None Like Him

I was first introduced to Alan Jones when I interviewed with him for a job at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He presented an imposing figure, tall, silver-haired and bearded, well-dressed, confident in his bearing. His was the office of a scholar, books and papers everywhere, well-used chairs next to tables of still more books and more papers. Once the door was closed behind me, the room took on the deep silence of a library.

We talked for a bit about things I’d done professionally, things the cathedral needed to accomplish, what the job might look like, and so forth; in short, Alan conducted a pretty much typical job interview, and I settled into what was familiar territory for me.

And then? Well, then, we took a wild and dizzying, destabilizing turn into the singular territory of Alan Jones.

He asked me about what I’d been reading lately – books, papers, magazines. He asked for my thoughts about climate change (I was working at a major multi-national energy company at the time.). Marriage equality. Race in America. The image of religion in modern society. The fate of high art and culture in a world built around instantaneous gratification.

That was just our first hour.

In our second, he asked some personal questions: Did I know the city? Was I married and did I have kids? What faith did I practice?

I said I was a native San Franciscan, was married and had two kids, and was raised in the Greek Orthodox church, and before I could say I didn’t at that moment have a spiritual community, he said, “Greek Orthodox, a tribal religion.” My face obviously reflected the fact that I didn’t quite know how to take his comment, because he quickly added, “My son-in-law told me he’s an atheist, but he’s a Greek Orthodox atheist.”

Funnily enough, I knew exactly what he meant – sort of what people mean when they say they’re secular Jews.

After our conversation ended, I left knowing a few things about him too. He’d been a choir boy at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation (he showed me the souvenir vinyl recording), he knew a lot of people I knew (or knew of) and, like me, he was a big fan of Foyle’s War (it reminded him, he said, of a time of greater prevailing civility).

Here’s what else I knew at a dead certainty: This guy was brilliant, well-read, well-spoken, curious, and even a little bit funny. He was surprising in a way people seem to be all the time on witty TV shows, but few people are in real life. He expressed the sincere desire for a church of radical openness to culture, thoughts and ideas, a vision I’d never heard before (or since). He was a complete grown-up, who recognized limitations, weaknesses, inconsistencies, shortages of time and money.

To make a long story short, I took the job and we worked closely together for several years. Over that time, I came to appreciate in even greater measure what a unique person he was. He lived the idea that people could hold both religious and intellectual beliefs fervently and simultaneously. He hosted The Forum (click for a video of an episode), a weekly live talk show to explore the connection between faith and life in a diverse, secular, technological society, with guests like Jane Goodall, Robert Reich, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Sandra Day O’Connor, Garry Wills,  Mollie Katzen, Stephen Prothero, Carey Perloff, Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes.

He opened the doors of the imposing cathedral to all; under his expansive vision we hosted social and artistic events you wouldn’t think would be hosted by a church – a sculpture garden, concerts with Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Bill Frissell, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the North American tour of the Keiskamma Altarpiece, silent films, original plays and many more.

Why did this make sense to him? Historically, cathedrals had been the community center of civic, as well as religious life. Alan wanted Grace Cathedral to live up to that model, and he did his best to ensure it did.

The last time I saw Alan was last year, at the memorial service of a mutual friend and former colleague. He told me his health had been worsening and that he was mightily pissed off about it. Still, we warmly reminisced a bit about our ‘good old days’ working together and shared a couple of laughs. He still towered over the other mourners and was the room’s center of attention, but he was quieter, he looked tired, perhaps even a bit smaller. When I think of him, I don’t want to picture him in that way at all.

I hope to always remember him, as that tall, elegant, silver-haired gentleman, swooshing around the cathedral in his outrageously decorated robes, spinning stories (he called them sermons but as a speechwriter I knew damn well what he was up to), challenging one and all to enter a sacred space and think bigger, think differently, think of faith in God as fully compatible with science and civic good in a diverse and secular society.

When you think of the majority of today’s empty, irrational, over-produced, self-enriching, politically motivated religious leaders, you can’t help but appreciate that Alan Jones was a rare bird, indeed.

May his memory be eternal.

This link will take you to an excerpt of a video tribute to Alan made for his final gala as dean.

Burt reconsidered

Burt Bacharach wrote monster hits back when I was a kid. They were always and everywhere on the radio, performed by megastars of the day – Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Herb Alpert, Sergio Mendes, the Carpenters, the 5th Dimension, and especially Dionne Warwick. Like most of my contemporaries, I went through a phase when I considered them overproduced and corny and just stopped listening. So, like most of the rest of pop music, Bacharach’s stuff fell off my radar and time marched on.

Then, years later like a bolt out of the blue, I heard about this album, a Bacharach-Elvis Costello collaboration released in 1998. And it blew my head off. The songs were raw, emotional, brilliant, beautiful, complex, poetic, and grown up. I found myself playing it again and again, over and over. I bought it on CD but if I’d bought it on vinyl those grooves would have been worn down to nothing.

Hearing that album drove me back to the hits I remembered from my youth and, guess what? Yeah, you get it. Try it yourself.

May Burt Bacharach rest in peace and may his memory be eternal.

Goodbye, cool

As a kid, I heard a lot of popular music over a cheap transistor radio shoved under my pillow at night so my parents didn’t know I was staying up late listening. Everything was muffled and I often misheard the lyrics, which was frustrating and often embarrassing when I talked about the latest tunes with my pals at school. But at the distance of decades, I remember it as impossibly cool and almost beyond imagination for today’s wannabe hipster kids with instantaneous access to bottomless music libraries and studio-perfect headphones.

Part of the allure was the music, for sure, but there were also disk jockeys back in those dark ages, who were real people with real personalities and quirks and tastes in music. They had cigarette-and-whiskey deep voices, encyclopedic knowledge of music, a virtually endless string of friends they’d mention, and seemingly knew all the places to hang out and dig the scene. I imagined how amazing the radio booth must be, how sophisticated the off-air conversations. People of a certain age will doubtless remember their names: Al ‘Jazzbo’ Collins, Don Sherwood, ‘Emperor’ Gene Nelson, Jim Lange, Terry McGovern.

Once I started working in college radio and had a few internships in real radio stations, I realized the reality was nowhere near as good as my boyhood imaginings. Also, radio was then in a period of radical change. Disk jockeys weren’t thumbing through libraries of vinyl to select just the right tune for the moment and vibe but playing songs on pre-recorded cartridges, repetitively calendared and timed out to the second. Many DJs were adopting loud and wild on-air personalities designed to attract attention and rabid young followers. These days, with the widespread advent of digital technology, most stations are programmed remotely by the computer banks of national syndicates; there’s not a soul left in the studio, just the whir and hum of machines that have the consumer data necessary to maximize audience and profit in real time.

In its day, KGO was among the coolest places around, hosting shows remotely from San Francisco’s hippest nightspots, interviewing the city’s hipoisie and airing locally produced content. Farewell, KGO and all the radio stations that represent a now-departed era of human cool.

Sanity, Check

There are failures and accidents, of course, but for the most part, modern machines do what they are designed to. For example, cars transport people. That’s what they’re specifically made for. There are breakdowns and collisions and other events that prevent them from doing so at certain moments, but they mostly work and mostly carry on the function of transport. And there are certainly unintended consequences of them fulfilling their mission, like collisions, and pollution and climate change, which weren’t their purposefully designed function, but which happen anyway. There are costs that come with those unintended consequences, like pollution control equipment, or the high costs of electric-only cars, or auto collision insurance.

On balance, most people accept these unintended consequences and costs as a part of their individual decision to use a car. A society has to account for the cumulative negative effects of individual decisions like these and pay to mitigate or eliminate them, like building safety barriers or parking, or requiring auto registration and insurance. Economists call these costs externalities.

Now let’s look at guns, specifically the type of rifles used by most mass shooters these days, something akin to the ubiquitous AR-15. What are they expressly designed to do? They’re designed to kill people. In the case of AR-15s and their kind, they’re designed to kill a lot of people really fast and really accurately. Killing people isn’t incidental to its function, or an accident; it’s the intended purpose.

These so-called assault rifles are in a different league than handguns when it comes to bodily damage. That’s what they’re designed for, to rip bodies apart. I once spoke with a former colleague of mine, a trauma surgeon of long experience who has consulted with the U.S. Department of Defense on assault rifle wounds. She said, once entering the body, the rounds from assault rifles like the AR-15 completely obliterate internal organs and turn flesh into something like an oozing liquid. Field medic log entries of wounds created by these rifles are like descriptions of scenes from a horror film:

“Chest wound from right to left, destroyed the thoracic cavity.”

“Stomach wound, which caused the abdominal cavity to explode.”

These wounds create injuries that are not always possible to recover from or degrade the victim’s quality of life to an unbearable level, even if a major artery or organ are not directly hit.

Because of my work, I have personally seen fresh handgun wounds many times, but I’ve never seen anything close to the kind of carnage visited on human bodies by assault rifles. To even imagine what the scene at Uvalde looked like, or Sandy Hook, or any of the other mass shooting locations, makes me physically ill. If we must allow personal civilian ownership of firearms in this society, can we at least remove these particular machines, which are purposefully designed and used to completely destroy human bodies?

Can we at least agree on that small concession to sanity?

Thanks, Mike

No one quite knew what to expect when an unknown guy from Army with an unpronounceable and unspellable last name arrived at Duke University in 1980 to helm an historically successful college basketball program. Forty-plus years, 1,100 wins (the most in NCAA Division I history), 5 NCAA championships, 12 trips to the Final Four, and 3 Gold Medals as coach of the U.S. Olympic team later, success may seem as if preordained but, of course, it wasn’t.

Mike Krzyzewski, or Coach K as he came to be called, had doubters from the start. For one thing, the Blue Devils program was already nationally known and respected; the Duke community of students, alumni, faculty and fans had come to expect Adonis-like athletes and mighty victories over storied opponents, especially the hated Tarheels of UNC. The athletes in his first class of recruits looked like hardworking everymen, not future NBA stars. When, at the end of Coach K’s first year, the team failed to make the NIT tournament, much less the more desirable NCAA tournament, there were serious calls for his ouster.

It may have been his West Point training or something more inherent in his personality but he started an all-out charm offensive on the Duke campus. I arrived there in 1981 and Coach K was seemingly everywhere. At charity tennis tournaments. At fraternity and sorority dinners. Shaking hands in the student union. Walking the quads. Like, everywhere.

Over time, Coach K revealed his coaching personality and philosophy as well. Brainy. Team ball, not one-0n-one showmanship. Dedication to the long haul. Hard work. Personal and team discipline. Commitment to academic as well as athletic performance. The team was clearly rebuilding and it was clearly going somewhere positive.

With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we know where this story is headed…

…year after year (40+ of them) of enviable success.

…a program generally considered “clean” by the standards of college basketball – which is to say generally free from financial, academic, criminal and sexual scandals.

…former players who find future success in basketball, sure, but also in business, medicine, law, academics, coaching, broadcasting, whatever, and universally express their gratitude for his mentorship.

…a coach who has earned the respect of his peers, who can offer candid and insightful perspectives on the nexus of sport and academics, and who holds an appointment in his university’s business school, not as a vanity-serving courtesy but because of his engaging books and lectures on leadership and organizational behavior.

The legacy of Coach K and the program he’s built are undeniable sources of pride for the Duke community and, perhaps, sources of envy for others. He deserves appreciation and thanks on the occasion of the announcement of his retirement at the end of next basketball season.

In any decent and civilized society, Mike Krzyzewski would continue to be a source of emulation by coaches and educators for many years to come. Here in the U.S., we can only hope.

Fantasy vs. Reality

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Proud Boys, Boogaloo, Oath Keepers, Molon Labe, “militia” groups, 2nd Amendment worshippers, Klan members, other white supremacist groups. I’m sure by now you’ve seen these dime-store militia boys parading around state capitols and Black Lives Matter protests. AR-15s strapped to their newly bought military rigs, in a child’s idea of what a combat-ready tough guy would look like. Attempting to intimidate all who look upon them.

Word is they’re preparing to fan out across our great land on election day to ensure the accuracy of results. For you at home, that actually means these jerk-off desperadoes will be showing up to polling places in swing states to intimidate non-whites and Democrats/liberals in hopes of suppressing the anti-Trump vote.

Proves that everyone can be Rambo in their own dreams, I guess.

How many are actually prepared for the reality of discharging their firearms, of shooting another human being, of ending someone’s life? As Kenosha murderer Kyle Rittenhouse recently discovered firsthand, the burden of that reality is a lot heavier than basement video game fantasies might lead one to believe.

In real life, murder by firearm is horrific and ugly – and not just for the victim.

Last evening, our hospital received a victim of gun violence, who died soon after arriving. I wish I could say this was an unusual occurrence but it wasn’t. We see too many victims of gun violence here, as our hospital is our city’s trauma center. When someone gets shot, chances are good we’ll see them. You can read a couple of my previous posts about gun violence here and here.

This particular patient was a young man with, from the looks of it, a large and close family and a substantial group of friends. Many of these people came to our hospital unaware their son, brother, cousin, nephew, friend died and had the horrible shock of discovery when they arrived. And that reaction, dear reader, is something impossible to take lightly, impossible to forget.

One young man, who looked to me like a pretty tough character, like someone who’d seen and experienced a thing or two in life, sobbed uncontrollably in our courtyard, repeating over and over, “My heart, my heart.”

You don’t really want to know

I am sick to death of these juvenile idiots posing, posturing and parading around our country with their phallic firearms as if they were totemic power-sticks. The people I see doing so reveal their own stupidity, their impotence and their disconnection with reality. If they had even the slightest conception of reality, perhaps they’d stay in mom’s basement playing pretend tough-guy video games, where they belong.

If Only You Could See This

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The other day, I went into the intensive care unit where our most acutely ill COVID-19 patients are being cared for.

The unit is full, busy, well-staffed. Life-saving personal protective equipment (PPE in the trade) is stacked at regular intervals along the hallway so it can be easily and quickly accessed and donned by staff as needed. The rooms have sliding glass doors and the unit is built on a gentle curve, so all the patients are visible from the nurses’ station.

All the patients are being helped to breathe by one device or another. Drugs, liquids and calories are being pumped into them via long tubes from devices outside their rooms – a distance that allows the nurses to attend to the machines without having to enter the patient rooms themselves, which would require the donning of more PPE, in very short supply.

The unit hallway is filled with beeping, blinking machines and the computers that monitor them. Like a sci-fi movie from the 1960s, it’s the very image of cutting-edge modern medical technology.

The nursing staff is busy, one sliding aside her facemask to get a quick gulp of coffee, another for bite of lunch in between direct patient care and impromptu unit meetings. Someone described pandemic response as a marathon but in this unit, it’s being run more like a series of sprints.

I expected all that.

What I didn’t expect was the feeling I had of being in a sacred space, filled with heroes. And I mean heroes in the literal, classical sense: people who know they’re exposing themselves to increased effort and risk but do it anyway, to serve their patients and the broader community outside these walls.

Most people will never see inside a place like this. They would have a heightened appreciation for the human beings who work there if only they could.

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Fleet Week Feelings

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Most people have a pretty shallow view of my hometown’s political stripes and may have no idea how pro-military the history of San Francisco is. In the era of first European contact, the Presidio of San Francisco, the Spanish army’s garrison, was the city’s very first establishment (1776). Once California was admitted to the Union in 1850, San Francisco’s presidio served as the headquarters of America’s western army and was the headquarters of the 6th Army until the base was decommissioned in 1994. The city also served as a primary station of the US Navy’s Pacific fleet and the US Coast Guard. There are 3 Air Force bases in the greater Bay Area as well.

Many of the region’s past and current residents were first introduced to San Francisco as servicepeople, shipping to or from deployments overseas. There is genuine and heartfelt pride in the armed forces here, which have the San Francisco Bay Area as an area of particular recruitment focus.

My dad also served in the Navy as a ship’s engineer, during two wars. So, I have a more personal connection to those seafarers.

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People who don’t know that history of connection might be surprised at the size and enthusiasm of crowds for San Francisco’s annual Fleet Week celebrations. This year’s event, just concluded, was no exception.

Each Fleet Week, in addition to public tours and the parade of ships from the navies of many countries including our own, we San Franciscans have become accustomed to the roar of the Blue Angels swooping and buzzing our city. Thousands turn out to line the waterfront for a glimpse of the F/A-18s in performance.

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We had a couple of special guests in from out of town this past weekend, so we took them down to the Ferry Building for some good eats and a chance to see the Blue Angels up close. The show, of course, didn’t disappoint. It never does. The embarcadero was packed with folks trying to find the blue and gold air machines as they whizzed by, the roaring sound trailing them by several seconds. If you like crazy-fast speed and the sound of loud engines, this particular show cannot be beat.

But life sometimes reaches out in unanticipated ways to remind you of the importance of perspective, of the difference between entertainment and more important things.

I noticed the sound at first, in between the teeth-chattering roar of the jets; it was the whine of an old stringed instrument; a sound both familiar and foreign. I turned to see an old man in a old suit jacket hunched over an oud, playing something that reminded me more than a little of the old Greek and Turkish music that filled my grandmothers’ homes. The coffee can at his feet had a few scattered tips from passers by.

At that moment, the jets overhead became the distractions, this man the center of my attention. I walked nearer, listened more closely. And it was beautiful and moving. When he took a short break, I offered him a little cash and asked him,

“Turkish? From Turkey?”

“Syria,” he replied. He began to say a bit more when the Angels roared by again, causing him to wince a bit. When the noise diminished somewhat, he looked down and started to play another song.

I’d always loved watching the Blue Angels, been excited by their skill, thrilled by the speed and the roar of their engines. At that moment, though, I wondered what Fleet Week looked like through the eyes of this Syrian man playing the oud far from home. What feelings did he have looking at the parade of warships passing by his perch on my hometown’s waterfront? As the Blue Angels zoomed by, would he be thinking of loved ones being bombed back home? Did he know that half a world away, the Kurds in his homeland were at that very moment being betrayed by the American president, even as thousands wearing American flag t-shirts and baseball caps walked by him?

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It Won’t Matter

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There’s an old saying that generals prepare to fight the last war, not the next one. And like most old sayings, there’s a kernel of truth packed in with the cliche. Case in point? The Democratic Party is preparing to fight the 2020 presidential campaign with the tools and assumptions of a now-dead American political past. Trump, together with constant support from the Murdoch media empire, has changed the way politics is done in this country.

Democrats seem incapable of understanding that basic truth. They seem to believe if only they disclose the right information to the public, Trump will resign, like Nixon did, or Republican elected officials will turn against him, like they did against Nixon during Watergate, or that he will be roundly turned out of office come next election.

Breaking news: There will be no silver bullet. Richard Nixon is no longer the president. Trump seems to have no dedication to civic principles, no personal sense of shame and doesn’t behave like Nixon would have done. Our electorate, media and political institutions don’t behave the way they did 50 years ago either.

Evidence? The Mueller Report changed nothing. Evidence of Trump’s long-lasting and deep corruption changed nothing. His dog-whistle calls of ‘nationalism’ and racism changed nothing. His ignorance of world events, macroeconomics and even basic governance have changed nothing. His demonstrated inability to articulate ideas has changed nothing. His overwhelming narcissism, sexism, bigotry changed nothing. His anti-democratic predispositions have changed nothing. His self-evidently staged inch-deep patriotism? Nothing.

Other than ulcers and teeth grinding among those already predisposed to vote against Trump, there’s only been marginal electoral movement. Yet, Democrats behave as though continuing to point out more of these now well-established truths will somehow make Trump’s unsuitability for the presidency obvious to either him, in which case he’ll resign, or to other Republicans, in which case he’ll lose support in the legislature, or to the electorate, in which case he’ll automatically lose in 2020.

Spoiler alert: It won’t.

We’re not in 1972 anymore. We’re not dealing with civic-minded, well educated, rational members of Congress. Today, we’re dealing with a religiously-fueled personality cult. Trump could literally shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any support. And by literally, I mean literally.

It’s just a little over a year until our next presidential election and if I had to set odds right now on a Trump re-election, I’d put it at 50-50, or better. Time to wise up, Democrats.

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One Human Thought

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Hang with me for a second.
There are people I like, people I respect, people I agree with and people I like hanging out with. And there are people I don’t. But I don’t have to agree with people to like them, at least not always. And some people who share at least some of my beliefs seem like creeps.
So where does that leave us?
I think it’s possible to see and even appreciate the humanity in many people who might pursue wildly different paths than we do, who believe in different visions of goodness, who articulate goals we cannot fathom much less align with.
And that brings me to David Koch, who died yesterday.
Koch and his brother, who took most of their income from hydrocarbons, funded some awful initiatives that contributed mightily to the ruination of the environment and harmed the health of a great many people. They skewed our American democracy in ways that served their interests and (I think) followed a twisted conception of what this country should be. And they funded a great many (again, from my perspective) good, beneficial and worthwhile organizations, most notably in the arts and in the field of cancer research.
The glee at his death and the personal demonization I’ve read about him today strikes me as beyond defense.
Sermon concluded.
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