NEMESIS

by Philip Roth

If I were still teaching Advanced Placement, I would add this book to the reading list as a point of comparison during any discussion of tragedy. A number of reviewers have touted it as a modern day tragedy just dripping with Greekness in the same way that they touted Edgar Sawtelle, the canine upgrading of Hamlet that was all the rage a couple of years ago. Roth's novel contains all the elements of tragedy except the most important, a great soul who can feel deeply. That isn't to say that it is a disappointing novel. It isn't. Like everything Roth writes, it is topical, witty, innovative, and nearly impossible to ignore.

Bucky Cantor, our hero, is a young, bespectacled man who seems to carry misfortune around with him like a cloak. His mother died in child birth and his father, an inveterate gambler, was sent to prison for two years and never returned to Newark. Bucky ended up with his grandparents and managed to live a good life. He became a great athlete and diver, notwithstanding his rotten vision. Much to Bucky's shame, his vision kept him out of the army during the 1944 build up of WWII. Instead he ends up as a teacher, lifeguard, coach, and summer playground director in Newark.

Of course, this smattering of good fortune is interrupted by the Newark polio epidemic of 1944 and Bucky is so disturbed by the mounting number of dead or dying boys and girls that he, convinced he must be doing more harm than good, rationalizes an escape to the Poconos and the summer camp where his fiancee works.

Life at camp is good. Bucky's life is a lot like Bill Murray's in Meatballs, or it would be if Bucky were a little less serious. But when even the camp isn't safe from the epidemic, Bucky becomes convinced that he is a carrier. And becomes further convinced that this God everyone keeps worshipping is at best an incompetent bungler and at worst an evil inventor of ways to torment the innocent.

It should be no surprise that Bucky contracts the disease, or maybe he was a carrier. At the end we see him bitter and alone, talking with the novel's narrator who finally reveals himself at the end in a Rothian tour de force manipulation of point of view.

So why isn't all this tragic? I loved Bucky and worried about him and all the little kids he cared for. I knew he wasn't going to survive the book unscathed, so I was filled with all the dread I needed for a catharsis. But I'm sorry Bucky. I knew Hamlet and you're not him.

Bucky mostly reminds me of The Chief, Salinger's hero in "The Laughing Man." John Gedsudski, The Chief, loved his little Central Park charges. He regaled them with stories and feats of mythic proportions on the playing fields of Manhattan. He was their hero for one perfect summer and he let an unrequited love ruin that world for a little while.

The Chief disappears and his charges are left disillusioned. Bucky's charges die and disappear and he is the one left in disillusionment.

His initial heroism on the playground standing up to the epidemic, consoling kids and parents alike, was admirable. And when he eventually turns his gaze toward the heavens and literally shakes his fist at the gods, he verges on the brink of the tragic stance. But he loses sight of the gods when his sacrifices for the good of others seem more like petulant bursts of egotism than the stuff of tragic heights.

Finally, this reminds me of my comparison of Freedom to Anna Karenina last year. Why does great literature have to be ponderous and difficult to read? Why is Tolstoy better than Franzen or Roth? The obvious answer is that their characters are greater souls than the ones Franzen and Roth create. I would have to agree, but hasten to add that American Realism doesn't lend itself to the tragic emotion the way Russian Romanticism does.

Bucky is just an everyday schmuck with a past no more troubled or blessed than lots of ordinary schmucks' lives. He rises to the challenges of his life with love and courage and fear and rationalizations and recriminations just like a lot of people would. Watching his story unfold is fascinating and poses all sorts of great questions about fate, panic, despair, blame, and the way communities deal with inexplicable loss.

This book was made to be taught to high school seniors in Advanced Placement.

* * * * *

A SMALL DIGRESSION

Have you heard about the Unluckiest Man In The World?

When he was just a child--confirmation age--he was at a church picnic during the spring. He was out in left field watching his parents sitting together on the bleachers cheering him on just like they always did when a lightening bolt came out of nowhere and turned both mother and father into cinders.

The kindly parish priest invited the poor orphan to come and live in the basement of the church. There our hero stayed through high school, shoveling coal into the furnace and chasing rats out of the same church basement where he was sodomized twice a week by the old man in the flowing cassock.

But ever resilient, he escaped the church and managed to get himself all the way to NYU in New York City where he began to study drama. Things went well for his undergraduate years and when he went to his first audition he even landed a lead part in a new production being mounted that year.

Of course, on the way to his first rehearsal he was crossing 42nd Street when he caught his foot in a street grate and a Federal Express van, in the act of parking, crushed our poor friend's ankle.

Needless to say, he was replaced by his understudy, a strange, brooding young man named Marlon Brando, who went on to win his first Tony for his performance in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Our hero never really recovered from that disappointment. His ankle never returned to normal and he made a living by teaching drama in a local Catholic high school.

But one day he did get a call from a long lost acquaintance in Los Angeles who had remembered his audition for Street Car all those years ago. He offered him a part in a new sit com and told him to get right out to LA.

The Unluckiest Man In The World got his ticket and was flying happily 30,000 feet above Iowa when he noticed that the far left propeller had stopped turning. Soon, a gentleman across the aisle shouted that the far right propeller had also stopped. As the remainder of the propellers stopped working, our hero sighed and walked slowly up to the front of the plane and entered the cockpit.

"Excuse me, but I know how to get the plane safely down."

The pilots were ready for any suggestion.

"You see, I am The Unluckiest Man In The World and the props are going out because of me. Just give me a parachute and let me jump and the rest of you will be fine."

In no position to argue, they gave him a parachute and sent him out the nearest door. No sooner had he started his descent than all four engines whirred back to life.

Our hero smiled and pulled his rip cord.

You'll never guess what happened.

That's right.

So he pulled the emergency cord.

Yep, you guessed it.

Finally out of options and plummeting to earth, The Unluckiest Man In The World put his hands together in prayer.

"St. Francis, my patron saint. If you've ever helped me help me now."

And a big hand came out of a cloud and grabbed The Unluckiest Man In The World. And with a booming voice asked, "ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI OR ST. FRANCIS XAVIER?"

"Xavier," The Unluckiest Man In The World replied.

And with that the big hand opened up and dashed the scrawny body to the earth in disgust.

SHOP CLASS AS SOUL CRAFT by Matthew B. Crawford

And some random connections

If Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a philosophical-literary-psychological exploration of the Ideal vs. the Real, Plato vs. Aristotle, and the virtue of honest work, than Crawford's book explores those same issues from an economic and political angle.

There is no Phaedrus, no kid to take care of, and no one teeters on the brink of psychosis, at least no one we care about. Instead, Shop Class As Soulcraft is exactly as advertised in its subtitle: An inquiry into the value of work.

This book's thesis should be familiar to anyone growing up in America the same time I did, meaning all of us at or nearing retirement age. We don't work with our hands anymore. No one does. Even though I was completely inept as a young man, I could at least open the hood of a car and have some recognition of the parts of an internal combustion engine and their purposes. I see nothing remotely familiar under the hood of my Inifiniti. If my transistor radio broke back in 1964, I was expected to make a feeble attempt to figure out the problem and fix it. Sometimes I actually succeeded and those were great moments. I couldn't break into a new radio today if my life depended on it. If something goes wrong, the stupid contraption gets disposed of and replaced by a new one.

My sister's washing machine broke down the other day and her husband, a man who knows how to work with his hands if there ever was one, tried to fix the thing. After a few futile days and confronted with the reality of the bits and pieces of what was once a washer in front of him, Dick finally called for the repairman. After paying the guy to recollect the machine into some semblance of order and to cart it off, Dick bought a new machine. He would have saved time, money, and piles of dirty clothes if he would have just bought a new one in the first place.

In short, we are becoming increasingly cut off from our tools and therefore from the world of experience. Work of all kinds has become trivialized, computerized, organized, and assembly-lined. It has become symptomatic of the larger societal dichotomy, the separation of thinking from doing.

There was a time when work had a kind of dignity and the worker was vitally connected to the fruits of his labors. Then Henry Ford came along with his assembly line and put into practice the thinking of Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. Scientific Management! In other words, the movements of labor were analyzed, stream lined, parcelled out, measured, controlled, and most importantly, timed. Workers became parts of a machine and there was no real connection between their work and the finished product.

It is interesting that in 1913 when the assembly line at the Ford plant was going full bore, there was such a flight of workers from the factory that for every hundred positions it was necessary to hire 963!

How do you end up controlling your workers when they find themselves in such degrading jobs? It worked in the good old USA because we invented advertising and were able to dangle the fruits of their labor in front of them so tantalizingly that they became consumers, consumers in need of even more money. And when they didn't have the cash, they borrowed. Before they knew it, working in assembly lines was the only way to feed the fever.

So, the idea of wages as compensation was born to justify the intolerable conditions for labor.

All of this takes its most interesting turn in a discussion of the difference between The Crew and The Team. He makes an important distinction between Real Work--the kind that produces a tangible product, like a plumbing installation or a rebuilt motorcycle engine, that can be seen and judged--and not-so-real work that results in ideas that can neither be seen nor judged, like the work of a college professor or a think tank. Real work is done by men and women in crews. These crews are characterized by a hierarchy based on experience, a division of labor, accountability to the customer and to one another because the result of the crew's work is visible and measurable. Social problems, historical analyses, recommendations from the social sciences, investment advice, all are done by teams. Teams are characterized by group dynamics, consensus, brainstorming. Where hierarchy is essential for a crew to function (you don't want an apprentice plumber telling a journeyman how to do a job), it is anathema for a team. This just further exemplifies our cultural disconnect between thinking and doing. The following quote sums this up best.

Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job--an autonomous good that is visible to all--then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter's level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.

Look at what happened to Green Mountain High School in particular and all schools in general. The job at school is not measurable in the sense that I can use a level to check a frame I just pounded together. Yeah, our country has spent my lifetime trying to figure out ways to measure the work of schools, but, contrary to all you CSAPers out there, has yet to come up with anything that really works. Therefore, at the end of my career we were all walking around on eggshells with each new contradictory directive and each rehash of last year's educational panacea. No one knew what was expected because what was expected kept changing with each knee-jerk reaction.

I think the main reason Crawford wrote this book was to point out the bad rap we give practical education, the Doing half of the dichotomy. As a society we place a higher value on the thinker, the white collar worker. We pay them more. We elect them to make decisions for us. We seem to think that they are some how better trained in analytical thinking. But Crawford strongly asserts, and my experience corroborates this, that there is AT LEAST as much analytical thinking going on in a carpenter's head late at night when he is wide awake in bed trying to figure how to compensate for a house with no right angles, or a plumber trying to figure out a tricky installation.

He just wants us to realize that there is plenty of nobility to go around, a nice thought.

My point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular, not to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life.

Crawford ends his book by making some political and economic points that are quite appropriate for today. To be mercifully brief, he contrasts the idea that we have an "obligation to others" to the notion that we should act in "solidarity with others." Acting in solidarity is what happens when we acknowledge the nobility of all types of work and, most important, that we live in a shared world. He ends his essay with a magnificent statement.

Such a sociable individuality contrasts with the self-enclosure that is implicit in the idea of "autonomy," which means giving a law to oneself. The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is not of our making.

In "E.O. Wilson's Theory of Everything" (The Atlantic, November 2011.),Howard W. French writes about a controversial evolutionary biologist's take on this very idea of autonomy.

Now, I never was fortunate enough to take Bio II with C. Fite, so I am not as conversant with Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould and the rest as I probably should be, so bear with me for a little while. First of all, Wilson and Gould are not particularly fond of each other. Wilson thinks Gould fudges on his research and Gould thinks Wilson's conclusions approach the delusional. Like I've always said, there is nothing more fun than a good evolutionary debate.

There is a hot national debate going on among biologists concerning the kin-selection theory and the idea, promoted by Wilson, of eusociality. We can best understand this by looking at ants. Wilson loves ants. Darwinism suggests that individuals within a species will make the necessary adaptations to preserve their genes. How does this account for the behavior of female ants in a colony who sacrifice their reproductivity to the queen? Wilson says that ants, like humans, are eusocial, meaning they unselfishly put the good of the group over the good of the individual. Having a queen control reproduction frees the rest of the ants, both male and female, to protect the community against those pesky termites. Protecting the community, while not necessarily the best thing for the individual, is the best way to insure the survival of the species.

I always have this argument with people, especially conservatives. This is a society built on cooperation, not competition. If we are to survive it will be through cooperation.

In the studies Wilson has done, he discovered that within the confines of a group, selfish individuals seemed to prosper more than the selfless, but he also discovered that groups characterized by selfless rather than selfish behavior, prospered more than their selfish counterparts. I wish republicans in Congress would heed that lesson. The article ends with the following wonderful passage.

Group selection brings about virtue, and individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.

Schools and Snow

I've always liked schools on those days--one or two a semester--when snow makes districts across the state teeter on the brink of canceling classes. Those are the days when classrooms are one third full with kids carrying heavy parkas and shod in moon boots and they all sit around talking about how hard it was to get to school and how stupid the superintendent is for not canceling. I liked hanging out in the otherwise idle classroom with those few hearty souls, drinking coffee, catching up on gossip, sometimes even talking about classwork, letting kids go out to the cafeteria to get hot chocolate. On days when the snow looked particularly beautiful, I'd get the class to go outside with me and make snow angels.

I would periodically walk out of my windowless classroom and down to the door at the end of the hall to check out the weather. There would usually be a small and ever changing group of teachers huddled around the little window, speculating on when the superintendent would tell us to close up shop, guessing at the road conditions and the chances of making it home without major delays.

If I was lucky, I would have left all of my papers in need of grading at home so I could waste my planning period in the lounge drinking coffee and bitching about suspect decision making skills at the district level. Back in the good old days before smoking was banned, the lounge would be filled with smoke and loud stories from jaded assistant principals with nothing else to do but regale us with school humor and inside stories.

Somewhere around eleven when the honchos finally cancelled school, we would all bond in the unplowed parking lot, window scrapers in hand, custodians coming around with battery chargers, hapless kids looking forlornly out at Green Mountain Drive for any signs of a ride. We truly were a community on days like those. More than once we stayed around till the lot was empty, pushing and jumping cars, giving frozen kids a ride home and then coming back up the hill for more.

The communal nature of the whole thing started in the morning. Just like everyone else, we would pile in the car with the radio tuned to KOA so we could listen for closures. (Once, we were about to turn off Kipling to Jewell just as we heard that Jeffco was closed. Another time we got the news as we pulled into the parking lot.) Usually, by the time we reached the bottom of Green Mountain Drive the hope of getting to school on time was a distant memory and we were reconciled to the long wait going up the hill. Back in the seventies and eighties, four wheel drive was a rarity and so Green Mountain Drive become one long and slippery parking lot on snowy mornings.

This was all complicated by the fact that a goodly number of those futilely spinning their tires were beginning drivers with no clue how to deal with snow and ice. We would get out of our cars with mugs of hot coffee and talk to each other about the crisp weather and listen to the whirr of spinning tires as first hour slowly slid into second.

See, I've discovered something else I miss about teaching. Those were great times with great kids and colleagues. (The ones who weren't so great normally stayed home at any excuse.) I miss the anticipation of the night before. I miss convincing myself that we will get snowed out, so I can watch the football game instead of grading those essays. I miss waking in the middle of the night to look out the window at the snow. Smiles and relief if the snow is falling. Despair and existential nausea if the weather is clear. I miss hanging on the weather forecast's every word. I miss the manly feeling of driving your family safely across snow and ice in the dead of winter.

Now it just isn't the same. I don't have dreams about snowfall. I don't worry about my kids missing that all-important CSAP practice test. I'm neither disappointed nor relieved by the morning's weather. I make some coffee, shovel the walk so all the kids can get to class unobstructed, wait for the paper man to show, and play Scrabble on my iPhone. Weather? What weather?

That's The Trouble With iPhones, You Have To Check Them Every Minute

I am following with interest the saga of former student and current friend Katie Hoffman's adventures with her new iPhone. She discovered just the other day, for example, that there is a compass in the utilities app, a piece of information like that could come in quite handy at times.

I'm thinking of my own experience with my iPhone and with all technology for that matter. My iPhone has essentially ruined my life in the same sense that our 60 inch plasma television has ruined my life.

There are all these apps to keep track of and I've discovered that you do have to watch them every minute. I used to shake my disapproving head at all the smart phone users constantly checking their devices (calling them phones is no longer adequate), being careful never to lose contact with the rest of the world for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now, I'm right there with them. There is the weather app for instance. I can flick this little icon and instantly get weather conditions in New York City (Nate and Ashley), Jackson Hole (Jenny Lake), Belize City (San Pedro), Washington, D.C. (Franny and Ken, but I'll have to change that now), St. Helena (Napa Valley), Denver (of course), and Gstad (like Dan Akyroyd in Trading Places).

Then there is my green message icon in the upper left corner. I check it at every opportunity just in case someone might be trying to get in touch with me. No one ever is. Of course, I have to check Face Book regularly for the same reason. I normally get the same result.

If I get in an argument with someone I can whip out my iPhone and Google things to prove my points. If I'm reading a book--something I do less of now that I have to devote so much time to my iPhone--I can check the definition of words with a flick of my thumb. If I am walking through the woods and hear an unfamiliar bird's song, I can open up my Audubon app and identify the new species.

I have a New York Times Crossword Puzzle app that is in constant use, especially on Mondays through Wednesdays when the puzzles are easier. I am beginning to distrust this app however. I finished a Thursday puzzle in under eleven minutes the other day and the rush of pleasure I felt when the machine played its congratulatory fanfare was immediate and intense. But when the stupid program showed my ranking compared to other players around the globe, I discovered some player from Florida (probably some retired guy with too much time on his hands) had solved the puzzle in 2:20. 2:20! I don't think I could manipulate the little keyboard fast enough to fill in the whole puzzle in that time even if I knew every word. There's something underhanded going on, but I'm going to let it pass. I don't want to get too crazy over the whole thing.

The most dangerous app of all is Scrabble.

I remember back to a simpler time. There I was in my pajamas curled up in an armchair in our living room in Estes Park. My grandmother in her housecoat sat in another chair with a cup of coffee and a Lucky Strike both curling smoke. On the table in between, the Scrabble board was laid out with tiles forming an elaborate cross-hatch. Gram took charge of the dictionary, ready to challenge every obscure word. I loved those quiet early mornings together.

Fast forward twenty years. Kathie, Chris, Nate, Franny in an infant seat, and I hunched over a Scrabble board spread out in front of our 14 inch TV at 3510 Teller in Wheat Ridge. This time I manned the dictionary and Nate, with his instinct for the jugular even in grade school, won more often than not.

I think either one of those scenes would make a great study by Norman Rockwell. The American Family At Home, Circa 1980.

Kiss all that goodbye. Franny, Ken, Kathie, and I all have Scrabble apps on our phones, so we are in a constant Scrabble marathon. That's a good thing, but the way this family Scrabble-fest manifests itself is sometimes a little too Orwellian for my tastes. I first came to this conclusion about a week ago when all four of us were upstairs watching some guy on the Food Network try to eat a ten pound burrito, or a fifteen pound omelet, or something of equal magnitude. In the little box next to Kathie's chair sat our unopened family Scrabble board, looking every bit of its 4o years. And there were the four of us, heads bent over our iPhones playing our solitary games together.

Ever on the lookout for irony, I made note of this juxtaposition. Here was one scene Norman Rockwell would never paint. I would have dwelled on this idea longer, but then Kathie made a 45 point play on the triple letter square in the bottom right-hand corner and there I was with just one vowel.

I Want to Be Gwyneth Paltrow, Tebow's Cool, Knitting Barometers, and What's Left Over

Katherine today.

I've been very busy with work, Franny's move to Denver (ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!), knitting deadlines, and all sorts of household flotsam that's too silly to explain. I've had numerous impulses to write and skipped the important note-taking step and have lost track of even the faintest glimpse of what I intended to write about and so I'm writing today in an effort to get something down before it vanishes. It's a scary proposition.

I think I'll formulate this as a list. I'd like to think I could organize my thoughts into something coherent by finding a thread that holds it all together, but it's not going to happen. I'm not sure why anybody would care, but here's some stuff on my mind of late:

1. Gwyneth Paltrow. She's perfect. She can read Shakespeare well enough to earn her an Oscar and cook light regional Italian meals and publish a cookbook full of her original recipes. She can sing country western songs and work out with Madonna. She married the lead guy in Cold Play and he's witty and humble and not the typical goregous rock star. I think I want to be Gwyneth Paltrow.

2. We had Chinese food delivered one day last week. Several days later I ate the last fortune cookie after reading my fortune: "Everything you are against, weakens you." Whoa. I actually thought about that. It's not really a fortune and I've been bummed over the last several years that fortune cookies rarely have actual fortunes anymore, but it certainly stopped me in my tracks. I think it's the only time a fortune cookie has actually made me think.

I understand that I could get a really good paragraph here about conservative politics and some sort of significant irony that's embedded in all this. I'm just not up to it. It's just too sad.

I'm trying to think of things in terms of what I'm for and not what I'm against. I'm in favor of natural fibers instead of being opposed to synthetic fibers. I'm in favor of natural foods instead of being opposed to processed and packaged foods. I'm in favor of regulating banks and corporations and reforming taxes to distribute the burdens more fairly instead of being opposed to uniform greed. I'm feeling myself getting stronger all the time.

3. I like Tim Tebow. I didn't expect to. Before I decided I wouldn't be against things anymore, I was probably against Tim Tebow. Too much religion and goody-goody stuff. Too much effort. Just too much.

As I said, I like him now. Tebow hasn't talked about religion. He's charismatic and I find it impossible not to want him to make this work out. He somehow got his fellow draft-mates to run an 18 hole golf course (sit-ups and push-ups at each hole) one night at their rookie symposium. He looks really good in the underwear he's selling. I don't know. I just want him to do well and make the Broncos fun to watch for a while.

4. Jim made a pumpkin pie yesterday. He makes wonderful pies. The pumpkin filling is laced with Scotch and the crust is really flaky and it's my favorite pie in the world. Franny had us over for dinner (Ahhhhhhh) and we brought the pie. She made a wonderful European-style fondue dinner (The Melting Pot isn't it) and it was just really nice. Her place looks great. It was a nice family time. We cook a lot in this family.

5. When my emotions are crazy and I knit rows, the rows remain the same. Self-pity does not change my knitting stitch size. Emotions do, however, affect the size of my purled stitches. I thought you'd want to know.

6. I wish FaceBook hadn't changed. I know that FB is really all about how we are changing what we do and what we think and who we are all the time. Still, I wish it hadn't changed.

7. I'll miss Jobs and the ability to make technology cool.

I think I'll stop here. I'm hungry and I'll go scrounge for something to eat. I have to have the body of a sweater knitted before my knitting class next Wednesday night and I better go upstairs and knit, knit, knit. I don't want to be in the slackers corner at knitting class.

Thanks for listening.

K.

Moneyball - Michael Lewis

I just finished Michael Lewis' latest book. It was a quick and interesting read which will surely make a good movie, but I don't see much beyond that. I enjoyed the way Lewis skewered Conventional Wisdom, baseball style. The Oakland A's approach to baseball under the guidance of general manager Billy Beane went counter to the rest of baseball, yet managed to produce more wins (BEFORE PLAYOFFS) than any other team save the Yankees.

Billy Beane did it with the league's smallest payroll and smartest approach. He discounts the conventional wisdom that applauds sacrifice bunts, stolen bases, high averages, and bodies built like Mickey Mantle and trades that all for patience at the plate, high on-base percentages, walks, and long balls. The statistical studies that he became devoted to proved the good old boy ethos of professional baseball was flat wrong about its approach to the game.

It is fun for a revolutionary type to read about conventional wisdom getting turned on its ear. It is also fun to read Lewis' great prose and fascinating anecdotes about baseball stars present, past, and future.

I am, on the other hand, glad to be done with the book so I can go on to other things more compelling.

Hot Dogs And Sex Strikes Go Hand In Hand

I read in the paper this morning about the man from Petaluma, California who was arrested for throwing a hot dog at Tiger Woods during a golf tournament. The man said that, inspired by watching the movie "Drive", he decided he had to do something "courageous and epic." That's what we have come to. Throwing a hot dog at a disgraced golf pro has become an epic and courageous act.

For proof all you have to do is manage to watch an episode of "Dancing With The Stars." I was able to do just that the other night. After sitting through an entire evening with the show, I understand why it has become so popular. It is very glitzy. The female outfits are tiny and growing tinier. There is always the chance that a stray nipple or two will pop out, thereby fueling two or three days of media blitz. The judges are alternately fatuous and downright nasty. The host seems extremely pleased with himself. And the contestants all seem to have moving human interests stories to tell.

Even though this was the first show I have watched from beginning to end, I have seen a few snippets from other episodes. In the backstage glimpses the audience is privy to, you can always count on at least one star breaking down in tears under the intense pressure of hours of rehearsal. Of course one of the reasons the star might be crying is the realization that he or she has the time for hours of rehearsal because no one else in show business will give him a job. There are lots of scenes of grateful stars shouting the praises of their pro dancer partner.

And the audience and judges get misty eyed over the whole thing. There was Chaz Bono being showcased the other night. The camera showed him sweating away during rehearsals. He laughed a little. He cried a few times. He and his partner talked about his sex change operation and the controversy over him offering young viewers a bad role model by appearing on the show. What he didn't do was anything resembling dancing.

Sitting there watching everyone in the studio react to the video as if they were part of some special moment was disconcerting. And Cher was there, standing, wiping tears from her grotesquely over-made face, as if this stuff mattered to anyone beyond this audience desperate for something to feel good about.

The whole idea of Chaz Bono's decision to have a sex change operation and then top it off by an appearance on "Dancing With The Stars" being somehow courageous grabbed me on the same level that throwing a hot dog at Tiger Woods is courageous. Personally, I think the most courageous thing about having a sex change operation is coming to grips with the fact that you will have to spend more than one night in Trinidad. But I am being flip. I just don't see what the big deal is. If you want to talk courage let's talk about the guy who was trapped on the mountain and cut his arm off with his pocket knife. Of course, he does lose points for using it as a kind of publicity stunt. If you want and need a sex change, be my guest. If you want me to think it courageous, grab a pocket knife and head for the mountains. You might want to think about selling the film rights before you leave.

So anyway, I was looking at all of this and realizing that these people are registered voters. Well, some of them. These same folks who are crying over Chaz Bono's existential choice and craning their necks to catch sight of Cher, will be asked to make informed decisions at the polls. They are the same people who pollsters call up in order to publish more contradictory results. I wonder how many of them have strong opinions based on nothing. Jobs Bill? The Affordable Health Care Act? Tea Party? Rick Perry? Michelle Bachman? Mitt Romney? Kenyan? Mormon? Socialist? Fascist? Job Producers? FLOTUS at Target? Illegal Aliens? All of this stuff pales next to Chaz' sexuality.

I read an article in The New York Review of Books a year ago focusing on the build up in Afghanistan. In the middle of reading it I finally came to the realization that one of the main reasons for the quagmire there is that we are dealing with a population overwhelmingly young, male, and illiterate. Expecting the typical Afghan to understand our presence there is like expecting a ninth grade boy to understand anything beyond his immediate urges. The best thing to do is lock them all in a large closet and wait for them to turn twenty-one.

I'm rooting for the people camping out on Wall Street and around the country. But unless they can stage some kind of contest that requires skimpy outfits and acts of media induced courage, I don't see how they will make much of a dent on our nation's consciousness. On the other hand, I did find some hope in what has happened recently in Colombia. The women in the town of Barbacoas, fed up with authorities' lack of action, announced last June that they would withhold sex from their partners until the 35 mile road connecting them to the region's capital got paved. Army engineers started the paving job yesterday.

I predict there will be a major revival in productions of Lysistrata this theater season.