"Going fission": Moeller joins the dissolutionists
"Abraham Lincoln really did a number on us," says Thomas Naylor, founder of the non-violent, left-libertarian secessionist organization, the Second Vermont Republic, "He convinced the vast majority of Americans that secession is illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional."
That quote appears in Bill Kauffman's 2010 book "Bye Bye Miss American Empire," which explores in depth, and with much color, a handful of individual regional political movements that exist today with the mission of withdrawing their state or region of the country from the United States of America. Kauffman, who supports the separatist movements on principle, and politically resides in a sort of Ron Paul/Ralph Nader/anarchist triangle, has written a book ostensibly supporting state's rights on this topic while also disavowing ethnic purity movements. Those that "want to separate as a means of preserving the white race, or La Raza, or pure Hawaiian blood, or whatever their ethnic obsession happens to be. I don't write about them. Life is too short to waste on assholes."
Today's media would-- and do-- label secessionist movements as "libertarian," but it's worth noting that communalism can only exist on a smaller scale also. It's really about localism. Do you consider localized direct democracy to be the best form of government? Except for the wealthiest among us that pervert the system, we all feel an undeniable sense of powerlessness in our nation of 300 million-some souls. Kauffman lays it out this way: "A Vermonter who dislikes his town's junk-car ordinance can remonstrate with his landsmen; a Vermonter who dislikes the Wall Street bailout or the Iraq War can shut up and get drunk, but he can't get within a Free Speech Zone of Barack Obama."
Consider me formally intrigued by the notion of a mass exodus of the states. I am recently coming to see this outcome as the logical extention of the movement to dismantle the American Empire I waste so many evenings writing about. Americans have a hard time understanding this, living as they do in the country that is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" (Martin Luther King Jr.), but a global empire is capable of causing a hell of a lot more bloodshed than any regional tyrant. Consider the words of Karl Hess, "Adolf Hitler as the chancellor of Germany is a horror; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would be an asshole." Overwhelmingly, for me, the greatest benefit I perceive of a potential mass secession of states, besides humans asserting their desire for a greater liberty, would be the defunding and dismantling of the American war machine.
Some states would do much better than others on their own, according to me. I have no problem envisioning the Second Vermont Republic as an almost paradise on Earth-- townhall-style representative government for their just over half a million people, a great education system, health care as a human right, along with a sustainable, green economy. In truth, Southern states would likely spiral downward economically. They're massively supported by the federal welfare tap in the form of military spending, and assistance for the needy that is much needed there as their workforce is almost entirely non-union, and upward mobility severely limited by a craptastic education system in most of the states. I share your concerns about a hypothetical Republic of Southern States of America, and the prospects of such a government for guaranteeing the protection of minority rights, and I'm not limiting that phrase to mean ethnic and racial minorities, but minority opinions as well. But I share the same concerns about Iraq, and I'm not advocating for Iraq to join the Union. The South has New Orleans. They'll be alright.
In Lincoln's time, the greatest threats to dehumanization came from the institution of slavery and from the violent continental expansion of the federal government and its army. Slavery was outlawed, but the violent colonial expansion continues unimpeded. We are dehumanized today by being the ultimately complicit, yet generally powerless, citizens of a depraved government, hijacked by war criminals, that, in just its latest incarnation, is the type that sends robots to bomb Muslim civilians, officially recategorizes the civilian dead as "terrorists" to cast a shroud over their crimes, and then while the "terrorist" is being buried, sends the robots again to
drop bombs on the funeral procession.
The ineffectiveness of the even larger governing body, the United Nations, to control these actions further illustrates the limitations of sprawling governments. The United States ignores U.N. bylaws and resolutions. It has refused to pay its bill. It plows forward with racist wars unsupported by the other member nations. Arundhati Roy calls the U.N. "the world's janitor.. employed to clean other people's shit... used and abused at will."
Democratic representation is a facade in the U.S. also. The House of Representatives, "the people's house," has only one representative for every 647,000 citizens. In 2012, there are over 300 million Americans. In 1776, there were 2.5(!) million, and there were 65 representatives, one for every 38,000 Americans. Nobody with purse strings today ever advocates expanding this number of delegates. I guess this is because they wouldn't all fit inside the 1793-constructed Capitol Building during State of the Union night, and because it would mean more lawmakers to have to bribe. And consider California, a state with 37 million people, and what would be the 8th largest economy in the world if it was on its own. They have only two votes in the United States Senate, and they're both cast by Jewish women from San Francisco. Wyoming's half a million people get 2 votes when we declare war. The second largest city in the nation, Los Angeles, effectively gets none, and if that's not bad enough, the Los Angelinos' state government is even 400 miles away from the city limits. It's no wonder they're all nuts out there.
The only traditional way for a U.S. President to wake Americans from their slumber has been to bomb some non-white people, and now even that doesn't cause a stir among the hooples. The vast majority of Americans have checked out entirely, and the ones that marry themselves to the idea of possible reform, you know the kind that wander around with sandwich-board copies of the Bill of Rights over their shoulders, are the ones perceived as lunatics. Those are my people. I guess it's true for the rest that, as Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, "Those who do not move, don't notice their chains."
Kauffman quotes the author Norman Mailer, who had the cut of a fellow traveler. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 on a platform of having the nation's largest municipality secede from the rest of New York state as a 51st star on the flag. Says Mailer, "We are like wards of an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us-- we pay for huge military adventures and social experiments so separated from our direct control that we do not even know where to begin to look to criticize the lack of our power to criticize... Our condition is spiritless. We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy." Sing it, brother.
I know the conventional wisdom is that state secession is a wildly unlikely scenario, but the seeds are being planted, and the Constitution has actually always been neutral on the topic. (We can add states, but we can't subtract?) It certainly won't happen first here in landlocked Iowa, but there are very real movements afoot in the geographical hinterlands-- Alaska, Hawaii, and the territory of Puerto Rico most prominent, with lesser ones in Texas, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The Soviet Union broke up only about half a decade or so after a time when the prospect had seemed an utter impossibility. Every other empire in history eventually disintegrated. Ours is the only empire left so it makes sense that it would be the next to go.
It's hard to imagine the oligarchy in Washington saying goodbye to Alaska without a fight, because of the state's abundance of natural resources, or Hawaii, with its strategic military position. They're central to the Empire, and that's why we're in both of those places to begin with. So maybe an outpost like Vermont is the perfect location to throw the first sledgehammer at the wall. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would miss the maple syrup socialists of the Green Mountains.
I have not come today to bury the Union. The stench of the Union's rotting corpse is so putrid at this point, I don't even want to get near it. Maudlin sentiment is hardly a good enough reason to keep the band together. Our national concerts are increasingly a medley of stale old tunes better left to a previous generation, but with half of the audience booing when you try to play the stuff off the new album. A worse yet excuse for continued unification is patriotism. I could give two shits about that vile weapon of warmongers. We need to face facts that we, as American citizens, have absolutely no control over this government as it exists. Casting a ballot is not an exercise in citizenship. If it was, your ballot would have choices on it. In any other location on the globe in which the only "choice" was between two corporate-chosen and vetted candidates, Americans would call the system "fascism." At least at one time we would have. Before the gangrene. Powerlessness over time breeds tolerance for helplessness. Voting in America today is more like an act of surrender-- less the act of participation in democratic government than a personal submission to the sorry reality of being only a cog in the machine.
Let's start over in several key regions with the benefit of two and a quarter centuries of hindsight. If the "forefather" metaphor is apt, then as their descendants, it's impractical for all of the cousins to continue living, as we do, in the same house playing by the old rules. Time immemorial has turned the first Americans into omniscient deities when they were far from it. The "forefathers" had some fantastic ideas, true, and then they were also, almost to the man, white supremacists. If they came back to life today, don't you think many of them would be shocked and dismayed to see that we were treating their blueprint from a now-ancient time as something more akin to a holy text? It was only a blueprint, for fuck's sake. I think they would also say, what's a Hawaii?
Time marches on, and sometimes people simply outgrow each other. In the 21st century, educated people recognize the imprudence of staying together in an unhealthy, emotionally abusive, violent marriage with broken communication, little cooperation, and all parties involved talking over each other at all times. It's time to part amicably while we still have a shred of humanity to allow for amicability. We can still visit.
The Citizen Kane of adults playing children movies
In 1994, Martin Short and Charles Grodin made a deliriously funny movie called "Clifford," about a little terror of a child. Naturally, the 40-something-year-old Short played the 10-year-old boy.
AV Club revisited the movie this week as part of their series, "My World of Flops," and it would seem that this little cinematic gem is still
entirely misunderstood. Yes, "adult actors playing children are almost invariably creepy." Viva la Marty! That's the hilarity. "Clifford" is not "ostensibly a children's film." Children would-- and should-- find this movie repellent as they are too immature to grasp it's central thesis, which is-- as a scene-stealing WKRP guest character once said-- "children are, by adult standards, insane." "Clifford" is not for children. It's an
indictment of children.
AV Club critic Nathan Rabin says he actually has a "charitable take on the film." As I read his descriptions of the movie, I'm laughing all over again: "For Short's hellion in short pants, the universe exists for one reason: to allow him to achieve his life's dream of taking his beloved toy dinosaur Stephan to Dinosaur World..." "When Grodin tells Short he loves him and Short replies that they're essentially strangers, Grodin counters, 'I was with you at your christening. I spent a better part of a whole day in your company. I have the utmost admiration for you..." "(Short) refers to his mother as 'sweet one who birthed me' and his rage-filled, resentful father as 'pappy.'"
I want to watch "Clifford" again right now. And checking to see.. that it is on Netflix instant view... Yes, excellent. I am off to watch it.
Amen
He was an African-American actor who starred and impressed in three successful television shows. You knew that. But you probably didn't know he was a jazz pianist, and was a self-described "music nerd," a huge fan and public proponent of the progressive rock music of bands like Yes and Nektar. He never married, had no kids, and though he kept working until the end, lived far outside of the Hollywood spotlight that had largely typecast him, and farther away still from his childhood home of Philadelphia-- in the Texas border town of El Paso. Sherman Hemsley-- just an incredibly talented and unique man.
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NCAA president Mark Emmert said on Monday that the punitive actions taken against Penn State were intended to "(establish) an athletic culture and daily mindset in which football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people." College football recruiters today showed how much they took those words to heart by gathering in bunches in the parking lot outside the Penn State football building looking to pilfer Nittany Lion scholarship players for their own programs. Said new Penn State head coach Bill O'Brien, probably in a sorrowful tone, "Our players are in our building right now and they don't want to leave the building because there are coaches from other schools in the parking lot waiting to see them."
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Quote of the day: The late great Alexander Cockburn, who died Saturday, writing about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2000, "It would be inaccurate to compare him to the lunatic on the corner. Friedman's is an industrial, implacable noise, like having a generator running under the next table in a restaurant. The only sensible thing to do is leave."
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Paraphrase of the day: Huggy Lowdown, this morning, "George Jefferson has died. Weezie Jefferson has died. Lionel has died. Helen Willis and Tom Willis have died. The maid did it."
Penn State's penalty
There are two ways to look at these punitive actions against Penn State University and its football program: the public relations angle, and angle of the cynic...
PENN STATE’S ANGLE—The university chooses to take down the Paterno statue, which promoted the coach as an idol figure. They keep the Paterno family name on the university library as a lasting symbol of the coach’s contribution to academics at the institution.
THE CYNIC'S ANGLE—The university takes down the Paterno statue as a no-brainer. They keep the Paterno name on the library because otherwise the Paterno family might want their money back.
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NCAA’s ANGLE—The governing body of college athletics hands down a $60 million fine against the school, eliminates scholarships over a period of years, allows athletes to transfer from Penn State right away without forfeiting even a year of eligibility, inflicts a ban on bowl appearances for 4 years, and strips Paterno and Penn State of their wins from 1998 through 2011, but does not impose the death penalty because doing so would wrongly penalize the innocent student-athletes.
CYNICAL RESPONSE—With this package of punishments, the NCAA makes sure that only Penn State pays a price. The death penalty of the program would have meant lost revenue for other schools besides Penn State because of cancelled games on the upcoming schedule, not to mention the loss of revenue to the NCAA's television partners. This move allows the NCAA to appear bold in its public actions, but in truth, this penalty has no meaning to any other school in respect to what should be a renewed mission of placing the sport of football in the proper context of an academic institution. All of the other Big 10 schools get to keep their annual Penn State game-- now an easy win. ESPN and the Big 10 TV Network get to keep every possible penny-- and at least for a time, they gain a ratings increase by continuing to televise Penn State games.
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Putting the death penalty completely aside, I think a more just penalty would have been letting Paterno keep his wins, which we all know he really won, and adding instead a punishment of no televised games for several seasons. An increase in alumni donations are going to cover that $60 million penalty in no time flat, but keeping the team's games in the dark strikes at the heart of the beast. Not even considered though, I'll bet. Papa Espy needs ta' git paid.
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There's a lot of criticism being hurled online at the parent(s) that had taken a 6-year-old child to the Batman movie premiere in Aurora late last Thursday. It's a movie based on a comic book superhero. A better question is why there were 40-year-olds there.
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Last month, David Letterman appeared on Alec Baldwin's public radio program in New York City, "Here's The Thing." It's
a great listen. Dave fills in some little-known gaps in the story of his rise to fame. We know he was an Indianapolis weatherman, but he shares quite a bit about his overlapping time in radio, and about his geographic transition to Los Angeles in the mid-70s. Baldwin's show also features Miles Davis bumper music.
Crazy from the heat
I liked the Chick-Fil-A restaurant chain a lot better when their anti-gay agenda was kind of hidden. Now it's not. Dan Cathy, president of the Georgia-based fast food company, tells the Baptist Press that they're "guilty as charged" for supporting "the biblical definition of the family unit." This means no queers.
Cathy added, "We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives." He neglected to elaborate upon why he chooses to have only one wife when Bible stars like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Solomon each took on several at the same time.
I haven't decided if I'm going to stop eating at Chick-Fil-A, but you ladies might want to think twice about frequenting a business that supports biblical definitions of family. If you get raped in the parking lot, you'll have to marry the guy.
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I now only listen to two music radio stations in Des Moines, in this order-- K-Jam 89.3, "The Heart & Soul of the City," and KIOA Oldies 93.3. This is a new personal policy: I will not listen to a station unless there's a chance that the next song played will be "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire.
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This afternoon at the library, I saw a biography of former Mets and Reds pitcher Tom Seaver, entitled "The Last Icon." I did not bother to thumb through the book, but I left the library still thinking about it, even as I had three other books tucked beneath my arm. I am officially stumped: In what Earthly context could Tom Seaver be considered "The Last Icon"?
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The 2011 work of fiction, "The Art of Fielding," is so, so damn good. It's authored by first-time novelist Chad Harbach, and it landed last year on the New York Times' list of the ten best fiction books of the year. In one of the story threads, the author seems to place the St. Louis Cardinals professional baseball organization, and a character inspired by their great shortstop Ozzie Smith, on a sort of pedestal of idealism, and that portrayal permeates throughout. Chad Harbach should be invited to Busch Stadium and given the Stan Musial treatment on the field before a game, but alas, this will not happen, probably because one of the other main story lines of the book involves a consensual homosexual relationship between a college president and a 22-year-old student.
The last paragraph of the book, incidentally, is my favorite last paragraph of any book, but also alas, you will have to read the entire book before the last paragraph to appreciate its context.
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This oppressive heat is not good for fostering fellowship in the neighborhood. Like all of my neighbors evidently, I come home from work each day and dart immediately towards my air conditioned unit within the building. The windows and shades stay drawn pretty much day and night. I haven't seen any of my neighbors in weeks.
My optimistic cynical dreaming
The best case scenario for the 2012 presidential election seems to be shaping up nicely: Wide swaths of eligible American voters stay home on election day, thumbing their nose at Obama, Romney, and the Republicrat oligarchy of corruption, a number of voters too large for the traditional news media not to acknowledge.
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Here comes
the Pete Rose reality show on TLC. Says the Hit King, "It's not going to be classless."
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Recent progress at State College in the movement to reverse the hagiography of Joe Paterno? Penn State still has a varsity football team. Paterno, the late child rapist enabler, still has a statue. Paterno is still depicted on a mural across the street from the school's campus, but the mural artist has removed the halo from above Paterno's head in his painting. Baby steps.
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The internet is ablaze with ideas about what to do with the Paterno statue. My favorite suggestion: Cover it up for 13 years.
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Uma Thurman and her husband Arpad Busson are the proud new parents of a baby girl born on Sunday. Busson is the father of two other children by model Elle Macpherson. That's how you do it.
Penn State's "total disregard" for the safety of children
It should be a foregone conclusion now that the Penn State football team would get the death penalty from the NCAA in the wake of today's release of the Freeh Report. Despite claims by the Joe Paterno family that there are no new facts revealed with this 267-page document, we actually now know...
-Head coach Paterno knew about formal child rape allegations against assistant Jerry Sandusky in 1998, four years before the shower rape witnessed by an assistant coach. On a bizarre side note, we have confirmation that Paterno wasalso lying when he said in a hearing that he had never heard of a man being raped.
-A year later, in '99, Paterno wanted a retiring Sandusky to stay on the payroll as "Volunteer Position Director- Positive Action for Youth" (a retroactively-hilarious job title). According to emails between the president and the athletic director at that time, "Joe did give (Sandusky) the option to continue to coach as long as he was the coach." Then Sandusky received a lump-sum $168,000 retirement payment from the university president.
-In '01, Penn State's president and AD wanted to go to the police, but changed their minds after a meeting with Joe Paterno. Of course we don't know what was said at that private meeting, but I would be curious to hear anybody's alternative to my admittedly-bold hypothesis: that Paterno told them to drop it.
-The university president testified in '01 that he didn't know about the 1998 investigation into Sandusky, but records show he was emailing the athletic director about it in '98.
-Joe Paterno did know how to use email and used it. His family is lying when they claim he didn't.
-Penn State officials failed to comply with federal law for two decades. A piece of federal legislation called the Clery Act requires university officials to report incidents concerning sexual assault to the university police department for the purpose of publishing such statistics for public access.
Despite this 13-year, institutional conspiracy to hide the child raping crimes of the second-in-command of the varsity football team, Penn State still might avoid the death penalty, presumably because they managed to avoid more severe crimes like giving money to their players for laundry.
Selfishly, I'm a little pissed about having been dragged into this whole thing. A couple years ago, my cable TV and internet provider began saddling me with the Big 10 Network. Now, upwards of one-third of my monthly cable bill will probably go towards paying off civil and criminal lawsuits against a state university with a $4.6 billion budget and a $1.8 billion endowment.
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Twenty years from now, when people point out to their friends the fact that
Game 6 of the 2011 World Series lost the ESPY award for "Best Game" to the San Francisco/New Orleans NFL divisional round playoff game, I predict one of two responses--
a) "I have absolutely no recollection of that football game."
b) "What the fuck is an ESPY?"
Real Sports with Chris Moeller
In the new EA Sports video game "NCAA Football 13," you can evidently take some of the great players of college football's history and place them on other teams. The pop-up advertisement I saw for this new feature on Gawker showed Ohio State's Eddie George Sim-ing his way downfield in a Michigan uniform. Ooh, see what they did there? Isn't that clever? A big rivalry switch for the fans. I guess you can do anything you want with these players when you're stealing their names and likenesses. Eddie George will get paid zero dollars in return for his contribution to this popular game even though EA (Electronic Arts) reported $4.143 billion in profit in the fiscal year that ended in March. This legal peculiarity stems from the fact that it's against NCAA rules for athletes to profit from participating in sports, chaining them to their bogus "student-athlete" status even long after they've left school. (George finished at Ohio State in 1996.)
Several of the more prominent names-- Heisman Trophy winners-- are now being used in the game, but even the other supposedly "anonymous" players have inspired Sims. The "players" in the video game match the real players' height, weight, race, along with other physical features. (Check out Archie Griffin's sideburns! Another ooh!). Their video game performance is based on real-life statistical achievements. Magnificently, EA is currently being sued in federal court over this prostitution as part of a class-action suit brought by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon, former college football player Sam Keller, and the great Jim Brown.
If you buy this video game-- or any product marketed by EA, you are supporting identity theft and slave labor.
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Brilliant PR move by Des Moines' Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones: She announces she's a 29-year-old virgin, and soon after she
picks up an endorsement deal with "family friendly" Proctor & Gamble. Fully grown women should not have to shun the very human and loving act of sexual intercourse in order to cash in with endorsements so I'm starting a movement to financially-reward companies that publicly support the sexually-active. I'm calling it "Loose Change for Loose Women," and I need
your help to make this a thing.
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In recent weeks, baseball has experienced a rash of marginal Hall of Famers coming out publicly in opposition to admitted PED users joining them in Cooperstown. First, there was
Goose Gossage, who was inducted into the Hall as a relief pitcher in 2008 even though he's 19th all-time in saves, and saves have only been a statistic in baseball since 1969. Then it was
Reggie Jackson, a 1993 HOF even though he's a lifetime .262 hitter with more strikeouts than hits, and more strikeouts, in fact, than any of the other 17,000-some players in the league's 132 year history. What's funny about their comments, besides the fact that both of these 60-something-year-old former players were charter members of baseball's infamous amphetamine-popping generation, and played their best ball during a decade (the '70s) when former big league hurler Tom House says every team in baseball had "six or seven" pitchers already "fiddling" with steroids and Human Growth Hormone, is that you just know both of these former jocks have now graduated to Viagra in their private lives.
Reggie used to call himself "the straw that stirs the drink," and at 66 years old, don't you wonder about his straw?
The All-England Club
Merv Griffin would often have "fabulous theme shows" on his old daytime chatfest. In the 1970s, you might catch a Merv that had all Davises as guests-- Bette, followed by Sammy, followed by Clive, that type of thing. I'm doing something similar today- a post-4th of July tribute to the country from which we liberated ourselves.
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First, the Libor interest rate scandal. If you've taken any of the training exams I administer at my place of employment, you know that Libor is an acronym for London Inter Bank Offer Rate. It's essentially the rate at which banks are borrowing money from each other at a given time in the money markets in London. It's a global index little known by Americans, yet it's tied deeply to our entire system of variable-rate lending in the U.S.-- mortgages, student loans, etc. It turns out that the biggest financial players in England have been criminally manipulating the rate.
As usual, Matt Taibbi can be counted on to explain this latest example of Wall Street corruption... oops, I guess this scandal doesn't technically belong to Wall Street. Force of habit. A 2008 email from former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond has been released showing that executives had permission and encouragement from the Bank of England, and even from high up in Her Majesty's government, to rig Libor rates downward, presenting information falsely to the world about the health and stability of the British economy. The email suggests that Barclays was just one of many British banks engaged in this chicanery, and may have even been bringing up the rear. Barclays got noticed, it would seem, because they were actually last to the party.
As promised,
here's Taibbi, appearing with Eliot Spitzer on Current TV.
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I'm going to give you a sentence, and I want you to judge its contents on how large a sports story you think such a sentence would deserve to be in this country. Okay, here's the sentence: "The American won her fifth Wimbledon title, matching that of her sister." (Pause for your thoughtful evaluation.)
Of course, I'm talking about Serena Williams, who pulled off this feat yesterday. Only two women in the Open history of the tournament have won more titles than the five won by both Serena and her older sister Venus. Of these four top women-- the others are Martina Navratilova (9) and Steffi Graff (7)-- only Venus and Serena were born in the United States, and just think: they grew up one year apart living in the same state, the same city, the same neighborhood, yes, even the same house! What are the odds? After Serena's victory over Agnieszka Radwanska on Saturday, the two sisters then proceeded to win their fifth-ever Wimbledon doubles championship. The sisters have faced each other eight times in the finals of a Grand Slam event. Serena has a combined 29 Grand Slam titles (14 singles, 13 women's doubles, 2 mixed-doubles), Venus has won 20 (7 singles, 13 women's doubles).
Did Venus and Serena have some sort of unfair cultural advantage in childhood that allowed them to progress to this point of wild achievement at the respective ages of 31 and 30 in what has historically been a very socially-exclusive sport? Actually, it's the opposite. They grew up playing on public tennis courts, coached primarily by their father, who only picked up the game himself around the time the two girls were born.
You're probably picking up my point. I think we should strongly consider the Williams sisters' achievements to be the greatest story in the history of American sports. So why does it not seem to be? Why do Venus and Serena get far less media attention than even another pair of sporting siblings, Peyton and Eli Manning? Why do they get so little love from the American sports media, and from the people in general, despite being nearly perfect role models for the nation's youth, boys and girls alike-- dedicated, persevering, poised, inventive, warm, and expressive? Why does Serena get a harsh public scolding for shouting at a line judge when John McEnroe rode the same, and much more frequent type of on-court behavior to the peak of American sporting celebrity and idolatry? They've been subject to some of the most ridiculous charges, like the one about how they throw matches to each other, though the fact that that one ever surfaced tells you how dominant the two sisters were in the game at one time.
Venus has led the way in the gender equity pay movement in tennis, helping to force Wimbledon and the French Open to finally agree to join us in the 21st century. Despite already being financially set for life, Venus received her associates degree from the Art Institute of Florida in 2007, and is currently pursuing her MBA. Serena joins her in her charity work, and has even opened a secondary school in Kenya. They have overcome terrific personal setbacks. Their sister, Yetunde Price, was shot to death in 2003. In claiming their newest Wimbledon titles yesterday, Venus completes a comeback from an energy-sapping illness called Sjogren's syndrome diagnosed in 2010, and in the same two years' time, Serena had made her way back from blood clots in her lungs and two operations after cutting her feet.
Venus and Serena are rich and well-known, but the extent of Americans' indifference towards them, and our failure to acknowledge them collectively for their remarkable achievements, leaves me cold. At Wimbledon this morning, the television cameras keep turning to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, seated in the front row of the Federer/Murray match, but as far as I'm concerned, the ladies of the American Ideal are in the air today flying home from London, their luggage loaded with ever more hardware, and both women in possession of more spirit, strength, and beauty than any tabloid princess.
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I wish I could have been at Wimbledon this week. Anytime John McEnroe and Charles Barkley are together in the same place, you just really wanna be a part of that.
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You've gotta hand it to the Brits for their magnanimity. Wimbledon is a major cultural event in their country even though Andy Murray is attempting today to be the first native son to win the "gentlemen's" singles title since 1936, and a Brit hasn't won the ladies' tournament in 35 years (Virginia Wade in 1977). I can only imagine how unpopular a sporting event would become in the United States if our competitors never won. This is why NASCAR raced past Formula One in popularity.
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Banksy, on his chosen vocation of 'art terrorist': "Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head."
The Great Andy Griffith
The artistic contribution of Andy Griffith to American life was tremendous. His show still plays, it seems, about a half-dozen times a day on television, though it's been more than a half-century since its debut. If you catch me in the right frame of mind on any given day, you'll hear me call it the best. There's nothing else like it among the best shows in television history in that it's truly about country people. Think of it, even shows set in similarly bucolic settings as Mayberry, North Carolina, shows like "Northern Exposure," "Newhart," and "Green Acres," are, at least in their most basic plotting, stories about city people adjusting to country life. These are some of my favorite shows, and they share the Griffith show's fondness for small town life, but city people that watch those are never asked to fully identify. Each of the principal characters on the Griffith show had lived in that town their entire life.
The older I get, the more I appreciate the very unique environment in which I was raised. My hometown had a population of fewer than a thousand people, and growing up in a farmhouse, along a gravel road, five miles out of town, there was even a distinction made at times between "town kids" and "country kids." (In town, they had cable television!) So I'm not lying my way into a club here. This is as countrified as a childhood can get.
I'm a full generation behind the Andy Griffith Show. Little Ronny Howard was born less than two years after my mother. By the time I was Opie's age, Ron's Richie Cunningham had already been married to Lori Beth for four seasons on "Happy Days." (Though they got married too early.) I remember the Griffith show being on daily, and that was still our life. Imagine that. A show about small-town life perhaps best remembered today as already being anachronistic when the original episodes were airing in the '60s was the life I was living two decades later. In Newhall, we could play and ride our bikes as far as our little bodies would take us. You knew every store on the only commercial street and the people that worked in each one. Violence never interrupted my childhood. In fact, I remember being completely surprised the first time I saw a gun at somebody's house, kept high up on the wall in the garage. They simply were not part of my childhood in anything but the most remote way. The people in Newhall, like the ones in Mayberry, were warm and friendly, and we knew them well. Among the older generations, the traditional church music, like the kind Andy Griffith cherished in his real life, was still a thing. Newhall was Mayberry. With bowling.
Griffith was just a beloved man, a man of great humanity in his public presentation, the Stan Musial of television. He was the real thing in a rather phony world. I try not to ever confuse that genuineness and humility, though, with our traditional ideas of "wholesomeness." That word was long ago transformed into a political buzzword, a complete inauthenticity. Mayberry doesn't survive to me in that way. It survives because it was true in respect to human kindness and folly-- and funny as shit. I'm not too parochial to believe that Mayberrys can't also exist within urban neighborhoods. There are men and women of Andy Taylor's character walking around in our largest cities, and in worlds that are as black as Mayberry was white. Griffith presented us the world he knew, and made it a place of love and grace that any of the rest of us would want to call home. Newhall and I have been separated now for nearly twenty years, but now Andy Griffith is gone, and Newhall has come flooding back in my mind.
Graffiti wisdom
Once upon a time there was a Bear and a Bee who lived in a wood and were the best of friends. All summer long the Bee collected nectar from morning to night while the Bear lay on his back basking in the long grass. When winter came the bear realised he had nothing to eat and thought to himself "I hope that busy little Bee will share some of his honey with me'. But the Bee was nowhere to be found- he had died of a stress induced coronary disease.
- Banksy, the side of a Notting Hill dumpster, London 2005
Happy mid-week day off to all.
Finally, results are in from CERN on their Large Hadron Collider
A group of European Sheldon Coopers are apparently close to "reach(ing) the mountaintop" in answering some of the most fundamental questions about how the universe exists. According to reports, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is
close to identifying the "god particle," or Higgs boson, the discovery of which would explain why the matter created in the Big Bang has mass. In a CERN background paper, scientists explain that, without this particle, "the universe would be a very different place.... no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and no people." We'll know if they've been successful when a pair of separate research teams combine their results and when the Associated Press stops capitalizing the word "god" in the phrase "God particle."
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British theoretical physician John Ellis says that at least one physicist-blogger has already completed the task of finding such a "hint" of the particle's existence. A public unveiling of the data is scheduled later this year. I love that that phrase now exists-- 'physicist-blogger.'
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While I found this entire story very interesting indeed, I think I'm going to wait and see what Sean Hannity has to say about it.
