Monday, February 26, 2007

To My Fellow Jurors

Was a troublesome weekend, wasn't it?
I have not get begun to write and I don't know where it'll end up, if anywhere. If you'd like to see the result it might be better for you to email me your email address and let me notify you when I'm done and what I've done with it.
My email is tvdpdx@gmail.com
I'm getting a CD of the courtroom recordings and I'd be happy to share that with you, too. They don't transcribe, or "translate" as that P.I. called it.
Thanks to those of you who gave me your notes. I will not be using the real names of any of us jurors.
I still feel I made the right decisions, even though doubt creeped in from time to time. It wasn't enough to make me think I should have voted the other way.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Portland Songwriters Contest Story

Here's a piece I wrote which ran on Friday, February 16 in the A&E section of The Oregonian.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Through the Open Shield

Originally posted on Common Ties a wonderful website which I am very happy to write for.

By Tom D’Antoni

It was 1992 and I had it going. I was living in Baltimore. I had a writer/producer staff job at an advertising agency, I had a show on a national talk radio network, I had begun publishing an alternative newspaper and I was producing a TV show for the Mayor of Baltimore. Around that time King World hired me to produce segments for a new TV show they were introducing starring comedian Tim Reid. And I was living with my poet girlfriend and helping her raise a 10-year-old son.

I had a great life.

Within six months it was all gone. Everything, including the girlfriend. Some of it was my fault and some of it was bad fortune. Doesn’t matter though, does it?

I had nowhere to turn. I got a job driving a cab and spent the next two-plus years working at America’s single most dangerous occupation.

Driving a cab in a city like Baltimore is not like driving a cab in New York or L.A. where, although it sucks, it is perceived as a way-station, an in-between job for creative types. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a godsend for immigrants, and in towns like Portland, Oregon, drivers actually enjoy their work and make a profession out of it. But see, I had already had my work before millions of people and I was over 40. It felt like a dead end. How could I ever recover? I didn’t see any way possible.

I played the kill-me game. I would pick up anyone. I picked up every criminal I could find. Maybe one of them would kill me. Baltimore was a racist town, probably still is, and the hatred went both ways. I was the fish and the cab was the barrel.

It felt good having sunk so low. It confirmed all the bad things I believed about myself. If I had been smart enough, I thought, I would have been a real criminal. They weren’t going to have their phone cut off. They didn’t have a heart to break. I was stuck. I could see no way out.

I was in shock. I felt the pain, but I was too numb, hurt too badly to feel all of it. I drove cabs so beat up they shouldn’t have been on the street. I wasn’t able to drive every day. I didn’t want to die that much. I was passive aggressive about my suicide. Three, maybe four nights a week, and no weekends, too much competition. I could make as much on a Monday as those poor bastards did fighting each other for fares on the weekends.

It was too crazy on the weekends, anyway. I couldn’t even commit to my own suicide enough to risk being out there at 1:30 a.m. when the night was at its peak, when the bars were almost closed, and the frenzy of drunken, vicious men scavenged the streets, out to use the night and everybody in it for their own purposes, no matter what the cost.

Fridays were the worst. People got paid on Fridays. You never had the back of the cab empty then. You were never out of danger. I wanted to choose my poison. I didn’t leave the house thinking, “Tonight I’m gonna do something to cause them to kill me.” Maybe it would just happen that way.

Odd, in light of this, that I wouldn’t drive without a shield between the front and back seats. Some drivers wouldn’t drive WITH one. They didn’t pick up criminals.

Cab drivers were getting shot all the time, blown away usually from the back seat, sometimes from the driver’s side window. It didn’t make me feel anything. I figured one of these days my number would come up. There would be a lot of pain for a brief moment, and then all the pain would stop.

I felt time running out. I had spent so much time working at what I did best, the writing, TV and radio … this should have been the time I put it all together and really did something. Instead, I was in this cab. I could feel the time slipping by like I was bleeding to death.

I thought about those self-righteous self-help bastards on TV, always talking about having a choice … nice theories … bullshit in reality. Ask a junkie. Ask a drunk. Ask the cab driver.

In the depths of it all, I picked up a black woman and her little daughter who was maybe 5 years old. I left the shield open. We didn’t talk after she told me where she was going. I was so buried under the weight of my failure I could barely talk to anyone.

What prompted her, I’ll never know. We drove in silence for 10 minutes. I stopped at a red light. Without warning, the little girl grasped the base of the open shield with both of hands. She stuck her head through the opening in the shield and said, “I love you.”

I busted out crying.

It was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.

Through my tears, I said, “I love you, too.” I don’t know if her mother heard me or what she thought, but she must have been as surprised as I was.

My misery continued for another couple of years, but that one moment of pure angelic bliss has never left my mind.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Send This Message To the Troops---The Truth

Republicans like John McCain and Joe Lieberman (I know) keep saying that we shouldn't send the wrong message to the troops, when it is they who have been sending not only the wrong message to the troops, but wrong in sending the troops THEMSELVES in the first place.

Truth is harsh. It's not pretty, but here is the message the troops should be hearing:

You have been sent to fight and die so that several American corporations can make untold fortunes from your sacrifices. You were lied to from the beginning. There was no threat to the United States. You are not defending "freedom." You are dying so that others may get richer.

That's why your friends have died, your wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, even Cindy Sheehan's son. Not for freedom, or to prevent another 911, but for the greed of the friends of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. In other words, in vain.

As tough as that is to swallow, it's the truth.

Troops, the rest of America has figured this out. We're trying to get you home. Many of us have been fighting for years to get you home. Many of us did all we could to try to prevent you going there.

One problem is that Bush has two more years in the White House, and you are stuck in his hell. Many of you will die for his miscalculated adventure which, although it blew up in his face, still provided war profits on a scale that should send him and his friends to a federal prison for the rest of their lives. His handlers have turned his latent megalomania into an excuse for keeping you in the middle of a civil war that they stoked.

Make no mistake, we want you home. The problem is that politicians are politicians. When a McCain trots out the tired old (see 1968) "supporting the troops" chant, even politicians against the war take cover, sputtering when they should be loud and clear. It's simple. The war was wrong. We were lied to by the Bush Administration to get into it. It is they who have the blood of your comrades on their hands.

They need to say, "Not one more dime for this war. Nothing. Mr. President, if you don't have the money to fight this war, then you'll just have to bring home the troops. And start today."

That's what the American people were saying on election day.

A harder truth is that it is our troops who tortured and are probably still torturing. Yes, I know that orders came down from above, but the deeds have been carried out by the "troops" we're supposed to be supporting. Every action carries personal responsibility and the responsibility for killing and maiming in the name of me and my country is on the troops as well as those giving the orders.

Here's another idea, troops. Stop fighting. Do everything you can to protect yourself and your comrades, but no more. Tell your commanding officers, they might agree with you. If you come home and they want you to go over again, don't go. Step forward and join the huge percentage of the rest of us who are convinced that this is a mistake that we need not compound any more.

So if you're one of the troops who continues to kill Iraqis so that Haliburton, Exxon-Mobil and the rest can continue to loot America's treasury and ruin the economy for future generations, I don't support you. You don't represent me. You represent a CEO someplace.

Like I said, truth is harsh.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Gays In the Military---It's a MALE Problem

The problem with gays in the military being out of the closet is not a gay problem. It’s not even a straight problem. It’s a male problem, it has to do with how men behave.

In the entire debate, which began again once last week, there has hardly been a peep out of lesbians or hetero women on any of the issues raised by straight men opposed to the idea. We didn’t hear anything about women not wanting to shower with other women, or sleep in close quarters, or…. anything.

Why? Because women don’t behave the same way as men do, sexually. For one thing, with very few exceptions, women don’t rape.

There is within every man, straight or gay, an unconscious understanding of male sexuality. It is, I am told by my gay male friends, better understood by gay men, because they deal with other men’s sexuality on a regular basis. But straight men (like me) know that, given the opportunity, men will have sex with anything that attracts them; be it male, female, animal, vegetable….basically any other person or object in the universe.

And when are the male peak sexual years? The same years most men serve in the military, including the years when the main thing men think about is sex.

That’s what straight men in the military are afraid of, even though they may not know that’s what they’re afraid of. Unfortunately, they may be right. This is not an argument against giving gay men and lesbians the same rights for which they are putting their lives on the line. It’s just a fact about men.

If gay military men were allowed to be out, it could well be a tremendous lesson for men in general. It could help men in confronting the fact that it is the men in the world who do the raping, and most of the sexual harassment. When these straight men are confronted with gay men who behave the same way toward them that they have behaved toward women….well, we may have some old fashioned consciousness raising.

And, by the way, anybody who thinks that gay men won’t be checking out every good looking man who walks by, just doesn’t understand men.

Does this mean that men can’t control themselves? Of course not. It means that men might better learn to, finally, or at least learn that anything that turns them on is not fair game.

It’s all a learning experience. Learning how to live with each other in or out of the military is tough, given the random nature of human behavior. There should be a lot more talk among men about their sexuality. And I mean neither Howard Stern-type discussion, nor running to the woods and beating on drums.

There aren’t any simple answers to the questions of how to deal with men of all sexual orientations in the military. Men just don’t deal with their own sexuality very well.

Perhaps a calms discussion of how men of all sexual persuasions can live together in the military is a good place to start.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Sex In Space?? America Demands Answers!!

Once again, reality catches up to tabloiditry.

Years ago I wrote a piece for The Sun, the American supermarket tabloid, entitled "Sex In Space, They've Already Tried It." The piece was rejected because they didn't want any sex stories, something I always regretted because sex is the home page for fantasies. There are more fantasies about sex than any other single aspect of human existence.

Don't look at me like that.

Nevertheless, I didn't include that story in my book "Rabid Nun Infects Entire Convent and Other Sensational Stories From a Tabloid Writer ." It just wasn't as funny as the others, which may be another reason it got shot down by The Sun.

Now we find out that astronaut Lisa Nowak and Shuttle pilot William Oefelein were "involved." They may have tried it during weightless training for all we know. They never flew together, but other men and women have shared that small intimate space aboard the Shuttle. According to MSNBC, "Nowak told police that her relationship with Oefelein was 'more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship,' according to an arrest affidavit."

All of this came out when she was arrested for allegedly going after a woman whom she thought was seeing her celestial lover.

Do our astronauts have meaningless sex in space?

Now the real questions begin:

Did they take their clothes off?
What's it like doing it while weightless?
Did the others know?
How far did they go?
What's the quality of the orgasm in space?
How do they clean up?
Is there video?
Where can I buy it?

As a loyal American citizen, I demand to know these answers. I helped pay for the damned Space Shuttle and the salaries of those astronauts and I want the facts! Here's where Congressional oversight comes into real play.

What have we learned from their experiences?
Did weightlessness contribute to Nowak's alleged jealous rage?
Is the pilot of the shuttle a cad?
Is it true that they had to erase "For a good time call Lisa at (phone number redacted)" on the shuttle and the space station walls?
And just how do all those sperms swim without gravity?

America demands answers!!

A can of worms has been opened! Was this the first time?
Have they been testing out the body's reactions to sex all along?
What about all those men-only flights?
Is there a higher rate of pay for those who participate?
Do they tip?

I want Congressional hearings now! And I want them on C-SPAN, every goddamned second of them.

America is drooling today!

And don't bother looking for the video online. I already tried.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com

Friday, February 02, 2007

Harold & Kumar Go to Jail In Boston---For WHAT?

How funny was it to hear those self-righteous reporters at the "news conference" held by Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, the two guys who pranked the city of Boston?

Very.

Very very.

Gave me faith in the power of silliness.

First of all, they were obviously told by their lawyer not to talk about the case. So what do you do if you're creative, hold a certain contempt for MSM and have been told to shut up? You ACT up. You talk about hair. Dreads, especially.

The New York Times said that "the men engendered little public sympathy when, after their release, they held a news conference at which Mr. Berdovsky said they wanted to discuss 'haircuts in the ‘70s and how they affect our lives today and how we live in the future.'"

Wrong. They engendered lots of public sympathy (and giggles) from people like me who understand what a prank is, and that somebody grossly overreacted in Boston, thinking that stupid little ad boxes were bombs.

According to the NYT, a spokesperson from the offending company. "said that the company had intended the devices as unconventional advertising in 10 cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. She said the light boards had been in place for two to three weeks and there had been no complaints from other cities."
A Boston official said, “Maybe the media wants to take this lightly and ask foolish questions -- they can do that, but we’re going to take this seriously.”

And now Boston wants to jail Harold and Kumar for putting up stupid little boxes to advertise a goofy cartoon series. Further, the media continues to excoriate the boys for playing with them at the news conference.

Somebody needs to lighten up, starting with the City of Boston and its media.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Some Recent Oregonian Stories of Mine

I've been writing for their A&E section. Here are some you might like:

On Noah Mickens

On bassist/singer Belinda Underwood

On trumpeter Jumaane Smith

Don't Be Fooled by Gordon Smith's "Moderation"

I was wrong when I wrote here about Sen. Gordon Smith (R. Oregon). Well, I wasn't mistaken in my reaction to my meeting with Smith when I was working on a story on physician-assisted suicide, I just cut him a break of which he isn't deserving.

For the real lowdown on Smith please read this story by Steve Novick in the current issue of Portland's Willamette Week. It'll set everybody straight about Smith.

Ok, I admit it. I WAS wrong. And I'm voting for Steve if he runs.