Dennis McDougal

Two good men left the planet last week.

One was a lifelong truck driver and the other, a newspaper editor. They were also fathers and grandfathers, and while their passing was not unexpected, the news hit hard. If a single grain of sand washes away, the beach does indeed get a little more crappy. That death comes to visit during the holidays -- when ebullient 21st Century grandkids track Santa’s progress on the Internet but still rip through wads of gift wrapping on Christmas morning -- only ups the crappy quotient.

My bride and I were on the road in San Francisco when word came that her brother Michael Randolph had finally succumbed to the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease that had plagued him for several years. A lifelong smoker, Michael knew he was dying a long time back, but didn’t let it keep him from the hard but rewarding work of reconnecting with his children, his friends and his family, cutting through the pettiness that keeps us all from forgiving trespasses while we still can. I only got to know him in the last couple of years of his life, but it was pretty clear that he was a rounder in his time – a long-distance trucker of the lock-and-load variety who spent most of his productive life crisscrossing the country with a load of this or a load of that. It seemed pretty clear that there’d been alcohol-fueled trouble in his time, amped up by a short fuse and a tendency to bluster, but the COPD had tempered that and the Michael I came to know was thoughtful, warm and whimsical. Perhaps it was the disease or simply the slap in the face that was -- and is -- Time, but Michael had mellowed and lived life these last few years the way we all should: one special and delicious day at a time. I’m sure he’d be pleased to know that he taught me a lot about living and dying.

Two days after Sharon and I sustained the news about Michael, I got another unwelcome phone call. My former editor at the Los Angeles Times and easily the most influential boss I’ve ever had, passed away from liver cancer. I’ve waxed on elsewhere about Irv Letofsky who I’ve gratefully cited in every book I’ve ever written as the best editor I ever had. But Irv was also a friend and teacher – one of those few, rare folk with whom you connect at a gut level. We shared an approach/avoidance conflict toward Hollywood, spoke truth to power, followed the money, exposed greed and punctured bloated star egos at every opportunity. I owe him nothing less than my career. Whatever I have achieved or will achieve is directly attributable to his faith and forbearance in me and dozens of other angry young men and women like me. We are no longer so young, but as near as I can tell, most of us are still annoyed, if not so angry, and it is the continual lack of justice and equity in the world at large and Hollywood in particular that pisses us off – and Irv Letofsky deserves much of the blame (or credit) for keeping us from lapsing into complacency.

Both Michael and Irv deserve much longer eulogies, but what struck me as most profound in the last days of each of these very different men is how alike they were in keeping one foot in this world while quietly, and with great dignity, preparing for the next. One was a Republican Roman Catholic from Mississippi and the other a Jewish Democrat from Minneapolis, but they reveled in living while resigning slowly to the inevitable. The day before he died, Michael called me from the hospital and asked me who Al Roker’s predecessor was on “Today”. He said of all the people he knew, he was sure I’d have the answer because I’m such a fount of trivia. Willard Scott, I told him, and the satisfaction of having the answer literally seemed to help him breath easier. “Thank you, brother,” he told me, and rang off with a chuckle. Similarly, four days before Irv’s passing, I stopped by to visit him at home and he was propped up in a hospital bed, watching a Lakers game. I spoke more with his wife Brian Ann than with him, breathe not coming all that easy to him. But when I did lean in and ask him during a commercial what book project he thought I ought to try tackling next, he gave me the old sly Irv smirk and said: “Try something serious this time.”

While they would have been diametrically opposed to one another on most subjects during their lifetimes, Michael and Irv will forever be linked in my own memory because of who they'd become by the time they died. They didn't rage so much against the dying of the light as delight in a Kobe field goal or the recaptured memory of Willard Scott. They were of this world and left us with an unspoken mandate to sustain what we've got while trying hard to make it a little better. These were the kind of guys that Rudyard Kipling would have called men, and the Earth and everything that’s in it was theirs as a direct result .... all the way to the finish line.

The last day of June was the first day of the Great Treehouse Project. For the past two weeks, grandkids Megan and Alex joined forces with Devin, Maggie and Callie in a concerted planning effort which saw the domicile downsized from a three-story townhouse replete with library, den and media room to the current vision. Economics also accounted for the loss of forced air heating and cooling, the Viking kitchen and bowling alley. There will be a ladder, however and, possibly a dumb waiter to haul up Rose, the dog. Chief architect, contractor, consultant and nail-gun operator Spencer estimates a completion date of sometime within the next month or two. Megan plans a tree warming party within the next two weeks. Stay tuned for updates.

Occurs to me that a project like this would rarely get off the ground in L.A. There'd be permits, contractors, subcontractors, inspectors, assessors, quality control doofi, insurance adusters, etc. Breaks my heart that I don't have urban bureau-dorks near at hand to tell me and my grandkids what we can and cannot do. Such are the travails of returning to the land. I'd feel so much more secure inside the enforced safety of L.A.'s poisoned freeway-opoly. Suppose I'll just have to grin and bear it out here in the wilderness. Pass me the sweet tea, will y'all?

I wrote my Congresswoman this morning, and here is what I said ---

Rep. Blackburn:

This is the first line of your bio on your website -- "Marsha Blackburn is an established, conservative, results-oriented legislator who solves problems." Okay, I'll take you at your word. Solve this problem. Iraq is Vietnam with sand. Americans die there daily for the same reason that they died in Southeast Asia a generation ago: no reason at all. End this war and end it now. I am a Vietnam veteran. I watch slack-jawed every day as George W. Bush repeats the crimes of LBJ, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with utter impunity and contempt for 70% of the American electorate. By your vote, you continue to give the President succor, comfort, and the power of the Congressional purse. Break with your party and vote your conscience, Ms. Blackburn. To do otherwise is to sanction slaughter purely to pander to a Presidential hubris that can only be described as breathtaking in its nihilism. I had no idea that at 60 I would have to repeat the entreaties of my youth to a deaf, dumb and blind government:

Stop this war, Congresswoman Blackburn. Stop it Now.

Respectfully,
Dennis McDougal

I came to understand that Marsha Blackburn was my Representative only by accident. Until today, I was under the impression that Steve Cohen -- a Democrat who voted against funding the war -- was my Congressman. Such are the vagaries of Tennessee gerrymandering that a Republican Reese Witherspoon lookalike from Nashville nearly 3 hours away from my home is my representative in the House. Who knew? When I went to the polls last November, I am certain I cast my vote for Cohen. What happened in the meantime to shift me to Blackburn territory is a mystery. But there you have it: the legacy of Tom Delay jiggers the map so effectively that even relatively cognizant voters like myself have little idea who -- or what -- represents me in Washington.
The clever machinations of a morally bankrupt, politically corrupt, cynical and compassion-free federal government leave me feeling as abandoned and alone as I did during Vietnam. Lately, the lyrics of "Ohio" keep me awake at night: We're finally on our own.
Yesterday, the gutless Democrats who voted with Republicans to continue funding the war underscored this sad turn of events. Bush and his chickenhawks triumph once more. The center does not hold. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Democrats lack all conviction while the Bushies remain full of passionate intensity.
The rallying cry of my generation was two words: QUESTION AUTHORITY. It became the anthem of my youth and later, the guiding force of my career as a journalist.
What happened? Where are Woodward and Bernstein when we need them? What happened to the Pentagon Papers Volume II? Why has the Los Angeles Times of Otis Chandler turned into the Pennysaver? Why do I feel like another Kent State is right around the corner?
I can only hope that some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem because I don't expect to hear from Congresswoman Blackburn any time soon.

Hooray! Hooray! It’s the first of May! Outdoor …..
Well, we all know the rest, though I doubt the proliferation of poison ivy in these parts would encourage much bare-assed procreative activity except for raccoons and squirrels, of which there seem to be a bumper crop.
Beale Street Music Festival’s this weekend. Jerry Lee Lewis and Taj Mahal are on the same bill with Barenaked Ladies and Three Six Mafia. Eat your heart out, Coachella Music Festival.
I heard a Jimmy Buffet song at one of the local bistros last week – “Cinco de Mayo in Memphis” – and it got me to missing tacos. There are Taco Bells in Tennessee, naturally. Hell, there are Taco Bells in Lithuania. But tacos? That’s another matter. Chili verde and carnitas still seldom translate in the South, which seems odd given that they were invented in the deep, deep, deep South, somewhere near the Tropic of Cancer. I have yet to find a taco stand to match Patricia’s in Bixby Knolls. If I want fajitas that aren’t white bread, served up with a jolly “that be all, y’all?” I have to make them myself. C’est la vida loca, to mix and match mother tongues.
A month’s work on the Writers Guild of America story finally ends this week with the “L.A. Weekly” publication of my opus “The Check Is in the Mail.” Early reviews seem controversial, but that’s what always seems to happen when Group A takes money from Group B and doesn’t give it to Group C as promised. Stay tuned. The fallout from the foreign levies story looks as though it could finally provide the roadmap into the multinational cash laundries owned and operated by Murdoch, Redstone, Sony, Disney, General Electric and the mandarins of Time Warner.
On its face, the WGA story looks like a small potatoes quibble over the slow-or-no pay-out of a few million bucks, but the deeper and far more devastating theme lies at the very heart of the current scramble by the MPAA and the RIAA over movie and music piracy. Why do we feel little or no sympathy for the $5 billion that the MPAA claims pirates stole last year in the form of counterfeit DVDs, CDs, Internet transmissions and videotapes? Could it be that we all secretly feel that the corporate assholes and their lawyers deserve to get screwed, the way they’ve screwed over writers and artists all these years?
For decades, Hollywood studios and record companies have hogged profits, exploited artists, and cheated them out of even their rightful if pitifully tiny contractual royalties and/or residuals. Backroom rip-off artists led by Dr. Jules Stein, Lew Wasserman and Mob mouthpiece Sidney Korshak set the machinery in place half a century ago, and made Hollywood unions complicit in the theft. What avaricious Lew understood – and few grasped at the time – is now the drumbeat of the Internet Age: Content is King. It becomes more apparent every day, as technology marches on and the appetite for new material grows ever-more insatiable.
And who owns content? Copyright holders, that’s who. In the rest of the civilized world, creators hold copyright. But not in Hollywood they don’t. In Hollywood, through a combination of accepted practice and a half century of MPAA/RIAA lobbying efforts with the lazy lawmakers on Capitol Hill, copyright belongs to the studios and record companies, not to the men and women who toil over computer keyboards.
I write books. The copyright belongs to me. But my screenwriter friends own nothing. Their Guild is supposed to help counterbalance this rip-off by forcing the studios to pay them a lot of money for their copyright, and to compensate them further by seeing to it that they receive residuals, foreign levies and other revenue for their work – and to help them with health benefits and pensions in their old age.
But Hollywood’s guilds do little or none of the above. Instead, they give all to the studios.
There was great lament this past week over the passing of Jack Valenti. Similar breast beating and keening followed the passing of Lew Wasserman and Ronald Reagan upon their deaths. Great men. Great things. Never their like shall pass this way again, etc.
Wake up, Hollywood wannabes. These were the architects of copyright theft. These were the leaders of a cartel and a conspiracy designed to pick the pockets of men and women who write, direct, act, compose, create – and slap the cash into their own bank accounts. It’s too bad the WGA and the DGA and SAG fell into lockstep with them. Wouldn’t it be swell if there was actually someone in Hollywood looking out for the interests of those who make the movies?
Not likely. If any producer reading this would like to turn the foregoing into a miniseries, call my agent. I own the copyright.

Put on my Sunday best – clean Hawaiian shirt, relatively clean black denims and barely passable sneakers – and prepared for an Easter feast yesterday morning. Fitz and family took us all out to Texas de Brazil, an all-you-can-eat churrascaria two blocks off of Beale where meat – leg o’ lamb, parmesan pork, garlic sirloin, filet mignon, ribs, etc. – is the meal. No rabbit however, Welsh or otherwise. It was Easter, after all. If you’re going to stage a Eucharist without gristle, best have no stringy bunny shin wedged between your molars.
Following a blast furnace beginning, spring has retreated this past week. It dropped to the 20s a couple of nights and forecast calls for rain this week. I’m past my ills – knock on Formica – but Sharon isn’t. Once our dual duels with intestinal carnage ended, she came down with something more. She rests. I kvetch.
My daughter Kate checked in late on Sunday. While both she and husband Id (he prefers the Freudian diminutive to his given name “David”) work their tushes off full time, they despair of ever having enough to afford a home. Such is the wretched purgatory that L.A. has become when tract lean-to’s go for half a million and a couple’s combined salaries have to top $150,000 just to look at a loan. Throw in the traffic nightmare that no politician seems willing or able to address, the impending drought that will throw the entire region back to a Baja desertscape, and air pollution that approaches a pack-a-day habit for every man, woman and child west of the Tehachapis and you’re pretty much talking about an average day in Moloch. L.A. has very quickly become a toilet, and while I understand how it could have happened, I had no sense that it would happen so quickly. Throw in the once-terrific school system where children get left behind every day from kindergarten to grad school, and a busted criminal justice system made all the more glaring in its “Here Come Da Judge” hilarity by leaps in gang tribal warfare that would make Marshall McLuhan flinch, and what you’ve got is a formula for chaos – the Biblical sort that should make James Dobson and the rest of his contemptuous flock of fat, preening evangelicals very pleased with their own self-righteous selves.
Ah, brave new L.A. with such creatures in it. Where’s Aimee Semple McPherson when you need her? All the City of Angels has left is Roger Mahony and his legion of pederasts. Makes you wonder if that’s how Gomorrah got such a bad rap.
Happy Bunny Day. Don’t load up on too many wafers and/or Cadbury eggs. Save some room for dessert.

There was a magnolia tree in front of my house, but there was little else about my childhood and adolescence that had much to do with the South. My father was from Texas and my mother, southern Illinois, and like half the population of Lynwood – or L.A., for that matter – they wanted to forget what they’d left behind. Following World War II, a place like Lynwood was an invitation to reinvigorate – to reinvent oneself and start over, a thousand miles and a couple of mountain ranges away from the hard scrabble caste system of the East. There might be a magnolia in your front yard, but that didn’t mean you were a slave or a sharecropper, a factory serf or a wage slave. California still had a halo and it hung over the City of Angels like a mantle of hope, until too many people with too many conflicting dreams paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.

Auto emissions now line L.A.’s inversion layer, and a very different sort of asthma afflicts the ever-increasing population. Each year more cars, more immigrants, more housing, more fast food outlets, more convenience stores, more crime, more mignons on the make with no end in sight and no effort on the part of public officials or private avarice to regulate, corral or control. What happened?

Just before I flew back to Memphis, I drove down the street where I grew up and the magnolia was still there, in front of my house. Only it was hardly recognizable as the place I called home for 18 years, until the day I headed off to Vietnam in 1967. The yard was neat enough and though the garish lavender is not the color I would have chosen for house paint, the place looked kept up and clean.

But it had become so much smaller than I remembered. The house where I grew up with two parents, two brothers, a sister and a dog named Mopsy couldn’t have been more than 1,000 square feet. Funny I don’t recall it being a cracker box. Funny that I remember it teeming with drive and imagination and shared motivation to taste and experience all that Southern California had to offer. In fact, the only thing about my earliest home that seemed to have gotten bigger was the magnolia, which now towers two stories above the house itself.

Here at our new home in Tennessee, we’ve got sycamores and maples, oak and alder and probably a hundred other species I wouldn’t recognize even if I owned a copy of “Botany for Dummies,” but at least on our spread, not a single magnolia. The temperature’s supposed to hit 70 today. When it does, I think I’ll head to Home Depot and buy a magnolia for the front yard. Maybe on the way back, I’ll drive through Walgreen’s and see if I can get some Flonase without a prescription.