If you haven’t seen this, you gotta see this:

He quit rather than lower flag for Helms.

I’ve spent so much time on this blog complaining about other columnists, I should probably send a little love to the good ones. So indulge me:

Who are your favorite columnists, Nance?

There have been many over the years. I always liked Mike Harden, although he was sometimes uneven. (As are all columnists.) Carl Hiaasen had some gems, but was mostly Florida-centric, and so the bulk of his newspaper work was lost on me. Dave Barry, of course, but only in the early, funny ones. (That’s a joke.) Gene Weingarten. But through it all there was one guy I read religiously. His weekly column moved on the wire on Mondays, and I would actually wait for it, start checking around the time it usually moved, be sad if it wasn’t on time.

Pete Dexter.

Dexter is sort of famous in journalism circles. He wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News when that paper was unique among American newspapers, a tabloid with a real sense of humor about itself, and I guess he wrote your typical big-city newspaper column. Then he fell in with Randall “Tex” Cobb, whom most of you know as the evil biker in “Raising Arizona,” and the two of them got into a pretty serious bar fight. As Wikipedia tells the tale [citation needed]:

(Dexter) began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely.

Now that’s what you call reader feedback.

Anyway, Dexter spent a lot of time in the hospital, and then recovering at home, and somewhere along the line he relocated to Sacramento and then to Seattle, and there were novels and screenplays and a National Book Award, and this is about the time I started reading him. I think the first piece was in the mid-’80s, for Playboy, about a guy at the Philadelphia Inquirer who rebelled against being screwed over by management. He did so by erecting a puppet theater on his desk, and every so often a new puppet would appear that bore a strong resemblance to a top editor at the Inquirer. He arranged them in tableaux; my favorite was one where all the puppets knelt before the editor puppet. The Inquirer was, of course, a Knight-Ridder paper, and I was at another K-R property, one where the BS skills were quite as well-honed as they were in Philly, but I recognized it the way I do my own bedroom. It was a perfectly told story of life in a certain sort of newsroom at a certain sort of time, and I fell in love.

Anyway, over the years, Dexter wrote some of my favorite columns ever, but the best of them all was about Mike Tyson after one of the Holyfield losses, a grand tale of tragedy rendered in 650 words or so, and I’ve been waiting years to see it anthologized. Just the other day I learned that Dexter’s had an anthology out for a solid year and a half, and boy do I feel dumb. So I rush down to the library and get a copy, only to flip it open and discover there’s no table of contents, no index, no division by (or even acknowledgment of) publication, no nothing. The first column is 1 and the last one is 82, and if I’m going to find Mike Tyson, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and read right through to the end, and…

…OK. I’m starting to see the reasoning here.

But I have a bad feeling. I have flipped and flipped and flipped through “Paper Trails,” and Tyson’s name hasn’t jumped out at me. Neither has the word “puppet.”

A few years ago, I went into the Sacramento Bee archive (Dexter’s home base at the time) and bought the Tyson column, and ran it here on the blog, a total copyright violation, for which I received the following angry response from the paper’s lawyers: Silence. No one reads this blog.

But I noticed something. I had that column printed out and pinned to a wall in my cubicle at work, and whenever I felt in need of inspiration I’d take it like a vitamin, so after a while I got to know its phrasing pretty well. And when I saw the SacBee version, something was different. He’d described the people who flocked around Tyson after his success as “pimps, whores and gangsters,” a phrase some helpful editor recast as “men.” But remember: It’s the internet that’s killing newspapers.

[Long pause.]

OK, this is going to bug me all day. I just went into my hard-copy archives — the CD-ROM backups I did of this site back before it was a blog — and found the file on the first try. Here was the edited phrase:

By the time he went away, Tyson had replaced D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney with an assembly of men who are there to this day and will be there as long as the smell of money is in the air.

That’s a real copy-editor’s trim, that. You can sit with one all day and explain how “D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney” and “pimps, whores and gangsters” are parallel phrases, that they match rhythmically, that making this change is like playing “shave and a haircut” and then “fifteen dollars and forty-three cents, plus applicable taxes.” They don’t hear it. All they hear is some supervising editor dressing them down because an old lady called and is canceling her subscription after needing her smelling salts. Also, one of the pimps, whores or gangsters might sue.

Rant over.

Anyway, this is what I’ll be reading on the plane.

Bloggage:

Things I just learned: Coozledad has a blog! (Suggestion: Disable the SnapShots preview. Irritating.)

However, I think we have a job for Coozledad’s bull: U.S. exports cigarettes, bras, bull semen to Iran. I had a neighbor in Fort Wayne who bought bull semen, to inseminate his herd of comely Black Angus heifers. It arrived in straws frozen in liquid nitrogen, sometimes transported by a pretty vet student from MSU, and if you’re thinking that’s the setup for a dirty movie, why shame on you.

I’ve lived so long, I remember how Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen met. (She sent a nude photo of herself to his hotel room. How romantic.) So I guess it’s not surprising she would have a boob job on live national television. In Germany. During prime time. I guess they don’t have HBO there yet.

Off to do paying work. Enjoy your lovely summer day, if you have one.

The other day I was listening to a story on NPR, about people stuck driving the guzzliest gas guzzlers, and what they were doing about it. I was struck by one man’s interview. He drove a Ford Excursion, the biggest SUV evahr, the station-wagon equivalent of an F-350 SuperDuty pickup truck. The man explained that he needed an extra-large vehicle; he and his wife had five children between them, “so we had no choice” but to buy the Excursion.

Five plus two is seven. That’s how many seats he needed. By my reckoning, that means he could have chosen just about any minivan, and a large number of other SUVs with third-row seating, nearly all of which get better gas mileage than the Excursion. But he had no choice.

Of course, as all adults know, there’s always a choice. It’s just difficult to make sometimes. For instance, yesterday I could have chosen to have something lean and protein-y and vegetable-heavy for lunch, but instead I had a cheese quesadilla. Then I had two Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies for dessert. If only it had been mandatory, but it was a choice. Some of you are feeling smug and superior, the same way I felt about Mr. Excursion. If it makes you feel any better, I went fiber-heavy for dinner (black beans) and took a long bike ride in penance. That was a choice, too.

I hate choices. I especially hate the way they’ve become the behavioral equipment of fiber. Been in an elementary school lately? “Make good choices” is the new “eat from all four food groups.” Earlier this year Kate was scolded by a teacher for the following: A boy threw down a book, and it took a funny bounce and hit a girl in the leg. She gave out a loud, cartoon-y howl of pain, hopping around on one foot, and Kate laughed. Laughing, the teacher said, was “a poor choice.” I wonder what George Carlin would do with that one.

We rail about wanting more control over our world, which means more choices. And then the vacuum cleaner dies, and we go to Sears. First we choose a price range, then we choose a brand, then we choose bagless or not, onboard tools or not, upright or canister, until our heads spin and we howl with pain and go eeny-meeny-miney-moe. There have been times, while buying a household appliance, that I wished I lived in the old Soviet Union. I would have happily gotten on a list and stood in line for five hours if, at the other end of the line, there was one vacuum cleaner, and the choice was: Take it or leave it.

Grumble, grumble.

OK, bloggage:

A particularly smelly Metro Mayhem today: Boy, 1, shot during fight over glasses. Eyeglasses, that is. (Huge, heavy sigh.) And they were probably knockoffs.

Christopher Hitchens speaks ill of the dead, and boy did they deserve it. Jesse Helms, of course.

Oh, and if you have time, prepare to waste it now: Look at what everyone’s uploading to Flickr, in real time, on a rotating globe. Don’t blame me when nothing gets done. (HT: Vince.)

Now, I choose to go to work and write more mediocre prose. Leave a better comment. (It shouldn’t be hard.)

The trip to Cornerstone went well, if you were wondering. As Jeff commented in an earlier post, Cornerstone isn’t really your typical Christian music festival. It’s more…alt-Christian. Multi-colored hair, much body ink, piercings, ear grommets, you know the drill. The mood was much closer to this…

…than, say, Up With People.

(Man, I just realized how little I know about contemporary Christian music.)

But the talk went well, and I had an interesting chat with Jane Hertenstein, who is a member of Jesus People USA, who put on the festival. It’s JPUSA for short, pronounced J’poosa. J’poosans live communally in their very own 10-story apartment building on the north side of Chicago, kind of like those FLDS compounds, but without the wack hairdos, child abuse, plural marriage, raids by the feds and, of course, a scary prophet. If it sounds a little hippie, I guess it is — they admit their roots are in the Jesus-freaky movement of the late ’60s and ’70s. I read a little in their website and, while I can no more imagine living communally than I can living in, say, Kabul, I can see its appeal, and they truly do seem to be doing their best to imitate Christ.

Their festival is certainly tolerant of all types:

Not sure what this guy’s journey was, but he was eye-catching.

I think this van belonged to Brother Ray:

Brother Ray wandered into the speakers’ hospitality trailer. Most people would notice his yard-long gray dreadlocks, but I was intrigued by his feet, which looked so toughened by exposure to the elements they were more like paws. If that is his vehicle, I suspect he propels it Flintstone-style.

It was a nice trip. A lot of travel for less than an hour of work, but what else is summer for but crashing in your friends’ guest room, driving far up into the wilds of east-central Illinois, crossing all the swollen rivers and creeks, hanging with the Christians for a few hours and then doing it all in reverse? I’m sorry I missed most of the speaker who followed me, from Exodus International. I could scarcely believe this crowd was swallowing it, but I also noticed the speaker didn’t wear a wedding band, so it’s possible she was selling the 20-percent-less-offensive alternative of celibacy for gay people, rather than full-out joining the other team. Dunno.

Anyway, that was my weekend. How was yours?

(Note: He didn’t. But he tried.)

Bloggage:

I don’t truck much in the workings of the blogosphere, mainly because it’s a huge waste of time. The oh-no-you-di’n't between the right and the left can go on forever, and frequently does. But I still read it from time to time, and if I recall correctly, wasn’t there a dust-up about so-called liberal photojournalists altering photos to make smoke blacker or some such? I guess the practice is catching on, only in a more chickenshit sort of way. Embedded video has the visual evidence. (Gawker has it in a one-stop, non-video graphic, too.) The NYT has picked up the story, and notes the network’s defense that “altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.” I’m calling bullshit on that — there’s obvious Photoshopping and there’s this kind, which is just nasty. Note that one of the victims is Jewish; couldn’t they fit a few dollar signs on his eyeballs?

Lots to catch up on today, and I’ll be back later. Enjoy Monday. If you can.

My internet connection is spotty here, so just a couple of quickpix in advance of a bigger report later.

My friend Vahe Gregorian is a sportswriter in St. Louis. He saves stuff. Like, for instance, all his credentials:

It’s funny — I’ve always been a credential-saver, too. Of course I don’t have a fraction of Vahe’s. My guess is, he’s saving them to sell on eBay in his retirement, to supplement what’s left of his pension when the entire industry implodes.

Meanwhile, at the Cornerstone Festival, the alt-Christian culture is in full flower:

If they’d had a T-shirt of this, I’d have bought it. But they didn’t.

More next week. Enjoy your holiday.

A few short items this morning before I start packing for the Christian Burning Man:

We’ve been visiting our lake cottage in Branch County less and less over the years, and perhaps you’d like to know why. OK.

Our next-door neighbor there, who bought the cottage built by Alan’s uncle, tore it down this year. No harm in that — it’s small and had a powder-post beetle infestation at one point. It probably needed doing. Of course we knew they’d put up something much bigger, but we were hopeful it would be, er, in character with the neighborhood. They decided on a prefab Swiss chalet. Other houses on the strip had been brought there in pieces, so there was a precedent. Can they get the truck to the lot without major damage? Oh sure, no problem.

The chalet went in this week. Their truck driver backed his semi across our front lawn and without so much as an oops, flattened two 10-year-old river birches Alan planted when Kate was a baby. Number of profuse apologies that have arrived at this address, or that of my sister-in-law, in the interim: Zero. Simple acknowledgment? None.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve told Spriggy that if he’d care to entrust us with his share of Leona Helmsley’s $8 billion, we’ll take very good care of it. Jeez, what a bitter old crone — $12 million for her own Maltese wasn’t enough, I suppose. I love dogs as much as you do, maybe more, and let me tell you: $12 million for a single dog deeply misunderstands the nature and needs of all dogs. You can argue with the foundation setup — I suppose there’s always someone who needs to hear the spay/neuter argument again — but at its heart it’s the work of a true misanthrope, in love with the poochies but not a dime for humanity. You know what I think? I think it’s because LA Mary couldn’t get her the strawberry preserves she wanted for her hotels. It queered her on two-legged creatures once and for all.

Inside baseball: Hank Stuever on why Clay Felker mattered:

Appreciate Clay Felker? It’s all anyone ever did, who wanted anything to do with magazines. Was it emulation, or was it envy, or was it a fantasy — working for the perfect place, the perfect editor, at the perfect time?

When I started freelancing, I had a simple goal: To do as much work as possible for editors who could help me improve. Needless to say, I never met Clay Felker.

Metro mayhem: Someone stole the copper plumbing from one of the city’s most visible landmarks. A six-figure repair bill for a few bucks in scrap metal.

John Scalzi printed one of his famous sunset pictures and included his cat, so I LOL’d it. No one will get it:

Bonus: Stay at Scalzi’s for a little perspective on the military service/electability track record.

That should keep you. I’ll be in and out until I leave for the airport, so, y’know, whatever. Oh, and thanks for all the SF recommendations, folks. I neglected to mention, this trip is basically a rerun of our honeymoon lo those many years ago. (Alan: “You sure you don’t want a diamond ring?” Me: “I want a two-week honeymoon more.”) You brought back memories and gave me some new ideas. You guys are the best.

Some housekeeping notes, as the summer moves into a higher gear:

I’ll be traveling a bit this month, so posting may be spotty. Wednesday it’s wheels-up for the Lou (as native son Nelly calls it), city of my birth, gateway to the west. I’m only sleeping there, however; on Thursday, I’m renting a car and driving a few hours into central Illinois, where I’m leading a workshop on blogging for the Prairie Writing School, part of the 2008 Cornerstone Festival. And what is the Cornerstone Festival, you ask? I’m told it’s the “Christian Burning Man.” Yes, I’m as intrigued as you are.

The week of July 14 will be off-and-on, too, as NN.C departs for a real family vacation. I keep hoping we can afford Turkey one of these days, but alas, the U.S. dollar is now the new Russian ruble, and it’s just too expensive. But we had a great time in NYC last year, so we told Kate to pick an American city she’s always wanted to visit, trusting she wouldn’t choose someplace like Colorado Springs. She thought for only a minute, and said, “San Francisco.” That’s my girl. So that’s where we’ll be (there, and Monterey). Intermittent blogging that week.

And with that, I realize I’ve left an important event off my morning calendar, so best skedaddle. What must we absolutely, positively do when we’re in SF? I mean, besides visit City Lights Books. That’s a given.

Back in a bit.

“Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials” — and all is explained.

Also, someone at IU needs to catch up with Jack Shafer’s excellent urban-legend debunking on so-called “pharm parties” at Slate. Actually, that particular IU someone needs to catch up with a lot of things. In a new study on substance abuse, a task force recommends: “Raise prices for alcohol and other drugs.” Your alcohol, maybe! Leave mine alone!

A small task for you today, my little fuzzy peaches, at reader request.

Let’s solve the health-care crisis. To quote a well-known public figure: Yes, we can.

I ask because I received an e-mail from a reader last week, with a link to a story with this non-inflammatory headline — Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits. Ahem:

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few. But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.

Castonguay is credited as the man who first conceived of Quebec’s provincial single-payer system, which eventually spread across the country and became the Canadian system we know today. In a story that begins by implicitly scorning the anecdote as a public-policy driver, the anecdote of Claude Castonguay (what a wonderful name) is given great weight, although his ideas about how to fix the Canadian system boil down to a pretty tame set of recommendations:

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In my night-shift editing I read half a dozen pieces like this a week. Everyone has an idea how to fix American health care, but no one has the idea. Personally, I don’t believe the system is fixable in the state it is now. But I’m always willing to read one more idea. My favorite is the Wall Street Journal, which has some of the best health-care reporting in the world, but a whack editorial page bought and paid for by the American Medical Association. And my single favorite piece on that page in recent months was last year sometime, suggesting we could all learn something from the Amish, who don’t believe in health insurance, and who use such radical cost-containment practices as chipping in for one another and, my personal favorite, dickering.

Oh, how I can’t wait for the day when I dicker with my doctor. I bet he can’t, either. Unmentioned in the admiring WSJ editorial are the other documented Amish health-care cost-containment practices, which include alternative medicine (herbalists, midwives, etc.), bus trips to Mexico for the Third World option and, frequently, quackery. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette had a pretty good series a few years ago, where a reporter followed one of these caravans. Among the anecdotes was a woman who’d had a serious ankle injury requiring reconstructive orthopedic surgery, and the incision stubbornly refused to heal, with chronic infections. (Dr. Nance would prescribe a hospital stay with heavy antibiotics to knock down the infection, followed by a rigorous home-care program emphasizing keeping the wound clean, with instruction for all her caregivers. Oh, and diabetes testing. This is just off the top of my head.) Her Mexican doctor advised removing all the surgical screws on the theory they were causing her infections, followed by poultices. I don’t know where the Amish woman is now. My guess is either pushing up daisies, or coping with life as a 19th-century amputee.

(A further note, also from the WSJ: Dickering doesn’t solve everything. Also, let’s recall the tragic case of the Amish Cook, who dropped dead at 66 from an aortic aneurysm, diagnosed by her herbalist as an iron deficiency, IIRC.)

I don’t mean to be flip, I really don’t. I’m glad the reader sent the link along. I know there’s no simple answer to this problem, or any answer. But here’s what I know:

A health-care system where a poor kid with asthma has to take three buses and a subway to his clinic doctor, and a doctor’s wife can get spa-level care while recovering from her breast augmentation — is not a good system.

A health-care system that rewards doctors more for choosing dermatology as a specialty (with all those lucrative, pay-out-of-deep-pockets anti-aging patients) than primary care (with all those poor kids with asthma) — is not a good system.

A health-care system where insurance is connected to your job, with no contingency for job loss other than COBRA — is not a good system.

There is no perfect system, and there might not even be a very good one. Life is a terminal disease, and some of us have trouble facing this fact. There may be no way to balance the truly miraculous technological and pharmaceutical advances that are driving the cost of health care into the stratosphere with the fact hardly anyone can pay for it. But maybe there’s a better way. This is your job today, little commenters of mine: Let’s fix it! You know we can!

And if you’re not up to it, in the bloggage, two internet-related stories about the campaign:

From Saturday’s WashPost, a woman offended by the Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail tries to track it back to its source, with more success than you’d think.

And in Sunday’s NYT, a piece on DIY attack ads by freelancers.

Both worth your time. And just for laughs:

A bunch of white kids fight the “Barack Hussein Obama” thing by taking “Hussein” as their own middle names, an “I am Spartacus” sort of protest. I am Salman Rushdie!

Well, I was right. The weather was hot and muggy and partly cloudy all day, and then, late afternoon, a deluge. This drove the film-festival launch party indoors, to the ground floor of the Renaissance Center. That place belongs in an architectural case study book somewhere, in several chapters, including “And Then Came the ’70s: What Were We Thinking?” and, of course, “How Not to Do It.”

Built in the mid-’70s, the RenCen has its own complicated history, perhaps best summed up in its name, an ironic joke worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Love. It was intended to reassure the white people leaving the city in their rearview mirrors (although I’m not sure, precisely, how that would work) that the city was done with the unpleasantness of the riots and was on its way back, yeah baby. Obviously it didn’t work, but the city got its signature building out of it — a five-tower “rosette” with a central silo reaching 73 stories and the surrounding ones, 39 stories, all wrapped in the black glass that was not only ’70s standard but also a trademark of its architect, John Portman. (Its familiarity was always an itch I couldn’t scratch, until a little research showed Portman was the man who designed the Peachtree Center in Atlanta. Atlanta’s downtown was an early-adult formative experience for me.)

Inside is the nightmare. I walked in from the parking garage and stood there a minute, trying to get oriented. A security guard sitting at a station nearby didn’t even look up from his desk when he drawled, “Lemme guess. You’re lost.” Everybody gets lost in the RenCen. All those towers! All those levels! Curse you, John Portman and your stupid ideas about atria. Everything is round, every walkway seems to lead to another roundabout, and all the walls are some sort of beige concrete. I tried to listen for the music of the party, but the acoustics are awful. I knew where I was going, but I still needed directions. These were the directions: Go straight, follow the walkway around to your right. Look for the escalator. Take it down one level, make another right and you’re there. And I still nearly missed the escalator.

It’s not a terrible place, though. There’s the GM Wintergarden, a vast interior public space with a window wall overlooking the river. Alan likes to take the People Mover over on his lunch hour and eat a Potbelly’s sub while watching the freighters go by. Tellingly, this was a 1999 add-on to the building, after GM bought it. Trust Michiganders to know how much you need the sun in January.

And, I’m pleased to report, you can get good cell service inside, which is good because you need it: “OK, you’re passing Starbucks? I’m right across from Starbucks. Stop. No, stop. Stop walking. Turn to your right. Look up. Not that far. Lower. OK, I’m waving. See me wave? Great. No, I don’t know how to get here from there. Maybe we’d better hold the meeting over the phone.”

The storm was great, and the clearing after the storm was greater, the sun breaking through to light the casino on the Canadian side, bright against the fleeing bank of black clouds. There’s nothing that says, “yes, the storm will pass” like CAESAR’S in red neon, is there?

One final note: I interviewed a man a couple years ago, a sailor. On the wall of his office is a great photo of a boat sailing down the Detroit River, past the half-completed RenCen. It was him, and his boat. He had no idea who’d taken the picture. He’d just found it at a garage sale. What are the odds.

Some bloggage:

Geoffrey Feiger’s co-defendant’s lawyer suggests thanks for his client’s recent acquittal goes right up to the top:

In his initial meeting with 39 mock jurors chosen to represent a typical southeast Michigan jury pool, the judge hired to conduct the simulated trials asked how many trusted their government to tell the truth. Just four of 39 raised their hands.

“In my father’s day,” Fishman told me, “there would have been 38 hands up, with maybe one holdout who’d just gotten out of prison.”

Roy, on a roll, riffs on a Peggy Noonan column about the need to let the gray stallion run, by letting him insult people. Worth a try — he already sort of reminds me of Don Rickles.

Happy Friday. Happy weekend. Happy everything. It’s a lovely day.