America needs a pope of its own

(564 words)

The tour de force Pope Francis visit was such a wild success it has me wondering why we in America don’t have a pope of our very own.

I’m thinking David Letterman.

Didn’t you feel better about humanity this week knowing it could still produce at least one prominent man or woman capable of speaking simple truths in simple sentences?

The reaction to his congressional address was especially telling. Did you hear them react when he gently admonished members it might be beneficial to practice the Golden Rule?

You’d have thought he’d have just shared with them an alchemic formula on how to turn acorns into diamonds.

They went, er, nuts!

Need a refresher? Here you go . . .

“Do unto others as you’d have others do unto yourselves.”

Maybe we should skip the next presidential election and send all our politicians back to kindergarten.

He reminded those of us who don’t have shareholder stakes in Native American casino riches, “We, the people of this continent, do not fear foreigners because at one time most of us were foreigners.”

I think that’s the line that caused Trump to strike him from VP shortlist consideration.

I couldn’t help but wonder how Pope Benedict felt about all the adulation we bestowed on his successor.

I have to think he’d be at least a bit morose. Benedict was a fine pope, sure, but Francis is a rock star, albeit with nuns instead of groupies, to use just one example.

It’s human nature to not want your successor to outshine you. I imagined he was in some Rome bar telling girls, “Big deal. You know, I used to be pope, too.”

Really, the man Francis most reminds me of is Fred Rogers.

He said the same things Francis says — be kind, be faithful, be generous, be fair, be not afraid — to children.

Francis was saying the same childish message but was directing is straight at increasingly childish adults.

Today, we no longer have Fred Rogers.

Today, we have Kanye.

I think that’s why the pope’s visit was such a sensation. He told us all the things that have been in our hearts all along, stuff that just gets buried beneath all the unseemly clutter of trying to survive.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how long the message will stick before it’s drowned out by shrill din of our ever-coarsening society.

That’s why I figure Letterman might be a good choice for American pope.

He’s funny, has sensible Midwestern values and can be profound without being complicated.

Sure, he’d have some concerns about that silly papal celibacy rule, but there’s no need to enforce that for a secular sort of pope.

But we need someone who can every once in a while do like Pope Francis did: just come out and remind us it’s okay to be kind, to be good, and to treat one another with love and understanding.

Maybe what America needs today isn’t a pope, but a parent, someone to remind us how civility suits us. This might be especially salient during the presidential primary season.

Let’s be thankful for this great pope’s message and let us try and keep it alive and pass it on to our children.

And let’s be grateful this well-meaning idea for a selecting a secular pope didn’t strike us back when Bill Cosby would have been the perfect candidate.

Related . . .

Pope retiring! To do what?

The papal butler did it

The Pope & The King (Happy Birthday Elvis!)

Bird watching in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

Calculating kindness: 65 free books

Prank phone calls, now and then

The girls roared with laughter as their devilish pranks confused the sweet old woman on the receiving end of the call.

They were reveling in their first prank phone calls, a malicious pastime that delights one party while it mostly infuriates the other.

Me, I stood back overcome by a misty wave of nostalgia for the distant glory days of the prank phone call. 

I’m not a ashamed to admit it, I was a master.

I used to entertain for hours my friends with the wit, daring and redundant drive of my drunken midnight phone calls to sleepy friends, impatient businesses and anyone foolish enough to have listed telephone numbers.

Alas, it’s a day that’ll never return.

This was clear because the only person our daughters could get away with pranking was my white-haired mother and the only pranks they could conceive were ones involving current pop stars or famous men and women who sound nothing like girls ages 9 and 4.

And they kept using terms of familiarity the alleged callers never would.

“Hello, Nana! This is President Obama!”

That was the 4 year old, who sounds nothing remotely like President Obama.

Of course, my mother reacted with delight to the names she recognized -- Elvis, Oprah and Jesus Christ (and what an auspicious trinity of callers!) -- but was mostly confused when my 9 year old called back four or five times within four or five minutes purporting to be Kevin Jonas, Zac Efron, Hannah Montana, Ryan Seacrest and Selena Gomez.

I didn’t want to ruin their fun by telling them about the good old days. That was before caller ID.

If it sounds like I’m disparaging that technological advance I don’t mean to.

I think caller ID, or as I call it “the in-law detector,” is one of man’s greatest inventions.

Thanks to caller ID, I can avoid awkward conversations with fathers-in-law, sisters-in-law and any friends-in-law who I’m sure likewise loath making microscopic small talk with me, too.

But with every advance, there is a retreat. Caller ID has made it impossible to go anonymously crashing into the lives of distant strangers for mischievous fun.

Used to do it all the time.

“Hello! This is David Letterman Where have I reached?”

The real David Letterman used to start hundreds of random phone conversations with those very words. And people were delighted to talk to the famous late night talk host.

They were equally delighted to talk to someone merely pretending to be David Letterman, as I did on numerous occasions.

Some would hang up after a few minutes. Some would talk so long that me and my audience would get bored. We’d expose the prank and begin insulting the intelligence of the target.

Then one of two things would happen. One, the person would get quiet and sad sounding. Then I’d turn into Dr. Phil before anyone knew Dr. Phil. I’d dig to the root of what was really bothering them.

It was amazing how many people would open up to a total stranger about their inner most problems, even when the stranger had already been exposed as a giddy fraud.

It was fascinating. As these were uniformly Ohio University college students we were calling, the problem usually involved the opposite sex. I would tell them, “Hey, cheer up. This is Athens, Ohio. You’re bound to get laid in a week or two!”

Even better was when, and this happened frequently, we’d land someone with anger management issues.

I remember explosions of fury at our daring interruptions. It’s when I first began to learn just how stupid some people are. Typical was this shouted response:

“Come over here! Come to my house! I’ll kill you! I’ll rip your @%&$-ing head off!”

Any person with a self-preservational bent like myself would never respond to such a hostile invitation. It would be suicide.

So instead, cocooned in our anonymity, I’d say, “I’ll be there in 20 minutes. I’ll be wearing a Domino’s pizza uniform and I’m going to kick  . . . your  . . . ass!”

I'd hang up and my friends and I would wrestle with the morality of dialing Domino’s and having a pizza delivered to that address, but none of us could live with the result of sending a hapless delivery man to face certain annihilation.

So we just put a big star by the guy’s number so we’d remember to call back, much later, much drunker.

Had that happened today, thanks to caller ID,  that same man would track me down and I’d be just another sad statistic in this age of rage.

The girls’ calls had me thinking a lot about those nights. I remember the glee animating my one friend when he talked about a then-distant day when the camera phone would revolutionize prank phone calls.

“Imagine in the future when people with camera phones will be able to call other people with camera phones. They’ll answer and all they’ll see on their phone is a giant butt!”

Do that now and your ass will wind up being ridiculed on Facebook pages around the world.

If it already isn’t. Social networking is rife with stories of stumbling innocents betrayed by a bystander with a camera phone.

Alas, we’ve eliminated the middle man. 

Most of our most vicious pranks are now the ones we play on ourselves.

Leno again-o: why critics are wrong

I feel so many pressures to opine on important social issues that it pains me whenever I have to stoop to trivial pop matters. But the blown calls on Jay Leno’s return compel me to speak up.

Let’s cut to the chase:

In two weeks/two months/two years, it will be like it was before Conan moved to The Tonight Show. Jay will still be on top by margins large enough to madden Letterman and his supporters.

Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel will continue to perform to numbers equivalent to large family reunions and Craig Ferguson will quietly continue to put on the best show of the whole bunch.

And people who like third or fourth ranked Conan will continue to be furious that the rest of us don’t appreciate his apparent genius.

We live in times of such jaded partisanship we feel forced to take sides in silly talk show wars. Really, who cares?

I guess most late night viewers are like me in that they aren’t. I usually start dozing off after a 1993 Seinfeld rerun I’ve already seen 49 times and still enjoy.

If I’m insomniac enough to watch anything I enjoy watching Jay. He does about three times the number of jokes that Dave does and most of them make me laugh.

But I’ve not sworn a cult-like allegiance to him. If Dave has better guests or has made news for something in his unseemly personal life to make him even crankier than usual I’ll tune in.

Late night is no longer something we all need to see to get the jokes the next morning around the water cooler. For that we have the internet.

That’s why I shake my head at the predominating criticism of Leno’s return.

“Oh! He told Cheney jokes. He told Tiger jokes. How gauche!”

Listen, if you revived sainted Johnny Carson and set him behind the desk, he’d be joking about the same topics.

It’s what they all do. I’d be disappointed if they didn’t.

Johnny wasn’t revered because he was cutting edge. He was revered because he had the spotlight all to himself and was at ease in the role.

After Steve Allen invented the gig, no one’s been cutting edge since Letterman and Letterman hasn’t been cutting edge since 1992.

The hostility all the other hosts unleashed on Jay didn’t surprise me either. It galls them that they just can’t beat him.

It must make these maladjusted hosts nervous to know that, even after all the Leno bashing, executives at every network would throw them aside in an instant if they knew they could get Jay.

That’s why Conan was bounced. Go ahead and blame weak lead-ins, etc., but he failed to deliver any substantial audience over seven months, dog years in TV programming. They could have given him a year and it wasn’t going to get any better because -- and here’s a little secret -- the guy’s just not that funny.

He can’t interview. His jokes are no better than decent and his sole genius seems to be the ability to project shrill facial gymnastics while doing bizarre mime impressions involving his nipples.

Rely on too much on those dubious skills, as Conan does, and you’ll alienate as many viewers as you impress. Ask Jim Carrey.

This will infuriate Conan fans who have become like devotees of tedious jam bands. They’ll argue that we don’t recognize the sheer brilliance of the composition and if we’d just give it another 18 minutes we’d appreciate the pop.

They don’t understand that most of us are perfectly satisfied with the snappy time it takes Tom Petty to sing “American Girl.”

To me the man who looks the worst in all this is Howard Stern. He was telling Harry Smith that the thought of Leno makes him vomit and that he prefers Letterman because he has so much “integrity,” a word Mrs. Letterman might not have used.

And he says Leno’s Jaywalking and other comedy bits were Stern originals Leno lifted.

That last claim reminds me of a “Simpsons” episode where Krusty the Clown becomes enraged at the sight of some other hack comic doing one of his signature acts. Krusty says: “If that’s anyone but Steve Allen they’re stealing my bit!”

So there you have it. Now I hope I can get back to writing about the important stuff.

Like how the instant chickens start laying Cadbury eggs I’m going to become a chicken farmer.

Hey, that’s a pretty good line.

I wonder if Howard Stern thought of it first.

Super Bowl recap

The Super Bowl has come and gone and I’m still feeling melancholy I didn’t have a team to hate since the Dallas Cowboys were eliminated. If the Pittsburgh Steelers aren’t in it, I need someone to hate or else I’m just adrift.

The Cowboys provide for me a near perfect hatred. I hate their history, their ridiculous stadium, their owner and their no. 1 fan, George W. Bush. If they ever show Dick Cheney and Ryan Seacrest yukking it up with Jerry Jones in the owner’s box, I’ll go delirious with hatred.

Next year’s Super Bowl is scheduled to be played in the new Dallas Stadium. I hope the Steelers play the Cowboys there and that Steeler fans outnumber hometown Cowboy fans by a ratio of 4-to-1. And that the Steelers win 77-0.

What’s to hate about the great New Orleans Saints? Nothing. I’m thrilled for them, their fans and the once godforsaken city I love so much. That party is going to blend right into Mardi Gras and last a month. I haven’t felt so like dropping everything and jetting to a party that didn’t involve me since the Berlin Wall came down.

What’s to hate about the Indianapolis Colts? They are a little bland for my tastes, but bland competence is so uncommon in professional sports it should be hailed as a virtue. Plus, I love the great Peyton Manning. He’s a class act, a devoted family man and a real professional dedicated to winning with grace and style.

And I was saying those exact same things about Tiger Woods right up until November 27.

Other thoughts:

• Watching the Leno/Letterman commercial had me feeling like two old friends of mine have finally made up after a ridiculous grudge. That whole thing was so unnecessarily bitter and tawdry, especially when all the principals are earning and will continue to earn fortunes. For the record, my preference list goes like this: Leno, Craig Ferguson, Letterman, Conan and Jimmy Kimmel.

• Budweiser’s ads were hilarious. I marveled at the tens of millions of dollars it must have cost to produce and air the spots. Still, if Budweiser never aired another commercial, I doubt it would lose a single beer drinker. Budweiser’s a national habit. I’ve been drinking beer since, oh, about the fourth grade. I’ve been subjected to probably a $1 billion in ads aimed at getting me to drink Bud. It’s never worked. I drink local second, fancy import third, and what whomever’s buying first.


• In five years when the latest American Idol is performing the halftime extravaganza, we’re going to look back on this as the golden era of halftime shows. Paul McCartney, The Stones, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and, yes, The Who. It’s not that The Who was bad. It’s that they’re not right for the venue. Their best songs top out at eight or nine minutes and don’t lend themselves to snappy little renditions. Their uneven performance wasn’t a sign that they suck, it’s a sign that the networks have run out of acceptable options. Look for Jimmy Buffett next year.

• This was the second year in a row when there wasn’t a single funny monkey commercial. I am again crushed. I swear, I’d run out and buy truckloads of feminine hygiene products if a really funny monkey subliminally suggested I ought to.

• Every time they show smiling and voluptuous cheerleaders, I cheer the fact that the Pittsburgh Steelers don’t have these silly silicone distractions at our home games. Professional football’s all about ugly. How else can you explain guys like Bill Cowher getting so much face time?

• It could be argued that the commercial-vanquishing DVR is perhaps the second greatest invention of all-time behind Caller ID, or as I call it, “The In-Law Detector.” Still, if commercials were as lively as they are during the Super Bowl, I’d ditch the feature. It’s insane, but the commercials are as big as the game.

• Without ever bothering to look it up, my wife and I have wondered for years if Abe Vigoda was dead or alive. Thanks to computer animatronics and despite his ad with Betty White, I’m still not sure. And I loved The Simpsons/Coke ad.

• I still enjoy a really good college marching band, but one of the best half-time shows I’ve ever seen at a professional football game was a 10-foot baby race. I watched in horror as they rolled out the mat at mid-field and brought six infants and lined them up in their designated lanes opposite their coaxing mommies. What looked absolutely ridiculous became oddly compelling and I admit I felt small when I heard myself yelling at No. 4, “Get your diapered little ass in gear you little son of a bitch!” I don’t remember who won the game that day, but I remember the kid came in second.