TR cleans up New York
I've just finished reading Richard Zacks' 2012 book "Island of Vice," a chronicle of the two years (1895-1896) that the great American comic character Theodore Roosevelt served as New York City Police Commissioner. This guy really believed his own shit. He was a reformer on that job in the sense that he consolidated police power into a single commissioner and declared war on Sunday alcohol consumption. Not consumption by all New Yorkers, however, as you might assume. Just because working men could expect arrest for drinking a beer or a whiskey at a tavern on their only day off during the week, Roosevelt's fellow society swells could still spend their Sabbath swilling champagne at Delmonico's, the Union League, the Harvard Club, or the Knickerbocker.
As the most powerful man in the New York Police Department for those two years, the Great Progressive did little to change the city. Tammany Hall-style corruption returned-- and thanks to Roosevelt, the power of the police baton had been institutionalized. He had the peculiar vision to see that saloon keepers, street peddlers, gamblers, and brothel madams were a greater threat to democracy than were the gilded robber barons living in the mansions along Fifth Avenue. An inflexible prude, Roosevelt was always a man of his class for his class, who accused every proponent of the silver standard over the gold standard in those days of being alternately ignorant or criminal. He said they violated the Commandment "Thou Shalt Not Steal," and he called farmers "the basest set in the land." His crusade against the "social evils" in New York City disproved the principles of Prohibition a generation before they began getting disproved at the nation level. He was unapologetic. For his stewardship, he was awarded the governorship of New York, the vice presidency, and later, after an assassin's bullet felled William McKinley, the presidency. From there, it was a full-scale imperial assault by the U.S. military upon the rest of the globe.
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Ouch.
More bad news from California.
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The St. Louis County Police Chief
admits that many of the county's municipalities issue fines and fabricate crimes to raise money. Chief Jon Belmar says he doesn't even know the names of some of the police chiefs in these small towns in his district.
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Here's another Dennis Hastert scandal for you. He enters Congress in 1987 with a net worth of $270,000. He leaves twenty years later with an estimated net worth of $17 million. Now that's what I call public service!
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How
cool is Kolten Wong?
Kroenke's ransom
It's very easy for sportswriters to get in over their heads. We see this each time the real world spills over into sports. Jock sniffers at ESPN and FOX Sports were drowning after heinous sex abuse allegations cast shadow over Joe Paterno's football fiefdom at Pennsylvania State University. We were treated to forced apologies from sports media talking heads almost on a daily basis after so many of them attempted to stray from the approved script of the Ray Rice episode. Only one sportswriter, Dave Zirin, is consistently excellent (he's the only writer talking about
Thabo Sefolosha during the NBA playoffs, for example), and of course, his publication,
The Nation, isn't a sports publication at all.
St. Louis has been enduring this problem for months with their local media involving the status of a new stadium deal for the NFL Rams. It's the height of absurdity, of course, to build a new $985 million stadium in a city whose public schools have only been recently re-accredited. The city also completed construction on a new domed stadium to house the Rams only twenty years ago, and is still paying construction bonds on that facility until 2021.
What we have here is a situation in which the Rams owner, Enos Stanley "Stan" Kroenke-- Sam Walton's son-in-law named by his parents for St. Louis baseball greats Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial-- has purchased property and developed a construction plan to build a football stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. But out of the clear blue sky, the Chargers and Raiders, shortly after, announced that they had a partnership stadium plan for the Los Angeles suburb of Carson. The NFL will allow two teams to enter the enormous and long-vacant L.A. market, but not three. Columnist Bernie Miklasz
puts these facts together as evidence that the city and county of St. Louis (separate entities) should come up with the financing for Dave Peacock and Bob Blitz's riverfront stadium construction project in the warehouse district north of St. Louis' downtown.
It seems to me, though, that the facts demonstrate the presence of a new stadium is immaterial to keeping the Rams. As of two months ago, Kroenke is under no legal requirement to keep the team in St. Louis. He's now on a year-to-year lease. There is no funding in place for the Peacock-Blitz plan and no property has been purchased. At this point, the two men have only offered up other people's money to Roger Goodell. The NFL would dearly love a publicly-financed new stadium in St. Louis, but the facility already in St. Louis, currently known as the Edward Jones Dome, is newer and in better condition than the stadia in which the Chargers and Raiders play, in San Diego and Oakland, California, respectively. Miklasz even acknowledges then that logic dictates the approval by the NFL of the Chargers and Raiders relocation, rather than the Rams, and the Los Angeles Times
concurred Friday that "the momentum is now in favor of Carson over Inglewood." Miklasz is concerned only that there is no guarantee, yet he's separately acknowledged that there's no guarantee even if St. Louis, St. Louis County, and the state of Missouri approve financing for the new facility. All of his facts are correct. He just proclaims exactly the wrong conclusion.
The Carson stadium deal became St. Louis' one and only ace. After the two opposing clubs announced their joint agreement, it no longer made any difference what St. Louis ultimately decides to do. Miklasz, however, still believes the smart play is to drop almost a billion dollars on new construction and for the privilege of placing your hopes on the moral integrity of the National Football League.
Sportswriters are always going to come down on the side of 'the money be damned' on this topic because they live on the sports page. The value of the Rams to the city of St. Louis is measured quite differently though in other sections of the Sunday Post-Dispatch. Every economic study completed at this point in every community has determined that publicly-financed stadia are a financial loser for everyone except the owner of the team housed in the stadium. History also tells us that the cosmetic value of having a given sports team in the community is overblown. Los Angeles itself is Exhibit A of this. They've been two decades now without an NFL team (and their taxpayers haven't paid for a new football facility since 1921), and the city appears to be no worse for the wear-- except for the epic drought of atmospheric, surface and ground water they're currently experiencing.
The NFL, financially, has delivered nothing but minimum wage service jobs to the St. Louis area, and few hours of that besides. The team spurs virtually no tourism. It's a television business. The Rams play at home only eight Sundays a year (at least two of which will overlap Cardinals baseball weekends, plus two more if the baseball team continues to reach the League Championship Series each October), and the Rams draw nearly all of their fans from the metro area. The entertainment dollars being spent, therefore, are only dollars being shifted from elsewhere in the community.
When you read items like the one linked above in the LA Times, it should become obvious to St. Louisans what is already obvious to everybody else-- that their city is simply being exploited. In reality, this is a battle between three (or two) ownership groups and two
new communities that are going on the financial hook for a public giveaway to private interests. St. Louis could very easily lose the Rams. Indeed they will, within a year or two, I predict. What likely happens is that the NFL gets both stadia, the Chargers get a deal done to stay in San Diego, and Los Angeles gets the Raiders and Rams (back) in separate facilities, as well as a Super Bowl in Kroenke's Inglewood facility in 2020. Yes, there is a minuscule possibility that the Rams get stuck on the outside looking in in Los Angeles, but the fact that other franchise owners, such as Jerry Jones, have already voiced their support for Kroenke, and he has already committed $300 million to Los Angeles speaks loudly. Either way, the presence of another new palace in St. Louis for a billionaire's football team, as stated earlier, is a non-factor. Los Angeles can take your football team with impunity. But guard the water supply.
Sinatra in winter
This is comedian Tom Dreesen
telling a story about a concert that I attended, at The Mark in Moline, Illinois, in 1994. My brother and a friend of mine were seated in the top row, but none of us are the fan in question. I have a vague memory, but none at all prior to seeing this on YouTube.
No tomorrow
Here's something else about David Letterman. I'm pretty sure that the website for his show is one of the first two I would have ever visited on the internet. In 1996, when I first explored the internet in the "computer room" at Iowa State, there was the St. Louis Cardinals site, upon which the club sent me an Ozzie Smith "photo ball" basically just for checking a box and proving I was on the site, and there was
The Late Show site, in which, before long, I was hooked on Bob Borden's Wahoo Gazette.
The blog is going dark tomorrow to mark the date of Dave's final show after 33 marvelous years. Paul, do we have music for this? Well, not really dark. I would hide it from the internet for a day, but I'm afraid I would delete it instead. I'm getting a cab though. I'm outta here. All other websites should also take the day off, like me and Jimmy Kimmel. The decision not to be a distraction has come down from the home office in Wahoo, Nebraska. The day is too special. Or as they say in Indiana, spayshul. I have a lump in my throat, kids, the size of a canned ham, and I wouldn't give my troubles to a monkey on a rock, ladies and gentleman. Does this look infected to you? You're making us all sick. I've frightened the audience again, haven't I?
So wake the kids, put 'em in front of the TV, and fill 'em full of hot, black coffee. You know him, you love him, you can't live without him. The only thing on CBS right now. A man with the strength of ten men. Hold on to your wigs and keys. He's here to blow the roof off this dump... the stuff in lieu of actual entertainment. The most powerful man in American broadcasting... David Letterman. Your TV pal. And for the kids, free balloons. Goodnight, everybody. (Cue Paul and the band.)
Pants Pants Pants.
Mid-May observations
According to Gallup polling records, 75% of Americans disapproved of interracial marriage in 1968. The percentage of Americans that supported the Chicago police after the '68 Democratic National Convention was 56%. The following year, 42% of parents told the pollster they would turn in their own child to the authorities for using drugs. "Greatest Generation," my ass. The Boomers are currently the team to beat.
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Do viewers want
Mad Men to end with Don Draper returning in triumph to the advertising game and reinventing himself one more time? Because I don't. I think the entire series has been about his escape from an unholy business.
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Mad Men made small moments expansive, said someone anonymously online. The show has been an absolute treasure.
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Jorge Posada thinks Alex Rodriguez is unworthy of the Hall of Fame, which he says is for players "that played with no controversy." He says that guys who used PEDs took titles away from others. He's referring to the American League MVP "title" he might have won over A-Rod in 2003. He's not referring to the four World Series titles won by Posada and the Yankees between 1996 and 2000. Twelve players on those Yankees teams were named as steroid cheats in the Mitchell Report in 2007. I've listed them below for reference. Andy Pettitte will have his uniform number retired by the Yankees this summer, along with Posada..
Ricky Bones
Jose Canseco
Roger Clemens
Jason Grimsley
Glenallen Hill
Darren Holmes
David Justice
Chuck Knoblauch
Dan Naulty
Denny Neagle
Andy Pettitte
Mike Stanton
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Only eight NBA franchises have won championships since 1983. Since that year, 18 different Major League Baseball franchises have won the World Series.
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Former Cardinals All-Star Jim Edmonds and his wife Meghan have been officially cast on the new season of Bravo's
Real Housewives of Orange County. The show is produced by St. Louisan Andy Cohen and the new season begins June 8th. My source tells me that the Edmondses married in October so I must be remembering a different wife.
The roots of Ben Affleck and a nation
One of the most interesting stories to come out of April was the discovery, via hacked emails, that Oscar-winner Ben Affleck had lobbied Henry Louis Gates Jr. at
Finding Your Roots to scrub the fact of his ancestors' slave-owning from a PBS telecast.
The director of the film
Argo, which turned a real-life story of a hostage rescue effort in Iran into a parable about the patriotism of the film industry, is one of us in more ways than one. One of White America, that is. We ain't proud of ourselves deep down in our guts-- and we shouldn't be. But, unlike Ben, we should at least try to own up to our ill-gotten gains. I like to believe my ancestors were honorable people too. Basically each branch of my family tree leads back to a group of German agriculturalists that arrived at New York's Castle Island in the middle of the 19th century. Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, I now like to imagine them as akin to Christoph Waltz' German character King Schultz in 2012's
Django Unchained-- cultured and intelligent first-generation Americans with a strong social conscience brought over from Europe during a time when Karl Marx was scaring the hell out of the feudal aristocracies. But this is an affectation on my part. The clans I belong to have too infrequently been out front on the great social issues of the day, and anyway, the issue of slavery has never been about who owned slaves and who didn't. It's about who benefited from slavery, and all of White America sure as hell has, even those whose ancestors came after. The suffering and forced labor of African-Americans, principal among all factors, made us the richest country on Earth. The past, as you certainly know, isn't even past. Today, the median net worth of white households is 13 times that of black ones. The sport of economic violence has only undergone some minor plastic surgery. The institution of slavery, it was once said-- by someone really smart-- is just capitalism with its clothes off. And capitalism endures.
Most Americans buy into the myth of our Founding Fathers' omnipotence. A lot of us prefer to think of slavery as simply a long-ago challenge from which we disengaged as the victor, another example of the United States advancing on its generally-upward social and economic trajectory, slavery not so much a permanent stain but a conquered opponent. And while we're on the topic, why can't black people just get over it already?
Pretending this shit never existed is something we do every day. It's part of our collective routine. If you continue to dwell on institutional terrorism, you're not going to sell a lot of Chevy Silverados. Ironically, Affleck has his cherished (and financially-lucrative) public image to blame for uncovering this inconvenient truth about his ancestry. He's a celebrity, and that made him an attractive subject. Gates hasn't been fact-checking
my family history, and for the entertainment of a television audience besides.
The sins of Affleck's forefather don't tell us anything at all about Ben as a man, but his attempt to cover it up tells us quite a lot. A little context might have saved him a lot of bad publicity, however. Think of it this way, Ben: If Gates' show had uncovered that you were a direct descendent, instead, of our estimable first president, George Washington, or the guiding hand of our enduring Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, your public image would have been given a tremendous boost, yet the results would be technically the same.
Zero Dark Thirty was a political lie
Another Pulitzer coming for Seymour Hersh at age 78? The bin Laden story goes the way of Jessica Lynch.
Sorry
... for the long delay. New Orleans says hi, come visit us, we're still resisting American assimilation. The situation in the Lower Delta remains, as has been reported here before, desperate but not serious.
Highlights this year included a respect-filled dust-up between historical revisionists and historical re-revisionists on a formal tour of Laura Plantation, as well as our first-ever
Bourbon Street Parade, Saturday the 2nd, the first-annual Gay Krewe of Krewes Parade.
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Go Bernie Go! Independents comprise the only Democrats worth voting for.
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The failure of many progressives to defend Pam Gellar, and of some to even assign her blame, has been shameful. You don't like her, fine, but you're making her claims of an imminent Islamist threat to democracy even more convincing. The Muslim gunmen and enforcers of Shariah that opened fire on the "Draw Muhammad" cartoon contest in Garland, Texas did so because the participants at the event were drawing cartoon depictions of Muhammad, not for reasons of Western colonization or anything else, just as another group opened fire on the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris for similar reasons of punishing satirical speech. You can make the claim that ISIS, al Qaeda, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, and others "distort" Islam, and I appreciate that the sway of moderate Muslims holds the key to the planet's future, but their holy book kind of speaks for itself.
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White privilege, a partial list of examples:
Running from police
Right to carry
Amateur hooliganism
Active resistance
Tax base
Generations of government-guaranteed housing loans
The sport of hunting
Toy guns
Childhood
Second chances
Generations of government-guaranteed housing loans
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The Cardinals have started the season 22-8. At this point, the
1906 Cubs are more competition than the 2015 Cubs.
