Human growth
Peyton Manning has been linked to Human Growth Hormone by a reporter from Al Jazeera America, but the Denver Broncos quarterback has something going for him that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Mark McGwire have never had—the institutional support of his bosses and his colleagues.
His supporters were out in force on four television networks Sunday. They point out that the man who was secretly recorded claiming that he sent HGH to Peyton’s house in 2011 quickly denied his own statements when the story blew up over the weekend. (The man in question is an anti-aging clinic intern beautifully named Charlie Sly.) The denial led numerous NFL talking heads, many of them former players, to dismiss the allegations as unreliable. A well-known former coach, Mike Ditka, went after the messenger. Apparently he's one of those many Americans that gets Al Jazeera confused with Al Qaeda.
I’m not sure what’s so far-fetched about the allegations, however. A then-35-year-old quarterback, only slightly younger than Barry Bonds was when he swatted 73 home runs in 2001, has a shipment of HGH delivered to his Indianapolis McMansion under his wife’s name. (I'm sure it was intended for her. Who does she play for?) The supplier brags later about it when he doesn’t know he’s being recorded, and then, most realistic of all, the supplier claims that he fabricated the story when he finds himself cast into a media whirlwind. Which pharmacist do you believe? The one chatting, unsuspectingly, into a hidden camera, or the one talking into the multiple cameras of a media horde, fearing that he’s just become the next Kirk Radomski? I lean towards the first.
Despite the denials, Manning fits as precisely into our preferred profile of a PED user as any athlete I can immediately conjure. Like Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Mark McGwire, his greatest successes on the field have been belied by his advancing years, and even
unlike Bonds and Clemens, his physical end came about (this year) suddenly and dramatically, as we’re told can often happen with PED use. (It’s possible that if Bonds was still playing, he’d be as dominant as ever with a bat in his hands-- his blacklisting preceded his decline.)
It’s much too early to tell, but I cannot imagine a scenario in which an HGH link like this keeps Manning from, say, being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio. Then again, our nation’s football hall of fame doesn’t have a ridiculous, so-called “character clause” for enshrinement, as our baseball one does. O.J. Simpson is in the football hall of fame. Nobody that I’ve heard is yet advocating that an asterisk be placed next to the NFL’s recently-established all-time passing record. Nobody in the United States Congress, as yet, has spoken publicly on the matter, let alone issued a call for public testimony.
Football is treated by its participants and its observers as a “man’s game,” an event for warriors. Within it, anything goes. When retired Broncos and Raiders scumbag, Bill Romanowski, found himself knotted in the BALCO scandal nearly a decade ago, there were yawns.
Oh, really? Bill did something to his body that was unhealthy? Like play football with it? Bill has since written a best-selling book about his career and appeared in several films. Meanwhile, you and I
equate the BALCO scandal with Barry Bonds. The slugger found himself unable to get a job on the field in 2008 despite a ridiculous .480 on-base percentage in '07. Then it got worse for him. He was indicted by federal investigators for perjury and obstruction of justice. All charges were later dropped and convictions overturned.
While these are remarkable double standards in the public consciousness, I pin much of the blame on Major League Baseball. The league craps its proverbial bed basically every night, then makes that bed, and lies in it, proverbially. Rather than rally around the flag, league officials constantly attempt to undermine the reputations and legacies of their brightest stars and most iconic figures. Baby boomer journos and fans all but hijacked the National Baseball Hall of Fame from subsequent generations ten years ago in retaliation for the destruction of their boyhood heroes' most hallowed records, laying shattered thanks to bigger, stronger,
better players. The Hall has coupled its hypocritical character clause with something called the “permanently ineligible" list.
Each of the other three major sports leagues promote the large salaries that its players command as evidence of the industry’s robust financial health. Major League Baseball teams routinely claim that their players are bankrupting them. MLB constantly promotes itself as a game for little kids, a strategy which denies the true nature of the sport itself, often denies the players the chance to behave and make decisions as adults, and alienates the all-important marketing demographic of teens and college-aged adults that don’t wish for the world to view them as children.
Manning and the other HGH gridiron conspirators should stop their denials and come completely clean. Major League Baseball slugger Ryan Howard has been linked to these HGH shipments as well, and you can lay odds that his employer will use the headline to attempt to wiggle out of the $35 million obligation they still have to him, but there is virtually
no potential for the damaged legacy of an NFL personality as far as precedent is concerned. Roger Goodell is still a league commissioner that's popular with his bosses despite several P.R. black eyes in respect to domestic violence, and his attempt to publicly discredit the medical research that connected brain damage with the sport. (A story playing now at a theater near you.) Bill Belichick and Tom Brady still sit at the top of the football world despite Spy-gate, Tuck-gate, and Deflate-gate. Nearly every football fan believes that O.J. killed his wife as well as her friend, and they don’t
like him, but they walk with bated interest past his bust at the Hall of Fame in Canton because you gotta admit that the man could ball.
Why are these guys so worried about reputations that are incapable of being soiled?
Baseball players are merely men. Football players are gladiators. Their brains may bruise, but their industry never does. And the playoffs are about to start.
The Twelve Days of Christmas
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, an entertainment center made of wood with lovely shutters. It came from Target and I had to assemble it myself. One of the doors sticks but it's not my fault. We don't really exchange gifts. It’s our one and only gift for each other, from both of us to the house. We were hoping that the remote controls for the cable and the DVD player would work
through the shutters, as there are sizable gaps between the boards, but alas, they don’t, so one of the two shutters will likely be open perpetually.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a private concert of two songs, performed by her along with the recent Adele television special on NBC. She DVR’ed it on December 4th. My true love didn’t intend this impromptu performance as a gift, I don’t think, but she has a nice voice, much better than she thinks she does. The door on the entertainment center was still sticking.
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, three nibbles from her panini. If not for these bites, my lunch would have consisted entirely of grapes and half a pomegranate. I’m trying to work off the fleet of reindeer-shaped sugar cookies I ate on Christmas Day. We sang songs in the evening to drown out the squeak from the door of the entertainment center.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, four admonishments for failing to take the garbage downstairs. My excuse was that the bin under the sink was not yet overflowing, and the discarded gift wrap had effectively buried the discarded, insect-attracting pomegranate peel. As Adele played on the iPod, filling the living room, I thought about sanding down the door of the entertainment center.
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, FIVE TEXT MESSAGES. This was the day we both had to go back to work, but it was worth getting out of the house to avoid the spilled garbage and the squeaky home decor.
On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, six new Christmas gifts purchased for loved ones on the family credit cards. We still have one Christmas party ahead of us, and the smart money waits to shop for them until the post-holiday sales kick in, but it’s still a lot. My true love texted me from across the Best Buy that she had found Adele’s latest for 30 percent off.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, seven gallons of gas for my Honda Civic. I drove the CR-V to work to get the oil changed as I work close to the dealer, and my true love texted me to tell me she politely topped off my tank in exchange. I keep a cleaner car than she does, though. She left behind some grape stems, and also changed my radio station to the one that repeats the same Adele song once an hour.
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, nine toothbrushes. That’s way too many brushes, but she was at Costco, and that’s what winds up happening when you shop there. A product like that I’ll use up eventually. The number of toothbrushes purchased did not match the numbered day of the Christmas season, but I’m not just going to make shit up for this blog post.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love and I saw very little of each other. She worked a second shift at work, and I did my normal 8 to 5. She did not buy me a gift on that date, but I had no expectation that she would. I didn’t get her anything either. As I mentioned, we don’t even really exchange gifts for Christmas. We just buy something for the house and then I try to assemble it accurately.
On the tenth day of Christmas, it didn’t really feel like Christmas anymore. I know that the holiday technically begins on December 25th, but that’s according to a traditional church calendar. The
first day of Christmas actually terminates the Christmas marketing season for merchants. The tenth day is January 3rd. Local children have gone back to school, and my true love and I debated how much longer before we pack away the tree.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, the winter doldrums set in. We went on Hotwire and looked for a deal that would get us out of Iowa and to someplace tropical without breaking the bank. I have two weeks of vacation time I need to use before my anniversary date at work in April, but my true love doesn’t have accrued vacation yet. We could probably swing a week.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, I checked the credit card statements online against our holiday receipts. I found forgotten expenses from Dillards and HomeGoods, and I’m wondering how we spent as much as we did during December. I knew we were going to want to spend later on a winter get-away, but the total cost of Christmas always sneaks up on you. I had an Adele song stuck in my head on the twelfth day, and the squeak in the entertainment center door now brayed harshly, like eleven pipers piping. I had a chat with my true love, and we decided that next year, we’ll set a more precise budget. The Twelvetide can be stressful, and the holiday too commercial. Bring on the next liturgical season.
Caucus yourself
I will not be participating in the Iowa Caucuses. There are two principle reasons-- #1, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and #2, participation only lends the event a legitimacy it does not deserve.
To participate in a Democratic Party Caucus in Iowa, one has to be a registered Democrat or change their party affiliation in advance or at the scene. I did this upon entering my neighborhood caucus gathering in January 2008. My mission that night was to support the presidential candidacy of Dennis Kucinich, but the six or seven of us gathered at that location were not enough for the Congressman to even be considered “viable.” I spent the better part of three hours at the caucus, spending most of the time listening to party platform proposals, and then my vote for chief executive didn’t even get counted, or even footnoted, because our members were so few. I was given only the opportunity to
switch to one of the “viable” candidates-- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards. (It’s under this unholy format that Martin O’Malley will likely earn zero delegates this year in Iowa despite recent polling support upwards of 5%.) Such are the mechanisms of America’s self-described “Democratic” party.
That was the last formal function of that party in which I participated. I walked out into the cold that night carrying my second fresh voter registration card of the evening, this one to switch my registration back to Independent through the mail the following morning. By the time the next presidential cycle rolled through the Hawkeye State, I had run, myself, as a candidate for state representative as a member of the Green Party, and the state passed a law that allowed me, and anyone else, to formally register as a member of the Greens-- or with the Libertarians, because those two additional political parties had met established electoral standards that include having to run a certain number of candidates in state races each decade. Many righteous persons worked long and aggressively through the courts to get the Green Party option added to the registration forms in Iowa, and switching affiliation, even for a night, to participate in the activities of one of the heads of the duopoly is not something I’m comfortable doing.
What’s good for Iowa is often not good for the rest of the United States. With this statement, we could be referring to several things-- ethanol subsidies, or federal mandates to buy crappy health insurance products (Des Moines is U.S. insurance capital #2, behind Hartford, Connecticut), but in this instance, I’m talking about our first-in-the-nation caucuses. The presidential candidates log thousands of miles in Iowa every four years reaching out to only the political die-hards. Some perennial candidates never seem to leave us. (This political system doubles as our punishment.) Iowans like to believe that the ancient voting structure of the caucus, which is very different than that of a primary, is most democratic-- neighbors gathering with neighbors to sip coffee, discuss issues, and cast their votes. It sounds terrific, but it’s pig shit.
The one-night-only caucuses are held on a Monday during the middle of winter, possibly during a snow storm. Unlike a primary, in which each voter can cast their ballot with a brief stop at the polling station before or after work, or during their lunch, caucus participation requires evening attendance, and not a brief attendance either. In most locations, voters are committing to at least a two hour endeavor, and there is obviously no such concept in play as an absentee ballot. (Also, FYI, in case you're new to it, they're going to pass the hat.) It’s also not a
secret vote. Any of your neighbors might be there to inflict pressure or shame-- your friends, your family, your banker, your clergy, a person to whom you owe money, your hair stylist, your teacher, your union leader,
your boss. That's kind of a big one.
Should employers in the state be required to give their employees time off to participate in the process? Absolutely not. The general election should be on a Saturday, or made a holiday, but the caucuses and primaries are the apparatus of the two major parties-- the Democrats and the Republicans. It should be up to their organizers to make the voting process accessible to the people if they, in fact, value a high level of participation, and clearly they don’t. Neither the state of Iowa nor its individual municipalities should be offering anything other than free public space to the parties for these self-governing functions. Iowa’s current economic support of the caucuses is, itself, an endorsement of the two-party system.
Would I like the opportunity to vote for Bernie Sanders? Yes I would. He’s the best presidential candidate the Democratic Party has put up... well, ever. (Maybe McGovern.) It’s probably just a coincidence that Sanders is not actually a Democrat. He’s a self-described Democratic Socialist who represents Vermont in the United States Senate as an Independent, one of only two Indies serving in that chamber. He made a decision this year to seek the presidential nomination of a party to which he does not formally belong, which is fine, until he loses because most members of his party don’t share his progressive vision. Then the man has a moral obligation, I believe, to get himself on the general election ballot in November in some other form, which unfortunately in this case, he will not choose to do, and that the two war parties have made virtually impossible at a state-to-state level even if the candidate is a completely self-financed individual, and Sanders is not one of those.
After Super Tuesday on March 1st, “the Bern” will only be felt in the Democratic Party graveyard, along with other progressive causes the party has co-opted with the intent of burying-- the anti-war movement, single-payer health insurance, Wall Street accountability. The list is long. Sanders’ ball will hopefully be picked up and carried by others, but for 2016, the only impact his candidacy will have had will be on Clinton, and not even on her policies and plans for governance, only her rhetoric towards the same.
The Democratic National Committee’s distaste for Sanders and his army of mostly-young, untriangulated voters is best represented by the actions last week of Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-Clinton. She ordered the suspension of the Sanders campaign’s access to its own electronic voter identification information after two Sanders staffers accessed Clinton campaign information from a server left unprotected. (The staffers’ mistake, I guess, was not steering the information discreetly to a private server, as Hillary prefers to do.) The punishment handed down to the Sanders campaign by Clinton’s BFF, based on the actions of staffers that were immediately fired by Sanders, was so punitive that even the traditional media was forced to weigh in on the matter. Remember when Bernie came to Hillary’s rescue during a televised debate in Des Moines over the issue of Clinton’s private email server? I guess Democratic operatives don’t.If you thought Clinton wouldn't get dirty, you missed the part of 2008 when her operatives contacted Matt Drudge with the first
Obama is a Muslim Marxist story line.
Sanders has been playing too nice. I'm still waiting for him to begin issuing forceful attacks upon Clinton’s political record, which has really been that of a mainstream Republican for a half-century-- from her student days as a Goldwater girl, through her support of
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, mandatory sentencing guidelines, the war on Iraq, and Wall Street self-policing. The disadvantage of being an independent politician like Sanders, I guess, is that you don’t have party hacks to do your slashing for you.
This nomination has been written out for Clinton by the party machine. It's been in her hands since the ’08 electoral pasting she took at the hands of Obama. It’s a make-good from the Wall Street titans whose bag she so gleefully carries. Nobody else dared oppose her this year except for the white-haired Socialist from the crunchy Green Mountain State. Progressives will pull their hair out worrying that Sanders' defeat means that the country is too right wing for such a visionary, but they can actually rest assured that it’s really just the Democrats that are too right-wing. Polls show Sanders would fare better than Clinton against any theoretical Republican challenger in state after state, even throughout much of the “right wing” South. Sanders is generally perceived as a fundamentally honest man that puts the needs of the country above his own career and his own pocketbook. Hillary is perceived as a Clinton.
When D.C.'s creaky press corps lands in Iowa on February 1st and attempts to tell the story of Clinton’s caucus triumph, they’ll leave out several important points. They’ll proclaim Clinton the winner going away, and they’ll explain that she has her finger on what the voters of America are feeling, even though it was just dedicated party activists that came out to support her. Sanders will fare better a few days later in New Hampshire, and not just because it’s a state that borders Vermont-- after all, it borders Clinton's home state of New York as well, but because voters there pull a lever in secret, they have a more independent streak collectively, and they’re allowed to vote for any candidate for either side of the duopoly regardless of registration. The media will count delegates but they won’t hear the results of any preliminary, first-choice votes, only final tallies after “unviable” candidates have been excluded.
There’s no incumbent running for the White House in 2016 so caucus participation will be up. Reporters will compare this cycle's numbers favorably to years in which there was an incumbent, and they often will not provide full context. They won't compare the overall voting numbers to the voting population of the state of Iowa. To do so would be to reveal how many people have checked out and don't consider the top news story being repeated 24 hours a day on the news networks to be a top story. They won’t talk about why so many people stayed home. The story on the Democratic side will be about Clinton only, and if you think they aren't saying much about Bernie that night, consider how much
less they'll be talking about him come October. He assured his irrelevance when he chose to oppose Clinton on in her own home field instead of in the general election.
Pollsters have been hassling Iowans on our phones for decades, and they always ask us two questions. They obsess over our answers to the second one, and basically skip over the first. But the first one would be fascinating as hell if they chose to probe it. The second one, of course, is "who are you planning to caucus for?", but the preceeding one always is "do you plan on participating in the caucus?" If you say no to that one, they're done with you, but the disgruntled and disinterested have a story to tell also. We don't agree to legitimize something we consider illegitimate. We believe in the axiom that if God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates. And a representative government.
We don't vote so we don't matter, right? The price we pay, right? Maybe, but not for the price of telling a false story. And we are heard when we take to the streets and protest Wall Street crimes, or a child of color shot dead by one of the oligarchy's storm troopers. Then you look at the video and say, where did they all come from? They've been under your nose, ignored.
100
Today we celebrate the 100th birthday of Francis Albert Sinatra.
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The man that would much later be known as the Chairman of the Board, thanks to New York City disc jockey William B. Williams, came into the world on December 12th, 1915-- beneath his fighting weight, tugged and ripped by forceps, an eardrum punctured, and not breathing, but his grandmother, an experienced midwife, exercised some quick thinking and positioned Hoboken, New Jersey’s youngest resident under a stream of cold running water. Seconds later, the Voice belted out his first note.
I get deeply possessive about my Frank Sinatra fandom. It comes from years and years of devotion, and also a run of melancholy. The number of people that can converse today about Axel Stordahl, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen, or Don Costa are dying off faster than the first-generation qualifiers of the G.I. Bill. As a young man, I saw Frank in concert twice: first, at Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa, in 1988, and then at The Mark in Moline, Illinois in 1994. (I was briefly trying for every state in the union.) Of the latter live performance, comedian Tom Dreesen, the opening act that night, tells
this story.
CBS’s prime-time special last Sunday night honoring FS, while well-meaning, was a test of my patience. It was overly-broad in scope. All the clichés were incorporated, specifically the rough framing of his life into the four time-marking verses of “It Was a Very Good Year.” Daughter Nancy's performance was cut from the broadcast. “The Summit” of 1960’s Las Vegas was referred to over and over again, as it often is, as “the Rat Pack.” (So uncool.) And virtually no attention was paid to Frank’s music and film career prior to his 1953 comeback, which I appreciate in one way-- since the second part of his career was so artistically-prolific-- but ignoring the bobbysoxers, the Paramount Theater, and the Columbus Day Riot of 1944 is a little like broadcasting a tribute to the Beatles and skipping Ed Sullivan. That was the day Frank Sinatra created the Generation Gap. Ironically, he later obliterated it.
I’m a touch of a karaoke deity when it comes to Sinatra tunes, but I'm an amateur nevertheless. I shouldn’t be capable of performing Sinatra songs better than so many of the great stars of today, and yet I clearly am, if Sunday’s show is to be believed. Hillbillies Garth Brooks and Zac Brown each swing like a busted screen door, and Adam Levine behaved as if he was contractually-obligated to perform, even though he was given a shot at "I Get a Kick Out of You" in front of the most important concert audience of his career (pointedly, Quincy Jones and Tony Bennett). Perhaps he expected the audience to have its chairs turned away from him.
Harry Connick Jr., John Legend, and Usher were fine, but what these guys never attempt to latch on to is Sinatra's masculinity. By aiming for luxury over strength, male impersonators frequently wind up giving tribute, inadvertently, to the crooners like Dick Haymes and Perry Como, whose careers would be obscured by Sinatra. Frank should not be held up as the personification of a silky style of singing. He was the beginning of the end for it. The Chairman’s tough-guy persona often seemed like a pretense in his movies, but in his music, it translated as a raw truth being expressed by a grown man, albeit a manic depressive, albeit a functional one. Crosby was the smooth one. Sinatra ached.
On Sunday’s special, Alicia Keys gave us real longing, as well as one of the few new musical arrangements of the evening, sitting at the piano and crushing George and Ira Gershwin's “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Keys told interviewers that she was introduced to Sinatra's music by her grandfather, and I often think it’s the women performers today that understand him best because they recognize the qualities of his strength and honesty from men that they have loved.
Seth MacFarlane, an animator by first vocation, knows the tune, literally and figuratively. He was one of the few vocal performers on the bill that would clearly list Sinatra as a top musical influence. He introduced a knowing segment recalling the way Sinatra would always credit the songwriters and arrangers during concert performances. (This is where your Stordahls, Mays, Jenkins, Kahns, Van Heusens, and Costas come in). The voice of Stewie Griffin blessed us first with a rendition of the sort-of-forgotten Capitol recording classic “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” then followed in the second hour with a stage performance of Sinatra’s greatest saloon song, “One For My Baby,” which MacFarlane croons lovingly, but struggles to “act.” Oh well, you knew he couldn’t act if you saw
A Million Ways to Die in the West.
I’m sure some people rolled their eyes at MacFarlane’s presence because the TV shows he draws are so crass, and also they like their celebrities to stay in a box, but when you consider it, the multi-talented creator of
Family Guy and executive producer of last year’s
Cosmos mini-series on FOX might be the closest thing we have today to the brash Sinatra of yesterday’s Hollywood-- an industry unto his very own, balancing a life among the jacket-and-tie crowd with a profoundly-crude sense of humor. Bad boys in tuxedos still play. Sinatra was famously
unsophisticated at times. I think that's what always made him fascinating. The FBI never abandoned its obsession with him, from a "morals" charge in 1938, through McCarthyism, the Cal-Neva Lodge, to the "Frankie and the Boys" photo snapped in 1976. He named his record label "Reprise," but pronounced it "re-prize" because it stood for him as a reprisal against his critics, and when his memory started to slip late in life, Don Rickles joked to friends that the singer suffered from Sicilian Alzheimer's Disease: "He only remembers the grudges."
A Sinatra TV special would really be more entertaining today if the time was filled by recorded video performances of the man himself. Much like the pair of Sinatra “Duet” albums released by Capitol during the 1990s, Sunday's event will be a pathway to the music for new, younger listeners, but within a week or so, we'll all be focused again on the original recordings.
I have one favorite anecdote to share on his birthday that’s not a well-known one. Tom Snyder told it from personal experience on his CBS late-night show the night Frank died in 1998-- and I have no media from which to recall it-- but Snyder was a long-time news reporter and anchor at KNBC in Los Angeles, and he was at Sinatra’s house in Bel-Air after Frank’s son was kidnapped in 1963. This crime happened only two weeks after President Kennedy's assassination. There was a pall over the scene naturally. The home’s entryway was filled with reporters, and one of the female journalists accidentally bumped into a shelf and knocked over a delicate item, shattering it on the floor. Imagine the scene: Sinatra, famously prickly to the press, and certainly at the darkest point in his life. Nevertheless, in the room's silence, he tells the woman not to worry about it, walks to the shelf, and nudges another breakable onto the floor.
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The Empire State Building will certainly be lit in blue this evening, and lights along the Vegas strip will be briefly dimmed, but the most important tribute to the man will be the countless, individual interludes of love and longing that will play out around the world on a typical Saturday night. People will be falling in love too easily, feeling as though there’s a wonderful fling to be flung, trying so not to give in. Men and women from all walks, their smiles so warm and their cheeks so soft, will make the conscious or unconscious decision that being loved by someone is no good unless they’re loved all the way... by only that one person beneath the moon or under the sun. Others will discover tonight that, for them, love is wasted on the young, and it's more comfortable the second time around. They’ll engage with their partners, alternately, in the lovely lovings, the hateful hates, and the conversations with the flying plates.
There will be losers in love also, in lonesome old towns, in the silence of lonely rooms, trying to think that love's not around, going out among us, fractured, in the wee small hours, attempting to get along without him or her very well, downhearted because they can't get started, with one they love that's in love with somebody else. They'll order one more Jack Daniels for that long, long road with no one in the place except the bartender and that solitary loser. Easy to remember, so hard to forget. Tough being alone on the shelf, worse to fall in love by yourself.
It's rare to find a jukebox in a saloon today, and those machines there are probably won't take nickels. But you can still get solace to fill the air from the leader of the losers ("Shake hands with the president of the club"), the mender of broken hearts, thanks to a miracle of today. When that moment of vulnerability strikes, Francis Albert's voice can be now be generated from nearly anybody's phone. The medium changes, but the voice is always with us... from here to eternity.
A broken tibia and fibula for the home team
The Iowa State Cyclones men’s basketball team, ranked 4th in the nation by the Associate Press, improved to 8-0 last night with an 83-82 win over the Iowa Hawkeyes at Hilton Coliseum in Ames. The Cyclones’ rebound from a 20-point deficit early in the second half inspired fans to run on the floor seconds after Monte Morris’ game-winning runner, and then a reporter for the
Des Moines Register named Randy Peterson had his leg broken during the charge. He had tripped and fallen when someone stepped on his leg.
There are calls then today, in national and local outlets both, for the NCAA to ban, or severely curtail, such fan celebrations. Many of the local are sour grapes from Hawkeye fans who feel the excruciating sting of defeat. A TV sports anchor in Des Moines, a graduate of the University of Iowa and rank lieutenant in the fun police, had his
eyes broken watching the celebration, tweeting an hypothesis that Cyclone fans would not be enjoying the victory so much if it was (star player) Georges Niang lying on the floor after the game, which is certainly true. Let’s get these college kids under control!
I have another solution. How about only university students get to go to the games? Rooting so passionately for your college team after you’ve left college is a little like passionately rooting for your high school team after you’ve left high school. Rooting for a school you never attended is stranger still. (Some of us chose our institution of higher learning
specifically based on sports so we wouldn’t have this problem later.) I guess one might make the case that they have a rooting interest in a state team as a taxpayer, but in Iowa, state funding of the universities’ total budget is down to about 7%. Claiming to people that you pay the bills in this instance is kind of an insult to those that pay enormous tuition prices.
Rooting for my college team is a pastime I enjoy at times, like last night, but I try to never forget, as many observers apparently have, who it is these games are actually meant for. Student fees prop up nearly all Division I sports, and the payers also provide the proverbial electricity that powers the event on game night. (The students are the Hilton Magic.) My dad rooted for the Cyclones at old State Gym during his tenure in Ames during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. My four years included season tickets, and overlaps with Fred Hoiberg, Dedric Willoughby, Johnny Orr’s last season as head coach, and the 1996 Big 8 Tournament Championship in Kansas City (Sec 231, Row Q, Seat 12). It’s no longer important for me to be there and be entertained by players that aren’t getting financially-compensated to entertain. It actually makes me feel kind of icky.
Many of last night’s celebrating students had camped out for three nights at Hilton to get tickets from a limited student allotment, even while a majority of the arena was filled during the game with non-students. That’s the part of the story that needs to change.
I’ll be curious to hear what more Peterson has to say about it. He’s been covering Cyclone sports for a long time. In my early days at WHO Radio in Des Moines, I was assigned to cover the football coach’s (Dan McCarney) weekly press conference in Ames. This was in the late ‘90s, and Peterson was already there, his hair already completely white. His initial comment following last night’s incident was a tweet that read simply, “Ouch.”
Reporters never want to become the story, but Peterson will be the big story, especially if this incident leads to a rule change. I would assume he’s rooting for anything but. Such is the hazard of his occupation. Sportswriters get paid trips, great seats at games for no charge, complimentary meals and snacks. And sometimes they get their leg broken.
Sunday questions
Why is it that the San Bernardino mass shooting wasn't considered terrorism, even by the President, until it was confirmed that Muslim fundamentalism was the motivation? Why are we still separating ISIS-style terrorism from the Christian-fundamentalist terrorism delivered by Robert Dear in Colorado Springs? White people committing mass killings are always referred to as delusional loners, never as part of a larger group of radicalized Christians. Do Muslim jihadists not also fit the profile of the mentally-unstable?
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ISIS is not a country or an army. It's a group of pirates. You prevent them from extending their reach by offering hope for a better future to Muslim moderates, not by dropping bombs on more and more innocent Muslims, radicalizing the survivors.
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Boko Haram has killed more people than ISIS, more than 20,000 during a six-year uprising in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Benin, and Niger. However, virtually none of those 20,000 are white. Thus, there has been scant news coverage.
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I'm excited to be traveling to Yellowstone National Park next summer-- during
the centennial celebration of the National Park Service.
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Interesting developments in the saga of Enos Stanley Kroenke moving the NFL's Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles following this football season. A number of Kroenke's associates in the NFL cabal seem to favor the alternative stadium plan in Carson, California, that would have the Chargers and Raiders, not the Rams, re-locate to the City of Angels. The league would love to place two teams in L.A., but presumably not three. Kroenke is so nervous that he's been privately offering to share his proposed stadium in Inglewood, CA, with the Chargers and owner Dean Spanos, and therefore freezing out Al Davis' son and the Raiders. Either he'll win or he'll lose, but in any case, he's desperate to leave St. Louis and has certainly burned his bridges there by failing to publicly address fans even one time in the last four years, and failing to engage Mound City politicians that have, without being asked, graciously offered up taxpayer money to build him a new stadium along the Mississippi riverfront. I could care less about the Rams at this point, regardless of which city they're in, but it's fun to watch Kroenke squirm. Could he possibly wind up moving his team to San Diego if the Chargers bolt (word play)?
Digging up Moses
One of the truly indelible moments caught on film during my lifetime is the confrontation between Michael Moore and Charlton Heston in Moore’s 2002 film
Bowling for Columbine. The debate over gun violence took place between the director and the veteran actor-slash-National Rifle Association president in Heston’s backyard in 2001 after Heston had begun to suffer the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s Disease, but before a public announcement had been made of the fact in 2003.
Though the film received high marks from critics and became one of the highest-grossing documentary films of all-time, political wisdom cast a harsh light, then and now, on Moore for supposedly failing to play fair with Heston in his obviously-befuddled state-- the big, bad liberal picking on a weak old man.
It’s a bogus charge. As expressed, Heston-- the one-time civil rights champion who devolved during his later life into David Duke’s favorite public figure and a man who blamed America's high rate of gun violence on its "mixed ethnicity"-- was still in a very high-profile position as head of the nation’s most powerful political lobby when the celluloid encounter transpired next to Heston’s swimming pool at his palatial Beverly Hills home. The year a
fter Moore interviewed the 78-year-old, the gun rights lobbyist campaigned for Congressional Republicans in 22 different states. He was on record shortly before as saying that the most recent standard-bearer for the Democratic Party, Al Gore, had “the guts of a guppy,” so when Gore made the strange public statement that Moore’s film did the impossible of arousing sympathy in him on behalf of Heston, it kind of re-enforced Heston’s point.
In this penultimate scene of the movie, Moore attempts to have Heston answer for the NRA’s decision to hold a meeting in Denver, Colorado in the days following the deadly mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Moore attempts to deliver (into Heston’s “cold, dead hands”?) an 8x10 photo of one of the dead girls, but winds up leaving it at Heston’s gate, instead, after the old man abruptly ends the interview.
Maybe what was so poignant about Moore’s film is that Heston, along with Ronald Reagan and George Murphy, were pioneers in using the Hollywood image machine to serve their political ends, nearly all of which were reactionary-- trampling the cultural and economic victories of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” that interestingly, all three actors had once championed. In Heston’s unique case, the persona was trading in on his many acting roles as “great men” in big-budget, historical epics.
The Moses Industry, as one might call it, led the one-time star of MGM’s
The Ten Commandments to take increasingly angry and ridiculous public policy positions. It’s well documented by sociologists that poor white men in America, as they age, begin to harbor deep resentments towards what they perceive as cultural favoritism towards women and minorities, but I believe these are nothing compared to the resentments felt during their golden years by
rich white men, especially those that have lived in the public eye, as they come to believe that, even though they don’t directly feel the crushing burden of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity, they are no longer venerated by young people. In Heston’s case, we add alcoholism into the mix. Moses/Ben-Hur checked into a rehab clinic in Utah in 2000.
His Moses alter ego was so extreme that it colored his public statement when announcing his Alzheimer’s in 2003. “I can part the red sea,” he
or a publicist wrote, “but I can’t part with you.” In his worsening, final phase, he attempted to reach back for a public sympathy he no longer garnered from the mushy political middle that he no longer occupied, adding lines to his statement such as “If I tell you a funny story for a second time, please laugh anyway.” It's almost enough to make you forget how uncivil the man had been for the previous 20 years.
The encounter in
Bowling for Columbine is painful at times to watch, for sure, but let’s not forget how it was forged as the result of Heston’s enormous Hollywood ego, one that that the radical reactionary fringe of our country always attributes, in blanket form, to movie stars on the political
left. Reagan suffered from Alzheimer’s late in life also, but he was kept discreetly away from the public. In the end, Heston couldn’t keep the same steely grip on his public image that he always kept on his sidearm. He had wandered so far and so long ago off the political reservation that the public could no longer determine when his demented opinions had simply become dementia.
