Taking a Second Look...

CLINT, I THINK YOU STARTED SOMETHING

2012-02-16T11:04:00.001-06:00

Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler started something whose ending is just now being written. In the various public responses to his flinty exhortation to Americans about "getting back in the fight."

Political paranoids aside, most viewers reacted something like we once did to those old B&W war movies in the Forties. You know, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Brian Donlevy blasting their way through Nazi and Japanese front lines. The difference in today's war epics -- like "Saving Private Ryan" -- is now they portray the bloody facts as well as the patriotic fictions.

Why is this...?

One explanation is today's generation knows too much to be fooled by flag waving. Another is today's kids are interested in making money not war. And yet...! Eastwood's steel-jawed call to arms was embraced by tens of millions of young people today who cheered and blogged their gut-deep response. Apparently there was something in his pitch about getting off the canvas and getting back in the fight that felt like a Rocky flick.

Most Americans haven't really felt unabashed passion for battle since World War II when there was no 99 vs 1%. Virtually everyone -- father and mother, parent and kid, rich and poor `-- were convinced this was THEIR fight.

We don't need to over-analyze this. If you lived through that War, you understand. If you didn't, stay up for some of those old B&W flicks on cable television. They look like they were made for Clint. Listening to him, he makes us feel like we were made for them. What does all this have to do with selling Chryslers? Not much. But selling America? Aha, now that's a question to which everyone this year claims they have the answer.

SEEING YOU GET UNDRESSED

2012-02-15T10:12:00.001-06:00

Almost every morning I do the same thing. I peel a banana with which to top my breakfast cereal. Each time I undress it, I know exactly what I will find. And if there does happen to be a bruise or two, well I already knew this by looking at it from the outside.

This doesn't work with people. You know it and I know it. What you see is not always what you get. Bananas don't have much to hide. But people...? We have all sorts of things to hide...!

Mostly little things. Holes in our socks, blemishes on our body, long ago fibs and outright lies from our past. Sometimes big things. A criminal record, a broken marriage, abandoned children, perhaps a whole other life.

Street cameras, airport scanners and computer searches today make it harder to hide anything. And maybe that's necessary. But is it also good? We're not yet sure. However -- just like sci-fi authors HG Wells and George Orwell predicted -- we move in a world where secrets find few hiding places.

Some debate the issue of privacy. I debate the issue of lunacy. I mean do I really want to know everything about you...? About my neighbors...? My boss...? My senator...? Today's information culture generates billions -- count them! -- of digital messages, reports, discoveries, revelations every hour of every day. We've proved it too much for the human brain to accept let alone process. Now let me assert -- even without proof -- it's also too much for the human soul.

Isn't there still room for some silence and distance and doubt and mystery and magic between us? I think so. You see, most times I don't wish to KNOW everything about you and my peers. Rather I want to DISCOVER it. And if you're hung up on the issue of national safety...well, you just don't know what I'm talking about.

EPIPHANY ON MARSHALL FIELDS 3rd FLOOR

2012-02-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

I taught in the classroom for 40 years. No argument with the classic adages "when the student is ready the teacher will appear" and "there are teachable moments." I would simply add a third: "teachers learn in much the same ways."

It was the Fifties...it was still Norman Rockwell in much of America....I had to work summers selling ...my assignment at Marshall Fields was their sheets & pillows department on the third floor. Don't look for it now, because the New York retail octopus known as Macy's has since devoured it. But what they couldn't swallow up are the sweet memories from those summers elbow-deep in bedding options. Often being offered by this off-duty teacher to some of the very kids he had recently taught, who were now going off to college.

MY teachable moments had nothing to do with the Civil War or the Homestead Act. Rather, with the way my customers -- kids, parent, dowagers, whatever -- were able to relate to something so mundane. Just as in the classroom, history could become far more than simply names and dates, so here could sheets and pillows become far more than, well, sheets and pillows.

As those July and August days ticked off, I found myself selling not products. Possibilities! The possibility of falling asleep faster, better, more ready to sink your troubles into the yielding comfort of clean white percale. Why I even envisioned for them payoffs like gentler nights. As both Shakespeare and Spatafora said: "To sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream..."

I have to half-smile when I remember the manager suggesting I "hang up the teaching gig and stay here where you can make some real money." Of course that wasn't going to happen. But I did learn a lot about how to lift the mundane -- be it history timelines or summer bedsheets -- to new and higher heights of interest.

Good selling and good teaching have a lot to do with intuitively understanding the brain of your student or customer. It's this "gift" which can help make the difference. Only now I understand some researchers at the University of California are developing a "mind-reading machine." I kid you not. The idea is to track the different patterns of neurons in the person's superior temporal gyrus, thereby deciphering what words they are hearing and decoding.

One of the researchers told the London Guardian, "This might sound spooky, but it could really help speechless patients." God bless him, he's probably right. About the "helping." And also about the "spooky."

ARE YOU IN THE MINORITY? YOU'RE LUCKY!

2012-02-13T09:56:00.001-06:00

In what we still like to call "the free world," majority rules. No argument. But at the same time, the minorities that are left must be given their fair share of that rule. It's always this indispensable balancing act that tests a nation's democracy. Look at four examples:

* Today's 1% of multi-millionaires and billionaires in Wall Street have upped their ante in the game of democracy by 700% over the last 20 years. That means from $15 million to $178 million in political donations per year. Over and above any of their PAC money That my fellow citizens is a "minority" which probably has more clout than the majority...!

* Today wherever the women in a community are in the minority, studies assert: "Men spend more money to attract them." Vladas Griskevicus of the University of Minnesota reports, "What we see in other animals is what we see here -- when females are scarce, males become more competitive." That my fellow males means in some places we're probably investing in bigger meals and nicer gifts than we can really afford...!

* While today's pregnant teens are still in the minority, the US has the highest teen-pregnancy rate in the developed world. Researchers from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed nearly 5000 teen mothers with the conclusion: "Most still really don't understand the correct usage of birth control." That my fellow concerned citizens means both our society and our religion are coming up short...!

* Today's Kansas has the arguable distinction of being a minority among the states whose science curricula teach evolution not creationism. And yet, minority or not, Kansas is now on the fast track to own America's favorite puppy: Toto, from the Wizard of Oz. The legislature is currently debating whether to make Toto the official state dog. And that my fellow Oz aficionados is just the way it is in Kansas..!

So yes, majority rules. But in some situations, it's hard to tell.

WHEN A YOUNG MAN'S FANCY TURNS LIGHTLY TO -- DOPAMINE!!

2012-02-12T11:11:00.000-06:00

OK, the correct saying is: "In the spring when a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." But, come on, that's so ante-diluvian! Look, today's age of science has cracked those old codes. Like the Bubonic Plague, polio, measles and hopefully soon cancer. God bless science.

On the other hand....

I'm not sure I want neurobiologists to crack this code we herald as: Love. I mean, think of all the poets, painters, composers and Hallmark Card employees who would get cast aside in a whirl of Dopamine. Oh yes, yes, the studies have confirmed this little sexy neurotransmitter is what makes you attracted to me, me to you, and hence the great Darwinian explanation of human existence.

Some of you will snarl that I sound like an Evangelical letter from deep in the heart of anti-Darwin Kansas. No -- you're thinking of Dorothy. This is me, and hundreds of millions of other me's traveling the earth in search of meaning, purpose and what once upon a time we sentimentally called Love.

However, the real struggle here is not between Sentimentality and Science. The struggle is to still find room in our amazing scientific age for enough sentimentality to keep us human. I prefer not to be an "informed man" if it means all I find is Dopamine, Norepinephrine and Serotonin in my feelings and passions for the woman I have loved for over 60 post-Darwinian years.

Hey, even Charles' devoted wife had her doubts about his insistence all species are a product of such evolutionary determinants as survival, satisfaction and procreation. And as far as the record shows, Charles never rebuffed that kind of love from her in their own marriage.

Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania, concludes kissing has a lot to do with getting close enough to expecience the bodily smells of a potential partner. You know, like a Warthog. Also, that when I first looked at Joan I was probably studying her pelvic possibilities for bearing my children. And that evolution had built into us the urge-to-merge.

This has to stop! I'm not against learning about my physical self, but not at the expense of my metaphysical self. I choose -- with all the Dopamine at my command -- to believe that Joan and I have not mated like some horse farm system trying to breed another Seabiscuit. If I sound angry, yes I suppose I am. I also suppose some of these researchers may be like the fella who knew 213 ways of making love, but never knew a woman.

'YOU'RE NOTHING BUT AN ANIMAL...!@#$%!!"

2012-02-11T08:29:00.002-06:00

True. We're all animals. But of all the species in the animal kingdom, we're the only one who kills its own so wantonly, and who despoils its own habitat so recklessly. We're also the only one who blushes (and as Mark Twain added "who should.")

But right now I'm thinking less about the animals in the jungle, and more about the ones right here in my own backyard. Most of them are regulars, and so I've given them names. What they call me is another matter:

* Take Squeaky the Squirrel. He's one of the few all-black ones. In OUR world he might feel different and out of place. But not here. He proudly joins -- usually beats -- the others in getting to all the feed first. When I watch Squeaky, he makes "different" look "distinguished." Go, Squeaky, go...

* Then there's Buttercup the Rabbit. Fat little gal who never bothers anyone, but who others bother on a regular basis. Buttercup makes me reflect a little on how people -- including me -- tend to be so damn aggressive. They call it ambition, but Buttercup and I still call it aggression. Stick to your guns, Buttercup...

* One of my favorites is Enrico the spectacular red Cardinal. He's here only part of the year, but when he struts his feathery stuff, I can't help smiling. And is singing -- quiet but quality. Really love Enrico, because he brings beauty to my world without asking anything in return...

* Can't ignore Freddy the Raccoon. Naturally he's only out at night, but watching his furry waddle through my grass, he makes me realize that slow and steady is often better than speedy and spectacular. I mean, no matter how I lock the garbage cans at night, by morning Freddy has figured it out. I hate the mess, pal, but do admire the persistence...

And now, my fellow animals, what do you have to say for yourselves..??

GRANDMA, GRANDPA, TELL ME A VALENTINE STORY

2012-02-09T10:24:00.001-06:00

Terrence Malick's award-winning film "The Tree of Life" divides American audiences like it did Cannes Festival audiences. Maybe it's the vastness of its Biblical spirituality, the enormity of its cinematography, or the innocence of its look at growing up in middle America.

Innocence has also been used by authors from Milton ("Paradise Lost"), to Voltaire ("Candide"), to Twain ("Tom Sawyer"), to Wolfe ("Look Homeward Angel"), to our annual splurge of Valentine Cards.

Lately, though, it's easier to dismiss innocence. Especially in a world fraught with sophisticated desires and dangers on every side. Kids growing up today -- watching these desires and dangers in violent action -- will find times-of-innocence in their country hard to imagine. Harder to believe.

It just could be that grandparents will be our kids' last repository of such beliefs. Sure, their memories may play willful tricks with their long ago youth, but things actually lived cannot actually be denied. So this may be a good time to have them tell their stories.

Stories of open windows and unlocked doors....of mothers wearing aprons in bustling kitchens and spic-and-span rooms...of fathers going to work in starched white shirts with the American Dream tucked in their pockets...of neighbors who called you by name when they hailed you to try their morning coffee cake...of mom & pop stores down the street who nobody owned except the folks behind the counter...hours of unsupervised kites and chases and pickup ball games on side streets uncluttered by parked cars or in empty lots just a walk-away.

In their stories you will meet horse-drawn milkmen and fruit peddlers instead of sleek retail chains; open fire hydrants instead of community pools; wide green lawns for dreaming on instead of digital board games for killing on; oh and grams and gramps may even indulge themselves in little whispered tales about puppy love on the village green which actually remained virgin-white until the wedding day.

I know, I know, Valentine Cards sell this kind of sentimentality for a profit! But grandma and grandpa aren't selling you anything. Just remembering. And letting you hop on for the ride...

FREE WILL...? GET REAL. HERE'S OUR DIRTY LITTLE SECRET!

2012-02-08T09:44:00.001-06:00

For those who believe if-you-dream-it-you-can-do it, this is not for you.

We're told we come in two parts: Intellect and will. Intellect is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals. Will is what we choose to do with that intellect. You know, change our outfit...run that light...marry this person...join Scientology.

But I'm here to say our much celebrated "free will" is hardly free. Frankly, it's at he whiplash end of every new whim around us. Our political opinions...? According to Pew research, they are the last political talking head on cable, where we now get most of our campaign news. Our cultural opinions ...? Probably a tie among the last best-seller we read, music concert we cheered, and movie we wept through. Our philosophy of life...? A tie between the last sermon we heard and wake we attended.

Bottom line -- the most crowded place in the world is a bandwagon!

Look, we're human, so we go where the action is. Where the herd is going. Where we get reinforced. If that abuses your sense of worth, notice the next time you're in an audience and start to applaud the music only when the others do...as you laugh when those around you do...oh and how you too now rise for that pre-requisite standing ovation at the end.

Freud and especially Jung were good at explaining this. Dostoevsky and Hemingway did a good job too. Or simply attend a championship game, get into a political rally, or find yourself in a holiday shopping spree. That proud perky "free will" you like to strut, it suddenly starts marching to the loudest beat it hears around it.

Despite our best protestations, our vaunted "free will" is as susceptible as the next marcher. Check the records: Caesar's legionaries, Napoleon's Grand Army, Hitler's Third Reich, O. J.'s jury, the next time your attend an angry PTA meeting with the superintendent.

We tend to sell our free will much too cheaply. At that rate, we're going to keep buying the loudest cheapest band we meet....

WANNA TALKS PACs? HERE'S THE BIGGEST!

2012-02-07T09:41:00.001-06:00

"Death is a distant rumor to the young!"

That's according to Andy Rooney. Living into his nineties, Andy knew what he was talking about. He could have added this may be why the young are so intensely attracted to our digital information culture. They feel they're going to be around long enough for all this stuff to be important to them.

That, in turn, may be why the senior population use blogs, tweets and Facebook so much less. They seem to say: "Be there, done that, why bother!"

And yet counter-intuitive as it seems, seniors often participate more in the political process than do the young. Consider how many elders have mounted the Tea Party movement, calls to change the FDR monument in Washington (they don't like him in wheelchair), and now a demand about the new Eisenhower monument (they don't want him portrayed simply in his barefoot youth). Their loudest calls, predictably, are about protecting Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Pensions).

As it turns out, both the young and the seniors have only limited staying power when it comes to their political agendas. Kids have their life to live; seniors have the doctors to see. That's why no matter how large their majorities, some minority usually carries the day. Minorities defined as those lobbies and interest groups who quietly but relentlessly stay in the fight to the end.

Enter our newest minorities: Political Action Committees (PACs).These along with big-buck-billionaires have lately come to own our democracy. Lock, stock and barrel. After all, the Supreme Court said so!

Looking for a way to buy it back...? Every political activist out there has an idea and a 800 number. That's when I noticed a very different number. This image of a phone at our local train station which read: "You can call anywhere toll free. Press 12 for God and he will accept the charges."

FEEL LIKE A LOSER? YOU MAY HAVE A GREAT FUTURE.!

2012-02-06T16:10:00.000-06:00

"Loser" has become this generation's new anathema. What could be worse? But wait, what does the record show? If you had paid more attention in your history classes, you might have noticed just how many losers end up winners. Well, they usually have to be dead first. But I'm just saying...!

The hottest example lately is Spartacus. You probably never heard of him in class, but ever since Kirk Douglas made the ancient Roman slave-warrior famous [ 1960 ] he's been a screen hit. Similarly, there are other famous losers [ read killed or died-out-of-power ] like Caesar...Cleopatra...Joan of Arc... Napoleon... Lincoln...Robert E Lee...George Custer...Jesse James...Truman...Kennedy. I had several uncles who were big-time losers too, but I won't force them into this august list.

To be sure, not every loser turns into a national hero after their death. But those who do may have something to say from the grave. For one thing, history is not written; it's re-written by each generation deciding for itself how to judge a loser. For another thing, it's always easier for a guilty nation [ like a guilty mourner ] to think good things about someone who is no longer with us. It sorta expunges our guilt plus gives us a safe new hero to worship.

This same chink in the armor of our tainted human nature needs to be re-examined every time loud verdicts are being rendered by the self-righteous. Say today! Talk-radio callers! cable-news pontificators! columnists, bloggers, and barbers across the land! Like the brawling fans in the stands, we can always play the game better; but only when we actually don't have to play the game!

So a long reflective time out here, fellow citizens.

The next time we judge another -- player, president, pope or even pop star -- a Mirror Moment, please. Looking at our self, don't we feel our losses in life should be judged in a boarder context than just the immediate moment? Just my latest action? Just my latest error? There's more to me than just now!

But think how long it took some of history's "losers" to be recognized as winners after all. If you don't want to wait that long or see these people that dead, then please. A long reflective time out.

WOW, NEVER SEEN THIS IRRESISTIBLE FORCE vs THIS IMMOVABLE OBJECT!

2012-02-05T10:35:00.001-06:00

The world looks warily at the hundreds of millions in China and India. Such size spells power. But have we noticed the 800 million people who "inhabit" Facebook's growing digital kingdom? It's become the world's third largest nation; and even without flag or army, it's a sovereign force unlike any in history. I know, because I live there; and an unelected leader named Zuckerberg governs there.

Usually bold innovations like Facebook are the irresistible force meeting the Immovable object like humanity. You know who you are...! To date, Facebook may be winning, given the way it's helped change elections, topple governments, and lately made the Komen Foundation backtrack. Privately owned and regulated, how does the world deal with this growing nation?

For one thing, we need to adjust, adapt and adopt, because you can't hide in the stubborn closets of your mind any longer. For a second thing, we need to understand from now on there will always be new virtual realities side by side with actual realities. So here's the plan. When you take your iPhones and laptops with you, why not introduce the little giants to worlds they've never experienced before.

That favorite Willow under which you have often dreamed...that special shoreline you know so well... that trail through the city's forest preserve where you talk to the birds...that stop on the highway where you've often pulled over to smell the land...and if you're really lucky, that cruise ship taking you to your own far-off Xanadu.

It's really all so simple. As our species has developed the new -- wheel, fire, printing, radio, television -- it's been given another staggering opportunity. To use or misuse? You see, it's not the tool but the toolmaker that decides. For instance, whenever I notice another FEAR FACTOR or JERSEY SHORE on television, I know right down to the pit of my wrenching stomach that humanity has botched television. Lets see what we can do with Facebook....

A XANADU JUST FOR YOU...!!!

2012-02-04T11:15:00.000-06:00

When I fall asleep I often wish I too could wake with such a mystic dream. But I'm not Coleridge. And I don't use his magic dust. However, if you're like me, you too would love to discover your very own Xanadu. Where...? Perhaps in those shrouded Tibetan highlands...or some Mediterranean island ...or why not tucked inside the impenetrable forests that give Maine some of its magic.

Those are the charts you like to travel when young and immortal. Later you discover smaller maps which, like an uncovered Mozart manuscript, lie hidden in some attic of your mind. Xanadu is usually closer than you thought.

Why not at your next school reunion? Where years of dis-information on your part suddenly glow in the realization that -- like Sally Fields receiving her surprise Oscar -- "you really really like me!" Or maybe that soup kitchen where you volunteered? You find, much to your own surprise, the embers of your young passion for others still flares. Or what about how your fingers find on Facebook lives you thought were no longer on your itinerary? Such an unlikely venue for sleeping memories to come digitally alive with distant family, friends, students and colleagues whose voices now become a soaring chorus in your new Xanadu.

There's that saying about old dogs and new tricks. You can't stop becoming old. On the other hand, you can stop forgetting how to be young. Not "American Idol" young! Eager old-age young! Whose youth the young cannot possibly yet understand....

WHAT I LEARNED BY CANCELING ALL MY WORKOUTS

2012-02-03T09:56:00.000-06:00

Frankly, I don't believe you when you tell me you love getting up with the birds, trudging to the gym, and going from torture-machine to torture machine.

I grant our national fixation with wellness. There's even a popular rumor among the young that Science is on the brink of finding a cure for death. OK, reality-check. Not true. But it IS working on a pill to replace exercise.

That's when this overweight pasta-lover starts paying attention. Some healthy members of Harvard Medical School report a drug is possible soon. Be still my fluttering heart...! They explain when we exercise, our muscles produce a hormone that communicates with our body fat. This Irisin hormone transforms stagnant white cells into fat brown cells which burn calories.

So, I'm thinking a couple shots of Irisin with my evening snack drowsing through Letterman means I wake up each morning a few ounces less. By the end of a year, pasta-boy is svelt-boy and I can forget about that gym application I never intended to sign anyway.

Well, wouldn't you know it. Here's one of those small-print science footnotes. While the gang at Harvard are dreaming my dream, their counterparts in the US Army have found several popular workout supplements like Jack3d and OxyElite Pro may cause death. Never fails. Science giveth and science taketh away...!

Here's my theory. At one time being fat was a sign of prosperity. Being skinny usually meant poverty. Fat men were viewed as successful; fat women were the object of sculptor attentions. But today, Hollywood icons like Sydney Greenstreet and Marilyn Monroe would have to lose weight. What...??

I won't contest the wisdom of lean. But I will share a fragrant fable from mealtimes in an earlier America. Yes, my children, there really was an age when food was among humanity's highest pleasures. Boundless feasts of red meat... whole milk...eggs and cheese...sugary desserts and creamy thick fountain delights. And you know what? Not an ingredient label in sight...!

I kid you not. Back in that fabled time, Americans chose their foods based on pleasure not proteins, taste not thought. Did we die younger? There are many studies confirming that fact. Did we die happier? Aha, not a single study from either Harvard or the Army on that question.

"AN D THE WINNER IS..." OH NO NOT ANOTHER ONE!

2012-02-02T10:32:00.001-06:00

Had your fill of award shows yet...? Wait, there's more...!

When members of the animal kingdom succeed at something, they award themselves by cackling, strutting, beating their chests, spreading their wings. Homo sapiens like to give one another trophies. Behold the awesome arrogance of the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, Golden Globes, Obies, Country Westerns, the list runs on into televised perpetuity.

Nothing's wrong with celebrating achievement, for achieving is what living is supposed to include. But really, I ask you, when do we stop....! Along with 23 ego-extravaganzas a year where entertainers entertain themselves with entertainment baubles for their entertainment resumes, come countless retirement dinners, school reunions, and doctor/lawyer/teacher/cafeteria-of-the-year celebrations. Where sometimes there are awards just for showing up.

A new zeitgeist is afoot in our fair land, starting in our school PE classes: "Everyone's A Winner!" Good for our self-image, self-confidence, self, self and self. In fact, so much self, the concept selfless has been excised from most dictionaries. Teddy Roosevelt, Any Rand, George Patton, and Steve Jobs would not understand.

I don't understand. Not because honoring our betters is wrong. Rather, because lately we have decided no one is really "better." Not in a democracy. Not where the most uneducated, incoherent, dis-informed, bought-by-TV-ads voter can cast their ballot with as much authority as the Harvard professor, Silcon Valley entrepreneur, Wall Street Journal editor, and my highly educated and passionately informed children. Sorry.

Democracy was born in ancient Greece where the greatest Greek of them all, Aristotle, wrote: "Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them."

THE WHERE THAT IS NO LONGERE THERE

2012-02-01T10:17:00.001-06:00

Everything in our life takes place in, well, in a place. It's the inevitable Where which comes with the When. You have them too, but let me mention one of mine. A Where that is no longer there.

A small white summer cottage at the end of a dusty gravel road off Route 120. Hugging a tiny lake called Lily just south of McHenry Illinois. I know, it's an unimportant place to bring to your busy attention. And yet you'll instantly recognize its symbology for your own life, where so many places are likewise no longer there. Somehow, though, their very absence gives them significance.

In the late 1930s, while the Great Depression raged on in cities like our Chicago, this modest corner of the green Midwest countryside became our family's 4 weeks of escape. Dad was struggling to sell new cars for which no one had the money to buy, but he and my uncles wanted their children to experience something more than the stark urban despair of an unemployed city.

Your own childhood Where's may have been a trip to the mountains, the seashore, or all right a cottage. Mine let me discover the un-citified splendors of fields of thick green, rows of yellow corn, blue tongues of water lapping white beaches, and what seemed like a thousand birds never before seen or heard in my mornings.

I drove by that fragrant Where last summer to breathe in the memories. The cottage was gone. Of course. Those summers were almost 80 years ago, Jack! But as I drove closer, I saw a crew of workmen. Something new was going up in my lovely empty Where.

"Good," I thought. If the beat is to go on, every sainted memory deserves a fresh one to take its place. Watching that crew, I thought I could hear my young cousins and I giggling a greeting to them. "We loved it here...maybe you will too!"

BUT WHAT IF THERE ARE NO SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET!

2012-01-31T10:16:00.000-06:00

From the Dallas assassination of Kennedy to the summer sightings of UFOs, some people always see plots. It usually turns out, no plots. More like patterns.

Currently there is a compelling pattern which divides us into the 99% & the 1%. And while this is indisputably true financially, there are two equally true yet less apparent patterns dividing us. Each closer to say 80% & 20%:

* The Power Struggle ~ Most times most headlines are about the grand struggle for power. Google, Apple, Comcast; NBC, CBS, ABC; NFL, MLB, NBA; Iran, Israel, Iraq. But lets be frank. Aren't the people most invested in these struggles no more than about 20% of us? Technocrats, studio execs, team owners, elected officials, generals and their various entourages and fellow profiteers. The rest of us...? Come on, these struggles interest us but bottom line don't always impact us.

The brutal reality is we may be faithful news junkies and keen observers, but whatever the outcomes -- even of a war! -- won't necessarily affect our everyday lives. To use an extreme case study: The celebrated French Resistance against the Nazi occupation in WWII never involved more than about 20% of the citizenry. The rest...? Unlike their passionate portrayal in "Casablanca," they mostly went on living their lives; only now under a different flag.

* The Science Struggle ~ There is little in our lives today that doesn't have some spectacular scientific overtone. Medicine...technology...energy...transportation...nutrition...weaponry...male pattern balding ...erectile dysfunction. Whereas you once looked for the answers to life's questions in your holy books, now more likely in your pills, DNA, and genetic profiles.

Can't be sure, but lately this seems to be about 80% of us. The other 20% -- often including the scientists themselves -- will tell you over a private drink that in all honesty they're still testing their answers. But meanwhile, the masses, dazzled by the media hype, have begun the same mistake their ancestors did: Deferring to the imposing voice of science as they once did to their imposing chieftains, shamans, and clergy.

Be it a struggle over power or science, the operative word is "struggle." Both these campaigns call for serious rather than frivolous strugglers.

SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW THE FACTS? THIN AGAIN!

2012-01-30T09:17:00.001-06:00

Award-winning author William Faulkner may have been a pain-in-the-ass personally, but he always told the truth boldly as he saw it. When challenged by a young fact-finder reporter, he snapped: "Look kid, facts and truth really don't have much to do with one another."

Let me show you what he meant with some last-year facts. Half of all US workers earned less than $26,364 last year, whereas a typical household in the nation's capital earned $84,523...just 1% of Americans accounted for 22% of the $1.26 trillion spent on health care...passengers left behind a total of $409,085.56 in change when they passed through airport security...Ronald Reagan's name was invoked 221 times during the first 16 GOP debates with George W. Bush's name spoken 56 times.

The more you check the facts the more Faulkner makes sense.

And here's what he might have added. The usual reason the facts don't always convey the truth is because of the unseen hands at work in the gap between the two. There are always behind-the- scene advisers...promoters...pollsters...spin-doctors. Of course we all understand this. What we may not understand are the less obvious hands at work doctoring the product.

Example? It's sitting right there in your very own music collection. Seriously. Play any musical hit from pop to rock to Broadway, and yes even to rap. But don't just listen to the singer. Listen to the orchestration backing them up. That where the magic either happens or it doesn't. Ask any singer and they'll tell you. In the making-a-hit business, the name of the game almost always starts with [and how right the name!] the arranger....

OH YEAH...? SEZ YOU...!

2012-01-29T09:52:00.000-06:00

Do you remember who said:"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." That was the ancient Greek politician and pop hero Pericles. Now 2500 years later, who can doubt him?

Lets get something straight. Politics -- like this year's campaigns -- may be tasteless; still, it's fundamentally noble. The mission of the politician is seeing to it this thing we call society holds firm and fair. Without that, nothing else will much matter.

But here's why it always gets messy in a democracy: Freedom! Just like in ancient Greece where democracy first began, we often get messed up with all this freedom of ours.

Candidates are free to say whatever cockamamie distortions and lies their hatchet-men can throw ....the media are free to dig up and twist whatever dirty little secrets they can find....fat-cats hiding behind their billion-dollar empires are free to pay for any pol who will back their empire...political parties like the Tennessee Tea Party are free to demand schoolbooks "stop repeating criticisms about our Founding Fathers intruding on the Indians and owning slaves."

Heck, Chef Paula Deen was free to pitch Southern-fried cooking when all along her own diabetes told her it was wrong. And then there's a 400-pound convicted felon free to sue New York City prisons "for suffering emotional damage because they failed to stock any clothing beyond size 6X."

So here's what it comes down to, fellow citizen. We wouldn't, we shouldn't, relinquish our freedoms. Freedoms are what America was and is all about. However, just like behind every faith there is doubt, behind every freedom there is obligation. How do you and I manage this...? Here's a simple test. Watch what happens when hurrying drivers all reach the same intersection which has no stoplight, only stop signs.

Most times most of us manage safely through. Now that's democracy working! Pericles would be proud. And you...?

THE ONLY FABLE YOU'LL NEED BEFORE YOUR 12/21/12 MAYAN DEBACLE

2012-01-28T11:28:00.000-06:00

Fables are funny things. Very often they tell us truths simple facts and stats cannot fully convey. Consider some of the big ones: Eden...The Red Sea...King Arthur...Valley Forge...the Kardashians. Ahhh, but this is an American election year. Thus the fables tumble out like political Topsy's.

How to find this year's grandest political fable...? As Lewis Carroll put it: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." So shall we take the nearest yellow brick road on the way to our nation's White House. As great economic and social issues lie in wait, each of the eager political seekers are wrapped in all kinds of phantasmagoric public images via the media.

Some images self-created; some created by their paid minions; still others by their worst rivals. Usually, though, not a single image represents the true man. Or his true agenda. Which, dear voter, makes for a colorful fable, but one helluva of lousy way to pick a president.

Newt...? either rolly-polly visionary or backroom viper! Romney...? business magician or mannequin from Massachusetts! Santorum...? noble Christian knight or crazy corpse-in-the-living-room zealot! Ron Paul...? Kris Kringle of our old American ways or nutty uncle from the attic! Then there's that complex otherness already in the White House...? either obstructed Messiah or Kenyan Muslim trying to make us another failed European socialist state!

Tally these phantasmagoric election year images, and the score comes out: WHAT...?? That's right, dear voter, we're traveling this yellow brick road toward an Emerald City whose Wizard we are being asked to choose from among candidates who have each been spun out of hyped cotton candy.

Will the real candidates please stand up...? Wherever you're hiding....!

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SMALL IN YOUR LIFE?

2012-01-27T10:03:00.001-06:00

Got a little flyer in my mail box yesterday. Threw it away. Usually do. Probably so do you. Why...? Because in a culture where everything is promoted as big, spectacular, the largest of its kind, well there's simply no room for little home-made flyers about local handyman services. Or some local shop that just opened in town.

Look, we've got big malls. big chains. big franchises. big international conglomerates for our needs. It's the age of McDonalds and Walmart. Little locals may be nice, but they're out of their league.

Wait a minute.

Exactly what league is that? You and I didn't form it. You and I may not even want it. You and I -- if old enough -- can still remember an age when the leagues were all fairly small. And local. Maybe not always as efficient or economical. But always more personal and handy. We knew the retailer and he or she knew us. Heck, they probably attended our church or were the cross guards for our kids on their way to school. Cozy, you know what I mean....

Until around 1950, the average American was born, lived and died within a radius of 50 miles. A car trip to the Grand Canyon or to New York City was a once-in-a-life-time-if-ever event. In contrast to today's culture in which weekend trips to London or Rome are hardly unusual.

Why these thoughts now....? Aside from an admitted affection for cozy, these very same thoughts are tucked into today's presidential debates about the size and role of government in our lives. In such a big world it seems foolish to deny the need for a government big enough to help us navigate a big world. At the same time, it would be foolish to deny the popular wisdom: "Think globally, act locally."

The fancy name for that is: "Subsidiarity." Matters should always been managed by the smallest local authority possible. Have a problem with your water main...? Don't call the state capitol, call your local alderman. A problem with your mail...? Don't call Washington, call your local postmaster. A problem with your kid in school...? Don't call the US Department of Education, talk to the teacher.

See..? Small and local aren't just reveries for old folks. Often they're what helped old folks grow old so well.

I AM SPARTACUS...!

2012-01-26T10:22:00.001-06:00

Ever meet a cop out of uniform? Or one of those goliath-like firefighters, humongous Bears linemen, bicep-ed Cubs sluggers, a member of Congress, or a Church Cardinal? Be honest, now, they all looked a lot smaller and more commonplace than they do in the papers or on the 10 o'clock news. Well, maybe not a 300 pound Bears lineman, but all the rest.

These occasional encounters are good for us. Something like noticing "that man behind the curtain." It's not to say people of stature have no real stature. They usually do. However, it's good to occasionally stand toe to toe with stature, rather than always gawking up at it.

The lesson here -- and lets face it, there are lessons everyday of our lives if only we notice them -- the lesson here is that in a democracy there is no royalty, no aristocracy, no caste system. Well, let me correct that; none by law or by inheritance. Wherever they do exist they have come by merit. In other words, their stature grows not out of accident but achievement.

Which is why we often like to think of our democracy as a form of meritocracy. Yes, we are all equal; but no, we can't deny some of us are more equal than others. Which is why we have generals and GIs...CEOs and line-workers...pilots and passengers...teachers and students...parents and kids.
Okay, that last one is not always based on merit; but speaking as a parent, it's based on necessity.

Currently the world's on Facebook & Twitter fire with billions of people-without-stature angry about those who, one way or another, have it. An ancient battle-line which has used terms like patricians & plebeians, aristocrats & peasants, and now 99% & 1%. Same battle-line, same war, same passions to either seize or to hold.

In the end, the little guys have almost always lost. Later they become heroes. Say like Spartacus. Notice though that while the movies give cinemtic stature to these little guys, it's always the big guys who are still around to make the movies.

In this election year, in every election year, we little guys once again hear big guys tell us how great the little guy is. An interesting question to pose might be this: Do either one of us really believe it?

WHEN THE BIRDS LEAVE AND DON'T RETURN

2012-01-25T10:51:00.001-06:00

I'm sure you'll understand. It's all part of the delicious rhythms of my morning routine.

Turn on my coffee maker, slip into my least ratty looking bathrobe, and venture forth onto my driveway for the papers. [Yes, papers, for even with all the flashy screens and scrolls at my disposal, my generation has an emotional attachment to anything you can fold]. But this time I notice something different. Something quite terrible.

There are no birds singing. Anywhere. The sun is still in the sky, the drone from nearby O'Hare Field continues, but nary a sparrow, wren or crow. I don't know about you, but I notice the birds. Their warbling and wrangling among our Oaks and Maples is like the scenery to my morning drama out here. A play without scenery feels incomplete. So does a morning without birds.

Yes, yes, I know all about them flying South in winter, but some of them should already be back by now. My God...! What if they never come back...? The neighbors find my bath-robed study of the sky a little peculiar. But then, they often find me peculiar. This sudden obsession freezes me in place with a question that often haunts me. Maybe you too. "What if things never go back to before...??"

So much is taken for granted. Eyes and limbs to experience our world; taste and smell to enjoy our food; family and friends to know what love is; schools and careers to discover what purpose means. But really, how often do we put these things out on the table look at? That's like asking how often do we count the breaths we take in a day.

We don't. And that, fellow breathers, is why I stand here in my driveway searching the skies for my morning birds. Once you finally realize something is missing in your life, at last that's when you feel their actual worth. Their enduring and indispensable worth to you.

And yes, you can feel this even standing here in a ratty looking bathrobe....

FACE IT -- TODAY'S BLOGGERS & NON BLOGGERS HATE ONE ANOTHER

2012-01-24T10:38:00.001-06:00

Okay, hate may be a pretty strong word. But when you scan the bloody epic of our history, the score clearly favors hate over reason. About 50 to 1. Why is this...?

Take today's bloggers. A galloping-growth industry whose 13-39 age group has become a global sub-culture capable of swinging elections and overthrowing entire regimes. From their desktop screens to their everywhere-in-the-world smartphones, they are blogging, tweeting and emailing in staggering multi-billion numbers each day. Doing it with the penache of those who feel sure they have reached the promised land.

Those who've been left behind [often chose to stay behind] deny any regrets. It is their conviction -- perhaps desperate hope -- the way-we-were is the way-to-be. After all, the age of writing and printing has been with us for sacred centuries, while these bratty newcomers are mostly just setting fire to those long, proud traditions. Look, Aristotle, Jesus and Shakespeare didn't need blogs, tweets and silly abbreviations! Another passing fad like the Telegraph, Pony Express and BetaMax!

We all know some of these admirable literary holdouts. Give me my book and my pen; my library and my archives! To be sure, there is nothing wrong with tradition, with the way-we-were, with those shoulders upon which today's kids can stand. Being of a certain age, I too sing anthems to my childhood world. I respect every wisp of joy and genius from that earlier time. Only the ancient Greeks warned long long ago: "No man can jump into the same river twice."

The river of time rushes on without stopping. Whenever we chose to jump in -- even if from the same shore we call ours -- the river we're jumping into is no longer the same as it was a moment ago. Frankly, this is the reason I hate getting all those Consumer Reports in the mail. Every issue is another hit list of products I have held sacred. Campbell Soups...Butter...Bayer Aspirin...Olive Oil... even my Italian Endive and Risotto have each been dissected or dismissed in the light of changing facts.

In confronting this forever-dawning new world, I have a choice. Either change my ways or cancel my subscription. Right now I'm watching that damn river roar past my shore, and I shake my head. More than likely, I'll send you my decision by email....

ARE YOU A REDNECK? WATCH NEWT ANSWER THAT FOR YOU

2012-01-23T11:38:00.001-06:00

Look, no one calls them-self a Redneck. Or a hothead, a racist, a zealot. Too negative and surely not us. I mean, so we have strong feelings, but they're always saddled by equally strong thinking, right?

The funny thing is, right now there's a thinking man who has intentionally shaken off this saddle in order to play directly into our feelings. In sharp contrast to Newt, there's also a candidate named Romney and a president named Obama. Each, however, seems much too saddled to appeal to an angry nation. Anger begets passion and passion demands instant gratification from the masses..

The nice word for this is Populism.

When times are hard, the populous want fast, furious and fundamentally simple answers. The very feelings that made our early heroes so heroic to us. Davey Crockett. Kit Carson. Buffalo Bill. Even Jesse James. Western legends of gut-level courage and fast-draw decision. In contrast to all those Dandies and Bankers back East.

Newt, a fast-draw legend...? Hardly. Except when he wants to be. Listen and learn. The high-IQ, rolly-polly wife-swapper comes across as this year's best raw-meat populist in either party. Watch the audience cheer him chew up his rivals, swallow reporters whole, and sneer at a strange, Kenya-based Black guy who spends all his time thinking!

Populism in American political history has brought us dozens of passionate candidates, and even a few presidents like Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt and Warren Harding. The 2012 election may be another case-study in passionate populism vs eastern education. In other words, forget the issues -- today's crucial debates about jobs, taxes, energy and terrorism. This time around it may all come down to which Goliath in the ring we cheer for the sheer gratification of his furious, fast-draw Goliathism.

2012-01-22T11:09:00.001-06:00

HOW OLD ARE YOU RIGHT NOW? NO, REALLY!

2012-01-22T11:08:00.000-06:00

Do you know how old your are...? No, not your birth-years. Your attitude-years. The way you take on your world each new morning?

If you don't much think about the question, it's safe to say you're attitudinally young. Which, in America, is the thing to be. But, according to some, that's precisely what's wrong with youth. They can only see forward. Too young to have much of a past, too hopeful to fear the future, they intuitively think forward.

Just this week the legendary Kodak Company filed for bankruptcy. The eulogy in the media was: "Nostalgia is fine, but it keeps you from moving forward."

Personally, even when very young, I always had this fascination with the elderly. At dinners, parties and services, I felt scrawny and callow standing next to men of size and substance. Yes, I could point to my stars; but they could point to their accomplishments. "Moving forward" is really only a verb, not an accomplishment.

In our community there's a sprawling public park just down the block from a lovely senior home. The kids and their parents flood the park; only minutes away, elders wait to die. There's something wrong with this picture. Occasionally some of the kids are lured into the home on little planned visits with their pets or hobbies. Usually the result is surprising gratification on both parts. But outside in the hurly-burly of everyday life, past accomplishments are expendable. Oh perhaps a few of their authors get a statue, but even then the young pause only briefly on their way "forward."

When the kids and their parents in the park look out, they see one world; from their bedroom windows, the elders see another. One filled with the faces of their families and friends, their heroes and heroines, their favorite venues and values. Now long gone. Like the entries in their old telephone books sitting next to phones with which they now have so few to call.

And yet, I am tugged by the insistent feeling that we should be calling them! If only to ask them -- as we would a traveler back from say the Holy Land -- "pray tell me, what was it like, so that I might be more ready to move forward?"

THE DAY I MET DUSTIN HOFFMAN AND MARSHAL MCLUHAN IN THE SAME BASEMENT

2012-01-21T10:16:00.001-06:00

It was the revolutionary year 1968. While the streets were filled with anti-Vietnam protesters, a few of us true believers met in a Washington DC hotel basement. It was the only place we could book a meeting with this peculiar Canadian professor and the even more peculiar star of the recent "The Graduate."

We were a handful of media instructors who back home were trying hard to convince our schools and their chalkboard faculties that there was a new ecosystem in the world: 24/7 media. McLuhan was pitching his peculiar idea about an emerging "global village" in which "we shape our tools and after wards our tools shape us."

Dustin...? He was more of a celebrity afterthought, but soon proved he too was a true believer. And had he still been alive, Friedrich Nietzsche might have fit right in with his "will to power" vision of the uber-men [AKA, media moguls].

But enough name-dropping!

The point is, the global village is not only here, but expanding exponentially with thousands of websites and billions of users all in instant global connectivity. Really, there is no longer any Here & There; nor Now & Then. Like it or not, even willing or not, this mediated ecosystem has swept us all up as if in an electronic tsunami. Forget your elitist protests about the "vast cultural wasteland," for we are all travelers in it. From the way we get our news and our data, to the way we buy, and sell, to the way we transact our lives and values.

Navigation then becomes the order of the day. How to either navigate our travels or be navigated.

As usual, this requires attention to any devils-in-the-details which may be lurking. Consider, for instance, how YouTube's modest seven-year history is about to go pro. Right now professional producers, writers and networks are planning a hundred new channels which will grab and fragment even more viewing audiences with even more virtual experiences.

At the same time, the global village now as two new start ups. Klout, tracking your every on-line behavior from Google to Facebook to Linkedin; and Reputation.com, tracking and scoring what it calls your social forensics.

In THIS village, you'll never be alone ever again. Never. Never. Never....

NEVER TALK POLITICS OR RELIGION IN POLITE COMPANY. EVER??

2012-01-20T08:56:00.000-06:00

No one has to tell us we 7 billion earthlings live, not for one another, but for ourselves. Darwin calls it the "survival instinct"...Capitalists call it "free enterprise"...Wall Streeters like Gordon Gekko call it "greed" ...most religions call it avarice. Actually it's a rather thin kind of life, because its outermost limits are limited just to yourself.

A thicker kind of life is more like Monks and Amish lead. Communitarian societies in which how-it-effects-others is part of any decision you make. That's thicker living, because there's more room in your life for the feelings of others. No surprise then that these are the people we usually choose to be our friends, our fellow riders on the commuter train, those we invite for dinner.

And yet...! All this seems to change when it comes to our politics. Here we choose our friends differently. Not so much by their kindness of spirit, but more by their kind of labels. The labels we wear these days are bold, brash and cocksure. On one side: "American Free Enterprise." On the other: "European Socialism." Both sides roaring labels they can barely explain, but they're damn sure about their roar!

How strange. The same people we find likable personally, we may find unlikable politically.

My philosopher-barber put it to me this way: "I see these two opposites like a tightrope and a safety net. The tightrope is where the gutsy are free to take their chances; they like risk up there. But down here there's gotta be some kind of safety net; not only for us little guys, but sometimes even for the gutsy guys. Because everyone falls sometime. Which is when I expect my government to catch us. Why else am I paying taxes!"

He summed up his case with a flurry of scissor trims: "I don't want to eliminate their tightrope, but I sure as hell want to thicken the safety net. My way -- we're closer to 50:50 instead of 99:1"

He had the scissors, so I agreed. I think even without them, I'd agree.

ALL STORIES ARE TRUE; SOME EVEN HAPPENED

2012-01-19T09:48:00.001-06:00

The child curls into your lap and plead, "Tell me a story." It's a request that echoes down the centuries from children to tribes to nations alike. We all need stories in our lives. Tales that can make us feel good, feel proud, feel there's a purpose to us.

Hunter-fathers and village-shamans were skilled at this. So were the firey-eyed prophets who came out of the deserts, along with the rich imaginations of a Homer, a Dante, and a Dickens. I remember my top sergeant recalling tales of his years fighting under Patton in WWII; perhaps the only thing I ever learned in the Air Force that made any sense out of killing.

Not every story is true, if by true we mean precisely accurate fact by fact. But then neither were the stories of the parables taught by Jesus nor all the news reports of the West by Mark Twain. Still, is there any heart that can honestly dismiss these as lies? As mis-information? As events that could not be?

When enough of these stories collect, they become all sorts of realities in the lives of their listeners. Some, religions like Judaism and Christianity. Others, philosophies like Stoicism or Existentialism. Still others take on the mythic proportions of legends such as the Greek or Norse Gods, King Arthur of ancient England or the Teutonic Knights of ancient Germany, right down to the Kit Carsons and Jesse James of the American West still played out on our screens by the John Waynes and Clint Eastwoods.

Screens...?

Yes, the great oral and written traditions of humanity's stories have now emerged most completely in the cinematic format of the movie and of television. Today's stories -- no less indispensable to our emotional lives than ever -- now come to us by way of our cameras. Film is perhaps the ultimate art form for telling us stories, for in it are all the art forms of sight and sound majestically woven together.

What was once a 10-cent Saturday treat at the local movie house has now been elevated into the most powerful persuasions in our lives. So when a Spielberg tells us of ETs, a Scorsese tells us of our society's under-cultures, a Spike Jones reports the culture in Black, or an Oliver Stone uses his cameras to make a searing political point...when artists like these fill our screens with stories, they are thereby filling our heads and hears with messages virtually impossible to forget.

No storytellers in history ever had it so good. No listeners in history ever had it so hard to decide which stories are true...

WE ALL HAVE DREAMS. NOW WE HAVE SIRI

2012-01-18T10:24:00.000-06:00

Like you, I've had some extraordinary dreams come true. Walking the white beaches of the Bahamas... strolling the crooked streets of New Orleans French Quarter...climbing the Eiffel Tower...sipping Chianti in a Tuscany trattoria. Then there was beholding both the Sistine Chapel and the Grand Canyon, struggling to explain either.

But now Apple has come up with Siri -- my very own voice-activated virtual assistant. The new app is available in the iPhone45. Simply by speaking into it, Siri will tell me where I am, where's the nearest Chinese restaurant, call a cab for, and tell me what the traffic will be like on the way.

Siri -- speaking in clear conversational English -- even has a saucy sense of humor. Ask her to "talk dirty," she'll cheerfully answer: "Silt. Gravel. Compost." Call her a bitch and she'll top you: "Why do you hate me? I don't even exist!"

We all remember sci-fi encounters with ET's. Creatures with small bodies and enormous heads, for it is their brain not their brawn that counts. Given a few thousand years of evolution, is this how our distant descendants are likely to look? Abs on the beach and pumping iron in the gym will no longer seem very important. On the other hand I ask you, what will be left to physically experience this phenomenally physical planet...?

I still want to smell the rich Colombian coffee bubbling over my cup in the morning. I still want to sit down and tuck in my napkin as the spice of the antipasto and the Bolognese of the pasta collide in my nostrils. I still want to feel the smash of the cymbals during a Beethoven symphony, to tear up at the National Anthem, to feel a giggle in my throat watching the giggle of my grandchildren, to be overpowered by the jaunty yellow of the sunrise and the garish red of the sunset.

I don't wish to KNOW these things. In my head. Or from Siri. Rather to SENSE them right down to the pit of my tummy and the tingle of my toes. Nothing against change. Or Siri. Or Apple. They represent human progress. Only we don't need to take the human out of the progress!

Or do we...? Siri didn't answer me.

WHAT WOUD MADONNA OR BRAD PITT FO FOR YOU ON A STUCK ELEVATOR?

2012-01-17T10:43:00.000-06:00

Oscar Wilde famously quipped: "Be yourself, everyone else is taken!"

However, in a rabid celebrity culture like ours, it would seem most of us want to be someone else. Someone rich, powerful and especially famous. Fame is the obsession of the young and the dream of the old. What makes this fixation so silly is who we usually choose to think of as famous.

Take a moment. Aren't they always the rich-and-famous from the worlds of show business...the arts ... sports...big business? The headliners and headline-makers? But here's the bottom line test. What could or would any of these do for you in the middle of a life-crisis? Surely your own life and safety is the ultimate measure by which you measure another's value to you.

Not to get too theological on you, but it's been written: "Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) Which famous celebrity can you imagine doing that for you? I believe the correct answer is: None.

And yet, people all around us are doing exactly that every hour of every day of every week in the year. And while we don't know them by name on a marquee, you and I know them well whenever some crisis rips out of the ground beneath us or from the sky above us. From earthquakes to tornadoes! crimes to fires! storms to floods! highway accidents to hallway accidents! failed hearts to failed lungs!

First responders.

The name hardly does them justice, these strong young legions of skilled eyes and trained hands. They appear out of the 911 night in ambulances, atop snorkels, in repair trucks, or on rescue boats. If there really is something noble to our imperfect species, it may most be found in these hourly acts in which one life reaches out in the service of another.

Oh...and not one of them from the rich-and-famous 1%.

LIKE...YOU KNOW...WHATEVER!

2012-01-16T10:30:00.000-06:00

"Whatever..!" "You know...!" "Like...!" The three worst verbal fillers in our language, according to the latest Maris Public Opinion survey. Like, who didn't know that??

In a software security survey, the three worst passwords were: "Qwerty," "Letmein, and "Password."

I submit that in any Worst-Of surveys, the American Reality Show stands tooth, claw and nail above any other. Network executives and Jungian psychiatrists can explain why their bizarre social popularity, yet I'm not sure they can assess their haunting social consequences. After all, how many avid reality-show viewers are going to tell a perfect stranger why they are so perfectly strange in their television tastes!

In the 1980s, Senator Daniel Moynihan produced a groundbreaking report which said "the more often the deviant behaviors in a society, the less those behaviors seem deviant..." His examples included the usual suspects: Divorce, teen pregnancy, teen smoking, children out of wedlock, and handguns.

You can design your own list, as each night the networks fill their screens with deviance that doesn't quite seem as deviant as it once did only a few generations ago. A progression -- or regression -- of social acceptance, easily predictable right in our own families and neighborhoods.

However. Today's cheap-to-produce reality shows push the prediction a giant leap further.

Rather than simply exposing the viewers to these practices [eg. the total number of televised divorces and affairs in a year tracks over 11,000 and counting], the Reality Show actually celebrates them. The wildest, zaniest, least inhibited, most exhibitionist participants the better. The mind boggles at the sight of "Jersey Shore," "Bachelor," and "The Housewives of..."

Come on, loosen up. Have a laugh. It's all just in fun.

When you put it that way, I suppose you're right. Reminding me of a time when the punks and wise guys in my classroom were sent to the Principal's office where embarrassed parents confronted their wild off spring. Oh, but I forget! In today's open-minded, reality-show culture, we're no longer embarrassed by anything. Nor do we confront anyone. It's called live-and-let-live.

Strangely enough, the title of the next Reality Show which plans to bring their cameras into your next door neighbors' bedroom....

3 C's OWN YOUR BRAIN: CAMERAS, COMPUTERS AND THAT OTHER ONE

2012-01-15T09:48:00.000-06:00

At one time, each of these pairs was an opposite: Beautiful & Ugly...Truth & Lie....Real & Imaginary. No longer! Especially that last one. Our cameras and computers have seen to it we can no longer tell if what we're seeing is really real.

On our screens -- and lets face it, virtually everyone everywhere is looking at a screen -- cameras and computers can airbrush or distort any real reality into whatever imaginary reality they want. Something almost Orwellian about our world. OK, if that seems like stretching the point, what about Spielbergian...?

While some of us have learned to spot the camera and computer tricks, there is a third C at work on our synapses: Conventions. Not the back-slapping, member audiences in Las Vegas hotels. Rather, those generally accepted standards of society (eg. people wait at stoplights, children attend school, etc).

Nobody writes these social conventions. They just bubble up into our consciousness from generation to generation. The Hollywood and network screens then take it from there. Scene after scene. For instance have you noticed how the driver always seems to find a parking place right where he stops to get out ...leaves his lights on...finds the closed doors conveniently unlocked? Or how the police always have helicopters and SWAT teams right at hand? Or how federal agents are always steel-jawed, buttoned-down teams with powerful GPS systems at their command? Or how the FBI and White House are always populated by unnamed planners & plotters whispering in private hallways?

Who wouldn't become sensitized to the imposing notion of "Big Government!!"

Granted, Americans have been suspicious of big-bad-government since the days of King George III. And the Confederates felt the same way when they seceded from the big-bad-Union. [Rick Perry is still on record suggesting the same for Texas]. Many family and neighbors see big-bad-government whenever their screens flash images of Washington DC, airport pat downs, and CIA headquarters.

At the same time, I also see government whenever I see my mail carrier coming down the block...state highways being upgraded...federal regulations protecting my national parks, drinking water, drugstore prescriptions, and coastlines. I think to myself there really IS a difference between the baby and the dirty bath water....

POLITICS IS JUST SHOWBUSINESS FOR UGLY PEOPLE

2012-01-14T11:03:00.001-06:00

According to Jay Leno, "Politics is just show business for ugly people." According to Uncle Harry, "Once they get elected and see light at the end of the tunnel, they go out and buy some more tunnel."

Why do we slam politicians? For one thing, it's easy. Like screaming at the bloodied quarterback from the safety of a sky box. We've been doing it ever since George Washington. Oh yes! all those heroes on our pedestals and our bills were once laughed at and lampooned far more brutally than even today.

Some consider this mob mentality. Others see it as how a free democracy works; the way the law believes even 12 of the least likely jurors usually come up with the best verdict. On the the other hand, when you consider some of our past leaders, the saying "Anyone can become president" takes on a whole new meaning. On yet another hand, George Burns put it this way: "Politics is like trying to be popular in high school; which is like trying to be mayor of a city that won't exist in four years."

Whatever! our politicians always use the same two words: Liberal and Conservative. The words have a gazillion different meanings in the mouths of different politicians. Perhaps the best definition is: A liberal is a conservative who just got mugged; a conservative is a liberal who just got arrested.

The funny thing about this conservative (red state) and liberal (blue state) dichotomy are some recent results. David Brooks of the New York Times reports there are now two conservatives for every liberal in the country. Most of them maintaining we need less federal government and greater traditional morality. Meanwhile, Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune argues: "As America has grown more secular, most indicators of moral and social health have grown better not worse. Crime has plummeted, teen pregnancy is down 19%, divorce rates are dropping, and abortions among teens are half what they used to be."

Chapman, an avowed libertarian, ends with a smile (or is it a smirk?): "Mississippi has the nation's highest rate of church attendance and the highest rate of murder. So please spare us the sanctimonious fairy tales. Secular America is doing just fine."

Now the debate becomes: What do we mean by "fine?"

LETS BE HONEST -- WE THE 99% ARE REALLY WE THE MOB!

2012-01-13T14:22:00.001-06:00

The "99%" is simply the latest compliment we are attaching to the vast majority of us. Who, in a democracy, like to think of ourselves as "we the people" nobly proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Sorry, folks, but as a long-time member of the "99%," I believe there are less ennobling but more accurate names for us: The Majority...the Masses...the Mob.

Want to see what we "the mob" really look like? Just look at us pushing and shoving in the malls...in the sports stadiums...on the crowded expressways....queuing up for the latest Hollywood hit. Not so impressive looking. What's more, we're even unimpressive in impressive settings like marching in Fourth of July parades...filing into churches and temples...holding candle vigils...marching off to war.

Truth be told [few leaders like to use the truth in public], we the 99% are often human herds following the tail of the buttock immediately in front of us. Call it going-with-the-flow or following-our-star, if you like, but in truth, we the 99% are usually just instinctively responding to whatever seems best for us. In the 1960s we sang it this way: If-it-feels-right-how-can-it-be-wrong!

However, when in the name of democracy we the mob operate this way, well human herds can be cow-poked into all kinds of crazy directions. Say, buying the hottest new widget on eBay...the slickest new candidate on the campaign trail...the most mesmerizing new televangelist....the inside-trading stock tip...the latest face we're told is a singing sensation. Pretty much any damn thing the big boys with the big bucks have decided to woo and wow us with.

Tragically, this can also include wars. Wars against whatever "enemy" we the mob are being advised we must fear. Hitler pied-pipered 60 million Germans that way. Frankly, Lyndon Johnson similarly convinced 250 million Americans Vietnam had attacked us. George Bush said the same about Iraq.

Buying into the latest "wonder widget" is a herd instinct that's probably harmless. But buying into the latest "enemy" is a mob instinct that's usually horrific. As a general-president who knew better [Eisenhower] warned: We-the-mob need to be careful we save our righteous furies for the right enemy.

WHY YOU CAN'T JUST LET THAT PHONE RING

2012-01-12T10:50:00.000-06:00

Ever try to sit there and ignore a ringing telephone...? Nine out of ten can't. I'm one of the nine. Nietzsche offered us an explanation: "Humanity is afflicted with the yearning to know the unknown." Personally, I like that. Gives my maddening curiosity a touch of class.

Lately the professorial minds have opined that our ringing Twitter and Facebook are doing wretched things to our beautiful minds. Too much input for any mind to authentically digest and use. They back it up with MRI evidence that's impressed my mind, as it reels from its every hour every day assault of information. I mean, when's the last time you walked Michigan Avenue in Chicago or Park Avenue in New York and saw more than nine people who WEREN'T staring down into their smart phones?

And yet.

That's right, there's no opinion you can slice so thin there's only one side to it. The other side here is those psychologists who believe Twitter and Facebook sharpen our minds in this hardscrabble world. Quoting one: "Our air of self ignorance ends as all these posted likes, dislikes, and comments make us intensely aware of who we are and how our thoughts track with others...." I myself have been tersely "de-friended" four times and "f--k you" at least once!

I'm not sure if these have enlightened my self-understanding, but I certainly have discovered the dangers of the un-nuanced written word.

Right now my phone is ringing in the other room. At the same time, my copy of the New York Times sits here reporting there is an earth-like planet, Kepler-22b, located 600 light year away which could sustain human life. Am I curious about what's out there...? Whether an advanced civilization exists there or has long ago died there...? Yes, yes, I am. But right now Nietzsche's "yearning" has more to do with Joan's phone call than any from an ET.

After all, a wife waiting in the rain is a far greater force than any creature from any Kepler-22b!

DONSTON ABBEY INVADES A WILLING AMERICA

2012-01-11T10:53:00.001-06:00

First the Redcoats, then the Beatles, now Queen Victoria.

The latest Brit invasion is the Masterpiece Theatre production: Donston Abbey. Cheerfully preceded in recent years by Upstairs Downstairs and other mesmerizing Victorian works such as Pride & Prejudice, Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights.

What's a nice girl like a Victorian heroine doing in a helter-skelter, smash-mouth American culture that lionizes NFL brutes, rapper troglodytes, and bare-knuckled pols..?

Here's a theory. You mustn't allow today's bare-chested tough guys and their tattooed ladies in the sports bars to deceive you. As they already deceive themselves. You see, while Americans have always prided themselves in the quick quip and the fast draw, deep down somewhere resides a Victorian gentleman and lady trying to get out.

OK, I said it was just a theory!

And yet, there's so much transparent logic to it. As our faster-than-a-speeding-bullet culture continues to pick up speed -- 24/7 news cycles, blogosphere chatter, smartphone exchanges -- the human animal here often finds itself exhausted, without knowing quite why. With all these digital tools, toys and talismans at our fingertips, we find ourselves on a breathless treadmill in which there is not a whit of time left for the form and formality of that Victorian zeitgeist charming us on the screen.

Really now, even the hottest fan and coolest financier has to respond to all those charmingly attired ladies and gentlemen speaking such luscious English and engaging in such precisely paced social rituals. All in settings and with servants that make our daily lives look disappointingly spare.

Oh, don't expect the folks at the Super Bowl, on Wall Street or at the local PTA to openly admit a repressed longing for a time slower and seemingly steadier. Like I say, it's only a theory. But here's a corollary to the theory. Just maybe this majority of us repressed commoners are what makes democracy work in elections like this one. Generally speaking, we are not nearly as involved and passionate about our politics as are the zealots among us on the extreme right and left.

That being said, this is why most extremists never win the presidency. So much for the mad monarchs that British form and formality all too often generated.

BESIDE THAT, MRS LINCOLN, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE PLAY?

2012-01-10T10:16:00.000-06:00

Try this.

Take a puzzle or a game like Monopoly and Scrabble. Open the box and watch the pieces tumble out. Do you find a message in that pile of pieces? No more than you find one in society's everyday pile of pieces otherwise known as: news reports, statistics, ads and quotes. The only message to be found in this daily jumble is the one you and I bring to it by the way our mind assembles the pieces.

Which is another way of saying the facts and the truth are often more in our minds then in our world. Which recalls the story of the interviewing reporter trying to get a story: "Yes, but besides that Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play?"

Quoting the Bible...the review...the speech...the report...the budget...the suddenly discovered love letter, is humanity's ancient mistake of sending a blind man to figure out the elephant he's feeling. Ten blind men will probably have 10 definitions. And who among us can boast we are without blindness?

This, then, is our task.

If we are to dare pretend we are free minds with the right to decide, that right must be joined to this obligation. Never again call the parts the whole! A single report, a single passage, a single statistic out context is often the same thing as a lie. In its selective singularity -- by the one reporting it -- it becomes a text without its context. Therefore it's able to prove black is white, good is evil, beautiful is ugly, honesty is deceit, and the person who challenges me is a demon.

Is that stretching the point...? Look at the record. Joan of Arc burned at the stake...Lincoln shot sitting next to his wife...John Lennon gunned down on the street...oh, and then there was that man from Galilee nailed to a cross.

Let the record show that the entire record is what needs to be shown....

THREE LAWS NO ON PASSED, BUT NO ONE ESCAPES

2012-01-09T10:57:00.001-06:00

Societies have a great many laws. Thousands of them. Too many probably for anyone to know let alone obey. Among them are laws that don't appear on any books. As it were, they've been written on the human heart. And there's not a day in our lives these three don't somehow apply:

* the law of contradictions
* the law of the survival of the fittest
* the law of unintended consequences

The law of contradictions says two antithetical propositions cannot both be true. Seems to make sense. Until recently. Some of us are still trying to understand how the Tea Partiers -- now in control of John Boehner's House -- insist government is bad at the very same time they insist on their government entitlements. I've tried to locate the protester last summer who screamed: "Don't let the government touch my Medicare!" No luck, as she is probably busy tapping into it as we write.

Further defying the law of contradictions, the Tea Partiers go on to explain: They are not opposed to government benefits per se, only to "unearned" benefits. Upon closer examination, this ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and the very young. Driving home their point, one recent state poll of Tea Partiers found that 83% opposed any Social Security cuts while 78% rejected any changes in Medicare.

How to reconcile such contradictions...?

Perhaps with that second unwritten law: The law of the survival of the fittest. Loosely translated into this year's political campaign: I've got mine because I earned it; if you don't, that's your problem, not the government's. For instance, if the upcoming Super Bowl were to be played by this law rather than the rules of the NFL, well it would roll out without either 10-yard-markers or referees on the field. You know, the biggest, baddest, boldest warriors win.

All of which brings us to that third law, the one about unintended consequences. Picture for a moment a Super Bow and a society without any governing rules and regulations. The biggest, baddest ,boldest win! Now go ahead and study that picture. Where do you see yourself? You and I and all the rest of the 99%.

WILL YOU WASTE TODAY? PROBABLY AND HERE'S WHY!

2012-01-08T10:55:00.001-06:00

You won't believe this, but you simply have to. It's right there in the Kansas police records...!

A fugitive who took a couple hostage in their home is now suing them for $250,000. The accused murderer, Jesse Dimmick, claims the couple "Accepted his knife-point offer of money to hide in their house, but the couple later breached their oral contract by escaping while he slept. As a result, he was shot in the back by authorities and has accrued large medical expenses."

The celebrated social satirists -- Will Rogers [1930s] and Mort Sahl [1960s] -- based their comedy routines on the same opening line: "I only know what I read in the papers." Today they would have to add TV, Cable, and Blogs; but the premise is still the same. Virtually everything we know and talk about with one another is what we read or see in the media.

Here's my problem. Virtually everything we see and read there is hardly worth knowing let alone talking about.

Yes, yes, weather forecasts, traffic reports, stock markets, yesterday's scores, current medical warnings -- yes, these can probably be called news-you-can-use. But have you ever tracked and tallied this stuff? I mean really, how much of it is worth knowing by lunchtime tomorrow...? You might counter by pointing to the in-depth reportage from the media's best editors, columnists. economists and social observers. I quickly grant there are those. And yet when is the last time you've NOT been able to guess the same recurring subjects to their reporting! Terror threats ...Middle East threats ...China Threats...Energy threats ...Civil Rights threats...Crime threats. Closer to home: Problems with our politicians...our taxes...our schools...our gangs ...our cops...our clergy...oh and of course Angeline & Jennifer.

The problem, dear citizen, is not in our stars but in ourselves. Somehow we've come down through the ages deciding the bad stuff is the stuff that counts. The stuff we must concern ourselves with at the water cooler, over dinner and at the club. Meanwhile, much of the other stuff gets taken for granted.

Say the birds singing in grand chorales outside our morning window, the youngsters hop-scotching down our blocks, the early-day truck crews making the rest of our day possible, the veined hands of our community seniors beginning another day in which the rest of us might learn from them, the dim roar of jets overhead bringing remarkable new people and ideas into our city, and to be sure that symphony of sights and sounds from our verdant parks and boulevards and lake shore.

A thought. Each of them will still be worth talking about by lunchtime tomorrow.

THE COMING ATTRACTIONS THAT NEVER COME

2012-01-07T09:53:00.000-06:00

Hollywood and television have mastered the coming-attraction gig. Their screens explode in color and volume as they assault our senses with extraordinary images of extraordinary people, plots and products.

As for the people....the screens feature everyone from Tom Cruise scaling tall buildings to Mitt Romney drinking small town coffee to Law & Order cops swooping in for the arrest in helicopters. The folks who shoot these coming attractions are cinematic masters at editing say 90 minutes of raw footage down to the precise 30 seconds they want you to see.. I mean, when's the last time you actually saw anyone rappelling the Sears Tower, any pol once elected coming back to your corner cafe, or any actual police helicopters dropping off so many beautiful cops?

As for the plots...Hollywood remains the master magician with their coming attractions bursting in theatres in digitalized promises of: Greatest, grandest, glorious, gratifying. Promises that afterwards simply don't fit the 120 minutes you just drowsed through.

As for the products...well, I ask you, how many of those advertised cars you bought actually swept you up rugged canyon trails, roaring across steaming deserts, or screeching up to Vegas hotels to be greeted by gasping models staring at your strut?

By and large we all live lives of quiet desperation. And so it is that coming attractions -- that promise us some of the power and glamor we gave up expecting after selling our last comic book collection -- can act like the promised Balm in Gilead. Somehow, somewhere, something out there offers us something better. Just when we needed it!

Most of these coming attractions are not so much mirages. More likely they are mirrors. Mirrors held up to our deepest desires and highest hopes in an otherwise modest existence. The glass is so polished, the images so glittering, we find it hard not to respond. The thing we have to remember is that all that glitters is not gold, all the desires that beckon in our lives are not necessarily desirable.

The optimists have the right to tell us that life is a fat piece of juicy fruit just waiting to be bitten. The pessimists have the right to quote pessimists like Bertolt Brecht: "He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news." And you and I...? We have right to choose.

THE TWO DEATHS ON TV HARDEST TO WATCH

2012-01-06T09:52:00.001-06:00

To watch television is to witness thousands of deaths each year. On the streets, on the battlefronts, on the highways. However, the two most horrific deaths you'll witness tonight are the slow but inexorable deaths of Democracy and Domesticity.

Each death is a ghoulish yet subtle dance whose steps at first seem altogether familiar and innocent. Once something becomes innocent, it's harder to detect its ghoulishness.

Take Democracy....We were taught in school that its cherished liberties depend upon an active and informed citizenry. Active is easy, informed is not! Watch the day-and-nightly ways in which the citizenry out there is wowed and wooed by the latest slash-ad campaigns...big-name endorsements...smartly orchestrated rallies...especially prime-time camera-time carefully allocated by the media. Watch carefully, because what we're watching is well funded marketing of human products in the name of Democracy.

Take Domesticity...We have grown up with the assumption it-takes-a-family to make up a neighborhood, then a community, and ultimately a country. I mean, there's all that home-is-where-the-heart-is stuff from our movies and Mothers Day cards, right? Wrong! Over the years, the home is often where the family occasionally meet for dinner, in between school, jobs, games, and exotic finding-myself-experiences. Homes, such as they are in today's fast mobile culture, look more like sleeping quarters than their traditional image of character builders. Where few mothers any longer feel secure or fulfilled.

No doubt you've have heard the eloquent evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, speak of "memes." Something like the genes in biology, memes are said to be the ideas floating around in a culture like living organisms. The vector of their transmission from one person to another is language by which they leap from brain to brain.

DAVINCE CODE AT LAST DECODED

2012-01-05T09:26:00.001-06:00

Dan Brown's blockbuster book/movie raised some old yet fascinating charges about the Vatican. Just recently, Leonardo DaVinci scholars raised some old yet fascinating charges about the restoration work being conducted on his masterpieces. Is there more here than meets the eye?

I think you'll think so too.

The scholars are arguing about the smallest of details to the delicate restoration process. Rather like political scholars are with the smallest of the Iowa caucus votes. But there's a big difference! The votes in tiny Iowa are but a tiny fragment of a tiny story that will be here today and gone tomorrow. In sharp contrast, the tiny story to the squabble over these masterpieces is not only here today, but it was here yesterday and will continue to be tomorrow.

The difference...? It's between the timely and the timeless.

In our 24/7 electronic whoosh of reportage, it's easy to get caught up in what's new and what's happening. People by the millions now rush through the day with earphones plugged into their heads so they can't miss a beat or a byte. However, as you read about the devoted scholars lovingly hunched over a 500 year painting, you have the feeling the every-hour-on-the-hour reporting outside seems a bit silly in the presence of something so immortal inside.

The works of masters -- DaVinci and Rembrandt, Bach and Mozart, Shakespeare and Emerson -- have stood the test of time. Reminding us that what-has-been is often of greater importance to humanity's heart and soul than what-is-now. Just maybe the nattering crowds that spill into our streets and malls and conference rooms each day are far too concerned with the glittering tyranny of impermanence.

THE NEW CLOUD IN YOUR LIFE NAMES ZETTABYTE

2012-01-04T10:31:00.001-06:00

All kinds of clouds in our life. Storm clouds, cumulus clouds, clouds-of-dust-and-a-hearty-hi-o-Silver.

The one that now counts the most is the one you and I understand the least. That invisible global accumulation of humanity's everyday data. Data from think tanks and basement bloggers...from our billion-dollar military complexes to our secret band of hackers...from the local college campus and medical center to the international Hadron Collider in Switzerland to the IMF in Washington.

It's been estimated that the accumulated knowledge of humanity first doubled by about 1800. That mass doubled by 1900. That mass by 1950. Well, you get the staggering exponentiality of it...! By the year 2020, some of these cloud-makers estimate this permanently stored leviathan of digital information at our disposal will be 35 zettabytes.

What in God's name is a zettabyte?

Funny you should ask. A zettabyte is a 1 followed by 21 zeros. Now let me put that into a very simplistic example. When you and I hear the traffic report on our station, the rapid-fire reporter sounds something like this: "Traffic from the Loop interchange to 53 south is 40...from the Ike to I94 28... Edens at Peterson 13 to the Willow cutoff now backed up 45 from 295...reverse lanes in all directions currently closed."

What???

Not sure about you, but when that's read in 7 seconds while I'm maneuvering on the Rockford cutoff behind ten semi's, frankly I don't understand what the hell she just told me! And that, my confused computerized colleagues, is the tiniest fraction of an example of how it is beginning to feel in a world where there now exists a billion billion more clouds of information than the human brain can effectively gather... sift...interpret...understand...and [the real crunch-point] use.

Does that mean we turn off the Cloud...? We can't. Turn off our minds...? We shouldn't. Start eating our lunch everyday lazily staring up at the real clouds...? That last one has a nice feel to it. Only...!

AT LAST WE DISCOVER THE MAN BEHIND THAT CURTAIN

2012-01-03T10:44:00.000-06:00

Look, we all know there are many curtains behind which stand many surprises. Perhaps the biggest surprise -- and here I'm beating the NEW YORK TIMES to a scoop! -- is a small circle of executives who rent a locked conference room in the Plaza Hotel [room212]. These 14 men and women meet six times a year to strategize most of what 330 million Americans are feeling.

Feelings...? That's right. Feelings are the agenda; fortunes are the goal. Here's how it works.

These are the power-brokers in the feeling-business. The nationwide ventures which package, promote and project what most Americans are feeling about their lives...their jobs...their leaders...their future. Two from network television; two from the cable channels; two from Hollywood; two from the printed media; two from the blogging community; two from the theatre community; two from the sports community.

I've never attended the secret conferences, but if I told you who these 14 are, it would be easy for you to understand just how they seize and stir our deepest feelings. About our heroes & villains; dreams & fears; passions & purposes. And as go a nation's feelings, so go their votes! their purchases! their beliefs! their devotions!

We live in an age which speaks to the power of the human mind, but at the end of the day we all discover it's been our heart not our head that rules. Which is why the 14 cast ballots to determine who and what will get the next multi-million-dollar treatment. In television (hit series, news coverage, Sunday Morning interviews, guest shots on Dave & Jay)....in films (the stars and scripts) ...in headline coverage (from front page to op-eds)...on the stage (whose plays and music get financed).

The next time you support a candidate, cheer a team, love a movie, fantasize about the latest hunk and heroine... do you actually think YOU'VE discovered them? Come on, folks! They and what they represent in your life have been carefully discovered and planned months ago. In life there are no coincidences.

But, hey, that's OK. If you want to believe your feelings are authentically yours, fine. And if you want to believe my secret society is authentic, that's fine too. Take your choice....

DON'T THROW AWAY THAT 2011 CALENDAR. NOT JUST YET

2012-01-02T10:34:00.001-06:00

Time is a fragile thing. Poets, painters and physicists each try to define it. You and I get to live it. But what should we do when it's over? As in that old calendar you just took down from the kitchen wall?

The pragmatists and environmentalists among us will simply say: Dispose it. I say: Study it. Take a little sliver of 2012 time to reconsider what you and I didn't do with 2011 time. It's something like the difference between the tea drinker who throws away the brewed leaves and the one who studies them.

Here's what I see in my 2011 calendar. The days that were used for tasks, appointments, deadlines, family dinners, parties, weddings and funerals. The everyday rhythms of my life that were scheduled and most times kept. But there are other dates! I see them scattered among those now expired hours, never to be regained or re-lived again:

* The days I spent dreading the bad weather that never came
* The days I hated going to a job that now I wish I still had
* The days I canceled attending an event that I now regret missing
* The days I never got around to calling my old friend who never made it to the end of the year
* The days I failed to experience such delicious cliches as: Health is wealth
* The days I didn't have time to look at the lawns and birds and kids just outside my window
* The days I forgot to kiss the ones I love
* The days I forgot to notice how I was aging into someone not just older but different

Well now. Your 2011 calendar will have other days to it. Gone now. Never to be lived again. But this little exercise is not meant to bury your Caesars. Nor to praise them. Simply to hold them up to the light of your best reflections. Some of them may draw a smile, some a tear, many a shrug.

But if held to the light just right...2011 could very well be your very best map for traveling your 2012

I LOVE HUMANITY...IT'S THE PEOPLE I CAN'T STANDYou know how every beauty queen stands up there, fixing her crown and holding back the tears. What's th

2012-01-01T09:30:00.000-06:00

You know how every beauty queen stands up there, fixing her crown and holding back the tears. What's the first thing she wishes for? That's right: "world peace." Dumb as she makes that sound, it's really the mother of all wishes.

Which is how I feel when I look out at my world from a long shot. The sweeping fields of lush green and yellow ripening in the spring...the cobble-stone streets rambling through country hamlets...the sky-seeking towers of our great cities...throngs of happy families giggling through Disney World...caring teachers happily herding their kids through recess...little ones building sand castles...congregations praying in the pews... crowds standing with their hands on their heart at flag-led parades and games.

People en masse can be people at their best. Because you're experiencing them like a Currier & Ives or Norman Rockwell painting. Humanity! The pinnacle of the Creator's [or if you insist, Evolution's] handiwork down the eons. The one strain of planetary life which has grown and conquered all in its way.

Now here's the problem.

I can't speak for you, but when the long shot tightens, and you find yourself shoulder-and-sweat next to them, something happens to humanity. The nobility gets grainy. Standing behind humanity in an growly checkout line, I seem always to get the shopper who waits till then to take out her coupons... driving behind a serpentine stretch of rush-hour traffic, I always find the hesitant first-time driver... on planes, I wonder why the passenger next to me is without exception the largest, latest most luggaged one on board...and as for the theatre, I can bet my life that 15 minutes after it starts, the usher will be jabbing a flashlight in my face to guide the entire party of late-comers to the very damn middle of my aisle!

I want to love my fellow man; and woman too. I believe in world peace, Santa Claus, and all the Rockwell calendars in my house. I really really do. But why, why, are people so different than humanity....?

VERIZON vs THE ARAB SPRING

2011-12-31T09:19:00.001-06:00

Verizon, the world's largest phone carrier, just backed down in the face of the American version of the Arab Spring -- an instant wave of Twitter protests from unhappy customers about intended price hikes.

You wonder how the history of the world would have been different if Caesar, Charlemagne, Louis XVI. FDR and Margaret Thatcher had tried to rule during Twitter time. Of all our revolutions, today's revolt-of-the-masses may be the biggest. Even generals can't lead when the ranks behind them refuse to follow...!

I was thinking of this yesterday as I watched our intrepid mail carrier trudging through the rain. Decked in somber blue, to match the mood of his fading profession, he slogged down the streets unnoticed and ungreeted. Not like in my youth when the mail -- delivered twice a day -- was an eager event for stay at home moms and their kids. Like the milkman, the iceman, the produce guy carting his fresh vegetables.

This is not a requiem for the dead.

It is simply an older memory sharing with younger memories an ironic epiphany. As I watched him, I knew he was bringing the new ink cartridges for my computer's printer. The irony screamed out at me. Yesterday was delivering today!

As the slow, personal, one-on-one world of communication slips into an irretrievable past, the instant, impersonal, all-at-once world of communication has arrived. Speeding up our thoughts...our messages ...our information...and our next revolution. Like the rodeo riders, our generation has boldly grabbed the reins, and we're on the ride of our life.

Now you have to wonder who's in charge of this ride. The rider or the ridden...?

THE HIGHEST ADJECTIVE IN THE HUMAN LANGUAGE

2011-12-30T09:50:00.001-06:00

Have you seen today's movie and concert ads? "Joyous," "Luminous," "Extraordinary," "Exquisite." The adjectives are like the credit cards reaching ever upward from silver to gold to diamond to platinum. We live in an age desperate to be bigger, better, happier. What's going on here...?

OK, so you don't sit on a serpent-encrusted throne in ancient Egypt. And yet, just like the rest of us, you occasionally dream of leaving behind a pyramid of accomplishments. Kings and presidents construct buildings and bridges, CEOs create business empires, religions erect cathedrals, Hollywood and Television pitch superlatives.

What can you and I do?

Eventually we can make a choice. Either we keep biting at every bait, eventually finding the hook inside. Or! We can ignore the trawlers fishing for us, and instead start re-defining what's really worth biting at. Ira Gershwin's 1938 lyrics said it simply and may have said it best:

"It's very clear/ our love is here to stay/ not for a year/ but ever and a day/ the radio and the telephone/ and the movies that we know/ may just be passing fancies/ and in time may go/ but, oh my dear/ our love is here to stay/ together we're/ going a long long way/ in time the Rockies may crumble/ Gibraltar may tumble/ they're only made of clay/ but our love is here to stay."

Composer & brother George had died shortly before the song was released. It turns out Ira was writing the lyric about him. Which reminds us that love -- romantic or otherwise -- is the highest adjective of the human language. To authentically love and live for another. After all, the rest is really "only made of clay."

DO MEN ACTUALLY THINK OF SEX EVERY 7 SECONDS

2011-12-29T10:52:00.000-06:00

Here's your headline: "Men think of sex every seven seconds." Here's your facts. "Ohio State researchers report it is on average only 19 times a day."

What's the difference? The headline [ the conventional wisdom among most women and editors thinking about sex ] is a grabber, because it is deliciously negative. The facts [ less dramatic ] have less grab, because they're a tad less sensational so they make page two.

Does this suggest fiction sells better than facts? You can get an argument. However, check the latest sensational headlines. Obama has love child...! Gingrich admits 5th wife...! Iran prepares for war...! Jennifer plots Angelina murder...! Parents have small to zero effect on their children...!

Hold on.

The first four headlines were lies, but that fifth was fact-spun-by-fiction. In his National Review article, economist Bryan Caplan qualifies it: "While parent-child relationship has a substantial effect on how children feel and remember their parents. it has little or no effect on overall personality and happiness."

Negative or fictionalized reports have been humanity's baseline definition of "News" from the first stone tablet. Why? Plenty of theories. The most popular is bad news appeals to our conscious curiosity about the unusual and to our subconscious need to feel superior.

Here's a test. See how many op-ed pages compliment vs critique their subject. Count how often the sports page reports harmony vs friction on the team. Notice how the weather page loves impending doom reports vs giving short shrift to another nice day.

So here's a thought. Whenever we say "have a nice day," aren't we really thinking "hope mine is nice but it sure would be interesting if yours and the others was a little wild and woolly!"

STARTING THE NEW YEAR WITH NIETZSCHE IN YOUR MIRROR

2011-12-28T10:18:00.000-06:00

You all remember Nietzsche...! You know, from your philosophy class. He's the guy who told the world: There is no true self... Truth is rarely useful... God is dead. And while his own life ended badly, each pronouncement has outlived its author. Ready to accompany us into our new year:

* Look into the mirror and you see you, right? Nietzsche would argue that's only the bark of you which keeps shedding each new spring. "We're in a constant state of becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger." Who we are is never static, for it's a continuous act of self-creation.

Hmmm, something you may want to explain to those who are trying to love you...

* Look into that same mirror and you see the truth of your dreams, right? Nietzsche would warn that achieving those truths may prove empty victories. "Truth is rarely ever useful. Instead, it is our errors, disasters and profound misunderstandings which are more precious to us."

Aha, something to re-think as you march ambitiously into another new year...

* Nietzsche's most famous comment was that God is dead. What he was trying to bury was not a cosmic higher power as much as the Judaic-Christian version. If he had lived to see Star Trek, he might have smiled a smile of recognition.

Well now. Something which just may make both theist and atheist ruthlessly hopeful about 2012. Either that, or decide to let Nietzsche remain in your mirror while you do better things. It's our January choice. A year from now, let us know how that works out!

WHAT'S BEHIND YOUR EYES? YOU'D BE SURPRISED

2011-12-27T10:17:00.001-06:00

Every day we read some new discovery. In the vast physics of space right down to the intimate biology of us. Years ago, the author Marcel Proust put discovery into perspective: "The only true voyage of discovery would not be to visit strange lands, but to behold the universe through the eyes of another."

That, my friends, will be the most compelling yet complex Eureka! in your life. Frankly, though, there's no known way in all this world you and I will ever know it. If Proust's words struck a chord, then the rest of this will make sense. If you heard no chord, best you forget it.

The classic film "Roshomon" dramatizes Proust by letting the audience see the same event through the camera's eye of all the different people present. Something like your last Rorschach Test showed how your reality is always behind-the-eyes. While the optic nerves are processing the scene, the brain is processing the significance.

How? A crazy-quilt network of past preferences and prejudices, fantasies and fears, are instantly filtering the physical scene out there into what it means to you inside you. Lady GagGa...? She becomes anything from wonder to wild to whore to whatever deeply private conclusion your brain has stored all these years that defines: music, style, beauty, womanhood. Barack Obama...? He becomes more than what he says and does, more about what your brain has stored about Blackness, thinness, scholarship.

Additional examples...? Far too many to count, for the brains behind the eyes are doing it right now as each different brain is reading these words through the filters of its own treasure trove of experiences starting from the day it was born.

With 7 billion brains at work on this planet -- good lord, does that mean no one really knows exactly what any one else knows at an known time? It should take only your one brain to figure that out. Once you do, you may think of your tomorrow out there as Mission Impossible.

Or, if your brain is inclined toward the positive, you'll simply think of it as a Mission.

IF I GET ONE MORE "DEAR VALUED CUSTOMER" LETTER!!

2011-12-26T10:25:00.000-06:00

Every time another computer-generated letter starts with "Dear Valued Customer," you have my permission to damn well resent that computer. Especially its owners. For once again reducing you to yet another microchip of data in some vast impersonal storehouse of data pretending to know you.

I'm not contesting the computer. 91-year-old Uncle Harry is among the last bitter holdouts left on the planet. No, I'm protesting its masters' ways of manipulating my existence into some sliced-and-diced blips on their marketing screens. Which is why the world no longer bothers to look at me. Instead they ask for my drivers license, social security number, and other faceless blips of data by which they now "value" me.

No sense fighting it. It's the price we pay for the progress we've made. [George Orwell is I-told-you-soing from somewhere in that great computer-in-the-sky]. I call it the Tyranny of Reason. Once the brain -- human and now digital -- is in total charge, there is less and less room for the heart, the emotions, the intuitions, the leaps of faith, and the epiphanies of personal discovery. Lets face it -- none of that stuff computes!

And so this week we're reading the year-end summaries of the computerized research of 2011. I read about why chocolate is good for me...drinking coffee wards of depression...envy can be made useful ...white-fleshed produce defends against strokes...neutrinos can exceed the speed of light...multi-vitamins are counter-productrive...city living can drive me crazy...and alien life seems increasingly real.

Woody Allen likes to say: "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once." Trouble is, with a world full of 24/7 computers, now everything IS happening all at once. But among all the extraordinary computerized results, I see none which have to do with the heart, the emotions, the intuitions, the leaps of faith, and the epiphanies of personal discovery. Why...? Because, thank goodness, none of that stuff computes...!

THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN YOUR LIFE

2011-12-24T09:27:00.000-06:00

I realize making a claim about the most important man in your life is not easily authenticated. And yet the only man who can dare to wear the claim is the Galilean preacher of 2000 years ago. More books and music and lives and deaths have been attributed to him than any other person in Western history.

But that's not the end of our story.

In this same month that his birthday is being celebrated in churches, another preacher of sorts is being celebrated in film. The British Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep. Everyone understands Jesus preached a message of inclusion. Thatcher, as British prime minister, rejected much of the inclusionary spirit of the emerging European Union. She argued that "world orders" are artificial creations that cannot take the place of soil, blood and race. Today's fragmenting EU appears to prove some of her warnings.

Interestingly, her fears are in some ways the same fears of millions of Fundamental Christians who pore over the Bible, Nostradamus, and apocalyptic novels like the "Left Behind" series imagining the arrival of a global-uniting Anti-Christ followed by the Second Coming of Jesus.

It would seem that humanity still has a problem trusting humanity. Especially any parts thereof which are not of the same soil, blood and race. And so we persist in living in ruthless fear of anyone or anything that is not made in our own image and likeness. Be they local, regional or global.

It's a good guess -- more than a guess, a strong likelihood -- that no member of humanity can authentically experience the imperative of consensus except those few who we have honored as Astronauts and Cosmonauts. They -- unlike Thatcher, more like Jesus -- have seen humanity as it really is. A bickering but beseeching troupe of wanderers on a very small blue planet...

...who may someday say with awe what Steve Jobs did as he looked up from his deathbed: "Wow, oh wow, wow!"

SORRY BUT IT'S TRUE -- YOU'RE A PROSTITUTE TOO

2011-12-23T09:24:00.000-06:00

Our bodies aren't the only thing we can sell. There's also our minds. Despite our proud insistence about being free, we're selling our minds almost every day. And sometimes for only pennies a thought!

Consider the facts. Every day you and I scan the papers...catch the news on TV or the Net...read a book or magazine... maybe get into a discussion at the local barbershop or beauty salon. Each a perfectly free exchange of ideas, right? Maybe. Actually, in most cases we've just sold a prized piece of our mind for the last loudest idea we just read or heard.

The news from China....? What the hell do you and I really know except what some reporter has told us! The latest clash in Washington...? Admit it, we can't be sure about thousands of pages of legislation and lobbying, so we take the best-sounding opinion from the nightly news or our favorite blog! Steven Spielberg's newest film...? Mitt Romney's freshest quote...? the mayor or the school superintendent or the Broadway show playing downtown...? Before we can pronounce "first-amendment," we're paraphrasing what we just heard and claiming the idea as our own.

See how it works? We don't start the day offering up our minds for a price. Our minds simply gravitate toward the best-sounding by-passer. And then -- like the hooker on the street -- we curl up around their ideas and lead them up the stairs of our own thoughts.

Not a crime. Although very likely an unconscious calculation. Selling a little corner of my mind in exchange for an idea that I can now boast during that next golf game, cocktail hour, dinner party or chat with the boss. Getting our best ideas like this used to be called plagiarizing. Now it's simply called being informed...

SECRET TO LIFE FINALLY REVEALED

2011-12-22T11:04:00.001-06:00

The secret-to-life...? People join religions, read tea leaves, travel to Buddhist monasteries to discover it. In the end they usually find it, like Dorothy, right back home. Where it's no secret at all. Beginning with that first Christmas you didn't get what you wanted, you learned life is full of trees and holly and hope; but at the very same, it's awfully hard. It comes with no guarantees!

Albert Einstein and explorer Sir Randulf Fiennes looked at this in two slightly different ways. Einstein: "The world is a dangerous place; not because of evil people, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." Fiennes: "There's no such thing as bad weather; only inappropriate clothing."

Seems to me, each man is pointing a finger at us and at what we can accomplish while we're here. You know, like TIME's person-of-the-year ["the protester"]. Those who follow the direction of these fingers take on both the bad people and the bad weather. With their own quiet gusto. We all recognize them. They might even include us. Driving the kids to school...joining the PTA ... volunteering for community programs...voting in every election... maybe even marching or occupying or running for office.

Hard to say whether or not the activists make a difference. But they won't leave the scene without a trace! Meantime the pacifists, among or including us, opt to go with the flow. Sure, the world is crowded with bad people and bad weather conditions, but I've got enough to do to just survive it. Don't ask me to leave the sanctity of my home for the struggles of a world I can't change.

Now here's the backside to the Secret. Our world is going to keep changing whether we get involved or not. So the question becomes: Sitting here in the earned sanctity of our home at the end of another tough slog, do we pull up the drawbridge? Or do we let it down and march across?

Each adventurer comes back with a different story. But the only one that counts is our own...

IF THERE IS ONE MORE HEALTH GURU ON PBS, I KICK THE SCREEN IN

2011-12-21T10:16:00.000-06:00

The only problem with, "The truth shall make you free," is how do you define "truth" and "free?"

With 7 billion of us cramming the planet, "truth" is often 7 billion truths [see the crowds attending any miracle or political rally for disputatious details]. As to "freedom," for many this often means the right to throw a punch at anyone who gets in your way [see the faces in front of your punch for another point of view].

All right, now lets see how all this applies to our current obsession with health and wellness.

When you consider the deluge of medical advice we're drowning in day after day after day, how in the name of the American Medical Association can we decide this gluttony of "truth" is actually "freeing" us? Most people I know feel chained more than free. Chained to all these impertinent truths about our cherished calories, cholesterol, and other assorted comfort foods. Remember who first fed us these gastronomical joys. That's right: Mom! She did it with a busy stove and a loving heart. You want us to really feel free? Get off our back! We accept your relentless good will, but your "truths" have been sucking the fun out of our eating and napping for years. It must stop....!

Before you answer by saying I'm being irrational, kindly explain this. Why are most of the wakes I attend lately for the leanest wellest people I've known? Also, why are the fattest flabbiest people I know in attendance. Just asking...

ORDERING IN A RESTAURANT TELLS WHO YOU ARE

2011-12-20T09:01:00.000-06:00

Ever watch people ordering in a restaurant? A little psychodrama all its own. How they treat the server [courtesy or condescension]....what they order [lean or lavish]....what they drink [sweet or sour]. As kids we loved the sweet stuff, like sugary Cokes and Pepsies. As adults we lose some of those taste buds for the bite of beverages like coffee, beer and wine.

Why is this? Well, look, if you don't care, then watching in restaurants is no psychodrama for you.

I have an un-credentialed theory. When very young, the world sorta seems sweet, and so our appetite for the sweet. When older, well things change. Our eyes, hair, body and the way we see the world. No longer quite so sweet, our experience has toughened our tastes. The coffee and beer that once seemed so bitter, now seem to exactly match the world in which we're drinking it.

OK, I'm not saying we do this consciously. But now that it's on your conscious level, think about it. Kids wake up and tend to see the sun in the sky, the green in the land, the fun in the streets, the snow forts and games in the day. Do you or I? I don't think so! Which may be why gulping down that hot bitter black stuff seems so right.

Or.

No one has ordained that our day has bitterness encoded into it. It's still the same panorama of nature and opportunities the kids see. Maybe there's a way to re-see things. Like a-little-sugar-makes-the- medicine-go-down...how about a splash in your coffee? Or a smile at the breakfast table? Or a whistle to your walk?

Not saying any of that changes your world. But it just might change you...

EVER MISS THE SMALL PRINT? MORE THAN YOU KNOW, PAL!

2011-12-19T10:12:00.001-06:00

We live in an age of facts and stats, data and detail. Whether we want them or not. Consider the latest breathless batch: 68% dislike Christmas because of lines...28% say the US should deport all illegal immigrants...76% say the economy favors the rich...31% of children have been arrested by age 23.

Wait a minute! Are they telling us almost one third of our kids have been arrested?

Well, yes they are. They being the criminologists in the current Pediatrics Magazine. The number is significantly higher than their last study in the 1960s. At first glance this would reinforce the cranky "kids today aren't what they used to be" critics. However, then the small-print pops out. The study did not take into consideration racial or regional differences, nor did it consider how the criminal system has become more punitive in the last 50 years, nor did it factor in the enormous growth of the drug culture.

Without the small-print, the headline-numbers are supremely unhelpful. The very same way different economists and candidates use numbers for their headlines without ever qualifying the figures with the footnotes. In a rush-to-print culture, everyone with a statistic goes for the splashy headline at the expense of the real truth.

Can anything be done about these distortions? Get real!

First, you must want to do something about them. Second, you must have a citizenry who really cares for the footnotes. But here's where the truth becomes a casualty of the spin. Neither the pitchmen nor the pitched-to have time for anything more than the quick easy-to-read headline. After all, we're living in the fast lane.

And then we wonder how we got into the mess we're in! My footnotes say the odds are 50 to 1 it's just where we all want to be....

MIRACLES...? THERE HAVE BEEN FIVE IN YOUR LIFE

2011-12-18T10:36:00.000-06:00

This notion of "miracles" is open to wide-ranging and sometimes disdainful debate. I will submit my definition at the end. Until then, how else would you define these five moments in your life:

1. You are still here...! In face of the remarkable odds against a safe pregnancy, delivery and the first 18 years of life on an infectious and unpredictable planet, there is a smattering of the miraculous to what right now you're taking for granted

2. You happened inside a family...! In face of the terrible numbers of parentless and/or homeless children in the world, this simple fact you simply assume is envied by millions

3. You are thinking about this...! That you can think is in itself a remarkable achievement of a healthy anatomy coupled with a healthy diet of nutritious parents, teachers and community

4. You have feelings about this...! Human emotions are what gives heart to the head, and to posses them with ample good will is what distinguishes you from that jungle, forever nipping at the borders of civilization

5. You have known courage in your life...! The capacity to smile Yes and to roar No in those moments of serious decision up until now, has made now possible

I'm not sure if by now you've considered terms other than "miracle" for these five. I'm quite sure the empirical-minded among you have. Bu quite frankly I can't think of a single one that I would feel content taking with me into my dreams tonight. Or any other night I am still among the lucky living...

THERE REALLY IS LIFE AFTER CHRISTMAS

2011-12-17T08:46:00.001-06:00

It's hard to believe during the frantic December buildup, but there really is life after Christmas. A little dimmer and darker, but weary adults may welcome it as cozier and calmer. We might also consider it as a blessed release from the pressure of all those chirpy Hallmark cards and TV specials that have been insisting we be as hysterically joyous as they are. I mean, really folks, no one can be that happy.

But now, what to do? How do we manage the post-celebratory winter days that loom ahead?

We're told -- by those same cards and specials -- if I dream it I can do it. All right, I invite my fellow Christmas survivors to dream with me an entirely new season for the days after Christmas. No more cards! no more specials! no more lines! no more gifts! and most important no more snow! Really, what possible use can the adult find for even one more inch of cold icy snow after Santa has gone...?

This then shall be our dream. During the days, from December 26 to March 21, Chicagoland will henceforth experience an entirely new fifth season. A season in which adults need not worry about the traditional blizzards, ice-sheeted roadways and frozen water lines. A season -- no longer Winter and not quite Spring -- in which the temperatures do not drop below 40 and the skies change only from sunny blue to sunnier blue. I don't exactly have a name for my new season, but it sure would be a dream.

Oh wait.

That would mean no more snow drifts, no more snow days, no more snowmen. That can't be right! Not even for us winter-weary adults! I think I have a whole new respect for the Creator who thought up these seasons! Back to the drawing-board of my dreams....

MY GHOSTS FROM CHRISTMAS PAST BUT NOT GONE

2011-12-16T09:40:00.000-06:00

Unlike Scrooge, my ghosts of Christmas past are not so much frightening as fulfilling. They visit every December, recalling those harsh but often heroic days of the Great Depression and World War II. For me they mostly happened in a weathertight red-brick bungalow tucked inside the westside of Chicago.

The neighbors -- you knew them by their first name in backyard chats and during when-in-need visits -- were pretty much an ethnic-religious cross section of a nation which had not yet learned we were what the campuses now teach as a "multi-cultural" society, each culture requiring its very own distinct status.

The mail carriers -- rather than being let go, arrived twice a day -- were part of that once-upon-a-time trilogy. The newspapers, the radio and letters. We got our news a little more slowly, but this way a little more digestibly. I jealously remember how Mom would put the morning edition away saying, "The news can wait, at least until after lunch."

The community grandees -- the local pastor, teacher, cop, alderman -- had not yet become the distant animatronic figures we see debating on our aggro cable networks. They were taught they were part of the cultural glue of a neighborhood. Flawed or not, they visited us in our homes as they took their roles more flesh-to-flesh seriously.

The family -- oh my, every Christmas was Mom's chance to gather them together from far, wide and even quarrelsome -- to an Italian-American dinner for 30. There had been loving days devoted to the planning, preparation and presentation of a menu that my aging tummy can now only fantasize about. And yet, it was never so much about the food -- or even the glistening decorations and the gaggle of gifts -- but about the insistent devotion to a dogged belief. Being together -- as a family, as a community, as a nation -- really really mattered.

My ghosts never tell me the past was better. They do telI me what has gone before is not gone. Rather it has made what-is more possible, and what-will-be more promising. I have a good friend, now a good many miles and years away, who once shared this same little neighborhood of long ago togetherness. He recently remembered those days with these words: "My face is fixed in a rictus of benevolence...."

Gene, as one of my living ghosts, I couldn't have said it any better!

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT MEN AND WOMEN!

2011-12-15T10:46:00.001-06:00

Right now the enormous Hadron Collider in Switzerland is on the brink of discovering the long-sought "Higgs Particle." Physicists can explain the details. It is left to romantics to explain the implications...!

If this deepest layer of cosmic reality can be documented in these tests, physicist Peter Higgs' theory will be proven. Namely, there is no such thing as nothingness, because even in what we call emptiness there exists unseen fields of resistance. Which makes the ideal metaphor for the tortuous history of women throughout time. You see, fellas, as it turns out, the apparent "nothingness" of women during most of recorded history is not true. While the men who wrote history dismissed them as "nothing," actually they were exerting an unseen kind of "resistance" all through the affairs of men.

Despite the reluctant male ego, facts are facts.

Need we point to the obvious and history-altering role of the female, starting right with Eve. The plot thickens throughout the years with the likes of Sarah, Helen of Troy, Bathsheba, Delilah, Mary Magdalene, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Marie Antoinette, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mata Harri, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton. [Okay, try to forget Michelle Bachmann]. Actually, before the male of the species was deemed so dominant, there were more goddesses than gods in our pre-history. Goddesses, for as everyone realized, all life comes not from the male but the female.

Exactly how men stole women's thunder is not clear. Perhaps because few men have been willing to document the real story. But documents and dates aside, my stubborn brothers, their recorded "nothingness" stands out as one enormous lie. For without the silent service and suffering of billions of women, billions of men would not have achieved the successes and the civilizations to which they continue to lay exclusive claim.

You know the old joke -- behind every successful man there is an exhausted woman? Time to fess up, fellas. There's not a doubt in my mind! in my life! in my bank account! in my children! Think about it. It's not giving anything up. It's simply discovering what's been there all along. Discovering this so-called "nothingness" to women's role over the centuries is nothing but a genetic decision that brute strength somehow trumps sheer endurance....

YOU WON'T BELIEVE THE NEW CHRISTMAS WARS

2011-12-14T10:10:00.001-06:00

A suburban New York school teacher faces disciplinary action for telling her second grade students there is no Santa Claus...! In a recent survey of Santa Claus denying adults, 67% report they hate the holiday because it means lines, putting on weight, and getting into debt...!

A very long time ago in a faraway land called the United States, Christmas was a quiet family affair in virtually every household. As Dickens reports in his own England, families either kept the day with joy or they simply bah-humbugged it away. Not many were waging wars over it.

Behold 2011 -- not choirs of angels in the heavens, but legions of lawyers in the courts.

Their anger is not so much based on religious principles -- they are not speaking for Judaism or Islam -- but rather on constitutional principles. Principles quite separate from the flesh-and-blood realities of December family life. More with the fleshless-and-bloodless theories of Liberty. You know that stirring word everyone uses, but which rarely puts food in the mouths or smiles on the faces of any children.

Why then do these "causes" seek a thin kind of justice which seems to serve no purpose for any families I know? I believe this is where the battle cry comes in: "It's the principle of the thing!" A word I have yet to find thrilling the heart of any second grader I've met. [In exquisite irony, it was my own second grade when that little monster Andy freed me from my unprincipled belief in Santa!]

And yet, there may still be something to be said for my constitutional liberty to dismiss the jolly old fella and all the sacredness that goes with it. I hear the Supreme Court has banned any more Nativity Scenes in the nation's capitol. They can't find Three Wise Men anywhere in town....

NOW FOR ALL THOSE MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS IN YOUR LIFE

2011-12-13T10:25:00.000-06:00

So we were watching this old B&W film about the Civil War which made me think of historian Hugh Trevor-Roper: "History is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened." Perhaps just like our own personal histories in which we didn't get the girl or guy we originally hoped for....had a boy instead of a girl...took the job with a company that soon tanked... moved to a city which later went bankrupt.

For 40 years I taught history as it happened. Watching this old MGM film, I wondered if instead I should have taught it a little differently. Not just as it happened! not just as it might have happened! but as it SHOULD have happened!

It was a fictionalized scene soon after the assassination of Lincoln. The Confederacy-hating Senator Thaddeus Stevens (played by a snarly Lionel Barrymore) comes to the White House one stormy night just in time to see President Andrew Johnson (played by a noble Van Heflin) sign a presidential proclamation pardoning every member of the defeated Confederacy. From Jefferson Davis to General Robert E Lee to anyone who carried a gun against the Union. A president who sought to carry out Lincoln's dream of reconciliation versus a bloc of senators bent on political revenge.

In the classroom you TEACH the students the Proclamation. In the movie the students FEEL the enormous national passions at work. The raging feuds between North & South, between whites & blacks, between compassion & punishment. All captured in one brief scene, based on the facts but concocted by a studio scriptwriter. And yet, the lessons revealed inside those foolish feuds were never more real. Never more applicable to our own times. Never more dramatically instructive for a 2011 audience about to commit some of the very same political madness as in 1865.

Nothing wrong with the textbooks. Or the facts. But had I the chance again to teach the Civil War to students today -- and to their parents -- I'd damn likely suggest they watch a few of these overly-sentimentalized films from the Thirties and the Forties. When the Hollywood studio system was not only out to make a buck. It was also ought to make a point.

They were "teaching" our history not exactly as it happened. Not exactly as it might have happened. But in some ways, as it should have happened. As we should understand it, if we are to draw from our national past what we need to best insure our national future.

I now stand ready to debate the point with my fact-and-quote-loaded fellow educators. Reminding them perhaps of just how many times they themselves were in scenes like this one during their own lives...

NATURE VS NURTURE AND THE WINNER IS

2011-12-12T11:01:00.000-06:00

There is the news and then there is the newsworthy. The difference usually jumps out at you:

* Newsweek Magazine just featured Angeline Jolie "The World's Most Beautiful Woman"
* Men's Health Magazine trumped that by featuring arch-rival-in-love Jennifer Aniston as "The Sexiest Woman of All Time"

* Gallup reported the average American male weighs 190 pounds, up from 180 in 1990; the average female weighs 160, up from 142
* University of Virginia trumped that by reporting lean physiques may be harmful right after surgery, showing a higher incidence of death among those patients whose BMI's were less than 23

* In the Big 12 College Football Conference, the top academic achiever (Texas Tech) graduates only 66% of its players
* Among the remaining 65 colleges with major football programs, only three (Northwestern, Boston College and Duke) graduate 90% or more

* H. L. Mencken famously wrote: "If given a choice between security and freedom, the average citizen will always choose security."
* When Charlie Brown asked Lucy to explain security, she famously yelled back: "Security, you dummy, is falling asleep in the back seat of your father's car, and waking up all tucked inside your own bed." She then added her clincher: "Something you will never ever have again!"

Tucked inside each of these thoughts is that old Nature vs Nurture debate. Harvard professor of Sociology and Medicine Nicholas Christakis recently tried to put the silver stake into the heart of this arguable dichotomy: "Things we once thought were entirely determined by culture -- like our choice of friends or our voting patterns -- turn out to have deep evolutionary roots." He cites studies showing we seek out friends who have the same genetic variants that we have. But he adds: "Conversely we also know that early social experiences -- like education, poverty, malnutrition and child abuse -- can modify the expression of our evolved genes."

He concludes, as do many today, it's time to accept the reality that "humans are not separate from the natural world...and we do have an intrinsic biology that could play a role in human affairs." A conclusion which surely reinforces today's existentialism that we function much like the rest of planetary matter. As to the ancient-medieval notion that we are different than, greater than, more destined than the rest...?

It seems to have faded under the current insistence that really we are: No more than the rest. Which makes you and I what?? Apparently something less than I believed at the start of this.

YOU DON'T GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION

2011-12-11T09:52:00.000-06:00

In a world cluttered with prized possessions like our homes, cars, TVs, computers, and 101 increasingly exotic digital baubles, have you ever calculated your most important possession....? Think about it. More than likely it's your image. That public perception of you which tends to click into place the minute you walk into a room. An elusive thing -- not so much learned as earned -- it has something to do with the rhythm of your body, the physiology of your face, the sound and substance of your voice. You may have planned one kind of entrance, but projected another far closer to the truth of you.

What's true of us is also true of a nation.

If you had to find the image that best projects who and what we are, what comes to mind? In the 19th C it might have been the trail-breaking hunter, cowboy, or farmer taking on the endless treks of continental frontier. In the 20th C the shirt-sleeved factory worker, white-coated innovator, or helmeted GI. Here in our own century, we have the obligatory end-of-year summations like TIME MAGAZINE's person-of-the- year. [I'm guessing it will be Steve Jobs].

Meanwhile, back in our First City, NEW YORK MAGAZINE just published its annual the-year-in-culture edition. Scanning the faces they've selected, there's almost no one with whom I'd liked spending a weekend or who strikes me as representing we 330 million Americans circa 2011. But then that's someone from the Second City talking.

To see who they are, you first have to page your way through the pre-requisite ads from Bergdorf- Goodman, Gucci and Rolex featuring some of the gauntest, most androgynous, dead-staring beings I've never had the pleasure of encountering on any of the real-world streets of my country. But then, starting on page 60, we meet those Americans of whom -- at least New York -- is most proud.

I have no right to judge, but I'd love you to do so. To pluck out those fellow Americans who you consider the most representative image of the "exceptionalism" so many of us see in us. God knows there are scores of exceptional Americans who have changed their world. But where are they here among the likes here of: Amy Poehler, Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Simon Cowell. Claire Dane, Damon Wayne Jr, Snooki, Kenrick Lamar, Katie Stelmanis, Laura Marling, Adele, Claire Mussid, Mario Battali, Christian Marclay, Kristen Wiig and Ashton Kutcher?

I bear these cultural icons no grudge. I just don't know one who I could feel represents what is American about America. Oh wait! There in the upper left background of the front cover is an image that for me leaps off the page. A smallish, stuttering, self-proclaimed neurotic: Woody Allen. I'm not especially small or stuttering, but neurotic I can understand...!

To weigh this wispish American's body of work -- from stand-up comedy to stand-out cinema -- is for me to discover an image which may come closest to our pre-dispossed sense of exceptionalism in these times. But then I'm not exceptional enough to be taken that exceptionally serious.

YOUR KISS-- FINALLY THE TRUTH IS OUT!

2011-12-10T15:00:00.000-06:00

Lets face it, kissing is taken for granted. You know, a kiss is a kiss. Only that's not true. The act and the art of kissing has evolved over the centuries with splendidly accidental imagination. Ranging from primal to poetic to pornographic.

On the poetic side, there've been kisses on the ears, the eyes, the nose, the tummy and the toes. Getting to the lips was a relatively late arrival. But then, even that was destined to evolve. From the proper Victorian touch-on-the-mouth, to today's ravenous swallow-of-the-mouth. However, truth be told, what you may consider your own patented moves are mostly learned habits from George Clooney and Cameron Diaz. Be honest. We're programmed by whatever is the current culture. [A quick caveat: explaining this fact will serve no good purpose at the time].

Putting these basic physical factors aside, there are also the complex social factors involved. The act may be the same, but who you're acting upon makes all the difference. You don't kiss Mom, sister Betty, your prom date, your bride, your boss's wife and your kids the same way. [If you do, well, this is not for you; and, quite honestly, you're not for me].

I don't mean to over-study the kiss here, as researchers seem to do lately with everything from who we kiss to when we kiss to which evolved gene pool is motivating the kiss in the first place. Research like that has its place in the eternal passion to know. And yet, when it comes to dissecting every mystery of life into a controlled-study-group on some nationally regarded campus -- I'm stubbornly inclined not to want to know "the explanations" to everything I do.

Centuries ago Lao Tzu may have felt the same way. I wish we could have had a cup of tea together while we mused over his words: "Stop thinking, and so end your problems...."

YOUR CALL IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US

2011-12-09T10:41:00.001-06:00

That annoyingly androgynous reassurance "your call is very important to us" must stop! So must that digital shaman lurking inside my computer who insolently freezes me in place with an abrupt "logging off!" After childhood years of taking orders from parents, teachers, crossing-guards and little neighborhood thugs, I had foolishly assumed I was free at last.

Such was not to be. Or have you noticed too?

Instead of actual barbarians, I now live in the control of virtual barbarians. Desktops, smart-phones, banking accounts, billing accounts, airline ticketing. Each, by the way, we were told by Silcon Valley would be working for US.

Just when I'd given up any pretense of being master of my own electronic fate, the blue-jeaned wizards out there have begun plotting to replace smart-phones with smart-lens. Oh, you're no longer surprised at anything either? Researchers at the University of Washington have been experimenting with tiny antennas, miniature circuits, and LEDs inside lens for rabbits. What has apparently worked for Thumper is now planned for us. Moving us one giant step closer to the time "we'll have full-fledged streaming in our contact lens."

Wait a minute....!

If someone in the backseat of your car offers you a glitzy new widget that can triple your highway speed, don't you scan the unpredictable climbs and curves ahead before saying Yes? OK, let me correct that. Some of us would. Probably not the young, the adventurous, the seekers, the boundary-breakers. They're likely to remind the rest of us how all through history the cautious hedged their bets. With fire... the wheel... Galileo's telescope...Gutenberg's printing press...Marconi's radio...Salk's vaccine...and Steve Jobs' Mac.

Count me cautious.

Among the many important civilizational shifts that have occurred in our Western World over the last 500 years, few are any more profound than the ascent of science & technology. Their works have changed our world for the better, faster in these five centuries than happened in the previous fifty! But thereby inviting this question from the front seat: Why? Faster civilizations like faster cars are obliged to understand why dazzling innovation actually fits into and serves our best purposes?

Lets put it this way. The wizards should be challenged to share their laboratories with the watchdogs. Those watchdogs otherwise known as philosophers, theologians, poets and worriers who can't help asking at each new dazzle: Why are we doing this...?

WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH ALL THESE DOTS!

2011-12-08T10:12:00.001-06:00

Connecting-the-dots has become a reliable part of the English lexicon. But as it leaches into everyday conversation, we may miss its most important implication. Namely, if our cities, nations and planet DON'T connect their dots, the consequences will be anywhere from dicey to disastrous:

* Cities from Chicago to Cairo to Kabul teem with millions of disparate populations. These dots of humanity tend to cluster tribally within their sprawling metropolises. Blacks & Whites...Muslims & Coptics...Shiite & Sunni. You rarely dare cross into the wrong neighborhoods. Somehow, though, the more enlightened mayors use those cultural connections which help hold these populations together. From welcoming parks and food festivals to sports stadiums and pop concerts.

* Nations too are increasingly more diverse, as a global economy shifts and shoves millions from poor countries to richer ones. Even the United States, which has always prided itself with its egalitarian E Pluribus Unum, has been rendered into Red and Blue states whose value systems fiercely clash. Try moving from Birmingham to New York City; DesMoines to Miami; Boston to Austin. You feel like you need a passport. Somehow, though, we occasionally stumble across a surprising leader whose Americanism connects the regions together. If only for a time. FDR's new deal, Kennedy's new frontier, and Reagan's shining-city-on-a-hill.

* This hunk of twirling rock has only recently been seen for what it is. Our cameras and space shuttles have at long last revealed the indisputable reality: We are a planet, among billions, whose make-up consists of 7 billion squirming dots. The only way this thing is going to keep spinning on course is if we learn what connects us is the only thing that can save us: cooperation. Which is precisely why we are called the UNITED States of America, Europe has formed a UNION of countries, even the feuding Arabs have formed a LEAGUE.

But here's the problem, my fellow dots. Race! Blood! Soil! have forever been the markers of exclusivity among us. The battlecry bellowed by the sick of mind who preach "Us Not Them!" They wear arm bands of intolerance whether they be the Flag, the Cross, or the Swastika. And in their foolish fears they can't see what they are preaching will scatter the dots thereby destroying what's left of the planet.

I suspect most leaders dare to harbor the dream that they're the one....! Not only to connect but to hold our dots together. But I'll be damned if most of us squirming dots just won't believe them. And even if we did, wouldn't follow them. We've just always had this psychotic thing about Me. Never Them.

WHAT "IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE" ANGEL WOULD FIND TODAY

2011-12-07T09:39:00.000-06:00

My fellow Sicilian sentimentalist, Frank Capra, made a sentimental classic when he made "It's A Wonderful Life" back in 1946. Remember that opening scene? The starry heavens looking down upon a world full of anxious voices, pleading and praying for something they desperately needed.

Were the cheery-cheeked Clarence to come down now, he'd find a very different America.

Oh, we're still pleading and praying. But not so much from a society of war-weary want, as one of shelf-filled plenty. Have you ever checked your bountiful supermarkets. Dozens of cuts of meat ....scores of fresh vegetables....dozens [count them!] of different toothpastes, deodorants, shampoos and nail polish. It's a crazy consumer paradise down here.

Here's the point.

Back then, Clarence was on a mission to save a life. Today, his mission might be to save a society. A society which, despite its currant anguish and angst, is filled to over-flowing with consumer gratifications of every little and large kind. When you're neck-deep in gratifications, it's often hard to still see that beach from where you began. That national shoreline which initially defined who and what and where you were in this ocean of plenty.

Currently there are waves of discontent and outright anger. About what...? Strangely about some of the best, most humane things we've ever done as a country. You know, those government lifeguards assigned to our protection. Agencies for creating intestate highways... regulating milk and meat deliveries...screening drugs....guarding our borders....monitoring our banks...not to mention two of the most compassionate national efforts in our history: Social Security and Medicare.

I have access to both. If you don't, you too have been assured some kind of access. But here's what might drive Clarence wacky. Sinking deeper in an ocean of plenty, we're actually arguing among ourselves about the "dangers and evils" to these time-tested lifeguards. Some of us point to their flaws...their incompetence... mostly their "unsustainable costs."

Lets grant those grievances. After all, no federal lifeguard could ever be as wondrously economic and efficient as rugged-individualist me!. Still, come the next wave or tsunami in our lives and those lifeguards -- deficient, defective and un-American as they may seem -- will be the first ones we call for

Whatever they cost...

FOUR WAYS TO GET OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING

2011-12-06T09:55:00.001-06:00

A recent study in Britain reached an audacious counter-intuitive conclusion. Men now spend more time in personal grooming and clothing each day than women [81 minutes to 75]. I, no metro-male, seriously doubt this. However, if the world's newest elite [AKA, statisticians] have so spoken, I suppose we're obliged to take them almost as seriously as they take themselves.

So, how best can we -- male and female alike -- greet our new day each morning? Drawing upon my own 80-year longitudinal study, I've reduced our options to my 4-Gs:

* GREGARIOUS: We can tear back the covers, bubble out of bed, and breathe deeply before our open bedroom window to greet our world and our fellow humanity with all the good cheer of a Mother Terese grafted on to a Justin Bieber. An unlikely grafting to be sure, but it does capture the annoying giddy goodyness of our world's if-I-can-dream-it-I-can-do-it legions

* GUARDED: We can peer cautiously out of the covers, squinting at the challenges of a new day, while methodically cleansing and arming ourselves for what we know are it's gladiatorial skirmishes. Fortunately we can energize ourselves with the memory of past victories, in the hope we will once more survive the arena

* GRIM: We can pull up the covers for another few minutes of cocooned safety. Deep inside those soft dark folds, we can pretend for a moment the arena will not be there this day. That our fellow combatants will uncharacteristically come out brandishing smiles not swords. You doubt it. And so it is, as in the days of ancient Rome, you will stand there and utter the same words: "We who are about to die, salute you..."

* GRATEFUL: Then there are those of us who will actually be checking the covers. To see if they're still a blanket and not a shroud. For you see, children, at a certain point in your own longitudinal study, your first emotion will be: "OMG, I'm still here. I'm still on this side of the grass!" As this reality seeps in, you gradually come to the conclusion: "I've got one more chance not to screw this up...!"

Ready...! Set...! Go....!

THE BEAST IN THE PARK THE NIGHT BOCELLI AND BENNETT SAN G G

2011-12-05T10:19:00.000-06:00

It was a great performance in NY's Central Park this month where Andrea Bocelli, Tony Bennett, and Celine Dion belted out their music for the adoring crowd. But there was a beast in that crowd ironically constructed from out of the same international humanity that made this performance so spectacular. On stage was a unique concentration of talent from Italy, Canada, Japan, and half the states in the US. A brilliant amalgamation of MUSICAL talent.

The metaphorical beast to which I refer is the equally brilliant amalgamations of FINANCIAL talent that have been formed in our time. Formed in the complex constructs of international banks, financial houses, hedge funds, monetary systems, and secretly assorted concentrations of power unlike anything in humanity's history. These financial artists come from every corner of the world, carrying portfolios so vast they rival the GNPs of half the nations of he world.

The appellation "beast" calls for some clarification.

Free enterprise economies cherish and celebrate a free marketplace in which the fittest can survive and the weakest can hopefully go away. But in time, the fittest become the fewest, and the fewest concentrate their power in ways whereby freedom is pretty much limited to those high rollers who know the game. Better yet who can game the game. It's been this way from the days of tribes to kingdoms to empires. In this respect, Darwin was dead right!

The bestiality enters our plot when these complex concentrations of financial power grow beyond the regulation -- even the understanding -- of the citizens and the governments they are supposedly servicing. To put it another way, check virtually every modern bubble and bust, war and victory, recession and depression over the last 500 years.

Some beasts should be killed. Others we try to tame and saddle. Saddle as in "regulate." However, when the beast is great enough, it can defy saddles in the name of freedom. And so it is today. For as thousands thrilled that night to Bocelli, Bennett and Dion, few among them were thinking of the beast in their lives.

The ones who were, huddled a few miles away occupying Wall Street in another of history's protests. A protest destined to become one of two tings: A footnote or a revolution. In the meantime, God bless our music more than our money....

THEN THERE'S THE DAY ALL THE CLOCKS STOP

2011-12-04T09:31:00.000-06:00

From the distant days of sundials to our days of atomic clocks, we have always been a species insistent on knowing the time. Animals and farmers can sense it; the rest of us demand to control it. If there's any doubt, check the number of clocks and watches and smart-phones in your life.

The scenario you and I live in right now is totally dependent on being timely. Getting the news... tracking the markets...having the latest poll results...being first to own this or sell that or have early access to the medical research. Like the frenetic rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland," we are frenetically driven by the watches we wear.

And yet.

There have been -- or surely will be -- those days when your clocks all stop. Not because they're not ticking, but because their ticking doesn't make much difference anymore. We didn't need Einstein to prove time is relative, for it's often relative not to the spin of the planet but rather to the spin of events

How many many times, time for us freezes in its tracks. When you're a child waiting for Christmas morning...a lover waiting for them to call....an applicant waiting for a reply...a patient waiting for the test results....a general waiting to hear from the front...a president pacing the Oval Office for word...a widow or widower waiting for this nightmare to be over.

I've watched and worked for those masters-of-the-universe whose decisions and victories are shaped by the way they've appropriated time to their exact purposes. Acquiring the stock, closing the deal, settling the case, getting the votes. Dazzling! I've not watched them when they are away from the levers of power, caught instead by the limits of the stopped clocks in their lives. However, they are as human as I, and so I know these things to be true.

I hear the honey-voiced songstress of my youth, Doris Day, has come out with her first album in 18 years. Among her countless song hits was the award-winning Que Sera Sera (what will be will be). My Italian Grandmother hummed that message to me years before Doris did. I didn't really get it when Grandma hummed it. Nor when Doris sang it.

That was then! This is now! By now, I hope you too have learned its timeless wisdom. After all, the time may be shorter than you're figuring.

WOULD YOU KNOW HOW TO SWIM FOR YOUR LIFE?

2011-12-03T08:53:00.001-06:00

You've heard about the first mate on the Titanic who was last seen re-arranging the deck chairs...! Pretty good image of large swatches of our population right now. The ship may be going down, but by god they're going to go down paying attention to what counts. How they look, dress, meet for lunch, invest in the markets and get the best seats on the aisle.

I don't know how you see things from here, but when the ship's caught in a perfect storm and the crew can only argue among themselves about what to do, it's not really the best time for self indulgence. Squeezing some pleasure out of life is fine; but saving that life is even finer. And yet right now you'd think millions of us on the ship had no higher priority than ourselves (see BMWs, upscale restaurants, Facebook & Twitter chatter, home shopping channels and reality shows for self indulgent details).

Maybe it's the flight-not-fight in us like that first mate. The storm is too big and the ship too small, so maybe all we can do is what the ship orchestra did that night of terrors: Play the music until there was no more ship.

Both as individuals and as a nation we still thrill to the echoes of our frontier mythology; and surely to the roar of today's corporate and military heroes. We even say we'd follow those same paths of glory too if only some someone would lead us. But it's not clear that we -- so caught up in our own personal problems and pursuits -- would really know a hero if we saw one. Nor would really know how to make the commitment needed to follow an authentic hero.

Fast-food America to the rescue!

OK, so the waves are growing higher, but what about this for an idea. Why not bigger burgers? That's not a joke. At least so reports my Alma Mater Northwestern University. "Studies show the reason fast-food chains are lately selling so many gargantuan burgers, fries, and sodas is that supersizing is an easy way for some people to feel powerful and important." Professor Derek Rucker puts it this way: "Jumbo portions may be a relatively cheap way for people who feel helpless to get a momentary catharsis."

Catharses in times of crisis? Well, it's happened before. In fact all through history on other troubled ships of state. The passengers suddenly living faster, laughing louder and eating more even in the eye of the storm. Only....? Only could it be that in our case fast-food America is serving us bigger portions of comfort food just when we may need to stay lean and strong for the swim ahead...?

WHEN DO YOU PULL THE PLUG?

2011-12-02T09:40:00.001-06:00

It's the best time of year to figure out exactly how young or old you really are. When you're young, the holidays are a wonder...when you're old, they're a job...when you're really old, they're a dread.

The dread comes in various dark flavors. Too much pressure, too few days, too many memories, too little time left in your life. My, how you'd like to feel the giggly Christmas Tree feelings you once did, for you remember Decembers as a tasty menu of emotional treats all month long. And just to prove that's not a silly memory, you can still see it and hear it in the little ones around you.

And why not!

They needn't bother reading the latest Medicare legislation, wondering how it will affect them. Nor do they have to study the latest reports on why "keeping everyone alive is an unsustainable national expense." Unlike health plans in other countries, Medicare is not permitted to factor in the price of the medical services. Only the benefits of the health services. [Talk about "evil big government" daring to interfere with our lives by being so damn humane!]

Humane or absurd, this fact has now become the eye of the budget storm over Medicare. Approximately 45 million Americans are covered at a cost to taxpayers of almost $500 billion every year. The math is simple, folks. If you're over 65, you're anxious to protect it. If you're under, well you pretty much see Medicare as your-burden-at-their-benefit!

So you can tally and tidy up all the statistics you want, but what determine your vote will not be the pure numbers. It will be your current age. Young...? Disease and death have no meaning. Old...? Those are someone else's problems you're paying for. Really old...? Now it's no longer a political debate, it's a life-and-death debate.

Health centers are jammed with young bodies sweating hard to stay young. Hospitals are jammed with older bodies striving to stay alive. In the meantime, "evil big government" has provided the best bridge between these two goals. Now then....who among us wants to throw the first stone?

THE BIGGEST MAGIC IN YOUR LIFE IS SOETHING SMALL AND SOFT

2011-12-01T09:36:00.000-06:00

First of all, not everyone believes in magic. Magic is seeing something that's not there; mystery is not seeing something that is there. Perhaps, then, I should call my subject: Mystery. The mystery of our nighttime pillow.

OK, I realize of all the great and grand objects in your world, your pillow seems fairly insignificant. But I protest. Firm or plump, feather or down, that small, taken-for-granted pillow waiting on your bed right now represents a cunning invitation into an entire web of felicitous possibilities.

If you're like me -- that's not necessarily a recommendation, you understand! -- when I got up this morning I reminded my pillows I'd be seeing them again in about 16 hours. Why such affection? such anticipation? I gratefully grant each dawning day is an invitation all its own. But think about it. It can only invite us to a confined world of routine. Washing...breakfasting... commuting ... working ... returning...a few hours of after-dinner diversions...then start the whole thing all over again.

This is absolutely not to demean our daily lives, family and friends. I mean this is it, folks, this is what life is...! However, doesn't everyone dream a little about what life COULD BE...? Daydreams or night dreams, the mind races with extraordinary possibilities. Breakthrough innovations, dramatic cures, soaring artistic creations, crowd cheering athletic feats, plus all the accompanying celebrity.

To the cynic -- Walter Mitty rubbish. To the romantic -- Awards Ceremony visions. Either way, our pillow is our path. That modest magic carpet upon which our minds can travel and soar to the highest of heights and the dearest of dreams. Not only forward into the future but backward among the accumulated delights of our child-hoods and green-years. The mind, you see, is a spectacular computer storing and projecting a thousand thousand scenarios. Each an energy source that can fuel our lives as they hurtle us onward.

So.

From one pillow aficionado to another, my recommendation is you show yours a little more respect this night. Magic, mystery, or simply mental magnitude, it's one of your freest and finest gifts.

WHEN'S THE LAST TIME YOU THREW A SNOWBALL?

2011-11-30T10:00:00.001-06:00

Pop-quiz for anyone over 30,,,! When's the last time you flew a kite in spring, climbed a tree in summer, picked apples in fall, and threw a snowball in winter?

Chances are, the older [and so much more adult] we become, the less time we have for such childish diversions. We are reminded of St Paul: "Now that I am a man I have put away the things of a child." And while I sure wouldn't want to arm-wrestle Paul in any theological debate, I can't quite swallow his wisdom whole.

In my advanced years, the way I see childhood is not something to put away; but something to build from. When all's said and done, our childhood just may have been the best we ever were. Not in maturity and accomplishments; but in innocence and aspirations. Generally our values were good, our actions proper, and our dreams mostly about being and doing great and wonderful things with our lives.

By now -- older in body, wiser in mind, and guarded in heart -- we're less likely to fly kites and start snowball fights. You know, there's that act-your-age thing from mom and your teachers and your bosses. Don't want to appear foolish. And yet, perhaps the most grievous foolishness of our adulthood is letting loose of that gossamer belief that the world is as beautiful as it is big, that people out there are as good as the family in here.

Seems to me the more we armor ourselves with the suspicions and skills of adulthood, the less we are that wholesome happy kid believing nothing can hurt you, no one is your enemy, and life is forever. Silly...? sentimental...? sappy...? Damn right! But my didn't life feel so much nicer.

Remembering and re-channelling those long lost memories doesn't have to mean dropping all your hard-earned armor. But it does mean getting in touch with the you you once were. And who enjoyed being you every morning you woke up.

Snowball fight, anyone...?

ANXIETY...?THIS WEEK'S "TIME" HAS YOUR ANSWER

2011-11-29T09:36:00.002-06:00

It's considered cool to live-in-the-moment. But wait a minute! Exactly what is this moment in history? What is this culture we call The West? The books say it's the intellectual and artistic tastes of the moment. OK, but what do you say?

While you're thinking, let me presume my own answer. Right now we're living in a culture which has increasingly decided we're what our neurobiology is. In other words, the new holy book is not the Bible, the Talmud or even Freud. It's Charles Darwin.

No denying Charlie his great due. So much of what we are is the everyday consequences of our evolved brain lobes, cells and genes. And if you still doubt it, the current issue of TIME has now made it official for the mass reading public. In six smartly illustrated pages. it makes the case for how emotional drives like human anxiety can be entirely traced to their neurobiological components.

Look -- nothing's wrong with neurobiology. It's advancing our knowledge and our health every new day. And yet, most great advances bring with them some ironic backlash. Like the nuclear scientists brought us not only great energy but also terrible weapons, neurobiological scientists are bringing us not only great medical advances but also a culture in which we're becoming little more than what our brain circuitry and genetic codes are.

Evolutionists smile: It's been a long time growing up and at last casting off from our ancient moorings to gods and spirits. As they put is: We're really all just part of this one planetary mass of evolving matter, so lets get comfortable with it.

Maybe.

But then there are those scientists who are willing to look deeper. To consider the thought what matters in us is more than just matter! Take a recent Stanford study which looked at the claim Will Power is less in our mind and more in our neurobiological supply of sugar glucose. [Sure enough, many coaches believe: the more sugar, the more fight in the game]. Not so said the gang at Stanford. There is something about us and our will to succeed that can't simply be measured under a scope.

Well now...! Is Stanford one small step for man in rediscovering there really is something more to us than we can see, smell and test...? Sorry to say, that study didn't make it into this week's TIME.

WHEN SOMEONE SAYS"HEY BEAUTIFUL" DO YOU TURN AROUND?

2011-11-28T10:20:00.002-06:00

Now for a look into that eternally fascinating subject: Beauty. What is it and who among us has it...?

Lets begin with the obvious. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, good lord, how else to explain the phenomena of a Mick Jagger or a Lady GaGa. What's at work there are the many conscious and subconscious factors each beholder brings to the party.

The precise standards of beauty have changed over the centuries. Size, weight, hair, nose, lips are all part of the formula, but my how humanity has mixed and re-mixed these. OK, so maybe we can agree on this much. In the West, two basic standards from which to work: The Greeks' statues of Aphrodite and Michelangelo's statue of David. If you look like either of these, you're home free.

But....!

Upon closer and more amorous inspection, I think we have to admit the rules are always a lot looser when it comes to the guys than to the gals. Aside from the changing standards of poundage, the rules for the female of the species have remained pretty damn hard and fast. Luxuriant hair...creamy complexion...large eyes...ripe lips...shapely bosom...and wherever possible a pair of great legs. Translation circa 2011: Angeline Jolie, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Zeta Jones, Zooey Deshanel.

Now take a look at the male of the species. Here the rules are, well there virtually are no rules! How else explain women oohing and awing over the likes of such incredibly diverse "hunks" as a Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and Al Pacino side by side with a Nick Nolte, Lyle Lovett and Malcolm McDowell.

Studies have shown the "beautiful people" get an edge in life, starting right from childhood. Intuitively we are drawn to the beautiful in both life and nature. However, by adulthood the guys pick up a break. Is it because women are more generous? more perceptive? less demanding? They will probably tell you they look deeper than the surface. You know -- character, faithfulness, and that old standby sense-of-humor.

To those of us males without abs and biceps, this sounds pretty good to us. So, paraphrasing Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, "Why can't a man be more like a woman...?"

UNCERTAIN ABOUT YOUR LIFE...? JOIN THE REST OF US

2011-11-27T14:23:00.001-06:00

If you've lived long enough you may agree. Cliches are a lot more than, well, just cliches. Over the many centuries they've lasted, some have earned the right to be taken more seriously. Take for instance that little classic: "The more things change, the more they're the same."

But lets not only apply it to this or that event. How about to the entire trajectory of human events...!

When our ancestors first peered out from trees and caves, they stared at an enormous world of chaos, all apparently designed to destroy them. Untamed nature...untamed beasts...untamed weather. Easy to understand why life expectancies were so awesomely short. Absolutely no certainty out there. And so they turned to religions of many kinds wherein gods and goddesses helped explain the chaos, and afforded them some controls over the uncertainties.

Over the eons, this worked well enough for the race to survive. But then, at long last about 500 years ago, our ancestors discovered a new way to master their uncertainties. Modern science. That particular way of thinking and operating wherein there are no divinities. Only reason, logic and mathematics. Whatever laws were to be found in this existence were to be found by scientists empirically testing observations, not clergy spiritually discovering beliefs.

Modern science has served us well, and yet here in the 2ist C we're experiencing the prickly irony of this same stubborn cliche. As it turns out, so many of the uncertainties we believed we had tamed are somehow still here. Nature, beasts, weather, even time & space appear to be beyond the controls we thought science had finally imposed on them.

And so today our climates, our computers, our communication systems often rebel, run amuck, even reject some of our carefully-designed controls and controllers. The cages we built for our ancient uncertainties are, well, they've somehow pried open just enough to make our lives almost as uncertain as before. Only now, these uncertainties smash into us and our leaders on massive, global scales never before known. Planetary disasters! climate disasters! personal disasters!

Could it be that this cliche is much more than simply a cliche? Has it really been a warning all along that mankind can cage and control only so much? That at some point we may have to accept that some things in this universe will forever remain just beyond our finest controls?

For some, these thoughts might even remind us all the way back into those ancient beliefs which pronounced: Humanity by itself is just not enough.

YOU HAVE A SMALL ISLAND JUST BIG ENOUGH FOR ONE

2011-11-26T08:49:00.001-06:00

There's a small island in every life.

This is a space and place that goes by different names. It tends to appear just over the horizon of our lives at a very young age, although it is frequented most often at older ages. Like most small islands, it is unpopulated and perfectly private. It is where we go when we need unpopulated privacy.

We usually travel there when our hearts are exploding with joy or breaking with pain. It would be unseemly to shout our glee or roar our hurt in public. Our small private island of emotions is where best to do this. But let it be understood the island is indispensable, for in every life there must be just such a pyscho-spiritual outlet.

There are times when we are inclined to share our small island with another. A parent, a spouse, an intimate friend. And yet, even they are only visitors, for this small island is usually just big enough for one.

Priests and poets, psychiatrists and philosophers have tried to map our small island. And their maps are very helpful. Still, there will always be islands in this world for which there can be no professional directions; only personal journeys. What is important is not so much how we get there (it can happen in the explosion of a second); rather, it is how we get back from there. How we navigate its perfect privacy, but then return to the land of our everyday lives. More enlightened. More emboldened. More prepared for the moments and miles ahead.

It is said that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And hearts will not be perfect until they can be made unbreakable. In keeping with those large wisdoms, these small islands must be protected. Not over-grown with too much pride nor infested with too much fear. That takes our attention, a kind of on-going emotional ecology.

What then might we call our small protected island...? Treasure Island sounds about right, only someone already copyrighted that. But I'm sure you can find an even better one.

THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE NOW PLAYING ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA

2011-11-22T11:06:00.000-06:00

May I tell you a little story...? Stick with me for three minutes, because it'll help you connect all the dots of crisis, crashes and confusion filling your daily headlines.

Bill was riding his usual morning commuter train. But on this particular day he began to sense the train traveling faster than usual. It even started rattling on the tracks. Bill was so concerned he decided to check. Walked through one car, two cars, finally reached the front car and the engineer's cabin. Just in time, for by now the riders were all getting concerned. He knocked on the door...no response ...he knocked again ...finally in a panic he pushed the cabin door open.

What he found was -- no one at the controls!

In many ways that train is our sleek civilization hurtling faster and faster, but with no one at the controls. It has become a force that lives and feeds on itself, while government leaders occasionally prance in front of international cameras pretending -- hoping -- they can somehow manage this force. But once all the riders start suspecting no one is really in control, well then we have what is guardedly called "social unrest."

This unrest is now playing out in the streets of Cairo, Damascus, London, Wall Street, Sacramento and college campuses in between. The unrest gradually becomes a counter-force. Representing an angry but vague sense of growing desperation, for it can feel civilization rattling on the tracks. In contrast, there are those running our great institutions who instinctively resist this threat from the riders.

Nothing new here. Force from the top; counter-force from below. It's the ancient story of rebellions and repressions [see from Spartacus to the French Revolution for details]. Only this time what IS new is the way in which the Traditional Media and the Social Media are helping this dynamic play out. The voices of institutional authority [government, schools, religion, military] appear on the 5:30 news and on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows speaking order; the fearful voices now without faith in these institutions [young, poor, jobless, disenfranchised] are in cyberspace speaking anxiously with one another.

Something old is happening out there...but in a new format which plays out faster, more organized, more global than ever before. The owners of the commuter train know they have a run-away on their hands, but unless someone gets to those controls, the owners, the riders and the train itself may crash all at the very same ugly time....

WHOOPS, THE FUTURE'S ALREADY HERE

2011-11-21T08:59:00.000-06:00

They even have an academic name for them, for the folks who study our future. They're called Futurists, and they pick up from where Aldous Huxley and Captain Kirk leave off. These are the scholars who analyze and project what our distant tomorrows will be like. Flying belts. time travel. computer chips in our brains. whatever.

I have a thought for them. The future you're studying so intensely is already here.

No real mystery to it. Just look around. Everyday, everywhere: Screens...! Big screens in our family rooms, little screens in our desktop computers, handheld screens in our smartphones, security screens in our streets and in our airports, medical screens in our hospitals, talking screens in our checkouts, surround-screens in our sport-bars, and by golly even tiny screens mom can plant in front of tiny Jimmy and Jessica wherever she wants to keep them mesmerized and mute.

This galaxy of screens in our daily lives may seem one-way. And yet, while we're gazing into them, they can digitally gaze right back. Tracking who, where, when, and why we're gazing. The question quickly becomes: Who's actually retrieving and recording the most from these daily transactions?

Call it whatever you've decided.The age of instant communication, of lifelong learning, or maybe of Big Brother. Frankly, though, whatever your choice, it won't be precisely correct. Because you see we've never been here before, and so we have nothing to compare it with.

It recalls the old Safari guide leading his troupe of jungle tourists. For miles he brought them through twisted roadways and pathways. Then suddenly the roads and paths disappeared in the rugged wilderness. The tourists were frightened. "What do we do now? There's no more trail to follow!" The worldly wise guide paused and explained: "From here on, WE'RE the trail...!"

PLAYING GOD AND TAKING 'CRAP DETECTION 101' AT THE SAME TIME

2011-11-20T09:56:00.000-06:00

I'm taking a wild guess here....

Waking up with a headache or a backache is all too common, right? Two more reasons Americans last year filled 254 million prescriptions for pain killing drugs like OxyContin and Percoset. That's enough to medicate every American adult around the clock for an entire month.

Lot of pain out there. Living itself can be painful. But it wasn't supposed to be this way. As we evolved from out of our harsh pre-historic past and devised all sorts of physical conveniences, wasn't humanity supposed to live better? Trouble is, most of these convenience were for the body, not the mind or the spirit. And so while we can always air condition ourselves in the middle of a blazing desert, we still can't always condition ourselves in the middle of a blazing crisis.

Enter the Internet.

An extraordinary instrument that allows us to reach out almost infinitely into time and space. I use it. You use it. It's connecting our minds and hearts, dreams and fears, joys and pains. There isn't a newspaper, TV commercial, or highway billboard that isn't preaching the latest generations.

So does the Internet perhaps represent humanity's highest rung on the ladder of progress? Well, in
some ways, yeah. Think of it this way. Being on the Net is something like being God: You're present virtually anywhere and everywhere you wish to be!

But just when you think you've got a good thing going, some spoil-sport critics crowd your act. Researchers from Cornell have concluded there may be a negative corollary between the number of "friends" we have on the Net and in real life. They surveyed 2000 adults and found: "On average they had only two friends with whom they could discuss important matters, down from three in 1985. Nearly half listed only one friend;4% said they had none."

Study author Matthew Bearshears: "While we appear to be just as social as ever, our friendships seem to be shallower, leaving us with fewer people we can call on to lend us money, give us a place to stay, or simply keep us company during a tough time."

Adding Internet insult to injury, other researchers now report the great god Google isn't all it's cracked up to be. What...? I use it all the time...! Aha, but they say we use it carelessly. When these sociologists tested college students they found: "Students didn't bother to assess the credibility of the information found online. For example, what if that Google profile on Martin Luther King was actually posted by a white supremacist? Googlers need to take a course in crap detection 101."

Damn, and just when I finally found all the right keys and thought I had a good thing going here...!

I CAN'T STAND YOU EXCEPT WHEN I LOVE YOU

2011-11-19T11:59:00.001-06:00

Lets see how good you really are...! Can you tell what the following all have in common...?

Barack Obama....George Clooney...Jerry Seinfeld...Stephen Spielberg...Regis Philbin...David Letterman...Jay Leno... Madonna...Paul McCartney...Billy Crystal....Charlie Rose....Tony Bennett .... Diane Keaton...Robin Williams...Betty White.

That last one may have given it away. They're all over 50. OMG, being that creepy creaky old in our young young America? What's going on here?

Here's something else that's going on. Our annual Christmastime TV specials are all over 50 as well. It's A Wonderful Life...A Christmas Story...A Charlie Brown Christmas...Frosty the Snowman... Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer...The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. The stuff they've been making in the last few years are cute, clever and computerized; but they lack endearing staying power.

So, my friends, what does this tell us? For one thing, we're living longer to enjoy old classics longer. But not only the oldsters but the youngsters. They're enjoying them too. Oh sure youth gravitates to youth, and you've got the young rappers and zombies to satisfy you. But by gosh, the same audiences that tap to rap and zombies also end up watching the old stuff every Christmastime.

Why?

Having been a youngster as well as an oldster, here's what I think. Christmastime -- like Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving -- smacks of the traditional. the classic. the timeless. And so suddenly being new and cutting-edge isn't so vital. In fact it doesn't seem to have any place here. These holidays are the times when wrinkles, gray hair, and canes simply do not come between us. These are the happy times we're all sorta one at heart. A very nice if rare moment in our national life.

So cue George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life and Charlies Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas so we can all gather round together. To really be together.

MOUNTING THE MONASTIC MOUNTAINTOP JUST DOWN THE STREET

2011-11-18T13:17:00.000-06:00

We're all familiar with the scene. The serious seeker climbing the Tibetan mountaintop to meet the great guru to learn from his wisdom. Saints, sinners and the Beatles have all done it. Now may I suggest you and I can do it too. But without the tough climb...!

The quiet wisdom you seek resides in several large building complexes only a few miles from home. Any one of our city hospitals. Inside is the entire breadth and depth of life. From birth to disease to rehabilitation to death. The hundreds of white and grey gowned people therein are all part of the great drama. They stand at the ready to assist as we travel our destined human trajectory.

Forget the glistening post-natal cubicles, MRIs, radiology guns, and surgical instruments. They're merely the occasional tools used during the great drama. What counts most here is what cannot most be seen here. The skills...the experience... the compassion behind the busy hands, gloves, and masks. These are what help bring us into life, back into health, or at the end into the Big Sleep. While outside these buildings athletes, celebrities, pundits and politicians prattle on about what is important...these few inside here are the great companions along this sudden back-road to our travels.

What I'm saying -- from a good deal of experience inside these secular monasteries -- is that once you're inside one it clears your head and heart of an awful lot of trivia from the outside. Inside here very little is trivial. Perhaps a birth! a cure! a death! If ever you're going to get in touch with what makes your life make sense, it won't be at Wrigley Field! Soldier Fields! the Chicago Theatre! or even the Field Museum!

They're about our entertainment. Hospitals are about our existence. So, please, a little more respect for the place we most hate to think about.

AT THE BRINK JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS

2011-11-17T10:49:00.001-06:00

We are on the brink.....! Of what...? According to the doomsayers, on the brink of both domestic and diplomatic disaster, as the American Empire sinks slowly in the west. Nial Ferguson's "Civilization" is just the latest history volume to envision this.

But whether you share in his demise-of-the-West scenario or not, right about now you're entering a very different scenario. Call it the Winter Solstice, The Holidays, or if you dare simply call it Christmas. It's our annual scenario of gift-giving. Especially gits for our children.

So, my friends, let us pause here at the precipice for a sweet jealous moment to gaze upon these wondrous little diversions that we kinda wish we were still young enough to own and play with ourselves. Some Christmas toys have passed the test of time. Among these: Crayolas...Raggedy Ann...Candy Land ...Mr Potato Head...Hot Wheels...Rubik Cube...Lincoln Logs...Kewpie Doll...and that centuries old little Red Wagon.

You can still find these tucked into little corners of today's sleek modern toy-barns like Toys-R-Us. You know, the big box emporiums where toys are stacked and packed by the carloads by parents and friends who who often prize the store's efficiency instead of its charm. I mean in a world of brinks and banks, who the hell has time for charm....??

Well, I do. And so do a great many old-time Christmas players from Christmases past.

And so while I perfectly well understand the big ticket items will be electronic games and toys and wands and goggles...well, I still notice how the little ones often prefer their littlest and simplest of toys. In fact, give a kid a great big wrapped toy this year and watch how they spend as much time playing with the wrapping as what was wrapped.

But pay no attention...just another antediluvian voice...recalling the ghosts of Christmas past which seemed so much smaller, quieter, simpler and authentic. Trouble is, after spending 80 of those old-fashioned Christmases, I fear there soon will be too few of us to tell you about them...

IT'S TIME AMERICA TAKES SOME CHEAP LAUGHS FROM JAY LENO

2011-11-14T11:06:00.001-06:00

In an absolutely unpredictable world, the pendulum is absolutely predictable.

Why should we care? Because right now you and I are riding a very big one. The pendulum known as education, teaching, curriculum. Today tens of millions of young people are in classrooms where the pendulum has swung from such traditional right-brain courses as history and humanities to our heralded left-brain courses like math and science.

Starting in the Cold War with the Soviets in the 1950s-60s, math and science became the focus of most curriculum reforms and federally funded school programs. Seen from the perspective of Silicon Valley and corporate America, the results have been impressive. Geeks and nerds are now the new campus heroes. The swell of scientific progress in space, medicine, energy, weaponry and consumer electronics has been spectacular.

But with this growing swing toward math and science, there has been a corollary swing away from the old curricula including history and humanities. We live in a highly competitive and practical age, so those traditional right-brained fields seemed more expendable. The problem -- and in the history of American education there always seems to be another problem that demands another reform movement-- we may be educating a population of more Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerbergs at the expense of more Jonathan Franzens and Stephen Spielbergs.

The press is crowded with reports of declining grades, falling graduation rates, and a citizenry that hardly understands its nation's history, culture and place in the world. To master the computer, the Internet, and the smart-phone without also mastering the where-and-why you've come from is an empty victory. If Jay Leno's Tonight Show is the social barometer of America, listen the next time he does a street interview. Young people staring blankly at questions about the Constitution, Lincoln, the Civil Rights movement, the New Deal, and Watergate. Not only a travesty worth the audience's laughter, but a tragedy worth a nation's concern.

We stand proud of our best-and-brightest technological minds today. And we should. But minds honed by scientific brilliance lose luster when we realize how many of them understand only their here-and-now. All too often without any sense of the where-when-and-why their here-and-now has come to pass. Has become part of their life. Has become central to why they do what they do.

The life of a nation is like the necklace of time. Each bead of progress exists and shines in and of itself. However, if understood and admired only by itself, it remains but a bead. Not a necklace! America is more than the sum of its beads. It's the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And that whole asks that our young people occasionally look up from their wondrous beads to realize how they are part of a centuries-old necklace.

The payoff? Well for one thing, Jay Leno won't get as many laughs from stupidly staring interviewees

WHAT BASKETBALL SEASON? WHAT DRUG STORE?

2011-11-13T11:55:00.001-06:00

Here's what I call an encouraging statistic: Only 12% of surveyed Americans report they missed the canceled start of the pro basketball season. Nothing against basketball, just nice to hear that our heavily hustled population doesn't always go-with-the-promotional-flow. Occasionally we do try to distinguish between what's important in life and what's not.

Which brings me to your local drugstore aisles.

I'm here to suggest that of all the sophisticated surveys about you and me, maybe the easiest and best is the one you can take right in your own drug store. When you write for so many of the Fortune 500 companies that produce so many of these products, you learn how vital their merchandising space is to them. I've seen their sales forces equipped with everything from free display counters to dollars bonuses for the drugstore in this pursuit of prominent "shelf space."

OK, so lets take a stroll and measure -- literally measure! -- the number of inches different products are getting on those shelves. Obviously, the more inches, the more important these products seem to us the buying public. Here's my report in order of inches displayed >>

* Greeting Cards ~ In an age when personally knowing family, friends and neighbors has become less common, there's always Hallmark to find the right words. And often they do. Only you wonder how it is we've lost so much of the ability to find our own words

* Confectioneries ~ We know the brain craves sugar. Candy makers have found a gazillion different ways to spin and weave their sweet diversions. Watching eager shoppers from kids to grandmas, you see our drug-infested culture reaching for one of its last safe drugs of choice

* Pain medications ~ Take another look at just how many pain relievers there are out there. Many now locked away from over-eager buyer hands. The pharmaceutical companies have found even more ways than the candy companies to woo you into their merchandising web. They know how intense Americans don't tolerate very well the discomforts that come from their intense living. Pop a pill and you'll be like those happy smiling folks on the TV commercials

* Beauty aids ~ Drug stores are famous for affording the customers a fist-full of bottles and sprays with which to enhance what they have, and/or camouflage what they don't want to have. After awhile, your merchandising survey here slips gears and turns into amazed curiosity. Wow...so many little secrets I never realized before

Of course, the ultimate beauty secret most customers over 40 dream of is that promised secret-of-perpetual-youth pursued by everyone from 16th C Ponce deLeon to 21st C Revlon. In pursuit of the Great Dream, the esteemed Mayo Clinic has recently discovered how cells "age and lose their ability to divide, thereby becoming senescent cells whose toxins produce our aging processes." Physiologist James Kirkland tells ScenceNews that using drugs to eleminate the senescent cells in lab mice has "contained the aging process."

Next visit to your drug store, bring a mouse and see which aisle he heads for first.

THE NEXT BIG QUESTION

2011-11-12T09:22:00.001-06:00

Because Rabbi Kushner posed that troubling question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" it seems entirely proper to now pose the next big question, "Why do good people do bad things?"

We are headline-deep in troubling examples. Coach Paterno and Penn State are simply the latest boils on the body politic. This disease-of-misdeeds is virulent. Coaches...politicians...bankers... priests...athletes....celebrities. What is the strain that runs through the disease? Power! Everyone whose misdeeds have lately arrived in the national ER gush from their enormous hold on power.

Over a century ago the British Lord Acton said it painfully well: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." In each of the current cases, the deed done was done from a position of absolute power being imposed on the almost absolutely powerless.

You don't have to look far to find ways in which this disease has now triggered social anti-bodies. Consider the rise of the powerless in today's mass protests. The Tea Party opposes the power of government...the OWS opposes the power of the 1%....the municipal workers unions in states like Wisconsin and Ohio oppose the power of the governor...damn near everyone in their local barbershop and beauty salon opposes damn near everything they read in their newspapers!

Nothing new here. Like cancer, this disease of power-over-the powerless has corrupted the body politic of tribes and nations from the get-go. This lack of mutual respect is in our very DNA. The only way to cure it -- well, if not cured at least contained -- is if the powerless compel the powerful to sit down in the patient's room as equal partners in finding a workable protocol for recovery.

Simply put.....the powerless need to get some systemic relief for their condition; while the powerful need to accommodate this need before it is seized from out of their hands. Sometimes even elections can help find such accommodation.

A NEW KIND OF VETERANS DAY

2011-11-11T10:41:00.001-06:00

There's something sacred about Veteran's Day, for it's been honoring the battle deaths of our young warriors ever since WWI. And we will do it again today. Only isn't there something missing ...? I mean, the honorable deaths aren't the whole story. There's also the even larger number of honorable lives. The tens of millions of lives those tens of thousands of deaths made possible.

A national genealogical chart would make the point. For every veteran-death in every war, there have been countless births that would simply not have been possible. For every twentysomething veteran-death in a family line, there's likely to have been one or more adolescent-lives who thereby survived the war. Who in time gave birth to other lives which may not have otherwise happened.

No one dies in a war to "save their country." They die because they weren't able to save themselves. And yet...! What their deaths helped save is the survival of the younger lives in the family line who went on to become the farmers, truck drivers, steel mill workers, teachers, firefighters, doctors and chemists in our nation's ranks. The makers and molders of America who might never have been born to make a difference!

We don't even need John Donne, God bless him, to remind us "no man is an island." We are all -- each of us in a family, in a land, in a world -- all inextricably connected with everyone else. If someone sneezes in a bank in Europe, America gets a cold. If someone crashes into a tower in America, the rest of the world catches fire.

So even as we mourn the battle-deaths of our veterans this week, look around at all the lives those deaths gave the rest of us. We might even want to change Veteran's Day to Resurrection Day.

WHEN YOU GET UP TOMORROW, WHAT WILL COUNT?

2011-11-10T09:59:00.000-06:00

The once-upon-a-time America known for its long lazy Tom Sawyer adventures through long lazy countrysides has changed. And you and I with it. Today nothing's lazy, everything's fast. News... scores...stock markets ... the Hollywood & Washington players. We want our information immediately, whenever and wherever we are. And now we've got the magic screens with us to get it!

As your therapist might say: How's that make you feel? We've been so busy becoming digitally timely about everything, have we stopped much to wonder how much of this we really need? There's the Timely (headlines, breaking news, back-stories) and then there's the Timeless (holy books, great literature, poetry). If you care to look at it this way, well there's really no contest.

Here, let me give you an example. A few headlines from this morning's tabloid: Paterno fired! GOP Debate Focuses on Economy Not Cain! Voter's Nose Nearly Bitten Off! Woman Gets 34 Years For Killing Teen! Dow Collapses On Italy's Troubles! Cheap Trick Moving to Record Row! Murphy Furious with Oscars! Cutler Learns to Smile!

With all due respect to the reporters, how important are any these reports to you? How likely are you to use or remember them a week from today? In other words, is "being timely" just another way of saying "here today gone tomorrow?" You know that old if-you-were-stranded-on-an-island-what- reading-material-would-you-want-with-you?

Chances are, not even these reporters would vote for their Tabloid. And so enter the timeless...

Kahlil Gibran: "If you love somebody let them go, for if they return they were always yours; if they don't, they never were." Emily Dickinson: "Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels or believes." Buddha: "Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship." Mark Twain: "A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."

Then there's the Bible's timeless take on being timely: "And this too shall pass..."

AMERICA'S NEW BIG THREE: CAIN, CUTLER, LOHAN

2011-11-09T11:11:00.001-06:00

Genetics has by now passed into parlor room conversation. Everyone can talk a few pseu-intellectual minutes about their "family genes" and how they affect us. But now comes a new twist: Epigenetics. It's telling some researchers at Stanford University that "environmental factors can actually switch our gene on and off." In other words, maybe the genes we're born with may not be the genes we have to live with....!

Whoa, you mean I'm not genetically destined to be bald like Grandpa or fat like Uncle Benny or racist like half my cousins...? Epigenetics is raising the prospect our environment not only interacts with our genes, but it may actually alter those genes via our exposure to diet, pollution and medications.

Well now. If this is true, might Epigenetics help explain our national passion for controversy? We Americans thrive on controversy. We love it, we create, we seem to need it. I mean, do the media ever report how politicians are "getting along"...how the players on the team "are a happy locker-room family"....how the stars in Hollywood are "ideal fathers and mothers"....how our candidates "have an unsullied personal history?"

Hell no. Not as long as we have Herman Cain, Jay Cutler, and Lindsay Lohan to kick around!

So here's the thing. We're a democracy. In contrast to a dictatorship where everything is passed down as good, here nothing is so good that we citizens can't -- shouldn't -- dig around and smell out the lies, deceits and controversies.

Look at it this way. If your morning newspaper or blog site didn't have anything bad to report...well, what would it do? Civics classes in a democracy prefer to call this the "marketplace of ideas" where everything and everyone is fair game as good citizens wrestle with the facts, smarmy or not.

Maybe so. But how did this come to pass? No one's quite sure. It's just the way it is. Is it good? Is it wrong? Is it necessary? Well now look, we've just started another controversy....

PICK YOUR FAVORITE PAGAN

2011-11-08T09:11:00.001-06:00

Have you ever counted how many times Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Russell Crowe, and Andy Whitfield have been in togas? Hollywood, even historians, loves to draw parallels between ancient Rome and modern America. It indulges in protean examples comparing Roman blood sports, gluttonous banquets, sexual deviations, and imperial wars to our own modern counterparts.

I used to ask my history students: With so many pagans to choose from, who's your favorite? If you were to pick a starring part for yourself, who would you select? Almost every time, the winners were gladiators and empresses. Now if you think about it, their choices were pretty typically all-American:

* Today America has its very own gladiatorial class. Great brutes of toned muscle who enter our arenas in splendorous battle-gear to the cheers or jeers of the masses in the coliseums of our great cities. Just like the Roman athletes, ours have been scouted, trained, motivated, and sent charging into the field of play with a pre-progammed passion for victory. One difference. Then victory meant life. Today it means a ring, a trophy, or at least a phonecall from the emperor in Washington

* Today's empress classes are not found in Roman palaces or Tuscany villas. And yet they are often very much cut from the same imperial cloth with which to preen before enviously adoring masses at these same events. Indeed, our empresses like Rome's will often be gifted with one of the surviving brutes of toned muscle, later in their very own bed chambers

You really don't have to push these comparisons too far to discover why most of my students chose gladiator or empress. What's interesting, though, is how a few of them actually picked a non-pagan from that pagan era. They mentioned the Christian martyrs!

When I pressed them on it, their explanations were revelatory. "Those were among the few authentic Romans back then!" "At least you can admire their kind of belief!" "Besides, if they were right, automatic free card into heaven!"

I'm not sure the martyr-choices were entirely serious. Nor am I sure there are any real counterparts among us today. But lets say there are. Who might they be? And why? Obviously they would come from society's counter-culture. Those few who break ranks from the-way-we-are majorities in order to stand apart from the safe. To stand above the consensus. To stand at the edge of some new and brighter shoreline.

Like who......?

I have some examples in mind. But let me bow out and ask you. Oh...? You're not sure...? Please, I'm hoping you can find at least two or three still left.

SCHOOL REUNIONS, OR RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

2011-11-07T10:53:00.001-06:00

Think about it. Aren't school reunions one of life's two-edged swords? One blade slicing through the years with a sudden sure swiftness, the other with a ragged reluctance to return to the scene of the crime?

Eight times out of 10 you go anyway You're not sure whether or how they'll remember you, but now 10 or 25 years out, you feel this compulsive need to find out for yourself.

Admit it. The real need churning inside you is to see if anyone will still recall any of those disasters you've lived with all these years. You know, the stupid answers you gave in chemistry...the election you lost...the teams you never made...the dances you missed because you didn't have a date. Or -- please God! -- maybe a few of them still remember your better angels. Like the time you were cast in the spring play...won the dance contest at the prom... did pretty good in PE.

You finger though the yearbook for some help. Faces. names. events. gotta look sharp tonight. Also, you finger through the closet for the right look. Confident. successful. yet not over-dressed.

Driving to the hotel, it's the entrance that bothers you most. I mean, when you walk in, will anyone recognize you? If they do, what will they say? Gotta be prepared for no one knowing who you are. Twenty pounds is a lot more of you than any of them ever saw before. Oh hell, they've probably changed even more than you. You don't have to be so defensive. As a matter of fact, if I don't feel comfortable the first ten minutes, well I'm outta there. And good riddance. Who needs them anyway.

What's that....? Someone calling my name....? Gee, it's Jake! [or is that Willy?] Anyway, smile. You may not remember him, but wow he remembers you. That's a good start! Now don't mess it up. Keep smiling. But wait -- lets start by not getting his name wrong. Names are important. You know that. So how do I play this?

"Hey tiger," you hear yourself smiling, "how long has it been!" Jake [or Willy or was that Ray?] gives you a big bear hug. You know, the kind of hug that says help. Hmmm? now that I think about it, we're probably all here for some of the same searching reasons.

OUR OWN SECRET STREET HERE IN CHICAGO

2011-11-06T08:52:00.001-06:00

As the holiday season arrives, I want to do you a favor.

The favor of taking you by your most sentimental hand and walking you down Chicago's great street State Street when it was still an amazing, awesome, astonishing midway of childhood desires. When exactly was that...? Exactly the last time you and I took the time to stroll it like a child.

My very first time was in the dark days of the Great Depression. Looking back now from the Great Recession, I remember it more vividly than I do this very morning. It began as a long, noisy ride with Mom on Chicago's Lake Street L train....inhabited with all sorts of tall, heavily-dressed people sternly reading their newspapers...feeling the tug of her hand when someone called out "State & Wabash" ....then being led down the bustling station stairs to a large gray building marked Marshal Fields. [I understand something from New York City called a Macy's has since usurped that grand old store].

The air was crisp, the crowds thick, and the place rang with bells, chimes and carols. I could only see it from down about Mom's waistline, but it felt like some magical crash of sights, sounds and smells unlike anything I had known before. It quickly grew louder as we turned a corner and -- then! -- State Street itself. A long wondrous blaze of ornamented street lamps, store fronts, clanging streetcars, shoving adults, fat red Santas tinkling their bells, angelic choirs from loudspeakers somewhere. If this was heaven, Father Cunningham hadn't been misleading us.

Mom efficiently took me by my little gloved hand to gawk at each of those celebrated Marshall Field window displays. They looked out on State Street, which in turned looked in at them. At age eight I had witnessed the excitement of giant coal trucks, horse-drawn milk wagons, screaming ambulances, and Dad's splendid new 1937 Dodge sedan. But nothing quite like this. Nor, did it seem to me, did any of the other oohing and awing kids at the end of their mother's hands.

Animated Victorian living room scenes with slippered children gathering around ornamented trees...Jolly Old St Nick squeezing down wreathed chimneys...puppy dogs and kitty cats and winking elves by what seemed like hundreds...oh and all those incredible dinner feasts around which the families would gather...plus of course the Nativity Scene reminding adults and kids alike what this whole day was supposed to be all about.

I remember instantly deciding I never wanted to leave. Very much like my own children the first time they walked Disney's dazzling Main Street. But leave we eventually did. Not only State Street but also that delicious fourth-floor toy department inside. It seemed to me it held all the toys in all the towns in all the world!

I've since learned all those toys are actually in big-box warehouse stores like ToysRus where they have now turned in their credentials as Christmas magic for their new status as boxed-and-ready stuff. Sometime I miss being eight. I think maybe sometime you do too.

A QUESTION FOR THE SUBSCRIBERS HERE

2011-11-01T22:29:00.001-05:00

WONDERING HOW MANY OF YOU HAVE ANY FEEDBACK FOR ME.........???

THE TWO THINGS YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO WEIGH ON YOUR SCALE

2011-11-01T10:23:00.000-05:00

That menacing scale in your house -- you step on it in desperate hopes your recent gorge of fast foods hasn't worked it's evil ways. Hopefully there was a little gustatory miracle. Whatever your scale reads, you've just encountered two of life's least understood phenomena: evil and miracles.

The problem of evil has haunted us from the very beginning. It's preoccupied every major religion along with history's most prolific writers from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky to Stephen King. The ancient Greek tragedies literally gave evil a face. Whether we see it in theological, philosophical or psychological terms, evil remains an issue that runs a lot deeper than just booing the other team.

Right now we see it manifested in organized terrorism to genocidal wars to the won't-go-away threat of atomic annihilation. While some of us say evil is something found in the deeds of evil-doers, others insist evil is a spiritual force that in some way walks the earth.

As for miracles, well we're calling events miracles every day. The miracle, against all odds, of a cure, a victory, an intervention. Probably the biggest all-time miracle worker has been the Virgin Mary who has been active in apparitions from Joan of Arc to Lourdes to Our Lady of Guadalupe. The stand-off between science and faith in these affairs is well known, and chances of converting either side would take, well, a miracle.

The next time you ease onto your scale, you don't have to believe in either evil or in miracles. However, you do have to ask yourself: Are some things in life measured in ways that have nothing to do with the science of weights, sights, sounds and test tubes? These measurements all have to do with the sensory, but what about what's not sensory? Recently there have risen serious studies of what has been called the extra-sensory (ESP). Now here's what's funny. These studies consider themselves scientific. Which makes them like the science of the unscientific.

I don't know if you react like I do to the science of your morning scale as something either terribly evil or this time something surprisingly miraculous. But I do know this. I'd love to see the reactions over dinner between a successful neurobiologist and a successful shaman. And then watch who afterwards would vindicated enough to pick up the check.

IN THE MOONLIGHT IS IT CHEMISTRY OR CHARISMA?

2011-10-31T10:38:00.000-05:00

We've all looked into the transfixing eyes of a Bengal Tiger, awed by its exotic tawny beauty. Everything about them is mesmerizing. Which may explain why of the 8000 remaining on our planet, 5000 are privately owned. Without debating our right to cage these great beasts, there's no debating the "chemistry" between them and their mates.

Somehow we've now taken to referring to the "chemistry" that exists -- or doesn't -- between actors on the screen, on the stage, in political debates, right here among the local members of city councils or country clubs. But sometimes we press a good thing too far. As in a Columbia University report: "Single women consider overweight men more attractive if they are wealthy....so for each 10% increase in body mass, a man must get a 2% raise in salary to stay in the same dating pool."

Does this sound like a victory of chemistry over charisma?

I kinda think so, and I don't like it. Being one of those who still wants to believe we're more than the sum of our evolutionary parts, I prefer to see the chemical beast that is us possessing other and higher characteristics. Now I understand perfectly well I may be swimming against the tide. A tide in which cars and foods, perfumes and body lotions are being designed to cue the right genetic reactions. But give me a break, fellas. Try getting in touch with my heart as well as my hormones.

Somebody smarter than me said it well. Satirist Ambrose Bierce: "We're all lunatics, but those of us who can analyze their delusions is called a philosopher." I'm trying, Ambrose, I'm trying...