What the Luck?

Everyone knows what "lucky" means … or do they?

I don’t suppose anybody has doubts about Elmer Searle. Back in 1987, he was simply walking on a sidewalk in downtown Chicago when something dreadful happened. A speeding car ran a light and struck a dog, Chaps, who was being walked by his owner nearby. The dog went flying at 35 miles per hour — lifeless but considerably faster than Chaps had ever previously traveled — clear across the intersection. There it collided with Mr. Searle, who also died instantly. Yes, Elmer Searle was minding his own business when he was killed by an airborne pet.

There is nobody who doesn’t think he was unlucky.

But not everything is so cut and dried. Luck is relative.

I once interviewed a young West Virginia steel painter who was in the middle of a railroad bridge high above a gorge when, due to a traffic error, he stood facing an oncoming freight train bearing down on him like a flying dead pet. The kid happened to be small and scrawny, and somehow managed to duck prone between the rails. All 20 cars rolled right over him.

Lucky break, until he went home and tripped on his front step fracturing his ankle in four places. He couldn’t work for two months and lost his job. Unlucky breaks.

Teacher-turned-one-time astronaut Christa McAuliffe and passengers of the Titanic’s maiden voyage were all exceptionally lucky, until they weren’t.

And now, what you’ve all been waiting for: the part where I make this all about me. All right, all right. I shall do so, though a bit obliquely. In the spring of 1955, Las Vegas showgirl Linda Lawson was crowned Miss Atomic, complete with mushroom-cloud crown. Coming as it did a decade after Hiroshima, it marked a low point for American cultural sensitivity. On the plus side, within days I was born into a loving suburban family. All three boys were healthy, but my father died young and we lived in prolonged financial duress. In high school, I was a strapping 6’1½” 130-pound hunk of manhood with disfiguring acne. This was excruciatingly unfortunate, but I was quick-witted and curious about the world — traits that would someday serve my livelihood. That went quite well, often thanks to coincidences of miraculous timing that had little to do with my talent. It was more like strolling aimlessly on a pierside when my ship came in. Pretty fucky lucky.

I also got better looking as I filled out. Many people mistake me for Omar Sharif.

My parents were not cursed with the premature death of a child, but in their 50s nearly their entire family generation themselves dropped like flies. Opinionated Jewish flies, just like me, minus the longevity. In the 1970s, I attended more funerals than you did football games.

I am, after a lot of pain and unpleasantness, on good terms with my first wife and my current wife. I have all the health conditions my father had, but am blessed with modern pharmaceuticals to manage them. Due to these various ailments, I am more or less chronically under the weather. But not six feet under the weather. Luck is a fickle beast.

Once I was kidnapped at gunpoint, but thanks to the bizarre intervention of someone who didn’t even know a crime was taking place, I managed to escape. (The St. Croix, Virgin Islands police believed the motive was recreational murder.)

“You are so lucky!” people told me.

Well, yes. I guess so, but the whole gunpoint abduction thing was quite harrowing and, you know, inconvenient.

In print, broadcast and the lecture stage I became pretty famous as a journalist and then after 40 years was fired, grotesquely — either partially justly or in a caricature of malicious office politics (read about it here and you decide). At a recent poker game, I won $4,350. At the previous session — how can I phrase this? — I did not win $4,350.

But here’s the main thing. Well into my 40s, I knew the luckiest thing about my life was being born in the USA. Beacon of freedom and opportunity worldwide. Powerful economy. Extraordinary infrastructure. Stable society. Frictionless government function. Many historical evils to be sure — slavery, Trail of Tears, Tuskegee, McCarthyism, Vietnam, Watergate, Abu Ghraib — but always evolving and aspiring to codify our founders’ unprecedented vision for liberty and justice for all. Randomly born into citizenship of the Greatest Country on Earth. How lucky can a fellow get?

Titanic lucky.

Now the United States is a continuing criminal enterprise trampling rule of law, operated by a Christian Taliban, racists, cultists, liars, cartoonish sociopaths, imbeciles and fools. We are not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We are The Godfather, This Is Your Day with Benny Hinn, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A Face in the Crowd and Darkness at Noon all at once.

The land of the free is now the shame of the world. Will the Space Shuttle Challenger ever unexplode?

Yeah, good luck with that.