Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • February 26, 2014 Whatever happened to SATs? Kurt Vonnegut is no longer with us. Fortunately, my friend Gregory Lalire may console us for the loss of Von- negut with his first novel, “Captured.” I nominate Lalire to explain to us a curious anomaly now being premeditated on the other side of the river. “Captured,” which will officially be published in June, is a novel in which the narrator starts out as a fetus who is tuned in to everything that goes on around his protective womb. He has a full deck of cards in terms of intellectual capacity but, being less than an adult, he is confused by lust and greed, both of which play critical roles in his mother’s attempt to engage in reciprocal romantic or sexual exploi- tation of a series of grouches and thugs. She is trying to get out of the Chicago stockyard district and up to the Virginia City gold fields and a life of luxury with her sister and her brother-in-law, who struck it rich and now enjoys lynching “road agents.” This is not “Little House on the Prairie,” and these are not Walt Whitman’s type of pioneers. White folks are mostly sexual or economic predators or self-deluded buffoons, black folks are sly but stalwart victims who do what they have to in order to stay alive, and the Indians are honorable and honest when they can resist scalping white people. No wonder the fetus is in no hurry to come out into this sort of world. As surreal as it may seem, it is probably a lot closer to reality than any Western ever made in Hol- lywood. Lalire, who is a proud Frenchman and a not unduly guilty white man, pointed out that the John Wayne charac- ter in “The Searchers,” probably the greatest Western ever made in Hollywood, was inspired by a rescuer who was African-American. Sometimes historical accuracy lends itself to the surreal. As we used to say in high school book reviews, “I won’t tell you how it comes out,” but this is a page-turner. In the end, it probably comes closer to reality than anything ever shown in a Hollywood movie. I include “Little Big Man” by Thomas Berger because Berger’s Indians were bemused humanitarians and Lalire’s are downright scary seen from the other side of the conflict. I have known both types, sometimes embodied in the same Indian. “Wild West” lets me hang out because I understand Lakota (Sioux) and have friends who consider it their first language. I’m not sure what they would think of this book, but I loved it, and I can’t wait for the movie. I only wonder who will get to play the fetus. Somebody had to replace Vonnegut, because just on the other side of the river we now have a Vonnegut situation. I had to hear it two or three times to believe a new pro- posal: college for credit for prison inmates. A politician suggested that people who are incarcerated -- people who have committed a violent crime or stolen from those who trusted them -- can now attend college classes “indoors” at the taxpayers’ expense. The idea seems to be that good boys go to jail because they failed to get a college diploma and just had to hold up that service station or liquor store or mug that senior citizen so they could go on paying their income tax. If the taxpayers subsidize a college diploma while they have plenty of time to read, they will be fine. Let us jump back a couple of steps and look at this one. Here we have a pistolero who never bothered to register his handgun. One day, he decides it is time to get some college under his belt so he can get a civil service job and make a good living without undue exertion. The military service subsidizes college for veterans and even for serv- ing personnel if they have spare time, and some of them pile up multiple degrees at the taxpayers’ expense while doing something theoretically worthwhile for America, assuming the politicians are not using them as pawns. But hey, you could get hurt doing some of that military stuff, and who needs all that discipline and all those long separa- tions from The Street? So what does the education-minded gunman do? He pulls off a stick-up with complete confi- dence that if he gets caught, he gets college! Of course, there are civilized ways to handle this. In a darkly great movie called “House of Games,” written by David Mamet, an attractive young psychiatrist confronts a sardonic con artist who has supposedly threatened the life or safety of one of her patients over an unpaid gam- bling debt. He offers to cancel the debt -- saying the patient lied about the amount, which was $800 and not $20,000 -- if the psychiatrist sits in on a high-stakes poker game and tells him if his opponent twists his ring around when the con artist gets up and leaves the room. This gesture means the opponent is bluffing. The con artist leaves the room, the rival gambler twists the ring, and when the con artist returns, he plays his hand -- and loses $6,000 because the opponent was not bluffing. He can’t come up with the $6,000 so the other gambler pulls a gun and tells him nobody is leaving the room until he gets his $6,000. He puts the gun down on the table. The psychiatrist offers to write a personal check for the $6,000 until she sees a droplet of water leaking from muzzle of the rival gambler’s gun, which is actually a water pistol. I do not wish to ruin this one for you either, but while the people are bad, the movie is very, very good in a bad sort of way. Senior citizens should be urged to watch “House of Games” at least once a year to avoid the games that could cost them the house. They will then be ready for the day the Mounties or the Federales call and tell Grandpa and Grandma they need to send $20,000 by Western Union to keep their grandson out of jail after a drunken auto crash in a country with no mercy, no love for rich Americans, and no college courses in prison. If we stipulate that only the guys who use water pistols in stick-ups can qualify for free college while in New York prisons, we could be getting somewhere. Getting shot with a water pistol is survivable, and if we reduce the incidence of stickups with real guns that shoot real bullets, we could be saving some worthwhile lives and letting dolts study while they are in the slammer for armed robbery could be humane and useful. The missing side of the equation is that a purported col- lege, in and of itself, really is not worth much. I could have handled my first daily newspaper job with what I learned in a good middle school, augmented by outside reading and TV, if I had been big enough to drive and had a license. Most of the editors were deeply ignorant people in any- thing not concerning politics and municipal govern and how to use weasel words to avoid being sued for libel, and you can learn that on the job. A couple of times they heard me speak French or German over the telephone tracking down missing locals in Europe, and I was marked down not just as a prodigy but as a freak. Nobody else they knew could do that! What makes college worthwhile to employers is the self- discipline it takes to keep pounding away at it for four or more years, plugging away at stuff you will never need to hold a job and do not find interesting in any way, shape, or form. Who is an employer likely to employ? A guy whose diploma says he spent four years of his family’s money or a guy whose diploma says he got a degree in applied crimi- nology at State Pen rather than Penn State? Obviously, col- lege for criminals is a very dumb idea -- but that will not stop it from becoming law, because it looks like the politi- cians are concerned with the poor. I have news for them. Most people in troubled neighborhoods want the bad guys taken off the street. People who are concerned about the poor support a fair minimum wage and a ban on cigarettes, not college for convicts. College degrees are worthwhile because the people who get them use their time in school reading and doing homework rather than shaking up fights. When these kids cannot crack 500 on a side in SATs to qualify for a serious college or crack 700-plus to quality for a possible scholar- ship, they hire tutors or seek extra help after class with teachers or friends. They do not walk into a liquor store with a water pistol and say, “Give me all your money, a 12- pack, and a diploma in applied criminology.” Letters to the Editor Lions thank residents, local A&P Dear Editor: Midland Park Lions Club held a Big Game Food Drive at the local A&P Supermarket to benefit the Center for Food Action of New Jersey on Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 1 and 2. The Lions collected over 20 boxes of food through the generosity of the grocery shoppers in Midland Park and the surrounding area. I want to thank all shoppers who supported this Midland Park Lions effort by donating a nonperishable grocery item to help those in need. I want to especially thank Sue Giordano, the Midland Park A&P store manager; Chris Pascal, the assistant man- ager; and their staff for allowing the Midland Park Lions to hold this event. John L. “Jack” Romano, President Midland Park Lions Club NJBIZ honors Valley Hospital’s Meyers (continued from page 6) to be included among this impressive group of women busi- ness leaders in New Jersey,” Meyers said. Meyers, a resident of Ridgewood, has dedicated her 34- year career to serving northern New Jersey patients and their families by ensuring that the organization she leads — one of the busiest hospitals in the state — offers both the highest quality patient care and the most compassionate service. As president and CEO of the Valley Hospital, Meyers is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the 451-bed hospital, which serves approximately 440,000 residents in northern New Jersey. Hospital services include a free- standing Ambulatory Surgery Center and Cancer Center, the Fertility Center, the Kireker Center for Child Develop- ment, the Center for Sleep Medicine, and many additional outpatient facilities. In 2003, Meyers was named president and chief execu- tive officer of Valley Health System. As head of the system, she oversees Valley Home Care, an award-winning home care and hospice agency, and Valley Medical Group, a mul- tispecialty group practice comprising more than 200 doc- tors and advanced practice professionals representing more than 30 medical and surgical specialties who practice at the Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, Valley’s Blumenthal Cancer Center in Paramus, eight urgent and primary care centers in New Jersey and New York, and community-based physi- cian practices throughout the region. “We are truly fortunate to have the opportunity to rec- ognize this outstanding group of women,” said Thomas Curtin, publisher of NJBIZ. “As business and community leaders, they are constantly redefining success within and outside the business arena. On behalf of NJBIZ, we would like to thank and congratulate these 50 outstanding women for their dedication to New Jersey’s future.”