Beautiful Nola was anxious to read the review of the new Off-Broadway show she’d just opened in. The Times and Trib would be covering it but Nola wanted to see what The Daily Worker had to say. Her face fell when she read it. The play was a socially relevant drama, of course, about the struggles of the Negro. She had chosen a dazzling white suit for her wardrobe. The critic said that this was unconscious racism on her part. She had, in fact, picked the suit because it made her boobs look good. 

Sometimes Nola would drag me to upper Broadway where the Thalia, a dusty old nineteen-thirties movie theater, screened Russian language films from the Soviet Union. These were not the brilliant pictures which had come out in the early days of the Revolution, but kitschy agitprop which followed the party line.  In one of them an enormous white plane majestically glides down out of the heavens and lands in an airport somewhere in the Ukraine. Little girls with bouquets of flowers rush out onto the tarmac. The door of the plane opens, steps are put in place and down them and onto a red carpet strides an actor playing the part of Joseph Stalin. He is gloriously handsome and dressed in a dazzling white suit. I glance over at Nola in the darkness of the theater; she does not return my glance.          

Party members in the arts back then willingly did as they were told. Their indoctrination had been total; they knew in their hearts they were doing what was right. Writers wrote about the downtrodden; actors played workers nobly, capitalists evilly. Musicians composed music of the people. To deviate from the party line was unthinkable. With the advent of the Cold War, this behavior slowly faded away. Now it seems to be back. Artists no longer take their orders from Moscow but, it appears, from Washington. Not to do so results in being shunned (or de-funded). 

I’ve been around long enough to see this kind of thing come and go in our beautiful country. Let’s hope it doesn’t last as long as it did back then. This time we’ve got Big Hollywood on our side.

Here’s what popped into my head on the Miller Show. At the age of five, my mother told me that if my father ever left her she would kill herself, and that if I wanted to prevent that from happening, it was my job to keep him around. This is a heavy responsibility to lay on a kid of five but I accepted it without question. I adored my mother. She was beautiful, smart, sexy and funny. She was also a self-destructive drunk who had room in her heart only for my father. He was a charming sadist with room in his heart for no-one: a hot-shot liberal who helped found the New England branch of the A.C.L.U. but in private often used the word jewbastard.

Their marriage was, to say the least, tumultuous. I had been sent by Central Casting to play the small but important role of the child. After each of their frequent and alcoholic altercations, my father would storm out of the house (actually, the rented, upper half of a house in a working class neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts…Gates-Crowley country) and head off to spend a few days with one of his girlfriends. I’d be sent after him, once actually barefoot in the snow, a sobbing ten year old, to catch up and explain how much I loved and needed him and beg him to come back. “Go home,” he’d tell me. “I’ll be back in a while.”

He would be back after a while and things would settle down for a time until the next upheaval. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, my father left home for good and, true to her word, my mother went to the kitchen, lay down on the linoleum floor, turned on the gas and packed it in. I put our furniture in storage, made living arrangements for myself and went on with my life. After ten years of analysis, two years of Reichian therapy, fire-walking, re-birthing and then a second ten years of analysis, I had forgiven my poor, sweet, alcoholic mother. But my father remained beyond my powers to forgive. The last shrink I attended put it this way. “The no-good bastard isn’t worth forgiving. Live with it.”

Meanwhile, I had become a Christian… my own form of odd-ball Christian (leave out the middleman and deal direct with the Maker for big savings). Each morning and night I get down on my knees and thank God for my life and ask Him to make me grateful all the time instead of just most of the time. One morning, a few weeks ago, I realized that I had forgiven my father. I don’t know how or when, I just knew that it had happened. Not because the son of a bitch was worth forgiving and certainly not because he had asked for it, but just because, if I was ever going to feel grateful all the time, in other words, if I was going to become truly happy, I had to forgive him. It wasn’t for him (although it affects him, wherever he is) it was for me.  The heaviness in my heart which he represented and which I’d always carried around, was just gone. I felt lighter. I loved my wife more now. I loved my kids, my grandkids, my friends, the blue sky above and maybe even guys who cut me off on the freeway. (Well…) I hadn’t tried to forgive my father. It had been, it seems, the inevitable result of my prayers to feel grateful, my determination to be happy.

Back to Professor Gates. He has spent a career immersing himself in all the bad stuff that white people have done to Black people. His head is full of it. It seethes in him like a cauldron and it hurts. He will never feel relief until he forgives us white folks. Not just good ones like Officer Crowley, an Irish cop who has worked harder than probably any white guy alive to understand the Black condition, but ordinary ones like me. Oh yes, and really bad ones like the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Hard, you say? If it was easy, as my dear old grandfather used to remark, everybody would do it. But it’s the only way. You can forgive and be filled with happiness and peace of mind or you can hold on to justifiable anger and be rich, famous, tenured at Harvard and miserable.

My high school pal Parker Swan and I would go to the Translux Theater in Boston which featured non-stop newsreel coverage of the war. When bombings of German cities were shown, we’d cheer. After V-E day, when the battle moved to the Pacific, newsreels featured G.I.s using flame throwers to dig Japanese soldiers out of their caves on Iwo Jima and Wake Island. When the enemy came screaming from his dugout, Parker and I would cheer. I sold newspapers, The Globe and Herald, in Harvard Square by the entrance to the subway station. When the A-bomb, about which we had been told nothing, was dropped on Hiroshima, the headline read New Kind of Bomb Devastates Japanese City. Everyone was elated.

War was a way of life for Americans in the early forties. Heroism was expected. Only one soldier was ever executed for cowardice. The year after the conflict ended, I graduated from high school and turned 18. Immediately, I joined the army and, after a few months of basic training, I took a troop train across the country to San Francisco, where I lost my virginity at “Brown’s Hotel… Where You Can Always Get In” and then shipped out for Yokohama. It was late December and we were crowded into a Victory Boat, a converted cargo ship which featured stacks of hammocks four high. I was in the bottom one so there were three young dog faces above me. We sailed along the coast of the Aleutian Islands. The storms were ferocious. The ship would rise up and then slam down. Almost all of us were seasick. The first couple of days out, I was afraid I would die.  The next few, I was afraid I wouldn’t. The compartment I slept in was next to the mess. The few G.I.s and crew members who weren’t sick lined up alongside my bunk, waiting to get into the mess hall to eat my food as well as theirs. Some of them whistled cheerfully. As I looked up at their faces I was filled with hatred. I wanted to kill them for the crime of not being as sick as I was.

I managed to get up above board as often as possible, so I could breathe the fresh air and get away from the aromas of the mess hall. They showed a movie every night on deck in the freezing cold. It was “The Black Dahlia starring Dan Duryea. Someone had screwed up and loaded only one film aboard for the six or seven day trip.” I watched it every night. Sometime during the night of December 24th, we crossed the international dateline and woke up on the 26th. That’s the kind of trip it was. The Red Cross gave each of us a little box containing two cookies and a tooth brush.

I spent a year of occupation duty in a devastated Japan, then sailed home and was mustered out. I never had to fire my carbine in anger but my experience in the army and my evenings with Parker Swan watching newsreels at the Translux Theater created profound respect in me for those who had done so. My wife, actress Alley Mills, and I have shown up at the USO station at Los Angeles Airport to say hello to the boys who are passing through on their way somewhere. They love to have their pictures taken with her: “Oh wow, the mom from ‘The Wonder Years!’”

On this day of Troop-A-Thon, I am especially grateful to our service people and will be sure to say an extra little prayer for all of them tonight.

Disney had taken miles of extraordinary footage from the long-running English nature series and condensed and shaped it into a story of sorts: mama polar bear and her cubs emerge out of hibernation in the arctic snow, with the adorable babies blinking at their first sight of the summer sun. She begins the task of teaching them to survive. Papa bear, meanwhile, or “dad” as he’s known in the narration, is off on the ice floe, trying to catch a seal for his dinner. But “global warming” is making this difficult to do as the ice is breaking up earlier than usual. Dad falls into the frigid water and begins swimming for his life. He swims and swims till he gets to Antarctica where there is an abundance of seals. But dad is too weak from all that swimming, can’t nab a seal, and lies down and dies. End of family.

Now, polar bears don’t mate; they copulate and split. “Dad” has never seen the cubs he spawned and never will. Neither is he any longer interested in mom nor she in him. It’s not a family. And “dad” is, in all probability, played by a number of polar bears from different episodes in the original series. This sad downer of a story has been cobbled together by the Disney writers to make a point: we Homo sapiens are a mortal danger to families and to our beautiful planet.

After a lucrative opening weekend, moviegoers realized that this picture was not something they wanted to take junior to see, and business fell off sharply. The movie could have made a fortune if an uplifting story had been created. Sure, nature can be treacherous and the world is often a dangerous place to live in. But that’s not the main fact of life. The main fact of life is that a gloriously beautiful and perfectly designed planet (and universe) has been created for us and for all our animal and vegetable co-inhabitants (my brother the carrot). Sunrises and sunsets are thrilling; even rainstorms and hurricanes are breathtaking. The BBC photographers captured all of this and the Disney film does show a lot of it, including the mass migration of thousands and thousands of animals. But of course, they focus in on the one baby elephant that gets separated from the herd and wanders off to starve to death. Hour upon hour of glorious footage, filmed by brilliant and intrepid photographers are turned into an agitprop picture condemning consumerism and capitalism.

“Wall-E,” a brilliant animated picture, is another example of the Disney crowd using its powerful creativity to send a message to the younger set: we are destroying the earth. “We” meaning, of course, America with its incredibly successful production of “stuff”. And like all good propaganda, it has more than a kernel of truth to it. The waste in this country is overwhelming. I don’t object to reasonable preachment in favor of conservation and against waste. What pisses me off is the fact that the cultural left is frightening the children. And they’re doing it on purpose. Polls of little kids have been taken which show that they are scared as hell that the earth will be an uninhabitable place to live in when they grow up.

There’s a video called “The Story of Stuff” being shown in classrooms around the country. It has been put together by a former Greenpeace employee and, to quote The New York Times, it “paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned”. The filmmaker also complains that the federal government “spends too much on the military.”

Children are being frightened. It’s not enough that the cultural left is sexualizing them at an early age, it’s also making a generation of worrywarts out of them: trans-fats and second hand smoke and climate change and toxic this and toxic that. And who is strong enough to save us from all this? Only the government, of course; only Big Brother. Worriers tend to vote Democrat and the left is systematically manufacturing a generation of them. Child molesters belong in jail.

Anyway, I guess Feldstein was just crazy enough to make the magazine a huge success. Now long retired and living in Montana (which seems to be a magnet for marginally crazy people), Feldman, an old lefty, recently forwarded an e-mail to a friend of a friend of mine who forwarded it to me. A million plus people have watched this e-mail by now. It’s a slickly produced film attacking Barack Obama. Any surprise that the President’s base is now turning on him?  It explains that he (Obama), is in the pocket of some amorphous, only hinted-at, world-wide society of manipulators who are behind everything bad in the world: “The Trilateral Commission, founded and conceived by David Rockefeller and his obscenely wealthy (redundancy?) Bilderberg Society cohorts… an amalgam of carefully chosen members of ‘The Elite’… the powerful rich… from the three main areas of the world: The U.S.A…. Europe… and Japan… who would slowly and carefully maneuver the free people of the Earth into a ‘One World’ system of Corporate/Fascism.” This is very old stuff. Conspiracy fodder. Been around for years in one form or another. International bankers turning Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into a single country, etc. And it’s all slickly packaged with music and graphics.

Left-wingers and right-wingers come together when they become extreme enough. The Nazi Party was called National Socialism, very similar to Stalin’s Communism, with the addition of “the Fatherland”. The crazies behind this film say they are non-partisan. They are: they’re equal-opportunity haters. They’ll never be satisfied until they are standing in the smoldering ruins of society… any society. They only feel comfortable in chaos. They whip up people’s fears and then give those fears something to latch onto.

The internet (as we are constantly reminded) is a powerful tool for good or for evil. This stuff is evil. It never goes away, and like all evil, it’s seductively attractive. No conservative can ever be conservative enough nor any liberal liberal enough to satisfy the conspiracy crowd. They are political nymphomaniacs, obsessive but incapable of satisfaction, and the stuff they disseminate is like pornography; once hooked on it you need more and more. Like the title of the late Marilyn Chambers flick, they are “Insatiable.”

In March, Andrew Breitbart was on a TV panel with a left-wing, intellectual African-American civil rights activist who, when asked if the election of Obama was at least a step forward, replied, “Just because one Black man is living in ‘public housing’ in Washington D. C., does not an end to racism make.” Nothing would satisfy him. If every white person in America were killed, he would turn on the remaining African-Americans and say they had been polluted and were Uncle Toms.

I’ve got no ending for this piece. I don’t know what to think. Everything’s a mess. The country is more divided than it has been since the war between the states. I’m not outraged by the left or the right. In my day, I’ve been both. One year I proudly sported on my refrigerator a Christmas card from the Young Republicans and Season’s Greetings from Gus Hall of the American Communist Party. The only people I intensely dislike are the ones who throw shit in the fan just to see everybody scurry out of the way.

I’m not a pessimist. I do believe that in some way we don’t understand, God has a hand in things and it will all work out for America. Our money says In God We Trust. And we are the best country, aren’t we?

Orson Bean’s latest novel, M@il For Mikey, is published by Barricade Books

“Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damaage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.

“But physical pain is a passing thing. The enduring torment is the taunting reminder that darkness encroaches. Already he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually his past, like his future, eludes him.”

In his editorial, Mr. Margulies describes how Abu Zubaydah was water-boarded: “They strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to produce the sensation of suffocation and insipient panic. Eighty three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture”, he writes.  “I am content with the self evident truth that it was wrong.”

The CIA did all this to Zubaydah, Marglies concludes,  “because they believed he was evil”. Because they believed he was evil. Because they believed he was evil. When I had calmed down a bit after reading this, I typed out a letter to The Times which they printed. Here’s what the letter said:

“She looks into his eyes. Hers are filled with terror. The heat is unbearable. Her skin is beginning to blister. He reaches out and takes her hand. His hand has a deep gash in it from the shattered glass of the window he has helped to smash. ‘Hold on tight to me,’ he whispers. ‘Keep your eyes closed. Don’t look down.’ Together, they step through the jagged opening of a high floor of the World Trade Center. On the sidewalk below, people shriek in horror.

I don’t know the young woman’s name, but I do know that, like Abu Zabadah, she can’t picture her mother’s face either.”

Orson Bean’s latest novel, M@il For Mikey, is published by Barricade Books

As luck would have it, the first week of the show’s run concluded on Sunday September 10th. The next morning, I slept in, then awoke to find an answering machine message from my wife, who’d driven off to a breakfast date. “Turn on the TV,” her breathless voice said. “New York City has been bombed.” I spent the rest of the day, like most of the country, glued to my set, unable to believe what I was seeing or hearing.

1776 was, as scheduled, dark that night, and the management cancelled the following night’s performance. America was in a state of shock. On Wednesday the 13th, we re-opened. The theater was packed but the reaction from the crowd was strangely muted. The laughs which usually accompanied the comic by-play between Franklin and John Adams were missing. But as the show concluded, the bells rang and the actors froze in the famous patriotic tableau, cheers and audible sobs erupted. People actually cried out, “God bless America.” The performers remained on stage after the curtain calls and asked for donations for the Firemen’s Relief Fund. In the five days following 9-11, in our smallish theater in Los Angeles, we raised just under twenty five thousand dollars. People were dying to do something… anything… to help. The president went on the tube and urged us to go about our lives as if nothing had happened; the people felt otherwise.

The patriotic fervor lasted for the best part of a year. Every ball game opened with “God Bless America.” It was a terrifying but in many ways exhilarating time. I’d lived through World War II and hadn’t been able to wait to join the army as soon as I turned 18. I’d loved my country then and I loved it still. But, as we all know, the euphoria didn’t last. Patriotic feelings waned and blame-America became fashionable again. “War Is Not the Answer” stickers bloomed on the bumpers of Saabs and Volvos, replacing the small American flags which had briefly flown from cars across the country.

In ‘08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I’d supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he’d won. I really hadn’t thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so. The elation didn’t last, as Obama kept one after another of his campaign promises. The millions of centrists and disgruntled conservatives who’d swallowed hard, joined the left and voted Democrat began to wonder about what they’d wrought. Rush Limbaugh’s ratings soared; so did those of Fox News. 

And so did the ratings of Mark Levin. When my friend Larry Elder had been taken off the air suddenly some months ago, the innocent victim of the collapse of a bankrupt radio syndicate, he’d been replaced, here in L. A. by Mr. Levin. I’d heard of him, of course, hadn’t read his best-seller “Men In Black.” I tuned in, resentful at first on behalf of poor Larry but was soon hooked by Levin’s wit and erudition. 

Nothing prepared me, though, for the brilliance of his new book, “Liberty and Tyranny.” The title is taken from a quote of Abraham Lincoln’s, which he features on the book’s back cover. What knocked me out though, was the sub-title: “A Conservative Manifesto.” I’d never heard the word used apart from Marx’s Communist Manifesto. (Well, there was the Uni-bomber.) 

Levin’s book is the equivalent of a popular college course in conservatism. Strict adherence to the Founding Fathers’ words are necessary, in his view, to be able to call oneself an genuine conservative. He has withering scorn for neo-conservatives, whom he regards as wolves in sheep’s clothing. His word for the liberal is Statist, a term he uses over and over until it begins to sound like an ugly epithet. “The state will take care of me,” is the mantra of the leftist, as Levin describes him, but as a bronco once broken discovers, there’s a heavy price to be paid. 

The book is divided into sections: In On Prudence and Progress, he begs conservatives to be wary of the sort of imprudent change the Statist insists upon. “For the Statist,” Levin writes, “liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. (The Statist) believes it is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way.” In On Faith And The Founding, he asserts that the founding fathers clearly believed in Natural Law as divined by God.  In On The Constitution, he declares that the Constitution is not “a living, breathing document” that may be altered at will, but a set of immutable laws to be strictly adhered to.

On Federalism deals with states’ rights vs federal intervention. I learned something I hadn’t known here: in the nineteenth century, northern states had laws on their books which created legal obstacles to the deportation of escaped slaves back to the south. The federal Supreme Court sought to rule these laws unconstitutional. It also held, in Dred Scott in 1857, that no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen. 

In On The Free Market, Levin quotes Abraham Lincoln: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

From On The Welfare State: “Barbara Wagner… was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer. Her doctors recommended a specific drug… However, Barbara is a resident of Oregon… the state refused Barbara’s request for the drug, since it does not cover drugs that are meant to prolong the life of individuals with advanced cancer… But Oregon also has legalized assisted suicide and in an unsigned letter from the state, Barbara was informed that the health plan would pay to cover the costs of a doctor to help her kill herself.”

Enviro-Statism (global warming). Here, Levin quotes a list of calamities predicted in news reports which hilariously include: Antarctic ice growing, Antarctic ice melting, Atlantic Ocean less salty, Atlantic Ocean saltier, crocodile sex (?) and itchier poison ivy. This reminded me of a Harvard Lampoon send-up of how various publications would handle the end of the world. Washington Post headline: WORLD ENDS TOMORROW: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.

Levin concludes his book with an epilogue: A Conservative manifesto. “So distant is America today from its founding principles,” he writes, “that it is difficult to precisely describe the nature of American government… If the bulk of the people reject the civil society for the Statist’s Utopia, preferring subjugation to citizenship, then the end is near…”

Like Tom Paine before him, Levin is a brilliant pamphleteer. Anyone who wants a thorough understanding of the difference between right and left in this country needs to read this book. A college credit should come with it.

Orson Bean’s new book, M@il For Mikey, is published by Barricade Books

2 DIE IN HEAD-ON COLLISION

A Culver City police officer and a Van Nuys man were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision that closed several lanes of the 10 freeway for hours during the morning commute.

Sgt. Curtis Massey, 41, was driving east on his way to work when he was struck about 5 a.m. just west of National Boulevard by a silver Toyota Camry traveling the wrong way, said Officer Miguel Luevano of the California Highway Patrol. Massey’s unmarked police car, a four-door Dodge Charger, was engulfed in flames.

 No one else was hurt and the CHP is investigating. Pete Demetriou, a radio reporter for KFWB-AM (980) was driving to work around 4:55 a.m. on the eastbound 10, when he saw a car, driven by the Van Nuys man, coming toward him.

“You’re used to seeing headlights coming at you, but you assume they’re on the other side,” he said. “At about 200 yards I realized he was coming in my lane.” Demetroiu said he called police after the car passed him traveling about 65 mph. All eastbound lanes and two westbound lanes of the 10 were closed at the 405 freeway until about 1 p.m.

Massey, who is survived by a wife and three young children, was a 17-year veteran of the police department and was most recently assigned to the juvenile detective bureau.

Police Chief Don Pedersen told reporters that Massey dedicated much of his free time to working with at risk-teens and every year volunteered for the Santa sleigh, a holiday event in which officers escort Santa Claus around the city and distribute presents to children.

“He was a friend and trusted colleague who could always be counted on to be the first one to volunteer for an assignment,” Pedersen said of Massey, who was a Medal of Valor recipient. “The community today has lost a dedicated police sergeant.”

Megan Gallagher, 28, a former community service officer who worked with the department for five years, was shocked when she heard the news about Massey, a colleague who had served as her mentor.

“He was someone I looked up to and someone I trusted at the station. Being one of the few females there, it’s kind of hard to talk to everybody,” she said. “When I started there, we have to get our uniforms and he offered up his jacket so I didn’t have to spend the money. He made my first days there comfortable. He was an automatic friend from Day One.”

On behalf of Massey’s family, the department has set up the Sgt. Curtis Massey Memorial Fund. Donations can be sent to Culver City Employees Federal Credit Union, 9770 Culver Blvd. Culver City CA 90232.

On the morning of the accident, I had a ten a.m. audition at Culver Studios at the junction of Washington Blvd. and Culver Blvd. for a chance to play Meryl Streep’s psychiatrist in a Nancy Meyers movie. My wife, the actress Alley Mills, had a ten a.m. rehearsal call at her soap opera, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” at CBS Television City, Fairfax and Beverly in Hollywood. We live on the west side in Venice.

At 8:45, I turned on 1070 News Radio to hear the traffic report. All lanes closed on the 10, it said, and as a result, eastbound traffic on Venice Blvd. and Washington Blvd. was virtually at a stand-still. Both of us panicked. “Damn it,” I muttered, reminding myself of Jack Bauer on “24.” “One more inconvenience in Los Angeles.”

We both flew out of the house. I shark-drove side streets and managed to get to my audition only ten minutes late. Alley was tardy by three quarters of an hour. So was everyone else in the cast. And as the day went on, we heard stories of actors, directors and crew people in the same fix all over the city. I remember thinking, “It’s like a movie, like ‘Crash,’ or something. One incident happens and dozens of lives are affected.”

The next day, I looked in the paper to find out what had occurred that had driven me so nuts. The small piece on the inside of the California section I’ve re-printed above was what I found. When I read it I remembered that Alley, when she’d heard that the cops were distributing toys for kids, had gone to the toy store run by a Vietnamese couple next to the old Venice Fox Theater and bought three brand new bicycles. She’d loaded them into our Ford van and driven them over to the station on Culver Blvd. It was a nice black cop who thanked her for them, she said, so I guess it wasn’t Curtis Massey.

Later that morning I got a call from my daughter Susie Breitbart, Andrew’s wife and the mother of their four young kids. “Dad,” she asked me, “do you remember years ago a police officer stopped you for speeding and recognized you from TV and said, ‘You’re Susie Bean’s father; I went to Pali High with her. I can’t give you a ticket,’ and he let you go?”

“Sure I do,” I said.

“Well, that was my friend Curt from Pali. He’s the officer who was killed in that terrible accident on the 10 yesterday. He was a really good guy,” she said.

Later on that Thursday, Alley got a call from a friend of hers from Bible study. The cop’s wife’s best friend, it turns out, is in her class. Six degrees…

An extraordinary human being is wiped off the face of the earth in a split second and all over town we experience it as just one more annoyance in L.A.

I just sent off a good sized check. Perhaps you’ll do the same

Why did Larson give up all that free money? Why did Madoff think he could get away with his Ponzi thing? What made Mickey Rourke become a wrestler? Strange are the ways of human behavior.

Why did I decide to write a book about becoming a Christian? Don’t I have enough trouble? Last year, I was guesting on a TV show, sitting on my canvas chair between takes, reading a C.S. Lewis book called MERE CHRISTIANITY. I can’t tell you how many people, cast and crew alike, came over to ask me about it. There seems to be a hunger out there, even in the vast, atheistic wasteland called Hollywood.

I believe there’s an emptiness in all of us that only the Holy Spirit can fill. Good sex does a pretty good job of plugging it up, but not for long. Cocaine and booze work for a while, too. Fame and money aren’t bad, either. That’s why so many people move to Hollywood. But when they’ve used up all these things, they’re still left with a hole in the middle of them that the Creator stuck there, knowing that eventually they’d feel the urge to fill it and do what they had to do to seek Him out.

I know this sounds a little nuts to a lot of people. But what doesn’t, when you stop to think about it? Science now pretty much accepts the idea of the Big Bang theory. At a certain point, fifteen billion years ago, an infinitesimal speck of something or other somehow came into being. It exploded and within a few seconds, everything needed to create the entire universe appeared, including time and space. Is that crazy or what? But science says it’s true.

Ten percent of the gross weight of every living thing on earth is ants. Ants! Don’t talk to me about crazy. It’s all crazy. Why do we fall in love? Why does love turn to hate? What’s the capital of North Dakota? These are unanswerable questions.

The reason I became a Christian is the same reason I became a conservative: I paid attention. I watched to see what worked. If a loving Creator designed the whole mishbooker, it all makes sense. If it happened by accident and coincidence (quadrillions of coincidences), it’s nuts. So, I felt the urge to write about it, to share the so-called Good News.

God is being siphoned out of the public arena. People don’t even say God bless you when you sneeze anymore. I want to be able to lay a Merry Christmas on someone without its feeling like a political statement.

I think God loves to hear little kids laugh at fart jokes. He didn’t just make sunsets and bluebirds, He made hot babes. And dirty old men like me. That’s the modest message I’ve set out to tell the world: you don’t have to be Ned Flanders to be a Christian.

Orson Bean’s new book, M@il For Mikey, is published by Barricade Books

When at the age of ten I was sent to summer camp, the rule was no phone calls to or from parents. The separation from home was to be complete. I remember the boy in the bunk underneath me, Mouse Taylor, crying for his mom the first few nights. The counselor, an eighteen year old Norwich student and the first grown-up we came to worship, was unmoved. Growing up was what we were there for. At the end of the summer, Mouse and I had tears in our eyes as we parted forever (we had become fast friends) but that was the only crying we had done for all of July and August. Recently in the New York Times, a piece ran on how summer camps today have to hire specialists to deal with anxious parents calling sometimes several times a day to see how junior is doing. Kids are given cell phones, sometimes two in case the first is confiscated. We are raising a nation of sissies.

As fear of God and his righteous wrath is removed from the public arena, our bodies become what we worship. And with what terror do we attempt to protect them. California recently became the first state in the union to ban all trans-fats from restaurant cooking (New York City had already done so). Smoking is outlawed, of course, even on the beach. Billboards everywhere remind us to eat our vegetables and fasten our seatbelts.

Remember the seesaw? You won’t see one in a public playground today. Jungle Gyms are rare. Anything that could hurt you. Not just your bodies but your feelings. In public schools in Massachusetts nobody wins at (competitive?) sports. The score is not kept. More and more universities decline to have a valedictorian address the graduates. The second smartest kid might feel bad. Remember when you invited a few of your best friends to your sixth grade birthday party? No more. The rule, at least in the public school my grandkids go to, is that the whole class has to be invited or else no party. The celebrations become huge and meaningless.

Mothers Day cards were recently banned in one Manhattan school I read about because some kids don’t have mothers. For a while no peanuts were served on airplanes because nine kids in the country were allergic to them. (That one has become academic now since nothing is served). Children are promoted whether they can read or not. Their self-esteem might suffer. Won’t their self-esteem suffer when they can’t get a job? You can receive a ballot to vote here in California in Laotian, as well as thirty two other languages.

When I was a boy, high tech communication was two tin cans and a string. It took most of the afternoon to find the cans, soak off the soup labels, punch the holes in the ends and knot the cord. What fun it was at four o’clock when you pulled the string taut, stood at opposite ends of the vacant lot and tried to figure out if you were really hearing anything. Now you don’t see even the poorest kid without a blackberry or a raspberry or a dingleberry or whatever permanently attached to his ear. God forbid we should not be entertained for one second of the day.

We can’t drill in ANWR because some moose might be inconvenienced and, God forbid, the oil companies make more dough. Personally, I could go for candles and a bicycle. But shouldn’t we have the option? What the hell are we afraid of? That third world countries will hate us? Their people are all dying to get in here. There’s no illegal alien problem in Ethiopia. The great American work ethic is being kept alive by foreigners. Mexican guys hang out in front of the lumber yards looking for a days’ work. I say let them all in here. Inside of a generation, they’ll be adding to the GNP and voting Republican.

Alright, I know I’m rambling. I’m old. I used to walk to school through eight foot drifts of snow. But I love this country so damn much and I can’t stand the way people who don’t love it, even though they pretend to, are harming it. So we’re not perfect. Perfect is the enemy of better. And better we are, not just than any other country on earth but any other country in history.

Orson Bean’s new book M@il For Mikey is published by Barricade Books