I’m out the rest of the week, but encourage you to check out the new issue of the magazine, which rocks pretty good, I think.
If you’re especially nuts for silly gossip and local crazy-talk, and you want to know why we’ve been getting so many dirty looks from our so-called competitors lately, look at this and try to imagine how much fun we had putting it together.
Why can’t we use our powers for good? Because there’s so much evil in the world…
Tonight Jesse Crain picked up his fourth win of the season out of the bullpen, and it looks like he’s on his way to eventually supplanting Juan Rincon as the main set-up man for Joe Nathan. He’s also looking like pretty good insurance for Nathan in the event that disaster strikes.
I love Crain enough to risk ruining his season (if not his career) by praising him in a (semi-) public forum. The guy throws in the mid-nineties and has a dynamite curveball, and though I expect the strikeouts will eventually start to come for him, so far he’s gotten the job done by getting opposing hitters to swing the bats. He’s also the one Twin most consistently willing to pitch hard up and in and drive batters off the plate, and it’s fun to watch his already crafty approach to each at-bat. I also like his unflappable demeanor. He’s the stone-faced straight man to Nathan, whose wincing, sighing, and lip-fluttering whinnying always makes me sort of nervous. Nathan’s a monster, but I’m not sure there’s a closer in the major leagues who displays such anxious body language on the mound.
It would be nice if the Twins offense could sustain a little consistency from top to bottom, but they’ve been maddening in exactly the same regard in each of the previous three seasons. There never seems to be a time when everybody in the line-up is running hot at the same time, and there have been far too many nights when everybody pretty much looks futile against mediocrities like Scott Elarton. This is still a team that’s going to go as far as its pitching will carry it, and the same seems to be true of both Chicago and Cleveland.
Tonight at least they managed to come through with a bunch of big two-out (and two-strike) hits, and I know that most stat wonks like to pooh-pooh the idea of clutch hitting, but, dammit, I know what I see, and Lew Ford has been clutch in so many key situations already this year that I have a hard time attributing it to nothing but situations and luck. Ford seems to have a knack for bearing down and getting a good swing in the tight spots of games, and I have to think it has something to do with the same curious mental makeup that makes him such a genuine and endearing character in the clubhouse.
I suppose the sort of encouraging thing about the last couple nights is that both teams have pretty much emptied out their bullpens, and if anything Eric Wedge has spent even more bullets. I think any time the Twins can come through the back end of the rotation with a 1-1 record you’ve gotta feel pretty good, although wasting a decent Kyle Lohse performance certainly qualifies as a major waste at this point.
Now, of course, the series comes down to which team’s starters can do the most to give their bullpens a breather in the next couple games. Which gives me an opportunity to say how much I like the revamped batting order Gardenhire has cobbled together. Between Stewart, Mauer, and Ford, you’ve got your three most selective guys getting guaranteed at-bats in the first inning, which gives the Twins a chance to force opposing pitchers to work deep counts and throw a lot of pitches. I wish I felt like some of the guys in the middle of the order were actually paying close attention to these at-bats, but most of the time lately it sure as hell doesn’t look like they are.
It took us three days to get through Michael Sokolove’s provocative piece in the New York Times magazine about Sen. Rick Santorum—partly because we couldn’t stop talking about it before reading to the end. (A long, loud discussion over beers at Pizza Luce on Sunday night was especially energetic.) Of course, we can’t plan these things, but we’ve had a remarkable run of good luck in our timing lately. We call it “planned serendipity.”
Sokolove’s piece on the rise of religion in national politics compliments our new cover story nicely. But where he keeps the frame tightly on Sen. Santorum, and does not wander off to compare him to any larger trends of increasingly noisy Christians in national politics, our story looked at a possible Democratic alternative, at least as it presents itself in the Minnesota state legislature—a Christian Left, as it were.
Is there an equivalent counterpart on the left, an equal and opposite religious impulse coming from the DFL? Not really, and here’s why: The left is not comfortable dealing in high moral or religious language for one simple reason—Democrats value diversity, and recognize that statements of confessional faith are inherently exclusionary and judgmental. It is not possible to speak of simple Christian morality without alienating non-christians, whether they are Jews, Muslims, atheists, or free-thinkers. Plenty of Christians are not comfortable with Christianity’s ascendency in American politics because they understand this. This country was founded in religious dissent, not religious consensus. Sen. Santorum and his many colleagues have made it pretty clear just how they feel about dissent of any kind, but they are particularly blind to the possibility that a person can be moral without being pretentious or self-righteous or even Christian about it.
As our cover story makes clear, a person like Sen. Dean Johnson recognizes as a key value the understanding that there are intractable differences when it comes to certain moral issues and positions. You can not legislate faith-based morality for the simple reason that there are hundreds of differenct faiths that cannot, should not, and will not agree.
It is time to put this literalist approach to scripture and religion out of its misery. We will no longer argue with anyone about what the Bible says or means (even when it simply “means what it says”) until our petitioner can read in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek—the languages in which most of the books of the present-day “bible” were actually composed. (Come to think of it, we’ll spot you the English translation, and you tell us which bible is it that ought to be interpreted literally? The Catholic or Protestant bible? KJ, NIV, RSV, INIV? Vulgate or Pentateuch as source document? Answers! We want answers!)
More to the point, we feel good about one thing, especially for our friends who are obsessed with Google: Finally, Rick Santorum’s search engine results will reflect something other than Dan Savage’s definition, which has slowly been inching its way toward Webster’s, and is one of the most euphonious coinages we’ve ever heard.
On Friday, Timothy Noah published the results of his online survey which asked the question, “If you had to pay to read each New York Times columnist, how much would you pay?” Apropos of the Times announcing that they were going to place their columnists in a premium subscription-only area of the Times website, Noah was asking readers to rank the Times columnists according to relative value. Krugman won, Friedman came in a close second, Dowd finished middle of the pack, Brooks and Tierney finished dead last.
Several interesting things to say about this. First, Noah dismisses the polarized partisan results as a liberal bias among Slate’s readers, but we’d bet dollars to donuts that Slate’s demographic profile is virtually the same as the Times (especially the Times online). Now that the Washington Post owns Slate, in fact, it will be interesting to see whether the Times continues to be allowed to poach Slate staffers, no matter what Jack Shafer may say about it.
Second, Noah admits that he was floored by the response he got to his little poll. (Again, what did he expect? That no one who reads the Times reads Slate?) Idiotically, he conducted the poll by email, and was therefore unprepared for the one thousand ballots he received in the four hours of voting. He threw in the towel, and decided to hand count only the last half-hour of votes.
Finally, we see a clear and crucial difference in the way the Post will run Slate, versus how Microsoft would have done it. It’s the programming, dummy!
It will be interesting to watch the gauges at NYTimes.com after the premium subscription goes into effect. Doubtless the columnists will suddenly disappear forever from the “most emailed” or “most read” queues or whatever it is that tells you who is winning the daily popularity contest at the Times. But maybe not. Anyone who has ever tried to hide premium content from the masses has not succeeded, at least not 100 percent. We continue to think of it as a reward for those with the time, energy, and perseverance to find it free at any cost.
FOLLOWUPS: As we predicted here, this has come to pass. How do you think she did? We are conducting an anonymous email poll as to who our readers like better as a Strib ombud, Lou Gelfand or Kate Parry, each with a letter grade, please. Although we are not a Microsoft property, we are confident in our ability to do simple math, and we will report the results tomorrow.
A friend of mine told me over the weekend that she missed my poetry posts. (If you are nostalgic, you can go back to any posts from April for the pedantry.) But that comment, and today’s news from Iraq made me think of one of my favorites: Horace’s Ode 3.2–the famous “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” ode–“It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.”
Now I’m certain that Horace was being ironic. In fact, I wrote a pretty good paper about it once in college. But, of course, that hasn’t stopped the guys who start the wars quoting him out of context for the last 2000 years. We have, luckily, the other poets and artists to interpret for us.
Here’s Hemingway’s take, for example: “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
And here is English poet Wilfred Owen:
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime —
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Read that last line again–the part about the “old Lie,” and think of how we got into Iraq. Think of that in the light of the stories out of England recently in which it was revealed in Parliamentary memos that the American government knew damn well they were lying about Saddam’s weapons.
Add that to the lies Rumsfeld baldly told to the questioning American soldier about why they were sent to Iraq with unarmored Humvees and inadequate body armor.
Think then of Horace and Hemingway and Owen’s imagery.
Five Americans were killed over the weekend, four of them by road side bombs that blew apart their bodies, which were shielded by little more than the leather armor worn by Roman soldiers in Horace’s time.
Think of the pink froth of those boys’ last breaths gurgling from their perforated chests and screaming lips.
And then think if you would send a dog to die like that.
Rumsfeld would.
After a time the beggars just sort of receded and became a peripheral blur in my daily routine, the traffic I had to navigate each day on my way to work. There were almost no cars in my part of town. A number of people had beat-up motor scooters or bicycles, but the narrow maze of dusty streets and terraces broken up by steep steps was largely impassable by automobile.
I don’t know how long it took me to get used to the beggars, or at least to learn to not really see them. Not long, to be appallingly honest. Even as on some level, of course, you never got entirely used to the daily swarm of children, old women, and various categories of broken men. But if you let their presence bother you as much as it should have bothered you, you wouldn’t have survived long in that place.
Whenever a group of foreign workers would get together we’d inevitably find ourselves talking about the beggars in ways that were shamefully abstract, as if they were pests –mosquitos, perhaps, or pigeons. Some nuisance you needed a strategy to cope with. This sort of strategic distance was necessary, I suppose, for practical, day-to-day survival in that country. Your compassion and mercy needed to be generalized and concentrated on the big picture, which was something that never really seemed to come into clear focus; if anything, in fact, it seemed to be continually receding to the horizon and growing smaller and more hopelessly fuzzed all the time. Still, we all agreed that it did us –or them– no good to give the beggars money or buy their useless trinkets.
I still remember one particular boy I would encounter every day, folded up like a large cricket on a dirty mat on the sidewalk, his emaciated legs bent behind him at impossible angles. “See me,” he would call out in a croaking, damaged tenor. “Look at me.”
I recall giving him what amounted to perhaps fifty cents one morning, and I was upbraided by one of my supervisors –a young Frenchwoman– all the way to the office.
It’s strange, I haven’t found myself thinking about those people for years now, and for quite a long time, I believe, I had succeeded in not thinking of them as people at all.
–Illustration by James Dankert
Fridays aren’t gonna work for me. I’m not a writer, dammit. I can’t be expected to drag my ass home from the day job (and I do mean drag my ass; some days it feels like I’m hauling a Volkswagon Beetle behind me), watch a baseball game, and then sit down and grind out some nonsense simply because Zellar feels like taking the day off and making merry.
Sometimes I feel like making merry myself, even if I do have a substantially different definition of what that phrase means than the average person. Last night, for instance: I didn’t feel up to venturing out to the Dome, so I hunkered down at home with a twelve-pack of Milwaukee’s Best (truly the best beer-bang for your buck when you’re pinching pennies) and a bag of Cheetos, which I enjoy because they stain the shit out of my face, hands, and clothes and when I finish a bag I look like I’ve actually been doing hard labor in some kind of mine. I also ate some pork and beans (mixed with Ken Davis barbecue sauce) cold and right out of the can. I like to imagine that I might be one of the last people in America –other than, perhaps, a few rare old-school hobos, if in fact there remain any such characters in existence– who still eats pork and beans out of the can.
What, some people occasionally wonder, does any of this have to do with baseball? And my answer is: everything. The game is all about ritual and routine, and I have as many –if different– rituals as a fan as I ever did as a player. Being a baseball fan should not be a passive activity, and it’s not an appropriate activity for the self-conscious. Athletes always talk about being in “the zone,” and even as a spectator the game is only truly excruciating or enjoyable to me if I can manage to find my way into a zone of oblivion all my own. Maybe that’s why I prefer sitting at home and watching on television to putting up with the aggravations and distractions of a crowd at the ballpark. When I actually go to a game, someone or something is always intruding on my oblivion, and these intrusions are often incredibly hostile. I also don’t wish to have my responses and behavior choreographed by anything other than what happens on the field.
Some people –many people– can’t stand to have their ballpark “experience” ruined by the behavior of a genuine fan, but that’s not my problem. When people object to my behavior at a game –and this happens all the time– it’s inevitably out of concern for the kids around me. One of the most pathetic fallacies in the world is that baseball is all about the kids. That’s nonsense. Unless a kid knows how to keep score, define the infield fly rule, and pay attention, parents or guardians have no business bringing them to a baseball game. Anybody who’s had to sit around a gaggle of squirming brats at the Dome recognizes that most kids would rather be somewhere else. Most of the time they’d rather be standing in line at the concession stands or running up the aisle to the bathroom.
I’ve been booed mercilessly on a number of occasions for wrestling a foul ball away from some kid (or pack of feral kids), and when this has happened I can tell you in all honesty that I’ve never felt anything but exultant. I’ve caught maybe a dozen balls over the years, and, truth be told, they don’t mean anything to me at this point, but I’ll still wade into the throng out of principle. I can see all sorts of lessons in this for the kids: Life’s not fair. Respect your elders. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and little dogs should stay the hell out of the way of the big dogs. The sturdier animal gets the foul ball. Shut your mouth and watch the game or go to Camp Snoopy where you belong. Don’t mess with Jumbo.
I can’t find much to bitch about regarding last night’s game. I love watching Carlos Silva pitch, and his performance last night was a thing of beauty. It’s easy to forget that this is a big guy who’s supposedly pitching with a messed-up knee.
I still don’t much like the offense of this team, and worry about the strength of the bench over the long haul. If you’re one of these people who seriously believes that Nick Punto or Juan Castro are the answers to any question worth asking, the odds aren’t very good that we’re ever going to be able to have a civilized discourse.
Because Silva was so great last night we can try to forget about the fact that the Twins stranded eleven runners, and Torii Hunter (.237 BA, .314 OBP, .396 SLG) grounded into two double plays with the bases loaded, and is now 0-8 with the bags packed for the season. This is a guy who right now is a serious candidate for the most overrated player in all of baseball.
The futility of the entire team with the bases loaded (9-51 for a .176 BA) is ridiculous, and might be either a pure fluke or a sign that the Twins just aren’t a very disciplined team. Right now I’d say it’s probably a little bit of both.
It’s probably something of a red flag when your barber has a Superman logo tattooed on his forearm. And this is probably not the sort of monologue you want to hear from some guy while he’s cutting your hair:
I’m not shitting you, I’m at the end of my fucking rope here. I know damn well that people look at me when I keep shaking my head like crazy, but it’s like I’m trying to erase something from my brain, you know? Like my brain is a fucking Etch-A-Sketch. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe some of the bullshit I’ve been through. My ex-wife has put me through the wringer, I shit you not. You’d think I was made of money. Hello? Did I happen to mention when I married you that I was a fucking barber? I’m pretty sure I did.
I had a guy in here earlier, and when I told him that I was at the end of my fucking rope, he says, “Well, from the looks of things, I don’t suppose you’re lying.” So, okay, it’s that obvious, okay? I’m not a guy who can keep shit bottled up inside. Like I always told the old lady, “What you see is what you get. I’m not hiding anything.”
I’m serious, though, everywhere I turn it seems like there’s a brick wall waiting for me, and the punks in my neighborhood have spray-painted the word “Fuck” in big red letters right across that brick wall. It’s like every day I wake up from one nightmare and slip right into another. The same shitty food, day after day. The same fucking undercover deadbeats shuffling by my house, the same bogus utility truck parked at the curb out front, the guy behind the wheel pretending to read a newspaper.
You think I don’t know what’s going on? Do these people really think I’m that fucking stupid? I ask my next-door neighbor if he’s ever seen anybody suspicious-looking lurking around in my backyard when I’m not around, and he gets all nervous and says he hasn’t seen a thing. Then, a couple nights later, I notice a small red light in the dark window of his bedroom, clearly the battery lights of a video camera that’s pointed right at me.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m this close —this fucking close [gripping a fistful of my hair with one hand, he shoves his scissors in front of my eyes and executes one quick, aggressive snip]– to snapping.
We’ve mentioned before the many, many awards that are minted each year for every little print publication under the sun. Some forms of industrial recognition are more credible than others, of course, but mostly they are an exercise in narcissism. We’re not sure anyone outside the industry cares that much, given that any publication that has been around for more than ten years has, at some point, with or without its own knowledge or participation, become a bonafide “award-winning” publication.
Last week, the City and Regional Magazine Awards were announced, and in our view this is a middling to negligable honor. Usually, it’s a good sign when a third party conducts the judging process, and the CRMAs are peddled along by the University of Missouri School of Journalism, using a full-to-bursting masthead of credible magazine professionals.
The problem with the CRMAs, though, is that the City and Regional Magazine Association itself limits who can enter the competition. As a point of policy, anyone can enter. As a point of practice, the people at the offices of the CRMA get to decide who is allowed into the competition, and they are happy to reject the applications of anyone they might feel threatened by.
We’re strictly observers of it all, not participants, but we find it interesting that bloom is off the rose when it comes to perennial favorite Texas Monthly. Anecdotally, everyone agrees that it’s one of the best magazines in the nation (we think so too), but TM has been getting shut out in the CRMAs and the ASMEs in the past two or three years. (Well, bronze and silver awards are not exactly getting shut-out. But a magazine that regularly receives national notice against Big Leaguers like The New Yorker and The Atlantic should easily dominate the somewhat silly CRMAs. It’s a little like having a Pulitzer winner come in second at the local library’s “what I did for my summer vacation” competition.) Probably the judges are eager to give others a chance, and wish to let TM lie fallow for a few years. Be that as it may, we think it’s about time Chicago magazine got some recognition, even at Texas Monthly’s cost.
There’s another article in today’s Miami Herald about Luis Posada Carriles. (Search their archives for a long list of more stories on this jerk.) Here’s the basic deal: Posada blew up a Cuban airliner that was on its way to Venezuela. He blew up some hotels in Havana. He tortured leftist prisoners in Venezuela.
Even putting aside the torture thing, which is wholeheartedly endorsed by the Bush administration, the airplane and hotel bombings kind of make him a terrorist, don’t they? Of course, there is the annoying mitigating circumstance that Posada was working for (gasp) the CIA at the time of the airplane bombing, but U.S. law clearly prohibits offering asylum to terrorists.
But, there’s also the law of South Florida, particularly Miami, which is, for all practical purposes, the Batista government of Cuba in exile. So, if Jeb-boy is gonna carry Florida in 2008, brother W probably ain’t gonna send a Cuban “freedom fighter” to Castro’s buddies in Venezuela to be tried.
Gee, even Libya turned over the Lockerbie bombers. (Of course, in Gaddifi’s defense, he didn’t have to worry about elections.) But, if Libya was once a charter member of the Axis of Evil club, what does that make us?