Kelly Feser Eells

Fear Factor 101

2003-10-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

My brother's girlfriend is warm; witty; generous - ideal sister-in-law material. What my cruder kinfolk call "a real keeper." She's also something of a pop culture savant, the kind of girl my brother, himself a walking encyclopedia of kitsch, never dared dream existed but I'd always hoped he'd find. (Which I'll admit was as much for his sake as for my own. I mean, if there's anything I've learned from all my years as his sister, it's that being his sister is great fun. Indeed, a roomful of people like him is my idea of party heaven. Consequently, any cozy little get-together with the real deal and his girlfriend is pure bliss.)

Except for maybe our cozy little get-together of last month, when, smack dab in the middle of a friendly discourse on who was "Bewitched's" better Darren, Dick York or Dick Sargent, my brother's girlfriend snarled something unprintable about the USA Patriot Act.

At least it felt like a left-of-center, out-of-nowhere sort of snarl at the time.

Because, now that I think of it, we'd already declared Dick York the better Darren and were discussing Mrs. Kravitz, "Bewitched's" sickeningly nosy neighbor character, when my brother's girlfriend got snarly. (And the thoroughly unlikable Mrs. Kravitz, what with her total disregard for other people's privacy and her overly suspicious little mind, is the stuff of the ACLU's - of which, it should be noted, my brother's girlfriend's father is a prominent member - collective nightmares.)

In any event, my brother's girlfriend's segue, however "logical" in retrospect, knocked me for a loop.

I heard her say, "It's scary to think that the government can hack its way into your laptop without probable cause." And I heard myself think, "Yeah. Especially since the government doesn't have anything better to do these days than wonder what a native citizen who's never gone to flight school; applied for a Yemeni passport; beaten an explosives rap; married a mullah; sued Louis Farrakhan for child support; or taken the Fifth on behalf of Sirhan, Squeaky, and 'kindred spirits everywhere'" has bookmarked on her sleek little Sony.

And I heard her say, "...assault on our basic liberties," which reminded me of my late '90s visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Sited at the vastly refurbished, long defunct Lorraine Motel - the scene of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1968 assassination - the NCRM is one of the most moving memorials to injustice, intolerance and the indomitable human spirit I've ever seen.

A genuine Rosa Parks/Montgomery, Alabama city bus; simulated "Freedom Rides;" galleries of liberty-loving luminaries, from the Boston Tea partiers to the Anti-Defamation League, from "Civil Disobedience" author Henry David Thoreau to the founders of the AFL-CIO; Dr. King's eerily preserved (down to the 35-year-old cigarette butts in the ashtrays) Lorraine Motel room...

"Are we keeping you awake?" my brother barked.

"Oh, sorry," I said. "I was just thinking about the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Next time you two get out that way, you should skip Graceland and check it out."

"What does that have to do with the Bush administration's -"

"A-ha!" I interrupted. "There it is, the 'Bush administration.' And what are we blaming it for today? Kim Jong Il's hairdo? The Beatles' break-up? Your DSL service?"

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean is, have you even read this Patriot Act you're so afraid of?"

"No," my brother yawned. "And I don't want to. Not now, anyway. Let's watch 'Billy Jack.'"

His girlfriend said, "yes, lets. And no, I haven't read it, either. But the thing that scares me -"

"- is the messenger," I interrupted again. "Scratch someone who opposes the Patriot Act and, more often than not, you'll find yourself scratching someone still bristling over Election 2000."

"No way," my brother's girlfriend said.

"Way," I replied. "Try scratching, say, one of your dad's cronies; subtly, of course. Something along the lines of, 'I see you're opposed to the Patriot Act. Might I interest you in a 'Not my President' bumper sticker, as well?' You'll see."

"Well..."

"Speaking of fear," I interrupted yet again, "are you afraid of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride?" "Of course not!" my brother and his girlfriend, both big Disneyland freaks (I told you they were compatible), squawked in unison.

"You can thank your dad and his cronies for that," I said.

"What do you mean?" my brother's girlfriend asked, for the second time that night.

"What I mean is, it wasn't so long ago that your dad and his cronies were afraid that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride was, to paraphrase you, an assault on the basic liberties of pirates. And prostitutes - 'wenches,' in Disneyspeak. So they lobbied to make the ride politically correct, even had the damn thing shut down for a couple years. And now that it's, oooh, no longer 'scary,' well, for me, anyway, it's boring beyond belief."

My brother's girlfriend said, "What does that have to do -"

"- with the Patriot Act?" I interrupted for the fourth and final time (that night, anyway.) "Everything. Because one person's misplaced fear is another person's justifiable concern. Here in Ojai, for example, a lot of people are worried about a local government official's proposal to turn an old jail into housing for the mentally ill. Anyone in favor of the idea dismisses the naysayers as paranoid loons. Or, worse, intolerant. Despite the fact that the local government official in question has admitted, more than once, that such a facility, if approved, could 'evolve' into something entirely different than what he's proposing.

'So what!' the supporters cry. 'What about the basic liberties of the criminally insane? Have we no compassion?'

Beats me. I still haven't decided if the Supreme Court of 1882 - which other trivia buffs will note included, surprise, surprise, one Stephen Field from California - was wrong or right to declare the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 (giving government the authority to prosecute Klansmen as terrorists) 'unconstitutional.' But I'm leaning towards wrong.

Hey, am I keeping you guys awake?" I barked at my brother and his girlfriend, both of whom were, much to my chagrin, unabashedly snoring.

"Oh, sorry," said my brother. "Do you still have 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' on tape?"

I did, but we were all too pooped to watch it.

In-tents Experience

2003-09-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

You needn't have been raised on an ashram - or in Sausalito, for that matter - to know that no one, and I do mean no one, can make you do something you don't want to do. Aside from those worst case scenarios where guns, knives or similarly intimidating third parties are present, we're all pretty immune to the sound of one hand clapping.

"Oh, so you think you'll be making me eat these peas now, do ya," the baby gurgles at his mother.

"Say whatever you want about Ike, you'll never make me like him any less," says the partisan to the proselyte.

And so on.

Yet we'll let everyone, and I do mean everyone, make us do things we'd rather not.

"Sure, I'll sign your Save the Dying Dung Beetle petition," the harried, already-late-for-mahjongg-night shopper tells the teeming throng. Never mind that, in this shopper's heart of hearts, the only good bug is a dead bug; with so many people vouching for its character, how bad could the Dung Beetle be?

Pit a pack of peers against a person, even a person that prides herself on being the sort that marches to her own drummer, and you can make her do just about any (lawful) thing.

Take, for example, me. I've been made to do a thing or two against my will on, dare I say it, more than one occasion. Why? Because, on each occasion, I felt I SHOULD do it - a feeling that's got less than nothing to do with doing something because "everyone else does it," which, to people who march to their own drummers, is just plain stupid. (Half the free world could be shooting heroin and I wouldn't think, "hey, I should be shooting heroin, too.")

Still, an involuntary act, no matter how right it is or how roundly it's applauded, is, when all is said and done, an involuntary act. The two-pack a day smoker knew he should quit; what he didn't know was that thousands of virtual strangers, acting on a timetable not his own, would make him quit. He supposed he should be grateful, but really: would a chubby person go around thanking everyone who withheld the dessert menu or denied her seconds?

Wasn't it the Apostle Paul who said, "a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still?" (Actually, it wasn't, come to think of it. It was my father-in-law, who gave the same toast at all of his sons' prenuptial rehearsal dinners. At least that's what my husband swears. But I digress.)

No, whenever a person's made to do something, especially the same darned thing over and over again because, unlike anti-smoking campaigns or compassion for the lowly beetle, this thing has never, and I do mean never, gone out of style, she's anything but grateful. Put-upon, miserable, resentful even, but grateful? No. I'm grateful for a lot of things, like being a kid who knew I should say my prayers before I lay me down to sleep, and who did so willingly. Or always knowing I should eat my vegetables and, for the most part, never having to be convinced of any one kind's merit. (While Bush the Former's aversion to broccoli was something of a disappointment, I was nevertheless impressed by his resolve: "I know I should eat it, but neither you nor your army of farmers can make me.") I know I should love my neighbor as I - well, never mind. Suffice to say I'm grateful for liking so much of the stuff a person should like, and for wanting to do so many of the things a person should want to do. But I will never like camping, and I resent the fact that it has never suffered even a teensy dip in the popularity polls.

I was made to camp when I was a Girl Scout, and unlike all the other initially squeamish scouts, I did not grow to like it.

I was made to camp when I was first married, because everyone, including my mother, who probably dislikes camping more than I do, convinced me it was the only vacation a young married could afford and, besides, "you don't have to rough it."

I was made to camp when I became a Brownie leader, despite leading hours and hours' worth of "alternative" meetings, where I urged my charges to work on their home pedicure skills and facial care badges while ever-so-casually dropping camping horror stories into our conversations.

Alas, I was unsuccessful, but when I realized I'd have to camp, I did try to look on the bright side. I was the leader, after all: I needn't pick a primitive site for our adventure. I'd pick a place not only KOA-approved, but replete with showers and flush toilets. And I'd buy out everything Big 5 had to offer. Wouldn't my daughter and I look back on this weekend forever fondly? Visions of group sing-alongs, my precious moppet to my right, gazing at me with a reverence most people reserve for their Maker, danced in my head.

It wasn't to be. Two of the girls claimed they were allergic to the bug spray I'd dusted my gear with, whining about the fumes for the entire trip. The other girls clung to my co-leader, a woman who wasn't just born to camp, but who knew all the words to "Kumbaya" and had a tent that slept eight. Plus, she could do tricks with it, like keep it from collapsing and make it fit back inside the film canister it came in. To my eternal shame, I hated her.

No Joking Matter

2003-09-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

This guy walks in to the UN and applies for a job as a translator. He completes the 15-page application; attaches his resume; drops it off with someone in Human Resources; and goes home - not really expecting anything to come from it, but, hey, he thinks, it couldn't hurt.

But no sooner had he gotten through his front door than his wife squeals, "honey! The UN called! They want you to come in for an interview right away!"

Excited, he throws on a tie and runs all the way back for his interview.

An hour later, his wife again meets him at the front door, squealing, "Did you get the job? Did you get the job?"

"N-n-n-no," the guy says, clearly dejected. "And I b-b-b-bet they d-d-d-d-idn't hire m-m-m-me because I'm J-J-J-J-J-ewish."

Sound familiar?

It should.

People like Art Torres, Chairman of the California Democratic Party, and Cruz Bustamante, the Golden State's Lieutenant Governor, have been telling a variation of this very joke ever since Bustamante's boss signed a bill that makes it legal for illegal immigrants to drive.

In Torres' and Bustamante's version of the joke, a guy walks into a recall; does, predictably, nothing about it (see the California energy crisis) except whine and cry that he doesn't belong there and it's all been a big mistake; wonders why people aren't falling all over themselves to bail him out; whines and cries some more; realizes his whining and crying is falling on mostly deaf ears yet fails to see the irony of the situation (see the deaf ear this guy turns on anybody that doesn't pay him for the privilege of "listening" to them); finally sees the irony of the situation; decides that listening, or at least pretending to listen, to his constituency, paying or otherwise, is his only means of escape; then decides - and here's the punch line - "Nah. That's a little drastic. I'll just pretend to listen to some of the constituency, the ones whose votes are for sale. Then" (insert Snidely Whiplash-like "nyeh, heh, heh" here) "I'll get everyone else to pick up the tab."

I know; it's not very funny. In fact, it's not even remotely funny.

But don't tell Torres and Bustamante, both of whom grin like canary-swallowing cats when they get to the "...everyone else" picking up the tab part, that. One poor guy, Congressman David Dreier, made the mistake of telling Torres that, not only did he find the joke unfunny, he found it insulting. And he told Torres this on national TV, to boot.

Torres, already infamous in the thinking, i.e., other 49, states for calling Proposition 187 "the last gasp of white America" on national TV, outdid himself this time: "That's because you and everyone else in your 'camp' hate Latinos; you always have," he snarled - managing to make MSNBC's Chris Matthews' hair go an even whiter shade of pale.

Huh?

Is "illegal immigrant" a synonym for "Latino" on Torres' planet? Because, here on Earth, immigrants - legal and otherwise - come from all sorts of places. And even if they didn't, I don't see the connection between being opposed to the idea of rewarding illegal behavior and being a racist.

But Ernesto Cienfuegos, Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles' La Voz de Aztlan, might. In July, Cienfuegos wrote an open letter to the Committee on Chicano Rights for the purposes of complaining about "recent representation in the Mexican-American community.

There are many naive Mexican-Americans that think it is good that Art Torres is the party's state chairman," wrote Cienfuegos. "They don't realize that Art Torres was placed there, not by us, but by the Jewish/Gay Alliance. He is there not to principally serve our interests but those of the gay community. Art Torres is an out of the closet homosexual, and the vast majority of the Mexican-American community would not support the Democratic Party if they knew the truth."

(I wonder if the vast majority of the African-American community would support Bustamante if they knew the truth about his fondness for the "n" word.)

"We are no longer being provided representation in government by elected officials that should be providing our community a voice. This problem is now endemic in Alta California, all the way from the Lieutenant Governor, Cruz Bustamante to our local city councilmen and school board members. These elected representatives are not representing us but have become mere lackeys of the two party dictatorship, mostly of the corrupt Democratic Party. They have sold out the 'real' interests of the Mexican-American community and their entire focus is to enrich themselves and their cronies," Cienfuegos sputtered.

Closer to home, the 0.8 percent of Ojai Valley residents that support turning the old Honor Farm into housing for the mentally ill are telling their own version of the joke. And they, too, botch the punch line.

In their version, a guy doesn't walk in to anything, but rather, out of something - a housing facility for the mentally ill, to be exact.

Of course, it's perfectly legal for the guy to walk out of the facility, but that fact doesn't comfort the neighboring residents very much, and...here it comes, the so-called "punch line," this means the neighbors are a bunch of compassionless crackers.

"A bunch of intolerant jerks," the supporters scoff; "afraid of anyone different from themselves."

Uh, right. And Ward Connelly, the black author of Proposition 54 (which, if approved, would prohibit state and local governments from using race, ethnicity or color to classify students or employees in public education) is a cracker, too, I suppose.

Okay, so maybe I am prejudiced - against people who don't know how to tell a joke. I hate anyone who doesn't know the difference between "funny" and "insulting."

Speech Impediments

2003-08-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

The nonprofit, California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, led by recovering leftist David Horowitz (author of such apologetic confessionals as "Radical Son" and "Hating Whitey") has officially endorsed the as-yet-unratified Academic Bill of Rights. And all I can say to that is, phew! It's about time somebody, or rather, a bunch of somebodies, did.

Because, let's face it: When it comes to education, the Golden State's reputation is less-than-sterling.

Which I wouldn't lose any sleep over (after all, even a state's entitled to a wild night on the town now and then, as the fine people of Florida know all too well), if we didn't seem hell-bent on tarnishing it further.

What's the difference between an educational system like, say, Afghanistan's -- that is, Afghanistan's pre-2002 "system," when no boy was left behind and every teacher was Taliban-credentialed -- and California's?

The answer, if you ask California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo student Steve Hinkle, whose attempted posting of a Cal Poly College Republican-sponsored flier in the school's Multicultural Center was deemed "disruptive" and "insensitive," is a resounding "not much."

Indeed, one of the five students who'd interrupted Hinkle's constitutionally-protected right to post the flier on the Center's public bulletin board alerted campus police, so offended was she by the flier's content.

That was in November. So imagine Hinkle's surprise when, in January, he was fingered as the "suspicious white male passing out literature of an offensive racial nature."

Confused? So was Hinkle. I mean, the race card was just so elementary school, so yesterday, so Gray Davis (see the "English in the Classroom" initiative, roundly condemned by the childless; out-of-touch empty nesters; a bunch of upwardly mobile white men whose own kids attended private schools and, of course, pandering politicians of indeterminate orientation like Davis.)

Weren't colleges supposed to be hipper than that?

Apparently not.

On March 12, Cal Poly's vice provost, W. David Conn, convicted Hinkle of the crime of "offending several students," sentencing him to "write each offended student a letter of apology...subject to the approval of the Office of Judicial Affairs," else risk suspension and/or expulsion.

Duly appalled, Hinkle appealed to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which in turn appealed to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

It wasn't the first such appeal, according to UC Berkeley's "Daily Californian" writer Regina Chen, whose August 15 editorial on the subject is -- not at all surprisingly --subtitled, "Potentially Offensive Speech Must be Allowed."

What is surprising is that a paper like "The Worker," er, "Daily Californian," would publish such a propaganda-free piece like Chen's, a piece that opens with this factual-yet-catatonia-inducing statement: "Responding to letters from across the nation about the state of free speech on college campuses, the Department of Education recently sent a strong reminder to universities that campus speech regulations should not infringe upon First Amendment rights."

Chen goes on to cite the Hinkle/Cal Poly "conflict," which, she rightly declares, began when Hinkle went to post a flier "publicizing a conservative speaker" (who just so happened to be a, gasp, UC Berkeley alumnus).

What Chen doesn't say is that the conservative speaker and Berkeley alumnus, Mason Weaver, is black; nor does she mention the fact that the offended students were all black, or that Weaver, a best-selling author, is one of the most sought-after speakers, black or white, in the nation.

Hmm, has anyone ever seen Michael Newdow -- the guy who wants "under God" taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance? I'll bet he's got horns. Ditto the "educators" who took the words "Christmas" and "Easter" out of public school vacation calendars. Or else just really thin skins, unlike the skins of my junior and senior high school classmates: sixty percent of the former and fifty-five percent of the latter were Jewish, i.e., didn't "celebrate" Christmas or Easter. They didn't care what you called a two-week break, just as long as there was one.

But back to the Hinkle case.

Until as recently as three weeks ago, Cal Poly was denying any wrongdoing. Perhaps the Department of Education's letter hadn't yet arrived, or had been misrouted. But as of August 7, as Chen notes, "the school published a message entitled, 'Cal Poly, the First Amendment and Free Speech,' reminding students that the university remains an open forum for free speech."

Okay, so maybe everyone with half a brain, that is, everyone who'd understood, right from the start, that "The West Wing" wasn't a documentary, knows that college is where conservative thought goes to die, that an institution of higher learning is no place for a Republican.

But what about the people who don't know? The people who, bless their hearts, entered the California public school system the year the "New Math" was launched; were taught that "school prayer" was something only oppressive regimes imposed; who never learned how to use a locker, never having had one themselves; who graduated not only with scoliosis (from never having had a locker to keep their books in) but without ever having heard the "i before e except after c" rule?

Who's going to stand up for them?

Then again, who wants to?

Voter's Remorse

2003-08-13T22:37:00.001-07:00

Boy, does my cup runneth over or what? TWO elections in just as many years!

Because, next to the Lifetime Movie Network (where even true stories are "based on true stories"); macadamia nuts; Beale Street; Benjamin Netanyahu; platform shoes (which, contrary to The Fashionistas' every-twenty-year refrain about their being "back in style," never went out of style); the color purple; Designated Smoking Areas; the Buffalo Springfield; Tony Blair; airtight alibis; unfounded allegations (but only my dad's unfounded allegations, which are always a delightful blend of the preposterous and the blasphemous); Navy whites; Paris (the casino, not the city, which is okay, too, but hardly doable over the weekend); and run-on sentences, I like elections best.

Granted, I used to like elections more than I liked run-on sentences, but that was before so many other people started voting. And the wrong way, at that.

Still, who'd have thought that, with six billion people on the planet - approximately five billion of whom live and, worse, drive in Southern California - I'd get a break like this? A chance to, as the wisecrackin' toughs of Hollywood's heyday would say, throw the bums out?

Make that one bum, one Joe "Gray" Davis. Hell, even if our Pal Joey gets to keep his ill-begotten governorship (as his party faithful hopes he will), this election won't have been for naught.

Indeed, it's going to be a lot harder for Joe to lie, or to lie on such a grand scale, at least. For who can forget the whoppers he was telling last year at this time? The lies he told to get reelected? Even the party faithful (and you know who you are) must remember that he shaved some thirty billion dollars off the budget deficit, calling it "manageable" right up until Inauguration Day. And it wasn't some vast right-wing conspiracy that made him say he'd veto any bill giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses. He came up with that lie all on his own. And now he's telling big Latino voting blocs that he's changed his mind: "Vote for me and I'll grant every illegal immigrant a drivers license! Maybe even a new car!"

Shameless, utterly shameless; even Davis' old boss, Jerry Brown, can't find anything nice to say about him.

Then again, Brown was never much concerned with making nice-nice, no sir. Call him Governor Moonbeam all you want, just don't call him a Yellow Dog Democrat.

And despite the fact hat my dad used to charge Brown's father, Pat - as well as Eleanor Roosevelt and LBJ - with the most outlandish things, always prefacing his dinner table slander with a straight-faced "Everyone knows..." or "It's common knowledge that...", I never came to believe that being Republican meant being right. (Heck, when George I said, "Read my lips," I did; they said, "No new taxes." And when, what do you know, those lips turned out to have been telling tall tales, I voted accordingly.)

Sure, there may be some folks calling for a recall for all the wrong reasons; I'm just not one of them. I'm just happy that we're not all so sun-addled that we've forgotten the true meaning of "democratic."

Crash Course

2003-07-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

If ever there was a party I'll forever regret not crashing, it was the one held last weekend in Crawford, Texas.

Granted, it was a small affair, as crash-worthy affairs go, boasting 100 revelers at most. (If the Secret Service, assorted functionaries, faithful retainers and fondue-makers can be counted as "revelers." If they can't, the number's closer to 12.)

And, yes, there probably wasn't much to wash the aforementioned fondue down with, either. (At least, not "much" by this and every other part-time party-crasher's standards; how could there have been? The host himself has been dry for decades. One needn't be a Mensa member, or even a Densa member - known, varyingly, as a typical Palm Beach voter; any O.J. Simpson trial juror; Carol Mosely-Braun's campaign manager, etc. - to reckon that neither "Drain pool and fill with Mezcal" nor "Stock up on Stoli jigglers" was on the host's pre-party to-do list.)

And then there's the matter of the guest list, which was so lacking in luminaries that even the treasurer of the Norman Fell fan club would've been underwhelmed.

So why all this morning-after regret?

Because the two VIPs that WERE in attendance, George W. Bush, President of the United States, and Silvio Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister extraordinaire (extraordinairio?), are my kind of VIPs. With a bullet! With two bullets, right where their word-mincing contemporaries' mouths are!

The Duke and Il Duce, Cowboys-in-Chief. One likes to wear boots, the other lives in a country that's shaped like one. And both are quite often accused of putting their boots in their mouths. Boy, the two of them together in one room would be all the hoedown I'd need. Even the flies on the wall must've felt like extras in a live action spaghetti western. Oh, to have been one of those lowly flies!

See, I happen to like spaghetti westerns. Well, I like spaghetti. And I like western things, if not the dusty old west itself. And I really like Clint Eastwood, the former king of the spaghetti western. Heck, I like all of Clint's roles (save for that sniveley, Alan Alda-ish guy he played in "The Bridges of Madison County." Ew; go ahead, Clint, make me puke.)

Dirty Harry Callahan, now that's quintessential Clint. And while I realize Mr. Eastwood's only been "pretending" to be all these diplomacy-challenged tough-but-upright dudes, I can't help but point out how well he plays them. Not to mention how consistently.

Indeed, there's an element of the "hooker with a heart of gold" in our very own president - and a more than whopping element of it in the Italian Prime Minister -which I, for one, have always been attracted to.

It's why I like Harry Truman. John McCain. The person that pulls you aside and tells you you've got toilet paper on your shoe (Dubya, you'll recall, pulled the world aside to tell it that the Little Dictator of North Korea was a whack-o, and though he was right, the world just wasn't ready to hear it put quite so, what's the word? Oh yeah, HONESTLY.)

Berlusconi can't conduct an EU meeting without being interrupted by a guy who clearly resents the Prime Minister's immense personal fortune. Berlusconi could offer the guy a Lamborghini and it wouldn't shut him up, so he (wisely) doesn't bother. Life's too short, one can almost hear the Prime Minister sighing, to bother with fascists - oops, did I say fascist? I meant to say people who would make a good fascist in a movie about fascism. Or a good concentration camp guard in a movie about the Holocaust.

I suppose it's a good thing that this country's leader has an immense personal fortune of his own. If he ever decides to write his memoirs, he'll have to pony up some big bucks to somebody who knows how to write the kind of memoirs that sell.

Style Council

2003-07-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I'll be.

Or rather, I am. Pleased, that is; pleased as punch, even. Two floors down from tickled pink and across the hall from happy as a clam, if you want to get technical about it.

But even if you don't want to get technical about it (and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't), you might want to know this: it's not a half-bad way to feel.

Okay, so maybe you already knew that. Maybe you're pleased as punch right this very minute, sitting there thinking, "Well, duh. Why doesn't she just get on high and tell us breathing's not half-bad, either?"

Or maybe you're the chronically, perhaps even congenitally, pleased sort -- and if it weren't for finding "The Collected Poems of Rod McKuen" in my attic one long ago spring cleaning, I'd never have believed such people existed -- in which case you, too, are thinking, "Well, duh..."

Fair enough. I'd probably be thinking much the same thing if the foot was in the other mouth, or if I was standing on your side of the fence, or, well, never mind. All this warm fuzzy business has clearly gone to my head.

And why wouldn't it? When you've been in a state of agitation for as long as I have (how long, exactly, I couldn't say for certain. I do know that Rolling Stone magazine was still about music and Miz Lillian was the First Mother when I started answering the phone the way the late Dorothy Parker used to answer hers -- "What fresh hell is this?" -- but answering machines were invented shortly thereafter, and life tickled me pink on many a subsequent occasion, and before I knew it, it was the 90s and I wasn't so much agitated as I was angry, tempered by frequent, if fleeting, bouts of joy, and after that, well, that brings us to the present. Let's just say a long time.) "pleased as punch" is the last place you'd expect to find yourself.

But thanks to our very own City Council, or two-fifths of it, at least, pleased as punch is where I am, and boy, is it a swell place to be. I dare say a girl could get used to this.

Of course, I probably shouldn't -- get used to it, that is -- because, let's be honest: I don't really belong here. I can't even vote, not on any Ojai-specific things, anyway.

Oh, sure, I've got the right zip code and belong to all the same property tax rolls as the folks who flood City Hall on Tuesday nights; I'm even part of the same "community" as they are, I just don't have the right address.

Consequently, I didn't get any say in what 200 of my fellow community members proposed last Tuesday night -- even though they proposed it in my name and, yes, even though I agree that the United States Attorney General does tend to take things a bit too far.

But that doesn't mean I would've signed their petition, a petition declaring, what, exactly? That I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? That I'm taking my marbles and going home? Nyah, nyah, nyah, we don't like you, Mr. Ashcroft?

Please. That's not my style. And it's not the style of another 10,000 or more people living downwind from City Hall, either. People whose children attend Ojai schools, whose dollars support Ojai business, who volunteer their services to Ojai organizations and support Ojai-based charities, people who, despite their very Ojai-ness, were all but invisible to their petition-circulating neighbors last Tuesday night.

Fortunately, it wasn't the style of two out of five City Council members, both of whom showed the petitioners the real meaning of "thinking globally, acting locally."

And I couldn't be more pleased about that.

Moveable Beasts

2003-07-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

The problem with giving kids unusual names is that you'll never be able to find any personalized tchotchkes for them when you go out of town. Which means you'll be taking little Sassafras or Jambalaya with you wherever you go, because, let's face it: they've already got their own baggage ("No, my parents don't do drugs; 'Sassafras' happens to be a family name.")

Of course, on some level, you already knew this. Just as you knew that, while genuine Swiss chocolate or sabots or souvenir slot machines are always appreciated, nothing says "I thought of you the whole time I was away" like a keychain or mousepad or license plate with their name on it. So you take them with you.

And, for the first 13 years or so, you can't imagine why you ever went anywhere without them. Prairie dogs, pyramids, poi - they're all just a little more delightful when seen (or tasted) with children. Even the "mid-sized" Primus the rental car agency gave you is fun, never mind that the air conditioner doesn't work and the radio's stuck on the Grand Ole Opry channel.

When you bring the kids, you take the tours you wouldn't normally take and learn things you wouldn't have learned if you'd left them at home. After all, you know what the Mona Lisa looks like; why spend two hours in line for a two-minute peek at it when you can spend two hours at the hands-on museum down the street? Where everything says "please touch?"

When the kids are along, you snorkel and visit aquariums to see "fishes painted by God." You say things like "mon" and learn all about dreadlocks. You giggle at all the topless sunbathers, and boy, does it feel good.

For the first 13 years or so, bringing the kids means never having to say you're sorry - for playing with the bidet, making faces at the Bobbies, mimicking the mimes, gagging on the haggis, or for just being an ugly American.

But then, without so much as a how-do-you-do, the kids start acting less kid-like. They start acting like, well, the way you used to act. The stamps on their passports are no longer magical, they're just stamps. They take their shoes off without being asked, placing them next to their GameBoys or CD players or laptops in the "bins provided" by airport security. They stop looking out windows and start demanding aisle seats. They don't waggle their fingers behind each other's heads when posing for pictures. They don't save their francs or yen or cute little guilders, they spend them - usually on magazines to read by the pool.

And, like the desert-wandering Israelites of yore, they complain. Not a lot, mind you; not enough to make you think that they, too, were stuck on a 40-year family vacation. But enough to make you realize that the Talmud was on to something: "Travel," it says, "is only enjoyable in moderation."

Of course, I'd amend that to say "group travel." And I have (amended it to say that.) Many times. But then, I'll get the pictures back from some family junket or watch the kids sleeping and I'm ashamed of myself. How could I ever go anywhere without little Sassafras or Jambalaya?

The answer is, I can't. They're always going to be with me; they're part of the journey.

Whoever said excess was wretched must have had rocks in his head. That, or one too many middle seats.

Some Splainin'

2003-07-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

You know how whenever someone says, "Don't turn around, but here comes..." the first thing you do is turn around?

That's how I am with those little boxes of pellet "snakes" that come in any Red Devil Fireworks "family assortment pack."

Lemme, in the words of Ricky Ricardo, 'splain.

Every year, from June 30 through July 3, whenever I heard my dad's car in the driveway, I'd drop whatever I was doing and rush out to greet him - my own little family tradition, you might say. But before you go thinking, "aw, how cute," you might take note of the fact that I was only cute a few days of the year. A lot of kids rushed out to greet their dads year-round. (We called these kids "suck-ups." No, just kidding. Well, sort of; I mean, some of these kids WERE suck-ups, and where I came from, suck-ups were only one caste level above bullies. But I digress.)

Still, it took some effort to uphold this tradition, seeing as how my dad never came home before six and was rarely home before seven; Mom kept his dinner warm until eight most nights, sometimes nine. More often than not, I welcomed Dad home from a hard day at the office in my pajamas.

But I'd run outside no matter how cozy I'd been or with any color goop drying on my (teenaged) face to greet Dad on those aforementioned days, because on those aforementioned days, I wanted to help Dad unload his trunk. Much as he'd rather I didn't - help him unload it, that is.

"Well, look who's here to help her old man bring in his blueprints," he'd snort, knowing with every fiber of his paternal being that he was as much to "blame" for my sudden, albeit annually-occurring, offers to help as he was. For my dad couldn't pass a fireworks stand without stopping to buy something, and he never turned away any bag of ignitable goodies "the guys at the office" were always giving him at this time of year.

"Don't even think about opening that box/bag/carton," he'd say; "I haven't had a chance to go through it yet myself."

'Going through it' was, of course, Dadspeak for, "I haven't had time to get rid of the pellet snakes" he hated so much.

Sparklers; Gushing Geysers; Roman Fountains; Piccolo Petes; Tijuana Tillies; all manner of screaming whatnots and whizzers; even contraband M-80s: They were all okay in my dad's book.

But pellet snakes, ugh. Just the sight of an unopened box of them could produce a curse-filled tirade. "Whoever the **** is that decided nothing says 'Happy Fourth of July' better than stained sidewalks and driveways and God knows what else should be ****** by his ********* at high*****noon..." for example.

Naturally, I was as drawn to these admittedly useless little black scourges-of-concrete as moths are to flame. They were the first things I looked for when I was old enough to buy my own fireworks, and I can't for the life of me explain my attraction.

Neither can my husband, who is almost as blasphemous as my dad on the subject and truly loathes "...the ****** things."

Indeed, I'm bracing for his annual, "You threw those despicable driveway destroyers out, didn't you?" even as I write this.

And, in the spirit of the season, I'll plead the fifth. Until next week, when I'll produce the infernal pellets and say, "No, dear, I didn't. But I didn't light them, either. Happy?"

Keeping it Surreal

2003-06-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

On the first day of class, my eighth grade English teacher breezed in on a cloud of patchouli, hopped up on the desk, assumed a half-Lotus and introduced herself. "Greetings, everyone; welcome to English and Composition. My name is Mary Something-really-long-and-Eastern-European, but I'm cool with 'Mary.'"

Wow, I thought; a real, live hippie.

Mary went on to say we could read whatever we felt like reading and write about whatever we felt like writing about, "as long as we kept it real."

But it turns out old "maryjane" (what most of us called her behind her back) hadn't meant "whatever" as I'd always understood it to mean, and that keeping it real was serious business - no place for potboilers, S.E. Hinton, J.D. Salinger, Tom Robbins, or even Ray Bradbury.

She approved of Pablo Neruda, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Carlos Castaneda, "but I don't want you reading these authors just because I approve of them."

Phew, I thought.

"I want you to want to read them," she said.

And all I wanted was an "A," not to have my head shrunk by this Woodstock refugee.

"What about biographies?" I asked.

"What sort of biographies?"

"Oh, only real ones, about real people - no celebrity exposes or rags-to-riches stories." Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she spoke. "I think that's an excellent idea. Especially at your age, when you're shaping your worldview and are at your most inspirable. Why, I'm still drawing a lot of inspiration from a biography I read about Gandhi..."

At that time, I didn't know what, exactly, a worldview was, and even if I did, I certainly didn't give a hoot for shaping it. I just wanted to keep it real enough to get my "A."

But a funny thing happened on the way to that "A": I discovered I really liked biographies, maybe even more than fiction.

By the end of the semester, I was much more in awe of Thomas Jefferson than I was the TV Jeffersons (even if they did manage to break the cursed White Ceiling and get themselves a "deluxe apartment in the sky") and would have, given the choice, rather spent an hour with the enigmatically one-eyed Moshe Dayan than collected a week's worth of one-eyed Peter Falk's "Columbo" residuals.

I've had short-lived crushes on everyone from Che Guevara to Teddy Roosevelt over the years; I've been uplifted, inspired, moved, and occasionally enraged by people I only "know" on paper.

But no one has shaped my worldview quite like the Honourable and eminently quotable Sir Winston Churchill, whose, "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire" just about made me fall off my chair.

I thought about calling old maryjane and telling her, but somehow I don't think she'd see the humor in it. After all, keeping it real is serious business.

Heir-Raising Lessons

2003-06-11T23:14:00.000-07:00

My dad can beat up your dad - not that my dad would ever be so uncouth. He just can, that's all.

My dad never played catch with my brothers or me, but I can't remember any of us ever wanting to play catch with him. I don't even think he knew how. We picked it up, as they say, in the street.

What he did do was show us the great outdoors, even if he had to drag our citified, whiny carcasses outside to do so. He showed us what kind of bush you could eat if you had to (even though I never understood how anyone would ever "have to," there being 7-Elevens and Auto Clubs and call boxes and simple common sense, i.e., why would I ever be by myself and more than a mile from any of those things?) And he tried to show us how to ride a horse, although only one of us ever managed to do so to his satisfaction (and it wasn't me; any horse I ever rode always knew he was boss) because "everyone needs to know how to ride a horse."

My dad also thought everyone should know how to play at least one musical instrument, or at least "want to know, damn it," which is why one of us was always taking some kind of music lesson when we were younger, although none of us mastered a single instrument.

My dad, on the other hand, plays piano, guitar, violin - which he, naturally, calls "fiddle" - harmonica, banjo and drinking glasses (his "I Dream of a Jeannie with a Light Brown Hair," using only four 8 ounce tumblers, is pretty amazing), and never took a lesson in his life.

That's because, in my dad's day, "we didn't have fancy schmancy music teachers coming to our house after school. Hell, we were lucky to have a house at all or even go to school" - which was, of course, thirteen miles away from anywhere Dad, as a lad, ever lived (snowy places all, even in the summer) and only accessible by foot.

One lesson we did manage to learn from my dad was that there was no situation, conundrum, or difficulty that couldn't be improved, explained, or made easier with an adage, and he had an adage for every eventuality. Sniveling, whining and all manner of ugly self-absorption could be cured with a stern, "Get out of the coal bin, mother, you're making a fuel of yourself." When my brother's teenaged heart was broken (over some hussy, per my ever-loyal Mom) Dad, who believed no man should marry, let alone fall in love, before 40, put it all in perspective for him: "She was only a moon shiner's daughter, but you loved her still."

Somehow Dad's aphorisms even helped me with algebra. "Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?" he'd bark, whenever I asked him to just "give me the answer" or struggled with the purpose of it all.

My dad believes every gift is a treasure, and every gift he gets touches him deeply - much to my mom's consternation. Indeed, his side of their bedroom and their entire garage is stacked to the rafters with useless geegaws, gadgets, garish ties, and whatnot he's amassed over the years - many, if not most, of these things from his children.

My dad, though not for lack of trying, never embarrassed me, not once, not even when I was at the age when everything embarrassed me, even other people's dads. How did he manage this remarkable feat?

By doing his darndest to do the exact opposite, i.e., embarrass me, that's how. Mornings when he'd take me to school - junior high school - he'd drop me off right in the most populated area, say goodbye, then whip out a white handkerchief, wave it madly in the air and trill, "toodle-oo!" And he'd do this, that is, look ridiculous, for me: "It'll put hair on your chest."

My dad, like Will Rogers, never met a man he didn't like. (Again, much to my mom's consternation. "You picked him up where?," she'll gasp, when he apologizes for being late on account of picking up another hitchhiker. "A hot dog stand in East L.A.? You're lucky he didn't kill you!")

My dad forgives anything, and when I say "forgives," I mean he forgets - the essence of true forgiveness - as well. He's forgiven all the hitchhikers and shady characters he's picked up over the years, guys who've stolen the watch right off his wrist as they were getting a lift hither and yon. And he's forgotten everything I've ever apologized for, even every misdeed I didn't apologize for.

And I may be a girl, but I forgive him for putting hair on my chest. Heck, I love him for it. Happy father's day, Dad!

Time after Times

2003-05-28T22:32:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, or at least the beginning of this month, there was William Bennett, that self-styled viceroy of virtue whose prodigious gambling losses, once revealed, set many a tooth a-gnashing and many a garment a-rending.

Then came Jayson Blair, that now-former New York Times reporter whose stories, it turns out, were precisely that: stories. Figments of Blair's fertile - but nowhere near as fertile as former Washington Post reporter Janet Cook's - imagination. (Although, to be fair, Blair didn't make ALL of his stories up. Some, the genuine, fact-checked ones, he simply "borrowed" from other reporters. Reporters working under the national, i.e., syndicated, radar, at newspapers with names like "The Cowtown Gazette" and "The Honest Injun Herald.")

As it was with Bennett, many teeth were gnashed and many garments rended.

And verily I say unto anyone listening, why? Indeed, wherefore all the hue and cry?

Cook, whose fictitious account of an eight-year-old heroin addict garnered her employers a 1981 Pulitzer Prize - which, of course, was returned, ahem, Posthaste - clearly warranted our attention. She lived, after all, in the house that bona fide journalists and, dare I say, bona fide patriots, Woodward and Bernstein built.

But Blair, well, c'mon: Blair worked for the New York Times. Surely there are more important things to fulminate over than some guy who, to coin a phrase popular with out-of-work Baath party loyalists, "was just doing his job."

For the Times is as much about straight reporting and the unvarnished truth as the (thankfully) as-yet-unpublished Jerry Falwell Papers are.

Yes, it boasts the best, perhaps even the WORTHIEST, crossword puzzle of any Yankee daily, ever. And no native Noo Yorkuh - or any self-respecting urbanite, for that matter - is ever completely dressed without a Times under his arm. (Unless it's Sunday, when many Times's can be found doing duty as makeshift deadbolts and/or doorstops.)

Now that I think of it, maybe that's the problem: too many Times's aren't being read. Because if they were, there certainly wouldn't be all this teeth gnashing and garment rending going on. (Except for in those circles where teeth gnashing and garment rending is considered a sport - which, incidentally, would explain the outrage over Mr. Bennett's hobby.)

Really, methinks that, if more Times's were being read, especially on Sundays, when the Times is at its most National Enquirer-esque, rather than being read about or used to accessorize outfits and prop open doors, we'd be able to focus on the more pressing issues of the day.

Such as, is it "al-Qaeda," "al-Qaida," or "al Qaida," no hyphen?

(No one addressed this during the "Khaddafi/Ghadaffy" days, either, and it's been bothering me ever since.)

All this horror over something that happened at the "just the facts, ma'am" Times?

Somewhere, Jack Webb is laughing.

80's Hades

2003-05-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

This may come as somewhat of a surprise to the people who think Rush Limbaugh and I were separated at birth (and I've no doubt it will surprise, if not out and out offend, some of my fellow Ronald Reagan Fan Club members), but I hated the 80s. With a passion. Indeed, with a gag-me-with-a-spoon-like passion.

All that conspicuous consumption! Forget Abscam, the Ayatollah, even ALF. Conspicuous consumption ó not to be confused with "wretched excess," which, unless the subject is body fat, is an oxymoron anyway ó is what made the 80s so dreadful.

Take those ridiculous and annoyingly ubiquitous "Baby on Board" signs. Who, pray tell, were those signs meant to alert? Drunk drivers? "Whoa, there's a baby in that car. Better pick another lane to weave and bob in."

No. Those signs were meant for other Beamer/Volvo-driving upwardly-mobile professionals. Those signs were yuppie code for, "Yo, check me out! I, too, delayed childbearing on my way to the top, but I'm still fertile! Now put THAT in your sushi and smoke it!"

The 80s credo, "more is more," was evident everywhere. If you think SUVs are, as Ralph Nader would say, unsafe at any speed, think back to the 80s, when it was virtually impossible to see two cars ahead of yours what with all the sky-high hairdos everyone wore. We took our fashion cues from the folks at "Dallas" at "Dynasty," donning 10-gallon hats to ride mechanical bulls and sewing shoulder pads into our bathing suits. Bigger, we declared, was better.

Perhaps the lowest 80s moment was the advent of the Tell All Talk Show, which gave everyone, rich and poor alike, an opportunity to be shamefully conspicuous. The 80s made Merv and Mike Douglas passé, sidewalk shrinks out of Oprah and Phil.

What was wrong with keeping things in the closet, with celebrity guests who revealed no more than their upcoming projects? Ratings, I guess.

More was, after all, more. The more we told on ourselves, the higher the ratings.

And, boy, did we tell on ourselves! Gleefully!

In the 80s, every manner of consumption was justified.

If you had a problem with Twinkies, you were hypoglycemic.

If you couldn't manage to "just say no," it was because your dopamine receptors were depleted.

And if you had to kill your parents? Why, you were suffering from Menendez Syndrome.

Nietzsche claimed God was dead; Helen Reddy claimed He was a She. But the 80s, well, the 80s claimed God, and any notions thereof, were profitable ó and then set about conspicuously proving just that.

New Age Mystic Centers, Christian theme parks (one such proposal called for the Sea of Galilee Walk), Marianne Williamson, Funky Cold MedinaÖGod was everywhere. And His, or Her, children, even His estranged children, like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, were making a killing.

The worst thing about the 80s, of course, was their very conspicuousness. Too big to ignore, they never really went away. They just, well, mutated.

Junk bond kings gave way to dot com princes to Kenny-Boy Lay and the Enron gang. Tell All Talk Shows gave way to the Starr Report and reality television; blame games to class action lawsuits. And New Age spirituality heralded the end of Easter vacations and the beginning of vernal equinox breaks, not to mention "What would Jesus do?" ad campaigns and Michael Newdow.

On the up side, Grace Slick's daughter changed her name in the 80s. Once called "God," she disappointed her unconventional mama and changed it to "Muffy." That's a little bit better, don't you think?

Better's Up

2003-05-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

So the author of "The Book of Virtues," Bill Bennett, likes to gamble. And...and nothing. I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but, apparently, there IS no other shoe. Indeed, "Right wing activist racks up millions in gambling losses" was followed by "Reagan's Education Secretary Gets Comped at Caesar's Palace," which was followed by "Former Drug Czar says the Slots 'Relax Him,' which was followed by, well, more of the same.

Am I missing something? I mean, must one renounce ones gambling jones if one is a Republican? And, if so, must I - I mean, must one - do so before the next election?

While I've never been a constitutional scholar/registered Democrat, I never had any trouble understanding my PoliSci 101 textbook (and no, it wasn't a remedial class). As a matter of fact, I did rather well in PoliSci 101, even managing an "A" on the final exam.

Which is why all this tsk-tsking over one man's hobby, a hobby that, to my mind, there's never enough time to indulge, has me so stumped.

Again, am I missing something? Did I sleep through the ratification of a twenty-eighth amendment, an amendment that seems to give everyone who's been sniveling about the Patriot Act a gander at my financial records, a peek into my private life, and basically repeals the fourth amendment? Was I holed up in a noisy casino when God issued that eleventh, "thou shalt not place wagers" commandment?

Golly, I hope not. That would be embarrassing.

But not as embarrassing as letting myself get so caught up in a Marxist-like frenzy that I'd dash off some "How Dare the Man who Wrote 'The Moral Compass' Show his Face in this Town Again" manifesto for all the world (or at least that part of the world still grumbling about, yawn, hanging chads) to see.

Honestly, what does a penchant for felt tables, black chips, free drinks, all-you-can-eat buffets, rows and rows of colorful - and, if you're lucky, musical - machines have to do with a belief in, oh, say, "traditional family values?"

I happen to have a penchant for such stuff myself, as do key members of my "traditional," i.e., parents are married and of the opposite sex, family. And not once has our collective fondness for the expression, "double down" led us into evil. None of us has ever taken a life, beaten a child, held up a convenience store, chanted "Death to America," burned a cross, cheated on our income taxes, cuckolded our mates, poisoned an animal, drove drunk, or even made rude noises in church.

So where do people - and you know who you are - get off clucking over Bennett's "significant" gambling losses? One recent, late-breaking "news" story on the subject devoted a whole sidebar to "what Bill's losses could have bought." (I couldn't read past the subheading, but I'm guessing "8,000,000 Communist Manifestos" was on the list.)

The way I see it, Bennett's gambling losses are only "significant" to Bennett. Unless he robbed me to pay for one of his Las Vegas junkets, they're none of my concern. Heck, I've got my own losses to worry about.

But nothing so worrisome that two days' worth of comped room service and a courtesy limo won't cure. Yee-hah, Nevada, here I come!

Protests Too Much

2003-02-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

Remember the Saturday Night Live "version" of 60 Minutes' old, pre-Andy Rooney program-closer, "Point/Counterpoint?" The Jane Curtin/Dan Aykroyd takeoff on those Sunday night face-offs between political commentators Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick?

Sure you do. In today's politically parallel climate, you can hardly turn around without hearing someone call someone else an "ignorant sl--;" er, let's just say there are an awful lot of people trying to make a point in the stupidest ways imaginable.

From the shores of Old Europe - oh, don't make that face; it's petulant France with all the Iraqi business interests, not to mention Baby Doc Duvalier, not me. And what about "I'll say anything to get elected" Gerhard Schroder? Must have gone to the Gray Davis School of Politicking - to the banks of Lake Casitas (where woe betide anyone who isn't wearing a "Free the Steelhead" T-shirt), dissent has never looked uglier.

Wait, yes it has: On Saturday Night Live. But that was television, o ye of ideological differences, you. Did all those "Kids, don't try this at home" disclaimers go for naught?

Take last weekend's so-called peace rallies, "so-called" because, from where I sat, less than half the teeming throng was rallying for peace. There were people carrying "Free Palestine" (take it to the Gaza Strip, pal); "Decriminalize pot" (uh, dude; wrong rally); "Kill Bush" (there's a real peaceful message for you), and a variety of other decidedly stupid signs.

Who ever imagined Madonna would come across as the most "intelligent" protester: "I'm not anti-Bush," the pop music mogul told MTV; "just pro-peace."

What a coincidence, so am I! And I know a lot of other people who are pro-peace, too! In fact, I'd bet every sane person on the planet is pro-peace - perhaps even pro-love, pro-health, and pro-happiness, too!

Want to protest a war? Then protest a war, for Pete's sake. Don't believe a preemptive strike on Iraq is warranted? Then why didn't you say so? Calling those who do "imperialistic pigs" doesn't exactly get your point across.

Just as no one in his right mind would take to the streets with a "No peace!", "Disease rules!", or "Up with hate!" sign, no one in his right mind would respond to people who can't stay on message.

But all this is moot, anyway, because your average heart is made up long before your average mind, and it takes an awful lot of work, if not a cataclysmic event, to get the two to meet (much less get along.)

Case in point: A friend of mine hated anything that even smelled "conservative" - I was always sure to burn some "Eau du Berkeley" incense in the den if I knew she'd be coming by - until her brother was killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

In the 18 months since, however, not only has my friend, a working artist, deigned to meet with Rudy Giuliani, she's come to like him so much she's adding his portrait to her gallery of "stars" (Che Guevara, Molly Yard, et al) What's more, she's no longer ashamed of her other brother's job - FBI agent.

It shouldn't take a cataclysmic event to get people of opposing viewpoints to meet each other halfway. To paraphrase Rodney King, can't we all just play fair?

Hoosier Daddy

2003-01-15T22:26:00.000-08:00

The good people of Indiana are, for reasons I've never understood, a little wacky on the subject of their home state. No one from Indiana is ever just from Indiana, no sir. "I'm a Hoosier!" they'll gleefully exclaim, as if being a Hoosier were akin to being an Olympic gold medalist or next-in-line to the throne. The more exuberant of these folks use their home state like credentials, handing out business cards that might read something like, "John Doe, Hoosier, M.D.," and putting things like "Current Hoosier" or "Lifelong Hoosier" under the "Special Skills and Qualifications" section of a job application.
How I envy these sweetly daft souls! How content I would be to be known for being a bit wacky about where I live, instead of trying to content myself with living in a state known to be peopled by the just plain wacky! A state that seems to get more demented, more deranged, and downright ridiculous by the minute!

Like the whole Hoosier phenomenon, I've never understood how a place as big and as grand as this place once was could let itself go, could let itself be taken over by lunatics. I'm not the only one who's noticed, either: In a Letter to the Editor just last week, a local gentleman very eloquently eulogized the apparent loss of our sanity, asking if others had "ever thought the same."

I don't know about anyone else, mister, but I sure have! Bless you; just knowing that more of my kind are out there, that there are other refugees from the plant Common Sense walking this state (the same state, incidentally, that produces the ridiculous commercials lamented in your letter), is a comfort.

We're also the same state with the highest health, home and car insurance premiums, thanks to a system that favors irresponsible, uninsured motorists, illegal aliens, and litigation-happy crackpots over people from our planet. I had the audacity to submit a homeowner's insurance claim and was - as you knew I would be - promptly canceled.
And "stupid voting" did indeed land us in the fix we're in; we're the king of stupid voting!

Perhaps it's because we have more morons per capita than any other state. What other people in the land would take their political cues from Sean Penn? Would say, "Well, if Sean says Iraq's weapon-free, then Iraq must be weapon-free."

What other people would give a baby to the highest bidder (think Michael Jackson, who, let's be honest, will never be mistaken for Ozzie Nelson - or even Robert Young.)
What other people would purport to stand for peace while wearing the hue, if not the cry, of the Black Panthers, the plague, and an insidious lung disease?

Add to this the fact that we give the looniest among us the choicest judicial posts, ensuring our madness in perpetuity. As if being home to the judge who ruled in favor of a bitter ex-husband at the expense of the Pledge of Allegiance wasn't embarrassing enough, we're also the proud owners of the court that recently decided it would deny any judge who supported the Boy Scouts a bench. What next? Will golfers be forced to renounce the evils of Augusta before getting a cart? Will public schoolchildren caught saying "Christmas vacation" forfeit their right to a winter break?

Anything's possible in the land that set O.J. free. And I'd probably be a little spooked if I thought I was alone. But now that I know I'm not, well, nyah, nyah, nyah, you nut-jobs, you. Catch me if you can.

Woe, Canada

2003-01-08T22:25:00.000-08:00

As plenty before me have no doubt discovered, Thomas Hardy was wrong: You CAN go home again. And you can do it pretty easily, too, when you're motivated. Even if you're flying coach through several time zones while toting a barely housebroken toy poodle as carry-on.

When all you've thought about for the last couple of days is going home again, panhandling Hare Krishnas at LAX give you a warm fuzzy and the smell of smog at 2:00 am fills you with the kind of loony longing that napalm did Robert Duvall in "Apocalypse Now."

When you're just plain homesick, even the "me-no-speaky-English" parking lot attendant who can't explain the extra 219 miles on your ostensibly "garaged" car's odometer doesn't bother you - much.

Nor does all the middle-of-the-night traffic which, under any other circumstances, would have you snarling, "Where are all these *%$#@ people going at this ungodly hour?!" but which you now regard with Zen-like detachment: "My, there sure are a lot of clever vanity plates, aren't there?"

Leaving home; that is, hitting the road, seeing how the other half lives, going on holiday - traveling, in short -has long been one of my favorite things. Coming home; that is, unpacking, wading through bills and/or other bad news, and reentering a housekeeper-less, mini shampoo-less, room service-less norm has long been one of my least favorite things - even when I've come home from places where there was no such thing as room service; places where I screamed "ugly American" without saying a word; and, yes, places where the very water is considered a weapon of mass destruction.

Which makes my recent, dare I say, triumphant, return home all the stranger. After all, it's not like I'd been in Yemen or on the Ivory Coast, gauchely throwing greenbacks at any quaintly-clothed native or gun-toting rebel who'd let me take his picture. I'd never even left the continent, for Pete's sake; I'd merely gone to Canada. Canada! A country I'd always had a soft spot for, had always been reluctant to leave, and in which I'd always found something new to love.

I loved it for spawning Neil Young, the Crash Test Dummies, and Donald Sutherland; for having the prettiest currency in North America; for its wide open spaces - so wide, it hardly noticed when we divested it of Alaska.

I loved it for Maggie Trudeau, whose Studio 54 antics helped push Miz Lillian and Brother Billy off the front pages for a while. I loved it for its kindness to conscientious objectors, but what I loved most was the Epcot Center aspect of it: veddy British in the west; tres French (its "other" language, in fact) in the east; a virtual Frontierland in the middle, and socialized medicine everywhere.

Ironically, it's that very aspect that made me run for the nearest airport last week.

It's as if they can't decide what they want to be when they grow up, but still expect us, whether tourist, subject, or citizen of the republique alike, to play by the rules - whatever those are. They seem to change from city to city.

Just when you thought Toronto, for example, had settled on being Western Europe, it goes all Eastern bloc on you: In 2004, anyone caught smoking a cigarette in a car with a child under 19 will be cited and fined for "abuse."

Yet, elsewhere in the province, a serial sex offender, thief, and convicted drug dealer, spent less than a total of two years in jail. Upon his latest release, two days before Christmas, he broke into an elderly couple's home and attempted to rape the wife as her husband slept beside her. No "fascist" three strikes law in Ontario, no sir.

News reporters across the country refer to Al-Qaeda as the "alleged perpetrators" of the terrorist attacks on the United States. An article in the Toronto Star went so far as to say, "...following the U.S.'s actions (a snippy word for 'behavior) against the Al-Qaeda network it blames for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

'It blames?' What, are we accusing the wrong guys?

Long the most overtaxed people on Earth, with levies imposed on everything from taking up space to breathing too much air - socialized medicine doesn't just grow on trees, you know - Canadians have been flocking to the Great White North's newly legit casinos in droves. Why the rush to sink billions of severely deflated (but still darned pretty) currency into U.S. made slot machines? Gambling winnings, believe it or not, are the only thing in Canada that isn't taxed.

Worst of all, medicine is no longer free; it hasn't been for years. Health care, says Parliament, is going private.

And they say our chief executive is a moron.

Note to Canada: Call me after you've decided what you're going to be when you grow up. In the meantime, I'll be spending my greenbacks elsewhere. Maybe even Yemen, which at least has the decency to hate me to my face.

Accounting Down

2003-01-01T23:13:00.000-08:00

A brand new year! Boy, if ever there was a time to start that self-improvement regimen I've been meaning to start for, oh, about a lifetime, this is it. Clean slates, fresh calendars: half the world or more is resolving to do better today, the first day of the first month of the rest of our lives and, you know what? I aim to join them. What's more, I aim to shout my resolutions from the rooftop! To share, unbosom, maybe even express a best-left-unexpressed thought or two!

Yep, that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Any second now.

Honest.

Okay, I give up: where do people like Dorothy Gale, people who believe saying something makes it so, get their nerve? I mean, it wasn't any of that clicking-of-the-heels hocus pocus that got Dorothy back to Kansas; it was her telling anyone and everyone within earshot that "there's no place like home" that did the trick.

For that matter, where does my friend Vicky, who swears by a similar MO ("modus operandi" to you learned folks; something they used to say a lot on "Hawaii 5-O" to those of us who flunked Latin), get her nerve? She's never woken up in her own bed after spending a weird night in Oz or anything, but that doesn't keep her from making wishes and resolutions all over the place; wishes and resolutions, I might add, that rarely, if ever, come true.

And not just on New Year's Day or in the aftermath of a tornado, either, no sir. Vicky makes them whenever she gets a hankering to be a better Vicky, turn over a new leaf, get right with the cosmos, whatever; no Auld Lang Syne soundtrack, catastrophe or crisis of faith required. Indeed, she once told an entire wedding party - during a toast to the bride and groom, both missionaries - that it was her intention to "...quit the corporate world and join the Peace Corps. ASAP."

Never mind that that was in 1988, and never mind the unprintable name she called me when I asked her, after a more-than-polite four years had passed, if she knew what "ASAP" meant. Making such a declaration before a roomful of people you know you'll see again, and again and yet again, takes guts.

As does making a public service announcement out of everything you resolve to do in the name of self-improvement, whether it's quitting smoking, giving up red meat, or vowing to say absolutely nothing about people you've got absolutely nothing nice to say something about.

But Vicky just waves my admiration away with a dismissive, "Pooh! Nothing gutsy about hedging your bets."

"Hedging your bets?"

"Yeah, the way I figure, telling people about your good intentions helps keep you accountable. The more people you tell, the more accountable you are."

"Hmm, so I guess you didn't tell many people you quit smoking."

"Shut up and pass me the ashtray," she says, in that sweet way nervy old friends have about them.

But sweet and nervy enough, I wondered, long after we'd finished our Porterhouses (medium for her, rare for me; hey, I'm not the one who gave up red meat), to make me want give this whole resolution, declaration, statement-of-intent-to-improve thing another try? To, yikes, broadcast it?

Well, let's see. Ahem.

This year, I resolve to eat nothing after 10:00 p.m. No, make that nothing in bed after 10:00 p.m., 11:00 on weekends.

Say, that wasn't so hard. Okay, on to resolution number two.

This year, I resolve to watch no more than two Lifetime Movie Network movies a week. No, make that three Lifetime Movie Network movies a week - four if one is based on actual events, which, of course, counts as a documentary and therefore really doesn't count at all.

Gee, I think I'm starting to get the hang of this!

This year, I resolve to learn a new language. Oops, scratch that.

This year, I resolve to clean up my language. At least when in the company of those under 18 or over 65. Oh, what the hell; make that, "or over 75." Have you ever crashed an American Legion party?

This year, I resolve to match every poison pen letter I write with a letter of commendation. And, considering how many poison pen letters I write (incidentally, do Governor Davis; Oliver Stone; Senator Byrd; the California Public Utilities Commission; Al Sharpton; and assorted other of my pen pals think their silly "cease and desist" orders scare me?), that's a pretty tall order/fat resolution. Still, no one ever said self-improvement was supposed to be easy.

This year, I resolve to give an opinion only when it is asked for - whoa, hold it right there.

No one ever said self-improvement was supposed to be impossibly difficult, either.

Happy New Year, Ojai!

Get on the Microbu

2002-11-20T23:23:00.000-08:00

Stuck in traffic the other day, I found myself behind a chartreuse VW microbus, its back windows festooned with vintage Flower Power decals. "This," I recall smiling, "must be Heaven sent."

For what better traffic-induced tension defuser could there be than getting a front row seat to the back end of a VW microbus?

Argue such disco era abominations as the AMC Pacer - looks, or rather, "looked," seeing as how Pacer sightings are about as common as Jimmy Hoffa sightings, like a cross between another disco era abomination, the Ford Mastadon, er, Matador, and George Jetson's company car - all you want. As far as this beleaguered motorist/savage beast is concerned, nothing soothes more than the microbus.

Even when stripped to its primer and sitting on blocks in your (preferably not immediate) neighbor's yard, Volkswagen's finest has the power to soothe. It is, bar none, running or not, the most viscerally pleasing vehicle around.

Think of it: You're going wherever it is you're going and, whether morning commute, trip to the market, or cross-country junket, you're either going to be following, traveling alongside of, or overtaking a bunch of other cars going wherever it is they're going. (This is, after all, America. We burn rubber the way, well, microbus drivers once burned bras and draft cards.)

"Where," you grumble, failing to see the irony in same, "are all these cars coming from?"

The more cars you see, the more irritated you become. Little old ladies in perfectly preserved Dodge Darts cease being cute when they're going 50 mph in the fast lane and you're late for work. All minivans and SUVs must be overtaken, of course, so you can determine if, indeed, they do contain large families and/or sports lovers, and, if they don't, silently curse them. Especially if you had to pass more than three other cars to make such determinations! And the sports lover one, believe me, isn't at all easy: Is the driver's face craggy, tan, recognizable from a Chapstick commercial? I tell you, it better be at least one of those things if I'm going to risk a speeding ticket or, worse, a fender bender finding out. (And please stop that "well, aren't you being a little judgmental?" business right this minute. For what are cars if not rolling book covers, their occupants the pages?)

People who want to scare us drive rap music-blasting Cadillacs. And, at night, with no other cars around for miles, they very often succeed in doing so. Beige, four-door sedans are driven by people who still haven't quite gotten over being the last one picked for every sixth grade team; white ones by people still smarting about the time they walked out of a public restroom with toilet paper trailing behind them. Naturally, I respect these drivers' silent pleas to "be left alone."

Then there are the bumper stickers, those mobile samplers that tell us who voted for whom; whose kids are honor students; who wants to beat up those kids; whose other car is a Porsche; ad infinitum. I once found myself driving between a "Darwin" bumper sticker-sporting '71 Volvo and a late model Volvo wearing a "What would Jesus do?" sticker on its rear window. The driver of the former car, I guessed, was a Berkeley grad, and from what I could tell about the back of his head, just plain not my type. The driver of the other Volvo, however, was only marginally less annoying; I mean, I wasn't in the mood for a pop quiz, and yet I found myself answering her question with, "well, I'll tell you what Jesus wouldn't do, and that's put a bumper sticker in his rear window."

And that brings me to the VW microbus. No matter how miserable the road conditions or how irritated I might be about having to go out in the middle of the night for cough syrup or poster board for some project one of the kids suddenly remembered was due in the morning, a microbus sighting works wonders. "Now there's a person I'd like to play 'Trivial Pursuit' with," I'll think. "And I'll bet they're not the least bit embarrassed to describe something as 'groovy,' either."

Some things, you know, just can't be described any other way.

Stop the Vote

2002-11-06T22:23:00.000-08:00

A local department store recently launched an ingenious advertising gimmick - "Bring in your 'I have voted, have you?' stub for select discounts" - that has me all atwitter. And not because I love a bargain, which, of course, I do; heck, who doesn't? Not liking a bargain is like not liking your current governor but stumping for him anyway; wait, let me start over. Not liking a bargain is like not liking something you haven't even tried; oh, forget it.

What I'm trying to say is, it isn't my self-seeking, consumptive nature that has me all atwitter about this particular marketing strategy, but said strategy's implications on society as a whole. I mean, think of the possibilities! Imagine how much unpleasantness could be avoided if we were to apply, no, make that ENFORCE, a "produce the stub, please" policy to, well, just about everything!

Take actors. What if we made them produce some sort of stub qualifying them for the political arena before we gave them backstage, and all too often frontstage, passes to such arenas? (This being a democratic society, I won't suggest that we make everyone - butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, even actors - produce some sort of stub certifying an IQ over 85 before going to the polls. But don't think I wouldn't like to. Suggest such a thing, that is.)

My toes verily curl imagining a society where the cuddly Lous, a.k.a., Ed Asners, not to mention Meatheads, a.k.a., Rob Reiners, of the world are made to furnish more than their SAG cards before they get to play statesmen, advising the minions on "a woman's right to choose." A culture where an Academy Award-winning portrayal of Sister Helen Prejean doesn't automatically confer grandstanding rights on capital punishment.

And don't get me started on the Ben Afflecks of the world, eye candy so sweet it hardly matters whether they're able to walk and talk at the same time. What does matter is that these people are paid to look good, not hold court on subjects they can barely pronounce. In a "produce the stub" culture, people like the eminently photogenic Ben, who, like Rob Lowe before him, would have to know more than where the best post-convention wingdings are before being allowed to "counsel" us less-attractive schlubs. People like the eminently photogenic Ben, who hasn't even bothered to vote (see: County Clerk-Recorder Registrar records for Los Angeles; New York; and Cambridge, the three cities Mr. Affleck claims residency in) since 1992, wouldn't have a soapbox to stand on.

I dare say this could be a utopian society if everyone adopted a "produce the stub" mentality.

Staging a "No War for Oil" protest? Splendid. Just be sure to weed out any marchers who didn't arrive by electric car, bike or foot, or who didn't support drilling in the Arctic Circle, and you can all but guarantee that the right people will sit up and take notice.

Headed out to your local Planned Parenthood? No problem. Just don't forget to bring the stub verifying that you're either (a) pregnant or (b) an adoption services worker.

The possibilities, as you can see, are endless.

Tales of Rebelry

2002-08-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

No matter how you slice it, some of us were just born old. Whatever your cup of tea - fundamentalism, pantheism, transcendentalism, Marianne Williamsonism, whatever - you've likely met, and probably know, at least one person who was born old. You might call them "old souls" if you're a Hindu; "old codgers" if you're an existentialist; "old dirty bastards" if you're a rap musicologist, or just not call them at all if you're a Trappist. The point is, everyone (including English majors, who annoyingly turn their noses up at single-syllable adjectives like "old," preferring the fancier "anachronistic," instead) knows someone, or is someone, who was born old.

But does everyone know someone who started out generically enough, someone who, as Freud would've observed, cooed in all the right places, delighted in all the wrong body parts, believed hers were the only feelings that got hurt, etc., then, wham! Suddenly got old when everyone else her age was getting braces and/or their first French kiss?

If not, permit me to introduce myself, a gal who was too dumb to do anything dumb when she should've, i.e., when she could've gotten away with it.

This isn't to say colossally or dangerously dumb, no sir. Nothing on the order of joining the SLA ; I was, in fact, offended by several of my fellow junior high school students' "Right On, Patty/Tanya" T-shirts, seeing as how I'd already decided Ms. Hearst was sorely misguided BEFORE photos of the Hibernia Bank job surfaced. And nothing so stupid as drag racing, either; cool as all those rebels without a cause looked, it was their era, what with its "I like Ike" buttons, roller-skating carhops and picture-perfect TV families I longed for, not their Porsche Spyders-cum-coffins.

Nope, I mean the regular dumb things that are the province of minors. Like questioning authority. Indeed, youth are expected to question authority, even if it's just for the sake of it (what we old codgers refer to as "mouthing off.") And the best part is, no matter how serious the consequences are for doing so, they're never all that serious. I mean, how permanent is that almighty "permanent record" when you're under 18?

But try questioning it when you're a bona fide grownup. Worse, a grownup who'd spent most of her childhood nostalgic for an age she'd never known and all of her adolescence repelled by disco, the advent of the "A Twinkie made me do it" defense, and words like "herstory." A grownup who then spent some 20 irascible years wishing people would go back to keeping their problems in the closet where they belong, and who is only just lately, at the halfway-to-old mark, no less, trying to recover from a fairly staid, largely misspent, youth. On second thought, don't try it.

The IRS doesn't care how upstanding a citizen you've always been; attaching a photocopy of your middle finger to your tax return will earn you a lifetime of consequences, er, audits. And telling the Jury Commissioner that you won't report for duty until Leonard Peltier is freed all but guarantees you two days' lockup and at least four frivolous, "he said, she said" trials in the bargain

Trust me, no one sympathizes, much less empathizes, with your condition. "Curmudgeonly before your time? Never heard of such a thing. But even I had, it seems to me there'd be better ways to treat it than pressing one's aging buttocks against the window of our office." (There were, of course, but I, alas, hadn't yet learned how to vent my frustrations by letter. Or subpoena.)

And if you're thinking of giving the highway patrolman who pulled you over that, "yes, I've got my current registration sticker right here; see? I just forgot to slap it on the old bogus license plate before going off on this here crime spree. It's a good thing you stopped me, though, Officer. If you hadn't, I'd probably still be right behind those two drunks up the road, and that was sort of scary, tell the truth," speech, well, I've two words for you: think again.

So what's an extremely late bloomer - okay, okay, immature clod - to do?

Anything that doesn't come with any serious consequences, that's what. For instance, I'm planning on tee-peeing my friend's house this weekend. She shouldn't have told me she's going out of town.

Roamin' Holidays

2002-08-21T23:07:00.000-07:00

When I was much younger - oh, don't look that way; it could've been worse. I came this close to adding another "much," and then we would've been here for who knows how long?

Anyway, when I was much younger, all I wanted from a vacation was a deep, dark, George Hamilton-esque tan, the kind of tan that said, I was sunbathing in some tropical locale during Spring Break and you weren't. The kind of tan you could wear to school in September (these were the days when school started in September) and admire in the reflection of your locker (remember lockers?), where you'd loiter a bit too long the first week (the better to answer all the "wow, where'd you go's?" that the kids whose tans had already faded or who'd spent Labor Day weekend shopping for school clothes would stop to ask.)

In my college days, a period lasting, oh, fourteen years or so - and, no, I'm not a doctor - I wanted a little more from my vacations. A tan, melanoma and wrinkle scares notwithstanding, was still part of the criteria, but now I wanted to get them in places that offered a pretty stamp on the old passport. I figured that, what with tanning beds available at every hair salon or quickie mart, a rained out trip to Jamaica or the Portuguese Algarve wouldn't be so much of a vacation sourer.

With the birth of my first child, I got even more demanding. Though I'd crossed tans off my list (you would, too, if you'd ever mistaken yourself for Ethel Kennedy in the bathroom mirror one early summer morning), I now insisted on ground level lodging and significant child discounts at area attractions. Extra points for any chain of hotels or airline that employed the kind of staff who stopped to coo or say, "aw, isn't he darling" at my little darling.

Child number two grew in direct proportion to my list of vacation needs. Woe betide anyone who wouldn't honor an advertised two-for-one tour of the French Quarter by pack mule coupon; knocked on the door and said, "checkout was fifteen minutes ago, ma'am;" or asked for the five-dollar-a-pop headphones back. ("These are OURS, thank you very much. And just where do you sanitize those rental sets, anyway?") By the time child Number Three came along, my list had become downright unmanageable. No rooms with a view of any people who actually looked good in a string bikini. No cabin stewards who can't fold the towel into a cute little bat for the baby. No elevator attendants who asked, "what floor?" with their palms out. And absolutely no visits to Graceland - where, if you can believe it, the King's artifacts are set behind thicker Plexiglas than that which guards the Mona Lisa, yet still aren't allowed to be photographed - despite how much Child Number Two wanted to go.

Vacationing a'la me got a bit easier when casinos got kid-friendlier. Now I didn't mind button pushers asking for tips as much, and would, in fact, tip just about anyone who'd point me in the direction of the casino's nearest video arcade. "Have fun, lovebugs!" I began trilling with a cheer I'm not known for. "Mommy will see you at dinner!" During this period, I visited more Indian reservations than Custer, and many a good, educational vacation was had by all.

I look back on these as my vacation honeymoon years, years when everyone in the family could find something to please them in one locale. A so-called "golfing vacation" in St. Andrews, for example, meant castles in Edinburgh for me, men in kilts for the youngest to laugh at, haggis for the oldest to gag at, the liberal telly for the middle kid to marvel at. But ever so slowly, things changed. It got so one of us was always out of sorts, then two, and so on. Finally, I gave up my list entirely, spending a few days of a few vacations snarling, "next trip I take, you're staying with Granny."

Though I think everyone pretty much knew that this was an idle threat (Granny spends nearly every weekend in Las Vegas), it seemed to keep the snarling from getting out of hand. And, at some point, the family came up with its own list of what it wanted out of a vacation, then proceeded to shoot for just that. As for me, I'm just happy to finish the book I invariably pack on these junkets. And guess what? This summer, I finished two. I'll worry about all the UV rays I inadvertently caught while finishing them next vacation.

Richly Deserving

2002-08-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

Most of us, especially those of us who don't keep our life savings under the mattress, aren't all that shocked by the flurry of post-Enron exposes about corporate hi-jinx. Disgusted, yes; shocked, no. It may indeed be a sad state of affairs, the masses responding to all this handcuffed Armani with little more than a suspicion-confirming snort, but no sadder a state than, say, the back end of the 90s, when the masses couldn't care less about corporate hi-jinx, particularly the commander-in-chief's. "Yeah, so what if the CEO takes too many 'meetings' in the executive washroom? Our bankbooks never looked better."

Funny how obscene money looks in another person's pockets. In fact, once it started leaving ours, we began developing a sixth sense. That's right: we saw rich people. Sometimes they scared us, but more often than not, they disgusted us. Some of us were both scared and disgusted, and, as scared-disgusted people sometimes do, began making sweeping generalizations. Not that one currently sweeping the nation - that the rich are an evil lot - is anything new. Remember "down with the Establishment?" The decade that began at filthy rich JFK's helm ended with that tired old notion, just as the Great Depression, led by filthy rich FDR, began with it. Heck, blaming the rich for all the world's ills was a fashionable colonial pastime, enjoyed by even filthy rich Jefferson himself on occasion.

Interestingly enough, this exceedingly unoriginal thought has begun making the rounds in Ojai, a place known more setting trends than following them. The not-so-great Depression we're in? Blame filthy rich GWB and Co. California's woefully mismanaged budget? All Dubya's fault. The Taliban, the Titanic, grandpa's tinnitus? No doubt the work of the current crop of Washington fat cats.

As always, it isn't the masses leading the revival but the upper end of the middle classes. And just how do I know that? Easy; the people on the lower end of the economic spectrum are too busy struggling to keep a Dodge in the garage/their place on the Sycamore Housing development to set trends, even tired old trends. As fun as a round of flay-the-rich sounds, who has the time to play?

Glad you asked. Because the urge to jump on the bandwagon, be part of the in-crowd, get jiggy with it, etc., is a powerful one, and should you succumb to it, it's important to know how the game's played, as everyone has different rules.

It's like this: the higher the tax bracket, the harder, even dirtier, a person plays. It's highly likely, for instance, that a guy who says he's been 'disenfranchised' (a fancy way of saying he's mad about not getting his way) will also say he blames the rich for all the world's ills when, in reality, he only blames the rich he doesn't like. Find another teammate if this makes you uncomfortable.

Take the letter I read last week, in which the writer brought out a favorite chestnut - the 2000 election, stolen by the filthy rich - to "explain" all this bad behavior we're seeing in big business. He closed his screed by chastising the masses' lack of outrage, its subsequent lack of embarrassment.

Lack of outrage? Friend, I spent the twilight of 2000 in a perpetual state of outrage, an outrage so intense that, whenever that OTHER filthy rich camp (see Dun & Bradstreet on the Gores of Tennessee) made like Bolsheviks with its "will of the people" whine, I'd quite unwillingly pop a vessel.

And embarrassment, well, you don't know from embarrassment. That uncomfortable compassion you have for people whose act is bombing? Magnify that discomfort some hundred times and you'll know how I felt when I heard, "no controlling legal authority;" "vast right wing conspiracy;" or, "if that man wins, I'm leaving the country." (Note to Alec Baldwin: Here's your hat, what's your hurry?)

Or how humiliated I was by the presidential pardon of a billionaire fugitive, the "Room for Let, Quaint Lincolnesque Décor" ad that ran in Variety for eight years, and the U-haul a certain New York senator backed up to the White House when she thought no one was looking.

To say nothing of the embarrassment I feel for people who snarl, "yeah, well your mother wears army boots" or some other non sequitur whenever they don't get their way.

See, if I were to play flay-the-rich, I'd need to know if my teammates counted failed presidential candidates with millions of dollars in stock in Occidental Petroleum, a stake in a zinc mine, thousands of dollars in support from Adelphia, WorldCom, even Enron - stuff like that. If they didn't, I doubt I'd want to play.

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, "people who hate the rich are different from you and me."

A Summer's Tale

2002-07-17T23:06:00.000-07:00

Though I love cheeky croupiers and St. Tropez tans as much as the next guy, I don't spend entire summers in some tiny-yet-tres-tony European principality because, well, because I suffer from REALLY post post-partum depression. (Not to mention a nagging case of Inadequate Trust Fund.)

How post is my post-partum depression? Let me put it this way: My "baby" will be eight in August. And it hasn't helped matters any that my oldest celebrates his natal day in June, my little heiress in July. Which means I've been going on seasonal crying jags, spoiling for a fight, and/or feeling like a heat-seeking blowfish for 16 Junes, 13 Julys, and almost eight Augusts. In layman's terms? Since 1986, a good two-thirds of every summer vacation and/or just plain summer month photo taken of me has been unflattering.

There's the, "omigod, how will I ever stuff these things into the top half of this bathing suit" picture taken when the oldest was a hungry newborn and we took a trip to 105-degrees-in-the-shade Biloxi, Mississippi.

There's the "whaddya mean I'm 'too pregnant to fly?'" picture, capturing me at a LAX check-in counter in all my snarling, temporal vein-throbbing, swollen-footed glory. (Like it was my fault the girl child didn't make her debut until two-and-a-half weeks later than promised.)

There are countless snapshots of a scarily miscast Mother Machree who bears more than a passing resemblance to me, hostessing an equally countless number of "fun" summer birthday soirees: That's me hissing at the hired clown for forgetting to bring the dancing poodle. And, yes, that's me gritting my teeth at the magician who neglected to inform me his "act" was a blue one. (That's also me handing said magician his top hat, wages - sans tip - and showing him, his assistant, and her pasties the door. But don't look too closely; the tears on some of those five year olds' faces are absolutely heartbreaking.) And let's not forget that touching home movie, the one immortalizing "Cowboy Clem" and I in a celluloid contretemps over whose responsibility it was to scoop up "Petey-the-Pony's" prodigious poops.

Worst of all, though, was the summer I spent waiting for my youngest to be born. That was 1994, and I don't think I went anywhere (she said like a spoiled brat) but crazy that summer. In addition to my usual June and July "spells" - hey, if your kids are a year older, what does that make you? - I was having phantom labor pains for a baby being born 8,000 miles a way.

Though I put on a remarkably composed front for the pictures the social worker took for us, inside I was a mess. What female hormones get tweaked during an adoption? I haven't a clue. All I know is that mine were a mess. And how was I to justify the banana splits I craved with a (relatively) flat belly? Friends and family weren't any help, either. "Be patient," they'd say, which, in retrospect, was like telling Al Gore, "tough break."

I spent the end of that summer and much of the fall cursing the eminently patient Korean social workers I'd never meet - but who I knew were eminently patient because they never once hung up on me, even after I said something snippy like, "but WHEN is when? I'm adopting a baby, not a teenager!"

It's when I did finally bring the baby home (and he was indeed a baby at four months of age) that I got weepy. But they were happy tears, just like the ones I had when his brother and sister were born.

The camera, however, makes no distinction between happy tears, tears of frustration - like the kind caused by a misspelled name on a birthday cake or a nasty kiddie entertainer - and tears from an over-chlorinated hotel pool. But what are some bad pictures in the grand scheme of things? As long as I get to summer somewhere with my kids, I really don't mind. Really! For, if I ever am spending June, July and August in a tiny-yet-tres-tony European principality, you can bet I'll be too old to enjoy it. And much too old to tan.

'Toon In, Drop Out

2002-07-10T22:19:00.000-07:00

If in spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, then summer must be the season when a young man - heck, everyone's - attention turns to their navel. And you know what they say about that, don't you? You don't? Well, neither do I. But I do know that too much navel contemplating, like too much anything, isn't good. I do know that idle hands end up in you-know-who's workshop.

Three summers ago, the Cartoon Network banned Speedy Gonzales from the airwaves, calling the Mexican mouse "an offensive ethnic stereotype."

Yet, for three years running, human Hispanics, most recently in the form of the League of United Latin American Citizens, has been begging the Cartoon Network, which owns the rights to not just Speedy, but every Warner Brothers cartoon ever created, to put the mouse back on the air. "Speedy Gonzales is one of Cartoon Network Latin America's - where shorts of the cartoon regularly run - favorite characters!" they cry. "He's a cultural icon," they whine to the, get this, ANGLO American network brass.

But, as of summer 2002, their bilingual arguments were still falling on deaf, white ears. (The word for "no" is the same in Spanish as it is in English.)

You'll recall that it was a bunch of gringos who got their gauchos in a knot over the English in the Classroom initiative five Junes ago, and it was a bunch of idle palefaces who took issue with the Frito Bandito a generation of summers back.

I don't have a medical degree, but I can smell an alarming trend from cinco paces back. And it seems to me that white man's brains don't do well in the heat. (So it's a good thing Congress doesn't convene in the dog days of summer.)

Many Julys ago, Sambo's Restaurants started going belly-up. Apparently, there was a gaggle of non-African American people who found the Little Black Sambo dolls the restaurant sold offensive. Summer after summer, the dolls disappeared, until, one day, neither the dolls - The little stuffed tiger was so cute! It even had a plate of pancakes and a teensy pat of butter! - nor the coffee shop itself could be found anywhere in Southern California. (There's one in Santa Barbara now, but the damage has already been done. And the food, frankly, just isn't as tasty without the dolls.)

In the summer of 2000, a cluster of Anglo businessmen opened a Krispy Kreme donut shop two miles outside Koreatown in the greater Los Angeles area, effectively crucifying about 10,000 Korean American entrepreneurs in the process. Were these white men's hands too long idle? I mean, there were plenty of other sites in the greater Los Angeles area to establish what is probably the country's one-million-and-sixth Krispy Kreme donut shop. Or did they, like so many other of my brethren, just go crazy from the heat?

It occurs to me that, since Cartoon Network owns the rights to the Warner Brothers mother lode, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig aren't long for this world, either. I'm guessing that the former will be declared offensive to neurotic fowl by the summer of 2003; the latter? Well, that's a tough one. For one, there is the weight-conscious population to consider, most of whom have already had it up to their double chins with mean-spirited oinking jokes. On the other hand, there is the Lap Dancers Union of America, all, presumably, big fans of Porky's racy, i.e., bottomless, ensemble. And what about the Speech Impediment faction, who look to the pig for inspiration? Who say, "by golly, if h-h-he can st-st-st-utter and be a st-st-st-ar, why can't I?

Phew. It's a good thing I keep my idle nose buried in as many books as I can when the mercury rises. There's not much damage a person can do when she's catching up on her summer reading.