I wish I had never thought of putting such a reprobate into my stories. *sigh*

I mean, we’ve got this un-winnable war in Iraq; we’ve got the threat of an imminent terrorist attack; we’ve got the looming disaster of climate change brought on by global warming; we’ve got the threat of nuclear proliferation; we’ve got genocide in Africa; we’ve got an epidemic of obesity; we’ve got a culture that admires the wrong people for the wrong reasons; we’ve got a huge trade deficit with China and Japan and an even huger federal budget deficit.  We’ve got a social security system that is sure to go bankrupt and a Congress that is just as sure not to have the guts to fix it.  We’ve got an immigration problem, a health insurance problem, a homeless problem, a drug problem, a race problem, and a crime problem.  We pay trillions for oil from people who hate us.  And we have two political parties who hate each other even more.

Not a pretty picture, huh?

Yet, as bad as all this is, there’s one aspect of American life that I think is even more threatening to our survival, and, in fact, has been a major contributor to, and in some cases even creates, all the problems I’ve listed above.

I bet you’re scratching your head trying to figure out just what in the world could be any worse than all the stuff I’ve set forth.  Well, think about it a little, and I might just come to you.  But if not…here it is, the biggest problem of all:

HYPE!

That’s right. HYPE. Short for hyperbole.  Hyperbolic statements.  Absurd exaggeration.  Spin.  Inflated rhetoric.  Bloated prose.  Grandiose overstatement.  Excessive strings of superlatives.  Magical thinking.  The compulsive, excessive use of adjectives and adverbs to inflate and distort even the simplest declarative sentence.

The definition of HYPE: The use of imprecise, emotionally charged words to make things seem better, or worse, than they really are.

HYPE’s purpose is to make the bland, the boring, the mediocre, the poorly done, the distasteful, the cheap, the ugly, the unpopular not only seem not so bad, but also by directly and repeatedly telling us so, to give us a positive feeling about the person or thing or idea it’s promoting.  HYPE’smission is to make us think what it wants us to think.

HYPE strives to distort our thinking, skew our judgment, and make us conform.

HYPE operates on the premise that perception determines reality. Change people’s perception and their reality is sure to follow.  Simple as that.

BIG TIME HYPE was first invented in the around 1950 on Madison Avenue in New York, the dark heart of the advertising industry, by some smart guys who understood that certain words, carefully selected and incessantly repeated, could sell a lot of stuff that people previously didn’t know they wanted or needed.

Now HYPE has spread, like an infectious disease, to every aspect of our culture: HYPE sells movies and movie stars, sports and sports stars, TV and TV stars.

HYPE creates politicians, wars, heroes, and HYPE sometimes creates the news itself.  In fact, a lot of news is nothing but re-packaged HYPE.

HYPE creates Brands.  Brands are what give corporations their identity and value, so corporations love HYPE. They pay for most of it, though government, politicians, and religion are big players in the HYPE game, too.

HYPE works by exploiting basic human psychology: DESIRE, HOPE, LAZINESS, ENVY, GLUTTONY, FEAR, GREED, and especially, the need to be liked.  More or less the “Seven Deadly Sins,” updated for our times.

Television and now the Internet have made HYPE the wild force that it is today.  It’s cheap and easy to blast millions of people in one single moment with a huge dose of HYPE.

How do you know you’re getting HYPED? (It’s sort of like getting “slimed” if you know what I mean.)

Here’s some of the words that are a dead giveaway that HYPE is happening:

“Excellent.” This is my all-time favorite hype-word.  I once knew a guy who, when you asked him how he was, as people often do as a form of greeting, would always say “excellent.”  It never failed.  Well, this guy was never “excellent” on his best day.  He was pretty much stuck in an upward struggle toward average, and I’m being generous here.  But like I said,HYPE knows that if you create the perception, surely the reality will follow. So if he said he was “excellent,” then it must be true!  Most people believed him.  They admired him for his self-hyped state of excellence. “Mr. Excellent,” as I came to call him, figured out HYPE’S secret: It works!

“Delicious.” And all its food-related siblings like “tasty” and “hearty” and especially “mouth-watering” (as if a watering mouth is an appealing image). I can’t even talk about this without getting nauseous.

“Brilliant.” If you read the New York Times on a regular basis you’ll begin to think that almost everyone who writes a book or directs a movie or acts in a movie is brilliant, if not a full-blown genius.

“Great.” Not a great word.  It means almost nothing.  Besides, it’s kind of “old school” now, having been replaced by “awesome.”

“Luminescent.” This is really big with people who write about actors.  It has something to do with “glowing.”  Do actors glow?  No.  They act.  Light bulbs glow.  “Radiant” and “transcendent” are common follow-ups, just in case you missed the point the first time around.

“Extraordinary.” This always means ordinary.  Especially the person who wrote it.  These people tend to follow up with healthy dose of “astonishings” and “unbelievables” just in case “extraordinary” was too subtle.“Stunning.” When was the last time you were stunned?  When I was in Little League I got hit in the head by a pitch.  That was the last time for me.  And I can’t ever remember being “dazzled,” maybe because I don’t know exactly what that is, or feels like.

“Beautiful.” This is the laziest word in the English language.  Whenever someone uses it, in writing or in speech, be assured you’re dealing with a slug.

“Breathtaking.” As in “gagging?”

“Fantastic.” HYPE-meisters who use this word have the arrogance to assume that all our fantasies are the same. I think not!

“Evil, Immoral, Brazen, Demonic, Damned.” Doom-and-gloomers often hype up their rants with such apocalyptic epithets.  Negative HYPE is really hot these days, especially in religion and politics.

So I implore you, my friends, please switch on your HYPEdetectors. Once you get tuned in to what the HYPE-MONGERS are up to, you’ll see it for what it is — a transparent and sophomoric attempt to control your thinking.  You’ll laugh it off or get mad at it, but you’ll also be building your HYPE-immunity so you can protect yourself from all futureHYPE attacks, that is from thinking something or doing something that you don’t really want to think or do!

About a hundred years ago when I was one notch above welfare, I earned a few bucks writing ads for an ad agency.  One of the clients was a burger joint. They made simple hamburgers.  That’s what the owner told me.

I asked him what made his burgers different.

Nothing, the owner said. We make hamburgers. Plain hamburgers. Greasy meat.  A bun.  Mustard (this was Texas).  Mayo and ketchup for the Yankees.  Cheese for 25 cents extra.  Nothing Fancy.   They’re good. That’s why people like them.

I had an idea.  The anti-hype ad campaign. It was called “The Last True Burger.” I thought it was clever.  Real. Honest. “Evocative.”  (Sorry, I just couldn’t keep myself from using a least one hype-word.)  I envisioned sexy young women (models, of course) eschewing style for simplicity, purity and reality, dripping grease and all, as they shoved the big fat burgers into their tiny little mouths.  I put it all together, the whole concept. Soup to nuts.  It was, well, “brilliant,” or so my internalized, private HYPE persuaded me.

But when I presented it to my boss, the “creative director,” of the ad agency, he said, “Are you crazy?  There’s nothing here.  No pizzazz.  No excitement.  Hell, they could do this themselves…why pay us?   It’s got to be a great hamburger.  It’s got to be delicious. It’s got to make your mouth water. You’ve got to tell them what to think.  You’ve got to make the fat slobs want to drop everything and drive there right now and buy the damn burger because you’ve teased and titillated them into a raging fit of hunger so overwhelming that they have no choice to but go there and satiate it. Do you think “The Last True Burger” does that?  This isn’t the title of a novel.  It’s an ad campaign.  Son, do you ever watch television?”

Thus ended my brief career in advertising.

And so I learned, the hard way, that all the adjectives and adverbs and superlatives—the blood and guts of HYPE — are designed to manipulate, not illuminate, and we should keep reminding ourselves that HYPE has nothing whatsoever to do with the truths we discover through our own hard-earned experience and contemplation, and also should have nothing to do with whatever choices we are compelled to make.

But the house my parents bought had been a “model” home and it had a sort of oriental façade, different from all the others because the builder liked the Asian look.  I guess no one else shared his affinity for curling rooflines and salmon colored trim because it was the only one like that in the development. My friends called it “the Chinese house.”

The streets were all straight, laid out in a rectangular grid, and all the lots were the same size. There were no trees except for the scrawny saplings people planted when they first moved in.

Because the land was flat and there were no trees, the view of the sky was open and vast, and the blazing sunsets set against all that empty space would take your breath away.

The High School I went to was also new—only about 600 students—so you got to know just about everybody, and they all got to know you. It was called “Lake Highlands High School,” just like the development, so we all had an instant identity. We lived in Lake Highlands and we went to Lake Highlands High School. We were the Lake Highlands Wildcats. And we were proud of it.

In a lot of ways, we were all pretty much the same. We were all white. There were no African Americans, no Hispanics, no Asians, no Middle Easterners.

Most of us had Western European surnames and the most popular religion was Baptist, which we pronounced “Babtist.” A lot of my friends didn’t go to church at all. Nobody talked much about church, or God, or religion. No one prayed at the flagpole. No one took vows of chastity. No one had ever heard the word “evangelical.” We were too busy having a good time to think about such things. We were filled with youthful exuberance and high spirits.

Girls had to wear dresses to school with the skirts no shorter than two inches above the knee, and boys had to wear slacks. Most of us dressed pretty well because looking good was important. I can’t remember anyone being fat.

Most of the girls were good looking and more than a few of them were knockouts. My girlfriend, who lived next door, was one of the knockouts.

Most of the boys played sports. There were no girls’ sports, except for tennis. The most popular girls were on the “drill team.” They performed dance routines in very short skirts at football games. They were called “The Highlandettes.”

We had a lot of parties, sometimes at houses when the parents were out of town, and we drank a lot of beer. It was easy to buy back then. You just had to know where to go.

A lot of us had cars. I had a 1958 Ford sedan that I paid for working part time as a sack boy at a supermarket. Back then you could get a drivers license when you were 14 if you took “drivers’ ed” which everyone did. So we were all driving our cars to school and to the new Northpark Indoor Shopping Mall and taking our dates to movies in downtown Dallas and dancing at the “The Studio Club” where we listened to our favorite rock bands until one in the morning when they shut the place down. We loved our music. We were sexy. We were incredibly connected to each other.

In the Fall of 1963, our football team, class 2A because we were a small school, was expected to do well, maybe even win the State Championship. All of Lake Highlands was behind us. We didn’t have our own stadium yet, so we had to play at another school’s ten miles away.  Every game was standing room only.

By the time we got to the district championship game, we were 10-0. We believed we could go all the way to State. We had a lot of talent. We were tough. No one could stop us.

The game was Saturday night against Rockwall, a hick town about 20 miles or so in the cow pastures and cotton fields east of Dallas. They were a bunch of country bumpkins and we were cool kids from Dallas. We were the Lake Highlands Wildcats.  They didn’t have a chance.  We would kill them.

That Thursday before the game I was in my favorite class, Contemporary Literature, with my favor teacher, Miss McCaffrey. We were discussing Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” about how he showed the thoughts of simple people and made them so real we could feel their deepest longings and anguish and grief. I’d never read such a book before and there were parts that had brought tears to my eyes. Ms. McCaffrey talked with passion about Faulkner’s novel, about how it had such an impact on other Southern writers because it made them feel they could write about simple country people without being ridiculed by the literary establishment.

We all loved Miss McCaffrey and we all loved the books she had us read. “As I Lay Dying” was like a blueprint of all my vague adolescent yearnings and I wanted to read every book this William Faulkner guy had ever written.

But late that morning, as I was lost in my daydreams brought on by our discussion of “As I Lay Dying,” the intercom speaker came on. It was a radio broadcast—one of the local stations—about something that had happened in downtown Dallas.

We all knew President Kennedy was visiting Dallas that day and it didn’t take long before we understood that he had been shot. There were only 15 of us and Miss McCaffrey and we all sat there and listened. We just sat there listening and looking at each other, feeling close enough to be a kind of family.

And then came the announcement over the intercom, a radio reporter saying in a strained voice, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35^th President of the United Sates, is dead.”

Miss McCaffrey said she’d be back in a few minutes and rushed out of the classroom.

We just sat there, waiting for Miss McCaffrey, listening to the radio station on the intercom. We just sat there listening and waiting and wondering what would happen next.

Eventually, Miss McCaffrey came back. She held a stack of papers and then began passing them out to us. They were mimeographed copies of the poem Robert Frost had read at President Kennedy’s inauguration. It was called “The Gift Outright” and then Miss McCaffrey read it out loud to us. Tears slid down her cheeks as she read it. She had always been so tough. Everyone thought she was a hard teacher. We were the “smart class” and she wouldn’t accept anything but excellence from any of us. She was always hard on us. But we loved her. All of us did. And now she was crying, right in front of us, as she read us Robert Frost’s poem.

A little while later, they closed Lake Highlands High School. I met my girlfriend and we drove home in my Ford.

My parents were very upset. For the rest of the night we watched the television, learning about some lunatic named Lee Harvey Oswald.

My father said they would cancel the football game, the first playoff game against Rockwall, which was supposed to be on Saturday. But he was wrong. They decided to go ahead with all the games. Business as usual.

My father was furious. He loved President Kennedy. I think he was the only hero my father ever had. He called the Principal and then the Superintendent, argued with them, but, of course, got nowhere. The game was going to be played.

It was a cool night, the air crisp and the sky clear, and I remember how different it smelled out there in the country than back in Lake Highlands. The minister talked about the departed soul of the President in his prayer, and then there was a “moment of silence,” and some people started to cry.

Our band played the national anthem and almost everyone sang. I was the sportswriter for the student newspaper and I had earlier talked to some of our players in the shabby locker room and none of them were much up for it.

The other team, the farm boys, the “Yellow Jackets,” seemed to be a lot more excited. They were jumping up and down on the sidelines and hooting and howling and beating each other’s shoulder pads with their fists. It was like what had happened in Dallas had no impact out here in the boondocks. It was like they lived in a different world, and I guess, in some ways, they did.

On the second play of the game, their star halfback broke through our line and went 75 yards for a touchdown. He was, of course, white. All the players on both teams were white, because in 1963 Texas schools were still segregated.

By the end of the first half, we were down 21-0. The second half was the longest half of football I had ever watched. We didn’t make a first down. Lake Highlands lost to Rockwall, 40-0. Our season was over. I rode on the bus with the football team back to Dallas. There wasn’t much talking. The truth is that I don’t think any of us really cared that we’d lost the game.  It just didn’t matter.

Instead of going up to the Dairy Queen like I usually did after a football game, I went home. My parents were still up. Their eyes were fixed to the television screen. They couldn’t stop watching it.

When I got up the next morning, I thought I’d try something. “I don’t feel like going to church,” I said to my father. “OK,” he said. “You don’t have to. Not today.” I was stunned.

Instead of church, I went next door to my girlfriend’s house. She was a little reluctant at first, but eventually I talked her into going downtown to see the place, Dealey Plaza, where the President had been killed. It was something I wanted to do. I just had to go there.

We talked her mother into giving us her car, a new Impala, and we headed toward downtown. When we got within a mile or so of Dealey plaza on the west side of downtown, the traffic slowed to a crawl, bumper to bumper for as far as we could see. I pulled into a warehouse parking lot, locked the car and we walked the rest of the way. The sunlight was bright that day, and it had warmed up quite a bit.

There were thousands of people shuffling like Zombies around Dealey Plaza. A tight knot of them stood huddled at the exact spot on Elm Street where two days earlier the President of the United States had his brains blown out.  The streets were blocked off, so there was no traffic. The place was weirdly quiet and most people talked in whispers. Some pointed their arms up to the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository from which it was said Lee Harvey Oswald fired his shots.

My girlfriend and I held hands as we slowly weaved our way through the crowd, eventually making it to a high place at the west end of the plaza. We sat down against a wood fence and watched. It was the infamous “grassy knoll” but, of course, we didn’t know that then.

At one point my girlfriend looked at me with her huge blue eyes and said, “Can you believe this?” We were both 14 years old.

Then there were the shrieks of sirens cutting through the quiet air. A few moments later cops were everywhere, herding people off Elm Street to the sidewalks and grass, and then there came a cop car with flashing lights, and another one behind that, their sirens wailing. People were running to wherever they could find a place.  It was as if it were happening all over again.

The cop cars moved down Elm Street through the crowd and behind them was an ambulance, the old kind that looked like a hearse. This ambulance had windows. I stood up and as the ambulance moved slowly through the crowd, I could see the body inside. The head. The body under a white sheet. Somebody was leaning over from the front seat. He was touching the body’s neck, searching, I figured, for a pulse.

Somebody in front of me had a transistor radio. I moved a little closer. The reporter kept saying, “Unbelievable. It’s just unbelievable.” Lee Harvey Oswald, while in police custody, was shot by Jack Ruby, owner of a strip club a few blocks away.

“What’s going to happen to us?” my girlfriend asked.

Even after 43 years, what we experienced that long weekend beginning November 22^nd, 1963 in Dallas, Texas is as vivid and immediate as it was then. The impact of its punch is just as sharp and shocking, undiminished or dulled by time.

In the coming years, we would be called “the love generation,” “the peace generation,” “the ‘me’ generation.” There have been a lot of labels the social scientists and historians and demographers have pinned on us. But back then, in November of 1963, we were just kids running blindly into our first head-on collision with history.

We had no idea, of course, what was still ahead, but we were young and optimistic by nature and we all believed that the future was ours to shape according to our wishes, and, as if it were our birthright, the golden days to come belonged exclusively to us.

“The Gift Outright,” by Robert Frost, mimeographed copy passed out to Miss McCaffree’s class, approx. 12:45 pm Nov. 22, 1963.