Retiring

I’m retiring this week; not from the blog, or from life, I’m actually retiring from my job of many years. This is proving to be a surprisingly stressful and demanding process, and I may bore you with the details of it all a bit later. However, it is clearly not going to be this week, so I thought I’d just let everyone know that I plan to return soon.

The hardest part about retiring is that it is like having your leg in a cast. Once people see the cast, you know where the conversation is going, and there are only so many questions to be asked. The victim of the broken leg has the advantage of being able to answer most of the obvious questions the cast evokes. I, on the other hand, have absolutely no answers to any of the standard retirement questions. About the 4-5th time they are asked it starts to make you feel stupid. Somewhere around the 25-30th time, it made me feel homicidal.

More on being a cranky retiree later.

The Iranian lunatic

Would anyone care to stand up for the U.N.? Or for that matter, can anyone identify something it does that couldn’t be done as well, or better, by individual countries? As a New Yorker, it seems to me that the U.N.’s principle reason for being is to provide free parking for its third-world members.

Yesterday’s performance by Iran’s Ahmadinejad was a complete disgrace. To have given him a platform, under the roof of an institution chartered to promote world peace, so he could spew his lies and hatred was beyond appalling. In case you missed it, the man who leads the country with no homosexuals once again denied the holocaust and said Israel “has no future.” And if that wasn’t enough they let the mass-murderer Kadafi have the soapbox next.

So today, Bebe Netanyahu got up there and called Ahmadinejad the liar he is, and called the U.N. the gutless enablers of extremist Muslims that they are. If the Israelis end up taking out the Iranian nuclear manufacturing sites it will be because the U.N. not only did nothing to stop these stone-age lunatics from getting the bomb, but actually gave them credibility on the world stage.

All the U.N. is doing is taking up a perfectly good location for condos with East River views.

A joke

St. Peter has a doctor appointment and asks Jesus if he’ll watch the Pearly Gates for him for an hour or so until he gets back.
Jesus says, “Sure – but what do I do?”
“It’s easy” replies St. Pete. “When someone shows up you just look them up in the book to see if they are on the list. If they are, let them in; if not, have them wait on the bench over there until I return.”
“Sounds easy” Jesus relies, and off goes St. Peter. In a matter of minutes the first person comes tottering up the path to the gates. A very feeble old man steps up to Jesus, who asks the old man his name.
“I don’t know.” he says.
Jesus tries another approach: “Well then, where are you from?”
“I don’t know.” the man repeats.
“Well I have to find you in the book or I can’t let you in. Do you remember anything about your life that might help me find you?” Jesus asks.
“Well, I remember that I was a carpenter, and that I had a son, who was greatly admired by millions from the time of his birth.” responded the old man.
Dumbfounded, Jesus opens his arms wide and cries, “father?”
“Pinocchio – is that you?” asked the old man.

I got that joke from Murphy’s Saloon, which continues to be my favorite podcast. If you like the blues I can’t recommend it highly enough. That reminds -- I forgot to give credit for the last joke I posted on 9/3 ...thanks Nigel.

If you are a joke fan, I also recommend the site “Old Jews Telling Jokes.” The jokes are old too, but the delivery makes them well worth hearing again.

Another podcast I’m really enjoying is The Moth. It was started by the southern writer George Dawes Green. Each episode is only about 10 minutes long and consists of a single person telling a personal story, without a script or notes. The stories can be about anything. Recently I listened to a retired NYC detective talk about tracking a fugitive, a guy describing his first trip to Burning Man, and a gay teenager talking about beating up a bully who was tormenting him. They are very personal and real.

I’m looking forward to reading “The Spies of Warsaw,” by Alan Furst. I got interested after reading Steve Dougherty’s piece in last Sunday’s New York Times travel section, in which Steve visited the Warsaw haunts of said spies. Doc is my hero. He has a way of talking editors into sending him to cool places where he can explore his exotic interests on their dime, including St. Petersburg, Russia and a Moroccan music festival.

Are any of you familiar with Studs Terkel’s work? I want to read something by him but I don’t know what to start with. Any ideas?

Ugly baby

If this health care bill does not pass, or if what passes is some obamanation that fails to cut costs or improve the system, the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

According to yesterday’s New York Times, HR 3200 weighs in at trim 1,017 pages. If you don’t want to read it, a New Jersey voice-over actress got 60 of her friends to help her read it into digital sound files that you can listen to online or download to an iPod. It takes over 24 hours to play the whole thing. What would you say the over/under is on how many Congressmen have read it? I’ll put $100 on “under” for any number over 50. It sounds fascinating. Here’s an excerpt:

“To the extent such provisions are not superseded by or inconsistent with subtitle C, the provisions of section 2705 (other than subsection A, paragraph 1, subsection A, paragraph 2 and subsection C) of the Public Health Service Act shall apply to a qualified health benefits plan.”

Is it any wonder no one trusts politicians? Instead of a simple, direct plan, the Dems have given us a Trojan Horse of a bill, in which I promise you they have hidden hundreds of gifts for their owners. Remember, drug and insurance companies don’t just own Republicans – than bought plenty of Dems too.

And then there is the “You lie!” issue. Joe Wilson is a jerk, and I don’t think the President lied; if you think you are telling the truth but you are wrong, you are not a liar. However, one thing keeps bothering me: has anyone seen a really objective analysis of the bill and what rights it gives to illegal aliens? I haven’t, and I’ve been looking. I would have thought the media would have been all over the substance of this comment. I know it is impossible to prove a negative, but shouldn’t this be a pretty straight-forward issue? Can’t the bill simply say, “No papers, no health care?”

I’d bet that more than 90% of Americans want a nonambiguous, no-health-care-for-illegal-aliens clause in the bill. So why isn’t it there? And if this most simple of all things can’t be made clear, what else is hiding inside HR 3200? If you want to stymie the right then draft a clear, direct bill that anyone can read and feel good about. This is the Democrats baby and it is an ugly child.

Tom Gorman

I didn’t know Tom Gorman until I attended his funeral eight years ago.

He was the brother of a colleague of mine, and a Port Authority policeman, badge #1712. Tom was assigned to an emergency medical services unit, which was among the first to respond to the catastrophe at the World Trade Center, and the entire team of eight men was lost.

He was just 41 years old, and left a wife, Barbara, and three children: Laura 15, Patrick 12 and Bridget 9. He coached both his daughter’s basketball team and his son’s Little League baseball team in his hometown of Middlesex, NJ, and was the driving force in creating the girl’s basketball league. He even designed the team’s logo and uniforms, which were the envy of the league. Before becoming a P.A. policeman, he was a fireman for eight years in Bayonne, NJ, the town he grew up in.

But facts are not the measure of the man. The value of Tom’s life was expressed in the words of the people who eulogized him – his hometown friend of 35 years, the buddy he coached with (who saluted him with Tom’s own goofy “Middlesex” cheer in front of a thousand people in the church), the priest who knew him all his life, and his own younger brother, who was working in Tower One and was helped to safety by another Port Authority cop. Representatives of Mayor Giuliani, the Governor of New Jersey and the Port Authority, also spoke.

Through their words we learned that he was dedicated to his family, loyal to his friends, funny if he trusted you, willing to help anyone, a hard-core fireman and policeman who never brought the job home at night.

Words aren’t always necessary. There were a dozen teenaged girls wearing their basketball jerseys over their street clothes, which spoke volumes about Tom’s impact on their lives.
It was an emotional and dramatic event. No amount of pageantry can replace a father, a husband, a son, a friend, a brother – but it was a comfort to many of us, as Americans, to see that a sacrifice on this scale does not go unnoted.

There was no casket. A policeman’s hat and gloves rested on a pedestal in front of the alter. Every corner of the church was filled; it was standing room only. There were over 200 uniformed policemen from the area, including an honor guard from the NJ State Police. A bagpipe and drum corps played “Amazing Grace” with such strength and passion that it became a physical experience.

After the policemen, and the family left the church, we exited into a beautiful, technicolor fall afternoon, with a bright blue sky and just a few white clouds high overhead. It was cool and a little breezy. The family stood on the steps of the church as the honor guard fired a three-gun salute. All 200 policemen faced the family, at attention, as a bugler played taps. The honor guard folded the American flag with perfect precision and presented it to Barbara. The policeman’s hat and gloves were given to Tom’s son Patrick – perhaps the most heart-breaking thing I’ve ever seen. And then several cars pulled up and drove the family away to begin trying to get on with rest of their lives.

It has somehow become common practice to refer to every poor soul who was killed on 9-11 as “a hero.” I don’t think you have to run into a burning building to save a stranger to qualify as a hero, but just being in the wrong place at the wrong time doesn’t quite cut it for me.

Tom Gorman was a hero – in life and in death.

The speech

Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was a good speech, that I support the components of the plan, and that neither of those things mean much. B.O. talked a little tougher -- which was good; but now we need to see if he can also walk the walk.

Have you ever seen a meaner, tougher looking politician than John Boehner? Man. Every time they showed him during the speech he looked like he wanted to walk up to the podium and beat Barack about the head and shoulders with Nancy Pelosi's gavel. I still don't see many GOP votes going for whatever bill makes it way out of Congress.

What say you? Will we get a bill? Will it matter?

A big week

President Obama is giving a speech today, and it is his one big chance to convince America’s school children of the importance of becoming homosexuals, getting lots of abortions, reading Marx, and keeping prayer out of their lives. I hope he nails it – otherwise what kind of future is in store for this country?

Then tomorrow we get something that FDR did only once in nearly 12 years as President (and that was to declare war on Japan) – an address to a joint session of Congress. The President will speak on health care and I want to add my voice to the chorus singing “this better be good.”

Issues don’t get much more complicated than this, and the economic stakes are rarely higher. After months of public debate I’m only sure of two things: 1) the Republicans are against everything and 2) I don’t know what Obama really wants.

It’s time for him to make clear what it is he wants, and to beat the Democrats in Congress into submission until he gets it. If he does that, I believe he will ultimately get some Republican support, and he will certainly regain some of his losses among independents. He can live without the former, but not without the latter.

Barack Obama will never be an effective leader of the country until he can demonstrate the ability to lead his own party. It isn’t too late, but it might be a week from now.

Miscellaneous

I hope I don’t get sued by Gary Trudeau, but the current storyline in Doonesbury strikes a note that is resonating with more and more Americans. Those of us of a certain age have seen this movie before and it did not have a happy ending for anyone.

Buy This Book: Former People writer and friend, Irene Zutell’s new novel “Pieces of Happily Ever After” was published by St. Martin’s Press this week, and if it is as much fun to read as her first novel it will be a great way to spend the Labor Day weekend. She got a great review from Publishers Weekly: Go buy it.

I hope President Obama read David Brooks on Tuesday. He is losing the support of independent voters at Usain Bolt-like speed and, as usual, Brooks puts his finger right on the cause of it. Read it here.

I hate to be insensitive, but when will “California is burning” cease to be news? Isn't it a permanent condition?

I think half of you are already reading it, but Pat Conroy's "South of Broad" is a terrific story by a great American author. I wish I could string words together like that. Three movies worth seeing: Inglorious Basterds, Hurt Locker and Julie & Julia.

...so I booked into a hotel and said to the receptionist,"I hope the porn channel in my room is disabled."

"NO," she said, "it's regular porn, you sick bastard."

And finally, they are burying Michael Jackson today. I hope they dress him in his Thrilla costume -- he won't need any make-up to look like a zombie at this point.

Have a nice, long, last summer weekend.