Author: Ron Hart

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

The holiday parties are over, and my liver is taking a much-needed break. As I get older, the parties get more and more formal and the cops are called less and less. I guess we’re growing up. Unfortunately, I am a painfully punctual person. When someone is perpetually late, I interpret it as an attempt to imply that he is more important than me. That’s silly, if you think about it. Time is a finite thing: 7 p.m. is a real, quantifiable thing, not a concept or a theory. And getting there on time is good business.

But promptness is not good for parties. When I get there on time I often catch my friends pouring the cheap $15 vodka into empty $45 Gray Goose bottles. I have no problem with that. If the pretentious snobs who feel they need to drink expensive liquor cannot immediately tell a difference when they are served house brands, then they deserve what they get.

But parties are not just a great way to get rid of your cheap booze; you also get to be with friends. Or at least it used to be that way. Today, it seems, folks are having parties with an agenda. Unfortunately, the more muckety-muck the party, the more showy, well-mannered, and boring it is.

One article of faith among the blue-blooded, done-nothing class is that they will do anything to avoid the truth in polite cocktail conversation. The reason is that the truth is upsetting. It reminds them of the reality that they are so desperately trying to avoid by drinking only with folks like themselves. As an alternative, flattery always seems to work, no matter how obsequious. I was talking to a rich yet homely heiress on New Year’s Eve. You know the type: When you have to look at her, there is no safe place to rest your eyes. A social climber rescued me by coming up and saying how pretty she looked. I used the diversion to excuse myself to the bar.

Which leads to another pointer: If you attend a cocktail party, always have a drink in your hand. On the surface it seems counterintuitive, but if you do not drink at a party, then it is assumed that you must be an alcoholic. So just to quell the rumors that you are a drunk, you really must drink publicly.

Another interesting trend I have noticed as I get older is the escalating number of gay men escorting good-looking, rich, married women to parties and other social occasions. Shades of Will & Grace, absent the laugh lines, unfortunately. But such relationships make all the sense in the world, if you think about it. After 20 years of marriage, most couples have little left to say to each other. The men do not want to discuss hair styles, Brad Pitt, Oprah, gossip, or anything remotely to do with fabrics. If only we husbands could have a gay guy do our cuddling and shopping for us, it would be perfect. Also, from the husband’s point of view, a gay male friend for his wife buys him precious male-bonding time — fishing, hunting, golfing, and drinking — drinking being the common thread that makes all of these activities appealing.

This new dynamic may be one where everyone wins. My wife is always saying that I don’t listen to her, or something like that. (I think she said that, but I am not really sure.) On the other hand, the gay men escorting these women seem to be great listeners. So this is a splendid arrangement: The gay guy gets to dress up and go to nice parties; the woman has a doting friend who actually listens to her and gets genuinely excited about her dress; and the husbands can go do the mindless dumb things that they do, unencumbered by guilt. Win, win, win! The trifecta of an easy transition into the latter years of marriage.

It has gotten so hard to be married that it now often takes three or four interested parties to make it work. But considering the collateral damage that divorce leaves in its wake, we should do whatever it takes.

Ron Hart worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. His e-mail:RevRon10@aol.com.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Billie-Jo Miller | Dreamstime.com

It was with great good fortune that I got to spend Thanksgiving near Boca Grande, a beautiful island off the Florida coast. Granted, it’s nowhere near the Galapagos Islands, but all the wildlife here still makes one think of the wonders of nature and man’s relationship to it.

Boca Grande (also called “Gasparilla” Island, which loosely translated means light-skinned and very rich) is overrun with iguanas, which are nasty-looking lizards. They eat plant life and hang around people’s homes looking really, really ugly. This problem all started with some crazy rich lady on the island who decided to raise a few of these nasty docile creatures as pets. I guess she thought they were cute. It’s the same way Kevin Federline got to Malibu.

The unfortunate thing about nature is that the most vile creatures tend to breed at an alarming rate, and again I reference Kevin Federline’s short two-baby marriage to Britney Spears. The iguanas of Boca Grande are also apparently going at it like rabbits, and now they are all over the island. In response, the residents voted to hire a trapper and other pest-riddance entrepreneurs to kill the iguanas in hopes of slowing their population growth. I saw one of these trapper guys in downtown Boca Grande, and I had to go talk to him. The one thing I have learned on this earth is if you get a chance to talk to a gent who chases varmints for a living, you just have to stop what you are doing and savor the moment.

Indeed, I knew we would get along as soon as I read the sign on his 10-year-old truck which advertises that he is both an animal trapper and a taxidermist. You would not think these two skills would be transferable, but this guy is a modern-day Renaissance man. I jokingly asked him if there was anything that he would not mount. He, in a clearly much rehearsed but still self-amused manner, said, “Well, I would never mount a man’s wife, unless, of course, she is game!”

After that, I felt like I had to buy the guy a beer at a local haunt called the Temptation. And, if you can imagine this, the trapper-taxidermist really likes to drink. After explaining to me the events leading up to about 17 of his 25 scars, we discussed how the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida (ARFF) and PETA (which I think stands for People Entirely Too Angst-y) have come to the island to fight the slaughter of innocent iguanas. The island residents and PETA differ in their approach to this. Islanders want to capture and freeze the iguanas at the cost of $20 per lizard. PETA, on the other hand, wants to capture, provide housing, union job training, and food stamps for the lizards until they can register them as Democratic voters.

This issue brings to light the classic paradox of wealthy human families. The Economic Engine who made the money to afford the beach house is usually tough and conservative. Next in the life cycle come the soft and often directionless kids who were sent to liberal schools and stand for everything their parents don’t. These offspring find silly causes to demonstrate the compassion they think their parents lack. It’s a case of biting the hand that feeds them — if only they ate meat.

My conversation with the trapper continued. I asked him about various animals and how they behaved. It was like watching an Animal Channel documentary produced by Playboy. Most of his insight into animals tended to focus on their mating habits, much like the articles in People magazine.

He told me of a recent study that determined that male apes seek out the oldest female they can find to mate with. We both were confounded by this. Yet, on the bright side, it is the strongest evidence yet that modern man did not evolve from apes.

Human women are attracted to different traits in males than female apes are. Fortunately for males on Boca Grande, chief among those traits are a boat and a beach house. There is no recorded history of female gorillas being attracted to male gorillas for this reason, if you do not count Maria Shriver.

My suggestion for the islanders to rid themselves of the iguanas in short order would be to send free bus fare to some good-ole-boy hunters from my home state of Tennessee and put them up at the Gasparilla Inn for a few days. Not only would the island be lizard-free, it would soon be PETA-activist-free as well.

Ron Hart is a columnist and investor in Atlanta. He worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. His e-mail: RevRon10@aol.com.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Post-Mortem

Thankfully the election is over. The Republicans got voted out by an electorate mad at their spending and corruption. Ironically, Republicans lost for acting like Democrats.

It was not so much that the Democrats won as the Republicans lost. A Democrat friend explained it to me this way: “We feel like we were in a room and our parents were so mad at our older brother that they were screaming at him. So we just walked out of the room.” In short, I am not sure there were any winners in this election — certainly not the taxpayers. And now, since they won, we might actually get to see the Democrats’ much ballyhooed plan for victory in Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld stepped down as secretary of defense after the election, fading into history with the legacy that he has, not the legacy he wanted. George Bush, flexing his remaining strength as president, immediately nominated his dad’s ex-CIA director, Robert Gates, easily beating out Nancy Pelosi’s choice of Cindy Sheehan.

Democrats said that Bush is a disengaged president. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, he was on top of everything in the Oval Office. Smelling victory and a chance to get out of the house, he even made some calls to people’s homes asking them for votes. I know it was Bill Clinton because when a husband picked up the phone, Clinton would instinctively hang up.

The new Democratic majority hopefully will fulfill campaign promises. The Republicans found that you can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think. I hope the Democrats do a better job with their win by enacting just two items:

1) Eliminate budget earmarks. These are those clandestine spending add-ons that provide pork in congressmen’s home districts. There were 16,500 earmarks in spending bills in 2005, costing the taxpayers $50 billion. The real cost, according to Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, is “probably 10 times higher.” Pork is Congress’ barter system. In fact, congressmen no longer pay hookers in cash; they just get a bridge funded for them.

2) Lobbyist and campaign-finance reform. Spending by lobbyists in D.C. has tripled in the last eight years. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform ban on “soft money” was a joke. It just moved money from political parties to the sleazy and less accountable underworld of “nonprofits.” If congressmen were smart, they would deregulate campaign-finance reform and allow unlimited donations to parties as long as it is disclosed quickly. That way, at least, we know who is buying our politicians.

Pelosi could muster some immediate credibility by actually proposing clear-cut bills addressing the aforementioned issues. But she will probably come up with some confusing law, perhaps combining gun control with ethics — like a one-week waiting period before you buy a congressman.

The Democrats have chosen New Orleans for their 2008 convention, trying to embarrass the Republicans over the president’s pathetic Katrina response. Pelosi was recently in downtown New Orleans where a commercial for the Democrats was shot — along with three cameramen. The race card is already being shuffled for the 2008 elections. Democrat Charles Rangel insulted Mississippi, and the Republicans are so indifferent to race that they reelected Mississippi senator Trent Lott to the position of “minority whip.” Oops.

For the Republicans, the uneasy alliance of the religious right and libertarians has begun to unravel. The intrusive social agenda of the theocrats sent us minimal-government libertarians packing. But we are packed with no place to go. Our Republican Party, hijacked by the big-government neo-cons, is no longer familiar to us. The only thing we agreed on — tax cuts — stands as the lone accomplishment of this administration.

Now, with the stock market at record highs, interest rates at near-record lows, unemployment the lowest in decades, the economy sound and growing, Pelosi and the Democrats want to take us in a “new direction.” I guess it is no longer “the economy, stupid”?

Ron Hart is a columnist and investor in Atlanta. He worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. His e-mail is RevRon10@aol.com.

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News

Ministers Do More Than Laypeople.

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction“ — Blaise Pascal

My great grandfather was a Methodist minister in the South. He had a sense of humor, and his rural congregants loved him. When a parishioner suggested he ask God for rain to relieve a drought, he told the individual that he would if he could but that he was in sales, not operations!

It seems today that the era of the humble minister is long gone, replaced by televangelists and mega-church “charismatics” who are all business. Many of them take themselves very seriously, are overtly political, and do not lead by example. As a result, they seem to be losing touch with those of their followers who are not zealots. Truly, religion has been Swaggart, Haggard and Bakkered of late, and as a result, trivialized. (And this doesn’t count the priest who ex-Foley-ated a future congressman on a boys’ camping trip.)

The troubles of Reverend Ted Haggard, the disgraced former head of the National Association of Evangelicals and founding pastor of a 14,000-member Colorado Springs mega-church, are emblematic of the problems facing contemporary evangelic churches. These huge churches choose their pastors based on charisma, marketing sense, and their ability to be trusted with sensitive personal information. It’s much the same way Tom Cruise picks a wife.

After denying that he ever met the gay escort who says he had a three-year relationship with the reverend, Haggard finally confessed. But really, who among us has not summoned a gay male prostitute to our hotel room for a massage and to score a little methamphetamine using church money? As Jay Leno pointed out, “You talk about robbing Paul to pay for Peter!”

My guess is that Reverend Ted plays the fake-addiction card and goes to drunk camp for 30 days, then comes out all cured of his gayness and ready to preach again. There is nothing the pious like to do more than to forgive someone, as it makes them feel superior.

There are some who pray on their knees on Sunday and then prey on others the rest of the week. And in my view, there is no bigger crime than to get someone’s trust, using the fear of God, then to take advantage of them. There’s a special place in hell reserved for these folks.

If you are going to set out lofty goals for your flock, you have to be an example for them to follow. These men of the loincloth do untold damage to religion. Those who live by the sword often die by it. And in these cases, they really should have left their sword in their pants.

The church has done so much good for so many over the years. It is there to relieve anxiety, comfort the afflicted, and provide a sense of community. It is human nature to want to be loved. And some are even willing to join a hate group to get it. Yet is equally wrong for some liberals to vilify all churchgoers as dumb white trash, devoid of logical thought.

What makes Haggard a national story is his hypocrisy, in that he fought to keep gays from wedlock. His best chance to get out of hot water with the other evangelicals is by making the case that he just slept with a dude — he didn’t marry him!

It has been my experience that men who spend an inordinate amount of time persecuting gays are often fighting their own insecurities, which are bubbling near the surface. Secure men — even though we may not like to think about the mechanics of gay sex — do not persecute gays.

I’ve concluded that gays are pre-wired homosexual. Folks, you just don’t “catch” gay. So, since God is responsible for the pre-wiring, how can it be so damnable if done between consenting adults? If He made them that way, then Christian logic would follow that they too are children of God. When churchgoing people react with such hate, it makes me wonder just what sort of Christians they are.

Not only are churches becoming more political, they now aggressively teach sexual abstinence. When I was growing up, they never taught such things. Folks in my church would have blushed even talking about it. The way I learned abstinence was the old fashion way — dating a Catholic girl.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Dreamstime.com PhotoEuphoria

The Internet has brought with it much joy and heartache since Al Gore single-handedly created it (and recently, when Mark Foley apparently often used it single-handedly as well).

Kids and adults have had their interpersonal skills either heightened or dulled by the Internet.

My parents recently lost a friend to the Internet’s reach. Their 71-year-old next-door neighbor was able to reconnect with his high school girlfriend once he finally learned to use his dial-up Internet. After finding her on Classmates.com and e-mailing her for two years, he came in one day and announced to his wife of 45 years that he was leaving her. My parents told me of this with sadness, and my response was that they should look at the bright side: It would have happened sooner if he had sprung for DSL.

I wonder what the net effect of getting to know each other via virtual communication will be on teenagers. In my day, we awkwardly learned about sex the old fashioned way — trial and error, mostly the latter in my case.

I would like to take this opportunity to officially and publicly apologize to the first five women I dated. It had to have been a terrible experience, and for that, I am very sorry. Liquored up and in the back seat of a Monte Carlo with a Landau roof is no way to have your first romantic experience. I understand that now.

Back then we had dates. We went out and we talked and we later married somebody — either by choice or because they were pregnant. It seems today, if there is a bright spot, it is that fewer girls are getting knocked up by idiot guys. (This remarkable 20-year trend may have been reversed recently by Kevin Federline.)

My first date was like something out of a sitcom. There were a lot of reasons a girl would not go out with me, chief among them being that my scrawny and bowlegged appeal was very limited. Imagine Napoleon Dynamite without the nunchucks skills, cool clothes, or the ability to dance. Yet, around my sophomore year, I somehow began to play my cards right with the ladies. Up until that point, I had played a lot of solitaire.

That was when I finally did find a girl that would be my Beta test for dating. I set my goals low and continued to lower them until this one girl went out with me. There are a couple of things you would probably never hear this girl say: One was “I will not go out with him” and the other was “checkmate.”

It is a wonderful thing when a young male’s inhibitions and standards are lowered to such an optimal level. I would like to mention the young woman’s name, but through her attorneys, I have been admonished not to ever publicly identify her.

So, unlike kids today, I got dressed up and picked her up for a nice dinner out. I cannot recall exactly when or why I decided that a plaid suit with eight-inch lapels would be a good choice for a first date, but pictures taken at the time have, sadly, well-documented the haute couture atrocity.

We went to the nicest place in my town, which seemingly was where everyone who had a sports coat was that night. We may or may not have had some Blue Nun wine that I scored, but we did dance to the strains of a $150 band’s rendition of “China Grove.”

She admittedly did not like me at first, but I sensed that over time she might develop a tolerant indifference toward me. But eventually we had trust issues. We broke up when I caught her lying — under another guy.

Yet we had a terrific time dating, which leads me to wonder how my interpersonal skills would have developed differently if the Internet existed back then — or whether I would have developed any interpersonal skills at all! I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to date, given the “virtual dating” opportunities the Internet presents to a young male.

Kids today seem to be mortified to actually have personal contact with another of their ilk. Instead of face-to-face encounters, many devote hours to developing personal Web sites on social-networking sites, where they reveal intimate information about themselves that they would never share with someone in person. Long-term, this cannot be healthy.

For all of us, with or without the Internet, youth is an awkward time. I just question how it will affect this generation.

Ron Hart is a columnist and investor in Atlanta. He was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. His e-mail: RevRon10@aol.com

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Opinion Viewpoint

Is There a Doctor Under the House?

My oldest just left for Vanderbilt University. (She went there because she likes to attend homecoming games and Vandy plays in every SEC school’s homecoming.) As a friend who played football for Vanderbilt said, “If there is one thing you learn to recognize as a football player here, it is a homecoming float.”

So we planned a nice trip to New York City together to spend some father/daughter time before she left. I always look for life-lessons to show my kids (usually over their objections), and an interesting one occurred while we were in Manhattan.

Near where we were staying, a doctor blew up his $9 million Upper East Side brownstone so his divorcing wife could not get it. Oh yeah, he was in the house when he did it and was buried in the rubble. I guess he showed her.

The demented doctor really loved his home and hated his ex-wife for trying to take it from him. Within minutes, the smoldering scene was on national TV with all the sensational details. It just so happened that talk-show host and centenarian Larry King was in the neighborhood and was awkwardly reporting on it for CNN. Larry is used to sitting on the set, half asleep, listening to Liz Taylor or Barbara Eden drone on about their feelings, but he was thrown into the heat of the battle reporting on this news event.

Larry said that the explosion was the “loudest blast that he had ever heard.” (The staff of his show, many of whom have worked in close proximity to Larry for years, disagreed.) Ironically, King, who has had about 34 wives at last count, was the one forced to do the reporting on this divorce-driven event. Larry just loves that new-wife smell, and clearly Viagra and his TV fame have kept him in the game well past the public’s comfort level.

Larry, like many Americans, enjoys getting married much more than being married. Too many people marry for idealistic reasons. In reality, marriage (for men) is our actual last chance to grow up. Marriage is not a natural state for men, and we are often pressured into it. Women are genetically conditioned to want a big wedding, and they feel the pressure until that is done. Men, as a gender, are not much — and women tend to over-think us. Deep down we are really shallow. We certainly don’t care about a wedding. There is a reason that there is no such thing as Modern Groom magazine.

A perfect marriage is an idealistic thing. The actual day-to-day of marriage is quite a real thing. Confusion between the two usually results in what happened to the demolished doctor and to Larry King. You never want to go through divorce if you can avoid it. Ask any wise person: Everyone loses. We Americans are too quick to throw in the towel. We see Hollywood divorces after two years of marriage, and both people are remarried before the divorce is final.

Now I love being married — just ask my wife. And I would never divorce, as I am not up to disappointing another woman. Yet divorce happens with way too much frequency. Most of the time the couple is trading one set of problems for another.

I had a dear friend who went through a divorce once. It was terrible, and I lived it with him. It was a starter marriage of two years, and it went before a judge (something else that you do not want to do). At the end of the trial, the judge delivered his final ruling to my buddy in open court: “I have decided to give your wife $700 a month in alimony in this case. Do you have any questions?”

My buddy looked at him and said: “Judge, that is so good of you, and I will try to kick in some money myself when I can.”

Some folks just do not need to be married.

So I have sought to lower my daughter’s expectations of men, in hopes that she will not be disappointed. I think I have done my part.

Ron Hart is a columnist and investor in Atlanta. He worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander.