The Scoundrel, previously unpublished

I’m a wretch, a rake, a Lothario. I seduced another man’s wife and I loved it. I am the worst kind of man, the kind of man who isn’t really a man at all. I’m the kind of life that isn’t fit to draw breath and I hate that fact but I adore her and I adore it – the danger, the stolen glances, the whispered phone calls, the long, slow murmured words and curled fingers and leaping in the chest like a child.

And didn’t they used to whip scoundrels like me? Didn’t they use to stick me in the dock and flay my back and brand my forehead? Wasn’t I, in nobler times, sent into exile penniless, my head shaven? Didn’t I scavenge among the wild hounds and seek sanctuary from the winter’s wet in some hovel, rejected by God and men, desolate, cast down into the pit of Hell on Earth? And didn’t I deserve it and didn’t my craving for her burn still?

But wouldn’t I then be at least besmirched in the minds and mouths of honest gentry? And wouldn’t my ignominy suit the lowness of my choosing and wouldn’t I be truly foul and fit the ugliness of my soul to my blasphemed body and wouldn’t it be as it should be if I were cursed and beaten and damned?

In other times, by better men, mightn’t I be shot? Mightn’t I be dragged into the night through mud and brush and bramble and mightn’t I hear the stallions snort and stamp the ground blue and flare their wild eyes red and frenzied heed their riders’ whoops and pull me by my bloodied wrists to some hidden glade where I might be strung up, my heart cut out, my face broken, my balls sliced off and shoved into my mouth, a hand-scrawled sign hung round my neck reading, “CHEAT?”

And in more civil times mightn’t I be brought before the bar and found wanting and mightn’t I be forced into a life of disgraceful service for what alms I could glean from the lowly tasks befitting a scoundrel like me, cast off by virtue and forced to scrabble from the soot and filth the means of base existence? Mightn’t I be friend to none, reviled by all, scratching with the drunks and whores and monsters of the night in some darkened doorway for one stale hunk of bread?

But ours are not such times. In our times someone has taken decency and hidden it behind fidelity. In our times someone has taken passion and hidden it behind commitment. In our times someone has taken virtue and hidden it behind austerity. In our times someone has taken love and sunken it in matrimony. And I love her, scoundrel that I am, and I love her madly, truly, deeply. And she loves me.

Of course, that isn’t it. I love a wisp of a thing, a breath, a notion, an inkling, a phantom of the mind plucked from the depths of all that is her without picking her in her fullness. And she loves me, but then she doesn’t. She loves and she yearns, but not for me. She loves that I can do what I do and her loving it so makes me love it. I exceed my talent and surpass my own proclivity for shameless indulgence and pursuit of vice for her and there is love in doing so. And in culling her from the herd and in loving her with words and breaths and sighs and longing in the breast I make the planets leap rejoicing in their encircling paths. She feels the touch of a hero and I leave behind my box of craftsman’s shoddy tools and humble pine and build for her a castle of rich oak atop our greening hill and she soars with hawks above the cliff and she knows love and it is mine.

She begs me on her knees sobbing to tell her of other conquests in my scoundrel’s past and I write of a girl from New Jersey who I would not let speak to me while she wore my shirt and she cries and feels awash in dangerous desire. I tell her of a young thing who hides her accent poorly and how I clutched her long, full, smoky, black hair in my fist and I ran my mouth along her quivering throat and smelled the hot blood in her veins and felt her heart quake with anguish and anticipation and my darlin asks me to tell her what I will do to her. And in time I do, scoundrel that I am.

And I write of our time on the island and our time in the desert and I add a line just now to the latter to fan the flame of her unquenchable lust:

The thin, crisp, ragged air could not sustain our cries so they settled down upon us and mixed with us and soaked us in a symphony of our own rapacity.

I know that she will read my words and hear them in my voice and although I won’t be there I will ravage her as surely as if I’d taken her down to Lorca’s river and all of Spain will know and she will cry aloud and press her thighs together, crossing her knees, pushing down the death inside with clutched heart and deep swallows. Scoundrel.

But then, it really is the thing, this – I love her. And she in return. And it is the love that quickens the pulse and sends the spike of hot desire into the chest and seals for all eternity this scoundrelous pursuit and makes the prowler prowl and the pursued get caught of her own device and catches the heart in the throat and shakes the soul and scares even the angels in their quarters and sends up the alarm call to the beasts of damnation. And so finally, and scoundrelly, I will fuck her in that stairwell and I will consign my soul to perdition for that thing that is not mine and it will be a price worth paying, for a scoundrel also loves.

The Direction of the Heart from NPR's "This I Believe" series

A friend asked me recently how I knew it would be all right and I told her what I believe.

I don’t believe in fate, but I believe in causation. I don’t believe in destiny, but I believe in certainty. I don’t believe in miracles, but I believe in the direction of the heart.

I believe in action and reaction. I believe in force and momentum. I believe in the law of falling bodies and I believe in falling in love.

I believe when one heart falls for another it falls at a rate of constant acceleration approaching the speed of light. I believe a heart can fall so swiftly it soon reaches the horizon of inevitability and I believe the force that pulls it inward is ultimately irresistible.

I believe in a course of action. I believe in the inexorable march of love. I believe that no force exerts itself in the spinning cosmos or the quantum plane more strongly than the direction of the heart. I believe that time is no cure, that only the completion of the journey sees the end of the heart’s unchosen path, and I believe that completion leaves the heart forever changed.

I believe that I will see that journey through and that I will emerge on the other side of that horizon and will have come full circle and face a choice. I believe in the power of choice and I believe in the necessity of right. I believe that I will choose the truth; that in the fullness of time more questions are asked than answered but one answer resounds – I live and breathe in the direction of my heart.

I believe that the choosing, in fact, is an illusion, that I haven’t really any choice. The direction of my heart leads me surely and safely back to you. I believe as much in these things as I believe the sun will rise and I believe that I will always love you.

That is the direction of the heart, darlin’.

Evolution from LastBlogOnEarth.com

May 8, 2007

An evolving incredulity
I never understood the English pastime of ferret legging until the other night when I decided I would not watch the Republican presidential debate because I just couldn’t permit myself to have that much fun. I was miserable and I wanted to get even miserabler. So I turned off the television, tucked my pant legs into my boots, grabbed two musty varmints, dropped them down my trousers, cinched my belt tightly and let those rascals go to work. That was still too much fun so I crushed out a cigarette in my navel, stapled my tongue and drank a cup of bleach. Altogether, it was slightly less fun than I might have had hearing ten Republicans tell me why they’re not assholes.

But it ain’t over yet.

I keep CNN on all day long because it reminds me that the world smells like shit and we’re all covered up in it. Now, either Anderson Cooper is lying to me with those pert, kissable lips, that boldly silver hair and those piercing blue eyes, or three out of ten Republican presidential hopefuls indicated to a nationwide television audience that they do not believe in the theory of evolution. Read that again. Got it? O.k. I’ll repeat it.

Three out of ten Republicans vying to be the most powerful sumbitch in the whole damn world do not believe in the fact of evolution. I don’t want to know which three they are. I don’t even want to know that the tensome exists in the first place. But I would like someone to answer a question about that: what the fuck?!

I’m reckoning the same triad probably chock the supposed moon missions up to some clever prop work in a sound studio. Surely they believe there are monsters near the edge of the earth and that one shouldn’t sail there. The mentally ill, I suppose, are inhabited by demons. Rodents of unusual size? I don’t believe they exist.

The presidency is a mixed bag. It calls for a variety of skills, talents and innate qualities. I can’t begin to list them all. But the one I will list is this: at least a 19th Century apprehension of the fundamentals of natural science, you nitwits!

Of course there’s the cynic in me that doesn’t believe that they don’t believe, but that instead they’re shamelessly willing to feign ignorance to appeal to the ignorant. But I’ve been trying of late to listen to my better half, the noncynical half, the half that chooses to believe that nobody with such lofty ambitions could be so calculating at deception.

What do you think? Should I give in to the impulse to conclude that these charlatans are lying to us? Or should I rather listen to my softer side and conclude that they’re an incomprehensibly daft collection of turds? Either way, I’m glad I didn’t watch that debacle and I’m keeping the ferrets around in case they do it again.

Illegal Immigration from LastBlogOnEarth.com

[Photos courtesy of my daughter, Gabrielle, through whose eyes the world is a beautiful place.]

Fear of the other
Using words to keep hate alive

Editor’s note – I spent the weekend in Mexico and waited three hours to cross the border on Sunday evening. When I finally arrived at the border gate with two blonde girls, last names Phillips and Jones, I was thoroughly scrutinized before being permitted to re-enter the country of my birth by a federal agent from the Philippines with a thick Tagalog accent. I wouldn’t say I hated that man, not in the true sense of the word “hate,” but at that moment I was none too fond of him.

* * *

Hate is a thing for which we all have a capacity. Some of us will never hate but most of us will. A few of us will hate so thoroughly that hate will become our sustenance. The rest of us should never meet those who survive on hate. The majority of us who know our capacity to hate but don’t survive on it should look at it and see in its ugliness the very reason why we should avoid it at all costs. We should not indulge that capacity. We should starve it if possible.

Hate is so terrible a thing that we reserve it for targets who we perceive as different from us, inhuman, other. Hate is so dangerous a thing and so cruel we can’t bring ourselves to point it at anything that resembles us. We can’t hate things that are too much like ourselves. To do so would be suicidal. When we hate we must transform the object of our hatred into a monster – a repugnant thing devoid of humanity, something different, strange, menacing, unnatural and foreign – an alien.

What an ugly word that is. Alien. Look at it. It’s slithering and gruesome. It’s horrifying. It’s the kind of word we use for those things we hate. It even sounds hate-worthy. It isn’t the sort of word like “immigrant” or “foreign national” that connotes the humanity of the creature so labeled. It is a word that brands a thing as different, other-worldly and fearsome. It’s an ugly word for an ugly concept and the concept is hatred. Who is it that gets hated with such a word?

By far the majority, in fact nearly all illegal immigration into the United States comes across our border with Mexico. Undocumented immigrants who cross the U.S./Mexico border include Guatemalans, Hondurans, Bolivians, Columbians, Salvadorans, and others, but they’re mostly Mexicans, probably half of them from the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán. More than 80 percent of all undocumented border crossers are men, the majority of them aged 30 years or younger. Most, but by no means all, are poorly educated, semi-skilled workers. Many come via the services of a “coyote” and owe a debt of servitude upon arrival, while many others cross on their own. Hundreds die every year in the deserts of California and Arizona.

Man, woman, or child, old or young, all of them are human beings and most of them are our close neighbors. They come a rather short distance by planetary standards and take a step in trepidation across an imaginary line into a land where they will be subjected to subhuman conditions and where all they once were will be swept away by the affixing of a new appellation – they cease being people and become aliens. And as if that ugly word needed a nefarious modifier, they become illegal aliens. With the appellation thus affixed the rest of us can bolster our hate with the force of law. Hate is easier to look at if it we believe it is justified.

Consider the following words written by CNN’s Lou Dobbs and printed in the pages of the New York Times on April 25th of this year:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Bush administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party are preparing to take another legislative leap at imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens.

And the mainstream media are complicit in advancing this thinly veiled blanket amnesty. Instead of asking and answering important questions about why our immigration laws aren't being enforced and why we're permitting pervasive document fraud, the national media seem hell-bent on trying to obfuscate the issue, shamelessly playing with language, equating legal immigration with illegal immigration while obviously trying to preserve the illusion of objectivity.

Too often, the language of the national media describes illegal immigration as "migration" and illegal aliens as "undocumented immigrants," even though many of them have lots of documents, most of which are fraudulent or stolen. Some media outlets have taken to calling illegal aliens "entrants." Whether such language is meant to engender sympathy or to intentionally blur the distinction between legal and illegal, the mainstream media are taking sides in this debate.

Now are those the words of a man with a merely political point to make? Does one write, “imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens,” to argue one side of a policy debate regarding the process of entry to the US or does one write such a line to demonize the object and sew fear among the readership? One thing is for certain, Lou Dobbs doesn’t want the media to “engender sympathy” for those thieving, fraudulent illegal aliens. Another thing is certain, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than the New York Times, the publication that ran Dobbs’ hateful rant about the mainstream press not using hateful words.

They’re people, Lou. They’re immigrants. They aren’t properly documented. Thus they’re undocumented immigrants. They are not illegal aliens. To refer to them as aliens is to say they are “others.” To say they are illegal is to say something about their existence, not their status. What they are, Lou, are ten million or more people who work very hard, live very poorly, suffer exclusion from the mainstream resources we take for granted and do so having left behind everything familiar and comfortable to them, in most cases even their families, all in the desperate hope that their children might have an opportunity to live as they never could. I don’t think we need fewer such people; I think we need more of them. And whatever you wish to call them, the only things alien about them are their strange and foreign optimism, their unnatural hope, and their repugnant courage in the face of a recalcitrant dehumanization by fear mongers.

Why does a man hate? What really drives a man to make the object of his fiercest hate so ugly that he can hate that object without remorse? It should be obvious. Only one force is so compelling that a man can use it to engender something in himself as ugly as hatred – that force is fear. Only fear can motivate us to identify a thing as an alien. In the case of the undocumented immigrants at whom so much hatred in our time is evinced, our fear has to do with a perceived threat to a false identity. Some of us are afraid of the fact that one out of ten Americans – Americans – lacks a piece of paper. Those Americans do not look like “us,” speak like us or act like us. Their multitude might, therefore, threaten our “usness.”

To some of us that’s a fearsome threat and it gets met with a hatred that shows itself through excoriating rhetoric, jingoistic isolationism and self-proclaimed superiority, even entitlement. Perhaps we have always been thus and perhaps we had to be. After all, I am writing from a land taken by “us” from those “aliens’” forebears with the smoke of a barrel and the point of a saber. I wonder if my Cherokee ancestors saw my European ones as aliens. I suppose they must have.

But that sort of speculation has little to do with what we should do today, which is to chart a path to legitimizing humanity and diminishing the spread of fear and hate. That work begins with the recognition that there is nothing alien about hope. There is nothing alien about dreams. There is nothing alien about love of one’s children. Those things are alien to hatred, but they should not be alien to us. We are still imperfect. We are a people who include the monsters who drug a black man to death behind a pickup truck for the crime of being a different color. We are a people who include the beasts who flayed the skin from a young man’s back and left him to die strapped to a fence for the sin of having a different orientation. We are a people who have no compunction about fighting over human legitimacy in public, debating the worth of human beings who committed the grievous offense of being born on the wrong side of a line. We have work to do.

So why not let that work begin at home? Why not accept the truth – that some ten million of us are immigrants lacking proper documentation, but that those ten million are no more alien to us than that black man in Texas or that gay man in Wyoming. They are part of us. In a sense, they are us.

An little told tragedy of the current administration is that it not only wasted its power on profligacy and war, but by so doing it also threw away the political capital needed to accomplish the one admirable purpose it set out to achieve, which is to bring our hidden population out of the shadows and into the hopeful light through a legitimate process of inclusion and investment. Sadly, the sun has almost certainly set on comprehensive immigration reform and it will not rise again until there is a regime change in Washington, if then.

In the fullness of time history is a fair judge. It renders a verdict that stands as a testament to the ages and there is no fairer judge than that. A people are judged for what they did with their moment of opportunity. We have thus far squandered ours and now live in a world where hate sears our airwaves and pervades our public discourse. That must stop. I cannot accept that in my daughter’s golden years she will look at my time and ask herself why nobody halted the hatred before it could grow and consume us so that as the world heated up, so did human passions until they erupted from internal combustion. Hate is the ugliest thing, but it is not the most powerful thing. More powerful than hate by far is hope and I hope there is an end to hate. I hope.

Drying Out from San Diego CityBEAT

May 9, 2007

Drying out
Dying is hard enough, but living – damn!
What a damnable space is the mind! Don’t venture there and if you do, don’t linger. If you must, take a guidebook. Alone in the uncharted mind the smallness of a self knows horror, even dread. It’s not the noise. It’s the silence – the vacuity of nothing, an expanding and consuming nothing that reduces a man to a cricket in the chasm of the mind.

A friend asked, “Why do you drink?” To shrink space, friend. That’s why. To make the limitless measurable, to bind infinity, to constrain the mind from the endlessness of possibility. Nevertheless, a friend is a friend so I told my friend I would quit.

Now, Hesse wrote better than I ever could that nothing is more frightening to a man than the path that leads to himself. Yes, Hermann, but what is so frightening about fright. It’s not being frightened that should worry us. Fright has to do with uncertainty. It has to do with the concern that something might happen. Fright is awful, but it isn’t the worst thing. What is more frightening than fright? What fear is more fearful than fear itself? What should scare us more than uncertainty?

Certainty.

I am certain that I am sober and I am certain that clear-eyed and fearless I know something worse than fear. I know that I know what I know. I know that I can see the light. I know that there is a place where children sing and angels listen. But I know also of the darkness. I know a place where a man roars and hell bars its gates and hides the imps in the closet. Knowing is more awful by far than not knowing.

So my friend asked me, “How drunk were you?” How drunk would you be if you didn’t know how drunk you were? How old would you be if you weren’t yet born? What if you were dead? How far is everything from nothing? What is the color of sound? The mind is a damnable space!

But the questions of the mind don’t matter. Neither does it matter that I might fall along the way. I probably will. It’s not in never falling that we’re the strongest. It’s in getting up again each time we fall. At the risk of disillusioning you, readers, I will admit a truth. I don’t write this column for you. I write this column for me. And I need to tell myself in front of you why I’m trying. I’m trying so that I might live.

Dying is easier by far than living. The one is eventually over; the other takes forever. So why choose life over death? Why knowing over ignorance? Why suffer the damnable space of the mind that comes with being alive? Because dead I could not have my friend.

Dead I could not know my child in the fullness of time. Dead I could not lift my grandchildren so they could touch the ceiling. Dead I could not laugh at comedy, cry at tragedy or tremble at a fugue. Still worst, dead I could not have my friend.

If there were a god, surely he would have made us drunk. That would be the merciful thing. So surely there can’t be a god, just some accursed scoundrel who made life and made it sober. Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps the blessing of life is that the living of it kills you. What an ironic twist that would be. Maybe god is a trickster and maybe life a pun.

I can’t know any of these things, I’m just a man with a damnable mind. But I know that I know what I know and I know that I have my friend. For that, to be alive is a price worth paying.

I know this part gets easier. I have dried out before. I haven’t ever written of it. I haven’t ever admitted to anyone (not even myself) that I did it. It’s not the not drinking that’s hard. It’s the really wanting to live. Half-dead and sober is no way to go through life, which is why I’m writing this now. Sure, you readers help. But I’m writing this for myself to remind myself what I’ve chosen. This time I’ve chosen to live.

Boy is that a consequential choice! I hadn’t ever considered its implication. It implies accepting possibility, especially the possibility that life gets better. I want to hope that’s true. I really do. But standing in the damnable space of the mind it’s mighty hard to hope. Trust me, I’m trying, I really am. I just can’t let myself hope yet.

I will never write of this again. Not for me or for anyone. This is a bastardization of a craft and a perversion of a science. Writing is too important a thing to be wasted on one’s self. Done well it can make a difference, a difference that matters to you. Portrait of the artist my ass! If I want to show you me I should do so through what I write.

But perhaps, after all, I need to show you me and perhaps I need to see myself do it. Just as I’ve admitted why I write in the first place, perhaps I should admit that what I write about is me, be it a caustic commentary, a wry observation or a splendid tale of finery. Perhaps those things are me in fact and perhaps I should admit it. One thing I know is that I won’t know unless I can know what I know and for that, living is necessary.

So after all, why write this piece, this one in particular? I suppose here, at word 952 it’s time to ask that question and to search the damnable space of the mind for the answer. Thank heaven for nicotine and coffee. This one will require a break . . .

I wrote it so I could finally be me.

Barack Obama from San Diego CityBEAT

May 2, 2007

The willingness to believe
Two days of angst and the beauty of Obama
What is it in us that wants to believe? Is it the brain or the heart? Is it a desire to be right, the exigency of logic, or a desire to be swept away, the rapture of release? I asked myself about belief as I wandered the floor of the California Democratic Convention last weekend and decided at last that it was neither the brain nor the heart that yearns. It is something more visceral than those. It is the loins. It is our most carnal aspect that aches to break free from resignation and give itself willingly in the trusting expectation of completion. The desire to believe is less a want than it is a craving, felt like hunger, carried like pain and guarded like lust. It is an urge, a compulsion of the flesh. We don’t just want to believe, we need it. We long to be fulfilled by true belief in something, anything, and nowhere is that longing more manifest than at a political convention.

Long since resigned to disillusionment, this cynic found himself on Friday afternoon in a hall of true believers and I too longed to believe. I recalled Lao Tzu’s acerbic line: “If rape is eminent, relax and enjoy it.” So I gave myself to the convention and felt used, violated, but none the worse for it.

The first thing to report about the Democrats is that they aren’t perfect. They lack attention to detail. In fact, they’re sloppy. My colleague pointed out a typo in a conspicuous bit of signage and although in its own right a misspelling doesn’t matter, I had to wonder if the Republicans would have let it go. Probably not. The second thing to report about the Democrats is that they’re passionate and here’s the thing about that: passion and San Diego don’t mix. Ours is a town complicit in contrived tranquility, content in its own comfort, relaxed in its abstention from significance. There were demonstrators along Harbor Drive holding signs – tens of people. It was pitiful.

But inside the hall, passion clung to life and the motley assortment of Democrats, young and old, black and white, man and woman that swelled the place wore their true belief right out in the open. They caucused and bickered and murmured in the hallways consumed by their desire to be sated. It was more than a pep rally, although it certainly was that. It was an orgy of true believers indulging their belief.

Friday wore on. I did what I do. I found a bar.

Judge not lest ye be judged. I had to find a bar. I spent well over an hour bouncing between the meetings of the Resolutions Committee and the Rules Committee and the only thing I took away was the resolution to never again follow a fucking rule. If you ever need to look up the definition of “arcane blather” just look under “committee.” I’m told there were three speakers at 6:30 that evening including former Senator Mike Gravel. They might have been good, I don’t know. But I know they weren’t as good as the Scotch I got from my bartender, Heidi, in the lobby of the Marriott. Why can’t true believers learn? It’s called lobbying because it happens in a lobby. Anyhow, so much for Friday.

Saturday morning began with a buzz. Friday’s passion spilled over and the energy of belief still permeated the cavernous place bathing Democrats in the warmth of hope. Hillary was coming. Now I’m a caustic and insensitive prick, y’all, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m a sucker for oratory. I sidled up stage-side and turned off my brain so I could listen to Hillary Clinton’s heart. One has to listen closely to hear that heart, she doesn’t let it tick too loudly.

Hillary told us a story of womanhood. She told us abut the splendor of life and the agony of loss and she nearly had me, she really did. Tears came and I didn’t wipe them away. I listened, I hung on each hoarse word and wanted more. Then she got to Iraq. She said it is time to “end the war and bring our troops home . . .” She lost me. “Yes, Hillary,” I thought, “and then what?” She never gave us a then what. She never spoke of the carnage and incalculable evil we would leave behind or of what we might do in the world with the abandoned abomination of our own scorn. Then what, Hillary? Then what? It was about 11:00 in the morning. I figured Hillary was just a tease.

The press room offered some pretty good eats by convention center standards, two types of pasta that went well with a Scotch-starved belly and helped to pass time while I kept longing for that true belief that would actually fill me. Damn it, Hillary! Why couldn’t you tell me then what? I grabbed a cup of coffee and meandered back down to the main floor in time to hear Nancy Pelosi say some utterly uninspiring things. The third thing to report about Democrats is boy howdy can they berate the obvious! When I die and suffer eternally for all my transgressions I will be forced to listen to Nancy Pelosi speak to a hall of Democrats.

I still didn’t believe. I wanted to. I craved it and there was nothing in the main hall to fill me up so I went back to the press room where at least there was pasta and coffee. Barack Obama showed up and suddenly I knew how the orgy would climax. Every tense muscle in the building reached out for the man and every raw nerve tingled. It was as if God stopped by to repair creation and I couldn’t bring myself to go to the main hall and share him with a crowd of revelers. I stayed in the press room and watched him on television.

Friends, I would not presume to tell you about politics but I will tell you about beauty and Barack Obama is a beautiful person. As a reporter observed earlier in the day, if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party’s brain, Barack Obama is its heart and what a magnificent heart it is. When it beats it moves the soul and fills the emptiness of longing. The words don’t matter. The sound alone transfixes the listener. It really isn’t speech. It’s music. It’s a rhapsody, perhaps a fanfare. As my colleague put it, it is the cadence of seduction. When Obama said, “It’s time to move past the slow decay of indifference,” he had me. I believed. I don’t know that I believed in him completely, but I believed in his heart. I’m telling you, this man is special. He’s beautiful.

It was mid-afternoon. There were another 24 hours of convention left and nobody cared. That moment, the crescendo of Barack Obama sealed the deal for everyone. I couldn’t bring myself to go to a bar after that so I did the other thing that I do; I sneaked into somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. There is a back exit from the main hall of the convention center that leads someplace where beautiful people get taken away to be beautiful elsewhere. I brandished my press pass like a shield and slipped past the men who were no doubt intended to keep people like me away from people like Barack Obama.

I saw him from ten yards away. He isn’t as tall as he seems. I expected him to loom enormously but he didn’t. He’s just a man. And as he passed the spot I’d sneaked into I paced alongside him and decided I needed to know what a man like that really feels. I asked him, “Senator Obama, can you tell me what you hate?” He slowed his gait nearly imperceptibly and turned his head to the right, looking over his shoulder so he could see me full in the eyes and answered. “What do I hate? I hate cruelty. I don’t know why people are cruel.”

On the whole I’m not any better for having gone to the California Democratic Convention, not in any substantial way. I’m not transformed or really even informed. I don’t know how I’ll vote in 2008 and I don’t think it will matter. But one thing about me is better, at least slightly, and for that I owe Barack Obama – I’m willing to believe.

The Draft from San Diego CityBEAT

April 25, 2007

Not my child
Are we really talking about drafting our children?

Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

On my 18th birthday, I walked into the post office of a little town and registered with the Selective Service. It was 1984 and I was a high-school dropout with an all-day erection, a nicotine addiction, a bad haircut and no car. I was a shitty kid; I would have made an even shittier soldier. But I walked out of that post office and shoved that crisp new card between my fake driver's license and my real one, lit an unfiltered Camel, took a deep drag and felt just like a man. There was no draft in 1984. I could afford to feel however I wanted.

Five years later, my daughter was born. She came into the world with some difficulty. Her mother labored for days before she was taken to the operating room for a C-section. I walked in just after the incision was made and stood at my wife's head, stroking her hair, for a matter of minutes that today seem like a second and when the puckered little face of my angel was pulled into the world, I knew not only that I had not yet been a man, but also that I would never be man enough. That was 18 years ago. My child will never walk into that post office. That is my solemn oath and affirmation.

There will always be wars and rumors of wars. Old men will start them and the youth will fight them and die. It will always be those youth who give the most and take the least who do the fighting and dying, and it will always be their mothers and fathers at home who suffer the unfathomable anguish of watching their sons and daughters leave home to learn to be killers. Not my child. Not while I breathe.

So what must Congressman John Murtha, the Democrat from Pennsylvania, think of men like me as he stumps for his H.R. 393, a bill that would reinstate a draft to constitute what Murtha calls "a citizen's army"? Surely he thinks less of me for never really serving my country. Surely he thinks me unpatriotic for being persuaded that I would never give my child to defend a thing, not even if that thing were an empire. I suppose I'm still not much of a man, but I'll tell you one thing: I'm man enough that all the John Murthas in Washington won't teach my daughter to kill. Not while I breathe.

Please don't anyone misunderstand and think I do not honor the service of every young man and woman called to risk their lives for the freedom I take for granted. The young men and women who answer that call deserve the highest exaltation of our country, as do the mothers and fathers who see their children off to war. But one never hears public accolades for those parents who keep their children out of harm's way. There are no plaques honoring the parents who sent money to their sons in Canada while those sons' friends died in Vietnam. Why is it more honorable to endure a child's death than to guard a child's life and more, a child's very humanity? I refuse to accept that it is a better thing to sacrifice life than to preserve it.

What madness have we wrought in our time that Congress can even consider something as unthinkable as a death lottery for our young? There was a better time for us as a people when our sons and daughters answered a call to give themselves willingly so that tyranny would not win the earth. This is not that time. I believe John Murtha forgets that fact. He must. How else could he conceive of anything so beastly as the idea of using our children to backfill the shortage of killers left by our campaign of monstrosity let loose upon the earth under one man's ruthless fiat? Well not my child. Not while I breathe.

How is it possible that we have forgotten to love our children? How have we come to look at them as a resource? They're our children—our children! Is it not enough that we will leave them a legacy of environmental catastrophe? Are we not content with forcing them to try to learn in schoolyards staffed with armed officers and security checkpoints at the front door? Are we not satisfied with poisoning them with chemicals, fattening them with slop and commercializing them with a barrage of sight and sound to prematurely sexualize their self-images and intensify their desire to consume? That's enough, God damn it! Our children already don't have much of a childhood. Must we steal their young adulthood? Not my daughter, John Murtha. Not while I breathe.

Like every other father, I wonder whether I will ever be as good a man as my child deserves me to be. I have had proud moments and some in which I have been tested and found wanting. At times I thought I did quite well. At others, I thought I was of no account. On the whole I think I've done satisfactorily but not well enough to take credit for the wondrous young woman my daughter has become. She just is that special. And whatever failings I may have, I can still look into my baby's eyes and read the words "I love you, Daddy," written on her precious heart and know that I would sooner deliver myself to the gates of hell and fight the army of darkness bare-fisted than give my daughter to be trained to kill the children of others. I could never love this country or any country that much—not like I love her.

So you rest easy, baby girl. Revel in the splendor of your youth and triumph in the moment of young womanhood. Daddy won't let that happen, not now, not ever, not as long as I breathe.

Please Stop Fighting from LastBlogOnEarth.com

April 19, 2007

Women: Please stop fighting
There are words and then there is writing. The former can round out a blog post, or an opinion editorial or a grocery list, but they cannot do what the latter can do. Words alone cannot transfix the heart, they cannot reshape the mind, they cannot weave from loose thread the strong cord of thought and furious sound that tethers the soul to a safer anchorage than can be found in the open water of semantics. Only writing can do that. And that is why it is still a noble thing to write, which is something entirely different than to use words.

Then still, writing can hurt. Writing is the two-edged sword of the mind and the most damning of the sciences. Writing is the haughty craft that pronounces its judgment on all other crafts and if that judgment be harsh, writing swiftly executes its own sentence, sometimes brutally. And that is why it is still a risky thing to write, which is something entirely different than to put words into print.

Take a case from this very blog, please . . .

A friend and colleague of mine wrote, in compelling prose, that the United States Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to uphold a law that bans partial birth abortion on the grounds that said law reflects the “government’s legitimate, substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life,” is a ruling at odds with this government’s practice in the area of life-preservation and promotion in general. She wrote reflectively, she wrote persuasively and she wrote from the heart. – the heart of a mother whose own daughter’s opportunities in adulthood will be determined, in part, by how much our generation is willing to struggle to preserve the opportunity for opportunity.

A reader responded to my colleague’s post and wrote, in so many words, that while my colleague’s thesis is unquestionably correct and while her reflection upon the matter brought out accurate sentiment, it is instructive to note that the backward step represented by the Court’s decision should alert a generation of young women to the truth - that there is no safety in past progress. Advances can be lost and gains given back in any battle if one contents one’s self simply to hold one’s ground. It is in moving forward, not standing still, that we beat back the tide of reaction and repression.

Another reader responded to the foregoing by observing that she believed my colleague had attempted to do that very thing, to write of the need not to rest and trust but to fight on and charge full ahead.

This is what got written, but somehow what got said was, “I’m a real feminist – no you’re not – yeah huh – oh yeah, well I march – so, I march too but I don’t feel the need to brag about it – well at least I didn’t change my name – neener, neener, neener,” and upon reading it all a demon rushed into this writer’s heart and I nearly wept but instead the scoundrel in me said, “Ladies, simmer your collective ass the fuck down!” and now the writer in me asks, eyes wet, “Women, will you please stop fighting – if not for yourselves, for the rest of us?”

Maybe April finds the child in the heart. Maybe in the bursting forth of brash new life consumed by hope I find myself trying to look no longer through the eyes of a wretch at the ugly and fetid world of things beaten and small. Maybe I tire in spring of the gnashing of teeth and the scrambling in the filth and soot for what meager sustenance feeds the heart of a man and maybe it is this that makes me want instead to see what women see – perhaps to glimpse this world once, just once truly and well lit, through the eyes of a mother in her late life and see the wash of true adoration for all things bright and beautiful or perhaps instead to see through the eyes of a daughter a world of ice and high mountains and travels still to take, or through the eyes of a sister a world of verdant calm where the baser, violent things, the things of men, can find no purchase. Whatever it is, it rends the heart and boils the brain and please, women, stop fighting.

Something there is in a woman that, however she may think, can still hold in fief the gathering storm and soothe the tortured soul and send the angel back into the scoundrel’s heart and with a laying on of her small hand quench the pain and unutterable wrath of a man in the warm spring water. Something there is in the world that needs the woman’s touch, something that needs its heart pierced by the angel, its soul soothed and its pain muted, and please, women, please stop fighting.

“Aha,” you’ll observe, “but what of the beastly things, the monstrous things, the ugly and devouring things? While women fill your world, you fool, with dreams of spangled tapestries and splendid galleries of rich statuary, who guards the door? Who watches that the demons do not swell their ranks and charge us in such force that we cannot long withstand?” It is one thing to watch, women. It is another thing to fight among yourselves about the watching. And please, women, please, for all of us – please stop fighting.

For while you fight, who will send the flare into the sky to alert the soldiers to their real call and duty? Who will sound the bugle and send forth the stalwart defenses to drive back real monstrosity when it shows itself? Who will send the runner to call the warriors from their drunken revelry and drive them out to meet the dust of thundering hooves beneath the war horses of true wickedness? While you fight, what keen eye will spot the threat on the horizon and pull us from our vice and shame and cast us as fiends at the enemies of beauty? Please, women, please stop fighting.

All flowery rhetoric aside, all musing and writer’s craft put away, look honestly at our world, detached, apart, at a distance, and ask if there was ever a time when your watch was more needed, your call more overdue and your orders more awaited. Look out at a world where someone has taken duty and hidden it in imperialism, where someone has taken fairness and hidden it in reciprocity and someone has taken love and hidden it in desire and ask whether you are not our first line of real defense. Ask if your eyes have not themselves been clouded by the encircling grey of a world gone mad under man’s dominion and ask if we can ever see the sun again without your leadership. Ask if rancor and self-struggle amount to leading. Ask yourselves that, answer, and please women, stop fighting.

The world is an awful place in which cruelty abides and hope shrinks. Maybe it must be thus. But would that it were not! Would that cruelty could shrink and hope abide! Would that the sum of wars be forgotten and the wretched things of men cast down into the sunken depths of the abyss of time. Would that ours were a world where women watched that broad horizon and ordered us into battle in time to halt the diminution of our claim.

I am ready to live in such a world or to die fighting for it. I am ready to heed the call and to rail against what ravenous monster might show itself at the gate. I am ready to put in service what ugly man’s weapons clutter my arsenal and to carry out what ghastly duty befalls me in the service of hope and womanhood. But I cannot hear your orders above your shouts and taunts and jeers at one another and for that reason I ask you please, please my mothers and daughters and sisters, please stop fighting.

Steve Got Beaten Up from LastBlogOnEarth.com

February 27, 2007

Steve got beat up by a chick in a jacket
Some of you have met my dog, Steve. Others of you have read about Steve’s unusual talent. Still others of you know nothing at all about Steve so here’s what you need to know.

Steve weighs six pounds. He’s a chirpy, squirrely, psychotic little critter who excretes more than he ingests. It’s amazing. Other than pooping and tripping like the six-pound whacko that he is, Steve does basically nothing.

So I thought it would be nice if Steve had some company. My good friend who lives across the alley has his girlfriend’s Chihuahua living with him now. Her name is Luna and she’s also a psychotic little critter (the Chihuahua, not the girlfriend). Although she’s no taller than Steve, she’s got a good two or three pounds on him.

I asked my friend, “Why don’t you bring Luna over to play with Steve?” My friend thought that was a bad idea because he was rather certain Luna would kick Steve’s ass. “Come on,” I said, “it’ll be all right.”

Luna wears clothes. Steve is a nudist. So cutting to the chase, Luna donned her finest spring wear and came to my house to meet Steve and beat him like a rented mule. She whipped the heck out of my dog and it was all I could do not to slap him for getting beaten up by a chick in a jacket.

Poor Steve.

Homelessness from San Diego CityBEAT

December 20, 2006

Fighting poverty during the holidays and all year long
I walked two blocks from my house to the Rite Aid in Hillcrest last Saturday night in what passes for a driving rain in Southern California. I only braved the elements because I had run through the stack of paper towels torn into quarters sitting on my toilet tank and, rain or no rain, a man’s pooper deserves Charmin once in awhile. En route I passed two homeless people huddled and sleeping under two nearly adjacent overhangs that afforded little protection from the wet and cold but at least kept them fairly well hidden from view. One of them was an old woman. The other was an old man missing a leg.

I will not propose a thesis in macroeconomics or urban planning in a mere thousand-word editorial comment. Neither will I espouse any particular ideology in this brief treatment of homelessness. What I will say is this: old men, women and amputees sleeping in the rain on Sixth Avenue amid ostentatious affluence are manifest evidence of something in our society gone horribly awry.

I can hear you groaning. “Why must you snooty, liberal columnists always trot out the homeless during the holidays?” I’ll tell you why: It’s the only time that most of you are the least bit likely to care. And for the record, I refuse to refer to a diverse population of men, women and children as “the homeless,” as if they were some homogenous mass whose circumstance defined their essence. Nobody refers to my neighbors and me as “the homed.”

I look forward to your letters, which will likely be of three types:

1. People are homeless because they’re mentally ill.
No, they’re not.

2. People are homeless because they’re substance abusers.
No, they’re not.

3. People are homeless because they choose to be.
Get fucked.

Friends, gather ’round. Tony’s got something to share. People are homeless because they’re poor. That’s it. Period. Homeless people are young and old, sick and well, red, yellow, black, white and brown, male, female and in between. Poverty is the only characteristic universally shared by all homeless Americans. Quote me on that.

Now, those of you who’ve been to law school or studied logic will object that there are causes and then there are causes. About homelessness, you will say that poverty might be the proximate cause but the cause in fact is substance abuse (or mental illness, or whatever) inasmuch as substance abuse, etc., is the cause of poverty. I wonder about that. There are more substances abused at Gaslamp clubs every night than are abused by every homeless person in the county put together. And while substance abuse sometimes leads to homelessness, it just as often leads to Betty Ford. Where a substance abuser ends up is a matter of the quality of his or her insurance coverage and the strength and integrity of his or her support system. The same is true of mental illness, age, infirmity and any other issue to which one might point and say, “Aha—that person is homeless because….” I’ll say it again: Homeless people are homeless because they’re poor.

But that, of course, is what was so troubling to me as I dodged the downpour in my quest for quilted tissue. As D’Arcy Thompson wrote in 1917: Everything is what it is because it got that way. How, then, do the poor get to be poor? What is it about the least among us that makes them the least? More relevantly, what are we to do differently to quit letting the poor get that way in the first place? What sort of systemic change would make it so that I could run to the store for something soft with which to daub my dumper without passing the byproducts of a society that indulges the amassing of indefensible wealth while tolerating, if not denying, the persistent existence of such crushing poverty?

I haven’t worked out the answers to those questions yet, not in much detail anyway, but I will offer one general observation. This country is ready for a war on poverty. What we need is a full frontal assault against the forces and institutions from which the downward spiral of intergenerational poverty stems. We must seek victory on the battlefield of opportunity and we must engage any enemy that shows himself, even if that enemy is us.

This country has never really sustained anything like a war on poverty, not anything that carries the moral force of war, nothing that conveys the seriousness of the term, maybe because those who declare wars haven’t seen poverty as a threat to all of us. Lyndon Johnson declared such a war in 1964, but that war petered out as we pressed ahead with a war deemed more winnable—the one in Vietnam. We have fought wars against aggression, against ethnic cleansing, against imperialism and totalitarianism, against drugs and now against terror. But we have never felt the need to combat the causes and consequences of poverty through the waging of full-scale war. Even during the Great Depression, what could arguably be construed as attacks on poverty were really minor skirmishes against joblessness. Fighting today’s poverty will require more than that. Sending men off to build bridges and dams might be a part of the war, but it won’t be the major part.

The major part will involve admitting that we, as a nation, have squandered more than 60 years of unprecedented sustained prosperity and 20 years of utter global hegemony and that we have become a people noted chiefly for our complacency. To win the second war against poverty we will have to ask hard questions and we must be prepared to make sacrifices. We must accept that poverty is as much our problem as it is the problem of the poor, we must be willing to join the fight not only during the holidays but all year long and we must learn, finally, as we should have known all along, that the worth of our contribution will not be measured by how much we give. It will be measured by how much we keep for ourselves.

OJ Simpson from San Diego CityBEAT

November 22, 2006

O.J., Rupert and abject assholery
I’m not saying I would have watched O.J. Simpson on the Fox Network next Monday and Wednesday night. I’m not saying I would have set my cable box to record his two-hour interview. I’m not saying I would have sat down on my couch with a can of Pringles and a Miller High Life. I’m just saying that if I had done so, that’s how it would have gone. I’m also not saying that I did have my picture taken kneeling beside O.J. in 1977. I’m just saying that if I did, this is what it looked like.

I was only 11. Since then, I have met O.J. many times. The last time was nearly 20 years ago. I wouldn’t say we were friends. It’s not like we ever smacked a woman together or anything. I doubt he would remember me if he saw me again.

Still, I remember him, not only as a shameless womanizer but also as a football player. Sure, he killed his children’s mother and her companion in a gruesome mêlée, but boy howdy he was one heck of a running back. In 1973 he rushed for 2,003 yards in a 14-game season with the Buffalo Bills, who at the time fielded the feeblest roster in football with one notable exception. O.J. remains, in my mind, the best pure runner of football’s modern era—better than Jim Brown, better than Gayle Sayers, better even than Barry Sanders. He was so good that, as far as I’m concerned, he can butcher everyone in Beverly Hills and get away with it. I don’t like effete L.A. snots, anyway. Not unless they’re Heisman Trophy winners.

All right. I’m being sarcastic—not about the football part, but about the killing-people part. Of course I don’t actually believe that possessing rare athletic talent gives anyone the right to kill people, and of course even people in Los Angeles have a right to live (as long as they stay the hell out of San Diego). I actually feel a little bit guilty about still being a huge O.J. fan, but I can’t help it. I always have been. So were most of you right up until June 12, 1994. Until then you didn’t know he was capable of brutality. You didn’t know anything about him until he leapt upon two defenseless people in the dark and slew them. You don’t know a ladder has splinters until you slide down it. (I don’t know what that means, but former NFL coach Bum Phillips once said it and I’ve been dying to quote him for a long time.)

That was then; this is now. I know there are still a few people who believe that O.J. did not kill Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. They’re mostly the same people who believe that Wesley Snipes did not file fraudulent tax returns. The rest of us, however, know the truth, and a significant number of us are compelled by maudlin curiosity to hear that truth graphically spelled out, albeit hypothetically. Shame on us. I am no moral authority. I have no right to preach. Y’all can do whatever you like and I am in no position to criticize you, so you can ignore this next missive if you wish, but I’m going to write it anyway: If you had planned to spend an hour of your life on Nov. 27 and another hour on Nov. 29 watching O.J. Simpson talk about how he “would have” murdered his ex-wife and her boy toy, you’re an asshole.

If you are, don’t worry. You’re in plentiful company. There are gazillions of assholes who want to hear O.J. talk about that heinous night. They are the reason that O.J.’s publisher, Harper Collins, was so confident that the book about which Judith Regan planned to interview O.J. on Fox would fly off the shelves when it was released. They are also the reason that Rupert Murdoch and the smug, slimy scumbags who run his empire initially had no compunction whatsoever about airing two hours of programming to help a murdering narcissist promote himself during sweeps week. Had it happened, tens of millions of Americans would have watched O.J. and they would have gone to work and said things to one another like, “Oh my God! Can you believe that guy! He should be ashamed of himself!” They would not have reflected upon who should really be ashamed of whose self.

Since they can’t do so now, I’ll tease the assholes with a snippet from the If I Did It publisher’s release. In it O.J. writes, “I’m going to tell you a story you’ve never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night, because I know the facts better than anyone.”

I’m sure he’s right, but I know some facts myself. It’s a fact that the only reason I and the rest of you assholes (you know who you are) would have gotten the opportunity to avail ourselves of such an extraordinary opportunity for assholery is because Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns both Fox and Harper Collins, was disgracefully willing to pander to the basest elements of our natures—that is, up until the hue and cry from those whose natures aren’t so base.

Here’s what Murdoch said about his change of course: “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project. We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.” Now I’m not saying that a man whose company would have published and aired such a travesty has no business claiming he didn’t know about it all along. I’m just saying that if that’s the case, he’s an asshole, an even bigger asshole than me.

North Korea from San Diego CityBEAT

October 18, 2006

Who’s afraid of Kim Jong-Il?
There are two kinds of crazy people in the world—crazy people and crazy people with nuclear weapons. You can ignore the first kind, but you’re pretty much forced to deal with the second kind. Kim Jong-Il is the second kind. Kim Jong-Il has nuclear weapons and he’s crazy as a three-peckered goat. Crazy or not crazy, when the leader of a country with the world’s third largest army blows up a nuclear device under a mountain range, the world is forced to pay attention.

Seven days after the test, U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that the event in North Korea on Oct. 9 was a plutonium-fueled nuclear explosion. What we now know from Washington is that something with a yield of around 500 tons of conventional high explosives blew up underground a few hundred miles northeast of Pyongyang. According to the U.S. Geological Service, the blast triggered a seismic event measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale.

I was surprised to learn that an explosion that causes a magnitude-4.2 earthquake is considered small by nuclear standards. In fact, according to self-proclaimed experts, such an explosion could be caused by a device just a fraction of the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Upon learning that fact, I breathed a sigh of relief. At least our technology of mass destruction is still more than 60 years ahead of a country where the citizens boil tree bark for dinner.

Feeble though the test was, U.S. leaders called upon their counterparts from China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to engage in immediate discussion. The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to wag a finger at North Korea and say “Bad.” Chinese President Hu Jintao is said to be rolling up a newspaper with which to swat his neighbor to the south on the nose. Dictators are like puppies—you have to let them know who’s in charge.

To a lot of people, Kim Jong-Il having nuclear weapons is scary. Scarier still is the prospect that he might sell some of his new toys to his friends in Iran or Venezuela or who knows where. But while the world is busy getting itself all freaked out over the whole mess, it occurs to me that we should keep this newest threat in perspective. North Korea is a naughty place—that’s certain. Kim Jong-Il is a water-headed nut job—that’s just as certain. But of all the things in this world that should scare the average soul, North Korea is way down on the list.

We live in a world in which 4 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that nation’s past decade of warfare, the earth’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, a conflict in which the U.S. has taken no part at all. We live in a world in which a crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan was officially labeled genocide by Colin Powell more than two years ago and still not one American soldier has put a boot on the ground. That delightful epic has now claimed the lives of more than 400,000 civilians and displaced more than 2.5 million. We learned just last week that we live in a world in which this country’s occupation of Iraq has led to the deaths of roughly 655,000 civilians. We live in a world in which we don’t need to worry about who has nuclear weapons; we need to worry about why somebody might logically use one.

Before we get consumed with fear of a nuclear North Korea, let’s tell the whole story about nuclear weapons. Including North Korea, the list of declared-nuclear-weapons states in the world now includes eight countries. Israel has never admitted to its supposed arsenal of 100 to 200 nuclear warheads, so we can leave those scary warmongers out of it for now.

At the bottom of the list are India and Pakistan with some 100 or so nukes apiece. Those two countries are none too fond of one another. They share an 1,800-mile border and both conducted underground nuclear tests in 1998. That’s scary. Then there are the mid-tier nuclear states, China, France and the United Kingdom, each with a few hundred nuclear weapons. None of them are all that scary, actually. For them, having nuclear weapons is just keeping up appearances.

But atop the list things are very scary. Russia has more than 5,800 active nuclear warheads with another 10,000 or so in storage. I won’t speculate as to the resale value of Russia’s arsenal, but I sure hope its economy stays afloat. That many nukes would make for one heck of a yard sale.

Finally, the U.S. admits to having 5,735 active warheads with another 3,200 in reserve. I don’t know what we plan to do with that many nuclear weapons, but I know that we are still the only country that has ever used one. We killed more than 200,000 Japanese men, women and children in two explosions when Kim Jong-Il was in preschool. That’s scary as hell. It’s no wonder that some people in this world are more afraid of us than they are of North Korea, with or without nuclear weapons. I’m not going to invite Kim Jong-Il to join me for happy hour any time soon, but of everything in this world that scares the hell out of me, for now, at least, that crazy sumbitch is not one of them.

Maybe it’s because we conveniently exclude ourselves from the company of nations who would use violence and threats of violence as geopolitical tools that so much of this world hates us. Since 1953, North Korea has not attacked anyone. By contrast, since dropping nuclear weapons on civilians 61 years ago, the U.S. has fought in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, twice. Add to that our military meddling in the affairs of Chile, El Salvador, Iran, Lebanon, Nicaragua and the Philippines and one can understand why we are so thoroughly hated.

That’s scary and it’s our own fault.

Mark Foley from San Diego CityBEAT

October 11, 2006

Duck and cover with Marky Mark and the fallout boys
I sure wish CNN would stop showing me old video of Mark Foley. He’s making me a little horny. God that’s gross. I’ll try again: Why don’t they use bookmarks in Congress? They just bend over the pages.

So it seems that a 52-year-old, six-term Florida Republican congressman couldn’t resist having cyber-sex with 16-year-old boys while serving as the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children because a priest felt him up when he was 13. Oh yeah—he’s gay. Oh yeah—he’s also an alcoholic. We don’t yet know what he plans to do about his alleged molestation 39 years ago. We must assume he’s OK with being gay. But apparently he does want to confront the alcohol thing because he checked himself into a rehabilitation facility right after resigning his office. Mark, Mark, Mark. Didn’t you get the memo? Rehab is for quitters.

You have to hand it to Foley. He has gotten way out in front of any defense he might have to mount in the face of potential criminal charges under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act that he authored, which was signed into law just two months ago. If one wants to paint oneself as a victim, not a perpetrator, there’s no better way to do it than to tell the world one is gay, a molestation victim and a contrite alcoholic who has entered rehab voluntarily.

Of course, being gay has nothing to do with sending lecherous instant messages to 16-year-old boys. There are other gay congressmen, like Barney Frank, the 13-term Democrat from Massachusetts’ 4th District, who is, by his own admission, queer as a three-dollar bill. As far as I am aware, Frank does not routinely stalk underage pages online.

Likewise, being one of the countless grown adults who took a dose of priest weenie in the past several decades does not, by itself, make one incapable of restraining one’s impulse to harass youngsters by asking them to measure their penises. Show me a former altar boy who claims he never got a visit from Father McBugger and I’ll show you a liar. They all got fondled. They don’t all leave the floor of the United States Congress during a vote to simulate orgasms with minors via the Internet.

And then there’s the alcohol. I have spent a good portion of my adult life shit-faced. At my shit-facediest I have never written to a 16-year-old to tell him I had a boner. That’s not what alcoholics do. Alcoholics bang their Ford Mustangs off of security barricades. Ask Patrick Kennedy. Alcoholics get a little bent and say ugly things about Jews. Ask Mel Gibson. Alcoholics get drunk as hell and pay $49.95 to see a two-round fight on pay-per-view. Ask me. What Mark Foley did, over a long period of time with several different boys, has nothing to do with his inability to control his drinking. It has to do with his inability to control his pecker.

Still, despite the completely appropriate public outrage over Foley’s online rub-and-tug sessions with the cast of The Dead Poets Society, I think that as the dust settles we ought to admit to ourselves that modern American boys in their late adolescence are not the sexual innocents we would like to think. At least one of them seems to have been quite willingly and quite eagerly engaged with Foley in their little tryst at a distance. That is not a defense and it is not an excuse, but it is relevant. It is relevant because it makes Foley’s actions, though grievous and putatively criminal, not the most grievous crime committed in this whole morass.

That distinction goes to the malfeasance of the Republican leaders who knew full well about Foley’s salacious e-mails and covered them up. The gang includes Tom Reynolds, the New York four-termer who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee; John Boehner, the House Majority Leader in his eighth term from Ohio; and Illinois’ John Shimkus, the chairman of the page board serving in this, his fifth term. What a disturbing collection of dissembling pricks.

Then, of course, there’s former history teacher, former wrestling coach and current body double for Jabba the Hut, the distinguished 10-termer from Illinois, House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Asked on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show whether he was considering resigning over the flap occasioned by revelations that he knew about Foley’s “overly friendly” e-mails as early as 2003 and did effectively nothing, the Speaker spoke thus: “I’m not going to do that.” At least he’s consistent. Why start doing anything now?

Watching these clowns throw each other under the bus is my new favorite pastime. And it appears, thank God, that it just might cost the Republicans control of the House. It’s about time. I guess you can’t get Americans riled up enough over unconstitutional wire-tapping to make them throw the bums out. It’s rather clear that an unjustifiable war won’t do it. It’s equally clear that as long as the GOP keeps beating the bush about flag burning, stem cells, wetbacks and queers getting married, voters will just keep lining up at the polls and pushing Republican e-chads because if they don’t, the next thing you know, a gay Mexican embryo will burn a flag at a wedding.

I am actually grateful to Mark Foley. I don’t care all that much that some middle-aged poof from Palm Beach sat around masturbating while imagining a high-school student in a jock strap. It’s weird, but it’s not very interesting. What is interesting is what it requires for the masses to get a clue. The Republican-controlled Congress has been rubber-stamping a fascist platform for W’s administration for six years now, and if the only thing that can raise enough hackles to shake the foundations of the crumbling Capitol is a scandal involving a lecher and some prep-school boys then so be it. Many of us have been wondering for six years what had to happen to shake up a narrow majority of American voters. At last we know.

Terrell Owens from San Diego CityBEAT

October 4, 2006

He ain’t allergic, he’s T.O.
There are known knowns, there are unknown knowns, there are unknown unknowns, and there are known clowns. There is also Terrell Owens. I don’t know what he is. I haven’t met him. He and I have never corresponded. As far as I know, he doesn’t read my column. Given my uninformed position, I’m going out on a limb with my next assertion: That guy’s crazy.

Mind you, I’m in a privileged position. I can make such pronouncements about strangers because I’ve been crazy for a long time. I’m not the kind of crazy that gets naked and runs out in the street proclaiming the end of days. I’m not the kind of crazy that sits in the park rubbing weeds in my hair and talking to invisible friends. I’m not the kind of crazy that ties a “born to lose” bandana around my head, takes a deer rifle to a playground and starts picking off soccer moms. I’m a different kind of crazy. I’m the kind of crazy that writes an opinion column, an undertaking that combines ludicrous audacity with morose solitude and somber withdrawal from the real world. There’s something else that combines those ingredients—bipolar disorder, a condition that renders one incapable of maintaining a stable mood.

Consider the case of the former San Francisco 49er, former Philadelphia Eagle and current Dallas Cowboy wide receiver known as much for his flamboyant antics and combative exchanges with coaches, teammates and the media as for his uncanny athleticism and occasional scintillating on-field performances. Owens is football’s bad boy, a freak of nature whose selfish, individualistic hogging of the media limelight is unparalleled, who exhibits no discernable sense of team sports and agglomerates personal glory and fame without heed to the sensibilities of his comrades. These things are well known.

Now, even more things are known. Last week, the world learned that Owens was treated at Baylor University Medical Center following a 911 call from his “publicist,” Kim Etheredge. Rescue workers arrived at Owens’ home around 8 p.m. last Tuesday and took him to an emergency room. When word spread, Etheredge claimed Owens had an allergic reaction to the hydrocodone he was prescribed to manage the pain from a broken right hand.

The story changed the next morning, however, when media outlets received a police report saying that Owens had attempted suicide by overdosing on painkillers, putting two more pills into his mouth even after Etheredge intervened. The report said that Etheredge had discovered an empty bottle in which there had been more than 30 pills earlier in the day, that she asked Owens if he’d taken the pills and that he said he had. According to the report, when police arrived and asked Owens if he was trying to harm himself, he said “yes.”

The next day, Owens and Etheredge were at the Cowboys’ training facility facing the press. The former repeated the initial refrain, alleging that he had suffered an allergic reaction brought upon by taking “maybe four or five” pain pills along with a half-dozen or so “all-natural supplements.” Etheredge denied trying to remove anything from Owens’ mouth and denied saying most of what the police report alleges she said. She did say, “I feel they take advantage of Terrell. Had this been someone else, this may not have happened.” Maybe she’s right.

Either way, as far as I’m concerned, if T.O. got in a funk and tried to make it better by fisting down a wad of pills, that’s his business. As far as I’m concerned, if one wants to keep one’s demons private, one has the right to do so. As far as I’m concerned, if T.O. has a problem, we have no business prying into the melancholy that might overcome him at times, as it does many of us.

But I was bothered by Etheredge’s final remark at the news conference. As she left the room, she said to the huddle of reporters, “Terrell has 25 million reasons why he should be alive,” referring to his $25 million contract with the Cowboys.

Consider the logic that underlies that comment. According to Etheredge, whose background in cognitive science is unknown to me, if one is fabulously rich, one can’t be suicidal. I suppose, conversely, that if Terrell Owens were poor, perhaps he should be suicidal.

Kim, it doesn’t work that way. Lots of rich people are crazy. Robin Williams, John Cleese, Patrick Kennedy, Kim Jong-Il—the list goes on. And not all poor people want to kill themselves because they don’t have football contracts. No, Kim, mental health is not that simple. External factors do not, by themselves, shape one’s internal biology. Actor Freddie Prinze killed himself at the height of his fame. He was 22 years old. He was a millionaire and he shot himself in the head while sitting on a hotel room sofa as his business manager looked on in horror.

Whether or not Owens felt suicidal, and whether or not his frequent on-camera outbursts are symptomatic of something horribly wrong, using the press to obfuscate the truth about the potentially deadly consequences of mental illness is irresponsible. I don’t know what Owens’ intentions might have been. I do know that ingesting an overdose of hydrocodone is not the sort of thing most people do. It’s the sort of thing that suicidal people do, lucidly or otherwise.

I haven’t any right to speculate about Owens’ personal affairs, and I haven’t any right to expect him to use his celebrity status to opine intelligently about the widespread and misunderstood reality of mental illness. But I would sure appreciate it if his publicist would refrain from making insensitive remarks. Most of all, I would appreciate it if Owens would seek help, if he needs it, and that if he does so, he would be open about it because, no matter what opinion the world may have of him at this point, it is not too late for him to do something good despite himself.

The Superdome from the Fifth Avenue Gazette

September 26, 2006

The Big Cheesy
New Orleans – U2 performed last night before a football game between the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons, which would be no big deal but for the fact that the game was played in the New Orleans Superdome just 13 months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast killing at least 1,836 people and leaving more than 700 still unaccounted for.

I, for one, was relieved to know that the Superdome is open for business. If New Orleans can’t do anything else, at least it can host sensationalizing media hordes to tout the resurrection of a building that was the site of this country’s most egregious travesty since Japanese internment. People, listen up. I don’t like to preach, but if you found yourself all teary eyed with optimism and swollen with faith in the human spirit because 106 millionaire athletes played a game in a city that still hasn’t removed the wreckage from a disaster that everybody saw coming, grow up.

My question to the National Broadcasting Company is this: How much of the tens of millions of advertising dollars that you made from last night’s charade got donated to the poor families in the Lower Ninth Ward, most of whom remain displaced, mostly in Houston, and whose insurance carriers still refuse to pay out equitable settlements? My question to Mayor C. Ray Nagin is this: How come you can get the Superdome open in time for football season but you can’t come up with a plan to stop land bankers and carpet baggers from buying up sections of town at deflated prices so they can build a playground for the rich and famous at the expense of the impoverished and disenfranchised? My question to Bono is this: Who the fuck do you think you are, you self-promoting Irish git?

There are still people in New Orleans waiting for FEMA trailers. There are still levees in New Orleans that have not even been brought up to pre-Katrina standards. There are still neighborhoods in New Orleans without water and power. There are still shells of homes in New Orleans that have not been re-entered since last August. There are still streets in New Orleans that are completely unoccupied. But thank God the Superdome is open.

The Superdome repairs cost a total of $185 million, some $114 million of which was paid for by FEMA. When I shared this fact with my sister she asked me how a sports stadium qualified to receive federal disaster relief. I don’t know, Amy. My congressman didn’t call to ask my opinion on the matter.

The Superdome repairs included the largest re-roofing project in American history. When I shared this fact with my mother she asked me why somebody couldn’t apply the same labor and ingenuity to upgrading the levee system that proved so woefully inadequate. I don’t know, Mother. I’m not with the Army Corps of Engineers. If I were, I would probably be Court Martialed.

The Superdome repairs were finished seven weeks ahead of schedule. When I shared this fact with my friend Mickey he asked me why the same government that can’t pass a bill in time to make a difference can knuckle down and get a football team back home seven weeks early. I don’t know, Mickey. What do you think?

Now I like football as much as the next man, but against the backdrop of the unfinished work in the Crescent City, I have to say that somebody has got their priorities upside down. I wonder what the evacuees whose hotel rooms are no longer federally subsidized thought as they huddled together around a television in a family shelter watching their Saints go marching in. I wonder what the players themselves thought about playing to a packed house on the site where old and infirmed people died during a four-day ordeal that nobody did anything to avoid. I wonder what the unemployed men and women scattered around the city thought about the enthusiastic throng who paid $140 apiece for sideline seats to celebrate a lie?

Anyhow, the game got played, and to put a finish to this story, it’s worth reporting that the Saints won, handily, by 20 points to be exact. There will be lots of people who consider that win a victory for the city. I and the 1.2 million displaced New Orleanians, most of whom watched the game, might not feel the same.

Steve on Drugs from Vyuz.com

September 11, 2006

Of dogs and drink and bones and mothers
Tales of an aging satirist with poor impulse control
San Diego – I have a right hand, I have a brain and I have a dog. All three of them perform their proper functions more or less normally most of the time, but not all the time. I also have a mother. She never fails. Take last week, please.

I’ll skip the details of what brought me to the point of meltdown. Suffice it to say, I was pretty irate and for good reason, though perhaps not good enough for me to just up and splatter my hand. But that’s what I did, and though my hand hurt instantly, it didn’t hurt half as badly as the hurt inside that had driven me to bust it up in the first place. So I went off to see the psychiatrist.

That’s the right thing to do, by the way, if you’re not the most stable of guys and you just busted your hand. It’s particularly appropriate if you feel yourself likely to do more harm out of sheer desperation and a sense of cosmic injustice.

Dr. There-there-now took pity on me. He listened to me, he reflected upon things with me, and he told me to go and sin no more, asking only if I had any plans to get out of my funk. I told him I thought I might call my mother and go stay with her for a few days until it passed.

He told me that was a good idea and asked if I wanted any Valium. I declined. He shook my broken hand vigorously (I’m not making that up.) and I squelched my desire to cry out like a stuck hog. I’m glad he’s not an orthopedist.

Mother came and picked me up to take me to her house. Not knowing how long I would be gone I took along Steve, my Chihuahua. En route to Mother’s house I decided to let her take me to the emergency room to get my hand treated. We got there at 10:12 p.m. We left at 1:20 a.m., me with a half cast on my hand and forearm and a dose of pain killer in my belly.

I don’t know what kind of painkiller it was, but my body didn’t like it. Four hours later I woke up in a cold sweat, my heart racing, my head clouded, my balance shot and sobbing inconsolably. Poor Mother. She didn’t sleep all night.

The next day I begged off of everything else I was supposed to do and Mother and I stayed around her house all day. At around 6:00 that evening I was napping in her recliner when she woke me and said, “Tony, Steve is running around in circles.”

Now Steve is an active dog. He’s only 10-months-old and at just six pounds he has the metabolism of an insect. I looked down at him, and sure enough, he was pacing insistently. I figured he just needed to go outside and play, so I let him out in the backyard.

That wasn’t a smart thing to do.

As soon as he got outdoors, he shot off like a bullet and started tracing patterns in the ground and leaping and snapping at objects in the air that didn’t exist. It took me some time to corner him against the fence, but I did. When I brought him back in the house, he continued, literally, bouncing off the walls, contorting his mouth and chasing invisible entities.

“Mother,” I said, “the dog is hallucinating.”

“What?” she said.

“He’s tripping!”

I figured Steve had eaten something, so I told her we should wait an hour to see if he got any better. He got worse. So I gathered up Steve in a bath towel and Mother drove us to Animal Urgent Care. We didn’t know exactly where the place was, so we drove around at 72-year-old woman pace for a half-hour, me holding a spastic Chihuahua against my chest with one good hand and a big blue towel. You can’t make this stuff up.

We had no sooner walked in than the nurse spotted the glaze over Steve’s bulging, dilated eyeballs and said, “He’s having an episode.”

“Episode my ass,” I replied. “He’s tripping balls.”

They took him to the back and seated Mother and I in an exam room. Five minutes later, the nurse returned and asked, “Can I speak candidly with you?”

“Of course,” I replied.

She said, “It appears as though your dog has ingested marijuana.”

Mother gasped, “Marijuana?”

It took every bit of persuasive reasoning that an unshaven, 40-year-old in the company of his mother with a cast on his hand and a blown-out Chihuahua can muster not to slap the look of disbelief off the nurse’s face as she questioned me at length about my possession, or lack thereof, of a drug I haven’t done in 20 years.

After a minute, however, it dawned on me that while I do not routinely use controlled substances, Mother does, about a dozen or so of them in pill form every day. “Mother,” I asked, “What kinds of medicines do you take?” She started with calcium and B-vitamins…. “No, Mother,” I snapped, “The ones with psychoactive properties.”

“Oh those,” she responded, chatting through a list of medication. She came to one with strong stimulant properties that is used to treat narcoleptics, and I knew we were on to something….

Steve spent the night and half the next day in the hospital coming down off something designed to keep full-grown adults with sleep disorders from dozing off – a visit that set me back a cool $869 – seriously!

Eventually, Steve and I came home in the relative assurance that I was better and so was he. As I type, one-handed, Steve is curled up on the couch asleep. He’s dreaming, no doubt, of little pink rabbits with sparkly tails, chocolate covered bacon strips, and smoky rawhide crickets.

I look forward to paying a visit to Mother’s house again very soon, but when I do, I think I’ll schedule the psychiatrist’s visit for afterward.

The Bar Stool from San Diego CityBEAT

August 30, 2006

Scaring beautiful blondes for fun and karma
There’s no sense being dishonest about things. Writers drink. Period. I write. I drink. That’s that. And like any writer of caustic satire with a chip on his shoulder, I don’t just drink, I also smoke. A lot. A whole lot, as in, I would rather drive than fly to Las Vegas because an hour without a cigarette and I might storm the cockpit with a plastic fork.

So the other night I was sitting in my favorite watering hole. It was getting late, and I was pretty lit. I wasn’t three sheets to the wind, but I had two sheets dry and the third was flapping crisply. I got up to smoke and, as is my custom, I left a beer and a shot on the bar, both covered by a coaster, with a pack of cigarettes in front of them, the universal symbol for “Somebody’s sitting here.”

I remember particularly enjoying that cigarette. Sometimes addicts like me rush through a smoke without appreciating the sharp metallic surge of carcinogens slicing our capillaries and steeling us with the stink and resolve to get back down to beer and whiskey business. This time, however, I appreciated every long, slow drag and every curl of blue exhale that hung wispily in the acetylene light. God damn that was a good cigarette.

It is not uncommon upon my return from such indulgence to spot an interloper on or near my stool. Usually the offender is just making use of a bare spot at the bar to order a drink. That doesn’t bother me. But on the night in question, just after that orgasmic cigarette, I returned to my stool to find a stool thief. A stool thief flounces down on one’s stool, pushes one’s things aside, and upon one’s return, ignores one’s request to reclaim one’s rightful stool. I hate stool thieves.

And this was no common stool thief. This was a beautiful girl stool thief, the rarest of all species, scientific name candybreasticus intrudicus regina. We’re not talking about a run-of-the-mill cute chick. We’re talking perfect skin, neon smile, piercing eyes, strong cheekbones, huge blonde hair, taut body, long legs and a nice set of sewn-ins. She was fine, all right, but I wasn’t about to get swooped by a stool thief, sewn-in tits or no sewn-in tits.

As I walked up behind her, something in my head began to hiss and it must have been audible outside my head because I had no sooner folded my arms and tightened my jaw than my bartender said preemptively, “Tony, do you want your stool back?” I answered, “I sure do.”

This rather loud exchange occurred across a gap of not more than five feet amid which sat the stool thief, who kept running her silly mouth to the youngster on her right. I rolled around to her left. The blind-side roll is a menacing maneuver that would have caught the concerned attention of a male stool thief. My quarry paid no heed, confident that her sexiness granted her immunity.

I said, “Honey, you had best jump up out of my stool now. I’m not playing around.” At that point I had the attention of every one of the dozen or so men in the place, including the one to whom the stool thief was still gabbing away. Had she not heard me the first time, which I’m convinced she did, she definitely heard me this time. The whole bar heard me. She ignored me.

It’s a well-known fact that pretty women often do not play by the rules. It’s a well-known fact to anyone who knows me that pretty women not playing by the rules piss me off. In fact, had the stool thief been a homely woman who had to buy her own drinks, I might have acted differently. But a pretty woman drinking on strange men’s tabs, stealing my stool and ignoring direct invocation of the rules of decency, well, she’s going to get dealt with. So I leaned into her, my mouth perhaps eight inches from her ear, and growled, “Get the fuck out of my fucking stool, now!” Every mouth in the bar fell open. Every eye widened. Every throat tightened.

The stool thief spun slowly around all smugly and asked, in that sing-songy chick tone that everyone hates, “Oh my God! Did you just tell me to get the fuck out of your stool?” I answered, “No, kitten. I told you to get the fuck out of my fucking stool. You might have heard me the first two times if the peroxide hadn’t soaked through your skull and ruined your ears.”

I don’t know where most people come down on bar etiquette, but I’m certain most would ordinarily avoid dropping F-bombs on strange women, even women who pander their prurience to win free alcohol. But I am also certain now, days after the fact, that I don’t regret a thing about that night. I’m certain I would do it again and I’m certain she probably would, too. And that’s the way the world is. There are those who steal stools and those who punish them. I’m a punisher.

At first I didn’t feel very good about being mean to a girl. As she slinked out the door, it took all the conviction I could muster not to chase after her and apologize. But I thought of Shakespeare’s Richard III and told myself, “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none and therefore am no beast.” And if the Bard’s consolation were not enough, I was rewarded by the cheers and back claps of an enthusiastic crowd of men, three of whom bought me a round for doing the right thing.

In time, my recollection of that night will fade. I won’t even remember what the stool thief looked like and I will forget how to tell the story. But I’ll tell you one thing for sure—I will never forget that cigarette.