Final Farewell To A Friend

“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way.” Irving Townsend.

That day has come for us, and we are living in a smaller circle. Thursday evening our 17-year-old best friend of a dog Mutley was given a simple shot to put him at rest. To our family, he was more than a family pet, he was a friend at all times and a bit of a fable at other times. We took great joy in creating a human persona for Mutley, I suppose because he was as close to being human as a dog could be.

It was the most heartbreaking decision our family has had to make, but in the end, the short drive to the veterinarian’s office was also the easiest. His quality of life had deteriorated in such a way that the only reason his heart was beating was because it knew of nothing else to do. Dogs have a depth of loyalty that we often seem unworthy of. By way of demonstrating that, we all believe Mutley went on living just to please us.

We were told by the vet that dogs are pack animals and when the first shot went in to relax him, he was surrounded by his pack. Mrs. Laz and I, the Boy, the Girl and the Ber were all at his side, scratching behind his ears and alternatively getting wet kisses on the mouth. We fed him snacks (lean snacks for some reason) and a bit of ice cream to keep his mind off the dizziness we were told he was feeling.

A final injection went into his hind leg but his old veins weren’t up to taking the medicine and burst. So a second injection had to go into his front paw and he began to slip quite quickly. I tried to give him another treat as if to slow down the process we all knew was happening, and he began to go for it, but the toxin had begun to do its job and he was unable to indulge in eating once more, a favorite joy of his. We all cried as we watched the life ebb out of him, but we had been crying for a while by then. The Girl stroked his soft coat several times and the Boy gave him a light final kiss on his nose and we all left the room knowing his body was there but his spirit had followed us out the door.

They say when you get to heaven all the dogs and cats you’ve had run up to greet you. Until that day, good buddy, rest in peace.

U-C-L-A

Some years things go well for a sports fan, but usually there are more downs than ups. The Michigan Wolverines took a thumping from Greater Sladed Family’s favorite USC Trojans. The San Diego Chargers, the only professional football team I care about, got knocked out in the first round of the playoffs and then crashed the entire team despite a 14-2 record.

Mrs. Sladed would lament more about the Padres falling apart in the playoffs than I would, but I am with her in spirit having lived through decades of mediocrity with the Pads. The only other baseball team I care about, the Detroit Tigers, didn’t fare much better.

Then, the fog seems to clear and your team does something good for a change. My Team, the UCLA Bruins, is in bollege basketball's Final Four and doing it with grit, hard-nose defense and crappy shooting. Except for the crappy shooting, I haven’t seen a team like this in Westwood since the old Wooden days.

Here’s hoping the Bruins hoist another Championship banner at Pauley Pavilion. Of course you can check back in a week to find out they didn’t get any farther. And that’s the funny thing about sports. There are hundreds of teams that only dream of being in the Final Four, and who could complain for very long about a 14-2 record? I guess it’s all about finishing the job and I suspect we fans put too much on winning it all. We’re so fickle!

Hubris

The Boy and I disagree on what I feel is the most specific example, but we agree we are witnessing more hubris by politicians than every before.

First there was Chuck Hagel, a senator and would-be presidential contender. He called a press conference in his home state of Nebraska and invited the national media, which generally spends its time in Washington, DC and New York (or at Skipper’s Bar). The press was a-flutter over what Senator Hagel had dragged them out to the Nebraska corn fields to announce. Surely, they thought, it was to tell the world he would be entering the presidential race. They were wrong. He merely wanted a little attention to tell the assembled press that he was still considering running for president. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t run for president. Stay tuned, was the best he could offer.

It’s difficult to think of a more self-important moment than Senator Hagel’s non-announcement announcement. Imagine believing the country cares so much about your personal choices that they would want in on what you were thinking on that particular day, especially when you weren’t thinking about that much. It’s an easy lure for the press because Hagel is one of those “moderate” republicans who wants us out of Iraq in some unspecified time (see the pattern here?) and took the courageous position of piling on the Attorney General. I am sure the press was hoping for more, but like most places around the country, I am sure there was a Skipper’s Bar where they could drown their sorrows.

The second round of hubris happened this past week in the bizarre announcement from John Edwards that he was staying in the race despite the fact nobody had asked. He too called a press conference and he too got plenty of takers.

Of course Edward’s yapping was a bit different than Hagel in that there was more to announce. Edwards shared with us that his wife had a reoccurrence of cancer and it had spread. The cancer in Ms. Edwards seems to be the kind people talk about beating, but, in truth, they don’t last that long. The Boy believes this announcement was worthy in that he has used his wife’s illness as a prop (my words, not The Boy’s) and there was more propping that needed to be done. Actually The Boy said Edwards had made his wife’s illness part of the strength that drives him and has included his supporters and potential donors in their journey together. I still think it’s a sick prop.

But believing the world wants to know the details of the internal struggle that happens in far too many families with cancer requires the believers to have some sense that the world cares enough for a prime time press conference followed by a 60 Minutes show. Whatever happened to quiet courage? I guess people can learn a bit about the dreaded disease. I heard a knucklehead reporter announce that he learned more about cancer watching Edward’s announcement than he had at any other time. Right, this is someone writing the news.

Actually, I know far too much about cancer and one great truth is that stress is not very helpful in living longer with the disease. Can anyone think of anything more stressful than being married to a man running for president? What kind of “man” puts his sick wife through the challenges of a presidential campaign? A man full of hubris would be my answer.

The Boy and I agree on this: if he really wanted to impress us, he would do the right thing and put his own ambition on hold and gear back up four years later. He should be spending as much quiet and non-stressful time with his wife as he can, because from what I understand, her illness is in a terminal state. He has plenty of money and plenty of time of his hands. Edwards should forget the rough travel schedule, the glad-handing and the dialing for dollars and remember he has a sick wife at home who could care less if he comes in a distant third in what will likely be her last presidential campaign.

A Veritable Age Of Unreason

When one gets a few years past middle age there are certain rights bestowed upon them. One is the right to be a curmudgeon. There are perhaps lesser rights such as loss of embarrassment and control of certain bodily functions. But for the moment I will dwell on the former rather than the latter.

Of late, Italiphil and I have been complaining about the general rudeness in business today. Common courtesy has disappeared and an ugly rudeness has taken its place. We grumble on about it a lot. Less enlightened and younger readers may say we’re fast approaching curmudegery, if there is a word, but we still remember a day when a phone call was promptly returned and a person’s handshake really was his bond, not just a Cameron Crowe line

When you’re in the midst of curmudgening, you tend to wonder how it has come to pass that the world has gone so wrong and how very smart you have become over the years. This, naturally, leads to being more pissed off.

Our parents had to put up with the Beatles, long hair and a confusing set of differing values. It seems our lot has to endure with smart little boys with bright ideas – like derivatives, start up ventures and the convenient parsing of certain sexual acts not being sex at all. Or at least our generation can’t get that final notion past our wives. We also have to put up with rap, which as near as I can tell is the sound of one man yelling while others throw trash cans down a flight of metal stairs. But I can live with these affronts. What Italiphil and I have struggled with is the loss of appreciation for what our age and experience has brought us. Certainly years of toil should mean something to the smart young people nipping at our heels to get a piece of what we have.

In my business there are a number of people who have entered it presuming they would begin at the top. The old adage of doing what I am doing while their mammies were wrapping their butts in diapers could never be truer. And yet it doesn’t stop their conceits and where they believe they fit in the world. This isn’t to say that some of these younger people aren’t clever, it’s just we don’t want to feel that our time spent blazing the trail for them was wasted.

When Pete Wilson was lured from the Senate to take the lowly job as governor of California, he brought with him much of his young Senate staff. One never met a bunch of more cocksure twenty-somethings. We used to call them the “Penny Loafer Boys” because they wore the uniform of DC and Ivy League training: blue blazers, starched blue cotton pin-point Oxfords and, of course, penny loafers. They came to Sacramento believing they actually knew what they were doing. Within a few months, Willie Brown had them twisted into so many Rubic’s Cubes that they were passing tax increases and extending rights to gays – not exactly what the conservatives had in mind when they dialed Pete’s number.

So Italiohil and I wonder, if we’re not sounding too old and out of step, is it too much trouble to return our phone calls promptly, as a point of taking another task off your Blackberry list if nothing else? Or, what if you ask us to write you an urgent proposal and to have it in your e-mail inbox by the morning, that you actually read it and say thanks? How about giving us some credit for knowing what you think you know, only we actually knew it when we were your age? Perhaps you could just give us some credit when you’re stealing our ideas or re-inventing what we already invented?

It would really be appreciated if you youngins could do this for us. Then we can stop being a curmudgeon and matriculate to being dirty old men. We could use the change of pace.

Rushing To Judgment

Mrs. Laz and I saw a good rendition of the 1950s play “Twelve Angry Men” the other day. It’s great drama that cleverly demonstrates that truth is not always easy to find, and that early judgment and prejudice is the bastion of the ignorant and lazy. And one other thing about the play: it starred George Wendt and the hicks from Sacramento actually held back the urge to yell out “Norrrrrmmmmm!” when he first came on stage. Maybe we’re growing up here, after all.

We saw the play on the heels of the guilty verdict of Scooter Libby and the reflexive and immediate hearings from democrats who promised not to waste your time and, if memory served, had some kind of a 100-day plan that involved something important. Damn if I can remember what it was.

As we now know, Libby was found guilty of what is normally called a process crime – in other words a crime that occurred during the investigation of an underlying crime. Quick judgment has been made by lazy journalists and opportunists from across the aisle that Libby did all sorts of heinous crimes and protected bigger fish up the food chain. Boiled down, however, Libby was found guilty of having a faulty memory, at least compared to that of reporter Tim Russert.

The actual trial was a parade of journalists who had trouble remembering any details of their conversations with Libby and came down to whether or not he talked to Russert on a certain day and what was said. Libby remembers it one way and Russert the other. Memory and juries can be a funny thing and so can judges. The defense brought up several instances when Russert could not remember details of important statements and events but the judge ruled Russert’s fuzzy memory could not be considered by the DC jury that was picked from a pool of republican-hating people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury service. The jury was forced to decide who was telling the truth between the two and settled on Libby as the liar. If only Libby took the Hilary Clinton method of testifying and said “I can’t recall” 250 times he would not be a convicted felon today.

Of course we know now that the original investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was a two-week journey to the truth and ended up being a two-year search to find a criminal without a crime being committed. Most will tell you the investigation was about the leaking of a covert CIA agent’s name, Valerie Plame, to reporter Robert Novak. Fitgerald knew early in his investigation that the State Department’s Richard Armitage was Novak’s source and revealed what he knew without political motivation and without knowing she had been undercover many years before. Armitage was never charged with a crime precisely because under the way the law protecting covert agents is written, there never was a law broken. This is because Plame had become a desk jockey and was known by half the social scene in DC as a CIA analyst at the time she was the subject of Armitage’s obscenity-laced conversation with Novak.

The democrats put on a great stage show this past week, bringing out the injured party herself, Ms. Plame. She complained that her $65,000 per year career was ruined and she could no longer work covertly again – leaving out the part that nobody was considering her for such service ever again. Just to make sure the nutcases watching C-Span were fully bamboozled, hearing chairman Henry Waxman referred to Plame as “covert” as if it were her first name. Obviously if Plame had been covert at the time of Novak’s story, Armitage would be looking for a presidential pardon instead of Libby.

I stopped feeling sorry for Plame and her supposed outing about the time she posed with her husband for the cover of Vanity Fair with gleeful looks abounding. Of course the loss of her secret identity will be eased by her book earnings and from the movie that will be filmed about her travails.

An appeal will settle the matter with Libby and history will allow future generations to have a chuckle at this perverse bit of bad theater, but this investigation could have focused on a different hideous crime: the revealing of numerous state secrets to the press by real intelligence personnel, the publishing of these facts by certain newspapers and the curious underwear stuffing by former National Security Council chief Sandy Berger.

Most of those who really work at the Pickle Farm would rather see these bad actors pay the price for these very real and damaging breeches of national security. And this would not come from a rush to judgment, but from a real and methodical understanding of the truth.

No Doubting Thomas

While flying to our Virginia estates, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Helen Thomas, the first lady of the first row in the White House press corps for the last several decades. While I am not a huge fan of her recent bout of negativity toward this president in particular and life around her in general, she is still an impressive woman who has seen so much over her career and remains quite sharp at age 86.

Those who know me are aware I strike up conversations with any poor soul sitting next to me on airplanes unless they give me that “don’t bother me” look. If I am want to engage with mere mortals, obviously there would be nothing to stop me from bending Helen’s ear for a two-hour flight. To my surprise, there was mutual ear-bending and we had a great conversation about a whole host of things.

I found out a few things about her. One, she drinks Scotch. Perhaps at a volume most would consider excessive. Two, when I asked her who her two most interesting interviews were she quickly answered JFK for his intellect and charisma and LBJ for his paranoia.

We also share the same notion of the modern journalist – that they are pack-like, following the lead of their colleagues only when it’s safe to echo the thoughts of the others. Ms Thomas is just the opposite; speaking her mind, perhaps too often for most, and is very critical of her colleagues for failing to keep the public informed. She even wrote a book about it and called out many of her peers by name (Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public).

Something I didn’t need to learn – mainly because it is obvious to anyone – is she hates our president and this war with the passion of the converted. Not sure if it’s because of her Lebanese upbringing or jaded opposition to authority and brazen power. It was difficult to have a conversation without her making a negative comment about GW and the war. Even if her facts were suspect (dwelling on the myth that 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2003 – or 13,000 per month), her passion was real and it was difficult to argue with many of her points on American standing around the world.

We did agree on one point about journalists, however. It was obvious that Ms. Thomas has been paying attention throughout her years and knows more about most things than most journalists. We talked about a range of subjects that I know simply because of where my own work has taken me. I mentioned I was working in the Balkans and she instantly asked me if certain Serbian war criminals would be caught and knew their names. Outside of Serbia there are only a handful of people who know that kind of detail. She even told me she once interviewed Tito who told her when he died the Balkans would explode into ethnic war; which, of course is what happened.

Most journalists coming out of school these days have no historical reference point beyond their own years. While it is encouraged, they are not required to study the Humanities and rarely know much about the subjects they cover. This lack of intellectual curiosity can be a real danger when journalists utilize the lessons of history to compare to current events and often make bold observations that assume we are living in the worst of times. Many younger journalists also come to the job as an advocate rather than an observer. They follow the words of famed journalist I.F. Stone who once wrote “It is the job of the journalist to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I thought the job of the journalist was to tell us the truth, at least as they see it, and let us make our own decisions. Ms Thomas’ opinions may be contrary to most, but she will never be accused of not trying to bring us the truth as she sees it. It was a great ride sitting next to her and far better than the guy picking his nose and reading over my shoulder on this flight. How do you like those apples, Mr. Nosey Pants?

OK, It Was a Short Sabbatical

OK, so I am writing on this blog again. This doesn’t mean that I have given up on writing a novel. To the contrary I have found writing in short bursts such as these posts very helpful to keeping my writing skills honed, such as they are. I have written more in my novel and I feel like I benefited from having written in this space, as much for the practice as writing for an audience, something that can be overlooked when one wants to sell books to more than just to his immediate family and friends.

I have missed my blog and writing it again is like being reacquainted with a long lost friend – you know, the kind of friend who you used to love to be with until they stole money from you or did some other rotten thing. Well, I am sure everyone has those kinds of friends. Anyway, I also have to admit that I find myself wanting to yap about things that are going on around me, even if nobody is reading or agrees with me. In other words, expect more and what lies above are examples of some pent up thoughts.