Life, love, lust and lunacies from the Sage of Topanga

We calculate time by different methods, beyond the persistent ticking of a clock. Some measure it by seasons, when autumn leaves turn to rainbows and fall from the trees; some by the growth of their children with height marks that rise steadily up a kitchen wall; and some by the longevity of their favorite jeans.

I see time’s relentless passage in the dying of my Levis 540, whose condition of disrepair has surpassed even the studied rips of designer jeans that lure the rich to downward chic wearing $22,000 diamond encrusted watches and walking around in $800 shoes.

I do not pretend that the condition of my Levis represents a designer’s skill. They are simply, as I am, tattered beyond repair, weary of the life that has taken them across the continent and to places in the world that few jeans ever see, even those that cover some of the cutest behinds in Hollywood. They were my traveling pants.

Stone-washed and softened by time, the denims were molded to my body with the warm tenderness of a woman’s embrace. They do not squeeze, they do not sag, but perfectly conform to the physiology that is me, for better or for worse. I feel good in them.

But the time has come, as my observant Cinelli has pointed out, for me to bury my pants. They are a decade old and beyond repair.
“Look at you,” she said the last time I wore them, “rips in your knees, rips in your thighs rips in your butt and a potential rip very near your…”

“You can patch them for me!” I cried.

“They’re beyond patching, stitching, gluing or any other form of adherence,” she replied. “They are dead. Bury them, Elmer.” She calls me that because I often mumble, leading telephone callers to believe that I am saying my name is Elmer Teenez. She thinks it amusing.

“I don’t have the heart to dispose of them,” I said. “Will you do it for me?”

“I’ll throw them in the garbage,” she said, “but I’m not digging a burial hole.”

“The garbage? Must you?”

” Take ‘em off, Elmer, I’ll get rid of them in a respectful manner.” She smiled impishly.

I slipped them off and handed them to her, attempting to look solemn in my baggy Boxer shorts.

“Even your underwear is ragged,” she said. “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing very interesting, but I’m not removing them in any case.”

She winked and went off with the Levis. I felt like David Caruso in an episode of “CSI Miami,” trying not to cry while watching them carry off a dead partner, taking my sun glasses off and on, and then off again in an acting class gesture of quiet despair.

I didn’t attend the disposal of my 540s, but trusted Cinelli to say a few last words over their inert and ragged remains. Dead jeans, like dead shoes, require solemn rituals of departure from those who loved them, or at least tolerated them.

As far as I could determine, they don’t make 540s anymore. I couldn’t find them at Sears, where they carry a large supply of Levis, and couldn’t reach anyone at Levis Strauss world headquarters in San Francisco who knew anything. When I told the person who answered the phone what I wanted in precise and simple terms, she replied, “Could you be more specific?”

I ended up buying two pairs of Levis 510 for $40 each. They’re white with buttoned flies. Or flys. I don’t know which is correct when it comes to the plural of the fly in my pants. I’m not even sure I like a buttoned fly but the lady who alters my clothes assured me that the buttons could be replaced with a zipper if I so desired, adding, “but it’s a pretty big deal,” meaning it will cost me. Altering a fly is apparently labor-intensive.

Even if I look a little dilettantish in my white jeans, I’ll get used to them, I guess, but I’ll always miss my recently departed 540s. Time is neutral in its erosion of men and mountains, and now it has taken my pants. Requiescat in pace, 540s.

It is 5 o’clock in the morning and there is a deep stillness over the mountains of Topanga. No coyotes wail or owls hoot. The small animals that own the night, the ones that scurry in the bushes beyond sight, have gone to their lairs. Soon we will begin to hear the low hum of commute traffic building on the boulevard in the canyon below, the early risers who will lead a parade of cars and trucks into the Westside or downtown or north toward the Valley.

But for now I am pretty much alone with my thoughts, and I am thinking of Peter Dennis, a good friend for 22 years who, during the course of our friendship, showed me how to laugh, how to remember and, at the end, how to die. I have thought often of him from the first time we met, glowing with life and excitement, to the last time I saw him near the end of his three-year fight against cancer, his hair gone, his complexion ashen, his voice a weakened whisper. Here was a gentle and loving man slowly disappearing from the life he loved so much, lost to us not by the diminishment of his soul but by the vulnerability of his body at age 75.

For more than 30 years Peter had been the stage voice of A.A. Milne’s stories of Winnie the Pooh and the other whimsical creatures of the “100 Aker Wood,” not just relating their adventures but creating their lives through the voices he gave them: the squeaking of little Roo to the snorting of Piglet to the dour, baleful observations of the donkey Eeyore. Sitting alone on stage, looking a bit like everyone’s favorite uncle, he was the gentle guide of a child’s imagination, taking us back to a sweeter time in our lives when we too walked the trails of the woods with Christopher Robin, past the trap for the heffalumps and the place where the woozle wasn’t.

Pooh wasn’t just for kids. Peter read from Milne’s works at gatherings of friends that celebrated the little bear’s “birthday” and once read for the 90th birthday party of my mother-in-law, Betty Lello, who sat with tears in her eyes listening to him re-create the stories she had once read to school children during years as a teacher. Winnie the Pooh was for everyone.

Peter never gave up on life. Just a few days from death, he could still smile and even laugh softly as he listened to friends and relatives tell stories of his triumphs and antics, his goodness and his caring at a living memorial given by his wife of 30 years, Diane Mercer, in their Shadow Hills home. I see him wrapped in a white robe that concealed a mid-section bloated by a rare form of cancer that defeated his best efforts to survive. When he accepted his fate, a new tranquility seemed to settle in, allowing him at the end to slip gracefully into his dreams.

We met in 1987 when I attended the performance of his one-man show “Bother!” at the Coronet Theater in West Hollywood. I learned later that he and Diane lived in the Canyon. I was both touched and intrigued by his passion for Milne’s stories, which he had discovered in 1976 as a drama student in his native England. He became Pooh’s voice in Britain and then in the U.S. 10 years later, performing in theaters, festivals and universities on two continents, reminding us all that there is still a place for us in the enchanted forests of our imagination.

Peter and Diane moved to Southern California in 1991 and became naturalized American citizens in 2005, celebrating in their Shadow Hills homes with many of the same friends who would attend his living memorial four years later. Peter’s acting career expanded beyond stories of Winnie the Pooh to roles in film and television, but it was his magical rendition of the endearing friends of Christopher Robin for which he will be remembered.

“Pooh is my life,” he once said to me, “and he’s in other people’s lives too. There’s a great commonality to him. There’s so much caring.”

In addition to his wife Diane, Peter is survived by his brother Michael Dennis of Kent, England, by a sister Dorothy Barker of Auckland, New Zealand…and by his many friends in the 100 Aker Wood.

I was flipping through an AARP Magazine the other day when I was stopped by a full-page ad that featured the photograph of a man who appeared to be licking the neck of his giddy female companion. An overline in red said, “Sex. It’s Never Too Late to Learn Something New.”

I turned the pages back to the cover to be certain I was looking at a magazine for pleasant old people and not some erotic journal that catered to the terminally horny, which is to say guys who walk around with their flies half zippered and women who just recently discovered the visual qualities of their mammary glands.

What intrigued me about the ad, in addition to the guy licking the woman’s neck, is that it was selling videos featuring 26 sexual positions demonstrated by “real people,” which I guess would exclude actors, in scenes that “leave nothing to the imagination.”

Wow.

“What’re you looking at?” my wife Cinelli said walking unexpectedly into the room.

I turned the page quickly and said, “Oh, a piece on some, uh, educational forums being offered in San Antonio.” It was on the back side of the sex ad page.

“You’re going to Texas?” she asked.

“Well, no, not right away but you never know.”

“Are you sweating?”

“No, I mean, yes, I don’t know why.”

“Does reading about Texas make you nervous?”

I couldn’t think of a good answer so she just shrugged and left the room, leaving me to ponder the 26 positions.

I can recall maybe two or three I’ve known about. The rest, I guess, hadn’t been invented during the time of my intense interest. They were probably still in the hypothetical stage in a dingy Berkley lab where the sex microbe was first isolated in 1962 by an unfrocked U.C. professor who specialized in female reproductive organs.

The AARP is generally oriented toward people over 50 and the idea that oldsters might try a position that requires athletic skills they no longer possess is frightening. A man of 80, for instance, attempting a particularly difficult position runs the risk of falling off his partner and breaking a hip, or, even more humiliating, suffering a muscle cramp and not being able to climb off without assistance. I can hear him cry, “Help, I’m on my girlfriend and can’t get off!”

Unwilling to buy the videos, I am left to my own erotic fantasies to imagine what the 26 positions must be like. I envision Number 8, for instance, to be the Bat Position, involving a man and woman doing it while dressed in black and hanging upside down from the ceiling flapping their arms. Eating insects and mice would be optional.

Number 14 might be the Bicycle Position, during which both participants pump their legs wildly while shouting French obscenities, fantasy-playing that they’re competing in the Tour de France. This requires a high degree of coordination to prevent legs from becoming entangled and collisions occurring.

For advanced couples, there is Position Number 21 that requires the presence not only of the primary duo, but also of a steel worker, two nuns, three dancers and a duck. One of the nuns drops into a fetal position, the duck is tossed into the air and…

“So that’s why you were sweating.”

Oh, oh.

Cinelli had wandered into the room again and was glancing at the ad next to me on the desk. “’Better Sex for a Lifetime,’” she read aloud. “’A visual encyclopedia of stimulating sexual fun!’” She turned to me: “Taking a little trip down memory lane are we?” then whispered, “Just don’t expect me to do it under water. You can’t hold your breath that long. Maybe while space jumping? Or spelunking in the Grand Canyon? I’ll think about it.” She winked and left the room.

I can visualize all kinds of possibilities, some of which would be outlawed in the Bible Belt but not in New York or California where whimsical notions of new wave sexual behavior continue to be explored. Just recently, a supermarket tabloid reported that Lindsay Lohan and an unidentified male companion were arrested while naked and engaging in erotic activity in the middle of the Hollywood Freeway. They were cited for creating a traffic hazard and sentenced to 30 days of community service in a shop that sold adult toys.

Sex is dirty, as Woody Allen once remarked, only if it’s done right. I see nothing wrong with two lonely, and possibly sleazy, old people getting together for consensual pleasures while watching a how-to video. One often finds want ads in many of the dirtier senior journals such as, “Wanted, filthy woman over 50 to enjoy grubby sex with a retired CPA from Wisconsin.”

What I can’t quite visualize, even with my distorted sense of wonder, is what Position Number 26 might entail being the Ultimate Entanglement of two people in heat. I hope that it has something to do with clowns and tumblers and perhaps balloons for the grandchildren, so that even if it doesn’t work out it can at least be fun.

It makes me sweat just thinking about it.

(Editor’s Note: The vibrant and talented Cinelli offers words on the buoyancy of spring.)

The older I get, the more important the simple things in life become. Like, it’s a good day when I can climb the stairs to our second story bedroom in under half a minute and it’s a real victory when I remember what day it is. For example: today is Tuesday the 14th of April and not only did I remember it but I’m content because it falls at the apex of spring. It’s going to be a great day for anyone who enjoys simple things Like spring.

It depends on the weather. In this universe, everyone is concerned with weather. Some like sun, others rain, and I know a few skiers who adore snow. I am partial to total weather patterns. Sun part of the time, rain occasionally, a smattering of fog on crisp fall mornings and short patches of snow that produce a white crown to the distant mountains.

I do have a personal attachment to one aspect of the outdoor environment which fills my inner self with joy. What I look for to satisfy the weather atoms that circulate inside my brain is a perfect spring day. Unfortunately, April 14 isn’t that perfect day, yet. A little too gray and a little too cold, but I haven’t given up. Occasionally the sun bursts through the haze and sends its rays into the corners of the yard where leaves are straining to grow beyond their small beginnings and buds are swelling in preparation for birth.

I believe that spring owes me a day or two that fall into the category of so gentle, so sweet, so inviting that only a hardened criminal intent on hatching up schemes to rob us of our hard won two cents hidden in a bottom drawer would consider staying inside the house. When the world is blessed with a perfect spring day there is absolutely nothing, and I do mean nothing, that can match it. Oh yes, a cool margarita on a warm summer evening, sipped while enjoying the company of good friends watching a glowing sunset, is close.

Actually, I recant. The perfect day is without parallel. This forever harrowing world doesn’t offer a lot that is perfect. Consider the evening news. “Let’s see what happened today,” the man of the house says as the hour comes up to eleven p.m. “I need to know what’s going on in this town.” “Welllll,” I respond, “okay.” Three murders and a car chase later, I declare a determination to go to bed. This is news? This is reality beyond reality. Truly, not what I seek.

I need the perfect spring day to bring my soul back to normal and to reassure myself that even in the midst of chaos there is still a place for tranquility. This is my right. I’m not sure what passes for perfection in other areas of our great blue orb, but my goal is not to understand how others look at total satisfaction but to revel in the moments that are my absolute ideal. I demand the seconds that exist in spring when everything is in an arena of what life should be.

This is my right of spring.

I can appreciate the joys of a fireplace and hot cider on a cold winter day, and the healing balm of a fall rain and lolling on the pristine beaches of L.A. in the midst of a summer heat wave, but I declare my right of spring to have days that lure one outside to prune a few bushes, pull a few weeds and smell the rich soil as it is turned in my hands. I doubt I could pass a law that would make shimmering spring days a legal obligation in the hands of the weather producers but if I could that would be my goal. Not too many beautiful days, mind you. Just enough. They need to be rare to be appreciated

So if one of those unique moments arrive when all seems to be in perfect harmony and the earth is calling your name, go outside, pick a flower, take a walk, say hello to a neighbor, feel the sun in your face and remember that there are reasons to continue having the belief that this mess of a world we live in has enough in it to make it all worthwhile.

(jomtz@charter.net)

   It is a day of unrelenting light in Southern California, a moment in the burgeoning spring that forces the sun into every crevice of one’s life, whether he wants it or not. I am writing in our gazebo where diagonals of light trace criss-cross patterns on the tiled floor, and the warmth on my back offers relief from autumn’s chill.

   Given all of that, it is not a happy time for me. I am saying goodbye to the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Tucson Citizen and, perhaps, to all of print journalism. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye and goodbye. Newspapers that I have never read or don’t know about, strangled into silence by the foundering economy, have shut down and others, like the San Francisco Chronicle, may soon turn off the lights in their news rooms.

   Some have fled into digital journalism, struggling to survive in an arena that requires a new way of thinking, blasting news, as it were, into cyberspace and hoping that the next generation of readers will be willing to abandon coffee and the morning paper for flashes of information on a computer screen.

   I hope nothing but the best for those who rush into the new era, including the newspaper I recently left, the venerable Los Angeles Times, but Like many older readers, if the day ever comes when daily newspapers no longer fill the street corner racks or thump on my doorstep in the morning, I will be even more disconnected from this world than I already am.

   I fell in love with newspapering in high school, and when I was hired by the 30,000-circulation Richmond Independent in 1952 I felt that my life had begun. They were the glory days. Newspapers were the primary source of information, straddling an era characterized by plays like “The Front Page,” with its lunatic take on the boozy, low-paying kind of journalism that existed in the ‘30s, and “Foreign Correspondent,” idealizing the dedicated war correspondent who would risk his life to bring us the news during World War II. We were a combination of Ernie Pyle and a Broadway drunk.

   Reminiscing, I can still hear the clickety-clacking of linotype machines, the endless chatter of wire service equipment, the drone of police radio monitors that no one listened to but everyone heard, shouts of “copy boy!” and telephones that never stopped ringing.  We used our typewriters like weapons, slamming the carriage to reload the sentences, charging past deadlines with breathless dedication, feeling very much like the world was waiting for what we were writing, and maybe it was.

   Eras end, sometimes too quietly to be noticed. The economics of journalism were altering the landscape. As the cost of newsprint rose and unions demanded better wages, Hearst’s Oakland Post Enquirer folded, and across the bay the News followed soon thereafter; then the Call and the Bulletin merged, and died. Only the Chronicle and the Examiner survived, at war with each other, and very shortly thereafter the Examiner went down.

   Television news began assuming greater importance as the 1960s exploded into riots and mass protests, bringing instantaneous images to the screen that categorized a culture in transition. We saw satellites circling the Earth, mushroom clouds rising against dark horizons of the Cold War and a fury on the streets unlike any we had ever seen, demanding a new day for the people’s republic of Amerika.

   In so many ways it was the beginning of the end for print journalism and for the joyous clash of professionalism and party time. The Knowland-owned Oakland Tribune, an afternoon daily, was trimming its staff, cutting expenses and dropping suburban sections. The warm embrace of the family daily had turned suddenly icy.

   The L.A. Times I joined in 1972 maintained a little of the rollicking flavor of old newspapering, but eventually rose to a new standard of professionalism under Otis Chandler. Drunks weren’t tolerated anymore, smoking wasn’t allowed in the building and the approach to news gathering and reporting was less haphazard. But it was still the same game in so many ways, the deadlines, the breaking news, the front page felonies, the governmental debacles, the liars, the crooks, the bylines and the banner headlines.

   Now a new age of Americans is turning away from us to begin receiving in online snippets the only news it cares about. So here we are, saying goodbye to all those print journals and preparing to say goodbye to others.  A company that specializes in distressed products just bought the San Diego Union-Tribune and it wouldn’t surprise me to see its name on the masthead— The San Diego Platinum Equity Union-Tribune—the way ballparks bear the names of the companies that own them. Is that how print journalism will end up, pimping for dollars?

   I lived through newspapering’s best era, when we were a band of brothers in a job that was both demanding and fulfilling, respected and condemned, and always vital to the free flow of information. But things change. Continents move, oceans dry up and mountains erode. What newspapering will become will be determined by the shifting notions of a new culture. But the way we were was special. We were the sons and daughters of a trade that flashed and burned brightly for two centuries, and we never forgot our responsibilities.

   Remember us when you’re sipping coffee at a laptop and wondering what in the hell you’re going to wrap fish in now.

   So I’m tooling up I-5 doing 70 in the slow lane from L.A. to my spiritual home, which is San Francisco, listening to Elton John doing B-B-B-Benny and the jets when I hear a horn beep-beeping in that very same rhythm.

   I say to myself that it’s one of God’s coincidences, relying on my scant knowledge of God to accept whatever I don’t understand as one of his miracles. It is my Catholic upbringing. But then it happens again and by that time John has moved on to another tune and there’s no reason for the All Mighty to beep in rhythm that way.

   I look around to see why someone would be honking at me when I notice that the guy in a car in front of me is giving me the finger for no apparent reason. There are a few out there within my sphere of influence who don’t like me, I’ll admit, but they do not usually throw me the bird on the freeway.

   A car passes and the woman inside waves. In fact, the whole family waves, mom, pop, Uncle Leo and the twins. I smile and wave back. I don’t know who they are but they seem nice enough and think they know me.

   I am confused why in relatively the same short expanse I am first given the finger and then honked and waved at when I hear beep, beep, beep, beep again, exactly four times. By now I have turned off the CD player and try to figure out who’s honking at me. And then I realize. It’s me.

   I have no idea why I would be honking at me, but it is something over which I have no control. My car, a reliable 2008 Camry Hybrid, is doing the honking. Like Hal in the movie “2001” it has assumed a life of its own. I keep driving hoping it’s not a case of demonic possession. I have heard about such cases but they have mostly been in Fords and Chevys.

   I don’t know what to do so I don’t do anything. Then I figure maybe the horn is stuck and needs to be rebooted as they say, so I push at it manually. It honks just fine but then an angry woman thinks I am honking at her and glares. She is driving a new, pineapple gold Mercedes and will not allow anything less than say a BMW to honk her way. I have offended her sense of placement and nod my head in apology. She shoots on by.

   I have Blue Tooth technology, which is a strange name for a communications system, but crazy or not I use it to call my mechanic. He has taken care of my cars for 25 years but won’t touch anything that has to do with telemetry, he says, in a voice that clearly indicates I am annoying him. You need expensive, high tech equipment to fool with car computers and he doesn’t charge me enough to buy one.

   OK, I say, I’m sorry to have bothered you. Next time I come in you can charge me extra.

   The car continues to beep four times and I begin to realize that it does that every time I hit a bump; not just any bump but a certain kind of bump. Like a scientist studying the evolution of a worm, I prove my hypothesis by connecting the beep to the bump for the next 150 miles; bump/beep, bump/beep, as regular as a metronome.

   No question that it’s a bump that does it, but I still don’t know what kind of bump. After another hundred miles of beeping I don’t care. I am embarrassed even more than I am when I have more than two martinis and trip over a table that knocks over a lamp and sends me sprawling over the hors d’oeuvres. It beeps when I stop for lunch and beeps as I pull into a service station for gasoline. I smile wanly and shrug. The looks that I receive range from fear to sympathy, with maybe a little homicidal rage thrown in.

   I finally reach San Francisco, get to a mechanic by beeping into the Van Ness District and he says it’s not a Toyota part that has gone wrong, it’s a part from another company that has been installed. I have to call the manufacturer. He sees the crestfallen look on my face and says oh, hell, I’ll just turn it off, and he does. We kiss.

   No, actually, we don’t kiss because I don’t do that with men, but I am grateful and touch his arm. That’s as far as I’ll go. He has in effect disarmed the security system that beeps and blares when someone I don’t know touches the car at night, which is OK with me. I know it is disabled because a red dashboard light that has been on suddenly ticks off, like the last blink of a dying man.

   We have killed my security guard, but as George Bush might say it was necessary to maintain life in America as we know it. May it rest in peace, and in silence.

   A friend who lost his job in a newspaper washout some time ago said it made him feel alone and isolated in the city.

   He was describing the intense feelings of rejection that accompany sudden unemployment. He was talking about the loneliness that an outcast feels.
 
  I know that feeling.

   I became like him on January 19th, my last day as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. It was the first time in a journalism career spanning more than half a century that I had been without a job. I joined 11 million others in America wandering Lonesome City like soldiers of a defeated army coming home to silence. No drums, no bugles, no crowds.

   We occupy a landscape of spiritual desolation, and if that sounds excessive, you’ve never been there. As a child of the 1930s depression, when 25% of the workforce was on its ass, I saw our family break up from the pressures of need, and I saw a step-father turn brutal when his role as a provider failed. Whiskey became his only route to a parallel reality that offered if not peace at least oblivion. Rage was the mood of the day.

   Even as a child I felt somehow abandoned, isolated by hunger, condemned by the crowds. It didn’t matter that there were many enduring the same bleak existence, and it doesn’t matter now. Failure, like death, is a walk we take alone.

   Memories of those days without food or hope have haunted me since childhood, firing an almost abnormal instinct to provide for my family. It wasn’t enough to work a day job on a newspaper; I had to stay up half the night writing for magazines too and then for television. I turned to writing books along with everything else and still wasn’t satisfied.

   I’ve never been sure if I did all of that for the love of writing or for the fear of failure, a condition heightened by the need never to return to my step-father’s world.

   But then here I am.

   We’re not in any kind of need. That’s not what I mean. And I’m not without family and friends. I’m talking about the icy chill of loneliness I’ve begun to experience in a culture that seems to be bustling on by, leaving me as more spectator than participant. I’m talking about the sudden need to put on a coat and tie and just go someplace! Anyplace!

   I see the world shifting into new forms through a kaleidoscope of changes that don’t include me. I see newspapers I don’t recognize anymore and hear music that has turned atonal. I see entertainment posing as news and violence as entertainment. I see a widening gap between the haves and have-nots, and the contempt of greed feasting on vulnerability.

   I’m not sure that unemployment heightens the senses. I don’t know that being apart from the crowd allows any special perspective. But involvement takes time and attention while isolation demands no such effort. We have moments to think, hours to wonder and days to decide.

   I have listened to the stories of many who have lost their jobs, their homes and their self-respect not due to their own malfeasance or indolence but to the billions of dollars demanded in assets and bonuses by the cheaters, liars and profiteers who rule Wall Street, and thus our lives.

   While my situation is in no way as baleful as theirs, I am attached by both memory and circumstance to the feelings of disengagement that accompany us along the rutted sidewalks of Lonesome City, thinking, wondering and deciding.

   As newspapers struggle to enhance their appeal to younger readers by dressing up their pages and limiting the use of words that exceed three syllables, I am filled with a growing need to help them survive.

   Readers of my column may have noticed that my own strong response to the effort is to be less scholarly in my output, eliminating topics like war and the economy in favor of dating, text messaging and how to screw like a vampire.

   Confusing words like ambience and environment no longer clutter my weekly essays while, on the other hand, I make good use of simpler terms such as she, it, crotch, butt and car, all of which contain a certain visual appeal to the young and the useless.

   In addition to which, in a continuing effort to be a part of whas happnon (that is “what’s happening” in the slurred argot of the hip) I have assumed the slouch and cool disdain of today’s young men, wearing my pants low enough to expose half of my behind and a T-shirt emblazoned with a series of suggestions of what you can do if you don’t like it.

   But that isn’t enough, I hear you cry, to save print journalism anymore than a nice dinner and good music could save the Titanic, another fine example of the cosmetic approach of form over function. Newspapers need to be generally jazzed up. The reader, or at least the newspaper buyer, has to be grabbed by the testicles, as a friend used to say, and dragged to the newsstand.

   It’s a question of editorial staffs digging for the right topics and dangling them like bikini panties out of a hotel window in order to attract attention. Toward this end, the supermarket tabloids, once dismissed by the straight press as an insult to our intelligence, seem no longer all that much of an insult when one is attempting with some desperation to lengthen the life of a newspaper.

   The Globe, for instance, offers a current edition almost blinding in its array of color photographs and glaring headlines, announcing inside topics with the flare of a circus barker. Some examples:

   “Camilla Dumps Charles—For a Woman!”

   “OBAMA’S WIFE ATTACKS OPRAH! ‘Back off! There’s only room for one First Lady in the White House.’”

   “What’s up Paula Abdul’s Nose?”—(accompanied by a close-up of her nose and an arrow that points to what appears to a speck of white dust in the right nostril), with a boxed comment, in case you missed the impact, “photo shocker!”

   Inside, among pictures of Mamie Van Doren’s amazing 77-year-old breasts, astrological forecasts, celebrity styles and a “new book bombshell” about the late Sammy Davis Jr.’s dope-fed sexual madness, we get to the stories alluded to on the tabloid’s cover page, all of which are presented in garish patterns of red, blue and gold and headlines that continue to scream their accusations, except that now they are followed by small, barely noticeable boxes: “Insiders say.”

   In other words, if the report isn’t true, it isn’t the fault of the Globe but of the lying insiders who betrayed the trust of the editors by feeding them misinformation. Oh, well, it happens. The name of the insider, by the way, is protected by newspaper tradition and by various extended shield laws that embrace us like a mother’s cuddling arms.

   While today’s struggling newspapers offer occasional bells and whistles in their effort to appeal to those who don’t read newspapers it won’t be long before they realize their pathetic efforts at redesign aren’t working and begin taking lessons from the supermarket tabloids.

    One can imagine typical headlines: “Oprah in Line for Cabinet Job!” “Bill Clinton Joins Monastery!!!” “Brad Pitt Pregnant!”—subhead, “How he did it.” And finally, “Katie Couric and Sarah Palin to wed! Jesse Jackson to Perform Rites in Ketchikan!”

   Open the pages and one will find considerably less than promised by the headlines. In fact, there is really no crying need to have a story at all unless it’s a play on words—Bill Clinton, for example, actually joining a monastery to raise money for organizations in need of funds to pay him for speaking at their annual fund raising events. He feels their pain.
    Insiders say.

It was an expression of hard, cold hatred I had never seen before, and it followed me down a street in Mumbai until I was out of sight. I felt targeted.

The man who locked me in a dark and threatening stare was tall, perhaps in his 30s and dressed in black. He wore a turban. I had noticed him in the first place because of his face. His eyes were dark and his jaw set. He stood out in the crowds that moved through the streets of one of the world’s busiest cities the way a flash of light or sudden, unexpected movement attracts one’s attention.

My wife saw him too. She said, “He’s looking directly at you.” There was no doubt of that. His head turned as we walked down a street of shops and stands so that his gaze was fixed directly on me, the way a hunter  tracks his prey through the cross hairs of his rifle.

Just before we were out of range of his view, I looked back to see if he was following. He was nowhere in sight. But for the imprint of his face on my brain, it was almost as though the moment had never existed.

We were in India for a month just a year ago, a journey of the soul we had always wanted to take. Vacations ought to be a learning process, a look at a world we don’t usually see. We were greeted generally by a people whose sweetness and spirituality are an integral part of who they are.

We attended their festivals, hoteled in their palaces and dined in their restaurants. We rode elephants, camels and rickshas, both motorized and man-pulled, and honored their heroes at ancient shrines. We respected their traditions and took hundreds of photographs.

It was the kind of odyssey into a dream world that we had anticipated, full of surprises and intriguing scenes. There was only a single moment of discomfort, and that was the face of hatred in Mumbai. Not even at war had I been confronted with such intense and silent hostility.

I think about it now as blood flows in the city once known as Bombay and realize that the hatred was directed not at me but at an American. To the man in black I represented what many throughout the Middle East were being taught by Islamic radicals to despise.

One is overwhelmed with a feeling of both vulnerability and helplessness when coming face to face with the kind of hatred that seems to spring from nowhere, directed at an idea embodied in a man.  It would have accomplished very little to stop and talk to him; his indoctrination in the concept of rage was complete.  He was beyond civility.

Being targeted by the face of hatred and subsequently viewing scenes of the current massacre in Mumbai, I came to realize how deep the loathing was. While the death toll included citizens of India and elsewhere, it was Americans and Brits the killers were seeking; it was their holy mission to destroy us.

The man in black had decided we were among those he despised.

Had we not marched into Iraq like an army of crusaders and instead sought diplomacy as a tool of detente; had we not “gone it alone” and instead gathered the world to condemn the dictatorship that was theatening global stability—things might have been different.

Now it’s too late.

Whatever communications we might establish under Barak Obama with our “new enemies” a half a world away, the residual effect of the Bush-engendered warrior attitudes will continue to impact upon us for years, and perhaps generations, to come. Bombs will explode. Guns will fire. Many will die.

The face of hatred, the kind I saw in Mumbai only months before the slaughter, will haunt our future just as it now haunts my dreams. We are a people under siege. How sad. How terribly, awfully sad.

   They should have played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” when Barak Obama was elected president of the United States.

   It’s a song about a defining moment in the Civil War that saw the old South and all that it stood for going down to defeat.

   They should have put the version by Joan Baez on a public address system and let it play over the massive audience in Grant Park like a marching song of freedom rising through the chilly night.

   Everyone there and everyone in their homes and everyone all over the world should have joined in singing it. “The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing…”

   Its intention would not have been to reject the South of today but to acknowledge that the Dixie of slavery, segregation and hatred had been rejected in a new and enshrining moment of American democracy.

   A black man had been elected president of the United States.

   I said hatred had been rejected, not ended. Our new president is as much a symbol as a reality. He represents equality and fairness. But even those who had been his loudest supporters can’t say that the rise of this intelligent, articulate man means that the nation has at last cleansed itself of ignorance and bigotry.

   It’s still out there, folks. I bring you an e-mail sent by a woman with whom I have communicated for years who seems to have suddenly lost her mind. Call her Esther. I wouldn’t distinguish her by using her real name.

   She wrote: “Make sure your guns are loaded because the blacks, oh excuse, African Americans, are going to be blasting through our front door…”

   She wrote: “I won’t ever distinguish him [Obama] by calling him president. He is going to turn our U.S.A. into a Communist nation, and the Muslims will rule. They will shoot every Christian on sight…”

   She wrote: “Now we are in for it. We keep a shotgun by our front door, leaning in a corner. We each have a loaded hand gun in our headboards…”

   The existence of our Esthers sends chills through me, but they do nothing to dampen the glory of what this nation has accomplished, overcoming Esther to emerge as good and decent people.

   Other e-mailers and telephone callers celebrated the election. One wrote, “I’m so proud to be an American, I can’t describe it. Proud in a way I never thought possible two years ago.”

   “What a night,” a friend shouted, “what a time!” Newspapers sold hundreds of thousands of extra copies to those who sought a piece of history to take home and keep as a souvenir of Tuesday’s triumph; as proof of change.

   Obama’s rise tells the world we have rejected the notion that the past is prelude to the future. We have overcome our past to create a new future, and now it’s time to dance in the streets. It’s time to sing. You know the tune: “The night they drove old Dixie down, and the people were singin’…”—about Obama, about the future and about a new place for America in this old and scary world.