“As defined by bestselling author Ibram X Kendi, anti-racism involves supporting policies and ideas that level racial disparities of outcome, while racism refers to any explanation of disparity that points toward black responsibility rather than white racism. This redefinition of racism from identifiable prejudice to disparity of outcomes represents the expansion of a propriety into what Antonio Gramsci calls a cultural hegemony: a power construct that cuts reality down to size and squashes any voice that questions its moral authority. While suggesting that black Americans bear some responsibility for their own outcomes was once considered merely in poor taste, it is now considered racist and therefore utterly beyond the pale in progressive circles.…If we are truly concerned with remedying the tragedy of racism and taking steps toward a society that views our racial identities as insignificant, we need to let the past be past. We can accept the reality of historical racism without creating an identity out of it that keeps us eternally suspicious of each other. We cannot change our past, but we can change how we make sense of it as we move towards an increasingly multi-ethnic future.”
After Gabe Kapler opened the kneeling gates, and the sickening green light from Major League Baseball allowing, indeed encouraging, player to parade their social, political and partisan views on the baseball field, I assumed that my home town team, the Boston Red Sox, would buy a first-class ticket on the Woke Train, nauseating many in the process. The Boston franchise has been awash with guilt since it was more than a decade late in breaking the color line, finally promoting journeyman infielder Pumpsie Green to the Show after every other team had added at least one black player. In addition, we must never forget that this is Massachusetts, where citizens continued to elect Ted Kennedy to the Senate knowing full well that he lied his head off while ducking accountability in a clear-cut case of manslaughter. I love it dearly, but the Bay State is the land of symbolic liberalism at any price, appropriate or not.
Thus it was not a shock to see the Red Sox unveil a massive pro-Black Lives Matter billboard this week. The 250-foot thing is adjacent to Fenway Park, and facing out to the Massachusetts Turnpike. The huge sign reads “Black Lives Matter,” with the team’s logo at the end. The billboard includes the URL of the Red Sox Foundation website, where Red Sox President and CEO Sam Kennedy has a statement titled, “Social Justice, Equity and Inclusion.” It is illogical, virtue-signaling pandering. You know: the usual. Continue reading →
I bet Michael, when he submitted this Comment of the Day, had a feeling I’d groove on it. After all, it’s about a President, I’m a Presidents nut, and he ends up agreeing with me, which is always welcome.
He also raises and interesting question that was not considered in the post. If we judged Presidents on a racism scale that weighted their attitudes according to how they compared to the culture and predominant beliefs of the day, which Presidents would come out looking best? That’s how baseball stat analysts judge players across eras, and it makes sense: players are compared to league averages while they were playing, and then the stats are adjusted accordingly. For example, Carl Yastrzemski’s .301 average in 1968 was more impressive, and represented better hitting in his offensive context, than Lou Gehrig’s .354 mark in 1936, when ten players hit at least .350.
Analyzed that way, Woodrow Wilson comes out as the most racist President, more than the slaveholders. Jefferson, despite being a slaveholder, looks relatively good in the context of his times. So, I think, does Teddy Roosevelt, unapologetic white supremacist that he undoubtedly was.
Only slightly more disgusting than this truncated season’s use of the abortion of an extra-inning rule that will put a runner on second base to begin extra innings in tie games are MLB’s “social justice promoting” regulations for players.
It makes me physically ill just having to post them.
Baseball announced guidelines today allowing players “to support social justice and diversity and inclusion” on the field—also on their own, but I don’t case waht players choose to do a private citizens, as long as they don’t abuse their postions as baseball palyers. “MLB supports the players’ need to express themselves,” we are told.
Yes, the NFL and NBA have poisoned baseball.
Players have no need to express themselves politically on the field, and should not be allowed to do so. But Major League Baseball, as it has been most of its existence, is run by venal fools, and they are terrified by the players union. The announcement of the green light for players to be overtly political while the game allows promotion of the racist organization sparking violent riots and vandalism across the country just happened to be announced almost simultaneously with an expanded play-offs format. Continue reading →
This moment in “Field of Dreams” was how I started off my baseball and culture presentation this week. Ironically, the speech has always irritated me, because of its stagey blocking, and because it is a speech that sounds like a speech, and is essentially right out of the book the film was based on. In the novel, “Shoeless Joe,”,the “Terrence Mann” character played by James Earl Jones was real life (and then, still living) recluse author J.D. Salinger. I dislike the speech, but the scene always moves me, for a personal reason.
As Terrance Mann stands, giving his speech, the ghostly players of the past silently assemble behind him in Ray Kinsella’s (Kevin Costner, of course) magic corn field. One of the players behind him has been identified in the film as Smokey Joe Wood, a 30 game winner with the World Champion 1912 Boston Red Sox. Just a few years before the film was made, I had been in the Fenway Park grandstands as Smoky Joe, feeble, in his mid-nineties and in a wheel chair shortly before his death, barely threw out—more like dropped—the first pitch at a Red Sox Old Timer’s game, to a standing ovation. And here he was, in that corn field, but young and vital again.
Gets me every time….
1. Ethics query: is it ethical to perform “Piggies”? I just caught an old concert clip in which George Harrison and Eric Clapton performed the obnoxious pseudo-Marxist ditty “Piggies” (from the White Album) to thunderous applause.
[Notice of correction: I originally wrote that “Piggies” was a Lennon composition. All these years I assumed it was, heavy-handed and juvenile politics that it was. I am stunned that the song was George Harrison’s doing; I thought better of him.]
This was well after the Manson murders: I had never heard anyone perform the song in decades. Admittedly, it is just moral luck that a madman seized upon the White Album Beatles songs as his inspiration to mastermind the slaughters of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and her house guests, as well as supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary the following night. However, “Piggies” was the one song referenced directly in both murders. It is not inconceivable that if the White Album had omitted that song—no great loss, either–at least the LaBianca murders might not have taken place. I know I can’t hear the song without picturing carnage, and it seems to me singing the song is like a celebration of Manson’s work. I wouldn’t ban it; I don’t believe in banning anything. I just think it’s bad taste to play it or perform it.
Is that inconsistent with my objection to “canceling” “Dixie,” “My Mammy,” “Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Oh Susanna!” and other songs that are redolent of the Old South? I would argue that those songs have the virtue of being great tunes and important cultural touchpoints…in other words, works of musical art that justify themselves. “Piggies,” in contrast, is musical junk, like about 20% of the White Album filler. Continue reading →
“We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
—-Joe Biden at a virtual town meeting yesterday, giving a novel version of American history.
Where to begin? I suppose it’s obligatory to point out, again, that the now routine assertion that President Trump is a racist is based on distortions, innuendo and outright lies. The Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream media axis doesn’t even bother to try to support the claim any more, because, I explained here, this is a a Big Lie strategy, pure Hitler/Goebbels, from the same source, ironically, of the Big Lie (it’s #3 on the list) that the President is like Hitler. Joe’s Big Lie yesterday is #4. It probably should be #1, since it was formulated from the moment Trump, in announcing his candidacy, said, very clearly, that a lot of illegal immigrants from Mexico were dangerous criminals. That is undeniably true, but it was reported, and has come to be believed, that he said all Mexicans were dangerous criminals.
I’m not going to rehash why Big Lie #4 is a lie; in you haven’t figured it out, please go to the link. However, it is amazing what happens when you ask anyone, even the most articulate and intelligent Trump basher, how they conclude Trump is a racist. They just can’t do it without resorting to misrepresentations and distortions, then bubble over with rage when you point them out.
Joe Biden, as we all know, isn’t articulate or intelligent, and never has been. Now, sadly, he is existing in the twilight world of some kind of mental deterioration. As an aside, I wonder how the news media and those who would vote against President Trump if whoever was running against him “shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue” are going to rationalize Joe’s increasingly garbled pronouncements. “Be fair. That’s just Joe being Joe. You know, he’s senile!”? “OK, he’s lost it, but at least he’s not a racist”? Incidentally, Joe’s statement describing Barack Obama as “clean” back when Biden had all of his marbles, which were never abundant to begin with, was a more reliable marker of racism than anything Donald Trump has said in public in his long career. Continue reading →
During a violent storm here in Alexandra, with the internet going in and out, my wife and I gave up and watched “Spotlight” again, an ethics movie, and a genuinely heroic story about journalists doing their jobs, informing the public, exposing popular institutions. Those were the days. The ending speech, where the Boston Globe’s editor talks in high-minded terms about the reason journalism is worth the effort, made me physically nauseous. The profession he described is virtually unrecognizable from what I see on CNN, Fox News, NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Almost immediately after, I read a column in the Times from two days ago, in the Arts section. It’s a periodic feature by John Williams where he interviews an author, “5 Things About Your Book.” This time he was talking to Larry Tye, whose biography of Joe McCarthy has just been published. The cut line read that Larry Tye “discusses his biography of that American bully, and an eerie echo.”
Having read the Times for the last four years and watched with admiration how it can toss gratuitous insults and sinister innuendoes about President Trump in any context no matter how remote, from book reviews to cooking columns to fashion essays. I was certain what the “eerie echo” would be. Joe McCarthy was a bad guy, so the article would show how much Donald Trump is like Joe McCarthy.
For the nonce, I will ignore that salient fact that it is “the resistance,” the Democrats and the anti-Trump media, which is to say, the media, that have been using relentless McCarthyite tactics against the President from before he was elected.
So where was this eerie echo of Trump in the life of “Tail-gunner Joe”? Here’s Tye’s shocking illumination of that question:
I knew there was a general link between Senator McCarthy and President Trump, but I didn’t realize how eerily echoing it was.
Huh? What “general connection”? The Senator died in 1957, when Trump was 10. How can you have a “general connection” with someone who isn’t in your family, you never met, and whom you didn’t know anything about at all until well after he died?
1 .Another shoe drops: The Boston Red Sox announced that they would “support” any players who chose to kneel during the National Anthem when The Strangest Baseball Season since World War II, when teams fielded 16-year-old infielders and one-armed outfielders, commences tomorrow. The announcement was no surprise, and this team in particular had little choice.
Boston’s AL team is forever viewed with suspicion on race issues because it was the last major league team to break the color line, and because it passed on opportunities to sign some of the early black stars. Last season a visiting player claimed to hear a racist slur hurled his way from the Fenway Park bleachers, and the Red Sox management has been ostentatiously “woke,” cancelling Tom Yawkey from the Fenway environs though the team owes its existence to the long-time owner’s beneficence. He was rumored to be a racist, however, and that was enough to justify erasing his name (except from his initials in Morse Code on the scoreboard).
2. Bad service only matters for drug stores, apparently. State regulators in Oklahoma cited and fined CVS for conditions found at four of its pharmacies, including inadequate staffing and errors made in filling prescriptions. Staffing just about everywhere is unfriendly to consumers—indeed, most stores were understaffed even before the lockdown, now half-lockdown while the teachers extort the country.
Our local CVS, where I have many ethics adventures, now has minimal staff, including in the pharmacy, because there are so few customers lately. Hilariously, the store’s auto-scan checkout option is one of the features that requires staff: the damn things don’t work half the time, or a staffer has to lead some confused senior through the process.
3. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult than ever to believe sexual harassment allegations. #MeToo so egregiously overplayed its hand and has been so schizophrenic in its standards that I have to look at any high-profile allegations as potentially motivated by politics. In an action that must have been well underway before the Washington Redskins suddenly caved and agreed to change the team’s name (yet another poll, a new one, has indicated that the vast majority of football fans and Native Americans have no problem with “Redskins”), 15 female ex-employees told The Washington Post that they were sexually harassed while working for the organization. Shortly thereafter, a Fox News staffer and periodic on-air guest filed suit in federal court alleging they had been harassed or raped by Ed Henry, the Fox News reporter who was fired for “willful sexual misconduct in the workplace,” The suit also alleges harassment by Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, the latter perpetually on “the resistance’s” hit list and the target of boycotts, and Carlson recently becoming a force as a pundit. Therefore he must be destroyed.
Do I find it hard to believe that the Redskins, or any NFL team, has a culture hostile to female employees? No. Do I think that Fox News has effectively banished its pervasive workplace sexism and misogyny since the forced exits of the late Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly? Absolutely not. Do I think weaponizing sexual harassment allegations has become a predictable and unethical tactic on the Left, (See: Mathews, Chris) thus making the timing of both of these sets of complants suspicious?
Is Bismark a herring?*
4. More things now as predictable as they are indefensible. The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts will remove its John Wayne exhibit as part of the school’s efforts to address “systemic racism” in society with obnoxious, shallow and foolish gestures.
The Duke graduated from USC, of course (he was raised in Iowa), and the justification for his dishonoring was an admittedly dumb interview he gave Playboy in 1971, where he was obviously (to me, anyway, at the time) trolling a liberal and hostile magazine by saying exactly the kinds of things the Wayne haters expected him to say. (I always assumed he was drunk during that interview.) This move by USC was expected—California, universities: you know, morons. As Spiked noted, Wayne’s importance to the culture and the history of film by virtue of his on-screen portrayals should not be diminished by any interview the actor did.
As an actor and a director,Wayne was careful to portray characters who respected blacks and other minorities as human beings. In “The Cowboys,” for example, he is routinely reprimanded and shown up by his black cook, played by the great Rosco Lee Browne. In many movies, like “McClintock!,” “Hondo” and “Fort Apache,” he demonstrated sympathy and respect for Native Americans; Wayne also prominently featured Chinese-American actor H.W. Gim in his films whenever feasible from 1942 on, notably as his landlord Chin Lee in “True Grit.”
If his character was a racist, Wayne didn’t hesitate to represent racism negatively, as when he opposed his black ranch hand (Woody Strode) learning to read in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” because Wayne’s character is hostage to archaic traditions, or when he seems determined to murder his white niece (Natalie Wood) because she has lived with Native Americans and presumably had sex with a chief.
All of John Wayne’s wives were also Mexican, meaning that his four children are “Persons of Color.”
Never mind. Wayne’s legacy and hold on the culture is unbreakable. Just last week I stumbled about four of his films on cable. They’ll get Mt. Rushmore before they shoot down the Duke. [Pointer: Pennagain]
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*Cultural literacy bonus points for identifying the source.
Yeah, I knew it was probably coming, and I even should have been able to guess the team and the manager, but nonetheless, this is nauseating. I assume the craven response from Major League Baseball in the coming days and weeks will be even more nauseating. Great. Welcome back, baseball!
San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler led several coaches and team members as they did a Kaepernick during the National Anthem before their first exhibition game in the Bay Area Monday. And I had just finished my Smithsonian presentation that night explaining why baseball has been a vital unifying influence in communities and the nation throughout its nearly 200 year history. How ironic.
Rookie manager Kapler, coaches Antoan Richardson and Justin Viele joined players Mike Yastrzemski (Yes, Yaz’s grandson), Austin Slater, and Jaylin Davis in taking a knee, according to NBC Bay Area. Shortstop Brandon Crawford stood between Richardson and Davis, who are both black, and placed his hands on their shoulders in an apparent sign of support.
Although the Giants did not announce before the game against the Oakland A’s at Oakland Coliseum that some members would kneel, Kapler said he had informed the team of his plans. Then he blathered out his explanation, which while considerably more coherent than what Colin Kaepenick said after the first time he imposed his political views on his team, the game, and spectators were offensive nonetheless.
None of those cardboard cut-out people in the stands would go on the record later, but reportedly they were not pleased.
Here’s Gabe:
“I wanted to share what my plans were and I did that because I wanted them to know that I wasn’t pleased with the way our country has handled police brutality. I told them that I wanted to amplify their voices and I wanted to amplify the voice of the Black community and marginalized communities as well. I told them that I wanted to use my platform to demonstrate my dissatisfaction with the way we’ve handled racism in our country. I wanted to demonstrate my dissatisfaction with our clear systemic racism in our country. And I wanted them to know that they got to make their own decisions and we would respect and support those decisions. I wanted them to feel safe in speaking up, and so we had these kinds of discussions for the last several days and will continue to have them.”
Asked if he and other Giants would continue kneeling, Kapler said, “We’re going to have 60 chances during the regular season to make the same decision that we made today, to either stand or kneel or do something different.”
Last night’s Smithsonian Associates presentation on baseball and American culture went well, I guess. Presenting on Zoom is like acting in a closet: no connection to the audience, no way to gauge what is working and what isn’t, or whether the invisible viewers are engaged. It did give me a chance, during the section on baseball cheating, to read one of my favorite passages from Philip Roth’s baseball allegory/satire,”The Great American Novel.” Roth’s narrator, mad sportswriter Word Smith, tells the sad tale of the legendary “Spit” Baal, a master of the spitball, the mucous-ball and other trick pitches aided by surreptitiously applied substances. After such adulterations of the ball were banned in 1920, Baal found his career in tatters, since he could no longer use his signature pitch. (In the real world, the National league and American league allowed acknowledged spitball specialists to continue to throw the pitch legally under a grandfather clause, but Roth’s fantasy is about a third major league, wiped from history and record books in the Fifties following the discovery that it had been infiltrated by Communists.) One day, again seeing his dry pitches clobbered and realizing that he could no longer get batters out legally, “Spit” has a psychotic break on the mound that ends his career in spectacular if unsanitary fashion:
And so before twenty thousand shocked customers including innocent children — and his own wide-eyed teammates, the once great pitcher, who was washed up anyway, did the unthinkable, the unpardonable, the inexpiable. He dropped the flannel trousers of his uniform to his knees, and proceeded to urinate on the ball, turning it slowly in his hands so as to dampen the entire surface. Then he hitched his trousers back up, and in the way of pitchers, pawed at the ground around the mound with his spikes, churning up then smoothing down the dirt where he had inadvertently dribbled upon it. To the batter, as frozen in his position as anyone in that ball park, he called, “Here comes the pissball, shithead — get ready!”
For years afterward they talked about the route that ball took before it passed over the plate. Not only did it make the hairpin turns and somersaults expected of a Baal spitter, but legend has it that it shifted gears four times, halving, then doubling its velocity each fifteen feet it traveled. And in the end, the catcher, in his squat, did not even have to move his glove from where it too was frozen as a target .Gagging, he caught the ball with a squish, right in the center of the strike zone…
1. So this graph would seem to indicate that the news media is scare mongering, right?Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 