An Open Letter to Kentucky *

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Dear Kentucky,

Jim Bunning was a good, and sometimes excellent, pitcher back in the day. He threw a couple of no-hitters, (one in each league), and tossed a perfect game on Fathers’ Day in 1964. When the Tigers brought him to the Bigs in 1955 they said he had “an excellent curve ball, a confusing delivery, and a sneaky fast ball.” He was elected into the Hall of Fame by the Veteran’s Committee in 1996.



I remember Jim Bunning from my days in Delaware. My father was a big Phillies fan and I heard for years about Bunning’s Fathers’ Day perfect game. It meant a lot to my dad because he had just become a father for the first time three days before Bunning’s feat and he posited some sort of connection between Bunning and the birth of my older brother, Jerry.
I wish Jim Bunning lived in my mind as a childhood memory that could make my dad smile.

Sadly, life went on for Mr. Bunning and shortly after retiring from professional baseball he went back to Kentucky and parlayed his fame into a career in politics. His career in politics has taken him to the United States Senate, where he has done…nothing. Time magazine has called him one of America’s “Five Worst Senators.” He skipped 21 floor votes in December 2009 alone, including the Senate’s Christmas Eve vote on Health Care reform. (Just as a point of reference, the 92-year old, sickly Senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, missed fewer votes that month.)

In his 2004 bid for re-election to the Senate Bunning’s behavior was erratic and led the National Republican Party to withdraw support for a run in 2010. Bill Clinton once described Jim Bunning as “so mean-spirited that he repulsed even his fellow know-nothings.”



Ticking off the people whose support he needs seems to be a pattern for Senator Bunning. According to Clay Dalrymple, Phillies catcher through the 1960s, Bunning would routinely shake off catchers' pitch signs that he knew to be signaled into the game from the dugout by Manager Gene Mauch. As you might surmise, this did not sit well with the manager.

Now, without the support of his own party and having already decided not to run for re-election in 2010, Jim Bunning has nothing to lose. Apparently, he has decided to just let it all hang out and be who he really is. Against his party leadership’s wishes, Bunning has decided to block a bill that would extend eligibility for enhanced unemployment benefits and subsidized health insurance for laid-off workers by 30 days. He is also holding up a stop-gap 30 day extension for several other expiring laws, including funding for highway projects that employed 2000 people until Monday, improved Medicare reimbursement rates (known as "doc fix"), flood insurance, and licensing that allows satellite TV providers to carry local channels in rural areas where they are unavailable with an antenna.

I know that you, the people of Kentucky, have chosen Jim Bunning to be one of your two Senators and part of me believes that you deserve the representative you choose, but now that we are all stuck dealing with the tantrums and venom of this bitter old man I can’t help but wish he had gotten into the broadcast booth or the coach’s box instead of the Senate. Do you think maybe you can talk him down and find something to keep Senator Bunning off the floor while the rest of the Senators try to take care of business? We would all appreciate that.

Oh, and Kentucky, please try a little harder next time. Thanks

Sincerely,

The Rest of Us





*Much of the information in this letter was obtained from the “Jim Bunning” entry on Wikipedia.

Words I Love To Say Out Loud

I am sitting at my daughter's Friday night gymnastics class, thinking about words. For no reason at all, here is a list of 78 words I really enjoy saying out loud. Do me a favor? As you read the list, say them aloud. Then add a comment with a word or two that YOU like to say.

Abergavenny

Aberystwyth

Avoirdupois

Behoove

Blagojevich

Boisterous

Cotillion

Chitzen Itza

Clump

Defenestrate

Doofus

Drabble

Elephantine

Erg

Exigencies

Fallacious (just ‘cause it sounds dirty)

Glutinous

Grandiose

Grunt

Hoi poloi

Hornswaggled

Hue

Ibb

Injudicious

Iteration

Jacobin

Japonica

Jiggle

Kipper

Kinesthetic

Klaxon

Lachrymiform

Libidinous

Lipid

Macrophage

Massapequa

Moile

Nascent

Niggling

Noisome

Oast

Oblation

Oracular

Penumbral

Phylogenetic

Plebiscite

Quark

Quartz

Quotidian

Ralph

Regulus

Rhomboid

Sacerdotal

Schenectady

Sibilant

Tachometer

Talus

Titular

Umbrage

Urdu

Uvula

Valparaiso

Vitiate

Void

Whelp

Whinging

Wizened

Xebec

Xenophobe

Xylem

Ya-hoo (must be spoken with a long A sound)

Yaw

Yurt

Zaftig

Zuppa

Zygosis

Leaving Las Vegas

Q. How are the movie Avatar and the city of Las Vegas the same?

A. Both make me feel like crap.

Don’t get me wrong—as a movie, I thought Avatar was excellent. The underlying story is an old one about an underequipped, overpowered people taking on and defeating a much larger, much stronger enemy. It was Rocky and the Maccabees and the USA Olympic hockey team from 1980 all rolled into one. James Cameron took a tried-and-true winner of a story line and spent $500 million to make it visually stunning as well. The film worked for me on every level. It was gripping—as I watched it the world went away, replaced by a distant moon of a distant planet and a struggle for the very soul of the world. It chewed me up and spit me out a few hours later with tears in my eyes…

…And an unsettled feeling I couldn’t quite make sense of.

And now, two weeks later, here is that feeling again. It hit me in the first few hours in Vegas. We landed at midnight and took a taxi to the hotel, driving down the Strip that was lit up like daylight and crawling with thousands of people on a Thursday night.

The next morning I took my daughter, Isabel, out into the town. We were at the Riviera, on the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard, and we got on the bus and went to Mandalay Bay, a few miles to the south. We then went to the aquarium and walked through several of the newer and larger casino complexes. The scope of the places was amazing. Many of the newest casino resorts in Las Vegas cost over $1 billion to create. Many of the buildings are spectacular—or at least aspire to spectacular-ness. The scale of things is just enormous. The buildings are huge, the appointments are luxurious, the shows are awesome. It is a city of superlatives.

And yet, as I left on an early morning flight yesterday, I had the same empty, guilty feeling I had after watching Avatar. I think I know what is at the root of this reaction. Both the city of Las Vegas and the movie Avatar have been “built” using vast amounts of resources. And the money laid out for them was spent, in the end, for one purpose: to make money by entertaining me. These edifices were constructed to give me a few hours or a few days of entertainment. And that knowledge makes me feel like crap. Ten percent of adult Americans who want work can’t find it. A hundred and fifty thousand Haitians died in the earthquake and now more are dying due to lack of medical care. Millions die every year because they can’t get clean water to drink.

I am not so naïve to think that life and the world are a zero-sum game, with every dollar spent making (or watching) a movie or building (or gambling in) a casino translating into a dollar taken away from the needy of the world. I know it is far more complex than that. But it is my brain that knows this fact.

My heart, on the other hand, is simple and my heart is dumb and it feels sad and guilty and dirty and wrong for enjoying things like Avatar and Las Vegas.

Ali Abdullah Saleh

Have you ever heard of Ali Abdullah Saleh? If not, I imagine you will within the next few months. Mr. Saleh has the bad misfortune to be the President of Yemen and I would bet even money that he will be the target of an assassination attempt before the summer sun hits Sana’a. Mr. Saleh finds himself stuck between the wishes of the United States and the ire of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He has some company in his cramped little space—Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has been in there for a while now.

Ali Abdullah Saleh was also the President of Yemen back in 1987, when I first got there as a Peace Corps volunteer fresh out of college. At the time, Yemen was divided into North Yemen and South Yemen, which was a client state of the Soviet Union. Since then, President Saleh has negotiated the reunification of the two Yemens and held onto power in spite of a secessionist movement in the south and tribal unrest (propped up by Saudi Arabia) in the north. He has proven himself to be an able politician.

Yet I say again, I have strong doubts Ali Abdullah Saleh will be alive come August.

I bring this up not to get my prognostication out in public, but rather in service of a larger point. When I lived in Yemen from 1987 to 1989, almost every person I met there, from the taxi drivers in the capital to the store clerk in Hodeidah to the dirt-poor farmer in the mountaintop villages, was able to identify George Herbert Walker Bush as President of the United States. Yet, none of my close friends or family members back in the United States had any idea where Yemen even was, let alone who their President might be.

The imbalance of power struck me powerfully, even then as a 21-year old who knew next-to-nothing about the world. The uneducated 35-year old farmer who had never left his mountain HAD to know who George Bush was because decisions made by George Bush affected that farmer directly. My mom did not have to know who Ali Abdullah Saleh was because decisions made in Sana’a by President Saleh did not seem to have any effect on her.

Yet, it turns out some of his decisions DID have an effect on my mom--as well as on every other American. And now we do what it seems we have to do each time there is a crisis in a new hot spot—we as a nation have to scramble to make sense of a seemingly-impenetrable situation in a place we know next-to-nothing about. When will we learn?

Slip Slidin' Away

“I know a man,

He came from my hometown.

He wore his passion for his woman like a thorny crown…”

Not the words to any lullaby you were raised with, are they? Me either. But for at least five years now this song has unfailingly gotten my daughter to fall asleep when nothing else would work.

My wife complains about how unfair it is that I can basically fall asleep whenever I want to. We will be talking in bed and at some point I will get tired enough and I will say, “I am going to sleep now.” And I do. Usually within two minutes of deciding to do so. She, on the other hand, needs to read a book or work on logic problems before she is able to set her day behind her and fall asleep.

Sadly, my daughter takes after her mother when it comes to falling asleep. The nightly process much more closely resembles some form of hand-to-hand combat between “awake” and “asleep” than an easy letting go for my poor girl. She has not yet read Dylan Thomas’s poetry, but it would not surprise me if his words strike a chord with her when she discovers him:

“Do not go gentle into that good night…”

I know Thomas’s words were about more than sleep. And as I sing Paul Simon’s words to “Slip Slidin’ Away” lately, they more often than not bring me to silent tears. I chose the song originally because I knew the words and it fit my limited range. I also liked the layer of meaning that using the song as a lullaby imparted to the lyrics. I truly wanted Isabel to slip slide off to sleep.

But now that she is almost ten and starting to develop more teenager-y tastes, I know that she is not always going to want me to lie down next to her and sing her a song to help her get to sleep. It is only a matter of time before she plugs in her earbuds and lets the Apple Corporation lull her to sleep. My time as her lullaby-singer is slip slidin’ away, too. Hell, she doesn’t know it yet, but SHE is slip slidin’ away from me—just like she is supposed to, I guess.

And on especially maudlin nights, as I finish up the last fading away lines of the song, I allow myself to look at the facts of the situation: Not only is Isabel sliding out of her childhood and away from me, but I am doing a little bit of slip slidin’ myself.

“Believe we’re gliding down the highway when in fact we’re slip slidin’ away…”

(Listen to the song.)