Spring Training

It's that time of year. Pitchers and catchers report this week in Florida and Arizona. Players say the first week of spring training is the most difficult. It's not just the physical deterioration. It's that every team is reconstituted, even a world champion. New teammates, new coaches, sometimes a new manager.

For many generations, in the area around what is now called Tempe, the Hopis gathered at this time of year in one of their few ceremonies not presided over by the elders. It was grass roots, for lack of a better term.

It wasn't a spring ritual; spring was still six weeks away. It was an act of faith. In the face of a hibernating desert, the ritual was a recognition that winter would pass. It was an act of remembrance, looking backward instead of forward. Remembrance of those who had not made it through. The old, the young, the foolish who didn't respect the mountains.

The remembering must come now, at this time of year, because very soon, our job will be to grow again, live green and full. The Hopi ritual is spring training.

Project JFK (Part 1)

Was LBJ involved in Kennedy’s assassination? I’ll never really know, but I have some idea. Not an idea really--a feeling. This has nothing to do with logic, or “follow the money,” or reading the tea leaves of an instant in time where I have to distinguish between a wink and a blink.


It has to do with how moral guilt seeps out of us (even the most corruptible) like sewer gas. Because there’s never going to be something that spells it out like a PowerPoint slide. No signing statement that turns up in the National Archives, or diary entry excavated from a Presidential Library, or box of evidence released after 45 years by the City of Dallas.

To explain how I got to that “feeling,” I need to take a detour. Since we’re hunting a killer, let’s start with “Dragnet.” I won’t regurgitate the history of the show's creation as a radio, then television, procedural. It’s enough to say that an ambitious Jack Webb, let loose in post-war Los Angeles, latched onto the LAPD both as an psychological extension of his U.S. Air Force service, and as the blunt end of the wedge that would pry him into Hollywood.

And for much of the 50s and early 60s, in first-runs and in repeats, Dragnet painted a picture of the big city to middle America, one where the bad guys always got caught by the good guys--and the good guys were always in uniform.

As the 1960s rotted on the vine, I think a little moral guilt started seeping out of people like Jack Webb and LBJ, even if they weren't quite aware of it. More on that in Part 2.