"Having a dream is no excuse for accepting an onerous status quo and waiting passively on ''someday'' to make things right. A dream is not an excuse. It's a responsibility."
- Leonard Pitts Jr.
Sen. Larry Craig did (or at least pleaded guilty to) a misdemeanor crime of a dubious nature. The whole incident from all accounts is at the very least bizarre and his present claims to having done nothing wrong seem to directly contradict his guilty plea. I would almost be willing to chalk this up to misunderstanding and police over-reach if it were not for that guilty plea. And his claim that the officer solicited him. According to the tape as I heard it, he tells the officer "you solicited me", but then the way he tells the story, there was no solicitation of any kind. He was simply reaching down to pick up a paper when he saw a police badge. It doesn't add up. At all. Go home, Sen. Craig, you are finished.
That said, there is no need for the incessant cries of "hypocrisy" and so on from the left, declaring incongruous the conservative stand for "traditional values" against a backdrop of never-ending corruption and moral morass (pun intended) from their end of the political spectrum. The problem is, when you set out as the champion of traditionally held beliefs and transgress them it is easier to be called a "hypocrite" than to call out someone who believes things need to change who then toes the conservative line. Conservatives are just happy you are "doing the right thing" on that particular issue. I think there should be less pointing fingers on moral issues, in a general sense, and more introspection (as an aside, I don't know how the Congress got tied up in making policy on "moral" issues in the first place. Where in article 1 of the constitution does it mention socio-cultural policy? [well, other than saying slavery could not be outlawed until at least 1808, which even then, I believe they'd argue had more to do with commerce than moral virtue]). There are no saints in Washington, and just because you don't (or can't) always live up to the ideal standard you believe in does not make you a hypocrite, does not make you a liar or a cheat or a criminal. It makes you human. But you have to try to do better or you are unforgivable and make fools of those who would forgive you. To quote Ben Franklin, "To err is human, to repent divine, to persist devilish".
That said, the conservatives need to realize that the sort of forgiveness they are advocating for Sen. Craig does not (or at the very least should not) only be extended to fellow conservatives. When are the Tom DeLay's of the world going to start advocating forgiveness for Michael Vick or Bill Clinton? No, forgiveness does not extend across the aisle, or out of the hallowed halls of Congress (unless it's for a fellow GOPer). Who cares if the other side piles on your guy when he falls, you should be the bigger pers...who am I kidding, these are politicians we're talking about; Bury the other side! Kill! Kill! Kill! Vote for me, because while I may not have anything to offer, look at those other guys, they're scum! Larry Craig was entrapped! Heckuva job, Brownie!
In other piling on related news: Picking on kids is never the right thing to do, but nobody's perfect and this was too good to pass up (forgiveness please).
We are a nation nostalgic for high school. The two big entertainment phenomena from the second half of this month were High School Musical 2, the Friday night premiere became the most watched event in the history of basic cable and the 2nd most watched program ever by the Disney target demographic 9-14 age group, and SuperBad, a hilarious raunchy, R-rated comedy about that one unforgettable night at the end of high school that should be instantly enjoyable to anyone who has ever been a 17-year old boy scored back-to-back #1 weekends at the box office despite the existence of the 2nd wave of threequels from Bourne and Rush Hour. In both films, high school is idealized as the apex of acceptable irresponsibility and social freedom.
What I find interesting is that neither of these movies about the high school experience is really targeted toward high school kids (although I imagine high school boys will probably flock to see Superbad, they aren't technically supposed to be allowed in without an adult...but tell that to the group of unchaperoned 8th graders that were in the same showing of 300 that I attended). "Tweens" (a ridiculous designation if ever there were one) watch HSM 2 and are excited over the prospects of their coming high school year being filled with dancing, singing, and everyone gets along in the end tales. The out of high-school viewer of Superbad remembers the good ol days of high school and reminisces about the crazy adventures they had or wild schemes they concocted back in their own adolescene.
Now to the films themselves: High School Musical 2 High School Musical 2 suffers from the worst fate that can befall a musical: the story doesn't 'sing'. Musical writers the years over stress the importance of telling a story that creates situations wherein the characters can't help but break out into song and HSM2 only has 1 such moment and its the first scene of the film. It is the last 2-3 minutes of the school year and when the bell finally rings and summer is here the characters break into song and dance in a number that compares favorably with a similar scene from Disney's mostly overlooked mid-90's stroke of genius that is A Goofy Movie.
Beyond that scene, which borrows heavily from the original High School Musical, right down to the dancing with basketballs, it descends into an extended episode of Saved by the Bell from the summer they spent at the Malibu Sands Beach Club, which isn't altogether bad, but there are several songs that are added in for the sake of having songs that aren't any good, feel needlessly tacked on, or go on too long, especially at the end of the movie. The only other song in the film that comes close to justifying its existence is I Don't Dance, a humorous number during a baseball game (once again, drawing heavily from the first movie).
The first film was carried by great musical numbers which made the meager acting/dialogue between tolerable and the sometimes surrealistic visuals of East High more acceptable, but this time around the bad songs only underscore the bad acting and lazy directing (other than in the scene with Sharpay's big number which is, at least visually, a great homage to the classic, lavish musical choreography of Busby Berkley).
I suppose this one is worth seeing if you loved the first one, but it really is forgettable by comparison. Probably better to just watch the first one yet again. Or better yet, introduce the youngsters (and face it, most likely yourself as well) to the dance-floor wizardry of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers in Swing Time or Shall We Dance.
Superbad Superbad has that same winning formula of the other two comedies Judd Apatow has a hand in since switching over to movies (40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up after failing to find an audience with critically acclaimed television shows Freaks & Geeks and Undeclared) in that the characters spout off pop-culture rich, profanity-laden dialogue for 2 hours, but while the dialogue is full of raunch the movie is really fairly staid in terms of what actually takes place on screen. The characters tend to make the "right" choices when faced with moral dilemmas and there is a strong theme across all three films of male camaraderie and how the "loser" (the titular 40-year-old virgin, the unemployed illegal immigrant in Knocked Up, and the chunky kid and awkward kids in this movie) can ultimately be "the man" in the end, continuing the cultural oscillations on the definition of masculinity.
Though set in the present day, the movie features a great soundtrack of 70s music and new 70s-sounding music recorded for the movie which serves to underscore the sort of goofy tone the same way it did in Undercover Brother.
The thing that sets it apart from most high-school movies is the rejection of traditional high school archetypes/stereotypes in the characters. For the most part, there are no clearly defined "cool kids" or "nerds", although the Fresno Bee's high school movie reviewer perfectly describes the one truly nerdy character in the film as a cross between Urkel and Harry Potter. Seth, Evan and the rest of the high school seems to be one big group of kids who've more or less known each other since forever, but have separated themselves out over the years for the sake of appearances, conveniences, whatever. There is no impenetrable social hierarchy that the characters feel they are fighting against. Jules says she is having a party and invites Seth to come. No strings attached, no qualifications, she just invites him. Perhaps as a joke, perhaps because she doesn't expect him to come anyway, but there's no evidence of that. She seems to genuinely think he's an okay guy. This sort of subversion of genre makes the film worth the ticket price. That and the first 10-20 minutes of this are as good as anything that's been out this year in terms of comedy. The jokes are vulgar, but come on, that's how it is with 17/18 year old boys and what else would you expect from a film called Superbad.
Recommended Reading: If you enjoy Superbad, you'll probably also enjoy I Love You, Beth Cooper, a highly amusing novel about, you guessed it, that one infamous night at the end of high school in the life of unpopular class president Dennis Cooverman (picture a male version of Diane Court in the high school classic Say Anything) and his buddy as he tries to hook up with the head cheerleader while being chased by her just-back-from-Iraq, slightly psycho boyfriend and his army buddies.
A professed gang member was quoted in today's Fresno Bee saying, "None of my boys are changing. Maybe one out of 20 wants to get out. A lot of them are locked up, but they get out and do the same things - get faded and rob some fools."
Stanley Crouch of the NY Daily News offered up the following information in a recent op-ed: Addressing a dilemma tantamount to terrorism, a few months ago Ben Stein wrote in the conservative American Spectator that, "In the five and a half years since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities." ...Besides all of the human costs of these murders, the burden is estimated by the World Health Organization to cost an annual $300 billion. That amounts to about 150 weeks in Iraq, or three years. This would seem a good subject for presidential debates, right? Wrong, apparently.
Given that there have presumably been nearly 10x as many Americans killed as a result of domestic gang violence as opposed to foreign radical terrorism in the half decade since we began our "War on Terror", it would seem to me that we have either a distorted set of national priorities or an unsettling lack of compassion for our fellow member of the body politic.
To those who are, in fact, concerned, the question remains what can we do about it? Local authorities have been trying, mostly in vain, to curb gang violence for decades. The problem continues to be that most gang members, seem to be impervious to reform, just recall that quote I started this post with. The only real solution to this is probably the very unspecific concept of prevention. Keeping kids involved, strong parents, focus on education and opportunities and so on. But these are the same notions and aspirations we have been telling ourselves are the cure for poverty and social disaffection for generations, and still we have the problems. We know "poverty" is a relative term and that the lifestyle maintained by some considered in poverty in America today would not have had such a distinction a century ago or in certain other countries; nevertheless, such comparisons are, perhaps, beside the point as the statistics fail to account for those today who either can't reliably be counted (i.e the homeless) or don't want to be counted (i.e. illegal immigrants) and their relative conditions would undoubtedly skew the statistics downward. Oh, the successes of the War on Poverty!
To Mr. Crouch's last point there, that the issue is not even on the general national radar, is an interesting one. I think the issue tends to be concentrated in certain areas (most notably California and Florida) so most of the country, at least geographically, isn't directly affected by gangs. I don't know if the FBI should be involved in ridding us of gangs, but I do know local level authorities have been struggling with it for decades, with decidedly mixed (if not downright disappointing) results. In England the answer the national government devised was a ban on handgun ownership, even to the point where the police do not carry guns (one of many facets of English life hilariously skewered in the unmissable Hot Fuzz, now on DVD), but the result was not what they expected): In the two years following the 1997 handgun ban, the use of handguns in crime rose by 40 percent, and the upward trend has continued. From April to November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose 53 percent.
Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. From 1991 to 1995, crimes against the person in England's inner cities increased 91 percent. And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime more than doubled. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of English burglaries occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the U.S., where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police. In a United Nations study of crime in 18 developed nations published in July, England and Wales led the Western world's crime league, with nearly 55 crimes per 100 people.
The Home Office figures - which exclude crimes involving air weapons - show the number of deaths and injuries caused by gun attacks in England and Wales soared from 864 in 1998-99 to 3,821 in 2005-06. That means that more than 10 people are injured or killed in a gun attack every day. (More on the Brown/Blair adminstrations recent fudging of these stats here).
Ultimately, though, perhaps this is simply a sad fact of life that we will have to abide, and there is no real way to rid ourselves of gangs and other unprovoked acts of violent crime; there will always be young, out of the mainstream, frustrated individuals who will feel slighted/disrespected by "the system", don't want to change their ways and don't even necessarily even want to be broadly accepted, will likely act out in rash and often violent ways as a means of gaining some respect (read: fear) or status in the public eye. If that sounds like a form of domestic terrorism maybe that distinction is not too far off (see the death toll at the top of this post once again for a reminder of the devastation), although if you thought there was a ruckus about calling Katrina victims refugees, just imagine the maelstrom that would ensue from classifying fellow citizens as terrorists.
From Leonard Pitts Jr at the Miami Herald: Meet Jack McClellan. You might want to shower afterward. Nobody in the greater Los Angeles area will have to ask what I mean. In the last month or so, McClellan has roiled Southern California by saying in effect: I'm a pedophile, and there's nothing you can do about it.
The hell of it is, he's right. You cannot, or in any event, should not, be arrested for what you are, only for what you've done. McClellan has done nothing. Or at least, nothing for which he should be prosecuted, there being no law against making people nauseous.
The story goes as follows. In late July, McClellan was confronted by police. They had been summoned by a woman who saw him loitering around the children's section of a library in Santa Monica. McClellan, who, according to news reports, lives mostly out of his car, was cooperative even to the point of allowing officers to take his picture. He was also candid and unapologetic about his sexual attraction to little girls. But McClellan, 45, evidently has no arrest record or warrants anywhere in the country, so police had no choice but to let him go.
The bizarre encounter quickly catapulted McClellan onto the local news and talk show circuit, where people learned that he had a website (since taken down) featuring photos taken of little girls in public places and ranking the best places for pedophiles to see children. It was also said that McClellan was thinking of moving to the city of Santa Clarita.
Two Santa Clarita lawyers were sufficiently alarmed to seek a restraining order requiring McClellan to stay away from the city's children. A judge was sufficiently alarmed to give them even more: an order prohibiting McClellan from coming within 30 feet of any child in the state. In effect, the judge imposed house arrest on a man who had committed no crime.
Predictably, McClellan was twice arrested last week for violating an order it would be almost impossible to obey. Just as predictably, legal experts are now saying the obvious: The order is unconstitutional.
Yes, Jack McClellan is a reprehensible freak. And that opinion holds, by the way, even if, as some suspect, he turns out to be merely some kind of bizarre prankster. But for our purposes today, take him at his word that he really is a man with a sexual fetish toward children. The urge to imprison such a creature for the rest of its days is more than understandable.
The problem is, there is no legal rationale for doing so. The law is a broadsword and it is being used here to peel an apple. It can't be done. You only destroy the apple and smear the sword.
There are limits to what the law can do -- and sometimes you find yourself stranded beyond those limits, faced with behavior that is clearly wrong and yet, just as clearly, legal. To respond to that behavior with acts that please the crowd but stain the law is to cross the line that separates the citizenry from the mob.
Californians should publicize McClellan's face and fetish until every child in the state knows to run, screaming, on sight. Put up fliers, organize online. But they ought not prosecute him for what he has only said.
Yes, fliers and such are unsatisfactory options. But any option -- the restraining order included -- that did not involve closing a fist on McClellan's windpipe would be unsatisfactory. At least those don't require us to sell out fundamental values for the fool's gold of security.
Even Jack McClellan enjoys the privileges of the First Amendment. He is free to say he's a child molester. He's free to say he's a Satanist. He's free to say he's a racist.
You think it's terrible that a man can say such things? I agree. Indeed the only thing more terrible would be if we lived in a country where he could not.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on this movie all week so I just got around to watching the Democratic debate from Iowa this past Sunday. About 30 minutes into the forum Dennis Kucinich called out moderator George Stephanopolous for creating artificial divisions and drama between the two front-runners and attempting to marginalize the rest of the candidates. About 20 minutes later when George asked a question about belief in the power of prayer to each of the candidates, Kucinich replied, "I've been up here praying that you'd ask me a question for the last 45 minutes"
Bravo, Congressman Kucinich. Take every chance you get to call out the nonsense of the process as it stands at these forums, as there's no real point in delivering the message of your candidacy or your policy ideas (curtailing free trade, creating a state-run, not-for-profit health care system, expanded civil rights for homosexuals, repealing the Bush tax cuts, etc), because they aren't going to recount your ideas/arguments on any news programs later in the day or throughout the week, so only the few thousand viewers and the few dozen in the audience will ever hear it. Which is not to say you don't deserve to be heard, quite contrary, I think every candidate deserves an equal and fair hearing, instead of incessant coverage of whether Michelle Obama is taking veiled shots at Hillary Clinton, questions about Obama's "blackness", or the never-ending "Just testing the waters" drama of the Fred Thompson non-campaign, but if you're not going to get a real shot to lay out your message for the people, then at least attempt to open people up to the idea that the process itself is something that must be fixed, regardless of who becomes president.
Ruben Navarette of the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote about the long shot candidates today. Excerpted: Long-shot presidential hopefuls may not get elected, but they do tend to grow on you – especially when they're being marginalized, insulted and picked on by everyone else. With the first primaries about 150 days away, the front-running candidates and the media elite no doubt prefer to simplify things by getting rid of those who are given no chance to win.
And I thought the job of thinning out the crop of candidates went to voters, not to the powerful and the power-brokers.
Try telling that to George Stephanopoulos. In a recent interview with Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, the host of ABC's “This Week” asked the candidate for his definition of success. Paul predictably responded that it was to win. “That's not going to happen,” Stephanopoulos informed him. The candidate then asked the host if he was willing to bet “every cent in your pocket” that Paul couldn't win. Without hesitating, Stephanopoulos said, “Yes.” Ouch.
Then it was Mike Gravel's turn for a reality check. In an interview, Stephanopoulos asked the former senator which Democrat he intended to ultimately support. “I'm going to vote for myself,” Gravel responded. “But you're not going to be president,” Stephanopoulos told him. Double ouch.
Apparently, not even John Edwards needs to apply, despite the fact that he usually comes in third in polls behind Clinton and Obama. In fact, in an extra dose of humiliation, Stephanopoulos introduced the candidates with their standing among Iowa voters in a recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll. Obama had 27 percent, while Clinton and Edwards each had 26 percent – statistically a dead heat. Several weeks ago an open microphone caught him whispering to Clinton that “we should try to have a more serious and a smaller group.” Now, poetically, some folks in the media aren't taking Edwards seriously.
This will all sort itself out. But what's the rush? The field will be winnowed down soon enough. So why speed up the process? It's not fair to the candidates, and it's not healthy for our democracy. That's the message we hear over and over again from the long shots. And by spreading it, they're making a valuable contribution. Campaign 2008 would be much duller without them.
I apologize for the lengthy sabbatical from posting here, but for the last week I've been working like a mad man on a little short film and as a result, I had no free time or energy to give to anything else. As of 2 hours ago that project is officially complete (I say complete, but perhaps its more accurate to quote Leonardo da Vinci, "A work of art is never finished, only abandoned") so I'll be back to the blog tomorrow as lots has happened in the last week or so that I wish I'd had time to get to here. So, be on the lookout for that.
This is the third time I've seen stuff like this around town this summer, so I figured I should document it as something new in the political culture around here, a veritable guerilla marketing tactic for a national candidate, probably without any prompting from the candidate himself or his official "people":
Back in February, I wrote the following in regards to the phony righteous indignation I saw regarding the judge in the custody hearing for Anna Nicole Smith's child: Well, here's my question. How would those, who now claim moral authority over this judge, know how he was handling the case unless they were watching? Don't tell me they have an overriding interest in family law or that Court TV is required viewing in their households; they were watching for voyeuristic entertainment value. They and virtually all media figures around the country were complicit in the exploitation of the Smith family and those around them over the past 2-3 weeks, gossiping about these lives for their own entertainment or profits. These are the same people who created Judge Judy, People's Court, and all of those other showcases for judge personalities that turned our judicial system into an attempt at entertainment. But none of them claim or take any responsibility, and now want to express indignation about this judge who might be trying to fit into their system.
Well it appears the phenomenon has reared its ugly head again and many notable folks are once again feigning outrage (to say nothing of the ridiculous self-imposed "bans" on Paris Hilton coverage back in June when she got of prison after the 'round the clock play-by-play leading up to her imprisonment):
Many of the candidates running for president have taken their pot-shots at Barack Obama for saying he would act on actionable intelligence if he knew where bin Laden was and the leaders of the harboring nation would not or could not act. The outcry from Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Chris Dodd and so on has been phony because they have all advanced similar ideas in the past and would do exactly the same thing in the situation outlined by Senator Obama, but they attack for the sake of political posturing, calling him naive for saying out loud what they might say in private. We all know they would do the same, so there is no practical sense in them pretending we don't know and pretending to be shocked B.O. would say so publicly. Joe Biden concurred with Mr. Obama, saying of course the U.S. would move in that situation, but no one has said anything about Biden's naivete. Perhaps it's because he's not a "front-runner" and the position is a good and honest one. Or maybe its just that no one heard him; the crowd at that candidate forum was pretty rowdy, so they could've just missed it.
In a press conference today, President Bush called out the Congress for holding too many politically-motivated hearings and not passing "meaningful legislation the American people require of them". Of course, this is phony indignation too because anyone who pays attention knows the president threatens to veto everything this barely Democratic-controlled Congress does manage to pass. And they wouldn't need to hold so many hearings if everything were on the up and up in his administration, the legislative branch wouldn't have to spend so much time doing oversight. But of course, it's easier to block any possibility of real progress and call them out for failing, calling it political expeditionism, as if that isn't exactly what he and his White House have been doing.
And then there's this, excerpted from Fresno Bee columnist Bill McEwen on Barry Bonds and the home run record: Everybody who's mad about Barry Bonds, everybody who wants an asterisk next to his home-run record because they think he uses steroids, step forward. Raise a hand and repeat after me: "I'm sick of cheaters, and I'm not going to watch another baseball game, much less any movies starring actors with surgically enhanced noses, lips and breasts -- or 4-inch lifts in their shoes." Hey, where did you all go?
Bonds' home-run record is fine with me -- because professional sports is entertainment, and has been since Babe Ruth started making more money than the president...Fans and media covering these games desperately want to believe there's a big difference between the World Series and the movies. Or the Super Bowl and rock concerts. But there isn't. Professional sports and Hollywood are fantasy worlds constructed on a business transaction. Fans pay to see stars perform.
But the business interests behind professional sports go to great lengths to convince us that games matter, records matter and that athletes compete on level playing fields. Film is fake, but we have a great time anyway and have no problem supporting actors with more modified body parts than a customized '32 Ford roadster. Baseball? We want it "pure," whatever that means, and we want to believe it's possible to compare Ruth to Henry Aaron to Bonds.
Good luck.
Ruth played when blacks were banned from baseball. Aaron played a good part of his career at a time when pitchers dominated the game. Bonds is part of an era known for small ballparks, intense weight-training and voodoo elixirs that build biceps bigger than bikini-movie beach balls.
You might as well argue whether Kate Hepburn has a leg up on Meryl Streep or Humphrey Bogart is better than Jack Nicholson. Some people are born with special gifts. Others enhance pedestrian talents with hard work. Or surgical tinkering. Think Morgan Fairchild. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death and wrote raw, lyrical poetry. No one is demanding an asterisk next to "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."
But Bonds hits 756 home runs, controversy erupts and it's much ado about nothing. He's an adult, and if he has pumped up his body with magic potions -- running the risk of early death along the way -- that's his business. He will have done what entertainers do. The sports leagues are free to make rules in their futile effort to maintain the cover story that sports is much more than entertainment.
All I ask is that if baseball wipes out Bonds' record, it happily return the ticket money to millions of fans who've watched, cheered and booed him during his nearly 3,000 big-league games. Ineligible for refunds: anyone tummy-tucked, chin-lifted, Lasiked or holding a prescription for certain wildly popular and heavily advertised male-enhancement drugs.
I say, rage on oh occasional defender of what you perceive to be right. Defend, every now and then, integrity and truth and honesty. From time to time stand up against all that is wrong with the world. Speak out against every 3rd evil that befalls mankind. The rest of us need your reliable moral vacillation to guide us through this truly trying, semi-charmed kind of life. I'm hoping for a famous person or two to screw up soon so you can let them pass by unscathed, because I know the next person after them is soooooo gonna get it and I can hardly wait for that.
Congratulations to Barry Bonds on attaining the most hallowed record in American sports (though on a personal note, I am still more amazed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 38,000+ career points and Cy Young's 511 career wins...and there is still the legend that Josh Gibson hit up to 920 HR in the Negro League).
And with that, I have fulfilled my baseball-related posting quota of 1 for the season. Let's move on, shall we?
Or so it seems to go in the sports media. I can understand the news media's quick shuffling off of this story, it's just sports and it's not like baseball means to the country today what it meant in say 1961 when Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season HR record, heck it's even less relevant today than it was 5 years ago when Bonds broke McGwire's single-season HR record. The fact is, we live in a cynical culture in which we, as the axiom goes, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Why else would we go straight away to the possible financial value of the Bonds ball? I understand the desire to become an instant millionaire (by the by, to whom is this ball worth $5,000,000 exactly, if everyone is interested in it only to sell it off for large sums?) Gone are the days when kids would hit the ballpark and try to get autographs and collect baseball cards and know the stats for all the players. It's much easier in a SportsCenter culture to catch the home runs, strikeouts and diving catches once a day on ESPN than to watch the games at all. The only people who do know the stats are the fantasy geeks and they have no allegiances to teams, only the individual players; they don't even care about the outcome of the games their various players are in (unless they have a pitcher in the mix and need him to get a win with at least 6 IP, 4 strikeouts and no more than 2 walks and 3 runs given up to lock up the top seed in his/her league playoffs).
This reminds me of the way the passing of two master of the cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, last week, passed without much of a blip. People don't know who they are, nor do they care. The films remain, but folks today don't seem particularly interested in seeking them (or much of anything else) out. If it's not readily available, it's not worth my time to seek out seems to be the mantra of today. Youtube has become the preferred source of entertainment for a generation. How much longer can we see pet tricks and people running into poles or falling down in painful ways, 1:06 at a time, before we realize how low our standards have gone? Is this really the future of entertainment? And don't even get me started on what passes for entertainment on TV these days.
There's been an interesting running discussion across the web about who/what in our entertainment will stand the test of time the way The Beatles, Babe Ruth, Alfred Hitchcock (at least in name), or Shakespeare (to go a little further back) and the like have. I saw a great argument that we no longer live in a "must-see" world. The ability for any event/song/movie/show/speech to affect the culture widely and immediately no longer exists here. There is no longer the shared experience that creates a cohesive culture. What it means to be an American, culturally, is constantly expanding (or eroding, depending how you look at it). Whether this is a good thing remains to be seen, but it certainly represents a shift that I think is worth taking note of, no?
Real football, not the Beckham-less MLS masquerading as "football". It's been 6 months since the Colts waxed the Bears in the Super Bowl and it's high time the boys get back out on the gridiron. Granted, we'll suffer through the requisite conversations and arguments about the necessity of a 4-game preseason, but who cares, really, it's football and bad football is always better than post-HGH baseball (except maybe the Yankees, I don't think they could be scoring as many runs as they are right now without doping). Football returns just in time to lift the us out of out of our collective athletic apathy and I'd say the American sports fan has earned it after another miserable summer of sports (other the Iraq-Saudi Arabia classic in the Asia Cup final and another Federer-Nadal classic at Wimbeldon.
Congrats to Michael Irvin, Thurman Thomas, Bruce Matthews, Roger Wehrli, and Gene Hickerson on being inducted into the Hall of Fame this afternoon. In Hall of Fame Game tonight, I'm picking Mike Tomlin to lead the Steelers to victory in his head coaching debut.
For the 2007-08 regular season, I'm picking the Raiders to win the Super Bowl over the Eagles in a rematch of Super Bowl 15. Raiders 27 Eagles 10
Wow, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), chief opponent of earmarks in the House was on fire tonight. Did anyone else see it? (Assuming you, too, found yourself riveted to C-Span on a Saturday night). Offering up nearly a dozen amendments to strike but a handful of nearly 1300 earmarks in the $460,000,000,000 Defense Appropriations bill, Flake took his time attempting to take on spurious, garrulousy worded earmarks for items like a charter school, glove manufacturers [cold-shielding hand protection-ware or something to that effect], Sherwin-Williams paint, and so on, "We cannot continue to go down this road with earmarks that are considered duplicative and wasteful".
Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) continued to rise in defense of the earmarks along with several other members from both sides of the aisle (including the perfectly contemptible Jerry Lewis of California). Pressed on continuing to fund the National Drug Intelligence Center which the Bush administration has requested be shut down declaring it unnecessary, Murtha glibbly offered up, "The Bush administration has made a few mistakes in the past...The administration believes a lot of things I disagree with".
Then, a devastating rant by Flake: "I would gladly yield time to anyone who agrees with the chairman of the Appropriations subcomittee that 1) these earmarks are competitively bid. Anybody in agreement here? or 2) that the US taxpayer, after paying for these earmarks, has the rights to the technology developed by these earmarks? Any takers there? I didn't think so. That is simply wrong. An earmark by definition is a sole source contract, it is circumventing the competitive bidding process. Now maybe you don't like what the bureaucrats over in the Defense department do, but to say that this is a competitively bid contract is simply wrong...if anybody can contradict, please take time."
No one rose to argue this point. However, they did shout him down on every amendment he proposed to strike earmarks. Some Congress we have. Press on, young Mr. Flake, fighitng the good fight against wasteful spending; thank you for not sticking to your 2000 campaign pledge to only serve three terms in the House. Without you, things would....be exactly the same unfortunately. Spotlighted on last week's Bill Moyers Journal, Mr. Flake was credited with getting one earmark stricken from the last appropriations bill, saving taxpayers a negligible $129,000. It's a start, and though things may look bleak, lets hope that's not where it ends:
Perhaps the most frequent justification for the contemporary practice of earmarking is that, quote, 'Members of Congress know their districts better than some faceless bureaucrat in Washington' But, let's face it: when we approve congressional earmarks for indoor rainforests in Iowa or teapot museums in North Carolina, we make the most spendthrift faceless bureaucrat look frugal...The truth is, we can try all we want to conjure up some sort of noble pedigree for the contemporary practice of earmarking, but we are just drinking our own bathwater if we think the public is buying it. It seems that over the past few years we've tried to increase the number of earmarks enough so that the plaudits we hear from earmark recipients will drown out the voices of taxpayers all over the country who have had enough"
From CNN, April 2001: A panel examining media issues concluded Monday that coverage of the Bush administration has been affected by reporters with "low expectations" in their view of the White House.
Six panelists with Boston University's Washington Journalism Center on Monday applauded the Bush administration's management of the media during its first 100 days, but criticized the fourth estate for its apparent preoccupation with the outgoing Clinton administration.
One result, according to panelist and former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, is that the media have "been managed quite well by the Bush political people."
Lockhart said even after the inauguration, there was an "obsession with following what Clinton was doing." He said that allowed an "opportunity for the new president and his staff to figure out where everything was in a way that if they did make mistakes they didn't get a lot of attention."
Members of the panel agreed that the Bush administration is far more restrictive with the flow of information from the White House compared to the Clinton administration.
But [Thomas] Edsall, a veteran political reporter for the Washington Post, gave the administration kudos for its managing of the press corps."You really have to give the Bush administration extraordinary credit for its media operations during these first hundred days, not in terms of good relations necessarily but well managed relations. They have succeeded in gaining credibility under very difficult, trying times with not a strong base to come in to office on."
