PETE CONFESSES!?

According to federal law, every sportswriter in America, for the past fourteen years, has been required to write a column one a year stating:
a)The evidence is “overwhelming” (this word is apparently mandated by statute) that Pete Rose bet on baseball, and
b)Pete must admit he bet on baseball so the healing can begin.

I have read every one of these articles.

In November 2003, Rose had a meeting with Bud Selig (“Acting Baseball Commissioner For Life”), in which some sort of understanding was reached. No transcript of the meeting was published, but we are given to understand via the usual reliable sources (i.e., Mike Schmidt), that Pete was told the doors would be opened to him, after a decent interval, if he were to admit betting on baseball.

In the two months since the Rose-Selig Summit, Pete has written a book (ka-ching!), had it published, and set up a media campaign. And guess what? He bet on baseball. HE ADMITS IT!! At last!! And now the healing, I guess, can begin.

I never really knew whether Pete bet on baseball because, unlike all the sportswriters who were required by federal law to describe the evidence as overwhelming, I read the Dowd Report and knew it was not. There was plenty of evidence that Rose is a cold, cynical, money-grubbing, narcissistic SOB who has only a nodding acquaintanceship with the truth, but the evidence he bet on baseball could only be described, in its worst light, as “suggestive.” In a court of law, faced with the charge he had bet on baseball, Pete would not have needed Johnny Cochran. Mickey Cochran could have handled it, and he’s been dead since 1962.

Let’s look at these latest developments from the point of view of a cold, cynical, money-grubbing, narcissistic SOB for a minute.

Here I am, locked out. It’s been fourteen years, and though I’ve been denying I bet on baseball since day 1, nobody who matters believes me. They will never believe me. If I go on maintaining I had ONE FREAKING SCRUPLE in my whole life, I will never be admitted to the Hall of Fame and I will never get a job in baseball. But if I say I did it, Bud will hem and haw, but then open the door. I’ll get a job in the minors the next day. In five years, I’ll be back in The Show. Hmm. As a cold, cynical, money-grubbing, narcissistic SOB, what should I do?

Since there was never much evidence Pete Rose bet on baseball, all we have ever had to go on is our opinion of his credibility. There’s no question Pete Rose is a liar. But was he lying for the past fourteen years, or is he lying now?

I honestly don’t know.

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

CHRISTMAS LETTER 2004

Dear Friends:

Has it been a whole year since we all “decked the halls?” Well, by golly, it has. And the Yule log is crackling again, so it must be Christmas, eh? A joyous Noel then, to you and yours. And a happy Chanukah and a merry Kwanza as well. And let’s have a Festivus for the rest of us. And to all you Muslims, well, whatever. Enjoy your Iraqi elections! And for you atheists---hey, I know---go Eagles! There’s something we can ALL agree on. I mean, Donovan’s the man, right? And what do you think---is that really his mom in the Campbell’s Chunky Soup commercials, or is it actually Kurt Warner’s?

But I digress. I know you’re anxious to hear what the Kubacki family has been doing this year.

Have you seen the naked pictures of me on the internet? Fore and aft? It was my therapist’s idea, of course, and I was shy about it at first, but now I see the beauty of it, or perhaps I should say the beauty of me. I LOVE my body now!! We should all love our bodies, shouldn’t we? Because like---that’s where we are, right? All the time. In our bodies. I mean 24-7. And 365, too. Anyway, consider the pictures a little Christmas lagniappe kind of thing for all my friends, right there at duckisnaked.com. I love you guys!

The pictures-on-the-internet decision was a huge spiritual breakthrough for me in 2004. I walk around naked in the house all the time now. (Stop over anytime and see!) I have a whole new confident attitude, even when I have clothes on, and it’s helped me all over the place, like in my militia, where Jeff and Bubba made me a Lieutenant Commandant and put me in charge of the militia affirmative action program in a ceremony we had out at the dump with a case of Milwaukee’s Best, some RPG’s and a bag of Doritos. You know---the works! So if you know any African-Americans or French people or homosexuals who want to join up and get ready for the day when Hillary comes to take all our guns away, well, I’m the guy to see. (And don’t forget---you can see it all on the website.)

Moondog too has had an awesome year. The so-called “road rage” case is completely over now, and she got her car back and everything. (Nuns just think they OWN the Roosevelt Boulevard, don’t they? I mean---be honest.)

Also, the Bebe-Afghanistan campaign is starting to take off for Moonie in a big way, and we couldn’t be happier. We have all had to face the fact that she’s in her late 20’s now, and the runways of New York and Milan are full of fourteen-year-old anorexic heroin addicts. We all get older, even Moonie. She’s just not a fourteen-year-old anorexic heroin addict anymore. So when the December issue of Vogue-Kabul, featuring her 12-page veil-and-thong layout, sold out in three hours, we were like totally---ka-ching! What can you say? It’s a universal language, I guess. Everybody likes blondes.

And finally, of course, there’s Tex, or as he now likes to be called, Jesus Finnegan. And, you know, I couldn’t be prouder of him if he were my own son, rather than Rick Mahorn’s. A lot of teenagers today are sullen and uncommunicative, but I’m thrilled Tex still talks to the “old man,” and I love our little chats, even though some of them take place down at the Roundhouse, through the plexiglass.

Like the other day, for example, I was in the kitchen when he returned from his rehearsal for the Christmas play (oops---I mean the “Winter Festival”) at school. He’s playing the role of Che Guevara. Anyway, it was about 7 o’clock in the evening, and he had been gone all day, and he looked a little tired.

“Hi, honey,” I said. “Would you like some noodles?”

“WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO STOP INTERROGATING ME, YOU FASCIST,” he replied, casually slamming his fist into one of the kitchen cabinets and shattering it into a thousand pieces.

What a night that was! He’s fourteen now, of course, and doesn’t have as much need for his parents as he used to, but I still cherish the “quality time” we have together, like we did that night, as the doctor set his fractures and applied the cast. We had some laughs, I’ll tell you!

2004 has been a super year for Tex (I mean, Jesus), and it seems he’s finally come out of his “shell”---you know, the phase he was going through last year that those doctors referred to as “psychotic catatonia.” What a bunch of quacks! With school, and rehearsals, and his bowling league (team name: Bowling For Columbine), we don’t see him nearly as much as we’d like to, but I guess every parent feels that way. And then there’s the “nuclear experiments” he and his pals are always working on in the garage with that Pakistani guy who works at the convenience store. (Don’t ask me! It’s WAY over my head.) Where DO kids get all that energy? That’s what I’d like to know! And where can I get some?

So with another great year at our house coming to a close, it’s Wassail to ye and all your kin, whatever your creed or height or sexual orientation or, you know, even if you lost a couple of toes in an industrial accident. We here on Coulter Street send you our love. Long may you wave! Merry! And Happy! Live long and prosper! May we all start jogging and really get into shape! May we all be transported back in time for an instant so we can say that thing we should have said to that girl or that guy or that boss or that judge or that creep on the subway! May we resist the urge to be clever, and be kind instead! Surf’s up, dude. It always is. The big ones are crashing on the shore. Hang ten, or eight, or whatever you’ve got. Shalom.

And be sure to visit the website.

Love,
Michael, Sandi & Tex

Copyright2004Michael Kubacki

GAY MARRIAGE

"The official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. All citizens have to change their underwear every half hour, and they have to wear them on the outside so we can check."---Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen), revolutionary leader in "Bananas," in his first speech after taking over the government.

Aren't you a little surprised that the latest developments in the gay marriage fandango haven't sparked any violence? This past week, would you have been shocked if you had flipped on CNN and learned that some nut had climbed on top of a building with a rifle and picked off a couple of the people waiting in line outside the San Francisco City Hall? I don't think I would have been surprised at all. And, of course, the night is young.

I'll tell you in a little while why I'm in favor of allowing gay marriages, but the real purpose of this diatribe is to tell you why what's happening now, via the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and the Mayor of San Francisco, is wrong.

It takes guts to do what they did, I'll give them that. The word that comes to mind is chutzpah. I mean, the institution of marriage is one that pre-dates governments and will probably outlive them. It's a creature of culture and tradition. It has existed in one form or another on every continent, in every clan, tribe, nomadic band, chiefdom, nation and state so long that (to quote an old law book) "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." For millennia, governments didn't even have any say in the process, and couldn't even perform marriages. All they could do was enforce secular laws (that came from the shamans, priests, and rabbis) about marriage-related topics like inheritance and property rights.

A lot of folks, faced with a history suggesting that marriage is a more important institution than any government that has ever existed, might pause before declaring unilaterally that marriage (as we know it) is wrong, unfair, discriminatory, and homophobic. But not the mayor of San Francisco. A lot of judges might wonder why, in the 224 years since the Massachusetts Constitution was adopted, nobody had noticed that a "fundamental right" was being denied to the state's citizens. But not the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Honestly now, by what possible authority (moral or secular), do these folks purport to decide for all of us what marriage should consist of? I mean, these people don't own the institution of marriage any more than I do, do they?

In law school, I had a professor named Yale Kamisar, and one of the few things I remember from his criminal law class was his view that that the large moral issues of society had no place in court. His examples were abortion and capital punishment, both of which have been addressed repeatedly by the Supreme Court, though neither of them are even hinted at in the U.S. Constitution. His point was that when a case involving these issues arrives at the Supreme Court, the justices have no law to apply. All they have is their own prejudices. Thus, when an opinion emerges from the court, even if it has a patina of legal reasoning to it, all you're getting is the biases of nine people who are no more qualified to decide the issue than any other nine people you could pull out of a bus station. It's tyranny. It's anti-democratic. It's what makes people pick up guns. Gay marriage was not an issue at the time, but if it had been, I'm sure it would have made his list of large moral issues that require the full, lengthy, messy and time-consuming process of democracy.

One of the great strengths, and profound frustrations, of a democracy is that large questions can sometimes take decades to resolve. Even stupid ideas can stick around for a hundred years, until all the diehards on one side are dead or have given up the fight. The "Free Coinage of Silver" campaign, for example, was a dopey notion even by the standards of economic science in the 1860's, but it stuck around for sixty years.

School vouchers is another example. It's been at least forty years since Milton Friedman came up with the idea, and it will be another twenty before it's finally decided. It's pretty clear which way the battle is going, but that doesn't mean it's even close to being over. There's money involved, and power, and political philosophies, and nobody is going gently into the night. But ultimately, it will be settled.

The beauty of this unwieldy process is that, so long as no one has the dictatorial power to say, "This is the LAW," nobody gets killed, and the government doesn't get overthrown. People bitch, of course, and they write letters to the editor and they call talk radio shows, and maybe, late at night in a taproom, somebody gets a bloody nose. But if you want to ignore the politics entirely, you can. Armed men don't come to the door to find out which side you're on. The mail still gets delivered. The Eagles still lose the NFC Championship game. And eventually, the issue gets settled one way or the other.

There are costs attached to the system, of course. It's not very efficient. The "Free Coinage of Silver" fight, for example, raged on for decades with millions spent on political campaigns, and resulted in exactly---nothing. People wasted their entire lives on it. William Jennings Bryan, a great man of his time, is now a sort of historical joke figure. The school choice controversy also carries a price, since at times it seems the very purpose of public schools, to educate children, has been forgotten. And doesn't it seem unlikely schools will get any better until the issue has been resolved?

In the fight over gay rights, one argument you hear is that allowing gay marriage would "undermine" traditional marriages. I'm not sure how that works exactly because I don't really see how it would affect me and my marriage, but maybe I'm missing something there. What I do know is that the current fight, like any long political battle in a democracy, has its costs, the primary one of which is that the fight itself undermines traditional marriage, in the following way.

There once was a time when society encouraged couples to get married, in various ways. There were tax advantages. It was easier to get a mortgage. Employers typically extended health insurance and other employee benefits to spouses. In these and many other ways, the government and the world at large nudged young couples toward the altar. And if you believe that marriage is a great civilizing influence, and the best way to raise children, this was a good thing.

Those days, to a large extent, are gone. Along the way, in the fight for gay rights, many major cities and many large employers (virtually every hi-tech and entertainment company, for example) started offering benefits to "significant others" or same-sex "partners." Once this process started, they couldn't very deny those same benefits to John and Mary, an unmarried couple who live together. "Why get hitched?" John wonders, and it's hard to give him much of an answer.

Well, I still want John and Mary to get married. Despite the leftist ideologues who wish it weren't so, all the evidence still tells us that kids are better off with both mommy and daddy, that married people commit fewer crimes and take fewer drugs, and are more productive members of society. Not that we really need any sociological studies to tell us of the civilizing influence of marriage, of course. The fact it has worked since we all lived in caves is good enough for me.

So bring on the gay marriages. It's OK with me. It's probably going to happen anyway in twenty years or so, so why fight it? Let them get married. But no more of this same-sex partner business, or "civil unions" or "significant others." No more “spousal benefits” for people who are just living together. None of that. It's marriage or nothing. You get the benefits, you get the joint credit card liabilities, you get the mother-in-law, you get everything. Let them all get married. And let's see how THEY like it.

Copyright Michael Kubacki 2004

THE 2004 ELECTION

I received the following email from a friend of a friend on the day after the election:

10:00pm, Nov. 2nd, 2004
I'm getting a sinking feeling but I am nothing if not an optimist with a terrific sense of humor. Part of me wants to run off a few choice bumper stickers, such as, "Red States Suck", or "Liberal hell, I hate Republicans". Can this Fun Puppy bear another four years of this Country mired in muck, or mucked in mire? Forever I've had this feeling of us/we versus they/them. And they are again going to be in charge of us. Yuck! Truly half this country, we now know, is made up of them, the United States of Enron. So where is the silver lining? I suppose it comes from the State where I live. California, I am happy to announce, is BLUE. I don't have to think that my neighbors have no sense. If I lived in a red state right now, seriously, I would feel like a Jew living in the early stages of the Third Reich. Maybe I'll invest in Brown Shirts. We have just given Hitler the Chancellery and it's time to head for Switzerland. But I don't have to. I live in a Blue State where the Republican Governor votes against his party on certain issues and may actually vote his conscience. Of course, my governor is an Austrian muscleman who made his way by becoming an action hero of make believe cinema. How Californian is that? So what I might do instead of moving to Switzerland, is, stop reading so much about current events, shit who needs the forthcoming grief that's bound to come in our future. I've had enough of that already. Maybe the inhabitants of the Red States know something already. That ignorance IS bliss. Shit, why did we have to be so well educated? Why wasn't I a child left behind?

It’s been more than a week since the 2004 election, and the chattering classes continue to parse the results. The left-wing faction that controls the Democratic Party is now engaged in explaining to itself and its followers what went wrong, and it is doing so, in public, in all the usual media venues. It is a process that amazes me. In some ways, it’s every bit as interesting as the election itself, which fascinated me and which was practically supernatural in many respects.

What’s different now is that the losers are telling us, to a large extent, what they really believe. The outrageous charges and insults that are part of every political campaign, the electioneering blather---that’s gone now. No one ever believed there was a secret plan to reinstitute the draft or cut social security benefits or stop black people from voting, so you are not hearing those claims now. Instead, on Air America and in the New York Times and on CNN and CBS and MSNBC and in the Washington Post, we have had the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party telling us what they think and what their world looks like.

And here is what they are saying:

1) Those who are opposed to same-sex marriage are less tolerant toward gay people.

2) The notion that we are fighting to bring freedom to the Iraqi people is so corny and unsophisticated that anybody who believes it is a rube.

3) The Democrats were not rejected by the voters. Either they “didn’t get the message out” (i.e., let’s all blame Kerry), or Bush voters were too stupid or fearful to understand their own best interest.

4) The purpose of Bush’s program of tax cuts was to ensure the richest Americans pay less and the poorest Americans pay more.

5) Right-wingers control the news media.

6) The only reason anyone would worry about embryonic stem-cell research is because the Pope or Jerry Falwell told them to.

7) The jihadists think God is on their side and Bush thinks God is on our side, so like, what’s the difference?

8) Anyone who believes Roe v. Wade was a dark day for our democracy wants to ban abortion.

9) Opponents of affirmative action don’t really care whether black kids get an education.

10) Now that Republicans are in charge of the Senate, they will appoint judges with specific right-wing political views.

11) Opposition to minimum-wage laws arises from an indifference to the plight of the poor.

12) “Faith” is a code word for racism, misogyny and homophobia.

If you voted for Bush, you are probably chuckling at the idea that anyone could believe such things. But if you voted for Kerry, you almost certainly agree with one or more of these statements, because these are the explicit post-election opinions of those who supported him and ran his campaign. They are among the core beliefs of those who lost the election.

It is not for me to lecture Democrats on how to fix themselves, but I can tell you how those of us on the other side of the fence perceive the message of today’s Democratic Party. We see it as mean-spirited, snottily superior, and lacking respect for our democratic procedures and traditions. In addition, we are puzzled by the unquestioning, even ritualistic, nature of the abuse directed at us. Maybe you think that characterization is wrong or unfair, but all I’m telling you is the truth. That is what all us Neanderthals really think.

In short, lowbrows like me do not simply disagree with the leftists that now run the Democratic Party. We have been insulted by them, routinely, and that made it personal. November 2nd was, in large part, payback time. And it’s hard for me to see how these guys will ever win a national election until they change their tune.

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

THE KUBACKI GASTRONOMIQUE

***Salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice are all you need to make any meat, fish, or vegetable delicious.

***In my experience, men consume 87% of all fruit.

***A couple years ago, I was making french fries when a drop of hot oil flew six feet across the kitchen directly into my eye. Always wear glasses when cooking with deep fat.

***Feeding Chicks I
Women are easy to feed as long as you observe a few simple rules.
First, women do not salt their food at the table. The reasons for this would take us deep---too deep---into the morass of beauty mythology and the peculiar confluence of traditional Calvinism with the pleasure-hating asceticism of postmodern leftist politics, but while a complete analysis of the psycho/medico/feminist underpinnings of the phenomenon is beyond the scope of this essay, the lesson for home cooks is a simple one: salt their food before you give it to them.
You will be astonished by the results. Many women live for decades in a gustatory wasteland of food so dreary and bland that when first they taste your properly-seasoned chow, they look up at you with eyes wide in wonder, like baby birds emerging from the shell. I have witnessed this reaction on more than one occasion to something as basic as a green salad. “Where did you get this lettuce?” I am asked. “Oh,” I say, “a man I know grows it for me special.”

***Grease makes things taste good.

***Fatty fish (like salmon) should be cooked as slowly as possible so the fat melts into the meat. Lean fish (like flounder or tilapia) should be fried quickly.

***If you are served spareribs at my house, you are likely to get a barbecue sauce I first started making thirty years ago. I have had quite a few more wives than barbecue sauces, statistically speaking.

***I have been making cornbread for twenty years, and I have never made one that satisfied me.
***Sophia Bryk, who took care of my mother during her last years, grew up in the Ukraine in very modest circumstances, and over the years had learned to produce delicious food when the larder was virtually empty. If you handed her a five-pound beef tenderloin, she wouldn’t know what to do with it, but she can take a handful of flour, a few carrots, a potato, and a small piece of fat-laden pork that most Americans would throw away, and produce (effortlessly) a dish I could never dream of creating.
Over the years, from sheer doggedness and study, I have learned how to make a few meals, but watching Sophia pull extraordinary food out of thin air has made me realize I know nothing about cooking.

***Feeding Chicks II
Chicks like shrimp. And chocolate.

***It is unforgivably rude to offer a guest pate and sweetbreads when you know in your heart that he would much prefer franks and beans.

***Large plates make food more appealing.

***Learn how to assess the doneness of meat by pressing a finger lightly into its surface.

***Goethe wrote: “A man who repeatedly examines the state of his health generally discovers that he is ill.” This is why it is not wise to read articles in popular magazines about the dangers of this food or that. Remember a few years ago when everyone you knew was lactose-intolerant? Now that they have regained their senses, aren’t you glad you thought twice before buying stock in the company that makes Lact-Aid?
It is possible to find scientific information about food and nutrition, but it never appears in Time, Elle, Cosmopolitan, magazines with the words “health” or “prevention” in the title, or books sold at airports.

***Always drizzle a couple drops of nice olive oil on meat or fish before serving.

***Meat stocks are so useful, so easy to make, so cheap, and require so little actual work, that the only acceptable excuse for not making them is lack of freezer space.


***Feeding Chicks III
Fat is every bit as tasty to women as it is to men, but a certain subtlety is required. Most women, for example, presented with a rack of ribs dripping pork fat and barbecue sauce, will politely consume two or three ribs, dabbing their mouths with napkins after every bite. Men, of course, will normally attack such a meal with loud sucking noises, the removal of several articles of clothing, and the use of body parts not often used for food consumption, and will then need to be thoroughly hosed down when the repast is complete.
Cream sauces have a similar, though less pronounced, effect. I have had little success in feeding them to women.
It is possible to conceal a half-pound of butter, however, in a few herbs and vegetables and a cup of wine. Hide another stick in the rice, throw a few shrimp on top, and you have achieved the perfect meal for the female palate. It is called Shrimp Diane.
If you are a man with pock-marked skin, a long and jagged facial scar, no discernable job prospects, and a lengthy criminal record, but you can make a really delicious Shrimp Diane, you can get married. If you also make a gooey chocolate dessert with a hint of raspberry to it, you can marry Catherine Zeta-Jones, or her equivalent.

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

THE DATING SCENE

My son’s buddy’s mother’s boyfriend, Bob, asked me out the other day. I admit I was flattered. I don’t get asked out very often. In fact, I never really dated that much at all, and I wasn’t very good at it when I did. I tended to hit the wrong note at one point or another---too serious, too happy, too flippant, too sarcastic, too shy, too aggressive---and that would be the end of it. Eventually, though, I hit on a strategy: whenever a woman would laugh at my jokes, I would immediately ask her to marry me. It’s not a method I am recommending to anyone else, but it worked for me, because many of the women agreed.

But that’s not really what I want to tell you about. I want to tell you about my date with Bob.

Bob and I have seen each other at parties for a while now, either at my house or at my son’s buddy’s mother’s house. He’s a big old friendly-looking guy with a ready smile and a sincere expression. He generally has a twinkle in his eye. Now, don’t get me wrong here. For all I know, he could be a serial killer with a brace of bodies buried under his porch, but he seems a decent sort. He’s somebody you would walk up to and talk to at a party, which I have.

Since Bob is my son’s buddy’s mother’s boyfriend, most of our meetings have occurred at my son’s buddy’s mother’s house, where I have certainly been welcomed but where I am something of an outsider. I just don’t know the crowd very well. So I have been a relatively quiet and polite party guest, picking out this person or that and having a subdued conversation or two.

But you don’t have to attend a party at my son’s buddy’s mother’s house for very long before you realize you are in a very politically-minded crowd, specifically a very left-wing politically-minded crowd. Just sitting around having a hotdog or a beer, you will hear references to “The American Friends Service Committee,” and “Matthew Shepherd,” and “Guatemalan peasants” and “Abu Grahib” and “reproductive rights.” And everyone at the party seems to be pretty much in general agreement on these and related topics.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it’s not my house. So I talk about the Phillies, and movies, and I ask the kids about their plans for the summer, and I avoid the little clots of radicals discussing their plans to blow up embassies or line up empty boots somewhere or whatever the hell it is they’re all so earnest about. I behave myself.

And then one day, Bob sidled up to me at the end of one of these gatherings, and we happened to start chatting about the school my son goes to, and I casually opined that it was a darn good school aside from the fact that the entire 8th-grade curriculum contained no suggestion that white males had ever done anything in America other than kill minorities, oppress women and disabled people, and pollute the environment. And Bob’s eyes lit up like a biologist who had just found a new beetle in the rainforest. I fascinated him. He gave me the impression he had never seen a person like me before.

“Are you a Republican?” he inquired.

“No,” I said. “I’m actually a crank, but I’ll be voting for Bush.”

“You’re voting for BUSH???” he asked in an amazed voice. “Well, let me ask you this---what’s your position on gay marriage?”

I told him.

“And what about abortion? What’s your view on Roe v. Wade?”

And I told him that too.

It went on this way for a half-hour or so, with him asking and me answering, and everything I said elicited from him a look of astonished glee, and another question. He didn’t argue with me about anything, though it was clear he did not agree with a word I said. He simply could not get over his astonishment at having found ME in my son’s buddy’s mother’s backyard. It was as if he had absent-mindedly kicked over a stone and discovered---a wooly mammoth!

It was great fun for me, of course. For one thing, I never get to talk about politics because I live in Philadelphia and almost everyone I know, including the people I’m related to, is a leftist of one sort or another and would fit right in at a party in my son’s buddy’s mother’s backyard. My friends NEVER bring up politics because they know I will say something that will annoy them, and an argument will erupt. And for the same reason, I never bring it up either. So Bob’s grilling was a pleasure. He WANTED me to be a right-winger or a libertarian or a troglodyte or whatever it was he perceived me to be. He WANTED me to think Clinton belongs in jail. He WANTED me to be a member of the NRA. I never had to hold my tongue so as not to offend. He wanted to hear it all. He thought I was cute.

A few weeks later, Bob showed up at my house for a 4th of July party. It was a busy day for me since I had to do a lot of cooking, and I had to go to the emergency room to stop the blood spurting from my back, and I had to attend to a guest who got a shard of glass embedded in his leg, and I also had to play horseshoes, but Bob and I did get a chance to talk a bit as I was rushing here and there. And as luck would have it, he had just been to see “Fahrenheit 911,” and he thought it was great.

“You really ought to see it,” he told me.

“Bob, I really don’t want to.”

“Oh, I know you don’t agree with Michael Moore, but I think the movie would surprise you.”

“Honestly, Bob, I’ve read about it. I’ve read lots of articles and reviews. There are websites devoted to it. I just don’t think it’s the sort of movie anybody could take seriously.”

“Look. Let me take you. I’ll pay for your ticket.”

“Really, Bob….”

“I’m buying!”

“OK.”

And that’s how I wound up at the 6:45 show of “Fahrenheit 911” at the Clearview Bala Theater the following Tuesday for my date with Bob. He bought the tickets. I bought the popcorn because---well, I guess I didn’t want him to think I was a golddigger.

* * * *

The movie consists of three interwoven elements, and my guess is that each occupies about a third of the footage.

First, there was the “Bush-is-a-dope” stuff. This is the comic relief and acts as the glue to connect the narrative elements of the film. Bush mangling an aphorism. Bush getting made up for TV. Bush chopping wood. Bush hitting golf balls. Bush, through some cheesy special effects, as Pa on “Bonanza.”

All these scenes elicited a hearty Pavlovian laughter from the audience, which was full of folks who never tire of this brand of humor. At this point, I am so weary of this particular article of leftwing dogma that I want to scream every time I hear it. I mean, when you hear the same joke for fifty years, don’t you stop laughing at it after a while? Don’t you get tired of it, even if you’re a Democrat?

I am fifty-three years old, and I remember hearing this same stuff about Eisenhower! How could this doddering old man get more votes than that smart Mr. Stevenson, I wondered, mirroring the bewilderment of all the good Democrats who populated my five-year-old world at the time. It was only years later I learned he had commanded the allied forces in WW II. Oh, so that’s it, I thought. Well, maybe he did have half a brain after all.

I am assured by all my intelligent friends that there is no such thing as a “liberal media bias.” Some of them even insist there is a bias going the other way. But isn’t it puzzling that every four years, according to the TV networks and all the big-city newspapers, the Democrats nominate a smart guy for president and the Republicans pick an idiot, or a psychopath, or an Alzheimer’s case? What’s the matter with these Republicans anyway? Can’t they find one guy in the whole Republican Party who’s smart enough to be president? Why do they keep doing this?

Eisenhower---your dopey grandpa. Goldwater---a psychopath. Nixon---another psychopath (Spiro Agnew was the moron). Gerry Ford---too much football without a helmet. Reagan---stupid and senile. Bush I---a bumbler (again, his VP was the 68-IQ guy). Dole---senile (remember the Depends jokes?). Bush II---well, it’s hard to say where he ranks. I used to think Reagan was our stupidest president, according to all the people on TV who know about these things, but Bush II is coming up fast, isn’t he? I don’t think there’s much doubt in Michael Moore’s mind about who the dumbest president is, and there was no apparent dissent in the audience on my date with Bob.

On the other side, there’s the Democrats---brainiacs all. Occasionally, they are portrayed as crafty or “slick,” but neither of these adjectives implies the stupidity that was regularly imputed to the guy who won WWII or the fool who brought down the Soviet Union. Al Gore, the VP who flunked out of divinity school, was a genius, but even he wasn’t as smart as Bill Clinton, who tried to throw his presidency away for a 20-year-old with a thong. Don’t forget Jimmy Carter---he was a nuclear engineer! And then there was Lyndon Johnson---well, he was not our favorite, was he? But he was still a “political genius,” right? Even though he slogged through Vietnam without a clue as to what was happening.

The “Bush-is-a-dope” montage was a full third of the movie. I used this time to go to the bathroom, pee, wash up, take deep breaths, and long for the 70’s. It was a decade that holds few fond memories for me, but in the 70’s, there always seemed to be somebody in the bathroom selling drugs, and I realized during “Fahrenheit 911” that this was not an altogether bad thing.

Unfortunately, there are only so many bathroom breaks you can take when you’re on a date.

* * * *

Another third of “Fahrenheit 911” is the grisly footage. If you ever wanted to see soldiers whose arms have been amputated, children with their insides showing, burned corpses, flag-draped coffins, a beheading and grieving mothers, this is the movie for you. There’s plenty of it. It’s revolting. If you do not at some point close your eyes or look away from the screen, you are a profoundly sick person. If you watch these scenes in their entirety, I would like you to let me know because I will be crossing your name off my Christmas list.

What is the purpose of subjecting a paying audience to these scenes, you may ask. I wondered about this also, and I think there are two reasons.

First of all, they are designed to make you hate George Bush, because he is the only bad guy in the movie. Saddam Hussein is virtually absent from the film. (Osama bin Laden is a guy with a goofy smile and a funny beard.) Iraq itself is depicted as a quaint backwater where women shop and children play along the Tigris. It looks like fun---a simpler place in a simpler time, with kites and smiling families! There is not a hint of the torture chambers where men would have their fingers cut off one by one, or where ten-year-old girls would be brutally and repeatedly raped in order to punish their grandparents, who were forced to watch, or where an infant’s eyes might be gouged out to impress upon his parents the importance of loyalty to the regime. Forget the graves where many were buried alive. Forget the dead, gassed Kurdish towns. Look! What a nice café! I’ll bet that coffee tastes pretty damn good!

The horrific scenes throughout “Fahrenheit 911” are shown without narration, and since Bush is the only villain, the message is that they are all his fault. Moore somehow fails to remind us that the Baathists routinely used civilian Iraqis as shields and cannon fodder during the invasion. Rather, all the grisly images are laid, by implication, at Bush’s feet. That child? Well, that’s an American bullet that did that. That’s Bush’s bullet, right?

Moore never says any of this, of course, because to state it explicitly would be to reveal how one-sided and unfair it is, and invite an argument. All Bush’s fault, we might ask? Well, wait a minute. What about the horrors inflicted upon innocents by Saddam and his Baathists? Is it possible his regime is responsible for some of this? Maybe the bullet in that child wasn’t Bush’s after all.

Well, we can’t have anybody thinking that sort of thing, can we, Mr. Moore? No, that would make for a much more complicated and ambiguous picture, a picture that approaches---what’s the word I’m looking for---oh, yeah---REALITY. “Is it worth it?” is a reasonable question to ask about Iraq. In a democracy, it’s a question that should be asked, and we should argue about it, and I’ll participate in that argument. But unfortunately, this is an argument that the courageous Mr. Moore would not touch with a ten-foot hot poker.

The other element of the horrorshow, the other reason for it, is Moore’s dark core of pacifism, where the very concept of good and evil must be extinguished in pursuit of his notion of “peace.” Moore inhabits that peculiar pacifist moral universe where Winston Churchill cannot be distinguished from, say, Pol Pot. Both were killers. Both were monsters. And Moore’s job is to collect all the dead things and show them to us.

This is the other reason why, when he shows us “the horrors of war,” there can never be a context, an explanation, or a justification, because in his world such a thing is impossible. There is only pain and death and maiming, and there can never be a reason for it.

Well, there are millions of girls going to school now, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Does that mean anything? There are families who now know what happened to their disappeared loved ones, who have retrieved the mangled remains from one of the many mass graves, and who have buried them properly. Isn’t that worth something? There are people who will not be taken in the middle of the night, tortured for months, and then returned to their families and shot in the head at the front door. Is it possible there is some nobility in human beings risking their lives to stop the cruelty and sadism that was everyday life in Iraq?

Michael Moore’s answer to all these questions is “No.” But actually, his view is even more extreme. To him, the very question is somehow illegitimate. And so he takes the wounded soldiers and dead children and flag-draped coffins and burned bodies, and he treats them as roadkill.

You know the feeling, I think. You’re driving along and there’s a dead dog on the highway, its guts splayed along the road. You drive on. You’re sad. The image stays with you. Later, you may think about it and feel sad all over again. But ultimately, it’s meaningless, isn’t it? It’s one anonymous dead dog on the highway in a world full of anonymous deaths.

And that, for Michael Moore, is what those flag-draped coffins contain---roadkill. Sad, yes, but random, anonymous, and meaningless. And I thought: how dare he? How dare he belittle the sacrifice of these soldiers and their families?

If Michael Moore had his way, half the population of Afghanistan (the female half) would still be imprisoned in their own homes---poor, uneducated, unemployable, abused, and unprotected by law. Kuwait would still be a province of Iraq, with thousands of Kuwaitis still held in horrendous conditions. In Iraq, the rape-rooms would still be open for business and the mass-grave industry would be thriving. If Michael Moore had his way, Uday would still be feeding his “ex-girlfriends” to his pet lions.

Is all this worth nothing?

In the name of ending this madness, good men and women and children have died, and each of their deaths is a tragedy. But what the hell has Michael Moore ever done to give him the right to tell us nothing has been gained, that the deaths of our soldiers were pointless, and that their sacrifice was in vain? And that those of us who are grateful to the fallen, those of us who feel a debt which can never be repaid, are fools?

* * * *

The rest of the movie, the other third, is the explication of his conspiracy theories. It’s all about oil, you see, and Halliburton, and Cheney, and the Bush family’s secret alliance with the Saudis. And as I watched this confusing pastiche unfold, I was reminded of my late uncle.

My uncle was a friendly, funny, garrulous old guy who grew up in a large family of Italian immigrants in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania before it was even called Jim Thorpe. It was a rough world he was born into, a world of quarries and coal mines and hard work and no money. I don’t know whether he had any schooling at all, but if he did, it didn’t last long.

He had a life, though, and plenty of stories---of bar fights and nightclubs and New Orleans in the old days, and World War II, where he was awarded a Purple Heart. And horses. Always the horses. My uncle was a lifelong horseplayer, and though I was never as obsessed as he was, I’m a horseplayer too, and this brought us together.

I loved the guy, and we spent a fair amount of time together over the years. I would pick him up, we’d drive to the track, spend the day there, and I would drive him home. And always there were stories, and some of them were even true, though I was never sure which ones they were.

And he was also a racist, an utterly unrepentant and unreconstructed racist. Everyone in the family knew this, and if you ever got to know my uncle, you would eventually hear one of his rants. I don’t mean to imply I heard them every day or every month or even every year. Over the fifty years I knew him, I remember a half dozen or so. We’d be rolling along the Roosevelt Boulevard, for example, and an African-American gentleman in another car would commit an act of questionable driving etiquette, and a switch would flip on in my uncle’s head, and he would give me two minutes on the goddam niggers and how they behave and how they’re ruining the country.

Now, if you’ve ever been in my position, and had a friend or relative who was a virulent racist, I think you know what I was facing. There’s literally nothing you can do. I tried to argue with him once, but that effort was worse than pointless. Instead of a brief monologue, I got twenty minutes of him muttering and cursing, and our day was ruined. You can never persuade a racist to abandon his racism because there’s no rational element to it that you can ever reach. The truth is irrelevant to such people. I mean, I could have talked to my uncle for ten years about it and would not have moved him an inch. Anthropology, genetics, biology, SAT scores, jokes---none of it would have penetrated. As a result, on the rare occasions he would sing his song, I would just listen quietly, throw in an “un-huh” here and there, and wait for it to end.

But there is a problem with that strategy as well. Holding one’s tongue carries a psychic price, a small one perhaps, but a price nonetheless. Nodding and listening, it’s hard to avoid the feeling you are a willing participant in the conversation, that you are voluntarily visiting the little corner of hatred in the other person’s brain, and making no effort to leave. After a very short while, your silence makes you feel a bit dirty.

The argument portions of “Fahrenheit 911,” the “factual” bits about the Bush-Saudi-Talliban-oil conspiracy, brought this all back to me. For me, it was like sitting next to my uncle thirty years ago on our way to Garden State Park, listening to his views on Martin Luther Coon. Because the truth doesn’t matter to Michael Moore any more than it did to my uncle. There’s a spooky, irrational corner of his brain where only hatred lives and where reality can get no purchase. And sitting there in the theater, I was transported back behind the wheel of my old red Chevette, crossing the Tacony Bridge into Jersey, with a nagging sense that anyone with a shred of decency would stand up and object, or run away, or do SOMETHING, but instead waiting quietly for it all to end.

There are many articles and websites devoted to the outright lies and distortions of “Fahrenheit 911,” and I’m not going to recount them all here. I’m not an expert on recent history or foreign affairs anyway; I’m just a guy who reads the newspaper and is interested in politics. But I want to mention a few of them that were so absurd, so bald-faced, that they cannot be passed off as “spin” or “commentary” or even “mistakes.” They’re lies.

First, there’s the matter of the Taliban visit to Texas in 1997 to meet with officials of a company named Unocal about building a pipeline in northern Afghanistan. This event, and the machinations about the pipeline, are presented as the reason Bush decided to invade Afghanistan in 2001. I know. I don’t get it either, but maybe where there’s smoke, there’s fire, or something like that.

But here’s the problem. Though the piece is an attempt to link Bush and the Taliban and the pipeline and the invasion, Moore forgets to mention that Bush had nothing to do with the Taliban coming to Texas. Since he was not president in 1997, he had no authority to grant visas to representatives of an unrecognized government like the Taliban. It was the Clinton State Department that permitted this to happen, and George Bush could have had no official role in it. As for an unofficial role, Moore also forgets to mention that neither George nor any other Bush attended the meeting or had any business relationship with Unocal. In fact, the only relationship George Bush had with this deal was that he also was present in the state of Texas on the day the Taliban met with Unocal to discuss it. My cousin Joe was in Texas that day too. Why isn’t he in the movie?

The pipeline negotiations broke down in 1998, by the way. I don’t remember Moore mentioning that part either. But I suppose the fact THERE IS NO FREAKING PIPELINE would have undercut his assertion that it was the reason for the invasion that occurred three years after the pipeline deal fell apart.

Another piece of the Bush-Saudi-oil conspiracy is equally bogus. This concerns the Carlyle Group, which is apparently even more evil than Halliburton because nobody knows about it. Moore correctly informs us that the Carlyle Group did $1.4 billion worth of business with the Saudis in the 1990’s. He also notes that both the elder George Bush and the current president were on the board of Carlyle. This is the centerpiece of Moore’s conspiracy story. “See!! It’s all about oil; it’s all about the Bushes and the Saudis! The war in Iraq is a scam! It’s just a way for these guys in turbans and cowboy hats to line their pockets!”

Now, as many commentators have pointed out, this idea, which is the core of “Fahrenheit 911,” is absurd. If the Saudis and the Bushes are such good buddies, why didn’t they help us? Why weren’t they part of the coalition? I mean, if your pal goes to war, don’t you at least give him a few bucks and a pat on the butt? The Saudis, however, bitterly opposed the invasion of Iraq. No money, no soldiers, no airspace, no landing fields---nothing. Is this really how one chum treats another?

But that’s not all. For Moore, it’s not enough that the theory is laughable, he has to conceal the facts too. Remember the $1.4 billion? Almost all of it came in one deal, with a Carlyle subsidiary named BDM, to provide training and some equipment to the Saudi armed forces. BDM was sold by the Carlyle Group months before the elder George Bush joined the board of directors. The current president had served on the board in the 1980’s, and had resigned long before the deal was signed. So yes, there was a huge business deal between the Saudi government and the Carlyle Group, but no, neither Bush had anything to do with it.

At one point, Moore is standing on a street corner in Washington doing an interview, with the Saudi Embassy across the street as a backdrop, when a Secret Service agent walks over to ask what he’s doing. I imagine that since 9-11, this sort of thing happens quite a bit in D.C. They’re all a bit jumpy down there. Personally, I don’t blame them.

But you don’t do something like that to Michael Moore! This meaningless little vignette occupies two minutes of the movie, with a Moore voice-over at the end of it informing us that the Bush Administration actually provides security to Saudi diplomats and the Saudi Embassy! The gentle people at the Clearview Bala Theater lapped this up, of course, and snickered in all the right places.

But it’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that Moore is not aware (and never bothered to find out) that the Secret Service routinely provides security to all manner of foreign diplomats? A long time ago, it was decided this was preferable to having hundreds of foreign troops standing in front of embassies with machine guns.

Some big lies, some small ones. Again, I’m not trying to dissect the picture frame by frame. This exercise is purely idiosyncratic---I’m just noting a few of the points anybody who reads a newspaper would find offensive, and an insult to one’s intelligence. This is only the stuff that reminded me of my uncle.

Then there is Moore’s take on the Florida election in 2000. I will attempt to describe what I saw, though it’s not easy because this was one of the more incoherent segments. But it didn't have to make any sense. For Moore, who put this at the beginning of the movie, it was a sort of secret handshake with his audience, and a wink and a nod to the true believers of this particular item of faith. Bush stole the election, he's telling us. We all know that, right? So let’s get that out of the way and then I’ll tell you all the other evil things he’s done.

Some relative of George Bush, a cousin or a nephew or something, worked at Fox News, and this relative made Fox News award Florida to Bush at 2:30 in the morning on election night. And that, according to Michael Moore, was how Bush got elected president. Honestly, as Dave Barry likes to say, I’m not making this up. That’s Moore’s conclusion---Fox News said Bush won, so he did.

There are a few other tidbits, of course, because one of Moore’s techniques is to slap up half a dozen unrelated items in rapid-fire fashion and encourage his audience to fill in the conspiratorial blanks. Gore got more votes than Bush in Florida, he tells us. And he would have gotten a lot more votes than Bush if African-American voters had not been systematically kept from the polls. And, of course, all those Gore votes would have been counted if the US Supreme Court had not stopped the counting.

Let me tell you how naïve I am. I assumed that two years ago, when two separate teams of newspapers (including the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, USA Today and others) completed their ballot-by-ballot recounts of the Florida election, and both groups concluded Bush had gotten more votes, that would be the end of it. I was wrong about that. Though there is no scenario, based on the facts, by which Gore could have won, this piece of left-wing mythology will not die. Much like the “all-Republicans-are-dopes” credo, the only thing that matters anymore about the Florida election is the hatred, which must be repeatedly nurtured and caressed, but never examined.

Moore’s statement that Fox News did not “call” the Florida election until 2:30 AM is a lie. Like all the other networks, Fox put Florida in the Gore column about 8:00 PM. (Unlike the others, they waited until the polls closed.) About six hours later, when the vote totals swung the other way, Fox admitted its error and proclaimed Bush the winner. All the other networks immediately followed suit.

What all this has to do with the actual outcome of the election is---well, you’ll have to ask Michael Moore about that. I can’t imagine. But again, it’s not enough for him that the theory makes no sense---he has to lie about the facts too.

Then there is the famous Supreme Court decision, which Moore races through in the hope we will not remember what really happened. Now, one can argue that the decision to stop the Florida recount was not the Supreme Court’s brightest moment, but what would have happened if that decision had not been issued? Well, the leaders of the Florida Legislature had indicated they would have stopped the recount themselves, and voted Florida’s electors for Bush. Under the Constitution, that was their right and duty. That is how it is supposed to work. There was simply no way, under our laws, for Gore to be awarded Florida. And considering that the recounts by America’s largest newspapers indicated Bush had gotten more votes, what is Moore’s problem with that?

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot the disenfranchisement of Florida’s African-American voters. As you may recall, though Moore would never remind you, The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Clintonites all) held six months of hearings on these claims and concluded there was nothing to them. Sure, there were spoiled ballots that didn’t get counted. There always are. Every presidential election, 2% to 3% of ballots are improperly cast and have to be pitched. It happens everywhere, and there was nothing unusual in 2000 in Florida.

* * * * *

One further point about the “disenfranchisement” needs to be made. Moore’s frequently-asserted concern for his darker brothers and sisters wears exceedingly thin once you begin to understand that his own worldview contains a healthy dose of racism. For me, this realization occurred in that part of the film where Moore revisits Flint, Michigan to interview young black men about their plans to join the military.

Cutting to footage of abandoned houses in Flint, then back to the 18-year-olds, then back to the abandoned houses, Moore argues the Bush Administration has (intentionally) impoverished these boys so their only option in life is enlistment. (A question I wondered about during the movie: if every house in Flint is abandoned, where do people live?)

Now, I always figured there were as many different reasons for joining the armed forces as there are soldiers. Am I wrong about that? I mean, isn’t the decision always a complicated mixture of wanting to leave home, wanting to serve your country, wanting to start a career, wanting to be independent, wanting to make some money, wanting to test oneself against the rigors of military life, and fifty other considerations, all of which get filtered through an inexperienced 18-year-old mind? Isn’t that the way it is, and how it’s always been? After all, Bush didn’t invent the process. Napoleon didn’t invent it. Even Julius Caesar didn’t invent it.

But I guess that’s only how it works for white kids. The black ones in Flint, according to Moore, have none of these motivations or nuances of feeling. They’re just mindless dupes and victims of the Bush war machine.

And he’s not just talking about those kids from Flint, of course. The larger message is that no African-American would ever voluntarily serve the racist gulag that the United States has always been. He even trots out a black soldier (in uniform) who states that he won’t go to Iraq “to kill poor people.” Of the tens of thousands of black soldiers risking their lives and serving their country with honor, Moore finds this guy, and presents him as a spokesman for his race.

For me, this was the most offensive part of the movie. Michael Moore defames every African-American who ever served his country in the armed forces. Patriotism? Ha! The Colored Brigades who fought for the Union in the Civil War---fools! The black GI’s who gave their lives at Normandy---dopes! In Korea, in Vietnam, in Lebanon, in Iraq---suckers! They’re just a bunch of dumb niggers, don’t you see, and easily manipulated. Even an idiot like Bush (or is he now an evil genius?) can make them all sign up and get killed. And how kind it is of Mr. Moore to look out for them.

Moore will use anybody and anything in the service of his goofy theories---wounded soldiers, grieving mothers, dying babies. That much is clear. Using the young black guys in Flint for his blood libel upon their race, however, struck me as the act of a man without decency. I was disgusted by these scenes and the point he was making. This was where I first began to feel dirty for remaining in the theater.

It must drive Moore crazy that our military today is composed entirely of volunteers, of every color and ethnic background, many of whom signed up for the noblest of motives---to defend their country from the horrors of terrorism that 9-11 brought home to all of us. In his view, this CANNOT be, since it disproves his central thesis that we are all being marched along blindly to further Bush’s secret agenda of domestic fascism and oil profits. So he converts the black teens in his beloved Flint to drones. They don’t really have a choice, you see. No matter what they may think their motivations are, it’s all part of Bush’s Machiavellian scheme.

(This same twisted racism is behind the recent campaign by some Democrats in Congress to reinstate the draft, an oppressive system that has been anathema to the left as long as I can remember. They don’t want young men and women volunteering to serve their country, and they especially don’t want African-Americans to do it. They would rather have young people dragooned into service so they can later say, “Aha! Look at this poor bastard, scooped up by Bush against his will and sent to die in a foreign land! He never even knew what hit him, but Bush doesn’t care.”)

* * * *

And then finally, mercifully, with an out-of-context Condoleezza Rice quote and a last “Bush-is-dumb” clip to send us all home laughing, it ended. The lights went up. Bob and I stood and headed for the exit. He was juiced. I was---subdued.

“So what did you think?” he asked, as we reached the lobby. “I want to know! C’mon, there must have been some parts you thought were on target!”

I didn’t really know where to start. “Let’s go to that place down the street,” I suggested. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

Five minutes later, we had parked ourselves at the long oval bar in the Bala Inn, a nasty little place with a dirty linoleum floor, a pool table in the corner, tattooed patrons and a bartender without the full complement of teeth. The Phillies were on TV, and I had a firm grip on an ice-cold bottle of beer. It was heavenly. I felt like I had just been whisked from Graterford Prison to a four-course dinner at The Four Seasons.

“OK,” said Bob. “Now tell me. What did you think?”

“Well, Bob,” I said, “let me tell you about my uncle.”

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

GRIEF COUNSELING

(A letter to the editor concerning an article on the ten thousand grief and stress counselors that showed up in NYC following 9-11)

In 1985, my parents were among the American hostages aboard the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship. Following the ordeal, families gathered at Newark Airport to greet the hostages on their return.

While we waited, a Navy psychologist spoke to us about symptoms of post-trauma stress we might observe---bad dreams, sleeplessness, and so on---but assured us that lingering effects were unlikely. “No matter how horrible it was,” he said, “most people will be fine after a week or two. Psychologically, we can recover from anything. If that weren’t true, our species would never have survived.”

A few minutes later, my parents emerged, and the family rushed to embrace them. My 70-year-old father had not slept for 48 hours. A few days before, facing imminent death, a rifle barrel pointed at him, he had whispered “Goodbye” to my mother. He had been through hell, and he looked it.

Nevertheless, when our hug ended, he put his hands on my shoulders and gave me a long look. “You know,” he said, “I never thought I’d see you again. But now that I do, isn’t it time you got a haircut?”

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AROUND THE WORLD

- by Thomas Sowell - A Book Review

Some years ago, Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, published a book entitled “The Vision of the Anointed,” in which he examined various social movements and government programs which are never evaluated on their merits, even though there may be years of data indicating abject failure in achieving a program’s stated goals. The policy argument that takes place regarding such programs, to the extent there is such an argument, concerns only the original rationale. The actual evidence of the program’s performance, even decades later, is not relevant. It’s impolite, politically, to present such evidence, so no one does.

Affirmative action, in its various guises, is one such program. Is it a good thing, we ask, to give the disadvantaged a leg up? Yes, of course. And that is the extent of the discussion.

It is surprising, in this vacuum, that there is enough evidence to fill a book, but there is, partly because affirmative action programs have a much longer history in countries other than the United States. Most of the book is a detailed history of these programs in India, Malaysia, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, and what is startling is the extent to which affirmative action programs around the world foster the same politics, experience the same problems, and progress along the same evolutionary path. If you happen to think that Indians or Nigerians are different from us in some fundamental way, this book will disabuse you of that notion.

In fact, the “uniqueness” of the American situation, with our history of slavery, is the first myth to fall by the wayside. Everybody, it turns out, is “unique,” and this uniqueness is invariably the centerpiece of the initial push for affirmative action programs, whether it involves the Maoris in New Zealand, the untouchables in India, or blacks in the U.S.

(Discrimination against untouchables, which has existed for millennia, is among the worst against any group in any society. Although they achieved legal equality in 1947, violence against untouchables [including lynching] persists to this day. And there are rural areas in India where the wearing of shoes by untouchables remains a sensitive issue.)

These programs are also touted as “temporary” and “limited,” though there is no affirmative action program in any country that has ever come to an end, or failed to expand beyond its original parameters. In India, for example, affirmative action for untouchables applied only to university admissions (at the insistence of the untouchables themselves!), but quickly led to “affirmative grading,” which has also appeared in the United States. Invariably, once group identity is politicized, political leaders emerge, and these leaders cannot rest on past achievements. They must continually seek new concessions from the majority. In India and Sri Lanka, these escalating demands have led to riots, murder, and atrocities. Sri Lanka, a peaceful multicultural society in the 1940’s and 1950’s, has been in a state of civil war for two decades because of ethnic wars that began with affirmative action and the politicizing of ethnicity. Though the United States has escaped the horrific ethnic violence that has plagued other countries, the goals here have continually progressed, from equality to preferences to quotas to demands for reparations. And it is difficult to argue that racial harmony has been achieved in the process.

Every country in which affirmative action programs are started also experiences a “redesignation” phenomenon. In Australia, for example, there was a 42% increase in aboriginals between 1981 and 1986, a demographic impossibility. In the U.S., there were 50,000 American Indians in the 15-19 age cohort in 1960. In 1980, when these same individuals would be in the 35-39 group, there were 80,000 of them. While it is not surprising that fraud occurs in procuring of government benefits, the increase in people who benefit from these programs adds to the difficulty in reforming or ending them, or even in assessing their results, since the constituency for affirmative action is always growing.

As the constituencies expand, and as new groups are designated as worthy of preferences, programs grow in ways that could never have been anticipated at the outset, and sometimes make little sense when considering the original purpose of the programs. There is no obvious social benefit in granting preferences to black millionaires in the awarding of cable TV monopolies, for example. Similarly, there is nothing in the “the legacy of slavery” that can explain why white children should receive preferences over Chinese-American children in San Francisco’s public schools. This morphing of affirmative action into entitlement programs for the politically-active occurs everywhere.

Historically, affirmative action programs emerge a century or more after the worst subjugation, peonage or slavery has ended. The subjugated group then endures a long period of second-class citizenship and poverty. When a sufficient number of the subjugated group manage to pull themselves up into the mainstream, the group becomes worthy of political notice, and civil rights legislation of one sort or another is passed.

Once legal equality is achieved, if affirmative action programs follow, the beneficiaries are those members of the subjugated group that have already joined the mainstream. In Malaysia, for example, the richest 10% of ethnic Malays have seen their incomes increase significantly, though the mass of Malays have made no progress at all. Since the awarding of preferences under affirmative action programs is a zero-sum game, there are also victims, and these tend to be the poorest members of the “dominant” group. In India, those who have benefited are the most politically-savvy (and educated) untouchables, at the expense of the lowest echelons of the Brahman caste. In the U.S., upper-middle-class black families are the primary beneficiaries, while the poorest and least-educated whites fall further behind. The evidence suggests that affirmative action does very little to help the poorest Malays, the poorest untouchables in India, or the poorest blacks in America.

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

DICK MEDICINE

Did you know Rafael Palmiero has hit 528 home runs? I didn't. I follow baseball, and I know he's a star for the (invisible) Texas Rangers, but 528 homeruns? Who knew? I mean, that's a hall of fame number. More than that, it's a first-ballot-walk-right-in number. It's a don't-even-bother-to-show-us-your-driver's-license number. It's a Mike Schmidt number.

And yet---well---I don't know what you thought the first time you saw Rafael Palmiero in a Viagra commercial, but personally, it gave me the creeps. And the 528 dingers somehow make it worse. I mean, here's a guy in his 30's, a pro athlete, a home run hitter, good-looking, a guy who has 22-year-old porn-star-wannabes waiting for him outside the locker room every night, and HE can't get it up? What the hell is wrong with him?

Speaking as a guy, on behalf of all guys everywhere, Rafael Palmiero is wrong for the product. I understand what the advertising people were thinking, but they were wrong, because most guys are not going to identify with him. I'm sure the advertising people thought the message was: "Viagra, man---if Palmiero can take that stuff, it must be cool" or "Take Viagra and you'll knock them out of the park too." No. Un-unh. Nothing like that. Speaking for all men, everywhere, here is what guys think when they see Rafael Palmiero pitching Viagra. They think: "Poor bastard. His dick is broke."

The typical customer for dick medicine, the 60-year-old guy who can't throw the football through the swinging tire like he used to, does not think his dick is broke. No guy ever thinks his dick is broke, even if the organ in question is sitting in a jar of formadehyde in a medical museum at Harvard. There's always a rational explanation for limpness that has nothing to do with a broken dick. ("So I'm sitting there, and there's 3 seconds left in overtime, and the Lakers are down one, and Shaq is at the line shooting two, and the bitch puts her hand on my thigh! And this is AFTER she burned the goddamn macaroni and cheese!!")

Needless to say, since no guy ever thinks his dick is broke, the last thing he wants to see is a commercial telling him it is. That's just not what he thinks. He thinks: "I am every inch the tough SOB I was forty years ago, but now I'm tired at the end of the day. And OK, I'm getting older. Everything still works, but I need a boost sometimes, like vitamins or something. I'm not some 30-year-old pretty boy who can't get it up; I'm more like---Ditka!"

I haven't seen Rafael Palmiero selling Viagra since the debut of the Ditka/Levitra spots, and I don't think that's an accident. Next to Ditka, Palmiero will always look like PeeWee Herman, no matter how many home runs he hits. I mean, if you want to sell dick medicine to the masses, who's better than Ditka? Clint Eastwood maybe? Well, OK, but he doesn't do commercials. Billy Dee Williams? Maybe, but he would never do a commercial suggesting he is actually 67 years old rather than, say, 25.

Most guys are not pretty, and neither is Ditka. But with his fireplug physique, and his psychopathic twinkle, he's still a tough guy after all these years. The hair still looks like he cut it himself with an Insinkerator, and is there any doubt that, in a pile of large, biting, kicking men with bad attitudes, he would still somehow emerge with the football? And yeah, he takes Levitra. YOU GOT A FREAKIN PROBLEM WITH THAT?? This is an attitude that the wimpiest, flabbiest, cubicle-bound, chicken-legged, bald, impotent 60-year-old guy can admire because he too is certain (certain!) that with the game on the line, he would also emerge with the football. I know I would.

The latest entrant in the sweepstakes, Cialis, seems to understand they have already lost the celebrity endorsement battle, because they don't even use a celebrity in their commercials. Instead, they use "life-style" scenes of loving elderly folks driving sports cars and looking out at the ocean together. It's possible to watch these spots and not even know Cialis is a dick medicine. OK, you think---happy geezers---now what the hell does this thing cure? Liver spots? Shingles? Cat-hair allergies?

Again, this message is wrong. Even if you can figure out what Cialis is for, it is not something guys are going to rush out and buy. Geezer romance? Is this something guys long for? Even old guys? I don't think so. Again speaking for all guys everywhere, I have nothing against romance. But let's face it, romance has NOTHING to do with boners. To the extent there is any link between the two in the public imagination (i.e., what chicks think), it's the product of a decades-long propaganda campaign financed by the Hallmark Card Company. Halliburton probably had their hand in there somewhere too. Geezer romance? Spare me. Bob Dole, in the darkest hour of his erectile despair, did not dream of holding hands with his elderly wife in a hot tub. Trust me on this.

Which brings us back to Ditka.

The problem presented by these products, for advertisers, is that they have to tell us what the product does (or at least strongly imply it), without grossing us out. Viagra succeeds on the first count, but the image of a 528-homer guy with a broke dick is way too distressing. Cialis fails on both counts---it's hard to figure out what it does, and even if you do, the payoff (in senior muskrat love) just isn't worth the trouble.

Using Ditka, on the other hand, makes all the problems go away. At a stroke, he eliminates the gross-out issue because it is impossible for anyone who does not live in an institution to look at him and think of sex. Though I do not claim to understand women, I cannot believe that any woman, ever, looked at Mike Ditka and said to herself, "Wow. That guy is hot!" It just never happened, even at the height of his athletic career, and his fame, and his wealth.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm sure Mike has his loving, cuddly side (though, throughout his 50-year career in the public eye, no mention has ever been made of it). But the point is that when he throws a football through a swinging tire, our minds won't take it any further. The metaphor never gets extended.

I mean, who would want to? The thought of Mike Ditka climbing into the sack with some pitiful creature---well, decent people just don't think of these things, do they? There are special neurons or something in the brain that prevent that kind of thought from forming. Because we're not talking Playboy Channel here, are we? No. We're talking Animal Planet. We're talking "The Miracle of Life on the Serengeti: Large Herbivores," right? I think it's fair to say that any human being with a shred of decency would rather witness a bloody, eight-car pile-up on the Schuylkill Expressway, complete with severed heads rolling across the median strip, than spend one second visualizing Mike Ditka "making love."

Mike Ditka is the rare person who can sell dick medicine on TV without anyone ever thinking about him having sex. For a man of his singular talents, this is perhaps the most unusual.

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki

THE TRAVELER

I am occasionally asked why we named our son Tex.

In the hallway of my sister’s house hangs a formal portrait (circa 1900) of my mother’s great-great granduncle, Artur Maciejewski. This is his story.



Artur Maciejewski was born on a farm outside of Gdansk, Poland in 1830, the first of eight children conceived by Sofia and Federik Maciejewski.

From his earliest years, Artur’s personality was characterized by a wanderlust verging on madness. At the age of fourteen months, shortly after he had learned to walk, Artur was discovered in a rainstorm, alone and half-drowned, in a drainage ditch some eighteen kilometers from his home. The farmer who found him, a dour yet loving man named Andrzej Movacek, with fourteen children of his own, rescued Artur and nurtured him back to life, searched vainly for the boy’s parents, and ultimately decided to raise him as his own.

Seven years later, Artur’s mother was selling pierogies at a fair in the region when a boy approached her table. Sofia, a mother’s love suffusing every fiber of her being, recognized him instantly, and followed him as he retreated, pierogies in hand, from her table.

At last, when Artur encountered a man who spoke to him in a way suggesting a parental relationship, Sofia pounced. Introducing herself, she told her tale and demanded the particulars of the lad’s provenance. Andrzej, in a trembling voice, his heart breaking, related the events of the stormy night seven years prior.

A discussion ensued and both families gathered, as did a number of townspeople. As darkness fell, Father Jok Doriecki, the village priest, wandered by and was recruited as arbitrator. Prayers were said. Vendors gathered, hawking “Death By Potato,” the local vodka.

Sofia spoke, as did Andrzej and each of his children. At last, Fr. Doriecki, swaying a bit and fueled by the spirit, pronounced his verdict in a single sentence still celebrated by every student of Polish jurisprudence.

“A mother is a mother,” he declared.

And there was silence. Many fell to their knees, dumbstruck at the simple wisdom of this parish priest, their eyes raised heavenward where, as if by providence, a shooting star flashed, fell, and disappeared into the darkness. Thus was the case decided. Artur returned home that night with Sofia and Federik.

The next morning, as dawn broke, Sofia arose and went to gaze upon her sleeping son. He was gone, of course, already halfway to the seaport where he would sign on as a cabin boy aboard a tramp freighter that would ultimately deposit the young man, ten years old, at the foot of Manhattan Island. The year was 1840, and Artur Maciejewski was now an American.

Artur spoke Polish and the patois of a hundred nations, yet not a word of English. But in a new country full of immigrants, for a boy already accustomed to earning his supper through the sweat of his brow, New York was a dream come true. For him, there was always work, always food, and always adventure. He hauled fish, shined shoes, and sold coffins. For several years, he worked as cook and laundryman for a bawdyhouse on Wall Street. It was there he learned to read and write English, with the King James Bible as his textbook.

But not even the Big Apple could keep Artur in its thrall for long. At sixteen, with twelve dollars in his pocket and new shoes on his feet, he set out for a place he had heard about only in the stories of drunken men at the cathouse bar. It was a land with a big sky and vast deserts and grasslands a thousand miles across, a wild place where riches were waiting for any man with a strong back, a brain in his head and a gun on his hip. He didn’t know exactly where it was, but he knew it was called Texas, and he knew he could not rest until he had seen it. It would take him eleven years to get there.

He worked the farms and orchards of southern Ohio, and tarried a bit. There was a girl named Polly, a girl with wide hips and apple cheeks and a ready smile, the only child of a prosperous widower with a big spread. He liked the farmer and he liked Polly, but she was not Texas, and when Spring arrived, he was gone again, through the hills and hollows of Kentucky to the Mississippi River, and St. Louis, Missouri.

There was always work at the docks for a man who wanted it, and that is where he went. His experience at sea got him a job on a paddle-wheeler as a laborer, then as a seaman, then as a faro dealer, then as manager of the bar and card-room. At age 22, Artur was wearing tailored suits and had acquired a taste for expensive cigars. He was a gentleman of sorts, a man of some means, and he was known in every port along the river.

On June 10, 1857, Artur was cutting into a steak at his favorite restaurant in New Orleans when his attention was drawn to an altercation at a table across the restaurant. An elderly gentleman was being accosted by two rough-looking men standing over him and shouting. The source of their pique was unclear, but as the their language grew foul and threatening, Artur rose and strode purposefully across the room. Grasping a shoulder, he spun one of the men around and flattened him with a right hand to the jaw. The other turned and swung wildly at Artur, who countered with a solid left. As waiters dragged the two assailants to the street, the elderly man spoke to Artur.

“Young man, my name is Sam Houston, and if you return with me to Texas, you will never regret it.”

“I am dining with friends, sir,” Artur replied. “May I finish my supper before we leave?”

And thus did Artur come to serve Sam Houston as factotum, bodyguard and friend at Houston’s home in Huntsville. Two years later, when Houston was elected Governor, the pair moved to Austin, where Artur quickly became “a good man to know” if you wanted the governor’s ear. Houston was forced to resign in 1861 over his staunch opposition to secession, and the men returned to Huntsville, where Artur attended the old man until his death in 1863.

Still a young man, Artur (now known as Tex) was well-situated financially and known throughout the state. Some of Sam Houston’s cronies wanted to launch him into Texas politics. Others came forward with various business opportunities.

But such a life of sedentary privilege was not for Tex. Instead, he took a low-paying, dangerous job with a group of men he respected above all others. Tex Maciejewski became a Texas Ranger. For the next 25 years, Tex would see every inch of the land he had come to love, bringing law to the lawless, and keeping the peace for the innocent.

In 1888, after three dusty weeks on the road, Tex returned to his headquarters to find a letter waiting for him, addressed simply to “Artur Maciejewski, Texas.” Sofia had found him again. Now in her late 70’s, she had immigrated to America with two of her sons and was living in Philadelphia.

Three weeks later, Tex knocked at the door of a nondescript tenement in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia, and was reunited with his mother, with whom he would live for the rest of her life.

Tex himself became a popular figure in the taprooms and clubhouses of Port Richmond, and his stories of cowboys and Indians, outlaws and range wars, all rendered in fluent Polish with a Texas drawl, captivated both young and old for years.

Toward the end of his days, he was once asked if he had any regrets in his long and colorful life. “Well,” he said, “I never married, never had a son. Ha! Maybe somebody will name a kid after me.”

Tex died quietly in 1907. His services were attended by five Texas Rangers who stood at attention throughout the memorial, then returned to Texas with his ashes, which were scattered along the Rio Grande. Among the Polish families in Port Richmond, and now among their descendants, the name “Tex” endures as a popular name for a first-born son.

THE TRAVELER

I am occasionally asked why we named our son Tex.

In the hallway of my sister’s house hangs a formal portrait (circa 1900) of my mother’s great-great granduncle, Artur Maciejewski. This is his story.



Artur Maciejewski was born on a farm outside of Gdansk, Poland in 1830, the first of eight children conceived by Sofia and Federik Maciejewski.

From his earliest years, Artur’s personality was characterized by a wanderlust verging on madness. At the age of fourteen months, shortly after he had learned to walk, Artur was discovered in a rainstorm, alone and half-drowned, in a drainage ditch some eighteen kilometers from his home. The farmer who found him, a dour yet loving man named Andrzej Movacek, with fourteen children of his own, rescued Artur and nurtured him back to life, searched vainly for the boy’s parents, and ultimately decided to raise him as his own.

Seven years later, Artur’s mother was selling pierogies at a fair in the region when a boy approached her table. Sofia, a mother’s love suffusing every fiber of her being, recognized him instantly, and followed him as he retreated, pierogies in hand, from her table.

At last, when Artur encountered a man who spoke to him in a way suggesting a parental relationship, Sofia pounced. Introducing herself, she told her tale and demanded the particulars of the lad’s provenance. Andrzej, in a trembling voice, his heart breaking, related the events of the stormy night seven years prior.

A discussion ensued and both families gathered, as did a number of townspeople. As darkness fell, Father Jok Doriecki, the village priest, wandered by and was recruited as arbitrator. Prayers were said. Vendors gathered, hawking “Death By Potato,” the local vodka.

Sofia spoke, as did Andrzej and each of his children. At last, Fr. Doriecki, swaying a bit and fueled by the spirit, pronounced his verdict in a single sentence still celebrated by every student of Polish jurisprudence.

“A mother is a mother,” he declared.

And there was silence. Many fell to their knees, dumbstruck at the simple wisdom of this parish priest, their eyes raised heavenward where, as if by providence, a shooting star flashed, fell, and disappeared into the darkness. Thus was the case decided. Artur returned home that night with Sofia and Federik.

The next morning, as dawn broke, Sofia arose and went to gaze upon her sleeping son. He was gone, of course, already halfway to the seaport where he would sign on as a cabin boy aboard a tramp freighter that would ultimately deposit the young man, ten years old, at the foot of Manhattan Island. The year was 1840, and Artur Maciejewski was now an American.

Artur spoke Polish and the patois of a hundred nations, yet not a word of English. But in a new country full of immigrants, for a boy already accustomed to earning his supper through the sweat of his brow, New York was a dream come true. For him, there was always work, always food, and always adventure. He hauled fish, shined shoes, and sold coffins. For several years, he worked as cook and laundryman for a bawdyhouse on Wall Street. It was there he learned to read and write English, with the King James Bible as his textbook.

But not even the Big Apple could keep Artur in its thrall for long. At sixteen, with twelve dollars in his pocket and new shoes on his feet, he set out for a place he had heard about only in the stories of drunken men at the cathouse bar. It was a land with a big sky and vast deserts and grasslands a thousand miles across, a wild place where riches were waiting for any man with a strong back, a brain in his head and a gun on his hip. He didn’t know exactly where it was, but he knew it was called Texas, and he knew he could not rest until he had seen it. It would take him eleven years to get there.

He worked the farms and orchards of southern Ohio, and tarried a bit. There was a girl named Polly, a girl with wide hips and apple cheeks and a ready smile, the only child of a prosperous widower with a big spread. He liked the farmer and he liked Polly, but she was not Texas, and when Spring arrived, he was gone again, through the hills and hollows of Kentucky to the Mississippi River, and St. Louis, Missouri.

There was always work at the docks for a man who wanted it, and that is where he went. His experience at sea got him a job on a paddle-wheeler as a laborer, then as a seaman, then as a faro dealer, then as manager of the bar and card-room. At age 22, Artur was wearing tailored suits and had acquired a taste for expensive cigars. He was a gentleman of sorts, a man of some means, and he was known in every port along the river.

On June 10, 1857, Artur was cutting into a steak at his favorite restaurant in New Orleans when his attention was drawn to an altercation at a table across the restaurant. An elderly gentleman was being accosted by two rough-looking men standing over him and shouting. The source of their pique was unclear, but as the their language grew foul and threatening, Artur rose and strode purposefully across the room. Grasping a shoulder, he spun one of the men around and flattened him with a right hand to the jaw. The other turned and swung wildly at Artur, who countered with a solid left. As waiters dragged the two assailants to the street, the elderly man spoke to Artur.

“Young man, my name is Sam Houston, and if you return with me to Texas, you will never regret it.”

“I am dining with friends, sir,” Artur replied. “May I finish my supper before we leave?”

And thus did Artur come to serve Sam Houston as factotum, bodyguard and friend at Houston’s home in Huntsville. Two years later, when Houston was elected Governor, the pair moved to Austin, where Artur quickly became “a good man to know” if you wanted the governor’s ear. Houston was forced to resign in 1861 over his staunch opposition to secession, and the men returned to Huntsville, where Artur attended the old man until his death in 1863.

Still a young man, Artur (now known as Tex) was well-situated financially and known throughout the state. Some of Sam Houston’s cronies wanted to launch him into Texas politics. Others came forward with various business opportunities.

But such a life of sedentary privilege was not for Tex. Instead, he took a low-paying, dangerous job with a group of men he respected above all others. Tex Maciejewski became a Texas Ranger. For the next 25 years, Tex would see every inch of the land he had come to love, bringing law to the lawless, and keeping the peace for the innocent.

In 1888, after three dusty weeks on the road, Tex returned to his headquarters to find a letter waiting for him, addressed simply to “Artur Maciejewski, Texas.” Sofia had found him again. Now in her late 70’s, she had immigrated to America with two of her sons and was living in Philadelphia.

Three weeks later, Tex knocked at the door of a nondescript tenement in the Port Richmond section of Philadelphia, and was reunited with his mother, with whom he would live for the rest of her life.

Tex himself became a popular figure in the taprooms and clubhouses of Port Richmond, and his stories of cowboys and Indians, outlaws and range wars, all rendered in fluent Polish with a Texas drawl, captivated both young and old for years.

Toward the end of his days, he was once asked if he had any regrets in his long and colorful life. “Well,” he said, “I never married, never had a son. Ha! Maybe somebody will name a kid after me.”

Tex died quietly in 1907. His services were attended by five Texas Rangers who stood at attention throughout the memorial, then returned to Texas with his ashes, which were scattered along the Rio Grande. Among the Polish families in Port Richmond, and now among their descendants, the name “Tex” endures as a popular name for a first-born son.

Copyright 2004 Michael Kubacki