Bookshelf update: Randy Pausch & Robert Crais

This will be quick. I'm 3/4 of the way through Randy Pausch's book version of The Last Lecture, and calling it inspiring is like calling grass green. The very act of writing it was inspiring; the end product could hardly help but be so. It really is a good read, though. Pausch emerges as a quirky, three-dimensional character for the ages, a self-professed recovering jerk whose intellectual arrogance is thoroughly undermined by his deep loyalty to his family and belief that some vital part of the secret of life lies in striving to achieve your childhood dreams. If Peter Pan had grown up to be a computer scientist with terminal cancer, he might have written this book.

The other thing that led me to post today was Robert Crais, whose Elvis Cole series is among my very favorite reads, and who just published a typically smart, witty, multilayered and purposeful essay about his own creative process, in the form of an imagined conversation between himself and Cole. If you aren't already a fan of this series and are curious about it, give this a read and see if it doesn't tempt you to pick up one of the books.

Life at warp speed

It's been some time since I blogged here, and -- fair warning -- may be some time yet. Somehow even in the most predictable of circumstances, life around the holidays assumes greater velocity. And circumstances today -- a new job starting January 5, three kids finishing finals this week and coming home for break, our good friends' annual Christmas party, etc., etc. -- include both the predictable and the life-changing. Where it's all heading right now is anybody's guess, but as usual the challenge is to stay in the moment and try to navigate your path with some element of grace and presence. When you're moving at warp speed, the laws of physics have a tendency to break down... but you're still making memories.

The Loving Decision

Back in May I wrote about the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down laws against interracial marriage, the fortuitously-named case Loving v. Virginia. In recent days a number of commentators have noted the irony that in 2008 Virginia's electoral votes were won by a presidential candidate whose parents would have been thrown in jail if they had visited the state when he was a child.

In May I happened across and wrote about Mildred Loving's obituary just a week before the California Supreme Court delivered its decision striking down as unconstitutional a California state law against same-sex marriage. And now Anna Quindlen has delivered a column that puts it all in beautiful perspective. "The world only spins forward" -- yes.

Tim Lincecum and Keith Olbermann

Other than the fact that Olbermann used to be a sportscaster, those two subjects have little to do with one another outside my personal bubble. But today they come together because I have two items to offer. One is of course the news about Timmy winning the Cy Young Award at age 24 in his first full season in the major leagues. Watching this kid pitch is the most fun I've had watching baseball since October 2002.

Item the second is one of Olbermann's trademark special comments. Now, Keith can be a bit of a blowhard; in his own way he has assumed the mantle of the Bill O'Reilly of the left, utterly sure of his own correctness at all times. That said, this special comment is clearly heartfelt and genuine and confronts the viewer with compassion rather than brow-beating. Well done, Keith.

Strange days indeed

What a strange day dawned just now. On the same day the nation overcame a centuries-old legacy of discrimination by electing our first African-American president, the citizens of California -- who voted for Obama by a 61-37 percent margin -- also voted 52-48 percent to write discrimination into our own state constitution. Never mind questions of right or wrong, the simple cognitive dissonance of that act is staggering.

To the extent there is a bright side, it's this. In 2000, California voters enacted a statutory ban on gay marriage by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent. Proposition 8 wrote that ban into the state constitution by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent. All indications are that voters over 60 years old supported Prop 8 by a substantial margin, and voters under 30 opposed it by an even greater margin. In eight years, the numbers moved nine percentage points. Supporters of Prop 8 may have prevailed in this instance, but the tide of history continues to run in the direction of freedom and equality.

Proposition 8: The Last Word

The No on 8 campaign released this ad over the weekend. Well done.

Proposition 8: The Ring-Bearer's Question

Yesterday I promised a more personal take on this issue. Here it is.

When the California Supreme Court handed down its decision affirming equal marriage rights this May, I took the opportunity to repost an op-ed piece of mine that was published in the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle fifteen years ago. That piece talked about my perceptions of various issues as a straight suburban parent whose kids have through their entire lives enjoyed the love and support of a godfather-figure who is gay.

Three years after that piece was published, I wrote another, similar one addressing gay marriage. I liked the piece but felt it made my grammar school-aged kids -- then 8, 6 and 5 -- vulnerable in a way I wasn’t comfortable with. So I put it in a drawer -- until today when, 12 years later and with their blessing, I am publishing it here for the first time. Thanks, guys.

***************************************************************

The Ring-Bearer's Question
by Jason Warburg

“Do you think Dave will ever get married?”

My eight-year-old son and I are splayed out on the family room floor watching a movie, the very portrait of late spring Sunday afternoon lassitude. I look over at him and see every dream I’ve ever tucked away reflected back at me, his bright face a prism glinting fresh hopes and opportunities across every wall of our home. Sometimes just a smile at the right moment from this treasure chest of innocent wisdom is enough to bring tears to my soggy, overzealous parent’s eyes.

“I don’t know,” I respond, stalling shamelessly.

I am trying to backtrack his thought process... his uncle’s wedding was just a few days ago, and he and his sister and brother each had speaking roles in the joyous, family-centered ceremony. Farther in the past, three years ago, he was the proud ring-bearer for a close cousin’s wedding. I try to imagine what he is thinking right now and see him dressed to the nines again, shoes freshly spit-polished following a tromp through the ivy after some interesting bug, beaming with the knowledge he is about to play an important role in his beloved godfather’s marriage.

My little man understands weddings well. The idea of two people declaring their love for and lifelong commitment to one another in front of their family and friends clicks on all his cylinders. He appreciates both the spectacle and, I honestly believe, the deeper meaning of it all. It is something, though he knows it lies far off in his own still-mysterious future, that he wants very much to experience for himself, and his roles in others’ weddings have been a kind of unconscious dress rehearsal aiming him toward a goal he has long since embraced.

At this point I decide to stumble forward with an answer rather than delaying further. “He might. I think he’d like to be able to, someday. But right now, even if he found the right person and wanted to, he couldn’t.”

My son looks over at me, eyes clouding, brow furrowing. We delve slowly further into the subject. I remind him of a couple of previous conversations we’ve had about his godfather, particularly the one in which we talked at some length about why “faggot” is such a bad word, even though some of his friends -- nice kids, otherwise -- use it occasionally.

“But why couldn’t he?” my son persists.

I answer as best I can, trying to keep my terms simple. “Because if he did get married, he would want to be married to another man. Remember?”

He remembers, we’ve talked this point through before, and yet he continues to protest, his unfettered mind clearly puzzled at the logic which allows people who love one another to marry only if they are of the politically correct genders. I listen with a concerned but mild expression; only inside my head do I let loose my own frustrated answers -- “Because a lot of straight folks don’t seem to comprehend that many gay people want long-term, committed, monogamous relationships, and because some so-called conservatives feel their particular interpretation of God’s will should overrule the Constitution when it comes to every American’s equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

What ends up coming out of my mouth instead is much milder -- a few words along the lines of “it’s just something that people haven’t done very much before, so some grown-ups aren’t comfortable with it yet” -- but it proves to be enough to tide him over for now. I won’t lie to him, but neither will I overwhelm him with a barrage of truths he is too young to absorb.

One piece of unfinished business from our conversation weighs on me, though. I have explained to my son why his godfather -- a warm and vital presence in his and his two siblings’ young lives -- could not today marry someone he loved and wanted to be with for the rest of his life. It has been difficult, but manageable. The moment I fear more may come later.

My wife and I have three children, two boys and a girl. Assuming somewhere around five to ten percent of our population is gay, there is roughly a 15 to 30 percent chance that someday one of my children may again ask me the question which launched this exchange. Except he or she won’t be asking it about a godfather, or cousin, or friend from school or work. She will be asking it about herself. My child will be asking me why he can’t marry the person he loves with all his wondrous heart.

And I won’t have the slightest idea what to tell him.

*
(c) Copyright 1996 Jason Warburg

Republicans just say no to Proposition 8

With Barack Obama poised to win “the largest California victory of any presidential candidate since World War II” and high-profile Republicans turning away from their party’s desperately flailing ticket in droves (let’s see, Colin Powell, David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, David Frum, Scott McClellan, Francis Fukuyama and the list goes on), it’s time for me to similarly turn away from the national stage and move to a topic that hits much closer to home: California’s Proposition 8.

Proposition 8 attempts to reverse the May 15 ruling of the Republican-appointed California Supreme Court in favor of equal marriage rights for all Californians -- rights now enjoyed in six Western countries (Canada, Spain, South Africa, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands) and three states (Massachusetts, Connecticut and California).

Most Californians are aware of Prop 8 and have at least the beginnings of an opinion about it. What's less well understood is that Prop 8 has attracted opposition from all across the political spectrum, as both liberals and conservatives have objected to government restrictions on basic individual rights and freedoms.

A leading Republican voice in 2006 stated that the Bush Administration’s proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage "strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans.” He added that the decision in Massachusetts to legalize same-sex marriages did "not represent a death knell to marriage." The words of Senator John McCain – or at least, the pre-presidential primary version of John McCain.

McCain may have been willing to shed his principles for the sake of appealing to the far right wing of his party, but traditional conservatives within the Republican Party -- who believe in individual liberty for all, not merely some -- oppose Proposition 8 by the thousands. Their site, www.republicansagainst8.com, identifies its sponsors as “concerned California Republicans who believe in limited government, personal responsibility, the maintenance of Constitutionally-protected rights and freedoms, and in protecting California’s business climate.” In addition to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and a long list of Republican local officeholders and candidates, the site lists as supporters leading California businesses like Apple, PG&E, AT&T, Levi Strauss and Google.

Republicans Against 8 have also developed three simple, effective ads spotlighting their arguments against Prop 8. This one focuses on the backward-looking nature of the initiative, this one reminds voters that Prop 8 would take away rights from people all around us, and the one included below features three Republicans – a federal prosecutor, a missile defense scientist and a Vietnam Veteran -- speaking out against Prop 8.



Tomorrow, a more personal take on this subject.

Switchfoot confuses the pundits

Over on the Daily Vault, I’ve blogged several times in recent weeks about the various musical artists who have complained to and/or sued the McCain/Palin campaign over their appropriation of songs for use in campaign events and propaganda. Meanwhile numerous major acts (Bruce Springsteen & Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, James Taylor and the list goes on) have performed benefit concerts or hosted fundraising events for the Obama/Biden campaign. It seems safe to say that, as a class, the majority of popular musicians prefer the Democratic ticket.

Unfortunately, it also seems safe to say that lazy stereotyping remains rampant all along the political spectrum, from Fox News on the right to MSNBC on the left. Today’s transgressor is uber-glib MSNBC.com columnist Dave White, who in the context of suggesting alternative music for the McCain/Palin campaign to use, indulged in blatant stereotyping to come up with this assertion: “There are some easy ‘gets’ though. Kid Rock’s ‘American Badass,’ or Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue’ are probably fair game without consequence. And I’m guessing Reba McEntire, Switchfoot, Daddy Yankee and Trace Adkins are open to having their music co-opted.”

Toby Keith yes, that’s a no-brainer, and I can’t speak for most of the others because I don’t know their music or whether they’ve endorsed a candidate. But Switchfoot? The only plausible reason I can think of for White “guessing” they would support the McCain/Palin ticket is that they are a band that is both nationally popular and openly Christian.

And there’s your stereotype – oh, they’re a Christian band, they must be for the conservative Republican candidates. Let’s deconstruct the fallacy here.

First, Switchfoot has never publicly associated itself with any specific candidate or party. Look it up. The only overtly political song they have ever produced criticizes “Politicians” as a class without differentiating between left and right and promotes an anti-nationalist viewpoint (“I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians”) that seems way out of sync with the Limbaugh-loving, U.N.-hating crowd’s ideology.

Second, Switchfoot’s fans come to the group from all across the political spectrum, as evidenced by this lively presidential race discussion thread on the Switchfoot.com forum.

Third, Switchfoot’s political philosophy, to the extent it has ever expressed one, is distinctly anti-materialist:

“When success is equated with excess
When we’re fighting for the Beamer, the Lexus
As the heart and soul breathe in the company goals
Where success is equated with excess

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

’Cause baby’s always talkin’ ‘bout a ring
And talk has always been the cheapest thing
Is it true would you do what I want you to
If I show up with the right amount of bling?

Like a puppet on a monetary string
Maybe we’ve been caught singing
Red, white, blue, and green
But that ain’t my America,
That ain’t my American dream”

The only thing you can really say for sure about Switchfoot’s political beliefs is that they clearly don’t believe that the materialism and greed that characterizes unfettered free market capitalism is the answer to our nation’s problems. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say they have some distinctly socialist leanings -- but then, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say the same about Jesus Christ himself.

Christian does not equal conservative, nor does it equal Republican. Some of the most politically liberal people I have ever known have been deeply committed Christians. The world is not black and white, but filled with shades of grey. The only way to see them all is to remove the glasses that render everything in easy stereotypes.

The new McCarthyism

The last couple of weeks have been a little dizzying, both for me personally and out on the campaign trail. Granted, it has to be tough when your core beliefs are being challenged by a wide swath of the American public, not to mention the global eonomy, but you can also tell a lot about people, both as individuals and as leaders, by the way they react under stress. And the reaction of some Republican candidates and public officials to their party's sagging poll numbers has been nothing short of alarming.

The gist of the response is "Real Americans agree with us." So where does that leave, say, the 56 percent of likely voters in California who plan to vote for Barack Obama? Do these Republican leaders really mean to say that anyone who doesn't share their views and/or vote for them is anti-American? It sure seems like they do. Which puts these folks in bed with Senator Joseph McCarthy and every other ideological fanatic who's ever proclaimed "you either believe everything I do, or you're evil."

Enough of my little rant, though... Jon Stewart does it so much better. [Usual warning here about adult language, content, etc. Jon does not pull punches. You've been warned.]

Best. music video. ever.

I realize all the cool people on the Internet saw this two years ago. I saw it for the first time myself several months ago. I don't care. I saw it again today and it made me smile. So there.



(P.S. The group is OK GO, the song is called "Here It Goes Again," and yes this really is one continuous shot. Don't ask me how many times they had to do this before they got the shot.)

Life (the series)

It’s not every day I find myself wanting to tell people about a TV show. Yes, I have my guilty pleasures -- Lost, 24, The Daily Show -- but unless the Giants are playing, my “must-see TV” list is a very short one.

It’s not every day, but it is today, and the show is NBC’s brilliant Life. British actor Damian Lewis plays LA homicide detective Charlie Crews who, after uncovering corruption within the department, was framed, convicted of murder and sentenced to life (thus the title). After 12 years in a maximum security prison -- thrown inside with the people he’d been putting away as a cop -- what does he do when a defense attorney finally gets his conviction overturned and gets him out? First, he files and wins a $50 million lawsuit against the city. Then, as part of the settlement, he gets his old job back and proceeds to use his position inside the department to try to unravel the conspiracy that led to his being framed.

That might sound a little contrived, a little bit too “Count of Monte Cristo inside the LAPD” Hollywood pat. And it could have been, if not for the writing – which snaps, crackles and pops its way through every cleverly constructed episode – and the superb Lewis, who invests every moment with meaning and, with the writers, brings his damaged character to life in perpetually interesting ways. Charlie learned to survive the brutality of prison life by studying Zen, which philosophy seeps into everything he says and does as he works homicide cases full of equally damaged victims and suspects. What did he miss most on the inside? Fresh fruit -- every episode he’s eating some different variety of it; on this fall’s premiere episode it was miniature kumquats. What does he do for fun? Pull over his now ex-wife’s hotshot second husband whenever he sees him. Oh, and his tightly-wound, by-the-book partner -- the superb and stunning Sarah Shahi -- just happens to be the daughter of the ex-cop who’s apparently at the center of the conspiracy that got Crews wrongly convicted.

Life’s first season was cut short by the writer’s strike, but NBC appears to believe in the show, having re-launched it by running two episodes a week last week and this week on Mondays and Fridays at 10, before settling into its regular Friday 10:00 pm timeslot. It’s one of the smartest and most entertaining shows ever to make it onto network TV, so catch it now before they decide that what civilization really needs is more episodes of Wipeout…

Palin's new chorus of critics: conservative pundits

The narrative of the presidential campaign the past two weeks has frankly been rather predictable. There's just one trend that's truly new and noteworthy here -- a developing groundswell of criticism of John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate from an altogether unexpected source: conservative pundits. George Will, David Brooks, David Frum and perhaps most notably, early Palin supporter Kathleen Parker (see at right) have all expressed serious concerns in recent days about Palin's fitness to serve. Parker, who previously hailed McCain's "keen judgment" on selecting Palin is now actively calling for her to resign from the ticket "for your country." To quote from Parker's column of this morning, "Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League."

Understanding the financial meltdown

The symptoms of the current financial meltdown are everywhere; what are harder to locate and explain in plain language are the root causes. That's why this column by Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post struck me as being tremendously valuable in the straightforward and practical approach it takes to explaining the current financial mess. In a nutshell, America has been living the "I want it all and I want it now" binge-buying consumerist dream for the past decade, and now the party's over and the bills have come due. The folks with the biggest financial hangovers today are the ones who, when things began to slow down, "doubled down" on their debt rather than cutting back on spending -- and their ranks range from individual households to international financial giants.

This too shall pass, of course, but there are a couple of important lessons in here for those in the younger generation who are trying to understand what all this means.

One is that the financial markets, those avatars of pure and rational capitalism, rarely behave rationally. Rather, the markets run on a mob mentality that can veer from "irrational exuberance" to suicidal gloom in a matter of hours. And when they do, the only rational actor standing between them and self-immolation is (cue Darth Vader theme music) the federal government. Yes, sometimes government regulation is not just necessary, but essential.

Another equally important lesson is that everything in the economy is cyclical. There never has been and never will be such a thing as an economic expansion that goes on forever -- only a group of reckless people in every cycle who are willing to bet that this time it will. Make your own judgments and don't follow the crowd -- it's a good lesson for both economics and life.

Lies, damned lies, and the people who tell them

While the talking heads continue to buzz away in their endless spin cycle of manufactured hype, there appears to be at least one journalist in America -- the often-irascible Paul Krugman, seen at right -- willing to get right to the heart of the matter and tell it like it is. To wit: the McCain-Palin campaign lies. Again, and again, and again.

Of course, so does the management of the San Francisco Giants, which keeps mouthing the words "youth movement" while continuing to sacrifice the rookies' playing time on the altar of should-never-have-been-signed retreads like Dave Roberts. But they're in the entertainment business, not the deciding-the-fate-of-the-world business.

Giants go young, win big

In other news, the San Francisco Giants finally, on September 7, seem convincingly committed to a youth movement, fielding a starting lineup yesterday that consisted of eight players with less than two years' major league experience, and Randy Winn. End result? The Giants' first 10-run inning in over three years, and a resounding win. Yes, the defense and bullpen and even the baserunning was a little shaky at times, but here, at last, is a team that's exciting to watch...

The Sarah Palin pick: Republican women react

Never mind winning over Democratic and Independent women who disagree with Sarah Palin on key issues like choice and the environment and evolution vs. creationism, can the McCain-Palin ticket even hold onto Republican women? Apparently not UPI correspondent and longtime Republican pundit Georgie Anne Geyer, who in her column today describes the Palin pick as "the choice of a vice president whose inexperience is a slap in the face to serious Americans" and bemoans her personal view that "the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan is falling apart before our eyes."

The Sarah Palin pick: focus group

Without intending to, I seem to have convened a focus group. This occurred simply because a good friend of mine is in fact the spot-on demographic for the Sarah Palin pick -- a woman who grew up in a rural community as a lifelong Republican until the party's rightward tilt repelled her, whereupon she went independent. Now she's a suburban soccer mom / working woman, fiscal conservative, potential Hillary Clinton voter and student of both parties whose voting patterns can be quite unpredictable. So how did this perfectly targeted swing voter react to Palin's big-splash speech at the Republican National Convention last night?

And I quote: "Is this the best they could do for a female Republican candidate? She reminds me of a high school cheerleader making snotty comments at a slumber party. Smug, self-righteous and just plain obnoxious. I can't stand her."

Gee, tell us how you really feel...

Personally, I could only manage to watch a few minutes of the convention here and there. I just find the whole "anyone who disagrees with us must not love America" tone of the event too nauseating and offensive to tolerate. I love America and I disagree. Get over it.

The Sarah Palin pick: adding insult to injury

Well, Republican presidential nominee John McCain certainly reclaimed his "maverick" status with his pick of virtually unknown Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. It's probably one of the kinder things people in the Republican party have been calling him after his selection of a person who almost no one outside of McCain himself seems to believe was his best available choice.

Watching McCain try to defend his pick might be comical -- "Alaska is our largest state" (unless you count the 46 others with a larger population) -- if it wasn't so frightening. Here is a person whose career highlight up until 18 months ago was serving two terms as mayor of an Alaskan town of 7,000 people. The only 3:00 am phone calls she's used to getting are demands for better snowplow coverage.

What's truly stunning -- and so very telling -- about this pick, though, is that McCain actually seems to think it was clever. He actually appears to believe that putting the arch-conservative Palin on the ticket will pull in droves of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters despite the fact that Palin's record on every significant issue facing our country today -- war, the economy, the environment, civil rights -- is either non-existent or diametrically opposed to that of Hillary Clinton. The underlying assumption here is that the only factor that really mattered to all of those Hillary voters, the only reason they all supported her so passionately for so long, was her gender.

It's hard to imagine a more insulting set of assumptions being made about a group of supposedly intelligent and independent-minded voters. Leave it to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show to distill these assumptions to their rawest essence, i.e. "Sarah Palin may be the ideological opposite of Hillary Clinton, but she's her gynecological twin..." (Warning: link contains the usual irrevent language and razor-sharp humor.)

Baseball adopts instant replay; Piniella ready to throw down

I'm honestly pretty ambivalent about baseball finally following the lead of other major U.S. sports and adopting the instant replay. But quote of the day on this or any other subject clearly goes to notoriously explosive base-tossing manager Lou Piniella. "What's the format? I'd love to be able to throw a red hankie or a green hankie," Piniella said, referring to the NFL system in which a coach throws out a red flag to challenge a call. "Imagine being able to throw something on the field and not be ejected."

Things To Do In Denver When You're A Democrat

Pardon the lame movie-title pun, but after a couple of weeks of summer doldrums (read: watching the Olympics instead of blogging), there is suddenly so much raw material to commentate upon that my head is spinning and I hardly know where to begin. Fine, let's go with the Democratic National Convention for $1000, Alex.

In no particular order:

Is it possible not to be moved by the very sight of NBC's new "youth correspondent" at the convention -- Tim Russert's son Luke? I think not.

Newsweek columnist Ellis Cose raises the deeper issue that's been lurking behind the conspiracy-theory-wingnut disinformation campaign that has attempted to paint lifelong Christian Barack Obama as some sort of closet Muslim. The real issue being, so what if he was? There is no religion test for the Oval Office. Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and, yes, Muslims are all welcome to apply. Right?

As for the convention itself, all I can really say there is thank God for The Daily Show...

Good Reads: Middlesex and Chasing Darkness

After a dry spell in the reading department, I just finished two terrific books that could hardly be more different. A few words about each:

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, which means (a) I was late to the game as usual, and (b) I was predisposed to believe it would be overwritten, pretentious and deadly serious. Instead I found myself immersed in the book almost immediately. Eugenides writes beautifully, of course, but his genius is the way he draws you into his characters' experience with a series of deftly staged and deeply interconnected story arcs. The story is nominally of a family of Greek immigrants who come to Detroit early in the 20th century, and how generations of inbreeding bring about the novel's unique narrator, the intersex wunderkind Cal, nee Calliope, who lives her childhood as a girl and his adulthood as a man. Reflections on the immigrant experience, the nature of sexuality and identity, and all sorts of other fascinating ideas emerge through Cal's witty, self-aware and ultimately deeply wise observations. A "great book" that earns the label.

Robert Crais started out as more or less just another detective novelist searching for a niche. There are plenty of those; the difference with Crais is that he's found it and is busily mining it for one great story after another. His prose is rather clipped and direct in the Raymond Chandler - Robert Parker school, but over the course of ten novels featuring LA private detective Elvis Cole he has brought such rich three-dimensionality to Cole and his supporting cast that every page sings with wonderful character bits. To top it off, Crais' plots are better than ever, as evidenced by Chasing Darkness, which starts out with Cole guilt-ridden for having provided evidence clearing a man whose later suicide suggests he was a serial killer. Cole's driven search for redemption takes some terrific twists as he discovers that just about everything he thinks he knows about the case and those involved with it is false.

Enjoy...

Deadline day doldrums

It's trade deadline day in the major leagues -- the last day of the season on which teams can make trades without having to pass players through waivers first, giving every other team in the majors the chance to block a deal.

For a team as badly in need of total teardown-and-rebuild as my frankly pathetic San Francisco Giants (teams in the major leagues with a worse record = 3; runs scored in the last 23 innings played = 0), the priorities should be obvious: trade whatever role-playing veterans will fetch so much as a bag of batting practice balls in return, and play the kids the rest of the year so that you know what you've got already on your roster before contemplating trades or free agent signings over the winter.

Of course, said priorities assume the collective management of said team has any common sense whatsoever left. Not this group. They're still talking about "competing" next year (for what, "Fastest Exit From The Playoffs Ever"?), still touting can't-hit, can't-field Pirates castoff Jose Castillo as a keeper, and still bad-mouthing their own young players who've never had a genuine chance to prove themselves as major leaguers (see: Dan Ortmeier, Nate Schierholtz, Emmanuel Burriss, etc., etc.).

I've been a fan of this franchise for 40 years and this is the most brain-dead, incompetent front office I have ever witnessed. The 1985 team that lost 100 games was more fun to watch than this one -- at least you had a sense that crew knew they were bad and were trying to get better. This ship just looks completely lost.

The biggest problem in America today

Is it the war in Iraq? High gas prices? The effects of global warming? The continuing plague of the American League's designated hitter rule?

Some would argue -- and on any given day, I might agree -- that it's the steadily growing gap between rich and poor, a.k.a. income inequality. A new story published today by that bastion of left-wing thought the Wall Street Journal only bolsters this perception. As the rest of the nation simmers in a frying pan of rising food and gas prices, a sluggish economy and a wave of foreclosures, how's the other half -- er, 1% -- doing?

Better than ever. According to IRS data obtained by the WSJ, "the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income in two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929." At the same time, "the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years."

In other words, if you get the sense that the rich are in fact getting richer while everyone else struggles to stay afloat, you are not a whiner engaging in class warfare, but rather an objective observer of a measurable phenomenon. The question now is, what are you going to do about it?

Morality play

It sure is nice every once in a while as I'm wading through the gossipy superficial slop that passes for online news to find something of genuine substance and interest. Thank the folks at MSNBC for this one, an article which explains what recent research illustrates about the inner workings of human morality. Given that decision-making based on moral assessment is one of the defining characteristics of human beings that separates us from other life forms, it's more than a little interesting to take an inside look at how our moral compass actually functions and where rationalization comes into play. The study described in the article suggests that "we are intuitively moral beings," but that "when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn’t that bad." The fact that people are able to rationalize actions that most would reflexively identify as wrong is at the root of more modern problems than there is space here to list.

Where The Hell Is Matt?

Many of you have probably already seen this video, which recently became such a phenomenon that the New York Times devoted an entire article to it. The most amazing thing about it for this particular viewer (i.e. me) was that I recognized people in it -- and so will anyone reading this who received our 2000 holiday card, complete with photos of our family with a group of tribal dancers in full makeup and feathers in Papua New Guinea. (If you prefer, higher def original version is here, and more about Matt Harding is here.)

The latest threat: tabloid spam

As if the real tabloids aren't bad enough, now we've got tabloid spam. No, it's not a subscription pitch from Weekly World News... it's a vicious Internet worm designed to hijack your computer, that's simply wrapped up in the tempting bow of a tabloid-headline subject line. I got one yesterday myself, some nonsense about Tom Cruise dying in a plane crash. I was of course briefly tempted to find out if poor Katie was finally free of her megalomaniacal spouse, but the better angels of my nature won out and I deleted with prejudice. Better luck next time, guys. "Giants trade seven veterans for one young slugger" -- that's how you'd get me.

Tim Lincecum: The Freak

The Giants haven't given this fan a whole lot to cheer for this season. Sure, they've done better than some expected and it's been great watching younger players like John Bowker and Fred Lewis and Jonathan Sanchez get the chance to develop. But the team has been so poorly managed that it's become actively painful for me to watch as Bruce Bochy and Brain Sabean have let half a season go to waste playing veterans and pretending they're in a pennant race instead of embracing the need to rebuild and playing the kids.

That's a rant for another day, though; today we're here to celebrate "The Freak," as some call him, or "The Franchise," as others have dubbed the most unlikely pitching hero you've ever seen throw a slashing 98 MPH heater across the outside corner. Tim Lincecum, all of 24 years old, 5' 11" and 172 pounds, is well on his way to being a national story, and Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci has given The Franchise just the sort of awestruck write-up that he deserves. The kid is for real, and it's going to be incredibly fun watching his legend grow.

Tyson Gay and the dangers of auto-replace

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford's rant of the day for today pointed me to one of the funniest things I've seen in weeks. It seems that the wing-nut Puritan cult that is the American Family Association (Hmm, my family is as American as they come... why don't I see my values represented there?) is so virulently homophobic that they installed an auto-replace filter on their "family-friendly" news feed that changes the word "gay" to "homosexual" wherever it appears in stories that post onto their site. This is merely pathetic until a major athletic figure with the last name of "Gay" starts appearing regularly in news stories, leading to headlines like the one below. Hilarity ensues.

The David Palmer Factor

I wrote back in January ("Where reality and fiction blur") about the possibility -- which even I regarded with some skepticism -- that Dennis Haysbert's four-year run on the television drama 24 playing a strong, courageous African-American president might have laid some of the cultural groundwork necessary for the success of Barack Obama's run for president. As it turns out, Haysbert agrees.

The part that's a little scary, though, is where Haysbert talks about all the people who still to this day come up to him -- the actor who played the president -- and urge him to run. Maybe on a ticket with Harrison Ford...?

The new national security threat: global warming

Here's a conundrum for the handful of far-right flat-earthers who are still trying to deny the existence and/or significance of global warming. What to do when that most rational and conservative group of institutions -- the Bush Administration's own intelligence agencies -- collectively comes to the conclusion that global warming poses a major threat to national security. It's the sort of news that makes you worry about certain peoples' heads exploding...

Of religion and sports bras

I suppose it's part of the nature of blogging that items sometimes catch my eye that might seem on the surface to have no logical relationship to one another. But sometimes they just call out to me, and at least my chosen title is more thoughtful than my second choice: Americans -- Smarter Than We Look.

• The more religious leaders try to narrow our minds to accept only their view of the universe, it seems, the more Americans cling to our tradition of stubborn individualism. MSNBC reports this afternoon that "a new survey finds most Americans don't feel their religion is the only way to eternal life — even if their faith tradition teaches otherwise." Maybe the most startling finding: "57 percent of evangelical church attendees said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life," in direct contradiction to the teaching of most of their church leaders. Thinking for yourself -- there's just no substitute.
  
  
• All this second one really needs is the headline: "Sports bra saves U.S. hiker trapped in Alps." But will she send a thank you note to Brandi Chastain?

The Bush Administration's war crimes

I admit, I have been known to roll my eyes when friends on the left begin frothing at the mouth at all that has been wrought by the dastardly Bush Administration. Yes, it's been a horrible eight years. Yes, the country is crying out for change. But no, verbal bomb-throwing is not going to get us anywhere. The more spittle that apoplectic liberals spray in the general direction of the nation's moderate swing voters in this country, the more likely we are to be watching John McCain's inauguration next January. The best thing we can do, folks, is simply to remain calm and keep pointing out the facts.

There are two reasons for this. One is that yelling and screaming and name-calling doesn't get you anywhere. The other is that it's so unnecessary. One more left-wing flamethrower calling George Bush a war criminal is not news -- hell, at this point, it's practically satire. What's news is when one of Bush's own generals accuses his Administration of war crimes. Now we're getting somewhere!

Tim Russert 1950-2008

One of the strange truths of post-modern America is that people on television sometimes come to feel like part of your family. Even as technology isolates us into individual information cocoons, it brings us into daily contact with certain people, so much so that you can come to feel like you know them.

I never met Tim Russert, who died at 58 today after being stricken at NBC News studios in New York, but that didn't stop him from feeling like family. Insightful, tenacious, balanced, intellectually curious and blessed with a warm wit, he was one of those people I found myself more than once putting on the imaginary list of ten famous people I'd like to have over for dinner. In fact, my lists rarely filled all ten seats; most celebrities seem so insufferably full of themselves that I couldn't imagine their heads fitting in my door.

Russert, by contrast, always seemed so approachable, so human, so real. He was like the neighbor you'd strike up a conversation with in line at the hardware store, and keep it up all the way out into the parking lot because he just had so damn many interesting things to say, and said them with such a unique combination of conviction and affability.

Russert leaves behind a wife and son and a studio full of heartbroken colleagues who have been, somehow, broadcasting all day about the friend they lost quite literally from their midst. After my daughter came in to see if I'd heard the news, she talked about how he'd been NBC's chief political reporter for her entire life. She's thinking of majoring in political science. I like to think I had something to do with that, but Tim probably did, too. His enthusiasm for the political world was contagious. He could make it seem entertaining, yes, but mostly he made it seem like it mattered, like it was a subject worthy of every ounce of the enthusiasm and precision he poured into his work.

Condolences to his family and colleagues on this huge loss. And Godspeed, Tim.

Cell phone nation

The fact that Obama leads McCain 47-41 in the national popular vote in latest post-primary polling is mildly interesting to me at best. After all, it’s five months until the election and we don’t even elect presidents by popular vote. In our system, which awards electoral votes on a state-by-state, winner-take-all basis with just a couple of exceptions (Maine and Nebraska award them according to the winner of the vote in each congressional district), the state polls are the ones the campaigns will be watching.

What I found fascinating about this Mark Blumenthal column about the latest polling is the emergence of a new phenomenon in the polling world – the cell-phone-only household. Pollsters have historically used the phone book to reach prospective voters, but “(a)s of late 2007, one in six American households had wireless service only (no landline) and would thus be missing from traditional telephone samples.” That’s right, more than 16% of American households today don't bother with a standard wired telephone, and the number is growing.

"It ain't over 'til.. " well, Saturday

I met Congressman Charlie Rangel many years ago in Washington D.C. He's a friendly, plain-spoken man of strong beliefs and loyalties who doesn't hesitate to tell it like it is. You've gotta love it when someone inside the Beltway breaks through the haze of rhetoric and spin and offers a dash of uncensored truth:

Mrs. Clinton had initially said she wanted to wait before making any decision, but her aides said that in conversations, some of her closest supporters said it was urgent that she step aside... "We pledged to support her to the end,” said Representative Charles W. Rangel, a New York Democrat who has been a patron of Mrs. Clinton since she first ran for the Senate. “Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is.”

The end, Senator Clinton and her backers now agree, is Saturday, when she will formally suspend her campaign a la Mitt Romney. Not giving up those delegates just yet, but no longer pretending she can do anything but harm her own party by continuing to campaign. Thanks for doing the right thing, Senator.

Obama: "America, this is our moment"

Ted Williams and his speechwriter had a heck of a night last night.

As someone who's written a few speeches in my time, I have a keen appreciation for the fine art of it. It might look easy to some on the outside, but it's not. You have to not just cover the subject matter in a comprehensive, detailed and imaginative way, but also capture the voice and character and cadence of the speaker in such a way that the speech comes out of their mouth as naturally as if the entire thing had been delivered spontaneously.

Barack Obama's whiz-kid head speechwriter Jon Favreau -- who earlier this year described his job as like being “Ted Williams’s batting coach” -- and his candidate hit a home run last night. If you didn't see the speech, it's well worth reading the text here, or watching the video here. It was gracious, statesmanlike, visionary, inspiring, powerful and the adjectives go on and on.

Former Bush press secretary lambastes administration

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, point man for the Bush Administration media machine in the run-up to the Iraq war, apparently isn't feeling too proud today about his role in hoodwinking the American people. In a new memoir he writes that "Over that summer of 2002, top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war... it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage... History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder."

Summing up his three years manning the White House podium, McClellan concludes, "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary." Strong words from the guy in charge of spinning the media into supporting the war. Nice to see he has a conscience, though.

Excerpts are here and here.

"A generational shift in attitudes"

It sure looks that way. Which just goes to show you that human beings have a fundamental desire for fairness and equity that no amount of dogma or propaganda can stamp out.

The Post-American World

I haven't yet picked up Fareed Zakaria's new book, but I expect I will, after reading this very insightful excerpt in a recent issue of Newsweek. The big question I still have about this is, how do we explain this change in circumstance to Middle America? (And the second question I have is, is my first question elitist, or just practical?)

Learning from our children

Fifteen years ago today, the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle simultaneously published an essay I wrote about an issue that was both complex and bracingly simple. I was a young father with a wife and three kids who adored their adopted godfather, my best friend. And he had just come out.

I was happy that my friend had opened up this part of his life to me and my wife. But it was also upsetting to me, because I knew I was living in a world -- an insular suburban heterosexual moms-and-dads-and-2.5-kids world -- which might have trouble accepting my friend for who he was (and is). I knew most of them were good people who would want reflexively to do the right thing; they might just need a little push to understand what the right thing was. So, I wrote.

The California Supreme Court's recent decision upholding gay marriage gives this little flare-up of personal nostalgia extra resonance this week. One of the things that made the Court's decision possible is the changing attitudes of a new generation. Today's generation is asking the same kinds of clear-eyed, fearless questions about sexual identity that the Boomer generation asked about race when they were young, i.e. why should we treat those other people differently?

In 1993, the Bee titled my essay "Learning from our children." We still are.

*********************************************************************

Learning From Our Children

by Jason Warburg

On a warm spring evening I sat, wedged into a metal folding chair, in a grade-school auditorium that could have been in any town in America. I sat, watching a roomful of parents and children and trying to figure out who was teaching whom.

It was opening night of that elementary school staple, the spring show. A crowd of adoring parents giggled and cheered as a hundred and fifty alternately terrified and mugging second through-sixth graders flooded the modest hall with a torrent of off-key songs. Video cameras, dotting the audience like ants on a sweet roll, recorded the event for posterity from ten or more vantage points.

My wife and I brought two of our three small children in hopes they would enjoy the show, or at least take a break from the ongoing process of leveling our house one chunk of plaster at a time. Our three-year-old Sarah was indeed mildly amused by the vast noisy spectacle, until she reached her maximum sitting-still time -- about forty-five minutes if it's a really good show -- and commenced one of her fidgeting frenzies.

Minutes -- and a bruised parental shin or two -- later, Sarah was suddenly still, frozen in time except for a widening smile, as a familiar melody rang out. She had been transfixed by the five indelible notes that begin the theme to Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast..

The story of Beauty and the Beast has long captured the imagination of a wide, youthful audience. As told by Disney, it is filled with echoing images of longing and awkwardness, jealousy and compassion, vanity and selfless heroism. This jumble of familiar adolescent emotions is crowned by a collection of unabashedly catchy songs, three of which were nominated for Academy Awards, with the main theme winning.

As we smiled at Sarah's excited recognition of one of her favorites, it struck me that similar scenes of grade-school musical drama must be playing in auditoriums across the nation -- and that this is only the beginning. Over the next thirty years, a thousand Belles and a thousand Beasts will conduct their shy, delicate dances across ballrooms fashioned of painted cardboard scenery and worn stage floors. Millions of parents -- a near-perfect cross-section of America -- will look on, beaming, filling rooms with pride so pure and thick you can taste it.

Few of the players in these scenes will know whom to thank for the warm feelings that envelop them. The name of Howard Ashman, lyricist for not only Beauty and the Beast but also The Little Mermaid and much of Aladdin, is not well-known, yet his life's work has touched the hearts of people of all ages and walks of life. As executive producer as well as lyricist for Beauty and the Beast, he more than any other individual is responsible for its vitality and resonance.

As I considered all of this, a sudden irony overwhelmed me. These young parents, many of whom have a difficult time even speaking the word "homosexual," particularly in any connection with the lives of their children, were joined in chorus with their sons and daughters, jauntily singing lyrics written by a gay man.

As this sunk in, I thought also of our youngest son, at home that night running and playing his two-year-old heart out under the loving care of his godfather, our best friend -- a man I hope each of our children will adopt as a role model, and one who, after foregoing shaving on weekends, occasionally resembles the Beast himself. If our children do emulate this man, they will grow up to be bright, thoughtful, exceptionally witty and gentle human beings. And I expect it will be completely irrelevant to them, as it is to the millions of children so well entertained by Beauty and the Beast, that the giver of this wonderful gift is predisposed to fall in love with another man.

Howard Ashman's legacy is tremendous. We live in a world filled with fears, both rational and irrational. To be a fully functioning human being is to recognize and respond appropriately to the rational, while eliminating the irrational as thoroughly as possible. In producing Beauty and the Beast, Ashman launched a vehicle for teaching an entire generation of movie-goers to banish their irrational fears -- to look beyond outward appearances, even prejudgments foisted on us by others' intolerance, and see to the heart of a person. Ashman died of AIDS in 1991, but his offspring is at work every day now reminding us that the only real beasts are the ones we create when we allow fear to prevent us from recognizing and appreciating the essential human sameness we all share.

At the close of the show, watching a hundred and fifty young faces sway to the music of A Chorus Line, I couldn't help wondering about the five, or ten, or fifteen or more of them who are gay. Will their friends and family be able to accept them for who they are? If so, perhaps it will occur to one or two of them to silently thank Howard Ashman for teaching millions of people that the Beast is ignorance and fear, and the Beauty is inside every one of us.

#
(c) Copyright 1993 Jason Warburg

Love is all you need

Congratulations to the California Supreme Court for doing the right thing. The fight is not over, of course, with further legal action and ballot initiatives just around the corner. But for today, it's a great day to be a Californian.

As for the headline above, it makes for a nice symmetry with this one.

Smart car, smart move, smart guy (?)

A diverse trio of items caught my eye in the last 24 hours.

First there's the crash-test report on the tiny Smart Car, which turns out to be one of the safest subcompacts on the road. It still looks a little iffy for long rides on the interstate, but for city driving -- not to mention parking -- this high-mileage, low-emission gadget on wheels is the wave of the future. Just ask all the Europeans who've been using them for years in Rome, Paris and Frankfurt.

Next up, the man who saved the Giants is about to step down. Peter Magowan has done a lot of irritating and flat-out stupid things in the last decade -- anyone want a slightly used $18 million a year pitcher? -- but in 1993, he and his partners pulled off what felt like a miracle, buying a franchise that was set to move to Florida and keeping baseball in San Francisco. Thanks for that.

And finally, R. Kelly once said "I Believe I Can Fly" -- but this guy actually can. No, really, 186 MPH with a rocket strapped to his back. Completely nuts. (Side note: is it just me, or did anyone else start humming the Jetsons theme song while watching this?)

The Elitist Menace and other campaign fictions

I have avoided the entire subject of the presidential election for weeks now due to campaign fatigue on my part. What? The numbers haven't changed? Obama still has an insurmountable delegate lead? McCain is still a smug warmonger? Clinton is still clawing after the nomination like a wolverine on crack?

Ah, but then someone comes along and puts it all in perspective. Thank you, Tom Tomorrow. You're my hero....

All you need is love

I don't always read the obituaries, but every so often something catches my eye. This morning it was an obituary for a true American hero, the fittingly-named Mildred Loving, who played a part in righting a wrong so fundamental that your average teenager today can hardly believe it was ever part of American life. As the Associated Press obituary tells it,

"Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died...

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero - just a bride. "It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work." ...

"The law that threatened the Lovings with a year in jail was a vestige of a hateful, discriminatory past that could not stand in the face of the Lovings' quiet dignity," said Steven Shapiro, national legal director for the ACLU.

"We loved each other and got married," she told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when the case was pending. "We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants."

Yes it should. Who will be this generation's Mildred and Richard Loving? I hope we find out one day soon.

Just because

That is all.

Iron Geek, er, Man

I am such a geek sometimes.

Not exactly a newsflash, that, but I’ve definitely been feeling my geek oats this week in anticipation of catching the new Iron Man movie. Yeah, that’s right, I’m all aflutter over a comic book movie about a guy who puts on red and gold armor to fight bad guys using “repulsor rays” and such.

There are reasons for this.

One is Robert Downey Jr., one of the great actors of his generation (my generation), who came perilously close to flushing his career – not to mention his life – down the toilet back in the 90s with a series of drug- and alcohol-fueled run-ins with the law. A decade later, Downey returns to the big screen as what appears on paper to be the perfect choice to play a desperately flawed hero -- an arrogant, hard-drinking uber-capitalist whose comeuppance forces him to question everything about his life, and convinces him to try to make something positive of it while he still can.

Another, I must admit, is the pure giddy fun of seeing another of my childhood heroes hit the big screen. Yes, I did collect comics all through my grade school, teen and even college years, and no, they didn’t rot my brain, thank you very much. They may have implanted some very archetypal ideas about good and evil, wrong and right, romance and loyalty and such – but what exactly is wrong with that, anyway?

A third is the fact that, while he’s never been my favorite, the Iron Man of the Marvel comic books has for most of his modern tenure been a wonderfully dysfunctional hero, a cocky s.o.b. with major alcohol and intimacy issues, not to mention shrapnel lodged near his heart that could kill him at any moment. All indications are that the movie is faithful to that vision, combining 21st century whiz-bang special effects with an equally three-dimensional lead character whose deep flaws give his heroism dimension and emotional impact.

Or maybe it was just that they closed the trailer with THE perfect song, Black Sabbath’s 1971 industrial music prototype “Iron Man.” Yeah, that was probably it...

The True Meaning of Sportsmanship

A friend forwarded this amazing story this morning. Kudos to the players involved, and a big raspberry to the guy who e-mailed one of the players criticizing women's lack of competitive spirit. Whoever you are, you're exactly the kind of parent I used to despise seeing around the Little League diamond. People who think sports are about nothing more than beating the opponent by any means necessary have no business being involved with them.