THE SHAME OF COLLEGE SPORTS...THE REAL STORY

Oh! Poor Penn State! Poor Joe Paterno! What a blot on the game! Bullshit! Big-time sports constitute a disease that thrives on cheating, dishonesty and abuse of children. It has been that for more than a century. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s football, hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer, cricket or cycling. The fans pretend that they support a pure contest of athletics in which the most extraordinary win. Bullshit! The winners are the crooks who don’t get caught. In fact, about the only sport that has a modest amount of honesty to it is professional wrestling because we all know it’s a theatrical fraud.

The latest in a long string of scandals that stretch back to the immemorial past comes to us from Penn State where the football program hauls in huge amounts of money for the school and coaches whose salaries beggar those of anyone in the academic departments. So let us consider the time line here courtesy of the Huffington Post and whatever the source from which they stole it.

In 1969 – that is 42 years ago – Jerry Sandusky, the central figure in this matter, was hired by Penn State to assist head coach, Joe Paterno.

In 1977 – 34 years ago – Mr. Sandusky founded a youth program called The Second Mile. It was initially a group home for “troubled” boys. It eventually grew to become a charity for children with absent and dysfunctional families and, apparently, Sandusky’s personal, perverse flesh market and candy store.

In 1994 – 17 years ago – Mr. Sandusky begins sexually abusing a 10-year old boy from The Second Mile Program, the earliest child abused who has so far come forward.

In 1998 – 13 years ago – the Penn State Campus Police receive the first report of Sandusky showering with a boy who was then 11-years old. After some crocodile tears and promises from Sandusky, the Campus Police, local police and county prosecutor deep-six the issue. Interestingly and possibly irrelevantly the prosecutor at that time was declared dead this past summer after being missing for more than 7 years. I am not a conspiracy theorist but coincidences make me very uneasy.

In 1999 – 12 years ago – Sandusky retires as assistant coach emeritus retaining his privileges to use Penn State facilities.

In the autumn of 2000 – 11 years ago – a Penn State janitor came upon Sandusky in the showers at Penn State fellating a boy who was somewhere between 11 and 13-years old at the time. The janitor reported the incident to his supervisor but didn’t not carry it further because he was only a temporary employee and feared for his job should he accuse a coach under the protection of Joe Paterno.

On March 1, 2002 – 9 and a half years ago - a graduate student finds Sandusky sodomizing a 10-year old boy in the showers at Penn State’s football centre. This student told his father of the incident and the next day personally went to Head Coach Joe Paterno’s home to report it to Paterno.

On March 3, 2002, the day following his meeting with the graduate student, Joe Paterno calls his nominal superior, Penn State Athletic Director, Tim Curley, to his home and reports the graduate student’s story to Curley. The report to Curley leads to a meeting between Curley and, please note this official’s title, Senior Vice-President for Finance and Business, Gary Schultz, with the graduate student who reported to Paterno. The two senior officials of Penn State assure the graduate student that they will look into the matter.

On or about March 27, 2002 Curley contacts the graduate student and assures him that Sandusky’s keys to the Lasch Football Building have been taken away and that they have reported the incident to The Second Mile, the charity that owes its existence to Jerry Sandusky. At or about this same time The General Counsel for Penn State who knew about the abuse allegations and who’d heard Sandusky confess to the abuse during a telephone conversation became General Counsel to The Second Mile Charity. This is significant given the alleged referral to The Second Mile. No further reports are made and no further investigation takes place until December, 2009. Oh, and by the way, this attorney retained his position with The Second Mile until the story broke in the newspapers.

Over the next 7 years following the incident the graduate student reported Sandusky remains involved with The Second Mile and continues to abuse at least two boys who, when the abuse began, were 11-years old or younger.

The first actual action against Sandusky occurs in the spring of 2008 when the mother of one of the boys, now in a Clinton County high school, reports Sandusky’s sexual abuse of her son and the school system forbids Sandusky from engaging with its students. It takes the Pennsylvania Attorney General nearly another year to mount an investigation of Sandusky and a further year to begin action against him and the people who protected him at Penn State.

So here we are more than 3 and a half years after someone finally credited a report of abuse and more than 13 years after the first report that was should have been investigated. The matter is finally in the public view. Head Football Coach, Joe Paterno, and the University President have been summarily fired and what happens? A great outpouring of outrage and sympathy for…wait for it!...Joe Paterno. Why? Not because the allegations against Sandusky are untrue. Not because he bore no responsibility for reporting the abuse when he learned of it 7 years ago. And not because the students and fans wanted to express their support for the child victims. No. The outrage and sympathy comes because he has the all-time record for wins as a football coach.

Nine years after we can confirm that Paterno knew of Sandusky’s abuse and failed to stop it a bunch of jocks and fans are still singing his praises as if he were not part of the problem. Let’s stick to the facts but is it truly credible that Paterno hadn’t any knowledge of Sandusky’s behavior at any time during the 33 years they were working together before the graduate student’s report in 2002? Clearly the Penn State Trustees didn’t think so. It’s also clear that the Trustees, in an effort to evade their own responsibilities in this mess, were clear that the University’s President was more interested in protecting the school’s income from the football program than a potentially unlimited number of young children. However, thousands of Penn State students and fans turned out on the night on November 9^th to protest Paterno’s firing rather than the cover up by the University.

Penn State has formed a committee to investigate and suggest a system that will insure that such things will never, ever, not-in-a-million-years, not-on-our-watch, you-should-live-so-long happen again. In short, a committee to paper over the whole stinking cesspool until it gets out of the news and they can go back to protecting what’s important to Penn State, its football program.

The media is describing this as a scandal, which it is in one view but more properly it’s an eruption. The disease has been there all along but this is just the latest eruption of the disease that is sports. The eruptions usually relate to individuals O. J. Simpson, Rae Carruth, Michael Vick come to mind. In these cases they are talented athletes who have been coddled, feted, showered with praise and money often since they were teenagers. At every turn they have been protected by individuals who valued their athletic performance above honesty, decency, social norms or law. Because we have nominal academic standards for our sports figures the also had the benefit of a culture of cheating that allowed them to continue their sports careers long after they should have been dropped from their programs. Similar corruption pertains in athletic programs across the nation where well-heeled boosters, coaches, athletic directors and college officials conspire to cheat while raking in the dollars from alumni and, in many cases, television contracts.

In the midst of this fetid and pervasive swamp there are advocates for paying college athletes, most notably, Historian Taylor Branch. Mr. Branch makes the case that schools are raking in huge piles of cash while treating their players, notably minority players, like plantation field hands. While I understand his point of view, Mr. Branch’s argument is utterly specious. First, the players he claims are treated like slaves are getting scholarships, tutors, cooperative professors, gifts from boosters and frequently people who complete their course work for them lest the school lose a game for want of a key player. The players and sports programs generally are hardly treated like slaves. In fact, Mr. Branch would be hard put to find a campus where the jocks of all colors do not rule. The actual “Shame of College Sports” is the corruption of the winning-is-everything attitude that pervades campuses big and small regardless of rating.

If colleges and universities actually had a scintilla of honesty about them the NCAA or whatever governing body would institute some actual sanctions. For example, players should have to maintain a full academic course load and pass an examination in each course. The examinations should be monitored by outside people qualified in that discipline and who have no connection to any sports program to insure that they genuinely meet the academic standards for continued participation in their sport.  If the athlete does not pass, he can’t play, period, until he actually passes without assistance. If a college has boosters who illegally support the sports program, those boosters should be banned from games and even campuses for a period of time and required to contribute equal amounts of cash or the value of gifts to non-sports academic programs before the bans are lifted. If a college or university violates the rules for conduct set down by its own organization, then the coaching staff involved should be fired summarily and the participating coaches, the school administrators who suborned the cheating and the school itself banned from participation in that sport for a minimum of 5 years, no exceptions.

Unfortunately money, the corrupter of everything around it, is involved and corrupts the players, coaches and educational institutions alike. The cry is that the school will lose funding, prestige, funding, the loyalty of key alumni and funding. The answer is that for the first 1, 2 or 3 schools those consequences will, in fact, accrue. And suffering the consequences will entail those problems for the the first 1, 2 or 3 schools after which players, schools and coaches will understand that the days of the We-have-rules-(wink, wink, nudge, nudge!) will end and seriousness has set in. Student athletes who can’t meet academic standards will be gone. Corrupt coaches will be unemployed and unemployable. Corrupt boosters will understand that they need to make legal contributions to their schools rather than illegal contributions to players and the schools themselves will understand that corrupt practices in sports are finished. And one more thing. State schools that have excellent sports teams that bring in television revenues…the television money needs to go to a general higher education state fund to be distributed based on some criteria such as student enrollment to all publicly funded higher education institutions in the state from the lowliest community college to the most prestigious state school. The incentive to excel remains but the incentive for corruption is largely gone. We could similarly require private institutions to implement a similar system by declaring television revenues by definition, a for profit activity and taxing those revenues at all levels of government up through the Federal level unless those revenues are distributed amongst academic as well as sports programs. In fact, the solution to much of the corruption in college sports may be to declare sports programs above the intramural level as for profit industries not subject to any tax exemptions. Then exemptions could be given to that share or revenues distributed to the actual academic programs of the school as charitable contributions so long as those contributions did not provide covert or collateral assistance to the sports program.

Some, perhaps among them Taylor Branch, will suggest that strict academic requirements will disproportionately affect minority students. I would suggest that strict academic standards should disproportionately affect minorities. We are not helping minority students by using up their athletic talents and then spitting them out when their sports careers end with no other skills on which to rely. Colleges and universities need to know that they must actually educate the gifted athlete, that they must protect him or her from injuries that affect both the athletes mental as well as physical abilities. If that means that the most gifted football player of his generation plays for the East Overshoe Community College rather than Penn State so be it.

However, I’m getting away from my point a bit. Jerry Sandusky clearly should have been fired from his coaching job some 17 years ago. He should not have been allowed to quietly retire as coach emeritus 12 years ago to evade prosecution. Penn State Administrators should have had both the clout and will to fire Joe Paterno in 2004 rather than allow him to protect Sandusky further. The fact that at least 2 decades of Sandusky’s known abuse went not only unpunished but rewarded is not just a “Penn State scandal”. That scandal is just the most recent eruption of the corruption that pervades sports programs in and out of academic circles. The scandal is another example of the corruption in our society that stems from the winning-is-everything mentality at colleges, universities, particularly at business schools and in our financial institutions. I have no doubt that this mess at Penn State will drop from the headlines, from the memories of all but a few and that the corruption in and of sports programs will continue apace. I also have no doubt that other scandals will erupt and similarly fade away until someone with the intelligence and the courage to stand up to the fools who demonstrated against Paterno’s firing appear and institute real reforms with real consequences.

And one last thought, if the crop of con artists who call themselves “Libertarians” insist that the free market always yields the correct solution without regulation and government interference, may I suggest the almost completely unregulated market we see here in college sports is the primary refutation of that bald-faced lie.

ANONYMOUS IDIOCY

We are to be treated to a movie about the latest nonsense in the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” lunacy that has been percolating particularly in the fevered brains of academics who haven’t any original thoughts to offer but do have a consuming desire to be thought of as geniuses. These Elizabethan Literature doctoral candidates in search of a thesis but without the originality one finds in elevator musac trumpet a discovery now and again and sometimes even convert some who should know better.

I first encountered the Oxfordian theory of “Who wrote Shakespeare?” when I played Prospero as a guest actor in a college production of The Tempest some years ago. The director taught Shakespeare at the college and did so badly and from little knowledge and less learning. Her primary function was to accumulate a group of young women acolytes to feed her ego. To this end she manipulated some of the least secure and most wounded women who crossed her path only to cast them aside without conscience should they have the temerity to question her authority. She had a veneer of education without any depth and thus was the perfect promoter of the Oxfordian literary quackery. I was clear that if Annie believed the theory it was probably dishonest but I did my own investigation in case I was judging her and not the theory.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime there seems to have been no doubt in any minds that William Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, wrote the plays attributed to him. There were, as any of us have, alliances and rivalries in the London theatre of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods one of which was between Shakespeare and his acting company and his nearest rival, Ben Jonson, and the troupe for which he wrote.

The Elizabethan stage had a great plenty of writers who could pen a line in iambic pentameter though none quite as memorable as those from Shakespeare. The giants of the era were Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Occupying a near second tier were Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, John Webster, John Ford, Philip Massinger, William Rowley, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood among others. The reason for this list of Elizabethan playwrights will become clear a bit later. None of these writers had any apparent issue with the idea that William Shakespeare was one of their contemporaries and the height of success in their profession. In fact, in the 1590s playwright Robert Greene wrote at some angry length about Shakespeare attacking him for being what we would now call a play doctor, one who improved others’ plays. Greene had no doubt that there was a William Shakespeare whom he despised. I will let the great actor, Sir Henry Irving, say more of Greene later.

One reason that Shakespeare reached the heights in his time was his sensibility. Ultimately in Shakespeare’s plays the great theme is forgiveness and reconciliation. The comedies end in reconciliation of the characters and, often, in a wedding. The tragedies end in a death or a funeral but the deaths result from a failure of reconciliation and forgiveness. To take the most prominent example, Hamlet, the prince whom Laurence Olivier incorrectly thought could not make up his mind, returns from his aborted voyage to England a man, still contemplative, but comfortable in his own skin. I’ll pass on a more detailed analysis of the play as irrelevant to this discussion. Upon his return from the interrupted voyage to England Hamlet would readily be reconciled to Laertes and even to Claudius. The tragedy reaches its bloody end because Claudius in his greed and guilt cannot allow any reconciliation.

One of the reasons that Jonson has not fared quite so well as Shakespeare is that he is unremittingly jealous, angry and unforgiving of human foibles. Jonson was a tough guy who’d been in the military. He had little use for and was often quarrelsome with his contemporaries. He was also famously and vocally proud of his learning. In plays like Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair the fools and villains get their comeuppance but no Jonson character ever reaches the insight that forgiveness and reconciliation is the real answer. No Jonson character ever arrives at the understanding that Prospero achieves in The Tempest when he sees that even the meticulously planned revenge in which Prospero is currently engaged, is fleeting and, ultimately, an illusion, "like this insubstantial pageant faded".

No one has suggested that Jonson wrote Shakespeare but this contrast is relevant in the context of the comment that has been the root cause of all the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” speculation.

When William Shakespeare died in 1616 a selection of his plays existed in print, often in corrupted quarto copies. In 1623 a group of people, probably lovers of the plays, actor-colleagues and the leaders of Shakespeare’s former acting company undertook to publish an “authoritative” version of the plays in a folio. We now call this The First Folio. For the verse introduction to the folio Isaac and William Jaggard acquired the services of the dean of the playwriting community, Shakespeare’s old rival, Ben Jonson. Jonson produced the laudatory poem that the Jaggards and their syndicate paid for but, as was his nature, could no more resist slipping in a few barbs than he could resist breathing. The most obvious of these being the line,

                And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,….

This comment is more an expression of Jonson’s ego and pride in his own learning than it is a knock on Shakespeare. Their contemporaries seem to have understood as much. William Shakespeare had a solid classical education for the Elizabethan period which included being able to read and write both Latin and Greek. He may not have been as fluent as Jonson but we know from internal evidence in, as examples, A Winter’s Tale and Antony and Cleopatra, that Shakespeare could manage a reading of classical languages. His preference for the premiere translations of his day is not evidence of a lack of learning. Rather it is evidence that Shakespeare was sensitive to the popular knowledge of his time. Even so, most of the mad speculation about other authors can trace its heritage back to Jonson’s insult to a dead contemporary.

The jumping off point for most of the “scholars” who advance the various fancies of alternate authorship is Jonson’s barb. The reasoning runs much as follows:

Shakespeare didn’t have much of an education. Therefore, he was a dunce. He wasn’t even petty nobility. He was the son of a provincial glover. Therefore, he could not have written the greatest poetry in the English language. Someone else wrote using Shakespeare’s name and/or a front man who was a hack actor.

To call that reasoning logic is nonsense. Let me explain why.

We actually don’t know how much education William Shakespeare had or, indeed, didn’t have. Still we have no reason whatever to take Ben Jonson at his word. In fact, we have plenty of evidence of Jonson’s nasty disposition and holding of grudges to discount Jonson’s remark in the introduction to the First Folio entirely.

Even if Shakespeare were not a dedicated and diligent student characterizing him as incapable of writing the works attributed to him for over 400 years is an unwarranted leap of illogic. That argument is the equivalent of saying that Bill Gates could not have created Microsoft because he never finished his degree at Harvard. I should also point out at this juncture that Thomas Alva Edison had three months of formal schooling and was considered “addled”, a 19^th Century shorthand for stupid and unteachable with a hint of insanity, by his teacher. The point I’m making is not a defense of a dunce being capable of writing great poetry but rather that average people often mistake genius for something inferior largely because that estimation is more soothing to their egos than any alternative.

William Shakespeare’s father, John, was, indeed a glover in provincial Stratford-upon-Avon. He was also and alderman and successful in a number of businesses. John Shakespeare clearly had both the position and means to provide a solid education for his oldest surviving son.

I am making the ultimate point that the Shakespeare we know from his plays was a genius who largely established the English language that we know today and that denying the existence of extraordinary geniuses who appear from time to time in our midst is nonsense. To insist that William Shakespeare must have been an upper class or noble scholar flies in the face of the irrefutable existence of, to name but a few, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Paine, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Edison as already noted, Samuel Clemens, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

With the scurrilous and patently false arguments of humble origins and inadequate learning out of the way let me now turn to the outrageously false arguments for two of the prime candidates. But first a bit of literary and stage history.

William Shakespeare wrote for the popular entertainment of his time, the stage. Like television today, shows appear. They remain popular for a time. Eventually they become “old hat”, lose their audience and fade from the medium. No one, probably not even Shakespeare himself, thought that his plays would get more than a limited run and an occasional revival. Certainly no one contemplated that they would still be in production more than four hundred years later. We have ample evidence that many early scripts, including those in print, came from,  either actors who’d imperfectly memorized their own and others’ lines or, perhaps, pirate scribes, like the people who sneak camcorders into theatres running new movies today, who were paid to transcribe plays during performances. Those bastardizations were one of the problems that the syndicate creating the First Folio sought to correct.

But, though there was a growing sense that these plays contained sublime and extraordinary writing, they still hadn’t the air of holy writ that they have for us today. Many poets, both fine and hack, in later ages put their pens to “improving” the plays. Indeed Laurence Olivier’s famous film of Richard III from 1955 uses Colley Cibber’s 1699 revision. Perhaps most famously King Lear suffered exceptionally. During the Restoration Nahum Tate gutted the play, removed the character of the Fool entirely and cobbled up a happy ending in which both Lear and Cordelia leave the stage looking toward a bright future. It wasn’t until 1823 that Edmund Kean revived the tragic ending and even then he had to revert to Tate’s emasculated version after three performances because of audience objections. Finally, in 1838, George Macready restored the tragedy to the original text which ending has held the stage since.

Kean’s and Macready’s restorations of original text are particularly relevant here because genuine Shakespeare scholarship began in the last half of the 18^th Century and began to seep into the popular performances in the second quarter of the 19^th. At the same point that restoring Shakespeare’s original texts becomes a popular fashion we get the influx of quack academics and foolish sophistry that becomes the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” farrago.

Also, lest I seem too harsh on Ben Jonson, he did have great respect for William Shakespeare even as he chafed at being only second to him. Jonson tells us that Shakespeare wrote without blotting out a line, high praise even if it may be as hyperbolic as the attack on Shakespeare’s learning. Jonson had an unmitigated mean streak but he also had to acknowledge superior writing when he saw it.

The first choice for most of the Shakespeare deniers was Sir Francis Bacon on the slim evidence that Bacon and Shakespeare shared some verbiage and because of Bacon’s great learning. On its face the primary reason for even looking at Bacon as a possible alternate author is that he wasn’t the glover’s son who had “small Latin and less Greek.” Bacon remained the primary candidate at the turn of the 19^th Century when Sir Henry Irving was the premiere Shakespearean actor. I am lucky enough to have a volume of the collected plays that my grandfather owned. The introduction contains Irving’s essay, Shakespeare and Bacon. Let me quote a bit here.

Has any attempt been made to give even the semblance of reason to the assumption that Bacon induced the whole world of players and playwrights, and all his contemporaries who had relations with the theatre – men like Southampton and Herbert, and officials of the Court, who were brought into constant and close contact with the players – to bolster up the fiction that Shakespeare wrote the masterpieces for which he had the credit and the profit, and then keep the secret so close that nobody breathed a word of it, nobody kept any memorandum of it, and everybody carried it to the grave? Shakespeare was a man whose rapid advancement excited bitter jealousies. He was stigmatized by Robert Greene as the “Johannes Factotum” who was monopolizing the playwright’s business. He was “the upstart crow, beautified with our feathers;” that is to say, the jealous Greene saw him handling, rewriting, and vastly improving plays which, according to the theatrical custom of the time, were wholly at the disposal of the manager who had bought them. Young Shakespeare was called in to revise these works, and Greene cried aloud to all the supplanted that such presumption could not be borne; and why was it not proclaimed then, that Shakespeare could not write, that he was virtually illiterate, and that the plays that he presumed to turn from commonplace to genius were conveyed to him by Bacon, who laid the magic spell on them?

It doesn’t matter much which alternate one chooses, Bacon, Oxford or some other, Irving’s point that the promoters of this farrago have to peddle the improbable nonsense that all the playwrights I’ve mentioned earlier conspired together to promote a fiction that Shakespeare wrote what they knew he could not write. The Bacon/Oxford/somebody/anybody but Shakespeare crowd must maintain that fiction in the face of the ample evidence that some worked with Shakespeare, others competed with him and a few hated him though none had any reason to participate in such a fraud. In short, there needs to be a conspiracy so seamless and thorough that even those with a clear interest in exposing the fraud perpetuate it unto their dying breaths. Not only is that improbable, it utterly beggars belief.

Some object that there’s no or little record of William Shakespeare outside of his plays. We do have a few scant documents but nothing like the broad complex of data that we expect for notables. This argument seems to have given one of my heroes, Samuel Clemens, pause and moved him in his day toward the Bacon camp. I have to point out that, as much as I admire Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens was forever getting conned into schemes that impoverished him even late in life. Here I think he got conned once again.

I will admit that there is not a huge record of William Shakespeare but there is some. Legal documents exist as well as the birth and death records we expect. The Shakespeare deniers object that there isn’t more but that objection shows their ignorance of history. Here followeth the history lesson.

Shakespeare lived in a period of religious strife that would not end in England for another 150 years. Elizabeth I’s assent to the throne was not the final victory of Protestantism in England as Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot in 1604-05 illustrates. Still the primary religious conflict in England had shifted from Roman Catholic versus Protestant to Protestant versus Protestant. The Protestant fundamentalists were on a crusade to “purify” the English church of all “papist” influences. The English Civil Wars were aborning in this period which, to coin a redundant phrase, lead to dunderheaded censorship and the closing of the theatres in 1643. When the theatres were closed there was a significant loss of documentation covering the preceding 50 years.

But there was an older and more violent force working to destroy records that reared its ugly head higher and more often than even religious fundamentalism: fire. The Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s own burned to the ground in 1613. There were other more localized fires that engulfed theatres, churches and other repositories of public records leading up to the Great Fire of London in 1666 which destroyed a large part of the city along with masses of books and records.

The fact is that we are extremely lucky that the thin record we have has survived at all. We don’t know that great reams of documentation of Shakespeare’s adult life disappeared in various fires but it is hardly unreasonable to assume that some documents disappeared in flames.

In addition there were visitations of plague in London during the 17^th Century. In a society that hadn’t yet figured out the relationship between rats, fleas and plague, one way of dealing with infection was leaving an “infected” house and burning it down. Again we don’t know that any such thing happened to places that housed records of William Shakespeare’s life but I offer it as a possible explanation for why so few records survived. The short of it is that because we have a scant record now does not mean that there never was more than a scant record. Plenty of events intervened that may have destroyed a richer record. Again, the Shakespeare deniers offer an argument that takes no account of the facts except when they appear to reinforce their harebrained theory.

In any case, Sir Francis Bacon, worthy of respect in his own right, fell away as a favorite in the 1920s and the Shakespeare deniers flailed about. There was a brief attempt to develop theories that gave authorship to Christopher Marlowe though many topical references in the plays required Marlowe to have known them well after he was dead. Finally the dolts, conspiracy theorists and their dupes hit on Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford as their candidate for the wholly wrong and superfluous position of the actual writer of Shakespeare’s plays.

Again the Oxford Con starts with the premise that if there ever was a William Shakespeare, he was incapable of writing the great poetry of the plays and sonnets. Next they make the leap that only one of superior education and breeding could have written such works. But they have to start positing a number of things for which there is no or scant evidence. They posit a world in which it is impossible for a nobleman of deVere’s rank to be engaged with the theatre. That is, on its face, nonsense. The Elizabethan and Jacobean Courts were closely allied to the theatres. As but one example we have the unquestioned tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself so loved the character of Sir John Falstaff that she insisted on a new play that included him resulting in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The fact is that the Elizabethan theatres were popular entertainment but always considered high poetry and writing poetry was a noble pastime. It certainly did not adversely affect the careers of Sir Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, or John Donne who became canon of St. Paul’s. In short, the argument that the nobility could not engage with the theatre ignores plentiful historical fact.

The Oxfordians also pull out of their…er…”bag of tricks”, a pretense that Shakespeare “knew” Italy well. DeVere traveled to Italy and did know it from personal experience. Both sides are clear that William Shakespeare never traveled widely and certainly not to Italy. The pretense that Shakespeare knew Italy rests largely on specifics of late medieval and Renaissance towns which were very similar between England and Italy. That he gets the neighborhood of Verona correct comes from his source material but when Shakespeare is inventing from whole cloth he makes Milan a seaport not to mention giving Bohemia a coastline. William Shakespeare knew Italy less well than I, who have never been there, do.

They also note that, at the end of the same embassy that brought Edmund deVere to Italy, an incident occurred that echoes in Hamlet. DeVere was embarked on a ship for England when it was taken by pirates. He was later released, without his shirt in England. DeVere’s capture by pirates is historical fact. That the only way a story of a nobleman captured by pirates and later released unharmed might find its way into a popular play is if deVere wrote it himself is prima facie nonsense.

DeVere actually tried his hand at poetry some of which has survived. He received some heady praise from contemporaries who would have been only too happy to receive his patronage. However, the actual deVere poetry is not “deathless” at all. In fact, it’s rather plodding. The praise for it amounts to no more than sucking up to an important noble.

But the hardest problem for the Oxfordians is the historical fact that their deVere died in 1604, some twelve years before William Shakespeare and well before existing records show that William Shakespeare bought property and gave evidence in a law suit. To cover these apparent inconsistencies Oxfordians claim that there was a William Shakespeare but that he was just the front man for deVere. All well and good, you may say. Except that deVere, as I’ve already pointed out, didn’t really need a front man. Yet there is a still more important bit of evidence that excludes deVere as the purported who “Who wrote Shakespeare?”

Audiences have always enjoyed topical references in their plays. The references are usually oblique citations of famous scandals or events that have seized the popular mind. They are, above all, current and "topical". Read the notes to any good academic edition of Shakespeare and you'll find lengthy notes explaining to us today those long-ago obscured references. Because “everyone” knows them “everyone” in the audience is in on the joke and, by extension, the players are bonding directly with the audience. Several references in several plays, unfortunately for the Oxfordians, took place years after deVere was dead. That’s a pretty good trick and one that ought to mean that deVere could see the future making him was legendary in gambling circles for never losing a bet. He was not clairvoyant. He does not appear to have been known as a man who never lost a bet and, in fact, obviously didn’t know the pirates were going to capture his ship.

Committed Oxfordians have combed the literature and worked mightily to find incidents on record before 1604 that might fit the topical references. They have done so regardless of how obscure or old those incidents may have been and even regardless of whether Shakespeare or deVere might have known of them but in this they miss the whole point.

Yes, there may be incidents from earlier in the 16^th Century recorded in books and that Shakespeare or deVere might have encountered them but they were clearly not topical. References to the Gabor sisters just puzzle any current audience that knows the Kardashians. The topical reference must be current for it to work with the audience. Thus, once more the Oxfordian remedy for Shakespeare’s ill turns out to be snake oil that, to people with reason intact and unblinded by the hawkers, is inevitably explosive at one end or another.

So on thin, mostly fictional evidence some credulous people with imperfect or no knowledge of the period want to take a scurrilous insult to Shakespeare and the fact that he left a scant surviving record and torture it into alternate authorship. Just the number of contortions into which Oxfordians must twist themselves should indicate that the whole deVere theory is a worthless lie. I respect Derek Jacobi for his wonderful work on stage and screen. I’ve adored him as an actor ever since I saw him as Prince Mishkin in a dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot at the Old Vic 40 years ago. I also love Vanessa Redgrave’s work and respect her politics even in those few areas where we don’t fully agree. Still, wonderful as they are, neither the adherence of Jacobi nor Redgrave and still less the film from Roland Emmerich, can magically transmute the Oxfordian theory into gold from the stinking pile of crap it is.

Let me bring another Englishman into this argument and suggest, in the spirit of William of Occam, that the simplest explanation is the best. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote at least thirty-seven plays, 154 Sonnets. Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and other poetry that, more than four centuries later are still the greatest in the English language. Let’s call this movie the high water mark of the “Who wrote Shakespeare?” silliness and end the idiocy here.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN AMERICA

We won’t see Rep. Peter King (Neo-Fascist, N.Y.) bring it up in his hearings into domestic terrorism but if I were Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, I would be finding ways to send all of the bin Laden billions and any change I could shake out of the sofa cushions to the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Flying planes into skyscrapers and government buildings isn’t anything compared to destroying the “full faith and credit” of the United States government. I have believed that the Republican Party has essentially been a criminal conspiracy since at least the 1950s. But with the passing of control from the old guard oligarchs to the young Turks of the supply side, Ayn Rand true believers who came in with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the 1980s the Republicans have become a full blown terrorist organization.

I give some credit to President Obama on two issues. First, he has kept in mind that he is the President of the United States of America, not just the leader of the Democratic Party. He has consistently acted in the interest of the nation as a whole rather than following the Republican paradigm of acting solely in the interests of the relatively small number of super-rich backers who control the money that buys power for the Republican officeholders and finances the Astroturf movement known as the Tea Party. It was President Obama’s job to save the American economy in the face of Republicans, particularly Tea Party Republicans, who expressly stated that the nation’s economy was of less importance to them than making a statement about their perverse political ambitions and philosophy. The Tea Party and Republicans more broadly have read too, too much of that proponent of fanatical sociopath, Ayn Rand, and decided that they were collectively Howard Roark. Their stated solution to America’s problems was to blow up the nation in the hope that they could gain something by demagoguery while standing in the rubble. After all, they blew up the economy in 2008 after 30 years of relentless work at doing so and created the Tea Party by demagoguing in the ruins. The president is president of all the people regardless of how stupid, misled, craven or sociopathic they are. Barak Obama deserves immense credit for understanding that basic principle.

The second issue on which President Obama deserves credit for giving a nod to the “leaders of the Republican Party” in his statement following reaching the agreement on the debt ceiling on Sunday, July 31^st. Again, in the interest of responsible governing, President Obama has put aside partisanship, if only minimally, while Republicans have not. By contrast Speaker Boehner’s subsequent statement that same night was a purely partisan polemic.

Still, regardless of attempts at conciliation by the president, make no mistake, the terrorists won this round. The lunatic wing of the Republican Party (as opposed to the neo-fascist mainstream) embraced extremists like Michelle Bachmann and Ron and Rand Paul to create a crisis where none existed before. Their voices magnified by Majority Leader Mickey Kantor nearly wrought complete destruction of the economy in the name of saving future generations from onerous debt. So let’s look at that issue of “onerous debt”.

I could go into a history lesson but the fact is that Republican insistence on low tax rates has kept revenues low while spending has increased. Most of those increases have come from useless, pointless and unjustifiable wars and military excesses whether in Vietnam, Granada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Persian Gulf and Iraq not to mention the similarly unjustifiable covert actions in places like Chile, Bolivia, and other parts of the world, especially the Middle East. Deficits rise under Republicans because of their commitment to a grossly unfair tax system that exempts the wealthy and burdens the middle class. During the 1990s after a tax increase the nation’s economy boomed and we were on track to reducing the nation’s debt. But the Republicans then switched tunes. Instead of allowing the Federal government to run at a nominal surplus which would reduce the debt, they insisted that governments shouldn’t have more tax money than was absolutely necessary to pay for operations. That gave us the Bush tax cuts that reduced taxes on the wealthiest 10% of the population more than on the entire remaining 90% and just to make matters worse the Republicans created a much needed Medicare prescription drug benefit but refused to fund it, they initiated two wars, one in Afghanistan that had some justification and one in Iraq that had no justification whatever and they either deregulated or refused to regulate industries and markets at home. The result of reduced revenues alone was that any surplus available to reduce the national debt ceased to exist and the continuing Republican waste and mis- or non-management ballooned the debt quickly and immensely.

In the meantime prices for goods and services kept increasing, often out of all proportion to actual costs while wages for most workers remained stagnant and the real value of those wages declined. Pressed by stagnant wages and rising costs the middle class was encouraged by banks, investment firms and the financial media to use credit especially to mortgage their homes to the hilt on the false promise that real estate prices never, ever fall.

We saw the result in 2008. The joy ride came to a screeching, crashing halt just in time for President Dubya and his crew of criminals to slink out of office and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

There is only one tried and proven way to clean up an economic collapse on the world wide scale that befell us in 1929 and 2008. That solution is massive government spending on programs that put people to work and which also subsidize lower branches of government faced also with falling revenues. It increases the debt in the short term while reducing the economic disruption for states, counties, cities, towns and families. The subsidies to the lower branches of government prevent job losses in those sectors and generate private jobs by promoting municipal projects like road improvements, construction of and improvement to public buildings, parks and such. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s put people to work who might not have been able to support themselves otherwise and trained those people in trades that they frequently pursued in private employment for the rest of their lives. Both the CCC and WPA were major creators of middle class employment both in their time and for the rest of that generation yet they are reviled by the neo-fascists as “make work” programs.

Once again the Republican propaganda machine changed tack and went into overdrive. Having piled up a massive debt then wrecked the economy so that current revenues could not keep up with that debt the Republicans decided that debt was bad per se. It was an evil that must be stamped out, however, those most able to help reduce that debt, those who benefited most by running it up had absolutely to be exempted from paying a penny more in taxes. They conveniently ignored the fact that many of those wealthy ultra-right wing oligarchs already pay not a penny in taxes.

The neo-fascists party line is that we are burdening “our children and grandchildren®” with a massive debt. There is no question that our national debt is large but if the ultra-right wingers were truly concerned with anyone’s children or grandchildren they would pony up and use their billions to help reduce the debt by paying another percentage point or two in taxes.

But aren’t those people the “job creators” we here so much about?

If they are, where are the jobs?

Well, they can’t create jobs because of “uncertainty”!

What “uncertainty”? They have bought themselves a minority of a minority in Congress that makes retaining the huge subsidies for their corporations not just certain but holy writ. That same minority insures that they will never have to worry about increases in taxes so what, pray tell is the “uncertainty” that stymies these alleged “job creators”?

Well, look at Europe! There’s a debt crisis there that could tank the world economy.

If those poor, beset “uncertain” “job creators” were truly worried about a collapse of the world economy their money would not be flowing at phenomenal rates out of the United States into investments in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere. The “debt crisis” in Europe is no more real than Standard and Poor’s reasoning in reducing the U. S. bond rating or the tooth fairy. That “crisis” is the creation of bond rating agencies which are the wholly owned subsidiaries of the ultra-right wing oligarchs whose corporations those agencies purport to rate. Standard and Poor’s, for example, is all in a tizzy over the debt of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and a few other smaller countries besides the United States. By contrast they were just ecstatic about the bonds of Enron, AIG and all those mortgage backed securities that destroyed the world economy when we found that they were worthless in 2008. The European “debt crisis” is a fiction created by some enormously wealthy people speculating in currencies and bonds while using that speculation to destroy the social fabric of nations purely for their own profit.

The end of all this is that the ultra-right wing propaganda machine led by Fox News and the various Foundations and Institutes that those oligarch have established to give a veneer of rationality to their irrational greed promotes a bunch of “Big Lies”. The “Big Lie” was not invented by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels but he did bring it into the age of mass media. The “Big Lie” is a lie shouted often enough and loud enough that some fools begin to believe it. Worse yet, in the age of 24-hour news networks desperate to fill air time, people and media that should know better talk about those “Big Lies” as if they had some credibility. They trot out the con men of the Heritage Foundation, Hudson, Manhattan and Cato Institutes and their odious kin and allow them to peddle their snake oil as if it were efficacious medicine.

The result is terrorism. The American public lives in constant fear and anger. The purveyors of the “Big Lie” direct public anger away from the rich who pay little or nothing toward maintaining the American social fabric and direct it toward the poor and the unemployed. They dare not talk about eliminating Social Security or Medicare so they pontificate about reducing “entitlements”. The paid liars for the ultra-right wing oligarchs won’t say that your child shouldn’t have coverage on your medical insurance policy until he or she finishes her education or that a cancer patient should be denied care because he or she forgot to mention a minor surgery 20 years before the person got coverage but they can rail against “Obama-care”.

And should someone have the temerity to demonstrate how false and empty their arguments really are, they fall back to the equally craven and empty position of pretending to be protectors of “our children and grandchildren®”. These con men so concerned about the financial burden on “our children and grandchildren®” are simultaneously arguing that government should not intervene to protect those same children and grandchildren from contaminated food, water, air and unsafe products.

The true terrorists are the monied sociopaths like the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife and their ilk who bought and paid for the Tea Party Republicans. They have done more to destroy America than ever Mohammed Atta and the rest of the September 11^th hijackers did or imagined that they could do. It’s time to treat them with the horror and disdain that we reserve for those Al Qaeda murderers because they are the true enemy within, the true domestic terrorists.

BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN: OSAMA BIN LADEN, FRED PHELPS, HAROLD CAMPING AND TERRY JONES

A war on terrorism is a perfect example of treating the symptom rather than the disease. The disease is fanaticism. As I've written before, it doesn't matter whether it's religious fanaticism (e.g. bin Laden, Fred Phelps), political fanaticism (e.g. Michele Bachmann, Pol Pot, Timothy McVeigh), simply fanatic, egotistical greed (e.g. the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdock, Donald Trump) or egotistical lunacy (e.g. Jim Jones, Charles Manson) fanaticism is the disease behind terrorism of the ilk of the Tea Party, Al Qaeda, and the Killing Fields. Fanaticism is inherent sociopathic and should be treated with the same sanctions that we place on a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy.

However, sometimes it can be absolutely hilarious. Case in point: Harold Camping of Family Radio, an alleged CHRISTIAN broadcasting group though it's more the megaphone for Camping's religious lunacy and fanatic egotism. Camping has predicted that the "true" CHRISTIANS will be Raptured this coming Saturday starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time. Let's forget for a moment that The Rapture is a bunch of utter nonsense though no more nonsensical than worshiping, in George Carlin's apt phrase, a "Big Imaginary Friend in the Sky". For now let's focus on Camping's prediction alone.

Camping has been eagerly searching for the date of the end of the world for a very long time. Some seventeen years ago he informed all who would listen - unfortunately there were at least as many credulous dolts then as now - that the world would end in September, 1994. Now let's all get out our calendars, boys and girls. You will notice that it is generally agreed that this is 2011 and, unless we all, along with Harold Camping, missed something, his September, 1994 Armageddon is a bit tardy. But hold on. You may remember that the Republicans lead by New Gingrich took over the U. S. House of Representatives in the elections of November, 1994, as clear evidence of Satan's ascendance as I can imagine. Be that as it may, one might think that such a whopper of an error might deter someone from uttering similar whoppers in the future but you'd be wrong. Learning from one's mistakes is the activity of a rational mind, something of which Harold Camping is manifestly not possessed. So what did Camping use as an excuse for such a whopping error. His excuse was essentially, "Son of a gun! Look at that! There's a Book of Jeremiah in The Bible. It was there all along and I just must have missed it!" Quite an admission for a self-proclaimed Bible expert. Still Harold Camping returned to his search for the hour of his personal Rapture.

Frankly, Camping seems a bit selfish to me. He is now 89-years old and unlikely to get another 17 years to recalibrate though there is that adage that "only the good die young". But I also think he's rushing things because he's trying to beat the Mayans. If the world ends in 2011 I think Camping believes the score will be Jesus 1, Quetzalcoatl 0. Not only is Camping cooking the books to insure that he's above ground for The Rapture but he's trying to win one for the Jeezer.

Some unkind souls have suggested that Camping and his followers should commit to not being in this world on May 22nd but I'm not quite willing to go that far even for as total a waste of breath and space as Harold Camping. Camping insists that "there is no plan B", that The Rapture will occur on Saturday, May 21, 2011 absolutely and without fail. I'm sure that on Sunday, May 22nd Camping will show up in church somewhere and suddenly discover some other book of The Bible that he'd heretofore overlooked. After all there's a whole 14 books in The Apocrypha or maybe he just forgot to carry a 1. But you must forgive me for suggesting that on May 22nd Camping needs to be true to his beliefs and pack up his radio ministry for good - in several senses of that term. My reasons that Harold Camping needs to find a nice, quite assisted living facility and shut up for the rest of his life is that, if he's correct, clearly he has been found unworthy of The Rapture. By his own definition he is an unredeemable sinner left behind to suffer the tribulations and ultimate damnation.

As I've said already, I think that The Rapture is utter nonsense. It is an heretical fantasy of an ego driven CHRISTIAN cult obsessed with an idea best expressed as, "Jesus loves ME and not you. I'm saved and you're not. Nyah-nyah-nyah." It couldn't be farther from the Jesus who offers salvation to all. So, if The Rapture is lunatic, egotistical nonsense what of Camping? Should he still "go gentle in to that good night"? I think so still. Camping owes it to those he's misled and the rest of us to shut up for whatever time remains to him because if his god hasn't judged him unworthy that leaves only two alternatives. Either Harold Camping is a charlatan who's profiting from conning a bunch of gullible fools about the end of the world or he's simply a lunatic who's disguised his tinfoil hat as a cross. In either case he does not belong on the public airwaves. He is abusing his license to broadcast either by intent to defraud or by being a deranged sociopath. In neither case does he deserve a forum.

So why do I link him with Osama bin Laden and the equally odious Fred Phelps and Terry Jones? Through their fanaticism. Bin Laden's fanaticism inspired truly horrific acts turned against innocent people. Bin Laden's murderous fanaticism may be quantitatively worse but is gualitatively no different from Jim Jones' leading the gullible to mass suicide in Jonestown or Timothy McVeigh's murders at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Phelps and Terry Jones too share this perversion of religion into the service of their own fanatcism and egotism. Their acts haven't cost many lives yet but they are trying to up the body count. "Pastor" Jones in particular has blood on his hands from provoking other lunatic fanatics with his own lunatic fanaticism.

I can't emphasize enough that our Constitutional guarantees of Freedom of Religion also guarantees Freedom from Religion regardless of what CHRISTIAN fanatics like revisionist historian David Barton would like to sell the gullible. I don't want anyone deciding what is the "true religion" or even the "true" form of worship but I think we have slipped too far from freedom into fear and perplexity. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously proclaimed that freedom of speech does not license those who cry "fire" in a crowded theatre. Currently we have an insane system where Christain Scientist parents can watch as their tiny son dies of a readily treatable intestinal blockage, Mormon sectarians can "marry" 12 and 13-year old children, cult leaders like Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate's Bo and Peep can shepherd their flocks into mass suicide and Phelps, Jones and Camping can preach their perversions of religion to anyone who's foolish enough to listen. We protect ourselves against profiteers who would feed us poison in our food, infected meat and impure drugs. I think the time has come to look at what is religion and what is just fanaticism and lunacy. Let's protect the former and sanction the latter.

FRIENDS AND UNFRIENDLY

A couple of years ago I was in the process of garnering signatures for a petition on something that was, most definitely not a pressing social issue. I was advised to join Facebook in order to increase the total number of signers. I did join Facebook, had no idea what I was doing - in innumerable ways as it turns out - and added minimally to the petition's signatures. Still, that put me on Facebook. Periodically I get e-mails from that site notifying me that someone wants to be my friend. When I know the person by name or association, I approve the request, leave Facebook and visit it again the next time those requests pile up and get insistent enough to warrant my attention.

I really didn't have much of an opinion about Facebook for a very long time. I truly despise the usage of "friend" as a verb. There seems to me something rude, drooling and imbecilic about "Friend me," as opposed to "May we be friends?" That's probably a function of my age and respect for language. Yes, I understand that languages are living, mutable things but that doesn't mean that they have to grow niggling and stupid like the sleaze from the Cato Institute I recently heard insist that because he is a "Libertarian" he will use any word he pleases, regardless of the ignorance it betrays in him, until it shows up in the dictionary.

Last autumn I got a message from an old and very dear friend. The message was one of the nastier and angrier I've ever received. She and I have been friends since the spring of 1967 when a mutual friend introduced us. We dated for a bit in college but have remained in touch more or less regularly ever since. We've spent hours on the phone during various crises in each of our lives consoling one another or simply allowing each other to vent. In short, she is a friend, an actual, real world friend and has been for some 44 years.

Earlier in 2010 she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is undergoing some aggressive and, from what I gather, debilitating treatment that, like much cancer therapy, runs a three-way race to kill the cancer before the cancer or the treatment itself kills her. My friend tends to focus outward rather than in. She is angry - as she has a perfect right to be - at her predicament as well as frustrated by the lack of control that she has over the disease and her body. She can't take out that anger on the cancer itself. It just doesn't listen. If the cancer could listen to her it would have left her body within minutes of its discovery. She can't be angry with her doctors because that's simply counter-productive in the extreme. Still the pressure of that anger and frustration is building up like unvented steam in a boiler. She must fall back on her friends when she needs to vent the venom.

The sources of the vicious message was that she'd decided that I and "unfriended" her on Facebook. That was news to me. First, I hadn't even logged onto Facebook in several months. Second, I'm not sure that I'd known that she was on Facebook or that I'd "friended" her there. Third, and finally, after logging onto Facebook and searching for an actual hour and a half, I still have no idea how one "unfriends" anyone. Please don't send me a response with detailed instructions on how to "unfriend" someone. I simply do not want to know. The real point of her message was a shout that translates as, "I'm here and you're not paying enough attention." Both points are true and might have been remedied by a phone call but the steam needed venting too and I'm far less likely to shy away after being scalded than a doctor or the impassive and relentless cancer.

I try to be in touch more frequently now but the other effect of that angry message was to get me to examine Facebook and how I feel about it as a site as well as linguistically.

I have friends most of whom have been close to me for between 30 and 50 years. They are genuine friends, people whose lives I have orbited, some closer, some farther away, from the days when we were children to the present in which we have grandchildren. They are my friends, my true and enduring friends.

I have other friends who are congenial people whom I know from some of my activities. I know this larger group of friends usually because we share a common interest or because we have worked in the same place bearing with the same horrid boss. A few of these friends I have never met face to face. A couple of them are in Sweden, a place I've never been. I think of them as friends as well but there is a difference born of duration and the comprehensive sharing of experience that characterizes the first, small group.

I also have acquaintances, the largest group of all, who come from the same spheres as the second group but whom I am in no way close to. I like their company, respect their abilities and knowledge but, nice and congenial as they may be, they are not anything like what I call friends. This is the group that tends to gather to me on Facebook. It's not that I don't like them. It's not that I don't care. But they are not my friends nor are they truly likely to be. I think their activities are sometimes interesting but I am not going to spend more that a couple of minutes every few months to find out what they are.

Friends, true friends, the first kind of friends I've described, are the family we choose for ourselves and who, better yet, who choose us. They aren't companies who want to keep us apprised of new products or offers. They aren't people who simply want our attention. They are the people who are godparents to our children. They are the people who know that they can phone us at 3:00 A. M. when the world had dealt them a blow and we will listen to their anger and tears because we love them and have loved them time out of mind with a love that no number of 3:00 A. M. phone calls can diminish.

So I may -may - link up with you on Facebook. But without that true friendship born of time and love and shared crises, you are not my friend. Don't be offended, please. It's just that true friendship isn't an Internet phenomenon. It is the absolute antithesis of "social networking". I may give a glance to you vacation photos, the pictures of your children or grandchildren or even the latest thing you want to sell me though the chance of that last is vanishingly small. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that because you have taken the time to do the linguistically foul act of "friending" me that we are friends. We are acquaintances at best. You are not like Lynn and Jeff, April, Anna, Richard and Anne, Harold and Karen, Michael and Rilla, Tony and K.R., Aleisha, my daughters all of whom know how to reach me without using Facebook.