"If you kill someone you're gonna fry, on Willie's bus you're gettin' high. That's your lesson in Texas 101." Texas 101

It's Time To Go Back Down To 49

I've never understood why we have 50 states. There aren't 50 regional differences that's for certain. North Dakota and South Dakota have no business being separate. Ditto for Kansas and Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the list goes on. I'm certain that if we were to combine the states of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana the world would not come to an end. We could probably get it down to 20 or so states easy. We'd save ourselves 30 or so governor's salaries in the process.

But there are some states that are very distinct. I happen to live in one of them, California. Texas is another one. Every time I fly there, I feel like I need a passport. I'm forever surprised that they use the same currency. Texas is different.

I can't quite put my arms around it, but every time I go to Texas something strange happens. I once interviewed for a professor job at the University of Texas. It was the oddest interview I've ever had. The secretary of the department put her hand on my thigh. I opened the office door of someone who was supposed to interview me and found him soundly asleep, his head on the desk.

I drink too much when I'm in Texas. The only time I've spent time with a cross-dresser was in Texas (who somehow was incredibly good at picking up women in bars). In a Texas newspaper, I've been called an "androgynous Hedwig" (note to Editor of the Dallas Observer: Hedwig is androgynous so calling me an androgynous Hedwig is redundant). The list goes on.

The people are fine and friendly. A couple of good friends of mine are Texans living in exile in other states. But every time I'm invited to go do something in Texas, I cringe at the thought. I think it was Woody Guthrie who once came up with the advice that you should marry a Texas girl because no matter what happens, she's seen worse. I understand that sentiment completely.

I've been assaulted at an ATM in Texas. I've been recognized and asked for an autograph in Texas (how, I don't know). Regardless of the good and bad, I've been willing to accept Texas as part of the US until now.

Recently the NY Times noted that Texas leads the nation in executions. It isn't even close. Texas fried 26 people last year. The next most murderous state was Oklahoma with 3.* Civilized nations don't have state-sanctioned murders. It's time to let Texas go off and be its own country. It's time to go back down to 49 states in the union.

*If you look at the map on the link, there's a good argument for lumping South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama into one state. Maybe we can get the US down to 15 states. Elementary school students studying geography would I'm sure be forever grateful. ;)

A Funny Analysis

A couple of days ago, two professors from prestigious universities came up with the thesis that steroids don't help baseball players' performance. You can find it here in the NY Times. It's a very funny piece of analysis. The authors compiled data from the Mitchell Report on steroids use and tried to determine whether drug use correlated with improved performance. It didn't.

The problem with this analysis is that the Mitchell Report's data are lousy for quantitative analysis. I too looked at the Mitchell Report and thought, wow if these data are any good, you could have a decent test of whether steroids improve performance. But then I started to look at the data and saw that it wasn't worth analyzing in any detail. You have a lot of oral testimony about when someone started to receive a drug from a source. You have no real idea when these people actually started using steroids, how often, how long, etc.

So my friends, I have to say that the analysis is a classic problem in data mining. Garbage in. Garbage out.

In their article, the two professors, Cole and Stigler, deal specifically with the case of Barry Bonds. They state:

"Barry Bonds’s career has been the most scrutinized, and in fact his home run production in the years after he supposedly started taking drugs does show significant average gains. But individuals always vary, and choosing specific cases does not yield general conclusions.

What should not be overlooked is that Bonds’s profile is strikingly like Babe Ruth’s high performance level until near the end of his career, with one standout home run year — a year in which other players on other teams also exceeded their previous levels....

There is no convincing way to demonstrate that Bonds’s performance owed more to drugs than Ruth’s did to his prodigious use of alcohol and tobacco."

The assertion that Bonds' and Ruth's profiles are strikingly similar is nonsense. The above graph shows the home runs per at bat for the four greatest home run hitters of all time, Bonds, Ruth, Mays and Aaron, as a function of their age. Ruth was a remarkably steady power performer over his years. Bond's power numbers in contrast shot up amazingly the year he started to play using steroids, 1999. In fact, his home run productivity increased over 50 percent over the time when he was 35 to 41 in comparison to the time period he was 28 to 34.

Did steroids help Barry Bonds? Only if the Pope is Catholic.

When Everyone is Unelectable

The current presidential campaign has been unusual on many fronts. The amount of money involved - we'll easily pass the billion dollar mark by the time the dust settles - is staggering. The lack of substantive campaigning and reporting is depressing. Both of these attributes represent long term trends. But there is something somewhat new that has emerged as a major campaign issue, electability.

Actually, I don't think electability is a real word. As I type it, my spell checker says I must be making an error. Regardless, it has been used time and time again in reference to many candidates. Usually, though, the word used is unelectable. The press uses it to denote a candidate who possesses some attribute that makes him or her poison to enough of the electorate to ensure that he or she cannot possibly win.

A funny thing has happened with this election. According to the press, essentially every front running candidate is unelectable. Clinton can't win because she's a woman. Obama can't win because he's black. Romney can't win because he's a Mormon. Guiliani can't win because he isn't a social conservative.

According to the press, electability means that a candidate must be white. They have to be solidly Christian. They have to be male. They have to have a past without public marital infidelity. Essentially, they have to be just like every other president in the past except for Bill Clinton.

But I don't think that's right at all. If it were so, why are those white bread candidates that the press thinks fulfill the "qualities" necessary for electability running in the back of the pack? My view is that the press's analysis is brain dead. To win this election, a candidate doesn't have to be white, devoutly Christian and male. The candidate instead has to be well organized, well funded, and have an appealing message and image.

If you look at the front running candidates from both parties - and I'll discount Huckabee because he isn't quite there yet and don't think he'll last - they are all highly accomplished people. They are smart and articulate. They are all people with resumes that make them seasoned and experienced enough to do a good job at being president. They are all "electable."

The "electability" issue is a canard. This election is about who in the end will run the best campaign, plain and simple.

The Sort of End of Class

I went to my first upscale restaurant when I was nineteen. The ceilings were high, the lighting was low, servers whisked away plates with the deftness of jewel thieves. There was some jazz in the background and you could actually hear the music because the conversation at my and other tables was soft and civil.

We had some red wine and I ordered coq au vin. It all tasted so good that I thought that I had entered the kingdom of heaven. There's this thing I do when I have real good food. My senses are so overwhelmed by the taste that I involuntarily close my eyes and just concentrate on the food. I know that's strange. It is what it is. I did that a lot that night.

The meal for four cost about 100 bucks with tip, a fortune at the time for me as a college student. My weekly food budget back then was 10 dollars, I kid you not. Normally I ate a lot of broccoli and kasha with bowtie noodles. Cream of wheat was my breakfast du jour. Lunch was yogurt with three fruits. So this was a leap in terms of both refinement and price.

On the one hand, I felt guilty to be pampered at this place. I was a working class kid. This restaurant thing seemed so ridiculously bourgeois. But on the other hand, it was fun to be treated so well. It was elegant. It was a quiet and refined respite from the day to day of life.

In a word it was classy. And back then classy was something you aspired to be in many things that you did. Helping someone out when you didn't have to and saying "hey buddy, you would have done the same thing if you were in my shoes" (we really talked like that) after he thanked you was a classy thing to do. Being classy or being a class act was kind of like being a "mensch" except you went to decent restaurants and had a tuxedo in your closet that you wore on occasion.

But being classy is now a retro thing to do. It's been replaced by something else. For instance, the other day I went to an upscale restaurant. The ceilings were high, the lighting was low, servers were surly, and it was anything but classy. The decor was something out of a boorish, rich uncle's condo in Boca Raton. And it was loud, incredibly loud. At the other tables, the conversations were filled with guffaws and shouts. People were being boorish. Plates clanged. It was all so loud that I couldn't hear my sweetie talking to me.

The food was perfunctory. I couldn't understand why - and this place was packed - anyone would want to go to a place like this. It wasn't a respite from the bustle of day to day life. It wasn't some elegant island full of good food. It was in fact like driving through a car wash, noisy and obnoxious. But people seemed to like it. The bar was full of trollers looking for hook ups. I looked at the restaurant reviews online after this dining experience from hell and people talked about the "great energy" of the place. If I want energy, I'll turn on a light bulb.

I was reminded of a trip I took to Las Vegas a few years ago. I was writing a magazine article and was interviewing a rather strange guy who insisted that we meet in the casino of The Desert Inn. I got there a little early and looked around. The Desert Inn was a choice location on the strip. It was the place where Sinatra and other cool 50s cats would hang. As I walked around, I was surprised to find that The Desert Inn was remarkably free of most of the tacky trappings of the rest of Las Vegas. The male staff wore tuxedos. It was quiet. It was almost elegant. It was in a word almost classy.

Sadly, they blew up The Desert Inn the month following my interview to make room for a new gaudy hotel. I walked into that thing just a couple of months ago. It was loud and bustling. I'm sure that people loved the "great energy" of the place.

You can still find classy places. I know. I still go to them. But a good number of people have no desire for such a thing. They want to be dazzled. They want their senses overloaded. Classy to them means boring. It's a paradigm shift as to what bourgeois people aspire to do with their money. We used to aspire to be like Sinatra. Now we aspire to be like rock stars. As for me, give me Sinatra anytime.

The Stuardian Calendar

A couple of days ago, I woke up a little early. It was dark and our furnace hadn't kicked on yet. This meant that the air temperature in the house was somewhere around 59 degrees, a little too cold for me to get out of bed. Strange thoughts can ramble through your head early in the morning. I thought about our solar based calendar and decided it could be easily improved.

It's obvious that seven days to a week really doesn't make any sense. Seven does not divide into 365, which means that you have an ever changing number of days with every month. To keep track you have to remember a silly rhyme, 30 days hath September, etc.

The only reason there are seven days a week is because of the Bible. I have it on the best authority that no, God did not make the Earth in six days and then rest. It's all made up, honest. We shouldn't have to twist our entire calendar to be consistent with a Bible story. There's got to be a better way.

365 divides into five quite nicely. So forget about the seven day week. We're going down to five days. We'll drop Thursday and Friday altogether. It'll be TGIW or Thank God It's Wednesday from now on. Every month will have exactly 30 days except one which will have thirty five. My sweetie suggests that we do that in June when it's nice and warm (sorry you folks in the Southern hemisphere lose out because of my sweetie's whim). No more remembering some silly rhyme. 30 days hath every month except for June. There. We're done.

June would also have a leap day every four years except for years divisible by 100 just like our current calendar does for February.

The Stuardian calendar would be clean, neat and easy to remember. The first day of every month would start on Sunday and the last day would end on Saturday perfectly. We'd go down to a three day work week. Who would argue with that? Since Fridays are gone, there would be no more dreaded Friday the 13ths. Bad luck would undoubtedly disappear.

I know that getting the whole world to change to this obviously superior calendar would be hard. Being better does not mean instant acceptance. After all, Betamax was better than VHS, the Mac was better than the PC, and look what happened to those two. So I'll start small.

I'm going to start with Venezuela. I noticed that Hugo Chavez successfully created a unique time zone for his country recently by moving clocks back thirty minutes. If he is up for that kind of change, he's certainly up for a better calendar. Caracas here I come. ;)

Major League Baseball's Bad Day

From 1988 to 2003, about 2500 people put on a Major League Baseball uniform and played the game at its highest level. Fairly reliable - one assistant coach and one former pitcher - estimates of the percentage of Major League players from this time period who used steroids are on the order of 25% or about 600 players. Yesterday, a report (you can find the pdf here) headed by former Senator (US not Washington) George Mitchell implicated about 85 of them.

In terms of outing steroids users, George Mitchell's batting average is terrible, well below baseball's unofficial "Mendoza line" (.200) of futility. But to his credit, he didn't have much to work with. George Mitchell had no subpoena power. He had no cooperation from the players or player's union. In fact, he had little cooperation from anyone in Major League Baseball including the Commissioner's office.

About two years ago, Major League Baseball (MLB) was dealing with the controversy associated with Barry Bond's steroid use. At the height of that scandal, Bud Selig, Commissioner of MLB, did what many leaders do to deflect criticism: he formed a panel to investigate. To head that panel, he selected George Mitchell someone on the Board of the Boston Red Sox. He gave him money to investigate, but no power to get any serious work done.

I know Bud Selig's family. I went to school with his kids. Bud Selig is a rather slimy guy and he isn't very smart. And this panel he convened was simply designed for show. I'm guessing that by withholding the power to subpoena, Bud Selig thought that this panel wouldn't come up with anything substantive. It would be business as usual for MLB.

This calculation, if it was made, clearly was not correct. Apparently, George Mitchell is a very resourceful man. Or he got lucky. Either way, he found one key person, Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets employee and steroids supplier to name names. I'm sure that if Mr. Radomski was not under arrest and facing time in prison, he would not have come forward. But he did. As a result, we have a partial portrait of steroids use in baseball that is very enlightening. Given that Mr. Radomski worked for the Mets, the focus of Mitchell's report is on New York and its two Major League Baseball teams. Extend the results to the rest of Major League Baseball and the aforementioned estimate that about 25% of all players were using steroids in the 1990s seems about right.

Who those 500 or so other players beyond the ones mentioned in this report that likely used steroids is anyone's guess. But with numbers that high, it likely means that the sport was entirely corrupted. Every team and many records of personal achievement during the 1990s and early 2000s likely were tainted. You should probably randomly put an asterisk after one quarter of all batting and pitching records during that era to denote just how corrupt baseball was.

George Mitchell's report is also tainted. Three days before it was released, the Commissioner's office was allowed to look at it and change wording. So much for this panel being independent. Not surprisingly, it paints a portrait of a Commissioner's office just not being aware of all that steroids use. According to the Mitchell Report, the Commissioner's office was not aware of steroids use until the summer of 2000. This is simply not believable.

The fact is that there is no way that Major League Baseball was unaware of steroids use in the 1990s. It would have had to have been completely blind. Steroids use was pervasive. Home runs were being hit by the most unlikely of players, and those who were once simply good were now phenomenal home run hitters. Players ballooned in size. Steroid use was part of day to day locker room conversation. Major League Baseball not only undoubtedly knew about steroids use, but it was likely happy to see all of the home runs it created.

The 85 players named by the Mitchell report are the tip of the iceberg. We'll likely never know about the other 500 or so. But we do know that human growth hormone is undetected by current tests and that it is now being used as a steroid substitute by at least some players. How many? Who knows? They are driven by a desire to win and extend their lucrative careers. That's a powerful incentive. And as the old adage goes, it ain't cheatin' unless you're caught.

What about the ones that have been caught? In track and field, another sport where steroids use was/is pervasive, those caught have to relinquish their medals, sometimes return prize money, and are suspended for a year or two. If MLB truly is concerned about integrity it should follow suit. That home run title of Barry Bonds and Cy Young award of Roger Clemens from 2001 should be taken back if further study proves guilt. They should also be each fined a few million dollars. And as for current players, they should be suspended for a year if further study proves guilt. If you're serious about enforcement, you need serious penalties.

Will any of this happen? No.

Whoops!

It's official now. US News and World Report is incompetent. In its effort to sell magazines, US News has largely abandoned journalism (it fired its investigative staff this year) and latched onto being a poor man's Consumer Reports. Instead of ranking actual physical goods, they've decided to rank institutions. Well actually that's not quite true. They've started ranking cars now, too. Except they don't test the cars themselves. That would require real work and real time and money. Instead, they aggregate other people's assessments using a proprietary formula.

Mostly, US News is now a ranking service not a news magazine. They will rank anything they can find that might interest the public. But like their rankings of cars, they don't really go out there and look at or test anything. They don't kick the tires. Rather they jumble some numbers around on a spreadsheet. It's an armchair ranking service. They use this armchair ranking approach for hospitals. They use it for colleges. And this year they decided to use it for high schools.

So let me ask a simple question. Suppose you need a critical operation and want to select the best hospital and physician for that operation. Would you trust a ranking of hospitals or physicians from an agency that had never visited those hospitals and never interviewed anyone? It would be absurd to do so. Armchair rankings are worthless. Institutions that make rankings like this and publish them are at best being both irresponsible and lazy.

When you're an armchair ranking service, when you don't go out there and do the real work of assessment, you can make some big mistakes. And boy did US News make a whopper of a mistake this year with their ranking of high schools. It turns out that their number 5 high school this year wasn't actually number 5. There was a data error. It was actually somewhere around number 500.

US News is not a financially healthy magazine. It's owned by an imperious billionaire with a real estate empire, Mort Zuckerman, who bought the magazine partly because US News owns some choice real estate in Washington, DC. US News goes through its Editors like Paris Hilton goes through boyfriends and their current Editor, Brian Kelly, had this to say about their latest gaffe:

"We feel terrible about having gotten it wrong in the first instance. We're in the business of getting these numbers right. It's particularly embarrassing that we're in the business of judging people based on their math scores, and we got our math wrong."

No, US News can't add or subtract very well. They don't do news anymore, either. Their rankings are just amateur armchair things. Why anyone would buy their magazine or believe any of their rankings is a mystery.

Keeping Up With The Curve

I was in Nashville last week pitching and recording. But I was also listening. I'd go out at night and listen to songwriters perform. It's the only way you can keep abreast of changes in country music. And it does change. Like pop music, country is always trying to find new sounds to perk the ears of listeners lest they turn off their radios and just listen to their old Garth Brooks or Johnny Cash CDs.

If you try to keep pace by listening to country radio, you're about one and a half years behind the curve, the time it takes for a song to be written, cut and sent to radio. You have to at least visit Nashville (better yet live there, but that's not for me) if you're going to stand a chance of pitching songs that record labels might be interested in. If they sense that a song is dated they get that look on their face, the why are you making me listen to this dated piece of junk look. Thirty seconds later, the song pops out of their CD player.

There are many people who lament these changes in country music. They want to go back to the times of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and George Jones. Give them a three minute, three chord song about drinking or cheating with a pedal steel or fiddle in the background and they are happy as clams. I happen to like those songs far better than what's on country radio now, too. But the public doesn't. If they played that stuff on the radio, country music would be limited to the South. And the market for country is much bigger than it once was.

It's a national market now. A major country act can sell out a stadium in a place like Philadelphia in a few hours. And like anything that aims for a large market share, it has to cater to a broad taste. What country music has become is music for middle-America Republicans. It's not just for Southerners anymore. It's Red State music.

Country managed to go national by borrowing heavily from 70s rock and pop. Searing rock guitar replaced the pedal steel and fiddle. The themes in the lyrics became a bit more youthful. The songs were still lyric heavy, but the words were designed to appeal to Red Staters with a longing for an idealized and romanticized rural life.

To some degree, the change was facilitated by the collapse of the pop/rock songwriters market in LA in the 1980s. Pop and rock record labels started to write almost all of their songs in house with their singers and producers about twenty years ago. Those LA songwriters no longer had a place for their tunes. Many of them moved to Nashville. And lo and behold, country radio loved the music they created.

Listening to Nashville songwriters last week, I could hear strains of 80s and 90s rock and pop bands. Gradually country music is leaving 70s music behind. And another thing it's gradually leaving behind is the heavy emphasis on lyrics. The words are becoming more and more generic. It used to be that country music was often about finding the simple truths of everyday life. But that type of song is going by the wayside. More and more, the emphasis is on simple words to describe love lost and gained. Some of it sounds an awful lot like the kiddie pop and rock of the 70s and 80s.

Joni Mitchell once said that there is a competition between melody and lyrics. If your lyrics are meaty, you have to give up a little in terms of melody. That's certainly been true traditionally for country music. But now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Nashville is slowly but surely becoming a melody and groove town. Lyrics are taking a back seat. For example here's a chorus from Pat Bunch - a wonderful country lyricist - written back in 1993.

No green eyes, no blue nights
No jealous heart and no little white lies
You showed me what love looks like
I had the colors all wrong, now they're right
No green eyes, no blue nights

There's a little bit of poetry in a nice simple song. In contrast, here's the chorus from a Pat Bunch song that I heard last week:

Ain't nobody ever loved nobody like I do
Ain't nobody ever loved nobody like I love you

It wouldn't work in 1993, but it works fine in today's market.

What makes country music unique? It's true that it's now mostly a rehash of 70s and increasingly 80s pop and rock. But it does differ in the way that early rock and roll differed from rhythm and blues. Elvis was essentially a translator of Sam Cooke. He made black music palatable to a racist audience.

Country today is essentially pop and rock translated. It makes drugs, sex and rock and roll palatable to those who are politically and socially conservative. Instead of some hippie singing, it's some big hunk in a cowboy hat who votes Republican. The song is more or less the same, but it's all about the messenger.

The Authenticity Race, Part II

Several months ago Mike Huckabee was on one of those Sunday morning news programs talking about his candidacy. He seemed like a natural candidate, relaxed, articulate and amiable. The interviewer threw him a few softball questions and Huckabee easily hit them out of the park. After the three minute interview and with Huckabee off the camera (he was being interviewed remotely), the talking heads talked briefly about Huckabee. "Do you think he has a chance?" Someone asked. "There is no way," the host said with a dismissive shake of his head. Then it was off to a commercial.

Mike Huckabee makes a great first impression. He has the gift of gab, a gift honed through many years as a radio personality and preacher, mixed with Southern charm. I've met quite a few Mike Huckabees in my life in business hotel bars in the South. They are pleasant people to share a beer with and talk about sports and the state of the world. I wouldn't want any of them to be President. And I have no interest in Mike Huckabee as President.

It's that ability to make a fabulous first impression that has catapulted Huckabee into the top tier of candidates. Up until this week, the press has been very easy on him. And that combination, pleasant personality and a soft press, has led people to consider Huckabee as "authentic," someone who is genuine and to be trusted.

When asked about his surge in the polls, Huckabee has ascribed it to two things: God and the public viewing him as authentic. Let's keep God out of the polls. I'll buy the second assessment

Americans are suckers for this authenticity factor. I've posted about this before. I've never understood it. Voting on the basis of authenticity is a vote essentially based on first impressions. But we now have two candidates that the public views as authentic, Obama for the Democrats and Huckabee for the Republicans. My guess is that because they have managed to acquire the authenticity crowns for each party, they'll both be in this nomination race until the conventions. They might even end up as the final candidates.

There is a key difference between Obama and Huckabee. Obama has a brain. Huckabee doesn't. It's an odd thing about Republicans nowadays. Brains don't matter. They seem to like dummies with warm personalities. That's how Bush got into office. And that's why we're in the trouble we're in. A President needs to be someone who has some degree of intellectual curiosity and problem solving ability. The Republicans now have two people with neither of these talents in their top tier of candidates, Huckabee and Thompson.

Huckabee is, to the best of my knowledge, the only major candidate who publicly has proclaimed his disbelief in evolution. You have to have a tremendous inability to ignore facts and hold onto your prejudices dearly to be a creationist.

Now that Huckabee is a legitimate candidate, the press has started to take him down. The news keeps coming out that he is more than a bit of an ignoramus. Back in 1992, he seemed not to understand that AIDs was a sexually transmitted disease. Who knows? Maybe he thinks that you can get it from a toilet seat. He doesn't apparently read the news when it comes to foreign policy. And he definitely has homophobia.

I don't think that any of this matters. The public doesn't seem to mind these kind of details. They usually vote on the basis of personality. I have no idea whether Huckabee will win the nomination. But the Republicans have three candidates with brains and some kind of world view in the running. The odds of the Republicans winning the presidency are not good, but at least they could put forth a capable candidate in the main election.

Star Power

A couple of days ago I got a ticket to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. I was in town for recording and pitching. I'd never been to the Opry and the show was being held at the original venue, the Ryman, so I decided what the heck. It was a fun time. I'm not a fan of country music, but I do write the stuff and appreciate the lyric-based nature of many of the songs.

There were about eight acts on the bill and every act got about fifteen minutes. For me, the act that was on for the shortest time was the most impressive, Little Jimmie Dickens. He sang one song, some ditty about mama's biscuits, and told a few corny jokes like this:

At my age you go to the doctor all the time. Last time I went, I was complaining about not being able to hear in my left ear. My doc looked at it and said. "I can see why, Jimmie, you got a suppository inserted there." Then he took it out. "Thanks, Doc," I said. "Now I can hear a lot better. And now I know what I did with my hearing aid."

Jimmie Dickens is over 80 years old and under five feet tall. The guitar he strums - and he can still play it reasonably well - engulfs his small frame. When he walks on stage in his white rhinestone studded suit, you can feel his presence. There was a palpable shift in the crowd as Dickens entertained. It was as if they were under a spell. Even over 80 and with a speech impediment likely caused by stroke, this guy had star power.

I know this is going to sound absurd and pretentious to a lot of people, but watching him, I was reminded of a concert of another diminutive octogenarian that I went to many years ago, a solo recital by the pianist Claudia Arrau. From the second he came on stage at San Francisco's Davies Hall, the crowd and I were mesmerized. It was one of the more memorable concerts I've ever attended. Claudia Arrau had star power.

Where does this magnetism come from? I have no idea. I'm usually a rational person, but when I think of the allure of certain performers, I have to believe that its cause is some magical thing. Some people are gifted with an aura - I have no idea how or why - that audiences can palpably feel. Watching them perform, you just know that there is a star on stage. They don't have to be well known. I remember watching Audra McDonald in her first Broadway role, an ingenue part in a revival of Carousel. She stole the show. She's gone on to win numerous Tony awards, but even back then, you knew she was a star.

Little Jimmie Dickens was on for less than eight minutes. They literally shut off his mic to get him off the stage so that the closing act could get its twenty minutes of Grand Ole Opry fame. I was up close when they shut off his mic. He said to the announcer after the mic was shut off, "I still have more to say." The crowd I'm sure agreed, but business is business. Off he walked.

Jimmie Dickens was followed by an relatively new country band that had a number one hit song last year. The band did its thing and played their hit song along with some new ones from an upcoming album. The singer was solid. His backing musicians were professional through and through. But the magic had left the stage. Star power is a very rare thing.

Love Me I'm A Liberal

My politics have always been on the left. I doubt that will ever change. There have been quite a few public personalities whose politics swung over to the right and far right as of 9/11. For me, 9/11 was not a watershed event. It was inevitable that one day the US would fall prey to terrorism. England, Germany, Italy, Spain - all of Western Europe - had felt the sting decades before. We blithely ignored the threat.

Actually, we didn't completely ignore the threat. We just chose to admit our inability to do anything about it. I remember talking to a former FBI agent who owned a private company in the 1990s dealing with terror deterrence and preparation. One of the things his company did was run mock terrorists attacks on American infrastructure. For example, they put a fake bomb in the DC Metro in a trash can (this was done with Federal funding; it wasn't a rogue act) and made an anonymous phone call tipping Metro authorities. The "bomb" would explode in two hours if no one found it.

The Metro actively seached for the bomb. They never found it. Verdict? Washington D.C.'s Metro was completely unprepared for a terror attack. Solution? Nothing was done to improve preparedness.

For me, 9/11 was an event that I was surprised didn't happen sooner. There are many violent groups of people who hate all of the West. Why wouldn't these nut jobs attack the US someday? And in fact, they had already done so; they detonated a bomb in 1993 at the World Trade Center. At that time, they only killed six and injured 1000. They decided to come back for more. We were sitting ducks. Preparedness is just not something that's in the American ethos.

I was surprised by one thing about 9/11: just how "successful" the terrorists were. I could never imagine that they would have killed so many and destroyed so much. But no, 9/11 didn't change me politically. I still believe that government can do a good job at helping people. I still believe that government regulations do more harm than good. I don't believe that we are taxed too much. If we were taxed more, I believe this country could, if run correctly, benefit.

What has changed is not my view, but the label that I attach to that view. I used to cringe at being called a liberal. Being a liberal in my eyes was a wishy washy thing. It meant that you didn't have any convictions that you held dearly; it was too moderate a label for my liking.

But the conservative movement has over the last twenty years redefined what the term liberal means. It now means that anyone who doesn't believe every part of the conservative litany - taxes are too high, TV and movies have too much sex, there are too many government regulations, there are too many social services, there's not enough money spent money on defense and policing, Christianity is too divorced from government - is a liberal. And since I disagree with every one of those propositions, I'm a definitely a liberal by the contemporary definition.

I don't wince anymore when the label liberal is affixed to me. I oh so want to be part of the group that O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter and all those other obnoxious, ranting loudmouths hate. In the 60s, Phil Ochs wrote a sarcastic song disparaging liberals for not being on the hard left entitled Love Me I'm a Liberal. I'm happy to drop the sarcasm. Love me I'm a liberal.

Turning Israel Into A Campus Pariah

I'm a Zionist. Yes, I know that Israel isn't perfect. Neither is the US. So? They are my countries. And in the balance both nations make me very proud. Yes, I possess dual loyalty. If this makes you uneasy, I understand. It's a bit like being bi-sexual. It's not everyone's cup of tea.

OK, enough joking. In a post last week, I mentioned an Israeli Independence Day celebration on a campus literally surrounded by Arab protesters with placards denouncing Israel's existence. Where did I read about such a thing? I didn't. I actually saw this at Stanford a few years ago. I was deeply saddened. Students proud of Israel could even dance without being taunted.

Israel has become more than a bit of a pariah on many American campuses. It's fashionable and acceptable to be an Israel basher. I'm going to take a rough stab at how this came to be.

First, I'd like to note that the hard left is as crazy as the hard right. Through the 30s, 40s and even a bit into the 50s, a good portion of the hard left idolized Stalin. It was nuts. The man killed tens of millions of his own people. What exactly was there to revere about this man? Then in the 1960s the hard left idolized the petty dictator Castro.

The hard left is easily duped. All you need to do is make claims that you are tearing down the hegemony of the wealthy or fighting a colonial power and voila, you have an instant legion of fans blind to your own excesses.

So it isn't hard to figure out where the hard left is going to line up on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Israel is the colonial power. Palestine is the oppressed nation. It's politics at its cookie cutter worst. As usual, the hard left is about as nuanced in its opinions as an atom bomb. Israel is evil. The Palestinians are angels. And if you read some of the crap out there, you can even find some of the hard left finding justification in the most atrocious of acts, suicide bombing of civilians. You see, what other recourse do those poor Palestinians have?

If the people who attempt to justify the morality of such actions were to walk into an Israeli restaurant filled with dead bodies and shrapnel after a suicide attack, the reality of the situation just might turn them sane. But no, they are far away from the carnage. It's apparently easy to pontificate about the Middle East and the evils of Israel when you have never been there and have never witnessed war.

And where are these people espousing the evils of Israel located? Some of them are on American campuses. The humanities are dominated by left leaning politics, some of it on the hard left. It's not surprising that Israel has become a frequent punching bag with humanities faculty.

Israel bashing is fashionable on campuses. No it isn't anti-Semitic. What it is instead is another example of hard left lunacy. You have a group of people predisposed to simplifying any conflict into a battle between the oppressor and the oppressed. It's all black and white in these extremist's eyes. In some ways, the evilness of Israel is enhanced by its Jewishness, but not in the traditional way of anti-Semitism. Rather, it's the European origins of a good deal of Israeli leadership and citizenry that allows Israel to be lumped in with all the other white European oppressors that have been hated by the hard left.

What's curious is that Israel bashing is allowed to thrive on campuses. No one seems to object. Part of the reason for this is that the humanities don't amount to much on campuses today. The faculty in the humanities at major universities are almost always second class citizens. Students hardly major in their departments. They are generally paid less than their counterparts in the social sciences and the sciences. Ultimately, hardly anyone really cares about what they think or say. They are a non-entity.

But there's another aspect of the open hostility toward Israel that is interesting to me that is more directly about Jewishness. At a typical major university or college about fifteen to thirty percent of the faculty are Jewish. Some of those professors end up in positions of leadership. And there's a curious thing about those leaders on campuses of today. The ones that are older than me tend to be deeply embarrassed by their Jewish roots.

I don't know why, but the generation of American Jews before mine commonly possesses a pervasive sense of shame and a wish to forget about their Jewishness. They've Anglicized their last names if their parents didn't do so already. They don't attend synagogue. They purposely marry outside the faith and it's a cliche that their search for love is restricted to the fairest of skin and hair.

Put a cliche character like this in a position of leadership on campus and they will be unable and unwilling to confront any problem on campus related to Jewish issues. You could write up a psychological profile of people like this I suppose. I'll leave pop psychology to others. I've only observed this phenomenon. I can't say why it happens.

For example, one year when I was a professor my dean retired. They decided to hold a big retirement bash for him on the first day of Passover. It was absurd. No practicing Jew, including me, could possibly attend this party. As far as I know, I was the only person who raised an objection. The campus leaders didn't say boo. Instead, all but one happily attended. One of the leaders who was Jewish even emceed the event. So much for sensitivity to diversity.

In this kind of environment, Israel bashers have a free pass. Critical thinking about the Middle East conflict is happily ignored. Mix hard left faculty with self loathing Jewish campus leaders and you have a perfect recipe for making Israel into a campus pariah.