Sub-par

The customer asked the female teen worker behind the counter at Subway, “Can I have a couple of more pickles?”

With a smile, the ‘sandwich artist’, her left hand covered by a plastic bag, grabbed a few more tiny pickle chips and tossed them on the customer’s tuna 6” sub. At the end of the sandwich processing line – at the cashier position – the owner of the store, a shaven-bald, mustached man in his 50s, grimaced, and rung up the order. As the customer took her food to a table to eat, the owner walked to his employee on the sandwich assembly line, winced, and said, perfunctorily, “Don’t give ‘em extra anything.”

Does a little extra of a single sandwich ingredient break the back of a Subway franchise’s business? Or, might it enhance customer satisfaction and boost return visits?

Without that freedom to have a little extra of that sandwich component, competitors like Jersey Mike’s and Quizno’s just might have the edge on Subway. In any case, isn’t it well understood that a business owner should take an employee aside in a private area to provide operational guidance?

With a bitter after-taste in my mouth after witnessing the Subway franchise owner, in front of patrons, teach his worker to scrimp on sandwich ingredients, in walked an obese teen wearing a Carl’s Junior uniform, his headset with microphone draped around his neck. I thought about taking a picture of that via my cell phone and sending it to Subway Corporate, which would relish a real-life photo of an order taker from a fast-food competitor standing in line at Subway.

“Dad don’t; no photo”, my daughter, rightfully advised, “It’s an invasion of privacy and, worse, might get him fired.”

It was time to leave Subway and head west on the I-10 freeway. We had several more hours to drive before returning home, where a warm meal awaited us.

"History will remember..."

This week, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister, bashed Syrian dictator Bashar Assad: “Bashar Assad should see the tragic end that meets leaders who declare war on their people. Oppression does not create order and a future cannot be built on the blood of the innocent. History will remember such leaders as those who fed on blood. And you, Assad, are headed toward opening such a page.”

The violent tactics of Bashar Assad's regime against Syrian civilians -- in order to remain in power -- are indeed ugly. But anyone with an understanding of 20th century history has to find condemnation from the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan awkward at best.

Yes, Turkey is a predominantly muslim-populated country neighboring Syria and has interest in how the Syrian government treats or mistreats the Syrian population. Still, Turkey's record of denying that a systematic slaughtering by the Turkish government of the Armenian people took place renders its condemnation of Bashar Assad hollow.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades — is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government. "The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."

"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world."

Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke in 2008 at a United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide — a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter was shot down. "The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives and senators.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.

The U.S. government has thus far put strategic military interests above its tradition of condemning state-sponsored violence against unarmed civilians -- tolerating the Turkish government's stance . The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2008 provides a cogent analysis of the conundrum: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2008/summer/state-of-denial

The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of  Armenians during the "relocation" or "deporation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide", a position that has been supported with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat^[138] as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."^{[139][140][141]} Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943). Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.^[142]

According to the retired ambassador of Turkey to Germany and Spain; Volkan Vural, the Turkish state should apologize for what happened to the Armenians during the deportations of 1915 and what happened to the Greeks during Istanbul Pogrom^[143][144] He also states that, "I think that, the Armenian issue can be solved by politicans and not by historians. I don't believe that historical facts about this issue is not revealed. The historical facts are already known. The most important point here is that how this facts will be interpreted and will affect the future."^[143]

The Play's the thing...

This coming Saturday, November 19, my alma mater, UC Berkeley (Cal) plays arch rival Stanford, and once again memories of “The Play”, 29 years ago, are in the news.

It was Nov. 20, 1982. The Big Game, Cal vs. Stanford, was being played that year at Cal's Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif.

It was a quarterback shootout of sorts between Cal sophomore Gale Gilbert and Stanford senior John Elway. When Elway completed a fourth-and-17 to set up a supposedly game-winning field goal and the Cardinal went ahead 20-19, four seconds remained on the clock. The Play was a kickoff return that covered 57 yards, involved an impromptu five laterals, at least a couple of questionable calls (or non-calls) by the referees, and the entire 144-piece Stanford marching band, including an unsuspecting trombonist, who was run over by Cal player Kevin Moan, who scored the winning touchdown. It was the only Cal football game that I would ever attend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfebpLfAt8g

John Donovan of CNNSI captured “The Play” in his wonderfully written piece November 21, 2002. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/college/news/2002/11/21/the_play/

He weaves insights and commentary on some of the players and coaches of that day, and what they are doing now. As this week we learned of criminal behavior at Penn State University, one paragraph tackled my senses – paragraph 58 of Donovan’s 73 paragraphs.

The paragraph explains what happened to the player who made the fifth and final lateral to Moen. Writes Donovan: “The fourth player, (Mariet) Ford, who made the fifth and final lateral to Moen, is serving 45 years to life at the California State Prison at Solano for the 1997 murders of his 3-year-old son, his wife and the couple's unborn child.”

Fast forward to a March 2011  Sports Illustrated/CBS News investigation on the criminal background of college football players. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/02/earlyshow/main20038160.shtml

Through an exhaustive series of background checks, the probe discovered that seven percent of the 2,837 players on the magazine's 2010 top 25 pre-season football rosters had been in trouble with the law. More than 200 players had either been arrested or formally cited by police. Thirty-nine percent of those who'd been arrested had been charged with serious crimes such as assault and battery, domestic violence, burglary, cocaine possession or DUI.

CBS reporter Armen Keteyian noted: "Another startling number…only two schools in our sample did any kind of regular criminal background check on their recruits."

Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports told CBS News, "I think as a general population, these are going to be stunning statistics to try to absorb, and policy changes will hopefully come about as a result."

Back to Mariet Ford. He had no prior convictions.

A San Francisco Chronicle version of the Ford conviction story focuses on Ford's financial woes, infidelity, and temper as setting the scene for the murders. http://panachereport.com/channels/hip%20hop%20gallery/Murderous1.htm. A blog assembled by investigative journalist Gabriel Baird suggests there is a possibility that someone else -- a drug addict-burglar -- committed the murders.

 http://marietford.blogspot.com/.

It is one thing to ponder if Ford's final lateral was illegal or not in The Play against Stanford 29 years ago; it is another to ponder whether or not he is guilty of murdering his wife and 3-year-old toddler and unborn child, then committing arson to cover up the crime.

In any case, while many Cal football fans will cherish the memory of The Play, it pains me to see what became of Mariet Ford and his family. Whatever the truth may be -- whether Mariet Ford is guilty or not, the ending of the story is so very, very sad.

Contemplating

Pre-Wikipedia, when I was age 6 and had time on my hands -- OK, I admit, when I’d go to the bathroom at my family’s house -- I’d read the World Book Encyclopedia, and went first to the very last page of the book “WXYZ”. I remember seeing a photo of Stephen Zweig, an Austrian writer, who sported a mustache similar to another Austrian who lived during his day and wreaked havoc on the world.  Zweig, a novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer, at the height of his career in the 1920s and 1930s, was one of the most prolific writers in the world. A Jew by birth who didn’t consider himself a practicing Jew, Zweig nevertheless fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. After stints in England and then United States, Zweig ended up in South America, where, in 1942, he and his second wife Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann took their own lives. “He and his wife committed suicide in Brazil because of their depression over world affairs” read perfunctorily one sentence of seven in the World Book Encyclopedia entry
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Stefan Zweig’s pessimism, for the first two decades of my life, resonated with me as being romantic and pathetic at once,  but fathomable. When I married and had kids, however, I no longer viewed life’s many confounding and deflating moments with dire pessimism; instead, I have viewed life as a book with thousands of pages, containing twists and turns, peaks and valleys, and even full of blank pages that need to be written on the spot.

On-the-spot television spearheaded by Art Linkletter long before reality TV blossomed via MTV’s The Real World and Keeping Up With The Kardashians entertained millions of Americans. From his early days as an announcer on local radio and a roving broadcaster at state fairs, Linkletter showed a talent for ingratiating himself with his subjects and getting them to open up, often with hilarious results. He was particularly adept at putting small children at ease, which he did regularly on a segment of “House Party”, an amusing question-and-answer session that provided the material for his best-selling book “Kids Say the Darndest Things!”

Linkletter was genuinely curious to know what was going on in the heads of the people he interviewed. “You have to listen,” he said. “A lot of guys can talk.”

Linkletter, until he died at age 97 in 2010, was an active optimist, even as he faced multiple tragedies during his life. He and his wife, Lois Foerster,  had five children: Jack, who followed his father into television and died of lymphoma in 2007; Dawn, of Sedona, Ariz.; Robert, who died in a car accident in 1980; Sharon, of Calabasas, Calif.; and Diane, who committed suicide in 1969, an event that spurred her father into becoming a crusader against drug use.

I’ve been thinking about Stephan Zweig and Art Linkletter lately, as several suicides of young people have been in the news in the area where I reside in Southern California.

• 17-year-old Agoura High School student, Dan Behar, sent his classmates a text message that said goodbye and where to find his body, then he drove his car down an embankment in Malibu State Park.
• A few days earlier, Joshua Feinberg, 21, also a former Agoura High student, was found at the bottom of Rindge Dam in Malibu.
• In mid-October, David Barseghian, a 17-year-old senior from Northridge Academy High, died when he jumped from an 18-story building at the Trillium Towers Center in Woodland Hills. The teen was clutching a rosary when he jumped, police said.
• Calabasas High School student Amelia Schiff, 17, took her life the evening of the first day of school.

Everyday life can often be challenging. There clearly is good and evil, and a lot in between. I’m sure there’s a lot of  thinking and emotion propelling one to decide to take their own life. Thinking and emotion I may never be able to fully comprehend. In the simplest terms, however, suicide is a choice of despair over optimism

Zweig ultimately was a pessimist; Linkletter, an optimist.

Who impresses you more: Zweig or Linkletter?

We Could Be Heroes

On this Veteran's Day, we remember those who have fought for our country. I honor my mother's father, Benjamin Diamond, who I didn't have the privilege to meet, as he died several years before I was born. My grandfather received the Silver Star citation March 1, 1920: "Private Diamond distinguished himself by gallantry in action while serving with Medical Department, 320th Machine-Gun Battalion, 82nd Division, American Expeditionary Forces, in action during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, France, 16 October 1918, in going to the aid of a wounded man during which act he was injured by a bursting shell."

My grandpa was 14 when he emigrated with his family from Odessa, Russia to the United States, and was in his late teens when he served in the U.S. Army during World War I. In a battlefied in France, where chaos reigned, he 'did the right thing', leaving the trenches to venture into the open field, to aid a wounded soldier, and in turn was injured by a bursting shell.

Doing the right thing is heroic when it entails, or possibly entails, great sacrifice. How we act or fail to act under pressure defines our character and how we are remembered.

Something to think about as 'doing the right thing' -- in legal and moral terms -- is the focus of discussion since a Pennyslvania Grand Jury conducted an investigation into reported sexual assaults of minor male children over a period of years by a football coach while he was at Penn State University and after he retired.

What did he know, and when did he know it?

My last blog post reflected on Rick Perry's "brain freeze" at the CNBC GOP presidential hopefuls debate earlier this week and also recollected a previous century when another Texan politician, Barbara Jordan, demonstrated profound oratory skills. Barbara Jordan arrived on the national scene when she served on the congressional panel overseeing the Watergate hearings. Her colleague, then Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr.,  acted as Vice Chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. During the committee's proceedings, Baker asked: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" Baker's post on the Watergate Committee was a bit awkward for him, whose 1972 campaign literature proclaimed him to be a "close friend and trusted advisor of our President, Richard M. Nixon." Fast forward to the scandal at Penn State University, and commentary from the university's own Malcom Moran, Knight Chair in Sports Journalism and Society at Penn State.


Moran's commentary, reported in the November 11, 2011 Los Angeles Times resonated especially for me, as I was about 11, when the Watergate scandal hearings took place.

"When you read grand jury testimony as deeply troubling as what we have seen, your thoughts go back to your roots," said Moran. "Before I entered the business of journalism I was a product of the Watergate era, watching hour after hour of the hearings. Throughout this week, I have thought of the twin quetions we all asked back then: What did he know? When did he know it?

Moran further offers that those two quetions can be asked of Joe Paterno and Grhama Spanier.  'What did they know? When did they know? What was described? How were acts characterized?"

Moran, had been invited to be part of a panel discussion at the Duke Law School in the wake of the scandal surrounding the men's lacrosse program. "One of the most powerful realizations was how little we all knew at an early stage of the process, when key decisions were made and assuptions were treated as fact. Until -- and unless -- this process reaches the point of witnesses testifying under oath, it may be very difficult to know what we really know."

Oops, you did it again, Texas

Wednesday night, for 53 painful seconds during the CNBC debate of GOP presidential hopefuls, when trying to list the three government agencies he wanted to eliminate, Rick Perry just couldn’t remember. As Los Angeles Times reporters Michael A. Memoli and Mark Z. Barabak put it in their lead sentence, "It was a night to forget -- literally."

Perry, elected Lt. Governor of Texas in 1998, assumed the governorship in December 2000 when then-governor George W. Bush resigned to become President of the United States.

The state of Texas needs to produce for the national spotlight more thought-provoking politicians with better oratory devices. 

Rewind to a different century. Texas did have an incredibly capable politician with profound communication skills, but in 1996, she passed a few weeks shy of her 60^th birthday. Twenty years before she died, Barbara Jordan, the first African-American woman to serve in the Congress from a Southern state, addressed the Democratic National Convention in 1976. No brain freeze, there.

Here are some wonderful Barbara Jordan quotes:

"A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny."

"This country can ill afford to continue to function using less than half of its human resources, brain power, and kinetic energy."

- Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, July 12, 1976

"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.... It is reason and not passion which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."

- Testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, July 25, 1974

"What the people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise."

- Harvard University Commencement Address, June 16, 1977

"Justice of right is always to take precedence over might."

"The imperative is to define what is right and do it."

- Remarks at "The Great Society: A Twenty Year Critique," a symposium sponsored by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, April 1985

"If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority."

"The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual."

- Remarks at "The Johnson Years: LBJ: The Differences He Made," a symposium sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, May 3-5, 1990

"American's mission was and still is to take diversity and mold it into a cohesive and coherent whole that would espouse virtues and values essential to the maintenance of civil order. There is nothing easy about that mission. But it is not mission impossible."

- Outstanding HISD Alumna Award Recipient, October, Annual Meeting of the Council of the Great City Schools, 1993

"Fairness is an across-the-board requirement for all our interactions with each other."

- Remarks at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in conjunction with a special exhibit, "The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America," quoted in the Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1993

"I have faith in young people because I know the strongest emotions which prevail are those of love and caring and belief and tolerance."

- Article in On Campus, February 14, 1994

"How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance -- the one value that is indispensable in creating community."

"One thing is clear to me: We, as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves."

- Article entitled "All Together Now" from Sesame Street Parents, July/August, 1994