THE PASSION OF THE HONDA

Andy Fazio
Andy’s Service Center
139 S. Blakely St.
Dunmore, PA 18512

Dear Andy:

    Since you and I are both fans and admirers of Father Jack Doris, let me say a word about him before describing the series of events that befell me on February 14.

    Jack is a friend of mine. We eat pizza together. We watched the Superbowl together. We argue about Notre Dame football. But over the years, and I don’t know exactly how this happened, he has also become a sort of spiritual advisor. He would probably laugh to hear me call him that (even though he’s a priest), but there it is.

    It works like this. Every now and then, I’ll give him a call and drive up the turnpike, to Dunmore, to see him. It might be a personal problem I want to talk about, or it might be some political topic that’s been on my mind. Sometimes, there’s no reason at all I could put my finger on---I’ll just feel the need to sit and talk with him a while. And whatever it is, I always feel better afterwards. In fact, I’m sure that’s the reason I do it. The problems may still be there, and the worries, and everything else. I mean, the guy is not a magician. But I always leave feeling braced, and optimistic, and ready to ford a stream if I have to.

    I live in Philadelphia, so these trips to see Jack have taken on a pilgrimage quality in my head, partly because I don’t much enjoy driving, but also because I seem to encounter extraordinary difficulties every time I attempt the journey. From Philly to Allentown, I’m fine. From Allentown to the Lehigh Tunnel, I’m cool. But I emerge from the tunnel into a different and dreadful place. Hurricanes. Blizzards. Wind that can blow a car into the median. Rain so hard you have to pull over and wait it out. I’ve seen rock slides. I’ve seen dead deer the size of elephants. I’ve seen tractor-trailers going sideways. Winter or summer, it makes no difference. It’s only a two-hour trip from Philadelphia, and almost all of it is on major highways, but I have NEVER undertaken one of these pilgrimages without, at some point, thinking, “Gosh, maybe I should pull off and find a motel somewhere, and try again tomorrow.” Never.

    I’ve heard people describe the Bermuda Triangle this way, that there’s something you can feel, something that’s wrong, something that’s out to get you. And yet, when I have driven up to Dunmore at other times, there’s been no problem. If my family is in the car, or if I’m going to a ballgame or a party or something, the sun is always shining and the birds are always chirping, and I zip through the glorious woodlands and mountains of the Poconos with a song on my lips and peace in my heart. If it’s not a “pilgrimage,” I have nothing to fear. But when I’m alone, and I’m on my way to a private conference with Jack, well, anything can happen, and most of it isn’t good. I’d be safer driving from Baghdad to Fallujah with a Star of David on the side of my car.

    And yet…. Well, that’s the nature of a pilgrimage, isn’t it? You don’t get something for nothing. If you want to talk to that hermit on top of the mountain and find out the meaning of life, first you’ve got to climb the mountain. Muslims go to Mecca every year, and sometimes they get trampled in stampedes and sometimes there are epidemics, but still they go, millions of them. The journey itself has a spiritual value, and the more difficult it is, the better. Unless you’re Paris Hilton, you don’t take a limo to Lourdes. You walk, or you limp, or you crawl.

    Not that I cherish my moments of terror on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, you understand. In fact, if I had known I would have to traverse the Twilight Zone when I first began making these little journeys, I might have thought better of it and made other arrangements. Jack comes to Philly on a regular basis, and I could possibly have made a date to buy him a cheesesteak at Tony Luke’s. But I didn’t, and now it’s too late. If I tried to do that now, I’m certain it just wouldn’t work. I’m a pilgrim now, and the journey to Dunmore cannot be separated from the experience and discarded. It wouldn’t feel the same. I NEED to be swallowed up each time, like Jonah, by the gaping mouth of the Lehigh Tunnel, not knowing what awaits me on the other side. I accept it. I do it intentionally. It’s worth it to me. A wise man once wrote, “We are all on the path to ordination; some of us take the high road and some take the low.” Me? I take the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

    All of which brings me to the events of February 14, which began, as many of my weekdays do, by dropping off my son at school in downtown Philadelphia. As I proceeded along Spring Garden Street toward the Expressway, the first snowflakes began to fall. A “wintry mix,” the radio called it, that would turn to rain. OK. I can handle that, though I wondered what the “wintry mix” would look like on the other side of the Lehigh Tunnel. At least I knew what I was facing, I thought. Often I don’t.

    The snow didn’t stop, but as I rolled northward, past Allentown, past the tunnel, past Lehighton, it didn’t seem to be getting worse either. With the temperature in the mid-thirties, the road was wet but not icy, and traffic was moving normally. I was going about 55, and I was being passed more often than I was passing. On the hills that characterize the northern reaches of the turnpike, there were some trucks moving very slowly, but there are trucks moving slowly on those hills on the driest day in July.

    Looking back on the accident, I think what happened was that I came to the top of a wind-swept hill that was perhaps a bit more exposed to the elements than the roadway before it, and perhaps the ambient temperature was more like 31 degrees than the 34 degrees I was used to. In any event, there was ice. I didn’t see any ice, and I hadn’t seen any all the way up from Philly. But ice there must have been, because when I turned the steering wheel a quarter-inch to the left in order to pass a slow-moving vehicle, I instantly lost control and began to slide.

    Anyone who has had a life-threatening experience will tell you it seems to unfold in slow motion. They say that because it’s true. I remember every millisecond vividly---what I did, what I thought, what I saw. I wish I didn’t remember it quite so well, because the memory of it has washed over me several times since, when I wasn’t expecting it, and made me shudder.

    The turn I was trying to execute when I began to spin out was only about 8 or 10 degrees of arc, but the car simply continued to turn in that direction as I worked the wheel and the brakes frantically, all to no effect. Twenty degrees. Thirty degrees. Forty-five. Seventy. I was now nearly sideways on the road, helpless, when a scream formed inside my head. It was a single word. It was a bad word. In fact, it was a very bad word, and I will not share it with you because Father Jack will also read this letter and there is no need for him to see it in print. Use your imagination. I suspect that in your career as a mechanic, tow-truck operator and entrepreneur, you may have heard it once or twice. It has occurred to me since the accident that there are people who, in my situation, would instinctively have offered up a prayer, though it would have had to be a brief one. “Please!” or “God!” or “Jesus!” might do the trick. Maybe you’re one of those people, and if so, you’re a better man than I am. There are a lot of men better than I am, I suppose.

    As the Honda proceeded past the 90 degree (sideways) position, with no hint of stopping, it became clear to me I was headed for a full 180-degree turn. Hope dawned. A false hope, as it turned out, but I realized that if my angular momentum were sufficient, I might spin PAST the 180 to a complete 360 and again be heading northbound in the northbound lanes. I could then regain control and proceed calmly on my way. I would not only live to tell about it, but I would become, for a moment anyway, the coolest guy in Carbon County. Women who happened to witness the maneuver would instantly swoon, and offer to have my children.

    All this raced through the old bean in a hundredth of a second---it’s amazing how the mind works when you have nothing to lose---and I turned the wheel as hard as I could in the direction I was spinning. Nothing. It was locked. I tried turning it the other way, and then jamming it back to the left, but nothing happened. I was sliding. I was out of control. What was going to happen was going to happen. I would never be the coolest guy in Carbon County.

    In the next instant, I was fully backward, facing south and sliding northward, but I had stopped spinning. The car had spun 180 degrees, I still had no control, and I had no idea what would happen next. It was at this point I began to question my romantic attachment to the notion of a pilgrimage. Why hadn’t I just called Jack on the phone, I wondered. He has a phone, you know. He probably has four or five phones, and an email address, and a fax machine. What was I thinking? And how important was this particular mission anyway? OK, I had a little problem and I wanted to talk to Jack about it. But everybody has problems, right? Maybe I should have given myself a slap in the face and sucked it up. Maybe I should have been a man about it. For some reason, I thought I NEEDED to talk to him about it, in person, and now I was sliding backwards on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I didn't like my chances of coming out of this without a permanent impairment of a body function or maybe even a permanent impairment of all my body functions, so I was performing a long-overdue cost-benefit analysis on the whole endeavor. There was a downside to this pilgrimage business, and perhaps I hadn’t given sufficient weight to it before.

    And who the hell was this Jack Doris anyway? A nice enough guy, of course, and he can tend a flock with the best of them, but he’s not exactly Dr. Phil, is he? I mean, he doesn’t even have a TV show. What made me think a few words with a guy who cares way too much about Notre Dame football was worth submitting all my favorite internal organs to the whims of gravity and momentum and centrifugal force and all that other Isaac Newton stuff you had to study in high school? I hated all those physical forces now, momentum in particular. There was a kid in elementary school---Stuart Sorkin---who sucker-punched me in the sixth grade and knocked me silly, and I got a D in Citizenship as a result, and I have harbored a secret loathing for Stuart Sorkin for the past 42 years, but now I hated momentum even more. I really, really, really hated momentum. I was none too fond of my high school physics teacher, to tell you the truth. Even Isaac Newton---I mean, he was a great scientist and all, and I admit he wasn’t responsible for my predicament, but at the time, I had no use for him either.

    I guess I was just in a bad mood.

    But these were my thoughts as, looking south, I slid north on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at 45 mph for what seemed like a week or two. I had a lot of time, maybe too much time, to think. Those who know me would tell you I usually have an optimistic attitude toward life, but this was a real test of the spirit, and I failed. I found it hard even to search for the bluebird in my current situation. He had flown away.

    I braced for impact.

    I began now to slide eastward, and I’m not sure why. You would have to ask my high school physics teacher. I realize it’s hard to keep track of the geography here, but “eastward” means I was now drifting sideways toward the shoulder and the guardrail. Most of my momentum was still backwards, of course.

    This cheered me somewhat. I had been worried about being rammed by a vehicle traveling northward in the normal, approved fashion, so the shoulder was an attractive option. At least I would be off the roadway. It was not something I anticipated with any eagerness, the collision with the guardrail, but if there had to be a collision, and there did, the guardrail was preferable to an 18-wheeler. I allowed myself another moment of hope. I was going to slide into the guardrail sideways. If I survived my first marriage, I could surely survive that. I had my seatbelt on, the Honda was fully equipped with airbags, and my insurance was all paid up. I would dance away from this disaster! I briefly regretted not having worn a tuxedo so I could carelessly flick a speck of dust from my immaculate cuff as I emerged laughing, James-Bond-like, from the smoldering wreckage and raced off across the Pocono moguls with Ursula Andress on the back of my jet-powered snowmobile. The odds, of course, were that Ursula was nowhere in the neighborhood, but I was going to live! That much was almost certain! Whatever else happened---well, the rest was whipped cream and chocolate sauce.

    In fact, the impact was more violent than I would have liked. I hit hard. This is the part I don’t remember all that well. I didn’t lose consciousness, but when I finally came to rest, my head was bleeding and my left hand was twice the size of my right. I still have no idea how these injuries occurred. I was dizzy. I wasn’t dancing. But I was OK.

    As luck would have it, a salt truck was sitting in a cutout off the road a quarter mile south. He had witnessed my adventures, and now proceeded slowly down the shoulder toward me. I opened the sunroof and gave him the OK sign. He stopped the truck, exited, and strolled over to the Honda.

    “How ya doing?” he asked.

    “OK,” I replied. “I’m a little foggy.”

    “Is it driveable?” he asked.

    I thought about that. The engine was still running. I was willing to give it a try. Since I was facing the wrong way, though, I would have to inch my way along the shoulder until I reached an area where I could turn around.

    I tried it. The car went into gear, the wheels turned, everything seemed to be working, but I couldn’t steer. I got out and looked at the wheels, but didn’t see the problem. The gentleman from the salt truck returned.

    “Want me to call a tow truck?”

    “Thanks,” I answered.

    So I waited. Cars and trucks zoomed by. The snow continued to fall. Salt trucks lumbered past, spreading crystals. I called Jack.

    “Listen,” he said, “there’s a guy here in town named Andy, and he has a shop and a tow truck. I can call him if you want. He’s a great guy and he won’t rip you off.”

    “Thanks, Jack,” I said, “but I’m still way down the turnpike from you and there’s a truck coming already.”

    At that point, the truck arrived. Schlier’s Towing, out of White Haven. With a gruff hello, the grim driver set about hooking me up. As he was doing so, a state police car appeared, lights flashing, and cautiously approached the scene of the crime. At length, its occupant emerged and joined our little party.

    Now, I guess I hadn’t been expecting a hug from Trooper Kugler, or a “Welcome to Carbon County” packet from the Chamber of Commerce, but it did strike me that a sympathetic inquiry regarding the blood dripping from my head would have been an excellent way for the trooper to break the ice and get the conversational ball rolling.

    “It’s just a few drops, Officer,” I would say. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

    “We have many qualified brain surgeons in the area, should you require their services, sir,” he might continue.

    “Some other time perhaps. I’ll just soldier on,” I would reply.

    “Stiff upper lip, sir? That’s the spirit! You’ll find that a manly attitude of strength and self-reliance will make you many friends here in Carbon County!”

    It might have begun that way, and should have, in my opinion. But Trooper Kugler was apparently blind to the finer shades on the conversational palette. Or perhaps he simply felt it was important for me to understand from the get-go that, at least in Carbon County, man was not placed on this earth for pleasure alone.

    “I’ll have your license, registration and insurance card, sir,” is what he actually said. I handed them over.

    “Were you using a cell phone at the time of the accident?”

    “No.”

    “Were you wearing a seatbelt?”

    “Yes.”

    “What happened?”

    I told him.

    “How fast were you going when you attempted to pass the vehicle in front of you?”

    “Fifty? Fifty-five? I really don’t know.”

    “I’m going to take your documents back to my car now. Please remain with your vehicle.” And he departed.

    The Honda was on the hook by this time, so I waited in the cab of the tow truck. Then I waited outside. Then I went back in the cab. Ten minutes later, Trooper Kugler returned with a traffic ticket.

    I scanned this document as he explained how to plead guilty, how to plead not guilty, how to request a hearing, and so forth. “Driving too fast for conditions” was the charge. The tariff was $110, but of course, nobody cares much about the fine itself. It’s the points on the license and the insurance premiums you worry about. I would have to report to Jim Thorpe, the county seat, at some future date and seek justice from a magistrate who, considering my luck so far, would probably be Trooper Kugler’s loving Uncle Fred.

    He blathered on. There seemed no end to the procedural nuances he was legally obligated to impart. Is this how you welcome an out-of-town visitor who accidentally embeds himself in one of your guardrails, I wondered? When was the blind kid going to show up and start playing the banjo music from “Deliverance”? Sure, I was glad to be alive, but I now understood I was a slight underdog to make it through the rest of the day without some greasy fat guy forcing me to squeal like a pig for his amusement. I had let my guard down when I survived the crash, I realized. I had thought my tribulations were over, but here I was, still the hapless pilgrim buffeted by the unknown horrors of the land beyond the Lehigh Tunnel. The snow continued to fall. It was getting colder. My head hurt. The trees all around me seemed to drip with a nameless menace.

    “Drive carefully, sir,” the trooper concluded, and took his leave. State police humor, I suppose. Drive carefully indeed! What an absurd thing to say to somebody whose car is on a towing hook.

    My sullen driver from Schlier’s Towing fired up the truck and got us rolling.

    “Where we going?” I asked.

    “We have a shop in White Haven,” he said. “It’s not far.”

    His cell phone trilled and he took the call as I considered my position. Now that Trooper Kugler had finished his bit of dirty work, I had apparently been captured by the Schlier operation. They could be the sweetest folks in the Poconos, of course, though my sour, laconic driver provided me with little evidence in that direction. More likely, I would simply represent a nice little payday for all concerned. I lacked options, and I would have even fewer of them once my car was up on a lift in a White Haven garage. And what were the odds they would be able to find the necessary parts for a 2002 Civic in such a place? Would I be spending the night? Two nights? The rest of my life?

    The driver clicked off his phone and pulled over to an area with a wide shoulder. There was also a crossover here, a gap in the median. We had traveled perhaps half a mile.

    “There’s another accident, and it’s more serious than yours. The car is blocking the right-hand lane on the southbound side. I’m the only tow truck in the area, so I have to leave you here with your car. I’ll send somebody else from the shop.”

    “How long will that take?”

    “A half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. I have to do it.”

    “Go ahead,” I said.

    He left the cab and started unhooking the Honda. In seconds, I was dialing my cell phone.

    “Jack, the driver here is unhooking my car. He has to go to another accident. Can you get that guy Andy down here to tow me back to Dunmore?”

    “I’ll call him now and give him your number.” Click.

    Seconds later, my cell phone rang.

    “Mike, this is Andy’s Service. Where are you?”

    I told him.

    “Is there air in all your tires?”

    “Yes.”

    “OK. Andy’s on his way.”

    The driver returned to the cab just as I was finishing my call. I explained what I had done. He didn’t like it.

    “I told you I’d get another truck out here for you.”

    “I know, but I’ll be better off in Dunmore. I know people there.”

    He made a sort of snorting noise at this news. I gathered he thought it was amusing that I would know people anywhere. “All right,” he said finally, “just fill this out.” He handed me a clipboard with a form on it that was already partially filled in.

    I glanced at it, then looked at him. “What is it?” I asked.

    “Fifty dollars for the hook-up and two dollars a mile. Fifty-two dollars.”

    I looked at him calmly, betraying no emotion, as I quickly assessed the danger. I didn’t want this man angry with me. He was bigger than I am, and he didn’t seem to like me very much. I was alone out here, and would be alone, on the side of the road, in a snowstorm, for an hour. I had no partners in this area code. And my head hurt.

    On the other hand, I wasn’t going to pay him any fifty-two dollars.

    “You haven’t really provided me any service here, have you?” I asked.

    “I told you I’d send another truck.” He grabbed the clipboard and shook it at me. “Look---I have to have one of these for every tow on the turnpike.”

    “But you’re not towing me. You’re leaving me here.”

    “I have to leave you. It’s an emergency. And you’ve gotta sign this!”

    “OK. Listen. Let’s be reasonable. Take twenty bucks and let’s forget about it.”

    This was the wrong thing to say, I guess. His brow furrowed and his face clenched in anger. For a moment, I thought the top of his head was going to blow off. Then his lips flapped for a few seconds but he couldn’t get any words out.

    “Get out of the cab,” he hissed at me finally. I was halfway out the door when he added: “I think I’ll have Trooper Kugler come and talk to you.”

    I walked behind the truck and climbed into the dead Honda as he roared off. As parting shots go, I had to admit the crack about Trooper Kugler was a doozie, and every bit as effective as a kidney punch. The very thought of another interview with Trooper Kugler filled me with nausea, and of course, there was now nothing else I could think about. Trooper Kugler??? I was done with him, wasn’t I? Wasn’t he just the guy in Act I who brings a distressing bit of news about Lady Winifred and ruins the tea party? Apparently not! Now it seemed that Trooper Kugler was a featured player, a major villain who would return in Act II to shoot the maid, and would only be brought to ground in Act III after he had poisoned the punchbowl.

    Yes, I had to hand it to that tow-truck driver. If he had offered to return with a tire iron and beat me to a jelly, I would not have been nearly as upset as I was now. Trooper Kugler! I had only recently formed an opinion that the world would be a better place if only it contained fewer and better Trooper Kuglers, but now I was to be confronted with them everywhere. I saw them behind every tree. They were multiplying like rabbits. I would never be free of the army of Trooper Kuglers who were even now closing in, surrounding me. Soon they would all be running my plates through their computers, demanding my license and registration, asking me questions, sneering at my replies, and burying me in their little yellow citations. I would be forced to leave my home and family and spend the rest of my life in Jim Thorpe defending myself before the magistrate who just happened to be Trooper Kugler’s loving Uncle Fred.

    As I waited for the army to descend, I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. The battery was dead. OK. Here was a silver lining of sorts. Maybe this was the bluebird I had been seeking. Perhaps I would freeze to death before my rendezvous with justice.

    To conserve my body heat, I pulled myself into a ball with my hands in my armpits, and waited. There was nothing to do. After a short while, I fell into a kind of trance, and began to imagine what my life would be like now that I had made it onto Carbon County’s Most Wanted list.

    First off, there was no chance Trooper Kugler would issue a mere citation for my latest crime spree. When he finally appeared, he was the sort who would be angry with himself for not having summarily executed me the first time around. As a two-time loser, I was facing the hoosegow for certain, complete with tight cuffs behind the back, the rough pat-down, the body cavity search, the lone phone call, and the clang of a metal door behind me. I am 53 years old and I have never been arrested, and when you are 53 years old and have never been arrested, you tend to assume you will never be arrested, and that this is one of those life experiences from which you have been mercifully spared. But of course, my assumption had been formed in a world without a Trooper Kugler. I had not known he existed until an hour before. Only now did I see, with a bitter laugh, how foolish I had been.

    I continued along this line of thought for some time, musing next about the accommodations I might expect at the Jim Thorpe lock-up, and the interesting people I would meet. And the chow!

    This was pierogie country, I knew---and the pierogies here were the genuine article, shaped in the withered hands of devout old Polish ladies, fried in cast iron, and dressed with sour cream or onions or even homemade applesauce. Then there were the sausages that could still be found here and there in the tiny ethnic enclaves hidden in the hills and hollows. You had to KNOW somebody to get these sausages, but they existed. I remember the kielbasa I obtained five years ago, at Christmastime, from a friend who had been subjected to an extensive genealogical interrogation from the butcher who made and sold it. Only when my friend had been able to establish his local roots to the butcher’s satisfaction was he permitted to buy.

    At the St. Mary’s Church Bazaar in 2004, I feasted on potato pancakes so crisp, so lovingly seasoned, that they made me cry out. Behind the exquisite potato flavor, in every bite, was a hint of fresh grease that rested upon them as delicately as a benediction but could not be seen on the pancakes themselves. “How great thou art!” I exclaimed. And I meant it. I have attended countless masses that never came close to touching me with the glory of God the way those pancakes did. As I shoved them on back, past the tonsils, I made a conscious effort to etch every detail of the experience in my memory, with the idea that on my deathbed, I could remember those pancakes and think: “I was happy then.”

    But there would be none of that now. No pierogies, no sausages, no potato pancakes. I would be dining in the cooler at the Jim Thorpe municipal building. My fellow miscreants and I would be fed from a bucket of baked beans, perhaps garnished with a few squirrel bits scraped off the highway. A local lady, a light-heavyweight, would serve it up in our tin cups with a steely smile, like one of those women in the Old Testament who went around driving stakes through people’s heads. When she left, my cellmate would demand my food, but I would have to defend it to the death even though I didn’t want it, because to give it up would mean I would be his plaything for the rest of the night.

    I checked the clock on my cell phone, the only working clock I had. Forty minutes had passed. Was it possible Trooper Kugler had bigger fish to fry? Was he now using his “jaws of life” to pry someone’s body from the crumpled wreck on the southbound lanes? The Schlier’s tow-truck driver had certainly reported me by now, and I remained at mile-marker 89.7 awaiting the brand of rough justice Trooper Kugler would be more than willing to dispense, but was there a delay? Had fate intervened? Was it conceivable my truck from Dunmore would arrive first?

    The car windows were completely covered with ice and my visible world had been reduced to the interior of the Honda---dashboard, glovebox, EZ-Pass transponder. I went outside and scraped, then resumed my fetal position in the driver’s seat. Now, at least, I could see what was coming. Fifty minutes. No sign of Trooper Kugler, but no sign of the tow truck either.

    I refused to hope. Here, north of the Lehigh Tunnel, hope is how they get you. Better to be ready for anything, and take what comes. The calaboose? Fine, bring it on. An asteroid? Sure, why not? Jezebel was a queen of Israel and she was torn apart by dogs, so what did I have to complain about? At least I had my potato pancakes. They were in the bank, and nobody could take them away from me.

    Fifty-four minutes. Fifty-five. Fifty-six. In the distance, coming south, a white pickup was approaching. Was it a tow truck? Was it Andy? BE Andy, I thought, in spite of my earlier vow. Rescue me! Transport me to Dunmore, to Jack, to the rectory at St. Mary’s! Only by completing my mission, I saw now, could this curse be lifted. When you embark on a pilgrimage, you must complete it or lose all. How could I have forgotten this simple precept? BE Andy, dammit! BE Andy.

    The pickup slowed as it approached the crossover. Yes! It was a tow truck, and it came to a brief stop at the gap in the median, then scooted across the northbound lanes to join me on the widened shoulder. I was out of the Honda before it came to a stop.

    And now, Andy, here is what I want you to understand. This is the reason I’m writing you this letter.

    If you’re like most guys, if you’re like me, you’re not famous and you’re never going to be. Nobody is ever going to erect a statue of you, and you’re never going to be invited to the MTV Music Awards. You make a living, you enjoy your chow, you say your prayers, you have a family who loves you and maybe some friends who like you and think you’re a decent human being, and you count yourself darned lucky to have all that going for you. You look at a sunset every now and then, and think life is pretty sweet. I know. I’m the same way. Nobody, though, is going to mistake you for Clint Eastwood, are they?

    But at 1:00pm on February 14, 2005, at mile-marker 89.7 on the northbound lanes of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, you were more than just some guy pulling up in a tow truck. You were something more than Clint Eastwood. In fact, you were more than Clint Eastwood and Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela all rolled into one, at least to me. As I stood by the Honda, waiting for you to come to a stop, I knew in my soul that my problems were over, and I would now complete my mission. I felt a rush of excitement and hope race through me, which was just as quickly replaced by a feeling of peace and a sense that everything had been made right at last. And I thought: “Wow! This is what those lepers felt like when Christ showed up.”

    As you may recall, my first words to you, even before you got out of the truck, were, “My hero!” I meant it as a joke, but you gave me a funny look. I imagine that when you drive a tow truck, you encounter people under varying amounts of stress, and you sometimes have to be careful. I understand. I did manage to resist the urge to kiss you, so give me some credit for that anyway.

    I also want to thank you for the prompt and logical diagnosis of the Honda once you got it up on the lift. It was the strut on the driver-side front wheel, you decided, and you and your assistant started calling around looking for a replacement.

    As the number of calls reached double digits, I could tell you were growing pessimistic about finding the necessary part by the end of the day. I wasn’t. I never had a doubt. What’s more, I didn’t care. I was three blocks from the rectory, and safety. If Jack had to put me up for the night, so be it. We would get a pizza. Maybe he would want to talk about the problem of evil in the world. He gets that way sometimes. It’s fun.

    I was sitting in your reception area while your assistant dialed, clicked off, dialed again. Finally, he said, “This is it. If this guy doesn’t have it….” He dialed. He talked. He hung up. He turned to me.

    “Well, guess what,” he said.

    “Any chance you can do it today?” I asked. It was 3:15.

    “I don’t see why not.”

    “OK. I’m going up to St. Mary’s. Andy has my cell phone number.”

    St. Mary’s is on a hill in Dunmore, and it felt perfectly correct climbing it to complete my pilgrimage. The snow had stopped. There was even some sunshine peeking through. I took long strides, with my back straight and my chest out, and filled my lungs with the crisp mountain air. I was Marco Polo completing his trip across Asia, walking the last few steps to the court of Kubla Khan. I had had my ups and downs on this day, but I was coming to the end of the trail.

    I rang the bell at the rectory, and a woman admitted me. “Oh,” she said, “you must be Michael. Father Doris is expecting you. He’s in his study.”

    I mounted the stairs and peered into his lair. The door was open. Jack rose from the desk and greeted me. We shook hands. He sat me on the couch and had me tell him my story. He offered to fetch me a doctor. I politely declined.

    We eventually worked our way around to the purpose of my visit, and we talked for an hour or so. I will draw a curtain over that part of the story, except to say this. In “A Boy Named Sue,” by Johnny Cash, Johnny wraps up the story with the lyric, “I come away with a different point of view.” That’s what usually happens when I talk to Jack, and it happened on this occasion as well.

    At 4:45, my phone rang, and it was you folks telling me the Honda was fixed. And of course, it was. Everything worked. It’s not a pretty car anymore, but everything works. Amazing. I drove back to the rectory to say my farewells.

    Twilight had arrived as I waved goodbye to Jack and climbed into the Honda for the drive back to Philadelphia. The sun had broken through in the late afternoon, and much of the pavement was now dry.

    The first drop of rain appeared on the windshield as I pulled out of the church driveway onto Chestnut Street. By the time I reached the ramp for 81-S, about ten blocks away, the rain had become a steady drizzle, and as I passed through the booth to enter the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the skies burst forth with a crash of thunder (the first I had heard since August) and a pelting rain.

    Hunched over the steering wheel and squinting through the glass, with the wipers now switched to “high,” I proceeded slowly and warily home, toward a sympathetic family, a cold beer, and a cat purring contentedly on my lap. I passed no one. The left lane was a closed book to me. Trooper Kugler, I mused happily, posed no present danger. He was probably home now, sitting with Mrs. Kugler and the little Kuglers around the dinner table. May the Lord bless them and their simple repast, I thought, though if the blessing fell a bit less heavily on Trooper Kugler himself than on his family, that would be OK with me too. One must forgive, of course, because forgiveness is the best revenge. But forgetting is another matter.

    It poured all the way to the Lehigh Tunnel.

Warmest wishes,

Michael

Copyright Michael Kubacki 2005

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