The Virtues of Vice

Ever since somewhere around 1975, when the first horde of the counterculture generation began meandering its way into positions of power and influence in American society, diversity (and I mean real diversity)has been on the decline. The result is not healthy. A free society does not prosper and continue to be free by forcing its citizens to adopt a lifestyle that is free from alcohol, tobacco, and great tasting food that happens to have negative side effects. The United States has experienced atavistic bouts of Purtianism and survived to renew its love affair with booze, broads, and well, a good cigar. But the most recent push into dull conformity will not be so benign and comical. What is it about some people that compels them to spend the better part of their adult lives trying to control the animal appetites of their fellow citizens? The paternalistic gene is not restricted to any one political ideology buts spans the spectrum of thought from the right with gays and religion, to the left with its obsessive desire to ban guns, cigarettes, and soon that 16 ounce New York strip steak that I throw on the grill every Saturday night, to the apolitical do gooders who want to turn everyone into an ascetic monk whose diet consists of skim milk, tree bark, and vegetables boiled in distilled water. Well, this way of thinking and philosophy is a crock of manure. I drink. I smoke cigars (at least two a day). I chase women. I eat steak, eggs, baked potatoes, and whatever unhealthy food I can get my hands on. I love all of it. My philosophy is simple: if it was good enough for Winston Churchill, it is good enough for me. End of discussion. A real man is not a real man unless he has at least two vices of which he can be proud. Ditto for a real woman. Life is not fun unless it is dangerous and having fun means knowing when to indulge in those little vices of life and sucking the excitement and pleasure out of them without fatally succumbing to their almost irresistible temptations.

Weekend Sports Edition: When The All Star Game Mattered

Miami has the good fortune of hosting, in the span of eight days, the NFL's most meaningful and meaningless games. The latter of course is the Pro Bowl, an event that is now on par with professional wrestling in the sincerity department. I would not be surprised to see an open bar on the sidelines hosted by Hooters. Perhaps for good measure, we could throw in mulligans for plays that need to be done over for dramatic effect. That the Pro Bowl is a joke is almost universally accepted, or at least should be. All sports all star games are now rigged gimmicks used to promote the product the way commercials are used as props for whatever merchandise is being hawked. In fact, we have reached a point where the tail is now wagging the dog: all star games are no longer competitive events but commercials for the league that is sponsoring them. But, alas, it was not always so. I remember all too well the 1970 baseball all star game. Pete Rose came barreling into home plate where Ray Fosse, the Indian catcher, was waiting for him, ball in glove. Rose ran over him as if he were an 18 wheeler crushing a VW bug at 80 mph. It was not a pretty scene. Rose made no apologies nor should he have. The thinking was if you are not going to play the game to win, why bother showing up. Say what you want about Rose. I would be the first to say that he was one of the biggest jerks ever to play professional sports and that covers a lot of territory. But he had a drive that is all too rare in today's athletes. In fact, the so called all star game is symbolic of what ails all professional sports: the pampered athlete who no longer has to worry about danger. In 1967, I believe Red Auerbach was ejected from the all star game for arguing with the refs. Imagine that happening today!

Does Atheism Defy Logic?

Bishop Fulton Sheen once said that the chief characteristic of an atheist is not that he believes in nothing but that he will believe in anything. Maybe. I was always intrigued by the atheist philosophy or epistemology. I felt it was more of a form of rebellion and chic irreverence than a firm system of belief. Years ago I read a book review of something called the scientific basis for the belief in God. The chances of the earth being formed by some accident of physics was one over some trillion to the trillionth power. In other words, impossible. Here is a recent link to the book (http://www.usnews.com/blogs/god-and-country/2009/05/04/francis-collins-a-scientific-basis-for-god.html). I have another approach to atheism that might shed light on its moral vacuity. An atheist does not believe that there is a supreme being. That is, human life begins and ends as we know it. Once you die, you are a mass of physical matter indistinguishable from the ground in which you are buried. Every person will end up the same: soulless. If this is a given, I have on occasion posed this question to an atheist: why should murder be illegal? If all humans are going to die anyway and their souls never resurrected, living is nothing more than the postponement of the inevitable. Sort of like sitting around waiting to pay the toll to get over a bridge. Each life is nothing more than a blink of an eye relative to time. It is insignificant. Whether you live a productive or happy life is beside the point. You and your loved ones are going to die anyway and end up in the same predicament regardless of what they did during your living years. So the big question is this: are there any moral consequences to committing a heinous act? Let us say you walked into a school and opened fire on a room full of children, killing them all. You then killed yourself. If you are an atheist, the answer must be no. You might answer that the families of these children will suffer. That may be true, but they can do themselves a big favor and commit suicide. That will end their misery. And since their is no after life or God, they will become part of the earth. They will end up no different from the person who murdered the children. Of course, people do not routinely behave this way because it is unnatural. The reason it is unnatural is because life is a gift from God and people have a God given moral compass that they struggle mightily to adhere to, often times unsuccessfully. The secular establishment has always boasted that millions of people have died because of religious persecution. This fact is true. But that does not detract from the point. People are capable of evil even if they pretend to adhere to a moral code inconsistent with their acts. Well, that is my Sunday morning sermon. Now, time to prepare to worship at the altar of a few other supreme powers: football, cigars, scantilly clad waitresses, and wine.

Weekend Sports Edition: The 1973 Miami Dolphins

Every NFL fan remembers the 1972 Dolphins. They won the Super Bowl and are the only team that ever finished the season undefeated. An amazing feat that has yet to be replicated. Were they the greatest team ever? No. They were not even the greatest Dolphin team ever. That prize must to to the 1973 Dolphins, one of the most underrated and forgotten teams of all time. The 1972 Dolphins played opponents who had a combined record of 51-86-3 (ten different teams when you factor in that they played the Colts, Bills, Patriots, and Jets twice). The 1973 Dolphins' opponents had a combined record of 69-69-4. Another factor hampering the 1973 Dolphins is that they were an inviting target, no longer underrated as they were a year ago. To go undefeated one season and repeat as Super Bowl champions the next is quite an accomplishment. Unlike 1972, Griese played all year. And unlike the 1972 Super Bowl, which was more lost by the inept Redskins than won by the Dolphins, the 1974 game was dominated by the Dolphins from start to finish. So here is a salute to the forgotten but great 1973 Miami Dolphins.

Weekend Sports Edition: Bowl Me Over

It is that time of year. Somewhere in the last 15 years, January 1st morphed into January 7th. I refer of course to the BCS Championship game, college football's equivalent of the Super Bowl, or at least an attempt to emulate it. The BCS game is a fraud. It is nothing more than a half hearted attempt to achieve the unattainable: a determination of the best team in college football through a combination of performance and computer precision. Writers, fans, and now politicians clamor for a so called playoff system that will leave no doubt about the ultimate winner's right to claim the title of best college football team of the season. To this perennial dream, I say PHOOEY! Devising a sure fire way to bring mathematical certitude to the collegiate gridiron is a chimera, a false dream brought about by the hallucinations of fans and writers who do not appreciate the beast they are trying to tame. The beauty of college football is that its traditions and structure are not suited to an elimination tournament. To do it properly would require a playoff system that started in early November and ended in January. Regional rivalries would be diluted. Conference championships would become meaningless. The debate about the best team would become even more raucous than it is now. I can hear it now. "Why should 10-1 Florida be dissed in place of 12-0 Boise State;" and vice versa. Great teams who have a very real chance of winning it all would never get a chance to compete in the playoff system.
Instead of moving forward, I think college football should take a look in the rear view mirror. There was something glorious about waking up on New Year's Day as a kid. First there was no school, which I hated anyway. Second, my parents would not wake up until 11. At 1, I watched the Cotton Bowl. It was always Texas against someone. I remember Notre Dame playing in that game many times. Rooting for ND was mandatory for me. Not doing so was to face eternal damnation or at least it seemed that way. At 2, it was the Sugar Bowl. Always a team from the South. If the Cotton Bowl was not interesting, I would get off the floor, and manually turn the channel from 10(CBS) to 7(ABC). New Year's dinner was served around 3:30. Around 4, I would turn on the Rose Bowl. I could never understand the pageantry until about 10 years later when we bought a color TV. The Rose Bowl seemed to always feature Ohio State against USC or Stanford. I remember OJ Simpson, Woody Hayes, Jim Plunkett, and Rex Kern. By 8, it was time for the Orange Bowl. It was always a Big Eight team against Penn State, or at least it seemed that way. What I remember is that each of these games was important. The outcome had some direct or indirect ramification for who could later claim title to a mythical national championship. I also remember a few years when there were two champions: an AP one and UPI one. The uncertainty is was made it all so much fun.
Now instead of one day full of four bowl games, we get New Year's Day full of meaningless games and then the meaningful game one week later. To this pathology of certitude, I offer a dissent and say Here's To Yesterday!

Sunset Boulevard And The Tragedy of Aging Women

"There;s Nothing Wrong With Being 50, So Long As You Don't Act Like You Are 25." So said Joe Gillis to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. So I ask: is there any group more discriminated against in our society than an aging woman? I think not. While we have progressed mightily in social and economic terms to tear down the barriers of prejudice in most all areas of American society, there remains that pitiful group of aging beauty queens, wrinkled faced former princesses whose implants and facelifts have long outgrown their warranties and against whom Hollywood and Madison Avenue have turned a cold shoulder and closed the door of opportunity with a proverbial "Old Ladies Need Not Apply." And for what reason are they ignored and put down? They are old and getting older by the day. A man ages gracefully, the specks of gray hair and leather like skin are held out as assets to which younger women are attracted. Age is equated with maturity, sophistication, and, most important, money. It is an unfortunate fact of life that the one attribute that a women has to snare a man, her beauty, depreciates once she turns 40 like an ice cube in the hot August sun. While Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, and just about any male actor continues to be hired, the same cannot be said of their female counterparts. Kathleen Turner may be the modern equivalent of Norma Desmond, except she is not dumb enough to believe otherwise.
The social ostracization will continue forever. While racial prejudice could be alleviated through economic progress and integration, the problem for older woman is that they are confronted with a force far more powerful: vanity. As long as our society treasures youth as the ultimate symbol of female beauty, the aging woman whose face is dropping to her shoulders and whose bottom resembles dried up flour, life will continue to be ever more miserable.
Of course there is a solution. Unlike Norma Desmond, refuse to play the game. I really think that a plain Jane has the advantage in the long run. South Florida is overpopulated with young twentysomethings for whom physical beauty is a measure of their self worth. And I include not only strippers and models but professionals as well. You seem them everywhere. You can also simultaneously see them twenty five years later. Go to Aventura Mall or Coral Gables on a Saturday night. The aging hotties try gamely to reach back and grab a piece of yesterday despite their made up faces and plastic filled bodies. It must be tragic indeed to look at the younger women in their midst who are competing for the affection of the same men they are and knowing, like some 20 handicapper teeing it up against Tiger Woods, they don't stand a chance. But if a woman was not born with the necessary social graces or beauty to enter the race to begin with, she is in the long run better off . She will have achieved a degree of contentment by the acquisition of a skill that will grow in value as she grows old with it. Not yielding to the temptations of vanity in one's twenties and instead pursuing a less ephemeral goal in life will yield a degree of happiness and solace in one's forties and beyond that her superficial sisters will never experience. In the long run, men get old too. They may go through their fifties popping Viagra and able to feel no different than they did in their twenties but the dark horizon is not far off. That arm candy will be replaced by a colostomy bag sooner than they think and a woman half a man's age is not going to stick around for very long when the highlight of the evening is not wetting the bed. The old geezer will forever regret dumping wife number one.
To every Norma Desmond in the world, I say do not look back but look ahead. Invest not in your body but in your mind. Make your own rules and don't play by those under which you cannot ever win.

Marty

I bought the Criterion Collection's latest offering "The Golden Age of Television" this week after reading Terry Teachout's excellent review of it in the Wall Street Journal. I cannot agree more with him that Marty is the most substantive 53 minutes of television acting you will probably ever see. The show centers around Marty, a 36 year old butcher, played by Rod Steiger, who lives in New York City with his elderly mother in the early 50's. He is plain, honest, and to others, boring. His relatives and friends pester him because he is still single. But he is an extremely shy and awkward social specimen for whom approaching women is potentially destructive to his ego, or what little of it he still has. He eventually meets a woman, Nancy Marchand of Sopranos fame, who is a mirror image of him, inside and outside. Despite the hurtful insults of his friends and family, Marty is determined to make her his wife. The show ends with Marty defiantly standing up to his so called friends and proudly announcing that he will one day marry her.
What makes the show a gem is its portrayal of the psychological toll that emotional loneliness and rejection take on the lives of people who are not socially equipped to play the dating/mating game of life. Think of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" writ large on the TV screen in grimy black and white. Not a pretty picture. Humans have a natural need for companionship. The pursuit of love and affection is a two sided coin. The rewards are as egotistically gratifying as are the pitfalls potentially ruinous. Think how it feels to date the most beautiful woman in high school or college. You feel like a million bucks and all of your friends and enemies look upon you with envy. Now imagine desperately wanting a girlfriend and then summoning up the courage to ask her out on a date only to be told "NO." And then having it repeated ad nauseum over the years. Or being a female frumpkin and sitting around a dance hall for two hours while other more seemingly glamorous people look upon you as outcast and even mock you. The effects of this conduct can cause permanent damage to even the strongest person's psyche. What makes the phenomena even worse is that men mask it by pretending it does not exist. Thus they adopt a veneer of "toughness" and cruel humor lest their friends think that they are affected by it all. The scene where Marty calls a woman he met two weeks ago and asks her for a date is like a knife going through one's heart. You can eerily sense that he is putting his manhood and ego on the line by asking her for a date. With each word, the risks are enhanced as his pride gets closer to the edge only to be denied once again. Another poignant scene: Marty takes his new friend home after a dance. He tries to kiss her and it appears that he is getting a bit physical. But it is clearly not malicious. He just has no clue how to act. He has listened to so many other men's exaggerated and made up tales of female conquest that he probably thinks that this is how men are supposed to behave. But in the end, his real self emerges. It is one of those movies that makes you feel good and might make you think twice before ever commenting about someone's else's lack of social grace.