'A penny saved is a penny earned.'—Bernie Madoff. Part 2.

UPDATE, Friday, Oct. 29. ... And yet, you run across something like this and it shakes you to the core. At least that's how it affected me. Since the moment I heard about this last night on Anderson Cooper's show, I've been asking myself: Was this odious, unfeeling man within his rights to say what he said, given his position with the school board? Is this just a horrific example of free speech—in its way, precisely the kind of speech that we must protect as an offensive, minority view, simply because it is an offensive, minority view—or does it rise to the level of, say, a "terroristic threat"? I'm honestly not sure.

I do know this much: These are the kinds of unspeakable cases that test one's commitment to a broad principle, regardless of where you finally come out on it or why.

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

Read Part 1.

Back in the early '90s I wrote several pieces about speech codes, which were designed to tamp down on so-called "hate speech"; the codes were then proliferating on American college campuses. What struck me especially dangerous was that colleges, whose collective faculty and administration overwhelmingly tilt left, seemed to be using the codes to bludgeon dissenting students, thereby ensuring conformity in matters of political thought and social engineering.

In one case I got some air-play after I reported on a male undergrad who'd run into trouble at a local college for speaking against a newly enacted school policy, which stipulated that sex between two drunken students was automatically "rape" on the male student's part, regardless of how a prosecutor might assess the case. His statements offended the considerable feminist presence on campus and were labeled hate speech. As a result he was censured, then suspended for making a stink about it. John Stossel writes about a similar incident in his excellent book, Give Me a Break. (I give Stossel credit even though he and/or his producer screwed me back when my special on self-help should have run. I still plan to write about that someday.)

More recently I've written a piece or two that applauded a scaling back in such codes, but I now realize I was naive; I misread the tea leaves. If colleges perceive less of a need for speech codes, it's not because they're suddenly taking a more open-minded view of personal expression (which, by the way, is the view a college should take. If you can't express ideas freely in college, then where and when?) Rather, colleges realize that society-at-large has met them halfway and then some by embracing the same cornerstone ethic that anchored the codes: OFFEND NO ONE WHO ISN'T PART OF YOUR (PRESUMED) GROUP.*. This renders campus-specific codes redundant and unnecessary.

Juan Williams, of course, just learned this firsthand. The FOX commentator and syndicated columnist made the mistake of mentioning aloud that he gets anxious when he boards a plane with people who are apparent Muslims. Though I'd guess he was speaking for at least 75% of all Americans (if they're going to be honest), Williams was summarily fired from the part-time gig he also had with NPR. In what seems largely like a weak attempt at damage control, NPR's CEO has now apologized to affiliate stations for the abrupt firing, which left them feeling blind-sided. However, she stands by the decision itself.

The other day I heard someone say, "How would Williams like it if some white guy said something like that about blacks?" Actually, it wasn't that long ago, November 1993, that a very visible black guy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, ruefully admitted in a speech that when he hears footsteps behind him and turns around to see "somebody white," he's relieved. There was a lot of cringing and embarrassed silence—and a few raving right-wingers got up on a soapbox to grandstand about how Jackson had finally "spoken the truth" about crime—but so far as I can tell ol' Jesse continues to serve as a Foremost Black Demagogue. This is in fact his formal title, I believe.

The point is that you can't, without consequences, say what you're really thinking today, if what you're thinking is likely to hurt the feelings of someone who's seen as representing a particular group or "hot" social agenda. You can't say that you believe homosexuality is sinful, shameful or unnatural, even if you do, and even if that's what your religion preaches.** You can't make an observation about how curious it is that a certain word is both (a) the most offensive term in American culture and (b) a word that members of the offended group themselves use as a kind of secret handshake or playful term of endearment. You can't say that you think a given industry is run by a class of people from a certain religion who had more advantages than you did growing up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not agreeing with Rick Sanchez. I'm just saying that even if his remark could be proved 100% factual—even if every single executive at CNN were a Jew who'd been raised in Grosse Point, Michigan, and gone to Harvard, which is not the case—it wouldn't matter. Sanchez would be excoriated anyway because you simply can't talk in those terms anymore.

There are certain opinions we just aren't allowed to hold.

Next time, in the finale: Let's just get it all "out there," shall we?

* except maybe men and white people as a class.
** And let's please be clear here: I'm not saying that I think homosexuality is sinful or shameful (though I'm not sure about "natural," in the textbook sense of the term. And I don't see why anyone should be offended by the idea that it may be unnatural, either. The mere fact that something is relatively unusual or a variation from the norm doesn't imply that it's bad). I supported both gay marriage and ending "don't ask, don't tell" long before either crusade was fashionable. I never understood why gays couldn't marry in the first place; why is that any of anyone else's business? At the same time, I don't see why a person isn't allowed to hold the opposing view.

'A penny saved is a penny earned.'—Bernie Madoff. Part 1.

Among the myriad things that puzzle me these days is society's knee-jerk tendency to vilify an idea based solely upon who said or wrote it. We saw this recently in the case of the local Pennsylvania high school that made the national news and talk shows, and was roundly chastised therein, for kicking off its yearbook presentation of graduating seniors with an epigram from that well-known "thought leader" (as our pal James Ray likes to call himself), Adolph Hitler:

And in the last analysis, success is what matters.

Look, quoting Hitler in your yearbook is dumb. It will haunt you forever in some sense; every time you open the damn book to see what one of your moron friends scribbled under his picture, there it will be. Decades later, even the person who picked the quote will still be saying, What was I thinking? But...what about the quote itself? It's not some fringe notion; in fact, it's the creed by which many of us live. Can't you see that same basic thing being said by Tony Robbins, or Vince "winning is the only thing" Lombardi, or any number of other heralded motivators who are invoked daily in classrooms, meeting rooms and auditoriums across America? We tend to be a bit skeptical of Machiavelli, but we sure quote the dude often enough, and he expressed the same essential thought in stronger, more ominous terms: "The end justifies the means."

I grant you, it's always interesting, and can be the spark for stunning insight, to look at a quote in the context of what we know about the speaker. In that sense, there's a chilling quality to Hitler's words. (You wonder: My God, what was he thinking of when he talked about success?) But why should an idea itself become tainted or lose its legitimacy altogether simply because we have no use for the person who said it? An awful person can have some brilliant ideas. And vice versa. There is irony in the title of this post that derives from its jarring incongruity with what we've learned about ol' Bernie, but that irony has nothing to do with the wisdom (or lack of same) of the words themselves. Even ol' Ben was a wee bit of a cad himself, you know, certainly for that era.

To me, it doesn't (and shouldn't) matter whether it was Lord Tennyson or Charles Manson who said, "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."* Nor, if we find out tomorrow that Benjamin Disraeli was secretly a pedophile cop-killer, should that knowledge undermine the stunning rhetorical power and grace of a line like, "A precedent embalms a principle." An idea is just that and nothing more: an idea. A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, these fundamental principles apply as time goes by. And if you suddenly have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, you really need to bone up on your knowledge of classic film, in particular by watching Casablanca. Then you too can ask yourself, as I have for decades, So what was the big freakin' deal about Ingrid Bergman, anyway? But I digress.

The larger point is that we worry far too much in this culture about what people say in general. We'll get down to cases next time.

* Technically, the correct form of the quote is 'Tis, which sort of gives it away.

Losing their religion?

The other day, after hearing pseudo-candidate Christine O'Donnell challenge her debating opponent, Chris Coons, with the question, "Where in the Constitution is the separation of Church and State?," I hastily tweeted a question of my own: "How did we get to where someone who asks that can be a serious candidate?" (in this case the Republican candidate for U.S. senator from the state of Delaware). There are, of course, just 100 senators in toto*; it goes without saying that it's a pretty elite office to hold, and an important position in Congress; you'd therefore expect aspirants to that lofty status to possess at least a working familiarity with the defining document in American democracy.

But in recent days I've been thinking about this a bit more. The reason O'Donnell raised the point in the first place is that she believes that schools should teach, along with standard Darwinian evolution, the possibility of intelligent design, with its cornerstone theory of irreducible complexity. Although intelligent design is bracketed by its advocates as an alternate scientific view, most of ID's critics dismiss that argument as sophistry: an attempt to skirt constitutional prohibitions against the introduction of religious dogma into scholastic curricula and the textbooks used for same. Public schools, say ID critics, are not supposed to teach religion; that would be a form of "state-sponsored" godliness, and would violate the so-called "establishment clause" of the U.S. Constitution, contained in the First Amendment of which O'Donnell seemed unaware.

Or was she?

O'Donnell may be an intellectual lightweight of an order not seen in the public sphere since, well, her chief sponsor, Sarah Palin, but leaving aside O'Donnell's confessed weakness in matters constitutional, I'm not so sure she was out-of-bounds in saying what she said, even if she said it for the wrong reasons. As it happens, the First Amendment makes no literal reference to any separation of Church and State. That entire understanding springs from an interpretation voiced by Thomas Jefferson after the fact (actually, written in a letter in 1802). What the Constitution does say is that the federal government can not formally establish a state religion. (As distinct, perhaps, from the belief in God, or a god, per se?)

America has always had a strange, schizophrenic relationship with religion, or the place of same in public life. There's "In God We Trust" and "One Nation Under God" and all that stuff, but it goes a lot deeper than that. F'rinstance, the U.S. House of Representatives—the "Everyman" half of the very same Congress that constantly wrings its hands over church-and-state matters—has a chaplain, currently Rev. Daniel P. Coughlin, who begins each session with a prayer for wisdom, peace, security and the like. The House has maintained an office of the chaplain continuously since 1774. It seems clear that the Founders embraced the belief in God, said belief apparently being viewed at the time as universal, "a given." So, while they did not want this new nation to mandate or sponsor a particular way of worshiping, they seemed not even to consider that a citizen would question the very idea of worshiping (whatever specific form each individual "god" might take). Although this is a heavily biased page, I doubt that its fundamental (NPI) facts can be disputed. Given that historical lens, I tend to think that the men who founded this nation saw religion and especially prayer as central to American life. Among other things, I tend to feel that the Founders would have supported school prayer...or considered it unthinkable to ban it.**

The Constitution also makes reference, in its first line, to certain core "Blessings" (in caps, as shown), which is hard to read as anything but a purposeful echo of the Declaration of Independence's enumeration of God-given entitlements. And let's not forget that when you become president of this great land, you take an oath on a bible. The Constitution does give a prospective office-holder the option of "affirming"...but why mention an oath at all? Odd indeed that men in the act of launching a "secular government" would ask the very leader of that government to demonstrate his commitment by swearing allegiance to an authority that supersedes earthly disagreement, debate and dominion!

As it happens, the U.S. Senate, to which O'Donnell and Coons aspire to belong, also has a chaplain, and the first line of Barry C. Black's web site reads as follows: "Throughout the years, the United States Senate has honored the historic separation of Church and State, but not the separation of God and State." That is a remarkable statement to find on a page maintained and presumably vetted by a U.S. government body. No matter where you come down on this issue, it seems to say it all, sans ambiguity.

Let me be clear at the end. I, personally, do not favor school prayer and the teaching of intelligent design (at least as science). However, I also think that invoking the Constitution and other "founding ideals" in arguing against such notions is a very peculiar, incongruous thing to do. If we really want to get religion out of public life, then a lot of things are going to have to be changed in Congress, in the White House, at the U.S. Mint, and just about everywhere else. First Amendment or no First Amendment, the Founders themselves expected this to be "a Christian nation."

* Yes, Kansas has one too. Yuk, yuk...
** If I'm wrong about that, and anyone has proof, please enlighten me. I'm writing this off the cuff. My inferences may be ill-founded, as it were.

On quotes, confidence and Cliff Lee.

Yesterday I stumbled across this wonderful Wiki full of famous last words. (I don't mean that in the jocular, metaphorical way; the page showcases actual death-bed quotes and the like.) The site would be impressive to anyone, I think, but as a journalist I sat there awestruck, ever-conscious of the massive amount of legwork that such ready compilations save people like myself. Think back a generation or so and imagine how much time it would've taken to research and produce, say, a term paper presenting the final words of a few dozen of history's most famous figures and the circumstances in which those words were uttered. OK, maybe that's not the very best example, as such topics have always been popular themes for "list" books, which were available long before Amazon. But you get my drift...and I'll give you a better example anyway. In the bad old days, pieces on governmental activities were a back-breaking bitch to write. They involved repeated phone calls, trips to the library and/or government reading rooms, appointments for one-on-one interviews, possibly even FOIA requests. Today 95% of that info is all in one place, waiting for you, right there on the Web. So is just about every other fact you could possibly want. Some of those facts are even true.

But seriously, folks—ta-da-dum!—it occurred to me that this phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining the love affair between Americans and self-help. Today, everybody wants (and expects) a link or a page or something quick, easy and convenient that provides push-button solutions, not just in matters of famous quotes or this year's operating budget for a given federal agency, but in matters of personal transformation as well. The self-help buyer wants to become a New-&-Improved Me—typically she* wants more self-confidence, more positivity—and she wants it now, from a book or a seminar or a few coaching sessions. Or maybe a sweat lodge.

What's more, having undergone that program, that "transformation," self-help buyers expect the world to embrace them ipso facto as, well, new-and-improved. With their just-bought positivity (which, in fairness, we begin trying to bolt onto kids as early as kindergarten), they hope the world will open its arms to them, accepting their newfound confidence as an unmistakable sign of competence. This creates further problems because as a culture, we tend to evaluate others by the same yardstick: We want to be led by people who project confidence and positivity, regardless of whether (a) they have earned the right to feel that way about themselves and/or (b) their confidence has any direct bearing on helping us find our own way to a better place. If there is disillusionment today with Barack Obama, even on the part of some who supported him wildly, it is because those people are asking themselves some tough questions related to (b): They're beginning to wonder if the vast confidence that Obama inspired with all that talk about "change" and "yes we can" has any demonstrable relationship to his ability to find workable solutions and, in a larger sense, govern.

See, we've somehow gotten to this curious juncture in American life where swagger is mistaken for success. And in a sense, it is indeed a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least for a time: The people with the swagger inspire confidence in the rest of us, ergo they become successful—we make them so. The trouble is, sooner or later you reach a point where someone has to be able to actually do something. Things can't run (well) on flash forever; ultimately you need some substance. And that's where it all breaks down. This is emblematic of the crisis we face in American life, not just in politics but in industry and finance and at your local McDonald's and everywhere else: We have plenty of people who know how to seem excellent (because you can acquire the trappings of excellence with relative ease); just not enough who know how to be excellent.

We promote people, we elect people presidents—we follow charlatans into sweat lodges—because they project confidence and bearing. They have the right swagger and the right line; they offer us that promise of instant transformation and/or a secret passage to the promised land.

And you know what? I worry that we learned nothing from what happened a year ago in Sedona. If we're more skeptical now, it's a limited skepticism that focuses on James Ray himself. Mass numbers of your neighbors still follow the rest of Gurudom to Fiji or wherever, to "sweat lodges" of each particular guru's own devising. Hell, a few of the Sedona participants interviewed on my ABC special said they'd still attend a James Ray event, given the chance! I didn't know those admissions were coming when I taped my various segments of the piece; I heard them for the first time along with the rest of you on TV. I was speechless.

This is what happens when you have large numbers of people who dwell in a realm without objective truths or measurements. A realm built entirely on mystique and, again, the lure of instant salvation.

Not to end on what some will regard as a silly, insubstantial note, but this is why I'm glad there is baseball. I was thinking this last night, in fact, as I admired Texas rent-a-pitcher** Cliff Lee's brilliant, wall-to-wall domination of the star-studded, $207 million New York Yankees. (Between the quotes and Cliff Lee, yesterday was an eye-opening day for me, as you can see.) I'm glad there are still enterprises, baseball being one, where talking the talk isn't enough: You have to put up or shut up. In baseball, as in few other societal idioms, the benchmarks are objective, for the most part. "Success" is not a function of parsed words or sly rationalization or airy, ambiguous catch-phrases about the Universe. For all of baseball's swagger and machismo, for all the cliches spewed in those insipid post-game interviews, you have to be able to get people out (or, conversely, deliver key base-hits) in front of millions who are dissecting your performance from every angle, by increasingly complex*** and revealing metrics. In Lee's case, you have to be able to put an 87-mph back-door slider on the outside corner and make some of the best hitters in the world flail at it. Then you have to do it again, and again, and again, for nine innings. Then you have to be able to repeat that 30 times a season. And if you do all that, then you have a right to be confident.

Laugh if you will, but I watch Cliff Lee and I think: Thank God there are places where actual mastery of something still matters.

* I'm not just being inclusionary or femme-friendly here; rather I'm recognizing the demographics of self-help, which skew strongly towards women.
** In baseball parlance, and most simply put, a “rent-a-pitcher” is a star pitcher on the last year of his contract who's acquired during the closing months of a season in order to help a contending team make a major, all-out push for the playoffs. The expectation is that the pitcher will move on to another team—often the Yankees, Red Sox or Dodgers—once the season ends and his agent throws him into the free market, where his cost will escalate far beyond what the "renting" team can afford to pay in long-term money.
*** Even if you're not a fan, scroll down and take a gander at some of these invented stats, just for the hell of it. The whole thing is hilarious.

And the dog whisperer makes a species-jump.

Comes word that Cesar Millan, best known for teaching yellow labs not to bark when the phone rings, aspires to be the next Tony Robbins. He says so himself in this article from The Canadian Press:

"I'm really looking forward to being a part of the super pack," the world-renowned pooch professional said in a recent phone interview. "The super pack of inspirational and motivational speakers."

Millan was speaking of Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and Byron Katie, whom he consulted before crafting his Cesar Millan Live show, which kicks off a Canadian tour Oct. 26 in Victoria.

"Super pack." Get it? How terribly clever of Cesar, keeping it real, tying his past life to his new life with a nice tidy bow. All those motivational alphas, out there showing the rest of us submissives the way.

See, this goes to my point about how we'll take advice from anybody on anything, once that person becomes a celeb. Sully Sullenberger (yes, I'm going to bring him up again) lands a plane in a river, so a publisher hands him $3 mill to cobble together his inspirational thoughts on life and living, knowing that we'll buy it. Beck Weathers runs into trouble on a mountaintop, almost gets himself killed, forces at least a half-dozen other people to risk their lives in saving him, then comes back and gives speeches about facing life's challenges. Barbra Streisand has a butter-smooth voice and an incredible range, so we listen, some of us, when she talks about politics. Ditto Sean Penn. (OK, Penn doesn't have that great a voice, to my knowledge, but you get my drift.) Even Bill Maher, indisputably one of the sharpest tacks in today's entertainment shed, started out, you gotta remember, doing dick jokes. Relatively clever dick jokes, but dick jokes nonetheless. And now his legions of adoring fans walk around each Saturday afternoon quoting (and tweeting) the clever putdowns of capitalism and conservatism that dripped from Bill's lips the night before; parroting the gospel according to Bill.

I'm not saying it's even possible to always "think for ourselves." I'm certainly not saying that's all I do, is think for myself. I'm just saying I don't understand why someone becomes eligible—empowered, if you will—to tell the rest of us how to think or feel or live, just by virtue of having become famous.

So why am I doing this again? (whines the not-so-famous author)

UPDATE, Thurs., Oct. 14. Speaking of articles and this crazy writing thing, my Skeptic cover story on the cultural obsession with happiness, "Ignorance of Bliss," is now in bookstores everywhere.

Just an FYI for anyone who doesn't have plans for some forthcoming evening and might really enjoy sitting down with 5500 not-so-cheery words....

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

The writing business has changed a great deal since I sent out my first manuscript in the fall of 1981. I'd put together a longish magazine memoir about my then current livelihood, which consisted of selling custom wall mirrors mostly in New York's dicey Harlem section—where I was often the only white face I saw, not counting cops and firemen, between the time I arrived in the city each morning and the time I headed back over the Triborough Bridge to the suburbs each night, well after dark. In a larger sense, the piece was thus about racial tensions and the "easy hypocrisy" of the liberal thinking of the era (my own thinking included).

I recall quite distinctly the experience of going to a Manhattan bookstore between sales calls, spending a couple of hours browsing the racks of magazine after magazine, and making up a list of about two dozen I adjudged good candidates for such a piece. At the top of that list was Harper's; I thought the magazine "sounded like me." I did not yet know that literary greenhorns don't usually presume to send their very first manuscript, unbidden, to a prestigious magazine like Harper's, which each month offers its cozy subscriber base the work of the premier thinkers and writers in America and the world. I intend no haughtiness in saying any of this. It's just,well, fact. But Harper's loved the piece and ran it the following January in an issue whose cover story announced the coming coke-fueled crime wave in Miami. (And the year after that, the same subject got a decidedly more pop-culture treatment in the Pacino classic, Scarface.) The best-selling author who'd been informally mentoring me in breaking into the business was stunned: "Harper's! You got a piece in...Harper's? I never got a piece in Harper's!"

The story was called "Going Uptown," and it pains me to say* that it features my favorite opening line, and arguably the best one I've yet to write despite the K2-sized pile of additional words I've churned out in the intervening years: "I stand, conspicuously Caucasian, in the lobby of 2937 Eighth Avenue."**

Today I'd have trouble making up a list of a half-dozen good candidates for such a piece...if that many. To its credits, Harper's still buys these types of stories now and then, but my spies tell me that the magazine doesn't pay that much more than it paid me three full decades ago in the fall of 1981. (And—I'll never forget this—a few months later when I hand-delivered a second piece they'd asked me to write, editor Mike Kinsley sits down, opens up a ledger book and writes me a check on the spot. Doesn't quite work that way anymore, you writers who are reading this, does it now...) And to some degree that's because it's a buyer's market: Many of the other magazines that were then on my list either ceased publication or have so dramatically altered their format, focus and/or business plan that there's simply no place for a piece like the one I wrote...let alone at the 4800 words I submitted it! (To give some context to those who don't really understand the significance of such a number, 4800 words would translate to seven or eight solid magazine pages, with today's art-heavy layouts; maybe more. You don't see a story of that size nowadays unless it's a revelation about a major crisis in Prince William's love life, or maybe Britney's ongoing upskirt issues.)

Of course, situations like the present buyer's market don't develop in a vacuum. Magazine markets (as well as other publishing markets) are a reflection of what the public wants to read. "Going Uptown" was a combination memoir/think piece. Today's readers—to the extent that people truly even read anymore—seldom are interested in a memoir that wasn't "written by"*** some celebrity, and seldom seem interested in thinking at all. We are a pretty literate bunch here on SHAMblog, no doubt about it, but I ask you: How many reasonably lengthy works have you read in the past month just because they "made me think"? I'm talking about open-ended articles that raised more questions than they answered and/or dealt with subject matter that might never have occurred to you to read about, given your customary interests and lifestyle. For that matter, how many things have you read at any length that challenged your intellectual biases instead of confirming them? If you consider yourself an atheist, have you read When Bad Things Happen to Good People? If you're an avid churchgoer, have you read The God Delusion? Hey, I'm just askin'.

I don't really know where I'm "going with" this post, but it makes me feel rather bad that so much of what passes for writing in 2010 is nothing more than gossip or how-to or pissing-and-moaning of one form or another. To young people weaned on Facebook and now Twitter, writing = venting or just "saying something." Standards for the written word are not much higher than standards for the spoken word—and that's a dramatic change from when I started out in this business. Most magazine writing today is either for titillation purposes or has some practical/pragmatic agenda. (The tacky genius of Cosmo at the height of its glory was that it managed to do both, via zesty pieces like "He Wants to Put His What, Where?") Craft is largely irrelevant in this equation. Who you are matters a great deal more to editors than what you have to say and how you say it. If that sounds elitist, I ask you: When did it become "elitist" to expect people to think? To "stretch" a little bit intellectually? To let an idea play out to a certain depth, and over a certain span, such that readers have to wait longer for the payoff (or must provide it themselves based on thinking about what they've just read)?

Is it too much to ask that every now and then, consumers who aren't professional writers read something that's written at a higher level than they could've written it themselves, if they sat down at the computer for a half-hour?

Maybe it is. I don't know anymore. I do know that a member of my own family said to me, just the other day, "Writing is communicating. That's all it is." Is that so? But a grunt communicates. So does a scream. So does a withering look or, in a sense, a fart. So does a tweet that says, "I just finished scrubbing the bathtub and I am soooo tired!" If that's really all that writing is, then I guess I wasted three decades that I could've (should've?) spent selling more $2500 wall mirrors to people who lived in buildings that didn't even have front doors.

* I certainly don't mean to compare myself to Orson Welles, either, but I sometimes feel as if I've ended up in the same sad predicament, never to equal my very own, poor-man's Citizen Kane.
** It's important to realize that Harlem was not, in those days, the kind of trendy, gentrifying place where certain horny ex-presidents would feel comfortable maintaining a business office. Indeed, it was ground zero in an almost incomprehensibly violent ongoing war between the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and New York City cops. The sprawling housing project mentioned in the first line of my story had been the scene of one of the most infamous police ambushes in Manhattan history, as recounted in former DA Robert Tannenbaum's riveting "period piece," Badge of the Assassin: Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones (who was himself black, but whom the BLA considered a "traitor") were lured to the complex by a phony 911 call, then savagely gunned down from behind. Especially during the beginning of my stint in Harlem, the early 1970s, the BLA and its imitator groups were not above doing things like waylaying white salesmen and tossing them off a rooftop.
*** i.e. ghostwritten.

You don't need a machine-gun to be a racketeer.

I'll admit that when this news alert arrived in my inbox this morning, I thought it might have something to do with the ballsy and groundbreaking work being done over at Salty Droid (whose site, by the way, appears down, at least as I attempted to link to it just now. Let's hope this is just a temporary glitch and not a sign of something more troubling). However, the lawsuit at hand seems unrelated to what the Droid calls "The Syndicate"—in terms of the principals involved, anyway. The actual business model sounds disturbingly familiar.

You gotta love the breezy, Brothers Grimm opening of the introduction to the class-action lawsuit, Mattern et al v. PushTraffic et al, as follows:

Once upon a time when the only mail was at the post office, con artists placed ads in magazines advertising: "Make Money at Home Stuffing Envelopes" or "Typing at Home." The unfortunate victim would pay $10 to learn how to get started in the envelope stuffing or typing at home business - and in exchange for their cash would be provided [a] copy of the same ad that had caught them along with instructions to place ads to snare other unsuspecting souls....

The lawsuit goes on to note that the Internet has exponentially raised the stakes here—providing scammers with access to millions (if not billions) of potential marks—then devotes the balance of its 84 pages to explaining why this "criminal enterprise," led chiefly by defendants John Paul Raygoza and Big John Denton*, meets the tests of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.

The suit describes the plaintiffs as "a diverse group living on four different continents," and pointedly alleges that defendants Raygoza and Denton have taken scamming "to new heights by specifically targeting the elderly, unemployed, and disabled and, not content with making off with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, have siphoned off tens of thousands of dollars from individual plaintiffs' credit card accounts...."

I haven't had time to explore whether this is one of the earliest shots of its type across SHAMland's bow, but if Droid is right, there may be more of these RICO actions to come...

* He's identified exactly that way in the lawsuit. For all I know it's his legal name.

'A step-by-step guide to reading step-by-step guides.'

So today I get an email* from a guy named Steve Olsher, who describes himself as "the author of Journey To You: A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming Who You Were Born to Be."

My question: But isn't that who and where we are already...by definition?

* Actually, it was a notification of a comment he'd left on my review of The Pow-errrrr, but it arrived via email, so for all practical purposes it's the same thing.