Harper Leave

I have been vocal about nothing else so much as Bryce Harper for the past 7 years. While watching him in a Nats uniform would have been fun, both for the circus he creates and the mammoth homers, 

I am glad he is somewhere else. He represents everything I despise in athletes, and in people in general. (Watching him on DC TV today, I am also appalled at his cliché-spouting and teenage-like verbal fillers such as “and things like that” in every sentence. I know I will now not patronize Silver Diner or the Italian Store again.)

Regardless of the he said/he said about contract negotiations, we all knew he would leave because he would always take more money and more attention. Ignore everything about where he wanted to be forever, or to raise a family. He wanted to be wooed and paid more than anyone, though he got screwed in the latter. Remember, he did not choose Washington; he was an obvious No. 1 draft pick. He did choose to leave.  And he left with two strikeouts in his last two at-bats.

He is Donald Trump in a baseball uniform. Everything is about him. He is dishonest. He wears brand names on every piece of clothing, waves the flag on his bat, has designer spikes, trademark hair, and a clinically destructive narcissism.  I assume Phillie fans are clued in enough to give him a standing ovation the first time he hits a cutoff man. The drunk cretins at Citizens Bank Park will probably just further enable his hair flipping, head first sliding, and bazooka throwing past the third baseman.

Showmanship is fine in sports, to a degree, but not to the point where the outcome of the game and the season is secondary. The Phillies may win it all, but a large part it would be due to other additions they made. They probably will not, just as the Nats WITH Harper, Werth, Zimmerman, Scherzer, and Strasburg did not. Baseball, as the sages know, is unpredictable – especially with rule changes that allow almost any lucky .500 team to become world champions.

I hope Harper fails in every endeavor, not because he chose Philly over DC (we may never know all the details of that), but because he represents everything wrong with sports, and he is bringing to baseball what has killed football and basketball, for me. A universe where wins don’t matter, only marketing.

Portrait of Mobsters

From a book about a central character in the New York City business world in the 1980s by journalist Selwyn Raab:

“Flattering print and television stories about his opulent lifestyle, his unorthodox mannerisms, and his …invincibility magnified his opinion of himself. …  ‘He was made to order for the press. The way he looked, dressed, his arrogance toward the law. The press was manipulated by him and turned him into a folk hero’ (said a U.S. Attorney.) … He was heard fulminating at the government’s vendetta to convict him and how tough the law would be on him if he were ensnared.  Yet he repeatedly committed the fundamental mistakes that earlier had gotten him into difficulties, until they proved to be fatal. … His inability to judge loyalty and talent were pitfalls for (him.”

The author also expounds at length about his and his associates’ foul public insults of federal prosecutors.

The passages are actually about John Gotti, but it adds to the portrait of Donald J. Trump as the greatest organized crime boss ever.

My only optimism is that he will talk himself into impeachment, exile, or prison.

Bye, Bye, Bernie

I did not support Bernie Sanders last time, and will not again, even though I might positively check most of his policy boxes. 

I gave him another chance while watching his CNN “town hall” but had to leave after a few minutes when I realized what a horrible candidate he is. He is unlistenable-to with a whiny Brooklyn accent; lengthy explications when a bumper-sticker-answer might convince, God forbid, excite someone; condescension and utter lack of genuineness. He is the most unlikeable politician I have ever encountered.

Today, I read this, and now believe he is a useless, horrible, specimen of a human being, as well -- Trumpian, by way of despising a free press and possessing not an ounce of humility or humor. He is a nightmare because, like Trump, he attracts politically brainless political neophytes. But unlike Trump, his voters have demonstrated they would rather lose the presidency than exhibit any common sense.

Since it is unlikely that either the House or Senate would become Democratic Socialist after a Sanders victory, try to imagine him managing the daily push-and-pull of events. 

I cannot.

I Really Wish He WERE a Carpenter

Now that the Nats season is over, I would like to unload on the most sickening aspect of the team – lead TV announcer Bob Carpenter. There is not a cliché he hasn’t overused, not  a poor play that he hasn’t made an excuse for, and not an unctuous word undelivered. As a game show host he would be mediocre. As a baseball announcer, he makes me glad I am losing my hearing.

I naively believed that to be a journalist, as I was, you had to have a pretty good command of spelling and grammar to get a job and then you could improve your writing. I believed that in broadcasting, you had to at least be able to speak correctly to get a job and then add whatever personality flourishes you wished. Local television news and the Internet have disabused me of both myths. And baseball color analysts, like F.P. “he should of went” Santangelo, seem to be hired BECAUSE they do not know grammar.

However, my point here – and I wish to ask any linguists reading this if I am wrong – is that Carpenter deviates so much from normal inflection as to make me even more insane. The articulation crime is the repeated emphasis on the wrong word in a multi-word phrase. For instance:

“The clean-UP hitter”

“A road TRIP”

“A home STAND”

“A home run to start the NIGHT”

“Seven base RUNNERS”

“A good rbi GUY”

“He had elbow PROBLEMS”

“A real crowd PLEASER”

“The on deck CIRCLE”

“The New York Police DEPARTMENT”

“A big power HITTER”

“From the Chicago AREA”

“The one major holdOVER”

“A pitch-OUT”

“The box OFFICE” … ad nauseam. 

This pox on broadcasting also has a peculiar and annoying tic, shared by Barack Obama, of hissing the final “s” on plurals or possessives ending with a “z” sound. As in “boyce and girlce” “runs the basessss,” “Alcatrassss Island.” 

Carpenter is from St. Louis, where I recognize that the “aw” sound is pronounced as “ah” as in the “shartstop” position. But does being from St. Louis mean you must emphasize the wrong word in a pair that everyone else knows how to articulate? It is as grating as in the Washington-Baltimore-redneck use of “ice CREAM,” “CEment” and “DE-troit.”

Officially Dead

The most overused phrase on broadcast news and on the Interwebs is “It’s official!” (More so than the single word "just.")

Stupid, ignorant, thoughtless, uncreative drones who want to say something cannot say it without first inflating their importance by saying, “It’s official.” Aside from the fact that nothing except a law or judicial order can be said to be official, the phrase just delays a reader from getting to the point and tells dear reader the author fell out of the cliché tree and hit every branch on the way down.   

It is not official when a baseball trade is made, it is not official when  Jonathan Pollard is given parole days after it was leaked that he would. It is not official when Apple releases a new phone. It is not official when some “on-again-off-again” thing is declared by a puerile news writer to be “on again” (of “off again.”) Things just "are" -- officially or not.

There used to be a silly little game teenage boys would play with songs on the “Top 40,” consisting of placing the phrase “between the sheets” after the title of each song. (Try it!)  Now, scroll to the next blog or Facebook post, look at a piece of junk mail, or God forbid pick up a book and randomly  find a sentence and put “it’s official” in front of it.   

It is is even more infantile for an actual writer who actually gets paid to begin a narrative with “It’s official.” No. It. Isn’t.  

And even if it were, the phrase is officially the mark of a tedious dullard.

Casey Jones, You Better Watch Your Speed

I fought the law today, and the law won. Naturally. 

But I did get a chance to question an “automatic traffic enforcement unit” supervisor and engage in some byplay with nice-enough June Cleaverish judge whose legal career has awarded her realm over the county court dedicated to speed camera violations. 

Some people are outraged by abortion, some by the easy availability of guns, some by war. The single issue upon which I will vote for or against local candidates is the misuse of speed cameras (I am kind of.a okay with red light cameras, because running red lights does cause accidents.)  

As everyone knows, these cameras are set to enhance revenue for jurisdictions whose leaders are too chicken-shit to actually raise taxes. As I have told the several public officials I know, “Tax me, but don’t disguise the act as traffic enforcement.” 

The camera in question has nailed me in the past, so I naturally am somewhat careful on a heavily traveled road I have used approximately 3,000-4,000 times. I and the spousal unit have probably gotten a total of five speeding citations, which we have routinely paid because the county (and state) will not assign points or contact your insurance company, even though you are menace to life and limb. 

My questions and testimony dwelt on the fact that no matter how fast you may be going, the camera always records your violation at 12 miles above the artificially low posted speed. I asked the officer, “If I were going 100 mph, would the citation read 100 mph.” He replied with the “factual inexactitude, “Yes.” 

A similar road elsewhere in the county has 50 mph limit, and I learned from the judge and officer that these limits are set by community groups. Boy, would I like to get on one of those! I am against speeding. I am against reckless driving. I sometimes wish I had a James Bond car, or a Batmobile, that could evaporate offenders. But these cameras are placed on roads (especially hills) and in neighborhoods designed to scoop up money that would go uncollected if the violations were actually seen but not noted by an actual police officer. Of course the cameras are operated by a private company. 

There might have been 100 names on the list of cases, but only about 20 showed up for this morning’s court (the rest having paid already or decided to skip and wait till their registration renewal is denied.) 

I went, knowing what would happen, but I have time these days and I wanted at least the judge to hear the enmity that local government engenders it is driving public. A few other people, one a scientist, said her three tickets recorded at exactly the same speed “strained credulity.” (I think she had to pay only one of them.)  

The result was, for showing up with an oral excuse, that the $40 fine was cut to $20 plus court costs of $22.50. You do the math. Plus the $4 it cost to park. 

As a bonus to having the judge and other traffic miscreants hear my case (one of them congratulated me on my performance later on in the hall and I recalled Abbie Hoffman’s dictum that “In the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls) there was someone taking notes on every case on a reporter’s notepad. 

She is an “investigative producer” for a local station, which already did a piece on this abomination of justice – with the reporter doing the “standup” guess where – at “my” speed camera. I expect to contact her.

 

I may even start a political movement to rid the county of speed cameras and replace them with a rotation of actual cops, whose presence for one week at a given location, will reap benefits for months. What if such a movement of everyone at a given location going exactly the speed limit tied up commerce so badly that politicians had to listen? What about establishing "rolling roadblocks" on multilane highways at exactly the posted limit?

In the meantime, there are several liberal Democratic local officials – buccaneers – who will never get my vote because they smirk “Don’t speed” as they happily spend public money garnered in such dastardly fashion.

Nine Reasons I No Longer Love Baseball

I have been in love with our once national pastime since 1955, when I first attended a Senators game and rooted for immortals such as Jose Valdevielso, Bob Chakales and Roy Sievers. I indoctrinated a wife and two children into love and loyalty for the game, which I believe transcends all others in appeal to whatever intellect attaches to being a fan.

Now, with the 2013 season one-third over, I find I enjoy attending -- and watching games on TV -- less and less. Not even mentioning the $6 hotdog and $9 beer, here are nine reasons why:

Noise

From an hour before the first pitch, there is not a moment of silence in the park, what with inane “entertainment professionals” running contests, vapid interviews with fans and advertising, which also takes up every available space on electronic scoreboards between, and even during, innings when a serious fan might actually want to know about lineup changes, or, God forbid, the score, the number of outs and the count.

"Walkup music” is by itself a reason to avoid the stadium.  At best, a live organist used to play a few bars of something clever attached to the batter’s persona, such as the “Star Wars” theme for ex-Cardinal Ken (“Obi”) Oberkfell.  After that, players demanded their own signature chords, with the club oblivious to racist, sexist, violent lyrics. Now, the p.a. system blares deafening samples of salsa, dubstep, hip hop or other music that supposedly helps the batter hit better. Only a handful has country as a genre choice

 Clubhouse fights have occurred over music choices, but we fans have no say in the matter.

Fan Behavior

The Wave -- it’s a football thing for cold weather blood circulation! It has no place at a baseball game. For one thing, it is most often done when the home team is pitching and in the field, exactly the wrong time to rouse animal passion. It does not consistently go in the same direction. It gets in the way of the action. Did the people come to a game to stand up in unison like mindless sheep or did they come to watch a game? The reality seems to be they came to annoy people who came for the game.

Entering a row in the middle of the pitch should be a capital offense. It’s fine to get a hotdog or go to the bathroom during the action, but when returning, please note what is happening on the field and stop, kneel or time your entry so as not to block the view of the game’s essential – the pitch to the batter. And for God’s sakes, why do you have to stand up in the middle of a row in the middle of a pitch to buy beer?

Ushers have a new authoritarian policy to stop people from entering a section during an at-bat, but it only works for people with seats near the top of the row. For those lower down, it takes so much time for the beer-laden fans to return, that a new batter is up and sightlines are once again blocked. If anyone ever read any of the popular social psychology books, it would be clear that people on their own will solve this problem better than bureaucratic automatons who possess usher shirts and severe authoritarian personalities. 

Ticket Policies

Since I was a little boy in a family of modest means, I always dreamed of having season tickets. I have been fortunate enough to have had them since the first moments of the Nationals creation in 2005. But I am no longer a “ticket holder.” I am a “plan holder” because the team has done away with tickets. For us plan holders, we enter the stadium and can pay for concessions with a plastic card, which also notes, Orwellianly, what time you entered the stadium. Since most of us are not going to attend all 81 games, we sell or otherwise transfer unusused “tickets.” But now it is a complicated computerized mess. The “reward points” we plan holders have, which enables us to get perks, including extra seats to games of our choice, has been severely restricted in terms of both points required for a perk and in the unavailability of many games and many premium seats.

The rewards cutbacks and the misbegotten and rapidly rectified raincheck policy of no refunds/no exchanges conjures the irony of Yogi Berra, who might observe that the attendance is so high these days that nobody goes to games anymore.

Uniforms

The word uniform means “identical or consistent” … “an identifying outfit or style of dress worn by the members of a given profession, organization, or rank.”  It doesn’t mean jerseys opened to midchest to reveal team-color tee-shirts; it doesn’t mean some guys wear socks to their knees and others wear pajama bottoms so long that they are clipped to the spikes so the player won’t fall down on the way around the bases; and it doesn’t mean the baseball cap – the perfect combination of form and function (to absorb sweat and shadow the eyes from the sun) – should be worn backwards or, even more bizarrely, with the bill at a 45-degree angle.

The back pockets should be tucked in and not flap around. Everyone is wearing beaded jewelry around the neck on the fraudulent basis that magnets somehow affect circulation. These necklaces are the equivalent of peach pits as cancer cures. Beyond that, if the pitcher is wearing one and the batter is wearing one, who gets the advantage? They just look stupid. The only necklace of note was that worn by the fearsome slugger and baserunner George Scott, who claimed they were made of second-basemen’s teeth. 

The Military-Sports Complex

At one recent game, there were six official recognitions of the military by the fourth inning. Yes, the national anthem should be played at the beginning, and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the middle of the 7^th inning. Beyond that, “God Bless America” and “God Bless the USA” (written for an used by the Reagan campaign of 1984 ) have no place at an athletic contest where on any given day most of the players are not American.  A baseball game is not a Bund rally. 

This Memorial Day was a vomit-inducing spectacle of trailer-park patriotism  and redneck “kick-ass-America” music written and performed by entertainers who can only wave the flag to sell a CD. Announcers reminded us that we paying tribute to those who keep us free. Really? Many of those servicemen are serial sexual abusers and sociopaths. Please let me thank those I know to be honorable. Besides,  I am less free now than I ever was thanks to U.S. military policy since the end of World War II.  And our freedom as a nation has not been threatened by anyone since VE and VJ Day. On this, one of four salute to the military days, sponsored by the defense contractor SAIC which profits off of war, players wore “digital” camouflage uniforms. Why? As the scoreboard kept reminding us, you can now buy the uniforms as a souvenir.

Several years ago the Nationals started paying tribute to “wounded warriors” with free seats behind home plate and public recognition in the 4^th inning. That was easy when no one else wanted to go to games. But soon they ran out of actual wounded soldiers and invited family and friends. If the time comes that all games are sold out, say goodbye to “wounded warriors.”

Have you noticed the Nats’ TV promotions in which Bryce Harper talks of his warrior mentality? Bryce, if you want to be called a warrior, join the Army! They would love to have an athletic gung-ho 20 year-old. (Note: They don’t cotton to slamming your helmet.) Jonny Gomes, then of the Nats, proudly displayed his leg tattoo with the Marine Corps logo. I wondered why the heck he didn’t just trade uniforms and actually risk something by joining up. The answer, no doubt, lay in his refusal to jeopardize his body or his seven-figure income. 

Giving Balls to Kids

Why does the ballclub announce that fans should give foul balls to a kid? I was 41 years old before I caught a foul ball, and haven’t since. Sure, it’s a nice gesture, but what if there are siblings next to you – which one gets the ball? What is you have a child or grandchild at home who would like to have the souvenir. And why can’t I keep what is mine?

When batboys, ballgirls, players and coaches toss a used ball into the stands, have you noticed it’s always to a kid in the first rows whose family could afford to buy balls by the gross? By the way, now when a ball goes out of play but stays on the field, the batboy gives it to an official Major League “authenticator” who notes who hit it, who pitched it and what the count was, and stamps a hologram on the ball so it can be sold by the club after the 4^th inning. This not only directly extracts more money from souvenir-hunters fans but also means they are paying indirectly through ticket prices for more balls to replace the marred out-of-play balls that were once used for batting practice. 

Cliches

As annoying as it is to attend a game now, sitting home and watching one on TV is just as irritating. The TV screen, no matter how high-def or wide is covered by multiple logos, game information and news crawling in from other games. The broadcast booths are manned by pre-lingual sub-intelligent babblers who reward us each year with the latest clubhouse clichés invented by baseball players, whom I believe are in the cellar of the professional athletic IQ league. Nats pitcher Ryan Mattheus  was only the latest example of critical thinking when he broke his throwing hand by punching a locker.

A batter no longer lets a ball go by, he “spits on it.” A hitter clouts a ball a good distance because he “barreled up on it.” The pitcher’s mound becomes “the bump.” A guy in a slump is “scufflin’.” A player who has no special skills but who plays hard and “gets his uniform dirty”  is either “a blue-collar player” who has “grinded” his way to the “show” – and most definitely “a clubhouse guy.” A player so described is always Caucasian. The black or Latino players who excel are always ” excellent athletes.”  

Now that Major League Baseball has its own network and one can watch several games a day, I am surprised to learn that each and every one of the 30 teams has “clubhouse chemistry” in which players subordinate their own ego to the overriding goal of “winning a ring.” To twist Rodney King a bit, I maintain that they can’t all get along. In baseball lore, if not fact, the Gashouse Gang of the 1930s, the Oakland A’s of the early 1970s and the Los Angeles Dodgers of the late 1970s had players who hated one another – and won. 

New Names for Pitches

What the heck is a “cutter?”  It didn’t used to exist, or if it did it was called, charmingly, an “inshoot.” We don’t just have fastballs anymore, we have two-seamers and four-seamers, plus something called the “swingback fastball.” We also can hear announcers yammer about “yakkers” or the blather about the “backup slider” and “front-door breaking ball.” 

Voting for the All-Star Teams in April

This is self-evident crazy – “voting” by going online 35 times to pick the best players three weeks after the season starts. This all but guarantees the selection of players from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia and/or players who are on the disabled list.  As part of the Commissioner Bud Selig’s (and isn’t “Bud” a dorky nickname for a kid going on age 79?) subservience to the Pentagon, this year fans can nominate active duty military members to be honored as heroes at the All-Star Game.

Somehow, I don’t expect to see my choice, Pvt. Bradley Manning.

Highway Robbery

There is one constituency that someone ought to organize to put the fear of defeat into local politicians – those of us with excellent driving records who are shelling out tax money under the guise of violating speed limits as determined by remote cameras. 

I am not for speeding or any other traffic violation. And I am in favor of cameras that catch red-light runners because there is hard evidence that crashes are reduced at such locations. I am also in favor of placing a hidden cop at locations where traffic experts have found there to be a speeding problem. 

I have in more than 48 years of driving received maybe four tickets for moving violations. I have had that many speed camera tickets in the past year, and it infuriates me for the following reasons: 

1)  It is a hidden tax. As I told my county councilmen by email (no response, of course) that if he would like to raise my taxes, raise my taxes. Just don’t lie about how you are doing it.

2)  Another of my councilmen, who may well be reading this, assured me in a personal conversation that it is fair because you get a 12 mph grace speed. In other words, the camera doesn’t click until you are 13 mph over the posted limit. I find it an incredible coincidence that each of these highway robbery cameras has clocked me at exactly 13 mph over a 35 mph limit each single time. I am not THAT good a driver to go the exact same speed at various locations at various times. So it is clearly a rigged game.

3)  The cameras are placed at locations where the posted limit is much lower than the traffic will bear, so to speak. Yes, many of them are near schools but also on multi-lane roads that are heavily traveled. Yet during school hours on school days, the traffic is heavy enough to make speeding unlikely, if not impossible. Why are these cameras still operating on Sunday afternoons, or mid-evening, when there is not only little auto but no pedestrian traffic? 

 

My solution is twofold: I will avoid certain areas, which means I will do my shopping elsewhere, including other jurisdictions, and I will vote against every single local incumbent when they are on the ballot in two years.   

I am not a community organizer, but I am certain if someone would organize a political movement against speed cameras, politicians would take note. And no fewer people would be killed by speeders.

Muting the Mawkish

The “mute” button will be my favorite and most used device of the day because TV today, especially the football portion of the schedule, will be dripping with inappropriate, if not fake, patriotic gestures staged by this generation’s Joseph Goebbelses -- reborn as Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

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.

SEO: The Epitaph for Journalism

Looking for suitable employment in my area of expertise, communicating important information to the public, I feel defeated – defeated by the evolution of journalism from almost a priestly calling to a puerile exercise in “search engine optimization.’"

Much criticism of the “mainstream media” centers on the notion of “media elites” deciding what is important and then propagating a presumed progressive agenda that “real Americans” are too stupid to figure out. Actually, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m not Ivy League, but I always thought I was smarter than the readers I was writing for and was doing them a favor by both reporting concisely and understandably about important government actions and presenting newsworthy material in a way that either explained the unexplainable or even offered a smile or two.
People who entered journalism over the past hundred years or so were actually spawn of the lower classes, had dirt under their fingernails, had an outlook on life representative of the commoner and had a passion for the underdog. Journalists knew what the people wanted because they were of the people. (A common aphorism that is still partially true today was that the definition of news is “what happened to the editor today.”)

Blame it on Watergate, which was broken by guys of no particularly great educational or social standing. After that, there was money and fame to be had. By the time I got to the White House in 1983, the rising stars in print and television came from money and New England schools and identified with the pain of high taxes, the importance of private schools for their kids and who got to play tennis or go to dinner with their presumed equals in governments.

A Brief History of Slime
Television news had already been sold down the river of greed when networks realized they could actually make a profit on it instead of using news as a loss leader. Print journalism had begun becoming professionalized. We student journalists, and later as paid journalists, began calling ourselves professionals. That was always a self-serving myth because there is no specialized training, board exam or licensing requirement. We were, in reality, people having the times of their lives snooping around and making life difficult for those in government, or out, who were unfairly taking advantage of people who did not have our access to information.

So many things have changed that I cannot now bear to watch more than the first five minutes of any newscast, local, network or cable. There is the matter of broadcast outlets hiring people who cannot write and cannot read. How often have you seen the “crawl” at the bottom of the screen, or the chyron describing what you are seeing and notice basic words and names being misspelled? How many times have you heard a ponderous anchor read something and jerk your head up and say, “huh?” How much longer must NBC employ the queen of nonsense, Janet Shamlian, who never fails to impress listeners with her vacuity – and sometimes her bent for the absurd, such as when she said, “A heat wave has a chokehold on the nation’s midsection?”


Why should I or anyone care about a two-bit bank robbery hundreds of miles away? Or a car chase on the other coast? Or a granny slamming a robber with her purse? A tire fire in West Virginia? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the vids. Matters of real importance are ignored unless they appeared in one of three newspapers that morning. And then the TV thieves pass off the information as their own, with no context whatsoever. Despite a multiplicity of broadcast and internet venues, all news comes from a handful of sources: the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. If local news is big enough to go national, you might add the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

To my further dismay, what is written about or broadcast in most outlets is picked up from and credited to competing organizations. There is no attempt to independently verify much less even cover someone else’s story. The “news” you read on line on portals such as AOL, Yahoo, Huffpo -- and even some of the more prestigious online outlets – is frequently repurposed or merely linked to someone else’s report of a report. This use of someone else’s enterprise used to be a journalistic sin of the first order.

Competition from the Internet has rendered irrelevant even such a venerated organ as the Washington Post, which is so thin you can literally tear the non-ad portion of the Sunday paper in half. The daily version would blow away on your lawn if it weren’t tied up in plastic.

It is an old axiom in newsrooms that sex, violence, children and animals do automatically qualify as news. But, it also had to be local or of some national significance. Nowadays, every commercial television news program wallows in violence, fire and prurience that happens anywhere in the world – so long as video of it exists. Many stories are broadcast as “breaking news” for as long as two days after the event happened.

Online and on the air, there is zero quality control over news judgment. No one asks questions.

Scott Brown and Lara Logan
Sen. Scott Brown pitches a revelation (for his own pecuniary and political interests) that he was sexually molested by a camp counselor although it was never “consummated, so to speak” and although he will not protect other victims by actually prosecuting the offender.

I have never seen Lara Logan’s reporting to know whether it is good or bad, but I sure have heard of her, because this former swimsuit model has a penchant for becoming the story both within journalism and in the bedrooms of other journalists. Yet she becomes a national tragedy for, according to CBS, having been brutally sexually assaulted in Cairo.

Without minimizing the terror and injustice of it all, it appears from other accounts that she was stripped, hit with flagpoles and pinched. This is abominable, but if true, this – along with the headlines generated by former Cosmo nude model Scott Brown – falls short of the disgusting images that were intentionally meant to titillate us.

To whatever degrees Scott Brown and Lara Logan were defiled, why on earth is it any of our business? Because they are both in the business of selling themselves, the media are in the business of selling depravity and we consumers are in the business of lapping it up.

Wheat and Chaff
I, for one, want people smarter and possessing a broader knowledge of the world than I telling me not what I should think but what I should know. That used to be the foundation of any education. It used to be the true value of a newspaper or magazine – the placement of information you would never have thought to look for amid the funnies, sports and lingerie ads.

Not anymore. As I look over media jobs that are available, the requirements do include an ability to multitask at a reasonable level of proficiency with the language, but the prime attributes that news organizations are seeking are (as described in a recent ad for a reporting position with USA Today) experience with “SEO, audience metrics, promoting audience interaction.” On more than one job-listing site, journalism positions are to be found under the category “Industry: e-commerce.”

I am not naïve. Journalism has always been about money – publishers having all of it and reporters having too little of it to live on. But there was always the pretense of providing the public with an honest service and, for the most part, free from the publishers’ rapacious capitalist biases.

Today, with the advent of interactive Web sites and sophisticated metrics, editors and producers are capable of selecting as “news” only what people tell them they want. The old saw is truer than ever: editors separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

Yes, I believe – as do all politicians – that the public is stupid and self-destructive beyond measurement and that better-educated and fair-minded people ought to tell us what is important -- which is exactly what happens when we hire hire lawyers, accountants and plumbers.

Jews and Jesus -- Not a Match Made in Heaven

Let me state I am not in favor of murder.

But the "tourist" stabbed to death in Israel was one of those "Jews" who believe in the divinity of Jesus and was there to spread her message of self-hatred. I have even spit in the face of one of these vermin in D.C. who was proselytizing at Metro one Rosh Hashana.

It's bad enough there are Christian and Arab Jew-haters. And I understand Jews who converted during the Inquisition and the Holocaust. But it is the soi-disant "Jews" who claim that Jesus is their savior who are the truly evil merchants of death for millions of real Jews over the ages. They take money from churches to fool the uneducated into thinking there is no difference between Christians and Jews and sadly to protect themselves from a perceived stain of being a Jew.

We Jews are pretty tolerant and open to shadings of Judaism. But there is a line. You can't be a Jew and evangelize for a church. And damn you if you do.

If a Jew killed the woman, it's a shame. If an Arab killed her for being a Jew, it's an irony.

Going Forward

I recently heard a government official pay a sparkling tribute to a pioneer in her field, until the end of the remarks when a hiccup of bureaucratic jargon let the fizz out of the speech. The speaker honored the pioneer by declaring that because her early work was so courageous and inspirational, her successors “have kept the promise – and we will! Going forward.”

I hate clichés, abjure words that have no meaning and wonder why people with first-rate minds feel the need to bloat their extemporaneous thought with phrases that truck drivers find banal and that dilute thought, which is always embellished by brevity. As a writer, editor and former journalism teacher, I live by one rule: If in doubt, cut it out. The best rewriting is done with the “del” key.

Here is a "thought experiment" (as if other experiments require no thought, though putting Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket may nullify my proposition.) Take "going forward," which I am certain you hear at least 50 times a day, and imagine its use going backward.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character going forward.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country going forward.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear going forward is fear itself.

I know not what course others may take going forward, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will be going forward in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome going forward.

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die going forward.

The Cup Boreth Over

Bless my daughter for being a baseball fan, but her real sports interest is soccer. I’m sure that’s because she played it through high school and needed some interest other than her parents’ and brother’s. Maybe she likes it because of the sweaty muscular young men who play it, or because there is grace, speed, strategy and tactics.

I have tried to understand the game and its appeal, but the one thing it is missing is scoring, and lack of scoring is something I remember quite well from young manhood.

I watched the U.S. games as much as possible during the World Cup and still find the sport mindless, boring and corrupt. And they don’t tell you how much time is left! When a team scores a goal early, maybe even two goals, what is the point of playing the rest of the match? The outcome is determined.

Also what I don’t like about soccer is that is plain and fundamentally un-American.

I will watch U.S. men’s and women’s teams in World Cup play every four years, but that’s as far as I can or will go with a game that in my youth was played only by foreigners and to this day pretty much still is.

Rolling Blunder and Sunshine Camo

Washington, D.C., is full of crap most of the time, but this weekend it is all of the time.

The crap this Memorial Day weekend is "Rolling Thunder," the massing of flag-waving bikers commemorating Vietnam veterans by revving their motors and pounding their chests in case anyone might think these losers also lost that undeclared, indecent, unnecessary and un-American war.

Most people don't even know what "Rolling Thunder" means. It was the name of most prolonged and least successful military campaign waged in modern times -- the three-and-a-half-year carpet bombing by the United States of civilian targets in North Vietnam, far surpassing the morally questionable, though probably justified, air terror unleashed by the Air Force against Germany in World War II.

Speaking of misplaced loyalties, the San Diego Padres baseball team showed up today in jerseys decorated in military camouflage, no doubt in tribute to the city's major industry -- training Navy and Marine Corps warriors.

These players are generally between the ages of 20 and 40 and among the physically fittest of Americans. Why aren't the American citizens among them wearing real uniforms instead of their phony camo jerseys?

If you would like your very own sunshine patriot camo jersey, you can get it on the Internet for $199.

Spittin' Images

I am not so much bothered by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's belief that he actually served in Vietnam as I am by his past assertions that veterans of that war were spat upon as they returned.

As I have maintained for nearly 40 years now, it never happened. How do I know this?

1) I was in a position in that era to watch the news wires every day and I do not remember any such news story -- and as a draft dodger and anti-war zealot, I would have paid attention.

2) Had someone been spat upon in an airport or other public place, three things could have happened: a) it would have been reported as an assault b) the serviceman would have decked the spitter or c) nothing would have happened, meaning bystanders would have looked on silently in approval. If a) or b) occurred, there would have been a police report. Even absent a report, it would have made the newspapers, and back then, newspapers verified what they printed.

3) Every time someone made this outlandish claim, when pressed, would say well I heard it from my brother-in-law's cousin's friend.

If anyone can document a specific incident of an antiwar protester, or anyone else, spitting on a returning serviceman, I will give $1,000 to that person's favorite charity.

It doesn't count to say, "It happened to me" or "I saw it." Because that would make the claimant look like a coward since there was no report made of it.

So let's stop this spit, once and for all.

I Hate the Sinner, Too

The honeymoon lasted just six months, and now President Obama is in the dog house of the American people, a collection of the smartest individuals ever evolved but dumber than amoebae when acting as a group.

Today’s polls show the more Obama talks up the necessity of health care reform, the less the people support him or reform. The Republicans are winning because they, alone among mammals have the ability to stick together -- and lie without shame.

They have opposed everything Obama has done, said or believed without ever coming up with a counterproposal to anything. The reason for that is simple – Republicans do not want anything done at all on any problem facing the country. So their strategy has the benefit of simplicity, as befits their intellect. If you are for nothing, then you are free to attack someone on the basis of his party and now, thanks to Glenn Beck, his skin color.

Everything Republicans have done in the past 20 years has been intended to divide Americans from one another, spew hatred and protect the very wealthy, or those who wish to be wealthy but are too dim to understand they never will be as long as any Republican is ever elected to office. As Harry Truman, as partisan a Democrat as ever lived but who conservatives would have you believe was a Republican, once said: “If you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote Democratic.” When nothing happens, those who have it all prosper. There is no hope for anyone else, and that is the way the debauched demagogues who put their religion above their public responsibilities and their dicks into anything that moves want things.

On health care, the venomous vermin in the Republican party have succeeding in tipping the political debate after losing handily in the last couple of elections. Their lies have finally convinced a majority of Americans that health care reform will hurt them. They have convinced most people that Obama has failed because the economy that Republicans wrecked in eight years has not turned around in six months.

Consider, in the past week elected Republicans have said health care reform legislation will kill old people, allow for an upsurge in abortions, take their doctors away and destroy freedom. And that is because – remember this is all from elected Republicans – the president of the United States is an undocumented Muslim socialist.

I am making none of this up!

Then there is Glenn Beck who has called Obama a racist! And Lou Dobbs, still employed by CNN, who is demanding Obama produce the birth certificate that is part of the public record. And there is Rush Limbaugh, the thrice-married drug-addicted bloviator who could not tell the truth of if he were waterboarded. (If he were, I would feel sorry for the board.)

The problem is that Democrats, or progressives, are incapable of agreeing on even general principles and they are too decent, in general, to adopt Republican tactics that have not changed since Dick Nixon, Dick Armey and Dick Morris crawled out from under rocks. Democrats and progressives are doomed; handicapped by the inconvenience of thought.

So to anyone who thinks Republicans have the answers (and these are people who demand that the federal government keep its hands off their Medicare!), I suggest they:

Lose their Medicare coverage.

Lose their veterans benefits

Lose their Social Security

Lose use of interstate highways

Lose tax deductions on their home mortgages

Lose flood insurance when their trailers are swept away by the Big Muddy

Lose police protection and

Get sick from unvaccinated children or AIDS-infected whores and die.

Then, the only government they will have to worry about is that of the Eternal King. And He is going to be mighty pissed at them.