Is there an Oprah in your future?

Finally, a solution to the auto crisis.

Executives who steered their car companies off the road should bail out, resigning to make room for success-oriented leadership.

That means putting Oprah Winfrey in charge.

Then Oprah can use the federal government’s proposed $25 billion handout to buy a million cars from the manufacturers and give them away. The companies will zing and Oprah will be free to apply her entrepreneurial talents, as Henry Ford did, to new ideas an long-term growth.

Fantasy? Yes, just like Congress.

Business chiefs out on bail

Nobody’s talking about bailing out newspapers. Some want to let bankers out on bail, courtesy of taxpayers. No matter how clumsy its leaders have been, Ford and General Motors and even Chrysler have a cheering section to set them free on bail. This stirs mixed memories in folks who bought unreliable American cars. I’m thinking of the Chevrolet Impala I bought in 1965. It broke down hours after I drove it off the dealer’s property, and was towed back there for the first in a series of repairs. A Plymouth station wagon, a couple of Buicks and an Oldsmobile continued the shoddy tradition.

Reliability appeared in the form of a Toyota station wagon I bought in Hawaii decades ago, followed by other Japanese vehicles and eventually the reliable American Saturn. The U.S. auto industry is big and politically powerful, but not loveable.

The communications industry, especially its ailing newspapers, has been dishing it out for so long that nobody gives a thought to bailing it out.

Given the number of respected business schools in the United States, and the number of MBA degrees granted by American universities, a person might wonder why nobody identified the massive problems that were developing in the dysfunctional finance industry. Even now, nobody knows what to do, except to try applying billions of dollars and if that fails, see whether more billions will work somewhere else.

The republic is not lost, even though the situation is grim. Huge numbers of people who are ready and able to work have lost their jobs. The pain is personal and growing. But a spirit of optimism was stirred in the election of Barack Obama, who combines the active ingredients of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Democracy has found a leader in the nick of time.

Does God use email?

Volunteer communicators for God have urged me to vote for John McCain for president because, they say, that’s what God wants.

The messengers tell me that God approves of McCain’s political position on abortion. There’s no mention of what God thinks about McCain’s decision to divorce his first wife and marry a beautiful heiress.

Announcements, usually by email, of God’s wishes at election time are more curious than convincing. There is no evidence of God’s intervention in earthly political processes.

If God becomes involved in elections, it is reasonable to wonder how Adolph Hitler was elected to office by the German people. Then there’s the election and reelection of Zimbabwe’s brutal president, Robert Mugabwe. There was no intervention in electing George W. Bush, who became an object of derision by millions who voted for him. Jefferson Davis was elected president of a Confederacy built on the backs of slaves.

Not everyone who worships God thinks that the Creator decides who will win and who will lose elections, wherever they are held. Too many scoundrels and incompetents win elections.

Certainly God is to be praised in prayer, and millions pray for the right outcome of human endeavors, including elections, visits to the doctor, rescue attempts and family disputes. But some campaigners go beyond that.

Is it blasphemy to claim God’s blessing in a partisan political campaign?

Does this show a lack of respect for Almighty God, and bring shame on the perpetrators?

I hear someone saying Amen.

Even better than being an admiral

So light travels at 186,000 miles per second. How does a motorist on an interstate highway relate to that?

More figures to ponder. From Earth to the Moon the average distance is 238,855 miles. Even if you’re driving from New York City to Los Angeles, it is tough to imagine that kind of travel.

A figure like $9,667,726,106,224 is so distant from anything I’ve ever seen on my bank statement that it is almost incomprehensible. It was the U.S. national debt when I checked it online.

During a week in September the federal government made $600 billion available in Wall Street bailouts, help for storm victims and support for money market funds. It also agreed to stand behind $5 trillion in mortgages, says the Wall Street Journal.

Politicians who want to increase taxes for the rich need to take another look at their figures. An income of $200,000 or $250,000, primarily in the form of paychecks, does not a wealthy person make. Americans in that income bracket are not likely to have inherited wealth, or to have grown up rich. This is the bracket of men and women who borrowed massively for their education, worked long hours and accepted stressful occupations to earn more than their parents did. They are not the inheritors of banks, oil wells and retail chains.

There’s never been anything like the stunning increase in national debt under the Bush Administration and all of its Republican enablers.

This is money already spent, billions of it on a poorly-chosen war, by a government that neglects its homeland of aging roads, bridges, power grids and the like. This is a government that bails out banks but wrings it hands over Medicare and Social Security funding.

In response to overwhelming economic and human needs, Sen. John McCain wants to become commander-in-chief. This privileged son and grandson of admirals, educated at the great government school in Annapolis, a former fighter pilot, employed as a U.S. senator with all of its pension and health care provisions, campaigns as though the main job of the president of the United States is to be the commander-in-chief. He would, incidentally, outrank his father, grandfather and classmates.

Neither he nor Gov. Sarah Palin, his understudy to become commander-in-chief, has the temperament of a diplomat.

My grandpa instincts make me cautious about the military instincts of those two. I don’t want my grandchildren to be drafted to risk their lives in undeclared wars. Who’s more likely to get us into more wars, John McCain or Barack Obama?

Scriptures may be copyrighted,
and church logos trademarked,
but patents on God are all pending



COUNTLESS CHRISTIANS affirm today, as they have for centuries, that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation. Others are less certain; it seems inconsistent with society’s impulse toward fairness and equality of opportunity. Surely, they say, God loves everyone and does not exclude non-Christians and non-conforming Christians, does not convict millions on a technicality.

Christians cherish the Bible as God’s inspired word. Belief is a gift from God.

Some who believe that God is the creator of everything, and all-powerful, are in touch
with God fairly often, through prayer. Some believe that God has never stopped inspiring Scripture.

Thus, early teachings about eating the other white meat or paying interest on a mortgage have
been recast.

Christians have long been encouraged to look for Christ in other persons. Jesus, the light
of the world, dissolves the shadows.

Christ is the way to salvation wherever he is, in the face of an American child, a Japanese
sage, an African cleric or a Tibetan monk. Fingering our computer keyboards, we celebrate
scientists and theologians who, using the tools of earlier times, advanced human life and purpose.
The first scripture scholars could not conceive of the many versions of the Bible to come, or of
copies produced by the millions, in scores of languages.

The tools of scholarly imagination are becoming as precise as the computer chip, as swift as light and as endless as space.

Thousands of churches and religions have been tempted to fence off their claims, posting
signs that say Private Property or No Trespassing. But one sun shines on everyone, felt one way
at the North Pole, another at the equator. Salvation is everywhere. Christ is already there.

Jesus won't leave us alone

Jesus has a lot of people helping him out in Orland Park. When my wife died in 2002 we were newcomers, having moved here to be near our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. Folks I had never met offered friendship and prayers.

Around that time my neurologist diagnosed an unusual disease with an unpronounceable name, Straight aisles and moving crowds took my equilibrium and made a church feel like a roller coaster.

I found out that Jesus never leaves us alone. There he was, in family, neighbors, friends, strangers. Our Lord turns a bachelor condo into a holy place when he comes here on Sundays with the deacon or another minister of communion.

Can you beat that? It is not the same as being in St. Francis of Assisi Church for Mass, because church is where Christians live out community. But if I can’t get to the mountain, that’s no big deal for Jesus Christ. While I’m looking for him, he’s looking for me through the priests, deacons, religious and laity of his church.

The word that comes to mind is Wow, which is a secular translation of Alleluia!

When news is the enemy

When vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin launched her famous attack on the right of news media to report bad news, she seemed to be reflecting the George W. Bush view of the first amendment. Her GOP convention speech in St. Paul was largely written by Matthew Scully, a former Bush speechwriter, according to the distinguished journalist Don Wycliff (who is not responsible for the conclusions I draw from it).

Her words reminded me of a previous Republican governor, Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, who became Richard Nixon’s surprise vice president. Agnew is remembered for needling nattering nabobs of negativism in the news media.

While Agnew was governor of Maryland I read a news account of a press conference he had held in Annapolis, the state capital, and I disagreed with what the newspaper said that he said. I wrote a critical editorial in The Catholic Review, weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The next day my phone range. It was Agnew on the line. He said the statement attributed to him in the press, which had led to my editorial, was wrong. He invited me to breakfast the next morning to read the press conference transcript. It showed that his remarks were not accurately reporter, and I wrote a correction for my paper.

After he was elected vice president he called me again. Would I write his biographical sketch for publication in the Official Inaugural Program? My first thought that flashed through my head was of something attributed to Abraham Lincoln. When asked how it felt to be ridden out of town on a rail, he reportedly said that if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, he’d just as soon walk. I did write it, and it was published over my signature, but it had been given a public relations tuneup and had little resemblance to what I wrote.

After he was in office I asked for a depth interview and was given one. This was in his office next to the White House. Then I returned to Honolulu to be managing editor of the morning newspaper, The Honolulu Advertiser. Before long Agnew was in Honolulu, where his phone call inviting me to cocktails at the Kahala Hilton caused some chuckles in the newsroom. I wasn’t there. Whoever took the message wasn’t sure whether it was the vice president of the United States on the line, or, more likely, a prankster.

When Agnew was nominated I was in Europe. His name was no better known than Sarah Palin’s. Journalists there knew an American when they saw one in a press club, so they asked me about the unknown Agnew. The one thing I knew about him, I said, was that he was an honest man. After he was found guilty of tax evasion and resigned his office in October 1973, my European friends never again asked my opinion about anything.

Agnew’s job was to speak for what Nixon called the Silent Majority, white, conservative, middle-class voters.

Governor Palin is a more formidable anti-media crusader than Agnew was, because she has causes. Agnew had no cause beyond exploiting his role as a conservative. Palin shares biblical convictions with George W. Bush. Agnew never thought he was chosen by God.

The real pain in the neck

The real pain in the neck
is not relieved by aspirin

We octogenarians ask ourselves a lot of questions because we’re running out of other people to ask. I peered down a long and familiar sidewalk in front of my condo, and asked myself whether a tree near the end of it was missing. Or whether my eccentric eyes were up to something.

Swerving off straight and narrow sidewalks, theater aisles or test lines on the floor of a neurologist’s office is one of the marks of a rare disease called olivopontocerebellar atrophy. I decided not to renew my driver’s license when familiar truss bridges, the kind with tall steel girders and beams, squeezed in on my car as I drove across.

Most of the people I know with this ailment, which we call OPCA, were not readily diagnosed. Most doctors never see a case. Some authorities say that it typically starts in men who are in their late 50’s, sometimes progressing so slowly that its symptoms look like something else. Eventually, with the help of the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a neurologist confirms an OPCA diagnosis.

The losses are not what textbook describe. Yes, there are gait problems, lurching, a tumble now and then. There’s a wispy kaleidoscope roiling around inside my head. Swallowing can be an adventure. But those are not the important losses in a long-term disease that still eludes a cure.

Grandson Matt has a baseball game. His brother Mike will be playing water polo. Katie will dance for the entertainment of family and pals. We live a mile apart, but OPCA trips me up in auditoriums with straight lines of aisles and squared-off indoor pools. Sometimes it seems like we’re a million miles from each other. Jacob lives half a continent away and comes for visits with his family, but his grandpa stays home. He might go berserk in an airplane, as he tends to do in a tubular MRA. There are no visits to family events with Jacob or his older cousins, Kristen and Dan, in the university two or three hours away. Two sons and their wives live a couple of time zones to the west, a daughter and her husband are near, and e-mail is a wonderful e-glue that helps keep folks together.

Friends, relatives and strangers are thoughtful and kind. They go on creating happy memories. They’re the medicine that turns discomfort into comfort. They overlook the fact that OPCA sometimes takes memory away, or diminishes it, or even embellishes it.

A couple of years ago I wrote a little book, The Dizzy Disease, for newly-diagnosed OPCA patients and their families. Just the other day I pulled an unfamiliar notebook out of a desk drawer. What could it be? I was astonished to find the original draft of the book, much more useful than what was published. I had written it and forgotten it. Sometimes I find an article long-stored in my computer, nearly finished but awaiting a conclusion that never came because the project just drifted away into OPCAland.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget my wedding anniversary or certain birthdays. It may take a moment to remember my phone number, but I’m able to answer Jeopardy questions and I know where everything is in the hardware store. As for that missing tree at the end of my sidewalk, it had been blown over and hauled away.

OPCA blurs some memories, erases some, and stirs up pains no prescription can wipe out. The loss that hurts most is time shared with family and friends.

Obama looked like a winner in 2005

Sometime after the 2004 Democratic National Convention I wrote this article for the Orlando Sentinel. The headline: Another Lincoln in the White House?

When Barack Obama was a schoolboy in Hawaii, I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, unaware that a major figure of the next century might have been surfing nearby. In the Hawaii I remember, racial identity sometimes required several hyphens (Filipino-Chinese-Hawaiian or Caucasian-Korean-Japanese). The boy with the soul of a Martin Luther King and the heart of an Abraham Lincoln might have been known as Black-Caucasian, the son of a black African father and white American mother.

Americans are often on the move. The one-time Hawaii resident ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, where he won by a wide margin. Obama now serves alongside the venerable Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.

Obama would have qualified for membership in the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Honolulu in the 1950s, when men with names like Ohata, Okada and Okino were welcome participants in annual corned beef and cabbage events.

Anybody who heard Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his hymn to democracy and the integrity that makes it work, may have wondered whether this man might make it to the White House. It took about 180 years for a Catholic to be elected, and no woman has ever been elected regardless of her race, religion or political party.

The first African American to be elected president will be Obama or someone very much like him, someone who is proud of his race and wants to lead an interracial nation, a country in which everybody belongs to some kind of minority – the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even the Cubs fans. He’d have to win enough votes from Americans of European, Hispanic, Asian and other ancestries to get there.

Spirited words by Sen. Obama, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, at the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, were recalled by Jeff Zeleny, national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in an article June 26. The words received less attention than they merited at the time because, Zeleny reported, the senator had barely finished speaking when the election of a new pope took over the front pages. Here’s some of what Obama said about Lincoln:

"At a time when image all too often trumps substance, when our politics all too often feeds rather than bridges division, when the prospects of a poor youth rising out of poverty seem of no consequence to the powerful and when we evoke our common God to condemn those who do not think as we do, rather than to seek God’s mercy for our own lack of understanding – at such a time it is helpful to remember this man who was the real thing."

The papal election may have grabbed the headlines at that moment, but it stirred memories of Pope John Paul II. His Polish ancestry was a joy to him, and he met with men and women of Polish ancestry wherever he traveled in the world – but he was not the pope of the Poles. He was everybody’s pope. Obama can be everybody’s president.

When I was a first-grader, almost 80 years ago, my hero was Lincoln. The first book I bought with the first half-dollar I earned was about Lincoln.

When I see Sen. Obama on my TV screen I see a bit of Lincoln. That’s before the beard, of course.