Recommended Reading

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal famously said that his party, the Republican Party, had to stop being The Stupid Party. A nice sentiment…but he just wrote an editorial that is kind of based on the assumption that Republicans are so stupid they'll believe any negative thing about Democrats. You can read it here and it's kind of amazing. It sounds like it was ghosted by Michael Savage or one of those "Liberals suck the blood of young virgins" talk show hosts like Michael Savage.

I have a lot of smart, reasonable right-wing friends but every so often, I run into someone who has an image of liberals that bears no resemblance to reality; that reminds me of when I was sitting in a comic book editorial meeting one time and the assignment was to create the most hateful, evil villains in the history of the medium. (The meeting never led to an actual published project but there were exchanges like, "How about if they have a ray that will torture every man, woman and child to the point where they will all commit suicide just to end the pain?" "No, that's too nice..")

I don't for a minute believe that Governor Jindal thinks the Democratic Party is 90% of what he says it is. I'm just kinda stunned that he thinks that's the way his followers should be thinking. Maybe somebody oughta remind him that all conservatives live in trailer parks, practice incest, hate minorities, worship Jesus but loathe the poor, etc., etc. Here are some other folks who think Jindal has not just jumped the shark but pole-vaulted over Sea World…

Recommended Reading

Kevin Drum on how John Boehner may let immigration reform pass but in a way that allows many members of his party to condemn it.

This kind of thing is not new. A lot of our Congressfolks and Senators are secretly for a lot of things they say they're against and vice-versa. Years ago, after Tip O'Neill stepped down as Speaker of the House, he appeared on an interview show — I'm thinking it was Lou Gordon's — and he discussed this. Said Tip, one of the secrets to his job was being able to count votes in order to be able to give the guys on his side (Democrats) permission to vote contrary to the party position. There was a bill — I don't recall what it was — that Democrats wanted to pass and Republicans didn't…but there were Southern Democrats who'd pay a price for that at the ballot box. So O'Neill said something like, "I had to make sure we had enough votes so certain Democrats could vote against it and scream about it but it would still pass. Every one of those guys wanted it to pass and would have voted for it if that had been necessary. But in their districts, it was not popular and…well, they were pretty damn happy when I could tell them, 'I've got enough votes locked up. You can vote against it.' One of them went out and denounced it as a monstrosity and an affront to human decency."

Final Notice!

murderville02

Okay, please do this for me, people. My longtime friend Carol Lay has a Kickstarter up to fund her newest comic book creation, Murderville. I've known Carol for years and everything she has written or drawn (and especially both) has been worth your attention and patronage. This will be a great comic if it happens but I'm worried it ain't gonna happen. It's looking like she's about to fall just a little too short.

Go to the Kickstarter page. If you've never backed something over there, this would be a great time to sign up and get your tootsies wet. If you have backed Kickstarter projects before, you know the great sense of satisfaction 'n' pride you get from helping out a great talent and helping them to avoid the compromises and shadows of corporate funding.

Pledge whatever you can. The $25 level is a tremendous bargain. You get a copy of the comic book on paper, a copy as a PDF plus an original signed sketch by Carol. The sketch alone is worth twice that. The $100 level gets you a page of original art from the book — also worth twice that amount. At least.

I don't ask you for much. I haven't even hinted lately that if you enjoy this site, you could show your appreciation by sending bucks my way. Instead, I'm asking you to send them Carol's way because that's where I'd rather see your money go. Let's make this happen. You will write me someday and thank me for putting you on to it.

Hi-Yo!

Leonard Maltin informs us that memorabilia from the late Clayton Moore is going up for auction. I only met Mr. Moore once but he was — the term is unavoidable — a real straight-shooter. He was quite devoted to doing right by the character who made him famous. When I met him, he was making a personal appearance at a Lone Ranger restaurant — a chain that didn't last long, perhaps because the food was so painful, it made you want to bite on a silver bullet. He gave a masterful performance that day, meeting and greeting folks, many of whom probably didn't grasp that this wasn't just some actor who'd been hired to put on the costume. This was the real guy from the TV show. He talked to everyone perfectly in character and when he became aware that I was more interested in meeting Clayton Moore than the Lone Ranger, he took me aside and talked to me as Clayton Moore. But not in front of others. In front of others, he had to be the Lone Ranger…and boy, was he good at it.

Today's Video Link

About half an hour ago, I posted a long piece that concerned, in part, a now-defunct seaside oasis of amusement in Southern California called Pacific Ocean Park.  Here's a look at the place when it was relatively sparkling and new.  By the time I went there in the mid-sixties, they should have had signs that said that in order to ride the rides, you had to be at least as tall as the cockroaches…

Recommended Reading

Barack Obama has finally found a way to bring this nation together: Americans of all ages, races and creeds do not want us to get involved in Syria. Well, maybe that should be Americans of all ages, races and creeds who are not John McCain. Anyway, Fred Kaplan tries to grasp what Obama is thinking by dipping a toe or two into dangerous water.

Tales of My Father #2

As I've mentioned here the other day, my father had this horrible, horrible job at the Internal Revenue Service. If another kid at school pulled the old "My dad can beat up your dad" line, I'd fire back with "Oh, yeah? Well, my dad can audit your dad!"

But that was a hollow threat as mine was not an accountant. Matter of fact, he really didn't know how to make out tax forms any better than most people. Friends and family members would ask him to do their 1040s for them and rather than say no — he hated to say no to anyone about anything — he'd take them on and then my mother would sit down with the manual and figure out how to fill in the forms. She sort of enjoyed it because then she got to see how much money everyone made.

My father's position with the I.R.S. was as follows: If you hadn't paid your taxes in, oh, more than five years…or if an auditor had ruled that you owed more taxes and you hadn't coughed up yet…you'd receive a visit from my father. So he went through life with a lot of people hating to see him and then taking their anger (often, self-anger) out on him.

His usual mission was to negotiate some sort of payment plan with you…but he had no power to sign off on one. He'd go over your finances and suggest, "Well, can you pay thirty dollars a week?" That would be a huge hardship for you at that point but you'd grudgingly agree to do without lunch on weekends so you could pay the thirty. Then he'd go to his superior who'd look at the proposed plan and say, "No. Tell them it has to be fifty!" And he'd have to return to you with the bad news.

You can probably name more painful tasks than that…just nothing that would have caused my father more grief. He simply felt too sorry for people who were in financial trouble, especially if it wasn't their fault and if they had kids to feed. Few things made him more upset than a case where children were suffering because their parents were spending all their money on liquor or hookers or anything of the sort.

And one of those other few things began in 1969 when a man named Richard M. Nixon took office. During those years, the policy in his office — dictated from on high — was to sock it to lower-income folks and to let the rich ones, especially Republican donors, off lightly. He'd come home some days and say, "Another poor person has to pay more so that one of Nixon's multi-millionaire friends can pay nothing." One time, I heard him yelling in the living room and rushed out to see what he was yelling about.

The news was showing a party that the then-president had thrown at his "Western White House" in San Clemente. It was Nixon surrounded by many of his friends and my father was pointing at certain of those friends and saying, "I had a case on that one and that one and that one…" Some of this came out in the Watergate Hearings and it made him very happy. A few years ago, I met John Dean, the Nixon lawyer who'd spilled most of the beans, and I thanked him for doing that. On behalf of my late father.

My male parent was supposed to keep his cases confidential, even from his family, but I occasionally heard about one. He had a case — a very long, ugly case — against a man who was prominent in the animation business. It dragged on for a few years with my father playing Inspector Javert to the animator's Jean Valjean but it was finally settled and I think the fellow lost his house in the process. Two decades later at a cartoon festival, June Foray introduced me to the animator and he stared at me for a long second.

"Evanier…" he muttered, trying to remember. "I knew someone once with that name…"

"Oh, it's a very common name," I quickly told him. "I run into ten or twenty Evaniers a day." (I think there are less than twenty in the entire country…) He never did place it.

There were other cases on famous people, including a prominent TV right-winger who scolded liberals for not loving their country enough. My father seriously pondered ways to "leak" to the press how though this fellow may have loved America, he was doing everything possible to never pay it a dime. Ultimately though, Bernard Evanier was incapable of doing anything illegal or unethical…and to be honest, a little afraid of losing the only job he thought he could do or get.

My favorite case of his that I knew about involved a rather shoddy (but beloved by many) amusement facility out in Santa Monica called Pacific Ocean Park. It was in operation out there from 1958 to 1967. What happened in 1967? My father closed it down.

Or rather, he helped close it down. The owners owed the government millions. The place was falling apart and a lot of the rides were still operating even though the departments that monitor such things said they were on the verge of being declared unsafe. Making the necessary repairs would have cost more than P.O.P. could be expected to gross over the next few years. My father attempted to negotiate a deal where the owners would be able to remodel the park and bring its attractions up to code, make a profit and then pay their back taxes…but the math simply wouldn't work. When it all fell apart, the word came from above: Shut 'er down! And one morning, a veritable S.W.A.T. team of taxmen did just that.

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My father had to get up at 5:30 AM to be there at seven when they moved in. Every entrance had to be padlocked and posted with a notice that the owners would face felony charges if they touched the locks or attempted to gain entrance. That was the easy part. The tough one was that everything in the park had to be inventoried and all the perishable goods (ice cream, hot dogs, etc.) had to be removed from the premises. He came home that night around 10 PM, dead tired but proclaiming proudly, "We did it."

Before he collapsed into bed, he watched the 11:00 local news where the shutdown was the lead story. In it, he heard people denouncing the "Gestapo tactics" of the I.R.S. agents who'd taken away their beloved playground…and there he was on the screen, being likened to Nazis for doing his job, trying to collect what was owed. It was not one of my father's happier evenings.

He hated being thought of a villain by anyone. He knew it came with the job and he understood why people despised the Internal Revenue Service. He said, "I hate paying my bills too but I do it." A few days later, he sat me down for a father-to-offspring chat in which he repeated something he'd said to me on several previous occasions: "Do whatever you want with your life, son. Just make sure you can make a living at it and you love it."

I'd already told him that I intended to be a professional writer…a goal I set around age six and never really considered changing. I sometimes changed my mind about what I'd be a professional writer of and there was a point in there when I wanted to be a writer-cartoonist — though never a cartoonist without the writer part. But I couldn't conceive of a future in which I wasn't a writer. I still can't.

A few years after that particular talk with him, I graduated high school and got serious about pursuing my long-planned profession. I got lucky right away. My first week trying in earnest, I made about three times as much money as my father was then making per week. But it took a while before I convinced him that I could really do it on a regular basis. I'll tell you about that in the third one of these…coming soon to a blog near you.

Bernie Sahlins, R.I.P.

Bernie Sahlins has died at the age of 90. If you don't know who that was, you shouldn't be faulted. The man kept a very low profile…but he was one of the founders of Second City and one of the most important people to impact American humor in the latter half of the twentieth century. Go read the obit and learn about a man who discovered and/or nurtured more prominent comic actors than just about anyone you could name.

Today's Video Link

Because of what day it is…

Monday, Monday…

A lot of folks seem to think that we're about to get two announcements of major Supreme Court decisions, possibly one tomorrow and the other the following Monday. One may be a victory or defeat for Gay Marriage. The other may be a victory or defeat for Affirmative Action. About all it's possible to predict is that two or three justices are solidly on each side in both cases and that there are one, perhaps two "swing votes" that will decide each issue. Remember when the Supreme Court decided the important stuff 8-1? Or even 9-0?

Beyond that, SCOTUS watchers have had a pretty bad track record lately predicting the swingers so I'm ignoring them. I'm also going to ignore CNN, which has gotten the last few major verdicts wrong after they were announced.

The decision on Gay Marriage, whatever it is, won't stop that movement. Might slow it down but won't stop it. A recent poll in California now shows a 22-point gap with residents of the state supporting letting gays marry by a margin of 58% to 36%. That's wide enough that if it ever came to another ballot, the opposition would probably just toss in the terrycloth. Heck, by the time it could be put to another vote, it might gain another ten points. That's about how fast opinion has moved on this issue. It's moving that way in most states.

Tales of My Father #1

I've been posting stories here for some months now about my mother. It's Father's Day so I've decided to write about my father.

My father, as I've mentioned here many times, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. It was a lousy job he took on a "just for now" basis while he looked for something better to do…and he wound up staying with the I.R.S. until he retired. He simply did not have any particular skill that would have allowed him to pursue any of his fantasies: Opera singer, baseball player, newspaper reporter or comedy writer. He was about as proud as a human being could be that I wound up realizing one of his dreams.

And he'd never pushed me in that direction, not one bit. Matter of fact, he tried several times to warn me away from the profession for two reasons. One was that the one time he'd made a serious attempt at it, things had not gone well. This was back in Hartford in the early forties, not long after the military had rejected him for most of the same reasons he never became a baseball player. He had a friend who had an "in" to someone at a local radio station. My father and the friend wrote up several pages of comedy material, took it to the guy at the radio station…and received a devastating turndown. It was so insensitive and heartbreaking, he said, that he never tried again. Many a time, he cautioned me how writing could break your heart.

So that was one reason he was wary of me doing what I've now been doing for 44 years. Another was that as a Revenue Officer, every professional writer he ever met was in deep financial trouble. This included some "name" authors and prolific screenwriters you'd think would have had a buck or two. That they rarely did made him worry when I went that route. It was important to him that I do something I loved but being a Depression-era kid, it was also important to him that I be able to make a real living at it.

He had a little trouble with the way I was paid in my profession: Nothing for weeks and then a big check, then nothing or a month or three. It didn't bother me but it bothered him. After I moved out of the family home and into my own apartment, he'd come by to visit me once or twice a week — he was joyously retired from the I.R.S. by then — and he'd say, trying to be casual about it, "So…any checks lately?" That was his way of saying, "Please…reassure me you're doing okay." That was especially important any week in which my name didn't appear onscreen on a TV show.

Him and me.
Him and me.

He died when I was 39 and right to the end, he was a world-class worrier. He worried about the oddest, most unlikely things — and never about himself; only about other people. If I was due at the house around 5 PM, he'd start worrying at 5:02 that maybe I'd been in a terrible auto accident. Once, I walked in at 5 on the dot and he said, "Oh, thank God. I was worried you'd had an accident or something." I pointed out that I was right on time. He said, "I know. But I had the feeling you were going to be early."

Usually, people like that tend to shout a lot and lose their tempers. Not my father. He almost never got at mad at me or anyone. He just plain didn't see the point of it. When I was in my early teens, I had a best friend named Rick. When I went over to Rick's house for the day, I would literally hear Rick's father yell at him more than I heard my own father yell at me in those 39 years. I could probably list every time he raised his voice at me during those 39 years in about three Twitter messages.

I'll tell you one story right now. At what was for him enormous expense, my father arranged for me to get braces when I was thirteen. The orthodontist was a colorful man named Dr. Nathan M. Seltzer who was based in Beverly Hills and who did a lot of work on kids who went into show business. You've seen many a Dr. Seltzer smile on TV and movie stars who are roughly my age. At one point, I was supposed to wear this ghastly retainer at night — a terrible contraption that Josef Mengele would have condemned as cruel and unusual punishment. If Dick Cheney had known of these, he would have done away with Waterboarding and threatened prisoners with Dr. Seltzer Night Retainers. And believe me, those guys wouldn't have just talked. They'd have yodeled.

One morning, I awoke with bleeding gums. My mother and I phoned Dr. Seltzer and he said, "Stop wearing it until your appointment next week and I'll adjust it." So I didn't wear it the next night. Somehow, we neglected to tell my father about this.

The next morning, he casually asked me if wearing the retainer had interfered with my sleep last night. I told him I hadn't worn it — and before I could tell him why, he exploded. He was paying a lot of money for that orthodonture and I damn well was going to wear it. I don't think I ever saw him as furious as he was at that moment and it was a long time before I could get a word in, not even edgewise but between his sentences, to tell him about what Doc Seltzer had said. When I did, he said he didn't believe me. He was even angrier at me for concocting such a feeble lie. Then he stormed out of the house to go pick up my mother at the market. Shortly after that, Rick arrived.

Thirty minutes later, Rick and I were playing croquet in the backyard when my father came out of the house in tears, hugged me and apologized about eighty times. My mother had told him what Dr. Seltzer had said. I was crying, too…and I remember thinking it was embarrassing that Rick was seeing my father and me crying. But as my father headed back into the house and I turned towards Rick, I saw that he was crying more than either of us. I asked him why. He said, "My father isn't always right but he would kill himself before he'd apologize to me for anything."

I'd seen Rick's father in action and he was right. It was one of those moments when I realized how very special my father was.

Another came a few years later. It was my father's unfortunate job to go to people who were seriously in arrears in their taxes and say, "We need to negotiate a payment schedule." He hated it. No, that's not strong enough. He hated, hated, hated it. He especially hated it when the people were desperate and in trouble.

Not all were. Some of them were very rich guys who just felt it was beneath them to pay taxes. When my father called on one, he'd walk into a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Most of them had on their walls one or more framed photos of themselves with Ronald Reagan and/or Richard Nixon.

My father knew what that meant. These guys would never pay their taxes in full and probably not at all. He'd be lucky to get five cents on the dollar out of them. And he'd be real lucky if his boss didn't call him in and say, "We got a complaint from someone in Washington about you harassing this fine, patriotic gentleman." My father was about as menacing as Wally Cox with a broken fly swatter. In the meantime, the boss would order him to get every cent plus penalties out of the poor woman in Venice whose husband had never paid their joint taxes, then had deserted her and the six kids she now couldn't afford to feed.

The woman in Venice was a real person. My father came home pale from the afternoon he called on her. She owed more money than she could ever possibly come up with and since she was not a Reagan donor, she was expected to actually pay it. She had six kids who were all running around her little dilapidated home barefoot.

My father had a thing about "barefoot." No matter who the person was, if they didn't have shoes on and weren't on the beach or en route to a swimming pool, he felt sorry for them. It was from his upbringing, I guess, that he associated shoelessness with stark, life-threatening poverty. After I was six or seven years old, I was discouraged from it.

We used to get a lot of these mailings that asked us to "adopt" an orphaned child in some third world country — one of those deals where you send the kid five bucks and he can somehow eat for nine months. They would include what looked like trading cards of these impoverished children and ask you to select one or two and send money for them. My father would always send money for any child who was barefoot. If a kid had shoes on or if the photo didn't show his or her feet, no bucks…but he was very generous with the others.

He asked the woman in Venice why the kids who were old enough to be in school weren't there. She had a chilling answer: "The school won't let them attend without shoes and I can't afford to buy shoes for them." This was the person my father had been ordered to get thousands of dollars out of.

For days after his first meeting with the woman, my father was haunted by the image of those kids scurrying about sans footwear, unable to go to school and better themselves. Finally, one night about 3 AM, he woke my mother up and said, "I need to do something I probably shouldn't do but I have to do it." My mother knew what he was thinking and she said, "Do what you have to do," kissed him and rolled over and went back to sleep.

The next day, my father went to a Stride-Rite shoe store in Santa Monica and made arrangements with the manager. The woman would bring in the six kids and he would pay for one pair of shoes for each. Children's shoes cost a lot of money and working for the I.R.S. didn't pay well so it was a big, significant expenditure…but he had to do it. I think that year we didn't go on summer vacation because of it but I sure didn't mind. I did ask if I could somehow get the free March of Comics comic books that Stride-Rite gave out when you purchased shoes at their stores.

He also went to bat for the woman with his superiors, finally getting them to settle her case for considerably less than the full amount. She was so grateful for that and for the shoes, she found out who my father's boss was and wrote him a letter, praising Bernie Evanier for his kindness. She meant well by it but my father was scolded. People were supposed to be afraid of an I.R.S. man, he was reminded. They were not supposed to think he'd tear up most of their bill and buy their kids shoes. Not unless they were a pal of Nixon's, at least.

He was still glad he'd done it. He did things like that all his life, often anonymously. I think I need to write more about my father here…and not so much for your benefit as for mine.

Chain Gang

Here's an article about David Overton, the man behind the Cheesecake Factory chain. I like the other chain his company operates — The Grand Lux Cafe. Or at least I liked the one here in L.A. which has now closed.

On the other hand, I've never cared for the Cheesecake Factory and despite their phone book of a menu, never really know what to order at one. It's kinda like, "Gee, if I'm going to eat something with that many calories, it oughta be better than that." I like the look 'n' feel of some of them — though not the wait on a busy weekend evening. I just can't recall not being disappointed in the food there. This may be my fault. I somehow have gotten into my head to expect something a cut above Coco's. Or maybe it's that I just never liked cheesecake.

Today's Video Link

A bit of John Oliver on The Daily Show

VIDEO MISSING

Foreign Affairs

I had a friend once who always predicted every new TV show would flop. He didn't base this on viewing their pilots or early episodes or reading scripts or anything. Indeed, he didn't know what most of the shows were about. If you said to him, "Hey, NBC is putting a new series on at 8:30 on Tuesday night," that was all he needed. Didn't matter who was in it or who produced it or what it was called. He'd predict its quick failure.

Why? Because, he explained to me once, if you predict every single TV show will fail, you'll be right an amazing percentage of the time. You will very likely equal or outdo those who study the shows carefully and predict this one will definitely succeed and this one might and these three probably won't, etc. I'm not sure the math didn't bear this out. Sure, he was wrong about a lot of smash hits…but there were a lot more instances where he was right.

I got to thinking about him today as I read up about Syria, a situation I don't pretend to understand. And maybe I don't need to because, you know, it's not like anyone's going to make policy because a guy who used to write Yogi Bear comics expressed his opinion. I'm thinking of ignoring, to the extent possible, all these matters. And if I just say, every time the U.S. gets involved in the internal affairs of some country, "We'll regret this, especially after our involvement escalates beyond what now seems like the extent of our commitment," I'll be wrong now and then. But I'll be right an amazing percentage of the time.