DenisHorgan.com

Some nice thoughts on my new book:

“Here’s good news for fans of Denis Horgan, former Courant columnist.
“Last year, Horgan charmed readers with his collection of essays called, “Flotsam” A
Life in Debris.” Now he’s back with a novel that examines the dangerous intersection
where religion, politics and the media meet.
“The Dawn of Days” (Ladder Press, $14.99) asks us to imagine what would happen if a
gentle, messianic man with a message of peace, love, forgiveness and justice were to
arrive and soon attract a following that rapidly becomes a phenomenon.
“How would governments that thrive on conflict, churches that jealously guard their
wealth and power, and media that promote extremism deal with such a man?
“The novel combines allegory with contemporary issues to tell its story, and Horgan
spares no sacred cows in his determination to expose hypocrisy. It is narrated by a
TV newsman who gets too involved with the man with the mission, to the peril of
each.
“Horgan’s newspaper columns were thought-provoking. “The Dawn of Days” continues
that fine tradition.”

Carole Goldberg
Books Editor
The Hartford Courant

It is so obvious that it takes two to tango that it is hard to even imagine a one-person tango.

 The Celtics won. The Lakers lost. The news is as obvious as that there are no Celts on the Celtics and no lakes in Los Angeles. But reading the coverage of Tuesday’s NBA triumph in Boston reinforces the truth that people see things from their own perspective.

 It is always illuminating to use the miracle of the internet to read different coverage of the same event. One side will say it lost while the other will say it won; if your team is held hitless they are chump batters while to the others it is great pitching.

 So on the NBA championship.

 In Los Angeles, they say the Lakers lost as if the Celts played no part in it, and are taking the skin off their players, notably the wondrous Kobe Bryant. In Boston and vicinity they say the Celts won as if the Lakers played no part in it and are praising to the heavens their players. The truth? In Boston, surely.

 “Lakers are buried in the garden” says the disintegrating Los Angeles Times.

 With almost nary a nod to the fact that the Boston defense was pretty good, Bill Plaschke says of Kobe: “The league MVP was AWFUL, unable to break through even the most basic of one-on-one Celtic defenses, unable to carry a team that needed carrying … They need toughness in the middle. They needed maturity everywhere.”

 T.J. Simers offers, “If Phil Jackson is supposed to be the best coach in the NBA, then how come he didn’t send Vladimir Radmanovic off to another continent to do some snowboarding this last week? Some strategist.

It’s over, all right, the Celtics champs with an exclamation point — Jackson outcoached, the Lakers outplayed, and as a group, your God-like heroes blew it. They are an embarrassment. They went into the NBA Finals favored, the Celtics suffering injuries to several of their starters along the way, and still the Lakers could not measure up.” And much stronger stuff, too.

 Meantime, Mark Heisler sighs, “All that was left was a confused, overmatched, soft little band of Lakers, circling the perimeter of the Boston defense like ants who couldn’t get out of the rain as 21 years of frustration fell on their heads in the Celtics’ 131-92 rout.”

 Across the continent, the story is not that the Lakers lost but “Celtics Win NBA Title.”

 Jeff Jacobs of the Hartford Courant, says, “The Celtics completed the greatest turnaround in NBA history in a manner befitting their remarkable achievement. They beat L.A.

“Actually, that’s a horrible understatement. The Celtics crushed L.A.”

The Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan took the same spin, “The Boston Celtics did not just win franchise championship No. 17 lastnight. They snatched it. They swallowed it. They demanded it,” while it was “Glory Goes to Celtics,” in the Boston Herald.

Sure, the Lakers came up waaaay short but a lot of that had to do with how well the Bostons played. Sure, the Celts came up waaaaay ahead and some of that is how the Lakers played. But is fun, just watching, seeing how each side spins the ball.

What’s the math on this? How do you chart a circle?

If Joe Lieberman would skin his once-fellow Democrats and Barack Obama in particular for imagining to talk with enemies of Israel what must he do to to Israel, on behalf of Israel, when Israel talks with its enemies?

Israel knows the wisdom of strength and it knows the wisdom of diplomacy. Israel sees that it makes sense to discuss things with Syria, Hamas and others. Lieberman-Bush-Cheney- McCain see it differently, stirring up “appeasement” talk and hatreds when Obama suggest doing less than Israel is actually doing.

This rather leaves Lieberman & Co,. with their pants down on a life-and-death matter. Not that they care.

Who could imagine that the terrible, horrid, catastrophic, monstrously inept times of Tribune would now be looked back on as “the good old days.”

Tribune destroyed one of the great newspaper empires in history — and, astonishingly, they actually look good in comparison to the scorched earthers who are pouring salt on the land and poisoning the wells of the journalstic skeletons wandering the blasted landscape.

The pathetic dolts of Tribune took the wondrous array of Times-Mirror newspapers and ground them down, gutted them, dismantled and dismasted them in one failed program after another; their successor pirates under the mad oaf Sam Zell are hellbent of not merely doubling down on Tribune disasters but making sure that no newspaper worthy of the name shall survive their reign of error.

Having picked Tribune’s pocket, Zell and his shipmates, with a keen eye to assets — not including journalism — of ballparks and downtown real estate, are instituting a slash and burn process from which no quality can possibly survive. This in some of major population centers across the nation, worthy of something more than gimmicks and sleights of hand. Giving the customers less for their money and imagining that they will be happy while massacring the workforce to ensure that no costly excellence shall be respected, they have turned over to the sadsacks in the respective papers who presided over the mess in the first place the assignment to repair it in the second place.

If these blunderers knew what is needed, mightn’t they be expected to have delivered it before now? What are they paid those vast salaries for? With huge layoffs threatened, who has the job to determine whose careers must be shattered? The same saps who ruined the process. Does anyone think that a boss will anywhere be inconvenienced by the gigantic staff reductions and journalism collapse promised by Zell? Of course not.

The wrong people are in charge and the good people — honest employees and the invisible readers — suffer.

Read all about it.

Maybe there’s some poor sadsack somewhere who still imagines that there are small vestiges of the Grand Old Party of yore someplace. He is wrong. If they ever existed at all, those instincts are long gone from the Republican party. It exists only to make life easy for the rich and hard for the rest of us.  

Who’s on your side when the chips are down?

In fact, whenever the American people are on one side of an issue and the rich powerful corporate interests are on the other, the Republican party will always, without exception, choose against the people in favor of the rich and greedy who are wrecking the nation, its traditions and its future.

The American people are groaning under the cost of gasoline and the Senate wanted to turn a cold eye on the bloated profits the oil companies are gouging from the people. The Republicans blocked it. Of course they did. People. Oil companies. Screw the people, say the Republicans, nearly to a one. When the economy is near ruination, George Bush and his MiniMe, John McCain, can think only of giving even more tax breaks to the wealthy. With the oil barons making astronomical profits and benefits from our misery, the Republicans can only think to give them further tax concession and handouts — which are paid for by the poor taxpayer who can hardly think of why trillionaires should get such treatment: Because the Republicans want it and will block anything that suggests a different aproach.

When the party that in ancient times alleged that it was for smaller government and traditional liberties sees now a chance to expand the power of the Central Government to dismantle American liberties and constitutional rights, it jumps at the opportunity. Govenrment gets bigger and the peoples’ rights get smaller.

When the air we breathe, the water we drink, the poisonous goods we consumer are threatened by greedy exploiters and corporate manipulators, the Republican party alone facilitiates their process at the cost to the American people and to the benefit of the rich. Every single time. There are no exceptions. Them. Us.

They wave the flag, made in China and imported by the rich, yet seldom have donned the unform to defend it — that’s what they have poor people for. People like you and me. They divide and destroy, have corrupted the govenrment more than even usual and yet pretend to stand for something beside the raw greed and kowtowing to the corporate bosses.

At our expense.

And then they ask for our votes to further enable them to enrich the powerful, empower the rich and wallow in their long culture of corruption.

Always, they are on the wrong side of the people when there’s a buck in it for one of their rich sponsors.

Who’s on your side? It’s a fair question to ask.

I don’t know why I hang around with riffraff like you.

You’re hurting my reputation. There’s a slumming affect that we extremely rich people strike but I need to be careful; you’re dragging down my image.

Consider. In the past 48 hours alone I have come into so much money that people like you are, well, rather below me.

Mrs. Saratu Aziz, widow to late Hassan A. Aziz, former owner of Petroleum & Gas Company in Kuwait writes me with a sad story about her bad health and how she wants to give me a piece of her $25 million.

Mr. Song Li le, Deputy Executive Director &  credit Officer of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd., has his paws on $19,500,000.00 and he wants to give me a big chunk of.

Medvedenko Stanislav writes from Russia wants to deal me in on a 15 million euro pipeline/transportation development project right here in the United States where so many Russian pipeline/transportation projects unfold. I will be rich.

Not that I need it, what with the work that might actually be involved. No, I am also quite a multiple lottery winner. In that same 48 hours, I hear from my far-flung e-mail world that that I have won 1,500,000 euros from a Dutch lottery that I had somehow forgotten that I’d entered.

By the most amazing coincidence, that very same day I won another Dutch lottery for $2 million. What a small world.

But that’s hardly all; no sooner am I winning the lotteries but in comes a missive from a South Korean gentleman, Mr. P. Lee, who volunteers in the way of businessmen that he is 59 years old and happily married, saying that  he has some tsunami money lying idle and wants me to help him move $25.5 million for a healthy cut of the action.

I don’t know exactly what my piece of the viggorish would be but, while I wait, I hear that my fantastic skill at lottery picking continues. Nearly the next e-mail announces that I have won the Pacifica Lottery’s modest 800,000 euros in category ‘B.’  I don’t want to get snooty but 800,000 euros hardly is walking around money the way my luck’s been going.

For the very same day that I was placing in the Pacifica, I was winning yet another of the lotteries the wild and zippy Netherlanders hold three or four times a day: This one nets me 1million euros.

I hope you are sitting down because I’m here to tell you that my luck is simply amazing: I now read from another e-missive that I have won a cash prize of $2,500,000 in the Vodafone lottery in — guess where! — the Netherlands again. What luck! This when on the very same day I am told that I have won another million euros from a competition that will be explained to me after I merely submit a few pieces of personal and financial information to them. That is, after I have completed my filing with the Staatsloterij Internet Program in which I have won another million euros.

This is all from the weekend. What a walking four-leaf clover I am.

I hope having all this money doesn’t change me too much. I will try to be the same lovable, kind, modest person I’ve always been — except a lot richer and a lot less likely to be seen with chumps like you.

Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?

If we had even a few troops left we should invade ZIP code 20001. Shock and awe the Pentagon. We attacked Iraq for less.

We sacrificed our troops and good name over weapons of mass destruction that don’t exist. We squandered lives and treasure over the wrongheaded fear of powerful weapons in the mitts of people too dangerous to be allowed to have them. How can we not take action where they do exist, for sure, in demonstrably irresponsible hands?

The Air Force.

Forget the aluminum tubes for imaginary nuclear weapons; consider the high-tech electrical nose cone fuses for actual nuclear weapons. They’re reportedly dumped the top echelons of the Air Force for not knowing a nuclear nose cone from a helicopter battery.  

Merrily, the Air Force sent parts for a nuclear nose cone to Taiwan thinking that they were parts for a helicopter battery.

Last year the Air Force blithely flew aircraft with weapons of mass destruction over America against its own wise rules. We went to war against the world, pipe-dreaming that Iraqi leaders might be possibly considering planning thinking about getting weapons of mass destruction when our own leaders, with real weapons of mass destruction aboard, are making a mess of it.

This crowd that still can’t get the right war supplies to our own troops in the wars is sending important stuff elsewhere and not even knowing it and is carting nuclear bombs over the heads of America’s citizenry and in so many ways demonstrating an incompetence as reckless as that we impute to tyrants elsewhere.

They might want to be careful here, developing consequences for huge blunders.

Oh, yes. We’re in good hands as Senator McCainBushLieberman demands one more war for the road in Iran.

Wow.

In Barack Obama’s lifetime, Barack Obama could have been denied the right to vote. And it was legal. Barack Obama could not live where he wanted to live, eaten at the restaurants where he might have wanted to eat, go to the schools he deserved to go to or to which he wished to send his children. And it was legal.

In Barack Obama’s lifetime it was legal and accepted that black people could be denied housing, education, voting rights and even the convenience of going to the bathroom in the same places as white people. In the lifetime of the candidate who will lead the Democratic party in November.

That changed, despite the most  vicious, violent, hateful and anti-American efforts of conservatives to block black Americans from their American liberties. Conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans, among so many quarters pandered to still by politicians in recent days and forever, fought to keep blacks in their place. It took the enormous bravery of the blacks and the liberals to right this huge wrong. 

Those with evil hearts, the Wallace Democrats and the Nixon southerners so forcefully still available as a bloc not ready to vote for a black person, exist but on the very wrong side of history. They are being left behind surely, no matter what affection their votes inspire in poisoned, greedy souls.

That has happened in Barack Obama’s lifetime and it was made possible by people of courage, fairness, good-heartedness and progressive American values.

What an amazing thing.

These guys are giving us mistake-makers a bad name.

Former President Clinton goes off on a long tirade about a critical magazine article and then sends a flunky out to apologize.

Vice President Cheney makes an incest joke at the expense of the people of West Virginia and then sends a flunky out to apologize.

A Catholic priests goes nutso on Hillary Clinton and apologizes.

Sharon Stone wildly links the Chinese earthquake to the horrid Chinese policies to Tibet and her sponsor apologizes but she barely does and maybe didn’t at all.

Barack Obama calls a reporter “sweetie” and apologizes, twice.

John McCain’s John Hagee apologizes to Catholics for insulting them, one and all.

Hillary Clinton refers to the murder of Robert Kennedy and later apologizes that anyone might misread why she refered to the murder of Robert Kenedy, blaming Obama.

This follows along after the Bosnia apology and various McCain corrections and amendments and footnotes and all sorts of “I’ sorry” traffic.

Who knows, maybe some of it’s actually sincere.

You must remember this …

Contemplating the vice presidential nominee, the Obama gang might reflect that when they get Hillary Clinton along will come Terry McAuliffe, Sean Hannity’s pal Geraldine Ferraro, Howard Wolfson, Bill Clinton, Paul Belaga, James Carville, Mark Penn, Harold Ickes and so many more who contibuted so brilliantly to the tone of the campaign. How comfortable would any president feel with that gang prowling the halls?