Author: Randy Haspel

Whatever happened to soap? I envision some

genius in the marketing department at Procter & Gamble saying,
“You

know, our soap smells far too pleasant and produces a rich lather.
Let’s change it to a

slick bar with no discernible scent that leaves an oily residue that
is hard to wash off, but also put specks of grit in it that

are uncomfortable on the skin and tell the public that it’s good for
them.” Before you know it, every bar in the soap aisle is either
anti-bacterial or Ivory, which brings back bad memories of childhood
punishments for cursing. I gave my heart to Safeguard, and then they
took it away from me. The whole concept of lather disappeared in order
to sell you new gel “body wash” in a plastic, disposable container. Of
course, that makes the bath net on a rope a necessity, and now you’re
into a whole new category of bathroom accessories.

A similar thing happened with Vanilla Pepsi. I finally found the
proper mixture of cola, carbonation, and taste and was pledging my
loyalty to Pepsi by listening to Michael Jackson records and watching
old Joan Crawford movies, when they cut me off cold-turkey. I protested
the bait-and-switch like a true Southerner and turned to Royal Crown
Cola. It’s hair tonic today and Bug Be Gone tomorrow. Packaged
groceries are shrinking in size, trusted brands are disappearing from
the shelves, and somehow the Watson’s Girl just doesn’t sound as sexy
in her new incarnation as the Family Leisure Woman.

That’s why, ever since the age of awareness, I have tried to be
cautious of developing brand loyalties. But then I’m not like other
people, if only for the fact that I put my pants on two legs at a time.
Always have. I sit at the edge of the bed, britches in hand, rock back,
place both legs in at once, and spring to my feet fully trousered. I
figure it saves me 15 to 20 seconds a day, which may not seem like
much, but accumulated over many years it gives me an extra few hours at
the end of my life to mess around. That sort of thinking, plus a few
college advertising classes, made me cognizant of tricks used by image
peddlers who know that if they hook you young enough on their product,
they’ve got you for life. Joe Camel was no accident. Neither were
subliminal images contained within advertising, mostly in popular
magazines. I saw devil heads painted into ice cubes in liquor ads
without actually having to drink the stuff. I once considered
advertising as a career until I realized I’d be lying for a living, and
had I wanted to do that, I would have gone to law school. Over the
years, I cast away the brand-name products for common sense, but there
was a time when brand preferences went a long way in determining social
acceptance.

The Watson’s Girl

In junior high, trying to be cool, we created a self-imposed,
official outfit and became slaves to fashion and brand names. I wore
Oxford-cloth Gant, button-down shirts in white, blue, yellow, or pink,
H-I-S slacks in navy or khaki, Burlington Gold Cup socks, and Bass
Weejuns. Upon enlightenment, I shed the “uniform” for simpler garb: a
light-blue workshirt, bell bottom jeans, and chukka boots. Then one day
I looked around and realized everyone was wearing exactly the same
outfit and that I was in uniform again.

Back when American cars were the world’s standard, they produced the
fiercest brand loyalties. Beginning in 1934, my grandfather owned one
long series of Buicks for his entire life. My first car was a Pontiac
Tempest Le Mans ragtop, and I loved it dearly. I had read in one of my
big sister’s Teen magazines that a gentleman should keep a scarf
in the glove compartment so his female passengers wouldn’t mess up
their hair when the top was down. I had a variety of colors. After a
few hundred trips back and forth from Knoxville, however, I began to
notice something known within the industry as “planned
obsolescence.”

After an angst-ridden stretch in a doomed 1969 Mercury Cougar and a
stripped-down, short-lived VW bus, I opted for an alternating group of
Hondas and Datsun/Nissans, the last of which I drove for 10 years. In
the cola wars, I prefer to drink whatever is on sale. I am very fond of
the Fender electric guitar, although I have owned others, but I have
played the same cracked, hollow-body Gibson acoustic for 47 years. To
power my home stereo, I still use the Marantz amplifier I bought for
$75 from my former college roommate in 1972. That was a good deal, but
the one I’m not so proud of was selling a 1962 Fender Stratocaster to
Buddy Davis for $175. He was a good guitarist, I wasn’t, and I thought
he could make better use of it. That same guitar is worth over $12,000
today.

As I have aged, my brand loyalties have dropped away one by one:
Ultrabright toothpaste, Mennen Speed Stick, English Leather, any razor
of any type, and since I’ve been married, Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine and
Sweet Sue Chicken and Dumplings. I have no favorite football team,
although I can’t say the same for basketball, and I always root for the
hometown, as difficult as it sometimes gets. I hate cell phones and I
refuse to text because that’s essentially typing on the phone. I’ve
entered the digital age but saved my record albums, and yes, I’ll
probably end up buying the newly mastered Beatles albums for the fifth
time.

All it takes to make me happy these days is a box of real Kleenex
with aloe and my remaining three undying brand loyalties which
perfectly illustrate my priorities: Charmin Ultra, Jockey, and the
Democratic Party.

Anyone who has ever waited for their team’s game to be televised, while an already decided contest bogs down into

a parade of free throws and timeouts, knows the frustration of watching 30 seconds on the scoreboard turn into 10 minutes of futility. During the game’s first 39 minutes or so, a personal foul is considered an infraction, both for the individual player and the team — something that’s supposed to produce a penalty. Yet in the final minute, a foul is encouraged and rewarded by stopping the action and giving the losing team the chance to steal a victory through, essentially, breaking the rules. It transforms a team game into an individual free-throw-shooting contest, and worst of all for television, it is intensely boring. It’s time for a rule change.

Other rule changes have benefited the game. I can recall when the dunk was illegal, and any player the referee believed was a little too aggressive around the rim could have his shot waved off. The slam dunk electrified the game when it was finally permitted, but the strategy changed from shooting a jump shot or layup to throwing the ball underneath to Shaq and letting him break the backboard. To correct this imbalance, the three-point shot was added to reward the long jumper and reclaim the game from the behemoths beneath the basket. Now, the excitement of a timely three-pointer rivals the dunk.

The shot clock sped up the game and ended the strategy of stalling and sitting on a lead. No one knows the pain of holding season tickets for a team whose game plan is to hold the ball for extended periods of time and only shoot if it’s a layup more than the fans of the Memphis Tigers during the mid-1960s. Moe Iba, who was hired because he was the son of the legendary Coach Hank Iba, proved that none of his father’s success wore off on him by routinely producing games with final scores of, say, 27-24. In the process, he ruined the career of Memphis prep star Mike Butler, who, with the proper coaching, might have been something akin to Pete Maravich. But the fans endured until Iba was finally shown the door, and the shot-clock made certain that such an abomination would never happen again. The excitement returned. The problem was fixed. Now, it’s time to address the game’s final flaw: the excruciating, final-second foul-fest and crawl to the finish.

These last-minute touch fouls that stop the action and turn games into the Bataan Death March should be called by the refs as what they are: intentional fouls. Just because a foul doesn’t knock somebody down, it’s still committed intentionally — with the purpose of stopping the action. Rather than put the fouled player at the free-throw line for a one-and-one, change the rule to make every non-shooting or open-court foul in the final minute an intentional foul and give the offended team an automatic two free throws. Or better still, do what they do in soccer: When a foul occurs in the open field, the offense just throws the ball back in and play continues. If there’s no reward for fouling, the action goes on and the losing team actually has to play defense and sink their three-pointers.

The better team should win, and no basketballer who plays his heart out for 40 minutes should have a game rest on his free throw, unless he was fouled in the act of shooting. I don’t believe Dr. Naismith ever intended for his game to be decided at the charity stripe. And, need I add, that if this rule-change had been in effect last season, my Memphis Tigers would be the defending national champions.

Randy Haspel writes the blog “Born-Again Hippies,” where a version of this first appeared.

“Happy birthday, Osama.

We hope it’s a blast.

But cover your backside,

It might be your last.”

Doggone it. I forgot Osama bin Laden’s birthday last week, and now I’ll have to send one of those belated American Greetings e-cards. I think the NSA still forwards his correspondence.

Osama has disappeared like Howard Hughes, supposedly in the “Mad Max” region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But they ought to check out the penthouse suites in the high-rise hotels of Islamabad, just to see if anyone has tin-foiled the windows. Osama’s probably up there, kicked back with his dialysis machine and a hookah, watching a Blue-ray of Ice Station Zebra on the 50-inch flat screen he just got for a steal at the Kandahar Circuit City.

I think the cave search should be about over, now that Osama is the hero of the Muslim world and could be given shelter and protection just about anywhere. I noticed that no one has yet ventured a claim to the $100 million that was offered by the Bush regime, “Dead or Alive,” for his capture. His devotees are busy celebrating the 57th birthday of a sick man who has been fighting in the mountains since the 1980s. He’s been the subject of a supposedly intense, worldwide manhunt and has already lived 15 years longer than Elvis.

Al-Qaeda’s stated objectives for their attacks on the U.S. were to draw the nation into their apocalyptic visions of worldwide jihad, entrap the military in an extended guerrilla war across rugged terrain, and drain the nation’s economy. I recall thinking at the time that if these lunatics believed knocking down the World Trade Center would alter our way of life, they had badly underestimated the United States. But Osama and his personal Karl Rove, Ayman al-Zawahiri, used the same playbook that worked with the Russians in the 1980s. Back then, when the Afghan mountain resistance was known as the mujahideen and were being armed and supplied by the Reagan government, we called them “freedom fighters.” The bloody and costly 10-year Soviet stalemate in Afghanistan did far more to bankrupt the Soviet Union than Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech. U.S. troops have now been in Afghanistan for eight years.

Look where Bush’s “international war on terror” has brought us: The Iraq war and the resulting atrocities have been a breeding ground for terrorist recruits like a fetid swamp for mosquitoes; 17,000 more troops have been ordered to Afghanistan to attempt to return the situation to the status quo that existed several years ago; and the American economy, in the words of Warren Buffett, “has fallen off a cliff.”

Wall Street greed, the housing debacle, and Reagan/Bush economics certainly contributed to our financial collapse, but no U.S. president in history has tried to fight two wars while simultaneously granting massive tax cuts and not requesting sacrifice from anyone but the military. Our financial institutions are in shambles, our armed forces are pushed beyond their capacity, the Taliban has returned (along with the burka), and Pakistan has granted safe haven to “suiciders” and “evildoers” in the Swat Valley, adjoining Afghanistan. One would have to surmise that in the past eight years, every one of al-Qaeda’s objectives has been met. And Osama is still alive somewhere, with his pal Ayman, carving up a birthday cake in the shape of Pakistan.

All this could never have been possible without the myopic Bush and his militaristic neocons. In fact, if al-Qaeda had hand-picked and trained their own accomplice, like a Manchurian candidate, and placed him in the U.S. presidency, they could not have found a more hapless and predictable foil than the crusader “Moe” and the other two stooges, Rummy and Cheney. To paraphrase the old country song by Roy Clark, “Thank God and Greyhound They’re Gone.”

There is still this thing called “accountability,” however, and in the name of “keeping us safe,” some evil deeds were committed in our Halliburton-sponsored war with Iraq. Somebody’s got some splainin’ to do, and someone needs to inform all the Bush lackeys screaming “executive privilege” that the executive they speak of just left town.

In addition to the “truth commission” that Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced to determine who did what in the phony, “mushroom cloud” build-up ad campaign for the Iraq war, the U.N. has just begun an investigation into the Bush kidnapping and rendition policies, stating, “The change in administration will have no effect on our decisions.” I know that Dubya wouldn’t understand irony if it hit him in the presidential library, but who would have believed that Osama bin Laden would plot and execute an attack on this country that claimed thousands of lives, and eight years later, the man facing prosecution is George Bush.

Happy birthday, Osama.

Thank you, Michael Phelps, for pointing out the most glaring hypocrisy in American life: the foolish and childish
demonization of marijuana that exists cheek-by-jowl with the romantic and seductive image of alcohol. The Olympic star is 23 years old — old enough to be responsible for his decisions — but the only misjudgment I see is that he trusted his rat bastard friends to not take cell-phone pics of him, thus proving Cindy Lauper’s warning: “Money changes everything.” Sure, pot is still against the law — another failure of my generation — but suddenly Phelps’ photo is all over the world, as if he were caught in a Chinese opium den, and he is being forced to grovel to save his sponsorships. Kellogg’s already has announced they are dumping him. If I weren’t hooked on Raisin Bran, I’d consider boycotting the company.

And all this was simply over a photo. I thought it was only illegal to possess marijuana, but Phelps is being persecuted for a picture of him smoking at some point in the past. The USA Swimming organization has suspended Phelps for three months, canceling several meet appearances and cutting off all financial support. The board’s statement could have come right out of 1968:

“This is not a situation where any anti-doping rule was violated, but we decided to send a strong message to Michael because he disappointed so many people, particularly the … kids who look up to him as a role model and a hero.”

Spoken like a true member of the 50 percent of Americans who still deny trying pot. Are those hard-won gold medals less worthy because of a bong hit? Fools! Your children already know more about it than you do. I understand that still-developing brains have no business trying any mind-altering substance. That’s why we don’t sell whiskey to children. But it’s easier for your children to get pot than alcohol, especially with the profit motive and the outlaw mystique that comes with its procurement and use. Had Phelps been photographed at the same party with a tumbler of scotch, no one would have raised an eyebrow, and that’s just asinine.

In Eric Schlosser’s book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, marijuana is cited as the largest cash crop in the country. In 2003, Schlosser wrote that “there are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in American history.” First outlawed in the states in the 1930s, a government-sponsored, anti-marijuana, disinformation campaign continued unabated until beatniks and hippies exposed it as lies and propaganda. According to Schlosser, “The war on drugs launched by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 began largely as a campaign against marijuana, organized by conservative parents’ groups.” When Reagan secretly supplied the Contras in Nicaragua with weapons, we now know those supposedly empty CIA planes came back to this country filled with cocaine, which, depending on who you ask, created the nationwide crack epidemic. Yet, the know-less-than-nothing Reagan began his “war on drugs” on a weed that grows wild on almost every continent. He might as well have declared war on kudzu.

The cultivation of marijuana is now an American industry. It is estimated that 3 million people grow it. Entire counties in Northern California have been given over to pot farming, and the legalization of medical marijuana has not just brought relief to sufferers of a variety of maladies, from glaucoma to symptoms of AIDS, it has made pot as easy to obtain as a pizza. But marijuana laws in other states, particularly in the South, are as draconian as ever.

Ohio State University scientists have recently shown that marijuana has the capacity to reduce memory impairment in the aging brain, and those few who still claim that pot is a “gateway” to more dangerous substances have yet to discover that the gateway leads to a bag of Fritos and a Snickers bar. Wouldn’t it be something if there were a movement under way to reeducate the public and decriminalize, regulate, and tax marijuana? Well, there is.

Representatives Barney Frank and Ron Paul have introduced two bipartisan bills: H.R.5842 allows the states to decide to decriminalize or allow medical marijuana without interference from federal authority; and H.R.5843 — officially called “The Act to Reform Federal Penalties for the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults” — would end the criminal prosecution of Americans in possession of 100 grams or less, which would be considered personal use.

The Marijuana Policy Project states that marijuana arrests “outnumber arrests for all violent crimes combined,” yet I never heard of anyone who held up a liquor store because he was out of pot. With all the problems on the new president’s shoulders, marijuana reform is probably a low priority. But if President Obama is looking for new and profitable businesses, he need look no further than California, where an already burgeoning marijuana trade, if properly regulated, just might take a bite out of the national debt. This is one project that is literally “shovel ready.”

Randy Haspel writes the blog Born-AgainHippies, where a version of this first appeared.