Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

Jun
14

Of Weiners and Hooters

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Anthony Weiner

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    If not sick of this story, we all should be. Too many sexual shenanigans among the famous surely have us jaded by now. I am here to add to the fascination, but as a concluding unscientific postscript.

    Certainly Anthony Weiner’s name lends itself to parody, given his particular fall from grace. But how did a name of that spelling get to be pronounced like “wiener”? The old rule about “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ or in sounding like ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’” clearly does not apply here.

    The ‘e’ before ‘i’ of his name, by all rights and rules, should be pronounced like “wy-ner.” In English, “e” before “i” is often spoken as long “e” such as the word “receive.” In German, words like “nein” are said with the sound of a long “i”. Vienna, in Austria, is “Wien” and pronounced as “Veen.” The name of the noted expert in early cybernetics at MIT, Norbert Wiener, is spelled like our hot dog and pronounced the same. So I’m confused.

    Maybe Anthony’s name isn’t the language genre I thought it was. Hence news reports and comedians have had a great time with this story. Trust me, were his name pronounced the way I think it should be, this tale of an idiot wouldn’t have lasted three days. We are an adolescent society and our nutty obsession with anything that can be construed as sexual will get and hold our attention forever.

    Fox News, of course, has no time for conservative peccadilloes, making only briefest mention of them so as to insist their news is “fair and balanced,” after which the stories are dropped like hot potatoes. Anthony the Tweeter saved them from news of another New York congressman as well as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose sin quite frankly was worse than Tony’s. But both are Republican, so expect no further talk of them.

    You may think what you’ve heard on polite news regarding Weiner is bad, but I’m here to say it’s worse: cable TV is freer, like Bill Maher’s show, to tell the fuller truth, as he did by reading, with Jane Lynch of Glee, an extended email exchange between Weiner and one of his six lovelies. I’m no prude, but I don’t wanna hear that again. Anything porn-ish, in word or picture, proves that sex as a spectator sport is highly overrated. Think about it.

    I have no opinion whether Weiner should resign because I’m not his boss; his voting constituency is. By the time you read this, pressure on him have forced it. But self-righteousness on the part of others towards those who err greatly is also highly overrated.

    But let’s stop calling Andrew Breitbart a “journalist.” He’s a conservative attack dog, and that’s why the GOP likes him. He’s been behind the unethical treatment of others, like Shirley Sharrod, whose government career he ruined by selectively editing remarks she made so he could convey the opposite view.

    Better to call him Dumb-bart and Dim-bulb, of whom we shall not see the last till someday he’s caught with his own pants down. Celebrity does that to most everybody, and now that Andy’s got it, you can count on his comeuppance in the foreseeable future. Believe me when I say he is being watched, and people like him, like their victims, are themselves far from perfect.

    I don’t see how tkhe young survive celebrity, but we wrongly think older people should be wiser. Wisdom however typically is trumped by a sense of self-importance and the belief, at last, that one should be above the law or common decency.    The GOP thinks that sexual aberrations or misbehavior are unimportant unless committed by liberals, and they wink at all hypocritical insinuations made by their own pals.

       Megyn Kelley, of Fox’s midday America Live program, didn’t mind being a pin-up in a winter issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ). There she was, quite falling out of her top, leading readers to forget she’s supposed to be a journalist.
Later, on her own show, she hosted a long segment with other women on whether it is appropriate to take children to Hooters, the place where wait staff are as close to Playboy quality as managers can find, and all, like Megyn, fall out of their tops and, for good measure, wear hotpants that leave little to the imagination.

        Megyn’s very principled stand, on her show, was that children should not be taken to such sites where their little eyes might be offended. Yet she didn’t mind being somewhat unclad in a magazine for all to see, regardless of age.

    So there is Hooters, and then there are hooters, and Kelley seems not to know the difference.

        It should be added that, in GQ, hers were both “fair” and “balanced,” marking the first such time in her “journalistic” career.

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Jun
06

The Shallow GOP Gene Pool

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GOP Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin givi...

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    The GOP’s search for a viable presidential candidate is akin to a needle in a haystack. And we all know that such a quest can result in a very painful moment of discovery.

    What we have now, save for Pawlenty and the recent entry of the Mittster, looks like a group photo taken in a fun-house mirror. Huckabee wants no part of this (for now) and Gingrich has twisted himself like a pretzel to be everything the conservative base wants in a candidate.

    In the interests of full disclosure, I fancy myself on speaking terms with Newt; I call him “Pudge” and he calls me “you lousy, stinking liberal.” He’s so cute when he’s mad, and was even more so in recent interviews where he repeatedly shot himself in the foot. I pray he does not take gun lessons from Dick Cheney or he’ll be shooting himself in the face.

    Huckabee, Christie and other gentry are playing coy but what they’re really doing is avoiding the current pack of wannabes, where one must don a requisite frightwig. No, they are going to wait until the real freak show, otherwise known as the Republican Convention, when all the crazies
go under the train and the red-meat crowd begins to flail about for someone to “draft.”

    We’re already rid of Donald Trump, who in a rare lucid moment realized what a Fat Chance is. He was cheered when Sarah Palin stopped by for a chat and Mr. Casino took her to the worst Big Apple pizzeria where cameras showed he doesn’t know the proper way to eat a slice. Rich he may be, but he clearly considered Sarah at best a very cheap date.

    So far, the best the GOP can come up with is bait from the shallow end of the political gene pool. They deem Obama to be so vulnerable, but next to him they all look to be jokes of the worst order.

    Sarah would even be the front runner again where it not for, hello, a Mormon, of all things. As an evangelical she should have an open field at this point, since her kind, along with fundamentalists, don’t like anything but the Old Time Religion, and to them Joseph Smith doesn’t fit in. He claimed to have dug up gold plates in the ground, which to them is absurd: they prefer a story where someone is born of a virgin and at the end flies up into the sky.

    This is to say that Mitt will have a problem throughout the South because all those right-wing religionists are not about to let the world see their president going to church in Salt Lake City, let alone having Latter Day Saints explored in endless news segments.

    We dare not fail to include Michele Bachmann, the other pretty face who shares with Sarah a predilection for not knowing the history of the country they want to lead. They should know better than to visit New England again but you can’t embarrass these gals, let alone insult them: there are even some Yankees who will believe Paul Revere rang bells on his midnight ride if a sexy broad with a sassy tongue says so.

    Given all the above, I consider Sarah the real front-runner and bride-in-waiting until Republicans gather to choose their banner-carrier. Christie or whoever else will finally claim the top spot but will be have to bring her aboard the ticket, and we’ll have to live with John McCain’s Folly all over again.

     But let’s just say Sarah becomes the nominee. She’ll tell us again that American tax dollars are going to Egypt before Obama, in the debate, will remind her that money was really used to buy U.S. farm products, and in the future to be part of a “debt-swap,” where the savings wold be re-invested in designated programs in Egypt. Sarah then might counter that she bets she could see Cairo from the top of a pyramid.

    When Barack reminds her that the annual $2 billion to that country began with the 1978 Camp David Accords and thus overseen by all administrations since, including Reagan’s and George W’s, she and the Fox News reporters will change the subject at the same time.

    As Sarah unadvisedly wanders into the area of unemployment and praises Reagan for bringing back America, Obama will counter that his jobless percentages have never been as high as Reagan’s and that, by the way, Barack’s disapproval numbers have never been nearly as low as the Gipper’s. Sarah, in desperation, may assert that, yes, but under Reagan American was still “free,” then flub the next question about her definition of socialism, which she may insist was begun under the Tsars.

    But suppose somehow the country loses its brains under a steady barrage of misinformation from Fox, and elects Palin. Imagine her press conferences, full of meanderings and inaccuracies, followed always by countrywide panels of schoolkids in segments called, “Is Sarah Smarter Than A Fifth-grader?” A local radio station did get calls from 5th-graders correcting her on Paul Revere.

    So sure, go ahead and elect a President Palin. I double-dog dare ya.

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May
27

Other Memories for Memorial Day

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Roadside memorial for Anthony "Tony"...

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    People die every day, and there is a scramble to give meaning to their lives.

   When the young die in war there are dignified rituals to acclaim that they were brave, courageous and sacrificed themselves for us all. Drums roll, guns roar and loved ones clasp folded flags as proof of the family’s valor.

   For the young who were not soldiers but robbed of life by treacheries of fate, the scramble for meaning is fierce. Middle-of-night car crashes, drug abuse, senseless violence, simple carelessness, or disease claim too many before the meaning of their existence has accrued.

    Then there is the struggle with obituaries, and funeral officiants grapple with appropriate eulogies: The kid had a great smile. Made everyone laugh. Touched the lives of all who were met. Was the life of the party. The apple of the parents’ eyes. What there was not enough of was time for accomplishment, to make a mark.

    Then little families gather on days fair or not so fair, and words are said with eloquence that can be mustered for the occasion, but nothing will temper the sorrow. And all without fanfare or crisply-dressed young warriors snapping to attention, or the sound of Taps.

    This may be hard to face, but there it is. We spend so much time denying the futility of certain deaths, and less on how to staunch the causes. But the briefest of driving trips cannot be taken without spotting the sad, little flowered roadside memorials, which are passed too quickly to see a name, only the mute testament that here a young life ended, one that now cries out wordlessly, and forever.

    Of course we always look for someone to blame, and too often it is those who spend lifetimes shepherding our children through the wisdom of the ages in class instruction or teaching them the value of teamwork and achievement through the healthy competition of sports.

    The blame-game extends to deciding who is and isn’t a fit teacher, and who among them is deserving to stay or go. We dangle compensation and benefits like carrots before their eyes, with threats of withdrawal if they don’t hold their mouths right.

    We won’t permit our teachers to talk about health if it has anything to do with safe sex, or about varieties of sexuality and our attitudes towards them. And heaven forfend we should expect ourselves to be as perfect as we expect them to be. When mistakes are made, let’s say so, but let the correction fit the error.

    As for alcohol abuse, what are the lessons from home? Is the use tempered? Is its proper use discussed and expectations stated? Is it named for what it is: the Great Killer, more so than all others combined, or do we refuse to call it a drug? If so, that’s hypocrisy.

    Then there are the auto deaths. What do kids hear and observe from adults in the family: that a car is a weapon or maybe a plaything? When I last taught a young man to drive, I took it as a sacred responsibility. The first time he put his hand on the driver’s door, I asked him to stop and “put on his humility,” and did so as we began each lesson. Maybe this will flash to his mind often enough throughout life as the first obligation of the privilege of operating a vehicle. And while operating a car, to drive defensively.    

      Violence among the young is another result of hypocrisy. Competition is one thing, as is its corollary, teamwork. But bullying is a plague that we choose not to stop. The abuse of kids who are not the “norm” is a great social and family failure.

     There are many lessons learned elsewhere as in school: the god of American culture has trickled down from pro sports to colleges and into elementary levels, with the message that it’s okay to let violence run freely, leading to misbehavior on the field and court, and to a cult of athletic celebrity that is winked at as long as the player, and his or her team, wins.

     But we blame schools and not our culture for whatever is wrong with our kids because the culture is ours and we refuse to be held accountable. The lesson then is always to look for someone else to hold responsible, and that the easiest targets are those who are most vulnerable. We can’t shut up loud mouthed pros who are beyond our grasp and control, and we certainly won’t stop watching and cheering for their antics. But we let our children defy legitimate authority. What a nation.

     Prior to many youthful deaths is often the death of their hope, opportunity and, too often, of responsibility and accountability. Something to ponder at the unnecessary loss of our children.

    If there is anything to “remember,” on Memorial Day, let it be that.

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May
17

Of Floods and the End of the World

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The Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis, Tennes...

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    For the umpteenth time, we’re told the Second Coming of Christ is imminent, this time on May 21 of this year. That’s the coming Saturday. So say some 1200 billboards nationwide, at a cost of $13 million.

The ugly thing about this prospect is that certain people will be taken up to heaven while the rest are left to a terrible fate, which is not a happy thought. So while some people will be okay, it means the end of the world as we know it.

    Actually, it’s already come to an end for some, given the Mississippi River’s latest rampage. I grew up on its banks and am here to say: it’s one kick-ass river. Those who set up shop or farm nearby know that one day they’re gonna get dope-slapped right out of home and livelihood. They’re very clear about that but when it comes, it still feels like Armageddon, big-time.

In the 1920s and 30s its floods set the standard by which today’s is measured and found to come up just short. A man named Herbert Hoover worked for the federal government at the time and dragged his feet on helping black citizens who were getting washed away. They had been Republicans since Lincoln but Hoover’s Folly made them Democrats ever since.

    An uncle of mine by marriage had been a grocer in what is now a godforsaken burg in southern Illinois named Olive Branch. After the Mighty Mississipp’ wiped him out he blamed God and never again darkened the door of a church. That made him a two-time loser, since blaming God for anything is as useful as spitting into the wind.

    He was also racist, and thence moved on to Cairo, IL which they pronouce “Kay-ro,” like the syrup, and why I don’t know since it’s named after a great Egyptian city. He liked Cairo because a white minority kept all the blacks from getting anywhere.

    As a kid, I saw countless cars packed with black folks going to and from church or on Sunday drives, tailpipes belching great clouds of smoke, and opined to my folks that if they ever got mad, they could take over the town. They laughed, but years later that’s just what happened: Cairo turned into an OK Corral and buildings burned like Gen. Sherman had just gone through.

    You’ll notice that just a few days ago the government took a page of advice from the Hoover days and breached a levee on the Missouri side in order to save, you guessed it: Cairo, Illinois. No sense making those folks Republican again.

    Long before that, my dear uncle had taken flight again to another town nearby where blacks were his sole clientele, but he never gave up thinking that, besides God, they were what was wrong with the world.

    We know now that the River has gone on to take further toll at Memphis (no way to mispronounce that) while on its way to Vicksburg and New Orleans, the latter a city convinced that God has it in for them. And to think that till recent years the Mississippi had been at low stages.

    The people who think Jesus arrives May 21 forget he said that even he didn’t know when that would be. That’s pretty much true for all bad surprises. The world is always ending for someone, somewhere, and so it has always been: history’s great plagues (and threats of them today: weren’t you just in a long line for your last vaccination?); world wars; tsunamis, earthquakes, acts of terror, and all the times the Red Sox lost playoffs or world series. One way or another, life’s a bitch and then we die.

    Not that reading about end-times isn’t fun. As with May 21, it takes one doofus with a gift of gab, add a bunch of impressionable people, give them some face-time on media, and therein hangs a silly tale. But we’ve seen it all before.

    The attraction was understandable when life was brief, cheap and there was no Lady Gaga. Death followed hard on the heels of birth, and there was no justice in between. Or as Thomas Hobbes put it: life was nasty, brutish and short. But not today, so why is looking for the end of the world a viable option? I credit, in part, certain institutions of lower learning, like some seminaries and Bible colleges.

    This is not to say the worst won’t happen sometime. An asteroid will do. Our sun is less of a worry, being billions of years from burning out; but that’s little comfort when you take out a mortgage on a home.

    Then there are those big and little deaths that come while we’re just hanging out on this mortal coil. Death itself is the end of every person’s world, and loss of love or a job can make anyone feel they’ve been whacked by Fate.

    So the world doesn’t have to come to an end all at once. It does quite well a little bit at a time. And when someone else falls out of the boat, we should pay attention to the splash. It could be us next time, whether by flood or asteroid.

    As for May 21, those of us not around the Mississippi River will probably sleep as well as any other day.

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May
05

A Wedding and a Funeral

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A still of 2004 Osama bin Laden video

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    We know there’s a god, or the death of Osama bin Laden would have come the day before the royal wedding. Imagine then the shrieking and screaming from all who still believe in fairy princes and princesses, were the best news about the world’s worst terrorist allowed to infringe on Happy Times in Britain’s First Family.

  As in Wonderland, things already had gotten curioser and curioser by nuptial-time in Jolly Old England: polls showed that no one there or in America intended to watch the ritual nonsense but, in a last-minute miracle, nearly everyone did.

    But why all the fuss when in truth this particular generation of Royals has been the clumiest of all at maintaining decorum; like the House of Agamemnon, they have had nothing but woe upon woe but, in this case, all from their own doing, not the hand of Fate or capricious gods. We should have known nothing good would come from Edward VIII abdicating the throne for love: an omen indeed, when a man with any sense at all would consider an ordinary marriage more desirable than the mere illusion of power.

    That’s right: power is not what the royalty has. All that pomp, circumstance and money is a big, empty show. The monarchy may be older but parlimament and the prime minister hold all the cards, while trying hard to look like they don’t, of course.

    That was clear when Prince Philip, though but consort to the current Elizabeth, early imagined that he, as man of the house, could drag the monarchy into modern times. He was chased off that tuffet not just by the Queen Mum’s stiff opposition (where the hell was Lizzie in all of this?) But because Winnie, that lovable old cigar-chomping Churchill, decreed that the Family should remain its stick-in-the-mud self–the great stone face of immutable tradition in what otherwise would always be changing times.

    And I have no interest in all the wedding finery as supposedly filled with deep symbolism. That would better have been affected had a wheel from the wedding carriage fallen off, and tripped one of those silly footmen. After all, there was another wedding just as fine, that of Charles and Diana, and we know how that turned out.

    The Family has seemed almost intent on disappointing us, only to beg our indulgence for another Big Show. Presently there is a Queen who simply will not allow her own son to enjoy a year or two as King. Nobody wants to talk about it, but we all know what that says: she doesn’t trust him, as if she’s done all that great a job herself as the big cheese.

    So Charles has become a boring old thing and along the way taken on a frumpy old spouse who’s a painful reminder that there used to be golden days of dazzling Diana, dearly departed, and by now no one cares if Chaz gets the throne or not. Think too of Fergie, who had a tad too much spirit, but so did Liz’s sis Margaret, for that matter but, hey, she was family. The only thing worse for the Royals would be if one were to kill another.

    And we don’t know if Will and Kate can handle being king and queen. It’s all wishful thinking since, to this point, recent history is murky. And oh, yes, Will and Harry looked so dashing in their cute little wedding suits, but minus those threads they’re no different than a couple of frat boys waiting for a party keg to arrive. It’s all such smoke and mirrors.

    So back to the real news. Osama bin Laden got whacked, to the relief of many and to the fate he so richly deserved, and now he sleeps with the fishies, if you want to call that a funeral. And talk about symbolism, there was a lot of it around for that occasion. CNN got its gang on board in time for the quick turnaround in news on a Sunday night but, for Fox, it fell just as Geraldo Rivera was up to bat.

    There’s the luck of the draw for you. Just be thankful it wasn’t during Glenn Beck’s turn; we would’ve had him all night, and imagine that for a freak-show. Geraldo, Fox’s long-time lightweight and very un-funny reminder of Groucho Marx, once made us all wait through his Great Safe-Cracking Caper, to come up at last with an empty stash-box.

This time, Geraldo may as well have affixed a big red rubber ball to his nose to be more ridiculous for the moment. He mispronounced words and mixed up the names Osama and Obama (talk about Freudian slips) while other geniuses at Fox, in their haste to scoop the real journalists at other networks, wrongly posted that bin Laden had died a week earlier.

    Thus in the space of a weekend, a wedding reduced us tears and Fox left us laughing.

    Thankfully, bin Laden is really dead. And that’s no joke.

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Apr
28

Bending It Like Beck

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Cropped from a photo of a group of predominant...

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    Not, “Bend it like Beckham,” a film of both drama and good humor about a dude, David Beckham by name, and his skill at free-kicks that curve, or bend, past walls of soccer defenders.

    This is about Glenn Beck, he of rapidly receding fame while his infamy grows. Beck is good at bending the truth, and mayhap you have stumbled onto his Fox channel gig and been regaled by his intellectual sleight of hand.

  Like demagogues since the world began, Beck garnered much attention before his eventual comeuppance, this one akin to a train wreck in slow motion before viewers turn away to other entertainments. His audiences call to mind old Western flicks of gawking crowds assembled before a hanging: when the hapless body fell through the trap door, the mob split apace, hoping their presence might be unrecognized, and later be able to deny having been there at all.

    Others at Fox News have long resented their self-centered compatriot hogging all the glory, but his ratings last January’s ratings showed a collapse of 40% in one year, along with nearly half of his prime demographic of 25-54 year olds. Ouch. And so soon after his famed puppet show on the Washington Mall where the crowd dangled like marionettes at, well, his “Beck” and call.

    Did you laugh or cry when he notified his distraught audience that he would soon depart Fox and turn to other means, supposedly, to save the world? The event was expertly parodied by comic Jon Stewart, who skillfully aped every overwrought mannerism and manipulative nuance of Beck’s typical evening fare, replete with chalk boards burdened with scrawl. When I get letters without margins, I know I’m dealing with people who are too many bricks shy of a load.

    Beck surrounds himself with graphics and depictions of many great Americans of the past, as if the discerning among us will believe that he belongs in their camp, or that they would even approve. He doesn’t know that many of them were deists, liberals and no few a tad horny. But nothing is too obvious for him not to try to explain away.

    Beck’s show falls at best into the category of the egregious: something you can’t keep from watching because it’s so ridiculous. Here’s a guy whose backdrop is a huge “GB” logo.  After all, he’s special, he’s his own brand, and he wants us to listen not to experts, but to him. God help us all if we did.

    It may come as a surprise that other conservative minds are more discriminating, like “Morning Joe” Scarborough, who said Beck’s bag of bluster was bad for the GOP, not to mention for Fox News. Former Bush speech-writer Peter Wehner dubbed Glenn “the most disturbing personality on Cable TV,” for his conspiracies and for portraying himself as “the great decoder of events” that create fear, hopelessness and helplessness.

    Jennifer Robins, a right-of-center columnist for the Washington Post, said conservatives should “call him out” and explain that Beck doesn’t represent the views of their mainstream candidates.

    Would that such omens fell on the ears of a local shrink in my selfsame little Massachusetts burg, by name of Dr. Keith Ablow. He co-authored a book with Beck that gets the prize for bad timing in that it coincides with Glenn’s fall from grace. This was not another Oprah-and-Dr. Phil team-up: Oprah did not need Dr. Phil, he needed her.

    There are countless mental health pros out there with a gift of gab and a flair for the dramatic: Phil just got the luck of the draw and the rest is his very profitable history.

    In this case, a shrink was needed to certify Beck as non-loony: how can he be nuts if some psychiatrist thinks he’s a model of humanity? I doubt many Good Doctors would do so. Of course, Keith Ablow is a Fox commentator, and hardly a neutral one: just another Republican but with a “virtual” evaluation of Americans’ feelings towards their president, most of whom he considers “in denial” about Obama. As you may guess, his thoughts are really more political than psychological, and the prez is thoroughly psychoanalyzed from afar, namely from Ablow’s esteemed couch in Newburyport.

    Curiously, Ablow sees Charlie Sheen as showing psychiatric symptoms of grandiosity and false beliefs, possibly bipolar, while Beck’s goofiness is given approval in an entire book, and one that is self-serving for both authors. The two believe, by the way, that it was God’s plan for them to meet, speak and come up with “Seven Wonders.”

    One of them is Beck.

    Another is why Ablow even bothered with him.

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Apr
17

It Was A Most Un-Civil War

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Map of the division of the states during the C...

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    It was a hundred and fifty years ago and we still aren’t over it. Less than a century after Independence to create a nation, we were at each other’s necks in a Civil War of “father against son and brother against brother.” Keep in mind that included mothers and daughters too. The accompanying graphic shows states of the Union and the Confederacy.

   My maternal grandfather fought in it. He was forty years older than my grandmother and but a boy when he charged across that field at Shiloh and took a Yankee bullet in the upper leg. A little higher and I’d not be writing this column.

   Mini-balls, so called, were terrible things and he was lucky that both he, and the leg survived the conflict. So many others, with only a pre-surgery shot of whiskey and a stick shoved between their teeth, were held down while field medics sawed off shattered limbs of the more unlucky.

    John Wesley Stone of the Kentucky Seventh died long before my birth. And he had been a statistic: like most southerners he fought less than a hundred miles from home. Cconfederate military pensions came much later than their Yankee brethren and he finally got a measly pension only two years before his death.

    My grandmother never knew that War and by the time I was a kid she had little to say or remember, except for one thing that became a family legacy: though he was willing to fight for his “country,” the Confederate States of America, she said, he always thought the slaves should be free.

    But extremist rhetoric is what we best remember, as from from the other kind of Southerner–the “Hell, no we ain’t fergittin’” sort. But my grandmother and most of her generation, that war was over and done, and she always referred impartially to “Mr.” Lincoln and “Mr.” Davis, Mr. Grant and Mr. Sherman. She gave her husband only daughters but one, my mother, and her own daughter bear the middle name “Lee,” after the great Robert E.

    More people died then than in all other wars, before or since, against our common enemies. But all of them brought out the worst in otherwise sensible people because they got personal. This is true of groups large and small, political parties and even churches: people finally want the destruction of those with whom they disagree. Call it temporary insanity.

    I grew up in Missouri, a Border state, where we were assured that the Civil War was not a pretty sight and regaled with stories of how families sent their sons to fight, then changed sympathies after and shot them dead when they reappeared in the wrong uniform.

    The great American novel, Gone With the Wind, relates no actual fighting, but captures the folly of that infamous “Lost Cause” waged by the South. They believed their men were superior and each worth a hundred Yankees. Rhett Butler is representative of the rare solitary cynic and opportunist, the only kind of man in all the South who was a realist, and one with a sense of humor, at that. All others were given to the lethal self-righteousness of the True Believer.

    We are wrong to glorify that conflict. Lines were never clear cut, and each side had many citizens who were enemy sympathizers. Thousands of Northerners opposed Emancipation and abhorred the thought of black soldiers fighting alongside their white sons.

    And as with all wars before weapons of mass destruction, the North won despite poor generals and too many unnecessary battle losses because they had vastly superior numbers. That’s what Lincoln meant when he redeployed Grant with the words, “He fights,” meaning that Ulysses had no problem throwing thousands to their deaths in order to overwhelm a smaller enemy. Sherman agreed: “War is hell,” he said: “a cruelty, and there is no way around it.” That means no war is “civil” only un-civil.

    And we know the outcome of that one: slaves were freed but with no program to assimilate them into larger society, and at best were doomed to sharecropping where they were cheated of their wages and kept in debt.

    In ancient Greece and Rome, there was more humane treatment of slaves and after years of service they were often given freedom along with enough wealth to have comfortable retirements. But slavery is corrupt in principle, where freedom must be given. Thus over centuries it twisted into what we know was the worst of plantation cruelty and the Jim Crow South.

    Such does not die easily. Racism still abounds. A black man who becomes president is a mistake; he cannot be a real American. Surely he is a Kenyan, thus illegitimate, deserving of the worst and to be banished to defeat and humiliation.

    Sounds like the Old South doesn’t it? Hell, no, such folks ain’t fergittin’, and never will.

    Thank god, it’s still a Lost Cause. But the fight goes ever on.

Categorized in Politics, Race in America and Social Issues
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Apr
12

The Myth of American Sports

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Babe Ruth

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Let’s please get over the fairy tale that sports in America are the cleanliness that is next to godliness, and that our children are better for their existence. It is but another piece in the myth of American “exceptionalism.”

But if Freud was correct that we deal with our wrongheadedness by facing rather than denying it, we do well to dummy up and listen.

Last in this space I dealt with the Big Joke that is baseball, and its anything-but-level playing field. More will here be mentioned in that regard, but In Other News, as it’s called by the talking heads in media, “This just in”:

We’re learning quickly that college football players are fessing up to getting handshakes filled with cash, along with cars and oh, yeah, sexual favors from boosters representing our proud universities around the nation. And this comes from sportscasters who are old jocks who wear pimp suits and look like fire hydrants from the shoulders up.  Till now they’ve dared not to kill the golden goose of sports that gives them face-time on TV and nice salaries of their own. It was time for those has-beens to “man-up,” anyway.

Then the White Sox GM allowed that $30 million salaries for baseballers who aren’t worth it, is “asinine.” He failed to mention that what men in suits in the front office make on player talent falls into the same category, but those numbers are never aired.

Then there are despicably dirty little matters like the Super Bowl seating at Cowboys Stadium in Texas in this self-same year, when 1250 temporary seats were deemed unsafe under butts of any size, and most were shifted to other roosts and the rest had to make do with standing-room-only. I.e., the palatial Tower of Babel they’ve been crowing about since its completion couldn’t figure out how to get in all ticket-holding fans. Gee, in Texas that’s enough to make you lose your faith in God.

I won’t even bore you with what’s going on at the trial of Barry Bonds, but all the players who are dishing on him in court are still playing when they shouldn’t be, as long as they tell on somebody else.

And now there’s Ramirez: Manny will henceforth have to be Manny off the field; I had predicted just over a year ago that his would be a tragic tale at the end. So you get the idea: the Big Bird of athletics has had a nasty crack-up, in more ways than one.

This all began, well, at the beginning. Let’s commence with when Sox owner Harry Frazee, unhappy with five world series wins (including the first one) between 1903-18, sold Babe Ruth supposedly because Harry was cash-strapped and/or wanted to finance his stage production of “No, No, Nannette.” That is untrue: he did it because he was stupid. And between 1922-33 the Sox were last in the league a total of nine times.

Then when both Fenway and the third installment of the Polo Grounds in New York were new, and with the red stockings safely ahead in games, owner James McAleer forced the series to go longer by making manager Jake Stahl start a different pitcher in what should have been the last game. Instead, it let the Giants back in and eventually they tied the set.

McAleer did that because in those days, players were only paid for the first four games; after that, all monies went to the leagues and the club owners. That of course was the beginning of the need for a union but, hey, that’s a bad word these days.

Fans finally caught on to McAleer’s tactics and were willing to pass up the final game, which turned out to be a doozy (and won thankfully by the Sox), but fans stiffed the game just to keep that little jackass from getting his money from extra ticket sales. Do you think fans would do that today? Hell, no, they’re saps for anything: crooks, juicers, and criminal behavior; just say, “Play Ball!” and they’ll put up with anything, then complain about the loss of American character.

Then the Bosox bosses did all they could to keep blacks off the team. As late as 1946 a local pol shamed them into trying out three players of “color,” and one was Jackie Robinson. But ownership yawned in his face and two years later Jackie began his fabled career with the Dodgers–all because a man named O’Malley had the balls in Brooklyn that were missing in Beantown. One writer said the Jackie Curse turned out to be worse than that of the Bambino, and Robinson forever hated the Sox for that.

Actually, the Sox were a team divided by north and south, and with all the religion and politics that went with it. Still, they won that 1912 series.

That of course were the days when God itself was a racist and all was (supposedly) right with the world.

Categorized in Sports
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Apr
04

Despicable Them: Baseball Strikes Out

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Latest Image on the new Yankee Stadium.

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Ah, just listen to the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. But it’s not a game anymore, only a newly-minted circle of the super-rich whose teams are wagered on in office betting pools and imagined to be gods by children.

Kids always felt that way about their hardball heroes, back to when they knew them by nicknames like Babe, the Iron Horse, DiMag, and the game-changing Jackie.

The new crowd of super-athletes is known for living in over-priced castles inside gated communities and, sooner or later during their careers, for disappointing their youngest fans with very unsportsmanlike behavior, and here we speak of Bonds, Clemens and their ilk. You know, the Brave New World of Take the Money and Run. But there are reasons this came to be.

We cannot blame only the players. There are other culprits and they wear no uniforms and win no games at the last out with talented derring-do. No, they wear suits and are a breed of American that has fashioned its own image of social contempt in places like Wall Street and uh, oh, yes, Sports.

I speak here of a few owners. A year ago, upon the death of Georgia Steinbrenner, I created an unauthorized epitaph of his having compromised the future of baseball. It mattered not to New Yorkers that he gave them what they’re used to: a sense of entitlement without their deserving or having to work for it. That, after all, is the Big Apple Way.

In sum, there was a long history of owners making a lion’s share of the money from the athletic talent of others, meaning, by improper compensation to those who made it for them. Such thievery always results in a union, what Americans with short memories think of today as the devil itself.

The players union set about to correct this imbalance and succeeded mightily in doing so. Now people blame them for high salaries while owners in their high-priced threads escape the notice of all.

One union tactic was free-agency, by which players would no longer be enslaved by a single owner but could, in timely fashion, benefit from an open bidding process. Credit for this goes to Marvin Miller, though people who don’t pay attention think it was the brain-child of Steinbrenner. But he only benefited from it. The impression is that George was the richest man in America and where else would he belong but in New York, and what else could he possibly spend his money on other than to make them happy?

But there were and are lots of owners with as much filthy lucre than he ever had, like the Cubs’ Rickets family and the Angels’ Arte Moreno, but Bob McLane of the Astros has a bit more and John Malone of the Braves a lot more. Mr. Nintendo Man who holds the Mariners has a whole lot more.

The difference is that to them baseball is a game, albeit a quite profitable one. To Georgie it was life and death, not to mention a chunk of his big fat ego. When a player was in free agency, the others would bid a reasonable amount but George would wave blank checks, and hence got A-Rod, Giambi, Abreu, and all the rest. To wit, he bought an all-star club with cash on the barrel head, many of whom had to sit on the bench a lot, given that nine others were already on the field.

That is how he compromised the future of baseball. He had everyone else chasing his rich kids. That house of cards eventually would have played itself out, if only all other owners stayed put and stuck to salaries that were generous and that made sense. Then the Red Sox blew the lid off by out-Yanking the Yankees, dishing $50 million just to talk to Matsuzaka and another 50 to sign him. That was obscene.

But it caught up quickly with the Sox, as it is with the boys in the Bronx. Players in their prime no longer want to finish their careers in pin stripes, witness Cliff Lee, who blew off all that money to go with the Phils. The Sox haven’t and never will get back their full investment in Dice-K, and after shelling out an insane new contract for Josh Beckett, have watched him start to tank right along with Papelbon. Now the heavily-favored Sox have begun the season without a Top Three pitcher who can avoid dishing up home run balls.

Meanwhile, please notice that the Twins are always right up there, making it to the playoffs though just short of winning it all, and they do it with sensical prices. All the USA ought to be rooting for them.

What gives me most satisfaction is that failure is settling in with the Yankes just after their building that new monstrosity(see photo) across from the old Yankee Stadium. Ironically, in that short distance, they abandoned their storied history, and Steinbrenner is succeeded by his doofus sons, known otherwise as the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum of modern baseball.

What clueless fans still don’t know is that tix sales for the new stadium plunged seven percent the first year, and though the team is worth much more than what George bought it for, it’s leveraged 95% to Stadium debt.
Modern athletics, not just baseball, is on more of a slippery slope than it may eager guess. And it’s more than greed:

It’s just despicable.

Categorized in Sports
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Mar
23

Women and Freud

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Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smok...

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It’s a marvel that the “second wave” of a movement to awaken and empower women in America was called “feminism” given that, at the time, to be “feminine” meant quite the opposite.

The month of March, annually, is one of attention to women’s place, role and history. The second wave mentioned began in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when I had the good fortune to gain valuable contacts with the movement and to interview various feminists, including Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and Betty Friedan.

Despite their shrill reputations, both Steinem and especially Millett were quite soft-spoken: concerned that my recorder might not pick up the latter’s voice I wrote the entire interview furiously in longhand. The interview with Friedan was a disaster: she was already controversial for her insistence that lesbian issues be excluded from the feminist agenda, and I made the only such mistake I would ever make again, and too soon broached the matter. She stood abruptly and without further comment left the interview.

Today we are amid the “third wave,” but the climate is much different. The niece of Phyllis Schlafly has co-authored a book with her aunt claiming that the feminist movement was the worst thing to happen to women. Some of their assertions however are as extreme as certain ones by the Second Wave leaders.

One was the denigration of Sigmund Freud. Steinem later had a role in the furious objection to a proposed exhibit on the life and work of Freud that was to be held at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Their assessment of his legacy was a bit of a stretch and overlooked his contribution, though flawed, to women as well as the rest of society. But certain feminist leaders found an effective punchline with which to smear Freud beyond recognition: his (in)famous quote, “…my god, what do women want?” Millett went so far as to throw him into the cauldron with Nazism and the USSR, as if he had written the ideologies for them.

It wasn’t enough that his comment was but an aside in a letter to one of his many intellectual women friends, who were diverse and extraordinary, and his relations with them no more complex than with men like Carl Jung.

Among them was Helene Deutsch, who came to make her own significant contribution to the analysis of the feminine, and whose life was incredibly identical to those who came to be known as the Second Wave of the movement: rebellion against her mother; family repression as well as sexual seduction by her brother; a struggle for independence and education (opposed by her father followed by success against daunting odds); early pregnancy and abortion when such were shameful; and ambivalence toward motherhood. And that’s a short list.

But those who are lionized come often to be eaten by lions, and such was the fate suffered by Deutsch, among whose predators were other women. Freud, who had opened doors to the unconscious for women as well as men, fell from grace as well. Friedan as the first to blame him when World War II ended and men returned to reclaim jobs temporarily and ably filled by the other sex.

In time, Karen Horney and Melanie Klein challenged Freud but continued to hold him with great respect. Curiously, Jung never became a target as did Freud, though Jung’s archetypal Mother had very unflattering connotations is his model of the psyche, but one useful to analysts like Marion Woodman. Connie Zweig also said that such explorations require a new relation to the “Father World” comprising “personal fathers, husbands and lovers, sons and brothers…” as a key to spiritual growth in the feminine ego; to which Woodman added that women must seek “to relate to the Father archetyupe without identifying with it.

Marie Bonaparte, to whom Freud wrote the infamous line, was not offended by the reference, perhaps because, like the Jungian, Robert Johnson, she may have recognized that it harkened from an Arthurian tale in which the future king, on pain of death, was obliged to ascertain the answer to what women wanted.

The legend features a repugnant hag who demanded marriage to Arthur’s good friend, Gawain, which the studly and honorable knight considered not too much to ask of a buddy. He allowed the  woman to choose for herself in matters that affected Gawain himself, which resulted in her transformation into a stunning beauty–the reward for his giving her respect and control over her own life.

This was a lesson not only to that older society, which went largely unheeded, but to ours, if we will only embrace it.

As Johnson concluded: if men feel that feminism is the ugly side of women, it is because they have been driven there, and the magic of transformation, fashioned from respect, dignity, choice and freedom will restore beauty of spirit to both men and women.

Categorized in Social Issues and Women and Society
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