LaRetires
I had no idea when I criticized Tony LaRussa on the blog last Tuesday that it would be for the very last time. Had I known the manager was going to abruptly retire at the end of the season I would have savored that last attack. I was prepped to share with you this week the hilarious commentary I read about LaRussa on the Deadspin site late last week, about the guy who said that LaRussa managed the Cardinals in the World Series the way Lennie handled his puppy. Then another writer responded that Rangers manager Ron Washington handled
his team the way Lenny handled Squiggy-- he feigns interest in them, but really he's only interested in his own lines. (Yes, Deadspin is this awesome.)
One hundred and seventy years (or so) after the game's creation, it's still highly debatable how important the field manager actually is to the success of a baseball team. Young viewers, and a few old ones as well, may wonder why it is that the baseball manager dresses like his players when the same thing does not happen in football, basketball, hockey, or soccer. Well, it's because for the first six decades or so of action, the manager was simply one of the players, a team captain, as it were. He wrote out the lineup, but he also grabbed a glove, most often to play first base, like my dad in couples co-ed softball during the 1980s. That's why they're called "managers," not "coaches." They're not teacher and students. They're more like fellow lodge members.
For the most part baseball managers don't draw up plays, but they do some shuffling of the game pieces about the field. It's the only one of the team sports mentioned above in which a player substitution must last for the remainder of the game. Still, it's the players that play. The offense in baseball isn't run from a playbook with 400-some plays. The defense doesn't have a "scheme." Either the batter hits the ball or he doesn't. Either the pitcher throws strikes or his career dies as he's trying. This is also why baseball is the great sport of democratic society.
What Tony LaRussa has been, more than anything else, over his three decades in the game, is the truest believer that what a baseball manager does matters. He's like the film director that walks his actors through every one of their screen movements and line readings. This is not inherently a criticism, mind you. Actors-- and players-- often crave guidance. This approach often eliminates needless confusion and gross inefficiency. It provides needed intensity and focus. It's also frequently maddening.
LaRussa teams have often been needlessly tight and ineffective in big games, in my estimation, particularly when they're the statistically favored club. I've frequently argued, to anyone who'll listen, that a team with competitive, single-minded leaders like Albert Pujols, Chris Carpenter, and Yadier Molina doesn't require anybody to motivate them. It just becomes unneeded pressure. Professional players can be trusted to act professionally-- to even lead themselves, I would argue. It's not peculiar that LaRussa pals around in his free time with basketball and football coaches like Bobby Knight and Bill Parcells. His leadership style lends itself traditionally to those other sports in which innovative play-calling and the raising of the performers' adrenaline are vital attributes.
I have no science to support this claim, but I suspect that the fans that are most easily aggravated by LaRussa are those that tolerate the least micromanaging by others over their own lives, and those that tend to roll their eyes at the attempts of others to motivate them. Here, I'm describing myself. After 14 years in the professional world, I'm at my lowest ebb ever for tolerating the "constructive criticism" of the supervisory class. I want to be shown the trust that I know what I'm doing.
LaRussa's players are in adoration of him as he exits. None of the 2011 champion Cardinals, and they are champion personalities indeed, have a bad word to say about him, but then it's worth pointing out that the many who have were shown the door long ago. The team that remains is epic, which is why it's hard to criticize anything about the man today, but with all the praise being heaped upon the manager this week, you won't hear anybody say this: "He's such a great manager, anybody could play for him." LaRussa did not get the most out of every player that ever played for him. A few very important players rebelled over the years, and sometimes in very public and negative fashion.
Still, it's hard not to like sometimes a guy with such a droll sense of humor, and a guy who genuinely loves animals so much. He said as recently as yesterday that one of the reasons he came to the Cardinals in 1995 was because he thought they had the most beautiful uniforms in sports and also he looked forward to seeing the Budweiser Clydesdales on the field with regularity. That's downright adorable. Yesterday, one of the Clydesdales at Grant's Farm in St. Louis was renamed "Tony LaRussa," and during the Championship parade, LaRussa rode atop the beer wagon.
It's impossible to argue that the Cardinals' great success over LaRussa's 16 years is not his doing to a large extent. I'll go to my grave contending that he tinkers too much and involves himself too much in the action, but his clubs, as a collective group, have always matched his demanding personality and his drive. If the club he managed this year, that refused to give up against all odds, becomes his enduring legacy, he will be well served by history.
He leaves at the very top. He made his retirement announcement this morning less than 72 hours after winning his third World Championship, and I can't help but believe that the timing of his departure speaks more about his legendary competitiveness than anything else that came before it. He leaves needing fewer than 40 wins to move into 2nd place all-time in managerial wins, which deadens charges of narcissism. Bitter competitors in Milwaukee and Cincinnati are denied another chance to beat him. His second title with the Cardinals breaks a tie with the Ozzie/Whitey 1980s regime he succeeded, and it dims the memory of his first decade of near-misses when many fans refused to accept his style of play and his personality in contrast with their earlier heroes. It's fitting, and not coincidental in the slightest, that perhaps the most coldly calculating and over-prepared manager in baseball history has chosen to leave at the very worst possible time for his detractors to criticize him. That's how competitive this guy is.
Moeller TV Listings 10/31/11
Tony LaRussa announced his retirement as manager of the World Champion Cardinals this morning. You can watch him talk about that, and about the Cardinals' amazing season, tonight on Letterman. And as a holiday bonus on Dave-- kids Halloween costumes. Tony is the third-winningest manager in baseball history and the only two men ahead of him on the all-time list were born, respectively, in 1862 and 1873.
Simultaneously this evening, Cardinals third baseman, and NLCS and World Series MVP, David Freese will be on with Jay Leno. The Freese segment will be followed by "Headlines" or "Jaywalking" or some shit.
Go crazy, folks, go crazy!
The Chris Moeller Blog congratulates the St. Louis Cardinals, 2011 World Champions, writers of the greatest championship script in sports history, and winners now of
eleven total World Baseball Championships!
1926, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982, 2006, 2011
Cardinals win greatest World Series game in history
Here's my favorite statistic about last night's World Series Game 6:
Game-tying hits with two outs in 9th inning or later in World Series elimination game
1911- some guy for the Giants (9th inning Game 5)
1992- Otis Nixon (9th inning Game 6)
2011- David Freese (9th inning Game 6)
2011- Lance Berkman (10th inning Game 6)
Plus, both Freese and Berkman were down to their last strike. And that was before Freese came up again in the 11th inning and hit only the 5th-ever walk-off home run in a World Series Game 6 or 7.
The others are slightly famous...
1960- Bill Mazeroski (9th)
1975- Carlton Fisk (12th)
1991- Kirby Puckett (11th)
1992- Joe Carter (9th)
The 2011 Cardinals are the first-team ever to score runs in the 8th, 9th, 10th, AND 11th innings of any Series game. And now the Cardinals' Albert Pujols and David Freese have taken Reggie Jackson's 3 home run game in '77 and Carlton Fisk's epic home run in '75 and combined them into the same World Series. Insane. I hope Ken Burns was at the game last night.
And then there was Game 7...
2011 World Series thoughts before it's over
Do I wish more people would watch the World Series on television? Yes, but you can't argue with the product. The World Series is routinely thrilling even if too few North Americans are tuning in. If it means disrupting the pace or dumbing the game down somehow in order to pull a better overnight rating
against the NFL, you can keep your popularity. A baffoon named
Charlie O. Finley once suggested that the sport switch from white baseballs to orange, an idea that ultimately didn't catch on, but unfortunately the owners ran with another of Finley's harebrained schemes, installing a "designated hitter" for the pitcher in the much more financially-desperate of the two leagues. In general, decisions effecting the game are best left to the people that actually like it. I wish more people watched "Community" also, but that show doesn't need to change a single thing about itself.
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I goofed on the Texas Rangers, their state, and their city in a post last week, but I suspect that the baseball fans in Texas are among the coolest people that live there.
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The dumbest of all the dumb ideas often suggested to improve Major League Baseball is the one where the league flip-flops the current designated hitter policy for both the World Series and for interleague games-- that is, use the DH in National League parks, and have the pitchers hit in American League parks. It's inevitably suggested that this concept would afford the opportunity for fans in the home city
to "watch a different style of baseball". First alternate suggestion for these fans from Chris: buy a television. Two: If you really want to see how the designated hitter rule works-- in person, or you wonder what Lefty Softtosser would look like swinging a bat, and your local nine is conspiring against you on this front, take the summer off from school or work, buy a ticket from the local stagecoach company, and ride by hoof to the next outpost.
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I was so excited after the Cardinals' tense Game 1 victory, I had to go sit in my car and scream. You're welcome, neighbors.
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Shame on Nikon cameras. Their TV ad campaign in which Ashton Kutcher snaps photos from his balcony of beautiful women frolicking on the beach is incredibly insensitive concerning the way he treated Demi.
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As usual, the Cardinals franchise has been disrespected by FOX television. Home viewers didn't get to see Bob Gibson, Bruce Sutter, and Adam Wainwright throw out the ceremonial first pitches before Game 1. (They are the three living pitchers that have closed out Cardinals' World Championship games-- 1964, 1967, 1982, 2006.) Likewise, before Game 2, nobody in their living rooms got to see Hall of Famers Lou Brock and Red Schoendienst throw ceremonial first pitches. Then the series moved to Arlington, and the United States was shown Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki and former President George W. Bush each throw out pitches on consecutive nights. What gives?
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I'm not opposed to George Bush being invited to Rangers Park to throw out the first pitch of a Series game, but when he got there and walked onto the field, nobody arrested him.
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Through the first five games of the best of seven, the Cardinals' runs scored have been 3, 1, 16, 0, 2.
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The Great Pujols' 3 dingers in Game 3 were the stuff of legend. If the Rangers win Game 6 or 7, this Cardinals' season will still be notable forever for September's Mad Dash, Chris Carpenter's epic 1-0 shutout in Game 5 of the Division Series against Roy Halladay, and Pujols' Fall Classic Game 3.
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Last night's 4-2 loss to Texas was humbling indeed for the Cardinals, what with that bizarre, failed hit-and-run, the many chances blown at the bat, and Tony LaGenius' dozen or so distinct mistakes. The
bullpen phone fiasco and the manager's oddball explanation afterwards was downright embarrassing, but even worse from a competitive standpoint was taking the bat out of his best hitter's hands twice by bunting a man over ahead of his at-bat. The worst of all, and nobody is talking about this one today at all, curiously, was that he pulled Carpenter from the mound in a 2-2 game in the 8th with 3 right-handers due to bat in the inning and after having thrown only 101 pitches. What about Carpenter being this generation's Bob Gibson does LaRussa not understand?
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When contemplating LaRussa's maddening resentment towards any potential Cardinals team success that does not have his personal stamp upon it, I still think back to the disrespect that the manager showed towards the talents of shortstop Ozzie Smith in 1996. Now that I know the manager's competitive personality a little better after his 16 seasons at the helm-- his likes and dislikes-- I realize it must have hacked him off something fierce all those years in the American League watching Ozzie in St. Louis performing somersaults and back flips on the field. Tony believes that untucking your jersey on the field after the game is disrespecting baseball so I'm pretty sure that back flips have always been on the forbidden list.
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The national anthems performed at Busch Stadium in Games 1 and 2 were very disappointing. St. Louis is one of the country's great musical cities, yet the Cardinals gave us Trace Adkins and the first hillbilly winner of "American Idol." (I'm not going to look up his name.) Ugh, was the team trying to out-Texas the Rangers? That was yucky. On Wednesday night, here's hoping for some Chuck Berry, Clark Terry, Fontella Bass, Michael McDonald, David Sanborn, Grace Bumbry, Nelly, or Nikko Smith.
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Play the Tim: I enjoy broadcasters Joe Buck and Tim McCarver enjoying each other on the air. No criticism of FOX in this respect. Those two guys are great. "Playing the Tim" is what I call it when Joe sets up the elder Tim for a joke (even though Tim is neither a cutting edge personality nor particularly funny), then you try to predict what Tim will say in response. During either Game 3 or 4, Joe pointed out that Rangers outfielder David Murphy is the first former student and player at Baylor University to play in the World Series since Mule Watson (N.Y. Giants) in 1923. Joe asked: "Could Mule Watson hit the slider?" I "played the Tim": I guessed that he would say: "The slider didn't exist in 1923." I was wrong. His response: "He was a horse."
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If you take only one fact about me to your grave, make it this one: I hate the song "God Bless America" being played at the ballgame. I hate everything about this unfortunate spectacle. I hate the ugly militarism. I hate the often-accompanying "flyovers" that waste your tax dollars and help to keep our kids malnourished and undereducated. I hate the posturing and the arrogance. I hate the theism of the song title and lyric. I hate the repetition since the league already wraps itself in the flag during the national anthem before each game, which should be more than enough. I hate the goddamn song itself-- so banal and hollow. Most of all, I hate the timing of each performance. Ever since September 11th, "God Bless America" has marked the 7th inning stretch of every postseason baseball game-- and plenty of the regular season games as well.
Here's a little newsflash for everybody: there is already a song to play during the 7th inning stretch. It's called "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." It's upbeat, it's catchy, it's fun to sing with your friends and especially with strangers, and it sounds
fucking awesome on the organ. There's a part in the song where you can mad lib the name of your favorite team, and near the end, you get to shout out numbers before this great big dramatic conclusion. It's a gas, and no other sport has a fun sing-along of any kind during a break in the action, and that's one more reason that baseball kicks ass. The 7th inning stretch is designed to be in the
middle of the inning so that it will always immediately follow a defensive third out by the home team. There's a natural excitement built in with this, and sure enough, in the World Series, those 7th inning defensive outs become even more thrilling as the crowd roars. Yet every night of October during the last decade instead, the crowd's excitement gets predictably tempered by a maudlin stadium announcer who comes on the public address system and dourly requests that we all honor the war dead with a sober rendition of a mediocre Tin Pan Alley funkiller. I wonder if it's true that Commissioner Selig and his wife pause during their lovemaking to duet the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
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Revised World Series prediction from last week: Cardinals in seven.
Occupy Iowa moves on Obama's office
Occupy Des Moines was on the march again this morning. Roughly 100 people marched to and protested outside President Obama's 2012 campaign headquarters on Des Moines' near east side. Incidentally, the march overlapped at times, by location, with the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for Des Moines and Central Iowa-- which is fitting when we consider the very political implications of medical research and of
all women gaining access to medicines and health insurance. When social justice is achieved, charity is no longer needed. Make no mistake about this: a fair national health care policy, and working to empower the politically powerless, are two completely overlapping movements.
This protest this morning had particular resonance for me in that it targeted the President. The "too big to fail" banks are terrific targets for demonstration, and will continue to be, but that's only one half of this movement. That first half, it seems to me, is drawing attention to and condemning the casinos on Wall Street, and corporate greed and malfeasance, in general; the other is drawing attention to and condemning the permanent occupation of these big banks and Corporate America over our government. The politicians whose influence the banks and corporations have purchased need to see our faces and hear our voices as well.
I am absolutely thrilled to see this movement evolve into one that is truly a non-partisan one, as I hoped and really expected that it would be. The people of this movement, in Des Moines and elsewhere, are the people of the United States. Nobody should feel excluded from being part of it so long as they are of the 99% that are without meaningful influence over their own government because they are not CEOs or corporate contributors. Everyone rallying this morning seemed to recognize that there has been a wholesale corruption of both major political parties of the United States, not only the Republican. As at least one speaker suggested, it is fundamental and institutional change to our political and financial systems that's ultimately needed.
Cards in World Series again
The Cardinals are National League champions for the 18th time, and the third time in the last eight years. This trip to the World Series is the sixth of my lifetime for the club, but I've come at it this year from a very different direction. I devoted about the same amount of time to the team as I have in the past, but since they won the Series in '06, I've allowed myself to really relax quite a bit.
As the papers reported, the Cardinals came from out of nowhere in September to qualify for the playoffs, and maybe that's why I've been sleeping like a baby this cycle. The players made a conscious, collective decision late in August to just relax and go for broke, and that strategy has been clicking for both the team and for me. I've even missed a part of some of the games on television, and this is unprecedented. The Occupy Iowa Movement broke out in my backyard a week and a half ago (with seemingly no regard to the Cardinals postseason schedule) and it's been occupying me as well. The partnership of the two events has been very stimulating actually. It's terrific when an energizing Cardinals' pennant race is able to combine its force with an all-but-entirely-unrelated powerful social movement. Objectively there's no connection between the two whatsoever, yet it's interesting to note that the Cardinals also dominated the National League in 1967 and 1968.
As I've aged, I've become more reasoned. Consciously, I think I've always known that my individual actions do not effect the outcome of the game-- whether I score the game or not, where I'm sitting as I watch a game, what I decide to wear that day, etc.-- but either out of habit, or because of the superstitions that the institution of baseball subtly promotes through its rhythm and tradition, I have found myself in the past often getting bogged down with such supernatural foolishness. Save the omens and curses and charms for the Cubs fans, I have now decided, and by the way, that's been working out great for them.
So, to that end, I have no intention of minding the unwritten rules of the game this time around. I'm not concerned about jinxes or karma. I'm going to call 'em like I see 'em, as the umpire says, and I see great things in the team's immediate future. I believe the Cardinals are going to sweep the Texas Rangers in 4 games this week.
It's a great Fall Classic match-up between the clubs to be sure. Don't get me wrong. St. Louis has been one of America's great baseball cities-- maybe its greatest-- ever since that October day in 1926 when Rogers Hornsby and the kid Cardinals took down Ruth, Gehrig, and the Yankees for their first world championship. The victory parade that followed in downtown St. Louis rivaled, and even preceded by one year, the parade the city would hold for Charles Lindbergh and his "Spirit of St. Louis" after the aviator's return from Paris. Dallas, for its part, has been one of America's great baseball cities too. Since roughly September of last year.
The city of St. Louis and its National League franchise introduced the concepts of both beer and hot dogs to the baseball park. The Texas Rangers introduced the world to George W. Bush.
St. Louis is Cahokia Mounds, site of an ancient indigenous city dating back to the year 600 and today, an officially-recognized World History Site. It is Lewis and Clark, the World's Fair, the King of Beers, the "St. Louis Blues" and incomparable cultural figures like Miles Davis, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Josephine Baker, Chuck Berry, and Tina Turner. It's Gateway Arch monument is the most inspired example of art for art's sake in the public square in United States history. The Dallas/Fort Worth "Metroplex" has arguably the worst suburban and exurban sprawl in the U.S., the second-largest number of freeway-miles per capita in the nation, yet still measurably the fifth worst traffic congestion. Dallas gave us the Kennedy assassination, Vanilla Ice, and the worst of all, Dr. Phil.
The Cardinals have boasted many of the game's great players: Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch, Dizzy Dean, Ducky Medwick, Stan the Man, Enos Slaughter, Red Schoendienst, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith, Mark McGwire, and Albert Pujols. The Rangers have inducted Rusty Greer into their team Hall of Fame.
The Rangers do have one hell of a team this year. They exploded for 17 hits and 15 runs in the clinching game of the American League Championship Series against Detroit. (Good grief, Texas, save some of those tallies for the next round. You can't execute a man more than once. I mean... unless you've developed a way. Pardon my ignorance.) The Rangers won 96 regular-season games and led their league in batting. But the fun is going to end beginning on Wednesday. It took the Cards only 30 nights to erase a 10 1/2 game deficit to the Braves. They defeated each of the Phillies' aces-- Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Roy Oswalt-- in a single playoff series, then posted a team batting average of .310 in their six-game series against a 96-win Milwaukee club. So I don't think they're too likely to be intimidated by the ghost of Charlie Hough and the haggard remnants of the second edition Washington Senators. Again, Cardinals in four.
Occupy Iowa is marching
If you're in or around Des Moines this weekend, you need to stop by the State Capitol on Saturday morning and join in a march with Occupy Iowa. The group has selected one of the nation's largest banking and criminal enterprises as its target on Saturday. We'll gather at 9:45am and march to the bank's local corporate office at 10, no later, to send the message that Americans are not satisfied to just sit back and have their government purchased out from under them. I encourage you to donate half a day this weekend for maybe the most democratic thing you'll do in your life. Democracy is not a spectator sport and voting isn't enough, especially when we have such a shitty slate of candidates to choose from each cycle.
Polls of the week
Time magazine,
released today:
Do you feel that the political debate in Washington and the media mostly represents the concerns you discuss and hear in your own community, or not?
Mostly Represents: 36%
Do Not Represent: 60%
Is your opinion of the Tea Party Movement...?
Very/Somewhat Favorable: 27%
Somewhat/Very Unfavorable: 33%
Don't Know Enough: 39%
In the past few days, a group of protesters has been gathering on Wall Street in New York City and some other cities to protest policies which they say favor the rich, the government's bank bailout, and the influence of money in our political system. Is your opinion of these protests...?
Very/Somewhat Favorable: 54%
Somewhat/Very Unfavorable: 23%
Don't Know Enough: 23%
The new Occupy Wall Street movement is currently twice as popular as the Tea Party.
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(To registered voters) Do you approve or disapprove of the job that Barack Obama is doing as President?
Approve: 39%
Disapprove: 52%
Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Republicans in Congress are doing in office?
Approve: 26%
Disapprove: 67%
Do you approve or disapprove of the job the Democrats in Congress are doing in office?
Approve: 30%
Disapprove: 63%
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Self-identified REPUBLICANS that favor increasing taxes on households making $250,000 or more annually: 53%
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Cubs fans, who do you want to see win the NLCS?
Brewers: 68%
Cardinals: 13%
This question is mean: 19%
Baby Birds
A woman that I work with is a Cleveland Indians fan. She has some sort of family connection to Cleveland, I guess. Who knows? I wasn't paying attention to that part. She talks some "smack" on baseball now and again, and the last couple years she and I have placed a financial wager on the World Series. She takes the American League team, and I'm.. forever a National League loyalist.
This woman-- lets call her Tabitha-- was telling me today about her 5-year-old son, whom she is raising to be an Indians fan. Over the weekend, the son told her that he was rooting for the Cardinals in the playoffs. The child apparently has this extraordinary ability, even at his vernal age, to sit and watch an entire baseball game on television. This means that there exists a boy in America that has not yet completed the first grade, but has already seen at least 150 commercials for "Conan" on TBS.
Anyway, Tabitha told her son that he couldn't root for the Cardinals because he was an Indians fan. The Indians didn't make the playoffs (again) this year, she said, but they "might" be in the playoffs next year. This vague promise of future Tribe success evidently stretched the limits of even this boy's unique attention span. "Mommy, I like the Indians and the Cardinals," he announced, which bothered his mother still, though I was quick to call her out on her hypocrisy when Tabitha announced to me, in her very next breath, that she was rooting for the Texas Rangers, of the remaining four playoff teams, to go all the way.
All sports fans that are parents have certainly been in this situation. I'm not a parent-- I mean at least not that I know of, am I right, fellas?-- but I've often speculated about how I would handle such a situation. Most parents have no qualms about pushing their team allegiances on to their children. My cousin in California, a Los Angeles Angels fan, has his children, 7 and 5, directing the worst school-yard taunts imaginable at the Los Angeles Dodgers. A friend from back home is raising a pair of Chicago Cubs fans now out in the Kansas City suburbs. I've often wondered, with great hope, if his pair of charming little moppets wouldn't one day be swayed by their friends towards the relatively-benign local nine (the Royals)-- and away from the hideous Cubs-- if they end up spending large portions of their lives in that city. Only time will tell.
Part of me thinks that I wouldn't try to sway my own children-- despite that rich, red blood coursing through my veins-- because that's the way it was allowed to happen for me. My parents were sports-minded, but for the most part, non-committed as rooters. I found the Cardinals on my very own when I was of an age not very different than Tabitha's son today. I caught Redbird Fever during the summer of my 7th year, in 1982. Like this boy, I discovered the team on national television. I lived in a different part of Iowa, but the Cardinals there were, like here, of the Midwest, but by no stretch of the imagination, the local team.
There was a family member that tried to sway me. A second cousin (though we were a generation apart) from Wisconsin attempted to get us all Milwaukee Brewers World Series tickets that fall. When he visited Iowa late in summer, it was not yet known that the Brewers would reach the Fall Classic, nor that the Cardinals would ultimately be their opponents when they arrived. I told him the Cardinals were my team. He said he would get us all-- that is, the family-- tickets provided that we pulled for the Brewers. To this day I'm not 100% sure that he was joking. All I remember beyond that is that I answered him in the moment with a defiant "no," and then no Moellers from Iowa wound up going to the World Series that year.
The Cards won that Series in 1982. It was the franchise's ninth championship-- and my first. The next summer Dad drove us to a pair of ballgames at beautiful Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and he bought me a book to read in the car called simply "The Cardinals," which was a statistical catalog of all the players in Cardinals team history, 1876 through 1982 ("Ody Abbott to Ed Zmich"). That book-- and the rest, as they say-- was history.
I thought of that 7-year-old boy from 1982 again today. I have such great reverence for him-- so young, so innocent, so goddamn charmed. The Cardinals and Brewers are doing battle again this week, this time for the National League pennant, and for the Cardinals, what would and could be, after one more round, their 11th championship. That's why even though my conversation with Tabitha was interrupted by work, I felt the need to send her a follow-up email later in the afternoon asserting myself directly, and perhaps impolitely, into her family life. I told her straight away-- you've gotta let that boy of yours fly. He's looking up into that azure sky, and he wants to leave the nest and soar with the eagles, except, wait a minute, the color is wrong. Those aren't eagles at all. Let him go, mom. Let him go.
An honest-to-god Obama death panel
Glenn Greenwald and Reuters
describe the President's secret, undocumented, outlaw committee for murdering Americans. There's nothing to fear from this, however. They're only targeting known terrorists like New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who is such a dangerous threat to us in Yemen that the incriminating evidence against him needs to be kept secret from the public.
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Are professional wrestlers unionizing? In the fictional wrestling narrative
they are, if that means anything. This is surely the insidious plotting of that slimeball commie
Nikolai Volkoff.
American spring
The protests are growing on Wall Street. This is a very exciting time. It's not a protest against Republicans or Democrats. It's a protest against the national political and economic establishment of Republicans and Democrats. A dozen kids squatting two weeks ago outside Trinity Church on Wall Street, "occupying" the Main Street of Corporate America, has grown to the size of 700 of their fellow citizens being arrested Saturday on the Brooklyn Bridge, with similar protests popping up in Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Washington D.C. Attacking our paymasters, their crony capitalism, and our economic inequality may be actually succeeding in becoming fashionable. To quote a refrain from "Arrested Development" completely out of context, "
you're going to get some hop-ons." And it's hop-ons you
want, hop-ons you
need.
You're also going to get some snark.
New York Magazine described the protest this way: "Several hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters decided that the best way to topple the oligarchy of 'the other one percent' was to cause chaos for the commuters heading in and out of Brooklyn. Which is why they occupied several lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge, closing it off for hours, and leading police to make mass arrests."
Now, let's set aside, to start, the fact that the protest was held on a Saturday and caused about as much of a disruption to the delicate balance of New York City's transportation system as a Susan Komen race. Next, we'll address the so-called politics of "alienation" that's being alleged: It doesn't fit here. Protests that disrupt, you see, are the protests that work. Showing the strength of your numbers puts the reactionaries in the uncommon position of being in the minority. Those people whose main pursuit in life is always avoiding it's minor inconveniences are not your target audience anyway. They're the ones that will eventually be swept along behind the movement anyway because they're afraid to be left alone.
Lest we forget that marching on Selma, Montgomery, Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere was controversial also, but it brought much-needed attention to the Civil Rights movement. In fact, the marches were the heart of the movement. Rosa Parks was not the physically-tired, reluctant hero she's often portrayed as being today. She was an activist, a verbally-blunt and pushy agitator, a revolutionary in its purest form. Today, being "loud and proud" on the lively streets of a gay rights parade provides the same kind of social resonance even as many still criticize such an aggressive, "in your face" cultural presence. "You can be as gay as you want," they say, "as long as I don't have to look at you being gay while I'm sitting in this comfortable chair." But people, as a whole, actually adore boldness as a human characteristic. Ask any of the presidential candidates or their handlers.
Criticizing the protests is a necessary tactic, though, to protect the establishment interests. Thus, these protests are condescended to by many, and criticized as being silly, unfocused, poorly-organized and strategized, and, above all, populated by undesirables-- that is, the jobless and in many cases, the uneducated (i.e. people that don't really matter, and are otherwise unseen).
Many so-called progressives are even criticizing the protests. These are the ones that fear political movements that are non-partisan in nature. They believe that a Democratic President cannot be targeted for criticism because the main goal has to always be electing more Democrats. Deviations from the official party line are perceived as threats to the viability of the party. If you doubt that any of this is true, take a peek out of your window tonight and look for an anti-war demonstration. Report to me by email if you see one.
We're wise, of course, to see the parallels between these protests and the protests throughout 2011 in the American Midwest, in European capitals, and particularly, in the Middle East. The Washington political establishment has opposed those movements as well. Granted, our leaders had to offer verbal support
publicly when the spotlight on the world shown upon millions of young men and women in the Middle East protesting bravely, peacefully, and using technology that's popular in the West to grow their movement, but in Egypt, for example, Hillary Clinton and the State Department never stopped working behind the scenes to elevate the dictator Mubarek's top military general as his successor. The goal of the United States was always maintaining the status quo. Places where there are few economic resources for the U.S. to claim, and places where the spotlight of the world never shines-- places such as Yemen, the U.S. is free to pursue its true militarist goals. It's in Yemen that we boldly back a dictator whose army opens machine gun fire upon the peaceful protesters. In return, he aids us in
the assassination of our own targeted citizens.
The goal of their criticism is not just to discredit either, but to intimidate. Rarely, if ever, in American history, has aggressive force and the violent suppression of dissent by the police and the military been so tolerated, and even encouraged, by the government and its apologists. It's essential that protesters become categorized as "disruptors" to the peace so that their hearts and minds can be more casually dismissed when their bodies are getting beaten, bruised, and pepper-sprayed.
Will the Occupy Wall Street movement succeed in winning meaningful financial reforms? Maybe. Maybe not. But in either case, what it does is remind people that there is a political movement out there in this country, free to join, that is committed to the idea that our establishment political and financial interests are not above accountability to the people. The fools will always be fooled, but the world will also see a percentage of the population that's willing to stand up to this political hustle. The bandits can make off with our cash and with our economic security, but that doesn't mean they get our tolerance and respect as well. It's on.
