It's good to have options.

Cannot let the news about Jenna Bush Hager's new job go unmolested. Hager, if you hadn't heard, will be filing monthly stories, probably on education, for NBC's Today Show. She got the job because NBC producer Jim Bell thought she handled herself well during a few appearances on Today two years ago. At that time, she was promoting her book on HIV-infected kids. (When she's not taking time out for book deals or to accept plum assignments from Today, Hager is a grade-school teacher in Baltimore.)

"It wasn't something I'd always dreamed to do," Hager said of her new network slot. "But I think one of the most important things in life is to be open-minded and to be open-minded for change."

You know, Jenna, I'm glad you're open-minded to this kind of change, because there are people who do dream about such a job. In fact, believe it or not, they go to school for it; I met hundreds of them at Indiana University, where I taught journalism for a time. They dutifully complete all the required coursework, then they trudge through a few (typically unpaid) internships, and then, if they're lucky, they land a first (barely paying) job reading the morning traffic reports for KTVO-3 in Ottumwa, Iowa, or some other minor-market station. And if they're super-lucky, that job leads to something a little better in a town people have actually heard of. It almost never leads to a cameo slot on the Today Show. And if it does, it's not because some high-profile producer in New York reached out to them.

Maybe for her first piece, Hager can interview Chesley Sullenberger. Who knows, a newly minted best-selling author* himself, Sully might have some valuable thoughts on how to redesign the American educational system. (After all, he can fly and land a plane.) Or maybe she can interview good old Dad and ask him why, despite his own considerable education, he still says things like nuke-ya-lar and misunderestimated...

* Technically Sully's book isn't out yet. But when a guy gets $3 mill for a book, I think we can safely call him a best-selling author.

A berry unfortunate situation?

Retouching on magazine covers and in other major photo spreads is nothing new; we've touched on this before. (So does that mean we're "re-touching" the subject today? Yuk-yuk.) Editors and especially art types defend the practice by pointing out that (a) they get one shot per month at strutting their stuff, (b) like it or not, many readers are appearance-obsessed and expect the magazines they read to project a certain image, and therefore (c) there's nothing wrong with trying to make models and featured celebs look as perfect as possible on the covers and elsewhere. It's their idea of perfection that's the problem. To them, perfection = super-skinny (but with big round boobs), even if the tweaking process leaves models looking vaguely like Martians, or maybe like really tall squids with mascara on....

The reason for this, of course, is that the culture continues to promote a be-skinny-at-all-costs mentality, despite some of the recent attempts to help women feel more comfortable with their natural selves. (As we've noted here on SHAMblog, even the photos in Dove's much-ballyhooed "real women" campaign were apparently retouched. That whole area of the "plus-size model" is a canard, anyway. I'm betting that most of the current crop of plus-size models are slimmer, perhaps a whole lot slimmer, than the average American woman who buys plus-size clothing. Clearly in the fashion world, anything above a 4 is a plus size.) But one is given pause by the lengths to which photo editors will go in seeking just the "right" look. I wasn't kidding about the Martians and squids. Quite often the computer-assisted transformation yields a cover model whose overall body proportions are not-quite-human, with limbs in particular that are featureless, waxy and unfinished, as if the model is newly emerged from a seed pod in that old sci-fi classic. Sometimes the joints aren't even in the expected locations. By the way, we're not talking about third-rate magazines here. We're talking about some of the nation's most popular, and in some cases prestigious, publications. Publications that are tops in the beauty biz.

This is a tough topic, because there's no question that American women, and Americans as a class, are getting heavier. That's probably not a good thing, medically speaking. Trouble is, the prevailing you-must-be-skinny-to-be-beautiful* message has nothing to do with health; rather, it tends to take the form of a full-out assault on a person's dignity, thus driving countless American women out of their minds with guilt and self-loathing. It is this same emphasis that makes so many women vulnerable to every new weight-loss fad/fraud that comes down the pike, including, most recently, the acai berry scam. For the record, that's pronounced in three syllables with a soft c in the middle: ah-sigh-ee.

This new "health and weight-loss miracle"—which, according to urban legend, was blessed by Oprah and her pal Dr. Oz (though not really, if you watched the relevant shows with any degree of discernment)—sets a dubious precedent in the annals of direct marketing, because it's a scam on so many levels. For starters, yes, the acai berry may be rich in antioxidants, fiber and certain other nutrients, but likely no more so than dozens of other berries you can buy in your neighborhood grocery store that won't set you back an extra $80 a month. Besides, the jury is still out on the value of antioxidants in the first place. Further, though it's doubtful that any one berry is going to solve just about every health problem known to man, that's the tenor of the ad copy. And once you order your "free 14-day trial"—which is typically how the product is pitched—you may find out that the clock on your trial starts running the minute you place your order, not when you receive the pills and begin using them. Since the pills themselves don't arrive for a week or 10 days, that gives the consumer maybe a whole big four days to road-test her new berries. The typical consumer never realizes this; if the info is anywhere at all, it's in the fine print on the manufacturer's website. The national complaint box brims with reports from consumers who insist they complied with the terms of their free trials in every respect, yet ended up getting billed for $69 or $79 or even $89 month after month. Some had to cancel their credit cards in order to get the billings to stop. Others saw their credit ratings dinged. (And gee, how shocking it is that companies that sell a fraudulent product might actually do fraudulent things with a customer's account info!)

And though I can't say this for sure, I suspect that most of these customers, at the end, were no closer to looking like Jessica Alba on the cover of some magazine. They were just poorer.

* or even worth looking at.

Finding the strength to go on. Or: Drowning in Kennedy coverage?

I've been mulling exactly what to post about the death of Ted Kennedy. And then this morning I saw all the headlines and I knew what must be written. Because apparently the most deeply principled human being who ever lived has left us.

Understand that I have no particular gripe against Teddy Kennedy, though I do think it rather remarkable, the way the clan as a whole has been able to maintain its hold on the American psyche despite the massive hypocrisy and, indeed, the shady tactics via which the Kennedys accrued and solidified their power. But...well, let's look at a few of those headlines.

This, from my local paper, the Morning Call: "Defender of a Dream."

From the Chicago Sun-Times: "Kennedy's Dream is Our Inspiration."

From the Detroit Free Press: "May the Noble Hopes Live On."

From the Washington Post: "Kennedy Did His Life's Work Until the End."

From the New York Daily News: "Sen. Ted Kennedy's Achievements Far Exceeded Expectations"* and "Health Care Reform Was Sen. Ted Kennedy's Unfinished Life's Work."

From ABC News: "How Kennedy's Legislation Helped You."

From our friends up north at the Chronicle Herald (who must have been channeling the editors at my local paper, above): "Defender of the American Dream."

And this, from AP: "Fame Didn't Separate Kennedy from the Little Guy."

In fact, the watery, hyper-lyrical tenor of the coverage was nicely captured by Hot Air in an item under the heading I chose for this post.

Why is it that the only "dreams" that seem to enjoy any standing with the media are those that emanate from the Left? Rush Limbaugh has a dream, too, an abiding vision of America, and I submit that whether you agree or not, his vision is as legitimate in its own Right as Ted Kennedy's. Rush happens to believe that people of Kennedy's ilk, for all their good intentions, are actually dismantling the traditional American Dream, which is writ in small government and individual initiative. Even if you want to argue that Rush himself doesn't really "believe" a damned thing—i.e. that he's just pandering to his audience of Angry White Males—surely people like Newt and Reagan and Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater believed it.

When Rush passes, do you think the headline will be "Defender of a Dream"? Or will it be more like "Controversial, Polarizing Figure Dies"?

I know, I know: As the AP tells us, Teddy was a "man of the people."

Seriously?

How did Ted, or any of the Kennedys, get away with that? How did they cultivate and sustain such a proletariat image while living in the lap of luxury as the closest thing we've ever ever had to American royalty? Folks, Cesar Chavez was a man of the people. Not Teddy Kennedy. I dare say even Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt union leader, was more a man-of-the-people than any Kennedy, including Ted's brother Bobby, who waged a long-term war against Hoffa and his pals in organized crime (which, some theorize, may have been responsible for the death of older brother Jack).

For a more balanced/nuanced take I invite you to read this, from Time, or this, by Chris Hitchens; the latter is on the mordant side, like everything Hitchens writes (or even says). But it may be just what the doctor ordered if right about now you're OD'ing on poesy.

* And whose expectations would those be, exactly? Everyone's? Or just Kennedy's liberal supporters and media admirers?

Further lessons in revolving-whore government.

Comes now Citizen Ridge, with his tale of behind-the-scenes shenanigans in the Bush White House. Short version of the juiciest allegation from Ridge's forthcoming memoir, The Test of Our Times: Bush's handlers tried to manipulate those screwball color-coded threat levels in order to gain political leverage. This is being treated in some quarters as if no one can even imagine that presidents might do such a thing. Was it really so long ago that we launched cruise-missiles at a Sudanese aspirin factory in order to take the spotlight off a president's fondness for getting fellated in various White House nooks and crannies?

To me, the most troubling aspect of the sigh-now, say-later Beltway culture epitomized in Ridge's book is the additional evidence it presents of the commodification of conscience (see under previous tell-all books by Richard Clarke, George Tenet, Scott McClellan, etc). Media analyst Howard Kurtz calls the Ridge book "smarmy," as if poor taste is its only problem. I think the rot runs much deeper and is more worrisome, for the lesson to current and future politicos is clear: Dissent doesn't pay...at least not till you're out of government, when it pays handsomely. So hold your tongue now and score a huge windfall later. Rather than raise a hand at some sensitive high-level meeting and blurt, "Mr. President, I believe that what you're proposing is terrible policy and I simply can't be a party to it," those with proximity to power wait for the meeting to end, race back to their offices, close the door, unlock a desk drawer, open a journal* and excitedly jot the events of the meeting (including the identities of all parties present and what was said by whom) while doing a rough mental calculation of the incremental worth of this latest "shocking" disclosure in an eventual memoir deal: "OK, I figure that adds another $700K in street-value to some publisher..." Does no one see how potentially dangerous this is?

Well let me be specific, then: It provides an actual disincentive for fair, honest, open governance.

A subordinate reaction here is that Tom Ridge himself should be colored yellow for cowardice. If Ridge had been faithful to his title—you'll recall that he was the inaugural director of Homeland Security—his first duty to the homeland he'd pledged to secure was to be upfront with the American people. These allegations are not just fodder for the Sunday morning talk shows; they have profound and disturbing implications for the public interest. Ridge should've gone to the Washington Post then, not written it up as part of a seven-figure book deal now. How much terror did Tom Ridge himself create, or at least fail to assuage, by looking the other way at the time? Have we so quickly forgotten the nationwide paranoia post-9/11?

Perhaps what we need is something like a "Son of Uncle Sam" Law: You can't profit from the disclosure of anything that happened while you were working for the government, supposedly upholding the public trust.

* You probably don't want to put it in a computer file, where it can be hacked or inadvertently erased.

Do it in (belated) honor of Tony C.

With two outs in the ninth inning of a recent Major League baseball game, Dodger pitcher Guillermo Mota drilled Brewers hitting star Prince Fielder with a pitch. It was an apparent act of retaliation for a pitch that grazed Dodger star Manny Ramirez in the seventh inning. When the game ended one out later, Fielder rushed the Dodger locker room, bent on committing mayhem on the Dodger pitcher. Among other things he screamed, "He [Mota] ain't gonna be out there tomorrow!" Fielder, a huge specimen of a man, had to be restrained by security guards and other players. Major League Baseball was said to be investigating; I haven't checked the status of things since. For the record, neither Mota nor Fielder is any stranger to controversy.

I've watched baseball my entire life. As a writer, I've probably expended more words on baseball than on any other single topic except self-help. I've played baseball continuously since 1991. I've run teams at the Little League level (coaching players, like Eric Chavez, who went on to Major League stardom), helped out at the high-school level, and I manage a team again now in a 45-and-over league. In sum, I think I understand the sport's timeless rhythms and unspoken codes as well as any person—surely any layperson—in America.

I do not understand why this juvenile "retaliation" nonsense goes on and on and on.

A baseball is a lethal weapon. When it's intentionally thrown at another man—especially at another man's head—it isn't just a case of "that's how it goes in sports" or "boys will be boys." It is assault with a deadly weapon. Now, before you baseball purists in the audience start groaning and shaking your heads, let me emphasize that there is precedent for taking such a position, from the realm of hockey. In 2000, Marty McSorley, a career-long NHL "enforcer," was found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon after "sucker-sticking" and seriously injuring another player, Donald Brashear. The McSorley incident sparked a long-overdue crackdown on gratuitous NHL violence involving the use of sticks, though if you've watched a hockey game recently (so you're the one!), you know that refs continue to stand by for an absurdly comical length of time while combatants pummel the crap out of each other with their fists.

I think baseball needs to man-up and do something similar here. While it's true that so-called "pitching inside" seldom results in catastrophic injuries, brushback pitches often leave hitters nicked-up: having to play with some nagging, performance-hindering injury to the hands, arms, legs, etc. And, of course, every once in a blue moon you have a Tony Conigliaro-type tragedy. Granted, this would be a lot more difficult than banning high-sticking, because even the best pitchers, we're told, can suffer inexplicable lapses in control. That's why we need to take the discretion out of it: If a pitcher hits a batter above the waist, he's suspended and fined. Not just one of those Mickey Mouse fines they issue now, either. A significant amount of money: say, a nice round sum like $1 million (or, for younger pitchers who don't earn that much, one-tenth of their annual salary). I think you'd be amazed at how much more accurate pitchers suddenly become.

(And seriously, if you think about it, the whole notion of retaliation, as practiced today, doesn't make sense. If you're really "protecting your players" by retaliating, then why are pitchers still hitting batters on purpose in this, baseball's 163rd year? If retaliation is a deterrent, it would carry over from one game to the next, and from one season to the next. Pitchers would've stopped hitting batters long ago.)

But if baseball isn't going to do something to ban knockdown pitches, I kind of side with Prince Fielder. Let's have meaningful retaliation. A pitcher throws at your head? Hire a few goons to ambush the guy after the game. (Ballplayers have plenty of discretionary income, after all.) Break his thumbs, as wise guys used to do to pool hustlers they found operating in their neighborhoods, or hyperextend his pitching elbow. Make sure the guy never pitches again. For that matter, why stop there? Whack the SOB, or take your cue from Clint Eastwood at the end of Unforgiven: Serve notice that you intend to go after his wife, his family, burn his house down. Be a man, a real man, not some pretend-tough guy who rushes the mound and flails a few wild, inept punches till the cavalry arrives.

Let a few episodes like that take place, and maybe this nonsense would end once and for all.

Too often, a college education is purely academic.

You may have heard about Trina Thompson. Unable to find work, the young woman is suing her alma mater, the Bronx's Monroe College, to recover the $70,000 she paid in tuition. The story inspired me to write an opinion piece, which ran in the New York Daily News this past Thursday.

Mindful of the Thompson case, and the preparations underway on campuses nationwide to receive a new crop of not-so-bright-eyed freshmen, I thought I'd provide some further thoughts here. We'll start with two scenes from my own encounters with academia.

Scene 1: During a decade of guest-teaching at three different colleges, I served as everything from a lowly adjunct (they were nice enough to omit the lowly in the actual course listings) to an "endowed chair" (that one always made me smile) to writer-in-residence (a position that's a lot bigger on cachet than it is on cash). In theory, the latter two posts entitled me to full faculty privileges. In practice, my one privilege was watching my tenured colleagues leave their offices at regular intervals for meetings at which my presence had not been requested. Anyway, during each of my college appointments I saw the same drama play out as each spring semester drew to a close: Suddenly realizing that jobs might come in handy, graduating seniors performed an exhaustive survey of the market but were unable to find any openings requiring intimate familiarity with Beowulf. Knowing that I was a published author and erstwhile magazine editor, they descended on my office in a panic. Though I did my best to help, their abilities invariably were a poor fit with the mainstream publishing market I knew so well. Somehow the four-year education that had done a superlative job of equipping them with their airy attitudes—I once had a student tell me he'd "settle" for a job at The New Yorker, and he wasn't kidding—had not imparted the nuts-and-bolts skills that underlie paying positions in writing and editing. What kind of skills? How 'bout, for starters, a working knowledge of proofreading symbols? In all the reading and workshopping of each other's work, no one had ever felt it useful to teach them that? Nor had anyone told them that there aren't necessarily jobs that allow each graduate to pursue his singular "creative vision."

Scene 2: In 1988 I wrote a piece about the Berkeley economics duo who dreamed up "portfolio insurance," the now-discredited computer-trading program that was said to seamlessly, invisibly hedge an investor's bets; later, the tactic was itself deemed to have helped catalyze the Crash of 1987. During an interview with one of the professors, Mark Rubinstein, I asked about the irony of it all: How did he feel when he saw the market imploding and it occurred to him that his "failsafe" investing strategy might have had something to do with it? "Oh, we were having a great time!" he blurted. "We couldn't wait to see what would happen next!" Millions of Americans were losing billions of dollars—and these two goofs were having a great time. To them, the tumultuous events of October 1987 were like a giant lab class. Seldom will you hear a more striking statement of academia's detachment from reality.

Criticism of the ivory tower is nothing new. But from a quality-of-education standpoint—having observed the college experience from multiple vantage points—I see the problem as follows. At best, academia provides students with an abstract "knowledge base" that (a) in most cases has been taught, with only minor updates and adjustments, for years and (b) is seldom connected up to its real-world applications. Even in the ever-evolving hard sciences, little effort is made to tailor the syllabus to present (let alone future) employment opportunities. You won't hear a curriculum-development chairperson ask, "What's the job market going to look like in five years? Let's prepare graduates for that." It's just not how academics think. (No, college may not be vocational school, but vocation is not a dirty word, either. And yet it's spoken in faculty lounges—when it's spoken at all—with the same inflection most folks use in saying Ebola or, lately, death panels.) College also gives short shrift to the critical differences between theory and practice, the law of unintended consequences, the ways in which elegant theoretical models must be flexed around little things like human nature, and so forth.

At its worst, this mentality degrades into outright scorn for post-graduate success. In my own discipline, writing, I found that my academic peers despised popular consumer magazines like People and Good Housekeeping—the very publications that offer the most jobs at the highest pay. While at Muhlenberg College I drew a stern closed-door rebuke from my (female) department chairman for teaching a lesson rooted in a story* I'd written for Playboy. The story had nothing to do with naked coeds—it was about deception and double-dealing in the organ-transplantation industry, and we got quite a bit of press over it. But my chairperson was livid over the fact that (a) her writer-in-residence had done a piece for Playboy in the first place, and (b) he'd had the temerity to bring the magazine to school. (After all, we wouldn't want to corrupt today's delicate, virginal college students.) Maybe it also irked her that Playboy had paid me for that one article a sum equivalent to what she earned in three months of teaching. She would've much preferred that I train my students to write for obscure literary journals with names like Zephyr of the Ephemeral Consciousness—which, often, don't pay contributors at all!

(And we won't even get into the myriad imperatives that have elbowed their way into the college zeitgeist that have nothing to do with education per se: e.g. political proselytizing, the selling of "diversity-based agendas" and other forms of social engineering, etc.)

Whether by design or not, academia's estrangement from the real world is institutionalized in its hiring practices. Administrators boast of their "high percentage of PhDs on faculty," as if that statistic alone guarantees a superior education. Trouble is, there's a certain kind of person who becomes a PhD, and it tends to be a person who—well—sees the world as a giant lab class. Moreover, the emphasis on PhDs keeps out not just the intellectual riff-raff, but also instructors whose stints in the trenches may have led them to different conclusions about the ingredients of success. This can have the effect of actually grooming students to fail. "One reason teachers leave the profession after only a few years," observed Pennsylvania’s Governor's Commission on Training America’s Teachers in the executive summary of its final 2005 report, "is that the real issues they are dealing with were not taught to them in the university." A student of mine put it more colorfully: "A zoology professor can tell you everything about the origin of a species. But a zookeeper can tell you how to avoid getting bitten."

There is nothing sacrilegious about ensuring that young people who go deeply into debt to finance their education have some reasonable prospect of repaying the loans—ideally by finding employment in their chosen field of endeavor.

* This is not from the actual magazine, so there are typos and such. Clearly someone typed it out and uploaded it, which is technically a copyright violation. But it's useful here.

Oh, we're seeing the big picture, all right.

Every now and then one of our adamant free-market types will launch into a lengthy diatribe that reduces to, "What do we need government regulation for, anyway?" In my experience, the folks who take that position tend to be highly educated and informed debaters who are quite successful in their own lives and have compelling case-histories to cite as well as reams of GAO and DoC data at their fingertips. In short, they are very persuasive and can wear you down. And hell, I'm the first to admit that in theory, in the best of all possible worlds, I'd like to live in a society where government intrusiveness is minimal. As noted in my previous post.

Then one night I'm sitting there in the middle of dinner and I see an ad like that shown above for a drug called TriLipix (that's try-LIP-ix), one of the newer entries in the war against cholesterol. The key action comes 24 seconds into the spot:

TriLipix has not been shown to prevent heart attacks or stroke more than a statin alone.

Digest that for a moment. Clearly the whole point of taking this drug is to lower cholesterol and triglycerides in order to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes. I quote from earlier in the ad: "Are you taking a statin medication to lower your bad cholesterol, but your good cholesterol and triglycerides are still out of line? Then you may not be seeing the whole picture." A few seconds later, the narrator begins a sentence with, "If you're at high risk of heart disease..." The ad, in other words, is appealing to people who want to reduce their risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. Which means that those 5 seconds in the middle of the spot, in essence (if not in fact), invalidate the other 55 seconds. The disclaimer quoted in red above, which is only there because of FDA regulations, is saying, "This drug is useless to you." (At best, if you want to split hairs, the disclaimer is telling you that the drug has not been shown to be useful.) Remember, too: The absence of a proven benefit does not = the absence of harmful side effects. As the long list of potential health hazards in the balance of the disclaimer shows.

But if the typical model holds, pharmaceutical giant Abbott Labs has spent over $1 billion developing and commercializing TriLipix. Abbott employs 68,000 people in 130 countries, and needs to be able to cut their salary checks while still delivering an adequate return to its investors. And apparently there is clinical evidence that, "along with [a low-fat?] diet," the drug does lower triglycerides (even if, again, all that has not been shown to offer any actual health benefit to people already taking the likes of Zocor or Lipitor). So Abbott is going to sell its glossy new drug. The company wants its share of the $18.4 billion market for cholesterol-lowering meds. Whether TriLipix "works" or not.

More to the point, I ask you to imagine what that ad would look and sound like without the FDA and/or FTC. I'll tell you what it would look like: a giddy symphony of uplifting imagery—a parade of 115-year-old grandparents gleefully running through parks, tossing frisbees with their adoring 75-year-old grandkids—that made TriLipix out to be the single most important breakthrough in the annals of medical science. (Since the last drug advertised on TV, that is.) The cagey, carefully lawyered wording in the present ad would be replaced by unflinching statements of "fact." There'd be no purposely vague talk about how consumers "may not be seeing the whole picture"; that would give way to bold promises of life everlasting. There would be no disclaimers. In fact, without FDA regulations, I'm betting that TriLipix ads would imply that you don't even need the statins, that TriLipix alone would keep you forever ageless and running marathons through the hilly streets of San Francisco.*

I know what our more libertarian, capitalist types will say: Let it all get sorted out in the marketplace. Really? After how many people waste how many billions foolishly depending on TriLipix to save them from heart attacks and strokes? After how many people die needlessly from, or at least suffer with, the serious side effects? Yeah, well, even so, it's up to the people to be their own advocates. Caveat emptor! Oh please. Twenty percent of all high-school graduates nowadays are functional illiterates. And you're going to ask them to decipher page after page of fine print written in medical jargon? (That's assuming that drug manufacturers even released the information.) For that matter, SHAMblog has a highly literate audience, and I bet half the people reading this very post probably looked up the term statin just to make sure they understood the issue here.

The free market, left to its own devices, will not usher in untold riches and fulfillment for all. Maybe it might, in an ideal world, if people everywhere were motivated by sincerity and a profound love of all mankind. Alas, that is not the case. We know it's not the case. We've quite recently received plenty of object lessons in just how much it's not the case. Too many of us are motivated by a sincere and profound love of a huge bank account or a vacation home in the Caymans, and we don't give a damn what happens to the people we exploit in order to get there.

Say what you will about the nanny state, the fact is, sometimes we just need to be protected from the worst aspects of human nature.

* Then why didn't the FDA simply refuse to allow the drug to be sold at all? That's a tough one, because, as noted, TriLipix does do something: it lowers triglycerides and seems to raise "good" cholesterol. And in general, I do think we want to err on the side of giving consumers choices. Still, they should be fair choices, where consumers are provided with sufficient info. And based on what we know about TriLipix, you have to ask yourself: What informed consumer would buy this drug?

Two more glimpses of your America going down the tubes.

So the other day I'm on my way to my ball game, in full uniform, when I remember that I need to withdraw the $60 for the umps.* I pull into the ATM-user's lane (i.e., the lane that's carefully designed to tear the mirror off your car if you drive close enough so that you can actually reach the keypad from the driver's seat), and before I have a chance to slide my own card into the slot, out pops somebody else's. Realizing that I need to do my civic duty, I sigh and drive around to the main entrance, get out of the car and walk to the front door. A middle-aged rent-a-cop is standing just to the side of said door.

"Please remove your hat before you go into the bank," he says.

And I start, reflexively, to reach for my head...then I stop. Please remove my hat? Had my uniform inspired him to sing the National Anthem? Were we going to have a moment of silence for the nation's civil liberties? But seriously, if I was up to no good, why couldn't I be concealing a hand grenade in my jock? (Not that there's any extra room in there, yuk yuk.) Should I take my jock off, too? And what about the merchants I see walk into the bank all the time with attaches and even satchels?

"Look," I tell the guard, "I'm not going to rob this bank. OK? I'm just running in there to give them this ATM card I found in your machine. And unless you have some evidence of a crime I'm about to commit, I'm not taking off my hat."

With that, I walked into the bank, gave the ATM card to the first available teller, and walked out again. The guard glared at me but said nothing.

======================

The news is on in the background, and apparently a couple of thugs knocked off an armored car in downtown Philly today. (What a shocker: Crime in downtown Philly!) Witnesses saw the thieves fleeing in a red van. As I write this, I am watching video of a joint task force of Philly cops and FBI agents as they stop all motorists driving red vans and SUVs and ask them to prove that they didn't rob an armored car today. I know that sounds like sarcasm or overstatement, but think about it: What's the point of stopping the vans at all if you're not going to look around the interior a little bit, ask a few questions of the driver and passengers, get an overall impression of what they're up to, etc? Clearly these people are presumed guilty, at least in some temporary-preliminary sense, by virtue of the fact that they're driving red vans. They must then demonstrate to the satisfaction of the policia that they're not "good" for the crime, as cops like to say.

I'm sorry. That is flat-out unconstitutional. Or ought to be. There is nothing connecting these people to the crime except the random fact of automobile color. It is exactly the same thing as finding out that a black guy robbed a grocery store, then stopping and interrogating all the black guys you see in the neighborhood for the rest of the day. Absent other probable cause or exigent circumstances, I defy the police to justify these tactics.

You may be under the impression that the job of law enforcement is to prevent crime and/or catch wrongdoers. Not so. Or it's not that simple. The job of law enforcement is to prevent crime and/or catch wrongdoers without violating the civil rights of innocent Americans (or the wrongdoers themselves). If catching criminals were the only imperative that mattered, that'd be a relative snap: Just stop and search people at random—or search everyone, for that matter—then take the best suspects down to the station and simply beat them or hold a gun to their heads till the right one fesses up. (Yeah, I know: We do that already at Gitmo.) There are reasons why we have laws against unreasonable search and seizure. Those reasons were central to the founding of this nation. And yet every day, a little bit more, we stray from the ethic that gave birth to the Bill of Rights in the first place.

Everybody is scared. Everybody wants the bad guys locked up. And so, in our desperation to feel a little bit safer (which most of us don't anyway), we cede basic rights to the gestapo. It's wrong, folks. Take a stand.

* I'm oversimplifying. It's actually $60 per manager, for a total of $120, since we play with two umps. But did you really need to know that to follow this story?

Hmm. I wonder how the recession is affecting people who wrote a book titled SHAM.

So here's what gets me—no, let me rephrase that: Here's what drives me nuts—about Oprah. Actually, that's still not quite right. Here's what drives me nuts about Oprah's audience, which is smaller than it once was, but still vast and enviably loyal, especially in these times of utter MSM free-fall.

I'm sitting in a pizza place last night, and unaccountably, on the large central TV where normally there would be ESPN or some other sports-related fare, there's the Oprah Winfrey Show. The day's theme, apparently, is the recession and how it's affecting people at all different social strata. One of Oprah's guests is a wealth expert whose name I didn't catch, but that doesn't matter. What does matter is that Oprah starts peppering the guy with questions like, "So, tell us, how have the rich been affected by the recession?" This, from the gal ranked among America's richest women (and arguably the richest one who isn't an heiress) by Forbes, which also pegs her as the most powerful celebrity. How have "the rich" been affected? That's a little bit like Shaquille O'Neal asking some expert in human physiology or sociology, "So tell us, what's life really like for tall people these days?" But undaunted, Oprah went on in that vein, with no apparent self-consciousness or sense of irony, for an astonishingly long time—a full 10-minute segment. Exactly as if Oprah Winfrey, she of the $2.7 billion net worth, has no idea how "the rich" might live.

How does she get away with this?

I really want to know. How does she get away with pretending to be just "one of the folks," as Bill O'Reilly might put it? When Oprah gasps at the fact that some shoes actually cost several hundred dollars, why do audience members not take off their own shoes, rush the stage and shove a stiletto heel into her eye? I don't understand how these people, these millions of nodding, smiling, ultra-made-up admirers, fail to see that they're being played. And I guess, if I'm overreacting here, it's because I see this occurring in one form or another throughout SHAMland. I see the wealth-building guru pad his bank account by inducing consumers who barely have the proverbial two sticks to rub together to empty their own bank accounts so they can scrounge up the fee for his new seminar on "surviving hard times." (Don't they realize that they are his strategy for surviving hard times?) I see the expert in multilevel marketing who persuades gullible Joes and Janes to part with their hard-earned wages in order to join an enterprise that will "make us all a fortune!"—even though he's already got his fortune, which he made on the backs of a previous generation of Joes and Janes. I see the guru of success mysticism who charges people $7500 for a private ride-along in his Rolls, as if success can be caught, like the swine flu; and though his clientele clearly aren't poor to begin with, I wonder how soon he starts laughing at them after they get out of the car.

I wonder how often Oprah laughs at her audience. I wonder if she gets backstage (or maybe back at her mid-seven-figure Magnificent Mile condo) with her BFF Gayle and they pop open a bottle of Cristal Brut and roll on the floor at how they pulled the whole thing off....

And once again, the media applaud themselves.

I'm glad that those two female journalists are coming back, apparently unharmed, from North Korea. It's a nice development. Their captor, Kim Jong-il, is manifestly nuts, and though one suspects his bite is not as bad as his bark, who knows how long he might have held them, or what he might have done to them, under the worst of circumstances.

But is this really the biggest, most important thing that has ever happened in the whole wide world?

I ask because that's how it's being played this morning on all three networks, CNN, FOX, etc. The story is getting "wall to wall" coverage, in media parlance. As I write this, in fact, a SPECIAL LIVE REPORT has preempted regular programming on ABC, with Diane Sawyer and her GMA cohorts working an extended session as they wait breathlessly for The Plane to land. The Plane, of course, contains freed journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, as well as former president Bill Clinton. Clinton, I hardly need to tell you, was and remains a media darling—one always got the feeling he was still "sort of" the president, even after he left office—and is today being treated as an authentic American folk hero, now that he has secured the release of the two journalists. (In the background, Diane Sawyer has just informed us all that Hillary Clinton yesterday referred to Bill as "my husband." Wow. What a scoop!)

I'm reminded of the media's total absorption some years ago in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. That ended tragically, you will recall, and nothing said here is intended to diminish the horror of Pearl's fate or the grief of his family, friends and coworkers. Still, I think we'd all be better off if journalists spent less time covering other journalists. And it's not just that I think the stories are too lightweight and personality-oriented to merit this kind of coverage, per se; it's that I think the media excesses in this area symbolize their inflated sense of (a) their own importance and (b) the active role that they, journalists, presumably play in world affairs. Journalism is not supposed to be active. It's supposed to be a basically inert lens through which we're afforded access to events we'd never see otherwise.

Look up the word medium, and think about what it's saying, and what it connotes for the news biz. You'll get the idea.

(A gushy Diane Sawyer, again, in the background: "There's former president Bill Clinton now..!" Gack...)

I have a question.

Has Brendan Fraser ever made a movie that isn't puerile sci-fi/fantasy crap? And has he ever played a role that doesn't entail overacted, wide-eyed, scenery-chewing buffoonery? OK, I overstate.* A little. But seriously, let's take a look at selected highlights from the Fraser filmography:

Adventure at the Center of the Earth (2008)
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)
Inkheart (2008)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)
Revenge of the Mummy (2004)
The Mummy Returns (2001)
Monkeybone (2001)
The Mummy (1999)
George of the Jungle (1997)

And so it goes. In fact, in development at this writing, according to imdb, is "Untitled Journey to the Center of the Earth Sequel." Inasmuch as the film lacks a formal title as yet, I would like to suggest the following:

The Ever-Vengeful and Adventurous Mummy Re-Returns to the Jungle at the Center of the Earth..and This Time He Brings a Dragon!

I figure that covers all the bases.

Granted, the guy is as handsome as handsome gets (when he's not mugging for the camera), so I guess he's the perfect "dashing hero." Besides, we've all gotta make a living somehow, and not every actor can be DeNiro or Penn. Hell, at least he's not perpetrating Ponzi schemes on fellow WASPs. But does the guy have no artistic ambitions at all?

On the other hand, perhaps it comes down to that memorable line from Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry movie: "A man's got to know his limitations..."

* He did make The Scout with Albert Brooks...and no movie is ever made worse by Brooks' involvement. I thought it was hilarious and well-done. But that flick was about baseball, so I may be biased in my fondness for it.

And, turning our attention for a moment to a different Gates...

You know, having now done it a half-dozen times on three different machines, it occurs to me that you simply cannot get through a complete install or reinstall of Vista—which is to say, the operating system itself plus a select handful of garden-variety add-ons like Firefox or one of the established antivirus programs—without having something go wrong. At best, you hear that ominous ding and get a little dialog box that explains why "module 28764" won't load, so you have to end up rooting around in the startup processes to turn the damn thing off, lest you keep getting that same annoying dialog box at every reboot. At worst, the install fails for some reason that is never quite made clear, and you have to "roll back" what you've already done and begin anew. Of course, when you're talking operating systems, you're talking hours, not minutes. What's more, my grim experience tallies with that of just about everyone I talk to...in marked contrast to the generally happy-go-lucky reports from Mac users.

I realize that I'm very, very late to this party. The jokes about Microsoft and its foibles ("Hmm, what if Microsoft built cars?") go way back. But that just underscores my point. All these years and they can't get it right? This is the company that quite literally transformed the way America goes about its business, in the bargain transforming a dweebish college dropout into the world's richest man...and three decades later they're still debugging?

What gives?

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It occurs to me that this sad story may have more to do with SHAMland than with its nominal subject—fanatical religious faith—and also provides some insight into why I chose the subtitle I chose for my book. (For the record, it's ...How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless). Very few Americans, I think, would sit there praying while their child is dying and desperately in need of medical attention. Millions upon millions of us, however, put our faith in one faddish self-help "belief system" after another, thinking that our spanking new attitudes alone will carry the day, substituting hope for personal initiative (or substituting a dogged, New Agey commitment to "our dreams" for a more modest and realistic plan of action). Rather than motivating genuine achievement, the core "logic" of self-help too often provides a convenient excuse for indolence and procrastination, while also fostering a slavish addiction to self-help itself.

You can't blame all of this on the gurus. They're just selling it; strictly speaking, no one's forcing the hordes of followers to buy in. But often, in assessing a given phenomenon, you have to consider human nature. For example, it's not crack cocaine's fault that it's addictive and that so many lives are wrecked as a result of its existence. Cocaine is just a substance, a chemical. But clearly we humans, weak as we are, can't handle crack; we are powerless, many of us, against its effects. If we give in to it, in some cases even just once, the high it provides will take us down the road to ruin. Something to think about.