STEREOTYPE THIS!

Let me see if I understand what people have been telling me over the years about our society: (1) everyone's out for themselves; (2) everyone's all about "the money"; (3) Jews, in particular, are all about "the money;" (4) if "they" say it's not about the money, then for sure it's about the money; (5) the society has gone litigation crazy; and (6) Jews, in particular, are litigious.

Did I get that right?

Well then, assuming I did, someone has to explain to me the behavior of the family of the recently slain New York Times journalist, David E. Rosenbaum. As reported by the Washington Post on March 9th, Rosenbaum, who was 63, died of a brain injury after "he was pounded on the head with a metal pipe by robbers who accosted him during an evening walk. He then was mistakenly treated as a drunk by D.C. firefighters and other emergency workers, who failed to notice his severe head wound." The Post reported that the event prompted the Rosenbaum estate to file a $20 million suit against the city, which legal experts thought could have been worth millions. Instead of pursuing the case, however, the family agreed to forgo any payment if the city overhauls its emergency medical response system in an effort to prevent future mistakes like the one that cost Rosenbaum his life.

Are the Rosenbaums crazy? They seem to be giving up millions of dollars that their family surely could have used. Rosenbaum had two adult children, and I'm guessing that they might have had children as well. Couldn't they use money?

I doubt that this is national news. I doubt that the media thinks the American public would want to hear much about the Rosenbaum family. But I at least find them interesting. They appear to value the welfare of faceless strangers (potential future victims of street crimes and accidents in the District of Columbia) above their own family's wealth. I'd like to know why they're doing this. I'd like to know whether other families have acted in similar ways. And I'd like to see the national media devote lots of air time to stories like this and not to all the latest scandals.

Just think how different our society would be if television news was more fascinated by the Rosenbaums -- and what the District of Columbia is doing to appease them -- and less by the Paris Hiltons of the world. We might actually watch TV to gain inspiration from unusually virtuous people rather than to stroke our egos by contrasting ourselves to yet another troubled celebrity or hypocritical politician.

MY FAVORITE JEWISH HOLIDAYS

I have two favorite Jewish holidays . The first is Yom Kippur. Known as the Day of Atonement, it is for me the most spiritual day of the Jewish year. You don't simply fast. You spend the evening and all of the next day in synagogue. Yes, that's a lot of praying. But the fasting breaks down the resistance of your ego so that the prayer helps you get more and more in touch with your spirituality as the day grows old. It's also a great day for introspection, especially about the areas in which atonement is called for. I always feel renewed when the day is over. Plus, the break-fast is a blast. Food and drink never tastes so good.

My other favorite Jewish holiday is none other than Purim. We celebrated that holiday this weekend. Rather than talking more about it here, I'd like to ask you to go to my website (danielspiro.com) and click on the page devoted to Purim. It will not only introduce the holiday generally, but it will allow you to link to several essays that I've written over the years to celebrate Purim. Please do me the honor of clicking on this year's essay and perhaps even some of the earlier entries.

Take care. And Happy Purim!

THE GATEWAY TO MY SPIRITUALITY

The older I get, the more relevant religion becomes. And no, I’m not saying that because I’m concerned about my after-life. I’m concerned about my present life, and finding as much meaning in it as possible. Religion gives my life much of its meaning.

But how, you might ask, can I buy into religion, in light of its basic premises? Isn’t it true that religion begins with the adoption of a belief in the cosmic Santa Claus – the notion that there exists an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omnipresent deity who created this world in accordance with His own inscrutable will?

Well, it that were to be true, then I definitely should stop blogging so much about religion. Like a huge fraction of the educated people in the modern world, I think of that deity as a figment of our own imagination. Or, if you prefer, let me say it like they’d do it in logic class. “If there’s a field called pediatric oncology, then there’s no Cosmic Santa Claus. If there’s a place named Auschwitz, then there’s no Cosmic Santa Claus. If there are tsunamis that kill tens of thousands of people, then there’s no Cosmic Santa Claus. If there’s an institution called television news, and all it ever covers is the death of Anna Nicole Smith, then there’s no Cosmic Santa Claus.”

But exactly who made the law that requires us to think of God as a Cosmic Santa Claus? Who made the requirement that, to be religious, we must adopt the view that this is the “best of all possible worlds”? That latter phrase comes from Leibniz, but the last time I checked, he was just a blow-hard, not a law maker. When it comes to our religious beliefs, we, the people are the only lawmakers. And as the Lord of my own beliefs, I say that I can believe in a God that is altogether different from the old-fashioned, miracle-working God of Scripture.

My spirituality starts with a much more modest assumption than omnibenevolence. I’ll admit it’s an assumption – pure speculation. Then again, believing its opposite would be pure speculation as well. I choose to believe in the assumption at issue largely because I intuit that it makes sense and largely because it makes my life more meaningful when I adopt it.

My assumption is that all of life is unified – and by that, I mean that it is one single substance, one single organism, if you will. My assumption, in other words, is that everything that exists today is intimately connected with everything that did exist but no longer does in the same form, and everything that will exist even though its form hasn’t yet manifested itself to our senses or thoughts. I start with the idea, in short, that The All is One.

And to that All, I grant the notion of divinity … of holiness, of beauty.

Try that approach for yourself, sometime. Consider that all your thoughts, everything you can sense with your five senses, and everything you can’t sense but believe is existent in some hidden set of dimensions, are part of a single Being – much like you already believe that your bones and tissue are part of a single being. Then, walking down the street or lying in bed, look lovingly at that single Being. Praise the Being for its beauty and complexity. Allow it to inspire your own actions. Give the Being a name (I’m partial to the name “God,” but you might prefer another – like Absolute Being). And then devote your lives to honoring that name.

Try that for a few days. Then let’s talk about whether there’s room in our lives for religion.

MEDIAN AND MEAN

Liberals like me often laugh at the old saw that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Whether you call it “trickle-down” or “Voodoo economics,” the idea that what’s good for the economy generally and the very rich in particular will inevitably – and almost magically -- benefit the middle-class or poor worker has been subjected to all sorts of ridicule by economists and pundits alike. Now, and perhaps only now, are we seeing some justification for our liberal scorn.

This fall, the New York Times reported that now, for the first time since WWII, a period of an expanding U.S. economy is poised to fail to offer an increase in real wages for the average worker. Assuming, in other words, that the recent economic expansion is coming to an end, the nation as a whole will have gotten richer at the same time that most Americans are getting poorer. Specifically, from 2003 to the present, a time when national productivity has increased steadily, the median American hourly wage has dropped by two percent. Corporate profits are at a four-decade high, but the trickle has not been felt down below.

It’s easy to look at these figures and blame the White House – the tax cuts, for example, or the shrinking minimum wage. But there may be something amiss here that transcends the policies of any particular administration or Congress. Consider what’s happened to that formerly great American institution, the trade union. If someone tried to make On the Waterfront now, nobody would know what it’s talking about. Or consider the rising costs of health care -- costs that will only skyrocket as we Baby Boomers get as old as I sometimes feel already. Companies will need to spend a greater share of their profits on health care, and that will leave less money to pay the wages that workers need to feed their families and enjoy the American dream.

All these facts and figures sound kind of dry and boring – at least until we realize what’s at stake here. Increasingly, we’re witnessing a threat to what is perhaps the most impressive and distinctive aspect of the American culture: the notion that everyone, practically, is a member of the middle class. The idea of a nation of middle-class farmers, shop owners, and unionized skilled workers suggests a tri-part America dominated by a vast middle class, with a tiny group of Brahmans at the top (the Adams’s, the Bush’s, the Kennedy’s, the Rockefellers) and another small group of urban and rural poor at the bottom. But, in fact, the situation wasn’t quite that utopian before, and it’s certainly not so now. In fact, we seem to be on the verge of heading toward a bi-polar economy.

On the one hand, you have a growing number of multi-millionaires – lawyers who bill $600 an hour, corporate executives who receive annual bonuses of several hundred thousand a year in addition to their huge salaries, and doctors who receive similarly overstuffed salaries, all the while complaining that they’re not making quite enough. On the other hand, you have an increasingly un-unionized force of laborers who are watching their bosses get richer while finding it harder and harder to purchase what even they had grown accustomed to buying.

As our country grays over the next few decades, I find myself wondering whether the problem of the median hourly wage will get better or worse. What will happen, for example, to social security? Will we provide universal health care, as opposed to allowing large fragments of the work force to grow old without the help of modern medicine? And will the graying of America depress real wages because of the health care burden, or increase wages due to a dwindling supply of labor? (I raise that latter point as a question, but I find it difficult to believe that the supply of labor in this country will actually drop – our population seems invariably to be on the rise.)

I have no crystal ball on this issue, but I do have a preference: whatever we can do to ensure that the median wealth in this country is on the rise, and not merely the mean, that’s what we must do. Let’s take care of this situation now before we split any further in two. We’ve tried splitting up before, and while it produced some pretty darned gripping theatre, in the end Lincoln turned out to be right.

THE ULTIMATE GAME SHOW

I pride myself in having friends from 8 to 80. It was one of the very youngest that turned me on to televised poker.

I had played poker before. In fact, when I was in college, there was a period of weeks when I regularly went to the local poker club (the Cameo Club on El Camino Real, for those of you who know Palo Alto) and played low-ball poker. Truth be told, I basically broke even as far as my battles with the other players were concerned, which means that I would gradually lose money to the House – but very gradually. I was decent enough that it was a relatively cheap form of entertainment. It all ended when someone working for the club decided that those of us under 21 had to get stamped on our left hands, and I felt that wearing a stamp that said, in essence, “child” wasn’t what I had in mind for that particular adventure. I never returned.

Then one day, a couple of years ago – or as they say in the poker world, a short time after the post-Moneymaker period began – my eight year old friend mentioned that he had been watching poker on TV. I thought he was nuts. I knew that stuff was being televised, but it seemed like something suitable for watching only in a lobotomy ward. Who would want to look at a bunch of fat, grimy men – punctuated by the occasional blonde – look at a couple of cards, throw some chips on a table, and essentially watch a dealer flip a few coins until one of the fat, grimy men won and another lost. I assumed that if someone came up with the idea of forcing televised poker on the prisoners in Git-Mo, my fellow liberals would lambaste it as a form of torture.

But the eight year old who recommended watching poker carried some weight with me. He wasn’t just any eight year old. He was a math prodigy … and a sports fan. I call that the nerd-boy daily double … or, if you prefer, a clear sign of a kindred spirit. I simply had to tune in for myself, and Lord knows, that wouldn’t be hard to do. ESPN was televising poker practically every evening. In the 80s, they featured hydroplane racing, tractor pulls, and Australian Rules football; post Moneymaker, they’ve featured poker.

In case you can’t tell by now, I’m hooked. If you showed me the faces of poker players, I could probably come up with literally dozens of names. And yes, one of those names is Moneymaker. I’m referring, for those who haven’t caught on to this fad, to a man named Chris Moneymaker. He was an amateur who looked like a truck driver and had the accent to back it up. Somehow, though, in the 2003 Main Event, he defeated a field of 839 to claim what was then a record yield of $2.5 million. All of a sudden, poker’s popularity on television increased geometrically. There was something intriguing about this “Every Man” being able to sit, expressionless, as millions of dollars were at stake. Perhaps it was an antidote to all those games shows we’ve watched for decades as bouncy bimbos yelled with joy as some John Edwards look alike screamed out “Congratulations. You’ve just won FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS!” That’s actually more like $3500 after taxes. And while that’s real money, it probably didn’t merit all the juggling and the yelling and the kissing and the … well, all the idiocy. You didn’t get that with Moneymaker. He sat still as he accumulated more and chips until finally, he was $2.5 million richer. Even after taxes, that was quite a haul.

Since Moneymaker, the stakes have only gotten bigger. In the 2006 Main Event, the number of competitors increased from many hundred to many thousand, and $12 million went to the winner. His name is Jamie Gold, but you can call him Irving Cohen because the guy seemed to fit one Jewish stereotype after another. I loved him! He was never too far from his motha – who was kvelling like a motha has never kvelled before (at least not my Jewish mother). And Gold was chatting incessantly, as only a Jewish boy can. But he didn’t just chat, he shared. That’s right, he kept giving lots and lots of meaningful info about what was in his hands. His style was totally unorthodox; in fact, it was probably downright incompetent. And yet the guy won anyway … in a rout! It was as startling, in its own way, as Moneymaker’s victory.

To top off the whole experience, the best part about watching poker on ESPN is the announcer – Norman Chad. The guy is classic borscht belt. I can’t tell you how many times he makes fun of his failed marriages. One minute it’s “and the next card is a two of clubs,” and the next minute it’s “take my second ex-wife, please!” Well, he doesn’t say it that way – he’s much funnier – but you get the idea.

The funniest thing about Chad, though, isn’t his intentional jokes. It’s his predictions about who will win the game you’re watching based on which players are incredibly good which ones are reasonably good, and which ones are mere pretenders. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m sure that some poker players are much, much, MUCH better than others. And the comedy fan in me digs the fact that poker has its own royalty who are treated as gods by the other competitors, as well as by Chad. But I’m convinced that on any given day, the quality of the players matters a whole lot less than the luck of the draw.

Norm, you may want this game to be like chess, where quality almost always shows its face. But at the risk of bursting your bubble, this ain’t chess. It’s a game for fat, grimy men – punctuated by the occasional blonde – who probably aren’t appreciably smarter than the truck drivers or actuaries they resemble.

But hey, it’s still the ultimate game show.