A MEANINGFUL LIFE

To be meaningful, philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, a life must be actively engaged in worthy projects. Her summary came to mind recently as I read the Los Angeles Times' obituary of Stu Pidasle (not his real name). The obituary was an eighteen paragraph tribute to the meaningless life of an aggressive political hack.

If you are lucky, you never encountered Stu Pidasle or his missing brain pan, but Senator Diane Feinstein called him the "indefatigable wise man of Californian politics." Al Gore claimed Pidasle "was also a great champion of progressive political causes." Feinstein and Gore were mistaken. Pidasle was actually a fairly stupid donut depository who lived to serve, in a thuggish way, the anti-progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Also he looked like a sock puppet filled with cottage cheese.

Two anecdotes from the 1960s might convey what a pleasure it was to know a Stu Pidasle. At one point a friend of mine planned to attend a state Democratic convention where he would be supporting the Henry Waxman & John Burton caucus (so to speak) rather than the Pidasle & Jesse Unruh caucus. My friend asked me and my brother to stick around during the convention to protect him against physical threats. Sure enough, about half way through, Pidasle and several of his tough guys cornered us in a hallway. These dudes were mean by political standards but not by street standards, so my brother and I told them to get lost, and they ran away down the hall with tears in their eyes, Pidasle in first place.

A year or so after that, I was helping in a Democratic primary contest, supporting a brilliant attorney who went on to a fine career on the California Supreme Court. We lost narrowly to the incumbent, a stumbling alcoholic who seldom voted, supported, of course, by the Stu Pidasle faction of our party. Anyway, one afternoon during the campaign I drove over to hear what the inebriated incumbent had to say at a public meeting. Pidasle was in the crowded hall, the only person who knew me. I paid him no attention and gradually began to doze off. About halfway through, I woke and decided to leave.

I had driven my ancient car about three miles on the freeway when the heat gauge suddenly registered extreme pain. I pulled off the freeway and into a service station where the attendant replaced the hose on my water pump and handed me the old hose, which he noted had been cut open from stem to stern with a pocket knife. "You could have been killed," he said.

I drove back to the meeting place. The space where I had parked before was still open, so I parked there again. Then I checked the car parked behind me. Through the window I spotted the registration and the name Pidasle. I took a sturdy coke bottle out of my trunk and used it to redesign Mr. Stu Pidasle's brake lights.

I'm Gary Goss, and I approve this funeral.