Patriots practice squad player Malcolm Williams high-fives a Mexican TV reporter after taping a vital interview on Tuesday.

Settle down, people. Thank you. Let’s get started, shall we?

Good morning, and welcome to this year’s Pre-Super Bowl meeting of the Bert Bell Memorial Support Group. Yes, it’s been a long season in many respects but we’re almost there! [Half-hearted applause] With each other’s help, we can survive another NFL season with our families and psyches in tact. My name is Rudy, and I’ll be your enabler this morning.

I can see we have some unfamiliar faces this year. Great to see you; you’re welcome here. Are there any questions? … Yes, you can leave that Colts paraphernalia in the coat check room… Okay, sure: The trash can is down the hall, around the corner… No, but that’s an excellent question: This is not an NFL-sanctioned meeting. This is important people, so listen up: Our group is not affiliated with the league office in any way.

This isn’t about the league, people; it’s about you. As we are each week during the NFL season, we’re here for your benefit. The fans’ benefit…

We have a busy morning planned. Today we’re going to discuss chip-to-dip ratios and the merits of large-screen television rentals. Those will be round-table discussions. We’ve also set aside some time for role-playing; our topic this week is, “Can I bring my wife? No really, I’m serious.”

But before we get started, we have a special guest speaker. I’d like to introduce Hal Phillips; he’s vice president pro tem of SWACO, Sports Writers Against Corporate Omnipotence, and he’s here to talk about scheduling.

Mr. Phillips?

[Light applause]

“Thanks, Rudy. Nice to see you back in football, putting that Jesuit education to good use… Good morning, football fans.”

GOOD MORNING, MR. PHILLIPS.

“Before I get started, I want you to know that we at SWACO are just like you. We love football and that’s why we want you to look back — back to January 2000, when the NFL in its momentary wisdom chose to conduct the Super Bowl exactly one week following its conference title games.

“As you know, the league routinely extends the period between its  conference championships and Super Sunday to a full fortnight. But that year, 2000, was different, and look at the results: The game itself was superb, a last-second tackle at the goal-line to preserve a 23-16 Ram victory over the Titants — not the anti-climactic blowouts we’ve come to expect.

“Further, the ‘short’ week automatically reduced the drone of media hype by half, leaving in its place actual anticipation for the game itself. Imagine that! Less insipid pre-Super Bowl prattle AND a competitive championship game that fits into the time-honored scheduling parameters to which pro football teams have adhered for 80 years.

“Simply put, football enthusiasts — even those who, like you, don’t have meaningful lives outside of football — don’t need two weeks of pre-Super Bowl ‘coverage’. The litany of reports (‘on location’, where desperate pundits literally scrounge for meaningful ‘news’) is nauseating enough after three or four days. Two weeks of this piffle is completely over the top. We at SWACO further believe that if football fans, fresh off 21 days of fawning playoff coverage, aren’t by then familiar with the respective Super Bowl combatants, surely they never will be.

“Make no mistake: This extra week isn’t there for teams to ‘get healthy’. It isn’t there because the two teams couldn’t fully adjust to the gravity of their Super Bowl moment in a single week.

“No. The extra week is there so the NFL’s corporate partners will have 7 additional days to foist their products upon us, via television, radio, web and the print press. [Circumspect murmurs float through the crowd]

“To support the thousands of Super Bowl-oriented advertisements, to synergize with the ubiquitous and tedious Super Bowl contests (which are essentially corporate fronts for still more advertisements), media outlets are obliged by their corporate sugar daddies to ‘preview’ and analyze this single football game for two solid weeks.

“This sort of rehash, while unnecessary and invariably annoying, is obligatory during the week directly leading up to the Super Bowl. We at SWACO understand and accept this. However, we feel it’s craven and superfluous to jam this piffle down anyone’s throat a full 12 days before kickoff.

“Even more important, however, we at SWACO believe the two-week break is competitively amoral. Yes, you heard me right. Pro football games aren’t meant to be played every other week; they’re meant to be played on consecutive Sundays, one after another, until a champion is crowned.

“Let’s be very clear about this: Professional football is predicated entirely on a team’s ability to prepare for an opponent — physically, mentally and strategically — in one week’s time. Bye weeks notwithstanding, regular-season records, playoff position and playoff qualification itself are determined on the sole basis of this 7-day framework.

“To throw it out the window for the Super Bowl — the most important game of the season — perverts the entire process.

“Think about it: The two-week layoff is one reason Super Bowls are traditionally lopsided, mind-numbing affairs. It’s a pretty simple equation: Give a superior team two weeks to prepare and the possibility of a walkover is only enhanced.

“Keep it to a week and anything can happen.

“Exhibit A: The absorbing Rams-Titans game in 2000.

“Exhibit B: The previous Super Bowl to be contested just one week after the respective conference championships — the 1990 affair, when the Giants claimed a similarly thrilling 20-19 victory over the Bills.

“Indeed, the Super Bowl’s average margin of victory when employing a two-week layoff is 17 points; with a week’s break, the average margin is a mere 7 points. Isn’t that what we want? A game where the conclusion isn’t forgone? A game contested in the same way as those preceding it, under the same competitive strictures? Was the Giants’ win over the Cowboys on the last game of the regular season this year any less important, in the great scheme of things, than this Super Bowl? The Giants wouldn’t be in Indianapolis right now if it weren’t. That game was contested with a week’s preparation. Why should the Super Bowl be any different?

“Corporate America has already perverted football in too many ways to count. Witness the plethora of mandatory television time-outs, the most offensive being those book-end commercial breaks following points after touchdown. You know the ones I mean: the PAT, three minutes of ads, the kick-off, then three more minutes of ads. The new kickoff-from-the-40 rule results in so many touchbacks, rarely does the return even represent actual game content. It’s outrageous!

“Citizens: You may think this policy is set in stone, but it’s not — not if we act immediately, with purpose, together. The sanctity of the Super Bowl depends on it.

“Thank you.”

So, I’ve got a question: Following a week when one team lost 24-2, and another ended abruptly under new playoff OT rules, what happens when an NFL playoff game goes into overtime and, under these new rules, an opening possession results in a safety?

We were informed, as OT loomed in Denver on Sunday, that the only thing that could end the playoff game without both teams getting the chance to possess the ball was a touchdown on the opening possession. However, it seems to me that a safety on that first possession should also end the contest. Indeed, it must end it, by my reckoning.

We all got a glimpse of the new rules governing OT during the Broncos’ Wild Card victory over Pittsburgh on Sunday.

In short, the old system had been pure sudden death: If you won the toss, got the ball, moved into field goal range and made said kick, the game was over. The first score of any kind won the game, in other words.

The new rules were devised to address what was believed to be an unfairness: the idea that your season could be ended, by an opposing field-goal kicker, in overtime, without your team ever having touched the ball. The new system says:

•  if you win the toss and score a field goal, the other team gets the ball and has a chance to tie with a field goal — in which case the game proceeds in pure sudden-death fashion from the moment the second field goal is kicked — or win the game with a touchdown.

• if you win the toss and fail to score, the game essentially proceeds in pure sudden-death fashion from the moment you punt or otherwise turn the ball over.

• if you win the toss and score a touchdown the game is over; the other team does not get a chance to respond — as indeed The Steelers did not following the Denver’s 80-yard TD pass on the first play of overtime Sunday.

My question is — and I think the answer is both byzantine and self-evident — what happens if you win the toss and your QB is sacked in the endzone for safety?

It says here that this eventuality must also end the game immediately, under the new rules, as the result of a safety means  the scoring team gets the ball back… right?

[The Harold Herald, the blog prototype I launched in the early 1990s, was nothing if not political, though the coverage wasn't always traditional, nor was it my own.  Mark Sullivan, a fellow alum/refugee from the Enterprise-Sun newsroom, was a frequent contributor. Today he's a skilled and prolific blogger in his own right. His HH essay below, marking the passing of Richard Nixon, was always a favorite of mine.]

By MARK SULLIVAN

Dave was in a triumphant mood when he stopped by my dorm room one night early in the fall of my sophomore year at Boston University. He was quaffing mightily from his favorite mug, a prep-school tankard emblazoned with a Pegasus-like winged beaver, and was pickled to his sizable gills.

I have a picture in my mind’s eye of Dave as he looked that night: The jumbo build, characteristically clothed in club tie and seersucker that gave him the look of giant Ivy League Good Humor man, but this night wrapped in a too-small blue dressing gown; the large head, topped by an outsized Boys’ Regular haircut — part Kemp, part Koppel, crowned by an ungovernable cowlick; the Mr. Limpet-like fish-lips and spectacles, the latter worn for chronic nearsightedness and leading him a resemblance to Piggy, the precocious but doomed overweight boy in the film, Lord of the Flies.

Dave had brought his transcript of President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech, which he proceeded to read in his best Milhousian timbre. When he came to the end of a page, Dave would toss it with a flourish over his shoulder, the sheets fluttering through the air and landing between my bed frame and the wall.

As he approached the end, he summoned all the stage poignancy he could muster: “Uhh, this is, ehr, not goodbye,” he read in choked, Checkers-speech tones, building to the farewell line in fractured Nixonian French: “This is, uhh, ehr, au-rev-oyeur.”

There were tears in his eyes.

I thought of Dave recently when news came of Richard Nixon’s death. David idolized Nixon, or, as he called him, “the, euhr, Pray-sident.” In conversation, Dave would often lapse into his Nixon voice, which was similar to the Nixon impersonation Dan Ackroyd did on Saturday Night Live. The Nixon voice was always preceded and intermittently punctuated by a distinctive low “euhrr” from the back of the throat, as in, “Euhrr, get down on you knees and, euhr, pray with me, Henry.” The delivery was always accompanied by a dismissive, two-digit wave of his index and middle fingers.

Dave Kept about him trappings of his hero. On the large Papal flag that hung on his dorm-room wall were pinned various “Nixon’s The One” campaign buttons. He liked to compose memos, which he would initial “RN.” Opposed to the Kennedys on principle, he liked to play a 1960s novelty recording of the Troggs’ Wild Thing sung by a comic impersonating Bobby Kennedy.

Dave had Praetorian Guard leanings: He once assigned himself the job of advance man to a student-union candidate, preceding his man into the auditorium and giving the audience the “Up, up” gesture, proclaiming, “All rise! All rise for the Pray-sident!”

As a character, Dave was, in a word, preposterous.

He came from a Pennsylvania industrial town on Lake Erie where his family was in the tire business, and from which Dave, given his predilections, had happily escaped none too soon. He endured a checkered career in private school and ended up at Avon Old Farms, in Connecticut, which had been the prep school of last resort.

He weighed in at a good 250 and was given to blazers and oxford-cloth buttondowns of commodious cut, wide-wale corduroys, Norwegian fisherman sweaters, L.L. Bean duck loungers, which were tested by his wide, almost Flintstonian feet. In appearance, he suggested a cross between convicted Nixon aide Chuck Colson and Tweedledee.

Dave disliked the light and kept the shades in his room perpetually drawn, leaving his complexion continually pasty. He was ticklish and did not like to be touched. He chain smoked non-filtered Camels, several packs a day. The butts in his unemptied ashtrays were piled like Mayan pyramids, and his fingers were dyed yellow from the nicotine. He would rise some mornings at 6:30 and immediately begin drinking straight sloe-gin from his 28-ounce Avon Old Farms mug, the flying beaver on which was named Amy.

Dave’s romantic orientation was a matter of conjecture. Some thought him to be asexual. He became obsessed with one friend, John, an easy-going preppie from Wisconsin who sailed boats. Dave referred to John as “the Pray-sident” and kept an hour-by-hour itinerary of John’s classes, which Dave carried about in a case he called “the political football.” John and his roommates gave Dave a key to their dorm suite, which Dave would clean and vacuum.

Dave was put out when John took up with Lacey, a coquette who looked like one of the Sagal twins in the Doublemint ads, who wore lipstick and earrings in the boat when she coxed the women’s crew at Henley, and who interned one summer for Sen. Packwood. Dave thoroughly disapproved of Lacey whom he dismissed as a “hussy.”

•••

In the fall of 1980, when he was a freshman, Dave engineered a monumental prank on a hapless, pear-shaped junior named Bob, who had been the butt of numerous practical jokes when he lived on my floor the previous year. Dave telephoned a Bob, representing himself as an aide to President Carter, and convinced a credulous Bob the president wanted to interview him for a campaign radio spot featuring comments from the college students across America. Dave then segued to his Carter impersonation, taking in a flummoxed Bob hook, line and sinker.

In a follow-up call to the campus newspaper, Dave, once again pretending to be a Carter aide, convinced the editor that a BU student had been called by the president. The paper, swallowing it, ran a story and photo of Bob on the front page in the next morning’s edition. A happy Bob waddled up and down campus the next day, stacks of papers under his arm, handing out copies.

Dave was gleeful after he pulled off the hoax, arguably his greatest college triumph. In Nixonian fashion, he kept tapes of the calls, which had recorded off a phone jack.

Dave could be lavish in his attention to friends. For Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural, he hosted a midday champagne reception in a study lounge he’d commandeered and papered with college Republican posters. He once presented me with a carton of Sullivans, imported British cigarettes he had purchased on a whim after spying the label. He behaved like a fat cat lobbyist in the way he dispensed gifts and favors; but rather than buying votes, he was trying, it seemed, to ensure friendship.

Dave expected, in return for his hospitality, to be paid proper court, as might be extended a Henry Adams-style host of a society salon. Perhaps I did not continue to pay him the appropriate attention, for in my last term at college, Dave began to cut me on the street. I never discovered what slight, real or perceived, I had committed to end up on the Enemies List.

I wonder where Dave is today.

Watching the Nixon funeral on C-Span, I scanned the faces in the crowd of mourners. G. Gordon Liddy was there, and Spiro Agnew, and Chuck Colson. There was no sign of Dave.

I picture him in Pennsylvania, unwilling heir to a tire company, a hunched figure walking the shore of Lake Erie alone, like his hero, in wingtips.

Most Wesleyan students during the 1980s were ambivalent toward organized sports and would've reserved an outright hostility for the golf team, had they known it existed.

There is little agreement on whether and/or how collegiate athletes should be paid. Honestly, what revenue could college golfers, for example, possibly generate and ultimately demand? They and their teams are essentially loss leaders, like all varsity athletics had been their first 100 years and continue to be at  colleges and universities with less athletic ambitions but the gall to charge students upwards of $50,000 per annum to attend. The only universal recognition is that a whole lot of money is clearly being generated by certain collegiate athletes, and those actual revenue-generators get nothing but barter value in the form of scholarships.

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera weighed in on the matter this weekend, in the NYT Magazine, and Sports Illustrated offered up a comparable scenario for how a paid system might work, in a November report. For the sake of context, the SI article noted that the University of Oregon annually budgets around $650,000 for its men’s golf team. This might be standard for Division I college programs, but it’s probably jolting to anyone who participated in small-college programs (which comprise the majority collegiate golfers, mind you).

It’s positively mind-blowing to those of us who competed for Division III Wesleyan University in the 1980s. This was competitive golf, but it was the stuff of van-enabled matches, mismatched shirts, and the odd overnight invitational. We got paid a couple times: per diems of $5 for lunch at the Big Boy just off I-91 in Agawam, Mass.

Still, while I would never hold out the experience as an argument for or against, I wouldn’t trade the experience.  It was a blast, and what stands out today, 25 years on, aren’t the personal victories (which were sadly few) but the ridiculous personalities the game attracts and the sometimes-absurd situations tournament golf continually drops in their laps. You can’t put a price tag on this stuff. At hippy Wes, where the vast majority of students essentially scorned athletics, golf was even more low-profile. Indeed, they’d have surely been appalled — if they even knew Wes had a varsity golf team.

•••
Two of my teammates and I recently harkened back to those days via an email roundtable. Rich “Danny” Gibbons and John Brais were both one year my junior, so we shared three seasons together. Despite what the rest of campus didn’t know or ignored, much hilarity ensued.

John Brais: So I’m in Professor Greene’s class, which is set up to produce your Senior paper, to complete your History major. We’re at his house for dinner, about 10 of us, and we’re sitting around the table at his house, setting up the schedule to present our papers. Two separate dates: First day, five people present and the other five choose a paper to critique. The following week, same thing but reversed. Problem for me was the second week was the first day of New England Intercollegiates at New Seabury and I present this dilemma to the professor while going over the schedule, in front of everyone. I suggest that I present and critique on the same day, first week. Professor Greene’s response: “You do know, John, that I was on a committee to cancel the golf program outright as certain students have protested that to support golf, which is obviously an elitist sport, is against the moral and ethical principals that Wesleyan represents.” I replied, If these people knew the members of the golf team, I am sure they would reconsider this opinion. Professor Greene went on to say, “It is your decision to make, if others in the group agree… By the way, congratulations for the great year on the hockey team. My son and I are huge fans.” The other students were stunned.

Rich Gibbons: Talk about worlds colliding. Golf team and the People’s Republic of Wes ethos…

JB: I seem to remember we consumed several cases of beer and an assortment of doobies that trip to New Seabury.

Hal Phillips: I seem to remember that was the case any time we traveled with the golf team. There was one epic quarters game and general piss-up in some condo where we stayed at New Seabury. Much silliness. That was the year Teddy Galo shot 75 or something on the easy course, when all the good teams were playing the gnarly Ocean Course. So he was, like, top 5 overall after Day I. He pointedly maintained a level of sobriety but went out and shot something in the high 90s next day. Classic.

JB: Wes golf was an absolute forum for top-notch comedy. You remember that 1st hole at New Seabury, the Ocean Course, like 590 yards dead into the wind to a green about an acre in size? Dude from Middlebury (you know that guy… blonde, blue eyes, 6’4” basketball player with no personality) is on the back of the green putting downhill, downwind to the front, about 120 feet of putt. The three of us are near the pin as he crouches down to read the putt. Now picture his golf getup. He’s got tan Haggar slacks (the kind Jack Nicklaus made popular in the ‘70s) with not a millimeter of room to spare around his waist… He crouches down and we hear this amazingly long and loud tear. He has split his paints, front near the belt buckle to back near his belt. He looks like he’s wearing one of those huggy blankets, only this one is for his legs not his arms. He plays nine holes like this and actually turns out to be a great dude.

RG: I recall the guy shredding his pants. What a cruel game. What a wealth of material. New Seabury brings to mind another, but it may have been my senior year after you graduated… I’m rolling a few on the green in preparation for the tumult that is a New Seabury round in wind/rain/cold. Pat Dudley comes out of the clubhouse, walks onto the green looking vexed. Then he’s shaking his head and muttering to himself. “Pat, what’s wrong?” There’s some poor guy in the bathroom just pissing out his ass with diarrhea. I don’t know how he’s going to go 18… College golf. Nothing better. Life lessons of endurance and fortitude abound.

HP: And empathy. Pat could have been that guy. Remember when we did an overnight for NESCAC Championships, spring my senior year, up at Middlebury? As captain, I had located for us a killer party on campus. On the way home Pat projectile vomited out the passenger-side window of the Wesleyan Athletics van into the cold Vermont night. We got him home and revived him in time to stumble onto the 1st tee, successfully drive the ball in play, and walk down the 1st fairway — into a gathering snow squall! This was, like, March or early April, in Vermont. Poor Pat. He turned back to those of us assembled on the tee behind him with profound resignation. He and his ghost-like pallor disappeared into that freak storm like an old time baseball player into a field of corn.

JB: Incident B — some horrible condo course outside Hartford…

HP: I think that place was called Farmington Woods. Tightest course in captivity.

JB: Yes. It’s Wes, Trinity and Coast Guard and the course is short and tight with condos on BOTH sides of almost every fairway. White stakes everywhere. The guy from Coast Guard is tall, thin and rigid in both swing and personality. I’m telling you, he had one way to play every hole: aim dead left off the tee and hope the first half of the trajectory cleared the trees. If this occurred the ball would land on the right side of the fairway. He was not a good player — but he was even par going into the 9th!! I swear it was a miracle round and he was actually loosening up and we were having a good time. Now, why am I telling you this… Well we all know the golf gods are sometimes with us and sometimes against us, usually within reasonable degrees. Well the golf gods were not going to be reasonable for this poor sucker, not this day. The way they set this poor bastard up for the fall made me rethink my own faith. Like I said, he’s going into nine even par… the round of his life… and that 80-yard slice is working like a charm. So he gets to the 9th tee, aims dead left, straight at one of those condos — and hits the condo. No slice. Out of bounds, so he re-tees. No slice. Hits the roof. He re-tees, no slice — puts it in the backyard. He re-tees, no slice, hits the house again. Finally he takes out a 5 iron, finishes the hole and cards a 15. Poor bastard.

HP: What about the Isao Aoki incident?

RG: Lyman Meadows GC, circa 1985… My putting is a disaster at the time. Eager to try ANYTHING to shake me out of my rut, I adopt an unconventional address/stroke that seemed to be getting some traction on the practice green. Brais and I are playing an afternoon practice round with, I think, Teddy. My Aoki set up with the hands-low, putter-heel-down has been working well for six or seven holes, allowing me to sink several over 20 feet. Finally, Brais can’t take it anymore. I roll in a 17-footer and you’re standing on the apron shaking your head, incredulous, yet also disgusted: “Look at him… He looks ridiculous… but he’s FUCKIN’ DRAININ’ THEM!!!” Delivered in your Chowderhead accent of course, which made it.

JB: Gotta shed light on the Little Three foursome.

HP: This is the year we did three-way match play against Williams and Amherst?

JB: Yeah. Me and Marty Shatner, alternate shot. We have no business being in this match but I swear every time I hit a putt, the ball drops in. The other guys are pissed, as we are one up with two to play (9-hole format) after I hit a seeing-eye 30-footer on 7. It was ridiculous. Marty steps up on the 8th tee, 160-yard par 3. He makes his swing but unfortunately that swing just did not hold up. His left side collapsed like an overcooked noodle and he shanked it dead right, 50 feet into the woods. The ball MAY have gotten two feet off the ground. I remember just trying to comprehend the simple physics of that shot. I think I came to the conclusion that only Marty and a jai alai player could produce that one.

So I get into the woods and find the ball. I’d say 110 yards through bushes, trees, you know, the works… I figure we got nothing to lose and just whack a half 5 iron. It clears everything, hits a mound, launches over a bunker and ends up miraculously 40 feet from the pin on the apron. Marty steps over the putt and rolls it down — and it lips out. He almost made the putt! I tap in which means we go to the last hole all square. Poor Matt is shaking like a leaf. He steps over the ball in the fairway and all five of us literally cover our eyes and, unfortunately, that swing just doesn’t hold up…

HP: Danny, perhaps now’s the time for you to give us the Brutalization of Marty Shatner Story.

RG: Circa 1986, Herb was coming down the passenger side of that huge white van and it was parked close to another vehicle, creating a tight alley. He was trying to get by Marty (after the former had likely shot a 98 with his mind-bending swing). In what was likely just Herb clowning around, but taken by Marty as an act of overt derision by the coach, Herb shoved him against the sheet metal of the van and walked past while muttering something. Marty was stammering and stupefied, repeating to anyone who would listen in high falsetto, “Did you see that???!?!! He just shoved me. HERB SHOVED ME INTO THE VAN!!!!” If you’d told me that day Marty was Woody Allen’s nephew, I would have bought it. Piss-your-pants funny.

HP: We haven’t talked much about Herb Kenny, our coach. He was the basketball coach, too, and a good one. Was an assistant on the 1972 Olympic team, or something like that. Golf was just a lark for him, another way to snag a stipend. I wouldn’t call him fun-loving. But he wasn’t a grouch either. Danny, tell the good people how Herb screened incoming freshmen to determine whether they had the right stuff to play golf for Wesleyan.

RG: “You got shoes? You got clubs? Alright then…”

JB: That’s pretty much all it took.

HP: I will say this about Herb — in my last match as a collegiate, he trotted me out no. 1 against some dude from Williams, who was New England Champion, all divisions, and some other stud from Amherst. It was three-way match play and I had been playing no. 3 or 4 that year. He tried to pass it off as an honor, playing my last match as a collegiate, my last match as captain, at no. 1. I was like, “Fuck that, Herb. You’re sacrificing me.” He just smiled and sent me off. The miracle was, I halved the guy from Williams. When I reported in after the round, he seemed genuinely happy and impressed. “Let me buy you a beer,” and he did.

RG: I recall one spring afternoon, Herb engaging in some “coaching”… We were mustered on the practice green and he called us over, intoning:

“If you’re having trouble with your 7-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 7-iron.”

“If you’re having trouble with your 6-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 6-iron.”

“If you’re having trouble with your 5-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 5-iron.”

“If you’re having trouble with your 4-iron, get out there on the range and practice your 4-iron…”

I looked around desperately to lock eyes with someone. Anyone. I was stunned.

I was this close to asking, “Herb, are you going to go through the whole bag?!”

[See below, as promised, an archival excerpt from The Harold Herald, the world's first blog, which I invented in the early 1990s. Yeah, I did. One of the things that made the HH special, and thereby transcend the as-yet-created blog genre, was the fact that we attracted scads of talented contributors. Dave Rose was one of these, and here we reprint one of my favorite bits, first published circa 1995.]

By DR. DAVID ROSE

BOSTON, Mass. — From a meteorological perspective, this winter has been a particularly difficult one in New England. The ground here has been snow-covered for at least a month, and each time the snow begins to retreat a new storm sets in, dumping a foot or two of the white stuff on the city’s long-suffering populace.

In times like these, even the most stalwart, Eastern masochist can cast an admiring eye to the South or West, imagining more comfortable — if less character-building — Februarys. In weaker moments we are all capable of believing we would be less miserable if only the weather were better.

What few people realize, however, is that misery — like matter, energy or gravity — is a measurable entity subject to strict physical laws. Paramount among these is the law of conservation of misery, which states that misery can be neither created nor destroyed. What the law of conservation of misery means is that each human being is subject to a fixed quantity of misery during his or her lifetime. This “misery quotient” is absolutely immutable, a constant that holds across socioeconomic groups and geographic boundaries.

The law can be demonstrated in the field by measuring and tabulating misery in test subjects by using sensitive, electronic monitoring equipment. In the following study, diary entries for three individuals are followed by the amount of misery experienced by each, expressed in misery units (MU).

Subject 1, Los Angeles, Calif.

Day 1: Beautiful day. Saw Erik Estrada at Arby’s (.002 MU)

Day 2: Beautiful day. Discussed Rolfing with a Scientologist. (22.001 MU)

Day 3: Beautiful day. Around noon my house ripped loose from its foundation, slid down a hill, burst into flames and was swallowed up by a huge fissure that opened in the Earth. I was trapped for four weeks and was forced to drink by own urine to survive. One of the paramedics looked just like Kevin Bacon in Footloose. (1223.12 MU)

Subject 2, Tallahassee, Fla.

Day 1: Beautiful day. Stayed in the trailer and ran the air conditioner. (.003 MU)

Day 2: Beautiful day. Noticed that some, but by no means all, of my neighbors bear a striking resemblance to Gomer Pyle. (12.4 MU)

Day 3: The morning was beautiful, but in the afternoon I was mistaken for a German tourist and shot in the head, doused with gasoline, and set afire during a hurricane that destroyed the entire trailer park. (1232.72 MU)

Subject 3, Boston, Mass.

Day 1: Mixture of snow and sleet. Frostbite in right foot. (415.041 MU)

Day 2: Mixture of snow and freezing rain. My right foot has become gangrenous, and the stench is unbearable (415.041 MU)

Day 3: More snow. However, I reflected today that my house remains intact and this gave me a sense of stability and well-being. Right foot amputated. (415.041 MU)

Note the three subjects had very different experiences during the test period. However, the total amount of misery endured by each subject is identical (1245.123 MU).

While life in Boston is characterized by an endless series of petty humiliations and annoyances, life to the South or West consists of long stretches of inane, vapid, colorless contentment punctuated by absolute cataclysm. You can take your pick, but you can’t avoid misery altogether.

And before you move to warmer climes, consider the fact that spring will bring nicer weather to Boston, whereas Gomer Pyle lives in Tallahassee year ’round.

Herald Science Editor David Rose, PhD, is the world’s foremost authority on suffering. While he still gets a charge from the warranted misfortune of others, he specializes in chance trauma and self-imposed misery. He once dieted for two weeks on nothing but chicken boullion and carrots. His latest book, “I’m Wretched, You’re Wretched” (Knopf, $14.95), was published in February.

The miniscule, make-or-break target at Beau Desert's driveable par-4 9th.

When he commissioned design of Beau Desert Golf Club, some 100 years ago, the Marquess of Anglesey lived in the ancient Hall at Beaudesert, a splendid country manor dating back to 1289 (when it was occupied by the noble Trumwyns of Cannock). Known in 13^th century Latin deeds as Bellum Desertum, “beautiful wild place”, the estate was later inhabited by all manner of British peerage; indeed, the place is cited by name in Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, “The Lady of the Lake.”

The Pagets didn’t come into the Hall and its attendant properties until 1549, when Sir William acquired the estate from a friend: King Henry VIII, who threw in a baronet for good measure.

The ninth Baron Paget of Beaudesert, Henry, was the son of Caroline Paget and Sir Nicholas Bayley of Anglesey. Henry’s son, Henry William, was created the First Marquess of Anglesey in appreciation of his services at Waterloo, where, thanks to French mortar fire, he parted with a leg. [Legend has it that upon receiving this not-insignificant wound, the future Marquess exclaimed to Wellington, “My God! I’ve lost my leg!” His Lordship dryly acknowledged this fact by remarking, “My God. So you have,” and promptly returned to his telescope.]

The historical serendipities attached to this land and its aristocratic governors would fill several chapters of a book. Indeed they already have; “Beau Desert: The Marquess of Anglesey’s Course” was published in 1992 (look for a reissue in 2013, marking the club’s centennial).

Yet for all but six years of its existence, Beau Desert GC has been a local club, played and administered by local commoners.

From the beginning, the Sixth Marquess extended play to a favored group of area businessmen, most of whom worked for nearby mining concerns. “Permit Holders”, these unlanded folks were called. When Paget was ogliged to abandon his estate in 1919 (when many nobles did the same, due to the heavy tax burdens following World War I), he first leased the course to this group of proto-members; then, in 1932, he sold it to them.

Unlike the Pagets’ great Hall (demolished for scrap during the Depression) the clubhouse at Beau Desert has always been a modest affair, befitting its middle-class membership (that’s British middle class, mind you). This remains a very low-key place, its “common” sensibility — along with its distance from Greater London — beginning to explain why few Americans have heard of the place, much less played the course.

There is also a working-class legacy at Beau Desert, a peculiar one having to do with the fluid, physical characteristics of the golf course itself. Because it was laid out over an abandoned network of coal mines, the ground at Beau Desert GC literally buckles and shifts with regularity as ancient shafts slowly deteriorate and collapse. The folks at Beau Desert refer to this phenomenon as “subsidence”.

Some of these transformations are subtle. Others are fairly dramatic, such as the lengthy 4-foot depression that abruptly positioned itself in the 2^nd fairway a few years back. This “ditch” was eventually filled in for safety reasons by the National Coal Board, “whose staff”, according to the club history, “are regular visitors, repairing subsidence damage as required by the terms of the Deed of Sale.”

Big or small, these changes occur quite suddenly in the context of 90 years’ time. “The hills and hollows on the greens seem to change from one year to the next,” the club history reports. “Hardly a year has gone by without plans being made to level at least one.”

Some have been leveled but they aren’t easily identified; as a group, the 18 putting surfaces at Beau Desert remain extremely flamboyant. They are, in short, some of the wildest, most interesting greens in the Midlands. In 1974, British architect Fred Hawtree was consulted about “leveling” a few. To the members he wrote, “There are a great many eccentric contours on greens which lead to approaches and putts which go beyond a spirit of adventure.”

Ultimately, few of Hawtree’s proposed changes were implemented at Beau Desert, suggesting the membership here smartly adheres to Goldwater’s golfing corollary that extremism in defense of high adventure is no vice.

•••

It’s very much in vogue today to develop golf courses in and around abandoned quarries or gravel pits. Beau Desert was a forebear in this regard, as Fowler routed his 18 holes amid and directly atop centuries-old coal-mining operations (the last of which ceased activity in 1993). Indeed, the opening drive here plays across a derelict collier works, dead uphill to an inventively canted punchbowl green. Check out the club’s the stellar online photo gallery featuring this and the other 17 holes here.

Fowler particularly liked his cross-bunkers and Beau Desert is replete with perpendicular hazards. At the 2^nd — a titanic par-4 which plays 458 yards along the crest of Cannock Chase — he coyly positioned one well short of the putting surface. It juts in from the left and appears to closely guard the green. This is the illusory gambit Fowler creates here for A) those unfamiliar with the course; or B) those with short memories.

The bunkering at Beau Desert is uniformly strategic and comely. Deep and rugged-looking, the greenside hazards complement well the hugely pitched, severely undulating putting surfaces, which come in all shapes and sizes. The 9^th, for example, is situated at the business end of a 263-yard par-4; it’s drivable, in theory. But the volcano green is so small and severely tilted right-to-left that approaching it with a sand-wedge is harrowing enough.

At nearly 10,000 square feet, the 18^th green is one of the largest in England and chock full of cunning movement (it has more pin placements than you’ve had hot dinners). Cutting this behemoth with an old 14-inch greens mower required the operator to walk some 6,300 yards, Beau Desert’s full yardage from the back tees.

Fowler also indulged in a bit of elephant-burying — in some unlikely places, such as along the perimeters of several putting surfaces. The humps at nos. 4 and 5, for example, are most disconcerting as they obscure portions of their respective greens; they also make putting anywhere in their general vicinity a stern test (read: complete nightmare).

The one-shot holes at Beau Desert are all strong, yet the best one (the 167-yard 7^th) is also the longest one. Some might find fault with four par-3s all measuring between 142 and 167, and this begins to explain why the par-70 course measures just 6,310 yards from the tips.

Yet length has little do with the challenge here. The trick is negotiating the greens and keeping the ball out of the ubiquitous rough areas, a roiling sea of hillocks and hollows covered with heather, bracken and knee-high native grasses — no small task in Beau Desert’s ever-present wind, as Darwin made clear.

The R&A held final British Open qualifying here for 17 consecutive years, ending in 2000. Former Club Secretary John Bradbury note that many players preferred Beau Desert as a qualifying site “because they knew good golf would be rewarded. In other words, it was possible to qualify and still be over par.”

[This is the second in a two-part posting on Beau Desert GC. See Part I here.]

Herbert Fowler is one of those architects whose name, curiously, isn’t readily attached to the many great golf courses he laid out and/or substantially retooled. Cruden Bay? That’s a Fowler. Royal North Devon? Fowler’s fingerprints can be found all over this west country masterpiece. Indeed, his renovation of the Old Tom Morris original (a.k.a. Westward Ho!) fairly well accounts for the superb course we know today.

This lack of name recognition begins to explain why a venue like Beau Desert Golf Club, which Fowler designed nearly 100 years ago in the Staffordshire hamlet of Hazel Slade for the Sixth Marquess of Anglesey, rings few bells. Yet a better heathland course golfers are unlikely to come across, as indeed many have not.

For his own part, The Marquess (nee Charles Henry Alexander Paget) recognized immediately that Fowler had created something extraordinary on his Beaudesert estate. When the course was completed, in 1913, Paget whisked Fowler off to the family’s “other” ancestral estate at Plas Newydd on the Welsh island of Anglesey. There the architect laid out a second course for the Marquess, Bull Bay Golf Club, another obscure Fowler product you’ve probably never heard of.

The majority of Fowler’s brilliant work was done in his native England, but he did get around. Fowler was the man who transformed a ho-hum par-4 at Pebble Beach into one of golf’s most heroic, par-5 finishing holes. His Cape Cod design at Eastward Ho! (whose peculiar moniker now makes perfect, book-ending sense) is an old world delight. Fowler also refurbished the ancient Welsh links at Aberdovey where venerated golf writer Bernard Darwin learned the game and played all his life.

Darwin would complete the Fowler circle by eventually visiting Beau Desert’s 160 acres of elevated, exposed ground some 25 miles north of Birmingham. Afterward he asserted that, “Here might be one of the very best of courses, for the turf is excellent and there is a flavour of Gleneagles about it. It stands high and is pleasanter in hot weather than cold, for the wind can blow there with penetrating shrewdness.”

The Ryder Cup may have played nearby at The Belfry; Little Aston may be the region’s most fashionable golfing address. But the finest course in this part of England is Beau Desert. And yes, Herbert Fowler designed it.

•••

If you believe the term “links” is too often misapplied (and it is), then perhaps “heathland” is the source of even greater misunderstanding. To grasp the qualities of heathland golf, think links. The soil is similarly sandy, only inland, upland and very much bared to the elements. Walton Heath is a celebrated prototype (Fowler did that one, too) and Beau Desert (www.bdgc.co.uk) is a worthy sister, laid out on the treeless heath that was Cannock Chase.

It’s not treeless any longer, of course. Many heathland tracks, even the very best ones, haven’t survived to the current day unchanged. Not by a long shot. After decades of tree growth, most heathland designs don’t look anything like they did immediately post construction. What’s more, many tree-infested heathland courses not only look but play very differently, as they’ve become veritable parkland hybrids.

But some still play as a heathland course should and Beau Desert is one of these. Its trees are numerous but, in the main, they merely frame the enormously broad, menacing rough areas, which in turn frame generous fairways. Indeed, if one could reach them, the trees that loosely border the magnificently blind, Himalayan 15^th would be preferable to the rough – this mindset, this value system (whereby a lie amongst the trees will likely be better than one you’ll encounter in the rough) is a sure sign you’re playing a heathland layout.

The Old Course at Walton Heath was Fowler’s very first design job, and one he secured only because his brother-in-law was an investor. But Fowler was a quick study. A world-class cricketer, he was 35, for example, when he first took up the game of golf; within two years he played off scratch. Walton Heath was his first foray into golf course architecture and he nevertheless produced one of the world’s great layouts (the New Course, also Fowler’s work, is no slouch either).

Why Fowler’s name doesn’t roll off the tongue alongside that of Morris, Mackenzie or even Colt is a mystery. He was certainly in their class. After all, this was the man who would go on to design Saunton and a pair of superb 18s at The Berkshire. This was the fellow entrusted with the sweeping and well regarded redesigns of Royal Lytham and Ganton, homes to Open Championships and Walker Cups by turn.

Beau Desert may not ring many bells but it, too, belongs in this rank. It’s perhaps best heathland course you’ve never heard of, much less not played.

This is the first in a two-part feature on Beau Desert GC. Check back at halphillips.net in the coming days for Part II.

About 25 years ago, as part of an avant-garde film series at college, I saw this great Louis Brunuel movie called The Exterminating Angel. Well, it wasn’t exactly “great”, now that I think back on it, but it was surreal enough to have made a lasting impression. In it some 12 to 15 members of Franco’s upper crust gather in a stylish Castilian villa. The first 40 minutes or so depict these men and women seated around a well appointed table, exchanging witty repartée on various existential topics. The movie basically goes nowhere during these early stages and I remember thinking — sitting there in the same lecture hall where I endured Psych 101 — that here was yet another obtuse, hyper-intellectual, dialectical drama of the mind that explores, in excruciating detail (and in Spanish), Iberian class struggles circa 1962. Sorta like My Dinner with Andre meets The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Just about the time my roommates and I were getting restless, wondering what better things we might be doing with our youth, the guests do a funny thing: Instead of going home, they all crash in the music room. Next morning, a military fellow in the film calls attention to himself with great ceremony and indicates that, sadly, he must take his leave. But his friends won’t have it; they talk him out of it… Before long a couple stands and makes a gracious but unmistakable move to depart. When the group protests, they look at each other and decide to stay… More high-blown conversation ensues before another guy excuses himself, thanks his hosts, dons his coat and gets as far as the door jam. Those assembled seem prepared to let the man go, but for reasons he doesn’t seem to understand, he turns around and resignedly re-takes his place on the couch.

It becomes clear that no one, for reasons they’re unable to articulate or comprehend, can leave the room.

Eventually the situation becomes dire. Even the servants have fled the premises for reasons they themselves cannot explain. Yet the guests are trapped, by what they don’t know. Hours pass. The police show up outside and attempt to coax them out with bull-horned pleas and instructions. Nothing works. It’s become a veritable hostage situation and eventually the guests eat all the leftovers and dicker themselves into a state of desperate exhaustion. Days pass, farm animals materialize in house (!) and one by one the guests collapse from a lack of food and water.

I can’t remember how the movie ends but my family and I are traveling over the impending holiday. Here’s hoping that life doesn’t mimic art exactly.

Like Brunuel’s dinner guests, we’ve all of us found ourselves stuck inside the some airport’s secure gate area, the bewildered prisoners of grim circumstances beyond our comprehension. Over and over again we try to leave, but for a variety of reasons — some practical, some damned surreal, all of them out of our control — we cannot.

Hour upon hour of travel impotence inevitably leads to contemplation, some of it darned existential. Surely Brunuel must have been an experienced air traveler. I looked into it, and found this telling quote re. The Exterminating Angel: “Basically,” the filmmaker explained, “I simply see a group of people who couldn’t do what they want to… That kind of dilemma, the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire, often occurs in my movies. From the standpoint of reason, there is no reason for this film.”

Godspeed to all of us this holiday season, everyone.

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, I’ve maintained an odd recollection of and attachment to the 1969 film, If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium. It was on TV when I was a kid, but no more than any other junkie films that populated the late-night film archives of local Boston affiliates. Why would I fixate this film? For a while I assumed it was the presence of a youngish, sneaky hot Suzanne Pleshette, and maybe that’s it. But maybe, just maybe, it was the fact that her love interest was played by Ian McShane.

I keep running into this guy. I just plowed through three seasons of Deadwood, in which he hit it out of the park as iconic Gem Saloon owner Al Swearengen. Now I’m onto a British mini-series production of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Fall, where McShane presides as the conniving Bishop Waleran. This son of Blackburn, Lancashire has been around forever but it wasn’t till the other day that I realized what a long screen relationship I had with him.

His big screen credits frankly leave a bit to be desired. I wouldn’t call them four thousand holes in the resume, but several decades of nothing films have been followed, of late, by a series of grey eminence roles (Coraline, The Golden Compass) and bit parts in animated features (Shrek the Third, Kung Fu Panda). This may be the only British actor who failed to land a sinecure via the Harry Potter franchise. Sexy Beast was a fine film, though his solid portrayal of Teddy Bass was overshadowed (along with everything else in this 2000 feature) by the sublimely, astonishingly evil Ben Kingsley character (yeah, he’s got range but who knew Ben had that in him?). McShane’s Blackbeard in the latest installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides, was probably a nice payday but it ain’t gonna win him any Best Supporting Actor nominations.

On TV, however, McShane has turned in a hall-of-fame-caliber roster of work, on both sides of the pond. God praise Wikipedia for logging it all for posterity. This guy is a mini-series maestro — Roots, Disraeli, Pillars — and has starred and/or appeared in a laundry list of fine or otherwise noteworthy series: Space 1999, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice, Dallas, The West Wing… Deadwood’s well earned praise, and his centrality to the show, now overshadowed what had been the jewels in his crown: eight years as the unabashedly mulletted, somewhat slimy antique dealer, Lovejoy, and a recurring role in the equally laudable (and British) series Minder.

I’m not trying to make any monumental cultural point here. Only that no one does rogues of ambiguous motivation like Ian McShane.

Little known fact: I invented the blog. Managed to do it proto-style, in print, and achieve a level of virality before the Internet even existed. A pretty neat trick, if you think about it. Should’ve made me famous, or rich at the very least. Instead, all I got was this lousy WordPress account.

In 1992, I moved to Maine from my native Massachusetts, and as a way of keeping up with friends and family, I started publishing a newsletter dubbed The Harold Herald, a moderately clever handle enabled by my given name, Harold Gardner Phillips III. The motto, “All the news about Hal that Hal deems fit to print”, pretty much summed up the original mission. I wrote all the copy, accounting for the vagaries of my new existence, laid it out in Pagemaker, made a bunch of copies and mailed them out. My mother thought it was hilarious.

Technically it was a fanzine, and there were a few of those around at the time, though, without the Internet, what did we really know about what was happening elsewhere in the world? However, no self-published newsletter that I was aware of, or have since been made aware of, fixated so pointedly on the personal — the way blogs and other social media do today, routinely. Much of it was a parody of journalism in general; newspapers had a masthead so I concocted and continually updated a fake one larded with cultural snark and inside jokes:

Publisher: Harold Gardner Phillips, III

Editor-in-Chief: Hal Phillips

Virtual Editor: Dr. David M. Rose, Ph.D.

Managing Editor: Formletter McKinley

Associate Editor: Throatwarbler Mangrove

Production Manager: Quinn Martin

Circulation Manager: Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog

Weapons Consultant: Michael Fay

Drug Tsar: Lou’s “Man”

Spiritual Consultant: Massasoit

Bamboo Advisor: Lee Kwan Yoo, Prime Minister Emeritus

Motivational Consultant: Danny Gibbons, Speak, Inc.

I don’t even remember “Lou”, much less his man. But like Barnaby Jones and Mannix, it was a Quinn Martin Production.

This sort of content was interspersed with actual travel logs, book and movie reviews, commentaries, cartoons featuring a recurring neo-nazi named Gunther, even actual news items. Of course, when I bought a new pair of boots, that was news. In time, an increasing number of contributors added their own banalities to the mix and it was all the richer for it.

These HH issues — from 1993 through 1998, I averaged 8-10 editions annually — got passed around. The Portland Press-Herald did a feature and the phenomenon garnered a bit more press, in the Boston Globe and the New England Newspaper Association Bulletin. At one point I cheekily pressed readers for stamp money ($20 earned one a lifetime subscription) and lo and behold they responded. Now, I wouldn’t say it rolled in, but still… At its high point, we had nearly 900 subscribers and a dozen regular contributors. It pays to have friends and family who can write.

When we moved to Camp Vanderlips in 1998, we had a party and naturally the invite warranted full-on feature coverage. A half dozen people I’d never met showed up; one, the sainted Luella, brought a vintage two-man saw with “Camp Vanderlips” emblazoned on the blade, a housewarming gift.

Eventually the responsibilities of wife, family, home and my business squeezed the life out of the HH. There was simply no time for such frivolity, and there certainly wasn’t any money in it. When the Internet arrived and blogging began in earnest, there was a half-hearted attempt to adapt it (see here an early bulletin board version, and note just how early the late-1990s were in the cyber-education of the culture). But the thrill and the moment were gone. Now I have this blog and, if you think about it, I’m more or less contributing to the burial of my own legacy.

This makes no sense at all.

Every once in a while I come across something that reminds me of the Herald, or something I or someone else wrote for it. A great many of the stories still exist, online and here on my laptop. I’ll read some items and cringe, but other bits are intriguing windows on the ‘90s zeitgeist, on the media form as it existed back then, before the fall, and on me.

In March it’ll be 20 years since I moved to Maine. I’m thinking of dipping back into the Herald archives and offering selections here as a sort of retrospective, if only to stake my claim on history — and give another, perhaps wider airing to the work of others. Because I can take credit for that, too.

•••

Here’s the first plucking from the HH Archives, which ran in a 1994 issue. Baby Boomers came under a lot of fire in the Herald; because my contemporaries and I have had the misfortune of following this all-consuming, self-absorbed horde for decades, navigating the scorched-earth path they’ve routinely left in their wake.

Boomers mark lunar landing with trademark cant

Okay, I admit it. I haven’t the faintest clue as to what I was doing or where I was that July evening when messrs. Armstrong & Aldrin set the standard for political one-upsmanship by setting foot on the lunar surface. I’m sorry, but I was not yet five years old during the summer of ’69 when Americans huddled before black & white Philcos and listened to Walter Cronkite verbalize their own sense of wonder. As best I can surmise, I was either digging my way underneath the backyard fence or blissfully sacked out atop my rubber sheet.

However, having endured the avalanche of news coverage marking the event’s 25th anniversary, I could surely conjure a false memory and join in the mass catharsis, contrived rot that it is.

“Where were you when Apollo landed?”

“Oh, I was still at Antioch. I remember stocking the microbus, about to leave for Woodstock, when Mara called me inside. We sat in front of the TV, ate some mushrooms and complained about Nixon… and the Army. Then we played some Donovan and tried to agree on our mantra for the weekend.”

“Wow, that’s great… So, how are things at Morgan Stanley?”

Where were you when Bobby Kennedy was shot? You were at Monterey, weren’t you? Remember when we got brained outside the convention in Chicago?

These are questions Baby Boomers still ask each other, over and over again, usually at cocktail parties thrown by investment houses somewhere in mid-town Manhattan. The moon landing is especially good fodder because its foundation was laid by the oft-recalled President Kennedy, the single greatest beneficiary of this intense need of Boomers to explore their collective memory.

The lunar expedition, or rather the 25th anniversary thereof, is merely the latest example the Boomers’ super-annuated nostalgia — made all the more ironic by the generation’s complete disinterest in further space exploration. These are the people who castigated American capitalism, then bought Saabs and now summer in Bar Harbor; the people who remember the Apollo landing as a timeless example of American will and know-how, then pointedly ask what purpose the Shuttle serves.

Despite their vast capacity for contradiction and hypocrisy, Boomers cling to these memories — and the ideals they once represented — because they can’t bear to look forward.

Boomers are obsessed with nostalgia because they’re afraid to imagine where in hell they’ll take the country next. Responsible as they are for the 1970s and ’80s, Boomers are content — nay, obsessed — with idealization of the ’60s, that period before they fucked up the country and compromised everything for which they had presumably stood.

The 25th anniversary of the lunar landing is just the latest in what has been a nauseating string of ’60s pop culture memorials, orchestrated by Boomers now in control of the nation’s media outlets. And they’re not done yet!

Did you enjoy Dan Rather’s live report from Woodstock II? Well, get ready for Katie Couric on location at the Cambodian border, marking Nixon’s clandestine bombings; Joan Lunden, a tear in her eye, wishing you “Good Morning” from Paris beside Jim Morrison’s grave; Peter Jennings standing in the Rose Garden, pointing to the spot where Nixon waved goodbye (With all due respect to the recently aired BBC documentary, the U.S. retrospective will take place in 1999, the 25th anniversary of Watergate’s unsavory resolution when Boomers finally ascended and their parents grudgingly stepped aside).

Mercifully, the deluge will likely stop there because, as we’ve discussed, Boomers would sooner trade in their Dockers than relive post-1974 America. Too painful. Too revealing of their own hypocrisy. There will be no anniversary celebrations of Reagan America because all the ex-hippies would rather not discuss why they voted for him, why they worked on Wall Street, why they started acting like their parents had.

Yes, by 1999, the 25-year retrospectives will give way to 30- and 35-year retrospectives — and to a potentially larger obsession: The institutional worry over their sullen, slacking children in Generation X.

It’s possible the Boomers are right about them. Can a generation whose only communal memory is the Challenger Disaster possibly carry on the American Dream?

A valid question, but here’s a better one: Will the Baby Boomers ever realize what Generation X has already grasped — namely, that Boomers boned and gutted the Dream long ago?

Doubtful. Retrospection is one thing; introspection quite another.

—30—