I guess everybody knows who Mitch Albom is. People around here, however, still remember him as a sportswriter for the Free Press, and in fact he still acts in that capacity from times to time, as well as contributing an occasional column on general subjects. Over time I’ve learned the secret to understanding a Mitch Albom piece – it’s really rather easy – no matter what the nominal topic, the real subject is Mitch Albom.

Take his thoughts on this year’s Oscars. Basically he bewailed the glut of gloomy, pessimistic films about unpleasant people, like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Why, he wonders, does the wrongheaded Academy and those silly critics gush over such things instead of supporting a life affirming movie like, say, The Bucket List. THE BUCKET LIST! Is Mitch really proposing that that universally panned, commercially disappointing piece of drivel receive the industry’s highest honor for artistic achievement? Does he really want to go back to the sixties when shallow acting performances like Julie Andrews’s in Mary Poppins and Rex Harrison’s in My Fair Lady could win Oscars in the same year? When a piece of unwatchable, rancid cornpone like Oliver! could win best picture and 2001: A Space Odyssey not even be nominated? No, Bucket List is just a stalking horse for Mitch, and a rather unridable nag at that. To decipher the real meaning of his argument, one merely needs to remember that Mitch himself has achieved fame and fortune by being the purveyor of similar shamelessly sentimental claptrap, and the plaintive whine of what about me? can be clearly heard. His mega-bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie became a television movie called Oprah Winfrey Presents: Tuesdays With Morrie, and subsequent tomes yielded The Five People You Meet in Heaven and Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom’s For One More Day. Clearly Mitch is a little perturbed that the cinema adapted from his work hasn’t broken out of the made for T.V. ghetto and, even if it did, would be shark bait for the critics. Why should Cormac McCarthy have all the fun? But in a world where The Bucket List can win an Oscar, Mitch could easily cop a lifetime achievement award just for the dreck he’s already come up with. In reality Bucket List really has nothing to do with it – it’s all about Mitch not getting the attention he thinks he deserves.

Then there’s this Sunday’s column. To those without the key it’s a real head scratcher. Mitch takes the You Tube culture to task, condemning people for being judged by brief film clips, you know, like the one of a soldier throwing a dog off a cliff or a woman repeatedly squirting and verbally abusing her daughter at a car wash. Why, he asks, do people make such a big deal out of these tiny snippets when they’re out of context, just a tiny part of someone’s larger life? This is an extremely tenuous argument. I don’t care if you’re Mother Teresa, throwing dogs off cliffs and tormenting your daughter are still wrong, and not too many people would disagree. Does Mitch really think that under certain circumstances child abuse and recreational killing of dogs is O.K.? He fulminates against the brevity of the clips, the rush to judgement, the lack of background, as if the fact that they were being filmed was really to blame. The acts themselves are clear, however, and no amount of explanation can excuse them.

Obviously defending these people is a very weird position for a champion of sappy goo like Mitch to take. It takes a little bit of inside information to figure out how this one is really about Mitch, too. The theme of Tuesdays With Morrie was how Mitch, a self-absorbed, career driven jerk, was transformed by his encounter with the saintly, dying Morrie into becoming a sensitive mench who learned to stop and smell the roses and cherish mankind. Morrie may have been all that, but people who know Mitch, or have even seen him in action know that he remains an extremely ambitious ego maniac, a man who, once the microphone is off, transforms into a screaming prima donna who regularly abuses those that he works with or has any power over. Imagine what would happen to his gentle, wise, ultra decent persona if scenes, which more than one person I know have been witness to, of Mitch extremely profanely bitching someone out were to hit the internet? I’m sure he saw that clip of ESPN’s Chris Berman going off on the underlings and blanched, and he has a lot more to lose than Boomer. Mitch’s facade of spirituality, even his friendship with Oprah would be at stake, not to mention the literary franchise he’s developed around sentimentally exploiting dead people. In this light it’s clear the column is a preemptive strike against such material emerging. When he says Is the world a better place when the worst of us can be viewed on a regular basis? he doesn’t really mean "us." As usual, in Albom land it’s all about Mitch.