Greening for the city
Our next book endorsement is last year's "Green Metropolis" by David Owen, available through your local and online booksellers, as well as your neighborhood library. The author punctures holes into a few of the conventional wisdoms surrounding environmental sustainability, namely that crowded urban areas are ecological problems. Instead, he argues, they should be our model in future planning.
In the book, Owen promotes New York City as the nearest ideal in terms of green civic design in the United States, but that hypothesis is in fundamental opposition to generations of public hostility toward crowded cities. It is exactly this high density in population, though, that he says makes that city our "greenest."
New York City residents live so close to one another that the use of fossil fuel-burning automobiles long ago became an impracticality. As a result, NYC contains 2.7% of the human population of the United States, but their residents actually use only 1% of all greenhouse gases. The current per capita consumption of greenhouse gases in the Big Apple has not been matched in the country as a whole since the mid-1920s. Residents there are forced to walk or use public transportation instead of driving and parking; and living vertically, rather than sprawled out across the countryside, keeps energy costs down and less thermal exposure in buildings. It limits commercial consumption as well-- in regards to those non-essential goods we all enjoy but that NYC residents simply don't have as much room for. The average New York City household uses 4,696 kilo-watt hours of power each year, according to Owen's book, but that's compared to 16,116 for the average household in Dallas, TX.
Owen writes that hostility in the environmental movement towards urban living traces back to the agrarian ideals set forth by figures like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Ford, and particularly by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Of course, U.S. cities in those days of their infancy suffered from much dirtier industrial air, and from epidemic diseases like cholera and yellow fever that ran rampant through filthy, unregulated, densely-populated communities. Human flight to the countryside was actually a reversal of the direction of natural human migration, and the result, over time, has been the explosion of sprawl cities, strip malls, wider and longer expressways, and the overall number of gas-thirsty motor vehicles on our roads.
If everybody lived with the same physical proximity between themselves and their fellow humans that Thoreau sought for himself, we'd have already cooked our planet long ago. Residents of New York State's Hudson Valley, as an example, may curse New York City and its residents every time they experience a summer "blackout" and "brownout" in their electricity, but per capita energy usage in NYC is several ballparks removed in the direction of "green" from that of the individual and sprawling Hudson Valley communities. Imagine the depleted resources and environmental havoc that would result if the population of New York City were spread out across the entire state of New York, rather than piled up on top of each other in metropolitan bliss.
Thoreau's endorsement of harmony with our natural world is his positive legacy, but it should be observed by his descendant environmentalists that it's that same idealism in regards to open space that has been so successfully usurped by automobile manufacturing companies, among other large polluters. To prove his point, Owens provides just a partial listing of the
names of marketed "off-road" vehicles that are designed to keep you as far away as possible from your neighbors-- Wrangler, Explorer, Yukon, Blazer, Pathfinder, Expedition, Sierra, Outback, Outlander, Tahoe, Santa Fe, Jellystone. (I made up that last one.) They're selling the idea of wide open space as individual freedom, not communal conservation:
This area of Earth is unspoiled so let's all move there. To Owen's mind, it was Thoreau's famous cabin in the woods that "set the American pattern of creeping residential development." After all, who has actually done more to harm the planet, Owen asks-- the now-multitude of "explorers" who have left their garbage strewn about the foothills of Everest and the Himalayas, or the people who have stayed home because they hate mountains?
New York City residents don't necessarily deserve credit for sacrificing more than we do. By and large, they aren't doing anything special to conserve the planet-- and they root for asshole baseball teams. Like most of
us, most of
them are simply doing what is the most convenient. It's safe to suppose that nearly all NYC residents would have cars if it were more practical to have them. People there simply have the advantage of living in a city that was beautifully designed for sustainability long before they were even born. (Except for Barbara Walters, am I right, people?) Most of the rest of us are junkies for gasoline, and the reason that we're junkies is because it's so easy for us to drive from one place to another. That's why the only ultimate cure for getting roasted to death by the sun, says the author of "Green Metropolis," is to make driving costlier and less pleasant in general.
According to Owen, the "green"-labeled initiatives that are the most counterproductive are the ones that are simultaneously making driving more convenient. For example, car pool lanes are a good idea in theory, but not if they're leading people that would normally use public transportation to get out on the road with their vehicles, and not if the construction of additional lanes for car pooling eases congestion in the other lanes, ultimately increasing volume again. Even a subway system like New York City's, a marvel of historic proportions in regards to green planning, is doing greater harm when it's extended beyond the city's limits and is making it easier for people to live further from the core. In those suburban and exurban communities, residents may be able to commute by train to work, but they're having to drive everyplace else.
Hybrid and compact vehicles are more fuel-efficient, of course, than the oversized sport utilities, but it's a meaningless trade if the driver of the new, smaller vehicle just has an excuse to drive more; and the "smart cars" have no place if they're being bought up by residents in the central city. These vehicles are still consuming energy on the road, and they also may have to be consistently plugged into the electrical grid for their charge. A golden calf is being slaughtered if a city block in Manhattan designed to allow for 80 parked cars now has room for 500.
All of the above numbers and insights are lifted directly from Owen's fine book. He doesn't state this specifically, but I would argue that the first rule of any meaningful environmental civic policy should be 'no new roads.' Observance of this commandment would save a load of money for taxpayers, as just one enormous benefit, and it would also make driving progressively less convenient, as another. It could be coupled with new tolls on highways and streets that go towards funding public transportation.
Any changes
have to be done in accordance with supporting public transportation programs and walking neighborhoods. Well-meaning community expenditures on public transit are wasted when they're coupled with funding for new or widening roadways that make the public transit unnecessary. My town of Des Moines comes to mind on that point. Many of us that live in the city core would love to have greater public transport options, but as long as the city and state keep widening the freeway and the arteries, the buses and trains won't and couldn't be filled. Government policy in this-- and all things-- has to follow human nature, and human nature here is that the true "green" option can't win unless it's also the "convenient" option for the citizenry.
Owen says he has also suggested in meetings with groups like the Nature Conservancy, which purchases parcels of unspoiled land to protect against development, that they buy up downtown parking lots in cities and construct apartment dwellings. Each such purchase has the double advantage of promoting in-fill growth and making parking more scarce-- a constant annoyance for drivers. (Yes!) All of these types of positive actions will be rare, though, until we change our collective mindset about the merits of urban living and greater population density. Who's with me?
A cover blows off
Ninety-two thousand confidential documents in regards to execution of the war on Afghanistan have been leaked by the website
Wikileaks. The early summaries on these documents have it that they reveal a failed U.S. military policy there, and a cover-up of the real conditions on the ground, concealed not just from the American people, but from Congress. They reveal that the White House and the Pentagon have been duped over a long period of time by our supposed allies in Pakistan-- the Pakistani government receives $1 billion in aid from the U.S. annually, but their intelligence officers meet regularly with the Taliban about how and where to attack us. And the sure kicker is this: there have been a cluster of honest-to-God American and Coalition war crimes, with evidence of 144 incidences of the killing of civilians.
This is a heroic act of whistleblowing on the part of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his informant(s). These are your
Pentagon Papers for Afghanistan. I'll yield to those who lived through Vietnam-- I didn't-- but the only ongoing difference between the two conflicts, it seems to me, is the level of public activism against them. The war on Afghanistan polls unpopularly with the U.S. citizenry, but there's been too little
activism against the war. Hopefully, that trend will now be ending.
Moeller TV Listings 7/25/10
You just watched him hit a home run at Wrigley Field on Sunday Night Baseball, now watch Albert Pujols give a hitting demonstration on the streets of midtown Manhattan. It's Monday night on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Mark Twain's dying wish
Time, combined with commercialism, has a way of sanitizing many of our great historical figures. Take your Martin Luther King, Jr. Here was a subversive rabble-rouser and an unpopular champion of civil disobedience against the law of the land. The
concept of "civil rights for all" may have appealed to many in his day, but the
real-life implications of civil rights, such as open housing, caused great strife at the local, neighborhood-to-neighborhood level. King was reviled by many whites, of course, in Birmingham, but he also had bricks hurled at him in Chicago. He loudly opposed the Vietnam War when opinion polls still solidly backed Presidents Johnson and Nixon in their efforts to keep foreign governments from falling to the Communists like "domino(es)." King courageously called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," and that's an unpopular idea
today, let alone in 1965.
Forty-two years after his death as martyr, King is nearly universally-lauded in America as a man. There's a federal holiday in his honor, monuments and museums devoted to him and the struggle he helped lead, and as he richly deserves, but his still-more-controversial ideas rarely get mentioned, and his descendants in the struggle still come up against the same opposition. It's as if King gets to be a cereal box hero, but for the benefit of others' agendas, while many of the leader's vitally-important, but less popular ideas get ignored. He's considered a more palatable "brand' of icon than a Malcolm X because he was less militant, and because he was a Christian. He's been stripped of many of the attributes that made him great-- specifically, his determination and courage in unsettling what was considered settled in American life. In death, where the establishment has greater control over the power of his message, he's no longer a threat to the comfort level of the American majority-- as he most certainly was when he lived.
Take another guy-- your Mark Twain. And this is where it gets good. America's greatest author, equally-sanitized on death, has been gone now right at 100 years, yet he's about to revisit us, and this is cause for a global-sized celebration. No, it's not a resurrection of the body, but Twain, you see, dictated a lengthy autobiography, and he had it filed away with orders that it not be published until he had been dead for a full century. UC-Berkeley plans to release the first of three volumes, "The Autobiography of Mark Twain," this November! When the entire trilogy has been released, the new text will run to half a million words.
Needless to say, this is a literary-- and cultural-- moment to impact a lifetime. Several lifetimes. It should make a Harry Potter release look like that time "Goober" wrote a book. Twain reportedly demanded the long duration between his death and the public viewing of his memoirs because he wanted to write as frankly and revelatory as possible. He's not holding back here, and history is so alive, I wonder if there won't even be some of his bloodstains on the page.
Historians tell us that during his lifetime Twain privately concealed many of his more radical and unpopular opinions on subjects such as politics, sexuality, and religion. Excerpts released thus far seem to bare out that they will now become widely known.
* For example, he refers to United States soldiers as "our uniformed assassins," and of their attack on a tribal group in the Philippines during colonization efforts, he describes their killing of "six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”
* Of America's dominant religion, "There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grubbing and predatory as it is-- in our country, particularly... it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime-- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."
* Of that era's Wall Street big shots, "The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars. He pays taxes on two million and a half."
Holy shit! What year is this? Samuel Clemens, the founding author of the American vernacular, our greatest storyteller, an astute social commentator, the Crown Prince of Hannibal (I made that one up), and our most iconic national humorist, also turns out to be an angry, brilliant prophet-- although he did also, it seems, and with lesser ascendancy in Volume 2, predict continued success on the diamond for the Cubs.
This is too much to bear.
Treme moments
The first season of HBO's "Treme" ended last month, and the network has guaranteed us at least one more season of this tremendous series that's set and filmed in New Orleans. Creator David Simon says the Crescent City is one that lives on its beautiful moments-- such as the spectacle of an elaborately-costumed and orchestrated Mardi Gras Indian parade along an otherwise dingy thoroughfare. His series does the same. Simon seems to truly love people. He's made a career's work on television of displaying our humanity and resilience in conflict against the social institutions that corrupt us.
I thought it fitting to wrap the show's first season by highlighting my favorite five moments of the series so far. A mild SPOILER ALERT is probably called for, but "Treme" is a show wedded more to atmosphere and spirit than to narrative so the more hearty among you non-viewers could probably venture to stick your toes in below...
#5- MEETING ADJOURNS, EPISODE 5: Creighton (John Goodman) is sitting in a planning meeting of the captains of the annual Krewe du Vieux parade at the
Mother-in-Law Lounge. Debate centers on the appropriateness, or lack of appropriateness, if you will, of their traditional "tongue-in-cheek" parade given the recent devastation of Katrina. A motion to acknowledge the seriousness of the storm via a riderless horse at the front of the parade is defeated, with a lifesize wax likeness of the late
Ernie K-Doe abstaining (presumably as always). When a second line parade then suddenly passes in front of the building and the meeting, Creighton presents a motion for "respite to appreciate the second line." All agreed.
#4- JEAN LaFITTE MEETS HIS PIRATE WENCH, EPISODE 8: On the Mardi Gras Day, Davis (Steve Zahn), dressed as the 19th Century pirate Jean LaFitte, meets our friend Annie (Lucia Micarelli), who's been shacked up in co-dependent squalor with the drug addicted street musician Sonny. Annie, as coincidence would have it, is likewise dressed in colonial garb when she meets Davis. He recognizes her from her previous violin gigs about town, and the two set off to enjoy a Mardi Gras together. Their pairing promises big new developments during Season Two!
#3- LaDONNA FINDS SOLACE IN THE SECOND LINE, EPISODE 10: LaDonna's season-long agony over her missing brother, and the exhaustion endured from attempting to shield their mother from the hideous truths lying at the end of their search, are underlined in the final episode of the season. LaDonna finds her liberation-- and do we all-- when the brass band strikes up the traditional "Didn't He Ramble" during a funeral parade. Actress
Khandi Alexander is also a trained dancer who once worked as Whitney Houston's choreographer. In her final scene of the season, she infuses LaDonna with not just a poignant display of emotional release and uplift as a woman possessed, but with some wicked moves to boot. This radiant and ridiculously-talented actress never steps wrong.
#2- ANTOINE RIFFS ON "ST. JAMES INFIRMARY," EPISODE 4: Trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce) had to put his "bone"-playing career on the shelf for a time after having his lip cut during a scuffle with local police. While waiting impatiently for medical attention at the hospital, Antoine treats his fellow patients to an impromptu,
refined version of that granddaddy of jazz dirges, "St. James Infirmary." Antoine's first verse:
I went down to Touro Infirmary/My baby left me there/My hair's gone gray waiting on this doctor/Sitting in this stone hard chair. Soon, the waiting room is filled with tapping toes, and a man in an oxygen mask gets percussive upon the lid of a garbage can.
#1- JANETTE AND DAVIS ENJOY A MID-DAY NAP, EPISODE 10: Davis has promised his "friend with benefits," Janette (Kim Dickens), a "perfect New Orleans day" in hopes of persuading her not to trade in their injured town for a new life in New York City. This day includes a breakfast serenade by musician John Boutte, beignets from Cafe du Monde ("beignet, done that"), a scenic drive, a po'boy lunch, a night of dancing, and best-of-all, I thought-- an afternoon nap, side-by-side on a blanket next to the Father of Rivers. Though the scene has no dialogue and lasts only 26 seconds, by my count, the look on Janette's face is pure serenity. It's a reminder that even though the city of New Orleans means action and excitement to most outsiders, part of what makes it great is that time moves slowly there. Life is to be absorbed thoroughly over long periods of time, and without haste.
God hates everything
Topeka minister Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" Westboro Baptist flock enjoyed a busy day of street protesting in St. Louis yesterday. During the afternoon, church members and their enslaved children gathered
outside of Busch Stadium and the Cardinals/Dodgers game. (I hope some of the acolytes went in. Wainwright pitched great.) Then in the evening, they engaged passers-by across from
the Lady Gaga concert at the Scottrade Center. They also worked in a stop at a local Jewish Community Center.
The Westboro Church website calls St. Louis "that evil city with the giant arch," which I'm sure has city civic leaders frustrated. Sure St. Louis is not "that evil city with mile after mile of white sandy beaches," but why can't it ever be "that city with the tremendous art museum," or "that city with the increasingly popular mass transit system"? Sure the Arch is great, but there's lots of other things to see and do in St. Louis.
And why are they slapping at Lady Gaga, yet
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers get completely off the hook for their show tonight? The veteran musicians of the Petty band may no longer get the amount of tabloid attention "the little false prophetess" does, but are they not also going to eventually have the spirit of supplication poured from them? Are they not equally complicit in the idolatry and promotion of the rights of fags to eat each other's feces and the whores to kill their unborn? I say yes. I read a Petty biography.
No sadness
Here's former Red Sox and Expos pitcher Bill Lee
on the death of "the Boss."
--
Not all of us are lucky enough to walk through our lives and discover along the way a natural-born enemy. Bill Lee, the free-spirited, insubordinate, humane, and dirty-kneed champ of the underdog, found George Steinbrenner.
May Bill continue to be blessed by the spirit of the great Whatever.
Steinbrenner: Gone, but not soon forgotten
America loves it its capitalists.
George Steinbrenner's death this week has allowed us to reflect on the man's rarefied, fascinating, and presumably much-envied life. Television and the internet have been offering up so many of the "other side of George Steinbrenner" stories, in reference to his supposedly frequent but quiet gestures of charity and generosity, that it's hard to wade through them to find any of the "side that's not the other side of George Steinbrenner" stories. Even the friggin' Yankees batboys are getting their cherished remembrances published online-- and at
non-sports-related websites to boot. For its part, ESPN lost its mind completely Tuesday.
But the truth is out there.
The man who came to be known as "the Boss" throughout the professional baseball world made his money the old fashioned way. His father, Henry, a shipping magnate in Cleveland, gave it to him as part of the boy's membership in the Lucky Sperm Club. It was a cousin that gave young George his first front office job, one in the shipping business in the mid-1950s, and when the young tycoon moved into the sporting world during the early '60s, as owner of the American Basketball League's Cleveland Pipers, he lost his shirt.
Quite famously now, Steinbrenner and a group of minority partners purchased the New York Yankees from CBS in 1973 for a net cost of only $8.8 million. Today, the franchise is thought by
Forbes Magazine to be worth an estimated $1.6
billion. I would calculate that return on George's investment for you but my pocket calculator only has eight digits.
"The Boss" quickly became a well-known baseball figure-- and persona-- as a tyrant. The ridiculous team policy on facial hair, the disruptive bids for media attention during and between seasons, and the constant firings of his field manager became rather comical attributes of George's leadership style. He fired Billy Martin as Yankees' manager five times, and changed his skipper a grand total of 20 times during his first 23 years as owner. His general managers fared slightly better. They were replaced only 11 times during his first 30 seasons.
We're told that these employee casualties came about due to Steinbrenner's unmatched desire to win. He once said, "I don't
have heart attacks, I cause them" (oh, the
schadenfreude), but even if we look past all of his shameless bullying and his sort of complete indifference to the humanity of his employees (and incidentally, four of his replaced managers during those years-- Ralph Houk, Dick Howser, Lou Piniella, and Dallas Green-- had won or went on to win World Championships as managers under different teams or ownership groups), many of "the Boss's" tactics were not so much comical as they were unethical, illegal, even felonious.
In 1974, three days before Hank Aaron passed the original Bronx Bomber, Babe Ruth, as the all-time home run king, the Yankees' team owner was indicted on 14 criminal counts related to illegal campaign contributions to Dick Nixon's presidential campaign. An additional felony charge came later in the year in the form and terminology of "obstruction of justice." Steinbrenner paid only a small fine for his rich man's crime, and commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him from the game and the Yankees for two years, though the suspension was later reduced to 15 months. Friends in high places helped out again when Ronald Reagan eventually pardoned him for his political dirty tricks in 1989.
Ironically, the presidential pardon came about just before an arbitrator (in October of '89) ruled that Steinbrenner and
every one of his fellow MLB club owners had conspired to hold down players' salaries for three consecutive years during the mid-'80s, refusing to sign free agents and to field their best teams. This ruling made the conspiracy the worst proven subversion of competitive fairness in the sport's history. A year later, in a final settlement, the owners agreed to pay $280 million to the players in return for what they had stolen from them (still a good deal for owners as it was only pay-back on lost salaries, and not any penalty).
I feel safe in calling this "the worst proven subversion," as I did. Even the "Black Sox" players, accused of taking money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series, were acquitted in court, and their accused crimes, anyway, came in the immediate wake of the first recorded collusion case, when the owners systematically released all players that were not in guaranteed contracts at the conclusion of the 1918 season, with a "gentleman's agreement" in place not to re-sign each others' players. (Historical note: I'm referring to
that 1918 collusion case
incorrectly as the first one, as there was already a
long-time "gentleman's agreement" in place by 1918 not to hire non-white players for any of the 16 clubs.)
Steinbrenner's two-year sentence in '74 paled in comparison to the lifetime ban (though this one wouldn't last long either) that he received from commissioner Fay Vincent in 1990 after it was uncovered that George had paid a "small-time gambler" named Howard Spira $40,000 to "dig up dirt" on Yankees' outfielder Dave Winfield, a player with whom Steinbrenner had been publicly and legally feuding after the All-Star sued his "Boss" for violation of his playing agreement. Steinbrenner had reneged on a contracted $300,000 contribution to the player's charity. Considering this long-forgotten story, it's funny to see how many times the word "charity" is being bandied about in Steinbrenner obits this week.
Charity has shit to do with George Steinbrenner. Bestowing personal kindnesses upon colleagues, underlings, and reporters, and jobs upon players, managers, broadcasters, bat boys, and stadium employees are what baseball bosses are
supposed to do. Steinbrenner didn't give. He took. He had money handed to him from the cradle to the grave. It came first from Papa Steinbrenner, then from hardworking employees that kept the turnstiles spinning by either deed or diamond exploit. He accepted money as political graft from even the most disinterested taxpayers, and that money got shoveled up into his coffers right until the very end. The new stadium that opened in the Bronx last year cost New York taxpayers $1.2 billion in subsidies. Even after he's been embalmed-- thanks to some luck in timing, and to another dickhead former baseball owner, the one who became President of the United States-- the Steinbrenner children get all of their inheritance
without that pesky estate tax. Even if you support this type of ludicrous and hopefully-temporary federal tax policy, the last thing you can call it is "charitable" when you keep for yourself everything but the crumbs.
No, Steinbrenner succeeded because he had all the face cards given to him from the start. He "fell up" in business and baseball despite decades of baffoonery, and he was given many, many more opportunities to succeed than he ever afforded his underlings. George Steinbrenner would have been out of baseball twenty years ago, and prior to four Yankees' World Championships that came under his watch, if his lifetime ban from the game had stuck for him the way it has for Pete Rose.
The irony of
that particular parallel, of course, is that although MLB employees have been forbidden from associating with gamblers for going on almost a century, Steinbrenner was allowed to operate a multimillion-dollar horse racing stable during his entire Yankees tenure. (In fact, he was longer-serving in the horse racing arena than in baseball if you factor out the suspensions.) He wasn't just in the horses, either-- he
had a financial stake in multiple racetracks until his death, and worked successfully as power broker at getting key industry-friendly political legislation passed. A number of baseball players and managers are still banned from the game long after their deaths not for game-fixing, but for merely associating with gamblers. Not George Steinbrenner. He gets a moment of silence in his honor at the All-Star Game and a ticket punched to Cooperstown.
From an on-the-field standpoint, Steinbrenner is indeed going to cruise into the Hall of Fame. He can point to a host of championships under his watch, yet the New York Yankees, as even the Queen of England could probably tell you, boast all the financial, regional, and cultural resources in the game. The franchise did, after all, when 20 World Titles during the 40 years spanning 1923 and 1962, during which time George was still either learning to tie his shoes in Cleveland or not yet born.
George added six championships for the organization during his 36 years in charge, and six is a dandy number to be sure, but four of those came after the dictator drastically scaled back his "dictating." The Cincinnati Reds, as just another example, won three during the same time period, but all of their home games were played in not the most-populous, but now the
24th most-populous U.S. city. All were played without Steinbrenner's $417 million a year in revenue from local cable television; without an annual payroll of players that
doubles each other team in the league save one, and which has
not included the not one, not two, not three, but four highest-paid players in the game. Most importantly, they played them without the
free network, cable television, internet-- even league-- promotion that overwhelmingly favors the Steinbrenner family team. Hell, the death of the Yankees' public address announcer got more national media attention last week than did, say, the death of Hall of Famer Robin Roberts (a longtime Phillies pitcher) back in May.
You can stuff the Steinbrenner whitewash between a pair of pinstripes. There were misdeeds a-plenty that took place between those colorful moments of personality and professional ambition. The track record of George Steinbrenner's life paints a son-of-a-bitch, a man who often dehumanized his employees. A more heinous "boss" possibly never set foot inside a baseball stadium office. I've heard that whole "camel/eye of a needle" thing at the Heavenly Entrance can be a bitch though, and here's hoping that St. Peter's password question for George at the gate is for the names of Dave Winfield's wife and children.
The Seniors take it!
Congrats to the National League (the Senior Circuit) on snapping their little All-Star Game slump. They claim their first win since 1996, and now boast the series momentum
plus a 41-38-2 all-time record. Braves catcher Brian McCann drove in a Red, a Cardinal, and a Cub with a 7th inning double in a 3-1 victory. There was a lot of fist-pumping displayed in the contest by NL players, and we saw that sort of competitive fire that made
Ray Fosse famous. No Yankees heroes. No dramatic George Steinbrenner subplot. A return to order. A great night. I've instantly forgotten about the World Cup.
World Series Game 1 in St. Louis!
Boycott pitch gathers speed
Enjoy tonight's MLB All-Star Game. It might be the last one we have of any substance for a couple years. Commissioner Selig is still refusing to move next year's game out of Phoenix, and as a result, it looks increasingly likely the sport's Hispanic ballplayers, en masse-- and hopefully others as well-- will refuse to participate in the 2011 game because of Arizona's draconian new anti-immigration law, one that codifies racial profiling and is now being challenged on Constitutional grounds by the United States Justice Department. (The lawsuit by the feds last week becomes the single most important-- and the bravest-- political action taken by the Obama administration during its first 18 months.)
This ESPN story provides an updated roll call of sorts in regards to a players' boycott of the game. Padres All-Star firstbaseman Adrian Gonzalez is already on record as saying he would not participate in an All-Star exhibition in Arizona, and White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said the same in May. In Anaheim this week, 2010 All-Stars Yovani Gallardo of the Brewers, Joakim Soria of the Royals, Jose Valverde of the Tigers, and the majors' leading home run slugger, Jose Bautista of the Blue Jays, all stated or suggested that they would refuse an All-Star Game appearance next summer. For the first time, to my knowledge, Albert Pujols is also described in
a news article as opposing the Arizona legislation.
That would be a large domino to fall, indeed. Pujols is a
perennial All-Star player often described as the greatest player of his generation.
Some people are still asking the question: What do Major League Baseball and the Diamondbacks have to do with the passage of a law by the Arizona state legislature? The answer is this: plenty. Taxpayer funds built the hosting venue for the game. The Diamondbacks' ownership partnership is a major contributor to the Arizona state Republican Party that championed the legislation, and the chief sponsors of the measure have even had campaign fundraisers held at the ballpark hosted by the team owners. Of course, an event such as the MLB All-Star Game serves as a major economic engine for a city like Phoenix and a state such as Arizona. It's the height of hypocrisy to say that an arrangement like this between corporate and municipal entities shouldn't involve politics. The D'Backs' owners clearly believe politics is a game that only they should be allowed to play.
There's precedent for a professional sports boycott, too-- and a
successful one. When Arizona voters rejected the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1990, shortly after the National Football League had awarded the 1993 Super Bowl to the Grand Canyon State, the NFL's site selection committee met again and withdrew the game from Tempe and Sun Devil Stadium. It was relocated, along with an estimated $350 million in convention and tourism business, to Pasadena, California. Arizona voters finally passed the King referendum in 1992, and they hosted the Super Bowl in Tempe in 1996.
Power to the people.
---
Despite the overheated rhetoric, the Mexican border region of the United States
continues to be one of the safest of the country in which to live.
A musical interlude 7/11/10
Enjoy these musical videos. YouTube recommended them to
me, but we share all our stuff, right?
First is Sarah Vaughan and Wynton Marsalis in concert from 19-eightysomething. Mild hijinks at 2:48.
Next up is Todd Rundgren from "The Midnight Special" and 1973. He's got kind of a Lady Gaga thing going here (Lord Gaga?) and I think that's either the Spinners or the Pips introducing him.
Lastly, we have Michael Buble and his blockbuster hit this year "Haven't Met You Yet." The video features Michael, a gorgeous blonde, and some ripe produce. Cool song. Video guaranteed to brighten your day. Hmm, maybe you should wait until Monday to watch it.
The King James edition
LeBron James has the prerogative to walk away from his hometown basketball team in Cleveland-- he's actually from Akron-- but for him to do so in such a spectacular and humiliating fashion towards the town and the team-- wow!
I don't follow the NBA so closely these days, but I've been dumped enough times in relationships to know there are proper ways to go about doing the dumping, and certainly one way
not to do it is to needlessly string the dump
ee along for weeks before selecting your next partner in front of the entire world with a prime-time special on national television. All the while, you shill your corporate "brand," and promise that all of the advertising proceeds from the telecast will go to charity.
True story.It could have been worse, I guess. He could have broken up with Cleveland and the Cavaliers on Facebook. Hey, it just dawned on me-- I'm seeing a lot of Miami "Heat" puns on headlines, but that was pretty
cavalier of James to do all of this. I digress.
I find myself perversely enjoying the spectacle now because of some of the freakish reaction around the league. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has some justification for his anger, for the reasons stated above, but
his public comments last night incorporated the word "betrayal" a few too many times for my taste. After all, James does reserve the right to play for whomever he wants. I recognize that Stan Musial would have been a lifelong member of the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, and Ozzie Smith a Los Angeles Dodger, if those two Cardinals greats had played out their professional baseball careers for their hometown and favorite teams of youth.
Gilbert went further today by
accusing James of "quitting" during the team's playoff run this spring, though if this had actually happened, instead of being simply the angry ramblings of a spurned employer, it would render highly dubious Gilbert's attempts during this past month to deliver to this star athlete an annual income of better than $15 million. It doesn't compute.
I think it's been fun to watch the triumvirate of NBA free agents-- James, Chris Bosh, and Dwayne Wade, teammates now for the Miami Heat-- act in tandem to chase down a championship or two. I've often said (though never written) that the most needless occupation in sports, aside from David Wells' personal trainer, is the team owner, and every fat contract awarded to an athlete leads us one step closer to a world without them.
The NBA is the closest thing we have to a "players' league" in American team sports, as this story helps to prove out, and though media critics have almost universally condemned the maneuvering by James, Bosh, and Wade to become teammates, what the commentators really fear is not the weakening of competitive balance among teams, as they claim, but an end to the owner-controlled power structure. As it is, the current system has given us a competitive imbalance that would be difficult to duplicate. Six of 30 NBA franchises have won all but two of the last 31 league championships. The Miami Heat, incidentally, are not one of those six teams.
While away...
Sorry for my week-long blogging absence. I was on hiatus studying Chinese so that I may one day soon translate for you the reader comments on this website.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), I didn't miss a whole heck of a lot in the news. The world isn't spinning so fast this summer. Crude oil still shoots out violently from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Washington politicians are all engaged in lengthier vacations than mine at the pricey, tropical homes corporate lobbyists have enabled them to purchase. Rush Limbaugh is still a jackass. (On
this matter, he's not only wrong about the motive, his memory fails him in regards to the original perpetrator.)
In other headlines--
An
editor at CNN gets
Helen Thomas-ed.A Russian spy is nabbed by authorities for her involvement in international espionage, but she's not deterred from making off with our tender hearts on her way out.
Lindsay Lohan receives the
judicial thrashing Americans have been begging for. Take
that, young sexualized air of entitlement!
LeBron James makes no announcement,
as of yet, on his professional basketball future, though his name emanates from the television in my hotel room in San Diego at a clip of about once every 72 seconds.
Woody Allen is asked by a London paper to name the six best Woody Allen movies, but he
names instead, I believe, the six that he feels need the biggest critical or commercial boost. Because those six can't be right.
Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa is
still a Republican. (Yes, he always has been, if reports are to be believed. He just disguises it under a layer of vegetarianism.)
River levels rose and threatened residential and commercial areas of Des Moines, but
so far, so good.
Serena Williams
captures her 13th Grand Slam championship with this year's Wimbledon. I contend that if you couple Serena's court accomplishments with those of her sister, add in the dominance they've enjoyed as doubles partners, you've got yourself the greatest sports story of the last decade. Any debate here?
A 5.4 magnitude
earthquake startles Southern California the day following the Moeller Family Reunion.
In a still-potentially big story, Prince
declares the death of the interwebs. Gather ye blog musings while ye may.
