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He earned notoriety in the late 1970s after he began treating Wilson, whose career had disintegrated in a haze of drugs and phobias after a decade at the top of the musical charts.

Hired in 1975 by Wilson's wife, Landy took control of the rock star's life, monitoring him 24 hours a day with a team of assistants to keep him off drugs and junk food; Wilson's weight had ballooned to more than 300 pounds.

Landy grew so close to Wilson that he participated in Wilson's comeback as his manager and artistic collaborator - an ethical breach that eventually caused the psychologist to give up his license to practice in California.

Born in Pittsburgh, Landy was the only child of Jules, a physician, and Frieda, a psychology professor.

He claimed to have dropped out of school after the sixth grade because of severe dyslexia and worked odd jobs, eventually winding up in radio as producer of a program aimed at teenagers.

He later became a record promoter.

By the time he met Wilson, he had a Beverly Hills clinic and a celebrity clientele.

Print This E-mail This MORE NEWS • 4 Chardon High students hurt as car hits concrete wall • Aging project ends 3 years with ideas • Busy day at Statehouse • More Stories © 2006 The Plain Deale...

Oddly enough, he maintains that his cancer has actually helped his art in some ways."I've always started off with all this energy, and you want to keep going, but you end up flattening (the painting) out," he said.

"Now, I don't have the kind of energy ...

You need someone on your shoulder, telling you when to stop.

With the cancer, I've gained that ...

I'm able to say 'enough.'"Billman never knew that he had any interest in art until he spent a year at Lancing College in England when he was 18 and part of a student swap program.

There, he took his first serious art class and was inspired by the works of the impressionists, whom he describes as "so prolific, so in your face."Back home in the United States, he attended Syracuse University, where he studied painting and drawing, receiving a b...

Speaking of which, jokes are harder to tell these days, especially the good ethnic ones, for fear of being accused of offending.

NOW LET ME tell you why this is all so important.

In the past, this sanitization of what we say and do would have been debate-worthy, but only a minor irritant to our quality of life.

But in the post-9/11 world, these trends represent a threat to our survival.

No wonder that 4 ½ years after 9/11, we're still flying blind in the war on terror, refusing to accept that the fact that radical Islamic terrorists usually evidence the common denominators of race, sex, age, ethnicity and, yes, appearance.

And isn't it curious that there is more attention paid to the half-dozen knuckleheads responsible for some truly minor indiscretions at Abu Ghraib than the good work of the 140,000 other honorable servicemen and women?

Have you wondered why there is more concern for whether we played Christina Aguilera music too loud for detainee No.

063 at Guantanamo than the fact that this same guy would have been hijacker No.

20, cutting throats with box-cutters on 9/11, had he gotten past customs officials when he tried to get into Orlando International Airport a month before 9/11?

Or that we actually have had a debate about whether to print political cartoons that work radical Islam into a lather?

It's because we...