Category Archives: Current Affairs

Why are you really sorry?

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Today’s "controversy of the day", at least for the morning, is what ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway said when he was asked about he would handle having a gay (homosexual, not happy) teammate.  Here’s what he said:

You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known," Hardaway said. "I
don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am
homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the
United States…

And second of all, if he was on my team, I would, you know, really
distance myself from him because, uh, I don’t think that’s right. And
you know I don’t think he should be in the locker room while we’re in
the locker room. I wouldn’t even be a part of that.

Yowch.  His statements are definitely politically incorrect, obviously objectionable to many people and just as obviously reflective of his true feelings.  And I’d hazard a guess that his views are shared by many of his NBA peers and by a fairly large segment of the population.  Personally I don’t share his views, but they are his views and he’s being brutally honest about his feelings with his comments.

Well, not 24 hours after his comments hit the airwaves Hardaway has issued an apology.  Here’s an excerpt from an ESPN.com story about the controversy:

Hardaway, later saying he regretted the remarks, apologized for the
remarks during a telephone interview with Fox affiliate WSVN in Miami.

"Yes, I regret it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said I hate gay people or anything like that," he said. "That was my mistake."

Well, I’m sure he is sorry for making the comments.  He’s probably lost a lot of future dollars from media and PR gigs and I’ll bet he is sorry for that.  But is he sorry for hating gay people?  I doubt it, and in our society I don’t know if we can or should demand that people apologize for expressing their true feelings.  Nothing says we have to agree with them, or support them, but their feelings are as legitimate as anyone elses.  If anything we should say, "I hear what you’re saying and here’s why I think you’re wrong."  Instead we shout "You’re wrong you bigoted asshole!" and then wait for the public bowing down and apology.

Our airwaves are filled with celebrities, athletes, politicians and other infamous folk who open their mouths, utter something considered objectionable by a segment of the population, and then when they figure out they might lose money or status they issue an apology.  Their apologies are sincere in that they really regret making trouble for themselves, but otherwise they ring hollow as a damage containment tool.

For once I’d like someone to say something like, "I know most people don’t agree with what I said, but it’s what I believe and that’s that.  Maybe I should learn to say nothing if I’ve got nothing nice to say, but it’s too late for that now so if you disagree with me let’s talk about it."  Unfortunately we don’t seem to have people in the public eye willing to do that.

What’s real interesting about the Hardaway story is the reaction of John Amaeche, an ex-NBA player who came out of the closet in a book he recently wrote.  Amaeche’s book has caused a big stir in the NBA universe and is what prompted the interviewer to ask Hardaway about his feelings on having a gay teammate. Here’s what Amaechi said:

Finally, someone who is honest. It is ridiculous, absurb, petty,
bigoted and shows a lack of empathy that is gargantuan and
unfathomable. But it is honest. And it illustrates the problem better
than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far.

Exactly.  Without people like Hardaway, people who say what they really feel, we don’t stand a chance of having an honest conversation about issues like these.  And without an honest conversation we don’t ever get any closer to understanding each other’s position.  In Amaeche’s words we will continue to have a gargantuan and unfathomable lack of empathy.

PC Crackers

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Over at Hogg’s Blog the Hogg shares a little something from his friend in Kentucky:

Just keeping you posted so you will not embarrass yourself.

Due to the climate of political correctness now pervading America,
those of us in Northern Alabama, North Georgia, Tennessee, North
Carolina, Western South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky
will no longer be referred to as “Hillbillies.” You must now refer to
us as “Appalachian-Americans”.

Thank you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got possums to fry.

Much debate ensued in the comments about the proper technique for preparing possum. 

Upon further inspection I was probably wrong in using the title "PC Cracker" since hillbilly seems to be a more specific derogatory description of white folks than either redneck or cracker.  From Wikipedia:

Hillbilly is a term referring to people who dwell in remote, rural, mountainous areas. In particular the term refers to residents of Appalachia and later the Ozarks in the United States.
Usage of the term "Hillbilly" generally differs from other terms
referring to rural people in the United States in that it can be used
for mountain dwelling people anywhere but is generally not used to
refer to rural people in non-mountainous areas. While terms like redneck and cracker
often connote rejection of, or resistance to, assimilation into the
dominant culture, theoretically hillbillies are merely isolated from
the dominant culture. Nevertheless, the term is sometimes considered derogatory depending on the context in which it is used or the attitude of the target.

That last sentence cracks me up.  When have you ever heard the term hillbilly used in a fashion that wasn’t derogatory?  And what does it say when you type "hillbilly" into Google and the image below is one of the three that appears at the top of the search results?

Hillbilly

I Swear

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Here in North Carolina an appeals court just ruled that a Muslim woman can proceed with a lawsuit claiming that she should be allowed to swear to tell the truth on the Quran instead of the Bible.  As you can imagine this is causing some consternation among the locals, and it’s making for some nice debate.  Over at the Greensboro News & Record Doug Clark makes this point:

This is an important case about an old tradition, or ritual, in our
courts. I think there is continued value in asking witnesses to swear
their truthfulness upon a sacred text (or affirming their oath if they
prefer). But the practice is meaningful only if the text is held as
sacred by the persom making the promise. If that’s a Quran, or the
Hebrew Bible, or some other holy text, then so be it. Our law should
not bestow authority exclusively on one above the others.

I have to say that I agree with Doug’s point.  I mean how logical is it to ask someone to swear the truth on something they don’t believe in?  Doesn’t it give them license to lie?

In my role on the Lewisville Zoning Board of Adjustment I get to hear "cases" along with the other board members.  In our training we were told that we function pretty much like judges in a court of law; our job isn’t to offer an opinion on how properties should be zoned but rather to interpret whether or not the zoning laws are being met.  Whenever we hear a case we have witnesses who either support or oppose the proposed project and we have to swear those witnesses in.  Most do swear on the Bible but in one case we had a lady who said that it went against her Christian beliefs to swear on the Bible so she was able to simply affirm that she would tell the truth.  Her position was a new one to me and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I came across a comment from Cara Michele on Ed Cone’s blog about the Quran case.  Here’s what she wrote:

"Again, you have heard that it
was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the
oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all:
either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is
his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.
And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white
or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything
beyond this comes from the evil one."  — words of Jesus in Matt. 5:33-37

If the Bible is your sacred text, then you’re not going to swear on it.  (That’s assuming that you’ve read it.  And if you haven’t read your sacred text, well… what are you waiting for!) 

And if the Bible isn’t your sacred text, then swearing on it is basically meaningless anyway, right?

Irony.

Interesting, huh?  Personally I’d be fine with moving to a non-sectarian affirmation of truth across the board.  Perjury is perjury whether you swear on the Bible or on a stack of X-Men comic books, so why not make everyone’s lives simpler by simply requiring witnesses to say "I promise to tell the truth"?

On a lighter note, this reminds me of a moment we had last year when we (the ZBOA) couldn’t find the Bible and we ended up using the town attorney’s PDA Bible memory card for the swearing in. I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an act of faith for us to believe that the memory card was in fact a Bible, but in the end it didn’t matter as long as the people involved believed it was a Bible. And of course if we hadn’t found the Bible we could have proceeded with everyone affirming that they would tell the truth.  Kind of makes me wonder what the big deal is here.

 

Forecast Gloomy

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I was enjoying my cup of coffee this morning while catching up with email and favorite blog posts and my mood was positively sunny.  Then I came across this post on David Boyd’s blog and followed his instructions to view the Nuclear Jihad videos on the NY Times website.   Well, there went my good mood.  Here’s what David had to say about the videos:

The only thing more shocking than how extensive and user-friendly the
AQ Kahn network was, is how surprised our intelligence and government
officials were at how extensive and user-friendly the AQ Kahn network
was.

If we were this clueless about what was happening, even after our
senses were heightened following 9/11, then we’re just waiting. This
thing is Hurricane Katrina + 9/11 * 1000. We know it’s coming. We don’t
know where and when and what we’re going to do about it.

This economy and lifestyle we have in the US and the West in general is
a powerful thing. More people are living well in the West than have
lived well in the history of the world. This is the pinnacle of human
achievement and one wonders what can happen to derail it. This is it.
Once the bomb goes off, we’ll look back at this period of innocence and
naivete with longing. Enjoy it while it’s happening.

Remember when the 9/11 report came out and everyone was saying that our intelligence breakdown was in part a failure of imagination?  Well, how hard is it to imagine that at some point in the future we’ll be looking back at our current naivete with longing?  Think about how we look back at pre-9/11/01 now and then multiply by a factor of 10 and I think we have an idea about how right David probably is.

There went my good mood.

All the News That’s Fit to Skew

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PBS’s Frontline had a story about a conservative mayor in Spokane, WA named Jim West who was found to be participating in online chats (and more) on Gay.com.  The mayor was also linked to a sheriff’s deputy who’d been found to have been abusing boys when he was a Scout leader in the late 70s.  The mayor had also been a deputy at the time, was the pedophile ‘s partner on the force, and was his Scout co-leader.  The combination of close ties to a child molester and his participation on a gay website attracted the interest of the Spokane Spokesman Review, which had been tipped off about his online activities and probable screen name and decided to try and find out if the mayor was trolling for boys online.

The newspaper hired an outside firm to investigate. To make a long story short the firm’s representative created a false identity, engaged the person they suspected of being the mayor in conversation, and tried to smoke him out.  The interesting thing is that the fake persona was originally said to be 17, legally underage, and the mayor never made any overtly sexual gestures or comments to "him".  Then the firm had their persona turn 18 and that’s when the mayor seemed to become interested sexually.  He arranged a meeting at a golf course with the fake persona, showed up and waited for 20 minutes (he was photographed by the paper) and then left when the fake persona didn’t show.

In the interviews with Frontline the editor and reporter from the Spokesman Review acknowledge that the pedophile angle didn’t play out in their story (they never found proof of any abuse by West) and they also say that at that point they decided it was a non-story, because even though it might be scandalous that a conservative mayor who had been identified as anti-gay in the past was himself engaging in gay activities, it was really his private business.  But then the mayor suggested to the fake persona that he could get him an unpaid internship with the city and the paper decided that they did indeed have a story since the mayor was abusing his office to provide jobs to young men he met online. 

They ran the story, and despite havng no proof that he had been involved in molesting children at any time, they used the headline: "West tied to sex abuse in 70s, using office to lure young men". The mayor’s career was effectively over and he was outed as either bi-sexual or gay.  Not long after the story broke a college student who’d chatted with West came forward to say that West had gotten him a spot on a commission because of West found him attractive and had told him that it was the only way he could see him (I’m paraphrasing).

All of this happened in 2005, and after refusing to resign West was recalled and voted out in December of that year.  He had a recurrence of colon cancer during the scandal and ended up dying in July, 2006.

Here’s my issue with this whole thing; can we really believe that the paper would have run with this story about abuse of office if it hadn’t involved gay men?  We’re not talking influencing mega-contracts with the city, or high-powered, high-paying jobs.  We’re talking about internships.  And let’s be real about how internships and committee assignments are generally made in the real world; first choice is given to personal connections of the people in power or their benefactors.  So this story probably would have been found on page "B4" if it wasn’t for the gay angle, and I think it’s disingenuous to say otherwise.

Using the sex abuse allegation in the headline was particularly egregious.  In fact that whole angle disappears in follow up stories, but the cat was already out of the bag.  It’s this kind of reporting that lends credence to the belief many people have that the media is biased.  Of course media people are biased, they’re human beings after all, but a media operation that is striving to be objective should avoid giving weight to a story merely because it is sensational. 

And of course in order to remain objective a media operation should try to constrain the inherent, human bias of its members.  That’s why it’s truly disturbing to find a memo from the VP of News at Fox that says, among other things, "And let’s be on the lookout for any statements from the Iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled Congress".  In other words the leader of the news operation is mandating they operate by his own bias and saying he wants his people to find him stories that fit his world view. (I know, I know, it’s Fox and what else do you expect.  But as long as they’re pretending to be a news operation and not an entertainment channel we have to treat them as, ahem, newspeople).

In the end that’s what the Spokesman Review did; it started with a premise and when the story ended up not fitting its premise it shoe-horned the square story into its premise’s round hole. Sure the mayor made some mistakes, but had he been doling out internships to pretty 18-22 year old women I don’t think it would have gotten him recalled.  Hell it probably would have won him re-election.

Unfortunately stories that don’t feature titillation, scandal or blood (if it bleeds it leads!) don’t sell newspapers, and objective reporting doesn’t win you a rabid, loyal audience.  As they lay dying the newspapers and traditional networks probably feel that producing crap like this is the only way to stay in business.  Unfortunately I think we’ll see more of this as they struggle to survive. Hopefully we’ll see the growth of a new branch of the fourth estate, one free of the vagaries of quarterly reports to investors, that will wear the mantle of true journalism.  If we don’t I think we’re damned to a lifetime of dumbass blatherers flinging "facts" at us like monkeys hurling poop at zoo visitors.  It’s kind of entertaining until the poop hits you squarely in the face.

Mommy Lushes?

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Only in America could someone right a book about setting up play dates for their kids and then tipping a few back while the little monsters tear the house down.  According to this article in Reveries that’s just what Christie Mellor has done with her book The Three-Martini Playdate.  Here’s a small taste:

Christie’s book actually is one of a number of titles “over the last
few years that urge parents to ease up” by mixing a little alcohol with
their childrearing. Some say this is a healthy thing, “a small break”
from all the “runs to soccer and ballet classes, fundraisers and
homework projects … the almost sadistically stressful world of modern
parenting.”

and

But Christie Mellor says the alcoholism issue misses the point, that
she really only meant the momtinis as "a metaphor for having more fun
in your life … It’s not just about drinking and cutting loose," she
says. "It’s about giving your children the tools to be self sufficient
… Because if you haven’t changed your general attitude, then you just
end up being a really busy drunk."

Somehow I just can’t picture my grandmothers or mother indulging in this kind of silliness.  I mean my grandmothers were non-drinkers and my mom didn’t start drinking alcohol until she was well into her 30s, but even if they did drink and did decide to have a martini during play date they sure wouldn’t make a big deal about it.  Has this generation been so Oprah-fied that we have to create drinking metaphors to tell us how to give our "children the tools to be self sufficient"?

When I was a kid being self sufficient meant you were banned from the house until it was time to eat either lunch or dinner and then if you didn’t show up on time you were in big trouble.  That’s when we kids took the opportunity to discover the wonders of fighting, which I guess in today’s parlance would be called "dispute resolution", seeing who had the most guts by taking whatever outlandish dare we came up with at that moment, finding out how far we could get from our homes without getting into trouble, finding and hiding the neighbors stash of Playboys that he foolishly put in his curbside trashcan, etc.  Our parents didn’t need metaphors to teach us self sufficiency and I suspect today’s mothers don’t either; they’re just looking for a reason to get lit while managing their kids’ schedules.  Of course micro-managing their kids’ lives is a great tool for teaching self sufficiency.

Self Flaggelation

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Quit snickering, the title is self-flaggelation not self-flatulation.  Every time there’s an election I think of this term as it relates to one of my oldest friends, Dimitri (Jimmy) Kesari.  Jimmy and I went to high school together and from the go he was more involved in politics than anyone I’ve ever known.  He talked me into running for Student Body president my senior year, got me elected and got himself elected secretary.  Of course he then ran the student body behind the scenes while I stayed busy flirting with the girls on the student council.

Jimmy’s an arch-conservative and has walked the conservative walk his entire life.  He went to Grove City College which is so conservative that they proudly refuse to take any federal funding so they don’t have to play by the government’s rules (at least that’s what he said).  After college he started a solid wast recycling business in Northern Virginia and hired me to keep an eye on all the ex-cons running his heavy machinery.  I survived that for about six months before deciding I valued my life too much to continue dodging front loaders and hydraulic mulchers that mysteriously seemed to attack the only college kid in the yard.  Eventually Jimmy had a split with his business partner and he went into politics, which is where the self-flagellation comes in.

Jimmy became a campaign manager for a couple of different hard-right conservatives running for the House.  Even in conservative Virginia these guys were unelectable so Jimmy’s guys would get something like 12% of the vote. Each time I’d talk to Jimmy after an election he’d say things like, "The campaign was a big success.  The last time my guy ran he got 5% of the vote and this time we doubled him up to 10%."  The man is a conservative martyr.

Now Jimmy’s working for Right to Work and running their state level political operations.  I talked to him this summer and he was getting ready to spend a month away from his family in October working the hotbed states.  Although our politics are very dissimilar I know that in Jimmy’s case the conservatism is heart felt and he does walk the walk, which means I’ll enjoy disagreeing while never losing respect for him.  I can’t say that about a lot of people in politics these days.  I haven’t talked to him about it but I can almost guarantee you he’s not too happy with the way the Republican Party has steered its course of late.  For his sake I hope he’s back home right now enjoying his wife and kids and refueling for the next fight. 

Easy to Criticize, Hard to Do

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A while back I left a comment on someone else’s blog (can’t find it or I’d link to it) in which I said some rather critical things about TV reporters and their writing abilities.  Lenslinger quickly, and rightly, took me to task.  He pointed out how hard it is to write stories on the fly, match it to video and then get it even semi-coherent for the air.  That was just one reminder about how easy it is to criticize and how much harder it is to actually do anything.

It’s easy to critique an author’s book, but incredibly difficult to write your own.  It’s easy to tell a waiter how to do his job, but when’s the last time you carried five plates on your arm without spilling?

I was reminded of this by Lenslinger’s post "Ten Things I’d Teach News Reporters."  You get an appreciation for how much goes into a nightly newscast, even when it doesn’t go well.  Of course we can, and should, criticize anyone who can do good work but doesn’t, just as we can be criticized when we don’t do our jobs well.  These folks choose to do their jobs in public and as a result they open themselves up to criticism by a far larger audience than the rest of us can even imagine, but that’s the road they chose.

There are other jobs that open the practitioners up to public criticism.  Professional athletes come to mind, and on this election eve so do politicians. I’m sure that politicians’ jobs are harder than we’d like to admit, but at the same time the power they wield demands that we be highly critical of them.  If TV reporters screw up the worst thing we get is bad TV (who’d notice?), and if professional athletes screw up they get check mark in the "L" column, but if politicians screw up we get, well, screwed.

While reading Lenslinger’s piece I remembered how pissed I got the first time I got a negative comment on this blog, and I remember how agitated I was when some troll got on here and started giving me hell.  I also remember thinking, "How do public people do this every day?"  So, yes I’m appreciative of the thick skin that all people in public life must have and I wonder why they do it.  I’m also trying harder to appreciate the hard work that goes into what these folks do, but I’m also not going to give anyone a free pass when they don’t do their jobs well.  In the case of a bad on-air report I’ll probably just laugh and say something like "that was inane", but in the case of politicians I’m gonna squeal like a stuck pig and demand better.

And, oh yeah, I’m gonna try and toss the rascals out.

Heckuvajob Rummy

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How is it that the one guy who can be held directly responsible for much of what’s gone wrong in Iraq still has his job?  "Heckuvajob Rummy" is still the Secretary of Defense, still getting his panties in a twist whenever someone questions him and still putting our military in a lose-lose position.  The worst part is that there was information out there, war game results from 1999 (Desert Crossing), that should have warned him that he needed to think twice about the invasion and to plan very carefully for the after-action occupation.  These war games were conducted by US Central Command (CENTCOM) under Marine General Anthony Zinni who even called CENTCOM in 2002, when it was apparent we were going to war, to remind them of the existence of the Desert Crossing report. 

Among other things the report found that there would need to be a minimum of 400,000 troops in Iraq and even then things would be messy.  Army General Tommy Franks, who took over CENTCOM after Zinni’s retirement, proposed 385,000 troops for Iraq in his original operational plan for the war but Rumsfeld insisted on a sharply reduced number and approved only 160,000.

Even with the 400,000 troops that the war game report recommended the authors anticipated many of the problems we have in Iraq today.

The results of Desert Crossing, however, drew pessimistic conclusions            regarding the immediate possible outcomes of such action. Some of these conclusions are interestingly similar to the events
which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown. (Note
1) The report forewarned that regime change may cause regional
   instability by opening the doors to "rival forces bidding for power" which, in turn, could cause societal "fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines" and antagonize "aggressive neighbors." Further, the report illuminated worries that secure borders and a restoration of civil order may not be enough to stabilize Iraq if the replacement government were perceived as weak, subservient to outside powers, or out of touch with other regional governments. An exit strategy, the report said, would also be complicated by differing visions for a post-Saddam Iraq among those involved in the conflict.

The war game findings were declassified in 2004 and became public as a result of a FOIA request by George Washington University’s National Security Archive and their posting of the document on their website on November 4, 2006. 

The full report can be found here.

It’s one thing to screw the pooch, but when you do it even after the pooch has growled a warning you deserve a special medal of incompetence.  What’s the opposite of a Silver Star?  Whatever it is we should give it to "Heckuvajob Rummy".

**Update 11/8/06** Rummy’s resigning. President Bush thought he was great until the House was lost to the Dems and the specter of Congressional investigations loomed.  I doubt Bush even had to push very hard to get Rummy to the end of the plank.