Bureaucracy, Baseball and Bad Joke

In letters and phone calls from readers and conversation at various public and private functions, variations of certain questions come up repeatedly. As a public service, I have maintained a file of those questions, and what follows is a synthesis of the questions asked most frequently--with, of course, the answers:

Q You exploit your family, friends and neighbors mercilessly in your column. Does this ever cause them any problems?

A Well, yes, occasionally. A while back, for example, in writing about the Anaheim Auto Show, I mentioned that my next-door neighbor had a vintage Jaguar in his garage under a shroud. A few weeks later, he got a Notice of Delinquent Registration from the Department of Motor Vehicles, which demanded that he send $78 posthaste.

He fired off a testy letter that read, in part: “For your information, my Jaguar has had mechanical problems and has not been ‘operated or parked’ on a California highway since 1988. . . . If you would like to confirm this, feel free to contact my wife. I am sure she will be more than willing to testify that our garage has been occupied by a Jaguar for years and that it gets in her way, collects dust and inhibits her from parking one of our ‘California highway legally registered’ vehicles in the garage.”

There the matter stands. If the DMV reads this, I was just kidding about him getting it out and driving it. I haven’t seen the damned thing out from under that shroud for years.

Q. During a recent meeting at the Airporter Hotel honoring Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), The Times reported that one of the comments making the rounds of the guests was: “AIDS is the cure, not the problem.” Is this a joke?

A. No. The joke is that the voters of Orange County would elect to public office anyone whose followers regard this as funny.

Q. At the same meeting, a field representative for Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) told a Times reporter: “A lot of people are not aware of the perversions of homosexuality. We want people to know it’s not just wearing a pink shirt and being an interior decorator.” Will this lose the interior decorator vote for Ferguson? Or the votes of everyone owning pink shirts?

A. Hopefully it will. I was unable to find a telephone number for the Pink Shirt Society. But I took a quick poll of interior decorators and found general agreement with one who said: “A lot of people are not aware of the perversions of bigotry and the negative group-typing by bigots. But we want people to know that bigotry isn’t just wearing a coat and tie and joining the Young Americans for Freedom or being a shill for right-wing homophobes.”

Q. I saw all those pictures of Mills College students crying and tearing their hair because they were told boys might be admitted to the school. Do you feel they were overreacting?

A. Not at all. We have to draw the line somewhere, and these young women clearly understand that.

Already men have infiltrated virtually every once-sacroscant corner of a woman’s world. Without apology, men are today caring for children, serving as house-husbands, doing laundry, gossiping among themselves, manipulating people, joining bridge clubs and even--for God’s sake--washing dishes. It is rumored that research is now taking place for an operation that would permit men to bear children. There seems no limit to the arrogant demands of the male movement for equal rights.

So these young women at Mills have simply put their bodies on the line. “Thus far and no farther,” they are saying, and we should applaud them for their courage and foresight.

Q. I notice that whenever the police in Orange County shoot somebody--even when the victim is unarmed and gets shot in the back--the district attorney’s office always says the officer was right. Does this seem odd to you?

A. Not at all. These people have to work together to see that justice is done in Orange County, and if the D.A. started seeking indictments against police officers, this daisy chain might break down. Besides, they very seldom find any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the police. Of course, they seldom look for it, either.

Q. A political consultant for Sheriff Brad Gates explained the other day that all the campaign money the sheriff has been spending for such things as Valentine’s candy for his staff and constituents is legitimate because the gifts “improved departmental and organizational morale and advanced the sheriff’s political and civic causes.” Does the million bucks or so of taxpayers’ money that he lost in personal lawsuits against him also fall in that category?

A. Certainly. Most of these judgments against Sheriff Gates came about because he was trying to use law enforcement resources to smash people who said bad things about him or planned to run against him. Smashing such people clearly “advanced the sheriff’s political and civic causes.”

Q. You write and speak with abject reverence about the game of baseball. So do some of the pointy-heads of the American political Right, like George Will and William Buckley. Do you find it uncomfortable to be in bed with them on this issue?

A. Only because they threaten to pontificate the game out of existence. Baseball can be intellectualized only up to a point; then it has to be felt. A spilled beer trickling under your feet, a foul ball that threatens to destroy all the people under it, cold hot dogs, young women in halters traipsing endlessly up and down the steps obscuring your vision of home plate at a critical moment--these things must simply be experienced. The intellectual Right--an oxymoron, but what the hell--tends to overlook this aspect of baseball and dwell inordinately on intellectualizing technical matters that sometimes have never occurred to either the players or the managers.

This reminds me of a teacher’s guide in a high school reading text in which a short story of mine appears. The guide asks the student to explain what symbolism I had in mind when I wrote such-and-such. What I had in mind was not much of anything except moving the story along. George Will and his buddies tend to give us teachers’ guides to baseball when all we want to do is move the game along while looking at the girls in the halters. Except for this cavil, I welcome them. Whatever rubs off on them at the ballpark has to be positive.

Q. When the Register did a recent lengthy hatchet job on Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, a lot of letters poured in pointing out factual errors in the story. The Register responded by saying, in part: “When we reprint an article from another publication, such as the David Brock piece on Irvine’s socialist mayor, which appeared first in The American Spectator, we cannot, of course, conduct normal fact-checking with our staff . . . Alas, he got a couple of things wrong, minor in the overall scheme of the work, and we regret that . . . That (the critics) do not challenge the major revelations in the piece . . . strikes us as curious, not to mention a marvelous case of straining at gnats and swallowing camels.” What does this mean?

A. They blew it.

Q. Rep. Robert Dornan has raised more campaign money than any other Orange County political candidate in the first q uarter of this year ($316,279). Since he is running virtually unopposed, what is he going to do with all this money?

A. He’s got to be ready to destroy him again in case Ron Kovic decides to run a write-in campaign this summer.