The Chris Moeller Archives

Mac & Charlie solve the racial problem

You might have heard this week that the National Football League is considering a rule in which a 15-yard penalty would be assessed for use of the word "nigger" on the field. This is a brilliant idea. It creates a real-world, concrete solution for bigotry.

Of course I'm being facetious. It's stupid. 15 yards. Let's see... that makes it worse than holding, not as bad as intentional grounding, equally as bad as roughing the kicker. The NFL believes it has the whole problem figured out-- racism as bad manners. There's no room for context with a very literal-minded NFL, presumably no difference between a racist white player spitting the epithet at a black man, and a black man congratulating a teammate with the phrase "my nigga." It's confusing the symptoms for the disease, attempting to suppress the shit we don't have the guts to deal with openly.

The NFL should ditch the entire initiative. The recent events they're responding to with this public action didn't happen on the field anyway. Philadelphia Eagles' receiver Riley Cooper, a white man, used the word at a country music concert. The video of such was uploaded onto YouTube. The Miami Dolphins' Richie Incognito used it as a frequent slur when he was bullying his teammate Jonathan Martin, but that behavior happened on the practice field and in the locker room and on Martin's voicemail, not on the field of competition on Sunday. My guess is that even in the heat of the most bitter gridiron battle, NFL players are not routinely throwing this word at each other. My proposed alternative is to keep things simple. Biracial teams, of which all 32 fit the category: Police yourselves. White guys: Never use the word. Black guys: Do what Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Rock do when they want to use the word. Go to Paul Mooney and get his permission.

Now it seems to me that the word the league really has a problem with is "fag." It will be interesting to see how that one plays out later this year, and whether or not an edict against it ever makes it onto the formal agenda of the Rules Committee.

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I am a partner in a biracial marriage, but I prefer the word "hetero-racial." Most of the rest of you are in what we call a "homo-racial" marriage.

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Conventional wisdom now is that “nerds” are cool. And I'm sure I agree. But they always give the credit for this to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, a pair of nerds that became extremely rich in the field of technology. I don’t think it’s that. The link between “cool” and having money is historically-tenuous at best. “Nerds,” that is, your science and technology types, have become cool because a certain separate segment of the American population has become anti-science in recent years. They know who they are. Being a nerd tends to cast one towards the enlightened side of issues as widely-varied as gay rights, organic farming, climate change, and the young Earth debate. I hated science in school, and I'm a technophobe, but still I dig the fact that the experts always seem to be on the progressive side.

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Speaking of race relations, Clarence Thomas sure is a putz, isn't he? He made the preposterous claim in West Palm Beach, Florida earlier this month that, when he was growing up in Savannah, Georgia during the 1950s and '60s, attending an all-white school, "rarely did the issue of race come up." Being the only black kid must also have been the reason there was never a line in front of him at the hallway drinking fountain.

Yes, indeed, everything you read about the South during that period in history backs up Clarence Thomas' contention that nobody there noticed your race. That's why he was able to date white women. Oops, I guess not without being hung by his neck before a picnicking gathering of white folks. Thomas' wife, a white woman, didn't become his wife until the '80s. By that time, his hustle was becoming that unique black man that even a white reactionary could love. You have to give the man credit for professional acumen. He embraced the reality that there's always an opening for a black man that's willing to tell white men exactly what they want to hear, and to make them feel enlightened as they listen.

The man who may very well go down in history as America's Uncle Tom played the most powerful and cynical right-wing extremists into planting him onto the bench of the nation’s highest court, and there he still is a quarter-century later, judge for life, and for all of them, I'm sure, never a regret.

But this past Saturday, we passed the auspicious eight-year anniversary of the last time Thomas asked a question during an oral argument before the court. Two colleagues, Sonia Sotomayor, sworn in in 2009, and Elena Kagan, sworn in in 2010, have never heard him ask a question. This fact is absolutely extraordinary, possibly the most ignored Washington scandal of our generation. He just sits on the bench during these untelevised proceedings (which is another scandal), sometimes apparently almost nodding off, doing the political bidding of plutocrats and disgracing the chair of his predecessor Thurgood Marshall, a man whose legacy he was handpicked to destroy because of his race and his willingness to do it. It was the same dishonest manipulation they used when Ronald Reagan, a one-time New Dealer, was tabbed to destroy the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt. Thomas is a total disgrace and an incompetent.

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Now when hear a football fan say that a college player is “coming out junior year,” they need to better clarify the statement.

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Does it really matter if I continue using my mouthwash after its expiration date? What’s the worst that could happen? Is it going to become more poisonous?

posted by CM @ 8:15 PM 2 comments

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon

Jimmy Fallon is the man who took the innovative talk show franchise Late Night on NBC, fronted first by David Letterman and then by Conan O'Brien, and turned it into the type of show in which the host gives away free sponsor gifts to every member of the studio audience to earn cheap applause. He won't have to do that much to wreck Jay Leno's Tonight Show.

NBC has found the perfect "company man" to walk in the chin-prints of Leno. General Electric, one of NBC's parents and one of the world's largest air polluters and producers of toxic waste, has jumped on board with a heavy-tie-in advertising campaign for Tonight: "Great ideas come after dark," including a running bit on the show called "GE's Fallon-ventions." If you haven't seen it, it's a ripoff of Letterman's long-running "Kid Scientists" segment except that Jimmy wears a lab coat and it's sponsored by GE, the corporate boss Johnny Carson consistently ridiculed on his Tonight Show, sarcastically calling it "the company with a heart."

Fallon gleefully caters to that teen demographic so cherished by advertisers, acting starstruck around every single guest he has on the show. The kids are eating it up, too. At least the ones that are really into giggling. Every comedy bit has at its center some cultural touchstone for teenagers today and their sense of identity-- YouTube, Twitter, hashtags, video parodies, celebrities performing much-loved television theme songs. I'm sure that NBC affiliates are going ape these days over the young eyeballs Jimmy's irony-free show in an earlier time slot promises to share with their stale local nightly newscasts. I haven't seen an entertainment act suck up this much to one generation of young people since Sha Na Na.

Good thing we've still got Dave, and Jimmy Kimmel and Conan to continue on after he goes. Fallon is unwatchable.

posted by CM @ 7:05 PM 0 comments

Zimmerman, Dunn, and the deeply racist country that houses them

It is still not safe to possess black skin in the United States, a nation constructed upon the terrorism of Africans. This reality of racism runs deeper than just the presence of racist citizens, although we are certainly many. Worse, we are institutionally racist, a country possessing two separate and very unequal systems of justice.

We're not simply racist because George Zimmerman took off with a gun after an unarmed black kid that was busy minding his own business. We're racist because a police department looked at the facts of the shooting, and didn't think there was enough there to even charge Zimmerman with a crime. The federal government ultimately had to intervene for charges to be filed.

We're not simply racist because another terrified white man with a gun in 2012 shot at a car of unarmed black kids he saw them as "thugs" because they were playing their music too loud. (17-year-olds playing their music too loud! Holy shit!) We're racist because a Florida jury, against all rationality, failed to find the man guilty of murdering Jordan Davis. Michael Dunn was instead found guilty last week of only attempted murder and a gun charge. As Professor Angela Ards of Southern Methodist University summarized it, "The chilling social logic of this illogical legal verdict is that Dunn has been found guilty of missing the other black boys in the car, of failing to kill them all."

The greatest fear in White America is and has always been having to deal with a black man or black woman on equal terms.

The lives of black people here have little to no value. The system teaches us that. Jordan Davis becomes the "thug" Dunn perceived him to be when Dunn is given legal permission to murder him. The presence of Dunn's racial anxiety justifies his violent action. Young black men are most often the target of white racial anxiety, but black women may be lower still in the caste system, the most economically-disadvantaged, and educationally-disadvantaged set of citizens in the population. They are not immune to the violence their brothers face either. Nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride was shot in Dearborn Heights, Michigan three months ago after she was injured in a car accident and knocked on a neighbor's door for assistance. The home's owner, a 54-year-old white man named Theodore Paul Wafer, fired a shot gun blast through a screen door, hitting Renisha in the face.

The peaceful reaction of black men and women to this sort of systemic violence and to the recent verdicts by courts clearly ill-equipped to protect them, inspires me to no end. Their resolve and strength is certainly more than white institutional America is owed. Whether young black people turn to violent self-defense to protect themselves against a predatory state, or choose to adopt principals of nonviolence, we kill them just the same.

Yes, there is a crisis of violence in black communities as well as white. This is about divided justice. Zimmerman and Dunn are more than just a pair of high-profile examples of white-on-black crime, of white men killing black boys, they are instructive of our hypocrises and failings. The idea that a jury of his peers would have acquitted Zimmerman of shooting Trayvon Martin if the races of the perpetrator and victim were reversed is absolutely inconceivable. The idea that Dunn would have avoided a Murder One conviction if he was a black man shooting into a car of white boys, instead of the other way around, is laughable.

The law is colorblind, as written. That's a legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. But the realities of the system in practice-- the presence in fact of two wholly-separate systems, is and will continue to be another mountaintop altogether. Claims of colorblindness in the Zimmerman and Dunn courtrooms, and in their jury boxes, are denials of a deeply-stained national heritage. That Thomas Jefferson is still considered first and best for his writings regarding democratic principles, and not for the contemporaneous reality of his life as a slave-owning rapist, is white privilege at its very essence.

At the very core of who we are as a people, their lives are simply worth less. And nothing here will be right until that fact gets resolved.

posted by CM @ 8:09 PM 0 comments

The kind of winner he is, A St. Valentines poem by Mike Lupica

 
And now for the Derek Jeter victory lap...

Mr. Yankee for near the last two decades has announced that the 2014 baseball season will be his last. He's been everything to everybody, and this without a sliver of personality to his name. The Houston Chronicle's Richard Justice is now telling the world that the prince of corporate cool is "it could be argued... the greatest player ever."

Of course that is stupid. Just a half a decade ago, when he was just past his prime, a researcher at the Wharton School at Penn determined Jeter was the worst defensive player in the game. I will grant you that he is even a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, whatever that means anymore, but he has never even won an MVP award. So come on. It exhausts the mind to consider that Jeter might be the all-time best ??, or that Justice has a Hall of Fame ballot mailed to him every year. Making this sort of declaration should be considered a professional embarrassment, on par with casting a Hall of Fame vote for Paul Lo Duca, Richie Sexson, or Mike Timlin.

Derek Jeter is Paul Molitor. Nothing more.

But, piling it on, Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci announced that Jeter "represented everything a superstar should be" and declared that "he understood from day one that it was better to be defined by championships than by statistics." Good. That helps when you can prove a baseball player's excellence without resorting to statistics. It's unbelievably cynical to think that Derek Jeter is exceptional or unusual in this regard. It's just empty prattle.

And New York Daily News newsdouche Mike Lupica wrote this week that "there will never be a Yankee that matters more than Derek Jeter." He wrote that Jeter is "as much a star" as any Yankee ever, which is, like Justice's, at its deepest essence, a preposterously ignorant, direct comment regarding and disrespecting Babe Ruth and the entirety of baseball history.

Lupica, in case you don't also know, cashed in big in the afterglow of the Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa home run race of 1998, offering his insights in a book entitled "Summer of '98," even though he was completely peripheral to the story, witnessing first-hand virtually none of the race. The columnist and ESPN talking-head incidentally now curses the names McGwire and Sosa as frauds, leaves them off his Hall of Fame ballot each year, but-- can you believe it?-- has yet to give back a single dime to any of the suckers that bought his book.

In honor of Grantland Mike, I'd like to now present a list of Derek Jeter teammates that were named in the Mitchell Report:

Ricky Bones 1996
Kevin Brown 2004-05
Jose Canseco 2000
Roger Clemens 1999-2003, 2007
Bobby Estalella 2001
Jason Giambi 2002-08
Jason Grimsley 1999-2000
Glenallen Hill 2000
Darren Holmes 1998
David Justice 2000-01
Chuck Knoblauch 1998-2001
Dan Naulty 1999
Denny Neagle 2000
Andy Pettite 1995-2003, 2007-10, 2012-13
Gary Sheffield 2004-06
Mike Stanton 1997-2002, 2005
Randy Velarde 1987-95, 2001
Ron Villone 2006-07
Rondell White 2002
Todd Williams 2001

By a country mile, there were more Yankees listed in the report than representatives from any other team (and this list of luminaries doesn't even include Jeter's long-time infield mate, Alex Rodriguez, who drove the Yankees' and Jeter's last championship team in 2009 and apparently never met an anti-aging drug he didn't want to inject into either his arm or buttocks). On the Mitchell list alone, there are nine players representing the 2000 World Championship Yankees team. Am I being clear about my point here? There are only 25 players on a baseball team, and that number again from one team in one championship season alone is nine. Good for Derek Baseball for not being on the list. I personally suspect that Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, for example, are drug cheats despite no evidence whatsoever and only whisper allegations ever against them, but Mr. Yankee-- despite the PED user at the adjoining locker, the two over here, and the three in the corner by the hamper-- I know for sure is clean. Jeets drew his strength instead from fucking actresses and always Helping the Yankees Reach Their Goal of Winning Another Championship.

Yes, Jeter also answers to "Mr. Clutch," but his career batting average and OPS in the postseason (.308/.838) is almost exactly the same as the regular season (.312/.828). In reality, Jeter became "Mr. Clutch" because he played in the only city where a man is allowed to become "Mr. Clutch." He basically beat out Bernie Williams and Ray Knight for the title. Also while playing for one of the home teams in the Big Apple, Reggie Jackson once and forever became known as "Mr. October" after he hit three home runs in a single World Series game, but Cardinal Albert Pujols matched that feat in 2011. That same year, Cardinal David Freese hit a World Series elimination-game-tying ninth-inning, two-out, two-run triple, and a game-winning 11th-inning home run in the same game. Cardinal Lou Brock, for his career, collected 34 hits and a .391 batting average in 21 career World Series games (Reggie: 35 hits and a .357 batting average in 27 W.S. games), and Cardinal Bob Gibson once won seven straight, complete World Series games-- in one of them striking out 17 men.

So now I'm thinking of taking this baseball season off as a fan to avoid the parade. In his retirement statement, Jeter thanked, first, "the Boss," George Steinbrenner, but then he forgot to thank Richard Nixon. That annoyed me. Later this year, during the final lap, the gifts will start rolling in. He'll be given an ugly painting in Detroit, a pair of boots in Dallas, and a hug from Jason Giambi, wherever he plays now. (Quick aside: Seriously, isn't the designated hitter rule a joke?) Commenters at Deadspin, no doubt Yankees fans, are hoping that at least one team will give Jeter a glove that he can actually use in a game, and another reader there has suggested that perhaps the Minnesota Twins will give him a rocking chair made out of the baseballs he didn't get to in the hole.

His last game at Yankee Stadium-- and the last one at Boston's Fenway Park-- will be nationally televised. But that second one's misleading-- all Yankees/Red Sox games are nationally televised. In the Bronx, during that last home series, local fans might even fill the box seats. It's the perfect time for Jeets to go. He presumes to be healthier than he has been for the last two years. He won't have to silently stew over A-Rod's presence during his final summer because Bud Selig has had him chained to a Frigidaire upright freezer in a basement in Miami. (Isn't A-Rod's year-long suspension a lovely coincidence?) Next year, it will be Alex's Yankee team at last.

This year, soak it in. Embrace the grand pronouncements as they flood in, and speaking of floods, don't hold back the tears. Gather ye rosebuds before Brendan Ryan takes over for the Yankees at short.

posted by CM @ 11:31 PM 1 comments

The courage of Sam

It’s been a disgrace to see NFL and team officials, almost all of them anonymous, project their own prejudices upon their employees. Since draft prospect Michael Sam’s announcement that he is gay, tweets and comments from NFL players have been 100% positive. Only front office people-- executives, coaches, and league personnel, people like former head coach Herm Edwards-- have been making those traditionally ugly statements alleging the “distraction” and "baggage" of a gay player.

There’s nothing like middle-age men telling us what their Generation Y employees think and feel. "We've got no problem with gay players on our teams, mind you. Don't even think of accusing us of bigotry-- or charging employment discrimination-- if we each pass on Sam in the draft come April. The players in the locker room, maybe..." Which is garbage. Certainly some players have a problem with gay people. We all know that the sport of football attracts a few. But the few that would have a problem seem to be wise enough to shut the hell up about it since the announcement. The Neanderthals seem to instinctively realize that they are the ones that now threaten to become a “distraction.”

The most predictive evidence of a professional team’s reaction on this matter is the evidence that Michael Sam brings with him to the table. He has already played a full season while being out to his college teammates. At the University of Missouri during his senior season, the team won twelve games and lost only two playing in the best conference in the nation. Sam was named that conference's defensive player of the year and a first-team All-American. A teammate and friend named L'Damian Washington stated his belief this week that Sam's great season was actually due in part to having lifted a "big boulder off his back" with his preseason announcement to the team. The teammates weren't distracted. They didn't keep their distance. It wasn't just brought up once and forgotten either. A teammate on the offensive line, Elvis Fisher, described the dynamics this way, "I practiced across from him for three years and it was just war. You don't set out wanting to know each other's life, but you spend so much time with each other you can't help but know them. I knew and I love the guy."

Professional players would be no different. Sam had dinner with a handful of active NFL players before his announcement. They are more than ready to accept an openly gay teammate, just as Jackie Robinson’s teammates were ready when observers in 1947 were likewise claiming that his future teammates would be troubled and, I'm sure, "distracted" by the presence of a player with black skin. Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers, of course, ended his rookie campaign playing in the World Series.

Now, NFL coaches and executives might be something entirely different. A scouting report that says Sam is physically undersized and "without a true position" on defense is starting to amplify even though there was no team in the NCAA's best conference last year that found a way to stop Sam from consistently getting to their quarterback. Will these NFL teams be up to the challenge of history-- and of their own honor-- on draft day? As they say around Sam’s alma mater, show me.

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You've probably already made the connection that Michael Sam missed out on making the CM Blog 2014 “Cool List.” He came out as gay in plenty of time to break down barriers at the NFL draft in April, but made his announcement four days after we posted the list he surely would have occupied otherwise. Next year.

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Incidentally, do ya think this guy would be responsible for the sale of just a few replica jerseys this year?

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Unrelated note: Thank you Shirley Temple for everything you did for curly hair.

posted by CM @ 6:41 PM 1 comments

The 2014 CM Blog "Cool List"

What's "cool" in the new year? If you're unsure, see below. Just missing the cut were Senator Mitch McConnell, Ben Bernanke, and Woody Allen.


Pussy Riot- Clever, angry, poised, courageous, and gorgeous. These dissidents of the Putin oligarchy, and victims of the modern Russian show trials, have been much more than one could have even dared hope as leftist global icons. They are the first annual coolest of the cool.

 

Edward Snowden- My generation's Daniel Ellsberg, but battling a more hostile and dangerous enemy.

 
Lupita Nyong’o- Hollywood is intimidated.

 
Kain Colter- The Northwestern University quarterback has led the movement to get college football players certified as union laborers by the National Labor Relations Board. It might mean the end of college sports as we know them, and wouldn’t that be terrific?

 
Boyd Crowder and Raylan Givens- Which one's cooler-- the morally ambivalent man in the black hat or the morally ambivalent man in the white hat? Shit, I still can't decide.


Malala Yousafzai- This 16-year-old is absolutely no joke.


Punitive traffic jams- I would have otherwise thought it was snow that caused me to be late to work this morning, but now I smell conspiracies from every crevice of civic life. Actually, Iowa governor Terry Branstad would never even think of engaging in this type of tomfoolery. He has a need for speed.


Heroin- First, that guy from Glee, now Philip Seymour Hoffman. Goodbye, crank. Heroin is back- and the suburbs got 'em!

 
King Dave- He's about to outlast Leno in the Carson slot. For the second time.

 
Justin Bieber- What, he doesn't have street cred now?


Ronan Farrow and his father- Look at these photos side-by-side and then tell me that Mia Farrow's son is not the progeny of Frank Sinatra, but rather Woody Allen. No way in hell. And in escaping the shame of being related to Allen, the kid has better timing than Sinatra belting out "I've Got You Under My Skin."

 
The Girl Scouts- Keep doin' your thing, girl scouts.


Al Jarreau- Always cool

posted by CM @ 8:16 PM 0 comments

The Fading Wonders

The Houston Astrodome has just been added to the National Registry of Historic Places, but Major League Baseball isn't one to boast about such things. League officials are not actually the preservationists they're always accused of being. "The Eighth Wonder of the World" opened on April 9th, 1965 before much fanfare and an audience of baseball fans that included Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The architectural marvel of design and purpose thus became the first-ever indoor baseball stadium, which made it also the site of the first baseball ever played in air conditioning, and a year later, the first ever played on an artificial surface. The home team, which was renamed the Astros after previously having been known as the Colt 45's, left for new digs in 1999. By then, the dome's other principal tenant, the National Football League's Oilers, had already bolted for Tennessee.

posted by CM @ 12:54 PM 0 comments