Baggy Paragraphs

Something odd happened when I entered Knight’s Steak House today, for lunch, hoping to be able to define the je ne sais quoi of the place. All those pasty-faced, overweight, middle-aged patrons slugging down drinks at the bar and puffing on their après-steak-sandwich cigarettes, all that smug conventionalism and complacency, made me want to yell, “Fire!”

Not true: it made me want to yell, “The University of Michigan sucks!”

Not true: I wanted one of my companions to yell it.

Knight’s must be Ann Arbor’s ultimate townie restaurant. As a former friend put it, “It’s where all the alcoholics go because they serve the biggest drinks.”

“Smoking or nonsmoking?” the hostess asked.

“Fuming,” I said.

She smirked.

The décor is Rat Pack Chintz, and in the dummy wing, a.k.a. nonsmoking, where we were seated, the walls are wood-paneled with moldings that scrupulously matched. The windows afforded a view of Mr. Knight’s house on the adjacent property. Above our table on the wall, there was a picture of him in a red blazer, circa 1972. (Not a bad-looking guy in his early 50s.) Just as we were gaping at that, I glimpsed through the glass of the fire exit door a much older version of the same face sticking out of a furry coat in a golf cart that was just then passing into the parking lot.

We asked the impish waitress. “That’s Ray Knight. He comes in and smokes and gets pickled every day. A customer built a bridge from his house to the parking lot; it was dangerous for him to drive the golf cart out in the street.” She wrote our order on the last remnants of a long, thin notebook that she said she got from K-Mart: this was the one with dogs on the borders, but she had the two cat notebooks before that. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Our sandwiches came in a jiffy, and they were perfect, or nearly so. The waitress kept refilling our pop from a pitcher. My beef dip made me recall the first time I’d ever had one, with Teri Spires, in about 1974 when she took me to a place in Omaha’s Westgate Plaza, across Pacific Street from her old high school, and was astonished that it was indeed my first beef dip sandwich. It was many more years before I learned the term “au jus.”

We lingered a long while at our table and speculated as to what Knight’s Black Day & Night Pie could possibly be but not daring to order it. When it was time to leave, we found Ray Knight at a four-top near the bar, putting the moves on a couple of blue-hairs who were pushing eighty. As if to block the sun, he wore a black fedora with a red feather. For someone who drives a golf cart, he has a preternaturally smooth face.

One in our group remarked about the picture and exchanged some banter with him. As soon as we moved on, I expressed my desire to pull his hat down over his ears.

Not true: I wanted one of my companions to do it.

I’ve always enjoyed knowing Brits, learning from them in school, and working with them. Their style, verbal concision, decisive leadership, and encyclopedic approach to whole categories of knowledge is always impressive. And I’ve never laughed as hard as when a Brit starts up with derisive remarks and self-deprecation.

But after reading Sarah Lyall’s “The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British,” it is now clear why I’ve had little desire to travel in Britain or adopt much of the culture. I must have sensed something. Why volunteer for the misery? A Danish friend once spent a term there as a student, and I wonder how she did it; I’m seeing her soon and will ask. Lyall, a London Bureau reporter for the New York Times since the mid-1990s, observes how confused and repressed the British are. What an impossible bunch! She actually proves Lewis Carroll was a realist.

The problem seems to start with the education of the privileged. Lyall shows that practices at boarding school set the pace for all of society, whether you’re talking about unheated dorms and cold morning baths and sadistic beatings, or the friendly attentions of the upperclassman in the nearby bunk. Binge-drinking is a popular outlet, and eccentricity is another. The plight of hedgehogs in the Outer Hebrides might evoke a greater emotional response than a humanitarian cause. National institutions such as Parliament are almost completely absurd. Postwar consumer culture was long marked by mediocre goods and services and awful food, but people expected privation.

And then there’s the weather. Lyall describes her hike “across Crib Goch—a knife-edged ridge leading to the summit of Mount Snowdon, in Wales—on a day when it rained, hailed, and snowed, practically all at once. Crib Goch is known for being challenging and sometimes fatal. Although I cried several times, and although I crept so slowly that my friends and I were passed repeatedly by hordes of hill walkers…I made it to the end, frozen hair and all.” Approximately the same result was achieved when she tried to picnic in a London park with her two daughters on a June day.

Lyall’s funny take on all this is a delight. (The chapter on the deplorable dentition of the British reaches into the macabre.) Her story moves along nicely when she shows how Brits have embraced contemporary standards of customer service, quality food, and even “therapy culture” that we Americans have taken for granted. (Princess Di’s victimology, David Beckham’s boo-hoo-hooing, and even Prince Charles’s autobiographical confessions have encouraged the latter.) The one subject I wish Lyall had addressed is how English rock music fits into all this, if it does; it’s the obvious antithesis to the stoicism that she so well documents.

I also couldn’t help wondering what she would write if she were to bring her penetrating powers to bear on a couple of other places that are of interest to me, namely, Stockholm and Salt Lake City. The results would surely be fascinating.

“Marley & Me” has a great cast, and when Owen Wilson and Jennifer Anniston are on screen, singly or together, portraying John and Jenny Grogan, it’s impossible to take your eyes off them. As John’s friend Sebastian Tunney, Eric Dane is equally compelling. Alan Arkin, playing the editor Arnie Klein, makes a great mentor for John. There are several amusing episodes with the incorrigible dog, Marley, who was the “clearance puppy,” priced lower than the rest of the breeder’s offerings and implicitly defective in some way: Marley chews, howls, pees, crashes, escapes, thieves, and even blocks traffic. Being a poor master of dogs, it was easy for me to relate to, although my advice to the Grogans would have been to buy a crate.

Nevertheless, this is a movie, for all its intrinsic merit and occasional high points, that manages to tax the viewer’s patience. After a while, I began to dread John’s anguished consultations with Arnie. Had his career followed the proper path? Through his successful daily newspaper column, he had become the comic voice of South Florida, but he wasn’t happy or fulfilled. And the anguish that John and Jenny share about starting and expanding their family becomes equally tedious. Couldn’t this somehow be compressed? Who decided the film had to sprawl across two hours?

The theater was jam-packed, and everybody was sniffling at the end, but I could hardly wait to get out of there and found myself thinking that the last things in the world I’d want would be a Labrador and to watch this movie again on DVD.

A woman friend writes about someone’s surprise to learn that her daughter had studied abroad this semester: “He might just as well have been told that she’d just re-entered the earth’s orbit after hieing to Kolob (there’s a Mormon hymn, ‘If I Could Hie to Kolob’; Kolob is reportedly where God lives).”

I didn’t know the hymn but did know there’s a Kolob Canyons section of Zion National Park. It’s in the northwesternmost part of the 225-square-mile part and the highest part, with Horse Ranch Mountain reaching 8726 feet. In fact, many of the park’s features have Book of Mormon names or more general Biblical or Mormon cultural references: Angel’s Landing, Court of the Patriarchs, the Pulpit, The Organ, The Great White Throne, Mount Moroni, East Temple, West Temple, Jobs Head, The Beehives, The Bishopric, Towers of the Virgin, Virgin Canyon, Virgin River, Three Marys, Altar of Sacrifice, Inclined Temple, Tabernacle Dome, North Guardian Angel, South Guardian Angel.

Tom, Ebbe, Me, on Angel's Landing, 2002

Some of these names I know from memory, having hiked up Angel’s Landing, for example. Others I find by looking at a map: long ago I purchased a 1:31,680 topographical map that depicts the park in 50-foot contour intervals; this document, 54 inches tall and 40 inches wide, on super-heavy paper, might be one of my finest possessions. It probably seemed like a needless extravagance at the time, but I doubt that it cost more than $10.

The odd thing about the nomenclature is that, while there are all these scriptural allusions, other features in the park go by more generic Western names such as Cougar Mountain , Wildcat Canyon, Corral Hollow, Beartrap Canyon, Horse Pasture Plateau, Trail Canyon, Sawmill Springs, Timber Top Mountain, and Phantom Valley. Then, of course, there are Potato Hollow, Sleepy Hollow, and Telephone Canyon.

Two names I don’t get at all are Temple of Sinawava, which is beside The Pulpit at the entrance to The Narrows, and Mount Kinesava, near the south entrance.

And maybe the religious imagination is responsible for Death Point—or else it’s all those contour lines indicating a steep drop.

Other features such as Parunuweap Canyon, Nagunt Mesa, Shuntavi Butte, and Tuoupit Point evidently take their names from Paiute words. For still others, it was just ranchers who contributed their names: Gregory Butte, Gifford Canyon, Neagle Ridge, Strapley Point.

There’s also an Orderville Canyon in the nearly inaccessible northeastern part of the park. You’d think Orderville Creek, which issues from it, would lead to the village of Orderville, due east on the park on U.S. 89, but the map shows it disappearing in Orderville Gulch, a few miles northwest. The name comes from Brigham Young’s experiment with communalism, the United Order, which lasted here from 1870 to 1885.

And then there’s the way my in-laws in St. George—and a whole lot of other Utahans—mispronounce the name of the park, itself: Zion’s Park. Probably because there’s a Zions Bank. But they also call Bryce Canyon National Park “Bryce’s Canyon,” or just “Bryce’s.”

I don’t get it.

A well-meaning soul sent me the clip of Larry the Cable Guy on the “Tonight Show.” That idiot sat next to Scarlett Johansson and told potty jokes, but the real travesty was that he wore a Huskers cap. Yeah, I’ve noticed him on the sidelines at Nebraska football games. He’s supposedly a big fan.

What I’d like to know is: What would it take to eliminate the Huskers cap from his costume? Could we buy him out? I can’t believe that we’re so desperate for a little celebrity rub-off that we’ll put up with Larry the Cable Guy. I don’t care that he was born in Nebraska; his redneck humor is embarrassing, and it reflects poorly on the university that has produced Willa Cather and Johnny Carson, the school where students prepare to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professional cornerbacks.

Could we stop issuing him a sideline pass so he can no longer schmooze with players and, oh, incidentally, get free face time on network TV? Could he be persuaded to wear a Jayhawks cap instead? Maybe the Sooners would find he enhances their brand. Brian Bosworth used to prowl the sidelines and get on TV every autumn, and we were reminded by the announcers that he was supposedly an actor, but he seems to have vanished. Maybe Larry the Cable Guy could go to Norman and afflict them guys.

Who should replace Larry as Nebraska’s “big-time” Hollywood supporter? It should be someone classy, like Matthew McConaughey, a Texas Longhorns fan. Not someone cheesy, like Verne Troyer (Mini-Me), a Michigan Wolverines fan.

I wonder if Scarlett Johansson likes football. It wouldn’t matter to me if she’s never even been to Nebraska. She would look terrific in a Huskers cap—maybe they could even make her an honorary Blackshirt.

The other day I heard one of those hopeless NPR twerps contend that the Detroit 3 needed a bailout because they didn’t build enough hybrids soon enough. He obviously had missed the recent Washington Post story that pointed out car manufacturers “still haven’t figured out how to produce hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.”

This morning, NPR is probably decrying Toyota’s decision not to produce the Prius after all at its new $1.3-billion plant near Tupelo, Mississippi. Last November, as gas prices soared, people bought 16,737 Priuses. The factory originally was to produce the Highlander SUV, but Toyota changed plans and said the Prius would be made there. This November, as gas prices plummeted, people bought 8660 Priuses. Toyota will finish the factory, which is 90-percent done, but not put any equipment in it or build any vehicle there for now. A brand-new, empty Toyota factory! That truly astonishes me!

Hybrids claim only a two-percent market share because, with all the extra cost on board the vehicle, they’re too high-priced to be a satisfactory value proposition. Of that small market share, the Prius outsells the next best-seller by more than three to one. As an AutoWeek reader said in a letter to the editor, “Toyota made a hybrid that looked like a sick squash, and it is a hit among the Chicken Little set. Unfortunately, the importance of the hybrid technology is not its efficiency but its ability to act as a grand-scale, moral-preening fashion accessory.”

Politicians and environmentalists won’t accept this. Barrack Obama came to Detroit last winter and lectured the Detroit 3 on the need to build more hybrids. The federal bailout is supposed to help the D3 “transform their companies to produce automobiles of the future, using advanced technologies and featuring hybrid or plug-in vehicles,” according to the Post. What the hell, the government is paying!

The Wall Street Journal road-tested a Cadillac Escalade Hybrid ($72,865) and figured the break-even point on fuel savings comes after 218,600 miles, and that’s if gas averages $3 per gallon.

A couple of weeks ago, one friend whose parents were among the first to buy the Prius—the dwarfish early version, and then the sick-squash contemporary one—asked why I’m such a reactionary when it comes to hybrids. Hey, I’m just repeating the facts (along with a little bit of name calling). And now there’s a million-square-foot emblem of hybrid hopelessness standing empty in Mississippi—proof that I’m not just making it up.

My grandmother used to tell me to enjoy my youth, because the fun stopped with the coming of adulthood. “Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity,” by Gary Cross, defines the phenomenon of “basement boys” or “boy-men”—the guys who move back in with mom and dad to play video games and watch violent adventure movies. Cross’s thesis is that men’s traditional roles were transformed because there were no longer farms or home workshops that enabled the father to participate in child-rearing; mass industrialization made men into mere breadwinners and turned over child-rearing to the mothers. Dads were to be pals and engage their sons through hobbies or Boy Scouts, this way teaching manly values. But boys, having already won the Oedipal struggle by default, rejected traditional masculinity. This fostered first the aimless howling rebellions and boyish Hefnerian self-indulgence of the 1950s, followed by 1960s radicalism. Cross cites a number of sources from the time that pinpointed the root of this activity in individual narcissism. He actually mentions the Weather Underground; an acquaintance of mine who, believe it or not, dated Bill Ayers in college here in Ann Arbor, says he had a smoldering hatred for his parents—his father was a busy executive at Con Edison in New York—and this contributed to his radicalism. Anyway, all the “New Man” stuff of the 1960s degenerated into consumerism. Meanwhile, cultural models such as “Gunsmoke” and “Father Knows Best,” as well as rugged John Wayne westerns and genteel Spencer Tracy comedies, became obsolete. Cynicism prevailed, and we’re left with gross-out humor, fools like Homer Simpson, and the comic-book violence of “Rambo” and “The Terminator.” Not to mention “Doom” and the whole culture of violent video games. Magazines like Maxim assert that it’s cool to remain an adolescent.

“Men to Boys” is quite absorbing. (But for a book from Columbia University Press, there sure are a lot of typos.) Cross’s explorations and analyses of popular culture are awfully persuasive. Once or twice I thought he would be unable to make his argument hold together, but he manages to do it. In answering a lot of questions, this book is particularly timely, as the 22-year-old son of some friends has just moved back home, into the basement, after flunking out of college. I told my wife that the kid will live with his mother till she dies. Or he dies. (The father isn’t going to make it that long.) And in my own family, there’s always the example of my Uncle Mike, who was lifted along on that first wave of 1950s teen culture and has devoted himself to preserving his youth by salvaging 1930s cars and generally espousing hot rod culture; he never married, nor even dated seriously, and lived at home with my grandmother until she died. He remains in that same house. My grandma was right, and Uncle Mike, now in his late-60s, continues to heed her advice by not growing up. “Men to Boys” makes me glad I never lost myself in hobbies such as model railroading or muscle cars. It affirms the instinct that kept me away from the action-adventure movies and the video game consoles of the 1980s. And I can now say I was right to have turned off “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” after fifteen minutes and sent the disk back to Netflix.

Market forecasters from CSM Worldwide made a presentation to the Automotive Press Association on Wednesday, December 10, and it was all very interesting but most of the forecasts were predicated upon the federal bailout for the Detroit 3. Now this appears dead, and I wonder how much of the presentation applies.

The essence of it was that Chrysler is dead no matter what, although someone might want Jeep and perhaps the Ram pickup. Beyond that, excess production capacity has to be reduced throughout the domestic industry, and many of the suppliers—the 25 percent that are most in debt—will have to enter Chapter 11. Imports of cars will increase, the technological gap between Detroit and the others will widen, and the “new domestics” will control 82 percent of U.S. production by 2014. As for fuel efficiency, be reminded that exotic technologies such as hybrid powertrains or all-electric propulsion add tremendous cost to each vehicle. In other words, don’t perceive them as the panacea.

So last night the Senate killed the misguided bailout bill. It’s great to see Senators Bob Corker, Mitch McConnell, and Richard Shelby stand up and tell the truth as they did. Corker was particularly impressive during last week’s hearings. Imagine, last night, representatives of the Detroit 3 and the UAW in chamber helping to craft language for Corker’s compromise. Corker says three words kept the bill from being finalized, and those three words had to do with “no pay cut” (my quotes for emphasis) for the UAW.

During Wednesday’s Q&A, one member of the press asked a question that essentially blamed the Detroiters’ problems on imports. “Everybody knows the profits don’t stay here,” he said. It’s shocking to see this kind of thinking persists. The APA is full of guys in their 70s who’ve hung around for years without having their byline in any important magazine or newspaper. When I first came to Detroit in 1985, my editor at Automobile Magazine took me to a press luncheon and warned that the town is full of hacks. She was referring to guys like the questioner. (And to make things worse, they’re still fighting World War Two.) As for Detroit’s cars, all members of the press have spent decades sponging off the press fleets for transportation. They drove the junk the came out of Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s. And in the 1990s, too! Remember the Aztek?

So the same old crock who asked about imports named Senators Shelby and Corker as villains in the current situation. (“Nice guy, he said of the latter, adding, “And they’re Republicans.”) A certain element of the press has long been complicit with the Detroit 3 and the union, and when all these old white-haired blatherskites sit at the same table and razz the presenters with pointlessly antagonistic questions, one really sees it.

“Why do you use the term ‘new domestics,’” asked another, who isn’t white-haired—he’s a bit younger—but holds with his elders on many points.

CSM Worldwide’s Jim Gillette, unruffled, gave a fine answer. The value-added percentage is higher in a Camry (built in Kentucky) than in a Mustang (built in Michigan). Anyway, Gillette reminded, they’re publicly owned corporations—just buy the stock.

Thoughts about the Federal Car Czar from Andrew Singer, M.D.—

I was thinking, now that medicine is moving to socialization, some of its more endearing bureaucratic hurdles may be adopted by the federally bailed-out auto industry .

Some insurance companies (okay, let’s be honest, all of them) have medications that require a Prior Authorization before payment is approved. Although a rational person would consider the prescription to be that document, they give us other hoops to jump through. This is all because the insurance company has contracted with certain pharmaceutical companies to negotiate cheaper prices.

If I want to prescribe a certain asthma medication, I have to prove a less expensive one has failed or provide an Attestation Statement (which requires 30 minutes of waiting on hold) saying that I attest to the fact that this patient may die or end up at least in the ER if the medication is not given. 

It’s a pain for us doctors, patients don’t understand why the medicine they are given at the pharmacy is not what we wrote for initially, as some pharmacies will substitute without checking with the doc. 

If the same sort of process were implemented through the car czar, it would probably look like this:

“Mr. Singer, we understand you want a pickup truck. Have you needed to carry any lumber this past year? Do you have to tow anything?”

“Well, I carried some building supplies last month.”

“Did you try another car, say, a Ford Focus? That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“No, it wouldn’t work.”

“But did you try it? If you try it and it doesn’t work, provide documentation that it didn’t work, and then we’ll authorize the truck.”

Assuming the authorization goes through, and the fax isn’t lost behind a desk, or unreadable due to poor toner, I would then go back to the dealership to buy the truck. Once there, it would be like this:

“Mr. Singer here is your car. It’s a Kia.”

“But I bought a truck.”

“Your bank will only loan you money for a Kia based on what your needs are.” 

“But I can afford the truck, gas and insurance.”

“You can file appeal paperwork, after you’ve proven the Kia is unsafe or does not meet your needs.”

Just some of my miscellaneous ramblings after dealing with three prior authorizations on asthma medication this morning and hearing more about the Car Czar on the radio.