By The Way... by Tom Pantera

I Want to be a White Castle vassal 8/01/2008

I know Fargo-Moorhead has too many chain restaurants, but we’re missing something that I think would add immeasurably to the quality of life here.

A White Castle.

Now, a significant portion of you reading this just gagged. White Castle burgers, like Spam and sushi, aren’t for everybody. Up until relatively recently, I was not a devotee of the burgers, although I’m nuts for Spam and rather like sushi.

But I’ve been converted. My girlfriend was raised on them and when we visit my mother in Minneapolis, there’s a White Castle close by. I started taking Mari there out of my love for her, but the visits have turned into a bit of enlightened self-interest.

Up until recently, I’d eaten at White Castle a few times, but usually after an evening of partying. It wasn’t someplace I’d go normally, although I’m thinking it would’ve been a fun place to patronize after, say, my high school prom.

Still, I’ve seen the light. But just my luck, I’ve developed an addiction I can’t satisfy here in Fargo- Moorhead. The closest White Castles to this area are in the Twin Cities. There are no White Castles at all in the Dakotas, Wyoming or Montana. In fact, there are none in the country west of Minnesota, although you can buy the burgers frozen in grocery stores. That just isn’t the same, though; one of the sublime pleasures of White Castle addiction is eating the mini-burgers in a building designed to look like a little, tiny white castle.

Like any good reporter, I called the White Castle corporate office in Columbus, Ohio, to ask why we are bereft of the chain. But I was unable to connect with any of their marketing folks to get that question answered (and to threaten them with the power of the press if they didn’t open one here). The only thing I know is that it’s not a matter of finding a local franchisee; they don’t franchise stores in the U.S. All White Castles in this country are company-owned.

I guess I’ll have to content myself with the other 10,000 fast-food outlets in F-M. If there are a lot here, there’s a good reason for it, given the growth of the metro area.

Fast food is perhaps the quintessentially American invention. The geniuses behind it – and you have to call them geniuses, given the success of the industry – came up with a way to satisfy a basic human need while combining it with a very American quality, the desire to get things quickly and relatively cheaply.

I’m fascinated by the kitchens in fast-food places. They’re marvels of design. Every time I go into a Taco Bell, I’m held rapt just watching the workers prepare the food. It’s obvious that a lot of thought went into designing the work spaces. They are textbook examples of ergonomic efficiency. No physical step is wasted, no physical motion is extraneous. I’m not sure it’s even possible to make food preparation faster and more efficient.

Unfortunately, the efficiency that makes fast food fast renders the job of making it less than interesting. I suppose we’ll see the day when all the food is prepared by machine, but for now, the efficiency of the process reduces employees to robots; put so many pickles on the burger, squirt on condiments in pre-measured amounts, get it out to the customer.

I know whereof I speak. My first job, 33 years ago, was at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. In those days, it was somewhat less efficient, but it still was a pretty robotic way to spend eight hours. (And no, I don’t have any scoop on what the “11 herbs and spices” are; the contents of the large breading bags read only, “flour and 11 herbs and spices.”) It wasn’t a bad first job for a high school kid, although the monotony of it didn’t exactly instill a love for honest labor. Nor did the management, either corporate or local.

The manager, Rick, is to this day one of the biggest weenies I ever worked for. He was a world-class dork, the kind of guy who got way too much pleasure from lording it over teen-age kids. My favorite example: Every so often, he would bring his girlfriend into the restaurant. Every time – every time – he did that, he’d order us to scrub the baseboards in the kitchen with hand brushes. I don’t know, maybe it turned her on to see a bunch of teen-age boys hit their knees and labor like galley slaves whenever she walked into the building. All I know is, we never had to do that except when she was there. It got to the point where, whenever I saw her, I’d automatically grab a pair of kneepads and a brush.

That wasn’t my only restaurant job. I also did time in an ice cream place (during summer, which is a little slice o’ hell, work-wise), where I accomplished something I have to believe is rare. I was an inept busboy. I never even made it up to soda jerk.

The manager there was another unpleasant guy. He delighted in recounting how much fun he had killing Vietnamese. On the bright side, he hired only pretty girls as waitresses. One night, I worked with the three best-looking girls at my high school. Made the night go considerably faster.

I also found out what slobs people are. I still have screaming nightmares about the kind of stuff I’d have to clean off tables. One of the nice things about the banning of smoking in restaurants is that people can no longer put out cigarettes in plates of half-eaten food.

But obviously, my less-than-positive experiences in the fast-food industry haven’t put me off the occasional quick meal. If the kings of the White Castle would decide to invade this part of the country, I’d become a willing vassal. We can only hope.

Deep in the silly season - 7/25/2008

One of the ways we can tell we’ve moved into the second phase of this year’s presidential election is that everything Barack Obama and John McCain say now is being parsed for signs of backing off on earlier statements.

A while back, there was a great hue and cry over Obama’s vote on FISA. He voted for the bill even though it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that rolled over for the administration. He’s suddenly being accused of Hilary Clintonesque expediency, putting his presidential hopes ahead of principle.

Well, surprise, surprise. As an Obama supporter, I’m not crazy about his vote on FISA either, but I also recognize that it’s merely one battle in a very long war that won’t end for another couple of months. He’s probably going to do a couple of other things that will disappoint me, but as a grownup, I expect that. Nobody gets everything they want, in politics in particular and in life in general.

But to hear some of Obama’s more left-wing backers talk, you’d have thought that he came out in favor of immediately arresting and waterboarding every Muslim in the U.S.

Both those who supported Obama and those who supported McCain during the run-up to their upcoming nominations had better realize that ideological purity ain’t going to win their man any points with most voters. They aren’t preaching to the choir any more; their job now is to appeal to as many voters as possible, and there are a lot of folks out there who aren’t going to make their voting decision based on straight, party-line considerations.

And it isn’t just some of the candidates’ more doctrinaire supporters who seem to feel that way. The national press also makes a big deal out of every pronouncement the candidates make that can’t be easily pegged as a “liberal” or “conservative” idea, as though the only people who vote are party members.

The problem is that, for now, we’re all hostage to the political junkies. To those involved in the process, and those who cover it in the media, the presidential race is the only thing in the universe that exists. The insularity breeds a certain lack of perspective.

That’s a particular problem with the media.

Trapped on campaign planes, covering the same speech several times a day, the reporters only talk to each other, the candidates and their handlers. It never fails to astonish me how often these reporters – who are supposed to have some kind of handle on the larger picture – seem to live and work in a bubble. That’s understandable, I guess. If those same reporters spent all their time covering marbles tournaments, they’d be discussing ad nauseum the condition of the top contenders’ thumbs.

But less defensibly, the way the national press covers the election also is due to laziness. It’s just easier to report the echo-chamber blathering of other reporters and full-of-baloney pundits – and believe me, if there were such a thing as baloney futures, this would be the time to invest in them – than it is to actually do what reporters are supposed to: dig for news.

That’s also why so many political stories are what’s known in the trade as horse race coverage. I mean, look at it objectively: Is there any point in reporting who’s ahead at any given moment? The only numbers that matter are those that come out after the actual votes are counted. Because we cast our ballots in secret, anything other than actual vote totals is guesswork. Yet, news organizations fall all over themselves trying to report the latest poll results first.

That’s due to what is purely a professional interest among journalists, the pressure to get it first. I have had occasional legitimate scoops in the 27 years I’ve been a reporter and I’ve been proud of them, probably inordinately so. Perhaps my finest moment is when I was first not just to report a murder, but to report the name of the victim, before the cops even gave it out (I got it from his landlord, who was called to the scene to identify the body; his family was less than thrilled with my scoop, by the way). When I’ve scooped other reporters, my first impulse has been to climb up on top of the building and beat my chest like King Kong.

But, and this is the salient point, in that same 27 years I’ve never had a reader come up to me and say, “Boy, you must be a giant because you got that story first.” People who have actual lives don’t care who got a story first, and even if they did, they don’t have time to keep tabulations of how far ahead of deadline a reporter got a story done. But I’ve heard tales of network TV reporters who lord it over colleagues because they had the story first by literally a few seconds.

The other thing that national reporters worry too much about is getting access to the candidates and their handlers. I once knew a guy who was a very sharp operator and told me years ago that reporters generally don’t find anything out that someone, somewhere, doesn’t want them to know. That’s not an immutable law, but it holds true in most cases; even Woodward and Bernstein had Deep Throat to help them break the Watergate scandal. So, politicians learned years ago that the best way to control reporters is to hold over their head the possibility they won’t talk to them.

Any reporter worth his salt knows the antidote to that: You go to the guy’s enemies (or, in some cases, friends) to get the information. There’s always a way to get the facts. But that takes some real work. The national press will blame the pressure of possibly getting scooped for not doing that, but make no mistake: Being a trained seal is easier than making your way in the wild. Trained ones get their food handed to them and don’t have to work for it.

And the national media is so used to working the lazy way that they don’t even notice when they violate their profession’s most basic tenets. Not long before he died, Tim Russert said that whenever he called a source, he assumed the conversation was off-the-record unless it was explicitly noted otherwise. That violates everything reporters are taught; once a reporter identifies himself as such, even the dimmest source is expected to know that anything they say can be reported. After all, why else would a reporter call a source?

So we’ve got another three months and change of some pretty silly stories to wade through before election day. Fortunately, the republic probably will survive.

Citizens of an alternate universe - 6/12/2008

Early in my career, I kind of enjoyed dealing with whackjobs. Reporters get to do that frequently. It’s amusing, at least at first.

But what you find out later is that people who aren’t quite all there can suck away any time you have quicker than a vampire can empty a blood bank. They spend way too much time on snipe hunts and, because snipe hunting can be a lonely pursuit, they’ll do all they can to get you to come along – especially if you have access to the mass media.

As a reporter in southwestern Minnesota, I covered state politics during the heyday of Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche isn’t much heard from now, but in 1986 a couple of his minions won Illinois’s Democratic primary for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. In the process, they pretty much pole-axed the Democrats’ hopes of winning the governor’s office that year.

After the LaRouchies (or LaRouchites or whatever you’d call them) won in Illinois, for the next year or two they had a bit of media cred. As a political reporter, I’d often run into them.

Like their leader, a largely self-educated “economist” and conspiracy monger (he’s got a particular bone to pick with the English, for some reason), the LaRouchies would sound pretty reasonable for about the first 10 minutes of any conversation. After that, their eyes would start going in opposite directions, they’d begin foaming at the mouth and the conspiracy theories would begin arriving like ants at a picnic. Needless to say, I did as few stories as I could get away with doing on them.

LaRouche and his followers may be largely forgotten 20 years later, but the world never runs out of its supply of wingnuts.

What always made the LaRouchies so problematic after that Illinois win is that, for a time, you had to get their opinions on things. No matter how glancing their acquaintance with the universe most of us live in, they were, for good or ill, news.

In his great book “It’s Not News, It’s Fark,” Drew Curtis, who runs the Web site fark.com, details why the mass media report so much crap as news. One of his chapters is about “equal time for nutjobs,” and it resonates with anybody who does what I do for a living. We’ve all had to do stories quoting people we knew were off-plumb just because they were in the news or, in some cases, available.

When Timothy McVeigh was executed, I did a reaction story. I needed to find a member of the tax-protester- wingnut community and the only person I could think of was a guy named Ron Stuart. Ron was a nice guy, but had connections to people like Gordon Kahl, the tax protester who shot two U.S. marshals. Ron spun the standard nutjob conspiracy theory about the Oklahoma City bombing, that the U.S. government did it with a nuke to discredit tax protesters, etc., etc. I put his quotes in the story – and got a very nice letter from him after it ran – but I knew I was quoting somebody who basically was spewing garbage.

Those thoughts came back to me recently when I was reading another book, Matt Taibbi’s “The Great Derangement.” Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone, recounts his rather depressing experience covering Congress, his frankly weird stint as a member of the church run by John Hagee and encounters with the “9/11 Truth Movement.”

Hagee and a significant number of his followers are right-wing nuts – believe me, as much as you’ve heard about his involvement with John McCain, Hagee is worse than Barack Obama’s pastor could ever hope to be – and the 9/11 Truthers are basically left-wing nuts.

What they share, though, is a deep, abiding sense of conspiracy. For the Hageeans (Hageeites?), the big conspiracy is filled with anybody who doesn’t share their apocalyptic religiosity. For the Truthers, the conspiracy involves anybody who doesn’t share their faith in a conspiracy. That will, presumably, now include me; I hope Dick Cheney buys all the drinks at our next meeting.

The conspiracy is much more central, and in some sense wackier, among the 9/11 Truthers. Taibbi has one particularly hilarious chapter in which he dissects the truthers’ claims by actually imagining a conversation among Cheney and two other conspirators. It points out just how Byzantine and frankly illogical the truthers’ claims are.

What conspiracy nuts don’t understand, ironically enough, is that the world isn’t a logical place. Weird and horrible things happen for reasons that sometimes can’t be foreseen and that just aren’t that complicated. Think of it this way: What’s more likely to happen? – that a group of terrorists would fly hijacked planes into buildings or that the U.S. government would form a huge conspiracy that included things like high-flying military planes dropping airplane parts around the Pentagon to simulate a crash there? And how likely is it that a huge, vast conspiracy could be pulled off and nobody with any real knowledge would cop to it? As the old Mafia saying goes, “Three can keep a secret if two are dead.”

Taibbi comes up with a good explanation for conspiracy- based paranoia. His basic conclusion is that people have become so used to being screwed by their government and moneyed interests that they cast about for someone to blame, for some overriding evil that they can point to as the culprit. That gives their suffering a logical explanation and explains their powerlessness.

What’s scary is that people like Hagee and the truthers can actually be taken seriously in some quarters, or at least by some reporters. Too many trees have died so their ravings could be published. Too much time is spent wondering what they want.

What they want, often as not, is just someone to listen. But it would do us all well to remember that just because somebody really believes there are snipe out there to hunt doesn’t mean that we have to go hunting with them.

Fear of the different understandable, but wrong - 5/30/2008

Among mankind’s hoariest clichés is that we fear the different.

Of all of man’s various irrationalities, that is perhaps the worst. It is arguably the single greatest cause of suffering throughout history. Pick a horror – the Inquisition, just about any civil war anywhere, the Holocaust – and it was, at a very basic level, at least partially the result of fear of the different. Much of the sales job on the war in Iraq was based on our enemy’s differences from us, at least until people woke up enough to look around and notice there was a Middle Eastern Muslim family living down the street.

There’s probably nothing we can do about it. It is the most primal of feelings. When we meet another person and find significant differences, suddenly a piece of understanding goes missing. Not understanding is a scary thing.

That was much on my mind as I watched “Dakota’s Pride,” the subject of this week’s cover story. The original impetus for the journey detailed in the movie was Girard Sagmiller’s realization that when his son was born with Down syndrome, he knew next to nothing about the condition. He responded in the most rational of ways: He set out to educate himself.

Of course, Sagmiller really didn’t have a choice. His wife gave birth to this kid with Down syndrome and, like it or not, ignore it or not, he had to learn about the condition before he could deal with the new addition to his family.

The disabled, particularly those in whom the disability is visible, often inspire discomfort on some level in the non-disabled. It’s that ol’ debbil, difference. The Americans with Disabilities Act made life better for the disabled, but legislation can’t change the way people are wired. On some primitive level, I think, whenever we see a disabled person there’s an involuntary sort of shudder. If we’re wise, the shudder is conscious only as “there but for the grace of God go I.” If we’re unwise, we turn away and treat the disabled as something less than – other than – fully human.

It’s amazing how unwise some people can be. Years ago, I had a friend whose daughter was extremely disabled; severe cerebral palsy was just one problem that kept her in a wheelchair. We were discussing people’s reactions to her one time and I asked him what kind of things people would say. “You wouldn’t believe it,” he replied. The worst was that occasionally some chucklehead would suggest that she’d probably die young, relieving my friend of the burden of taking care of her. You have to wonder how stupid someone could be to say such a thing and believe it’s comforting.

Of course, being like that is its own punishment. It’s all too easy to sanctify the disabled, but it’s true that even the most different, handicapped person has something to teach us about what it is to be human. But differences don’t have to be handicapped/ablebodied to be significant. One of the most valuable things I learned during a year of study in Japan is that while it’s nice to believe folks all over the world are just the same, they’re not. They’re different. Everybody basically wants the same things – three hots and a cot, love, acceptance.

But what circumstances make people happy can vary widely. Japanese society, for example, is built around the group. Whereas the paradigm of a truly courageous man in the West is a person who stands alone for a belief, even when everyone else believes differently, it’s the opposite in Japan. There, the hero is the man who may believe something other than everybody else, but goes along anyway to preserve harmony. Needless to say, most Americans would make lousy Japanese. But then, Japan is a relatively homogenous society. There’s not a lot of difference there. There are beautiful things about their sense of identity, but they’ll never know what it’s like to exist as part of the huge gumbo that is America.

What’s distressing about this country is that even though every American’s story is virtually unique, we still haven’t been able to get over our fear of the other.

There are white people, for example, who have said they simply won’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black. Think about the aggressive ignorance that betrays. With his college degree and his time overseas, Obama’s life is closer to mine than it is to, say, Willie Horton’s, to name the last black man shamelessly used to appeal to people’s prejudices during a political campaign. Yet there apparently are people who equate Obama with Horton simply because of shared pigmentation. And people in the Democratic party think there are so many of them that they are worried about how to get bigots to vote against John McCain in the general election.

Fortunately, such idiocy is a minority view (no pun intended). If it wasn’t, Obama wouldn’t be as close as he is to becoming president.

Bigotry against the handicapped isn’t excusable, but it’s at least understandable as an irrational reaction that touches us at a very deep level. Bigotry against skin color is less explainable. Think of it this way: You’ve probably met otherwise intelligent people who don’t know what to say about a handicap, but when’s the last time you met an intelligent bigot?

Society has at least done something to accommodate the disabled; there are more wheelchair ramps than there used to be. People are generally rational enough to realize that whatever differences a disabled person may have, the differences are less important than the similarities.

Why should race be any different? And more importantly, why is it?

Youth sports folks need to be adults - or maybe not. - 5/23/2008

You’ve got to give this much to adults: They’re really good at screwing up kids’ things.

The latest example is the current urination competition between Red River Soccer Club and the Fargo Soccer Club. One side is accusing the other of recruiting players, while the other maintains that youth soccer’s local establishment is keeping them from joining the local soccer community.

Both sides, of course, are saying that It’s All About The Kids. The dispute is rather complicated and more than a little dreary; suffice it to say that, as it does with most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

What both sides have to ask each other is: What does their disagreement have to do with kids actually dribbling and trapping balls and kicking them into/keeping them out of the goal?

The answer is, of course: Nothing. My suspicion is that, instead, it has everything to do with adult egos and plain, old-fashioned wooden-headedness. In the end, it’ll be resolved somehow and the kids will keep kicking balls into nets, at least until some grown-up’s feelings get bruised again and the urination resumes.

When they were small, my kids played soccer. They didn’t play for long and took different paths later, one in music and the other in music and theater. I was always rather glad for that; every time I saw one of my kids in a concert, it always reminded me that there are no benchwarmers in an orchestra. And while arts parents can occasionally be obnoxious, they’ve got nothing on sports parents.

Still, soccer was a positive experience for our family. I even coached a year or two – at a level when the coaching consists of, “don’t use your hands” – and had a blast.

Fortunately, my kids lost interest in soccer just before they reached the level at which adults begin getting over-involved. They just decided there were other things they wanted to do. I wonder, though, how many kids drop out because they just don’t want to deal with the baggage adults bring to what should be just a fun childhood activity.

My own love for a different sport, good old American football, was killed in high school because the adults that ran it were such lousy examples.

As a kid, I loved football. I lived and died with the Vikings and loved nothing better than to strap on pads. But by the time I got to high school, I was a pretty bad football player – slow (even though I was a lineman, that was a handicap) and totally unable to take it seriously enough to impress the coaches.

Still, I played, or at least dressed for games, all three years of high school. I was a starter briefly my junior year, but over three years I played in no more than a total of maybe eight quarters.

And I endured a lot of crap from coaches. Over three years, my line coach never learned to correctly pronounce my name (or at least, if he learned, didn’t do it). I was one of those guys who served as mostly a tackling dummy during practice, in between heaping helpings of psychological abuse from most of the coaches. It so thoroughly killed my love for the game that it was years before I could even watch the Vikings.

After my senior season, I put a long letter in the school paper that was highly critical of the football program. And for three days, I was a hero, the talk of the school. The memory still warms 30 years later.

It came out just before Thanksgiving. My high school had a traditional Thanksgiving assembly that always included a skit in which teachers presented gag gifts to notable figures in the school. That year, the skit was presented by the girls’ volleyball coach and the wrestling coach, two classic cases of arrested development. I was told the morning of the assembly that I’d be getting one of the gag gifts, so I knew something was up. And I knew I’d have to be a good sport about it.

So, that afternoon, I was one of about 1,500 kids in the gym for the assembly. When they got to the gag gift for a member of the senior class, they called me down.

“We all know about Tom’s well-developed writing ability,” said the volleyball coach. “So we’ve decided to give Tom this special roll of stationery and matching pen” – he pulled out a roll of toilet paper with a pen taped to it – “because Tom, like all seniors, knows that the pen is mightier than the sword.”

There was dead silence. I was probably the only kid in that whole gym who understood the joke, and only because I had heard my Dad once use the archaic slang in which “sword” is a euphemism for male genitalia.

Still, I remember thinking, I must have misinterpreted it. These were adults, I thought; they wouldn’t try to publicly humiliate a 17-year-old kid, at least not in such a juvenile way.

After the assembly, I was at my locker putting on my coat when the German teacher, whom I didn’t even know, approached me. “I want you to know, I thought what they did is really terrible and I had no part in it,” she said. And the light bulb went on. My God, I thought, they did mean what I thought they meant.

Those teachers couldn’t get away with that today; they’d be looking at lawsuits and ruined careers. In fact, the only reason my Dad didn’t raise hell about it was because I begged him not to. But still, if adults rarely do something so blatant now when it comes to youth sports, they often get involved in the kind of silly warfare that the soccer leagues are engaging in here.

Maybe it’s an ironclad rule: When adults get involved in kids’ sports, it quickly ceases to be all about the kids. It becomes more about uniforms and traveling teams for elementary school kids and showing that my kids or school or program or all of the above are better than yours.

And nobody stops to think that maybe it should be about the joy of competition and the fun of running up and down a field unencumbered by concerns about how much more your team can score than the other, or how good you can make your coaches and the organizers look.

Notice I said “coaches and organizers” and not grownups. There’s nothing grown-up about it. Maybe it’s time youth sports boosters here considered that.

D-G-F principal does the right - and smart- thing. - 5/16/2008

There are two things you can never go amiss saying: “I was wrong” and “I don’t know.”

That’s particularly important in dealing with the media. Most people out there, even professionals who ostensibly get paid for handling reporters, forget the sin of Richard Nixon. The cover-up is nearly always worse than the crime.

In fact, people who deal with the media the right way are so relatively rare that when they do, it’s always gratifying to watch.

A case in point is last week’s dust-up at Dilworth- Glyndon-Felton Junior High over the suspension of some students for refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. The school’s principal, Colleen Houglum, earned her paycheck for the entire year over about two days.

First, a disclaimer: My girlfriend teaches at the school, although her involvement in last week’s incidents was extremely peripheral. Because she teaches seventh-grade history, she was asked to make the Pledge announcement to students the day after the suspensions. She was directly involved in neither the suspension nor the aftermath. And yes, Houglum is her boss.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Houglum apparently handled the whole thing with a heaping helping of class and a great deal of honor.

For those of you who didn’t see the story, three eighthgraders were given a day of in-school suspension after failing to stand for the Pledge in home room, a rule noted in the school handbook. Students are not required to actually recite the Pledge, but must stand for it.

After it hit the front page of the local daily and then the Associated Press wire, it briefly became a media sensation. Houglum got calls from reporters (and others, including a couple of veterans groups) all over the country. As soon as I heard about the story, I knew it would probably make the national news, even though there was considerably less to it than met the eye. After nearly three decades in this business, I know the drill.

Now, in the first place, this was hardly a free-speech issue. The kids said they’d been remaining in their seats for much of the year and the teacher hadn’t enforced the rule. Houglum happened to be in the room Thursday, saw the behavior and levied the punishment.

For what it’s worth, the students apparently weren’t protesting anything. One suspended student’s parent said his daughter was talking to a friend and didn’t hear the announcement about the pledge. It was only the day after it happened that one of the students apparently discovered he’d been sitting down for the pledge because he didn’t agree with something about the war in Iraq; he didn’t say anything about protesting the war until the day after the story broke.

There were mistakes made by the school. In the first place, the teacher should’ve been enforcing the policy all year. And you could argue that Houglum overreacted in suspending the students, although without having actually witnessed the event, nobody can say that for certain. It’s not my intent to run out on the battlefield after the fight is over and bayonet the wounded.

It was in the aftermath, though, that Houglum showed some real class. In subsequent days, she smoothed things over with the suspended students and said publicly that the policy would have to be reevaluated, since it could be construed as a violation of students’ First Amendment rights.

And with that, the story died the death it so richly deserved.

Houglum did exactly the right thing in that situation, when it came to dealing with the media. She didn’t pass the buck. She answered reporters’ questions as fully as she could (given restrictions on data privacy, which is a whole other issue). She didn’t bob and weave.

She was honest and above-board, more so than most people who get in similar situations.

The last time I saw anybody act that intelligently, it was Rick Foss, the ELCA Lutheran bishop in eastern North Dakota. It came out that one of his pastors had been involved in an affair with a congregation member. I had to do a story on it, called Foss and got every question answered. The story – which was somewhat more substantial than the Pledge of Allegiance flap – died in a day.

Contrast that with the way Catholic church officials act whenever a priest gets caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing. They circle the wagons and immediately clam up. If the church makes any statement at all, it’ll be some irrelevant claptrap about church dogma or something. And the story never, ever goes away.

It’s amazing how many people try to evade public questioning and wind up not just in the spotlight, but in an unflattering one. There’s a pretty simple reason for that, which goes back to another principle I live by: Don’t ever try to best someone at what they do for a living.

I’m a reporter. It’s my job to find stuff out. If you want to lie to or evade me, unless you lie or evade for a living, like a (insert name of least favorite profession here), I’m going to be better at getting the truth than you are at concealing it. And God help you if I’m an unscrupulous reporter. If I’m after something other than the truth, I’ll get that too; if I want to euchre you into confessing to the Lindbergh kidnapping, I’ll be able to do it.

But if I’m an honorable person, getting at the truth of a situation is how I put bread on my table. You might be tempted to lie to me because it’ll make you look good, or at least less bad, but you might as well come clean. But beyond that, telling the truth is, quite simply, the right thing to do. Houglum showed some real character in reacting the way she did, but she also probably knew that her life would be much, much simpler if she just manned up and took whatever lumps she had to. Personally, as you can tell, I thought she came off looking rather good.

There’s a lesson to be learned here and it has nothing to do with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Making the grand march toward a wider world. - 5/9/2008

I did something last weekend I hadn’t done for more than 30 years and probably won’t ever do again. I went to prom.

No, I didn’t dance. Didn’t even go to the whole prom, in fact. My girlfriend’s two kids attend an area high school and we went for the Grand March, which is something they didn’t even do at my high school proms back in Columbia Heights. My kids didn’t go to prom, so this was my first grand march experience.

I knew grand marches were a big deal here, but I didn’t realize just how big a deal. We stood in line for more than an hour so we could get a seat in the school auditorium. That was a good thing, because more than 800 people attended that part of the dance and there were some who couldn’t even secure standing-room-only spots in the auditorium and were turned away.

I’m not complaining, but it was … long. It lasted a bit more than an hour. Still, there was some fascination to it.

All of the girls looked marvelous. Most of the boys looked pretty good, except for one who was dressed like he’d just awakened after a short nap under a local bridge; I sort of wondered why his date, who was decked out in the full formal, let him do that. There was only one kid I wanted to slap. He wore a sideways baseball cap with his tux. I didn’t want to slap him for being sloppy, I wanted to do it because it was such an affectation. “Look at me, I’m cool, I’ll do the whole tux thing but this sideways baseball cap shows I don’t really buy into the whole prom thing.” Nice try, Beaver, but you just looked dorkey.

It was funny to compare the performances of the girls to the boys. Most of the girls actually were pretty radiant. For some of them, that brief time of trotting across the auditorium stage was a little moment in the sun, something they won’t experience again until their wedding.

The boys were a different story. About half looked like they were enjoying it, but a significant number wore slightly embarrassed, lopsided smiles, or looked like they just wanted to get their short walk on the Green Mile over with as quickly as possible.

A few vamped and camped it up. Several couples – too many -- ostentatiously donned sunglasses. One guy did this little James Bond shtick, which was cute. One or two guys carried their dates across the stage.

Being a student of high-school social dynamics, I tried to scope out exactly who the social lions were. The best guide was the announcers, who peppered some names with inside jokes (obviously for the “ins”) and mispronounced other names (the “outs,” I would guess).

It was an interesting hour or so. Of course, it’s impossible to sit through something like that without flashing back on your own experience.

Part of the sales pitch for those who sell prom accoutrements – dresses, tuxes, flowers, photos -- is that it’s an evening you’ll remember all your life, that it’s a Big Deal that marks some kind of passage. That is, of course, crapola. Fact is, if you didn’t spend so much money and dress so well, you wouldn’t remember it any better than you would any other high school dance, which is to say: not at all.

About all I remember about my proms is who my dates were (Carrie Ferlita junior year, Beth Minehart senior year; my girlfriend’s dad wouldn’t let her go with me senior year and Jackie gracefully allowed me to ask Beth, who was very sweet) and what my tuxes looked like (velvet vest, ruffled shirt, big, honkin’ bow tie, brown junior year and green senior year). That’s it. I don’t even remember where we went to dinner. I guess I had fun.

Every few years, when I’m looking for something else, I’ll stumble across photos of my high school prom and the first thing I think – the thing that most of the kids I saw Saturday will think 30 years hence – is, “Good Lord, did I actually think that hair looked good?” (One kid in particular Saturday looked like he combed his hair with a fork.)

Prom, like weddings, is presented as this big romantic foofaraw, but is really a way for a lot of businesses to make money. I suppose you can make a case for it as that rite of passage. It’s probably a fitting way to mark the end of high school years, at least for the seniors. I heard it said once that prom is a way for kids to spend an evening trying on a grown-up role and grown-up behavior. That may be slightly true, but you know, there have been few times as a grown-up when I’ve rented a tux and wore a flower for anything other than a wedding.

Still, high school is a horrible enough experience for most people that any little break from its petty tyrannies and terrifying social strictures is a good thing. I didn’t have daughters, but it must be a real rush to see your little girl onstage, smiling radiantly and looking for a brief moment like the confident, grown woman she’s becoming. That’s got to be scary in equal measure, though, because a) it’s an early sign she’s slipping away from you and into a separate life and b) as a former teen-age boy, a father would know exactly what every boy is thinking when he looks at her. And it isn’t “gee, she’s looks like the confident, grown woman she’s becoming.”

I don’t mean to be condescending here. Actually, there was more than a little beauty in that grand march. It always does an older person good to see kids on the cusp of adult life, at a time when their world is all potential and dreams and before life has done its best to grind them down and make them manageable. The kid in the silly baseball cap might have looked a bit off, but in the grown-up world there are places that such a social statement could lose him his job. My opinion of his fashion statement doesn’t mean a thing to him and for that matter, it shouldn’t at his age.

So march on, kids. In the greater scheme, the steps across that auditorium stage are among the least important you’ll ever take. But just because something isn’t really important doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed. It was good to see you shine.

A different view of the cultural divide - 4/25/2008

News flash: People of different faiths can actually talk to each other.

That’s the unlikely conclusion of a tremendous new book, “Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture” by Daniel Radosh.

Radosh’s book is, first and foremost, an example of top-notch reporting and writing. The author immersed himself in attempts by evangelical Christians to either form their own pop culture or make inroads into the pop culture of the secular world. He attends everything from Christian music festivals to Christian pro wrestling to Christian sexadvice seminars.

The writing is snarky when it needs to be – the bornagain actor Stephen Baldwin comes off as something of an idiot, which I don’t doubt is true – and serious and respectful when it should be, like when he speaks to intelligent artists who happen to be Christian about the role belief and faith plays in their work.

To be sure, he encounters his fair share of cheese. One chapter details a live show by a Christian superhero, Bibleman, whose shtick includes quoting scripture while he fights bad guys with names like “The Protester.” The Christian pro-wrestling chapter is funny, albeit in a respectful way; it shows how a relatively shallow theology can make an already silly pursuit that much sillier. His foray into a Christian trade show talks about tchotchkes that even many Christian merchandisers refer to as “Jesus junk,” like polyester 10 Commandments neckties. He also meets his fair share of the deeply clueless. Radosh is Jewish and there are many scenes in the book where evangelicals light up at the news, viewing him only as a representative of the group on which is their faith is based.

He also meets some fairly scary people, like the vaguely sinister head of an organization that promotes creationism. Another guy attempts to browbeat him to Jesus.

But much of the book is deeply thoughtful and, to say the least, fascinating. There’s an absorbing chapter on Bible manufacture (there’s a version for virtually every niche market) and Radosh effectively takes apart the “Left Behind” book series for the fringe ideas on which it is based.

Radosh also encounters some deeply committed people who effectively refute the stereotype of all Christians as simple-minded, naïve followers of piein- the-sky groupthink. Believe it or not, one of the more thoughtful people he interviews is Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye and now pastor of his own liberal, punk-rock church. He takes Bakker to a hell house, one of those Christian haunted houses that spring up around Halloween, and Bakker refutes its message angrily and eloquently.

One of the most affecting passages in the book is about Radosh’s conversation with Aaron Weiss, front man for a band called mewithoutYou. Weiss talks at length about what is good and bad in Christian music and about whether it can, or even should, be used to influence a listener’s faith. Weiss is a deeply thoughtful and intelligent man, the kind of person anybody could talk to and actually come away with ideas worth pondering.

Through no fault of the author, who deftly avoids patronizing his subjects (even when talking about a chowderhead like Baldwin), it’s hard not to feel a little condescension toward some of his subjects. There’s so much unbelievable naivete at places like a Christian trade show. Many of his more thoughtful sources cut to the heart of the matter when they basically say that Christian art, for example, is often judged more by its doctrinal fitness than its quality and is thus doomed to be ignored by much of the world, which either doesn’t agree with the doctrine or doesn’t know it. And a superhero who fights his enemies with Bible verses (and a thing that looks like a light saber) is going to be over the head of any kid young enough to be influenced and hopelessly lame to any kid old enough to understand what he’s saying.

Radosh’s final conclusion, though, is nearly moving. He talks to many evangelicals who say the key to finding an intersection between evangelical Christian pop culture and other kinds is for evangelicals to rescue their reputation from the more fringe elements that make the most noise. As much as one hears about fundamentalist Christians, they’re a relatively small part of even the evangelical movement; they’re just extremely vocal. There are more reasonable Christians out there than not. For every one who holds up a “God hates fags” sign, there are many more who seek to welcome gays into their communities without either trying to “convert” them to straights or demanding that they be celibate. For every “scientist” who tries to promote creationism, there are many more who realize that there’s really no reason why faith and evolution cannot coexist and even buttress each other.

Actually, the book shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. As someone who’s covered arts off and on for years, as much bad Christian art as I’ve seen, I’ve seen plenty of good stuff as well. One of my favorite artists is Bebo Norman, who’s a sort of Christian James Taylor (and a really nice guy, to boot). Norman often sings about the struggles of being a Christian; his music speaks not about how he’s headed for heaven and everlasting bliss, but how it’s really difficult to live by Christ’s principles. It’s the kind of music that even a deeply secular person can relate to, because it’s not so much about Jesus as about how a good person struggles to live a good life.

In the end, Radosh’s is a deeply hopeful book. It’s a reminder that there are good, thoughtful people on both sides of the cultural divide in this country. The trick, in the end, is to ignore those on the fringes who are too angry or too rigid or simply too dumb to be reasonable. Radosh points out that most people want to do the right thing and those with different views of what that is need to not only talk to each other, but to know they can.

The pleasures of punking the boss - 4/17/2008

I’ve never been particularly big on practical jokes. Despite my professional style as a hard-bitten, cynical scribe, when it comes to my personal relationships, I can be a bit gullible.

But every so often, when I’m tempted into participating in somebody else’s punking of a friend, I can’t resist. Once again, that ol’ devil, my inner 14- year-old, weakens my resistance.

Last Friday, nearly the entire Moorhead-based staff of Extra Media “quit.” If they gave out Oscars for best portrayal of a real jerk, Publisher Kolness would be a shoo-in.

It actually started earlier in the week when Shawn and Tammy, who sell ads in addition to doing several other jobs, somehow began telling Kolness’s partner, Dennis Ding (also our advertising manager), that they were thinking of opening a restaurant. That was, of course, untrue, but they kept stringing him along just as a way to tease him. They informed Kolness of the joke late in the week, and the three of them cooked up a little skit in which Kolness would fire them, ostensibly because their work on the “restaurant” was taking time away from their jobs at Extra Media. I got involved late in the week, when Kolness told me, and he added me to the cast; my role was to get so upset over the firings that I quit.

Suffice it to say it went off without a hitch. We were all really good, although I had to keep ducking back into my office so Dennis wouldn’t see me giggling. For his part, Dennis had a look on his face that could only be described as stricken. He looked like somebody had grabbed a particularly sensitive part of his anatomy and squeezed. Hard. His relief, when he found out it was a joke, was palpable. I think it took the better part of a halfhour for the blood to come back into his face.

I felt like a bit of a jerk but, Lord, it was fun.

What’s nice is that I work in the kind of office where you can do something like that and be threatened only with retaliation in kind. It was simply an inventive way to have fun.

I’ve worked in other offices where practical jokes flew fast and furious, but for entirely different reasons. My third newspaper job was at the Detroit Lakes Tribune and Becker County Record when they were owned by the late John Meyer. John fired people to get his heart started in the morning – I worked there when he fired his wife – so, to say the least, the lack of job security made the place a bit stressful. In fact, I think the trenches in World War I were a less stressful place than Lakes Publishing. People dealt with that stress in different ways, but some of us blew off steam through the odd practical joke.

An example: I once lost a $1 bet to one of the other reporters and paid him off with 100 pennies in a jar of marshmallow cream. He promised to get me back, but nothing happened for a while. A few weeks later, I was covering a county governmental meeting. The only people in the room were about seven members of the county Solid Waste Planning Committee and I. The meeting was droning on when a clown in full regalia walked into the room, sat down next to me, put an arm around my shoulders and said, “How about a lip-lock?” The funniest part, in retrospect, was the reaction of the people on the committee; several were cracking up, but the rest were trying to bravely carry on as though there wasn’t a clown in the room (the reporter who pranked me had cleared it with the committee’s chairman first). The other reporters all walked into the room to watch; one had to go to the other end of the Becker County Courthouse because she was laughing hard and didn’t want to cause any additional disruption.

I actually was a bit miffed because one of the few things I take seriously is my job, and having a clown cozy up to me interfered with that, to say the least. And dope that I am, it took me a while to realize my colleague was behind the prank. Of course, when I returned to the office, I bowed down before him and proclaimed him the practical jokemeister. What else could I do?

But as I said, such practical jokes were a way for the soldiers in the trench to forget their misery for a few minutes. Working in a place where job security is but a distant dream nibbles away at the edges of your soul and sanity.

One reason that I’ve never been a big practical joker – much of it is fear of retaliation – is that there’s a fine line between pranking and cruelty. It’s one thing to yank somebody’s chain gently, but it’s another thing to make them look like a complete and utter bozo. I’m just pompous enough to dislike being bozofied.

Of course, these days, what with the Internet, one has to worry about bozofication on a global level. About the only thing worse than being made to look like a dork to your immediate circle is having a video of the experience posted on YouTube for the entire planet to see. I have to admit, I’m guilty of watching those kinds of videos online, but I never do so without at least a small twinge of sympathy for the victim.

In fact, I even felt a little guilty about what we did to Dennis, who had had kind of a tough week. That was, in fact, one of the reasons we did it to him; the guy sorely needed to be distracted and, let’s face it, what better way to do that than to convince him that his entire staff was disappearing on the spur of the moment?

Well, okay, maybe a greeting card would’ve been better. But it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.

How I escaped going to stamp prison 4/11/2008

I love the blasts from the past you can get on the Internet.

A Web site I frequent recently ran a selection of vintage ads from comic books. For anybody who grew up reading Superman or Batman or Archie or Sgt. Rock, they were a short little trip back to childhood.

There were all the classics: x-ray specs (with their picture of an obvious sex offender looking through a woman’s dress); the seven-foot Polaris submarine (that “fires rockets and torpedoes”; take that, Mom, and there’s more where that came from if you ever serve spinach again); seven-foot-tall monsters for $1 (more if you chose Dick Cheney); the $1.75 100-piece toy soldier set (“made of durable plastic, each with its own base,” which tells me they could’ve charged twice as much); and my personal favorite, sea monkeys (I have sea monkeys in my office, a Valentine’s Day gift from my beloved; they talk to me).

I always wanted to order the submarine (not that I was forced to eat spinach) and the 100-piece toy soldier set (especially because each had its own base). I can only imagine, as an adult, how cheesy some of this stuff was, given the prices, which were pretty low even by the standards of the day. I imagine the Polaris submarine looked considerably different than it did in the ad; the ad makes it look like military-surplus hardware, but my guess is that it was probably made of a particularly inferior grade of cardboard and would’ve lasted about 15 seconds. And I’ll bet the torpedoes were all duds.

I actually did order something from a comic book once. It almost landed me in prison. Fortunately, I was 9 or 10 years old at the time.

As a kid, I collected stamps. It was a fun hobby and, at that age, it doesn’t have that slight nerdy aroma that adult philatelists have to deal with. It really was interesting; the stamps I collected spoke of exotic places and people I could dream of someday seeing.

I somehow came by some money and looked through my comic books, shopping for something I could order. In an X-Men comic, there was an ad from the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J., offering a whole bunch of stamps for very little money (I seem to remember $2.25 as the price, but I could be wrong). You got a certain amount of stamps, plus another set “on approval” – a phrase I didn’t understand and which would, in the end, wind up providing one of the bigger scares of my young life.

My sister Jenine agreed to help me order something with my money but, for some reason, made it conditional on my buying the stamps (which, to be fair to her, I was inclined to do anyway). So, she helped me order merchandise from the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J. A few weeks later, I got an envelope chock-full of loose, canceled stamps. There were quite a few duplicates, but enough variety that I felt I got my money’s worth.

Included with the envelope was a more fussily packaged bunch of pristine, uncanceled stamps. They were nice. One set even had Adolph Hitler’s picture on them. I figured they were just included with the order, so I pasted a few in my stamp album and promptly lost the rest.

A few weeks later, I got a friendly letter from the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J. It was something on the order of, “Hey, Tom, thanks for ordering from us. Did you decide to keep those on-approval stamps? If you did, could you send us the rest of the money?”

Being an ordinary kid, I ignored the letter.

I kept getting them. Each one was a bit less cordial. Finally, it got down to where the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J., threatened to turn the whole thing over to their lawyers if I didn’t pony up for the other stamps.

Even at that tender age, when I saw the word “attorneys” in a letter, I knew it was serious. I talked to Mom and Dad, and they realized that the company was dunning me for the on-approval stamps, which, except for the Hitler ones in my album, were nowhere to be found.

My older brother took great delight in telling me they’d haul me off to prison if I didn’t send the money, describing in loving detail the horrors of incarceration (he grew up to be a prison guard). It didn’t help my mood.

Finally, Dad came up with a solution. He sat me down and had me write a letter to the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J. I don’t remember the exact wording, but I do remember one phrase: “I don’t think my third-grade teacher will let me out of school to go to court.” We sent the letter off and I awaited the next salvo from the stamp people.

It never came. To this day, four decades later, I have never heard another word from the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J.

For my entire childhood, though, I always harbored a secret fear that they were just waiting. I always wondered if, on the day of my 18th birthday, there’d be a knock on the door. I’d answer it and there’d be two guys in dark suits and fedoras.

“Tom Pantera?” they’d ask. “Yes,” I’d answer, trembling.

Then they’d draw their guns and scream, “STAMP POLICE! ON THE FLOOR, SCUMBAG!” And before I knew it, I’d be in stamp prison.

As I said, I’ve never heard from them. For all I know, the Mystic Stamp Co. of Camden, N.J., went out of business a long time ago. Or maybe it still exists, and in a dusty file drawer somewhere is an outstanding bill owed by a third-grader in Columbia Heights, Minn., with a note attached. “Find this person,” the note says. “Terminate him with extreme prejudice.”

This much I know: I’m not going to be vacationing in Camden, N.J. And the next time my sister helps me buy something out of a comic book, I’m not going to listen to Jenine’s advice.

Abstaining from healthier views - 4/4/2008

Astory in the latest New York Times Sunday Magazine tells about the struggles of True Love Revolution, a student group at Harvard that promotes sexual abstinence.

It’s a little sad to read, really, as it’s a little sad to read about any quixotic quest. Much of the story focuses on Janie Fredell, one of the organization’s leaders. She comes off as a serious, committed person, but also one who has some very specific issues about relationships and certain sexual practices. Those issues make it pretty obvious that, despite her sincerity, she’s really swimming upstream.

Virtually every objective, well-conducted study one sees about abstinence education indicates that it’s basically a failure, if you measure success by lasting effects. Abstinence boosters are forced to fall back on what are, at best, dubious arguments.

Pro-abstinence folks make what seem like some good arguments, on the surface: birth control isn’t 100 percent reliable; early sexual activity can be emotionally harmful; and nobody ever got an STD by saying no. And it is true, as they often say, that a hypersexualized culture puts pressure on young people to experiment with sex often before they’re ready.

But they tend to go further, making all kinds of unsupported assertions that waiting makes marital sex somehow better, that sex outside of marriage is a prime cause of poverty, that in general (to paraphrase George Carlin) it rots your mind, curves your spine and loses the war for the allies. The Times story mentions a 2004 report issued by California Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman that said 11 of 13 abstinence curriculums that his House committee examined contained scientific errors and information that was untrue or misleading.

Abstinence advocates face a couple of basic problems besides their lack of evidence, though.

Sure, there are good, secular reasons for a young person to abstain from sex, most of them having to do with a young person’s lack of understanding of the emotional power of the act (an understanding many older people lack as well). But so many of their arguments are begging the question; they simply assume that which they seek to prove.

And what their arguments don’t say is perhaps more interesting than what they do.

Take the assertion that abstaining from sex has something to do with “self-respect.” Now, doubtless, there are people out there who have sex for the wrong reasons. One of the worst reasons is to get another person to like you, as though that other person would have no other reason to do so. That does indicate a general lack of respect for oneself.

When a person does something that, by its very nature, is harmful to him- or herself, that shows a certain lack of self-respect. If you get addicted to meth, it’s pretty obvious that you’re self-destructive, and you can’t be self-destructive and respect yourself at the same time.

Assuming sex is undertaken with the proper precautions and for the right reasons, it’s not self-destructive; indeed, it’s life-affirming. It’s the best possible way to establish a certain kind of human connection.

But the abstinence backers are really saying that, outside of marriage, it’s always bad. I think that speaks volumes about their view of sex in general. It’s as though two people absolutely have to go through a marriage ceremony before sex is permissible – that, without a formal event to mark it, commitment just isn’t possible. We all know couples who have stayed together for years – and presumably have had a sexual relationship – without benefit of matrimony. And we’ve all known married couples mired in mutual loathing. Marriage does not necessarily make for intimacy, emotional or physical.

Abstinence backers also have an uncomfortable habit of focusing on the female side of the equation. With their insistence on father-daughter chastity balls, chastity rings and that kind of thing, they seem to be saying that, ultimately, it’s the girl’s responsibility to say no because boys simply can’t be trusted to control themselves.

That’s a rather reductionist view that basically lets boys off the hook. It’s the same view that’s at work in fundamentalist Muslim countries, where women must only be seen fully covered because men are just too susceptible to temptation and unable to control themselves.

The most disturbing subtext in abstinence advocacy is that sex is somehow dirty by its very nature.

Abstinence backers pay lip service to the positive aspects of sex. But their basic attitude is pretty clear. It’s as though anyone who engages in sex outside of marriage is somehow soiled, that they bear a stain that never can be cleansed. That’s a very neurotic view. It’s like the old Woody Allen joke: Is sex dirty? Only if it’s good.

Maybe because of that neurotic view, the abstinence folks insist on compartmentalizing sex, on treating it as though it somehow is never part of the rest of a relationship.

The New York Times story talks about Fredell’s relationship with her boyfriend. “Fredell does not make sexual demands of him nor does he make demands of her,” the story says. “‘So I’m free!’ she said. ‘I’m free to experience the emotional and intellectual and spiritual intimacy of another person.’ By closing herself off to sex, she claims to have found the humanity in her boyfriend and to have opened herself to an experience of love.”

Catch that? By foregoing physical intimacy, they become more intimate in other ways. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s never wrong to avoid sex until you’re ready, but to say avoiding intimacy makes one more intimate in other ways sounds a bit, well, tortured.

Maybe the abstinence folks should abstain from tortured philosophical justifications and just be honest. They probably wouldn’t do any worse than they’re doing.

A chance to dent racism - 3/28/2008

I was a victim of bigotry, or at least a form of it, at a fairly tender age.

My high school girlfriend was Vietnamese. Her father, who met me only twice, and briefly, hated me. He didn’t hate me because I mistreated his daughter or anything like that. He didn’t know me enough to hate me for any deep reason. He hated me because I was American.

Jackie’s father was a major in the South Vietnamese army. For whatever reason, that soured him on Americans. Jackie’s mother, who didn’t get along with her father, covered for us during our relationship, but the pressure of having to deal with her father’s disapproval (plus normal teen-age fickleness) doomed the romance after only a couple of months.

Still, it was a useful lesson for me. It taught me in a very stark way the irrationality of prejudice. It also made me promise myself that if I ever had kids, they could date anybody they wanted – white, black, brown, green with two heads – as long as that person treated them decently and didn’t spit on the floor during dinner.

I’m about the least politically correct liberal you’ll ever meet, but racism is one American characteristic that fascinates me. It’s alive and well. One wonders, nearly a century and a half after the surrender was signed at Appomattox, if this country will ever get the poison out of its system.

Any student of U.S. history knows how deeply intertwined the question of race is with our past. Politically and culturally, it is part of our fabric. Race has brought out our best qualities – courage and the can-do spirit – and our worst – intolerance and naked self-interest.

Maybe it’s not so much an American quality as a human quality: the fear of what’s different. Japan, which has a fairly homogenous society, is a deeply racist country. They hate Koreans, for example. A Japanese friend of mine was a champion bicycle racer. But his parents were Korean and he was all but forced out of the sport because every time he won, he’d get a ration of crap from people because a “Korean” boy had no business beating a Japanese boy (even though he was born and bred in Japan). His dad kept a boat with a loaded rifle in it ready for the day the storm broke.

What’s always disturbed me about racism in this country is its sort of casual nature. A few years ago I was in New Orleans. The cab to the airport was driven by a retired fireman, an elderly white guy who was quite a talker. He told my companion and me about how his fire station was in “niggertown” and regaled us with tales of the “little nigger boy” who used to hang around the firemen. To my northern ears, it wasn’t merely shocking, it was disorienting to hear his casual use of a word so offensive it’s bleeped on cable television. He may or may not have been a bad guy, but there was something very, very bad about his attitude and speech. And he used perhaps the language’s ugliest word as casually as he would draw a breath.

I have often thought, when I hear such casual bigotry, that it helps me understand the rage beyond words some black people must feel. My experience with Jackie’s dad was a lame joke compared to what it must be like to have someone judge your individual worth by something as insignificant as the amount of pigment in your skin. To know that there are people out there who would like to see you dead – literally – because of your complexion is something no white person could ever understand. I imagine Jews get the same feeling when they consider the Holocaust.

That’s the main reason why, in the end, the candidacy of Barack Obama gives me something approaching hope. I think there are many good reasons for voting for him, but perhaps among the best is that maybe, with a black president, this country finally will be forced to confront the racial elephant in the room. We won’t be able to push casual racism, which really is the worst kind because it makes all other kinds possible, into the background of the American dialogue. Every night, when a President Obama appears on the news, we’ll be reminded that huge numbers of Americans aren’t white and that those of us who are had better learn a better way of addressing that than thinking in stereotypes.

Some will accuse me of racism myself. I’ll plead not guilty there; as much as I hope Obama wins the White House, I’m not favoring him because he’s black. I think he represents the first possibility in my lifetime for real change in the way the system works. My hope is tempered with the usual cynicism – you can’t get to even his position without compromising some of your ideals – but all other things being equal, he seems like the person who could best bring new ideas and perspectives. Even if he were white, freckled and blonde, I’d be backing him.

But even if he fails to bring the kinds of changes many Americans want to see, there’s real value in electing a national leader who doesn’t look like every one who’s gone before. It will show the rest of the world that, when it comes to overcoming our differences, we’re not just talk. And it will show us, the American people, that we can seriously take the first (admittedly) small steps to realize the dreams of equality that are enshrined so beautifully in the documents that helped form this nation.

To put it less elegantly, having a black man in the White House will push our collective face into the fetid morass that is race relations in this country and maybe make us – white, black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian – do something to make it better. Isn’t it about time?

Onetime fame can bite you - 3/21/2008

Sung to the tune of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme:

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale

And I’m not talking rot

For it is true that Mary Ann Was out and smoking pot

Yes, you may have heard the news last week: Dawn Wells, the good girl Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island,” was busted last month for reckless driving. A search of her car found a small amount of marijuana and four half-smoked joints.

Heavens to Skipper! What’s next? The Professor getting caught running a meth lab? Ginger giving up her Hollywood career to be a gubernatorial hooker?

(A couple of things while I’m on the subject of “Gilligan’s Island”: I’ve probably mentioned this before – it’s my all-time favorite piece of trivia – but “Amazing Grace” can be sung to the tune of the theme song, and vice-versa. And furthermore, I think Gubernatorial Hooker would be a great name for a band.)

To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated “Gilligan’s Island.” I’d put it up there with the worst sitcoms in history. What always irritated me was the laugh track. The Skipper would walk onto the beach and say something innocuous to Gilligan like “Gilligan, what are you doing?” and there’d be a rousing burst of mechanically generated laughter. It was really, really, really irritating.

Still, you’ve got to feel sorry for somebody like Dawn Wells. First of all, her mug shot was plastered all over. Now, few, if any people, look good in mug shots (Nick Nolte, anyone?). Wells, who’s still kind of cute, could’ve looked worse, but she looked a bit, well, baked.

I researched her background on the Internet Movie Data Base. Boy, if it wasn’t for Mary Ann, she wouldn’t have had much of a career. Of the 48 entries for movies and TV shows in which she’s acted, 30 are from “Gilligan’s Island” or after. Of those 30, in 10 she played characters named “Mary Ann” (including the original show and spinoffs like “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island”). One of the Mary Anns was on “ALF,” another on, of all things, “Baywatch.” Is there a pattern here?

At least it’s provided her a steady meal ticket. Many a Hollywood actor, whether a has-been or never-was, would give a limb to have that kind of job security.

But don’t you think there must be times when somebody like that looks around and says, “Hey, I’m doing dinner theater in Hoople, N.D. What happened to my fame?”

I wonder that mostly about musicians. Ace Frehley, for example, plays the Fargo Theatre. Granted, he lived the high life to a harmful point. He’s clean and sober now, which he wasn’t during his years with Kiss, and he’s working. He isn’t taking a dirt nap; given the life he led, that’s probably more a matter of luck than anything else. Still, there must be times when he arrives in places like Fargo to play a movie theater and thinks about the times he arrived at megaarenas in large cities, to be greeted by mega-groupies and do mega-unhealthy things. He may or may not be glad he doesn’t play those places and do those things anymore, but he probably has at least a residual nostalgia for those times. I’ll bet he had fun.

Every once in a while, these living “Trivial Pursuit” questions surface and, often, the immediate reaction is the most damning: “You mean that guy’s still alive?”

The last time John Mellencamp played here, he was accompanied by the ’60s icon Donovan. Needless to say, I don’t think as many people would have bought tickets to the Fargodome that night had Donovan been the headliner. He’s a bit long in the tooth to fill a rock concert hall; when he sings “Mellow Yellow,” you get the uncomfortable feeling that he’s not singing about drugs, unless they’re the kind prescribed by a urologist.

There are people, particularly musicians, who manage the sort of opposite trick. Rather than fading into obscurity, they hang onto their fame like grim death. One of the worst concerts I ever saw was by the Beach Boys. One of the reasons it was so bad was that there’s only one guy left from the original group. Mike Love is able to call his band the Beach Boys mostly because he’s won the legal right to do so, but legal rights do not bestow talent on somebody that is far past his prime. There was something a little disturbing about a guy that elderly singing “California Girls.” Lack of talent aside, it was just creepy.

Sadly, in the case of people like Love, it’s not a matter of hanging on to that 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol talked about. Rather, they just don’t seem to know when their time is up, when the calendar page has turned and taken with it the reason for their notoriety. I mean, you can’t really blame somebody like Dawn Wells for parlaying a modest level of fame into something like a career; if you have any advantage in this cold world, you use it. And when she embarrasses herself by, say, getting caught with a little illegal herb in her car, it’s an accident.

But a Mike Love, who was a minor member of one of the most influential and beloved acts of its day, is the kind of person who doesn’t have the good grace to get off the train even long after it’s left the station and sits rusting on a siding. He’s still got a measure of fame, but he makes his living more on good will and nostalgia (when I panned the Beach Geezers in a review, you’d have thought I soiled the flag, given the reaction of even some friends). He sure isn’t making it on talent. Worst of all, he’s messing with memories some folks hold very dear.

I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on people like Grandpa Mike. Fame can be an addictive drug; it would be terribly hard to give up all the perks, all the adoration of the strangers you’ve sung to for 40-plus years, people to whom you once meant something.

And besides, no matter how bad he might be onstage, at least Mike Love doesn’t have the whole world looking at his police mug shot, at least until milking your fame becomes a crime.

Remembering the '70s wonderland - 3/7/2008

I was having a crappy morning on the drive to work last week, but one song on the radio made me feel much better. It was, of all things, a disco song from the late 1970s.

“Boogie Wonderland.” Real disco, none of that latter-day faux disco stuff.

I hated disco music, but I love “Boogie Wonderland” because whenever I hear it I flash on my friend Faisal. He was a member of the Notre Dame contingent in my group of exchange students in Tokyo (one of the few Notre Dame people who wasn’t a spoiled, obnoxious rich kid). Whenever I hear that particular song, I think of Faisal on the dance floor of Radio City, a disco we frequented in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Faisal was thin and angular and whenever I hear that song, I picture him on the dance floor, dancing in his abandoned, loose-limbed way in the near-darkness of strobing lights, his arms seemingly about to detach from his body. It’s a memory that still brings a smile nearly 30 years later. It sums up not just the tremendously wonderful guy he was, but the kind of fun I had in those days.

It’s kind of ironic that one of my fondest memories of the ’70s revolves around a disco, one of the least appealing aspects of ’70s culture. Of course, it helps that it was a disco in Japan; that was perhaps the most crucial, not to mention fascinating, year of my life. I ended that benighted decade at a Shinto shrine, watching an ancient ceremony as the calendar turned.

I wasn’t necessarily sorry to see the ’70s go, but now I look back on them with way more fondness than I ought to.

I’ve been told by more than one Generation X member that they wished they’d been around then. I can sort of see it. The 1970s was the last great age of excess. It was, perhaps, the last time you could really party hard and generally worry about nothing more serious than a bad hangover. It was a tremendous time to come of age.

For us late Baby Boomers, it was Our Era. The economy wasn’t great, of course, but even if it had been, our older brothers and sisters had already snagged all the really good, high-paying jobs. Our generational elders had all the really interesting historical memories, like the war and the assassinations and the moon landing; we later boomers remembered most of those, but with less clarity and fewer emotional associations. We had Richard Nixon, of course, but we ended up with Jimmy Carter, who was a pretty mediocre president (although a great ex-president).

So, in terms of nostalgia, we’re stuck with things like disco, body shirts, perms and earth shoes. Whenever I see pictures from that era, I always wonder if American popular culture wasn’t afflicted with some sort of virus that made everybody’s taste go on hiatus for a decade. I mean, was there ever an ensemble that looked more ridiculous than the leisure suit? I hasten to point out that I never owned one. I went for the more classic three-piece suit.

I didn’t have a perm, either; didn’t need one, since my hair was already curly. Instead, I straightened it with a hot comb and sprayed it to a helmetlike stiffness. Anybody who wants to blackmail me (or any other late boomer) needs only to find a high-school graduation picture.

If the ’70s was an era that knew how to party, I think those of us who gloss it with nostalgia forget how important pure appearance was. Take those discos, for example. It was a time when you couldn’t just go out on the dance floor and wing it, which is about all 95 percent of men can ever do. No, you had to be John Travolta or Denny Terrio (extra points for remembering him), all smooth moves and smoldering sensuality. Even if you impressed that babe when you met her at the bar, as soon as you led her out on the dance floor, her image of you evaporated in a puff of skewed rhythm and flop sweat.

And, oh my God, the clothes, from head to foot. It was the great era of polyester; you were lucky if a lit match in the middle of a crowd didn’t result in a spate of third-degree burns. I found the shoes particularly horrifying. Earth shoes – which had a lower heel than toe, for those of you who’ve repressed the memory – were actually comfortable once you got past the duckwaddle feeling of learning to walk in them. But they looked unbelievably silly. It was sort of the height of granola culture (hence the name).

But the real horror was platform shoes. I recall going to a mall to buy a pair of dress shoes and being unable to find a pair that weren’t platforms. That was another thing I refused to wear because, unless you bought a really expensive pair, they screamed, “DORK!”

Not that the ’70s were entirely horrible from an aesthetic standpoint. The style in women’s hair was long and feathered, which to this day I find attractive. If a guy liked that sort of natural hippie-chick look, there still was plenty of that around.

When it comes to the life of the mind, though, the ’70s started some plagues from which we still suffer. Not for nothing was it called the “Me” decade. Charlatans have always been part of life, but the 1970s brought a new breed: the human-potential scammer. That probably was best epitomized by Werner Erhard, who founded est, a 60-hour workshop that included heaping helpings of verbal abuse and a rule that you couldn’t go to the bathroom for long periods of time.

Est is no longer around, but the sort of intellectual fuzziness it encouraged still exists. That’s most obvious in politics, where a presidential candidate who doesn’t believe in evolution actually is taken seriously and anyone who proposes a flat tax draws more criticism than someone who believes in a flat earth.

Still, if you can ignore the bad clothes and stupidity, a little nostalgia for the ’70s is excusable. They were fun, after all.

But please, God, don’t let leisure suits make a comeback.

Missing that toddler that was - 2/29/2008

The other day, a woman who works in my building walked in with her tiny baby granddaughter in her arms. The kid was, to say the least, adorable, sleeping the sleep of the truly innocent.

And the other night, I finally saw “Knocked Up,” which does a pretty good job of encapsulating the frightened exhilaration of impending first-time parenthood.

Whenever I see a baby or toddler, I always get a little nostalgic for that time in my own kids’ lives. For about 30 seconds. Then I remind myself that I’ll never have to change another diaper as long as I live (and no, if I ever become a grandfather, my mind isn’t going to change). I always tell my kids that the next diaper that gets changed in my house will be mine.

Becoming a father is probably the most rewarding single thing I ever did. When I was younger, for a variety of reasons I came to believe that I’d probably never have kids. In the first place, I didn’t really like them. I was the youngest child of a youngest child, so most of my cousins were considerably older. When they started having kids, and I was around family, I usually got stuck hanging out with my cousins’ children and, believe me, it wasn’t much fun. It gave me what I thought would be a permanent distaste for small children.

Things changed, thank God.

My children are now 19 and 21. They’re men, albeit young men, who have taken the first steps on the path of the rest of their lives. I suppose they still need a dad, but my role has gone from provider/protector/teacher to occasional counselor. That’s fine with me; at my age, I no longer have either the energy or the desire to be their emotional wet nurse.

Still, there are times, usually when I see some guy in the park really enjoying his toddler, that I’d give every penny I have for just 10 minutes of being not just Dad, but Daddy.

I was a pretty good father, but I also was tremendously lucky. Between the two of them, my kids never have given me so much as five minutes of trouble. I probably just didn’t catch them when they did things they shouldn’t have, but the fact is, they’ve always been really good boys – smart and funny and decent and honest. Hell, I’d rather spend time with either of my sons than about 95 percent of the people I know. I really like them. Besides, they crack me up.

But even given that happy result, what I miss as much as anything from their childhoods is the innocence and guilelessness. I think of my kids when they were maybe 2 or 3 years old, walking around the living room babbling, bumping into the furniture, looking at even the most mundane object with bright, curious, beautiful eyes.

I used to love watching movies with them at that age. They would experience them so directly, reacting just as the characters reacted. If the characters laughed, they laughed; if the characters were scared, they were scared. When my older son was very little, he would run out of the room during certain parts of “ET.” (To this day, he doesn’t care for horror movies, although he at least doesn’t run out of the room.)

But it was that innocence that was most appealing. In the adult world, you can never deal with anybody without at least a brief flash of cynicism, of wondering what their real angle is. Particularly in my business, there are times I can go through a whole day and count the truths I’ve been told on one hand.

But with a little kid (sadly, a very little kid), what you see is what you get. Every emotion, every reaction, is painted on his face. Every touch speaks volumes. Is there anything more wonderful than the feeling of a tired two-year-old’s arms around your neck?

That’s why when you catch your child in that first little white lie – “Who broke the lamp?” “Not me!” – something inside you dies just a little. You know they’ve learned to compromise their innocence. You recognize that they’ve taken their first bite of the Garden of Eden’s apple. You hope they don’t spend their whole lives eating it.

Still, if innocence slips away little by little, there are huge compensations. Once they start to figure out the world, they start learning at a truly amazing rate. A toddler is a sort of information sponge. I often wonder if that is the essence of genius; perhaps a genius is someone who keeps for a lifetime a toddler’s ability to take in information. If you’re lucky, as an adult, you can enjoy having a ringside seat at your child’s discovery. And if you’re smart, you participate whenever you can. I mean, you’re a chump if you don’t take advantage of the brief time your kid actually believes that you know more than he does.

But as much as I’ve loved fatherhood, nobody ever told me about the downside of it: You spend the rest of your life scared out of your wits, at least subconsciously.

There’s an old saying that he who loves gives hostages to fortune. Stephen King once observed that no horrific scene he wrote could even come close to the horrible things he could imagine happening to his children. About once every week or two, the Associated Press carries a story about a weird child death, a kid crushed by a fallen birdbath or some such occurrence. When my boys were little, those stories would send me into paroxysms of worry; gee, thanks, AP, having my kid killed by a lawn ornament was a fear I hadn’t yet thought of.

You learn to live with the fear the same way you learn to live with the fear of your own death: You push it back and ignore it; you convince yourself not just that it will not happen, but that it cannot. Denial can be a wonderful thing.

But really, the fear (and the financial drain and the fatigue and the running back and forth to soccer practice) is a small price for the compensations. If you’re a good parent, and if you’re lucky, you get to see what is best in you reflected, even amplified, in your children. It’s one of the few things in life that isn’t ephemeral. If you keep your eyes and heart open, you gain something that nothing other than parenthood can give. And no matter how many jerks or lies you have to deal with a day, it reminds you that what’s important can also be what’s really, truly satisfying.

View different from the podium's other side - 2/15/2008

I’ve always been a frustrated teacher. In fact, that was my chosen career until about halfway through my senior year of high school, when I put a letter in the school paper that caused a stir and turned me into the ink-stained wretch that I’ve now been more than half my life.

Still, part of me always wanted to teach. The closest I came was speaking to a college journalism class once or twice a year; I enjoyed it immensely, and the students seemed to respond. But I knew there was a big difference between keeping a roomful of students amused for an hour and actually imparting useful information over the course of a semester.

Well, I’ve finally gotten my chance. Mostly through pure luck, I’ve landed a part-time teaching gig at Minnesota State University Moorhead. I’m teaching a section of media-writing to about 20 students.

In my deep hubris, I’d always said I could teach a basic writing class off the top of my head. My first day of class disabused me of that notion. I mean, I could do it, sure; you can’t do something for more than 25 years without learning the job pretty well. But I found out there’s a big, honkin’ difference between knowing how to do a job and actually telling people in a systematic, useful way how they could do it.

And you can have all the funny war stories in the world to tell, but when you’ve got a roomful of kids paying good money for an education, you’d better have more to offer than just the odd chuckle.

I also was given the freedom to teach the class pretty much the way I want. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but it’s more than a little frightening.

Fortunately, I was blessed with some very good teachers during my school days. And even the teachers who were less than stellar at least showed me what not to do. I had a history professor in college who was a truly wonderful man and who must have been, in his day, an incredible teacher. But by the time I had him, he was rather elderly and his mental faculties were beginning to dull. My notes would often be a jumble of seemingly unrelated sentences; his lectures, while often interesting, were so scattered it was hard to know what to study come test-time. So I knew that what my students would need from me, first and foremost, was organization – never my strong suit.

I literally got the job two days before the first class. I didn’t even have a syllabus, the handout that lays out the teacher’s policies and the schedule for lectures and tests. That by itself took a solid weekend of work. I’m still working on making lecture notes for myself. The class – and I warned the students about this – is very much a work in progress. They’ve been very patient and forgiving guinea pigs.

As much as I’d always wanted to teach, I didn’t even anticipate what the real kick is: seeing the students GET IT.

I try to spend at least one of the two weekly sessions actually having the students write or do other things directly related to the task of media-writing. It’s an endless source of fascination to me to watch their brains and hands at work. I’ve been blessed with a really good class; they work hard, certainly much harder than I ever worked in college. You can almost hear the mental wheels turning as they struggle to do things I myself can do almost without thinking after all these years. Watching them struggle, watching how much they get right and how logical it still is when they get something wrong, is incredibly intriguing. It’s nearly addicting.

And they ask great questions, the kind that I actually have to think to answer.

The hardest part for me so far has been grading. My girlfriend, an award-winning seventh-grade history teacher, showed me an online site that has what are called “rubrics.” Those are basically customizable tables that lay out what a student must accomplish to get a given grade, then translate those criteria into number scores that can be used to arrive at the final mark. Thank God she showed me those; grading writing is subjective enough, but if I have any hope of being fair to the students, I have to at least know what I’m being subjective about.

I haven’t been doing it long, but I’ve already learned a couple of things about teaching.

First off, it’s hard, at least if you want to do it well. I always had a huge amount of respect for good teachers and remember some of mine with extreme fondness. The best one I ever had was my seventh-grade history teacher, Dennis Meyer, at Central Junior High School in Columbia Heights. He not only taught me things I still remember 35 years later; he gave me a lifelong love of history that has enriched me considerably. I had a highschool English teacher whose enthusiasm for reading turned me, an already avid reader, into a voracious one. I had a couple of college journalism professors who taught me skills and commitment to my craft that I use every day.

It’s as though those people are looking over my shoulder as I try to teach my own students.

The other thing I learned is that, when it’s going well, teaching is about the most fun you can have legally. Seeing those lights come on is a huge blast. In fact, the reason we get away with paying teachers so poorly is that the profession has a dirty little secret: When it’s going well, teaching is something most teachers would do anyway, just for the sheer fun of it. Nobody’s in it for the money, that’s for sure.

So, I hope to keep having fun. More than that, I hope I can actually teach my students something they can take with them once they’ve left MSUM, other than the odd funny story.

Job hunting "help" often no help at all - 2/8/2008

There were two particularly memorable, if not very tasteful, ads in this year’s Super Bowl, both from the job-hunting Web site Careerbuilder.com.

One showed a Jiminy Cricket-like character being eaten by a rather nasty-looking spider. The other showed a woman’s heart literally leap from her chest, climb up on her boss’s desk and hold up a sign saying “I quit” (the tagline was “follow your heart,” apparently to better employment).

The ads were striking, although they were criticized by some for being rather too graphic. Still, they accomplished what ads are supposed to: They made you remember the company’s name.

Unfortunately, both ads are a case of a company putting more effort into its advertising than its product. In my experience, Careerbuilder.com was pretty useless as a job search tool.

In fact, there are a lot of pretty useless such job search Web sites. I discovered that when I spent the better part of a year looking for a job in my field.

I still get the occasional e-mail from Careerbuilder.com, with the subject line screaming that THEY’VE FOUND JOBS FOR ME IN MY AREA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don’t have any particular need to look at their site any more, but I really stopped looking at it long before I took my current position.

I’d estimate that, in the time I was looking for a job, Careerbuilder.com sent me no more than three or four job ads for which I was qualified and fewer than that in which I would be interested. They apparently operate on the throw-enough-crapagainst- the-wall-and-see-what-sticks method; maybe they figured if they sent me enough ads, even for jobs for which I wasn’t really suited, I’d land one and thus be a satisfied customer.

My favorite listing they sent me was for a pharmacist’s job. As it happens, my son is in pharmacy school, but I don’t think that quite qualifies me to enter that profession. Hell, when I look at the classes he has to take, I recall with a shudder that one of the reasons I took a journalism degree was so I wouldn’t have to take hard sciences that would’ve virtually guaranteed my flunking out.

There were a lot of garden-variety sales jobs and such, but nothing that I was particularly qualified for. I might’ve given those a shot eventually, but I still (fortunately) hadn’t given up on the news biz.

I tried a couple of other job search sites, but had similar experiences. It seems that job searches are one of those things that draw enough desperate people that Web sites, no matter how materially useless, can sell ad space around providing a “service.”

It isn’t just Web sites, of course. My personal favorite on the uselessness scale – so much a waste of time that you have to admire its brazenness – is “Job Dig,” which has both a free-circulation paper and a Web site.

I didn’t look at the Web site much, but I often picked up the paper just to marvel at the fact that it remained in business. About all I ever saw employment ads for were nurses’ and truckers’ jobs; given the nationwide shortage of nurses, if you can’t find a job in that field without the help of something like Job Dig, maybe you ought to take up welding or something. But the employment ads were a relatively minor part of the publication anyway. It was filled mostly with what in the trade are called “house ads,” advertisements promoting the publication itself. The rest of it was filled with rather stock, silly job-hunting advice on the order of “don’t urinate on the interviewer’s desk during your job interview.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only job-hunting sites I ever saw online that were worth looking at were the state Job Service sites for Minnesota and North Dakota. That’s how I got my security guard gig. The jobs they sent out, and the job-hunting advice they gave, were at least attractive.

In the end, though, I got my current job the way most people do: connections. I’ve known Publisher Kolness for more than half my life and it just happened that my need for a job coincided with his need for an editor. As the old saying goes, it’s better to be lucky than good.

Job hunting, especially when you don’t have one, has to be one of the most frustrating experiences possible. It’s one of those awful times when, no matter how hard you work, the situation is out of your control for reasons you can’t even know. During my year-long search, I applied for jobs for which I was very qualified and didn’t even get so much as a “thanks but no thanks” letter. I applied for other jobs for which I was virtually unqualified and got an interview (and, in one case, hired).

The jobs where I got no nibble nearly drove me crazy. What did I have to do, I wondered, to even get considered? And when I had an interview, I always wondered what it was I’d done wrong when I didn’t land the position. (That’s hubris talking, of course; it may be that I did nothing wrong, but that somebody else simply did something right, or was in the right place at the right time.) You go into a human resources office with less knowledge than you take with you into a casino, and the stakes, often as not, are higher.

The other thing that a year of job hunting here showed me is that Fargo-Moorhead’s great employment picture is largely an illusion. Sure, there’s a low unemployment rate here, but I’d guess that the underemployment rate is horrendous. Out of all the jobs I applied for that didn’t require a college education – I applied for everything, just to get a paycheck of some kind – I’ll bet 75 percent of them paid no more than $9 an hour and most paid a good deal less than that. You can’t live very well on that kind of pay if you’re single; if you have a family, it’s not even close to a living wage. That’s wrong, and it’s going to be trouble for this area down the road, especially if the disparity between the haves and have-nots here gets bigger.

Still, unemployment does have its advantages. It gives you time to watch those clever Careerbuilder.com ads.

Will the turkeys riot? - 2/1/2008

So, how are you going to spend your windfall?

That, of course, has been the topic of water-cooler conversation nationwide ever since The Titular President and Congress agreed to what they’re calling an “economic stimulus package.” Many of us are going to get a whopping few hundred bucks, which the politicians hope we’re all going to run out and blow on various widgets and gimcracks, thereby pumping money into an economy that’s soon going to have all the vitality of a drunk hit by a wrecking ball.

So tell me, have you heard anybody say, “Boy howdy, I’m going to take that money and spend, spend, spend on things I don’t currently own or need! Hey, know where I can buy a Popeil Pocket Fisherman?”

Personally, I might spend a little bit of it, but most of it is going into savings, assuming my heating bill or some other cost of living doesn’t swallow it like a whale going after plankton. A close friend of mine says his rebate, or tip, or whatever they want to call it, already is spent; he’s going to pay off a bill that’s been languishing in the back of his checkbook for months. Besides, even if most people don’t have overdue bills, they’re smart enough to know that spending even a small windfall when we’re headed for a recession is a mug’s game.

My fellow members of the middle class, we’re being played for suckers again. Both political parties are hoping that, come November, we’ll credit either side for the paltry extra amount of cash we got a few months earlier and scuttle into the voting booth to show our gratitude.

What’s most depressing about the whole cynical exercise is that they actually think we’re that stupid. I suppose a few of us can be bought with too little, too late, but most of us actually have some brain activity left – more than those who think they’re doing us a favor, anyway.

Maybe the powers that be are hoping that a couple of hundred bucks spent on a new living room set will help us forget that we can’t afford health insurance. Or that we’re about to lose the living room that set was to go in because our house payments are twice our monthly income. Or that teachers have to buy school supplies out of their own pockets while CEOs who lose millions are paid millions more.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats said.

What’s keeping the center together right now is the forbearance of the middle class. It’s not like we have any choice. If everything falls apart, it will touch us each individually. Keeping this country going is more than an act of faith for us. If it falls, we fall with it and we fall first. But I wonder when people will say they’ve had enough. There’s always some crap people won’t take, but the crap capacity of most people in this country is nothing short of amazing.

Of course, our overseers have developed some fine techniques of distraction. They don’t even have to go to the trouble of finding bread and circuses. Misdirection works just as well, apparently.

There’s something almost perversely amusing about the latest distraction (I don’t mean the rebate checks, either).

In a recent appearance on Fox News, the house organ of the right wing, a guy named Jonathan Hoenig, of something called (seriously) CapitalistPig Asset Management, said the following:

“What worries me about the Democrats is that if you listen to them, their message is so explicitly socialist. I mean, at every opportunity they seem to have this contempt for capitalism, this relentless pursuit of collectivism and this total distrust for free markets. If you put all the politics aside, their goal is a national health care program. Their goal is environmentalism. They see bigger government in every element of public life. That has never been good for America and it has never been good for the market either.”

Got that? Democrats are COMMIES. It’s a measure of how ideologically bankrupt many conservatives are that they attack their opponents with statements that could have come out in, say, 1955.

Are people going to buy this? Does the majority really think there’s something evil about universal health care? That there’s something morally wrong with wanting a clean planet? These aren’t naïve questions, by the way; sure, these are complicated issues, but people like Hoenig aren’t debating subtleties of policy.

And what’s more, are people really going to pay attention to this? Or are they finally going to realize that every dollar that goes to tax cuts for the wealthy or to a horribly misbegotten war or to any of a hundred other things is a dollar taken from them personally?

You see, things are beginning to get so bad that we simply can’t be oblivious to them any more. People are starting to lose everything from their houses to their lives because of the greed of others. For years, to be middle-class in America was to be viewed by many as a turkey ready for carving. But now, when the knife goes into the breast, it’s starting to hurt. Most of the good meat was carved off long ago and the sharp edge is biting into bone. Soon, the turkey will have nothing left to give. The carving has been going on now for a quarter century or more. Because greed is short-sighted, those wielding the big knives never really worried about how long it could continue; they just assumed Thanksgiving was forever.

Forever might be ending, though. We can’t afford to be oblivious any more. We can no longer afford the luxury of cynicism, which keeps us from doing anything and is the bad guys’ best weapon against us.

We’re not quite at the rioting-in-the-streets stage, but if things keep going as they are, that may yet happen. I hope it doesn’t, because in the end it won’t do anybody any good. But if it’s to be avoided, somebody better come up with a better idea than throwing us a $600 bone.

`Whaaaaaaaat' I want at the end - 1/4/08

I’m a whole lot closer to shuffling off this mortal coil than to my arrival in it, so I occasionally find myself thinking about my funeral. I know, I know, that’s morbid.

That came to a sharper point recently when I attended the service for Dave Zielinski, a friend and my son’s former bass teacher. Dave was a musician with the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony, many of whom played at the funeral, so the music was beautiful. And the eulogy was well-done. The service drew quite a crowd, which was gratifying. It was a very fitting and nice funeral.

Describing something as a “nice” funeral, for those of us who dislike the traditional rituals of death, is about as far as we’re willing to go. Actually, when I think about my own service, or whatever it turns out to be, my inner 14-year-old comes out in full flower.

Basically, I want to weird people out because I’m a weird guy.

I actually want to start with my obituary, which will be the first indication most people have that I’ve expired. Since I’ve spent my life as a writer, I think it behooves me to write my own.

When I worked at the newspaper in Worthington, the reporters did obit duty in week-long rotations. During one of my weeks, I got really bored with the conventional form. Just for chucks, I wrote my own, straight, and immediately discovered I’d led what looked on paper like a relatively dull life. So I wrote a joke one and showed it to the other reporters.

Needless to say, everybody started to do their own. They were very, very funny – it was a cynical bunch – but, more interestingly, proved to be a real Rorschach test of what people thought of their lives. One reporter had been through a pretty contentious divorce and her obit’s discussion of that was hysterical in a rather bitter, vitriolic way.

Years later, when I was working for Fargo’s Only Daily, I wrote a paid obit for myself that I wanted run in case of my demise. It talked about what a total jerk I was, a horrible husband, father and coworker; the last line was, “He will not be missed.” I thought it was pretty funny.

My then-wife refused rather indignantly to have anything to do with it, and for a good reason I hadn’t thought of. It would have looked like at least one, if not all, of my survivors had a real ax to grind with me and were doing the grinding in print after I stopped breathing.

I certainly understood her position. Still, I may have to find somebody to run it for me. It’s a nearly perfect joke, in the sense that anybody who knew me will realize I wrote it and anybody who didn’t know me will read it and say, “Whaaaaaaaat?” I mean, there’s hardly ever an interesting paid obit, despite the opportunity it gives survivors to personalize the dear departed. The only one I really remember mentioned that the deceased’s favorite meal was “steak smothered in pork chops,” which gave a rather obvious clue about his cause of death.

But the obit would be only part of what I’d arrange. There’s the funeral. Now, I absolutely hate – hate, hate, hate – the showing of the body. Some look better than others, but I’ve never seen a good-looking corpse. Come on, they’re dead; how good can they look? I’ve made my family aware that if they even think about showing me off, I’ll not only come back to haunt them, I’ll haunt them in ways they never even thought possible. I don’t know if ghosts are flatulent, but I’m going to check. Actually, they have standing orders to burn me and flush the ashes, except for maybe a little tiny bit (I’ll get to that presently).

Anyway, my principles there rather deprive me of being laid out in, say, a clown suit or a nightie, just to make folks once again say, “Whaaaaaaaat?” I’ll have to do that with words.

Maybe I’ll write my own eulogy. After all, the only cleric I know is Heidi, our proofreader, who’s a pastor in Hendrum, but since I’m nominally Catholic, a priest probably will officiate and I don’t know any priests. Rather than have somebody who doesn’t know me scramble to come up with a few nice things to say, I could just do it myself. I could do a eulogy version of that paid obit: “We’re gathered here today to say goodbye to Tom, and most of us would agree it’s about bloody time.” Or I could do a sort of “my speech to the graduates,” a collection of advice stemming from what I learned during my life: “No matter what, never walk naked into a machine shop.”

The one traditional thing I want is a big, honkin’ tombstone. The coolest tombstone I ever saw was at the cemetery where my paternal grandparents are buried in Lansing, Mich. The guy was a circus strongman. On the front of his tombstone, which is an obelisk, is a depiction of him lifting a barbell, with a fairly long epitaph. On the back is a reproduction of one of his circus posters. It is, as I said, way cool.

I don’t necessarily want anything elaborate, but I want something bizarre. I want a really cryptic epitaph. Probably the only thing that will survive of me for more than a generation or two is my tombstone. I’m thinking if I put something strange on it – right now, I’m leaning toward, “No, thanks, I already own a penguin” – in 10,000 years, some archaeologist will find it, translate the inscription and say, “Whaaaaaaaat?” Whole symposiums will be devoted to it. The archaeologists will tie themselves in knots trying to interpret my epitaph. “We’re not sure,” they’ll say, “but we think he was from a race of people who worshipped flightless waterfowl.”

This, by the way, is where keeping a little bit of my ashes comes in. If I’m going to spend money on a cemetery plot, there ought to be at least a little something put in it. Besides the penguin.

Of course, all this presupposes that I’ll actually arrange my own obit/funeral/burial. Being a baby boomer, I don’t really believe I’m going to die (it’s much like our baby boomer belief that our generation actually invented sex). As a backup, I somehow have this belief that, as long as I don’t actually do anything to prepare for my death, it won’t happen.

Still, I probably ought to do something. Anybody out there have a penguin for sale?

Dad probably cooler than Batman, certainly cooler than Clemens - 12/21/07

To the surprise of nobody, except perhaps someone who has been in a coma for the past 10 or 15 years, a big report on drug use in major league baseball came out last week and said that way too many people in the sport played “juiced,” in the parlance of the game.

And there were some big stars, like Roger Clemens. Clemens, of course, has denied it; something tells me they’ll find out later that his denial was, to say the least, hollow.

Of course, among those who like baseball, there’s been great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Personally, I don’t have a dog in this particular fight; I find watching one of those coma patients more exciting than watching baseball, so it’s really hard for me to care.

Of course, much of the wailing and teeth-gnashing has been about The Kids. Golly, the wailers and teeth-gnashers say, how will we explain to the little tykes that their heroes were artificially enhanced? How will we ever explain to them the apparent moral rot at the heart of America’s Pastime? How will we keep Little Leaguers from seeking out the nearest steroid pusher, the better to emulate their grown-up role models?

Personally, I feel worse for gamblers than I do for kids. Kids are resilient; they can find other heroes. But all those guys who bet against Clemens’ team and lost have to wonder if they were even bigger suckers than they appeared to be at the time.

Perhaps we should be teaching our kids that we immortalize sports heroes to our peril. Professional sports – all of them – get a lot of mileage out of their chief myth, that the players are naturally the best at what they do and, at the end of the day, compete For Love of the Game and the money really doesn’t matter. If we wanted to let our kids know the reality, we should have told them a long time ago that professional sports are money-generating machines. And the more teams win, the more money they make both for the owners and the players. And this ain’t a recent development. If you think there ever was a time when money had nothing to do with professional sports, pick up a copy of Eliot Asinof’s “Eight Men Out,” probably the definitive study of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. That whole foofaraw was a reaction to the greed and penuriousness of White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey.

The problem with making heroes out of athletes, at least pro athletes, is that it’s based on a false premise: That it isn’t whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game. That little outdated piece of advice really is a fig leaf for Al Davis’s slogan for the Oakland Raiders, which applies to all professional teams in all sports: Just win, baby. Just like car salesmen don’t get prizes for having the secondbest record at the dealership, no pro jock wants to finish second, because he just won’t make as much money. Were that not the case, there would be no difference in the winners’ share given to either side in the Super Bowl.

So if we don’t hold up jocks as heroes, who do we use, then? I idolized an athlete or two when I was a kid, but nobody could come close to Batman. I thought he was really cool. I was too young to recognize camp, so I took the old TV show at least as seriously as I took my comic books. If I could have met anybody when I was seven years old, I would’ve picked Batman.

Granted, it’s easier to hold up a fictional character as a hero. I mean, there isn’t ever going to be any report coming out that says Batman was using crank and steroids to keep his stamina and physique up while chasing The Joker. Nor will Robin ever file a civil suit alleging that Batman’s intentions toward him were less than pure.

Maybe we should only hold up as heroes those we know well. Granted, everybody has a skeleton or two lurking in the closet, but generally speaking, you’re going to know the hero-worthiness of somebody closer to you better than you could judge, say, Barry Bonds.

This is going to sound mushy, but I’ll tell you who my childhood hero was: my Dad. Of course, as I got older, I idolized my father less, but mostly because I didn’t really need to idolize anybody. When I became a man, I saw that he was human and, while he didn’t necessarily have feet of clay, he wasn’t perfect.

But you know, when I think back on my childhood, and when I part the mists that can obscure true memory, I’m still left with a happy realization. I chose my hero pretty well. Dad was one of the most honest people I’ve ever met. I can’t think of a single time he ever lied to me. And as I got older, if I saw that he made the odd mistake here and there, I saw even more that he did the really difficult things well. He always answered the bell; he provided for his family to the absolute best of his ability and, as it turns out, he was an extremely able man in that respect. My mother will live comfortably until the end of her days because of his foresight. Because he took providing for his family seriously, and because he knew that it was better to give a gift with, as he always put it, “a warm hand,” my kids will have a significant chunk of their college education paid for on their graduation days.

But if he did a great job of providing for his family, it’s that personal honesty that made him my hero and still does. In fact, as I spend more time in the world and see how often crapola rules, it only deepens my admiration for him. Being honest is difficult. It doesn’t make life any easier much of the time. Sometimes, in the end it only leaves you with your honor intact. But my Dad showed me that, sometimes, that’s enough; in fact, sometimes, that’s the most important thing.

And isn’t that the essence of real heroism? Isn’t doing the right thing, the difficult thing, regardless of personal gain, what makes a hero? Isn’t that the only kind of purity worth pursuing?

People who never knew him will remember Roger Clemens for a long time, and how he turned out to have an arm of clay. Nobody who didn’t know him will remember my Dad. But my Dad won’t ever disappoint the people who saw his good qualities. And you know what? I think he would’ve recognized that that made him at least as good a man, and usually better, than any big-money, big-time, big-name jock could ever be.

Production cost shouldn't force safety off the tracks. - 12/07/2007

Ialways liked Thomas the Tank Engine. My kids were little not long after Thomas became popular in this country and hey, you’ve just got to like a kid’s show hosted at different times by George Carlin and Ringo Starr.

So it was with more than a little distress that I saw the recent news about lead-loaded Thomas toys coming out of China. It’s not like I was going to buy any toy trains for my kids, who are now 19 and 21 and probably wouldn’t get much of what the toy biz calls “play value” out of them. Let’s face it, I’d be a little worried if they did.

But still, because I’d actually bought Thomas toys once upon a time, I could relate to the distress of parents who discovered junior’s Christmas gift was an invitation to brain damage. In fact, it made me a little angry.

The one thing I haven’t heard discussed much is, to me, the elephant in the room. The reason this happened has much to do with the source of the toys – Thomas, and all the others that have been recalled due to everything from choking hazards to date-rape drugs. Those toys are coming from countries that basically don’t have the same kind of consumer-protection laws we do, or that have a culture that allows the factories to ignore them. If there’s a quality-control problem, it just gets shipped to this country.

In other words, this is what a global economy hath wrought.

China, of course, has been getting a lot of the bad press over tainted toys. And should we be surprised by this? This is a country that only relatively recently has come out of a failed social and governmental system into a roaring capitalist economy. China is so busy making money hand over fist that it really doesn’t have time to think much about how it’s doing it.

And even if the Chinese had controls in place to prevent your child from ingesting substances he shouldn’t, there’s no guarantee the Chinese system would work. This is a country with a tradition of corruption. One of history’s great engineering feats, the Great Wall, wound up being a bust because the gatekeepers were paid so little they were easily bribed by invaders. The greasing of palms in China is not a recent phenomenon.

Still, I haven’t heard anybody raise the issue of how desirable it is for this country to farm out its industrial economy to foreign countries. I suspect the people in this country who are responsible for the decisions that led to that – everybody from the manufacturers to the retailers to the consumers – were blinded by the possibility of low production costs on one end and low prices on the other.

Now, I’m not calling for a boycott of companies like Mattel and Wal-Mart. The problem is much deeper than one any boycott could solve. Decisions on this have to be made at a sort of macroeconomic level. This is big-picture stuff.

Nor am I calling for economic isolationism. There are going to be times when it might make great good sense to move production of some goods overseas. In fact, it does now, if you choose to ignore the possibility that buying a certain product could ratchet Junior’s IQ down a few points, or maybe kill him.

But somehow, there have to be tighter controls on how other countries make what we direct them to. And those controls doubtlessly have to come on the manufacturing end, rather than once they’re shipped to this country. If tainted products leave a foreign factory, it’s simply too easy for them to end up on store shelves here before anybody knows they’re bad.

Sure, it’s the responsibility of the retailer to make sure they sell safe stuff. But we have to be able to rely on the governments of these foreign countries to control their citizens. If they can’t demonstrably do that, and I’m starting to have serious doubts about China in particular, we just flat shouldn’t deal with them. I think there are probably too many third-world manufacturers who are like Irwin Mainway, the guy on the old “Saturday Night Live” sketch who sold toys like General Tron's Secret Police Confession Kit, Bag O' Sulfuric Acid and Teddy Chainsaw Bear. They don’t care because the money is just as green if the products are unsafe.

It’s up to the American companies and the U.S. government to take these other countries by the scruff of the neck and make sure they’re making safe products. It won’t do, as Mattel did, to apologize to China and claim that design flaws in the original product were the root cause of the problem. Use of lead paint isn’t a design flaw; either the paint has lead or it doesn’t, and it’s not a matter of poorly written design specifications. Mattel’s shameless, craven butt-smooching of the Chinese government doesn’t serve anybody.

Yes, it’s a global economy. We’re reminded of that every time a U.S. factory moves overseas. American business, if it ever really had it, long ago blew off the part of the social contract about watching out for the interests of its employees. That probably won’t change.

But providing safe goods isn’t a matter of a social contract. It’s a matter of basic morality. If we’re farming manufacturing out to countries that treat their people brutally (remember Tiananmen Square?), we’d better make sure they’re not going to treat our consumers the same way.

Yeah, it’s a matter of basic economics; third-world factories can produce goods cheaper than can American factories. But more than economics is at stake here. America probably has some of the strongest consumer-protection laws in the world and those laws doubtless have saved lives. It’s one thing if we ship production overseas to make it cheaper, but it’s a whole different thing if shipping production overseas makes products less safe.

Maybe this year&