WKRP: The Incomplete First Season
A persistent blogger has obtained
a list of the music and episode changes for the upcoming WKRP in Cincinnati DVD release on April 24th, which has been besot by licensing challenges and high costs. What he's found is not very encouraging.
Nearly every episode, it seems, has experienced cuts or changes in content and music, either because Fox Television deemed a certain song to be too expensive to include, or because they they couldn't gain the rights to use it. It's hard to know who's to blame for this. The music publishing business is in the toilet. Licensed music is readily available for free-- or at least cheaper-- online (legal or otherwise), and you know if you've been to a record store lately that, despite class action challenges several years ago to price gouging in the industry, the price of compact discs has done nothing but climb higher. It's difficult for me not to blame the musical artists and their representatives, though, as well. You
also know if you've pursued big-name concert tickets during the last decade that those multimillionaires are sticking it to us also. (And I might add that many of these artists should be paying a debt of thanks to WKRP for part of their professional success.)
I anticipated some cost-cutting in areas where songs were not vital to the action on the show. Often you would hear just the first or last ten seconds of a song just before Venus Flytrap or Dr. Johnny Fever went on the air in the studio, although their dialogue frequently, and quite naturally as radio DJs, referenced the tunes in question. Howard Hesseman (Dr. Fever), it's been reported, has gone back in to over-dub original dialogue, which should be an improvement over some of the dubbing problems in syndication, but it's hard to imagine how well this would even work with the lips of 1979 Johnny Fever still mouthing the original words.
It's asking a lot of the consumer to accept many of these changes, such as the absence of Pink Floyd (from a memorable scene in the turkey drop episode in which Mr. Carlson asks Johnny whether he hears dogs barking on the spinning record) or James Taylor singing "Your Smiling Face" at the end of the episode "I Want to Keep My Baby." The original press information for the DVD implied that many tunes would be replaced simply by licensed songs that
were available, but Jaime Weinman's blog reveals that a lot of generic music has been substituted. The quality of these substitutions will be staggeringly important. If the doorbell of Jennifer Marlowe's luxury apartment does not play the first few bars of "Fly Me To the Moon," as it did originally, something appropriately elegant has to be incorporated. Which tunes from the public domain (i.e., expired copyrights from around the late 19th Century and before) would suffice? "I've Been Working On the Railroad" or "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" won't quite hack it.
I'm torn between my disgust for this whole predicament, and my loyalty and support for the WKRP cast and crew who are trying to make the best of a bad situation. As Weinman suggests, strong sales for the first DVD could conceivably result in a higher budget for the three subsequent seasons of the series. Important decisions may still have to be made on the retention of Earth, Wind & Fire's "After the Love is Gone," Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger," Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," Johnny Mathis' "Chances Are" (the only record Les Nessman owns,) The Carpenter's "We've Only Just Begun," and preferential background tunes by Bruce Springsteen and Steely Dan. Entire episodes were build around songs like "Tiny Dancer" and George Gershwin's "Someone To Watch Over Me."
To conclude on a positive note, so many of the great scenes and moments from WKRP are in no danger of being butchered. Hoyt Axton's country songs were poignant and funny, when his character from Jennifer's hometown in West Virginia came to Cincy to woo her back, and that hilarious radio jingle the KRP staff recorded for Ferryman's Funeral Home will be safely intact. And of course, the great writing and comedic performances that made WKRP quite possibly the greatest television show of all-time will be better than ever thanks to digital technology. We'll still experience the brilliant design of creator Hugh Wilson, and terrific actors like Frank Bonner, Gordon Jump, and Richard Sanders. There's no danger of Fox replacing Loni Anderson with Cheryl Ladd.
Opening night itinerary
Gather 'round the television Sunday night for baseball's first official pitch of 2007. The World Champion Cardinals welcome the New York Mets to Busch Stadium for a 7pm ballgame, with Chris Carpenter taking the hill for the Birds.
The real place to be that night will be Busch itself, where pregame festivities commence at 6 . They begin with the Budweiser Clydesdales circling the field, followed by the annual motorcade of players and coaches, and the semi-annual raising of the World Series Championship flag.
Three ceremonial "first pitches" will be thrown that evening in unison, one each by the last three Cardinals pitchers to coax the final out of a World Championship-- Hall-of-Famers Bob Gibson (1967) and Bruce Sutter (1982), and current Cardinals hurler Adam Wainwright (2006). Their catchers, respectively, will be the field managers who steered those victorious clubs-- Red Schoendienst ('67), Whitey Herzog ('82), and Tony LaRussa ('06). Also on hand will be former champions Lou Brock, Julian Javier, Tim McCarver, and Mike Shannon; Dave LaPoint, Bob Forsch, Keith Hernandez, and Joaquin Andujar.
REO Speedwagon will sing the national anthem in advance of the Tuesday release of their new album "Find Your Own Way Home," and everybody's favorite Cards fan, Academy Award winner Billy Bob Thornton, co-emcees the festivities along with the team's radio voice, John Rooney.
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Not Surprising: On the eve of the baseball season,
The Chicago Sun-Times has
a verdict in its month-long case of
the people of Chicago vs. Tribune Co.
Links for thought
Mia Farrow, an actress and activist who lives the values that she publicly promotes, is
holding film director Steven Spielberg to account for his behind-the-scenes promotion of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Don't miss
her website, either.
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Tom Vilsack's decision to endorse Hillary Clinton may have been
more inspired than I initially thought.
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Only four of exactly 4,734,991 American veterans of the first World War are still known to be living. One is
Frank Woodruff Buckles, 106, of Charles Town, West Virginia.
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Boy, that
New York sports media is merciless towards its hometown athletes.
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I just joined my first ever fantasy baseball league at my workplace, about which you've now endured the last on-line reference. I suspect my opponents may be taking advantage of my naivete. What do you think?-- This afternoon, I traded Ryan Howard for
Ugueth Urbina.
Clinton, Edwards pick up key Iowa endorsements
Hillary Clinton is about 15 blocks away this morning participating in a "Town Hall Meeting" for "Good Morning America," bullshitting her way through audience requests for specifics about her health care plan, and then later today, picking up the endorsement of former Iowa Governor and one-time presidential candidate himself, Tom Vilsack. (I'm certain the Disney Corporation, ABC-TV and GMA have extended similar broadcast invitations to candidates Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel in the interest of fair access.)
The endorsement by Vilsack comes as no surprise. The former head of the self-described "third-way" Democratic Leadership Conference has been in bed with the Clintons, Terry McAuliffes, Bob Shrums, James Carvilles, and Rahm Emmanuels for years. Under his watch, as before, the DLC backed the Iraq debacle and publicly scolded Democrats who spoke out against it. Only in a last ditch effort to gain traction for his flailing presidential bid did Vilsack call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and few activists were fooled. (To steal author Camille Paglia's assessment of Hillary: all politicians are actors, and he's a bad one.)
High atop Sherman Hill overlooking downtown Des Moines and the Science Center where Clinton is speaking this morning, I have made the decision to make public today my decision to back Democrat John Edwards in 2008. The final decision came after watching Edwards with his wife Elizabeth on "60 Minutes" last night. I've always had a strong gut feeling about Edwards' personal and professional character, and that was vividly on display last night just as it has been the last few months as Edwards has repeatedly and humbly apologized on the campaign trail for his Senate vote surrendering congressional authorization-- and by extension, oversight-- on the Iraqi war. The right wing shouldn't have a monopoly on "values voters" by any stretch of the imagination.
My support for Edwards continues to be conditional upon his support for immediate redeployment from the battlefields of Iraq's Civil War, and his willingness to engage Iraq's neighbors, Iran and Syria, in helping to bring about stability. I support his call for the immediate creation of a NATO force to stop the genocide in Darfur, his attention to developing a new energy economy, and a plan to pay for the first year of college for anyone willing to work part-time. Edwards has been the most aggressive advocate in the race for fighting poverty, both rural and urban, which I believe, particularly after Hurricane Katrina, should be the Democratic Party's #1 political mission in helping to renew once again its healthy electoral majority. More than any other major candidate, Edwards seems to realize that this national crisis is tied directly to the availability and quality of good jobs and health insurance, and unlike Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, he has
outlined a plan for universal health coverage.
I don't share the thoughts of
some progressives who are writing today that "60 Minutes" and Katie Couric were out of line in asking very personal questions of John and Elizabeth Edwards over his decision to continue the pursuit of the White House even as her cancer has returned. I think its basically just angling for one's candidate to accuse the news coverage of being unfair, and I'm no stranger to that, Lord knows, but it's also a manifestation of a real fear that is inherent in too many liberals-- fear of having to answer for one's own beliefs and decisions. (Along these same lines, Rep. Emmanuel, a former Clinton advisor, has ordered freshman Democrats away from the Stephen Colbert political comedy show.)
John and Elizabeth were not granted a 12 minute interview ten months before the Iowa Caucuses for John to outline for America the specifics of his health care plan. (We can only wish that network television news operated that way.) They were given 12 minutes to discuss a very serious decision they had both just made. Slate.com reports this week that-- at least statistically-- the metastasis of Elizabeth's bone cancer has decreased her survival rate for the next five years from 85 to 20%, and I wanted to know just as much as anyone else rather the decision to continue with the campaign had more to do with John's political ambition than a commitment to public service they both share. I came away thoroughly convinced that it is the latter. In fact, I venture to say I would not be writing an endorsement of Edwards today without having heard the candidate answer the questions posed by a tenacious Couric. (Transcript
here.) Hopefully, it's the beginning of a journalistic strategy that will extend more consistently to all other public officials and candidates for office.
John and Elizabeth Edwards will not get a free ride from anyone, and frankly, it needs to be that way. Politics is-- and should be-- a rough business. I think they understand this as well. Their "private life" stopped being that as soon as he entered public service, and especially so, after they made the decision to push forward last week. I think the dignity they've been displaying will propel Edwards in the race, and you won't see them complain if Elizabeth's health, or their coping with it at least, prove a political asset. It very well could now that their campaign packs the same emotional wallop with the public as the campaigns to elect the first black, Mormon, or female president. It will not only be a character test for them to deal with on the campaign trail, but a character test for the GOP and the Clintons as well, and their highly-tuned corporate smear machines.
As for the other candidates: I've never warmed to Dennis Kucinich, who's displayed a healthy amount of inconsistent behavior and political priority through the years, and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel's been gone too long. Joe Biden is the Senator from Visa and Mastercard (both headquartered in Delaware,) that is, a betrayer of all working Americans during the debate surrounding bankruptcy legislation in 2005, and along with another candidate, Chris Dodd, simply too much a part of the old-Senate-guard of neutered-Dems of the Tom Daschle era, who were steamrolled by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.
Barack Obama, for all his rhetoric, has still only been in the Senate for two years, and a completely indistinguishable two years at that, spending most of his time falling in with the corporate goons of the caucus, keeping his mouth shut about the toughest issues, and even now, spending his stump time more focused on flattering voters and soft rhetoric about dead presidents than on straight talk about America's future.
I regret Sen. Russ Feingold's decision not to enter the race this winter. He's a man of uncommon courage in Washington, and the disappointment of his bowing out crossed my mind again last week when I heard the Edwards clan had scheduled a press conference to discuss Elizabeth's health and the future of that campaign. Perhaps that's part of the reason I found it necessary to act now in pledging my volunteer time and this on-line space. No American needs to be reminded the strong candidates are few.
I chose Edwards as my anti-Clinton choice. There's a battle on for the soul of the Democratic party that has to be won before any meaningful social movement can proceed in this country, whether it be for environmental change, or to end American imperialism or our national hostility towards the poor. Hillary Clinton will not get my vote under any scenario at this point, regardless of her opponent, and that should be interpreted the way I intended it-- as at least one individual threat from a voter in the left-wing of the party, with almost a full year to do something about it. I won't hesitate, like I didn't last time, to cast a principled third-party protest vote in the 2008 election, if I'm left with a choice between two candidates who don't represent my values.
There's a certain protected class in Washington that is getting rich on the backs of hard-working Americans and the lives of Iraqis. And by my estimation, a disproportionate number are decision-makers in the Democratic leadership in Washington. They run their campaigns and caucuses to the middle, bending over for right-wing zealots, and punishing party members of principle-- throwing them to the wolves who attack their patriotism. Then they expect the progressives to accept the lesser of two evils in the general election after they've strong-armed, if not entirely purchased, the nomination process.
Hillary is going to continue to hope she can move forward behind the anti-Bush cyclone and ride her name recognition and campaign warchest to that nomination. (Incidentally, at what point do you have more money than you can spend? All she can buy with it are TV ads that increase her visibility, and 40 percent of Americans already know her well enough to tell pollsters they would never vote for her.) She'll continue to claim the war was a mistake, but refuse to say she made a mistake in authorizing it, leaving her vulnerable to the same attacks that sunk John Kerry, and leaving our military in its ruined state. She'll stick her finger in the air, and wait for others to lead the way on questions such as whether homosexuality is immoral, or whether
her own pursuit of national health coverage in 1993 was a mistake. She
should be promoting her foresight on that issue, like Al Gore does with Global Warming, but the hard fact is that she no longer believes in it, or much of anything except the pursuit of power. She's not that same public advocate. She's a triangulating, unprincipled opportunist like her husband, and she's willing to sell out everything that he did, not the least of which was the future of the Democratic party.
John Edwards is our strongest alternative.
One night in March
I'm going to assume that since I got three sarcastic e-mails and a crank phone call related to this subject today, it's expected that I post a comment on Cardinals' manager Tony LaRussa's drunk driving arrest early this morning. In case you missed it, the team's skipper was discovered asleep in his car at a stop light in Jupiter, FL at 4am, with his foot on the brake pedal of his SUV. He registered a blood-alcohol level of 0.093, above the state of Florida's legal limit of 0.08.
I've eased up on LaRussa in recent years. A World Championship, in particular, went a long way towards that end. The manager had long been regarded as one of sport's most intense competitors, and sometimes the level of intimidation on display and his strong-arming of opponents put him, to one's mind, more in the company of a Corleone, or a Soprano, or a Clinton. In recent years, he's publicly softened. First, displaying warmth and emotion after the death of pitcher Darryl Kile in 2002, and then progressively showing more patience and levity towards his detractors in St. Louis (myself once included.)
What fascinates me most about this story (and of course, too much is just sorry and unfortunate) is the public reaction of sports fans. LaRussa is a very unique character, you see. He's not sport's most fiery leader, like maybe Lou Piniella, or most ill-tempered, like perhaps Bobby Knight, and others may match his intensity (though very few in the relatively even-keeled realm of baseball,) but none are more focused on gaining that competitive advantage, and none have been more concerned with guarding every ounce of vulnerability. That's why when he allows that door to slip open and the vulnerability to escape, twenty-five years of truly exemplory public and professional service can so quickly evaporate.
Tony LaRussa has never been a public person who pointed the finger at others. Unlike so many other cases, this substance abuse episode did not unveil a hypocrite. He's a high-profile individual who has embarassed himself, and he will pay an appropriate price. As a celebrity, he will be treated better than the average or below-average Joe by law enforcement and judicial authorities, but he'll face greater public humiliation. He's got more sincere and humble public apologies still to deliver, and a brand new responsibility to build public awareness for the anti-drunk driving message. But one of the positive aspects is that, with a by-all-accounts civilized gentleman like LaRussa, he understands all of this.
The passing of Larry "Bud" Melman
Television has lost one of its great characters. Calvert DeForest, who embodied the strikingly similar Larry "Bud" Melman on "Late Night with David Letterman,"
died Monday in Long Island, NY at the age of 85. DeForest was with Letterman from the early days of his NBC show in 1982, but was forced to leave his "Melman" moniker behind when the late night host made the jump to CBS in 1993 and NBC claimed "intellectual property" rights on the name. It was DeForest who opened "The Late Show"s premiere on CBS by standing inside the network's famous eye logo and announcing "This is CBS."
Rest in peace tonight, Mr. DeForest. We remember
your triumphant moment.
Plus, a bonus clip--
Calvert in a bear suit.
Mid-week reading
1.
The Nation's Robert Lipsyte gets down in the mud with the pigs of collegiate basketball.
2. A third cousin from back home who shares the Moeller surname (but actually relation on my mother's side)
was profiled in the
Cedar Rapids Gazette over the weekend for his military service in Iraq and the resulting loss of his religious faith.
3.
Sticks and Stones: An acclaimed television writer
counts down the 10 most "socially-redeeming usages of the word 'nigger' in modern history."
4.
Blog spotlight: This is one of
my new favorites-- Texan Marisa Trevino gives the news of the day from a Latina's perspective. I'm not sure where else you can get it in the English-speaking news media.
Bowie Kuhn's legacy
Former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn died last week. Not surprisingly, the obituaries and assessments of his reign, are being written from the club owners' perspective-- the baseball press still equating the 30 team ownerships as same thing as the league, and the collection of its players as something separate.
Almost universally, Kuhn, who served from 1969 until 1984, is being judged to have had more impact than any league commish other than its first, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and perhaps its current, Bud Selig, but it's very inexact to even call the commissioner the league boss, and too easy to overstate his importance. The baseball commissioner, you see, is an employee of the club owners, just like the players.
What Kuhn may have-- or didn't-- accomplish had more to do with the men-- and a small number of women-- at whose pleasure he served, and it's not coincidental that Kuhn's professional career prior to landing the job as the sport's commissioner included two decades as general counsel to the Major League clubs.
Kuhn presided over the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973. To this day, though I still feel as if I must immediately shower and disinfect after watching a game in which the pitchers did not bat for themselves, credit (or blame) for the DH has to rest with former Oakland Athletics' owner Charlie O. Finley, who introduced the concept, and the other American League club owners, who went along with the carnival sideshow idea.
Credit is being given to Kuhn for increasing baseball's television exposure, for booming revenue, and for prolonged league parity during his reign, but neither he nor his bosses deserve praise for any of these developments. Baseball owners, and their hand-picked appointees, had long shunned television, just as they feared radio prior to that advancement, believing foolishly that the public wouldn't attend games they could watch or listen to for free from their homes. It was National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle who was revolutionizing sports on television, even as Kuhn was getting his feet wet on the job. Even into the 1990s, the baseball commissioner's office and the club owners, claiming territorial infringements, were fighting efforts by Ted Turner and the Tribune Company to send their respective teams' local broadcasts across the nation upon cable TV "superstations."
It's the Baseball Players Assocation and their chief, Marvin Miller, who deserve credit for-- if not booming revenue (a bigger pie to share?)-- than at least for soaring franchise values. It was free agency and the development of a fair market for players as company assets that caused resale value of clubs to exponentially increase, and contrary to a still-stubborn myth, has also led to greater on-field parity between the teams. The sport's richest club, the New York Yankees, won 20 Championships in the 40 seasons between 1923 and 1962, but only six in the 45 years since, as the seeds of Miller's union have flowered. Even though a lack of
economic parity has allowed George Steinbrenner's Yankees to purchase the best available veteran players season after season, the flipside of free agency has meant that the New York and other wealthy clubs can no longer boast not only the league's best player at a given position, but also its second best stuck behind him on the bench.
Which leads us to Kuhn's ultimate legacy-- that, strangely, of a mail recipient. His tenure will be remembered as the one during which the sport's players, against his tireless efforts, finally became full partners in the financial profit of the game. Their cause has been most heroically personified by a ballplayer named Curt Flood, who challenged baseball's anti-trust exemption and its reserve clause that bound a player to one team for life. He and his attorneys wrote one of the most famous letters in American history to Kuhn in 1969, to be met only with refusal for Flood's request:
December 24th, 1969Mr. Bowie K. KuhnCommissioner of Baseball680 Fifth AvenueNew York, New York 10019Dear Mr. Kuhn:After twelve years in the Major Leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states.It is my desire to play baseball in 1970, and I am capable of playing. I have received a contract offer from the Philadelphia club, but I believe I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions. I, therefore, request that you make known to all the Major League Clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season.Sincerely yours, (Signature)
Curt FloodCF/JCC- Mr. Marvin Miller- Mr. John Quinn
Sin wagon
I feel I'm uniquely qualified to chime in on "
Des Moines' Dairy Dustup" (Newly-copyrighted phrase). The city council of Iowa's most-populous village is now weighing whether or not to permit ice cream trucks to roam the metropolitan streets. Since the commercial vehicles have been outlawed here for nearly 40 years, I doubt that many other of her residents can claim having one time worked as an ice cream truck vendor, but as you may or may not know, I did just that for 10 glorious weeks in St. Louie, Moe in the summer of 1994... when we were all just little babies.
The crackpots were out in force last night at a meeting devoted to the controversy: Mothers expressed fear that child predators would be hired to man the wheels of the motorized devil-mobiles, and they warned that harmful bacteria lurked with malice inside each and every Dream-sicle. A Des Moines police sergeant summoned up seminal adolescent memories of the unfortunate 9-year-old girl who was struck and killed by an ice cream truck
40 years ago, the precipitating element of the long-time ban.
It's all so silly to me. Your child could just as easily be preyed upon by a complete stranger, their home room teacher, a member of the clergy, or a member of the immediate family, than by the ice cream man, which means ultimately it's not even safe to keep them in the house, let alone permit them out. Products sold from the trucks would presumably still fall under the safety jurisdiction of the nation's highly-effective Food and Drug Administration, as the trucks themselves would still assumedly be subject to all federal, state, and local traffic laws. Sadly, the grief of the victim's father continues to overwhelm the debate, as council members are forced to reconcile common sense with human concern for a well-meaning gentleman's long-lasting pain.
The Des Moines Register, once a frequent recipient of many of journalism's most prestigious awards-- thanks to penetrating investigations into malfeasance in the agribusiness industry, now only makes an impact on the community when it uncovers such tawdry tales as the college basketball coach who enjoys sipping Natural Light in the company of coeds, or when their photographers stumble upon an out-of-towner selling a frozen blend of cream, condensed milk, and butterfat from the passenger-side window of a full-sized conversion van.
Hmm, I wonder where Dairy Queen comes down on this issue. They're against it? Truly? I'd love to keep paying $4 for two scoops of ice cream and a crushed candy bar, but as so many venture capitalists have explained to ours and every other city council across this land:
a little competition never hurt anybody.I sympathize with that man in the
Register picture. That was me 13 years ago (
13 years!?)-- same truck, same happy children (though my cap was red.) Our only lasting concerns should be the fattening of our children and that annoying music, and that's neither here nor there in a competitive marketplace. Let's let kids be kids. Let them enjoy one of summer's great neighborhood pleasures. Let them reward themselves for having completed their yard-related chores, and for their full-hearted efforts upon the city's baseball and softball diamonds. But then I suppose you people would rather they spent their money on drugs?
Baldwin's riddle
Actor, impresario, and master of all-things-theatrical Alec Baldwin struck a hornet's nest with a ball bat today-- posting
a piece on Arianna Huffington's blog describing the ideal presidential candidate, proclaiming that he actually exists, but then not disclosing who he believes that person is. As of 8:30 this evening, 129 comments had posted.
Roughly ninety percent of the respondents so far believe he's referring to Al Gore, but my immediate reaction was that he must have sat mesmerized as I did, listening to Ralph Nader describe his new book
"The Seventeen Traditions" Sunday night on C-SPAN2's "Book Notes. " One Nader-hater in the comment thread even said he would vomit on his computer if Ralph were the subject-- obviously having recognized the public advocate from Baldwin's description: "One man. Smart. Experienced. Brave. Doing it for the RIGHT REASONS!"
I swear to you nothing gets my blood up anymore like these knee-jerk attacks on Nader, mostly from people who were sound asleep during the Clinton Administration and the 2000 campaign. Not until Bush and Cheney arrived did they then see fit to blame it all on the one persistent messenger who had warned against the Democrats' race to the middle. One writer in the Baldwin thread (top of page 2) had the audacity to claim that it has been Al Gore who "has been more right, more often, about the most important issues facing our country over the last couple decades." Whooaa there! Wrong guy.
GarryJ must have been out drinking the night Gore debated Ross Perot over NAFTA on Larry King in 1996.
He's also forgetting about Gore's role in the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose core tenet involves moving the Democratic Party towards capitulation to the modern-day right-wing-controlled GOP. He called for a stop to the vote-counting in Florida in 2000, disenfranchising thousands of African-American voters and inviting Republicans to steal the next presidential election and who knows how many more to come. He thought Joe Lieberman was the best candidate for Vice President, but seven years later, Lieberman accompanies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the 20 percent roll call of Americans who believe a military escalation in Iraq is a good idea, and who in 2006, leveraged his own party's success against his career and continues to sell it out at every turn.
Baldwin
can't be talking about Gore. Gore is smart and experienced, but he's not brave. He was steamrolled by
Al From during the 2000 campaign, and even now, keeps himself out of the arena on all but one issue. Only one candidate ever filed a lawsuit over voter fraud in Florida or Ohio in 2000 and 2004, and he's a pariah to most on the left. Gore's a captivating film subject, I'll give him that. He convinced me so completely that the Washington political establishment needs to heed the dangers of Global Warming, I damn near forgot he was Vice President of the United States for eight years. And I'll give you one guess which U.S. President first stripped the Kyoto Treaty of all of its potential global impact under the political and financial servitude of American corporate polluters... and it wasn't George W. Bush.
The rock star treatment Gore gets from liberals is extravagantly short-memoried. It's Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all over again-- focusing
one more time on the candidate's words and not his or her records. The activists have been charmed by a pretty face, and that pretty face is Leonardo DiCaprio's, on stage with Gore at the Academy Awards.
You've been waiting for this, and here it is:
Ralph Nader is the one man "that's been more right, more often," not just about the most important issues of the day, but about damn near everything, and not just over the last two decades, but since his public life began in 1959. He's been perhaps our greatest citizen and statesman in history-- smart, displaying bravery at every turn, and embodying, in Baldwin's well-chosen words, "the true American spirit."
I, for one, plan to buy his book.
News consumers strike back
If you've seen news directors, producers, and anchors on television defending their editorial decisions in recent years, you know there's nothing they'd rather do than be able to devote their professional careers to covering important stories. It seems they've only been focusing on tabloid, celebrity, and human interest guttertripe because that's what strengthens circulation and ratings.
You're the problem, it turns out, because you'll choose the evening or cable news program that gives you the most information on Britney's flipout, the death of the People's Princess, Anna Nicole, and the stranded skiers in the Rockies that no one has ever heard of or who directly influence our lives, but who are the upper-middle-class white families television viewers all aspire to be, envy, and resent.
The problem with this consultant-driven corporate strategy is that pandering to an ever-shrinking radio, television, or newspaper audience might help you compete short-term, and on paper, against your closest network competitors, but it dismisses entirely all of the "news consumers" who have abandoned the corporate pissing contests entirely in favor of more trustworthy and vigilant journalism.
It was bad enough when the Viacoms, GE's, Time Warners, and Clear Channels took over America's largest and most trusted news departments, and transformed them from trustees of the public-owned airwaves into profit-driven network engines, but it's now degenerated to such a point that their high-salaried talking heads can no longer stifle the giggles when attempting to convince the public that they exist for any purpose other than to get that quarterly stock bump selling our fears and prejudices back to us under the heading of news-gathering, and protecting the new generation of robber-barons who cut the checks.
The privately-owned broadcasting behemoths are fortunate that they're still allowed to occupy the public airwaves rent-free, because, otherwise, the audiences that remain wouldn't be enough to fund the year-end company parties. Having worked in corporate radio for nine years, I can attest that it's rarely, if ever, about the message, unless that message is propping up the political gatekeepers who guard the broadcast licenses. The deregulating Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by the original Arkansas razorback hog, was the death knell. At WHO Radio in Des Moines, it's all quite out in the open at staff meetings-- it's too cost- and resource-prohibitive to win back the listeners who have already left, so the focus becomes getting the "true believers" and nutjobs that haven't left to listen for longer periods of time. The near-decade I worked there, a poster in the hallway promoted the claim that Clear Channel was the "most advertiser-focused" sales option in Des Moines. They're broadcasting for ad-buyers, not their listeners-- and definitely not for the larger general public that owns their AM broadcast frequency.
The good news is that the American people
are abandoning these short-sided nitwits, and the communication industries are wobbling towards collapse. Combined annual 6am-midnight cable news ratings on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are down 21 percent in the last five years, according to the Nielsen ratings company, while the routinely-focused "Newshour" on PBS typically enjoys a 10 to 70 percent ratings advantage over its cable news counterparts, according to the show's host, Jim Lehrer. Content-driven National Public Radio has experienced 24 percent growth during the same half-decade period of cable news decline. The linked article above also draws attention to the fact that
The New Yorker magazine, which employs perhaps America's top investigative journalist, Seymour Hirsch, has seen a 21 percent circulation increase since 2002, as Time Warner's
Newsweek and right-wing financier Mort Zuckerman's
U.S. News and World Report have had no growth.
And this says nothing even of the extraordinary mushrooming of independent journalists online, who are propelling this media revolution forward. Americans, in fact, may be more attuned than ever to the political and socio-economic world in which they live. The pursuit of the facts is alive and well, thanks, as always, to the most enlightened and vitally-engaged percentage of the citizenry, and not to the greedy but so-called "industrious" motives of Wall Street. I shall weep not for the dinosaurs.
New Guy
If you are reading this, I, Chris and Aaron's learned, witty and humble cousin, have just successfully added my first post as an official contributor.
Some may be wondering whether my views will bring chaos or cohesion to the Archives. I'm not sure...but I am a Cubs fan. I'll try to fill out a profile soon.
The family returns
On April 8th, the final nine-episode run of "The Sopranos" begins on HBO, and the April issue of Vanity Fair has a preview. You can enjoy
the provocative cover and a photo shoot video at the magazine's website (Sound Warning!), but you'll evidently have to hit your local newstand if you want to read the feature article.
That was April 8th, people.
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Tonight, the Iowa Senate passed "Fair Share," a bill forcing public workers (teachers, city, county, and state employees) who receive union-negotiated benefits to financially contribute to the cost of providing those benefits. Unfortunately, Democrats backed down on a plan that would have also included private sector workers in the legislation, fearing the measure would not get the votes to pass. The bill now goes to the House, where Democrats believe it has the support needed to advance, and Gov. Chet Culver says he would sign such a bill into law.
In a complete non-starter, Republicans-- along with lapdog David Yepsen of the
Des Moines Register-- have claimed that the bill would damage the state's economy, but
the Center for Policy Alternatives reveals different information about "Fair Share" and the effects of so-called "Right-toWork" legislation:
1) Right-to-Work states have a poverty rate of 13.5%, opposed to 12.2 in free bargaining states.
2) The infant mortality rate is 7.94% higher in Right-to-Work states, and the uninsured population rate is 15 percent higher on average.
3) The rate of workplace deaths is 41% higher in Right-to-Work states, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics.
and
4) Right-to-Work states spend an average of $1,680 less per pupil in elementary and secondary schools, resulting in average teacher salaries $6,943 lower and composite ACT scores 3.55 % lower than their free bargaining counterparts.
The cause, as I see it, was best supported by Donald Clarke, of West Des Moines, IA, in a letter to the
Register on Wednesday-- a letter I'm reprinting in its as-published entirety and without permission:
I once spent 10 years working in one of the world's biggest car factories. It was a really good deal: I gave the company 40 hours, and they gave me a nice check so that I could afford to buy one of the cars.It was a closed shop, but I didn't mind paying dues to the United Auto Workers, and later to the International Associaton of Machinists, because it was their negotiation with the company on my behalf that had led to my relative prosperity. Anyway, the majority of my co-workers wanted the union, and that's democracy.But now I live in Iowa, where someone who works in a place where the majority has voted for a union is not required to belong to that union, but gets a free ride. That's an interesting view of democracy. I don't have much use for state government these days, and Gov. Chet Culver wasn't my first, or second, choice for governor. So I don't have to pay my taxes. Have I got that right?3/9/07 am update: The Register's
coverage of this issue continues to be wretchedly biased-- about a dozen column inches for the 2,000 member "Professional Educators of Iowa," and virtually nothing for the 32,000 member Iowa State Education Association.
Much Ado About Nothing
For four days I've been reading about Angels centerfielder Gary Matthews Jr. getting himself entangled in this internet sting operation on Human Growth Hormone, but today I find in the fine print of
one of the stories that he was alleged to have been sent a shipment of HGH in
2004, a year before the drug even made it onto the sport's banned substance list--
and the government investigation will not be pursuing whether or not the substance was even consumed, focusing instead on distributors and producers. Also in the fine print, a team doctor for football's Pittsburgh Steelers has allegedly been implicated. The NFL still has no testing program for HGH, but this is a baseball problem. Next scandal, please.
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A baseball blogger has
re-written a passage from George Orwell's "1984" to apply to the Chicago Cubs, substituting the words "party" or "party member" with "Cubs fan(s)," and the word "war" with "rebuilding."
What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the CUBS FANS themselves. Even the humblest CUBS FAN is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of REBUILDING. It does not matter whether the REBUILDING is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the REBUILDING is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of REBUILDING should exist.Tomorrow, "Tale of
Two Cities."
Objects in the rearview may be closer than they appear
One of the frustrating things for white folks in America-- like me-- to come to grips with is the lingering impact of slavery on modern society. "Why can't they--
meaning, black people-- get over it already?" is a common thought. I've heard it expressed, I've felt it myself.
What we constantly need to be reminded of, however, is the way that slavery so permeated each of our cultural institutions for centuries, from our civic engagement to education to family and beyond, and how our growth away from it since the beginning of the abolition movement has been subverted by a doggedly institutional form of discrimination and by our own personal impulses towards laziness in the futile hope that the stains upon our flag could ever one day be wiped clean. Our
shared cultural heritage is part of each of us, and we can no easier deny it from ourselves than we could our personal experiences that have made us who and what we are. That's the burden of attempting to maintain a living and breathing democracy.
Last week's report of the ancestral connection between Al Sharpton and Strom Thurmond is the most extraordinary national story of the young year because of both what it says about who we have been and about who we are capable of becoming.
Reverend Sharpton's reaction deserves attention. The mere writing of his name will now be enough to take the institution of slavery out of the abstract and place it into his daily life. For me, it's the geneological aspects that resonate. My family heritage is a passion of mine, aided by the research of relatives and the existence of church records in Germany that date back centuries. The discovery of deep roots has created an extraordinary sense of pride within me, as well as a feeling of strength from which to tackle a world with so few answers to its biggest questions.
For the descendents of slaves, the research of family trees often produce only the discovery of stunted branches, a lack of available information altogether, shame, and sadness. There are painful realities to be revealed, and it's especially confusing and trying for children, who are first absorbing their personal and shared histories during a period of such amazing identity development. I was moved by
this piece today from author Debra Dickerson, who is raising a pair of biracial children in upstate New York. Dickerson is a woman bringing up infants in the 21st Century that still has personal recollections of a relative born in slavery. The span of her life is but a drop of water in the bucket of human history.
Resting on laurels and losing touch with forebears who lifted us to such extraordinary heights is quite clearly the wrong approach. We need to confront the bad as well as the good in our past-- despite the heartache, pain, and especially, fatigue, which is the most insidious detriment of all. Rev. Sharpton gave us the cue last week from his unique perspective-- be fearless about resolving the problems of today, and constantly ask yourself what
you're doing to make your ancestors proud.
Snow day/Snow job
Hooray, hooray! I was out at work at two o'clock thanks to a blizzard warning in western and central Iowa. It may not seem like much, but in the work-a-day world of loan counseling, every few hours of added freedom counts, and since my shift today was scheduled to go until closing at eight, I'm one of the office's big winners.
Des Moines will be clipped by sleet, rain, and six to ten inches of snow between now and Friday night, but the northwest half of Iowa will really get buried-- up to 17 inches of snow is forecast on a line between Algona and Sioux City, and they've shut down both I-80 between Omaha and Des Moines and I-35 between Des Moines and Minneapolis. Could this be the beginning of a long weekend for Moeller? With Mondays already scheduled off, I may not have to be back in the office until the 6th.
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Thoughts then turn to the fun and sun of the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues. The so-called "steroid
controversy" continues to flare up, but more and more, it has become obvious that the whole affair is nothing more than an attempt by headline-seeking Congressman and envious sportswriters to curtail the well-earned rights and freedoms of baseball employees.
I've spent the last month reading two insightful books: John Helyar's "Lords of the Realm" from 1994, which focuses on the labor/management history of the game, and Brad Snyder's brand new "A Well-Paid Slave," about Curt Flood's life and struggle for free agency in professional sports. The players' union head, Donald Fehr, says tongue-in-cheek in Helyar's book that two things have always been true if you study the history of baseball: one, that you can never have enough pitching; and two, that no one ever made any money.
I would add two more to his list upon finishing these tomes: one, that those same club owners who are always pleading poverty (and the league commissioner beneath their collective thumb) will do everything in their power to lay culpability for error at the feet of the players, keeping a precarious grip on their Congressional anti-trust exemption; and two, that the establishment of American sports journalism will be alongside at all times to trumpet those initiatives.
As they've often done since creating the Office of the Commissioner in 1920, the club owners decided to select another "independent" arbiter last year to help combat the mounting government pressure to hone up to their steroid failures, naming former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as an "impartial" investigator into league steroid use. Of course, Mitchell is a long-time friend of current Commissioner Bud Selig.
What Mitchell's investigation is designed to produce-- as the Detroit Tigers' Gary Sheffield pointed out earlier this week-- is a public indictment of Barry Bonds and other players, guilty or not, who Selig and Co. believe will be capable of shouldering the legislative scorn that might otherwise be directed at the club owners, the people who truly hold the responsibility of maintaining fairness on the playing field of baseball. (Specifically, their target is Bonds-- who will be tarred and feathered throughout this summer during his race for the all-time home run record, after chemically-enhancing his body over a three year time period prior to any steroid prohibitions being in place in the game.) If you doubt the intentions of "the Lords," consider that they've already leaked grand jury testimony in the BALCO case, and leaked the names on positive steroid tests beginning in 2002 in violation of the privacy language explicit in the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Members of the sports media, always looking to protect precious clubhouse access, helped to foster the original image of the money-obsessed athlete, going back in salary disputes long before even the creation of the Players Association. They personally destroyed Curt Flood, and their efforts today are indisputably "gotcha" tactics designed to pin the blame squarely on the players. (Consider
this fawning profile of the
valiant Mitchell by an unnamed AP sportswriter.)
I ask you-- if steroids are such a public health scourge-- then why have the players not been portrayed as the real victims throughout all of this, rather than as alleged perpetrators upon our nation's youth? The players were the ones forced to compete with one another for some of the most exclusive jobs on the planet, in a working environment that valued gate receipts and advertising revenue above their long-term physical health. Absent any subpoena power, baseball players should fully ignore the inquiries of George Mitchell. His office was designed to make scapegoats of them and convince the public that Major League Baseball can police itself for substances Congress deems dangerous. We all know that it
can't, incidently, but its customers continue to display rabid indifference to the entire issue of steroids at stadium turnstiles.
The worst that could happen if Congress intervened, other than some additional mawkish grandstanding, is that it would then take
its turn proving an inability to manage a system of scientific advancement that will always stay a step ahead of the law. The potential
blessing, although quite unlikely, is that it would wind up costing Major League Baseball its anti-trust protection. Then the Players Association could go about securing its members' employment rights on the level playing field of America's courts.
