Holiday vacation
Sorry to abandon you again, but I'm off to San Diego for a week of fellowship, conviviality and Skip-Bo togetherness. The Moeller Family Reunion is back, and California's got her! This triennial July 4th tradition inspires many of my fondest memories even as its holiday scheduling quirks have severely damaged my competitive hot dog-eating career.
While I'm gone, enjoy this provocative
news article from
Salon about the unnatural social conventions of monogamy and sexual possessiveness, an investigation into the state of our very being that threatens to uproot the entire Moeller Family Tree--
as well as yours!
The All-Popularity Game
Debates about baseball's All-Star Game trap me like a glue strip. I can't help myself. I can feel another unnerved blog post coming on.
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Issue 1) Should the league that wins the All-Star Game continue to get home-field advantage for the World Series?
I had no problem with this policy when it was originally implemented and I still don't. Nobody has more league pride that I do, as a fan, and it used to infuriate me when the starters would be in their street clothes by the 7th inning. We continue to hear arguments about how ridiculously random it is to have something potentially so meaningful decided by an exhibition game, especially when probably 90% or more of the participants in the exhibition will not be in the championship.
OK, I feel like I've already written this a thousand times: but you can't get more random than the previous system. That's right, for almost 100 years, home-field advantage between the two leagues was decided by
alternating seasons, and nobody ever complained about it. In 1985, the Cardinals won 101 regular-season games, the Kansas City Royals won 91. Yet the Royals had home-field advantage for the Series because the Cardinals had the misfortune of getting to the World Series in an odd-numbered year. How is that any less arbitrary than the way it is now? At least with the All-Star Game today, the Cardinals (or whomever is destined to win the NL pennant-- I have no inside information) have a chance to get three or four players into the game and help to dictate who has the home field in a Championship Game 7. Hell, there hasn't even been a Game 7 in the World Series since 2002 yet we endure almost as much hot air over this issue than we do about steroids.
The
big problem, of course, is that the field managers still don't get it.
This time, it counts. What is it about that All-Star Game marketing phrase that repels gray matter? It's
not an exhibition. It stopped being one when they upped the stakes. The exhibition is the night before with the home run derby and all the theatrics that accompany that. The All-Star Game is for winnin'. This means: best players play, and play the whole game if they have to. Some guys get named to the team, but don't get to play. Dem's the breaks. All-World Stan Musial hit a game-winning home run in the 1955 game
in the 12th inning. The return of such a scenario is what the Commissioner had in mind when he was forced to mandate effort by players and managers after the tie-game debacle in Milwaukee. And don't tell me that it would cause more injuries. You get injured more frequently from going half-ass than you do from going all-out. The game does-- and should-- count.
When it's over, you want to be able to tell the guys from the other league to take their designated hitter and go suck on it.
Issue 2) Should fans continue to choose the starting position players for the game?
Yes. ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski says "it isn't the All-Popularity Game, it's the All-Star Game," yet Wojciechowski should stop by the website Answers.com, which defines "star" as "outstanding or famous, especially in performing something," confirming that it actually does mean "All-Popularity Game." Wojciechowski suggests a commissioner-selected panel that includes the likes of baseball Hall-of-Famers, the Baseball Writers Association of America (of which he is presumably a member), along with a Bob Costas and/or George Will. What I guess he's promoting then is a system in which only
famous fans get to vote. He's against All-Star players, but in favor of All-Star fans.
Annual debates are inherent, but I think the proletarians, despite the dirt under their fingernails, do a pretty great job of selecting the starters-- at least as good as the players and managers do in their selection of the pitchers and the reserves. Players and managers play favorites and carry just as many grudges into their voting as fans do. The managers select the Gold Glove recipients every year, and in 1999, they gave one to Rafael Palmeiro at first base though he played only 28 games at the position that year.
Issue 3) Should Washington Nationals rookie ace Stephen Strasburg be named to the National League team?
Of course not. He's been heavily-hyped, of course, and something impressive so far, but he has started only four games. If he's going to be as good as his publicist promises, he'll have plenty of other opportunities to pitch in the All-Star Game. If his career is going to take a Mark Prior-like turn for the worst, then he
definitely doesn't belong in this year's game. Some have argued that Washington baseball fans have not had much besides Strasburg to get excited about the last few years, but how about this for excitement? They were given their own Major League Baseball team in 2005, and one was uprooted from Montreal so that they could have one.
The All-Star Game is Tuesday, July 13th, in Anaheim. Online voting ends Thursday night at midnight. Remember to back the top National Leaguers... and the worst American Leaguers. This year it counts.
The bells of summer
I can appreciate
this article about the search for the elusive ice cream truck jingle that has a pleasant wear upon the ears. 1994 was my summer of 's'creams at the helm of a
Frosty Treats freezer van in north St. Louis County (MO). The money was much better than I expected-- it paid for the entire out-of-state relocation for the summer with enough left over to buy a stereo system, but the exterior sound system of the truck made the work days interminable at times. The music box (fastened to the dashboard) had only four musical settings. One was an instantly repetitive "ding-dong"-like bell and another was "Pop Goes the Weasel," so that narrowed it down to really only
two musical settings.
The most-manageable two were the couple mentioned as ice cream truck staples in the linked article-- "Do Your Ears Hang Low?" and "The Entertainer." The latter had the distinction of having been composed (by Scott Joplin in 1902) and published also within the Frosty Treats coverage area of mid-city St. Louis, but despite that, and despite its honors (ranked #10 on the Recording Industry Association of America's
"Songs of the Century" list), no melody can be endured on a loop for nine to ten hours a day, 60 days a summer. Pity the drivers,
then the residents.
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These guys sell beer better than Harry Caray.
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Speaking of Missouri, their Democratic governor has
signed a Republican-led bill today that puts severe restrictions on strip clubs and adult-oriented businesses located in the state. The bill restricts the location of strip clubs, bans alcohol, outlaws nude dancing entirely, prohibits semi-nude dancers from touching patrons, and closes the doors of clubs to commerce each night at midnight. This is the second go-round for such a measure. A similar law passed in 2005 was earlier struck down by the state supreme court.
Iowans, you're next. The South is creeping its way north. They'll come for our gay marriage, and take our naked dancers while they're here.
Greening '10
A Green Party candidate, journalist LeAlan Jones, is
polling at 14 percent in a race to claim Barack Obama's former Senate seat. At the age of 13 in 1993, Jones became the youngest-ever winner of a Peabody Award for his radio documentary film "Ghetto Life 101" about life on Chicago's south side. He's pitching a divine
Share our Wealth program that features a 90% "Paris Hilton (estate) tax" on individuals worth a million dollars or more.
The Democrat and Republican parties will have to work overtime to quash the current rules that would seemingly allow Jones' participation in the televised debates. Stay tuned.
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The reality of Dick Cheney's wet dream is now being alleged:
It's raining oil in New Orleans.
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Ralph Nader identifies an outsized media reaction to the Helen Thomas controversy earlier this month.
Conversation of the day 6/22/10
Is between my siblings, 6-year-old sister, Katya, and 35-year-old brother, Aaron. Katya walks into a room that has a World Cup soccer game emanating from the television.
Katya: What is that noise?
Aaron: That's a horn of some kind that the fans are blowing into.
Katya: Why?
Aaron: I don't know.
Down the Mississippi
November 30, 2010 will mark the 175th anniversary of the birth of Sam Clemens, and one of several related books to hit store shelves this spring is entitled "Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens," by Jerome Loving.
Loving writes about the greatest of American writers,
It had started with the Jumping Frog in a story that wasn't original with him. Like Shakespeare, he had many sources, but his adaptations of the works of others were always original. Twain had come out of the oral tradition of the Old Southwest and proven to be its culmination. But that feat was just the starting point for his greatness as a writer. He turned harmless humor into profound tragedy, always reflecting his times and the nation that had nurtured him. He couldn't have started out from a less promising place than Florida, Missouri, but then Whitman was the son of a drunkard and Dreiser was the twelfth of thirteen children of impoverished parents. These democrats of our literature thrived because they drew from the nutriment of their native soil and humble beginnings. Yet all three employed the American vernacular in literary plots that were sharpened by their sense of competition with world literature. Like Whitman and Dreiser, who objected to European pretentiousness, Mark Twain couldn't have achieved the heights of his humor without the sham of English aristocracy and its American claimants.
In addition to everything else he did and was, Twain stood very publicly opposed to American imperialism and foreign policy (through essays in magazines and literary journals), particularly late in his life in reference to America's annexation of the Philippine Islands in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. Loving proffers that Twain's high-profile opinions put his literary reputation on the line during that era, and that today he would be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for such contribution and courage.
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I just spent a long, music-oriented weekend in Memphis, Tennessee. Highlights included tours of both the Stax and Sun Record Studios, a visit to the Gibson Guitar factory, and three nights on Beale Street. Under the Stax label, my traveling companions and I agreed that the best song titles in the publishing catalog were "If You Don't Cheat On Me (I Won't Cheat On You)," "Try To Leave Me If You Can (I'll Bet You Can't Do It)"-- two songs that incorporate the marvelous use of parentheses-- along with a third tune lacking parenthetical citation entitled "Stop Half-Loving These Women."
Miss Vicki, making vocal melody with the house band at Morgan Freeman's "Ground Zero Blues Club" on Beale, also introduced us to a tune called "Your Husband is Cheating On Us."
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Moeller TV Listings 6/22/10: Proud musical sons of New Orleans, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, make their "Late Show with David Letterman" debut Tuesday night.
Off for a bit
Traveling to Memphis, Tennessee for some rest and a brief "drying out" period. Be back next week. I'm leaving the door unlocked.
An Inconvenient Rumor
A tabloid,
Star Magazine, has it that the marriage of Al and Tipper Gore broke up over a two-year extramarital affair between Al and Larry David's ex-wife, Laurie David. The David marriage ended in 2007.
Laurie, the 52-year-old environmental activist and film producer, vehemently denies the report, and I'm inclined to believe in the best of people, especially when I don't particularly care. I only hope that the dissolution of the Gore marriage can lead to something as positive as Season 6 of television's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." That was the year Larry David wrote his real-life break-up into the plot of his HBO comedy series.
New York Magazine examines the David divorce through the ever-skewed prism of "Curb."
Too big to clean
President Obama is demanding that BP set up an individual account to pay out damage claims to Gulf of Mexico residents and businesses impacted by the oil spill, and tensions are up between the United States and Great Britain over Obama's rhetoric in reference to the oil spill and the company that was called "British Petroleum" until recent years.
Many Britons, and some Americans too, own stock and pensions in BP, and now British Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as Obama, are feeling political pressure to help protect BP's stock price. The two political leaders talked by phone Saturday in a conversation during which Cameron is thought to have asked Obama to tone down his comments in regards to BP and their responsibility in the cleanup of the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Obama had said that BP should withhold its quarterly dividend and suggested that he would have fired BP's CEO.
Obama's responsibility to BP stockholders is on the leading edge of nil. He's accountable to the American people, as I think he realizes. Guess what. Investors-- and employees-- take inherent risks when they buy stock or choose to associate themselves with companies that trade publicly. Many of the companies prove to be corrupt and/or serially criminal. Sometimes it blows up. Shit happens. Or
slick happens, in this case. BP is a transnational corporation, unrestrained by national borders and many regulations, devoid of any authentic sense of public responsibility. Yet as soon as it hits the fan, they're British again, asking for the political protection of the leaders and the people of Great Britain. Turns out the economic system on that side of the pond is exactly like ours-- socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
What has the United States
already done for BP, incidentally? Well, in addition to turning over to them our national resources for pennies on the dollar for more than half a century, how about our overthrowing a democratically-elected government in Iran in 1953 so that BP could even exist in the first place?
That's right. Before BP was "BP"
or "British Petroleum," they were the "Anglo-Iranian Oil Company." They were a nationalized oil company based in Iran, but they weren't nationalized by the Iranians, they were nationalized by the British colonialists and the Royal Navy. A problem arises in 1951 when the people of Iran elect Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, a secular-minded, European-educated lawyer, as their Prime Minister, and he plans to nationalize the oil fields of Iran for Iran, eliminating Britain's #1 foreign investment by doing so. Enter the United States Central Intelligence Agency, which
stages a successful coup of Mosaddegh. The shah is installed as dictator, Iran's political development is retarded for six decades and counting, and the incident comes to serve as Chapter One to a metaphorical book entitled "Why They Hate Us."
So Gulf Coast residents, take heart: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company/British Petroleum/BP has fucked you over for good in the process of extracting your economic lifeblood and laying waste to your living environment. But you're not the first.
The Not Quite So Big 12
Online reports have it that the University of Nebraska is about to join the Big 10. This action by a single school is going to set off a radical realignment of the Division I college sports conferences, and it appears as if my alma mater, Iowa State, is going to wind up on the outside of the new "power conferences" looking in. Best case scenario, ISU gets grouped with Kansas, Kansas State, some castoff Mountain West conference schools, and an aggregate of reform schools for wayward youths located in the Dakotas.
Yahoo's Dan Wetzel provides
a clear-eyed recap of the developments that have led to the coming shakeup. As it turns out, some conference commissioners were never as stupid as we thought they were for inflicting the disastrous Bowl Championship Series upon their football teams and the fans. They were scamming us instead.
And Nebraska can suck it.
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A sports memorabilia collector says he's in possession of a game-used
corked baseball bat from Pete Rose. Analysts speculate that Rose may be staring down the barrel of a 10-game suspension.
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It's June 9th, and there was a high temperature of 65 degrees today in Sandy Lake, Saskatchewan. Why is there hockey in my TV?
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World Cup Fever is back! Like a skin rash. With the thrills and excitement of soccer returning to the public stage every 48 months, is it any wonder that the sport has taken off in popularity in the United States like Rush Limbaugh from of a two-year-old marriage?
Because we've been overwhelmed by the number of requests for copies,
here's what I wrote about the sport of soccer the last time the World Cup visited.
One tough Dominican
A new title appearing in bookstores this spring is
"Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player of All Time," and that's what 25 noted writers do within the pages of the book. Roger Kahn, the author of "The Boys of Summer," likes Jackie Robinson. Surprise, surprise. Jonathan Eig, author of a book about Lou Gehrig, favors the Iron Horse. Does he now?
Sports Illustrated's Pat Jordan digs Tom Seaver. Whatever. I think we could each do better than these selections.
So let's play:
Whom to choose? Or should I say: Which
Cardinal to choose? Lonnie Smith was my very first favorite player. I searched high and low among the clear packs at the toy store to find his 1984 Topps baseball card. Ozzie Smith (unrelated) was the joyous star and iconic Cardinal of my youth. He was there for me from the age of 7 all the way to 21, then I drove to Cooperstown six years after that to witness his Hall induction. The Grand Stan Musial was well before my time, but Stan was-- and still is-- Mr. Cardinal, as well as baseball's Andy Griffith. Rex Hudler left it all on the field. He ran the bases until they tagged him out.
The perfect hybrid player, if we could built him, would have Ozzie's determination and Albert Pujols' consistency (or is it Ozzie's consistency and Albert's determination?). He would have Bob Gibson's toughness, Curt Flood's courage, Mark McGwire's generosity, Bob Uecker's wit, Willie McGee's humility, Jim Edmonds' flair, Yadi Molina's facial expressiveness,
Tommy Herr's hair, Lee Smith's cool, and Tito Landrum's first name.
Each of these players warrants individual consideration, but I'm going to go instead with that near-great pitcher of the 1980s, Joaquin Andujar, because he was the greatest
character of them all-- the most fun, the most enigmatic, and ideally, for the purposes of this exercise, the most bang for our buck. Andujar displayed all the above attributes in his game at one point or another (except for the first name, though "Joaquin"'s not bad either). In an SI profile in 1983, reporter Steve Wulf described Joaquin in one single sentence as "charming, evasive, humble, egotistical, intelligent, suspicious and generous." He had it all.
As a most notable trait perhaps, Joaquin possessed a violent temper-- and he put it on display during some of the most critical moments in franchise history. The hurler had to be forcibly removed from the seventh game of TWO different World Series. In 1982, his manager, Whitey Herzog, pulled him out with a one-run lead in the 7th inning after the pitcher
charged at Milwaukee's Jim Gantner. The Brewers infielder had called him a 'hot dog' while running out a comeback ground ball to the pitcher's mound. Joaquin wound up the winning pitcher in that clinching game just in time to have his expletive-laden clubhouse comments broadcast over the Busch Stadium loudspeaker to the lingering fans celebrating after the game. Then in Game 7 of the '85 Fall Classic,
Andujar got tossed by home plate umpire Don Denkinger after throwing only two pitches in fifth inning relief. This was the night that followed Denkinger's epic blown call at first base in the 9th inning of Game 6. Joaquin's manager joined him this time in his early trip to the showers, and the pitcher expended his final bit of energy in a Cardinals uniform by grabbing a baseball bat and destroying a toilet in the visiting team clubhouse of Royals Stadium.
Joaquin was a sentimental sort, though, too, and that's what makes him everlastingly endearing. He gave generously to the children of his hometown, San Pedro de Macoris, that hotbed of baseball talent in the Dominican Republic where he has been revered. According to the '83 SI piece, he dreamed of being a home designer and had two giant aluminum discs installed on the roof of his house above his bedroom so that the sound would be magnified when it rained. The pitter-patter of raindrops reminded him of his youth as an only child of very modest means. As a boy, he had to quit school because he didn't own a pair of shoes.
Andujar believed his career had been rescued in 1981 by Herzog and Cardinals pitching coach Hub Kittle following a solid but unhappy tour of duty with Houston, and he referred to Kittle always as "Daddy." In return, Kittle called him "Jack," something nobody else on the Cardinals was allowed to do. Opponents sometimes called him neither Joaquin nor Jack. They called him the aforementioned "hot dog," or, on occasion, "Cuckoo Jar." Ozzie, his shortstop, called him "Senor Jack," which irritated him, and in return, he called Ozzie "Midget."
He called
himself "One tough Dominican."
The Brewers' Gorman Thomas spoke for many in baseball when he quipped that Andujar "was missing all of the face cards," but Joaquin's diamond logic possessed a certain brilliance. For example, he was a switch-hitter, but instead of batting lefty against righthanders and right-handed against southpaws, as is the standard course of attack in baseball, his batting decisions seemed to many observers to be random. (A few teammates suspected he reached for a batting helmet and decided which way to hit based upon which side had the ear flap.) But for Joaquin, there was an outline. He batted right-handed against lefties, but also against righties he was unfamiliar with or didn't trust. He didn't want to get hit on his pitching arm. He batted lefty against righthanders because he made better contact, but he always
bunted righthanded because he felt he bunted better that way. It remains a mystery today why he would wear a jacket on the bases when the temperature was in the 90s, why he would forego a jacket when the temperature was near freezing, or why would sometimes wear a one-sleeved warm-up jacket before a game to protect his non-pitching left arm.
He took batting practice prior to his starts in Games 3 and 7 of the '82 World Series, even though the designated hitter rule was in place for the entire series. "Since I have seven months of taking batting practice every time I pitch, why in the World Series, which is like any other game, shouldn't I take batting practice?" he reasoned. "I pitch better when I take batting practice."
"Screw the DH," he told Sport Magazine in 1985, and a more eloquent attack on that odious rule has never been uttered. Indeed, he fancied himself a formidable slugger, though he batted only .127 for his career. He may still be the only pitcher to hit a home run from both sides of the plate, and he clubbed a memorable grand slam in 1984, one swing of the bat good for 4 of his career 38 runs batted in. It was a solitary slam and yet it was one more than he surrendered for his entire 13-year pitching career. Andujar 1, Major Leagues 0.
He was one hell of an accomplished pitcher actually. As a member of the Astros from 1976 to mid-season 1981, he made the NL All-Star team twice. As a Cardinal, he led Herzog's starting staff for five years. He was 6-1 in '81 upon the trade from Houston; 15-10 in '82, posting an even more notable 2.47 ERA, tied for second in the league. Andujar won both of those W.S. starts in '82, and should have been selected as the Series MVP, but after his attempt to throttle Jim Gantner, it was easier for media voters to award the trophy to his "born-again" catcher (Darrell Porter), a .286 hitter for the series with five runs batted in. Today, Joaquin is one of only three living Cardinals to win a W.S.-clinching game (the others, Bob Gibson-- in both '64 and '67, and Jeff Weaver in '06).
He dropped to 6-16 in '83, but won 20 games in '84 and 21 in '85, still the last Cardinal to win 20 in back-to-back summers. The big boss, Gussie Busch, ordered his trade after the very televised meltdown against the Royals (that Series attracted more viewers on television than any baseball championship before or since), but that's what you call "going down swinging."
The definitive Joaquin Andujar story, though, is one reported by Herzog about a decade after the pitcher's departure from the Major Leagues. While working in the Angels' front office during the 1990s, the Rat called Joaquin at his home in San Pedro and hired him on as a scout. He instructed his former mound ace to travel up into the Dominican mountains and round up all the raw, young baseball talent, aged 12 to 16, that he could find. Whitey then flew down for a tryout, where Andujar had assembled the kids on the diamond and proceeded to pitch to each of them one-by-one.
There was nary a foul tip. Andujar was not throwing batting practice, he was pumping his best fastballs past these kids, some of them not much taller or wider evidently than the bats they were swinging. Herzog said he realized immediately that Joaquin didn't quite understand his role in this process. He was auditioning. Driven as ever, he wanted to show his old manager that at almost 50 years old, he could still bring the gas.
Andy and Barney... and Blanche
Happy Summer Sunday.
To celebrate, here's
a collection of scene summaries from "The Andy Griffith Show," compiled at the AV Club. They're 20 leisurely-paced conversations between Griffith's "Andy Taylor" and Don Knotts' "Barney Fife," sometimes even composed as extemporaneous filler, but all gentle, slice-of-life exchanges, deepened in audience recognition of the two distinct characters, that today stand as some of the most brilliant ever delivered upon screen or stage. Take #14 as representative:
A local chicken farmer protests the county's decision to build a road through his property, and when he gets the townsfolk on his side by giving them presents, Knotts tells Griffith, "We could book him on a 204."
Griffith: What's a 204?
Knotts: Bribery, collusion, and/or tampering with a material witness.
Griffith: That's a 204?
Knotts: It's kind of a catchall.I googled my name together with Andy Griffith's and it turns out I already linked this piece-- back in March of 2006. But here it is again. Just goes to show how well they all hold up. Though always critically-popular, "Griffith" is sometimes plainly categorized as middle-of-the-road, inoffensive television fare, but these chestnuts contain some of the most surreal juxtapositions and non sequiturs. The program was also representative of one of the most radical periods in television history-- when rural Americans were portrayed as wiser than their urban counterparts, and relaxation and even lethargy were portrayed as valued traits over ambition and consumption.
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If you're finished with that, and you feel as if you're now ready to spend three more hours with Don Knotts,
here's the comic actor's interview with a representative of the Museum of Television from 1999 prior to his death, as opposed, I guess, to the one he did after his death.
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Emmy-winning actress Rue McClanahan died this week. Of course she portrayed that endearing Southern belle Blanche Devereaux on "The Golden Girls" from 1985 to 1992, a 50-something woman presented on TV actively enjoying her sexlife at middle-age. The character's bedroom escapades made her the target of seven years of barbs from her three roommates, (like this one: "When Blanche Devereaux meets a man, she does not stand on ceremony." "Or the floor."), but Blanche was simultaneously a pioneering sex-positive television character championing the idea that women could own their lives at any age. She also helped to liberate a generation of young boys and men, allowing them to grow up recognizing and appreciating the allure of a mature lady like her, even one who had been "cursed with devastating beauty."
TMZ, of all sources, has given us a great tribute to Rue this week--
a clip of the actress and castmate Betty White (as themselves) exchanging smutty, bestiality-related jokes on the set of GG.
The matter of Palestine
An American teenager was among the nine people murdered Monday by Israeli commandos who boarded civilian foreign aid flotillas floating in international waters that were en route to Gaza in violation of Israel's blockade of the territory. Nineteen-year-old peace activist Furkan Dogan of Turkey, who was born in Troy, NY and held dual-citizenship between the two countries, was shot at "close range, with four bullets in his head and one in his chest," according to Turkish news reports. Israel, though claiming it has nothing to hide, has rejected calls by the U.N. and others for an international investigation into the deadly raid. The United States is the chief financial sponsor of the Israeli military.
It is time for Israel-- and the United States-- to lift the heinous three-year blockade of Gaza, under which humanitarian aid has been cut off to a million and a half Palestinians. The settlers there have been effectively imprisoned in retaliation for their choosing the militant Hamas as their parliamentary leadership in a 2006 free election, a vote that incidentally met with more U.N. and global scrutiny and approval than some of the elections held in, for example, the United States, and one in which Jimmy Carter called the results "completely fair and honest." Israel had demanded that a free election be held and it got one, yet they responded to the action of the voters by attempting a military coup in 2007 (that failed), then cutting off from the outside world a territory in which nearly 80 percent of residents rely on the U.N. for sustenance. Further, Israel violated the terms of a cease-fire in 2008, launching an air attack that was likely strategically conducted on the eve of the U.S. presidential election.
Has Hamas been guilty of engaging in terrorism? Yes. But has Israel also? And on a disproportionately larger scale, with more casualties, and with much less attention from Western media? The answer again yes. The difference in motive is that Israel's neocon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to sit down at a table with Hamas? Israel and the United States refuse to accept the political legitimacy of the Palestinians' chosen leadership. Israel claims this is so because Hamas does not support Israel's right to exist. This is a media-supported fallacy. Hamas has broken with their original charter to support the recognition of Israel, but
if the country agrees to a separate Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, refugees being allowed to return to Israel, and East Jerusalem being recognized as the capital of the new state. There is room for negotiation here, even as Hamas has risen to lead the population as a very creation of Israeli military actions and policy that are unsustainable for both parties. President Carter has been a vocal advocate of the two-state solution, along with most of the rest of the world.
Since '67, Israel has been building up its settlements in Gaza, speeding construction in recent years, installing a wall that physically imprisons the Palestinians, and of late, blocking that delivery of basic necessities. Israel has placed a figurative boot on the throat of the Palestinian people. Its recent behavior has Israel hemorrhaging global support, and with that has gone also more of the dwindling good will people still feel for the nation that arms Israel, the United States. Is it right for "radicals" to compare Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust, as many have done? Answer: It's not necessary to do so, as Israel's crimes against humanity can stand on their own without the benefit of comparison.
If Israel ceases to exist within a generation or two-- a growing reality, it will not be because of the increasing throngs of "anti-Semites" across the globe. (In the current, heated climate, we have even people like Carter being labeled "Holocaust deniers".) It will be because of the cutthroat and unsustainable military and political actions authorized by Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, and their self-delusion endorsed by long-time enablers in the West like the AIPAC lobby in Washington, the militarists in the U.S. Congress and in the White House, as well as American commentators like Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Pat Robertson, Alan Dershowitz, and Ari Fleischer (to pull just a few names from recent headlines, some of whom, not coincidentally, also holding religious views consistent with the desire for Israel's ultimate destruction). This pending and possible dissolution of the state is not a wish for Israel. It's a sad fact under the current direction.
If Israel wants peace with its neighbors, the simple way to test Hamas' desire for the same is by meeting and negotiating with them. The problem up to this point though is that Israel has not wanted a settlement, they've wanted a pretext for commandeering somebody else's country.
The oil stains on the wall
The warning signs should have been there regarding BP.
Most Americans would likely assume that the major oil companies: BP, ExxonMobil, Conoco-Phillips, Sunoco, and Citgo have at least somewhat similar safety and environmental health records.
Not true. During the last 3 years, BP has tallied 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, according to OSHA statistics publicized by the Center for Public Integrity, compared with eight each for Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips, two for Citgo, and one for Exxon. That's a 97% share of the poisonous pie for BP.
Should there even be a debate at this point about whether or not a criminal investigation is warranted then following the Gulf catastrophe? That's a minimum. One might argue that we have an example here of simply one renegade company because of the statistical skew, but I say the numbers further support the argument for nationalization of the entire industry. There's little incentive for other companies to follow the law when such unbalanced statistics can be racked up without the slightest public scrutiny or P.R. damage to the offending scofflaw (up until the point of the spill).
We've been the victims of
systemic destruction to our ecosystem and economy by a serial environmental criminal, while there's been little or no oversight of the industry and a toothless enforcement of penalties. It's inconceivable to me that this would be the case if a government agency was charged to extract and refine our oil, a naturally-occurring and should-be-public resource. There could and would still be spills-- the concept of "clean oil" is as large a myth as "clean coal," but in the instances of disaster, there would be public hearings, firings-- accountability, and most importantly, the elimination of the profit motive that is
100% responsible for the corner-cutting and/or outright disregard for safety and environmental standards that resulted in this deadly crisis.
The American people can't have BP CEO Tony Hayward fired, despite his crimes of domestic terrorism against us. Hell, thanks to our Supreme Court earlier this year, we can't even limit the amount of money he can use to bribe our Congress and the White House into further relaxing the company's operating restrictions and strengthening his right to steal. The powerlessness we've all been feeling over the last month in relationship to this spill is born of this broken, laissez-faire system of economic destruction-- from Milton Friedman's classroom direct to the shoreline in your backyard.
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As of last weekend, 22% of Americans (according to
Rasmussen) still have a "favorable" view of BP. I want to know who these 22% are. They can't
all be in Congress. They are what we have to call "the true believers," though in what they believe, I have no clue. Maybe it's "bad shit happening more directly to other people, not me." Maybe everybody that gives a hoot about the natural world was out of the house enjoying it over the Memorial Day weekend and unable to pick up the pollster's call. And just maybe it's the same 22% of Americans that still supports Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and torture, and for whom "BP" always first means "Blame Progressives." As Studs Terkel used to say about the McCarthyists, "Suppose the communist comes out against cancer, they'd have to come out
for it." So it goes.
The excrement-faces
When federally-employed writers assembled in 1937 to write the WPA's "Guide to the Hawkeye State," one of them described the origin of the city name "Des Moines" this way...
The name Des Moines is probably traceable to the mound builders who long ago lived near the banks of the rivers. The Indians called the main stream Moingona (River of the Mounds). French voyageurs, who followed Marquette and Joliet into the Midwest, called it La Riviere des Moines, from the monks who once dwelt in huts beside the water. It was spelled phonetically De Moin, De Moyen, Demoine, and Des Moines. The term, De Moyen, translated as "middle," was understood to refer to the principal river between the Mississippi and the Missouri. Another variation in the meaning is "the less" or "the smaller," referring to a small tribe of Indians living on the river.Noncommittal-- and then each theory eventually debunked by
a visiting linguist from Indiana University who suggested that the name derived from the Peoria Indians' unflattering name for their Miami-Illinois tribal rivals, the Moingoana, or "mooyiinkweena," meaning "excrement-faces."
As the Register reporter indicated in the story linked above, the Des Moines Convention & Visitors Bureau is unlikely to take the "excrement-faces" theme and run with it during its promotion of the city. Perhaps we should consider renaming one of the local sports teams though. Making this name change to, say, our popular minor-league baseball club wouldn't sell a helluva lot of caps, t-shirts, or foam fingers, and "Des Moines Excrement-Faces" would be a slight redundancy (like "Philadelphia Phillies"), but it would still be less embarrassing than being called the "Cubs."
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Way to go, slugger: The wife of Cardinals hitting coach and former firstbaseman Mark McGwire
gave birth to triplets, all baby girls, on Tuesday. Does the big guy still have a flair for the dramatic or what? Just for fun, they should name one of them
"Interstate 70".
