Holiday baseball update
Happy Memorial Day weekend. I haven't blogged hardly at all about baseball this season, but it's been a pretty enjoyable season so far if you're a Cardinals fan. At the one-third pole of the regular-season, the club has re-claimed the top spot in their division (at least so far, but I'm optimistic) after surrendering the division crown to Cincinnati a year ago.
The Cards are nine games over .500 despite what should have been a recipe for failure. If someone had told me on the first of February that one of the two pitching aces (Adam Wainwright) would throw out his elbow in Spring Training and be lost for the season, that the second of the two (Chris Carpenter) would be 1-5 with an ERA of 4.58, that their closer (Ryan Franklin) would be 0-3, 1 of 5 in save opportunities, and have a 7.79 ERA, that the Great Pujols would be batting .262 and ranked 45th in the league in slugging, and that the club would be second in the league in blown saves and 11th in in fielding, I would have guessed that the team would be giving away their tickets by now. But they're not. I just had to buy some. Starters Kyle McClellan, Kyle Lohse, and Jaime Garcia are a combined 17-4. As a club, they lead in the league in hitting, are second in runs, and only the Phillies have more wins in the Senior Circuit.
If that's not good enough, the Reds have settled back into their traditional mediocrity, and the Cubs are going nowhere (although
Harold Camping reportedly likes "their intangibles.") It could be worse for both these clubs, they could be the Dodgers. Day-to-day management of the National League's L.A. franchise was taken over by the commissioner's office because of "deep concerns" over the team finances in the wake of the team owner's divorce. Also, a fan of the rival Giants was nearly stabbed to death at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day, and last night the stadium
started on fire. Oh, you can't beat fun at the ole' ballpark, as Harry used to say.
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Randy Poffo died a week ago in a car accident. He was one of the great professional wrestling artists of the world, but what is less known is that before reinventing himself as Randy "Macho Man" Savage in the ring,
he played three seasons of minor league baseball with the Cardinals beginning at the age of 18. His minor league roommate,
Tito Landrum, went on to great Major League success, and
remembered Poffo this week during an interview on St. Louis sports radio.
The Landrum podcast is worth a listen, if only to catch up with Tito Landrum, but I'm really referencing this story so that I can link
this photo from a "Macho Man" memorial.
Feel the Heat
I don’t care what you say. I’m pulling for the Miami Heat in the NBA Playoffs. I'm not planning to watch any of the games or anything. It was 81 degrees in Des Moines today and there are tons of baseball games on the other channels. But I'm picking them for my favorite.
I can’t understand the resentment people seem to feel towards LeBron James. The superstar forward had every right to leave Cleveland as a free agent last summer. (If you thought James’ departure was ugly, just watch the reaction when
Dennis Kucinich leaves town.) James put in seven years there as a player. That's pretty good. He gave it “the old college try,” as we say, although he technically skipped right over college on his road to success. James isn’t even a native of Cleveland. That's an oft-repeated inaccuracy by many repeaters who know better. He's actually from Akron, as they know. And catch me agreeing to a lifetime contract with any sports team in Sioux City.
“Loyalty to community” is one thing, but “loyalty to team” is something potentially quite different. Too many fans like their sports best when they’re soaked in the traditional patriarchies. That's especially true when the stars on the fields and courts of glory are rich, young black men. The owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Dan Gilbert, is a pretty odious figure incidentally, a legalized loan shark as head of the "0% interest, no money down" Quicken Loans internet mortgage provider. "Subprime Dan" attacked James viciously and personally when the player signed with Miami, likening his departing employee to a child, and calling the decision a "cowardly betrayal." That made it pretty clear, at least to some of us that don’t pay close attention but nevertheless have opinions, just why it was James might have been looking for greener pastures of employment.
James’ successful attempt at timing his free agency signing in Miami with the team's signings of two other greats of the game, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, is a threat to the establishment of the game, according to many fans. These fans are correct. Coordinated team building by the participants makes it painfully obvious that team owners in sports are superfluous. These businesses could be just as-- and even more-- effectively run by the players themselves, or by their local communities, such as it's done with the NFL’s Packers in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Last I checked, the Heat had won only a single NBA Championship prior to this year. Meanwhile, their Eastern Conference rivals, the Chicago Bulls, whom they lead 2-1 in a best-of-7 series, have won six titles since I started high school. Combined with their home court advantage, I’m not so sure why everybody thinks the Bulls are the underdog team we should all be pulling for. As recently as the 2007-2008 season, the Heat had the worst record in the league. They're kind of a great story.
Would I like to see LeBron James, who is often thought of as a "brand" rather than an actual person, evolve into a more socially-conscious superstar in the game? Yes. Would I like the Miami Heat to adhere more closely to the traditional customs of American sport in regards to pluralistic team nicknames? Also yes. But I’m pulling for James and his teammates in their current series and this post-season. It would be a marvelous event if a terrific player delivered on his grand ambitions. But again, I'm not going to watch any of the games. I haven't sat down to watch an NBA contest, beginning to end, since I
attended a game in the Twin Cities in 2004. It was an afternoon game on Super Bowl Sunday and because of my traveling, I missed seeing Janet Jackson's nipple on television. I will be damned if I let something like that happen again.
A meaningful challenge
With great bravado, a carnival barker hollers at the passers-by along the midway. “Behold the amazing turtle man. Half-man, half-turtle! Come inside the tent and see this amazing oddity of nature!” An intrigued man turns over two bits and walks into the tent. Atop a couch, he sees a model who has fastened some sort of large shell-looking aparatus to his back. The man shrugs and exits the tent. As he turns to leave, the barker shouts at the man-- and for all to hear: “Is that not the most extraordinary thing you have seen in all your life, sir?!” All eyes nearby turn and peer towards the man to see his reaction. He responds with a sheepish ‘yes.’ The man was had, but he’s not about to compound the mistake by admitting it to the world. Such as it is with Barack Obama and so many of his liberal supporters.
A vote for John McCain, we were told by Democrats, was a vote for a third term for George W. Bush, but lo and behold, we got that third term anyway. In fact, dare I say the Obama presidency has been arguably worse than either of Bush's, a stunningly depressing reality to consider, though I'm pretty sure that American hero Bradley Manning would concur. At least Bush went to the Congress for authorization before launching his illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His cabinet may have phonied up the intelligence to justify one of them, but at least (the
very least, oh god, this is depressing) he called for an up-or-down vote from the legislative branch. Democratic lawmakers, almost all of whom cast gutless 'yes' votes when they got their chance, must have vowed not long after to never let that happen again. No more Congressional authority would be needed. Every new war will be "the president's war."
Obama launched
his war against Libya. He didn’t allow a Congressional vote. Instead, he extended executive authority over our military’s imperialist actions to an unprecedented new level. Like Bush, he lied about his motives, stating that the war was for humanitarian purposes only, but now it’s about “regime change” and we’re still engaged 60 days later in a bloody civil war between warring tribes. Obama has ended neither of his predecessor’s wars, and in addition to throwing Libya onto the bonfire, he’s also secretly bombed Yemen. Wiki Leaks uncovered that Yemen’s oppressive government claimed credit for the action, but it was the U.S., in actuality.
The Obama administration began launching drone attacks on Pakistan also, killing hundreds of civilians. (Even Bush and Cheney didn’t have the gall to do that.) Then after stepping past the Pakastani government that his and Bush's administrations had paid out in the billions, he launched a military attack to kill the 9/11 mastermind (imagine any U.S. president pulling the same type of unilateral maneuver involving a hotel in London or Paris), and he had the man immediately murdered and buried at sea without trial. The anti-war factions across the country have sat utterly silent throughout all of this aggression because the president is a Democrat.
The rule of law is entirely passé for this administration. This past week, the Patriot Act, once so unpopular with liberals, and many conservatives as well, was extended for the second time during Obama's tenure, both times without any proposed changes by the White House. The Obama Justice Department has continued the Bush/Cheney practice of torturing prisoners; like Bush, trying to officially label the practice something other than torture. Much of the torture is now outsourced to foreign governments (again, as Wiki Leaks confirmed), but Obama hasn't even managed to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison, the symbolic Ground Zero for America's sadistic coercion tactics and for its national shame in violating the Geneva Conventions and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. (Even "John McBush," Bush’s third term, has been an outspoken opponent of torture.)
The Department of Justice has continued the legalistic charade of denying trials for prisoners that they consider "too dangerous," and they’ve even added to the War Powers Act the extraordinary idea of authorizing the assassinations of American citizens who have not been convicted of, or even charged with, a crime. The Obamas have continued to promote the Bush argument that we’re in a permanent war so that the unconstitutional War Powers Act remain legally unchallenged and in effect. President Obama is free to declare and pursue any wars that he chooses anywhere in the world, and enact any laws that he so desires if he publicly claims it in the security interests of the state. For all intents and purposes, he is a king.
It’s hard to imagine that even George W. Bush would have handled the “Arab spring” any worse than Obama has. When the people of Egypt rose up in such historic and peaceful opposition against the dictator of their country, Secretary Clinton and the Obama State Department threw their public support behind the dictator’s second-in-command, anxious over losing their strongman in the region who had been charged with keeping “stability.”
The crimes of Israel continue to go unchallenged. Obama made a soaring speech Thursday in respect to the Middle East, but no change in policy was laid out. (Finding the pretty words has never been Obama's problem.) The governments in Israel, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, where protestors have all been targets of violence by the state, like in Libya, continue to get a free pass. Middle East democracy protestors cannot be fully supported by the compromised U.S. government because logic dictates that the next step would be forcing Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders and cease the assault of the steamroller on the West Bank and Gaza. Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth Thursday when he said that "every state has the right to self-defense," but then stated that the Palestinians must be content in being "a sovereign non-militarized" one. The president's speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Sunday should be even more enlightening.
Israel is to this decade something like South Africa was to the 1980s. The Palestinians live walled off as Israel morphs into an apartheid state. The United States refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian leadership, labeling their democratically-elected government a terrorist organization. As late as 1988, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa was also officially considered one of the world's "most notorious terrorist groups" by the U.S. government. Like South Africa two decades before, Israel's right-wing government, because of its actions, is now becoming increasingly isolated around the world even as it continues to claim the steadfast support of international corporations and the American government and commander-in-chief.
Dr. Cornel West of Princeton dared to challenge the president last week from the position of both a progressive and a black man. He was met by other liberals not with substantive debate, but queer accusations about his personal motives. West called Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” which the historical record struggles to contradict, but the high-profile professor, whom incidentally has rarely failed to mention the great hope he continues to hold out for the Obama administration (against all possible indicators, I might add), is accused of acting petty over perceived personal slights from our first post-racial president.
It's worth noting, actually, that part of Obama's original vetting among the Washington Democrats and Wall Street power brokers in 2007 and 2008 was establishing the candidate as the anti-Jesse Jackson, or the anti-Al Sharpton, former Democratic and African-American candidates with whom Dr. West more closely identifies personally and publicly. This central concentration of American political power had to be assured that a "President Obama" would not be a threat to the establishment hierarchy of power in the country. West's personal motives in criticizing are immaterial anyway in respect to his specific policy criticisms. Either they resonate or they don't, and West's accusations about the president's epic failures in office clearly touched a nerve here because the claws came out. It’s sad when the party affiliation attached to the politician's name means more to the establishment liberals than the importance of acknowledging the moral cowardice of the leader of the free world and of its most powerful army.
Most progressives have claimed a position like that of the battered spouse in their relationship with Obama and the Democratic Party. They defend the president, particularly, for his health care initiative and his program for economic stimulus, seemingly without even noticing that even the modestly progressive gains Obama has been responsible for have simultaneously been massive corporate giveaways. And why shouldn't they be? The corporations paid for them with their record-breaking campaign contributions. West’s critics, such as
Joan Walsh of Salon, only tolerate criticism of Obama if the criticism is toothless enough not to damage him politically. Dissenting voices are shut out of the party's primary process, but then if the candidate is opposed from the left in the general election, those candidates will be scolded for having not mounted their challenges during the primaries. It would all be a big joke if the results being felt all across the globe weren’t so tragic.
The refrain from Democrats never changes:
Trust us... this is the best we can do right now... the timing's not right... first this, then this, then that. Yet as Dr. King said about the civil and economic rights struggles of his era, “'Go slow' means 'don’t go at all.'”
Candidate Obama told us he opposed the two Bush/Cheney wars in Asia. Now we have five. He told us there should be no more ignoring of the law after Bush invaded Iraq, now he has his own Iraq underway in Libya, and this is arguably worse because he had the benefit of witnessing Bush's disastrous results. Barack Obama is
not “the most liberal president to date,” as Walsh preposterously claims. This president is less liberal than
Richard Nixon. That's how much the goalposts have moved during two generations of American political life. Corporations have purchased our government. They’ve purchased our elections and they’ve purchased the officeholders. They’ve even purchased the debate.
Contrary to Walsh’s claims, there
are easy choices here. Liberals have tried the capitulation strategy for decades, and we’re getting rolled. Shockingly, when you demand nothing of their leaders, that's exactly what you get. During the early 1930s, Huey Long, the Louisiana lion that challenged Standard Oil, was touring the country, engaged in heavily-attended public policy debates with and against Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. That’s how mainstream both of those men's ideas were at the time. Now working people and the disenfranchised are fighting to hold on to even the very concept of labor unions. Thanks to the unchallenged Revolution of the Right, the monumental Civil Rights Act is controversial again, as if it were 1963. Activism is being criminalized. Abortion rights are being stripped away little by little, state to state, in clearly unconstitutional ways, yet nobody even challenges the attacks on the firm legal footing on which they stand for the silly fear of opening up Roe v. Wade to the current court. We have a majority of Washington Democrats conceding cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while the president from their party throws exponentially more money down the hole in his imperialist efforts at nation-building. What are a Democrat's priorities if not protecting the safety net over militarist expansion?
Dr. West is damn right that there are racial and class elements to this. Those elements have been fundamental to the destruction of the Democratic Party. Joan Walsh can be a progressive in theory, but she doesn’t really feel it when things go sour. A large percentage of your establishment/corporate/apologist Democrats aren’t feeling it economically even when our government priorities get this far out of whack. They’re typing their political arguments over six dollar coffees. They say they care about the poor, but you’ll never even hear a Democratic politician use the phrase “working class” to describe these Americans. Listen close, they’re always fighting for the “middle class.” That group of voters is much more difficult to categorize.
Walsh decries old-fashioned "identity politics" because it’s divisive, but division is what’s needed. The splinter is required to differentiate the ideas from those of the Republicans. The Democrats now have no "identity" at all. The advantaged class running the show declared war on the disadvantaged class right about the time Ronald Reagan gave them the blueprint to do it.
The solution is excising the tumor. Once liberals and progressives actually free their ideas and agendas from their unholy entanglement with the Democratic Party, its corporate interests, and the industrial war machine, then and only then will be start to see the political pendulum swing back to the left in America. That's a tent show that would actually live up to the advertising, and one I'd pay to see.
President Kucinich?
You would never guess it to read American newspapers or watch American television, but the political leaders that dominate the media's attention are completely out of step with American voters. That's why it's considered a terrific turnout if half of our eligible citizens bother to show up to vote.
More than 60 percent of Americans oppose our military exploits in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, but the candidates that also oppose it, like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, are not treated as viable by party leaders or by establishment pundits.
It might surprise you to know, though, that Kucinich would likely win if he were paired in a race against either right-wing media favorite, Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. According to
Public Policy Polling, Americans prefer Kucinich to Palin 43% to 36%, and Trump 40% to 36%. The PPP opinion firm is in the bag for Democrats, but it's interesting to note that, in these head-to-head matchups, Kucinich does essentially as well as President Obama does. Since Obama is looking at a re-election landslide of Reagan-like proportions against the GOP's warm body, it's time for progressives to start strategizing about what they can do in 2012 to send the President a message of dissatisfaction over his lack of moral courage.
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Quote of the day: Nancy Hicks Gribble, on "King of the Hill"--
"Telling the truth is like the sun. People used to think it was good for you."---
Maybe it's just me. When I read the news reports that Navy SEALS uncovered quite a lot of pornography at Osama bin Laden's compound, my first thought was: What does the news media think is a lot of pornography?
Don't make plans
For the first time, the Moeller TV Festival will be conducted in two installments this year. In honor of our 10th Anniversary, Part I will be July 23rd in Cedar Rapids at Aaron’s house, and Part II will be at my Des Moines habitation in November or early December. It’s all very exciting to contemplate except when you consider that the world is going to end this Saturday.
Well, perhaps not exactly. But a major downward turn commences in just five days. If you live in Des Moines, you might have seen the billboard on the city's east side overlooking the McVicar Freeway, but it's not only in that location. Eighty-nine-year-old Harold Camping and his international Family Radio ministry have been buying up billboards all over the country announcing the coming Day of Judgment.
I won’t bore you with the specifics of his calculation because I don't want to have to study it hard enough to explain it. But the short of it is that the divine Rapture will take place May 21, 2011, and for those not swept up to heaven, the event will be followed by 153 days of human suffering, earthquakes, open graves, hellfire, and what-not, before the world is swallowed whole by the Lord on October 21st. (Baseball teams, set your pitching rotations.) The early departed will miss the first half of the TV Fest though so too bad for them. It's going to be a luau theme.
The timeline confused me at first. I saw the billboard weeks ago that advertised the May date, but later I saw a dude wearing a sandwich board on the I-235 ramp at ML King that had the October date and it seemed like we were conflicting. Now I know. You've got your hell on Earth and your hell in hell. There are two dates. It's like a TV Festival in that way. Reverend Camping was wrong once before though. He misread the numbers the first time and came up with a date of September 6, 1994. Oops, that's some egg on his face there. Measure twice. Cut once.
Apocalyptic doomsayers are batting oh-for-'a lot' so far, but Rev. Camping has a calculator and a dream. I'm not sure what he'll do when he wakes up a goat on Sunday morning, but I have a guess: He’ll claim he misjudged the numbers again and he'll come up with a
new date of prophecy, and he’ll ask for more contributions for his church.
His flock is invited to Moeller TV Festival X, Part I-- again, it's Saturday, July 23rd, at Aaron's house in Cedar Rapids. Wear a Hawaiian shirt for the luau and bring your calculators. It's free to attend, with a meal provided, so it would make for a perfect day if you've given away all of your money and possessions.
Nature's course
I saw a lot of the Mississippi River on my road trip to New Orleans last week, and there's a lot of the Mississippi River to see. Flood waters were trickling over the interstate (and under my car tires) north of Memphis on Monday. This weekend, thousands have been evacuated in the Cajun country of Central Louisiana so that a spillway might be unlocked and opened, and greater damage averted downriver in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
And now do you want to read something even more troubling? I came across
this one the day we arrived home. Some experts predict that the Great River may be about to shift course, choking off both Louisiana's capital city and it's largest by population. Although the river's course has changed radically and multiple times throughout the planet's history, New Orleans has been the drainpipe of the river for so long that the city is actually built, not upon bedrock, but on vast quantities of packed mud and clay that the river has carried down to the gulf. (That's Iowa soil under the Bourbon Street cobblestone.) We're not just talking about its commerce and its culture when we say that the river
literally provided the foundation for the city and the near-entirety of Southern Louisiana.
Finally a Bridesmaid
Do yourself-- and all of us-- a favor, and rush out to see “Bridesmaids” at your local movie theater. The Kristen Wiig vehicle (co-written by and starring) is very funny, and it’s also what we would call "character-rich."
These are dark days at the cineplex (no pun intended). The studio corporations make primarily two types of movies-- comedy/action flicks aimed at Friday and Saturday night audiences of teenage boys, and insipid, badly-written romantic comedies about one-dimensional women and their bland boyfriends. The presentation of women of complexity, sadly, is left to the almost exclusive domain of television. Complicated women are rarer on the big screen than a Terrence Malick release.
It’s “the chicken and the egg” as far as women staying away from the movies that are aimed at them. Do women not go to movies because the ones made for them are so bad, or are they bad because women don't go to movies? (There were only about seven other movies playing at the theater that I attended today and two of them were called "Something Borrowed" and "Jumping the Broom"-- oh, wedding season.)
One thing we know for certain is that too many men and boys show no interest at all in sitting through anything on the big screen that they perceive as even the slightest bit “feminine.” In a recent New Yorker piece, reporter Tad Friend spoke an unfortunate truth that “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.”
That’s why it’s your civic duty-- Y chromosome or not-- to patronize “Bridesmaids,” especially during the all-important opening weekend, if possible. Wiig's "Saturday Night Live" characters don't blow me away, but I've found her appealing in many projects, and never more so than here with her
Liz Lemon-y imperfections and her wild foolishness. The "Support 'Bridesmaids'" movement is gaining traction, too.
Salon and
Slate both have stories this weekend in respect to the cultural importance of the film doing ace box office. Take your friends to see it, and for Christ's sake, take your sons. It pains me as an American, a human, and a heterosexual, to think that the latest batch of boys in this country prefer seeing mythological Asgardian warriors in 3D, or Vin Diesel crashing a bus, to watching beautiful women be funny and charming.
Jazz Fest is back
I'm off on my annual sojourn to New Orleans today as my soul is due to be cleansed. No more blogging until next week. Choose from the "Blogs I Follow," or click on "Next Blog" above if you get bored.
Remembering 9/11
Part of this story you might know, most of it you probably don’t:
The date is September 11th. The nation is attacked by a group of radical fundamentalists that have been financed by the oligarchy of one of the world's most resource-rich countries. Many innocents are killed. The world expresses outrage at the abhorrent assault on innocent human life and vows solidarity with the victims. The country, which had previously enjoyed generations of peaceful democratic rule, is changed forever.
Now picture an extended scenario in which the onslaught does not simply end with that one terrifying day. Let's say that the orchestrated attacks are successful in reaching the center of the government and the president's house, where he is killed, and the terrorists actually manage to install a new dictatorial form of government. Thousands are murdered, thousands more brutally tortured, tens of thousands imprisoned for their resistance, and hundreds of thousands flee the country. The new terrorist rulers, after years of only funneling money and arms to combat the popular and democratic government, now establish an organized security center in the government designed to infiltrate other democratic governments and repeat the formula. "Freedom" is truly threatened across the globe.
The mastermind of the deadly charge, and of the atrocities that follow it, is not killed with two gunshots to the head after a period in deep hiding. In fact, he is never indicted because of the successful raid upon the government. He evades justice throughout his life, dying eventually of natural causes after living out his days secluded, but in general familial comfort.
Following the hijacking of the government, the country's unemployment level rises more than 600%, yet the terrorists and their propagandists aren't concerned. They have different priorities. They call theirs a larger war "against tyranny and injustice," a necessary "moral cleansing." The Constitution and Congress are suspended. Strict censorship and curfew are imposed, all political parties and activities ended. The victims are primarily not military officers, but non-violent activists killed not because of their weapons but for their beliefs.
The above scenario was always a rather unlikely result of the al Qaeda attacks on lower Manhattan and Washington D.C. a decade ago, but it's also the story of a
real government hijacking. The date of the attack
was September 11th, but the year was not 2001. It was 1973, the country was Chile, and the real extended scenario, as you can see, makes the al Qaeda assault of 9/11, as horrific as it was, look like an Oscar party by comparison. Another difference between the two 9/11 events, of course, is that the successful coup against Chile and the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende by the United States Central Intelligence Agency did not change the world. That sort of behavior was-- and still is-- all-too-common as far as the C.I.A. is concerned. Shoulders shrugged.
The country of Chile, the toppling of their government of self-determination in 1973, and the human rights atrocities that followed for three decades and more after our incursion there, are the reason that Americans looked like dicks when they chanted "U-S-A, U-S-A" in the streets late last night and this morning. Citizens of the nation that Martin Luther King Jr. not that long ago called "the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth" have never actually been interested in renouncing violence or in opposing the death of human innocents. They only give a shit after that violence has been used against them.
