Murdoch: Or, When They Do It to Themselves

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    I love dead poets, and dead philosophers too. Thank goodness for liberal arts educations and their classical referents. They won’t make you rich like an MBA does, but they help to make important sense of the world.
    Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is among the truest of insights: people and institutions that have the world by the tail and nothing, including foes and competitors, can stop them. Until, of course, they do it to themselves.
    In the wake of this discernment lays a wealth of history, literature and its cast of sorry characters that have no one to blame but their own idiocy. The Greeks were best at pointing this out in countless tales and myths, signposts of sorts along the road to hell, and the latter not necessarily paved with good intentions. The Good Book, on which so many Americans rely in our own time, has notable reference to that: Pride, it says, goeth before a fall.
    How true: who can forget Oedipus, Medea, Creon, Hamlet or the House of Agamemnon. And that’s a very short list. I beg you now to think of Tiger Woods. Roger Clemens. Anthony Weiner and too many other pols for which space here does not allow mention. Or Toyota. Who could have toppled them? And don’t forget Glenn Beck, which leads one to think with pleasure what Rush Limbaugh is driving himself toward.
    Woods’ life was so good he thought he could have two of them, one completely out of sight; what a guy. And Roger-dodger really did it to himself when he nonsensically demanded to testify before Congress, thusly setting himself up for a trial now underway. Uh, Rog: Abandon all hope, ye who enter there. Say if you will that a heightened competitive spirit is a good thing but keep in mind it has its limits: did he think that when Congress balked at his lies, he could just throw a fastball at their heads and walk away the winner? Best not to try that with the tough judge presiding in his case: Clemens will be the one called “Out!”
    One can even muse on religion, which in our part of the world has succeeded in giving God a bad name. Its faults are many, not the least of which has been the illusion of knowing the mind of the Almighty and thereby authorized to speak on its behalf.
    Perhaps its greatest sin has been the inculcation of guilt in the body social. This is a problem whether you’re Protestant, Catholic or Jew. Appropriate guilt has its uses, but the inappropriate kind has been stock in trade for certain prophets, priests and theologians who are merely snake oil salesmen. It all began with misreadings and misinterpretations of Genesis and thereafter the whole of a Book that teaches quite something else.
    Then they did it to themselves, and society caught on. The greed, graft and ungodliness from philandering televangelists to priests who abuse children, have turned believers on their heads and occasioned a thorough review of the nature of faith and its morals. So is there now a decline in the great church? Well, yes: it overplayed its hand and thereby did itself in. Stripped of its power, religion now has opportunity to be what it was really meant to be: just love toward all, service to each other–and stop being so damned judgmental.         And now we turn to Mr. Murdoch, he of the vast news and communications empire, who gave us Britain’s scandal-sheet called News of the World, which cooked up a scandal of its own and is now shuttered; and TV muck-raking that we know as Fox News. Given that we’re not yet privy to what he will do, in time, with the Wall Street Journal, it occasions Jefferson’s unforgettable warning in the face of political lies in his own time: “I tremble for my country when I ponder that God is just.”
    People who work for Rupert at News of the World apparently took him seriously at his worst and thought that if Fox can pull the wool over the eyes of so many unthinking Americans, they could take it up a notch and restore British supremacy by hacking the voice mail of child murder victims and England’s war dead.
    This caused Murdoch forthwith and post haste to get on a plane to London where his scion, James, who thought to inherit dad’s empire and extend family mischief another generation, was unable to staunch the bleeding at that newspaper. It was high comedy to see Rupert scurrying to do something besides cause trouble for our planet.
    And don’t be fooled by what seems his loyalty to staff: everybody got fired except the person who should have been, exec Rebekah Brooks. Truth is, were she to get the pink slip it would open the door to fuller investigation of everybody who really matters in Murdoch’s world, including the government and its current prime minister–and they ain’t gonna let that happen.
    This has put at risk his expected takeover of a satellite TV communications giant, or what had been dubbed his “nuclear option.” Now it’s he who is going nuclear and a total blow-up of all he’s worked for may be imminent.
    Isn’t this fun? Ah, yes, total good fun to see him, at last, squirm the way he’s had all the rest of us on the hot seat for so long. Maybe he thought he was “too big to fail.” Well, Rupie, think again.
    Fox News, by the way, always trying to pin whatever’s wrong in the world on Barack Obama, has wanted very little of this story. They’d rather we go back to talking about Anthony Weiner. I watched one morning to see when and if they would bring up Murdoch’s big problem. Nope. So I waited till the top of the 11 a.m. news. Nope again. Next day they said they would have no comment because, you know–blah, blah, blah. Sorry guys, no excuse will do.
    Murdoch had it all. Nobody could have brought him down. Then he met Aristotle, and found he could do it to himself.

ABOARD THE GOP BANDWAGON

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    Did you see the Great Candidates’ Debate? Aw, well, it’s not like you missed anything.

    Republicans in the guise of “debating” is no longer (if it ever was) an opportunity to discern issues. No, it’s a red-meat party: throw it out raw to the crowd, and hear them roar. It’s a great showcase for attention-getters, like Michele Bachmann and Mr. Pizza-on-Demand, Herman Cain, who then went on Glenn Beck’s show and sucked up to that honky. No black vote for you, Herman.

     Beck, by the way, couldn’t resist weighing in meanly on Weiner-gate, which is curious given that Glenn’s considerable pile of past misbehaviors are laundry-listed in his “Seven Wonders” book, wherein he says he’s repented and expects readers to forgive him. So why does he, er,  flog Weiner so hard? It’s as if Beck is saying, “My sins were different!” It’s also why he’s not an ethicist.

     As for Bachmann, think of her as an orator if they wish, but anyone with a brain knows she’s the shallowest end of the GOP gene pool and, speaking of red meat, that’s what she’d be in a real debate against a heavyweight. So go ahead, nominate her. That sight will be more fun than using Pudge Gingrich as a pinata.

     Given all the audience smiles at the debate, you’d think Republicans have a great sense of humor. Think again. Case in point is the more recent GOP Leadership Conference at which spirits were high and knee-slapping was loud, right through comedian Reggie Brown’s pokes at Obama. It could’ve been a convention of hyenas.

     Then Brown got around to some playful pokes at Bachmann and Gingrich, causing the night to go sour, and the jokester was escorted from the stage. What the hell is wrong with these people? Obama laughs at, and tells, jokes on himself, but Republicans take themselves more than a tad too seriously.

     The guy who gave Brown the hook said it was because the comic went on too long (yeah, a couple minutes, less than some GOP speakers, including Ron Paul) but mostly because he said Reggie became “inappropriate.” That means you can’t say anything at all humorous in regard to conservatives’ darlings, for these are serious people on serious earth. Oh, dear me. Don’t they know that Republicans are also known as a “party”?

      Only one other thing gets longer faces from that crowd, and that’s to contradict Republican orthodoxy. As I’ve said before, in those circles you learn one dance move only, and that’s lock-step. No one is to say, or vote, for anything but the party line. Democrats vote for candidates of different views, and indeed the same gentry often vote against their own party in Congress and the Senate. Not the Elephants in the room, no sir: shut up and play the hand yer dealt!

     Oh, sure, Romney owned up to the notion of global warming, and for a moment I thought Fox News would go dark till they could think up some effective spin on that. What they did was better: they just didn’t talk about it, and Mitt avoids the subject hereafter. Ain’t conservatism grand?

     This means that when national politics becomes nuanced, as it always does, the straight-laced among them must become adept at particular agilities. Call it contortionism. Then the trick is to appear to be in lock-step even when flip-flopping, sort of like synchronized swimming.

     Allow me to explain. The GOP wants balanced budgets brought about by severe cuts in what makes for economic stability, but without raising taxes on people least hurt by the economy itself. Then there is war: Republicans thought they would enjoy scorched-earth, pre-emptive strikes on Obama as a presidential peace-nik, but instead he’s became a mad bomber in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Libya. And it took him no time at all to get bin Laden. You know, all the things conservatives thought they held the patents on.

     Now who’s holding up Peace Signs? Why, every hawk in the GOP, which is to say: everbody. And their reason? It all costs too much! Oh, Nellie, I remember when Republicans would be on Dems like stink on a skunk for suggesting that the price of democracy was too high, even if it meant killing all enemies including those imagined, and blowing up the world in the process.

     But moral terpitude is their fave issue. Of course, too many of their own politicians have had their pants down (who’d of guessed, given all the prudes and Bible-thumpers in their ranks) so their cover in flip-flopping is to pray for Weiner-gates. The last one featured a real Weiner, so they had a field day.

     Of course, it saved them from the story immedately preceding, that of Schwarzenegger himself. No Tweeting of his bod, just a guy who before and during his lordship of the Gold-Dust-to-Gold-Rust state, was boinging a house maid and fathering two families. Call him Arnie the Germinator. Or the Perpetrator. So whose pants were really down?

     Being aboard the GOP Bandwagon is risky. A lot of people fall off. 

Of Weiners and Hooters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shallow GOP Gene Pool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Memories for Memorial Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of Floods and the End of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Wedding and a Funeral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bending It Like Beck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    One of them is Beck.

    Another is why Ablow even bothered with him.

It Was A Most Un-Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Myth of American Sports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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