My dad always shook his head at the people who railed about the scandalous tardiness of the surgeon general's finding in 1964 that cigarettes caused cancer. "We all knew smoking was killing us all along," he said.
Sorta like the young people quoted in a piece over the weekend in Block Club Chicago:
"Mike, from Old Town, who did not want to share his last name, ordered a vodka Red Bull before getting back in line with friends at Old Crow Smokehouse’s curbside bar. He had just gotten back from a vacation in Dallas, Texas, with a friend, where he left a day early due to the spike in cases and the state’s rolling back on its openings.
'[It feels] like I’m the problem,' he said with a nervous laugh as he talked about being out and about amid the pandemic. Looking around at the throngs of people drinking and walking around Wrigleyville, he said it is concerning.
Outside Vines on Clark, a patron said he felt guilty as things are going back to what he described as 'normal.' Then he joined his friends on the patio."
I know magical thinking. For instance, I ride a motorcycle in Chicago, occasionally with my own precious daughter on the back.
Riding that motorcycle around my neighborhood Sunday afternoon, and rolling past packed and roaring beer gardens and patios, I think I realized that people engage in a kind of reverse superstition.
It's not that we tell ourselves it won't happen to us. No, our magical thinking is smarter than that.
Instead, we admit to ourselves that we are doing magical thinking. And we believe that, as long as we admit that we are worried, that this is probably stupid, that we know it can happen to us—we think it won't happen to us, or to the people we love.
(And truth be told, the strangers next to us on the patio and the millions of others in our city factor into our magical thinking about as frequently as do the Sentinelese.)
We are dead wrong, of course, all of us—about all of it. And we know it.
We keep waiting for adults to arrive and tell us exactly what to do and what not to do.
Over the last few months, you and I have complained so much about the lack of consistent leadership in this country.
We might take a moment to admit just how badly we need it. Worse than five-year-old kids—who at least, when they eat themselves sick, don't blame a lack of leadership.
Writers like to bitch a lot, as if the government forced them to write for a living. We don't get laid like guitar players and ironworkers. Nobody understands how hard we work. The pay hasn't improved since about 1982 and it sucked then.
On the upside, Calvin Trillin once said writers have the perfect kind of fame: Just enough to get a table at a popular restaurant, but not enough to get bothered while you eat.
What I like about a writer's fame is that a writer never has any way to know what impact he or she is having, or how far the ripples run.
And so at some point you stop caring, really. You just write—mostly to get things in your head out where you can see them. And to make room in your head for new things.
You try to notice what sorts of stuff seems to make the biggest stir; and you try to make time to find bigger audiences, by publishing in a magazine or writing a book.
But you realize, you really don't care anymore about the numbers.
Hi David - I'm not a speechwriter, know zip about corporate or political life, and I'm not even in the US. I'm a novelist in Australia. But I just want to tell you how much I love receiving your Writing Boots emails, every single one. Always insightful, grown-up, tender, amusing and sharp. This one is a superb instance of all of the above. Thank you. - Charlotte Wood
And you look up Charlotte Wood and you see she's quite accomplished, indeed. (And cool, too.)
And then on your next run, which happens to be the very next day, you listen to an interview with Charlotte Wood. And to your delight, you find her insightful, grown-up, tender, amusing and sharp.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
When I was young, I thought Dylan meant that grown-ups should just fuck off, really.
As a grown-up in the middle of another rapidly aging road, I find myself thinking about how I can lend a hand—and also about how to get out of the new road—gracefully, thoughtfully and even helpfully.
Just. shutting. your mouth on Facebook. Or as I suggested to a lifelong communication combatant, in a private email: "By not shrieking at each other on Facebook and making all about us again." Maybe it doesn't make any difference at all what a bunch of fifty-year-olds are yelling on the social media equivalent of a rest home about statues and how far pendulums should swing and slippery slopes and bad apples and what the BLM people are or aren't setting the movement back. But whatever ripples this sends out, you wouldn't want to drink.
Biting your tongue when young people say things that sound simplistic. “Make love, not war” was simplistic, too. It was also right on, man. Would the effectiveness of the young people who drove the anti-Vietnam movement been improved by long, solemn dinner table lectures on the subtlety of geopolitical power from a million armchair Henry Kissingers?
Look for chances to lend your experience to young people's efforts. No horse puts itself out to pasture; and to be honest, we middle-aged folks aren't financially prepared to be made irrelevant. For the even the most selfish reasons, we mothers and fathers should be looking for chances to make their skills and connections available to activist young people—and in the process, perhaps moderate their most rash impulses. Lately I'm doing my best to support several such projects in my sphere of influence. And many of these came to me through other prominent elders in my industry who weren't shy about recruiting me to help. (Q. But what if some of these projects amount to nothing in the end? A. Who cares?)
From your new position on the side of the new road, stand and cheer on the parade! Vital Speeches' Vital Speech of the Week this week is Obama speechwriter Cody Keenan's valedictory speech to Northwestern University grads this month, in which he urged the young people, "Open the floodgates, overwhelm us, run us out of town ... Don’t look for reasons to hope, don’t look for other people to make you hopeful, be those people, create those reasons. Be icons of idealism, be rock gods of activism. Be the new vanguard of anti-cynicism, because there is already another generation coming up behind you that’s growing up even faster than you did, because they had to.” Just because you're out of the road doesn't mean you have to be lying face down in a ditch.
I love to rattle off my dad's lifetime voting record:
Dewey
Eisenhower
Eisenhower
Nixon
Goldwater
Nixon
Nixon
Ford
Reagan
Reagan
Bush
Bush
Dole
Bush
Kerry
Obama
If you'd asked him, he'd tell you that the Iraq war was what turned him away from the Republicans. If you'd asked him, he'd also tell you that my younger sister and I were in our thirties by then, and both pretty intense Democrats (our views also strengthened by the war) ... and the future was ours, not his. So when in doubt, why wouldn't he just vote the way we wanted him to vote?
And when he returned from the Middletown, Ohio polling place after voting for Obama, the 85-year-old WWII veteran with two months to live cried with astonishment that he had just voted for a black man for president.
If that was possible, what else might be?
That's up to us now to answer—mothers and fathers throughout the land, and the sons and the daughters beyond our command.
One item that never saw light during the now legendary "Coronavirus, and us" Writing Boots diary period strikes me as something I can't throw away:
"I can wash my car in less time than it takes my teenage daughter to wash her face. I just walked by the bathroom and she was actually buffing her cheek, with an actual machine."
This morning we launched the 2020 World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association. The event will be virtual this year, and the amount of invention required to convert a time-honored and beloved physical gathering to an equally useful and convivial digital affair has reminded me often of the first PSA World Conference, held at New York University back in 2014.
Logistical circumstances that I don't quite recall dictated that we announce the conference only about three months before holding it. That's not nearly enough when you're launching a brand new event. For instance, when we created an Asia-Pacific Speechwriters Conference a couple of years ago, we announced it well over a year in advance of the day, so that by the time the show rolled around, it seemed to folks an institution already. And when you're launching the first conference of a new global association, you don't want to make it appear as if the idea popped into your head yesterday afternoon.
Beyond the loyal cadre who made up most of the speakers for the event, I had to convince speechwriters quickly and completely that this event was important enough for them to subsidize and attend on short notice. I caught a huge break when I casually mentioned the event to David Petraeus, with whom I was corresponding back then because he was the mentor of the author of a book I was helping to write. Petraeus felt grateful to me for helping his protégé, a young army officer dying of cancer. When he ascertained that the conference was going to be in New York, where he was working at the time, he asked me if I'd be interested in having him make an appearance. (At left is former military speechwriter and early PSA booster Randy Lee.)
With Petraeus on the program, people had to realize I wasn't screwing around. But of course that's exactly what I was doing: On the eve of my departure for New York, my art teacher wife and our 10-year-old daughter were feverishly stamping out PSA buttons at the kitchen table, using a machine borrowed from the school.
On location, my administrative support from the publisher that then owned the PSA consisted of a very nice young man whose sense of urgency, shall we say, did not match mine. For instance, he asked if it would be cool to cut out of the event a little early because he had an appointment with a really baller New York tattoo artist. Permission granted. But on the morning of the first day of the first conference in the unwritten history of the Professional Speechwriters Association, my man was not in the hotel lobby. After making futile calls to his room, I walked off toward Washington Square alone.
Somehow, it all worked out. My apologetic associate caught up with me on the sidewalk. The sixty participants appreciated most of the program, which was a bit uneven but which contained enough memorable sessions—including my conversation with Petraeus, in which he talked about his experience of once having served as a speechwriter, as a young officer—that most of the people who were there wanted to come back next year. (In one session, a Danish classical trumpeter and rhetoric scholar named Mette Højen reduced the entire delegation to tears by verbally connecting their personal sadnesses with her heartbreaking rendition of Danny Boy.)
The most indelible moment for me was at a caucus at the very end, where people got up and spoke about what the new organization meant to them. Hal Gordon, a former Reagan White House speechwriter who I first met in 1992 when I was 23 years old and a staffer at another speechwriting conference, stood up to talk. Do you know what the PSA means to me? he said. It means THIS! And with that, he triumphantly thrust aloft the PSA button that that my wife and daughter had made at our kitchen table just three nights before. Gordon went on to talk about how for decades he had found himself at civic events and cocktail parties, always having to explain what he did for a living and feeling he needed to convince people that speechwriting was a legitimate professional practice and not just some fringe racket. Now, he suggested, he could tell people he was a speechwriter, and proudly point to his button, like a badge.
My associate off to his tattoo appointment, I was left at the end of the conference boxing up leftover materials with a young NYU communications staffer. I turned to her and cried with relief.
***
Now it's 2020, and we stand at the beginning of something else.
But this time, I do not walk alone: With the help of an impeccable support team—and on behalf of hundreds of speechwriters who we have happily come to take one another and us for granted as permanent colleagues and friends—I've pulled together a World Conference that's as necessarily inventive as the very first one. And that I have every reason to believe will be just as meaningful and memorable, too.
U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black and San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank CEO Mary C. Daly join several former White House speechwriters, the speechwriter to the president of the European Commission and speechwriters to some of the world’s most influential corporate, political, university and nonprofit leaders for a crucial conversation about the state, the future and the soul of the speechwriting business. And the conference will not end until Mette Højen, along with her husband Jonas Wiik, who is the principal trumpet at the Royal Danish Orchestra, plays us out by connecting for us the deepest magic of rhetoric and music, once again.
If you are a speechwriter, I hope you'll use the generous early bird discount to secure an affordable slot at the first conference of the unwritten future of the Professional Speechwriters Association, the unwritten future of your career, and the unwritten future of global rhetoric.
Emory University psychology professor and political science author Drew Westen has made an academic career out of criticizing his fellow Democrats for shooting themselves in their two left feet with the rhetoric they choose to describe the causes they're promoting. They appropriated the enemy's label, "Obamacare." They mincingly propose "campaign finance reform" instead of demanding "fair elections." Instead of talking about pollution, liberals gas on about "CO2 emissions."
At times like this, terms must be descriptive and socially useful, and however important the concept behind it, "defund the police" has been neither, beyond its initial contribution, of jarringly drawing attention. It's time to settle on a better term before it's too late. "Reimagine the police" works well enough for me.
Two other terms, I've wanted to erase from the public conversation of late. Again, both terms describe a thing that's real; but the terms are less descriptive and useful than they are unnecessarily and gratuitously insulting and alienating, on either side of the vicious political tetherball game that passes for national dialogue at the moment.
One is "virtue signaling." This is a term usually used by Republicans, who accuse liberals of taking easy stands in favor of politically correct causes in order to show how woke we are. Which is exactly what we are doing, of course. But in many cases our motive for wanting to appear woke is wanting to publicly declare ourselves allies to endangered or grieving or powerless fellow citizens in a time of trouble. "Virtue-signaling" implies that our motive for "liking" a gay wedding or a Black Lives Matter rally is preening vanity. That's an unfounded accusation to which we will not often cop, even private.
Another is "white privilege," which as far as I can tell is used most frequently by white people to shame other white people (sometimes with the motive of "virtue-signaling"). That white privilege exists is not refutable. But putting energy toward getting white people to make a long catalogue the endless social advantages they have over African Americans—I don't have to worry about getting shot at the Wendy's drive through even if I'm a little tipsy, I get to go through my day without making six hundred judgements about the racial and emotional motives of the people I'm doing business with, I can walk off the street into the Palmer House hotel and use the men's room without being questioned ... I really could go on all day. But what good would that do?
At the end of the day—and I don't mean that as a cliché, I mean it literally at the end of the day—no one feels privileged, no matter how sincerely they say they realize how privileged they are, as I wrote here three years ago:
Why? Because no matter how privileged a person may be thanks to his or her class, race, gender, physique, nation of origin, region of origin, city of origin, neighborhood of origin or block of origin—no one ever feels privileged.
That's because even the most privileged person had an alcoholic mother, teenage acne, adult psoriasis, a permanent case of impostor syndrome, panic attacks, weight issues, relationship issues, gambling issues—or all of the above.
And everyone—even the most gifted of us—feels from day to day that he or she has fought like a dog to get to cocktail hour: Has climbed out of a warm bed in the cold dark, beaten traffic, tolerated crazy co-workers, sated bottomless customers, and slogged through more traffic home while on the phone with a narcissistic relative only to be told upon walking in the back door that the fucking dishwasher is leaking.
"Privilege" is real and must be acknowledged by intelligent people as a socially negotiable fact of life; but "privileged" is a term for the academy, not for useful political conversation.
Not too long ago, the idea was to do things to empower people who were known as the "underprivileged," and as old-fashioned as that word sounds, that's more the idea here, isn't it? To see that all American citizens have all the privileges that everyone ought to enjoy? If I'm walking down Wabash and I need to go, I'm not going to shit my pants in solidarity with you. How can we make it so that you can stroll blithely into the Palmer House, too?
It's very easy to overstate the importance of this argument relative to everything that's going on right now.
And maybe it's even too early in what I hope is a real profound social movement—and I've seen evidence of said profundity, in communications with others, and with myself—to be quibbling about the terms of the debate.
But I don't play guitar.
And I think if we're going to change the world we're going to have to change our words, too.
Last Monday, while drinking, I shared with you my musings as I watched the seventh game of the 1952 World Series.
Last night, while drinking, I watched the very first Monday Night Football game, a contest between the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns on a hot September night in Cleveland Municipal Stadium, in 1970.
Here was my live account. I interspersed it with italicized excerpts from a Huffington Post piece I wrote five years ago about why football connects me to a certain part of my childhood and comforts me so reliably, a skill that has come in handy almost nightly over the last several months.
***
I was a kid before ESPN came along and injected sports into every home.
Our Hudson, Ohio home had music, so I took piano lessons. Dad was into antique cars, so I went to car shows. Both my parents were into horseback riding, so I did that. I didn’t know about sports, beyond the cultured-sounding “human drama of athletic competition,” which we saw some Sunday afternoons on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
But when I was about 10 years old, I suddenly and totally fell in love with football. I vaguely associate this cataclysm with a “math football” competition among the homerooms in fifth grade at McDowell Elementary. Playing for Mrs. Anderson’s Dolphins, maybe I figured that if football could make math fun, it could make everything fun.
It sure made reading fun. Every afternoon I rode my bike to the Hudson Public Library until I’d read everything they had on the NFL. I don’t remember checking the books out. I remember reading them in the library, and hearing in the silence the roaring echoes of real stories about magic men with magic names. Johnny Unitas. O.J. Simpson. Bart Starr. Jim Brown. Gayle Sayers. Joe Namath.
For a boy growing up in a WASPy little Ohio town where everyone was named Murray or Sullivan or Butler or Keane, these men’s names were as strange as anything from Tolkien. Curly Lambeau. Big Daddy Lipscomb. Bambi Alworth. Roman Gabriel. Sam Huff. Ray Nitschke. Chuck Bednarek. Dick Butkus. Zeke Bratkowski!
I read about The Sneaker Game, the Heidi Game, the Ice Bowl, the Immaculate Reception, Wrong-Way Regal, Ghost to the Post, The Longest Game, the Sea of Hands, the Perfect Season and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
I gaped at the pictures of the sun-splashed September grass, the crisp-clear October air, the mud-caked men of November, the frozen granite fields of December and the Super Bowl palm trees of January.
It was all impossibly rich — and to me, impossibly beautiful.
***
We pick this game up in the middle of the first quarter with the Browns up 7-0. Play-by-play man Keith Jackson just described the crowd noise as a "cacophony." Don Meredith said, "What in the world is that?" Jackson replied, "I got that from Howard." Cosell, of course.
***
I just watched a 60-second Marlboro ad showing cowboys working with their horses at dawn, making coffee and smoking cigarettes. No words until the last 10 seconds. "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country."
***
I just watched Rod Serling narrate a commercial for the 1971 Ford LTD.
***
The 1970 Browns had a starting wide receiver named Fair Hooker. He won the job (presumably fair and square) from a receiver named Homer Jones.
***
The Jets coach is named Weeb Ewbank. What's more, Weeb Ewbank actually looks like a Weeb Ewbank.
***
The Bo Scott just scored for the Browns, putting them up 14-0. That was a very big lead in 1970. Unless, of course, you were playing against Joe Namath. Who got the ball and immediately hit on a first down pass. To Emerson Boozer.
***
I just saw a Goodyear commercial convincing men they owe it to their wives to buy the best tires. "When a woman's at the wheel, Polyglas means more than mileage." Say what you will about the sexism, I do think that's an original English sentence.
***
Boozer just scored a touchdown to make it 14-7. Speaking of that, how about one more vodka lemonade.
***
As bewildered as my parents may have been at my Fosbury flop into football history, they must have been glad to see me spending so much time at the library.
Maybe as a form of encouragement, my dad started watching Cleveland Browns games with me on the big TV, up in my parents’ bedroom. Our English Springer Spaniel had lived the first few years of his life in a civilized house, and so when Dad and I would yell and slap high-five, the dog reasoned that a fight had broken out. He would bark madly, shattering the Sunday afternoon peace and prompting shouts from my startled mother, below. “Jesus! What’s going on up there?”
Incredible things were going on up there. That year, the Browns happened to have a season seemingly made for me.
Brian Sipe was a fragile little quarterback that an undersized 11-year-old could relate to. With a black rubber sleeve protecting his weak right elbow, Sipe heaved the ball over the line like a shot put over a woodpile, and it somehow wobbled into the waiting arms of enough resourceful Browns receivers that Sipe somehow won the MVP of the American Football Conference that year.
That wonderful team was known as the Kardiac Kids, because every victory was last-minute. (And so were the losses.) I could go on about the Kardiac Kids, and their coach, Sam Rutigliano, a kind of Phil Donohue figure who said things like this, after a tough loss: “There are 800 million Chinese who didn’t even know we played today. We’ll get over this.” I could name every player on the roster, right down to Dino Hall, the short, slow, butterfingered kick returner who we loved anyway. In fact, it is very hard for me to stop writing about that team. Let’s move on, before we get to the bitter playoff loss against the Oakland Raiders, when Sipe threw a terrible interception in the back of the end zone when all we had to do was kick a short field goal to win the game and I walked out of my parents’ bedroom and sat on the stairs and sobbed.
***
Now Al Hirt, the concert trumpeter, is deep-sea fishing and swilling Miller High Life, "the champaign of beers."
***
Dandy Don Meredith is having a terrible time referring to Fair Hooker without making a crack. "There's old Fair Hooker," he said.
***
For several straight years at Christmas, I only wanted jerseys and helmets of NFL teams. I played “electric football,” a toy that was imbecilically conceived, and terribly noisy to boot, involving a motor that shook a sheet of metal. The teams my game had come with — the Cowboys and the Broncos — were forever insanely vibrating in the opposite direction, or around in circles until the ball carrier skidded out of bounds with a 30-yard loss, all over the buzzing din of a vibrating sheet of metal. Electronic football — a handheld game in which little red dashes represented football players who you wore your thumbs raw trying to avoid — was by comparison much more satisfying.
I played football during recess, of course; and still remember a touchdown run around the right end at McDowell; the kid thought he had me, but I was too fast. I played football at friends’ houses, once intercepting a pass in perfect stride and returning it all the way down the left sideline for a touchdown. Mostly, I played football by myself in the backyard, usually in full uniform including Walter Payton-style mouthpiece. I punted the ball straight up in the air and tried to judge the bounce in order to catch it, juke an invisible safety out of his invisible jock strap and dive for a touchdown, across the septic tank drainage trough.
Meanwhile, football and other sports were the way I began to expand my vocabulary and explore larger questions. I remember my parents chuckling when I directed them to watch a replay highlight that contained, as I put it, “the moment of truth.” I remember them listening patiently to my politically precocious dinner-table comparison between quarterbacks, running backs and receivers as “white-collar workers,” and offensive lineman as “blue-collar workers,” and my enthusiastic sixth-grade social studies conclusion that society needs both kinds of workers, just like a football team does!
***
I first realized the what football did for me as a grown-up the day my pregnant wife was scheduled to be induced to deliver our first and only child. My wife was on her hands and knees scrubbing the house. I had finished my work and did not know what to do with myself. I found myself—without really ever deciding to go there—at the bookstore, in the sports department, sitting at a table and turning the pages of a huge coffee table book, looking at pictures of members of the Fearsome Foursome, the Doomsday Defense, the No-Name Defense, the Steel Curtain, the Orange Crush and the Purple People Eaters.
When I need to not be an adult for a little while, I pretend I'm a little kid pretending I'm a pro football player from the 1960s or 1970s.
These days, I need to not be an adult for a little while just about every single day.
***
I just saw a commercial for Champion spark plugs. Commercials during football games in this era were all for men: car batteries, tires, beer, cigars, razors. Nothing even unisex, like AT&T.
***
"Isn't Fair Hooker a great name?" Meredith asks, rhetorically.
***
I've never admitted this before: The very first time I heard about a thing called the "Information Superhighway"—which turned out to be the Internet—maybe about 1993 or 1994?—the only personal benefit I could think getting from it was watching Super Bowl III in its entirety, with commercials. (This was Joe Namath and the Jets' preposterous upset of the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. By now I've seen that game at least four times.) I could never think of any other purpose for the Internet than that. Come to think of it, I still can't.
***
Halftime, 14-7 Cleveland. Howard Cosell offers highlights of other NFL games over weekend, a tradition that would last a dozen years at least, which tells you your first ideas are often your best ideas.
***
The unappreciated Homer Jones just returned the second-half kickoff 85 yards for a touchdown. 21-7 Browns. That was a big lead back then. Unless you were playing against Joe Namath.
***
I'm eating peanuts now. Like a motherfucker.
***
Boozer is inspired tonight. But I brag.
***
Touchdown, Boozer. "Watch this again," Keith Jackson says on the replay, "as Boozer really busts it." 21-14 Browns.
***
My parents made me go to bed at 9:30 Eastern on Monday nights. That was usually well before the first quarter was over. It's 11:30 right now, on a school night. Fuck you, Dad.
***
In 1970, Miller could claim with a straight face that High Life was "the best beer there is." Now look. There have probably been a few hot afternoons or hot nights in bowling alley/bars where I might have agreed that Miller High Life is exactly the beer I wanted to be drinking at that time. But the best beer there is! This puts me in mind of the great Seinfeld acceptance speech at the Clio Awards where he says he loves advertising because he loves lying. Me too!
***
September, 1970. Nixon was president and Vietnam was all napalm and B-52s. RFK and MLK had been assassinated two years earlier. Four students had been killed at Kent State four months earlier. The only thing that seems to matter tonight, is this.
***
Don Cockroft kicks a field goal, putting the Browns up 24-14, which was a big lead in those days ...
***
(Said Emerson Boozer about that great Jets upset of the Colts in Super Bowl III, "It was during the postgame celebration that we learned [Jets officials] must have thought we'd lose because they hadn't ordered any victory champagne. So someone went next door to the Colts' locker room and 'borrowed' their champagne.")
One of the ways I pass the time watching these old football games is to find out what became of these players. According to the Baltimore Sun, "After football, Boozer worked as a CBS commentator, owned a machine shop and then a bar/restaurant on Long Island. Eight years ago, he retired as head of his town's parks and recreation department. Married 46 years, he mentors at-risk youths at local schools, plays golf and walks as much as 1 1/2 miles daily."
***
We're in the fourth quarter now, 12:50 to play. Boozer is being treated for leg cramps, and the Browns trainers just tried to wake up their completely unconscious receiver Gary Collins with smelling salts.
Whatever happened to smelling salts?
***
Namath is moving the Jets. A pass to Richard Caster. Another to George Sauers. (Wide receivers named Richard and George!) And Sauer scores. 24-21 Browns, with 3:22 to go. No wonder Monday Night Football caught on.
***
Supposedly, Don Meredith said during this game, "Fair Hooker. I haven't met one yet." But now I've listened to the whole thing, and I can tell you, it's a myth.
***
Namath just threw a game-losing interception and looks cooler than you and I look in our finest hour.
A pal of mine and I disagree on some matters of public policy, but a common hobbyhorse of ours has for years been the appearance of the uniforms police wear and the cars they drive. We have always thought it was really important. And if it was important before, it must be more important now.
So I had to comment when the police force in the leafy little, WASPy little, preppy little white bread Ohio suburb where I grew up posted about their citizen-friendly policies over a photo of one of their menacing police cars.
To answer that last question, Beth Dominguez, the blindness of some to the symbolism of what the police look like is as clear a demonstration of the stubbornness of an us-versus-them attitude—between police and some citizens, and between some citizens and other citizens—as anything else I've seen.
Imagine if you were in a hospital, and the nurse came in dressed head to toe in black.
I think you'd have a hard time focusing on anything else.