In memory of David H. Provost, father, mentor and friend

I stood in the imaginary batter’s box at one end of the back yard in Woodland Hills, waiting for the pitch. There were imaginary baserunners, too. And imaginary fielders. Just beyond the “outfield fence,” in the next house over, lived a real live baseball player, Bill Buckner, then at the beginning of his career with the L.A. Dodgers.

But on this field, in our back yard, it was just me, my dad, and a Whiffle ball. He’d come home after work – a day working as the dean of new program development in the Cal State University Chancellor’s Office bracketed by an hour or more in rush hour traffic each way. And he’d play Whiffle ball with his only son in that back yard.

Sometimes, he’d be too tired, and looking back, I can’t really blame him. A man in his forties in a high-pressure job doesn’t always have enough energy to get out of the car, walk through the house and out back to engage in a game of Whiffle ball – or ping pong, a game he taught me how to play. He even built a basketball court, complete with a permanent, regulation 10-foot hoop and a square concrete slab on which to bounce that ball until your hands were caked with dust the consistency of chalk.

I never played competitive basketball, or baseball or, for that matter, ping pong, but my dad gave me the opportunity to try all of them on for size – this 6-foot-8 giant of a man whose own foray into competitive sports consisted, to my knowledge, of some recreational basketball in Australia in the early 1950s, where he did his postgraduate studies. He was so much taller than the rest of the people on the court that he was able to score almost at will in one game and wound up with more points than everyone else combined.

Wilt Chamberlain, eat your heart out.

Fan

But mostly, Dad enjoyed sports from the stands – or in front of the TV. In fact, his love of sports went back long before the age of television: He vividly remembered listening to the 1939 Rose Bowl as an 8-year-old boy and how thrilled he’d been to hear USC score the winning touchdown with a minute left to beat Duke 7-3. It was the only touchdown the Blue Devils had allowed all season, and Dad was a USC fan the rest of his life.

How big a fan? In 1974, we were watching the Trojans play archrival Notre Dame on TV, and Dad was so upset he stormed out of the house when the Irish took a 24-0 lead. I don’t know where he went, but shortly after he left, the Trojans scored a touchdown to make it 24-6; then star running back Anthony Davis returned the second-half kickoff for another score.

“Dad, you’re missing this!” I remember saying aloud, pacing back and forth in front of the TV (just as he would do), waiting for him to come home as USC scored another touchdown, then another, then yet another. By the time he got back, the Trojans had scored 35 points in the third quarter and led 41-24 on their way to a 55-24 victory. Dad had missed the best part of one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.

Dad took my mom and me to half a dozen Dodger games each year, and one of them was the last game of the 1977 season. That one was special because we got to see Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the year, the first time four players from the same team (Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith being the others) all hit 30 or more home runs in a season. And I got to see it, thanks to my dad.

We also saw Fresno State’s football team beat Bowling Green twice in the California Bowl. And we got to see the men’s basketball team dismantle fifth-ranked UNLV 68-43 in perhaps the greatest basketball game ever played at Selland Arena in downtown Fresno.

Mom, as a rule, didn’t enjoy sports too much; she’d go off and do her own thing while Dad and I were watching football in the family room. But when we moved back to Fresno in 1978 and the basketball team became a regional powerhouse, she caught the bug and began rooting for Boyd Grant’s Bulldogs as hard as either one of us.

All three of us were part of the famous "Red Wave" of Fresno State fans who packed Selland Arena (aka Grant's Tomb) to watch the Bulldogs' suffocating defense dismantle one foe after another. 

One year, Dad and I went to the mall and bought Mom a custom red T-shirt with metallic lettering that read “I love Mitch Arnold,” in honor of her favorite player. He kept it in the closet of the house where I grew up long after she passed away.

Partner

Mom and Dad were married for 39 years until she died of a stroke on Jan. 9, 1995, just shy of her 63rd birthday. Stricken by polio as a child, she’d been told she’d never walk again, but not only did she walk – despite being almost fully paralyzed on the right side of her body – she earned a degree from UCLA and then went to work at Douglas Aircraft in Southern California, which is where she met my father.

He asked her to marry him on the spur of the moment when they were smooching in the car, and she said “yes.” They were married Sept. 1, 1956.

They seemed, from the looks of them, to be a bit of a mismatch: my father at 6-8 towering over his 5-foot-2 bride; this beautiful woman on the arm of the professor with the dark-rimmed glasses. When she couldn’t get up off the couch or needed help steading herself as she walked, he was always there with a hand to help her. His lasting impression of Richard Nixon, whom he met before Nixon became president, wasn’t anything political; it was that Nixon had once helped steady my mom when she stumbled as the three of them were walking together. That cemented Nixon in my Dad’s mind as a good guy. Sure, there was Watergate later on, but he had shown compassion toward my mom, and that’s what Dad remembered most.

During all the time my parents were married, I never heard Dad yell at Mom. Oh, he’d raise his voice and had quite a temper, but he never took it out on her. He never remarried and, although he flirted with women from time to time and even had a couple of girlfriends, there was never any doubt that Mom was, and always would be, the love of his life.

My parents tried for years to have a child, without success. Doctors told them they could find nothing wrong, but after six years, they had pretty much resigned themselves to a childless marriage. Then, in 1962, Dad was recruited to run for state Assembly. He’d been teaching at Fresno State for a few years by then, and as a former debating champion at Pomona College, he’d caught the attention of the California Republican Party.

It was an uphill battle, as he was running in a heavily Democratic district, and he was out on the campaign trail when he got the word from Mom that she was expecting. He lost the race by a handful of votes and never ran for office again; but he became a father in the process. He considered it a good tradeoff.

Teacher

I often asked Dad why he hadn’t run for office again, and he told me he preferred to teach.

He loved it so much that he continued to do so at Fresno State as long as he could, after the “traditional” retirement age, teaching into his 70s. In 2004, at the age of 73, he even taught a class for free. That’s right. And they almost didn’t let him.

Of all my father’s many professional accomplishments, it was this the singular act that, to me, said the most about his character.

A budget crisis in California had forced Fresno State to cancel several sections of a political science course. All the remaining classes were full, leaving some students without a class they’d need to graduate. So Dad, who had just retired, offered to teach a section for free.

The university rejected his offer, leading Dad to ask, “Why the heck can’t someone volunteer?” Officials contended it would actually cost the university money, based on a complex funding formula, but Dad wasn’t buying it: “It is difficult to figure out how that works,” he said. “I have a serious problem with that kind of logic.”

A story about the university’s rejection of his offer appeared on the front page of The Fresno Bee. Then, three days later, the university reversed itself and allowed him to teach a class, after all.

Not only did Dad teach the class, he taught everyone in the community at large something about the importance of character – and of putting students before the almighty dollar.  

Father

Dad also taught me a few personal lessons that I’ll never forget. Perhaps foremost among them was the value of an education. When I was struggling as a freshman in high school, failing more than one class, he told me once as he was driving our gold Buick LeSabre that I had two choices: I could start taking school seriously, or I could wind up in a minimum-wage job or doing field labor for the rest of my life. I listened, and the next year, I was earning all A’s and B’s.

He also taught me that victories are infinitely sweeter when they are earned. For a while, when we started to play ping pong, I never beat him. Ever. He wouldn’t let me win just to make me “feel good” because I was a 12-year-old kid; he wanted me to enjoy that feeling of accomplishment he knew I’d get when I finally did beat him.

He knew what he was doing, and he was right.

He was honest in action and word alike. When I wrote a novel I was sure he’d enjoy, he told me it hadn’t really grabbed him. He wasn’t harshly critical, but he didn’t offer false praise to spare my feelings. On the other hand, when I wrote a book on discrimination, he said it should be in every classroom in the country. So when he told my wife, Samaire, that her Mad World novels were some of the most exciting stories he’d read, I knew he was telling the truth. Although the two of them only knew each other for five years, they developed a close bond and heartfelt friendship; Samaire dedicated the third book in her trilogy to him.

Although he spent most of his career in the classroom, Dad did take a couple of detours from his job as a tenured professor at Fresno State. In 1966, he took me and Mom back to Australia, where he spent a year teaching as a visiting professor specializing in American government. His 3-year-old son played with plastic trains, drew crayon pictures and befriended imaginary dragons in an apartment overlooking Botany Bay in Sydney.

Politician

Dad was twice a finalist to become president of a Cal State university – once in Chico and once in Bakersfield – and he served for six years as dean of new program development for the entire university system. He wrote a textbook on California politics that went through 17 editions and served as a political analyst on virtually every Fresno TV station during election season over a period of more than two decades.

He served as chairman of the California Republican Assembly president of the statewide Academic Senate. He liked to talk about how he had invited then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to speak to the latter body, amid criticism that faculty members weren’t interested in hearing from a conservative politician. Dad introduced Reagan to tepid applause but said that, by the end of the session, he had won over the room to such an extent that he received a standing ovation.

He also recalled a visit to Reagan's office in Sacramento, where the governor invited him to try some jelly beans.

Dad was an interesting character, politically speaking. A lifelong Republican, he was nonetheless once branded the “pink professor” for a wholly imagined sympathy for communism. Yet despite his conservatism, he did hold a number of views that could only be described as progressive, and he valued a willingness to compromise well above any rigid allegiance to partisan dogma. In his later years, he often lamented the gridlock that evolved from a growing refusal to see the other side of things. He’d been trained as a debater to argue either side of a given issue, so it was natural that this refusal to listen to other points of view didn’t sit well with him. It’s yet another value he passed along to me.

Adventurer

But Dad’s life was so much more than politics.

He hitchhiked the Australian Outback during his first stay there (enduring an encounter with leeches in the process). He visited Egypt, Italy, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona, Utah … and I’m sure I’m leaving something out. We flew in a helicopter together on Maui, where we also drive the infamously curvy Road to Hana. We visited Stonehenge, Edinburgh Castle, York Cathedral, Monument Valley, Waimea Canyon, the Oregon coast and Haleakala crater together.

Along the way, he introduced me to his love of photography, shooting seemingly endless rolls of slides with his trusty Minolta. He taught me how to “frame” a photo and explore different angles to find just the right composition. We once arose before the crack of dawn to drive around the San Joaquin Valley, taking black-and-white photos of old barns and dilapidated buildings as the first rays of sunlight crept over the horizon, creating shadowy ghosts that appeared to linger among the beams and rafters.

Supporter

Dad was also a fan of science fiction from way back, from the literary world of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke to the on-screen entertainment of Star Trek and Star Wars. We watched all the movies in both series together up until the late ’90s, but there was never any doubt which franchise we both preferred. In the ST vs. SW debate, he came down squarely on the side of Trek. He introduced me to The Original Series in the early 1970s, and I’ve seen every episode of every incarnation – big and small screen – since.

He enjoyed folk music (Glenn Yarbrough, who died just a few days after he did at the age of 86; Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul and Mary) and endured my   preference for bands like KISS, Aerosmith and Queen with good grace. He might not have agreed with my tastes, but he respected them: He was the kind of person who picked out Christmas and birthday gifts he thought you’d like, rather than just buying something he would have liked to get himself. He knew I liked dragons, so he picked out a dragon-themed wallet for me; he knew I liked “Star Trek,” so he bought me a “Star Trek”-themed mug. Little things like that from a very big heart.

There were big things, too. He bought a car for me to drive after I got my license. When I was a teenager, we visited Kauai every other year for about a decade. After Mom died, he took me on trips to Maui and England.

He also put me through college at Fresno State, where I graduated summa cum laude (all A’s except for one B and a single C). I was proud of my academic achievement, and I once suggested that I take one of my dad’s classes to see how well I would do. He had a reputation as a good but very challenging teacher, and I wanted to test myself, but Dad pointed out it would be a no-win situation: If I didn’t do well, it would be a discouraging setback, and if I aced the class, people might think he’d showed me some sort of favoritism.

There were all those things he did for me, and then there was just who he was. I would not be who I am today without my father’s love of language, history, science fiction, sports, logic … the list goes on and on.

For years, Dad and his colleagues would gather every week at 4 p.m. at a Fresno watering hole to “solve all the world’s problems” in the space of a couple of hours. Club, as he called it (not “the club,” just “Club”) was primarily a gathering of political science professors: my father’s best friend, Karl Swenson; Freeman Wright, Maurice Van Gerpen and Lyman Heine were among the regulars. They met at Fresno Feed and Fuel for a while, then switched to Sutter Street Bar & Grill at the Ramada for many years, where I was initiated as a sort of adjunct member of the group (not being a professor) for several of those years. Dad would almost always order a martini and an O’Doul’s.

Giver

Dad worked as a professor into his 70s and taught many future leaders, including onetime Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines, Fresno City Councilman Craig Scharton and Fresno Bee Executive Editor Jim Boren,

His health declined in later years, but his mind remained active even after he sold his home and moved into a long-term care facility. As long as you kept your sense of humor, he’d often say, you'd have a life worth living. His favorite comedians included Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Tim Conway and Carol Burnett. He was himself an inveterate punster, which I’m happy to say has rubbed off on me (although others may not be quite so happy about that!).

A couple of years ago, Dad helped me by providing information and firsthand recollections for my book Fresno Growing Up. His insights, as always, were invaluable. One of the last times he made the trek out of his care facility was a year ago, when he attended my launch party and signing for the book in downtown Fresno. In his final months, he told me repeatedly how proud he was of me and how much he was looking forward to reading my next two books, both due out next year. One is a history of Highway 99 in California, to which he introduced me; the other is a novel called Memortality about a woman who can bring back the dead through the power of her memory.

I wish I could do that with Dad now. In a sense, I’m doing the best I can with this remembrance, which can never come close to doing justice to perhaps the most accomplished man I’ve ever known, not to mention my greatest supporter and lifelong friend.

My father passed away Aug. 6, 2016. We’d seen him a few weeks earlier and held a three-hour conversation with him about politics and life, the past and the future. As always, he was gracious, telling us we should get going as the day stretched into late afternoon because we had a long drive ahead of us and shouldn’t be traveling too much after nightfall. “Watch out for all those nuts on the road,” he’d say. Every time.

I talked to my dad on the phone two days before he lost consciousness. He didn’t seem to be feeling too well, so just before I hung up, I told him something I said too infrequently.

“I love you, Dad.”

He told me he loved me, too. Those were the last and best words we ever exchanged.

Note: The photo that appears above shows my father and my mom, Lollie Provost, in the early 1970s.

How the Clintons helped pave the way for Trump

I never thought I’d look back fondly on the days when a political campaign could be crippled by the public’s reaction to a snowflake that looked like a teardrop.

We used to have so little tolerance for anything that even hinted of scandal in our public servants that even the slightest (perceived) imperfection could disqualify them.

In 1971, Edmund Muskie was the Democratic frontrunner for the presidency until his reaction to a published letter attacking his wife tested his composure. He appeared to wipe away a tear at a news conference, and that was all it took to send him on a downward trajectory in the polls. Muskie himself said he was wiping away a melting snowflake that landed on his face, but it didn’t matter. He was done as a viable candidate. Just like that.

In 1987, Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration for the U.S. Supreme Court after it was revealed that he’d used marijuana “on a few occasions.” Around the same time, Gary Hart went from early favorite to also-ran in the Democratic presidential race based on accusations of an extramarital affair. Both he and the woman in question, Donna Rice, denied (and continue to deny) the accusations, but that didn’t matter. Hart was finished.

Compare Hart’s alleged dalliance with the numerous accusations against Bill Clinton, who became president a few years later – including one that involved a White House intern and a blue dress. Clinton survived in what may have been the turning point in the public’s perception of political faux pas.

What changed?

Instead of going on the defensive, Clinton acted as though he was the victim of some affront, declaring forcefully that he “did not have sex with that woman,” while his wife, Hillary Clinton, proclaimed that her husband was the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Republican lawmkers’ insistence on pursuing impeachment charges, when it was already clear that the Democrat-majority Senate would never convict Clinton, only added to the impression that they were out to get him.

The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. - Hillary Clinton

Suddenly, the Clintons, not Lewinsky, were the aggrieved parties. Never mind that Clinton’s actions were, at best, highly inappropriate and, at worst, a flagrant abuse of power. But those actions became obscured by the Republicans’ determination to make him pay, come hell or high water, for their own political purposes.

To this day, supporters of the Clintons routinely answer any criticism against them by maintaining it’s all merely part of a Republican strategy to discredit them. Of course, Republicans do want to discredit them – often with accusations so blatantly partisan that they border on the ridiculous to most objective observers.

But the flipside of the coin is this: The public has become numb to serious accusations against the Clintons that don’t stem from Republican sources at all. Is Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, really at tool of the Republican party? It’s hard to argue that. Yet his campaign’s charges that the Democratic National Committee sought to tilt the playing field in Clinton’s favor are hard to deny in the face of recently released emails.

What it comes down to is this: The public is so fatigued at wading through the he said/she said morass of accusation, denial, conspiracy theory and high dudgeon that they’ve thrown up their hands and stopped paying attention. They don’t want presidents to do … that … with White House interns, but they don’t want interminable impeachment hearings that distract Congress from addressing the issues facing the nation, either.

The Bengazi hearings proved the Republicans hadn’t learned their lesson from the impeachment debacle. The biggest winner was Hillary Clinton, who wound up looking like the victim of a ridiculously expensive partisan witch hunt.

He’s not a war hero. He (John McCain) was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. - Donald Trump

Which brings us to Donald Trump, who, if anything, has upped the ante to unprecedented levels. He can insult a former POW (John McCain), claiming he wasn’t a real hero. He can falsely accuse Barack Obama of being a noncitizen. He can make crude and demeaning comments about women, do the same thing about immigrants and falsely claim that thousands of American Muslims cheered the collapse of the World Trade Center.

And nobody cares. They don’t care about his bankruptcies, Trump University or, really, anything else he does.

They don’t care because they’re tired of the blame game that’s been going on between the Clintons and Republicans for decades now. Some even call Trump “refreshing” because he “tells it like it is” and doesn’t lock everything up so tightly no one can tell what’s real and what’s not. They’re so sick of pervasive secrecy on the one hand and the endless investigations on the other that Trump seems like a breath of fresh air ... no matter what he actually says.

The irony is that the Clintons – along with congressional Republicans – paved the way for Trump’s success by making it possible to do or say virtually anything with impunity, because so many people stopped caring.

Just eight years ago, our presidential ballot presented us with the choice between a law professor and a war hero. Today, we have a matchup between a pair of candidates who behave very much like Huey Long and Richard Nixon, the two most unpopular candidates in modern history.

What I wouldn’t give for a wayward snowflake now.

The price of violence — and our only alternative

Guns don’t solve problems. People do. Or we can when we look past our anger, our fear, our prejudice.

Fists don’t solve problems, either. Neither do knives, threats or bullying. This should all seem so very obvious, but we’re losing track of the obvious in a maze of blame and accusation that we’ll never escape if we don’t reverse course soon.

We want easy solutions that aren’t solutions at all. Most often, they only make the problems worse.

Afraid of someone? Shoot him. Easy. Problem eliminated. Right? Except now, all of that person’s friends view you as the problem and probably want to eliminate you. They have guns, too. They can get those easily enough. But more importantly, they have something you gave them: a reason to hate you.

To solve a problem, we must first understand it. But that’s too much work; we want the easy way out. Just exterminate it – or the people we believe caused it – and the repercussions be damned. Understanding is hard because it requires that we educate ourselves, that we try to see things from other people’s perspective even though we may not have experienced their pain, their challenges, their hardships.

They may even tell us, “You can’t understand. You haven’t been what we’ve been through.” But that doesn’t excuse us from trying. At best, we’ll surprise them. At worst, we’ll learn something that will increase our level of knowledge – and more knowledge is always better than less. We won’t be able to solve the problem right away, but we’ll be closer.

If we pull the trigger or dismiss another person’s pain, we’ll be further away. We’ll be promoting the opposite of knowledge, which is ignorance, because those we’ve silenced will never be able to help us understand. Those whose pain we’ve dismissed feel as though they haven’t been heard. And they’ll not only stop trying to help us understand, they’ll stop trying to understand us. And then where will we be? On opposite ends of an armed standoff, trying to blow each other’s brains out rather than using those brains as the best weapons we have against the fear and hurt that divide us.

The alternative

There is another way, if we have the courage and the patience to pursue it.

It’s hard.

When we try to understand, things get complicated, and we don’t like complicated. It’s frustrating dealing with problems you can’t solve right away, with people who don’t trust you, with bureaucracies, playing fields that are anything but level and people who are hell-bent on protecting – and exploiting – their advantages. There’s prejudice and there’s bitterness. But none of that goes away by pulling a trigger or responding with some shallow platitude and going on our merry way.

People who are hurting are hurting for a reason. We can try to shield our tender sensibilities from the hurt by placing a bandage over our own eyes, but that doesn’t make the hurt go away. It only sends a message to those who have been hurt that we don’t care.

The unheard scream, “We matter!” not because they believe others matter less, but because they feel their pain is being ignored or dismissed as unimportant.

Yes, everyone matters. But when you’re hurting and it seems like no one cares, you don’t feel like you do. Then you have two choices. You can surrender to the judgment of others and believe that you really are unimportant. Or you can reject that and say, “I do matter.” And you can take that self-worth and use it as motivation to speak a little louder, try a little harder to be heard. Until someone starts to listen, tries to understand and maybe even helps you change things for the better. Or at least stops hurting you. At least that.

Those who haven’t been heard and those who don’t want to hear have this in common: They lash out. The only way to stop this is to start hearing one another. Hearing leads to understanding, which, in time, can lead to trust.

Building trust is, by its nature, a long and tortuous process that can, tragically, be upended by the frustration and impatience that leads us to pull triggers, call each other names and stop listening. When we do, we put everything right back at square one. Because that’s the reality of this: Not only does the “quick fix” never fix anything, it destroys the entire process of seeking understanding and, ultimately, of building trust.

And it destroys lives along the way.

We have to stop shooting people. But more than that, we must stop thinking we can eliminate problems we don’t understand by invoking brute force or wishing them away. By calling names or building walls. The only way to achieve our goals is by building understanding that leads, ultimately, to trust. That’s hard work; there will be miscommunication and hurt feelings along the way. But obstacles and detours shouldn’t deter us from keeping to the path.

There are no shortcuts.

NBA Finals 2016: When destiny jumped the tracks

Don’t believe the headlines. LeBron James did not win the 2016 NBA Finals all by himself ("King James dethrones Warriors," as one media outlet put it). He wasn’t even the difference for Cleveland, whose fans are basking in a long-overdue championship glow today.

That honor goes to Kyrie Irving.

We shouldn’t have believed the headlines about the Golden State Warriors, either. This was supposed to be a team of destiny, the team that would change the face of professional basketball as we know it.

In the end, it was the 2007 New England Patriots all over again.

THE ASTERISK

This year’s Warriors will go down in history not as a champion but an aberration, a regular-season asterisk next to a postseason disappointment. The 2015-16 Warriors will forever be remembered as the little engine that couldn’t, a team that should have won the title – and easily – but nearly got derailed in the semis and ran off the rails completely in the Finals.

How does this feel to the Warriors? Ask the ’07 Patriots, who were 18-0 before losing to a vastly inferior New York Giants team in the 2008 Super Bowl. Or ask George Foreman, undefeated and billed as “indestructible” when Muhammad Ali KO’d him in Zaire.

Both the Patriots and Foreman rebounded, but in different ways. The Pats have been back to the Super Bowl twice, winning once, in 2015. Foreman was so shaken by his loss to Ali that he took a year off, then retired for good another year later when Jimmy Young beat him on a decision in 1977. Foreman stayed out of the ring for a decade before launching a comeback that resulted him recapturing the heavyweight title with a stunning knockout of Michael Moorer at nearly 46 years of age.

Foreman was never again “indestructible,” and the Patriots have never again been undefeated heading into the Super Bowl. They both missed a chance at history that never came around again. The same is likely true of the Warriors, who can’t be expected to win 74 games next year or the year after that or the year after that.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

They’ll have to live with the emptiness of this year’s “what if,” just as Patriots have to live with that lost opportunity against the Giants, and Foreman struggled to come to grips with what he behind left in the ring against Ali. Both the Pats and Big George went on to distinguish themselves in different ways, though: the Patriots by winning their fourth Super Bowl of the century in 2015 – more than any other team so far – and Foreman by becoming the oldest man ever to win the NBA title.

Will the Warriors bounce back to similar greatness? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, they’ve been given the bitterest of pills to swallow: a might-have-been glory that never was and the irony that last year’s excellent championship team turned out to be better than this year’s “team for the ages.”

In part, that’s because Stephen Curry’s shooting touch largely failed him in the Finals, as did Klay Thompson’s. Draymond Green played up to his usual standards but missed a game because of a suspension, and 7-foot center Andrew Bogut was lost in Game 5 to a knee injury, leaving the Warriors totally reliant on their small-ball lineup and without anyone to counter Tristan Thompson or James in the paint.

Anderson Varejão, the former Cavalier who picked up many of the minutes Bogut would have played, was ineffective to the point of being a liability. It was during his time on the court in Game 7 that the momentum swung from the Warriors, who kept trying to feed him the ball (with disastrous results) to Cleveland.

THE DIFFERENCE

The Warriors didn’t just lose the series, the Cavaliers won it, and they deserve all the credit in the world for coming back from a 3-1 series deficit, something no other team had ever accomplished in the Finals. But while James got almost all the credit in the next day’s headlines, he wasn’t the one who made the difference.

Yes, his play was outstanding, and there’s no way the Cavaliers would have won without him. But he actually played better in last year’s loss to the Warriors, when he averaged 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds and 8.8 assists. His numbers this year: 29.7, 11.3 and 8.9.

No, the difference wasn’t James, it was guard Kyrie Irving, who played just one game in last year’s Finals before being injured but averaged 27.1 points while starting all seven games this year, including 41 points on 17 of 24 shooting in the pivotal Game 5 and the three-point shot that won the decisive Game 7.

Take Irving out of the equation, and the result would have been the same as last year, even with Curry’s and Klay Thompson’s shooting woes. Put Irving back in last year’s lineup, and – if he’d have played like this – the Warriors could easily have lost.

But those are just more “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

The Cavaliers had to live with their own “if onlys” for this past year, but to be honest, they were never a team of destiny, an other-worldly entity that was supposed to transform the game of basketball. This year’s Warriors were both those things … until suddenly they weren’t. And win or lose next year, they’ll have to live with that for a very long time.

Welcome to Political Babylon

We, the people of Political Babylon ...

I’m taking a timeout from talking about presidential candidates online. That’s not to say I’ll never do so, but I’m going to try to refrain – and here’s why.

It’s not that I don’t care about the election or have a preference. I have a strong preference and, yes, I do care. What I don’t care for is how this election has started to look like everything that’s wrong with organized religion.

It’s not the candidates but their supporters who have led me to this conclusion, just as it isn’t any deity that makes me wary of religious fervor. It’s the us-vs.-them fanaticism that drives people to turn against one another and feel as though it’s acceptable – even noble – to become backbiters, kitchen sink dumpers and even suicide bombers.

All for the sake of some cult of personality; for the privilege of following some Pied Piper.

The way people hurl abuse at one another in the name of one candidate or another is nauseating. It’s gotten to the point where one can’t make a reasoned observation about any candidate without one of his/her supporters shouting the political equivalent of “Blasphemy!” or “Heresy!” Facebook and Twitter have become venues for verbally re-enacting the Spanish Inquisition using less physical implements of torture: bullying, accusation, name-calling and the full gamut of fallacious arguments.

People defend “their” candidates like they’re Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all rolled into one.

They’re not.

Partisans and true believers go around throwing money into campaign war chests as though they're making offerings at some sacred temple. They refuse to risk upsetting any of the money-changers’ tables for fear one might topple over on their candidate and he/she will lose the advantage. The end justifies the means. Sure it does. Keep telling yourself that as your credibility disappears down the toilet. Do you even care?

Nearly everyone decries the tenor of the candidates’ rhetoric as unbecoming of a president. Well, look in the mirror. How's your rhetoric sounded lately? These politicians are putting on a show you’re paying to see, so kindly stop paying for it or stop complaining.

We the voters have personalized these candidates to such an extent we've adopted them as symbols of our own psychosis. In psychological terms, there's more projection going on here than you'll find at a 20-screen multiplex, and the image on the screen is just as two-dimensional.

No, I’m not joining the chorus of “let’s get along for the sake of party unity.” Party unity be damned. It’s just an excuse for people to act like one party or the other (or the two-party system) is “the one true church” and everyone else needs to be excommunicated. Whatever happened to voting your conscience? Whatever happened to staying civil for civility's sake? That concept seems to have disappeared down the toilet as well.

In the meantime, we’ve stopped talking about the issues. We’re so busy defending “our son of a bitch” because he’s our son of a bitch, it's as if we’ve forgotten why we started supporting him (or her) in the first place. This is what happens with personality cults: They become all about the person, while the issues are neglected and forgotten. The result is paralysis at best, demagoguery and despotism at worst. We get what we pay for with our 30-second attention spans.

Wonder why we tolerate people who flip-flop on the issues - who obfuscate, lie and spin everything under the sun? Then read that last paragraph again. We care more about party affiliation, name recognition and our own projections in this theater of the absurd than we do about the plot lines, the substance, the issues.

It’s what we want. It’s what we allow. If we don't have a Pied Piper, but we'll create one to follow. If we believe hard enough, these candidates will be everything we want them to be, right?

Be careful what you wish for, because the reflection in that mirror ain’t pretty. If we really want a candidate who looks just like our own psychoses, it won’t be long before we come to regret it. Then we’ll blame our savior: We’ll sacrifice him or her on the altar of our own denial, and we’ll start the ugly cycle all over again.

Welcome to Political Babylon. 

Meet Isis: Cat, companion and the truest of friends

Allow me to introduce you to Isis. Not the goddess (although she sometimes behaves like one) and certainly not the terrorist group.

Isis is a cat. My cat. And I’m her human.

As I write this, Isis is in severe kidney failure. She’s only nine years old, and she doesn’t deserve that. She deserves so much more.

I met Isis at a PetSmart store on one of those days when they bring in shelter pets and hope someone bonds with them. Isis was there, with her brother, who was running all over the cage, playful as can be. Isis wasn’t having any of that. She just casually came up and said “hello” to me, nudging her head up against the cage when I put my hand down to pet her. Right away, we were comfortable with each other.

I had a name picked out for her right away. I was going to call her Frejya, after the Norse goddess, because her crystal blue eyes and glistening white and grey coat, with a hint of tan, reminded me of a book I’d read by Elizabeth H. Boyer from the early ’80s. I’d read it a long time ago, and if I remember correctly, one of the characters was a woman or goddess who’d been magically transformed into a cat.

But then I was informed that she already had a name: Isis. I liked that, too, and I figured that, since she already had it, I wasn’t going to take it away from her. Isis she would remain.

Isis came along at just the right time, and she’s been there during the hardest time of my life. Since I’ve known her, I’ve been through a divorce, been laid off from my job of fourteen years and watched my father’s health gradually decline.

Isis was there for me the whole time, and along with my mother and my wife, Samaire, hers has been the most comforting presence I’ve ever known.

She nearly always came when I called her name, and even today, in her weakened state, she still does. Sometimes, she lies down at the foot of the bed, and the moment I say her name, she’ll turn around and look at me, then get up and walk like some miniature white tiger on padded paws right up to me and curl up next to me, purring.

When everything was going wrong and I was struggling with depression, I imagined she was that white tiger, and that she was there to protect me when I no longer had the hope or energy to fight myself.

Now, I have to protect her. She spent the past week in the animal hospital on IV fluids and she seemed to perk up a little, but at the end of that time, she still was barely eating and her kidney numbers weren’t much better. The vet said he recommended euthanizing her.

Samaire said she didn’t think we should, and I realized she was right. I wouldn’t make that kind of decision for a family member who walks on two legs. How could I do that for my beloved white tiger just because she walks on four?

Besides, I want more time with her – even if it’s only a little bit. I’m typing through tears here, and I don’t cry very often. Not to complain, but I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve learned to deal with loss and numb myself to pain pretty effectively. But not this kind of loss. Not this kind of pain.

All the talk of rainbow bridges and “better places” doesn’t mean a thing when you face the prospect of losing someone you love deeply and someone who has loved you so unconditionally for so long.

Right now, Isis still isn’t eating on her own, but she will swallow (grudgingly) the food we put in her mouth, and we’re giving her subcutaneous fluids to keep her hydrated. I’m spending as much time curled up in bed beside her as I can because, to me, every moment now is precious.

I wanted to introduce you to Isis, because I may not have many more chances to do so, and because everyone should get the chance to know someone this special. An unfailing friend. A white tiger. Someone you know without a shadow of a doubt really loves you.

That’s who Isis is to me and, whatever happens, it’s who she’ll always be.