We Americans are not long on memory or delayed gratification. When things go wrong we expect them to be fixed, and pronto. And so after sending Obama to Washington as if he was Harry Potter or some other wizard capable of saving us all from reaping the harvest of years of magical thinking, we are now sending the Tea Party to Washington to burn the place down.

It’s an interesting choice; to take the only institution in our Republic part of whose expressed mission is to check the powerful and protect the powerless – our government – and instead of reforming or rebuilding it, castrate it.  How this is expected to return any real power to the average American is anyone’s guess. But at least it’s a mission possible.

I understand the urge to just tear everything down and start over. It’s an alluring fantasy. I felt the same way when I was fifteen. I didn’t much care for the choices and responsibilities in front of me, so I daydreamed of hiding a row boat somewhere on the southern shores of Lake Erie, then going for a swim one day and faking my own death by drowning; only to row off to a brand new life in Canada. Some of my more liberal friends are undoubtedly considering a similar plan right now.

As for me, I’m not going anywhere soon. One thing I’ve always admired about conservatives is that when they are in the minority they band together and fight like hell, whereas liberals tend to move to Paris and whine. I fervently disagree, however, with much of what those conservatives are fighting for, especially when the predictable result will be to continue redistributing America’s wealth to its wealthiest.

This is tricky turf for discussion. Most Americans see the accumulation of great wealth as proof of the American Dream, with close to 70% believing they have a real shot to reach the uppermost rung on the ladder. That mathematical impossibility aside, the facts are that social mobility in America is at historic lows. The signature result of the economic policies of both Republicans and Democrats over the last 30 years is a wealth distribution curve that’s beginning to look like Zimbabwe’s.

Every major economic metric from percentages of earned income, investment income, and GDP growth to property ownership and the accumulation of other real assets, shows a steady climb in the share of the nation’s bounty that’s under the control of the top 3%. Meanwhile the middle class is doing slightly better than the polar bear at staving off extinction, while poverty soars and the bottom 50% coagulates into a permanent underclass.

It’s no wonder so many people are feeling oppressed and angry with their government.

Unfortunately, they’re targeting the puppet while the puppeteers laugh all the way to their too-big-to-fail banks. The real culprit undermining individual liberty and opportunity in America is not government. It’s this ever-increasing consolidation of wealth.

Such concentrations of power are inherently abusive to individual liberty and opportunity. That’s just the way power acts, whether it’s political, religious, military, or economic. It’s also why the founders created a political system of checks and balances: to blunt the abuses of unrestrained power so the average individual could be free to flourish.

Now that system itself has been captured by a moneyed aristocracy, through multi-billion dollar election cycles like the one we’ve just gone through that make a mockery of the term “free speech.” The vast majority of this money funds negative advertising, corroding the body politic. The outcome is a “Party of Washington” political class beholden to that money, and a general electorate either enraged or disengaged with the whole idea of government; a win-win for the already disproportionate influence of our super-wealthy elite.

Understandably, most among the super-wealthy disagree with this analysis. They claim that they are the oppressed, not the oppressors, victimized by a progressive tax system that forces them to pay almost as great a share of the nation’s taxes as the share of its assets that they control. They argue that they should be the first in line for a tax cut, if not just for the sake of “fairness”, then because they clearly understand best what to do with the money, which is why they are super-wealthy to begin with.

This explains perfectly Meg Whitman’s decision to spend $140 million of her own cash in her attempt to become California’s governor, a job that pays $206,000 a year. In case  the fiscal hubris of such an expenditure wasn’t blatant enough, she didn’t even get the job. She’d have been better off waiting until the state is forced to auction itself off on eBay. Still, Ms. Whitman did manage to remind a lot of people of the good old days in America, when the poor were blessed and the rich were filthy. So it wasn’t a total loss.

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Meanwhile a far different narrative about wealth and power and the role of government is unfolding in my wife Daisy’s native land, Brazil. It’s been a fascinating tale of two countries during our marriage. For one thing, having suffered – and I mean real suffering, not just the psychological kind – for so long under the indifference of a ruling elite, Brazilians do not share our illusion that great wealth is necessarily a sign of superior intelligence, competence, merit, or morality.

In the last half of the 20^th century, while Americans were enjoying the most prosperous fifty years of any people in history, Brazil was experiencing a coup d’etat, followed by 20 years of a military dictatorship that gutted the middle class, followed by another 10 years of  hyperinflation that flattened everyone else except those at the top that were running the show. In the 1990’s alone, the country created and abandoned four different currencies as it struggled to its feet.

Then came the first ten years of the 21^st century, when America suddenly devolved into the world’s largest debtor nation with one of its slowest growth rates, while Brazil prospered, paying off her international debts thanks to a booming economy. Ironically, from our limited American ideological perspective anyway, this turnaround was accomplished under Brazil’s first working class/leftist/socialist leader, President Lula da Silva.

Brazil’s story is not all sweetness and light. Much to the disgust of his people, Lula’s presidency was also marked by constant corruption scandals similar to its aristocratic predecessors. But in contrast to the cronyism of those elites, his party’s decidedly non-ideological economic policies helped lift 20 million Brazilians out of poverty, and 30 million more into the middle class.

Having lived through every imaginable shell game, Brazilians view this progress with a sophisticated cynicism. They don’t believe in their government any more than we believe in ours. Days after Lula was elected to his second term, the people let it be known that they were not pleased and not fooled by all the corruption, booing him heartily when he presided over the opening of the Pan-American Games. They’d voted him back into office because for the first time in half a century their nation’s wealth was spreading outward and downward, not just to the top, but they made it clear it was a vote about those results, not of trust or confidence. At this point in their history, most Brazilians believe only in themselves. Not the party, not the government, not the markets, and least of all the upper 3%.

Less than a week ago, just days before Americans chose the Party of Really Big Money over the Party of Just Big Money, Brazilians elected their first woman president. Dilma Rousseff’s resume is even more strikingly leftist than Lula’s, including a decade spent in a guerilla group that fought against the military dictatorship. She is said to know her way around an AK-47. She also knows what real tyranny is firsthand, having been captured, imprisoned, and tortured for several years during that struggle. While Brazilians are decidedly skeptical about her promise to reign in her own party’s corruption, and continue to make it known that they are watching, no one questions her love of country.

But then, that wouldn’t occur to a Brazilian. They all love their country, or to be more precise they all love being Brazilian. It’s an emotion far different from what we call patriotism, bigger and simpler than any political or religious or ethnic identity – in a country as wildly diverse as America in all these areas – and completely free of ideology.

It’s just something they all own, individually and collectively, forged in the crucible of the last 40-50 years, which is untouchable and truly indivisible.

Not that Brazilians aren’t as contentious and argumentative as Americans. If anything they are more so. It’s a highly volatile and passionate culture. But they also have this unspoken connection that brought them through those dark and troubled times together. A spirit of unity that doesn’t expect or require unanimity. In a word, they have a “we”.

As long as they maintain that spirit, Brazil is likely to continue its rise. And as long as we remain hooked on the addictive fury of us-versus-them, with its nonsense battle cry of “taking our country back” from each other, the indifferent elite who actually run this place will keep egging us on from the comfort and safety of their luxury skyboxes, placing wagers on a contest that only we can lose.

For anyone under a certain age, it is hard to imagine the sparse media landscape of that time, and how it amplified the impact of their gesture. In the pre-internet and pre-cable era of broadcast television, the Olympics was the first globally televised real-time event of its kind. The 1968 Summer Games was only the third to be televised live, and the first to receive a significant audience.

This was in large part due to the coverage concept put together by ABC’s Roone Arledge, who saw the Games as a live dramatic mini-series in which the athletes were the characters. Arledge’s story-driven approach struck ratings gold, helped along by three of the most unforgettable storylines in Olympic history: Smith and Carlos, Bob Beamon, and Dick Fosbury.

Fosbury, the offbeat high jumper, became my instant favorite, winning his gold medal using a technique that was the opposite of every other high jumper in Olympic history. This was heady stuff for a 15 year-old like myself, who was pretty sure almost everyone was doing almost everything the wrong way.

Instead of diving over the bar face down in a slowly torquing sideways straddle, Fosbury launched himself into a high, arcing twist that sent him over the bar head first, feet and face to the sky, landing on his back. They called it the Fosbury Flop. Not only did Fosbury flop his way to the top of the medal stand in Mexico City, but by the next Olympics 70% of high jumpers had switched to his method. Floppers have won all but two of the 36 Olympic high jump medals since.

Beyond the minor detail of changing his sport forever, the most memorable thing about Fosbury was his facial expression. While everyone else wore the heavy, hyper-focused glare of champions, Fosbury had this goofy zen grin, which erupted into an expression of pure joy after every successful jump. He looked more like a kid leaping into a giant leaf pile than a highly trained athlete going for Olympic gold. Dick Fosbury was clearly having the time of his life.

Bob Beamon’s achievement was equally rare: a singular moment of athletic perfection. His winning long jump broke the existing world record by almost two feet, setting an Olympic mark that still stands and a new world record that lasted for 23 years. It’s been called the Perfect Jump, which it certainly was in Beamon’s career. He would never again jump even as far as the old world record that he shattered in Mexico City. But on that day, on that stage, in the moment when it mattered most, Beamon did more than just jump. He flew

Smith’s and Carlos’s protest came on only the fourth day of competition. I don’t remember watching the medal ceremony live. I do remember the outcry that followed, as Smith and Carlos were banished from the Olympic Village and the remainder of the Games.

1968 had delivered more than the average amount of shocking news for Americans.  Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated. Vietnam drenched in its bloodiest year ever. The Prague Spring crushed by an onslaught of Soviet tanks. Worst of all was an America helpless to prevent any of these things from happening.

The Olympics was supposed to give us a break from all of that, though medal counts had already become a proxy battleground between the Cold War superpowers. Instead, two of our own had turned on us and hit us in our weakest link – race* – in front of the whole world. It stung.

But it was also an act of unmistakable courage and dignity, not only by Smith and Carlos, but also by silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia. He joined Smith and Carlos in adding an Olympic Project for Human Rights patch to his tracksuit for the ceremony, and was excoriated by the Australian press and public for his participation. He was pointedly left off the 1972 Australian team, and was even snubbed by the organizers of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, only to become a part of that event at the invitation of the American team.

Looking back, Smith and Carlos were merely the first to recognize the global media platform the Games inevitably created. Four years later came the unthinkable massacre in Munich. Eight years after that, the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics altogether, ostensibly to punish the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Thank goodness the USOC has since changed that metric, or we would’ve had to boycott ourselves in the last two Olympics, and possibly the next.

Now Smith has put his gold medal, along with a pair of his signature red running shoes, up for auction. The starting bid is $250,000. One wonders whether Glenn Beck, with his twin passions for gold and wrapping himself in civil rights iconography, will be able to resist. Almost anything is possible in our current media landscape. Anything, that is, but the pure defiance, pure perfection, and pure joy of America’s 1968 Olympic champions. We don’t do purity anymore, unless you count pure crassness. That competition is at an all time high.

*A little-known sidebar is that Beamon had been suspended from his UTEP track team four months before the Olympics for refusing to compete against Brigham Young, due to BYU’s alleged racist admission policies at the time.

The 10-5 vote is presumed to be due to Mr. Jefferson’s advocacy of “a wall of separation between church and state” and other Enlightenment ideas, considering that the phrase “Enlightenment ideas” is also being stricken from the standards. Jefferson’s replacement is the conservative French theologian Jean Cauvin, a.k.a. John Calvin, whose backers argue that the change was not ideologically driven, but merely predestined.

The Board also added Thomas Aquinas to the list, who lived in the 13^th century. As definitions of modernity go, this places the current SBOE firmly in the company of nostalgia buffs like the Knights Templar and the Taliban.

The layers of irony here are as thick as the decision itself. First, Jefferson was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, which stands alone among  America’s trinity of founding texts for its references to both God and the Creator. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are conspicuous for their absence of any such language.

Second, Mr. Jefferson’s wall of separation has greatly benefited the religious fervor that is now being turned against him. In a clear testament to the framer’s approach to religious freedom, the United States consistently has the highest percentage of regular churchgoers of any nation in the free world. The country with the most longstanding official church, Thomas Aquinas’s Italy, has the lowest.

Jefferson’s demotion, accompanied by a width swath of revisionism cutting through the Board’s new American history standards, has sparked outrage among educators and historians in Texas and beyond. But their insistence that curricula remain connected to the best scholarship is lost on Don McLeroy, the Bryan, Texas dentist and board member leading this backwards charge, who last year summarized the majority’s disdain for all such criticism from qualified professionals in a sentence admirable only for its clarity: “Somebody’s got to stand up to these experts.”

Fortunately, with their sights set on Jefferson the Board let Voltaire slide by, meaning students may still encounter his maxim that ”prejudices are what fools use for reason”. Too bad it’s as apt a description of the Texas textbook police in 2010 as it was of Paris, circa 1750.

(update: in its final vote on this matter, the Texas State Board of Education decided to edit but not delete this mention of Jefferson. Several other important facts and figures in American history did not fare so well.)

(this post first appeared first on the website of the Cartoonists’ Rights Network International)

Comedy Central’s reaction to the threat issued against South Park’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone by Revolution Muslim, a website promoting fundamentalist Islam run by a group in New York City, is misguided and regrettable.
The small and until now mostly obscure group posted Parker and Stone’s Colorado addresses as well as Comedy Central’s in New York, alongside a graphic image of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was brutally murdered in 2004 after the release of “Submission”, his film criticizing Islam’s treatment of women.
The network’s ill-considered response was to heavily censor the ensuing South Park episode, including the customary final speech, which the show’s creators say had no mention of Muhammed. The action was taken ostensibly to protect the employees of the network.
To their credit, the network did not censor Jon Stewart’s free-wheeling defense of Parker and Stone the following night, including his rather pointed message to Revolution Muslim. Nonetheless, Comedy Central must understand that this is not simply a matter of principle, but also one of real world consequences.
At CRNI, we are often the last line of defense for courageous cartoonists speaking truth to power in hostile circumstances around the world. The threats against them are rarely idle. They run the gamut from financially ruinous state-sanctioned lawsuits to criminal trials, imprisonment, and even disappearance and death.
We cannot think of a single instance where giving in to such threats and intimidation has led to anything other than more threats and intimidation, against a wider and wider list of “offenders” challenging the status quo.
Recent history shows that public pressure and unequivocal resolve are the only effective weapons against this sort of thuggery. These are even more effective when accompanied by the kind of pointed public ridicule Comedy Central normally champions.
A case in point: In 2005 CRNI presented it’s annual “Courage in Cartooning” award to the Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart, who was convicted in a criminal libel suit brought by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan because of an editorial cartoon he’d drawn depicting the Prime Minister as a cat. Mr. Musa’s employer stood by him during this fight, absorbing significant financial cost.
In solidarity with the cartoonist and his publisher, immediately following the conviction the cover of the Turkish humor magazine Penguen featured a series of drawings of the Prime Minister as a frog, a camel, a monkey, a snake, a duck, an elephant, a giraffe, and a cow.
The magazine suffered a similar suit and even larger fine, but in the process Mr. Erdogan’s image suffered lasting and well-deserved damage. While the outcome was far from an unequivocal victory for freedom of expression, the pushback and blowback unquestionably strengthened the still-fragile state of free expression in Turkey, in a struggle that continues today.
We at CRNI can only hope that upon further reflection Comedy Central will realize the danger of its acquiescence. The network’s abandonment of South Park will only encourage future demands and threats against this iconoclastic outpost of the right to be ridiculous. It will also embolden the miscreant cranks at Revolution Muslim, a clear lose-lose.
After almost 13 years, it’s hard to find a group or belief that hasn’t been targeted by South Park. Mockery is the currency they trade in, and Comedy Central has been rewarded handsomely for brokering that trade. Yet the network has thus far failed to grasp not only their moral responsibility, but the critical connection between free expression, creativity, and our (and their) prosperity. We urge them to rethink this miscalculation.

In a larger context, the Western world has overcome many experiences with the ultimately useless effort of the authoritarian mindset to stifle the spirit of freedom. For their right to think and speak freely, hundreds of thousands paid with their lives during the 400 years of the Catholic Inquisition, and millions more in the last century under the secular tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin.
All failed, but the mindset survives. Empowering fundamentalist Islamists, or anyone else, to undermine our free speech traditions through threats and claims of special privilege is an invitation to its return to power.

For the last 20 years I’ve been a stand-up comedian, though I’m probably best known for my “Amazing Juggling Finale” video,  which went viral with over 60,000,000 hits a few years back. 60,000,000 is an impressive number, or was until that vixen Susan Boyle came along. The experience was an incredible high. And yet it pales in comparison to the excitement I feel about the truly historic opportunity that has brought me to Austin: The Bill of Rights Plaza.

Since August of 2005, I have been working night and day to promote the freedoms and principles embodied in the Bill of Rights, through the installation of Bill of Rights displays in civic spaces across America. Why the Bill of Rights? Because, simply put, it is the single most powerful and successful legal assertion of individual rights and liberties ever written, forming the very core of our common ground and shared purpose as a people. Ideas matter, and great ideas make a great nation. Giving the Bill of Rights a tangible presence in our most prominent public spaces will help reinvigorate its many great ideas, as well as the nation they inspired.

I know: this project sounds like a stretch for a comedian/juggler. Funnily enough, it began as a comedy routine about the debate over Ten Commandments displays. My take was that instead of arguing whether to take those down, we should put the Bill of Rights up next to them, and let people comparison shop. Because the Bill of Rights gives you such an amazing deal. It tells you to speak freely, carry a gun, pursue happiness, and then presumes you are innocent, and I can’t find a religion that will match that offer!

The routine always got a good laugh. But in the aftermath of 9/11, with its rapid expansion of the national security apparatus and revelations about secret policies that broke faith with so many fundamental American principles, I didn’t find my little joke funny anymore. Beyond the obvious fear factor, I couldn’t understand how so many Americans could be so seemingly indifferent to the fate of the very foundation of our way of life. I kept asking myself: what can be done to inspire Americans to think more about their liberties?

As I always do with questions I can’t answer, I turned to Google. Repeated searches failed to find a single permanent display of the Bill of Rights. Many sleepless nights and loud conversations with friends and family culminated in my starting MyBillofRights.org (though we’re actually incorporated as the Foundation Foundation. The joke was on me with that one. Go ahead, google Foundation Foundation. It’s the internet equivalent of standing between two mirrors and staring down the wormhole into infinity).

On July 5, 2008 we dedicated our first Town Square display, and the nation’s first of any kind, in front of the Poweshiek County Courthouse in Montezuma, Iowa. We also passed our first State Capitol resolution in Arizona in 2006, and our second in Texas the following June. All three efforts were bipartisan efforts. At long last, here was something Americans across the spectrum could agree on!

Which brings me to Austin. I am thrilled to report that the State of Texas has approved the first national destination display of the Bill of Rights ever conceived: The Bill of Rights Plaza. This achievement is the result of three years working with the legislature, state agencies, and other stakeholders, and over $125,000 in project development.

Austin designer Holly Kincannon’s imaginative and elegant redesign of the existing plaza in front of the Texas Supreme Court, directly adjacent to the Capitol, takes the visitor through the genius of the Bill of Rights, with each amendment individually displayed. The construction estimate is $4.1 million, to be raised by MyBillofRights.org through private contributions.

$4.1 million sounds like a lot of money (okay, is a lot of money). But to put it in perspective, a single skybox at the new Cowboys Stadium runs $500,000. That’s 1.25 amendments per skybox, and you only get the skybox for one season. The Bill of Rights Plaza will be here for generations.

How can you, your families, your classrooms, your offices, your neighborhoods and organizations become involved in this lasting legacy for Texas and America? How can you join in the essential part the people of Texas must play to make this project a reality? Call me. Write me. Email me. And imagine a time in the near future when you can place your palm on an undeniable acknowledgment of our rights as Americans, written in stone.

With awareness of this birthright seemingly growing dimmer by the day, I can think of no better gift for future generations than a major permanent display spotlighting these founding principles. For as Thomas Jefferson so prophetically wrote:  “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

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The change was the result of new guidelines from the little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an agency set up under the Reagan Administration to do statistical cost-benefit analyses of all draft rules and regulations for the federal government, giving the executive branch approval (and effective veto power) over how new laws are interpreted and implemented by federal agencies.

As soon as the details of the EPA’s decision came to light it caused a heated controversy, forcing the agency to beat a hasty retreat. The reversal was as predictable as it was unfortunate, because the abandoned OIRA guidelines held the essence of a revolutionary insight: that our government has for too many years placed an unbalanced and fiscally irresponsible priority on assuring the longevity of average Americans.

Much of our debt and deficit problems can be traced to this interference by the federal government in the personal lives and choices of We the People. If our federal, state, and local agencies were mandated to pursue only “life expectancy neutral” regulatory regimens, not only would individual and corporate liberty soar, but over time popular programs like Social Security and Medicare could very well offer improved rather than reduced benefits.

All we need do is look at a country like Afghanistan, where the average life expectancy is 46. As many seemingly impossible challenges as that nation is facing, paying for entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare is not among them.

I’m not suggesting we need to aim that high (or low, in this instance). But even with some minor and relatively benign deregulation, such as raising the national speed limit; eliminating seat belt, airbag, and motorcycle helmet laws; and cutting back on the intrusive federal inspection of meat, we could trim 12-18 months off the national average in no time.

Since approximately 80% of Medicare expenditures come during the last two years of a recipient’s life, the savings would be more than enough to pay for a real (if somewhat counter-productive) prescription drug benefit.

Best of all, the changes would usher in a new era of freedom of choice for financially strapped consumers, who could opt for cheaper cars – and meats. This would also offer relief for that other oppressed group who has just recently gotten their due from the Supreme Court, our corporate citizens, by reducing production costs for two major industries; a clear win-win.

While there are bound to be the usual objections from the usual suspects, I predict that before too long the surviving public would be won over by its new found personal freedoms, its access to cheaper products, and the peace of mind of knowing that if you make it to 65, your benefits will be waiting for you.

At that point these same principles could be more broadly applied to create whole new sets of incentives for government, business, and the individual alike. To mention but a few:

1. Instead of ever more punitive “sin taxes” on alcohol and cigarettes, which are particularly burdensome for older Americans on fixed incomes, add both substances to the aforementioned prescription drug benefit. Here’s your carton of Kools and your quart of Wild Turkey. You go, Granny!

2. End the endless debate on juveniles and the death penalty by mandating it for all juvenile crime. Such a “one strike and you’re toast” policy will not only bend the life expectancy curve early in its arc, but will eventually result in a precipitous drop in adult crime, saving untold taxpayer billions on what has for several decades been the fastest growing budget buster for our state governments: the prison-industrial complex. Collateral benefits include fewer courts and police, and smaller class sizes for our struggling secondary schools. We’ll even save money on last requests. How much is a Happy Meal?

3. Rather than restricting the freedom of our corporate citizens by oppressive regulations that force them to spend billions cleaning up toxic waste sites, give them tax credits if they donate the land for either day care centers or nursing homes. West Virginia already has at least one enormous coal slurry pit (Marshy Fork) perched above a Head Start school, which could serve as a pilot program.

I realize that to some this sounds draconian, if not unjust. But as our friends at OIRA were trying to tell us, there is ultimately no avoiding the human toll. Anyone who has ever fallen behind on a mortgage, credit card, or IRS payment can tell you that freedom is never free, especially not freedom from creditors. The only questions are: who pays now, who pays later, and who decides. I don’t relish offering the approach outlined above. But considering the options, I’d rather have a shorter life of quality time than stick around long enough to see who gets the bill, let alone how and where they get stuck with it.

There was plenty of trial and error in that process. Comedy is more susceptible to the instant gratification of bad habits than most professions, because verbal self-indulgence is all but required for the beginning stand-up. Cheap laughs are lifesavers for a struggling newcomer, and the thrill of wantonly crossing the line can be heady stuff.

But both of these tactics can also backfire, with the crowd either turning off – or worse, turning on the comedian. Experience, plus a couple cautionary tales from other comedians, eventually led me to adopt two additional guidelines: Don’t pick on the powerless, and never tell a joke than can get your legs broken.

I’ve crossed both lines since, though infrequently. I can vividly remember bringing an audience member to tears once with a cruel (but funny) comment. And while I’ve never been physically threatened because of a routine, I have been fired because of one.

It was on my first-ever cruise ship gig, back in 1990. I had a Dan Quayle bit that involved playing an actual recording where he mangled the United Negro College Fund’s motto: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”. What the then Vice-President said was – and I quote -  “what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful”, thus achieving the ultra-rare Freudian misquote. I followed this recording with an admittedly tasteless joke about how Quayle and John Kennedy, who he’d been famously compared to during the 1988 vice-presidential debate, were indeed similar, at least in terms of the condition of their respective brains.

It wasn’t the tasteless part of the joke that got me fired, though. It was the fact that I had dared to mock the vice-president. After the show I saw a short, portly, bald man in a Rat Pack era tuxedo complaining stridently to the ship’s West Indian captain that he did not pay his money to “hear America’s second in command made fun of”. The captain noted the complaint, though he also asked the passenger with a look of concern if there was still free speech in America, or had that been changed? Nonetheless, it was almost a decade before I got another offer to perform on a cruise ship, leaving me with a strange debt of gratitude to Mr. Quayle.

In late 2005, I actually met the former vice-president. It was backstage during intermission at an Alice Copper Christmas benefit, where I’d just closed the first half. In deference to my guidelines, the season, and my mother’s side of my nature, I took a pass on the opportunity to thank him.

Fortunately all these crosscurrents of opinion about the Times won’t affect me, as I wasn’t actually mentioned by name. The article was headlined “Hurt at Home, and a Fall Is Likely to Blame”, and it lays out recent statistical analysis that the most common cause of injury to Americans is falling down, with most of those falls happening at home.
I’d fallen just the day before, tripping on something that wasn’t there while walking the dog. Somehow I managed to stab one shoe awkwardly into the sidewalk, where it caught, sending me tumbling to the ground.

It must’ve looked pretty bad, because a passing car to stopped to see if Grampa was okay. Pride aside, he was for the most part fine, though he had ruined his jeans and for the first time in 45 years skinned his knee. As my dog vacillated between concern and embarrassment, I picked myself up and waved off the driver, making it the rest of the way home without incident, only to find out the next day that I’d accidentally stumbled into the statistical mainstream.

In second place behind falling down came transportation injuries. Accidental poisoning was third, which raises a statistical red flag. It seems likely that a substantial number of those poisoned also fall down at some point, with more than a few winding up in traffic accidents while rushing to the emergency room. Are these incidents counted in one or multiple categories?

The article also noted that women are more likely to be injured in a fall than men, whereas men are more likely to be struck by an object. How many of those women were pushed by men, and how many of those objects were thrown by women, are questions that apparently escaped scrutiny.

This points out the problematic nature of all statistics. Numbers can be accurate without offering any clear insight into exactly what they measure. For example, gun control advocates constantly harp on the disproportionate number of gun-related deaths in our society versus the rest of the developed world, but they make no attempt to quantify how many lives may have been saved by the presence of firearms.

Nor do they ever mention that 56% of all gun deaths in America are suicides. You’d think that would be a comforting statistic to those concerned with reducing the collateral damage of gun violence, as it indicates that the number of gun owners predisposed to using their weapons is to a large extent self-limiting.

It also calls into question the efficacy of restricting ownership of the most lethal weapons and ammunition, if only for the sake of holding down the substantial costs to the health care system of all those failed firearm suicide attempts. In this context, the grenade launcher and the killer bullet are simply the most efficient means to the end. It is the wounded who are bleeding the system dry.

As to what to do about the epidemic of slips, trips, tumbles, dives, plunges, and toppling over; my suggestion it to stay in bed whenever possible. It may not be the magic bullet, but you don’t need a statistician to tell you that the best way to avoid falling down is to not get up to begin with.

Having gone through more rebirths than a bodhisattva and more re-releases than Benson the Carp, there’s no arguing that the Beatles’ music is beyond timeless. Word is this latest digital re-mastering of their last studio album has been purified to the point where you can actually hear the sound of one hand clapping as the group achieves sonic nirvana.

Or something like that. I haven’t been able to work up to taking off the shrink-wrap yet. In part, that’s because I’ve been performing to the final medley on Abbey Road for as long as I’ve been performing. I have probably spent 40 days and 40 nights of my usable lifespan with those five minutes as my personal soundtrack (I just did the math, and that’s 11,580 performances and rehearsals, or roughly 400 listens a year for 30 years – alarmingly close).  Also, by the time you hit your 50’s the thrill of the new isn’t so new, which is especially true when it’s mostly forty years old.

Back then, when you bought a record it would be on the turntable the minute you got home, with liner notes in hand; the same way that your stereo was the first box you unpacked and set-up after moving in. Today it’s easily thirty years since I read my last liner note, and almost that long since anyone’s written one. And even though I’ve got one seriously kickass sound system that can feed multiple audio sources to distinct speaker zones at the touch of a universal remote, it’s still boxed up in the storage attic of the house we moved to in July. Amid the multi-tasking gadgetry and nonstop complexity of every waking modern moment, silence is now the music most thrilling to my ears.

Kick ass stereo or not, I’m still looking forward to giving Abbey Road a fresh listen, as soon as I can find the time. I’m hoping to squeeze it in tonight, maybe right after I finish my workout, answer my email, feed and walk Titan (our minpin), and skype Daisy (my wife) in Brazil. And post this damn blog.

But it’s the fresh part that’s most problematic. I still remember the excitement of hearing Hey Jude for the first time, when it debuted on the Smothers Brothers’ show, and how I got chills when the lights came up as the final chorus kicked in, revealing a studio filled with people who surged around the band to sing along. Finding my way back to those fresh eyes and ears (and heart) gets trickier every day, but I know the mind must stay open to stay alive. After all, a man never crosses the same river twice, especially if he forgets how to swim.