A college admissions scandal broke this week and caught up 50 people including parents, school athletic coaches, test monitors, lawyers, corporate executives, celebrities and others who all paid to get their children into “elite” colleges. The perpetrators, who, of course, are now spilling the beans, collected over $25 million. The thing that puzzles me is why would the parents do it? To send your child into a university where they are probably always going to be the intellectual anchor is a recipe for making your kid feel like a loser for their entire college career and maybe for life. What does the parent get out of it? Bragging rights—“My kid goes to Yale.” The parents probably tell themselves, “I’m doing it for my kid to give them every advantage,” but it does just the opposite. It convinces the kids they can’t survive without cheating or without daddy’s money, so they often stop trying. Sad to say we all know a few kids in Malibu on mommy’s or daddy’s money. Celebrity can be an enormously heavy burden for them to handle and many end up in rehab trying to work it all out.
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Last Sunday, we had the 29th Dolphin Awards Ceremony at the beautiful Malibu Swim Club and it was all a bit magical for the 180 people attending. The predicted rain turned into a sunny morning and the black cloud hanging over us all from the Woolsey Fire dissipated for a few hours, and people felt hopeful again. We gave out a number of Youth Dolphin Awards to kids who stayed, fought the fire and seemed courageous and competent beyond their years. Malibu is a real contradiction. We’re world famous in a spectacular setting, but we are also just a small town where people know each other, like each other (sometimes) and help each other when the chips are down. We also have some in the young generation coming up who are focused, seem to have it together and, most of all, want to do for others. Expensive toys or degrees from the “right” university can only get you so far in this world and, frankly, are meaningless if you feel rotten about yourself. End of sermon!
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Recently, we ran a story about the Malibu Planning Commission relating to some permit denials, which seemed to us to be rather arbitrary. Our headline read, “Planning Commission under fire over arbitrary permit denials.” I will confess the headline might be accused of being something less than totally objective, but then again, when you’re dealing with arbitrary government, you have to call them as you see them and it’s not going to make everyone happy. This story certainly did not make everyone happy and I received two very huffy emails from two planning commissioners accusing me of putting out fake news and demanding everything from a retraction to a mea culpa to throwing myself onto my sword. The two commissioners will remain anonymous, other than to say it was John Mazza and Steve Uhring and I invite them both to submit a guest editorial of up to 900 words about why their arbitrariness is not really arbitrary but really good government. We will run it as they give it to us, but I reserve the right to trash them accordingly. In the idiom of our day, fake news is apparently news you don’t like to see in print. Fortunately, after 31 years as a publisher and columnist, I’ve grown a hide as thick as a rhinoceros and probably, some would charge, a somewhat similar temperament. If you harbor a deep desire to be beloved, you certainly don’t want to be a newspaper publisher, so I will admit I’m looking forward to their puny defense.
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As some of you may know, Karen and I have a dog, an eight-pound Yorkshire Terrier we’ve named Studley—or “Stud” for short. We got him at the Agoura Animal Shelter just before the Woolsey Fire. He didn’t look like much when we got him since he had been out on the streets for a while, but he cleaned up nicely and, much to our surprise, he looks like a thoroughbred Yorkie with good lines or whatever they call it in Yorkieland. They told us they though he was between 10 and 12 years old and he was an unfixed male, probably kept for stud, hence the name. That seems correct because we noticed when he’s around lady Yorkies, he goes into his charming “how do you do” routine. I had wanted a bigger dog, like a Border Collie, but Karen wanted a Yorkie and I lost that argument, but I digress. For the first week, he didn’t make a peep, which for a Yorkie is highly unusual because they tend to be a yappy breed. Once we bonded, he no longer held back and his real personality began to emerge. Yorkies have a bit of a body image issue. They think they’re the size of a Rottweiler, much to the amazement of some large dogs, and they frequently act like one as well, which is a somewhat risky strategy. Most dogs just go along with what you want. Studley has his own opinions, which he doesn’t hesitate to express. I like to sit in Starbucks, sip my cappuccino, eat my morning bun and read the news. Studley shares my morning bun, but after 10 minutes, I get a small yap, which means, “I’m bored, let’s get out of here.” If I ignore the yap, it gets louder; we’ve actually been thrown out of a couple of Starbucks, especially in Sacramento, where they’re less tolerant than Malibu.
Maybe in retirement, I’ll write a book called, “Studley and Me.” After all, John Steinbeck did it with his dog and it was a best seller.