| Barrasso (R-WY) | Enzi (R-WY) | Nelson (D-FL) |
| Aderholt | Gallegly | Murphy, Patrick |
Monday, January 02, 2012
Killer Congressmen
Monday, October 24, 2011
Oct. 24, 2011
Sunday, October 02, 2011
What We Can Know
“Everything happens for a reason.”If it weren’t such an odious cliché, the thought should be applauded as the highest form of Enlightenment thinking. However, the Age of Reason occurred about 400 years ago and has been replaced by an emphasis on the mystical and divine (which is why Rick Perry may be president in 2013 and not Barack Obama.)
Yesterday, New York Yankee Robinson Cano explained his prodigious output of six runs batted in a playoff game by saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”
The reason apparently is that Friday night’s game was suspended by rain, so it had to be resumed on Saturday.
I tossed and turned last night trying to examine what Cano meant. Did it mean the rain delay caused him to improve his swing? Did it mean that God had planned for him to win the game all along and that the delay was only incidental? Did the gods of baseball, or of Reason, make it rain Friday night and stop long enough for him to become – God, I hate to say it – a hero?
I happen to agree that all things happen for a reason, though we don’t always know what that reason is. Every action of every animate object on Earth is caused by some other action and has consequences for the future. But I don’t think Mr. Cano can know what the hell he was saying. He’s just another stupid athlete saying the same things all stupid athletes have said when a microphone held by a stupid TV reporter is shoved in their faces.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Muting the Mawkish
I do plan to watch football and check the news at the appointed hours to see if there is anything I need to know.
What I don’t need to know is what a zillion talking heads think about 9/11 or what the anniversary means. What I did need to know, I got early in the day from a documentary run on all the History Channels, consisting of raw footage of that morning 10 years ago. No narration, just an assemblage of contemporaneously live home video, with a minimum of TV news blather.
The universal instantaneous reaction seemed to be that no one knew what was happening. They seemed to know why (Arab terrorism) but not what” -- which is the normal human reaction to the incomprehensible. Yet 10 years later the United States still does not know what to do. The morning paper carries the impossible-to-believe news that the Obama administration is about to sign a pact with Turkey for the basing of American drones – the purpose being for the Turks to crush the Kurdish minority, who a few short years ago we were defending from the predations of Saddam Hussein.
We still think Pakistan is our friend, and we still think we can make Afghanistan a democracy. On foreign policy and national security issues, a president of color with a Muslim name is no better than the playboy prince he succeeded.
The aforementioned morning newspaper sports section carried a full page (thus, expensive) ad from the devil himself, Redskins owner Dan Snyder, depicting a Redskin charging across the national Mall carrying an American flag like the upraised sword of a crusader. The page tells us that the Redskins “thank and salute our heroes” and that the Redskins “will always remember.” Did I mention that it also says “God Bless America?”
One more reason I hope the Redskins lose every game they every play under the ownership of this monstrous height-challenged ninny who, it was reported elsewhere in the section, was under the influence of alcohol when he decided to hire the current coach.
We each have our own remembrance of and meaning for 9/11/01, and no one’s is any more valid than another’s. One thing that is a lie, however, is that “nothing would ever be the same.”
It won’t be the same for families and friends of the dead, but for the rest of us, life (except for airport security) is pretty much the same as ever. Football on Sundays (Mondays and Thursdays as well as Friday nights and Saturday afternoons), a warlike national mentality guided by a foreign policy that dooms this country to slow demise and the unwillingness of enough young people to enlist and carry it out.
The only area of national life that has changed was that George W. Bush’s prosecution of two misconceived wars, George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and George W. Bush’s stewardship of the mortgage bust made this generation and the next one poorer than the ones that preceded it.
Watching the raw footage of what happened 10 years ago today can certainly inspire hatred and wishes for revenge, and I am as hateful and vengeance-minded as the next
American. But those twin towers of viscera should be directed at Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and every other Islamic government that harbors terrorists. We know who they are, and so do they.
So spare me the crock of “heroes” and “unity” and “God.” No “hero” sacrificed his or her life to protect my freedom. If God had truly blessed America, it means He has damned everyone else. We have not been this disunited as a nation since the Civil War. Because of 9/11, I have less freedom today than I did 10 years because while we were weakened as a nation, it was more a result of our own government’s reaction to it than by the precipitating act itself.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Dodger Blue Language
It was because Jon was in his finest form, and I wasn’t too bad, either, in the art of heckling the visiting team, the home plate umpire and the home team Nats. We could be heard! And we were not profane and not threatening. We were damned amusing, actually, and it is part of American sports fan history to needle the visitors and hope to unnerve them just a little – if not engage with those multimillionaires whom you usually see only from a distance far greater than about the 10 feet we were from the vaunted Dodgers.
However, the fascist freedom-hating jackbooted security officials hired by the Nationals to dim the fan’s experience, actually warned a group of us fans to stop heckling because “they’re tired of it.” We could not get an answer as to who “they” were – the umpires (with whom we engaged in light banter on their way in and out of the weather stoppage), the Nats who struck out an amazing 17 times or the Dodgers themselves who either ignored us, or in the case of Dee Gordon interacted with us with a smile and a souvenir baseball for Jon’s soon-to-be- born son, or in the case of my newfound favorite pitcher and Cy Young Award candidate Clayton Kershaw, who turned around and told us, “I think it’s funny.” Apparently he was referring to comments about a rookie teammate’s awful haircut, or about Jon’s needle-sharp review of the home plate umpire, which someone who has pitched could pull off.
However, potential MVP candidate Matt Kemp, who makes $7.1-million-a-year, was not so amused, which was made evident when after the Dodgers finally went ahead he yelled to a group of fans, “Shut up you motherfucking sons of bitches.” (Note: anyone with entrée to Major League Baseball’s discipline chief Joe Torre, feel free to repost this.)
I’m not sure whether this was before or after Jon yelled into the celebrating Dodger dugout, “So you’re celebrating beating the Nationals in September. That’s sad.”
In fairness, Kemp might possibly have been irritated at the relentless reminders from fans near the dugout about his one-time relationship with Rihanna. Whoever that is.
The serious part is that this is not the first time that employees of the Nationals have told fans when we could stand and cheer and when we could not and what we could or could not say in a public forum that supposedly encourages fan-player interaction. And next week they will ask me to plunk down another full season’s worth of not-so-cheap tickets. I am wondering for what.
