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We loyal PBS junkies were shocked down to our Birkenstocks and driving our Volvos into bridge abutments at the news that a former employee of Georgia Public Broadcasting has been indicted on a charge of diverting more than $21,000 in GPB money into her bank account.

Outrageous. That’s money we gave in good faith for Fleetwood Mac reunion concerts and Fifties acts in their 70s singing about teenage love. How many Justin Wilson cooking reruns or “Civil War” episodes would twenty-one grand have bought?

Obviously, there’s only one recourse for GPB to recoup that money.

Pledge drive.

(Fade-out from concert hall. Fade-in to applause from studio full of people seated at banks of telephones)

“Isn’t that wonderful? Doesn’t that bring back some great times, Jack?”

“You bet it does, Beth, and we’ll be right back with more unforgettable memories from ‘Ossified Legends of Doo-Wop’ right after this brief 45-minute break to remind YOU of why YOU need to be a part of the Public Broadcasting family, and why we need YOU to send in your pledge and become a member. For just a $20 contribution we’ll send you a Grateful Dead poster featuring high-resolution pictures of the band, including the late Jerry Garcia and all three dead keyboard players; a $60 pledge gets you 12 hours of Carl Sagan’s historic ‘Cosmos’ series in the equally historic Beta videotape format; and for a pledge of $120 or more you’ll receive the 12-CD complete works of Yoko Ono.”

The other possibility is a few brief on-air announcements that for $21,000, they won’t have a pledge drive.

They’d have the money in a week.

Economic agoraphobia

So what’s the latest thing that airline you’re flying next week had to cut from the budget? Spare fuel? A co-captain? Air masks? Replacement parts for the landing gear? Were a few mechanics or maintenance folks no longer affordable? Did somebody decide an aging fleet of jets that should have been retired years ago will just have to be duct-taped and baling-wired together for a few hundred more flights?

Not picking on the airlines here – statistically, you’re still safer in the air than just about anywhere else – but the Metro rail crash in D.C. got me thinking about something that must have occurred to lots of people, even if not many talk a lot about it out loud.

Namely: Just how much has this crappy economy put people who use mass transportation at risk?

It’s a creepy question precisely at a time when we desperately need more people to get out of their cars and into more efficient forms of transportation for the sake of the economy, the environment and our whole quality of life.

But that’s not going to happen if you start wondering whether one of the corners somebody decided to cut was the one with your life in it.

Some early speculation about the Metro tragedy, whose body count stood at nine as of Wednesday, centered on the use of aging train cars whose emergency systems might have failed. There’s still a lot of investigating to be done, and the usual suspect – human error – could still turn out to be the culprit.

But it would be naïve to think that the pressure of a tanking economy hasn’t put us at risk.

To use an example fairly close to home: Delta’s financial troubles have been almost daily biz page fodder for years now. That hasn’t stopped me from flying Delta several times over that period, and won’t for the foreseeable future. But I consciously try to avoid – at least while I’m in the air -- thinking about things like how old the plane might be, or how deeply the cost-cutting process has cut into things that contribute to passenger and crew safety.

Those things cost money. So do things like brakes, and bridges, and railroad trestles, and safety inspections, and crossing signals, and even traffic lights. And almost nobody has enough money right now.

So I’d be mighty comforted if somebody could convince me that money and safety have nothing to do with one another, and that when I leave my house – to cross a street, a state or an ocean – I’m just as safe as I would be if times were flush. It’ll be a tough sell.

* * *

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy

It was an item that seemed to go all but unnoticed last week, at least judging from the attention it got on TV (none) or in the news pages (brief notice, buried inside).

Richard Scrushy – former HealthSouth CEO, Archweasel of the Grand Duchy of Alabama and looter extraordinaire in a state where the looting of public assets is considered the highest calling of public service – was ordered to pay up.

A state judge in Montgomery ordered Scrushy – whose net worth at last report was down to a poverty-line $284 million – to pay upward of $3 billion to shareholders who had filed suit over years of HealthSouth execs overstating assets and earnings. Circuit Judge Allwin E. Horn ruled that Scrushy “knew of and participated in” phony earnings reports filed with regulators between 1996 and 2002.

Scrushy, in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, is the fat cat who used his ill-gotten millions to buy himself a “Christian” radio show, which in turn enabled him to co-opt a handful of gullible preachers to pollute the jury pool in his federal fraud case.

He dodged that rap but was convicted on a bribery charge, along with former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, in a case that might have been contaminated by the simple fact that it was prosecuted by the Bush Justice Department. Enough said. Meanwhile, Scrushy is, at least for the time being, on ice in the Big House, where if there’s any justice, he’s made the close acquaintance of new friends with nicknames like Big Bubba and Tony The Tool.

This is another one of those infuriating instances where some thieving dirtbag who’s been living large on other people’s money gets caught and supposedly “ruined” -- but still manages to come out of it all fabulously rich. How exactly does that happen?

One Alabama judge is obviously trying to make sure it doesn’t.
If the numbers are accurate -- and Scrushy doesn’t have a massive offshore stash somewhere (and don’t rule it out) -- he obviously can’t pay the reparations the judge has ordered.

Which brings to mind a onetime federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who would become the first commissioner of baseball after the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. Landis once sentenced an aging burglar to 20 years. The man pleaded, “But Judge, I’m more than 70 years old. I can’t serve that long.”
“Well,” Landis told him, “do the best you can.”

Richard Scrushy needs to do the best he can. To the last nickel.
* * *

Pure democracy

The Wing Nut Right’s unique brand of head-held-high stupidity was on display last week, and it deserves proper tribute.


First there was U.S. Rep. Michele Bachman, R-Minn., who offered this ominous X-Files take on swine flu:

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

There are too many nuggets of stupidity packed into this one short comment to just let it fly by; it needs to be parsed, like a line of Frost, to be fully appreciated.

First, there’s the “Democrat (sic) president” bit. It really is adorable how a few righties of the lowest uncommon denominator still do that smirky little thing of using “democrat” (usually with a small “d” if they can write at all) as an adjective. It’s like listening to little kids call each other “doodoo heads.”

Then there’s the part about not blaming Obama, which of course she was, which of course is why she brought it up in the first place.

Finally – and OK, this is nitpicking – the last outbreak of swine flu was in 1976, when Gerald Ford was president. Oops.

Not to be outdone in Red State moronics by a Yankee, Kim Hendren, a state senator from Gravette, Ark., enlightened a meeting of the Pulaski County Republican Committee last week by referring to U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as “that Jew.”

Hendren apologized to Schumer, and then finished the job of making everything right with this disclaimer in the Arkansas News: “I don’t have any issue with Jews or Jewish people or whatever the politically correct term they wish to be identified as.”

Oh . . . OK. So this isn’t about Hendren being a bigoted nitwit. It’s about the tyranny of political correctness.

Actually, pols of this caliber should be saluted, not scorned.

These people are, quite obviously, complete cretins. As they could be elected to public office only by other complete cretins, their strict adherence to the code of complete cretinhood is true constituent service. This is representative government in its purest form.

* * *

Yes, we still have free speech, so shut up about it

In 1999, when then-Braves pitcher John Rocker spewed a bunch of sociological barf onto the pages of Sports Illustrated, I wrote either a column or an editorial – I honestly can’t remember which and don’t feel like looking it up – saying in effect that Rocker was an idiot.

The ink was hardly dry on it when I got a letter from a longtime family acquaintance, a career radio man, scolding me for trying to deny Mr. Rocker his First Amendment rights, and adding something to the effect that a journalist, of all people, ought to be ashamed for not respecting the very constitutional franchise that protects my profession.

I didn’t respond. If I had, I would have told him I wasn’t denying Rocker his First Amendment rights (as if it would ever be in my power to do such a thing) – I was exercising my own. And that frankly, it was kind of pathetic for a broadcaster, of all people, not to know the difference.

But that reaction to my criticism of Rocker 10 years ago seems almost to have become the norm: Speak out in disagreement with somebody else’s speaking out, and suddenly you’re a wannabe censor. It’s patently inane, and flies in the face of logic comprehensible to a reasonably bright 4-year-old, but there it is.

In a recent column that begins “Checked on your freedom of speech lately?” Great American Bill O’Reilly weighs in on the “persecution” of Miss California Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA runner-up who got lots of people’s undies in a wad by saying she didn’t approve of gay marriage. (In BillWorld, other people are criticized or disagreed with; conservatives are “persecuted.” It seems if you’re on the right, Nero or Caligula lurks behind every door.)

But this isn’t about O’Reilly; he is what he is, and you know going in what gallery he’s playing to. And I really thought the outcry against what she said – which, like it or not (and I don’t), still represents a majority view in this culture – was overblown and silly. (It did, however, land Prejean a temporary gig as a host on Foxymoron News, just in case this whole thing hadn’t yet gotten stupid enough.)

It’s about what free speech is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t a protection against employers or sponsors or beauty pageant officials taking issue with something you said, and severing their ties with you as a consequence. And it sure as hell isn’t a protection against people responding to a public utterance by calling you – or me – an idiot.

I’ve been called an idiot many times, in some cases accurately. I don’t feel persecuted.
* * *

FOUL!

Did Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switch parties as a matter of pure political expediency, even of political survival?

Well . . . duh.

So did Sonny Perdue, and Richard Shelby, and a couple of smug Auburn twits a few years ago who called a press conference to “confess their sins” before switching to the straight and narrow of (Republican) political righteousness, and a few hundred other nervous Democrats in years of GOP dominance.

Shelby’s Damascus conversion, in particular, was interestingly timed, coming literally days after the 1994 “Contract With America” GOP takeover of Congress. In fact, the number of former Democrats who have jumped ship since the dawn of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 would fill a pretty good size file.

Yet to listen to the hyperventilation of the conservative media, especially here in the (Red) Peach State, you’d think we were talking about Arlen SPECTRE, a Bond flick nasty who throws people in shark tanks and makes nerve poison out of fish gonads.

"Arlen Specter has waddled and quacked and strutted his webbed feet for years," huffed the always entertaining Augusta Chronicle.

"Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter did more spinning Tuesday than a Maytag washing machine . . . he let his principles and his former party out to dry," was the verdict of the Savannah Morning News.

“Sometime there has to be an endowed chair of political survival in the name of Sen. Arlen Specter,” was the lead of the Marietta Daily Journal.

Local TV commentator Al Fleming scorned Specter as “a pathetic old man” -- which prompted one of our readers to speculate on how long it had been since Al looked into his own mirror . . . which in turn prompted my wife to speculate on whether Al even casts a reflection.

Give Specter this much (or don’t): He’s been relatively honest about his motives. He doesn’t think he can even win the primary as a Republican, so he’ll try to win one more round as a Democrat. For what it’s worth, I think he’s probably toast anyway.

It was interesting to hear Specter’s spin on the familiar “I didn’t leave the party – the party left me” routine parroted by 25 years of Democratic ship-jumpers. In his case, it sounds valid: Right-wing fulminations notwithstanding, Specter is a conservative in the Goldwater-Rockefeller-Eisenhower (even, in some ways, McCain) tradition. As he’s watched his party taken over by wing nuts, Specter, like McCain, has seldom hesitated to speak out against the grosser excesses of the right.

To acknowledge anything principled in that, of course, it is first necessary to acknowledge that the right is capable of excess. Which is, I suspect, where rational response to Arlen Specter inevitably breaks down.

* * *

Are we still speaking English?

I recently wrote a column about a few feeble attempts by minor leaguers of the Rabid Right to make a political point about the health care debate out of actress Natasha Richardson’s death in a Canada skiing accident. It got some response that was interesting, to put it mildly.

One kind e-mail correspondent informed me that her death “had nothing to do with her initially refusing medical care.”

Oh.

So . . . if she’d gotten treatment right away, she’d still be dead? A fascinating take on subdural hematoma, but I got a C in biology, so let’s move on.

She was taken, this correspondent informs us, to a hospital without a neurologist or MRI facilities – something we know could never happen here – and wasn’t within access of helicopter transport, which I presume is a universal amenity for American trauma patients. (Especially here in Georgia, where the fatality rate from trauma cases dwarfs the national average.)

Finally, I’m informed that “asking somebody named ‘Dusty’ to be rational on a subject probably is asking a bit too much.”

That might not be the first time my nickname has been offered as evidence in an observation about rational debate, but it’s definitely the first one I remember.

Then there’s the guy who said I could “continue to argue for the federal government getting more involved with health care all you want” -- which I might ultimately decide to do, but am at a loss to determine when and where I might have done so already.

Maybe he read the column backward and got the subliminal satanic messages.

He also offers this: “Why a small-town Southerner has gone so big-time liberal will always be a mystery to me.”

It must have happened in the Sixties, when They took prayer out of schools and invented sex at Woodstock.

Contemplating closure

If there is such a thing as a First Amendment fundamentalist, I’m it.

Like the religious fundamentalist who thinks every word of the Bible is to be taken literally, I think an American’s freedom of expression should be damn near absolute. When somebody explained to me why shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater isn’t a legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights, I got it -- but I still had to think about it.

I’m such a purist on the subject that I even resented Tipper Gore’s attempt to child-proof dirty lyrics 20 years ago. If I got torqued by something that low key, you can only imagine my loathing for flag-burning amendments and other such patrio-fascist crap.

There is one glaring exception to my free-speech absolutism:

The word “closure” should be constitutionally banned from the language, and anybody who speaks or writes it should be hanged, drawn and quartered.

I passionately detest that word for more reasons than I have time or patience to go into here, but start with the fact that it has been journalism’s favorite cliché for years now, and we just by God won’t let go of it.

It meets all the qualifications for a media cliché, beginning with the most obvious: There are certain stories where you can see it coming from far enough away to take cover.

Just as any story that takes place away from an American coast or border demands that the word “Heartland” appear in a minimum of 12,342 headlines and screen crawls, any account of lingering grief or tragedy will invariably and inevitably steer us into a closure collision.


But beyond my own industry’s abuse of the word as a weapon to commit multiple journalistic felonies, I hate it because it’s psychobabble at its worst – a bogus concept that casually, and I think callously, implies that some event, gesture or ceremony can wrap up grief in a tidy little compartment and end painful chapters in our lives. Hurt doesn’t work that way.

So enough already. Let’s permanently consign that dismal, smarmy noun to the mass grave of clichés that newspapers finally figured out were clichés long after everybody else already had. That would truly bring me closure.

Consigliere

Don Obama needs Tom Hagen.

You remember Tom – the German-Irish street kid Vito Corleone took in out of the kindness of his heart and turned into the family lawyer, not to mention the best intelligence man in the history of Hollywood GoonWorld.

It’s Tom who digs up the goods on movie mogul Jack Woltz, it’s Tom who finds out Sollozzo is dealing dope for the Tattaglias and has Captain McCluskey on the take, and it’s Tom who tracks down Frank Pentangeli’s scary brother in Sicily just when Frankie is about to sing for the Senate.

Tessio and Clemenza had the muscle, but Tom could vet.

I bring this up because whoever is doing the vetting for the Obama gang flat-out sucks at it.

You didn’t need to wait for this embarrassing procession of tax cheats to sense that. You saw it way back when Obama’s association with Jeremiah Wright seemed to catch his campaign totally off guard.

Tom Hagen would have had a ranting nimrod like Wright on his radar long before he became an issue. The good reverend would have been quietly bundled off to a nice out-of-the-way pastorate in Nevada, with a salary more than high enough to convey the appropriate message, and Rocco Lampone dropping in now and then to make sure he was behaving himself.

Now come Geithner and Daschle and Killefer, and it’s like nobody has even bothered to ask the most obvious questions.

Who’s running this administration’s domestic intelligence team -- Fredo?

Mr. President, get yourself a good consigliere. And tell the next person you consider for anything, from the Supreme Court to White House basement toilet attendant, that he or she had better be as clean as an unwrapped bar of Ivory. Or else.

Even the rich and powerful can be brought to heel. Just ask Woltz.

* * *

Visiting royalty

To paraphrase the late Gene Siskel, one of the best things about being a journalist is that you get to meet a lot of important people. One of the worst things about being a journalist is that you have to meet a lot of important people.

And here’s something you might not know, but probably suspect: Political VIPs play as fast and loose with other people’s time as they do with other people’s money.

There are few things more butt-chapping irksome than being at the mercy of people who demonstrate open contempt for everybody else’s time. The medical profession is the worst on that score. (I’ve never set foot back in the Hughston Clinic since a broken finger and a 10 a.m. appointment , when a receptionist announced to the room at 2 p.m. that they were “running a little behind.” Thanks, Professor Hawking.)

Doctors have something of an excuse for time-management arrogance. The excuse usually isn’t adequate to the arrogance or the time, but at least there is one.

Politicians just have the arrogance. Throw in a buck for every time we’ve sat around a conference table waiting for some governor, senator, congressperson or other ostensible notable who should have been there a half-hour ago and apparently can’t tell time or dial a phone, and we’d solve the economic crisis. (Word has it that Bill Clinton is the worst of the lot. I wouldn’t know; presidents, as the vernacular has it, are above my pay grade.)

A typical specimen of the species, a relatively high-ranking state official, scheduled a visit not long ago. About 15 minutes into what should have been the meeting this eminence’s office had asked for, we get the call – not from the eminence (natch), but from an aide.

We’re running a little late.

Strike one.

So this honorable shows up with a politician’s usual ridiculous retinue of acolytes, serfs and suckups (strike two), talking on a cell phone (strike three and out) – a conversation that continues all the way up the elevator and does not conclude until we are all sitting around the table waiting.

And you know what the really pathetic thing is? None of this was in the least unusual or surprising.

If I had one message for every politician or political appointee, regardless of party or ideology, it would be this: Unless you have your hand on the proverbial button, you’re not that freaking important. Cultivate some perspective. And while you’re at it, some damn manners.

***

Inauguration Day, Then and Now

(Originally published as a column in the Sunday, Jan. 18 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.)

Exactly 40 years ago Tuesday, a teenage boy stood on a crowded Washington street and saw Richard Milhous Nixon inaugurated as the 37th president of the United States.

“Saw” is actually a gross exaggeration. My vantage point was the inaugural equivalent of nosebleed seats, although “seats” isn’t accurate, either. I was close enough to distinguish the unmistakable Nixon features, but that doesn’t say much; Nixon was recognizable from space.

I remember little if anything of his inaugural address. My most vivid memories of that long-ago day are of overcast and cold, and of the crazy street theater the occasion provided. America was a wild and woolly place in 1969, and nowhere was it wilder or woollier than in its capital city, even when it wasn’t inauguration day. The scene in “Forrest Gump” where Abbie Hoffman screams incoherent obscenities to cheering mobs on the mall is a pretty faithful depiction of D.C. on pretty much any day in the late 1960s.

I went online to find what history has recorded about that day, and what Nixon said that I had so totally forgotten.

TIME magazine’s Jan. 17, 1969 issue forecast “unseasonably balmy weather” for Inauguration Day. Is my memory that bad? Is my most vivid recollection completely wrong? (No. The forecast was. It was 35 and cloudy.)

“The mood of Inauguration 1969,” TIME opined, “is neither the bleak desperation of 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt succeeded Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression, nor the partisan exhilaration of 1965, after Lyndon Johnson had been elected in his own right.”

So what about the mood of Inauguration 2009? Certainly there’s plenty of “partisan exhilaration” among Democrats, who have been mostly wandering in the wilderness for eight years. But if you had to put your Mood of the Country chip somewhere between 1933 and 1965, the smart money would be on the low side.

Nixon’s speech began this way:

“I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment. In the orderly transfer of power, we celebrate the unity that keeps us free.

“Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.
“This can be such a moment.”

I have no memory of that eloquent introduction, but given the arc of Nixon’s career, there’s an almost poignant irony in it now. His swearing-in was, as it turned out, indeed a moment in which courses were set that shaped both a decade and a century.

He would ultimately resign in scandal and shame, done in by his own paranoia and an apparent need to destroy foes, real or imagined, rather than just defeat them. The last public memory of Richard Nixon is the humiliating image of his grimaced grin as he waves victory signs from the boarding steps of Marine One before flying off into secluded ignominy.

Nixon has largely been forgiven by history, thanks to the smoothing effect of time; to a belated acknowledgement of the lasting value of his achievements, especially in foreign policy; and — I have absolutely no doubt of this — to the wreckage left by his current successor.

It was Nixon who ultimately extricated us from a war many still believe claimed Lyndon Johnson as one of its last casualties. And it is Nixon who probably deserves most of the credit for ending the Cold War, an achievement for which Reaganauts would claim gleeful credit two decades later.

In “Going Too Far,” a book about the early days of the aggressively irreverent and hilariously tasteless National Lampoon, author and former Lampoon editor Tony Hendra offers a technically inaccurate but convincing definition of The Sixties. He brackets that mythical and mostly misdiagnosed epoch within the years 1963-1974 — from Kennedy’s assassination to Nixon’s resignation. By that standard, the dominant figure of the decade, and perhaps of the last half of the century, would indeed be Richard Nixon.

One phrase from an online transcript of Nixon’s speech did ring a rusty bell, although whether I actually recall it from that day or have just encountered it somewhere since, I can’t honestly say: He spoke of the country having endured “a long night of the American spirit.”

Forty years later, I have occasion to applaud.

***

Brood of Grinches

I’ve always loved Christmas and always will.

Not wanting to contribute to what in recent years has become a rising tide of rancor over a holiday that is supposed to herald exactly the opposite, I held off on this one until after the New Year. But before we get too far past the moment…

As I was driving to work a few days before Christmas, I spotted this sticker on a back windshield:

MERRY CHRISTMAS
Extinction threatened

Oh, please.

For another year, we’ve found ourselves in the awesome presence of the relentlessly righteous (just ask them), fierce and fearless defenders of something that doesn’t need defending.

Except, perhaps, from the likes of them. If anything threatens to kill Christmas, it’s these damn people.

This tiresome and obnoxious surge of Christmas fascism (in a rational world, that would be an oxymoron) is becoming something of a holiday tradition, and it’s one I’d personally like to see go the way of cigarette commercials and “The Little Drummer Boy.”

(Yes, I know “The Little Drummer Boy” is still around. But this is, after all, a season of hope.)

We’re now subjected yearly to a horde of humorless, clueless, forbearance-challenged Bible-clutchers who spend every December policing the culture to make sure the season conforms to their creed, and denouncing as a “War on Christmas” anything and everything that doesn’t -- including harmlessly cheerful secular salutations that have been around for years.

Did you feel spiritually renewed by every dutiful “Merry Christmas” on the lips of store clerks? Or did you suspect some not-so-subtle bullying of, and by, the lords of commerce?

Surely that’s just what Jesus had in mind.

The scowling sanctimony of the spiritually superior has always been with us, and always will be. John the Baptist called them a “brood of vipers,” those folks whose self-serving public piety is for the eyes and ears of other human beings.

Now they’ve taken to getting especially venomous in the holiday season, and accusing other people of stealing Christmas.

Nobody stole ours. If theirs is missing, the evidence points to an inside job.