Irvine is a pretty square place.

This isn’t always a bad thing. I mean, all the neighborhoods are nice–there are no “bad” areas of town. The schools are the best in the nation (Irvine has a University of California campus, a private university, and a junior college). The Spectrum, Irvine’s business district, is one of the largest high-tech meccas in the United States. There’s a lot of greenery, lakes, parks, and people always smile and say hello to you on the street. If I try really hard, I can probably think of worse places to live.

But the cookie cutter “planned community” aspect of Irvine gets old after a while. For example, it’s hard to find small, quirky, one-of-a-kind stores. One of my favorites, a small sandwich & liquor store called Mesa Foods, is closing at the end of the month. Why? “Too little business,” the owner told me.

I was so sad. They make the best sandwiches, and the people who work there are real characters. One of them is an over-bleached, blonde, gum-chewing transplant from New York, replete with accent and attitude. Another one is more down to earth, very chatty, and always knows the regular customers by name. Every time I pop in for food or a Coke, she takes the time to ask what show or concert I’m working on. You just don’t get that kind of thing in a national chain store.

Now that I think about it, all my favorite quirky Irvine people are gone. One of them was a moderately well dressed middle-aged woman who, despite the bundle of cash she carried around, would walk through the parking lot at Alton Center begging for enough change to buy “a small iced tea with lemon”. She must have asked me for change a hundred times on a hundred different days. Hot, cold, sunny, stormy–it didn’t matter. She always wanted a small iced tea with lemon, and she always bought it at Togo’s. And by God, when she finally did get the tea she was the happiest person in the world. I always meant to ask her why she didn’t use her own money, but I thought that would somehow be sacrosanct.

Iced Tea Woman was great, but the all-time best must have been Sign Man. As far as I could tell, this old guy was completely insane.. He would always appear on a major street corner carrying large rectangular signs which said things like “will maybe required” or “and that’s how now sometimes” or “some things you know”. They made absolutely NO sense, but he was out there just like those 16 year old kids who get paid minimum wage to wave signs touting the newest housing development, sale or grand opening. Okay, they were on roller blades while he sagged pathetically against the light post, but you get the point.

Sign Man’s appearances seemed to coincide with the hottest days of the year. He had a long white beard, and beneath his cheap hat looked like a cross between Dr. Gene Scott and George Bernard Shaw: unconventional, brash, vaguely intimidating, certainly brilliant in some cosmic way, and definitely off his rocker. For a while, I even convinced myself that Sign Man and Iced Tea Woman were an item. Was he ever forced to drink tea when he really wanted milk or water? Did she understand his signs?

I could never determine if the signs were supposed to be of a religious nature, or if they were just completely random. Maybe he wasn’t crazy at all, but like so many people just thought Irvine needed a square peg for a round hole. I don’t know why he went away, but after a while he just stopped appearing. Maybe he wasn’t getting the response he was looking for. Or perhaps God told him to go somewhere else. Whatever the reason, according to a friend he’s recently surfaced near her home in Tustin carrying the same old signs. So I’ve made a mental note to drive by there next time I’m in the area.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hankering for some iced tea.

People are so funny. We rant and rave about how things should be different. Then, when they change, we’re even less happy than before.

Occasionally I’ll hear some person or other comment on how they never watch the news anymore, because it’s always negative and depressing. To me, that seems like sticking your head in the sand. Just don’t look at it and poof! It’s gone.

I always want to ask those people exactly when it was that the news used to be all sunshine and baby’s breath. During Vietnam? World War II? Personally, I’m a news junkie. I always have the television on, and it’s usually tuned to a news channel. CNN, Headline News, CNBC, MSNBC, you name it. Mind you, I rarely sit in front of the TV and watch it. But my house is small enough that I can always hear it.

Yesterday I happened to catch something on ABC which was interesting enough to make me stop what I was doing, go into the living room, and sit down to watch it without even trying to fool myself into thinking I would only watch “for a second”. The show was called Is America #1? The Success and Failure of Societies (you can read the full transcript of the program) I only caught the last half of it, but basically it came to the conclusion that the United States really is the best place to live. That we have more freedom, wealth, opportunity, resources, and diversity than any other country in the world. It was downright surreal to see a show which took issue with the standard nightly news mantra about how the rich were getting richer while the poor and middle classes were rapidly being crushed into oblivion under the heel of Bill Gates.

After doing a bit of research, I realized that I’m apparently the last remaining person on earth who has never heard of John Stossel, the guy who wrote the story. He’s received 19 Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award, among others.

The thing I really loved about the program was that it took the idea of poverty and put it into a worldwide perspective. How do the people we consider poor compare with those in other societies? Stossel and company went to the South Bronx, the poorest Congressional district in the United States, and everyone they interviewed living below the poverty line said they:

• live in an air conditioned building

• own a color television
• own a microwave oven
• own a VCR
• receive cable television service
• own a modern, frost-free refrigerator
• receive at least some government financial assistance

This isn’t to say that there aren’t homeless, mentally ill, outcast, and other highly needy people out there. Every February I see them en mass when I’m in San Francisco, huddled in the doorways of Union Square’s most affluent stores. But it was amazing to see some of the things I’ve been saying all along broadcast on a major news network, principally that socialism doesn’t work. I’ve been to Russia, China, France, Germany, Italy, England, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Mexico–I’ve seen it first-hand.

Watching Stossel interview Hashin Halim, a political leader in Calcutta, was theatre of the absurd at its best. Calcutta is infamous as one of the world’s poorest, most destitute cities. Halim claimed that Calcutta was only poor because of immigration, and that his city was an example of socialism’s superiority from which America should learn. He actually said it was “a hundred times better”. Unbelievable. How is it that the thing which has made America so strong has reduced Calcutta to it’s current state?

In the end, which society really is best? How do you even measure something like that? Is it completely subjective? Aren’t all countries best in their own way? Perhaps. But Stossel interviewed someone who said the most objective way to determine how well a country was working was to look at how many people wanted to go there. And by that standard, America is king of the hill.