Why Us?

Yesterday, on a warm breezy day, two little girls approached me on the beach where I was sitting, my trusty cane at my side.

"Why do you walk with a cane?" one of them asked.

"Because I am old and if I fell it might be hard to get up."

"Oh, the cane helps you not fall, right?"

"I hope so."

"We're friends," the other girl told me. "So we don't have to keep a distance."

"Yeah" said the other. "We could get Covid. But if so, we'll get it together."

I watched them runoff to the water, one with golden hair and one with dark hair, hand in hand. They looked to be about five years old.

Why can't we all be like that?

***

Don't know about you, but I'm not looking forward to what will happen in Tulsa this Saturday night.

With the city's black residents celebrating 155 years of freedom from slavery this Juneteenth weekend, but also cognizant that perhaps the country's worst act of mass racism and murder occurred there 99 years ago, Tulsa is the last place on the planet to hold a political rally for a man who divides the country by race and hatred at a time we need healing.

Why Tulsa?

I fear what is about to happen there.

The confrontation between people marching peacefully for justice and the President who has threatened them with police violence is set to occur. By lumping the vast majority of protestors, who are always peaceful, with the infinitesimal minority who cause violence, Trump is inciting chaos.

That this is all in a quest for a second term in office is obscene. 

***

Beyond the potential for violence and further division tonight in Tulsa is the very real possibility the unmasked masses at or near Trump's rally will pass Covid-19 among themselves and the many others they will come in contact with the next two weeks.

You can do the math. Tulsa authorities say as many as 100,000 people may gather there; if each person only exchanges air with ten others between now and the Fourth of July, one million people will be potentially exposed.

It's easy to see why public health officials fear a disaster.

Most of us will not be in Tulsa or meet up with someone who was. There are 330 million of us. But if the virus gets spread among the cohort in attendance, many thousands of people could get sick, some of whom will die.




                                             "Why Me"

Why me Lord what have I ever done
To deserve even one of the pleasures I've known
Tell me, Lord, what did I ever do
That was worth lovin' you or the kindness you've shown

-- Kris Kristofferson

Finlandia, the Sequel

Juneteenth is here. the holiday no one knew about until President Trump made it famous. Also, no one knew it was part of the U.S., but Venezuela continues to hold down the Deep South. It sure would have been cool to invade it.

The Prez himself is on to other issues, like why doesn't the Supreme Court like him or what he'll say in his speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday, where 19,000 attendees have to sign a waiver to attend, less they get Covid-19 and die as a result.

Tens of thousand of others are expected to show up outside the venue where the President will be holding his rally, and very few are likely to be wearing masks. Experts worry this will trigger a new public health crisis in the middle of the country.

This is the stuff you can't make up. so Hollywood is currently casting Alec Baldwin in the lead role  for, as Ron Burgundy famously said, "When in Rome..."

So this is what it comes down to, a leaderless country lurching toward an election where many may be afraid to go outside to vote, so of course Trump is battling to restrict vote by mail. That makes sense.

When the man at the top lacks empathy, or concern for the ill, or compassion for the grieving, that indicates this has become truly a country without God.

Religion is not among my favorite topics to write about, but it is clear there are still many devout citizens in this nation. Moslems go to mosque on Friday, Jews go to synagogue on Saturday, Christians go to church on Sunday.

Besides Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, there are many other religions brought here by immigrants to the greatest melting pot on the planet.

So what difference can the devout make?

Three months after Hurricane Katrina wrecked the Gulf Coast in 2005, I traveled there to cover the damage and the nascent recovery efforts. During two trips to the Biloxi area I documented that the big charities everyone (including me) had given money to were nowhere to be found.

The Red Cross and United Way had shown up at first, doled out some relief supplies and food, harvested great publicity, and then moved on. FEMA was there but it was a mess.

So who filled the gap? Tiny nonprofit groups of volunteers and church folk. Individual churches not from the area sent down volunteers to repair houses, comfort the victims and mourn the dead.

The article I wrote about what was happening in the areas hardest hit by the monster storm was published in Salon, and it had direct consequences.

A new organization, GreatNonprofits, was created to address the issues my article had surfaced -- how can you tell whether your donations make a difference?

That group is still out there helping us do God's work.

***

It's painful to contemplate that this may be an enduring reality -- staying away from one another whenever possible, wearing face coverings, not going to public places except when necessary, reducing the range of activities available to us to the bare minimum.

The next stage depends on whether the virus spikes again soon or if it waits until the fall. If it waits, there will probably be a more "normal" summer this year for millions of people, perhaps the last of its kind. If the virus doesn't wait, there will not be.

But either way, Covid-19 will be back in force and this time the shelter-in-place restrictions will be mandatory.

Even in the best-case scenario, whereby a vaccine gets miraculously developed by early next year, that will only help us avoid Corona-V, not the other pandemics health experts warn are in our future.

Imagine wave after wave of new viruses knocking us down as we try to get up again after this one.

It's a bleak vision, and not one I care to contemplate, but it would be responsible to look the other way. Perhaps our kids will never go back to school. Perhaps there will never be sports again. Perhaps all religious gatherings will have to cease except for zoom calls.

Perhaps this is permanent.

Think about that, and if that isn't enough to get a person to pray, then may God help us all.

-30-

Life is a Reach

My pet theory is that a person's ego develops in the second trimester. That's when you can feel him/her bucking around, hitting up against this side and that side, as if to say, "Hey get me outta here!"

Why do they call theories pets?

That's easy. If you don't have a cat or a dog, a theory will keep you company when you're reduced to talking to yourself.

"Do I have trouble with a person talking to himself?"

"No, I think it's fine."

"Then why do you ask the question?"

"Will you shut up, already?"

Back to the trimester business. I've always thought the anti-abortion people would make more sense if they backdated a baby's age to the point of conception, though I realize that might be a bit hard to pin down. Most everyone would be nine months older, but there would be endless debate about which date was the actual birthday.

That debate, in turn, would give the fools in the House of Lords or the Knesset something to actually do.

Oh, and you'd have to change the word birthday to the "Day We Did It." Or you could call it the day of the pepperoni for short. Or long.

***

For a while there, I thought this Corona-V might be a Republican. Because look what happened to New York, New Jersey? Solid Democratic country with people dying right and left, or should I say left and left.

But lately, I'm seeing the virus may have mutated into a Democrat. Now the Republican districts are getting hard hit, including the swing states that the GOP desperately needs to hold onto the Senate and keep Trump in the White House.

Who wouldn't want Trump in the White House? He must really love the place. He's the only known President so fond of inspecting the situation room bunker that he still does it four years into his term. He'll defend the place against peaceful protestors with vicious dogs, tear gas, smoke bombs, all kinds of weapons. He'll call out the military to blockade that nearby defensive zone, Lafayette Park.

Now we even learn, from the guy with the worst mustache since Cecil B. DeMille, and he didn't even have a mustache, that Trump begged China to help him hold onto the White House. I suppose Russia and the Ukraine were not enough to carry Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin or most of the other Big Ten schools.

Bolton also reveals that Trump thought Finland was part of Russia -- "No, Mister President, they are not part of Russia but they do eat reindeers, if that helps") and that he never realized Britain was a nuclear power.

Are you kidding me? Where did they find this guy? He's the poster boy of why it's a really bad idea to leave your kid a $413 million inheritance. I say spend it while you can because you can't take it with you, so don't leave it behind. (Note to kids: I'm not leaving you the $413 million.)

There one comes again. Cliches keep popping up like PopTarts in the toaster (Jolly Rancher Watermelon is one of the top-ranked flavors.)

No, I'm spending my kids' fortune. In fact, I've been working on becoming a man of leisure. Am headed for the mountains next week, and yesterday I went to the beach. Did you know that Life is a Beach?

It's also a Peach, a Teach, a Quiche (if you firm up the crust), or my all-time fav, Life is a Reach.

Life is a Reach. Get it? I don't.

***

Now we've dealt with pets, pepperoni, politics, Pop Tarts, and poetry, the only p-word left to mess up our day would be piss.

As I compose my memoir, covering years of doing this and that, going here and there, with lots of ups and downs, big things and little things, minor achievements and major failures, writing ledes and  kickers, the inevitable question pops up like a Jolly Roger Watermelon.

Is any of it true?

Well, to answer that would take the piss out of the whole thing.

***

One of my grandkids has a pet theory, and no, as far as I can tell she doesn't yet have an issue with talking to herself.

Instead, she talks to her parents, and even sometimes to her hard-of hearing grandfather.

"When I was eight," she said recently, "I had to go to bed at eight. Now I'm nine I have to go to bed at nine.

"That means when I turn ten, I should be able to stay up 'til ten and when I'm eleven I should be able to stay up until eleven. When I'm twelve..."

"That's all fine and good," I interrupted. "But what about when you're seventy-three?"

-30-

Back in the Day

Once you retire and don't have any real schedule any more, it's natural to start losing track of what specific day it is. One way to fight that is through song. Just sing your way through the week.

"Monday, Monday, can't trust that day..." -- Dennis Doherty / John Edmund Andrew Phillips 

"Goodbye Ruby Tuesday / Who could hang a name on you?" -- Rolling Stones 

"Wednesday Morning 3 a.m." -- Simon & Garfinkle

And I was Thursday's child" -- --David Bowie / Reeves Gabrels

"I've got Friday on my mind"-- George Redburn Young / Harry Vanda

"'Cause Saturday night's the night I like" -- Elton John / Bernard Taupin

" (T)here's something in a Sunday / Makes a body feel alone" -- Kris Kristofferson (Johnny Cash)

That's just a representative sample, of course; there are plenty more songs to sing for every day of the week.  

***

We mailed a vial of my spit to Ancestry.com, so we'll see where that leads us. My kids got me the kit for my birthday. I'm hoping that it turns out that I am descended from a bat.

Seriously, I don't know what to expect, as I have not kept up in detail with advances in knowledge based on DNA. Apparently, if we triangulate my DNA with my kids, we'll be able to project something backwards about our ancestors.

Until a few years ago, the only thing most of us knew about who we came from were via stories, most of which were passed on within the family, one generation to the next.

In my case, the Scottish line was clear -- my mother was born in Eaglesham, near Glasgow, and there are a variety of family names that migrated to this country when she and her relatives arrived in the 1920s. Plus I heard the old folks speaking with their accent when I was growing up in the '50s.

My father's story is a little more mysterious -- we knew the Weirs came from Ireland, but there were other influences in the mix, especially the French. We'll just have to wait to see what Ancestry.com says about all this. What is documented within the family is our long Canadian period, which lasted from the 1830s through the 1920s.

Beyond the nature/nuture debate is the family dynamic whereby kids react against their parents at the same time they adapt to their parents' tutelage. Many children show mannerisms and gestures that their parents have/had; all kinds of things like the ability to wiggle your ears or raise your eyebrows one at a time are, according to anecdote, inherited.

I've gotta remain non-committal about all this, but I know for sure that whistling is not inherited, at least not in my case. My Dad was a big whistler; I can't whistle worth a toot. But my oldest son can, and does. So maybe it skips a generation.

On my Scottish side, an almost mythical status within the family concerned our red-headed ancestors, none of whom had appeared in a hundred years or so. While there have been traces of red hair in several of my kids, it was the birth of my second son that brought us our first true redhead. One of my Scottish aunts was dying at the time and when she heard the news, she said, "Hallelujah! Now I can die in peace." She did.

My third son soon came on the scene with even redder hair.

My three girls have hair that seems to change color over time, sometimes blond, sometimes reddish, sometimes brown. The best way to describe it is nuanced.

Back to me, the patriarch, I had very dark hair as a boy and a young man. In my 20s, I had shoulder length dark brown hair. It started turning gray a bit in my late 30s and that process continued until my 60s, when the gray was replaced with white.

Now I have shoulder-length white hair.

***

Of everything I've done, what seems to be of the most enduring interests to the historians, journalists and documentarians who contact me is my years at Rolling Stone, 1974-1977. Within that, the Patty Hearst stories Howard Kohn and I wrote have led to interview requests every single year since they appeared in 1975.

After that, my work on Circle of Poison still generates a lot of queries. I'm almost always willing to talk about the past, with the caveat that I cannot always vouch for what is fact and what is part of the myths that have grown up about the work we did back then.

That I'm so bad at cliches plays a role here. I can never figure out the simplest things, like when people ask me what it was like "back in the day." Back in or on *which* day?

I may be able to sing my way through the week, but I never know which one of those pesky critters was *the* day. That's why the first sentence of my memoir, assuming I can ever settle down enough to complete it, will start out:

Once upon a time, a long, long way from here, back in the day, we don't know which day, but back on some day, something happened or maybe it's just that my memory made me do it.

-30-

Le coeur de l'océan

Films ape life in one notable aspect -- the same scenes keep playing out over and over in our lives, just as they do in the movies. When you watch enough of them, you hear the same knocks at the door, the same wave sounds of the ocean, the same train whistles, the same echoes out in space, as director after director repeats the techniques that have proved effective in earlier films.

These redundant special effects apparently bother me so much that last night I had a dream revealing that there has only been one knock on one door throughout all of film history -- sort of a Garden of Eden moment, you know. It may have been Adam 'knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door' or wherever Eve was staying at the time.

During my long writing career, nobody ever asked or assigned me to write a review of a movie, and now you can see why. I'm way too likely to give away the family jewels, which is, of course, a veiled reference to Indiana Jones, without the veil.

Yesterday I rewatched "Titanic" for the umpteenth time. It's around three hours and fifteen minutes start to finish, much longer than most Hollywood films. One brilliant wag came up with my favorite line about that movie soon after it was released: "It was a relief when the iceberg finally showed up."

The dialogue in that flick that always sticks with me is when the Rose Calvert character is hanging off the ship's stern, poised to jump to her death, only to admonish the guy hovering nearby, Jack Dawson:

"Don't presume to tell me what I will or will not do. You don't know me."

Luckily for the plot's sake, he did in fact know her very well.

Rose and Jack were imaginary characters, but the iceberg was real.

***

Yesterday marked my return to Millbrae, smack in the mid-peninsula, for the first time in three months to see my doctor and get a checkup.

As I told my daughter as we were driving there, for many years I motored back and forth through that part of the Bay Area, either on the ancient route, El Camino Real, or on the bayside highway 101, or the western route 280. They all have their individual charms, trifurcating the peninsula north-south into three almost evenly split pieces.

All roads lead to San Jose, of course, which is the answer to Dionne Warwick's melodically rhetorical question, which might better have been termed "Do you know the ways to San Jose?"

***

Ever since the Covid-19 crisis hit, traffic in the Bay Area has been lighter than I've seen it since the 1970s, but that's starting to change now. We actually hit an old-fashioned slowdown as we headed back toward San Francisco and the Bay Bridge yesterday. That made us nostalgic for the good old early days of the pandemic, when the highways felt more like you were in Montana than one of the country's most congested metropolitan areas.

The main thing we learned at my doctor visit is that new research suggests Vitamin D is an effective anti-viral agent, perhaps even against Covid-19, though I gather than remains unproven. In any event, I'm to take 2,000 mg a day from now on.

Anyway, against the odds, my doctor pronounced me of sound health, although she didn't get into the mental health side of the ledger. Best to leave well enough alone.

***

I'm truly relishing the process of creating these daily essays: Unstructured, spontaneous missives that seem to have broken free of the stylistic constraints that confined my writings during my long pre-retirement phase.

"Your problem as a writer is you use more than one voice in the same piece," a frustrated editor once told me early in my career. What she considered a defect was in my view a success, because it meant I'd beaten down the numerous voices in my head to just two or three.

These days, when critics send me similar feedback, I have a ready response:

"Did you hear I had a stroke?"

-30-

Assisted Living

The average age of U.S. Senators is 62. Three-quarters of them are male. Over 90 percent are white.

These elected officials have aides, free meals and free health care. They basically do almost nothing for themselves; some of them may not even read reports or attend hearings except, of course, the highly publicized ones.

That's why I consider the Senate an assisted living facility. It's where we park senior citizens in their golden years. Should they have an occasional "senior moment" we forgive them. How charming.

The Senate also happens to be the place where we badly need leadership to help us weather the Covid-19 pandemic, the unemployment epidemic and the crisis over racial injustice.

Having lived briefly in another assisted living facility (I didn't win an election to the Senate), I can attest that there are certain signs you look for when a fellow resident is in decline. Of course, you start with the assumption that we all are in decline -- why else would be in here?

It could be as simple as no one wants us anymore. Maybe our families don't have room for us; same with our friends. Our partner is gone to death or divorce, and the word is that we are not all that good at living on our own.

The logic of moving in with 100 other old people is you will all have one thing in common -- age -- even if you've never met any of them before.

Once all of these kinds of thoughts have had their way with you, you return to the indisputable fact that you watch every day for the signs of decline among your peers. It becomes a fixation.

It is in this context that I watched, along with millions of others, as President Trump (now 74) had difficulty walking down a ramp at West Point on Saturday and also had to use both hands to lift a glass of water to his mouth during his visit.

You slow down on stairs because you are afraid of falling. If you are having balance issues, going down stairs is far more scary than going up them.

When lifting a glass to your lips becomes difficult, the first choice you make is simply not to drink in front of people. It's too embarrassing. But when you really need to drink, because you are thirsty or some food is caught in your throat, you grasp the glass with one hand and push it from the bottom with your other.

That is what Trump did on Saturday.

The bit about having trouble swallowing, which is often why you really need that glass of liquid, is another problem for aging people. There's this little flap at the lid of your esophagus that is supposed to open and close automatically when you swallow things. (In case this starts happening to you there are preventive exercises you can do; personally I found them useless because I couldn't swallow at all while doing them.)

Problem is, as you age, that flap can atrophy just like all of your other muscles until you feel like a veritable cross of Mister Floppy and Mister Gumby out there in public.

***

Now we've taken this delightful tour of gerontology, let's turn our (limited) eyesight to more inspiring visions, such as hummingbirds and butterflies and bats.

Bats? Like fruit flies, bats share much of our DNA and also they just happen to have all the bones we do, plus large wings to fly about as they please. Anderson Cooper hosted a special on bats this weekend, which is well worth tracking down as we shelter in place in our caves.

Unlike us, bats seem to be able to protect themselves from diseases like Covid-19, so scientists are researching whether we might be able to acquire immunity courtesy of our winged relatives.

It's much like a baseball game, where you live or die by your bats.

Speaking of baseball, there's talk of a season still, but it would be vastly reduced in scope from 162 games to just 50. As a fan and an amateur statistician, I object. What if a player hits for a .440 average and breaks Hugh Duffy's all-time single-season record?

How big an asterisk would we have to put next to his name in the Hall of Fame?

Preoccupations with horrific prospects like that definitely are preferable to obsessing over how many of the known or unknown symptoms of Covid-19 you may be exhibiting, particularly if in general you remain asymptomatic from a diagnostic perspective.

Where does all of this leave us?

"You've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything."

-- Aaron Tippin / William Brock / William Calhoun Jr. Brock

-30-

You Never Know

When I was in college, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recruited grad students, including from the University of Michigan, to create a secure communications network for military leaders. 

What they got was the Internet.

According to the story that reached me, the students and their supervisors couldn't crack the technical obstacles in their way until one night, they got stoned and came up with the TCP/IP networking solution that represented a breakthrough.

I don't know if that story is precisely true or if my sources simply got stoned and made it up, but as a '60s guy, it makes a lot of sense to me. After all, "everybody must get stoned," and you never know what will happen when you do.

Of course, the irony is that what DARPA ended up with was/is the ultimate information sharing tool, no more secure than the old party line telephone system we used to know.

It's so leaky, in fact, that in recent years, journalists I know have been using end-to-end encryption services like Signal's app to communicate with sensitive sources, in the hope of thwarting law enforcement agencies from intercepting their communications.

Whistleblowers use these methods but nothing is foolproof, so it continues to be an extremely dangerous time to be a whistleblower. Nothing remains secret for long in our world -- nothing.

The police shootings and protests continue across the nation. Some, like the situation in Atlanta, go viral, some wait for history to catch up with them. That a black man sleeping in his car at a Wendy's drive-through was killed by police after a struggle Friday night seems almost too perfect a metaphor for our age.

After all, hasn't Wendy's been known as the high-quality junk food purveyor? It's almost as bad as in the '80s when a boy died after eating a hamburger from Jack in the Box. At least, for the company's sake, his name was not Jack. (Tragically, it was Riley.)

The momentum to change U.S. society from the current protests isn't going to dissipate even if the demonstrations die down. By this point, the pressure to address centuries of racism is too great to be stopped by those who would try.

Since I've already referenced Bob Dylan once in this column I might as well go back to the main warning poem of the era when the Internet was created; it resonates down through the decades now that people once again fill our streets with cries for change:

"Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your wall
For the times they are a-changin'"

No one else before or since could have put it any better or plainer. But the people who needed to act then didn't get the message.

Once again, it is time to right these wrongs. Who might be listening now?

-30-