Photo Todd Walton and Robin Chin by John Grimes

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser September 2011)

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” Winston Churchill

Last week there came news that Dick Cheney was canceling his subscription to the New York Times because the New York Times had the audacity to print what Paul Krugman wrote to commemorate the disaster known as 9/11. I was curious to read what caused the perpetrator of so much needless death and destruction and economic ruin to cancel the paper that had been so helpful to him during his eight-year reign as on-site puppeteer of George W Bush, and here, in case you missed Krugman’s brief epistle, is what made Dick so mad.

“What happened after 9/11—and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not—was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neo cons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

“A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits—people who should have understood very well what was happening—took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

“The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”

Krugman’s words washed over me like a cool breeze on a hot day, the hot day being the hundreds of newspaper and interweb articles and thousands of minutes of radio and television time spent on further hijacking and poisoning the memory of 9/11. And though the content of Krugman’s note held nothing new for those who don’t swallow the propaganda of our overlords, the placement of Krugman’s note in the nation’s paper-of-record at that moment in history was, in my opinion, a brave act.

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” Mark Twain

I first became aware of Paul Krugman when I was giving a little help to my friend Robin Chin as she strove day and night for two years to make a documentary entitled There’s Something About W, a movie she hoped would be a valuable weapon in defeating George W. Bush as he ran for a second term as President of the United States. And I am convinced that had even ten per cent of the American voters seen There’s Something About W, George Bush would have been defeated by a landslide.

So there I was watching a rough cut of There’s Something About W in John (Robin’s partner) and Robin’s tiny one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, their little living room converted into an editing studio, when Paul Krugman appeared on the screen, a likable, matter-of-fact fellow explaining in easy-to-understand terms exactly how George and his puppeteers were pulling the economic wool over the eyes of the American public. Krugman appears several times in the course of Robin’s marvelous film, which also features a number of well-known political comedians, and Krugman’s wry delivery of the terrible truth fits perfectly. Over these ensuing eight years, as Krugman’s fame has grown and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, I have been a semi-regular reader of his articles; and it has been fascinating to watch as his warnings prove repeatedly prophetic while our overlords gleefully ignore him—for they most definitely do not want what Krugman wants, which is for the world to be a better place for everyone.

“There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.” Ken Venturi

Robin Chin and John Grimes are two of my favorite people, and how we became friends is a favorite memory. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and feeling as if you already know them. I’m not talking about especially liking a person the first time you meet them, or falling in love at first sight, but of familiarity, as if you and they might have been roommates or neighbors or siblings, though you’ve never laid eyes on each other, not in this lifetime anyway.

That’s how I felt when I first met Robin and John on a December evening in the early 1990’s—as if I knew them already and had known them for eons. I was camping in an empty cottage in Berkeley owned by my pal David Jouris (the person from whom I cadge many of the quotations I use in my essays), enjoying a brief respite from my swiftly devolving life in Sacramento. David, hoping to cheer me up, invited me to tag along to a holiday party in San Rafael; and though I have never been much of a party guy, being psychically porous, allergic to alcohol, and possessed of a preternatural talent for putting my foot in my mouth, I went with him.

On those rare occasions when I do attend parties, my strategy for survival is to scout around for a good place to hide, procure a plate of food, and return to my hiding place. At this party, however, every square inch of the house was occupied and it was freezing outside, so I settled near the guacamole in the very crowded kitchen next to Robin, a beautiful woman with long black hair who seemed as shell-shocked as I by the cacophonous goings on.

At that point, if memory serves, our mutual friend David waltzed by and introduced us. Robin and I fell into conversation, and when I learned that Robin was a San Francisco-based photographer, I mentioned a commercial photographer I knew in the city who turned out to be someone Robin knew. Then John, who is most definitely a party guy and an indefatigable punster, joined us in conversation, and before we knew it we were all fast friends and planning the first of many reunions.

“Always remember there are two types of people in the world. Those who come into a room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are!” Frederick L. Collins

Robin and John are definitely “Ah, there you are!” people, and if, during the first several years of our friendship, a person had said to me, “Robin and John are making a major documentary film that could seriously influence who becomes the next President of the United States,” I would have assumed the person was speaking about a different John and Robin. Not that they aren’t talented and creative and passionate, they are, but they are such “Ah, there you are!” people and not at all “Well, here I am!” people that it never occurred to me they might aspire to write and direct and produce something on the scale of a major motion documentary. How such a thing came to pass would make a fine documentary in itself, but an even better fictional comedy based on a true story.

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” Lewis Carroll

By the time I moved to Berkeley in the mid-1990’s, Robin had transitioned from photography to film editing and would eventually become the assistant editor on a number of award-winning documentaries, while John continued to amplify his success as an illustrator and cartoonist. They were living in the aforementioned tiny apartment where they live to this day, John’s office a desk, computer, and a photocopy machine adjacent to their miniscule kitchen, Robin’s editing studio inseparable from the living room. The interweb boom was just getting underway and the Bay Area was awash in money trickling down sufficiently to support thousands of freelance human beings such as John and Robin and yours truly. Clinton was President, and though we knew he was spearheading the frenzied sundering of the social safety net, destroying our industrial base, and bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, he was technically a Democrat, the economy was literally bubbling along, and we were busily scrambling to pay our rents, so in much the same way that liberals and progressives are neutralized (neutered?) today by Obama being a Democrat and the official “lesser evil”, we were rarely moved to protest.

“I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

But then Bush was enthroned, the towers came down, and the overlords chanted “weapons of mass destruction” day and night until finally the muddled masses conflated Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden. Then, as W was on the verge of ordering the invasion and demolition of Iraq, millions of Americans and millions of people around the world, old farts and young farts, got off our butts and went to march against going to war; and Robin and John decided to film the anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco.

I remember marching along Market Street with a half-million other passionate people and realizing that something was very different about this march than those anti-war protests of the 1960’s and 70’s; the largest difference being that our overlords had cleverly diverted traffic from several blocks away on either side of Market Street so no one but the marchers could witness the true scale of the protest. And the subservient media, including the shameful San Francisco Chronicle, reported only ten thousand marched against the war that day, and gave equal space to fake little pro-war demonstrations attended by a few dozen shills.

But we who marched knew how many of us there were, and on an island in that river of humanity, Robin and John stood filming the truth as it flowed toward and around them. I like to think it was the passionate energy of those hundreds of thousands of protestors that infused Robin and John with the awesome energy it took to transcend their previous notions of who they were and enable them to make a movie that might very well have changed the world. If only…

Todd: What motivated you, Robin, to start filming the anti-war protests?

Robin: Watching the pre-war reporting on television and in the papers, I felt we were being fed nothing but pro-war propaganda, and I was scared to death about the tragic consequences of the United States going to war and the erosion of our civil liberties the administration (Cheney) would implement. So I wanted to document the protests in San Francisco and interview people with different points of view.

Todd: And what were you going to do with that footage?

Robin: Well, we got so many compelling interviews at those protests, interviews with people from all walks of life, that I thought we’d make a small video to present the anti-war side. And then I tuned in C-SPAN for the very first time so I could watch the debate in Congress about going to war, and I was shocked to see what else was going on in Congress, and what else, policy-wise, the Bush Administration was doing—all these radical changes to our government, the whole New Deal safety net being dismantled, the drive to privatize Social Security, out sourcing of jobs, the Patriot act, the NSA’s invasion of privacy, and on and on. This shifted my idea of making a small piece about the war to the idea of a larger documentary that eventually became There’s Something About W.

Todd: And how were you able to involve Krugman?

Robin: Krugman was one of the first and most articulate people we saw writing and speaking about the radical policies of the Bush Administration, and the first person I saw in the mainstream media calling people in the administration liars. When we saw a video of Krugman talking at the New School, John contacted Krugman’s publicist and we ended up interviewing him in three different venues when he visited the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

Todd: But knowing you as I do, knowing what a private person you always were, and are, I wonder what it was that compelled you to go out of character, so to speak, and undertake the making of such a public epic as There’s Something About W.

Robin: As I was driving home one rainy day I felt something suddenly jump into my body, and I felt a very big responsibility to warn everyone about all the changes and policies the Administration was trying to enact. I didn’t think people were really getting this information. It seemed like the world, as I knew it, was going to be taken over and destroyed by the Bush Administration, and I thought if I was going to take the big leap and make the sacrifice to produce and fund a documentary of my own, there was no better time and no better subject than this one. Having worked on documentaries for Frontline, Frontline/World, and with many other independent filmmakers, I thought I knew how much it would take, though it ended up taking much more than I ever imagined. So I enlisted John and many other friends and people I knew in the film industry to help sound the alarm.

Todd: And what are you doing now?

Robin: I have continued to document the unvarnished history of our government through my video archive that now contains over 20,000 hours of television broadcast footage, and we’re going to have a meeting with the Internet Archive about putting as much of that footage as possible on-line for all to see, and to be a historical record for researchers.

John Wooden, the legendary coach of the UCLA basketball team just turned ninety-nine. Wooden coached the UCLA team from 1948 to 1975 and won ten National Championships in a span of 12 years, including 7 in a row from 1967 to 1973, a feat so unimaginable today it seems more myth than fact. As a college player, Wooden was a three-time consensus All-American, the first ever, and spent several years playing in the early professional leagues while simultaneously coaching high school teams. During one 46-game stretch as a pro he made 134 consecutive free throws. During World War II, he enlisted in the Navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant. He never made more than $35,000 a year as the UCLA coach, and never asked for a raise.

Wooden said: “The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team,” and “What you are as a person is far more important that what you are as a basketball player.”

In an interview with him on the day before his 99^th birthday, he was lucid and wry, and made a fervent wish that “they” wouldn’t do anything special for his birthday. “If I make it to a hundred, well, okay.”

Among Wooden’s many famous protégé’s was Lew Alcindor who became Kareem Abdul Jabbar. We often hear superlatives connected to the superstars of today, but none of them single-handedly changed the game of basketball as Alcindor did. Few remember that when Alcindor began his college career at UCLA, freshmen were not permitted to play on varsity teams. Alcindor’s freshman squad played the UCLA varsity squad, the number one-ranked team in America, and beat them 75-60. Alcindor scored 51 points, many of his baskets dunks.

As a result of this overwhelming display of his dominance, and before Alcindor could join the varsity squad as a sophomore, the NCAA banned the dunk in college basketball, a ban that was lifted three years later when Alcindor graduated and turned pro. That’s right. They imposed a national ban to contain one specific player. But even without the dunk, Alcindor was so dominant (and seven-foot two inches tall) that for the first time in the history of basketball, referees allowed defenders to constantly foul another player (Alcindor) to keep him from scoring. I am absolutely certain that when defenders were given the green light to hold and push and hack Alcindor, the game of basketball began its swift devolution to the completely different game we have today.

Basketball was invented as a non-contact sport in 1892. And by non-contact, I mean No Contact. No touching; something hard to imagine as one watches the physicality of today’s pro and college games. When I played basketball in high school in 1964, we were stringently coached that any contact with the player we were guarding was a foul. Any touching at all, even a slap on the wrist, was a foul. The only permissible contact was when players bumped each other going for a rebound. If you went over somebody’s back or intentionally pushed another player to get a rebound, you were committing a foul. Five fouls and you were out of the game.

I played on the university team in the early days of UC Santa Cruz. We played in an industrial league that included Sylvania, a cannery, a meat packing company, a couple taverns, and a Bible college. No contact allowed. Good referees. Big fun. When I dropped out of college, I continued to play in pickup games and on city league teams wherever I lived. Then in 1974 I moved to Eugene, Oregon and encountered the newest kind of basketball, a dangerously violent game wherein if I dared call a foul when someone shoved me or punched me, I might get punched again.

As it happened, John Wooden was in his next to last year as coach at UCLA when I lived in Eugene, and he seriously considered forfeiting the Eugene game with the University of Oregon because “the kamikaze kids”, as the Oregon team was nicknamed, might seriously injure one or more of the UCLA players as part of their game strategy. Yikes. I soon discovered that such intentional violence had taken hold in the gymnasiums and on the playgrounds of Eugene, along with another truly absurd wrinkle in the game: legal traveling. Traveling in basketball refers to a basketball player carrying the ball several steps without dribbling the ball, a thing that used to be verboten. But in Eugene, players were suddenly taking several steps with the ball before shooting or passing, and the few times I called someone for traveling I was threatened with bodily harm.

I am not a large person, and one of the supreme joys of the original game of basketball came from knowing that the rules protected me from having to go mano a mano with anyone, let alone someone a hundred pounds heavier and a foot taller. Finding these protective rules removed, I spent the remainder of my year in Eugene shooting hoops solo or playing volleyball with a net separating me from my opponents.

John Wooden was horrified by this sea change in the game he loved, and he became a vocal advocate of raising the height of the hoop from ten feet to at least eleven feet, and the addition of a new rule: when the shooting team got a rebound, the rebounding player had to make a pass before that team could take another shot. He tried using this new rule with his teams in scrimmages, and sure enough, much of the bullying big man domination was neutralized.

But Wooden’s suggestions came too late, as size and brute strength and dunking became all the rage in college and pro ball, and by the time Magic Johnson played one year of varsity college ball as a freshman and then turned pro in 1979, the old game was dead. Magic was six-foot nine inches tall, and played guard, the little guy’s position.

In 2008, the NBA added yet another new rule to professional basketball: players who have the ball low in the key, within five feet of the hoop, can charge and knock over any player between them and the hoop without being called for a foul. They’ve even painted a No Charge Will Be Called stripe in the lane to mark the magic boundary. This ridiculous new rule allows huge players like Shaquille O’Neal and LeBron James to use their enormity to shove or scare defenders out of their way. Violence has now been officially written into the professional rules, along with allowing players more and more steps without dribbling prior to a dunk. This new dunking protocol facilitates more spectacular dunks, which are now the most popular part of the professional game.

As a teenager, basketball was my escape from an unhappy home, and as a young adult basketball was a big part of my social life. If I had a dollar for every hour I spent shooting hoops from age twelve to forty I could buy a nice new Japanese pickup truck. Two of my eight published books are novels with basketball as backdrop to the human comedy, which is to say the devolution of what was once my favorite sport saddens me. My novels Ruby & Spear and Inside Moves can be purchased for mere pennies, and I mean a few coppers, from myriad used bookseller on the internet.

For many of us who knew the game thirty years ago, today’s professional games are fairly redundant variety shows of semi-staged performances by amazingly gifted athletes, but not often contests between whole teams. And as the pros play, so do the young players who watch them. I recently gave a ride to a tall young man hitchhiking with a basketball under his arm. We began to speak about the game, but within a sentence or two, I realized he might as well be Russian and I Turkish, with no common language regarding the game, so we fell silent.

I have a friend with whom I used to avidly play basketball. For the last twenty years, he has been playing basketball four mornings a week at the YMCA in Sacramento with a bunch of guys who play by the old non-contact rules. He says the game continues to be a fabulous workout and a supreme blast, and I am deeply jealous.

Todd’s web site is underthetablebooks.com