Welcome to Al's World

He’s the one in the $5,000 Italian suits expertly tailored around his newly trimmed down 60 year old body. He’s the one who scowls angrily at the cameras one minute, then flashes a mouth full of oversized teeth at you the next.

He’s the man who recently bragged, “I’ve been able to reach from the streets to the suites!” And because he is who he is, it hasn’t cost him a dime. Welcome to Al’s World.

The Rev. Al Sharpton was recently celebrated at a lavish Manhattan restaurant birthday party attended by every prominent New York State politician the other day where everyone took turns praising the great man. Even the President sent an aide with a message to read, extoling the Reverend’s many virtues. Apparently, thrift isn’t one of them.

It would seem that the good Reverend owes the Internal Revenue Service some $4,500,000 in unpaid State and Federal taxes, a figure that has been growing each year. Sharpton’s non-profit organization, National Action Network has been kept afloat for years by failing to pay Federal payroll taxes on its employees.(Now that’s some Action I could get on board with!) Neither Al nor his non-profit organization have bothered to pay travel agencies, hotels or a long list of landlords for years. Despite this penchant for welching on his debts, the lavish birthday bash at the Four Seasons was paid for by a long list of corporations that for reasons unknown are not troubled by his history of serial freeloading.

I bring this up because in just a few days the grand jury down in Ferguson will render their verdict, and if it doesn’t contain a conviction, that luckless town will go up in flames. Then Al will show up, a gaggle of cameras in his face recording the rhyming rage coming forth from his mouth. The Reverend will no doubt be in high dudgeon about how poorly African-Americans are treated, about how the system is out to get them and how the burning buildings in Ferguson are a just and understandable reaction to years of ill-treatment at the hands of the privileged white establishment.

When speaking this way, he will be referring of course to the great unwashed African-American population, not the Al Sharptons of the world. I’m almost positive that if Doug Dunnevant had somehow managed to amass a 4.5 million dollar bill for back taxes, my white skin wouldn’t stand a chance of saving my ass from the heavy hand of the IRS legal team. My prison cell would be the last on the left, right across from Hannibal Lecter. I mean, Al Capone got away with murder, extortion, bribery, and racketeering, but couldn’t fight the taxman. How does Sharpton manage it?

Becoming a race hustler and poverty pimp was obviously an astute career move for Al Sharpton. It’s Al’s world. The rest of us are just living in it.

2014 Christmas List

We have now officially reached the middle of November. This can only mean one thing—the unholy alliance between Christmas and Capitalism is upon us. For the next 38 days we will be bombarded by land, air and sea with relentless marketing extoling the virtues of conspicuous consumption. From the ubiquitous sales fliers crammed into our mailboxes to the carpet bombing Walmart television ad campaigns, there will be no escape from the Gekkoesque message, “greed is good!”

Pam needled me the other day about my Christmas list. She does this every year. I am always the last one in the family to attach my list to Dunnevant Christmas Central, our famous family Christmas website. Secretly, this is my form of silent protest, but partly it’s because I have a hard time coming up with a list of things that I want. Listen, I’m 56 years old. Most of the things that I still “want” cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, I suppose I could put, “a lake house in Maine” on my list but what good would that do? So, each year I sit at my computer trying to come up with a Christmas list and each year it gets snarkier and snarkier. Who could forget 2011’s request for a Santa PEZ dispenser followed by “a capital gains tax cut?” Or how about 2012’s plaintive plea for “better spelling skills?” I can report that I did in fact receive the new fingernail clippers that I so daringly asked for in 2013.

This year, my list will be even harder to write what with all of the turmoil in the world today. It’s hard to prioritize a wish list while watching Bill Cosby implode right before your eyes.  Asking for a year’s supply of beef jerky seems rather petty while the country is poised a heartbeat away from a Joe Biden Presidency. But, it’s November the 17^th and I either do this now or face the wrath of Pam for the next month. Sigh….

So, without any further delay, here is my 2014 Christmas List:

1.     A new coffee maker

2.     Overnight success as a published author

3.     New exotic coffee beans from Central America, Jamaica, or South America

4.     New set of golf clubs

5.     Lake house in Maine

6.     A man or women of raw intelligence, common sense and actual accomplishment to run for President in 2016

7.     Gift certificate to Men’s Warehouse

8.     Gift certificate to Patient First

9.     A grandchild

10.   A less cynical outlook on life

11.     A new stylish suit

12.     A cool hat. (third year in a row for this)

13.    A really nice modern looking but not too ostentatious…watch

14.      Underwear

15.  Dress socks

Old and Stupid

The arrival of my new cell phone has unleashed a flurry of glitches that make the Obamacare website debacle look like a miracle of innovation. It’s so complicated I can’t even find the words to describe the trouble. It has something to do with my failure to back up my old phone to the cloud, the fact that I have too many pictures and videos, and maybe something to do with not having enough storage capability. Whatever it is, we are now on our third setup regime and I am temporarily phone-less.

This is always how it is with me and new stuff. There is always a glitch, usually multiple glitches. I am always left feeling old and stupid by the process. Once it all gets fixed I am happy with the new thing. But while my wife is at her happiest upon being presented with a new technological devise, I feel nothing except apprehension, a great disturbance in my sense of well-being.

One of the first strategies we employed yesterday to try to fix the phone was to go through all my videos and erase the ones I could live without. As it turned out I found that I could live without almost all of them, one in particular.

Most of the videos were of Lucy doing something puppyish that I thought was adorable at the time, but now that she has done the same thing a thousand times…not so much. There were videos of Nationals Park and Camden Yards, scenic vistas of the Shenandoah Valley, that sort of thing. Then I stumbled upon a video I took of my dad maybe a week before he passed away. I had gone over to the nursing home one night and was feeding him some ice cream. At the time I thought he was having a very good day and I wanted to take a video to send to Linda to encourage her. When I pushed “play” I was shocked at how weak and feeble he looked. Why on Earth had I thought that he was having a “good” day? I suppose that near the end this was good. I immediately deleted the thing and fought back a wave of tears suddenly welling up inside me. That’s not the way I want to remember him.

So, thanks Apple for forcing me to stumble upon such a depressing memory!

Stupid technology!

Password Hell

Now that I have that new cell phone I have entered that most cursed state of modern consciousness… password hell. Yes, all of my old phone data was magically rescued from The Cloud and safely deposited onto my new shiny phone, saving me the heartbreak of losing all of my pictures and other valuable stuff. The only problem is that now every time I want to actually use an app, I must reenter my username and password. The usernames were all saved, but all of the passwords were not.

Ok, here’s the thing. I haven’t been called upon to enter these passwords in nearly three years. My chances of remembering them all are roughly equivalent to the chances that any national democrat will admit to ever having heard of Jonathan Gruber.

I have two choices. First I could consult my dog-eared page of usernames and passwords that I keep deep in the bowels of my briefcase. Its reliability isn’t absolute since it is so old that the ink has begun to fade and several coffee stains have rendered it unreadable in places. My second choice is the painstaking process of trying to answer the safety questions that I apparently set up years ago to test my knowledge of my own past. For example:

What was your first girlfriend’s middle name?

What was your Grandmother’s favorite pudding?

If you were one of the Beatles, which Beatle would you be?

Wait…what??

So, having failed my own tests, I must then plead ignorance and beg the various companies to e-mail me a new password, or at least allow me to start the entire identification process all over again, always great fun.

Now before any of you technogeeks out there(and you know who you are) start sending me messages about some new gadget that I can get that will store all of my usernames and passwords in the Fort Knox neighborhood of The Cloud…save yourself the trouble. The last thing I need in my life is another gadget, because that would require me to come up with yet another username and password. My powers of creativity are tapped out in that area. Since I’m constantly warned not to use things like street names, pet names, middle names, birth dates, anniversary dates, in other words anything that I might actually be able to recall under pressure, I must conjure up weird things like…PuKeVTHokiessuckooii%43320{…to which I get the reply…Sorry, your password is insufficiently complex and must contain at least three punctuation marks and two mathematical formulas. Please try again.

Isn’t technology great?

Hooked

Almost three years ago I wrote a blog entitled, “Ignorant and Helpless…yes, I got a new cell phone.” It was my first smart phone and the thing wore me out. I felt like a third grader being introduced to calculus. My wife was very patient, and my two smarty-pants kids tried mightily to keep the snickering to a minimum, but I managed to learn how to use the thing in something quite less than record time. Well, this morning I got the following text from Apple:

“Good news!! Today’s the day! Items in order W246******* should be delivered today.”

My new phone is ready. Pam bought it so I don’t know much about the details except that it’s the newest model, but not the ginormous one. Hopefully the learning curve won’t be as severe. It should be pointed out that this order was placed a month ago because every retail outlet in America was sold out of the things, which reassures me that those 100 shares of Apple I bought four years ago on a whim might very well prove to be the best investment I have ever made in my life.

I suffer from major league ambivalence with these iPhones. On the one hand I love them. I love the convenience, the amazing power, and the functionality. On the other hand I hate how dependent I have become on their existence. When I see some hapless millennial walking down the street, nose six inches from the screen, fingers frantically typing away, I used to roll my eyes in disgust, fairly dripping with condescension. “Look at that moron,” I would sneer. “Dude probably can’t go to the bathroom without that contraption!”

Well…I may not require my phone in the can, but with every passing week I am growing increasingly tethered to this miracle machine, and it is a source of great shame and embarrassment. At least I have created phone-free zones for myself…the golf course for one, and…and…well, the golf course. I don’t even bring a bible to church anymore. There’s an app for that.

Whatever…it’s too late to turn back now. I’m hooked. Maybe one day they will discover that cell phones give us all cancer or that after 15 years of sustained use our ears suddenly fall off of our heads. Then we will all look back and wonder what the hell we were all thinking. Maybe then we will all stop walking into light posts. Maybe then we will rediscover the bliss of ignorance.

Thanks Eminem!

There was a huge concert last night on the Mall in Washington DC celebrating veterans. Hundreds of thousands of people were there and the event was live-streamed by HBO. Lots of famous singers and entertainers donated their time and talents. There was no charge for the concert. What’s not to like?

Unfortunately the only thing I see about the “Concert for Valor” this morning in my news feed involves the F-bomb laced performance by rapper Eminem, who opened his set with this classy gem, “Happy Mother-F***ing Veterans Day!”

A few observations…

This rapper has first amendment rights to free speech, rights that Veterans know a thing or two about defending. Veterans themselves are quite famous for their liberal use of profanity, the F-bomb in particular being a staple of boot camp and the battle field. I am no Puritan when it comes to colorful language, although I do think that excessive use of the profane in literature or music lyrics is mostly a linguistic crutch for the inarticulate. However, having said all of this, I feel a bit silly having to point out the fact that just because you have a first amendment right to use foul language doesn’t mean that you should. There’s a little thing called decorum, and well-mannered people for millennia have had enough of it to know the difference between language appropriate for a poker game, and a public concert to honor Veterans.

Increasingly, public manners seem to be going the way of the rotary phone. My opinion of rap music and rappers in general is well known to readers of this space, and this Eminem business does nothing to change my opinion of this wretched, cesspool of racists and misogynists. But it’s not just rappers who have poisoned the public well. Freedom doesn’t work without discipline. Free speech isn’t a license for brutishness. Thanks Eminem for making that so glaringly obvious.

A Veterans Day Tribute

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. I will do nothing special to commemorate the day. I never do. Neither will most of you. It’s not really that we don’t appreciate the men and women who have served their country, it’s more like we are too busy enjoying the freedoms that their service purchased for us. Tomorrow, I will spend most of the morning engaged in free enterprise, and the afternoon on the golf course. One of the reasons my life turned out so well was the fact that 70 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of men barely 20 years old who dedicated themselves to the annihilation of the Nazis. One of them was my Uncle, John Henry Dixon.

A few days ago I went to see The Fury, a film about a Sherman tank crew in the waning days of World War II in Germany. The film took place in April of 1945. One month prior to this imaginary tale, a real flesh and blood battle was raging near the town of Pruem deep inside the crumbling Third Reich. Lt. John Dixon, in the early morning hours of March the sixth was about to be given a set of extraordinarily ill-conceived orders from his commanding officer. Behind the scenes, other senior officers had tried to talk the commander out of such a dangerous move but to no avail. In the book written about the 70^th tank battalion and its amazing combat history, Marvin Jenson describes what happened this way:

“The next morning I told Lt. John Dixon that his platoon would lead. They had only four tanks left, and I figured if they got hit it was better to lose fewer rather than more. I was very apprehensive about the whole setup. I told John to get his tanks going full speed and to head for a clump of trees, maybe 200 yards ahead and left at about a forty-five degree angle. The idea was for Dixon to get that far, which would give us firepower for the main attack.”

There was good reason for apprehension. Sending four Sherman tanks across an open field with German guns trained on every inch of that field was the sort of thing that contributed greatly to the short life span of tank crews in WWII. There is no indication that my Uncle questioned his orders although he surely must have known what was about to happen.

“An infantry major radioed Dixon and ordered him to move out…Dixon got his tanks going full speed, but about half way down, all hell broke loose. Tanks 1,2,3, and 4, all four were hit. We couldn’t see where the fire was coming from on the ridge, but it was a hell of a display of gunnery, and they had excellent guns, probably 88’s…Lieutenant Raiford Blackstone was a witness to the attack and reports that he and Lieutenant McCaffrey went down to the tanks to aid the stricken crewman, “I wrote with white enamel on a tank:6 killed,14 survivors, March 6, 1945”

Uncle John survived the battle and the war. According to my mother, he was never the same man after he returned from Europe. He settled down and lived his life in an unremarkable way. I knew him only when I was a child. For me he was the kind man with the very sad eyes. He, along with hundreds of thousands of others, did their duty, then came home and mostly never talked about it again.

Mr. Jenson was gracious enough to sign my copy of his book. I told him that John was my Uncle and he went on and on about what a great man he was. On the inside cover he wrote this:

To Douglas,

Your Uncle John Henry Dixon was one of the men who made the 70^th an outstanding unit in the long struggle against the tyranny of the Nazis.

Marvin Jensen

So tomorrow, I will think of my Uncle and say a prayer of thanks for the men and women just like him who have answered the call throughout our country’s history.