IN THE MOONLIGHT IS IT CHEMISTRY OR CHARISMA?

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...

IS 38-28-38 BEAUTIFUL OR FAT?

This will anger all my lawyer friends, but I just have to say it. Facts may be important, counselors, but only important like the bricks to a building. The bricks themselves aren't the story. It's how different people understand and assemble them into different kinds of buildings.

Take an easy if not sexist example: 38-28-38 may be a beautiful woman to some oglers, to others she's overweight. Take a more serious example: the facts behind today's 1% battle-cry. By protest- sign facts these are today's bailed-out bankers, hedge-fund managers, and other plutocrats from the world of finance. But lets not forget one-third of this 1% are also executives in non-financial firms, one out of six are in medicine, one out of 12 are lawyers, many are information-technology specialists, more are scientists and professors than celebrities from the arts and sports, plus the interesting fact that more than half US Senators and members of the House are also in the mix.

So now you have the facts [based on the Internal Revenue Department]. But once you have all the facts, you have only part of the truth! How does each of us assemble these facts into our own conceptual architecture? If perception is reality like my psychology professors liked to say, then the real meaning to these facts exists behind our eyes. The facts in and of themselves mean nothing until we give them meaning. Our meaning!

Which means to some of us, this 1% are rape-and-pillage capitalists, while to others they're essential job-creators.

Take your choice. I've made mine for some time now. But for those of you worried that American Capitalism may be under siege, not to worry. Robert and Diane Maresca of Long Island NY have already filed to trademark the phrase "Occupy Wall Street." See...? Capitalism is alive and well.

Oh, and as for my lawyer friends, take comfort in Charles Dickens: "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers..."

AN APPS FOR YOUR VIAGRA MOMENT

At one time love was the many-splendored-thing in life. Now apps are. Like the new apps called "I'm Getting Arrested" which lets you press a single icon to notify friends and lawyers that you're being nabbed by the cops. What's going on here...!

My guess -- it's the many-splendored instant gratifications of our smartphones. Any day now I'm expecting an icon that lets you flash your Viagra Moment to your partner. Or heck maybe just to that hot number across the many splendored party. We've progressed from caves to skylines, from grunting for our food and sex to simply pressing our apps. Convenience is one thing; this growing network of instant gratifications is a whole something else.

If evolution is right, in another couple centuries homo sapiens will have grown smaller legs but larger thumbs as we really let-our-fingers-do-the-walking. To which I have no serious objection, because just like you I won't be here to endure it. However, the question is, do we really want to pursue this evolutionary path? More to the point, is there any way we can really stop it?

The blue-jeaned, twenty-something gang from Silcon Valley has no intention of stopping something so profitable. But then you think of the Biblical passage, "What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and yet lose his own soul?" You wonder how many of your fellow travelers have in their own way sealed some Faustian pact in order to gain that world. Alexander? Caesar? Elizabeth? Napoleon? Hitler? J. Robert Oppenheimer? Steve Jobs?

There are no written covenants to this effect by any of these world-changing men. Well, except Oppenheimer. He fathered the Manhattan Project that found an apps for the atom, thereby creating the Atomic Bomb. After watching the monstrous blast in its first test at Los Alamos, he put his troubled thoughts into these words: "We knew the world would not be the same again. As the Hindu Scripture Bhagavad-Gita writes: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds..."

Oppenheimer was haunted the rest of his difficult life for what he had gained in this world. Will any of today's great minds...? Will any of us...? Or will there soon be an apps marked: "Cue applause for instant and deafening approval!"

NO PRIEST OR RABBI EVER TOLD ME ENVY WAS GOOD

Two ways of looking at your world. Great Depression humorist Will Rogers liked to say, "Everything is funny, as long as it's happening to somebody else!" Behavioral psychologist Sarah Hill of Texas Christian University reports to the New York Times: "Envy of others heightens our power of observation and memory. Sucj single-minded focus can help us learn how to imitate -- or sabotage -- the people we envy." So what's this telling us -- life's funny, but gets better with envy?

I don't think so. But what I do think is the current worldwide wave of street protests has a lot to do with envy and resentment of the 1%. Forget party politics, this has more to do with people politics. Lets call it Trickle-Down-Resentment. The 99% out there may come from very different strains of their society -- kids, seniors, ethnics, crazies -- but all connected in a common sense of disenfranchisement. Everyone out there feels as if someone else is running their lives.

That feeling was hardly new to the crowds in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; they've known it all their lives. But here in the United States it's very new feeling.And we don't much like it. Here we've always been led -- by leaders and literature -- to believe in the American Dream and American Exceptionalism. I mean, anyone here could always go out and become a free-floating Tom Sawyer or free-riding Calamity Jane, because here: if you can dream it you can do it. Right...? Wrong!

Not when the 1% control over 70% of the nation's wealth. Not when the 10 largest banks hold 54% of corporate financial assets. Not when the income gap between rich and poor is the widest and deepest in the entire industrialized world. And so it's no surprise that a majority of Americans say they have a positive view of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A century ago Russian literary guru Leo Tolstoy said it well: "There are no conditions of life in which a person cannot get accustomed, so long as they see them accepted by everyone around them." But now people are seeing the other 99% around them no longer quite so willing to accept the traditional standard by which the 1% expects to -- and somehow becomes entitled to -- control the lives of the rest.

This 99:1 resentment is nothing new in the story of our species. But in America it is more historically new and more camera visible than ever before. Think of it this way. In the casino of life the players pretty much understand the house never loses. However, once the players stop getting at least some occasional jackpots...

...well, take a look out there. The casino isn't going to go bust, but perhaps the owners will have to re-think the odds they're giving us.

CAN SAND SPEAK...? OH SURE IT CAN!

Long sandy beaches at sunset -- poets love them. People with sore feet don't. Another of life's epic dilemmas: To listen to the sand out here or not...?

Early October evenings along a city beach can do this to you. To the left, black-blue waves; to the right, Chicago skyline; in front, zig-zaggy lacework of footprints in the sand. Time to play poet.

One trail of prints so tiny and flibberty-jibberty you can just see her blond-haired gaze up to her daddy's large arm guiding her little steps. Over there another trail, not of steps but bounds as this bicep-ed Adonis ran the sand. Further on a foursome of feet marking where a pair of lovers watched the waters.

Well, at least that's what I see. Remember, I'm new at this!

I'm guessing what poets find out here at the end of another day of the world trying so hard, is an impressionist mural which marks where part of that world walked this day. Walked and talked, dreamed and feared. True, we don't live on beaches; but we do occasionally come out here to catch our breath. And our thoughts.

Thoughts maybe like: Where did this day go..? Where did this week go...? Where has my life gone...?

I don't know how accurately I'm hearing the sand out here. But I do know this. The sands of time flow faster and faster the older and older we grow. When you stand back and size up that great ocean of national and global events lapping the shores of your life -- well, I can't help recall that country-western-church lyric by Vince Gill:

"Let this be my solemn vow/ to take each moment/ and live each moment/ in peace eternally/ let there be peace on earth/ and let it begin with me."

Amen.

UNDER 50...? TAKE MY LAUGH/LISTEN TEST

Bracketing time into tidy titled segments is probably impossible. But let me try anyway. I say the first 2/3 of the 20th C was a very different America than the last 1/3....!

Here's what I mean. From 1900 to the end of the 1960s we generally talked and walked one set of values; then from the 1970s to 2000 a very different set. To test my proposition, I invite you to surf through some of the music & movies, radio & television during the first 2/3. If you do, I'm betting you'll start out by laughing but gradually you'll begin listening. To what? To what we mostly believed in as a nation during those years. I'm not saying we practiced everything we believed, but just believing is in itself a powerful thing for a people.

Consider some common beliefs back then long before you were around:

* Government Is good >> As in Sousa marches, "Mr Smith Goes To Washington," "Cavalcade of America," "The FBI In Peace & War"

* Family is important >> As in "Home On The Range," "The Hardy Family series," "Pepper Young's Family, "Father Knows Best"

* The American Dream >> As in "This Land Is My Land," "Young Abe Lincoln," "I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy," "The Mickey Mouse Club"

OK, have you been stifling some laughter...? Sure, because such pop entertainment from that America plays a little corny in this America. A post-1960s America that has become smarter. more informed. more skeptical. more willing to admire public rascals say like a Charlie Sheen or a "Family Guy" than the old public heroes say like a Babe Ruth or a "Dr Marcus Welby"

I tell my grandchildren there's nothing wrong with growing up smarter than we did. And learning all that glitters out there is not actually gold. However....! Guys my age can't help feeling kids their age are missing something. You see, what this America may laugh at, that America listened to. And at important times in our history, it sounded awfully good to the ears.

70 YEARS AGO ORSON WELLES GAVE YOU SOMETHING SPECIAL

September 5 was the 70th anniversary of the release of Orson Welles masterpiece Citizen Kane. The film opens and closes with the simple word: "Rosebud." Like any impressionist artwork, it is left for you to connect with it however seems right.

To Kane -- a man of enormous wealth, power and celebrity -- it is where his mind focuses in his last dying moments. Rosebud, we eventually discover, is a small sled from his childhood. But more than a plaything, it is his metaphor for his own long lost innocence. Having become an adult with stunning status and style, his final minutes on this earth are not of such transient trivia. Instead they are of an enduring memory of a brief time in his life when all seemed simple. safe. sure. innocent.

To Kane, Rosebud represents and re-presents the lost bliss of a once-upon-a-time security. Like falling asleep in the back seat of your father's car, and then waking up all tucked inside your own bed...! We each have our very own Rosebud cushioned inside the museum of our minds. A place where we can go when the world outside is much too large and complicated. A place, as with Kane, that few if any know about or could even understand.

Today we walk in a world of equally and exorbitantly powerful men and women. Who command global authority...lead great nations...control wide-spread financial assets...stand before us on film and television screens with vaunted image and imagination. And yet, and yet, like Kane, like us, they each have their own Rosebud. Somewhere safely secured from prying eyes. Their Rosebud, like Kane's, like ours, probably has to do with some tender past.

A first prom night...a first promotion...a first child...or, more likely, the last time they can remember watching with mom and dad the twinkle of a first Christmas Tree. Somewhere, in the little private galaxy of childhood memories, probably shines their best selves.

Us too!