'Bright Side' award goes to goofy bunch of folks

WASHINGTON -- The anthem of August should be Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," written in 1979 for "The Life of Brian" and now revived in the Broadway musical "Spamalot."

It instructs us, when cornered, to adopt impossibly daffy solutions such as:

"When you're chewing on life's gristle

"Don't grumble, give a whistle."

That is perfect background music for everything that was happening last week. Everyone had gone on a richly deserved vacation because nothing was working, from sink drains to software to the breaking pitch.

So the only thing to do was to smile and give out a few prizes to ourselves:

-- The Bright Side of Life first prize of one week's well-earned vacation in Crawford, Texas, goes to President Bush.

His decision to celebrate the new Iranian president's willingness to talk and to ignore Iran's growing status as a blatant nuclear renegade is in the perfect spirit of Monty Python.

"The man said he wanted to negotiate," said Bush, already vacationing in Crawford. The man was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran with a striking resemblance to a fellow who once was a Tehran hostage-holder. He has taken office just as his country resumes uranium-conversion work in defiance of warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Ahmadinejad campaigned on a pledge to make Iran a nuclear- weapons state regardless of the United Nations. But he notified U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that he was ready to negotiate. Bush said that was a positive sign. Cue the violins.

-- The Bright Side of Life second prize of two weeks' vacation in Crawford, Texas, goes to stockholders and investors of the Walt Disney Co.

Last week, a judge in Delaware ruled that a $140 million severance package granted to a Disney executive, Michael Ovitz, for 14 months on the job was "breathtaking" but legal.

This apparently was interpreted by the markets and the Disney organization as good news, for the Disney stock rose.

A Bright Side approach has always guided Disney, now led by former Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell, who will soon be its chairman. An investor revolt last year led by Roy Disney, and now a series of revelations about corporate infighting between Ovitz and Disney President Michael Eisner, who told the judge that Ovitz required daily oversight, have not dimmed the Magic Kingdom spirit.

Everyone at Disney seems to be whistling while they work and listening for September, when Eisner steps down to become a board member.

-- The Bright Side of Life third prize of three weeks' vacation in Crawford, Texas, goes to the voters of Iraq.

They are now about to receive a constitution for a war-scarred land, worked out by Shiite-dominated representatives under the watchful eye of religious zealots.

While the constitution's details have yet to be worked out, it is beginning to look a lot like -- apologies to Benjamin Franklin -- an Islamic Republic, if they can keep it. Some think it will be more Islamic than Republic, a carbon copy of Iran. As Monday's deadline approached for action by the constitution committee in Baghdad, women's rights and basic religious and minority protections as well as free press, speech and assembly looked very dubious.

But on the bright side, democracy and freedom have come to a war- scarred land, Bush said.

-- The Bright Side of Life fourth prize of four weeks' vacation in Crawford, Texas, goes to sports fans everywhere.

We deserve a hug.

Nothing seems to shake our confidence in athletes and the integrity of the games they play -- not scandal, not drugs, not the fiction of scholar-athletes, not anything.

Major League Baseball is going through one of its worst crises since the Black Sox scandals with the steroids investigation. Yet the stadiums are full. We go to the games. We still want to believe everything is on the square.

Hockey locked us out, but we'll probably come back.

Sports is not all fantasy. There are real reasons to look on the bright side.

Like Lance Armstrong . . .

John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. E-mail [email protected]. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.

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