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Commentaries for the Week of March 25, 2002 |
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Week of 08/05/2002
Week of 05/20/2002
Week of 05/13/2002
Week of 04/22/2002
Week of 04/08/2002
Week of 04/01/2002
Week of 03/25/2002
Week of 03/18/2002
Week of 03/04/2002
Let Doyle be Doyle
Week of 02/25/2002
Put Rhinos in Rochester
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Bart Giamatti was once asked by a college student if he liked pro basketball. “Young lady,” he boomed, “you want me to discuss thumpety, thumpety, thumpety, swish?” Pro basketball is a sport for misfits and losers. Did Shakespeare, on the other hand, like college hoops? It is “divinely to be wished.”
It seems impossible to conceive of now, but college basketball was once a TV non-person. As child I recall rapping so that I could see the tape-delayed late-night title game. That was it. No regular-season coverage. No Dick Vitale. A college fan shouted SOS. Exposure was MIA.
Then came cable -- a hoop junkie’s millennium in the morn. Coverage is now wall to wall. March madness makes psychos of us all. Is there a better sports interregnum than the 64-team NCAA tourney? It makes even the World Series seem like a walk through the Abbey of the Genesee.
The only thumpety, thumpety you hear is the pulses of our hearts. Shakespeare said, “The play’s the thing.” Sure is in March.
When I was little I loved memorizing cars. “There’s a Ford Fairlane,” my mother quotes me as saying. Or “A Chevrolet Corvair.” The sole exception was foreign autos, then rare. “That’s a special car,” I’d say of a Saab. Most were instantly recognizable -- like families around the tree on Christmas Eve.
The reason, of course, was styling. Each car was unique. Picture an MG or AMC Rambler. You won’t confuse them, say, with a Thunderbird or Cadillac Deville. The French Citron had to stem from another planet altogether. My first car was a used 1966 red Renault-8. It cost me $250, and was worth every penny. I still have its license plate. The owners manual was in French.
It’s said you never forget your first love. No man forgets his first car. That’s especially true as cars have become more generic. A Ford looks like a Chevy, which apes a ... well, you get the point. Which brings us to BMW’s new Mini Cooper, unveiled last week. The front-wheel drive, two-door-hatchback will be the smallest car in America. It mimes the British Mini, introduced in 1959.
You won’t mistake this baby for, say, a Mazda or Mercedes. You will enjoy this blast from the past. A special car, indeed.
Recession? What recession? The issue Democrats thought would give them the Congress must now be assigned to the past, not present, tense.
Recently, first-time applications for unemployment fell. In January, retailers increased their inventories for the first time in a year. Federal Research Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said the expansion is now “well-underway.” If so, a lot of the credit is due the Fed itself.
A decade ago Greenspan was said to KO recovery under President George Bush. Greenspan has keyed recovery under Bush’s son. The rates bank charge each other for overnight loans affects borrowing costs throughout the economy. Since W. took office, the Fed has cut that rate an astounding 11 times.
In 2001, the rate plunged from 6.5 percent to 1.75 percent. Greenspan primed the pump. Small business took the cue. Remember Barney Fife, pledging to “nip crime in the bud.” The Fed nipped recession in the bud.
Bush’s dad became a one-term president because the economy tanked. If Bush fils wins re-election, he won’t forget who helped the economy soar.
Recently a tape recording from the Nixon Archives was released. It reveals 1972 conversation between the then-President and Billy Graham. Nixon worries about what he terms a Jewish domination of the media. The evangelist agrees, saying it is unhealthy for America. Were they right? Should they be able to express such a view? My response, respectively: No, and yes. This is still a free country. We have all the right to be wrong.
Politically correctors, of course, don’t believe in free speech. So they denounced Graham as anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League has been especially vicious -- wishing one conversation to obscure a brilliant career. Will they succeed? Not likely: Since the 1950s Graham has neared the top of Gallup’s most admired Americans -- remaining there to this day.
Even as a boy, I loved how his crusades invited sinners to stride forward -- inevitably, “Lamb of God” graced the organ -- and rededicate themselves as a winnowing force for good. That good went beyond saving Protestants. Graham scored anti-Catholicism, and befriended Israel. In the end, he knew that we are One Nation Under God.
All this is ignored by the bigots of left. Their attack on Graham is a smoke screen for assaulting Christianity. Perhaps they should recall how Christ told the Pharisees: “Judge not, lest you be judged.”
I grew up in public school -- kindergarten, grade and high school, college. Both my parents taught in public school. I thought of them as middle class, Main Street, and made in USA. Private schools were somehow effete, like a side dish you’d decline to order.
My, how times change. Today, many parents despair of public schools. Think them left-wing, alien, politically correct. Private schools, on the other hand, have come to embody value, standards, a moral rock in a cesspool world. No wonder their enrollment has surged in the last 10 to 20 years.
A billboard for Catholic Schools of Rochester says: “We teach faith. We teach fact.” Fact: Private school students beat their public peers on state English and math tests taken this year. Who released the results? The state Education Department. What does this suggest? Publics can no longer win even in those areas you and I subsidize most heavily a taxpayers.
For 30 years Uncle Sam has been a Dutch uncle for public schools: Money, poured down the drain. I am almost ashamed to say I went to public school. Ask yourself if you don’t need feel the same.
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