For your Hall consideration...
Baseball Hall of Fame voting season has arrived again. On Sunday, two separate Veterans Committee groups will vote from a pair of lists of managers, umpires, executives, and pioneers, with the results to be announced Monday. The most obvious candidate for induction on these ballots is Marvin Miller, the man who built the players association into what is arguably today the strongest union on the planet. Sadly, the latest voting configuration for the Hall puts the candidacy of the now-90-year-old Miller predominately in the hands of his former adversaries from the front offices of the Major League ballclubs. A 12-member panel will vote on the executives and pioneers, and 7 of those members are or were executives themselves. Gone from his jury are many of Miller's long-time associates and allies among the Hall of Fame players, as well as the Spink and Ford Frick Award winners for print media and broadcasting.
Miller's impact as the union's executive director from 1966 to 1982 is best measured by a rise in the average player's annual salary during that time from $6,000 to more than $500,000. Miller also helped to steer Curt Flood's legal challenge of the reserve clause, a uniform contractual item of the time that bound a player to a single team for life. But what's often
not included in discussions of Miller's impact on the game were the changes that resulted from the union's principal successes-- revolutionary improvements in team travel conditions and ballpark facilities. He was also the springboard for the establishment of salary arbitration, which stripped away the power to decide salary disputes from the commissioner, the owners' "handpicked toady," as Miller has often referenced the position.
In truth, baseball's executives also owe a debt to Miller, and to the former chief counsel of the union, Richard Moss, and to Miller's successor, Donald Fehr, for much of their accumulated wealth today. It's been the driving up of players' salaries that has largely spurred the exponential increase in franchise values in the financial market. In 1973, George Steinbrenner and a minority partner bought the New York Yankees from CBS for $10 million. This past April, Forbes magazine placed the estimated value of the franchise at $1.2 billion.
"I was exposing the whopping lie of the owners that they don't make money," Miller told oral historian Studs Terkel in 1995, "I took the most recent figures from Fortune magazine. The total payroll figures, the total gate receipts, the TV income. It was public knowledge. I (told the players), 'I know what you've heard about unions, but you must understand that only by working together can you have any impact.
"Consider the player who fights back, who's a holdout. The company sends him a damn contract that is an insult. He's had a great year and they offer him a cut. You may not know this, but Jimmy Foxx, who won the Triple Crown, was offered a pay cut the following year. Even a Joe DiMaggio, holding out after his second and third years, probably the greatest two consecutive years any player ever had, was holding out for $35,000. He had to crawl back and take whatever Colonel Ruppert, the owner, offered him. That's the fate of an individual as skilled and valued as Joe DiMaggio. But all of you together are something else. There's no way to deny anything that is reasonable, because you're irreplaceable as a group."
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Whitey Herzog, the former Cards' manager, both skipper
and front office architect of the 1982 World Champions, needs 12 of 16 votes from the managers-umpires panel this weekend to earn Hall of Fame induction. "I'd be elated," the 76-year-old "White Rat" tells the Post-Dispatch's Rick Hummel, "but everytime I talk about it, I don't make it. I (think) umpire Doug Harvey will make it. I think it's going to be close... I'll probably get nine or 10 votes, but I don't know if I'm going to get 12. It's very uncertain."
Herzog elaborates, "I didn't get along with Harvey on or off the field. He was very dishonest. But he was the best-dressed umpire. And he thought he knew more than the weatherman." Then recalling a rain-related incident in which Harvey called off a sold-out game against the Cubs before it even started, "We had to have the banks open up so we could give the people their money back."
That being said-- "I'd go in with Jesus Christ or I'd go in with the devil," Herzog quipped, "It wouldn't make any difference. I'd even go in under an assumed name."
More Moeller musings
Does Christmas season really have to begin immediately following Thanksgiving? It wasn't always this way. On "Happy Days," the Cunninghams didn't even bring the tree home until Christmas Eve.
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How much can we really expect from Chevy Chase's
second tour of duty on "Saturday Night Live" when he doesn't have Ford to kick around anymore?
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If you're trying to understand the biggest differences between the inner-workings of the Republican and Democratic parties, look no further than the respective treatments of presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich. Neither of these men have physical traits that project anything remotely "presidential" and neither are political insiders by any stretch of the imagination. But Huckabee has been treated by his party's establishment (and then, by extension, the mainstream media) as a legitimate contender, and has subsequently made himself one; while Kucinich, though equally in tune with his party's base voters and carrying a much more impressive career resume, gets treated like Ron Paul. He's always banished to the far end of the platform at the debates. Kucinich opposed the war on the Iraqi people from the very beginning. He doesn't have to
lie about it. But the Democratic party and its self-loathing constituents don't take Kucinich seriously. I'm not sure why he insists on taking them seriously.
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Where would American music be today if not for the bright light of Miss Alicia Keys? Gregory Stephen Tate at
The Village Voice testifies.
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The Clinton campaign conducted a poll among Democratic primary voters before announcing their Barbra Streisand endorsement.
It's starting to border on self-parody.
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I don't know if there really is
a secret plan in place to install Kerry Wood as the Cubs' closer next season, but it will be a lot of fun for everyone if it happens.
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This sport is a train wreck.
Moeller TV Listings 11/26/07
As the writers strike continues, "The Late Show with David Letterman" suffers another week of repeats. Here's this week's schedule of encore presentations, courtesy of LS writer Steve Young at
LateShowWritersOnStrike.com.
Monday: OJ Simpson, Kid Dry Cleaners, performance by the cast of the Broadway musical "Kucinich!"Tuesday: Michael Jackson, cooking demonstration by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, singer Ryan Seacrest.Wednesday: Ayman al-Zawahiri, Identity Theft demonstration, standup comedian Barry Bonds.Thursday: Stupid Senior Citizen Tricks, impressionist Kathie Lee Gifford, animal expert Mickey Rooney.Friday: Pope Benedict XVI, Piedmont Tree Callers, magician Karl Rove.
Woodman
Only some information in the following paragraph is fictional...
Woody Harrelson and I go way back. He was the boy bartender, "Woody Boyd," on television's blockbuster, "Cheers," while I was a boy bartender for my alcoholic father in small-town Iowa. I quit my high school basketball team the year he made the film "White Men Can't Jump." He acted in the movie "Indecent Proposal" the year Robert Redford tried to have sex with my wife. When I was broadening my mind in college in the mid-90s, he was broadening his resume of dramatic roles with controversial turns as the serial killer "Mickey Knox" in Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" and as the real-life title character of Milos Forman's "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
Dad and I saw Harrelson at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Broadway in 1999 as the lead in a revival of N. Richard Nash's 1954 play "The Rainmaker," and the mischievous actor provided an indelible image for a lifetime by reciting one of the key passages of the play while performing a handstand. After a brief hiatus from my big screen periphery, he showed up in last year's dramedy ensemble piece, "A Prairie Home Companion," director Robert Altman's "swan song" and a story about a theater in a small town that could have easily doubled for "Woody Boyd's" birthplace of Hanover, Indiana, at which the Texas-born Harrelson also attended college. Throughout his career, the actor has
spoken out as environmentalist, social activist, and civil libertarian, making it easier for others like us to be thought of simultaneously as roguish sex symbol and global citizen.
Now in 2007, his career is exploding again. In
a profile in today's
New York Times, film reporter David Carr relates that the now-family man and resident of Hawaii "wears life like a beach towel around the shoulders and grabs what it offers with both hands." He portrays just the latest in what has become a long line of entertaining hustlers and con artists in the Coen Brothers recently-released masterpiece, "No Country for Old Men," of which I had the pleasure of seeing last night; and in addition to the soon-to-be-released films ("The Walker" and "The Grand") listed in the Times story, he'll star in short order in the film "Battle in Seattle," a screen drama in real-time, likened to "United 93," about the 1999 WTO riots.
"I thought I might eventually end up doing some quality regional theater," Harrelson tells Carr about the arc of his career. "Instead I end up with this role (in "Cheers") that everyone remembers. And hey, people who don't even know me like me because of that role. That's a pretty cool thing.
"Even cops like me," adds the long-time advocate of industrial hemp.
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The Nation's Dave Zirin
has my back on the topic of Barry Bonds, steroids, and federal indictments. What we're indeed witnessing is the United States Justice Department pursuing another "cheap political hit." And surely by coincidence only, they've found another black man to take that hit.
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Super-blogger Ken Levine went to high school with actress Jan Smithers-- ingenue "Bailey Quarters" on TV's "WKRP in Cincinnati." On Thanksgiving, he
linked to a rare extended-length version of "WKRP's" opening theme song.
Happy Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is one of my two or six favorite holidays on the western calendar. I enjoy most of the U.S. holidays, truth be known-- all but the ones claimed by those fascists in the American Legion. Thanksgiving offers that sort of universalism and inclusiveness that still handicaps many of the bigger, year-end holidays in this Jeffersonian democracy, and since the old adage still applies that a country is only as wealthy as its poorest inhabitant, Turkey Day stands out for its enduring traditions of social action and charity. There's no bigger day for volunteerism at the shelters and soup kitchens, and the holiday has remained shockingly free of both politicization and efforts at religious recruitment. And one other point-- whoever thought to schedule it on Thursdays so we could get a four-day weekend deserves to have his picture on the currency-- and on one of the low denominations.
He does.
This year I feel especially thankful for the following (in no particular order)...
A roof over my head, nearly a quarter paid for
My local public library
My startlingly precocious baby sister
My startlingly precocious twin brother
Daily interest accrual on student loans
"According to Jim"'s writers going on strike
Maureen Dowd on Hillary Clinton, sometimes twice a week
Expert movie-making such as "Michael Clayton"
My buddy, Rob, who let me crash with him for six weeks this summer. I miss watching "Will & Grace" with you, Rob.
Mike Gravel
Netflix
My Davenport posse
Rear window defrost. How did I ever live without it?
The single-minded focus of Albert Pujols
The arm of Yadier Molina.
The diamond instincts of Jim Edmonds
The health of Jason Isringhausen
Friends
Family
My readers
Iowa goes Green in '08
Beginning January 1st, 2008, voters in Iowa will be able to register as members of the Green Party on state registration forms. A lawsuit filed in 2005 by the Iowa Libertarian and Green Parties, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, led to a court decision significantly loosening state restrictions on ballot access for political parties. On November 9th, Secretary of State Michael Mauro announced that the Green Party had successfully completed a petition drive to gain at least 850 signatures from at least five different counties before an October 31st deadline.
This legal and electoral victory for the Greens is one to be celebrated by all Iowans as it gives each and every voter in the state a new viable alternative on their ballot to the slates of candidates fielded by the two dominant war parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
The next important step in wrestling power away from Washington's powerful corporate interests and war profiteers should be the drafting and support of former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney to be the Green Party candidate for president. McKinney is a former Democrat who has publicly condemned government secrecy over the 9-11 attacks and who introduced the first Bush impeachment resolution in the House of Representatives. For these efforts and similar others, she was run out of office twice by operatives within her own party, most recently in 2006. The submitted articles of impeachment against the president charged that: George Bush lied and manipulated intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, that he failed to uphold accountability, and that he violated U.S. privacy law through his domestic spying program. McKinney's often-tumultuous campaign history and her long legislative advocacy for franchising the voting electorate, such as those in Florida in 2000, provides her valuable acquaintance with the battles that surely loom ahead over ballot access.
McKinney supporters have filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to establish an exploratory committee for a Green Party bid. The politico is soliciting individual contributions
online, and she's indicated that a formal declaration of her candidacy may be coming before the end of this month.
Obstruction of justice
"Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy faces every team in the face." - Albert G Spalding, owner, Chicago White Stockings, 1881.Perhaps the most remarkable of Major League Baseball's many never-changing traits is the club owners' ability to convince the men and women-- and mostly men-- who cover them for a living of how dangerously close to the precipice of destruction the league stands at any given time. The failed jocks and mostly bitter, lazy hacks that comprise the North American sports media trip over themselves in appeasement of these owners, the gatekeepers of stadium clubhouses, and when the time comes to call the owners to account for their particular sins, the reporters' lack of experience in speaking truth to power causes them to usually fall flat onto their mustard-stained faces.
Case in point are the two dominate sports stories of the week, the first involving Alex Rodriguez, and the second, Barry Bonds. Rodriguez's powerhouse agent, Scott Boras, a former minor league ballplayer in the Cardinals organization, is again being portrayed as a greedy and arrogant monster of a man, this time because his client made the decision to exercise an escape option in his contract with the Yankees and become a free agent. The decision was announced during the seventh inning of the Fox Television broadcast of Game 4 of the World Series in October, roughly an hour before the Boston Red Sox were crowned the league champions.
After a league executive publicly criticized the timing of Boras' announcement, calling it an "upstaging" of the late post-season proceedings, the media disciples at NewsCorp, Time Warner, and the other four major media conglomerates jumped in to support the charge. After Rodriguez and the Yankees came together on a new 10-year agreement yesterday, as well as another substantial raise for the all-world thirdbaseman, the new angle by the media is that Boras wound up failing in his bid for an even more astronomical pay raise for his client, and that A-Rod was even forced to pull Boras out of the negotiations to get a deal done-- the latter charge I'm sure we'll come to discover quickly is just a blatant falsehood.
Boras represents everything that the post-Curt Flood baseball club owner-- not to mention the American Corporate Socialist at large- has come to fear and loathe-- an advocate who intrinsically knows the value and the credit owed to his client for a successful financial partnership. Bud Selig and the Steinbrenner clan had little defense in proving the lack of worth in a 32-year-old ballplayer who hit 54 home runs and drove in 156 runs last year and is the best player to grace the roster of baseball's richest team in over half a century.
Henry A. Wallace told us that the American fascist's preferred method of combat was the poisoning of the public channels of communication, and normally, Commissioner Selig and the club representatives mislead and lie to us each year with respect to their respective profit/loss statements, but the Barry Bonds debacle, which they created, and which blew up in their faces yesterday with a series of federal indictments being handed down, forced them to unveil some honest numbers in having to prove the financial health of their enterprise. MLB's revenue, it turns out, climbed to $6.075 billion this year, according to Selig. That's billion with a 'b,' and it's up from what they claimed was only $1.2 billion just prior to the players' strike in 1994. Think it's the $9 beer, the Dodger Dogs, or the prospect of seeing Hank Steinbrenner in a skybox with one's binoculars that gets people walking through stadium turnstiles? No, it's Rodriguez and his colleagues on the field that keep the tickets printing.
Every public announcement and media release that generates from Major League Baseball's commissioner's office is made in concert with the effort to hold down free agent prices. This is the first thing that's important to understand, and there's a long documented history to back up the claim. (That's why the league resented the timing of Boras' World Series announcement. It was a positive counter-ploy by Boras in drumming up interest in Rodriguez's free agency, though, in fairness, it may have also detracted from some of the other important elements of the broadcast, such as the endless Fox network programming promotion, camera cutaways to Fox television stars, and crass commercial bullshit like the Taco Bell Million Dollar Pitch.) Think it's a coincidence that a federal indictment of Barry Bonds
four years in the making was handed down not during the week of the World Series but instead during the first week of the off-season free agent filing period, and immediately after Bonds himself filed? We know that the Justice Department, when it's not waterboarding prisoners, is working with the club owners and more specifically, the commissioner's "independent" steroid investigator, George Mitchell, in witch-hunting alleged steroid users.
Such as it is with other U.S. drug enforcement efforts, the department's focus is on publicly punishing and shaming accused users and high-profile defendants while turning a blind eye towards the pushers and enablers that created and continue to foster the environment of abuse. This is why Selig and the men who have always set the rules of the game, up to and including the 43rd President of the United States, the former CEO of the Texas Rangers club and a reported one-time cocaine user himself, will get off with full legal immunity and without a hit in public relations with Mitchell's report, while the document can certainly be expected to add to the media "debate" and public castigating of doctor-prescribed and supervised hormone users like ballplayers David Segui, Paul Byrd, and Rick Ankiel. Mitchell's report, not coincidentally, is due to be released in short order.
Today's USA Today
headline detailing the Bonds' indictment reads "Steroids, HGH talk overshadow hot stove league," implying that once again the timing of the steroids story is purely coincidental, but as I have stated, this is an entirely disingenuous idea. Media outlets, public watchdogs by establishment and design, simply cannot be so naive as to not recognize the timing of the forces and actions at play here in attempting to hold down player salaries and further demonize the players and their union during this period of record-breaking league profits.
As recently as last week's annual off-season meeting of team general managers, that word "collusion" reared its ugly head once more as, in the wake of Alex Rodriguez's decision to opt out of his Yankee contract, the GM's began a new tradition in which each general manager took the floor at the meeting and stated in front of the entire assembly his team's specific off-season plans, including which players they were going to be pursuing in free agency and which players they would be making available for trade. A week following the gathering, A-Rod is agreeing to another deal with the Yankees for $75 million less than his original asking price, and none of the other 29 teams end up even submitting an offer for the player many believe is the game's best.
Disney Corporation spokesman Gene Wojciechowski, representing subsidiary ESPN, one of MLB's best-financed corporate partners, began his online opinion piece today with the words, "Barry Bonds has played his last game," but his presumption seems rather premature, at least to me, considering the deliberate grind of our nation's judicial system and Bonds' .565 slugging percentage as a member of the San Francisco Giants in 2007. I can think of at least one red-uniformed ballclub in dire need of a clean-up hitter for the '08 season, but if enough legal baggage can be effectively pinned to Bonds than none of the 30 team owners would have to pony up for the talented slugger next year, coerced as they would be into avoiding the risk of publicly justifying their unprincipled thrift.
It's a story as old as the game itself. Major League Baseball, not unlike thousands of other American businesses, is one with an ancient history of labor manipulation by management, while the dessemination of public information remains largely controlled by sycophants acting on behalf of these paymasters. For this unfortunate reason, social, cultural, and political issues connected to the game must always be viewed through that prism of discernment.
What I've been reading...
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This morning's New York Times column by Bob Herbert cementing President Reagan's complicity in furthering the GOP's shameful race-baiting Southern strategy.
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This on-target assessment of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, and its legacy for today's America.
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This censure motion by California progressives toward turncoat Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has done more than her share to help make torture and warrantless wire-tapping the issues of such bipartisan agreement that they are today.
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This Roger Ebert review of a poorly-distributed film by John Turturro called "Romance and Cigarettes," starring a lot of talented people. It may be the most enthusiastic endorsement of a film that Ebert's ever written.
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This winning judgment in favor of Jim Edmonds' new upscale eatery in downtown St. Louis. No surprises here. The Card centerfielder has always projected that airy sense that there's more to his game than just his game.
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And these damnable lies by an entity that calls itself "The New York Television Festival." The industry's first independent television festival? Founded in
2005? We know better.
Festival 6
Sorry it's been a whole week since posting, but the Moeller TV Festival, held Saturday in Des Moines, turned into a monster. Thanks to all who participated. The shows themselves were phenomenal as always, and hearty credit goes to the cast and crew of each of the classics that we viewed. A television festival is only as good as its television product, and we had our pick again this year of some of the greatest episodes of the greatest TV shows of all-time-- from "All in the Family" to "Cheers" to "Get a Life" to "30 Rock." The sub sandwiches, I thought, were better than ever, and we avoided nearly all of the thousand different catastrophies that can befall such an event, such as the batteries going out on the remote control.
There was but one hitch in the proceedings. An "Open Remote" selection from "Malcolm in the Middle" had to be substituted at the last minute with an episode of "How I Met Your Mother," because of a Netflix snafu, but all in all, the event was a bonanza. I'm sure Aaron concurs because he called me last night and told me so! Oh, why must Moeller TV Fest come but once a year? Me thinks that perhaps we should schedule MTF7 in 2008 for early January. I simply cannot wait any longer than that.
Like
last year, I'll take an evening here to post the "greetings" that Aaron and I wrote for this year's festival program. Talk to you soon.
Wow! That was phenomenal! I can't remember when I spent a more entertaining six hours!Oh hi, I'm Chris Moeller, co-founder of the Moeller Television Festival. You've caught me in a state of nonplus. I was just enjoying a pre-festival private screening of this year's festival, and let me tell you, this one is going to be a whopper! That Dean Martin sure is one suave and sophisticated performer. And let me inform you that that old Archie Bunker sure is one prejudiced individual. That must have been one of the strangest afternoons Sammy Davis Jr. ever spent when he visited old Archie Bunker. And those Muppets sure are cute, no? And talented. Really, what a line-up we have in store for you this year.If I could be serious, though, for just a moment, and I think recent events around the globe require that I do-- I was at home with my wife Fran just a few nights ago and that program came on with the devilishly handsome young actor who plays the cop who can see into the future and stop crimes before they occur, and I said "Honey, can you believe how much the Moeller Television Festival has transformed itself-- and the world-- in just six short years? Now back that sweet apple bottom over here and snuggle up real close." Aaron and I never could have predicted that a project intended to simply gain passing marks in a college horticulture class would metastasize, if you will, into such an interplanetary force. We had elaborate dreams for the festival back in 2002, no doubt about that, but what I think we both predicted at the time was that television festivals would mushroom across the western world like the popular bottled fragrances of our hottest Hollywood starlets.Reality had other ideas in mind, however, as is her fickle custom. The television medium's other would-be festival organizers have apparently found the challenge of organizing and promoting a TV Fest, let alone a series of TV Fests, to be uncharacteristically daunting, for even these certified geniuses of highly-elevated entertainment and human spectacle. And earlier this week, television writers pushed Hollywood to the very brink of its pending destruction by walking out on strike in protest of the industry's negligence in protecting intellectual property in a series of high-profile TV Festival copyright suits.At last, the one and only Television Festival to be found on planet Earth in 2007 A.D. bears the name "Moeller," and for that, both Aaron and I, and our adopted brother, Irv, remain grateful and moderately humbled. The planning of what will now be six annual festivals has required literally hundreds of minutes of planning through the years, and is blamed now definitively as the chief cause of Aaron's emergency bypass operation in the fall of 2005. We've witnessed a sea of change and a healthy dollop of turmoil around the world since that first TV festival day in June of 2002. But with the annual Moeller Television Festival trudging valiantly forward through the new millennium and with Mitt Romney as the next president of the United States, I believe we're in store for a calming of international waters, and America will continue to be a beacon of strength and hope in the world.Chris---Special Feature- DVD Extra (from Aaron)"Reclaiming the Top Bunk: Planning the Moeller TV Festival"The Moeller TV Festival has long been celebrated for its loose, free-wheeling atmosphere and its supposed "thrown together at the last minute" charm, but a lot of behind the scenes planning goes into its production. This year, Aaron and Chris Moeller allowed unprecedented access to the process, allowing video cameras and reporters into their top-secret festival bunker for a day of pre-screenings and preparation.Dateline: Saturday, October 9th, 2007, in Des Moines, three weeks before the festival.
11am- After twelfth year of roadwork and detours, Aaron again gets lost in labyrinth of Des Moines freeway construction. Abandons car on highway and walks to Sherman Hill district. Unable to remember which is Chris' fourth Sherman Hill residence, Aaron shouts his brother's name in front of every building until Chris hears his plantive cries.
1pm- Discussing "Three's Company," Chris is offended when Aaron insists Terri was sexier than Chrissy.
2:20pm- A fight breaks out in regard to product placement and festival sponsorship. Aaron fights for chance to pass out information about U.S. Cellular's new unlimited family text message packages. Chris wants equal opportunity to bury recent college graduates under mountain of debt.
4:03pm- The twins argue over who does a better Alec Baldwin impression.
6:07pm- Pizza this year? Nope. Sub sandwiches now and forever.
6:37pm- The Moellers hold a self-haircut seminar for the assembled media, then square off in a Sideburn Grow-off.
9:12pm- The twins' short fuses and competitive natures erupt again in even more arguments. Should they only show DVDs or are VHS cassettes still an option? Is "King of the Hill" still on the air? Who bakes better scones? Who did Grandma love more when she was alive? Who does she love more from Heaven?
11:43pm- The evening gets late, cooler heads prevail, and the exhausted Moellers finally come to conclusions. The festival date and lineup is set. It is agreed that Terri and Chrissy are both beautiful creatures- each perfect in her own supple way. The arguments about Alec Baldwin impressions are declared moot when it's understood that all you have to do to impersonate Baldwin is whisper. The festival, now, cannot fail.
Dateline (future): Saturday, December13th, 2007, five weeks after the TV Festival is a raging success.
Aaron and Chris again meet in Des Moines to Christmas shop for their little sister and to record a commentary track for the eventual release of "The Best of the Moeller TV Festival" DVD. Bookmark amazon.com and pre-order your copy today.
The rules of expulsion
The Des Moines Register occasionally stumbles onto something that resonates. Wayne Lienen of Marengo, Iowa had his church membership revoked from Trinity Lutheran Church in nearby Conroy because he hadn't received "The Lord's Supper" in two years, and he was further notified that he would have to forfeit the plots he "leased" in the church cemetery, including the one next to his deceased first wife, who died in 1989. Lienen decided then to have his wife dug up, coffin and burial vault, and moved to a cemetery in Marengo. At least one of his daughters is convinced that the actual issue was Lienen's failure to make adequate financial contributions to the church.
This cuts close to the bone. I was baptized and raised in the faith of St. John's Lutheran Church in Newhall in neighboring Benton County. The Newhall church, like the one in Conroy, is affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In fact, my uncle served as the minister at that same Conroy church in the early 1980s. I'd be certain that I've attended service there if my adolescent memory served me better. Like Lienen, I also attended my church's parochial school through the eighth grade, went through catechism, and have very immediate family buried in the church's cemetery. Though I moved away from the area, I received the same letters in the mail each month, the Bible verses, and the requests for donations. The similarities end only with the fact that I don't already have a burial stone located in the church cemetery with all but my year of death engraved.
Obviously, we get just a partial picture here of this story, but what do you think, gang? Is the church returning to the doctrine of indulgences, the original bone of contention between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church, and a crucial spark for the entire Protestant Reformation? Or is "Godgirl64" correct in the Register's comment thread-- that the real issue is Lienen's relationship with the Lord? Shouldn't you have to be a member of "the club" to enjoy the privileges of the club, after all? Is it any of our business at all, and does it even matter where this woman's body is buried, from a spiritual standpoint?
The line of the night, though, is in the comment thread from "Primewonk" on Sunday night. "In retrospect," (s)he writes, "I grew up in the LCMS, maybe this gentleman just got tired of shaved ham sandwiches and lime jello with the little grated carrots."
I won't get caught in this type of mess myself, despite the general religious heresy and unctuous agnosticism of my adulthood. If my future executor(s) are reading this, I want my ashes spread across the field behind the Moeller family farm, but I don't want 'em spread until corn is selling at at least six dollars a bushel. I want my hair shaved off the corpse first and fashioned into a wig to be displayed at the Smithsonian Museum, and the Des Moines Art Museum gets my collection of erotic wood carvings. My brother can have anything he wants from the liquor cabinet-- that stinking drunk, but my kid sister gets the quartet of uncashed and fully-matured savings bonds.
2007 TV Fest schedule announced
It's six days and counting until Moeller Television Festival 6: An All-Star Salute to Brent Musburger. For the first time ever, the TV Fest will be just a one-day event, though a sneak peak at last year's schedule reveals that Saturday's schedule will stretch now slightly longer, perhaps back to its original length.
Once again, you'll find an "Open Remote" segment scheduled for mid-afternoon. "Open Remote" allows non-Moellers in attendance to submit their favorite television episodes or specials for group viewing. (Disclaimer: those persons will not be allowed to actually handle the remote control, however.) Please email me any of these selections at
christophermmoeller@msn.com before this Tuesday. As always, bring your appetites and your inquisitive minds.
The 2007 screening schedule follows (subject to change)...
NOON SATURDAY
"Positively Negative," The Sarah Silverman Program, Episode #3, Comedy Central 2/15/07
"Louie and the Nice Girl," Taxi, Episode #23, ABC 9/11/79
"The Best of the Dean Martin Variety Show," NBC 9/16/65-5/24/74
"Sammy's Visit," All in the Family, Episode #34, CBS 2/19/72
Open Remote
"Steve Martin," The Muppet Show, #32, Syndicated 10/31/77
"Neptune 2000," Get a Life, #20, FOX 4/28/91
"A Commercial Break," WKRP in Cincinnati, #17, CBS 3/26/79
"Jack-Tor," 30 Rock, #5, NBC 11/16/06
"Please Mr. Postman," Cheers, #158, NBC 2/2/89
All the victims of war
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. died yesterday. Tibbets lived in both Davenport and Des Moines, Iowa as a boy and grew up to become the pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. His plane, the Enola Gay, was named for his mother, Enola Gay Haggard of Glidden, Iowa.
In 2003, an interview with Tibbets appeared in the book "Hope Dies Last," written and collected by the oral historian Studs Terkel, in a chapter chronicling World War II. The interview profiled a man chosen by his government to carry out a horrific act of violence, and is fascinating in its revelation of a man who, as a piss and vinegar youth, was asked for more than surely any of us ever have been or will in "rendering unto Caesar."
A couple snippets...
(President Truman) had a big smile on his face, and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the Army Air Corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honor, and I appreciate it." And he said to (General) Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr. President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognize the potential in aerial refueling. We're gonna need it bad someday." And he said thank you very much. Then he looked at me for ten seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think? I said, "Mr. President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."Studs: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?
Second thoughts? No. Studs, look, I got into the Army Corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. On the way to the target I was thinking, I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At twenty-nine years of age, I was so shot in the ass with confidence, I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing. I thought, Yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade Japan....Studs: One big question. Since September eleventh, what are your thoughts? People talk about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.
Let's put it this way. I don't know any more about these terrorists than you do; I know nothing. When they bombed the Trade Center I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it, and it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sweet time. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court. The hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them....Studs: When you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em, let's nuke these people," what do you think?
Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe them out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.---
Other topics:
It's difficult for outsiders to understand the interworkings of Hollywood and the issues at play with the looming strike of the Writers Guild, though all of us who occasionally enjoy their industry's product will soon be affected. Super-blogger Ken Levine, a former scribe for "M*A*S*H," "Cheers," and "Wings," provides a sense of the writers' posture and perspective
here. It shouldn't be difficult for you to find the opposing perspective of the behemoth media conglomerates.
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Good for Barry. That's bullshit.
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Perhaps no political story today speaks more to the rotted-out state of the power structure of the Democratic party than the sorrowful treatment of the Dennis Kucinich presidential campaign by the party elites. The opening descriptions of the Chicago labor rally and its aftermath in
this story make me want to cry in my soup. Labor in the United States has been awarded the raw deal it compromised to get.
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The Cardinals have a new general manager-- long-time front office lieutenant John Mozeliak. I'm just grateful that he's older than me.
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The viewing schedule for this year's Moeller Television Festival-- to be held at my place in Des Moines November 10th-- will be published on this site Sunday morning. With this daggum writers' strike staring us all down like a bully in the schoolyard, has there ever been a more fortuitous time to participate in this always exciting, educational, and sweetly-nostalgic event?
