I enjoyed the first episode of HBO’s The Pacific, but my enjoyment was somewhat marred by hearing Tom Hanks, one of the miniseries’ producers, state that the war with Japan was based on racism, which he then compared to the current war on terrorism.

Raymond Chandler’s detective character Philip Marlowe summed up an actor-turned-hood in one of Chandler’s great novels by stating that the phrase “ignorant as an actor” was invented for him.

Ditto for Hanks.

Rich Trzupek offers a good response to Hanks’ comment in FrontPage Magazine

“The implication that race had anything to do with the war is nothing but nonsensical, unsupportable, neo-historical propaganda,” Trzupek wrote.

Perhaps a screenwriter should be hired to inform Hanks that the Japanese declared war on America by bombing Pearl Harbor and America had Asian allies who fought alongside us like China and the Philippines.

Someone should tell Hanks to shut up and roll the film. 

When Falls contributor Judi Cutrone has just been informed by a reputable source (aka her sister) that because of yesterday’s inflammatory post against Jerry Seinfeld, she has been banned from several establishments and landmarks in Massapequa, NY, which is hometown to both the controversial blogger and Seinfeld, who is arguably the hamlet’s most famous onetime resident (unless you’re a big Police Academy fan).

Amidst chants such as “Ever heard of hometown loyalty?”, Cutrone has lost her key to the city (given to her by residents after she courageously rescued a small child from the fountain in Sunrise Mall.) and has been declared Persona Non Grata in several key Massapequa establishments:

All American Hamburger Drive In

That Starbucks across the street from All American

Massapequa High School

Massapequa Bowl

United Skates of America (which is technically in Seaford but everyone knows Seaford’s been riding Massapequa’s coat tails for years)

Cutrone’s response is as follows: “I apologize for the hardship this post has caused my family and all of the people I went to grade school with who have since befriended me on Facebook. I stand by my statements on Seinfeld and will only amend that portion of my post where I recommend he move to a small town in the Rust Belt, instead recommending he maybe spend some time in his actual hometown instead. That should do it.” Raising her voice above the boos and jeers, she adds, “Hey, I said I liked Alec Baldwin. Doesn’t that cancel some of this out?!”

Since Alec Baldwin rates as another famous, former Massapequa resident, Cutrone’s sentence has since been amended. She is now allowed to pass through Massapequa unharmed on her way to visit her parents, who now reside in Amityville. It may be a while before that visit, however, since her parents, actual owners of the Seinfeld trivia game, are not currently speaking to her.

August 8, 2009
I dream Deborah has just arrived for a visit with me and Gail. When I am alone for a few moments with Deborah, I see there are specks of blood on her face. I ask her what the hell happened. She says she had to rescue a cat who had hung himself from her shower rod. She couldn’t untie him, so she had to find a pair of scissors and cut him down. I tell her to clean up, but she insists she doesn’t look that bad. Later on, I see that the cat has a collar and I impulsively cut the collar off with a pair of scissors. The cat suddenly has a burst of energy because he is finally free.

September 3, 2001
I dream I am looking for magic shops below Cottman Avenue and I find one I used to visit. An ex-girlfriend who works there sends me downstairs to talk to “the boys.” I can see the boys through a glass window. They are sliding cats down a banister and laughing as the cats crash into the window. I think about calling the cops on them, but I decide I don’t like cats anyway.

September 18, 1996
I dream Gail and I are guests at David Mamet’s apartment. I see through the window a suspicious-looking man swinging from a vine. He appears to be stranded, so I call 911. As I watch the swinging man from a crouching position, one of Mamet’s cats, a black panther, sweeps by me luxuriously. He feels good, but I know I’m in danger. I nonchalantly walk into the bathroom and lock the door behind me. Later on, Gail complains because I have to stay at Mamet’s apartment, I’m too cheap to get a motel.

“Fred’s Dreams” appears every Wednesday.

Dear When Falls the Coliseum,

I am 8 years old and a cute, innocent little girl. My friends told me that there is no such thing as St. Patrick, and that St. Patrick’s Day was just an excuse to let grownups get drunk. Are my friends right?

Sincerely,

Virginia

Dear Virginia,

As I sit here at my computer savoring my fourth Irish coffee of the morning (top o’ the morning to you!), I can’t help but to feel melancholic about your question. In a word, your friends who have been saying these things you asked about are spreading vicious lies to hurt your feelings and confuse you, or they are retarded, one or the other. Are your friends retarded, Virginia? It’s okay if they are, but you can do better. Maybe your parents are overprotective. I am SO SICK OF PAREnnts that treat there kids with kidgloves! Letm e tell you, my my parents didn’t’ tprotect me from ANYTHING< and I turned out to be a REALLY COOL GUY with a pretty bad headache rightnow and I’m pretty sure I feel another  blackout comingexkmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

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Sorry I past out on the keyboard facedown. To get back to yor question, when have you ever been to Ireland? Virginia, THERE ARE NO GODDAM SNAKES IN IRELAND. NONE> And do you know why that is? Can you answer that little question, Virginia I need another Irish coffee excxuse me? No? Because none fo those oh so wise friends of yours haven’t’ been to Ireland either? It’s because St. Patrcick himselef, the patron saint of Ireland and of paralegals, drove those mothers out of there!

Virigina, if ther were no St. Patrcik, there would still be snakes in Ireland. Can’t you see that? What is it gon a take to make you see that? Can’t I get through to you? Why did you  have to meka me so sad like this, vrigigina? The children toddday don’t have nothinggg to loookkf orewared to. Oh theymaekke me so sad viriginiia.

Don’t’ grow up sad, vriginai. Don’t letyer life bewaon oe f regreat like mine is. Oh sure I have fun barhoppiong and ST. patrikc’s day is my day to really cut loooose and have somefun druinking green beer until someone lookes at me funny the bastard yea youbetttter run I’m gonna beat you down DON”T LOOKATME LIKE THAT hey! You! She’s’ gona home with me and whats’ wyourn ame again I can”t; åthjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

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Sorry I hadto get some more Irish formy coffee agin.

Virigigigigina, there is a st. parktick. He is watchingn over us all. When that two drunk girlsss outside the barr gett inatao an argulment, that eascalates into showuting match to calawing and hairpullinlgll fisticuffs, st. patrikc is them with there. When another women gets past out drunk and the friends holds her hair out of the way so that she doesn’t’ voimit corned beefa nd hash into her ownha ir, St. PARTckic is there. When a man inadvrerenetly gazes with lust at another man’smy girlifreiend, than the second man punches outh the frist man and pounds the liibing crud out of him the frirst man, ST> PRICKTA is there.

He’s also in the Catholic mass that we all attended that morning,b ecause that’s the really meankning of St. PRACTICK”S Day.

Oh but viiriginai, it really botherst me that your friendeds don’t’ belieieve in him? Why don’t’ they? It makes want to cry so bad”? IT’s just not fairt that kidss today don’t’ have that same senseo fo wondered that your so scyinical all they time. Viriginaia, your’e makingmecry n wo. Virigiinia? Vigiriginain!

They have paradessfo r St.partirks Day. In chicaggo they turn watwer green; it’s’l like amiracle, Vaginar. Green water! Don’t’ lilsten to those small mainds that want to make you feell badabout ST>PATCKkrisk’s DAy. So in answear to your waustion, yes, Viriginani, there’re is aST: PARTRIK’s day.

NOW exscuse me becuasse I ma going to go to th barand cebrelate.å   å ?? hf g tzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzxwhay did I openaanewa docummeant?

YES I Woluld like tosave the changedes imade to thisadcuument! Wears thea save button?

In the exciting opening scene of Brooklyn’s Finest, bad guy Carlo (Vincent D’Onofrio, in an effective but too brief performance) explains to Sal (Ethan Hawke) his philosophy about “righter and wronger.” Issues of moral relativism drive this taut cop thriller, and it is sometimes hard to tell the cops from the criminals. Crisp direction from Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), compelling characters and a trio of excellent lead performances kept me completely engaged in a film from a genre I usually avoid. The film is a bit of a downer but it is exciting and enjoyable.

Brooklyn’s Finest follows the lives of three cops over several days, as they each struggle with their jobs, lives and morality.  Eddie (Richard Gere) is a few days short of retiring after 20 years on the job. He contemplates suicide, visits prostitutes and crosses the days off his locker calendar. When he is ordered to spend his last few days training a rookie, he balks. When the squad commander asks Eddie if he wants to spend his last two minutes on the job doing something worthwhile, Eddie answers, “No.” But Eddie’s cop days are not quite over. Tango (Don Cheadle) is deep undercover in a drug ring and is promised a promotion if he can make one more drug bust. But Tango is torn between his job and his strange loyalty to drug dealer Caz (Wesley Snipes). Sal (Ethan Hawke) arrests drug dealers but the stress of supporting his children and pregnant wife Angela (Lili Taylor) challenges his moral code, despite support from honest partner Ronny (Brian F. O’Byrne). The three main cops have no real scenes together, but their lives intersect at the end of the film.

Richard Gere, looking haggard and hopeless, is the essence of the burned out cop who just wants his pension. Eddie’s affect is flat as he goes through the motions of his last week on the job, refusing to be interested in his rookie partners.  When one of them berates him for not interfering when a man hits a woman, saying, “In my book that is called a coward,” Gere replies flatly, “But you know I’m not much of a reader.” But when he finally turns in his badge and is told, “You’re done” Gere replies with disappointment, “That’s it?” Despite outward appearances, Eddie is not quite done with being a cop.  The excellent Don Cheadle is charismatic and convincing as Tango, the undercover cop. He is tough when posing as a drug dealer, and we see why his cover is intact. He is jumpy as the cop who is having trouble keeping his two lives separate, as he demands, “I want my life back,” while waving a fork in the face of his commanding officer. Cheadle shows how close to the edge Tango is when he nearly hits Agent Smith (a tough as any tough guy Ellen Barkin) after she tries to pressure him into setting up the dealer who befriended him. It is one of the film’s most intense scenes and Cheadle and Barkin play it perfectly. Ethan Hawke’s tattooed and smoking Sal is wound so tightly that we know he will snap; it is just a matter of when. Hawke is convincing as the caring husband and father when with his wife and children. Sal almost hits one his cop friends for making a racist remark in front of his children, and goes to confession after he bends the rules. “I don’t want God’s forgiveness, I want his help,” he tells his priest. But Sal is merciless with the criminals he encounters, and Hawke is scary as Sal gets darker every time he bends the rules. Wesley Snipes gives an understated and completely believable performance as drug dealer Caz, and has real chemistry with Cheadle. Brian F. O’Byrne plays honest cop Ronny with rough sincerity, as the one cop who has not lost his way.

Despite a running time of 132 minutes, the film never drags. Director Antoine Fuqua keeps things moving at a brisk pace, and sustains suspense and excitement throughout the film. Apparently the parts of Brooklyn these cops frequent have not yet been gentrified. These streets look gritty and unsafe. There are lots of scenes in restaurants, cars and near graffiti covered buildings. Fuqua uses many close-ups and many two person scenes, which adds to the film’s intensity. Fuqua has assembled an excellent cast, and gets strong performances from all of them. Michael C. Martin’s screenplay is full of tension and believable small moments.  Its only flaw is that the resolution is dependent on a series of coincidences that strain credulity.

This film reminds me somewhat of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, although nowhere near as strong and without the twists and turns. But the complex characters and performances had me hooked, and I found that I was rooting for their moral sides. The three main characters are deeply flawed, but that is what makes them, and Brooklyn’s Finest, compelling.

Brooklyn’s Finest .  Directed by Antoine Fuqua.  Richard Gere (Eddie), Don Cheadle (Tango), Ethan Hawke (Sal), Wesley Snipes (Caz), Vincent D’Onofrio (Carlo), Brian F. O’Byrne (Ronny Rosario), Lili Taylor (Angela)and Ellen Barkin (Agent Smith). Overture Films, 2009.

Gail sees a movie appears every Wednesday.

Now that spring is upon us, and the trees are beginning to leaf out and grow, my life has become a lot more hectic. Such is the row a forester has to hoe, but I’m busy planting trees, measuring trees, I’ve got three logging operations running at the moment, so on and so forth. I’ve been reading my usual three or four books a week. I’ve been keeping up-to-date on political movements, health care reform, cap-n-tax, the TEA Parties, you know, all the headlines that fill our days.

However, I find that I want to write about something and I can’t think up a topic. 

Of course, I can easily pop in and make comments on conversations and articles here and on the other websites where I post, but I can’t seem to come up with any ideas for a longer, more refined piece such as what WFTC tries to provide for our readers.  I don’t want to discuss the current debacle in DC right now, it’s too depressing and I think that just about every position a person can have on health care reform has already been hashed and rehashed over and over again.  I don’t want to discuss work, nature, child rearing, or any of the other activities and ideas that consume my days.

But I still feel the urge to write.

I just have a sense of unease, of urgency, of the need to put something intelligent down in word form (if I have ever accomplished such a thing even when I’ve been in touch with my muse). I just can’t find anything worthy of the site.

It’s been bugging me for a week or two now. I spent a couple of hours here Saturday evening after the kid went to sleep, thinking, staring at the word editor, occasionally writing some half formed, embryonic, not-quite-a-clone kind of paragraph about the usual BS that just made me grind my teeth and delete it after the first read. If there is one thing I do NOT want to be as a writer, it’s one of those writers that give us the same thing, over and over and over, never deviating from popular/populist thought. While I may hit the same topics on occasion, I don’t want to be the Sean Hannity of the writing world.

It’s really upsetting me. I’ve never had this problem before. I got used to cranking out 5-10 pages papers every night while I was in grad school and it’s almost reflexive at times. Not being able to fill a page with anything of consequence (well, of consequence to me) is annoying. It’s like feeling a tick crawling up the inside of your leg, or getting that one damn gnat out of the whole godforsaken swarm which decides that, with all of Creation in which he could roam, he MUST be right inside your ear.

I feel like Charlie Brown kicking the football with Lucy. I have a million ideas running through my head, from the year’s first encounter with a rattlesnake to a discussion I had with an old Marxist I know about whether or not human nature exists, but as soon as I articulate the idea, it’s like Lucy snatches the football away and I go sprawling on my back with a giant ARRRGGGHHHH!, to lay spread eagle in the dirt of my own maladroitness.

Do any of you ever feel the same? There are so many other writers here that have been writing for years, have been trained, or teach, in the literary arts, I can’t imagine that no one here has had the same feeling, and the accompanying irritation at your inability to scratch that particular itch. What do the pros have to say about the topic? What are the causes of “writer’s block”, if that’s what I’m dealing with? How does one go about getting past that?

Some of you do this stuff for money. There have got to be methods, exercises, something more productive than me just staring at the screen for hours. I’d imagine that deadlines would be impossible to meet consistently if there weren’t.

Once upon a time two boxers fought round after round until one couldn’t continue. This was bad for two reasons:

1. It often took a very long time. (Frankly, once you reach round 80 or so, the crowd’s losing interest.)

2. After hours of punches, fighters tend to suffer fatal internal injuries.

And so the sport was changed so that you could win by decision, which was great as spectators had places to be and the athletes didn’t die quite so frequently. Still, there’s a basic flaw in the system: people pretend decisions are accurate and should be treated with respect, when time after time that’s shown to be wrong.

Decisions aren’t always incorrect (for instance, this weekend pound-for-pound champ Manny Pacquiao took at least 11 of 12 rounds in an unanimous and indisputable victory over Joshua Clottey), but they are much too often. Rocky Marciano retired undefeated…except it’s generally acknowledged he stole a split decision from Roland LaStarza (to his credit, Rock flattened him in the rematch). Likewise, it seems insane that “Sugar” Shane Mosley is still credited with an already iffy split decision win over Oscar De La Hoya now that he’s admitted to being on steroids at the time (De La Hoya hasn’t made much of a stink, probably because he signed Mosley to his company Golden Boy Promotions — it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as you get a cut).

Most depressingly, there are bouts neither fighter deserves to win or even tie: they are so bad they should be a double-loss. I’ll cite as an example the much-hyped match-up between “Pretty Boy” Floyd Mayweather and De La Hoya. Both men have been great champions (and, having interviewed each of them, I can add to that “entertaining talkers who return phone calls relatively punctually”). The bout found Mayweather clearly the faster and sharper fighter, going through the fight essentially unblemished…which would have been fine if De La Hoya hadn’t also gone through the fight pretty much untouched (and keep in mind soon after this Pacquiao showed the Golden Boy to be all too touchable when he beat him into retirement). Yet someone had to win, giving the passive Mayweather an ugly split-decision, allowing him to cling to his “undefeated” credentials just like Marciano did so many years earlier.

And I thought, “When a man’s rewarded for putting on a show that caused the audience to suffer more than his opponent, something’s gone very wrong.”

This is not to advocate bringing back the olden days of fighting, which as noted took way too long and tended to kill people. But if boxing ever hopes to regain its place as the sport of kings (or at least, bigger than hockey), it better find a happy middle ground already.

I watched The Marriage Ref on Sunday.

This is not TiVo’s fault (I love you, TiVo, and I know you’re reading this because you can do anything. ANYTHING.) TiVo knows I’d basically lay over train tracks for Ricky Gervais and, so, it thought it perfectly acceptable to tape the latest episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s new show on NBC, The Marriage Ref, where Ricky Gervais joined “panel” guests Larry David and Madonna. Larry David and Ricky Gervais in the same room? I am only human for God’s sake.

And, clearly, that’s exactly the reaction that Jerry Seinfeld was hoping for- that I would dumbly follow my comedy gods anywhere. I spent the next forty minutes wincing and burying my head in my hands.

There is an element of phoning-it-in for a television show where you actually start to feel insulted. Don’t get me wrong- David was fine, Gervais was fine, Madonna continues to successfully act like some weird caricature of herself- but the rest of it was just awful.

The premise is that a real, honest-to-goodness married couple has a fight on a giant television screen. The celebrity panel mocks them, chooses sides on the argument and declares a winner. The married couple gets vaguely excited that they’re on TV, they wonder off-camera where Jerry Seinfeld is, get the verdict for their fight, and nothing has changed in their lives whatsoever. The host, former stand-up comedian Tom Papa, struggles to remember throughout the show that the money for this job is very, very good (he’s got kids, college is expensive, I totally get it) and that he might get to meet Ashton Kutcher next week.

The problems with this set-up are as follows:

1.  A premise contrived based on delusional logic.

Nothing brings an audience of real people closer to non-real people (aka celebrities) like watching those celebrities mock and criticize real people. Right? Bueller?  You know, there is a reason why the popular kids in your high school were not allowed to have a school TV show where they make fun of all the losers and it was streamed live into classrooms.

2. This is a joke right? Where’s John McEnroe?

With the audience in attendance, the fancy stage, the nonsensical set-up and the gimmicky premise, it reminded me an awful lot of “Gold Case,” Kenneth the Page’s disastrous game show for 30 Rock. And by that I mean a poorly conceived show that feels like a fake show within an actual show. Always nice to spend millions of dollars on something like that as another scripted series bites the pilot dust.

3. Even the celebrity guests know, just as that beleaguered high school principal knows, that “This is a very bad idea for a show.”

Surprisingly, with Larry David in the room, the most awkward part of the show was when David and Gervais blatantly discussed how awful and weird the show is.  At least I have proof for when I sue Seinfeld for this hour of my life back.

4. I’m sorry but the “panel” for this episode consisted of three people who are judging real married couples and yet NO ONE ON THE PANEL IS CURRENTLY MARRIED.

Larry David is famously divorced and we all know what’s happening in Madonna’s house better than she does (it ain’t Guy Ritchie). Ricky Gervais, frankly, has the longest-running relationship but has never actually made it legal. These are our relationship experts? Why not grab famous married couples (like Ted Danson and Mary Steenbergen)? Or famous people who are married to nobodies for more than the LA Standard (that would be 10 years, aka Pre-Nup is Up Time). Or maybe actual marriage counselors?

But, see, if they had done that, I wouldn’t have been lured to the show with that damned comedy god carrot.

5. NBC is piping in Jerry Seinfeld’s name as producer whenever possible.

NBC, I have news for you. You’re not going to like it. See, celebrities are awarded a certain amount of stock points- let’s call them Affection Points. Basically, the more Affection Points we have piled up for the person, the more likely we are to put up with their misfires. Alec Baldwin should kiss Tina Fey on the mouth every day because, thanks to her show, his points have piled so high that we all completely disregarded that nasty voicemail message he left for his daughter.

Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. Let’s talk for a second- unidentified blogger with digestive issues to rich, former comedian:  You were the star of the most beloved sitcom of all time. It left us with a LOT of Affection Points, helped by how heavily Seinfeld is in syndication. But you have blown through these points over the last five years like Gary Busey through a cocaine farm. Your first project back into the world was that animated movie about bees (”Cartoon movies make a ton of money! Let’s do it!”). You promoted it so much that I now hate bees. You bashed that writer for suing your wife over the kerfluffel over her Hide Your Veggies In a Brownie cookbook. Regardless of whether or not the claim was unfounded, you are at the top of the heap and that writer is decidedly not- it wasn’t classy, Jerry.

You backed NBC & Jay Leno’s return to The Tonight Show, as if I needed another reason to grind my teeth at night. I think you were serious when you said Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin were laugh riots hosting the Oscars, which leads me to believe that maybe you should go back to stand-up… in the Catskills. And stop popping up at Saturday Night Live to say things. Seth Myers, frankly, has enough problems with pulling SNL out of Comedy Hell. You do not own the question, “Really?”

This latest enterprise confirms my suspicions that you have lost all perspective. It’s time to move out of both LA and New York, give your whole fortune away to charity and move to a small town, maybe in the Rust Belt or something. Get to know us again, Jerry. Go back to your roots. Maybe start observing the real world again, the way most of us actually live it. Go to a post office. Put your kids in a public school, the kind with ancient textbooks and weekly PTA meetings. Start to remember who the good guys are. You might begin to see what I’m talking about. You might even learn to be funny again.

In case you’re wondering, that’s the show that I really would like to see.

…if, for example, you’re jogging on the beach and listening to your iPod and a small experimental plane has to make an emergency landing and the pilot can’t see because there’s oil on his windshield and he lands on the beach and you don’t hear the plane coming because you’re jogging on the beach listening to your iPod and the plane runs you over. Looked at another way, we could say that jogging can kill you, too. Or maybe it’s the combination of jogging and listening to an iPod. No, that’s not enough. An emergency landing has to be added to the mix. And a windshield covered in oil. Maybe never mind. Keep up the jogging and the listening to the iPod, since the chance of the above all happening has to be near zero. At least, the chance of it happening again. This might even be almost funny, if it happened in a movie, maybe to a villain in an action spoof of some kind — if it hadn’t happened for real, if Robert Gary Jones hadn’t been killed, if he didn’t have two children, if he weren’t just minding his business, if things that shouldn’t happen didn’t and a person’s life didn’t sometimes end like that.

Nobody has enjoyed a late career renaissance like Johnny Cash. The series of collaborations he made with Slayer producer Rick Rubin reignited critical interest in his work at a time when Cash believed he was destined to become a touring nostalgia act. The first of these, American Recordings is a fantastic album — raw, dark, stark, stripped down to the Man in Black’s voice and primitive guitar playing. Cash had never sounded young, and he’d always been good with death, but I was shocked by the simplicity of the first lines, the frank, naked, blasé expression of brutality:

Delia, O Delia
Delia all my life
If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia
I’d have had her for my wife

Whenever I play American Recordings I find that opening as startling as when I first heard it well over a decade ago. Cash could get close to the darkness without screeching or posing. He was already there. He just started singing in that rumbling bass-baritone and you believed. It’s so powerful that you forget he could also be funny — and indeed, the last track on American Recordings was a joke song, The Man Who Couldn’t Cry.

Later I discovered that Delia’s Gone was an old song, that Cash was covering himself. The American series always relied less on Cash’s abilities as a songwriter and more on his skills as an interpreter, even if he was reinterpreting an earlier version of Johnny Cash. Some of the songs covered were selected by Cash, others by Rubin. It was easy to tell which was which: Cash’s sensibilities were steeped in the broad country, gospel and folk tradition, while Rubin favored a narrower palate of heavy metal and alt rock. The miraculous thing was that it worked, most of the time. Cash could invest the adolescent self-loathing of Trent Reznor’s Hurt with the same authority and sincerity as an ancient standard like That Lucky Old Sun, a mournful lament for the difficult life of a working man. The songs on these records sat comfortably alongside each other because Cash’s experience, persona and interpretive gift enabled him to uncover the shared themes of God, pain, redemption, love, violence and longing in the unlikeliest bedfellows.

The peak of the Rubin mix n’ match approach was reached on American III: Solitary Man. Cash’s versions of Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat and Will Oldham’s I See a Darkness are revelatory, as good as if not better than the originals. By the time of American IV however the alt-pop covers were starting to sound like novelties. Personal Jesus is a trite rather than inspired song selection while even the much vaunted version of Reznor’s Hurt gains much of its power from the harrowing video. American IV is also marred by some disastrous appearances by celebrity guests. Nick Cave strangles I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry to death on his first verse, and then, as if unsatisfied, repeatedly kicks the corpse in the head before the song ends. Fiona Apple rots like a dead whale on Bridge Over Troubled Water. By far the best track on the album is Cash’s apocalyptic The Man Comes Around, which is as good as anything he ever wrote. When I play that album now I skip the corny covers and concentrate on Cash’s choices.

Anyway, Cash died before Rubin could throw Lady Gaga’s Poker Face at him and as a result the two albums culled from his final recording sessions are much lighter on the reinterpreted heavy metal/gothic pop factor. American V, released posthumously in 2006, was a decidedly stripped down affair. Recorded in the aftermath of June Carter Cash’s death, Cash was himself teetering on the brink of eternity. The album has an intimacy that can be painful, even claustrophobic. It is mournful and sad, and Cash’s once booming voice is reduced at times to a croak, almost a whisper. Unlike its predecessor however, it feels like a whole; and yet it wasn’t, not really — because Rubin had a sequel planned.

Which brings us to American VI: Ain’t No Grave. I had some anxiety about this record: as somebody who loves Johnny Cash’s music, I wanted it to be more than just good. It needed to cap not only the American series but also Cash’s career, reaching all the way back to his Sun recordings (best experienced in the excellent Bear Family box set). And after a few listens I’m starting to think that — just maybe — Rubin and Cash pulled it off. Although American VI like its predecessor finds Cash in frail voice over subtle, spare arrangements, the tone is different. Cash’s body may have been shattered, and he may have been in mourning for his beloved wife but the record sounds calm, almost transcendent. On the title track he sings:

Well there ain’t no grave
Gonna hold my body down
Well there ain’t no grave
Gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna get up out of the ground

The song mixes defiance with a joyful declaration that death is not the end. And it is this bedrock of religious faith that liberates Cash from fear and informs the rest of the album. This is the sound of a man at peace with himself, with his life, who is ready to meet his Redeemer. Indeed, he’s so at peace he can take a Sheryl Crow track, Redemption Song and make you forget about her musings on toilet paper and suspect for the first time that she might actually have some talent. Then he takes Kris Kristofferson’s For the Good Times — basically a song in which a horny bastard tries to emotionally blackmail his ex into giving him some pity sex — and turns it into a moving reflection on a long life nearly at its end. The fourth track, 1 Corinthians 15:55 is the last song Cash ever wrote and begins with the famous lines from scripture:

Oh Death where is thy sting?
Oh grave where is thy victory?

Before Cash continues with a plea to God for shelter, guidance, forgiveness and mercy; but it’s a plea given in the certainty that God is merciful, delivered over a cheerful waltz. Cash knows that if he asks, he shall receive.

American VI is Cash’s final articulation of his faith, his life’s experience, his long dying. At times it sounds like a ghostly transmission from the beyond. Some critics have complained about the emphasis given to Cash’s frailty and mortality on the last four American records; others have even accused Rubin of exploiting him, as if Cash was the sort of man to allow himself to be thus used. Other critics complain that the gothic darkness of the American series overshadows the richness of his persona, obliterating memories of the speed freak Cash, the rockabilly Cash, the historian Cash, the comedy Cash, the socially conscious Cash.

They are wrong. Forget my crack about Lady Gaga on the way in: Rick Rubin deserves only praise for seeing the potential that still lay untapped in the old country music warhorse when everybody else thought he was washed up. Cash was lucky indeed to have found such a great collaborator in his last decade, although he probably didn’t think it was luck. The other, younger Johnny Cash still exists; his records are out there, and are being rediscovered all the time. Nobody else has such a rich discography — thematically at least — for Cash could become a killer, a child, a dispossessed Indian, a randy husband and yet always remain Cash. But it’s the emphasis on mortality that makes the American albums unique and adds to rather than subtracts from that richness. Cash was strong enough to be honest in his expression of weakness. If it makes us uncomfortable then that’s our fault. Cash showed us how it’s done, this business of dying, and he did it in song. Let us all hope that when we get there we can do it with the same dignity, resolve and peace of mind as the Man in Black.

“A 40-year-old Racine man is accused of killing a 2-year-old boy, punching him because he was spilling his milk.”

Manuel Garcia “lost his temper with his girlfriend’s son, punching him numerous times in the abdomen on Thursday, killing him.” He “admitted punching the boy at least three times because the child was[…] ’frustrating him’ and spilling his milk.”

We at PWSBKTW understand that two-year-olds can be frustrating. They have terrible table manners. Still, no one should die over spilled milk.

The mother, Lawanda Martinez, “is charged with child neglect resulting in death. Prosecutors said she largely ignored the boy’s injuries and symptoms until it was too late.”

It’s hard to blame the mother. She’s probably had a tough life. She has (had) four kids. They must spill milk all the time. Well, maybe not anymore.

The grandmother kept telling Martinez (the mother) to take the child to the hospital, but was ignored. As someone with the brilliant moniker “NachoBizzness” said in the comments section of the Racine Journal Times:

You people need to stop ripping on Grandma! She could have encouraged the daughter to take the child but since Grandma is not the custodial parent the hospital would do nothing for the child if she took him to the ER. A custodial parent must give authorization for treatment. 

The grandmother is clearly not to blame as much as Garcia is, since she didn’t punch the child. And her authority over and responsibility for the child is not the same as the mother’s. But the grandmother could have called 911. We at PWSBKTW suppose that if you are allowed to call 911 for complete strangers you find injured on the side of the road, you can call 911 for your dying grandson.

Maybe we’re wrong. In that case, we bow to the expertise of NachoBizzness. Surely anyone smart enough to come up with a name that sounds like “not your business” and at the same time makes us hungry for a truly impressive plate of tex-mex nachos (extra guacamole!), must be smart enough to be a medical professional with great knowledge of emergency room protocol. NachoBizzness says it, so it’s true — if you carry a dying child into a hospital, a strange kid you found bleeding to death on the sidewalk, for example, certainly the doctors would refuse to stop the bleeding because you aren’t the parent. 

So we at PWSBKTW have to agree with NotYoBiz that the grandmother was right to do nothing. As the grandmother said, her daughter “should’ve took him to the hospital like I asked her to do.” Fortunately for the grandmother, we at PWSBKTW are not grammar snobs. (If we were, we might also have some words for the copy editor of the Racine Journal Times.)

The boy’s father told the Racine Journal Times that “he had seen signs of abuse with the child, but didn’t know how to report it.” We shouldn’t judge him. It’s not his fault. If only there were a section at the beginning of every phone book with phone numbers for local authorities and child services.

And if only people had invented a way to type in “racine wisconsin child abuse” and find out information. If one day they did invent some kind of machine that was connected to other machines — let’s guess they’d call it an inter-network of computing machines — and then someone invented something we might call a searching engine, and then someone created a really good searching engine that they would name after a large number, a number with lots of zeros, well, in that science fiction world, the father might have found a phone number right there on the searching page to a “Child Abuse Neglect Access Line.”

No, they probably wouldn’t name it something that obvious, even in the future (unless you passed your mouse over it). Yet it probably would be pretty easy to find. If this were the future and there were computers and such. We at PWSBKTW can only live in the present, so don’t know when or if we will ever have these miracle devices. In the absence of this advanced technology, perhaps the father could have called the police, or city hall, or asked a librarian, to find out how to report the abuse of his son. If it wouldn’t have been too much of an inconvenience.

In addition to the boyfriend’s violence and malevolence, there is an awful lot of stupid and neglect floating among this twisted family. We at PWSBKTW usually reserve judgment for the perpetrator of the crime, and in this case that’s an easy call: For punching a two-year-old in the abdomen over and over hard enough to kill the child, Manuel Garcia should be killed this week.

We at PWSBKTW will leave it to our readers to decide how much of a lightning bolt, if any, the mother, grandmother, and father deserve.

I’m interested in the recent flap between Chief Justice John Roberts and the White House over comments that President Obama made at the State of the Union address. In the speech, you’ll recall, Obama criticized the Court’s decision in Citizens United to roll back campaign finance restrictions. Then, last week, a tape was released in which Roberts characterized Obama’s open criticism as indecorous. The New York Times has a roundup of the argument, along with the jabs of several writers who have weighed in — the word “crybaby” comes up frequently.

This blog is too polite for such saucy language. Instead, I’m interested in another word that the two disputants employ to externalize their mutual ire. Here’s Justice Roberts:

The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.

This is an atrocious sentence. The main verb doesn’t appear until 36 words in. What’s more, although Roberts is clearly irritated at the hooting and hollering, his phrasing suggests that he is upset over the image of hooting and hollering. This is hard to understand. How will that image cause damage, and to what? Is the Chief Justice a lay media theorist? What a thrilling possibility.

But the real curiosity of this sentence is the last word: “troubling.” This is the word that White House spokesman Robert Gibbs grasped on to when he issued his response,

What is troubling is that [Citizens United] opened the floodgates for corporations and special interests to pour money into elections — drowning out the voices of average Americans.

Who is in trouble? Where is the trouble? What does it mean to be “troubled” in this context?

Let’s start off with what it doesn’t mean. To be troubled with something is not to say that it is illegal, unconstitutional or without precedent. What we have is an argument about manners, not an argument about the balance of powers. I know that’s difficult to grasp, considering that Obama and Roberts are the head honchos of their respective branches of government, but the word “troubling” does not fit an activity in which they are acting in official capacities. So all of the “Constitutional Showdown” hullabaloo is noise; such characterizations are the expression of puerile journalistic delight, no more.

After all, “troubling” an adjective that is most noteworthy for its weakness — substitute “appalling” or “unbelievable” and you’ll notice how feeble it is to be only “troubled.” We are troubled by things that privately preoccupy, over things that keep us up at night with worry, yet over which we have comparatively little power. One is troubled over the health of an ill relative, over the sorry state of one’s profession, over developments in far-off lands whose significance is as yet unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for the word draws on religious commentaries: “the troubling cares of men;” “troubling thoughts;” “troubling bags and packages.” A troubling thing is a private encumbrance, a mortal worry to be lamented, bemoaned and shuffled off rather than confronted.

So to be “troubled” is to express irritation in a sheepish and paralytic way, to detest through emotional stalemate. Isn’t it appalling to find that our public expressions of indignation are in such a wan state? That’s what’s troubling about “troubling.” In shaming someone for showing too little politeness, “troubling” shows way too much.

Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things.  He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache…and a pair of horns growing from his temples.

It’s a great beginning to a promising story: part thriller, part horror, part treatise on the nature of the devil.  While Horns occasionally gets bogged down in reminiscence, it’s still an extremely entertaining read. 

A year ago, Ig’s girlfriend Merrin was raped and murdered.  Ig was the prime suspect — an alibi like “I was passed out in my car parked behind an abandoned Dunkin Donuts” is not very convincing — and although he was never charged, he was also never cleared.  There is a cloud of suspicion hanging over him already, and growing horns is not going to make him look innocent.

Eventually, Ig discovers that the horns have their own terrible power.  They make people want to tell him things, the things they really want to do.  They want to get his permission, or his twisted blessing.  When he gets rousted by the local cops, he learns a little more about Officer Posada than he intended:

“I’d like to put my hand in your pocket again,” Posada said.  “And leave it there.  You don’t know how hard it is not to use my position of power to cop a feel.  No pun intended.  Cop.  Ha.  I never imagined how much of my job would involve handcuffing fit, half-naked men.”

You’re not going to believe the advice he gets from his parish priest.

Ig finds out things he wishes he didn’t know, but he also sees a way to use this power, this ability to get answers from people, to find out who really killed Merrin.  The parts of the story that involve Ig’s investigation are my favorites — filled with insights into the people around him that are both hilarious and horrifying.  We really do not want to know what goes on in the minds of the people around us.

The story, for me, got bogged down in backstory.  Some explanation of how Ig and Merrin got together, his relationship with his brother and his best friend, Lee, is necessary, but I didn’t find it very compelling.  When a story starts in the present then jumps back to the past for an extended period, it’s hard to keep up the level of interest. 

I’m also sure that some of the symbolism went right over my head (I never did figure out the whole Treehouse of the Mind thing), but I loved the commentary on the nature of the devil.  Some of the ideas Ig lays out are the sort of questions I used to ask my very-Catholic grandmother, driving her to distraction; for example, if God hates sin and the Devil punishes sinners, aren’t they working on the same side?  Seems perfectly logical to me that the Devil would reward sinners.  I’m sure that a lot of readers can relate to the comments about God and his “criminal indifference”.  After all, who hasn’t watched a tragedy unfold and asked “why?”

“If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered.  Show me the moral logic in it.  You can’t.  There is none.”

I enjoyed Horns, but not quite as much as I had hoped to.  I found a lot of humor and suspense in the story, a couple of good scares and a lot of little touches that made it memorable.  (Just for fun, take a minute to translate the Morse code on the inside cover — I got a chuckle out of it.)   Author Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King and storytelling is definitely a family gift.  I loved 20th Century Ghosts and I also enjoyed Heart-Shaped Box and I will be looking forward to his next novel — a good, scary story is hard to come by.

My copy of Horns was provided free of charge for review.

Some weeks back I mentioned Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Science,” which is a meditation on the development of the atomic bomb. It ends thus:

A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?

This, of course, is merely a 20th-century gloss on something Alexander Pope said a long time ago: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” It is a sentiment that has done yeoman’s service as the premise of story after story, from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, and I have no intention of challenging its fundamental wisdom. But I would suggest that there is a corollary question connected to it that has been largely ignored: Just how much knowledge is enough?

Take, for instance, the ongoing debate about climate change (neé global warming), regarding which many insist that the “science is settled.” Of course, since a cache of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s University of East Anglia were posted on the Internet late last year, the science has seemed to many to be noticeably unsettled. According to a memorandum submitted to the British Parliament by the Institute of Physics, “the CRU e-mails as published on the Internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.”

The real question, of course, has to do with this business of the science being settled. When is the science about anything ever settled? Are there areas that we no longer need to investigate? One encounters a similar sense of dogmatism with regard to evolutionary theory, which is rather odd considering that Darwin’s original formulation has long since been revised to account for genetics.

And, speaking of genetics, it has always seemed to me that the really great 19th-century natural scientist wasn’t Darwin, but Gregor Mendel, whose years of patient and meticulous experiment and observation gave us the knowledge of genetics that in turn gave us that new and improved evolutionary theory. And if Mendel’s discoveries made it necessary to revise Darwin’s original formulation, isn’t it at least possible that some new discovery might necessitate further revision?

On another front, think for a moment about all the things regarding health and diet that have been bandied about in the media over the years. Stay out of the sun, we were told, or else slather on the sun block — except now we are being told to get at least 15 minutes of exposure to the sun every day. Remember the oat bran craze? I always thought that particularly amusing, since all you really needed to do was eat whole oats, which includes the bran — that’s why they call it “whole.” Of course, the craze proved much less amusing to the people who got a grievous bout of constipation eating the bran minus everything else.

There are plenty of other examples besides these. How about all that we’ve heard, back and forth, about fats, supplements, sweeteners, alcohol? It all has one thing in common: the belief that we knew enough to do something, followed by the discovery that, well, maybe we didn’t.

The underlying problem may be that we have come to think of knowledge solely in terms of data and information and of the intellect as simply a passive receptor of same: We take in the facts and figures, process them, and act accordingly. I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that. To study something in depth is to see the subject of one’s study opening out and getting deeper — like the ocean. Genuine learning is a process of initiation into the mystery that lies at the heart of everything. True knowledge invariably confers a measure of humility, which in turn tends to be prophylactic against undue or hasty action.

You know what’s amazing? Sometime this week, almost everyone you know will fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket. Male, female, young, old, basketball fan, non-basketball fan, it doesn’t matter. The numbers are staggering. I don’t have the research on this, but I have to imagine that it is the sporting event that pulls in the most non-fans this side of the Super Bowl.

I have been filling out tournament pools for as long as I can remember. My results have been mixed, but mostly poor. I have had the occasional high finish, although I have never won outright. The thing that really amazes me is how often the winner is someone who seems to know absolutely nothing about college basketball. How is this possible? I know there is an awful lot of information out there to be had, so people could go online and find picks made by some expert and use those, I guess. A lot of pools have rules that reward risky picks, and that could help people who don’t know very much. Still, winning one of these pools is not like picking who is going to win the coin toss at the Super Bowl. There are 63 games that need to be predicted. This stuff is not easy. The fact that a person who watched no games this season has a shot to win is why so many get involved.

The tournament itself is amazing. For a college basketball fan, there is nothing like it. Back in my first-ever Bad Sports, Good Sports column, I talked about the trips my friends and I used to take to Las Vegas for the opening weekend of the tournament. The scene in the Luxor sports book during the games was something to behold. Even though most of you will never experience that, the fun of filling out a pool and watching games throughout the month is not a bad substitute. It’s no wonder that so many take part.

Happy March Madness, everyone.

Good sports, continued:

2) Administrators at Calvin Coolidge Senior High School in D.C. have done something that makes them unique in this country: they have hired a woman to be the head coach of their varsity football team. 29-year old Natalie Randolph, a science teacher at the school, has been named to succeed Jason Lane, the former coach. Randolph used to play in the National Women’s Football Association.

3) Kevin Mawae, a center who is currently an NFL free-agent, was a unanimous selection to continue as president of the NFL Players Association. Mawae, most recently of the Tennessee Titans, has been in the league for 16 years, has made the Pro Bowl eight times, and has been the union president for the last two years.

Bad sports:

1) The hype will come to an end. There has been a lot of talk about a matchup between the two greatest female horses currently running, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra. Plans had been in the works to have them both run in the Apple Blossom Invitational in Arkansas next month, but Rachel Alexandra’s loss in a race on Saturday caused her owner to call off his horse’s participation in the event.

2) Talk about scary. In the first lap of Indycar’s first race of the season on Sunday, Marco Andretti ended up underneath the car of Mario Moraes after a multi-car crash that propelled Moraes’ car on top of Andretti’s car. Andretti was unhurt, fortunately.

3) Star soccer player David Beckham will be unable to participate in the upcoming World Cup after tearing his Achilles’ Tendon on Sunday in a match against AC Milan.

Bad Sports, Good Sports appears every Monday

Whenever someone proposes spending money on a new government program, critics will say that we should balance out the effect on the budget with a matching tax increase. That would be great if it worked, but it’s a mistake to think that we can make up for increased government spending by increasing taxes.

Economist Steven Landsburg tries to illustrate the problem with an analogy about personal spending, pointing out that if you spend too much on your lifestyle, you can’t make up for it by going to the ATM more often. His point is that the American taxpayer is kind of like an ATM: Keep taking more money, and eventually you’ll run out. Sooner or later, you will have to stop spending.

I’m sure he’s right, but I think there’s another way to look at the problem. When the government spends money, it spends money on stuff — roads, tanks, buildings, research, gasoline, airplanes, ammunition, computers — but when the government collects taxes, all it gets is money.

The problem is that money has no intrinsic value. It’s just ink on paper (or magnetic fields in some bank’s data center). You can’t eat it, you can’t wear it, you can’t pave a four-lane highway with it. Just having money doesn’t get you anywhere.

This is where you’d probably like to call my bluff by asking me to give you all my money. Don’t hold your breath. Although having money is intrinsically useless, there’s immense value to be had in trading money for other stuff. I can walk into a restaurant, give them some paper money (or allow them to make an entry in a credit card computer), and they will give me food. Elsewhere I can get housing, clothing, transportation, medical care, education, and entertainment.

Unlike money, these goods and services directly make our lives better, and it’s the production, distribution, consumption of these goods that constitute what economists call the real economy. The money is just a tool to help it all run smoother.

The goal of an efficient economy is using available resources to produce and distribute goods and services as efficiently as possible. It’s a complex problem, but our free markets solve it surprisingly well: Consumers buy what they need most, at the best price they can get, and producers try to earn a profit by providing those goods and services as cheaply as possible. Thus, our economy uses the least amount of resources to produce the most goods and services, in the best combination, and distribute them where they will do the most good. The free market has its problems, but it’s brought us pretty far.

Now suppose the government spends a billion dollars on a new highway. This giant construction project will use resources — building materials, construction tools, and labor — and once those resources are scarfed up for the highway, they can’t be used for anything else. Concrete that would have been used to build housing foundations gets used to build a roadbed. Trucks that would have hauled groceries to market are now hauling construction supplies. Construction workers who could have been building homes or packing groceries are now working on the government’s highway. This is the effect of government spending on the real economy: Resources that would have been used to produce other goods and services are sidelined into the government project.

That’s not to say the free market won’t provide all kinds of substitutions and adjustments. Food wholesalers probably found replacements for most of the trucks that were taken for the construction project, although the replacements are probably not as good. Or maybe the trucking companies bought additional trucks so they could continue hauling groceries during the construction project. Those trucks are now unavailable to whoever would have used them instead. Maybe someone will build new trucks to make up the difference, but then the extra materials and labor for the new trucks have to come out of something else that won’t get built.

You get the idea. The change in demand ripples through the economy in a series of trade offs that are complex, far-reaching, and sometimes hard to predict. But there’s only so much stuff we can produce, so whenever we decide to produce something, we consume scarce resources that could been used to produce something else.

Economists call this the opportunity cost because whatever that something else was, we’ve lost the opportunity to have it. When it comes to the real economy, every decision has an opportunity cost. So when the government runs a billion-dollar highway construction project, it does so at the oppornutiy cost of not producing about a billion dollars worth of something else. This is the real cost of government spending.

Of course, the government has to pay for its billion dollars worth of construction with money, and the money has a story of its own. Perhaps the government takes the money as taxes, in which case the affected taxpayers will be a billion dollars poorer, and thus have to reduce their consumption of goods and services by roughly a billion dollars. This works out okay, because the government has taken a billion dollars worth of goods and services out of the economy for its new highway construction. In a free market system, all those trade offs I described earlier will eventually end up taking goods and services away from the taxpayers who couldn’t afford them anyway.

Putting it that way makes it sound kind of magical, but what happens is that the taxpayers have less money to spend so they buy less stuff. This frees up resources which help make other stuff easier to produce, freeing up more resources for still other stuff. These ripples eventually collide with ripples of increased demand coming from the highway project and it all balances out. The process is helped along by traders who understand the system well enough to get ahead of the ripples and take steps to fill shortages and siphon off gluts before anyone feels them.

But what happens if the government doesn’t raise taxes and borrows the money instead? Well, if the government borrows the billion dollars, it has to come from people who are willing to give up spending the money now in exchange for having more to spend later. This reduces their spending by roughly a billion dollars, and has the same short-term effect as if the money had been taxed away.

The point is that however the government gets the money, the goods and services consumed by the highway project are removed from the economy. Once the government spends money, it doesn’t matter where it came from. It’s the spending that does the real damage.

One last thing: Just because the government consumes a billion dollars worth of resources doesn’t mean the economy takes a loss worth a billion dollars. The highway project used up a billion dollars worth of resources, but it created a new highway, and that’s got to be worth something to the economy. The question is whether it’s worth enough.

Highways are a notorious example of something the free market is very bad at providing, so there’s a real possibility that a billion-dollar highway project could reduce travel times and congestion to allow the economy to produce far more than a billion dollars worth of extra goods and services. It could make us all better off.

So before all the politicians and pundits debate the mechanics of paying for a government program, we need to find out if the program is going to be worth the opportunity cost of whatever the free market would have done with an equal amount of resources. In other words, before we figure out how to pay for it, we need to make sure it’s worth buying.

Two of my favorite things in the world are fine food and game shows. There is nothing I enjoy more than curling up on the Victorian settee to watch the latest episodes of “Jeopardy!” and “The Price is Right” while eating foie gras-stuffed quail with asparagus and drinking port wine. The extreme pleasure of consuming great food combined with the excitement of a thrilling game show causes the cares of the world to just drift away.

Given my love of food and of game shows, the appearance of the NBC program, Minute to Win it, should be cause for celebration. After all, it is a game show, and it is hosted by a popular figure from the Food Network.

You might think that one such as I would enjoy the Food Network. You might think that, but do not say it out loud, because if I hear you, I will remove my gauntlet and slap you across the face. Maybe this is an extreme reaction, but to even imply that I would like something as reprehensible as the Food Network is a metaphorical slap in the face. A literal slap in the face is a wholly appropriate response.

And no one more embodies what I find so distasteful and about that spoiled-rotten network than one of its most popular “personalities,” the guy called “Guy Fieri.” He is the “guy” that your mom dated for a few months right after her divorce; the one that you and everyone else could tell was a total sleaze, but for some reason she just couldn’t see it. He is the “guy” that’s everyone’s buddy at work, but the minute your back is turned he’s gladhanding the boss and belittling you. He is the “guy” whose success is attributable not to the modicum of actual talent he possesses, but to his ability to ingratiate himself to exactly the right person. He is the “guy” who thinks his ridiculous accoutrement make him look “cool,” as opposed to ridiculous. He is the “guy” who attempts to compel you to join him in playing air guitar whenever “More than a Feeling” comes on the classic rock station (and he sticks his tongue out while doing it). He is the “guy” who oozes his way into your life unbidden, who furthers pushes himself on you, who never leaves, who is inescapable. He is the “guy” who wonders about the people who don’t want to “roll” with him. Because he’s just so “off the hook” and “money,” can’t you see it?

His success is inscrutable to me. I am trying to scrute it; I really am. I am trying perhaps too hard. Below are my theories:

1. Guy Fieri represents punishment at the hands of an irritated, but not quite angry, god. The god of the Bible is capable of some massively awful things when he is angry. He sends a plague of locusts to harass the Egyptians who were keeping slaves and didn’t believe in god. He gave Job oozing sores and killed all his children and wives simply to test his faith. He killed every man, woman, and child on the planet in a great flood (except the drunken Noah and his family). He killed people for practicing birth control. I am not saying that Guy Fieri’s popularity rises to the level of floods and plagues, but if a god were capable of doing those things when he’s angry, it doesn’t seem out of the question that he might send something like Guy Fieri to harass us if he were only a little bit annoyed. Being a skeptic, I understand rationally that Guy Fieri is probably not the agent of an irritated but not quite angry god; nevertheless, it is a seductive theory.

2. Guy Fieri is an agent of satan. I am still a skeptic (see above), however, if there is a satan, and he wants to wreak havoc on the world, the best way might be to wear us all down and force us to just throw up our hands in disgust. Unleashing a Guy Fieri loose upon us is a step in that direction. He is often photographed wearing fiery clothing, his very name (his stage name, by the way; his actual last name is Ferry) is just one letter off from “fiery,” and his hair is like a shock of flames atop his giant, beet-red head. In this scenario, Guy Fieri isn’t the only nuisance; after all, there are other Food Network stars that could also be agents of satan. Also, Gwyneth Paltrow (who is, incidentally, a very close friend of Mario Batali, one of the original Food Network stars).  Perhaps satan has let loose a number of human hobgoblins to harass and harangue us, and Mr. Fieri is but one.

Is Guy Fieri attempting to attack us with hellfire?

3. Guy Fieri is an extra terrestrial creature in human disguise sent to destroy us for our callous disregard for our planet. This perhaps slightly outlandish theory came to me while reading over a synopsis of a recent film in which Keanu Reeves played an alien sent to earth to destroy it, or something, because humans were already destroying it. I didn’t watch the movie; I think it was a remake (of course!). Anyway, in this scenario, the aliens have only a basic understanding of human beings, and so disguised one of their own in such a way as to give him a superficial resemblance to a human. This would explain some peculiarities in Mr. Fieri’s appearance. For instance, why does his hair spike up like that? Why is it so dark at the roots, and so blond everywhere else? Why the multicolored Vandyke? Why does he wear sunglasses on the back of his head (does he have another set of eyes back there)? Why does he wear sweatbands on his forearms? Why does he wear bowling shirts even though he is not bowling, and it is not 1998? Perhaps the aliens are trying to tell us something; if only we would listen.

4. Guy Fieri is part of a conspiracy designed to combat obesity. The Food Network began broadcasting in 1993. In that time, obesity rates have increased. While most of us understand that correlation does not imply causation, the government does not. It’s only a matter of time before some enterprising elected or non-elected government official goes after the Food Network to collect some of its profits to help pay for our nation’s health care bills. Sensing this, the Food Network has endeavored to force people to lose their appetites by promoting nauseating personalities that make food unappealing. Mr. Fieri is the human equivalent of the warning on a package of cigarettes, or a video game rating system. If this is part of Food Network’s plan, there are hopeful signs that it’s actually working, as obesity rates seem to have plateaued since Mr. Fieri made his debut on the Food Network in 2006.

5. Guy Fieri is living my life, and my hatred of him is motivated purely by jealousy. Perhaps I see some of myself in him, or at least, what I would like to be. He and I rate roughly the same: five out of ten looks, four out of ten personality. Neither of us can grow a full, manly beard. Yet, Guy Fieri owns some mediocre restaurants whose culinary point of view seems to be “throw a bunch of crap together and hope people will buy it.” He has been on a reality television show. He hosts no fewer than three shows on the Food Network. He tours around the country like a rock star (seriously). He collects cars. He gets to travel the country eating food for free. His name has appeared on bestselling books. He has his own line of kitchen knives, and sunglasses. And, he now hosts a prime-time network game show. Guy Fieri has done everything I would like to do, and he had as little with which to work as I.

Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t feel jealous. Consider that Mr. Fieri is vermin. Now consider that one of his television programs on the Food Network is called Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. There is something so appropriately on-the-nose about having vermin host a show called Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. His success is just one big joke on him! Vermin hosting a show about skuzzy restaurants! Ha! It makes perfect sense and now I can get out of bed again! Oh my gosh please someone put me out of my misery!

10. “No, that’s my shillelagh, but I’m still glad to see you!”

9. “But I love the taste of Bailey’s Irish Cream!”

8. “Every time I see you, somethin’ starts Dublin in size!”

7. “What’s this I hear about Meredith Baxter practicing her Gaelic?”

6. “Because of you, my Irish thighs are smiling!”

5. “I’ll show you who’s hung like a leprechaun!”

4. “They don’t call me Lord of the Pants for nothing! ”

3. “You’ve made my sham rock hard!”

2. “It’s those two Irish smoothboys: Patrick Fitzgerald and Gerald Fitzpatrick!”

1. “Oooooooooooooooooo! Danny Boy!”
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

For many of us, our lives don’t work out the way we planned. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a plan. It’s very apropos that Lost’s “Dr. Linus” episode was named for a teacher since it taught us some very valuable lessons about who we are and what our purpose here may be. In other words, it really was all about you.

Life can often be frustrating. We can work hard, have faith, follow the clues, be good people, make sacrifices for the greater good, and still find ourselves in pretty dismal circumstances. When reflecting on our lives, we may wonder where we went wrong, or, if we are being punished for some reason. Perhaps something we did in a prior lifetime — karma that finally caught up to us.

From our limited perspective, it may sometimes seem that our lives aren’t amounting to much. But like It’s A Wonderful Life, we usually just don’t realize how many lives we’ve touched — lives that were made better because we were in them or at least helped influence them in some way. We might feel like failures, but in fact, may have succeeded without even knowing it. It’s just that there is a bigger picture going on behind the curtain that is more important than our own wants and perceived needs.

As Ben is told by Jacob at the end of “The Incident” it’s not about him. But it is about how he fits into the overall picture. That was why as Miles told Ben in “Dr. Linus,” Jacob continued to have hope for Ben right up until the very end. Hope that despite all of Ben’s hardships, much like the Biblical Job, he would keep the faith. So while Ben had given up on Jacob, Jacob never gave up on him. And this knowledge may have swayed Ben to return to Jacob’s side, despite his temptation from Jacob’s nemesis to join the dark side. Perhaps Ben had to go through all those hardships so that he could have the strong foundation to be able to make the tough choices he would need to make — choices that would drastically affect the lives of others.

In both his island life and parallel life, Ben had to make a choice between benefiting just himself or, someone else. And in both lives, he chose the more challenging, selfless path. Perhaps then, Ben is one of the good guys as he had claimed all along. So is there a message there? That whatever makes us who we are stays with us no matter what life situation we are placed in? Are there good souls and bad souls that will remain that way regardless of how their life turns out? Is there an inner-intelligence that determines what we are?

This question of what makes us who we are was the theme of the 1998 movie Dark City. In the film, a society of aliens has created an artificial world and placed Earthlings inside it with different professions and socio-economic backgrounds. Once the humans were comfortable in their respective lives, the aliens would change them around, complete with lifelong memories of their new life. Millionaires would become paupers, healers would become killers, cops would be criminals, and all of them would believe that this is what their life had always been. What the aliens were looking for was what stayed the same when they continually shuffled the people’s circumstances. Whatever this constant was, was presumed to be the soul, and this is what the aliens wanted to find. If you put people into different life situations, will the same people always be good while others are always evil? Or, will it depend upon the life situation they find themselves in?

This element of what makes people who they are is also explored on Lost as seen through the flash-sideways, enabling us to see what stays the same when the characters are thrown into different life situations. In both parallel worlds, Kate is running away from her problems, Locke is angry at the world, Jack is dealing with daddy issues, Sayid is a killer, and Ben devises intricate plans to suit his Napoleon-esque power-hungry ego. This all comes down to the characters’ nature. But can it be changed, or at least, tweaked?

In both versions of his life, Ben feels that he hasn’t been treated fairly and therefore, has not been able to live up to his potential. Despite this belief, he still ends up making a sacrifice for the greater good. In one life he does this by giving up his blackmailed principal position in order to ensure his student Alex’s future. In the other, he gives up the power offered to him by MIB/Locke in order to return to help the side that he felt was the good one — a side that will have him despite his past transgressions. So does this mean that the villainous Ben Linus actually has a good soul? Yes…we all do. But some of us just have to clear away the crud that life has thrown at us in order to find it. A theme of Lost has always been that no one is truly bad or good. They just do what they think is right as seen through the filter of life that they have experienced.

As seen in both timelines, the characters sometimes choose to do bad things, but usually it is the result of situations they are thrown into. Each choice they make helps determine who they really are — tipping the scale more towards the ego/selfish side, or the spiritual/selfless one­. Dogen believed that Sayid’s internal scale had tipped too far towards “evil.” But everyone can be redeemed. In fact, no matter which side of the scale we are leaning, the universe will continually challenge us to grow with experiences that require us to make a decision about who we are. These decisions don’t change our soul, but can help us to get in touch with it. In some parallel versions of our life, we have grown ourselves by making a majority of choices that went against our selfish nature. In others, we’ve stayed pretty much the same by making an equal number of selfish and selfless choices. And in others, we’ve tipped the scale entirely towards the selfish side by usually choosing for just ourselves.

Ben’s father Roger Linus is someone who lives life full of regret in both of his timelines. On the island, he’s tipped the scale entirely towards the selfish side, blaming his son for the death of his wife and becoming an alcoholic in the process. In the parallel timeline, Roger blames himself for leaving the island, and while still relatively negative and regretful, seems to have a better relationship with his son. Not shown on Lost, but existing somewhere in the multiverse is a version of Roger Linus that is even stronger. Here, there is no blame at all, but acceptance. This version was able to accept his wife’s death and play the challenging role of both father and mother to his son. In “Dr. Linus” when Ben complained to his dad about the way his life turned out, instead of agreeing and being regretful about leaving the island, this version of Roger Linus would have commended his son for completing his doctorate, dedicating his life to helping others, and being able to take care of him in his old age. This stronger version of Roger Linus would’ve told his son that he was proud of him, just as Jack told his son in his parallel timeline.

On Lost, it seems as though the decisions that the characters make on the island, influence their parallel lives. Island Hurely has risen above his belief of feeling like a jinx and is rewarded with good luck in the parallel timeline. Jack has taken a leap of faith by risking his life with Alpert and is beginning to accept that he has what it takes, enabling him to resolve his issues with his son in the parallel time. Ben’s selfless decision to return to Jacob allowed him to make another selfless decision for Alex. On the other hand, Sayid who has decided to kill on the island, eventually makes that same choice in his parallel life. Perhaps this is why he is not married to Nadia in this life, it is sort of his punishment because he does not “deserve” her. In both timelines, Sayid wants to be good but always makes the choice to kill. I personally feel that the choice was a bit unfair in the off-island timeline since he was kidnapped and Keamy had threatened his family, but hopefully, Sayid’s story doesn’t end there.

Overall, the message for us is that even though things may not appear to be going according to our plans, it is not our plans that necessarily matter. Despite how things may appear, we are part of a much bigger plan. Richard Alpert feels betrayed and misled by Jacob, dedicating multiple lifetimes to a plan that seems to have failed. Was all his hard work and dedication for nothing? Even if the plan doesn’t work out, the answer is no. The reason is because all his hard work was not ultimately about helping Jacob, but helping himself. Just as Jack thought that the lighthouse would be helping someone else, we come to learn that it was all for his benefit. Similarly, our journey through life isn’t about how we succeed in mastering the material world. It’s about how we succeed in mastering ourselves — overcoming our own selfish desires. And the better you do, the easier you’ll make it for everyone else.

If things have been particularly challenging for you, perhaps you just have more growing to do because you’ve taken on a more challenging role. Each time you are presented with a tough decision and make the more selfless, challenging choice, you’ll be presented with fewer of those types of decisions in the future. Make the more selfish choice however, and you’ll be presented with those same situations again and again.

If you want to know how you’re doing, just look at your own life. What parts appear to flow smoothly and what parts feel like a broken record? Why does Sayid continually have to make decisions about killing? So he can choose to walk away from it. Why does Jack always end up in situations that he feels need to be fixed? So he can accept something even if it’s broken. Why does Kate always have something to run away from? So she can choose not to and settle down. Why does Locke always have crap happen to him? So he can learn not to react and be grateful for what he does have. Why did Hurley always experience bad luck? So he could learn how to make his own luck. Why did Claire keep having her baby taken away? So she could really want to raise it on her own. And why do you always have that same thing that always happens to you? Next time it happens and you’re about to act the same way you usually do, take the more challenging path. You’ll be one step closer to redeeming the main character of your life story.

Marc Oromaner is a New York City writer whose book, The Myth of Lost offers a simple solution to Lost and uncovers its hidden insight into the mysteries of life. He can be contacted in the discussion section of The Myth of Lost Facebook page.

The Myth of Lost is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.

To those who believe that the ongoing war on terrorism against Islamic fanatics is a war without end or a war that can’t be won,  I suggest they read up on the anarchists’ 19th Century international terror campaign.

The Times of London published a good review of Alex Butterworth’s The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers and Secret Agents. The book covers the terror campaign of the anarchists, which lasted from 1871-1905.   

“History rarely rhymes, warns Alex Butterworth, let alone repeats itself,” James McConnachie writes in his review. “But in this rich and passionate account of the world’s first international terrorist campaign - as conducted by anarchist zealots between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the first Russian Revolution of 1905 - the disquieting echoes of our own times are impossible to ignore.”

The anarchists’ assassinations and bombings in the late 19th Century created a wave of terror, but the anarchists eventually faded out, just as I believe today’s Islamic terrorists will fade out if America and Western nations continue to stand up and counter them.