On being and editedness

I'm not as upset as I used to be about being less than well edited. I'm still annoyed when bad editing or mistakes make a piece harder to read, but I don't obsess about it. People do get over the rough spots.

But it's not just the years and the mellowing of age, though they do play a part. And it's not because I no longer care as much about writing as well as I can, and seeing my work presented as well as I wrote it. If not better (which is what good editing can do.)

The other important factor is digital. Thanks to blogs and web pages, I can publish my own work in a way that is a bit more permanent than in newspapers or magazines, with a greater availability---literally a global availability. And what I write, for better or worse, is what you get.

And if I feel strongly enough that I want to fix forever in print some longer work, I can always spring for the relatively modest cost of a print-on-demand book.

Just knowing this is liberating. No editor or publisher has the absolute say, the complete power over what I write.

So when I write for a newspaper or magazine or, maybe someday again, under contract to a book publisher, I now concentrate on two other elements rather than just the finished product: 1. the process. 2. the money.

The process is the research, interviewing, travel, gathering and organizing information. The process is the writing itself, the effort, against whatever deadline pertains, to make it as good as I can.

The process can also include working on the editing: conferring with editors, reading changes, re-working them when that seems right. Sometimes an editor will reorganize a piece but it doesn't quite work. I add, subtract, multiply and divide, shift around and so on, to make it work within the new structure.

But there isn't always time or opportunity for all that, and sometimes I just have to let it ride. It can still be disappointing when something I really liked---large or small---is unnecessarily lost, but then it can also be disappointing when that something is preserved, and nobody really notices.

I've always been especially sensitive to losing the sense of my voice, of a piece no longer "sounding like me." It's part of my larger obsession with sound and voice, hearing through the eyes, etc. which I've come to realize is pretty integral to who I am, one-eared and all. But sometimes I even have to let that go, at least if it's not complete ventriloquism.

So it's best to stay invested in the process, make that as much fun and as rewarding in itself as possible, and make sure in the end you get paid.

For the truth is that seeing it in print (either in some publication or as I want it on the Internet or in a print-on-demand book), seeing that you still think it is as good as when you wrote it, and even seeing others appreciate it, is not a thing in itself but a continuation of the process. At best it's closure but also generative, for you and for others.

Some of the mellowing is probably also the result of just getting worn out, or benumbed. Some of it is just perspective. The echo of time passing, of time running out. Once you're done with the writing, it's really over. It's time for the next task, the next curiosity, the next attempt, the next stretch, the next discovery, the next performance, the next making and re-making, the next surprise.

Tess

Tess

About fourteen years ago, a skinny young female tabby cat spotted Margaret talking with her friend Annie, in Annie's back yard in a Pittsburgh neighborhood. The cat, 6 or 9 months old, ignored Annie and wrapped herself around Margaret's feet.

Annie identified this cat as a stray, a street cat, though it was a residential neighborhood of homes with lots of gardens. Margaret's two children were in the process of leaving the nest, and her house was feeling empty. She decided to give the calico a month's trial residency. That little cat was on her best behavior for those 30 days. She got into mischief later.

Margaret and I were just getting to know each other. I'd had the same three cats since they were kittens in Cambridge, Mass. They all lived past twenty, but were all gone by then. Margaret asked me about names. I advised her to choose one with lots of sibilants---"s" sounds got a cat's attention. Soon when I visited Margaret, she introduced me to Tess.

Tess lived on Worth St. in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, and afterwards in Huntingdon, PA when Margaret taught there. I joined them for a term, although I kept my Pittsburgh apartment at the other end of Squirrel Hill. Once Margaret knew she would be coming to the North Coast of CA to teach at Humboldt State, she gave up her house and she and Tess moved in with me.

Actually it was Tess and Allie, another cat---black with some white, who Margaret adopted to keep Tess company during her long hours at school. But Tess wasn't especially interested in the company of another cat. Allie was sweet and deferential, but Tess barely tolerated her, and seemed to be getting a little neurotic about it. In the fall of 1996, Margaret flew to Arcata, and so did Tess. Tess didn't like riding in cars, let alone airplanes, but we thought she'd like riding in a Ryder truck with me for a week even less. I saw them off at the Pittsburgh airport. Everybody who saw Tess poking her nose against the cat carrier door remarked on what a pretty cat she was. (Allie stayed in PA: my sister Kathy adopted her. I saw her on visits and she was quite happy there.)

Tess had to move only once more, this time only a few blocks, from a townhouse on Hidden Creek Road in Arcata to a house on Ross Street. There she reigned over her home, and policed the perimeter of her backyard garden. Tess had a few adventures in her past by then: a mouse or two on Worth Street, and an errant bat in the house in Huntingdon. But in Arcata she was content to chase moths. A few years ago she gave up chasing anything. In her youth she played with a stuffed spider, we called Spidey. It was gray with eight red legs when she started batting it around, and was down to one pathetic limb when she finally lost interest. It was the only toy she ever liked. She disdained scratching posts as well.

She liked chewing certain blades of grass and leaves of particular plants, and for some reason she really liked drinking rainwater. But mostly she was a house cat. She'd torn up some of my furniture pretty good in Pittsburgh but here she confined herself to a few rugs. She stayed off tables, and generally out of trouble. In her maturity she was economical with her movements, but she always moved with grace. She was not exactly bold--she drew back from even a brisk breeze---but she was sweet and gentle.

She and I developed several rituals. In PA she had a brief nighttime exercise period when she would play hide and seek, and bat at string as she chased after me. But by the time we moved to Ross St., the rituals mostly had to do with feeding-with what kind of food she got at a particular hour-and her participation in our ritual behaviors, like "TV time" in the evening, and bed times. She slept on the bed, either at Margaret's feet or sprawled across my feet or legs. She would take one of those two positions for many nights in a row, and then switch. I could never figure out the pattern or a reason for the timing of the switch. She had her own language for certain communications---a little tail-twitching dance in front of the refrigerator for her evening meal, and so on.

Because Margaret and I had somewhat different schedules, Tess had separate rituals with each of us. She would get up early with Margaret, hop up on a particular chair for her attentions. Sometimes she would come back to bed with me after Margaret left, or else she would just doze on the couch until I got up, then spend a few minutes with me, before wandering back to the bedroom. She didn't react much to my comings and goings, but she always knew when it was Margaret coming to the door, and she would go to greet her. Margaret was her mother, she hardly ever took her eyes off her. At night, if I was up too late, Tess would come and get me, sometimes quite insistent that I come to bed. She'd nag at me until I followed her to the bedroom.

In early July, the seemingly minor and intermittent problems Tess was having with eating became more pronounced. Her body began to change shape severely. The vet told us that she had a large tumor, probably cancerous. For the next several weeks we treated her with medicines that improved her appetite and would have been the treatment as well for a non-cancerous tumor. Margaret took her in for hydrations, and we learned to do it ourselves.

As Tess got thinner except for where she was swelling, I spent more and more time with her. I had the night shift taking care of her, and Margaret took over in the morning. We fed her baby food from our fingers, which she licked with an expression of great pleasure. Until she stopped eating even that. Tess was an education in courage. Margaret worried about her being in pain. I was determined that as long as she was still Tess, and still showed that she wanted to be with us, that I would do everything I could for her. She had periods of distress and confusion, no expressions of acute pain, and long periods of quiet and apparent contentment. She stayed on the bed most of the time, and during the day I stayed with her, reading and writing. When Margaret was with her in the evening I did the work I needed to do on the computer.

There were a few nights I wasn't sure Tess would make it to the morning. Yet I would wake up and see her on the bed, and I was grateful for that day, and sometimes almost hopeful. One exceptionally sunny and warm Sunday afternoon, Margaret and I were both there on the bed with her, reading. When it was just Tess and I, I would talk to her, reminiscing about our past, about Spidey, the bat, and the time Allie alerted me that Tess was out on the window ledge of my second floor Pittsburgh apartment, high above the pavement. The time she and Allie and Margaret had to be rescued from a stalled car in a snowstorm.

I'd look more carefully at the swirls and blendings of browns, black stripes and patches of white. With the white on her face and chin like a beard, we were starting to look alike. Tess had amazing green eyes, and a peculiar thoughtfulness in her expression. Her fur was shiny and soft, especially her underfur. She had a slight sienna spotch on her forehead, in the third eye area. She always looked at me directly and openly.

I comforted her as best I could when she began those long helpless rattling purrs, that she seemed to use to calm herself to sleep, or near sleep. I kept my hand and my breath near her. She still liked to be petted in the ways and places she always had, and now welcomed a kind of full body massage. This contact seemed to strengthen her.

She developed some peculiar behaviors, and began staring off into the infinite at times. But she always came back. When she was still eating, she would end it abruptly by turning on her heels and walking back to the bedroom, leaving me sitting there on the floor, gooey baby food on my finger. But sometimes she would stop and wait for me to follow. When I did she would continue.

Towards the end of July, she began an especially peaceful period. We'd given up all medicines except the hydrations. She now had a little bed of her own next to ours. But then she began jumping up on the couch again with Margaret or me, or both of us. She responded to being petted, and to the sound of my voice. She began going outside again, sometimes just sitting under a chair on the porch, sometimes venturing to the perimeter of container plants, sniffing the air deliberately and eagerly, as if drinking in the world. She began to stop in the "library" and so I made another bed for her there. She seemed calm, and yet determined to gather the moment. And she was determined to be with us. She had trouble getting up on the bed, but she kept doing it nevertheless.

One afternoon when Margaret was out and Tess was on the couch, I put some Bach on the stereo, and we listened together. Every day or night now, I made a point of singing Tess her song. She usually responded to it. I used to think this was some weird thing only I did, but I read somewhere that it's quite common: many people have a special song they sing to their pet, usually a familiar melody with special words.

I talked to Tess about happy times. There was once, earlier this year, when I'd gone to bed late after writing. Tess had been sleeping on my side of the bed, so she got up, went out to the kitchen while I got settled. She left a nice warm spot. As I was beginning to doze off, Margaret turned over and was just touching against me. Then Tess jumped up on the bed, and settled across the back of my legs. That's how I fell asleep. I was aware of that being a happy moment.

But now Tess was skin and bones, except for her distentions. Her ears seemed as large as a kitten's. She was weak, and would sometimes just lie down wherever she was. But Tess was still Tess. She enjoyed being touched. She still wagged her tail. She knew us, knew we were near, and she was determined to be with us. She was also at times clearly on her own journey.

One Thursday night, the night John Kerry gave his acceptance speech, we had guests. Tess was on the couch, and I spent as much time as I could sitting beside her, stroking her as she rested. That night she went onto the bed with Margaret, but later had trouble, going to her box with no result, going to her water dish and only hovering over it, maybe getting a sip or two. She wandered back and forth, and wound up on the couch at four a.m. where she rested quietly.

In the morning I was awakened by a sound---I opened my eyes to see Tess. She'd jumped onto the bed. Margaret was up and gone. I looked at Tess sleepily. I was very happy to see her, but I thought I saw an almost pleading look in her eyes. Dozing and waking, I petted her and talked to her. Margaret came home to pick up some pills she'd forgotten, between finishing yoga and going to school. She stayed to eat something, and as we talked, we heard Tess cry . She was in her bed in the library. She was in pain and distress, having spasms.

After she'd calmed a bit, and there was clearly nothing we could do, Margaret and I retreated to the bedroom to talk over what we must do. Tess surprised us by once again getting herself up on the bed. She had more spasms. But she was determined to be with us, to show how much she wanted to be with us. She'd had to give into whatever was happening to her, but she wouldn't abandon us.

Now we had a duty to her. It was late Friday afternoon, and we could not let her suffer through a weekend with no other recourse. We bundled her in a sheet. I held her while Margaret drove to the animal hospital. Tess never liked riding in cars, she would meow a constant litany, but this time she only looked around at the world passing by. When we got there and went in, they were not ready for us. There were lots of people there with their animals, and all of the people seemed to be quite old. Despite the kind and professional people who worked there, it was not the kind of place I'd like to spend my last moments.

I took Tess out to the front lawn, talked to her, and showed her the flowers, and the blue sky. She was interested in all of it. People who passed by all said what a pretty cat she was. Her eyes were large and open and she was not distressed. I held her and told her we would have to say goodbye. I told her I'd see her in my dreams.


It seemed to all happen so fast. Did we panic? I don't know. Tessie was never going to get better. She trusted us and we did what we felt was best for her. In the end neither of us could live with allowing her to suffer any more.

But in the late afternoon I was holding her as she nuzzled under my chin. And by early evening I was digging a hole in the ground, the hardest job I've ever done. The first shovelful of dirt on that small cardboard box was like a gunshot to my heart. I'd wrapped her in my shirt, the one I'd worn most often when taking care of her those long nights, and we put some of her favorite kinds of weeds and plants in the pockets, along with some sage and a bit of Pennsylvania soil.

There's a theory that people shouldn't have pets, because it robs the animal of its wild nature. Specifically it keeps them from maturing, they are always dependent as infants, which may be the way we like them. I'm sure that's true. But it's not the worst thing that can happen to a specific animal. And given our inherited way of life in this human society, this is as close a relationship to another species as many of us get.

I've never had children. And I'm ruefully aware of our strong predilection to project onto animals. Since they can't talk (or not in our language) we do their talking for them. Perhaps it is also the relative simplicity of our relationship with pets that makes it so powerful. One can fail or please or disappoint a pet in only a few ways that are usually very obvious, and usually the same each time. With humans sometimes you never know.

Who know why I've taken Tess' death harder in an immediate sense than the deaths of humans who were quite important in my life, including my grandparents and parents? It can be somewhat explained, simply in terms of companionship. Since I work at home, Tess was my almost constant companion for the nearly eight years we've lived here. The last thing I did before leaving the house was to check on her. She would greet me---or I would greet her---whenever I returned. An empty house was never really empty: there was always a beautiful being here. Her beauty inspired me, even gave me a kind of anchor of hope.

We developed a unique relationship, and it deepened in those last weeks. It's impossible to explain, even to myself. Something simple and direct, yet complex and uncertain, as we each tried to communicate and figure out what in the world the other was trying to say. Something earnest, yet everyday, and without the defenses we learn in our encounters with humans, even those we love.

But it may be a combination of the factors I mentioned before that have channeled the experiences of death that in prior human cases were defended against, or complicated by other aspects of a relationship. So the feelings were and are quite raw. For example, for awhile I felt that she trusted me but I failed her, because I could not protect her from becoming ill and dying. I've felt this idiotic anxiety of waiting for her to return. I've felt angry that she can't be here anymore. I've regretted every moment I got annoyed with her. I've felt a lot of the meaning empty out of my daily existence. Tess was a secret reason for going on. We have only a few photos of her, for some dumb reason. But looking at them reminds me that I almost never looked at her without smiling, without feeling delight. Perhaps worst of all, I selfishly feel bereft that I will not have Tess warm on my chest as I pass away.

All of these emotions seem more seemly when applied to humans. No doubt this is a character flaw on my part. But Tess wouldn't be bothered. As long as she could jump up and be petted as she clung to my shirt, under the warm lamplight as I read. As long as she knew I would be there, making sure she was okay.

Why was this harder than losing my other cats? Perhaps because when I was younger there was an unknown future of potential growing and looking forward to blossom. Change could be sad and painful and haunting, but there were the possibilities, the mysteries and destinies. I don't have much of that sense now. Little Tess grounded me, yet her beauty and grace and maybe even the strength of a simple reciprocal relationship reassured some idealistic sense.

In the months before she got sick, Tess liked me to pick her up a lot more than she used to. She was generally friendly with people, but she didn't usually like to be picked up. I always felt honored by this, and pleased. Editors could diss me, employers ignore me, my clients not pay me, the world insult me, and people bewilder me, but held in one arm and petted by the other hand, Tess would still purr. And her warmth across my legs or sometimes in the small of my back would ease me past the anxiety to the surrender of night.

What I learned from Tess in her last weeks I have not yet entirely absorbed, but much of it will be of her courage, of her loyalty, and her love of the world, even as she seemed to be gazing into the next.

Tess, the lion-hearted. It's just not the same without you.

The Real News continued

No, it wasn't the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless and without crops in Bangladesh and India because of floods. Nor the continuing fires in the tinder-dry west, including several up here in northern California that have destroyed---and this is usually the only thing that gets media attention---hundreds of homes.

And it certainly wasn't the study showing that increasingly hot summers are matching global heating models, as referenced here:
Guardian Unlimited Special reports Heatwaves here to stay

No, it was a hurricane in Florida. Maybe because they're named, the media treats them like celebrities. So the weather finally dominated the news for a few days, as we watched hapless TV reporters being blown around (even in wind tunnels, if the real thing wasn't available) and pointing to tree branches lying ominously on the ground, on all channels, all day, all night, all day, all night...

Promises...

I promised not to post anything about basketball outside the June 25 entry. But I didn't say I wouldn't mention that I just added an update on the end of it.

I just added an update on the end of it.

Why I'm Not There

I watched my first Democratic convention on television in the summer of 1960. I was 14, an age for heroes, and I had one: John F. Kennedy. It was an exciting convention, in the conventional sense: the outcome was in doubt. Kennedy had won the most primaries, but not enough to assure him the nomination. There was powerful opposition from the party elders: none other than Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman included. They favored their two-time loser, Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy was too young, and his Catholicism was the unspoken fatal flaw. By the night of the voting, the Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite conventional wisdom was that if Kennedy didn't win on the first ballot, he might not win at all. So the first roll call of the states I ever saw was one of high drama as well as high theatricality. While reporters tried to keep up with Robert Kennedy's visits to key delegations, Kennedy did win on the first ballot.

Conventions since then haven't had that kind of contest, although they had plenty of drama in 64, 68 and 72. Except for 1968, when my candidate was dead and I was outside the Chicago hall in spirit and for a couple of nights, in fact, I always enjoyed watching the conventions on TV. I liked the speeches, the hoopla, the roll call of the states, the celebrations. I projected myself inside them, fantasized being part of them. But though I labored to one degree or another in various presidential primary and general election campaigns, I'd never been to a convention. So you'd think if I ever had the chance, I'd take it.

My chance came, as chances often do, as a surprise, or a series of surprises and accidents. About a year before the 04 campaigning actually started I had coffee with a new friend I'd met during the 2000 election campaign, who was soon to become the chair of the Humboldt County Democratic party executive committee. We talked about possible 2004 candidates and I mentioned John Kerry. It was the first he'd heard of him as a possible candidate.

By the by, a couple of summers ago when I was in Washington, eating the very good pasta cooked for us by the former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton-and former classmate of mine at Knox College---John Podesta, I ventured to suggest that John Kerry might be the 04 candidate. Podesta thought not.

Anyway, as the California primary came closer, I responded to a meet-up invitation for Kerry here in Arcata. It was a very small gathering. There was my friend from the Dems, who'd become a Kerry enthusiast, and a few others. This is Green country, and Democratic activists tended to favor Dean and Dennis the K. The party wasn't terribly interested in the presidential primary, since Kerry seemed to have the nomination nearly locked up, and the chances of Bush winning California depended on the Democrats nominating, say, Osama bin Laden. So I found myself one of the few people willing to actively support the candidate most likely to win the nomination.

Brian Mau, my Dem friend (also known as Chairman Mau) had to find someone to speak for Kerry at a university forum, and at the county Democratic convention. As Chairman Mau, he couldn't do it. So I did, as I've described in an earlier entry. He also needed people to run as Kerry delegates to the convention. Only one other person was willing to do this, so I said I would, too, just so there would be Kerry delegates.

This delegate election turned out to be almost as private an affair as our meet-ups. But there were actually two elections to poll registered Democrats who showed up: one up here in northern Humboldt, and one in the southern part of the county. I believe there were slots available for two men, three women, and one male alternate. Everyone up here voted for the two of us who were there, and everybody down there voted for their folks. They however had more people at their polling place. If I had invited a friend or two, I would have won, but even in this odd arrangement, I was elected as the alternate.

I almost didn't run at all---for as I was filling out the form, very close to the end it mentioned that the delegate would be responsible for his or her own convention expenses, including transport and housing, and that this would be about $1500. However, delegates could raise funds from others to pay their way. $1500 is a major chunk of change for me these days. But I figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.

Having been unreliably informed that as an alternate, I wouldn't be going to the convention anyway, I relaxed. It was only much later that I learned I was not only eligible, I was expected to attend. And that $1500 figure turned out to be an estimate from some prior century. It was likely to be double that.

By that time I'd made several commitments for work that was actually going to earn me something, and that looked like it would take me through July to accomplish. It seemed to be what they call a no-brainer, which usually means an obvious practical decision based on balance sheet figures.

Still, I put off a final decision until I was getting so many emails and phone calls from the state and national Dems and the Kerry campaign that I had to commit one way or another. By that time I was deep into this work. I had a moment of enthusiasm about going to the convention, of realizing it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and even that because I knew Boston and knew some people who might put me up, the expenses could be cut down considerably. But then all the noise about security and traffic, and security checks on delegates. And all the emails I was getting that cast being a delegate as being a fund-raiser. I don't actually know who the delegates are, but it seemed they were either fund-raising types, or members of unions and other organizations who were footing the bill for their attendance. (Politicians and officeholders have their own delegate slots.) And I can't say I felt a whole lot of encouragement to throw caution to the winds and go.

So I had to actually resign as a delegate, and thanks to the layers of organization involved, I had to do it at least twice. It was a bummer. I had a day of very gloomy second thoughts about it. What was I thinking? I thought. So what if I wasn't a typical delegate---I am a writer, I could write about it, right? When I was younger there wouldn't have been any hesitation. I would be off on the adventure. Now I thought about the physical demands: the travel east, jet-lag, the T to the convention, the standing around, the foot-miles in the city, etc. Even from a career point of view---I'd meet more and different people than I will sitting at home. What's wrong with me?

Then the mail started coming. I have a shopping bag full of it: from Americans for Democratic Action, Yankee the Magazine of New England Living, the Democratic Party Visa Platinum Card, the Mayor of Boston, American Association of Registered Nurses, Planned Parenthood, Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and Edward Kennedy, Southern California Edison, National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, etc. etc., with invitations to cocktail parties, receptions, galas, breakfasts and a No Carb Lunch. As flattered as I might be, I somehow couldn’t believe I’d make much of a lasting impression.

Now that the convention is about to begin, I am only slightly uncomfortable. I realize that I could have combined a sentimental journey back to Boston and Cambridge and the Italian North End with witnessing some unique moments---Hillary and Bill Clinton, Edwards, the most important speech of John Kerry's life so far, plus all those balloons. And maybe if things had happened a bit differently---if I'd realized sooner that I was eligible to go and maybe found some support or at least thought about it more, if I hadn't happened to get more work this summer than I've had in many months, etc. When I was most upset about not going was when I was most upset with myself for letting the environment dull my sense of possibility and adventure, the lack of an echo chamber for my enthusiasms keep me from even considering them as legitimate.

But this didn't last long. Maybe it's just ego to recoil from the given role as delegate cog, assumed fund-raiser, with no voice except to say hooray. Or maybe I'm giving into my introversion, combining it with the age-related reluctance to push physical limits for vague purposes, and coming up with timidity. I do know one thing: I felt it would be lonely. In a city where I once belonged but do no longer, peopled by ghosts, and by people who no longer would take my calls. I would be a member of the California delegation---none of whom I know or who know me-- and of nothing else. I have nothing to offer lobbyists except explanations for why they ought not waste their time lobbying me. It would be noisy, frenetic and filled with people. Not everybody's definition of lonely, I admit, but for me it's not necessarily a contradiction.

There will be thousands of people writing about this convention, and if they are anything like the commentators on TV, they will be largely saying the same things. I don't think they need me there to add either to the noise or to the silence (since it's unlikely I'd get published anywhere but here.) I'll watch the speeches on TV, mostly on C-Span, where they won't be background noise for perky analysts chatter. I'll watch the roll call of the states, I guess. But if I don't want to watch it all, I can do something else. I suppose I can't really explain why I'm not there. Maybe it's as simple as being of the age to view resources---of money, energy, time and emotional resilience---as having limits. Or let's just say I didn't feel finally that it was my fate to be there. I have responsibilities here, and they are real. Though not all of them are very important in any greater sense, they are personal to me, while my presence was not required in Boston except as a body to fill a folding chair. I hope they got somebody to fill it who can clap loud and yell continuously for hours. That's the job, after all.

Cause Unknown

One isolated story after another, about the wildfires scorching thousands of acres in southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Alaska, derive their import as news items directly from the number and type of homes threatened or destroyed. Big fire but don't worry, no homes were destroyed.

Some recent stories from southern CA and the southwest mention that there has been six years of drought in the area, and that this spate of huge fires is appearing about two months earlier than past "fire seasons." Which certainly doesn't mean the season will be over two months earlier as well. They fear another season like way back in '03. That was a real bad year. Hey, wasn't that actually like...last year?

What causing the fires? It's either something very specific (one of them was reported to have been caused by a bird, electocuted on a power wire, whose burning body touched off the ensuing inferno) or it's "cause unknown."

So it's not just the deliberate ostrich heads of the Bush administration, refusing to believe in global heating and the climate crisis. It's the ostrich habits of the news media, brains full of sawdust that will eventually catch on fire, along with their permed hair, though of course by then it will be cause unknown.

You'd think that obvious and quite violent evidence that climate models have predicted would at least attract that level of analysis. But then you would be thinking, and that drops you right out of this happy nightmare.

The Real News Update

Most of the U.S. sweltering with temperatures in the 90s. Violent storms continue in many parts of the country. Torrential rains in New Jersey and Pennsylvania cause floods---13 inches of rain fell in Philadelphia in one day. Tornadoes touched down in Maryland and in Illinois. Dangerous storms moving across the Midwest into the lower Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, where they are expected to merge Tuesday evening.

Giant forest fires in Alaska and California. A huge dust storm in Phoenix. Scientists in the U.S. and Canada report that due to drought in both countries, the duck population has fallen by 11% in one year.

The Real News Update


Severe storms including tornadoes tore through large swatches of the U.S. midsections last week, as mega-forest fires rage in Arizona. Forecast for severe storms in Montana and Wyoming this weekend. Retail sales in U.S. down in June, attributed to "bad weather."

Bill Moyers, alas

By William S. Kowinski

It's an unfortunate coincidence, if it is a coincidence. After 50 years of journalism, Bill Moyers announced this spring that he will retire from broadcasting after the November elections. Shortly after this, we started hearing rumors about the fate of NOW, his PBS Friday night hour, which is the best---and let’s face it, the only--- weekly hour of quality news and commentary on television.

Then Ken Auletta in the New Yorker detailed the right wing swing of PBS, under heavy pressure from corporate interests and the conservative members of Congress in their pockets, as well as the more obviously virulent mouths of the Rabid Right.

At the moment, NOW is facing either cancellation when Moyers leaves, or being cut back to a half hour in January with current co-host David Brancaccio. One new conservative mouth has already been added to the PBS schedule, with at least one other in the works, whether or not NOW stays on the air.

Clearly PBS is in danger of becoming the Pandering Broadcasting System, although frankly it's a miracle that it has remained as vital as it has been since the right first tried to cut it off at the knees in the Nixon era. It's half a miracle that Moyers got on in the first place, although PBS owes more to him than to any other single person for high profile successes over the years. PBS, like the cable and broadcast networks, have plenty of programs covering business, and none covering labor. This alone has skewed politics in this country for a generation. But at least PBS occasinally deals with the public sector in the same way they all deal with the corporate sector. Moyers covers them all.

But disgust at more caving into the rabid right and Power Incorporated is tempered by sadness in any case, since Moyers absence either way will mean the deterioration of NOW, and what's worse, there is no one in television to take Moyers' place. Who else can interview as well? Interview such a variety---politicians, scientists, artists, philosophers---many of them who otherwise wouldn't appear on national TV? And of course, that's only part of what Moyers does. He is an excellent reporter of a kind that's gone from TV news, and just about gone from print journalism as well. He's an excellent commentator, succinct, lively and clear about where he stands and why. He and his wife Judith, and their line producers, have put together some of the best narrative news documentary segments I've ever seen. His program on the environment that more or less began the NOW series is a textbook example.

After hosting the show alone and more recently breaking in the new kid, Moyers had just now developed NOW as an energetic front to back winner, as he and David B. worked as a team. The June 11 program was a great example. The NOW hour reported just three stories, but provided information that no other television program had, or likely would---which of course is what gets them in trouble.

Then Moyers went on vacation, and we got to see the NOW of the future. At times Brancaccio did well, at times he faltered, but there's room for growth. Then this week Moyers came back, and the contrast was sadly clear. Brancaccio conducted a terrible interview with Republican pollster Frank Luntz. D.B. was clearly overmatched, and so wedded to his list of questions that he missed obviously outrageous statements that Moyers would have jumped on, however genially.

Then Moyers interviewed philosopher Sissela Bok. Will a philosopher ever be interviewed by anyone else on a weekly TV news program? Not only was Moyers completely comfortable doing the interview, he clearly knew her work and was comfortable talking about her ideas, which deal with matters of public concern. And this interview-and Bok's concerns---were appropriate both in terms of the show's fourth of July theme (Bok's new book is an investigation of ideas about happiness, but she's also written on lying) and as another level of commentary on the previous stories and the Luntz interview.

Yes, Moyers had actually read her work---a recent series of lectures that were preliminaries to her forthcoming book, and her past work. He read it apparently way before a producer told him she would be interviewed. Contrast this with a morning show I saw recently: the regular cohost interviewed (former colleague) Craig Unger, author of HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD. Not only had the network cutie not read the book, she was unaware that it WAS a book.

That PBS is caving into the Rabid Right---just at the moment when that influence could finally be waning---is bad enough. But the most disconcerting element of all this is that there is no new Bill Moyers. There is no one on the scene who can do what he does, which is so necessary. When one familiar and respected public journalist, known for integrity as well as the views he doesn’t hide, can bring our attention to the evils of media conglomeration, the power of money and corporate interests in government, Robert Bly and the men’s movement, Joseph Campbell and the reality of myth in our lives, the earth’s environment in peril, the health link between mind and body---when he does series’ on Ideas, on religion, poetry, death and dying: he is reflecting the depth and reach of our real lives, and validating our attempts to make meaning that links these parts.

The story of electronic media and the dominance of advertising and marketing and corporate concerns and power, has been the story of the evolution of ignorance in our time. We are being dumbed down, deliberately and systematically, for the profit of a relative few. When we lose Bill Moyers, we lose the most visible counterweight to that process within media, which potentially could be a great force for learning, and sometimes is. Moyers slowed down the evolution of ignorance at least a little, and because he did so with great skill and warmth, we were delighted and inspired. Lately he has kept our eyes open to what’s happening to us as media, big corporate money and government collude to enforce the darkness, to make sure we all stay peasants, in every resonance of the word. Without him, the future of television and journalism is just plain scary.

as the year turns


We mark the turn of the year we have in common, and the turn of the year that is ours especially, because it marks our birth, our inauguration day. Remembering my birthday this year was almost unavoidable, since it was portentously mentioned many times a day on television for weeks, even months. Countdown to June 30 even had its own banner, though not yet its own theme music on cable news.

Then on June 28 the surprise backroom transfer of Iraqi sovereignty was accomplished---no big deal, just harried-looking men huddling around a piece of paper that could have been a cartoon somebody copied off the Internet, and suddenly the countdown was dropped, and June 30 not mentioned again. So my birthday went by as quietly as usual after all.

There will be important birthdays marked soon-George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were both born the same summer I was. We're all of the age that birthday fuss becomes reserved for the turn of decades. But probably more for me than for them, this coming year assumes a more defining importance. G.W. will either be president or an ex-president next year, but there's not that much difference in identity once you've been one. Bill Clinton is being pretty smart about his authorial authority---he understands the effects, large and small, with the power of celebrity creating real contact of his words with millions of readers and non-readers of his book, so he's written things that others have written better, but without the audience and the power to reach them. I do wince when I hear of him bragging that he had no writer's block. He also apparently had no editor block, internal or external. He may have written a fine book, there are no rules about that, but writing is not his trade. Still, could you even imagine G.W. writing a thousand pages---or even reading them?

But where was I? Oh yes, my birthday. In late June I picked up a book--a gift Margaret gave me on some earlier occasion, Christmas or birthday:Original Self by soul man Thomas Moore. It's comprised of short thematic chapters, similar to his book of meditations some years ago (which Margaret also gave me.) At least that's how I had been reading it, a chapter now and then, perhaps before bed.

But in late June one passage I read struck me, with a certain birthday appropriateness. I read a few more chapters then, and realized that although each chapter was self-contained, the chapters could also be read sequentially, as a kind of organic exploration. So I made that my birthday project, reading this book front to back.

As usual I found passages and thoughts that pertained to various simmering writing projects (even a Star Trek reference) but I also placed little checkmarks here and there where a thought jumped out at me. So just for fun, and to mark the occasion, I've typed up those line, and offer them to you.

I'll begin with the passage that first got my attention, and then proceed sequentially in terms of the pages where the quotes appear, repeating that passage in its proper place. Of course, the quotations take on more power with the surrounding contexts.

Thomas Moore has a genial face, a soft manner in his writing and speaking, which helped attract a following for his first best-seller, Care of the Soul. He achieved the popular success that his mentor James Hillman hasn't. Partly because he's younger, more media-friendly, with the spiritual aura of a former Christian monk, but the casual manner of a suburban American family man who has good things to say about sex; partly because his writing is more personal, and Care of the Soul in particular deals more specifically with finding meaning through appreciating and honoring the textures of daily life.

But Moore's message is no less complex and even heretical than Hillman's. It can even be considered harsh. They agree on the limitations of the current dogma of human potential as constant growth, and spiritual growth as something to pursue because it's healthy. Moore and Hillman don't minimize the difficulties and the darknesses, and their conception of soul bears this out. Spirit is airy and pure, the body is earthy and prone to troubles. Soul includes them both; it is the mediator, the harmonizer, the active synthesis that defines identity and is the center of vitality, the blue fire.

I don't go for any dogma, and striving for spiritual growth and complete health seems pretty okay and healthy to me, as long as you realize that it's the process and not the attainment you'd better concentrate on, or else you're just setting yourself up for failure and guilt. But I agree completely that these limitations and complexities exist and we must resist the temptation to be scandalized by them. Soul is pretty important.

But I should let Moore---Thomas, not Michael this time---have the stage.


"It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity---following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life." (126)


"The secret of a soul-based life is to allow someone or something other than the usual self to be in charge.
(7)

Anxiety is nothing but fear inspired by an imagined future collapse. It is the failure of trust.
(13)

But an established habit of defensiveness is not the same as defending oneself in the presence of a threat. The former is a neurotic habit, while the latter is a way of keeping sane.
(16)

Puer [Latin for child, a term used by Jung to describe the spirit of youth] is not simply literal young age, but an attitude of youthfulness that may be full of spirit, high destiny, and a forgetfulness of mortality. It is a spirit that brings new life....As Jung says, dreams of children may signal some new beginning, a fresh turning of the cycle. [29]

The best response [to depression] might be to respond courageously to the world's suffering. The attachment to sadness one sometimes senses in people diagnosed as depressed may simply be the odd presence of ego in what is the world's malady. If we could let go of the need to make it personal by clutching it close as a symptom, we might find some relief by finding its proper mileu. (35)

Each artist seems to have access to a special chink in the opacity of the cosmos, a crack through which they can perceive the whole and make a philosophy and a life out of it.(40)

The impetus for dealing only with what is may be rooted in a spirit imagination of pristine clarity. If only life were simple, separated from the haunting past, the underworld of emotions and desires, and connections with the rest of the world! It may be equally important to deal with what was and what appears to be beneath the surface of things. (42)

Our criticisms have obscured the archetype [of patriarchy], and in all areas of life we are left without the leadership and procreativity we need. Procreativity differs from plain creativity in that specifically it seeds a future, offering confidence and hope. (51)

We may each have an idea of who we should be, knowing the seeds of a self for many years. But our idea of who we are and the direction we ought to go may be entirely thwarted by circumstances and fate. We may discover that we are most ourselves when we are furthest from the self we think we ought to be. (57) Our life is then a response, our creativity a surrender. (58)

The ideal is not to become sane and hygienic, but to live creatively by responding positively to the powerful moods, feelings, and ideas that captivate us. If we don't meet these life-shaping expressions of the soul creatively, they will quickly become adversaries, and we will develop the split psyche so characteristic of our times, in which our sane lives are flat and aimless while our passions seem incomprehensible and out of control. (60)

Modern psychology tries to tell us that we are constantly developing creatures, but I prefer to think of us as seasonal beings. We have our summers of sunny pleasure and our winters of discontent, our springtimes of renewal and our autumns of necessary decay. We are essentially rhythmic, musical. As the ancients used to say, our emotions are in orbit, like the planets. Patterns that define us return again and again, and in these returns we find our substance and our continuity, our original nature and our identity. (64)

This loyalty to one's own myth is understandable because our story is the most precious thing we have. Our lives depend on it. (65)

The story within and beneath the familiar story is almost always full of insight and new possibility. It may take courage to go another level down, to abandon clarity, however illusory, for confusion and puzzlement. Our habitual stories usually protect us from the mystery of our lives. But there is always the opportunity to take our storytelling deeper, always the chance to find the intelligence and comfort we have been seeking at a level far beneath the basement of our expectations. (67)

Many want to be somebodies, and that appetite is probably natural and fine, but it can also be a distraction from the rich life available midway between being somebody and nobody.
(70)
Maybe it isn't literal celebrity we long for, but the sense that life has meaning, that we belong on this earth, that we are contributing, and that we are appreciated...But the thing for which being a celebrity is only a symptom is the strong sense of self offered by one's passion, one's real substance, and true and heartfelt recognition from the people around us. (70-1)

We may come to know our friends and lovers over years of conversation and experience, but we may eventually realize that it is enough to love them without knowing what they are all about. We may not approve of everything they do, and we may not appreciate their eccentric ways, but still we know and appreciate them. We have faith that in the dimness of our ignorance we have the opportunity to give ourselves more fully to their reality. Unconditional love means that we don't love on the condition that we understand. (74)

We go on living when meaning fails and when we don't get it right. We go on in the presence of mortification, a word that means simply "death-making", and we become who we are destined to be as much through the death-making as the life-making. Success and happiness are impossible without the continuing nudge of death. Living through our mortifications is the coupon for vitality and the ticket home. (80)

Both Shakespeare and archetypal psychology take their power from their capacity to reveal what we all know, if we were only to think openly enough, about the fundamentals of human life. If we could live from that deep place of recognition, we might allow ourselves the beauty of our eccentricity and tolerate in others their efforts to find their souls in the odd collection of emotions, fantasies, and behaviors that form the raw material of a human life. (92)

But it is also the path toward that extreme of desire, that ultimate love that usually feels unrequited, which is the eternal and the infinite. The opening made by desire, that hole in our satisfaction, is the opening to divinity, and only there is our desire brought into the realm of the possible.
(94)

....we feel the absence of meaning and are speechless when we learn of atrocities in our society. We don't know how to think about them because we don't know how to think, and we don't know how to think because we don't believe that thinking for its own sake is worthy of our attention. (97)

In the currently accepted view, as long as you do the right thing, it makes little difference what your reason is. But this, says T.S. Eliot, is the greatest treason, a betrayal of our humanity, because the interior life counts. Without it we are indeed machines that can be manipulated genetically and given new mechanical parts. (98)

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion. It is the other way around. Fact is an illusion, because every fact is part of a story and is riddled with imagination. Imagination is real because every perception of the world around us is absolutely colored by the narrative or image-filled lens through which we perceive. We are all poets and artists as we live our daily lives, whether or not we recognize this role and whether or not we believe it. (100)

During the European Renaissance it was thought that the first role of the imagination was to keep old thought fresh through reflection, interpretation, and re-presentation. (102)
I love Monday mornings, the time we wash our clothes and write our books. Yet I sail in imagination and I like to leave nothing I touch uncontaminated by my own fleeting way of thinking. (103)
In the intersection of movement and stasis, life becomes interesting and is worth living. Change ennobles tradition, and honoring the old gives grounding to vitality and movement. The waters of a mountain stream flow constantly and yet it is one stream, a static picture of endless flow. (104)

The wish to be normal conceals a deeper desire: negatively, an attempt to avoid the weight of our individuality, and positively, the idea of being fully ourselves in a community where we can belong and participate. (118)

It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity---following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life. (126)

A second step might be to shape a life that is more in tune with our perceived nature, or dharma, and stand firm in our originality and eccentricity. This intense level of self-possession comes at a price, of course, for friends and associates will feel the rub of individuality when their concern is to sustain the adaptation to unconsciousness, otherwise known as normalcy. (129)

A third step would be to manifest our originality, not at all for ego rewards, but as a necessary way of giving it life and substance...The simple act of showing one's deeper nature is a form of personal liberation and a generous contribution to community." (130)

Moore power to you
by William S. Kowinski

We saw Fahrenheit 9-11 at the evening show on Sunday of its opening weekend, at the movie house in Arcata, up here in far northern California. There was a long line for tickets that went around the block, and the theatre was filled. A few shows earlier in the weekend had sold out---several political groups sent emails urging people to attend on opening day. We stood in front of a couple who had driven down from Crescent City, more than an hour to the north, expressly to see it. In the theatre, we sat in front of a woman who actually recognized the Oregon state trooper shown in the film---he was the only one the state could afford to keep on duty to guard a long stretch of coastline (there were a total of eight troopers on duty for the entire state.) The Oregon coast starts just past Crescent City.

I guess I had expected the same older crowd that predominates at peace marches, and they---or we---were certainly represented, but there were a lot of younger people, too: more of the coveted moviegoing demographic. I had also expected the possibility of the same kind of reception for the film that the better speakers at rallies often receive: boisterous appreciation of the views held in common, each laugh or round of applause the equivalent of a vote. But though the film got a share of laughs and occasional applause, there was also a lot of stunned silence, a lot of cries and exclamations of surprise and shock, and some tears.

Michael Moore's point of view was not as simple as a party line screed, though given his previous movies---especially his first---and his background, it turned out to be characteristic. But the emotion came mostly from the power of the images and from the pattern, the assembly of images. Many of the most powerful images were original or otherwise hadn't been seen much before. But the power of the pattern was precisely in the fact that many images had been seen on television, especially on news reports; moments that came and went over many months were put together. I remember seeing many of them, though some of the most powerful early on were ones I hadn't seen---of the attempts of black Representatives to contest the supreme outcome of the 2000 elections on the floor of Congress (with Al Gore presiding), but failing because not a single Senator joined them; and of the protests at Bush's Inaugural that disrupted the parade. I'm not sure if such images were broadcast or not, because I remember not being able to stomach watching TV at all right after the Supreme Court coup, or during inauguration week.

You can argue about how Moore put these images together---did they really make his point, was that the point that should be made? But I would also argue that assembling these and other similar images, without Moore's interpretations, would have been just as powerful, and would lead to the same "actionable" conclusion: America was duped---all too easily duped---and sold out, and George Bush should not only be retired in November, he and his administration deserve nothing less than permanent exile and ignominy. That's not to say just anybody could have made THIS movie, but that another movie with that particular effect could be made simply in this way, especially with such an abundance of damning images to select.

I'd seen a few TV segments focused on Moore's "distortions," which were minor even if they could be considered distortions. But as I watched the film, what these segments chose to criticize was trivial compared to what the TV critics never mentioned: the main argument in the first part of the film, of the financial connection between the Bushes (and Cheney) and the Saudis, and all the oil, arms and other businesses they and other big Republicans are involved in, stand to gain from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hoped-for outcomes of those wars. The recently published book-length description of the Bush-Saudi connection was written by Craig Unger, who appears in Moore's film---the two of them getting questioned by the Secret Service while standing outside the Saudi Embassy in DC (Craig Unger was a colleague of mine in Boston and Washington).

Though the basic points of Big Oil's determining influence and the Bushies nefarious self-interest in using government for their business interests is clearly demonstrated, Moore's voiceover analysis does seem to overreach beyond the material he shows on this point. But after he makes the point, he pretty much drops it and moves on.

His second major point is more powerful and more effectively shown: that the Bushies manipulated the nation after 9-11 with the potent tool of fear. The manipulation of fear, you may recall, was a major theme in Bowling for Columbine, when Moore asked why there was so much gun violence in the U.S., while there are lots of guns in Canada but only a small fraction of the violence. Moore presents only a scattering of images that should haunt and embarrass Americans and their media for generations (though at least until now the media is functionally so shameless that they’ll erase this from memory and history. At least in person, TV newspeople typically preempt criticism by being more sarcastic about what they do before anyone else gets the chance, but when it comes right down to it, they won’t wound their image.)

From 9-11 through Iraq, the major media and much of America were completely suckered and coopted. However, I thought it would have been worth five minutes of film time to show at this point some of the massive worldwide protest against the war BEFORE the U.S. invasion, which was unprecedented in my lifetime. The Bushies bulled ahead despite the opposition of most other nations, ignoring the warning of knowledgeable people who predicted pretty much what has happened, and especially mocking the outpouring of global preemptive grief.

In this section, Moore shows an unappreciated gift for artful subtlety with footage shot on 9-11 in Manhattan that never actually shows the Twin Towers. We hear the planes hit, we see faces reacting, we see people running, and the haunting images of paper swirling slowly in the wind. Remember that image in American Beauty, of the paper caught by the wind? This was almost as beautiful in a truly awe-ful way, as the wind itself is created by the devastation in progress. This was shock and awe for real.

Moore’s third major point is the most powerful of all. Symbolically and actually, he went back to Flint, Michigan (scene of his first film, Rodger and Me) and its broken streets and its black and white working class. He merely had to show images from today’s Flint that are so much like images from his first film to tell us that the economic pain continues (with a young black making the point that the devastation Americans created and are paying to repair in Iraq looks a lot like the devastation nobody is repairing in Flint), only to be joined by another profound source of pain: working class young people as Bush cannon fodder.

Here are the most powerful images Moore shot for this film: the white Marines recruiting black teenagers at the inner city (not the suburban) shopping mall, with their smooth sales pitch and their salesman lies; the black Marine who has refused to go back to Iraq, joining Moore in trying to get members of Congress to sign up their sons and daughters (only one was serving in Iraq); the actual images from Iraq, including shots of prisoner abuse that go by in a fast and confusing way, but with searing images of combat, of haunted faces, of real and ugly wounds; and finally, the mother whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, in her Flint living room reading his last letter, which condemns Bush for sending them there for no good reason, and in Washington, as she is accused of being a fake by some unnamed interloper in front of the White House---the same kind of rabid right winger, we surmise, who tried to get theatres not to show this film.

Moore had the courage and the guile to show some of these soldiers at their worst in Iraq, pumping themselves up with vicious music as they slaughtered people like video game blips. By doing so, and then showing some of them chastened, haunted, the enormity of what they had to do revealed, he provided real weight to his third point---that the worst Bush/Cheney crime was to exploit these working class young Americans---turn them into killers, or corpses, or with life-changing physical and mental wounds---when this war was, at minimum, not necessary.

It is this final section that I believe earned its large audiences not only in lefty enclaves but in military towns in the South. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns, at which books burn. Fahrenheit 9-11 was the temperature at which the American soul burned.

This film was the #1 movie over the weekend, and its influence has only just begun, even if Spiderman now steals its box office thunder. The DVD and video come out in October. That the rabid right wing tried to crucify this film isn’t very surprising. That the film industry establishment tried to marginalize it---first by Disney refusing to distribute it, then with the R Rating and censoring of its current advertising, while threatening to halt all advertising after the conventions---may seem a bit odd. But though it sometimes has a liberal reputation, the movie industry has never been very brave. It was Hollywood, after all, that created and enforced the Blacklist. The collusion of Big Media corporations that own today's Hollywood with the interests of the mega-corporate Bush government only serve to make Moore’s relevant assertions more credible.

As for the R Rating, it wasn’t because Dick Cheney told someone to fuck off—--that isn’t in there. It’s probably for graphic violence---for the briefest glimpse of the only honest footage of the Iraq war so far seen by many Americans. No, we need to make sure our children continue to believe that warfare is just like a video game, or they might not fall for the recruiter next time.

That even anti-Bush people who came to cheer left this theatre somber, shaken and teary-eyed is a testament to its power both as a movie and as truth-telling.

The Real News Update

Over the weekend, heavy rains and floods in Colorado.
Today, heavy rains and severe thunderstorms forecast for the southern plains.

expected high temperatures:
Honolulu 88F
Fairbanks, Alaska 95F

The Lakers Gripe Page

Okay, here's the deal: The entry for this date will be the ONLY place on this blog---okay, on ANY blog---that I mention the Lakers, or anything NBA. But if you are one of the -0 persons interested, I will keep adding to this date's entry when the mood strikes over the coming days, weeks, months, I don't know, it' s all too depressing...

The thing is I thought I was prepared for the idea of the Lakers without Shaq. His habit of going through the motions (at best) until the playoffs was getting old. In fact it was amazing to see him for a couple of games in the playoffs, especially game 4 of the finals, when it turned out he still could do many of the things that Shaq used to do. Apparently he just can't do them all that often, or on less than two full days rest.

But then they started talking trade, and talking about who they might get for him, and then I got really bummed. Shaq not being a Laker is bad enough, but what's worse is who could become a Laker instead. Those guys from Dallas? DALLAS? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Dallas is even worse than Sacramento: they are both entertaining teams with enough talent to put on a good show, but they can't actually win anything against a good opponent. Especially Dallas. There isn't a player on that team I can think of I'd care to see in a Lakers uniform. They just don't have it.

Well, nobody seems to really know what's going on. But it's nothing good so far. Derek Fisher has opted out of his contract. What's the Lakers without Derek Fisher? He could still sign with them, but... So Fisher is a free agent, Kobe is a free agent, Shaq wants traded, Malone ain't talking, the best coach in NBA history was asked not to return--- and who says he'll be back? Gary Payton. GARY PAYTON. The one guy they need to get rid of.

The writers are writing in circles. Payton wouldn't say he's coming back unless he knew his buddy Shaq was coming back. But Shaq is really serious about leaving. Which means?

It's Kobe's team now, that's what all the changes are about. Only Kobe isn't saying anything, except to let the Clippers know he's available---and they're shedding players like mad to be able to afford him. THE CLIPPERS?

The owner who started all this has gone off to Italy. I wish I had. His general manager, who nobody seems to like, seems to be delaying doing anything about Shaq, hoping either that Shaq changes his mind or he gets better offers. Jerry West, who built the Lakers championships team, is exiled in Memphis, and he says he doesn't believe Shaq will leave, and he certainly doesn't expect the Lakers to trade him to a team in the West (like Dallas, or Sacramento.) But if anybody with Jerry West's basketball mind or common sense was still running the Lakers, would any of this be happening?

Meanwhile I'm waiting to here from one of the players who is trustworthy, what really happened in the finals. I haven't yet worked up the courage to watch the game 4 tape to see if it's true that Shaq was open in the 4th quarter and Kobe didn't get him the ball, and that's why they lost the game that Shaq dominated.(Not that I could really tell anyway.) Watching the Houston series again, it was clear how important a healthy Karl Malone was to their winning the first round, so maybe they couldn't have taken four games from Detroit. Game 5 would seem to indicate that.

Okay, that's enough for now. Everything (except Phil Jackson returning) is still more or less possible, like Shaq, Kobe, Fish and Malone return to the Lakers, and Gary Payton gets traded for a power forward. I mean, what else nearly good could happen? Kobe and Shaq are so expensive, what really good team can afford either one? Well, I've got my old Lakers playoff tapes, and my old Chicago Bulls playoff tapes. I guess until they wear out I'm good.

UpDATE 7/16

It's not so much that the Lakers traded Shaq, or that they mercifully traded him for 3 players I don't know much about (some say they're good, some say they're bad) and not for players from Sacramento or Dallas, but that these players come (from Miami) with such preexisting fat contracts that the Lakers have little room to improve further, unless they can trade somebody else--and all they've got at the moment is those three guys, and Gary Payton. With Derek Fisher also officially gone---having won his championships he opted to make some money with Golden State, can't fault him for that---the Lakers almost have to keep Payton now, or play without a point guard as well as a center.

See, that's the major problem. Shaq may not have been the player he once was, but he was still big. And now the Lakers are let's just say significantly undersized at the center position, assuming they even know who they might play at that position. Now if these new guys don't work out, they've got to pay them anyway and they can't afford anyone new, even though there doesn't appear to be a really good center out there anyway. They'll be lucky to get Vlady Divac, who was a Laker before he was traded to make room for Kobe many years ago, and might be interested in returning if they can find some way to pay him. He is at least sort of tall and a veteran with some knowledge of the game and the position.

No one knows if Karl Malone is coming back---he loved Shaq but he also loves Kobe and the LA fans. On the other hand, he's being recruited by San Antonio, which has a legitimate chance at the championship next year---which is why he came to LA---and his wife is from that Texas city. So chances are he'll go there, and then the Lakers will really be questionable. Unless managment has another move or two up its sleeve before the season starts.

The big news of course was that Kobe will be back. Probably crucial to that were statements by the Laker owner and GM that Kobe had nothing to do with Shaq being traded and Phil Jackson being un-asked back, although both of them thought that management's preference for Kobe undermined them. Kobe denies he had anything to do with it, he told both he'd be content to play out his career with them, but he did have issues with them and...how the hell should I know?

So the Lakers will be a run and gun team, they hope, and good enough (the sports seers say) to make the playoffs but nowhere near good enough to get very far into them. The other very good teams in the west just got a lot better, simply because Shaq is no longer in the west. He and his new but supposedy more team oriented Kobe-type shooting guard are supposed to make the Miami Heat a surefire playoff team---not too difficult in their conference---but if Kobe and Shaq couldn't dent Detroit, can Shaq without Kobe? Maybe, maybe not. The Lakers are betting that Shaq has one or two more good years at best---probably next year---but that Kobe will become the premier player in the league and stay pretty near the top for the next seven years or more. Next year? The Lakers could be fun to watch, and the Heat could be, too. But as things stand now it's not likely either will be in the finals. Just as well. I can spend the time working on my shot (I can no longer with any degree of accuracy call it a jump shot.)

August 3 UPDATE So the Lakers did sign Vlade Divac, and a forward who can spell at center, and who can run, in Slava Mevendko . But the possibility of the Lakers being a playoff team next year rests entirely now with the decision of Karl Malone.

Malone apparently has offers to play for the Lakers (with Kobe) or the Heat (with Shaq) or for San Antonio (where he arguably would have the best chance for a championship ring, but would be part of a completely new bunch of players that might or might not be a team.) Though Malone came to the Lakers at the behest of Shaq and maintains a good relationship and lots of admiration, he also developed a great relationship off and especially on the court with Kobe. The on-court partnership began to sparkle most conspicuously against San Antonio in the playoffs. It was evident at times in the few games both played during the season, and then in flashes in the Houston first round series. If Malone had not gotten hurt, it's more likely that the Lakers would have been able to hang on and win the championship against Detroit. (Not a lock, obviously, given what looked like team fatigue, but he was the missing element.)

With Malone, Kobe has somebody he can trust on the offense, and somebody he can rely on to play defense. Without Malone, the Lakers will be on a steep learning curve, and without much maturity in the playoffs. So stay tuned: the Lakers season is on the line.

On another note, I watched with actually a great deal of pleasure as Italy dismantled the U.S. Olyimpic team, made up mostly of second and third tier NBA semi-stars. The Italians play a different style, but it's smart basketball, with lots of player movement and crisp passes, and accurate shooting. Apparently they've learned that scoring points will win games. They increased a ten point lead to nearly 30 in the fourth quarter. Not only isn't the U.S. team anything like the Dream Team, but the rest of the world is playing their game. Italy has been a mainstay of European basketball for years---hey, that's where Kobe Bryant learned the game (and learned Italian) when his dad played there.

The Real News

Where do you go for the real news, the significant news, the news you need to heed? Well, you can get the latest on Britney's tour cancellation, the Lacy Peterson trial or Madonna’s name change, plus the furor over whether the voting is really fair for American Idol, in most any newspaper, TV network news, MSNBC, CNN and Fox. But for the real news, you might try the Weather Channel.

There you will see, day after day, a summer full of violent storms from the east coast through the Middle Atlantic States---particularly the Ohio Valley---and into the Midwest. Torrential rains, frequent and damaging thunderstorms. In much of the Midwest, this stormy weather has been accompanied by tornadoes---up to 100 in a day this spring, which NOAA has announced was the 3rd warmest spring on record. Storms in the mountain states, too. And in the West, the worst drought in 500 years. Get that? Since the continent was invaded, since it saw its first metal plow.

Nobody really knows how bad the global climate crisis will get, but it’s clearly underway. Not clearly enough for most people yet, it seems. Americans are incredibly literal---the only time they “got” global warming was the very hot summers at the end of the 1980s in the eastern U.S.---including the media capitals of New York and Washington. Hot summer equal global warming, get it? So the first flood of books and films made their way into the marketplace in 1990. But now there's just storms and floods in some places, drought in others, too scattered and slow for the pattern to look as real as a still photo, a special effects sequence.

Probably it will take a combination of extreme events and a new president to point out what the problem is. Or it might be the next international climate change report, due this year, though with a Bush-approved change in its leadership, probably not till after the election.

What really will matter is what the U.S. does or doesn’t do about climate change. Later it will also matter what China and other growing industrial economies do or don’t do. Much of Europe is getting itself into better position to both cope and begin slowing down the runaway train. But the consequences are likely to go on, and probably continue getting worse, for a hundred years or so. In twenty to fifty years, our children and their children will probably have a pretty good idea just how bad it will be---whether it’s going to be manageable, survivable or apocalyptic.

If it’s apocalypse in store, the half-full folks can cheer themselves by remembering that our species achieved its humanity, that we became pretty much what we still are, except with a closer relationship with nature and the realities of the universe now hidden to us, during the last period of major climate disruption---the most recent big Ice Age.

The kind of consequences outlined in the deadpan predictions of the last international report suggest there will be some big losers (in the Third World mostly) and a few offsetting winners (some in the U.S.), so this will be something we’ll just muddle through. I don’t really think so. For one thing, our current government is not only unprepared for any serious set of problems, but is bleeding away the financial resources the U.S. will need, even if incrementally over a very long time, to cope. The goodwill of the world to offer help that might offset what the U.S. can’t afford, is an even more precious resource being bled away. We could wind up with no recourse but to threaten people with our hydrogen bombs and other WMDs.

Or the whole nation-state vs. global corporation situation could come to a head, what with gigantic companies buying up fresh water and doing their best to destabilize governments that might stop them (I’ve even seen this charge applied to attempting to destabilize Canada, the biggest reserve of fresh water in the world.)

It’s all way beyond my meager knowledge, but my intuition does tell me that (and I suppose this is another half-fool move) a lot of the things people are terribly worried about in our technological future---wholesale genetic engineering, human cloning to order, etc.--—aren’t going to turn out to be problems, because society won’t be able to afford them (financially, in terms of energy or social stability), and technology is going to have to take quite a different turn.

There’s just no doubt that climate is going to shape how humans live in the future that is now beginning, for climate always has. And apparently we’ve usually been blind to that fact.

For the last half century or more, and certainly since the 1980s when coincidentally the “greenhouse effect” began to attract notice (although Arthur Miller notes in his autobiography that some scientist he met mentioned the possibility in the 40s) there’s been the drumbeat of the end of western civilization, one that has been growing so insistent that it seems a foregone conclusion. But we might have figured that, absent blowing ourselves up, this might turn out to be overly dramatic. Still, the end of a “civilization” is a bit abstract---a lot of people who wouldn’t agree with each other on what constitutes western civilization, believe it has already ended.

It’s “civilization” or “society” in the broader sense that’s now at issue---humanity that doesn’t shrink way down, that doesn’t go back to the caves and the deserts. Absent being overcome by barbarians---not an idle thought anymore, thanks to…well, let’s not get into that—we’re looking at biological threats. We might be poisoning ourselves fatally---I’ve always expected that my generation would be the litmus test of that, since most of this crap started when we were babies. Overcrowding breeding disease and spreading around the world in a flash, or even the coincidence of a few badly placed disasters that might have gone unnoticed in a less intensely interconnected and interdependent, smugly vulnerable time as ours---earthquake in LA, big volcano eruption somewhere else---or just another brazen meteor—there are lots of scenarios for the possibility of Armaggedon. I’ve even had the nasty thought that a fairly large human die-back is the only way this planet will survive without tossing out the last few million years of evolution: the Gaian enterprise. Still, it wasn’t until this climate thing that it truly seemed that major painful change became all but inevitable.

If it’s the end of the world as we know it, I can’t say I feel fine about it. I’d like to believe we’ve learned enough to make a conscious transition, to do what plenty of us know has to be done (and plenty of people smarter than me know how to do). We could even eventually go back for what we mistakenly jettisoned and see if we can’t recover what we lost in the process of developing certain other aspects of ourselves. At the edge of science and other thought, we seem primed for that.

Oh well.

I’ll keep plugging at this for as long as I’ve got the resources and the wits to do so, because I believe that the future is what we do and what we dream right now, so living in the future and living in the present are really the same thing, as far as our mortal lives go. There are a lot of people working that future more diligently, more knowledgeably and more effectively than me. But facing the climate challenge will take the whole society, and sooner or later it will change the whole society, maybe all societies and cultures on the planet. The longer we do nothing, the worse and the longer-lasting the crisis will be. The sooner people start taking in the real news, the better chance we’ll have to make the major changes that might keep this enterprise going with the least possible amount of pain and destruction.

A Guy Thing

Several of the recent posts in this particular blog have been about sports. In a way they're an anomaly; there probably haven't been any before that for several months. But what do you expect? I'm a guy. I like sports. (Some sports.) I have to, right?

Of course during NBA finals week I also read William Irwin Thompson's book Coming Into Being, which has no sports in it at all, I saw the new Harry Potter movie and watched some DVDs, including "The Hours." You know, the Virginia Woolf thing, the chick flick? And it blew me away.

Maybe I'm strange, and maybe there's no maybe about it, but what's really strange is how strongly gender stereotypes have returned. A great deal of what young men (especially of draft age) went through in the 1960s was redefining our masculinity, and then "women's lib" and feminism in the 1970s seemed likely to sweep away all gender stereotypes forever.

But then some feminists of all genders found it politically convenient to simultaneously insist that gender roles were obsolete (so women could get any job, hopefully at equal pay) and that women were different and essentially better. Gender became a popular political tool, trumping race and totally obscuring what was most important in determining the limitations of my life: class. Feminism of a certain sort became exclusionary.

Which made it much easier for the stereotyping of men to resume. It got much harder to stereotype women beyond the continuing emphasis on sexual attractiveness, but men could be stereotyped with impunity as dumb and barely housebroken. Every societal ill up to and including war was the fault of testosterone.

So strong is the reaction against anything traditionally "male" in some quarters that young boys who don't act enough like young girls in school may be routinely drugged and treated as dangerous mental cases. All children are victims of America's scandalously impoverished schools, but it's the boys who more often wind up in jail. Amongst the upper to mid class young adults, the New Age man is not much of a solution either. Someone once described such fellows as forever looking as if they'd just been hit on the head with a board.

But the most effective stereotyping of men was launched by those who most profit by it: advertisers. Men became not just sports-watching louts, but beer drinking sports watching louts. And so on. You've seen the commercials. It's much easier to sell to a defined market, and much, much better to define the market so it requires the product you're selling. Define this lifestyle repeatedly, and you create a self-fulfilling prophesy, otherwise known as a market of men who believe that being a guy means drinking beer, hating wine, and not being able to shop for groceries without a woman supplying you with photographs of the correct cans and boxes.

There's the true story of a man---and I've got his name somewhere---who made a lot of money writing New York Times columns, and giving lectures and workshops, on feminism. But when he began advocating for men, he stopped getting published, he stopped getting paid big bucks for lectures and workshops, and so on. Remember the reaction to Robert Bly and the men's workshops? They were widely ridiculed as a bunch of comical suburban wildmen, running in the woods, beating on drums and crying. No one would dare ridicule a feminist workshop in these terms, but that kind of gross insulting disdain was widely accepted, without a raising an eyebrow.

But now we've seen that the Iraq prison scandal involves a fair number of the fair sex, just as there seems to be no distinction in behavior exposed by this scandal based on ethnicity or race.

Actually, before I read the Thompson book this week, I was ready to deny any broadly defining role at all for gender, apart from the continuing gender roles and equal pay injustices. I still find most references to "the patriarchy" as offensive and reductionistic, as do folks like James Hillman and Thomas Moore (of course they're just MEN so what do you expect?) But Thompson persuades me that at least the archetypes of gender are meaningful, and that "patriarchy" has some real if limited reference. He's even pretty convincing on the Goddess mythology, though I still think the popular view is much too simplistic, not to mention sentimental, divisive, self-serving and irrelevant. (The problem with nation-states, monotheistic religious cults, industrial civilizations and violence isn't that they're patriarchial; it's that they are nation-states, monotheistic religious cults, industrial civilizations and violent.) And I still think gender as explanation is used inappropriately and unhelpfully most of the time.

As for sports, maybe it's because I come from Pittsburgh, where little old ladies could discuss the Steelers' interior defensive line with comfort and insight. And I suppose I do believe there is something I'd call a chick flick---a movie about relationships with no resonance beyond the mundane---and I'd rather see a good baseball game than one of those. But I find the idea that I have to moan about how "The Hours" is so slow and nothing really happens, because that's the paradigmatic guy reaction, equally as infuriating as the idea that still being captivated by the beauty of a home run swing as I was when I was 10 can be reduced to some cliche that involves swilling Budwisers and scratching.

Is the force with them?

Strange days, my Lakers fans. A single three point shot was the difference that preserves the dynasty, at least for the moment. The Lakers lost the first game of the finals at home, and won the second with a staggering improvised fourth quarter and a dominant overtime. Now they go to Detroit for three games that will tell the tale. They need at least one, and could really use two.

Credit the first game to Detroit's coach, Larry Brown, who had them very prepared and efficient. The Lakers had a tough time figuring the Pistons out, and seemed to be waiting for Detroit's nearly flawless performance to falter. When uncertain, the Lakers depend heavily on Shaq and Kobe, and though both of them came through, the rest of the team was woeful.

The second game showed the Lakers ability to adapt, but their Achilles heel right now is injuries. Contrary to early reports, the Lakers now seem more banged up than the Pistons. Crucial injuries to Karl Malone and Derek Fisher have been costly. Both are playing, Malone is clearly limited and Fisher's shot has been off---though he made two crucial three pointers in the fourth quarter, so maybe he's adapting.

Malone is still valuable on the floor, if only for his courage. The real mystery is Gary Payton, who was a bit more effective defensively in the second game, but is still spiritless and sulky. Neither he nor Malone are hitting their shots.

Injuries (including Rick Fox), inconsistent play and match-up problems had Phil Jackson improvising some strange lineups particularly in the 4th quarter of game 2. But ultimately he outcoached Brown in that quarter, and the battle-tested Lakers dominated the drained Detroit team in overtime.

The star of the quarter was Kobe Bryant, who is now has to be considered a favorite for MVP if the Lakers win the series. Not only for his 3 point shot that tied the game with 2 seconds left, but for his determination, going to the basket for shots that no one else can make, and his defense.

But the player of the game was the rookie with the great pedigree, Luke Walton. Son of Lakers great, Bill Walton, Luke energized the Lakers when he got into the game in the second quarter, and again in the fourth and overtime. He scored crucial baskets, made crucial defensive plays and rebounds, but most of all he made plays, and has the kind of on-court rapport with Shaq that Malone has with Kobe. His passes to Shaq and an inspired alley-oop were the difference. Shaq performed well, especially making an absolutely crucial foul shot and three-point play just before Kobe's three pointer. But he has yet to have the outstanding defensive game as he had against Minnesota and San Antonio.

If the Lakers follow their usual script, the need for so many "crucial" plays in the second game will lead to easier victories in Detroit, perhaps with one more lapse. But Malone's injury and Payton's confused and spiritless play are very troublesome.

The difference could come down to character and playoff experience. Detroit really fell apart in overtime, and they must know they've played about as well as they can. They could have a great shooting night and run away with a game, but they have to win three more, not just one. But the Lakers fought through tremendous adversity---they lost a pretty big lead and were down by five points very late in the 4th quarter. They had a terrible no-call on a foul to Bryant that was inexcusable (when does a Bryant shot fall a couple of feet short of the basket except when his shooting hand is hit? You don't need a replay to show that, although that is what the replay shows) and a bad call against Shaq for his fifth foul, but they overcame that. Malone made important contributions even though his obvious injury cost them at times as well. In the end it was their thundering will that smashed the Pistons in overtime. It could be the difference, but it's unlikely to be easy.

Luke Walton will probably get more playing time, and he deserves to, but he's a rookie and they don't get breaks from officials. The matchups continue to be a problem, especially on the boards. They need a big rebounding night from Shaq and Medvenenko. But Luke's energy and ball-handling ability could be very important. Is that enough for the force to be with them? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Turns out that Payton is playing with physical problems as well. So, hours before tipoff of game 4, after the Lakers played probably the worst playoff game in their recent history (although they had some bad ones against Sacramento, too, a few years back, a prediction for the outcome of the finals: Lakers in 6.

DOWNDATE Did I say six games? Seven---I meant seven games.

But while it is still possible, the way they lost the 4th game is not encouraging. Whatever happens, the Hollywood ending isn't likely to be there. Karl Malone is completely ineffective with his injury. Finger-pointing has begun among the LA Times sportswriters---one blaming Kobe for not passing enough to Shaq (Kobe did have another bad game shooting), another blaming Phil Jackson for not heeding the request of his 5 former champions and starting the old lineup of Fox, Fisher, Shaq, Kobe and George.

Whatever the reason for the meltdown, if the Lakers don't win the championship, the chances that this team would return intact---which seemed likely a week ago---is about zero. If they lose, the Shaq v. Kobe noise will drive at least one of them out of LA, Malone will retire, Payton will be gone, and other veteran players will probably go, as a new team is built around whatever star remains (if any) and the most promising young players, Luke Walton and Kareem Rush. The end of an era could come as soon as Tuesday. (Which I'm sure for some of my regular readers, won't be soon enough...)

Last Date
There was no Hollywood ending after all, at least for the Lakers. No championship for Karl Malone, whose knee was so bad he didn't suit up for the final game---his injury was the most crucial of many---and he will consult his doctors before the probable decision to retire. No record-breaking tenth championship for coach Phil Jackson, who said there was only a very slight chance he would be back. In the next month--maybe even before the Dems have a VP candidate---the shape of next year's Lakers will be clearer: either almost completely different (no Jackson, Malone, Fisher (free agency), Fox (retires), Grant (retires), Kobe (free agency, but he could return anyway) or surprisingly intact, ready for one more shot (hopefully, without Gary Payton.) Who knows how much ego got in the way, or why Kobe had such a run of poor shooting games...But it says something that every one of the players apologized to Malone for not getting him his championship. Malone said he was disappointed but didn't regret playing for the Lakers this year---he really bonded with this team.

But it was a Hollywood week for Detroit, becoming the first team without home court advantage to win their three home games, and the championship. They played a stellar game, confident that the Lakers couldn't match them, especially with Malone out and Shaq playing on two days rest. The Lakers only hope was that the Pistons would come out flat, and Kobe and other players would catch fire. Instead it was Detroit shooting the high percentage, and both Kobe and Shaq were gracious in defeat, giving Detroit their due as playing a better series and deserving the championship. They were also gracious about each other and Phil Jackson, so all options remain open, and pretty much up to the Lakers management. Then of course the really big decision---who do I root for next year?

The Finals


Down two games to none against the defending NBA champions in the second round, with all of their flaws exposed, the LA Lakers could have fallen apart. Instead they've become a team, a process that was not entirely accomplished until game 6 of the western conference finals. First the stars had to (as they say) elevate their game, and while doing the difficult and improbable things that stars do---in terms of skill, smarts, heart and stamina---they kept teammates involved and played the coach's game. Improbably they won four games in a row against the defending champion Spurs. It took a very improbable shot by a non-star (Derek Fisher) to do it, but most of the time it was Shaq or Kobe or notably both, who sealed the deal.

As predicted here, Minnesota gave them a battle, and also as predicted, there was a most improbable hero, Kareem Rush, whose 6 three pointers won a mostly ugly game 6 (made uglier by needlessly interfering officiating) and the series for the Lakers. And it was Kobe's passes to Rush, and Malone's passes to Mevedenko (and pats on the head when he saw how nervous this reserve player was) that made this a team at last.

So this is what the Detroit Pistons have to face. The Lakers still have a tendency to get lazy (though I thought their much advertised "giddiness" in the locker room before their tepid performance in the fifth game was a good sign---a collective tension release that was another team bonding moment) and Detroit will compete hard, especially on defense. But just as the western conference series was essentially over when the Lakers won the first game, if they win the first game of this series, it will be just a matter of how many games it will take---4, 5 or 6---before they claim the championship. It's not just a matter of numbers, but of the fact that the Lakers have successfully adjusted to their opponents better as the series goes on.

They could get lazy and blow the first game, since it is at home, but that's unlikely. I expect Karl Malone to have a great series and keep the Lakers honest. It will be his first championship, and he may retire afterwards. (Although my decidedly minority view is that he will be back next year, along with Shaq and Kobe. Gary Payton is less likely, and coach Phil Jackson is somewhat of a mystery, but if the two stars and Malone stay, it will probably be as much up to them to ask him to stay as it will be for management to renegotiate his contract.)

I can't say I cared for Malone much before this season. I thought he was mostly a redneck bully; I was slower to forgive him for his comments that caused Magic Johnson to retire (Malone said players wouldn't guard Magic as hard because they'd be afraid to get some of his HIV-infected blood) than Magic was. But he's shown me something this year. Even though he was hurt for a good part of the season, he was the guy who held this team together and insisted on its character, with an openness and honesty, emotion and calm that belies his muscular play. At 40 he may not have the ability to have an MVP series but he's going to be a crucial element. The guy who will be playing at an MVP level will be Kobe, and it's not irrelevant to mention that Malone and Kobe have bonded off and especially on the court this year; at crucial times, before Shaq elevated his game and the team knew what to expect of him, the Malone-Kobe combination was what kept the Lakers going.

Who else is going to step up? Rick Fox has had a dismal playoffs, still hampered by his injury. His defense and passing have been crucial in the past---perhaps they will be again. Gary Payton will earn his championship on defense in this series, but he's capable of scoring in heaps. That's what this Laker team learned-that when the defense gives somebody an opportunity (and they must, faced with the decision to double team and swarm Shaq or Kobe), every one of the "role" players is capable of making big shots, and lots of them. Detroit is perhaps more banged up than the Lakers, though Derek Fisher was playing hurt and not terribly well in game 6. But at this point, every team and every player is hurting. Still, the finals are the finals, and the adrenalin should raise the level of play. Game one is Sunday.