomely in some of the most puerile lyrics of his generation, ("And no religion too." Gimme a break!) and only a complete idiot, a horse-blindered true believer on the level of Jean-Paul Sartre, (who never left Paris) would try to tell you that Stalin's Moscow was a great place for a vacation. But religion was outlawed, so it must have a been a big orgy of brotherhood, right?

And then there's the "cranky uncle" angle, most recently on display in Barack Obama's speech defending his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah "Josef Goebbels" Wright. Atheists tend to fit the cranky uncle mold, by which I mean they tend to be Little Johnny One-Notes. Attacking religious belief on blogs and in op-ed length letters to the editor is their chief, consuming passion.

Which brings me to my visit to the blog yesterday of some doofus in Scotland.

I was doing a search on "Woody Allen's 'The Moose.'" If you don't know this classic five-minute monologue, go look it up. It's one of the funniest things Woody ever did. I wanted to find out when he did it, as in, what year. Turns out it was 1965. But in the course of my search I stumbled across an atheist's blog. As you might expect, aside from Woody Allen, it was pretty much an all-atheist show.

Now, to what extent, I ask you, is this kind of obsessiveness any less mephitic than that of some Bible-pounder who won't shut up about Jesus for two minutes? Ask any atheist what his ten favorite books are. Eight of them will be books on atheism. The other two will be Harry Potter.

There's a word for such people on Dictionary.com: "Bore: (noun) 2. a dull, tiresome, or uncongenial person."

While I don't find God an especially attractive figure, (I think seeing Michaelangelo's bad-tempered curmudgeon creating the world on the Sistine ceiling, in a Time-Life book called The World's Great Religions when I was about eight years old, permanently placed a mental image in my head of God as a grumpy old bastard) neither am I taken in by the "peace and brotherhood" message of the You-may-say-I'm-a-dreamer, but-I'm-not-the-only-one crowd. My friend Michael is a loud-mouthed, truculent atheist who tends to win arguments by outshouting his opponents. But even he would have trouble out-shouting the track record of atheism for producing peace, love and brotherhood. If he chucks that tired "Spanish Inquisition" thing at me, I can just easily chuck back at him Kim Jong Il, beloved leader of the North Korean atheist paradise, crushing the skulls of Christians with a steamroller. And the Spanish Inquisition was 550 years ago. Kim Jong Il is still with us, unfortunately.

Finally, I just don't like the implications of a world run by a committee of atheists. Stalin and his acolyte John Lennon aside, there is a reason for Kim Jong Il, as there was for Heinrich Himmler. It's the logical bus stop that atheism must, by its very nature, lead to. Atheists will tell you that the human race doesn't need God to be good. That may be true, but neither can it thrive on nothingness. Buddhism doesn't have any notion of a ruling intelligence,(hence its attractions for anti-authoritarian types like my ex-friend Ray, who rejected the Catholicism of his father because he didn't get along with his father) but lacking a deity or not, Buddhism is still a religion. It finds meaning in the realm of the human spirit that transcends what Joyce called the "Ineluctable modality of the visible."

There is a good reason why communism, "the god that failed," failed. It was totally based on determinist materialism, the same essential idea at the core of atheist Richard Dawkins' particular flavor of Darwinism. Communism had no transcendent side. All it promised was that the workers would throw off their chains and seize the means of production on the great getting-up morning. And that wasn't enough to revolutionize mankind. "New Soviet Man" was still man: grubby, grasping, self-interested and very much in need of his better angels, but thrown back on his own resources, if he cared to cultivate his spiritual side, because he lived under a state that denied the spiritual dimension of life in favor of a dull, gray materialism that insisted on seeing nothing in the world but things.

That reductionist materialism can lead to the good life by forcing people to "relate to each other instead of to some imaginary god" is a crock of shit. The world that Dawkins and his cohort are trying to sell, a universe that is only blind and random chemical and electromagnetic chain reactions with no purpose except to keep running like a perpetual motion machine until it runs down, is a place where nothing has any meaning or purpose whatever. It's a place where children wearing black overcoats open fire with high-powered rifles on the grounds of public schools, then shoot themselves. Loathe as I am to cite C.S. Lewis, it's a universe that resembles his vision of Hell.

That universe lacks not only meaning, but right and wrong, up and down, hope, values or charity (Yes, I said charity. Nietzche was a syphilitic whose rejection of human sympathy was a symptom of his sickness. And as for Albert Camus, the atheistic saints of The Plague are as puerile a fantasy as John Lennon's.) This warm and wonderful world in which moral equivalency reigns supreme is the end product of what the new atheists are pitching: in a black, meaningless void whose only destiny is just-as-meaningless nonexistence, well, as the man said, everything is permitted, from Nazis frying Jews in ovens to those two nice little boys we read about last year who tortured a puppy to death by roasting it alive.

I may have problems with the idea of God, but I don't want to live in that world. Michael can live in that world if he wants to, but I'm with Bob Dylan, who said "Negativity won't pull you through." (He said that, by the way,long before his so-called Born-again Christian period.)

Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk are pushing negativity as the wave of the future. They can have it and it can have them. They can also shove up their collective asses their smug, snotty attitude that because they don't believe in God, that makes them smarter and more sophisticated than the rest of us. What utter, preening bullshit. What they're really trying to do is pass off their stunted imaginations as signs of higher intelligence. They aren't capable of imagining anything greater than themselves, therefore they sneer at those who are and call them stupid.

My father was like that. If he couldn't see something, that meant it wasn't there. If his puny imagination couldn't wrap itself around a concept, that meant it wasn't true. Like the atheist crowd, he mistook that shortcoming in himself for wisdom, and scoffed at anything he didn't understand.

And don't come back and tell me about what a wonderful imagination Arthur C. Clarke had. It's true, he did have a fertile imagination, grounded moreover in a rock-solid background of scientific learning. That science has become the modern substitute for religion in the past century is a subject for another discussion, but Clarke, while brilliant, was one of those scientists whose logic led him to cultivate a huge blind spot concerning the entire spiritual dimension of life. He was capable of imagining bases on the moon, spaceships propelled by giant sails catching the solar wind, and even, fifty years ahead of its time, something like the Internet. But, like the architects of Soviet communism, his world was one that consisted of nothing but things. And he threatened to do some pretty dreadful things in the name of scientific truth, like erasing Beethoven from history by breaking a record album. Man, I'm scared, boys, ain't you scared?

My belief that the opening fugue of Beethoven's C-sharp Minor String Quartet will be playing somewhere in the universe long after all the Arthur Clarkes and Richard Dawkinses have fallen as silent as their empty, antiseptic souls is all the belief I need. But it's plenty, and its implications are great. My atheist friends won't see that of course. Because they can't. They aren't capable of it. Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet is one of the most profound spiritual statements ever made. People for whom the word "spiritual" has no meaning, people who reduce music to nothing but vibrations that tickle certain areas of the brain, just as they try to reduce all life to chemical and electromagnetic interactions with no underlying purpose, might as well not bother listening. They can just go listen to themselves talk. Sooner or later they'll shut up. But Beethoven, whose belief was profound, and finds its most sublime expression in that opening fugue, will play on.

Okay, here's some music that I really LIKE

Let me put it this way: at 52 I'm beginning to understand how my English 105 instructor at Southwestern College, Don Baird, felt 35 years ago.

Mr. Baird, as curmudgeonly a teacher as I ever had, was a devoted music lover. Had been most of his life. He used to sometimes bring records into class to illustrate things for us. For example, when discussing the difference between classicism and romanticism, he brought in a Haydn string quartet and contrasted it with a quintet by Brahms. It was clear, however, that by the age of 45 or 50 or whatever age he was in 1974, Baird preferred Haydn to Brahms. He preferred the classical period to the romantic period in general. In fact he tended to sneer at romanticism. Some of his students didn't understand why. The seventies were the decade of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Love Story. Rod McKuen's poetry. Hermann Hesse in every college kid's book bag. Many students, who considered themselves "romantics" as the "Me" Decade understood the word, were offended by his tendency to dismiss the entire romantic movement in the arts as the equivalent of an orgiastic wing-ding that produced little of any lasting value.

But history has shown it to be true generally that romanticism is a youthful thing. In general, the older you get the more "classical" your tastes become. Baird preferred Haydn to Brahms. He wanted no part of Chopin. In fact, just about everything over-the-top rhetorically or idiosyncratically had been ejected from his ken. He wasn't even interested in James Joyce anymore. He preferred Tolstoy to Joyce, Pope to Wordsworth. He still revered Beethoven, but dismissed Prokofiev -- and most 20th century music -- as sounding "like tuning up."

In other words, he'd become an old fart.

I've arrived there myself. I'm not quite where he was; I will listen to music written after 1850. But I've just about had it with the high romantics. These days my listening tends to veer between the very old and the somewhat-recent ("somewhat recent," in classical music terms, means within the last 100 years.) These days I'm likely to vacillate between Guillaume Dufay and Webern, Handel and Stravinsky. Let the radio hit me with the Grieg A Minor Piano Concerto and I'm going to reach down and change the station.

Last month I posted an essay in which I outlined my history as a fan of classical music, which at the end included a list of some 30 pieces of music I've gotten so sick and tired of over the past 35 years that I wouldn't care if I never heard them again. The old war-horses. The chestnuts. And not all, but most of them are -- guess what! -- 19th century romantic war-horses. The ones that you always seem to see on symphony concert programs because most symphony orchestras are so scared of scaring away their subscriber base that they assume people want to hear the same stuff again and again. (Also, I'm sure, there are plenty of orchestra musicians out there who are just lazy about learning new pieces os music.)

Still ... as I wrapped up that essay, I also noted that I could cite at least one piece of music by each and every one of those composers that I love dearly and will never tire of, no matter how many times I hear them, or at least have not tired of them yet.

In the interest of not sounding all curmudgeonly, grumpy-poo and constipated all the time, here is a thumbs-up list of pieces by those same composers, most of them romantics but one of them actually Mozart himself, who were on the never-want-to-hear-again list a few weeks ago:

Mendelssohn: Any and all of his "string symphonies"

Berlioz: "Roman Carnival" Overture.

Brahms: String Quintet op. 111

Beethoven: String Quartet op. 131

Tchaikovsky: Second String Quartet

Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

Mozart: String quartet No. 15 in D minor

Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E-flat

Mussorgsky: "Dawn On The Moscow River" from "Khovanschina"

Mussorgsky: The Coronation Scene from "Boris Godonov."

Grieg: Lyric Pieces

Chopin: Scherzo No. 2

Mozart: Divertimento in F, K. 138

Mozart: The two "Serenades for Winds"

Beethoven: Missa Solemnis

Gershwin: Anything of his sung by Ella Fitzgerald

Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 (When I heard this piece on the radio for the very first time, J.D. Steyers, the deejay on KFSD in San Diego who played it, said he thought the last movement "One of the most exciting moments in 20th Century music. I agreed 34 years ago and I agree now.)

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 (Yes, I know my thumbs-down list included "any symphony by Tchaikovsky," but I love this one so much I'm putting it back on the shelf.)

Tchaikovsky: The opening scene of "Eugene Onegin."

Dvorak: String Quintet in E-flat

Wagner: "Lohengrin," Prelude to Act I

Wagner: "Die Meistersinger," Prelude to Act I

Vivaldi: Lute Concerto in D

Schumann: Symphony No. 2

Weber: Overture to "Die Freischutz."

Pachelbel: Anything else but the Canon in D major

Ravel: String Quartet

Chopin: Sonata No. 3 in B minor

Dvorak: "In Nature's Realm"

Liszt: "Annees de Pelerinage," Book I

Tchaikovsky: "Italian" Capriccio

Beethoven: String Quartet op. 132

Brahms: Quintet in F minor

As with the previous list, I could add to this one. But let no one call me curmudgeon, and if music be the food of love, by all means let the radio in the kitchen play on...

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.