Revisionist History

In Chicago's Grant Park there is a statue that was commissioned in 1933 by the Italian community of this city, devoted in the words inscribed on the front of its pedestal: "To Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of America"

In Humboldt Park about five miles to the northwest, there is another sculpture, this one commissioned by the Norwegian community of Chicago, devoted, in the words inscribed on its roughly-hewn granite base, to  "Leif Erikson, Discoverer of America."

This city also has a significant Native American community, most of whom would more than likely dispute either claim, as their ancestors lived in the Americas tens of thousands of years before either European explorer set foot upon these shores.

Depending upon your definition of the word "discovery", any one of these claims could have merit. Such is the challenge of history, the narrative depends upon who is telling the story.

In 1893, Chicago hosted a tremendous World's Fair, held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first journey across the Atlantic. (Actually the 401st anniversary as the city couldn't quite pull off the event in time). Ninety nine years later on the 500th anniversary of the event, there was barely any mention of the milestone. And today, nearly thirty years after that, while Columbus Day is still an official holiday, mostly I think out of deference to the Italian-American community, there are plans afoot to keep the holiday but swap the recognition of it from Columbus to Indigenous Americans.

"It's about time", says one segment of society, while another segment indignantly shouts: "revisionist history."

I found a wonderful quote about that old bugaboo "revisionist history" from a noted historian. James McPherson, the author of several books on the American Civil War such as The Battle Cry of Freedom writes that far from something to be avoided, revisionism:

...is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past.

I didn't find the quote in a story about the Civil War or the "discovery" of America, but in a recent Chicago Sun Times article about the founder of the Chicago White Sox. The article titled Pop History Gave a Bad Shake to 1919 ‘Black Sox’ owner Charles A. Comiskey, written by Richard Lindberg, tells the story of how Comiskey's bad reputation comes from the characterization of him in the novel Eight Men Out by Eliot Azinov, the story of the notorious Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The book was made into a popular movie in the eighties.

Quoting myself from a piece I wrote about this very subject four years ago:

The book and especially the film depict Comiskey as a real bastard; imagine a pre-redemtion Ebeneezer Scrooge mixed with old man Potter and Simon Legree without the good side, and you get the picture.

Without understanding (or caring) that Eight Men Out is essentially a work of fiction with a few historical facts thrown in for good measure, popular historians such as Ken Burns have taken the book to be the definitive source on the scandal that rocked baseball in the second decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, they have perpetuated the myth that Comiskey was a notoriously greedy tightwad who all but forced his players to take money from gangsters to throw the 1919 World Series. Research in the past decade has shown this to be pure rubbish, as is another popular myth also perpetuated by Burns and others about the character of one of baseball's greatest players, Ty Cobb.

Yet despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, many people still hold on to their strong biases against the two men, claiming the serious research that went into discovering irrefutable facts that ended up clearing both their names, is not to be trusted as it is merely "revisionist history". In my piece about Ty Cobb, I quoted the estimable baseball writer and statistician Bill James who speaks eloquently not only about the ballplayer, but also about the general public's attitude about history:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

Why is it so hard to let go of our historical biases, especially when confronted with compelling facts to the contrary? In his book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Author Charles Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical bad guys Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not as bad as those two. In other words, if we like the story, it becomes a part of us and we stick with it, come hell or high water.

In the past couple of years, the interpretation of history has been at the center of a controversy involving the removal of century old monuments to Confederate leaders in the American South. The argument against the removal of the statues is that by doing so, communities are practicing their own brand of revisionism by "whitewashing history." In a sense the critics are right, but the history being removed is the history of the statues themselves, NOT the history of the event they were intended to commemorate. Decades after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA., marking the end of the Civil War, a movement that would become known as the "Cult of the Lost Cause" took it upon themselves to revise history by portraying the Confederacy in a kinder, gentler light. According to members of this group, which included historians responsible for much of the understanding of the Civil War for many subsequent decades, the Confederate States fought not to preserve slavery, but to defend states' rights over what they viewed as a tyrannical federal government, to preserve the noble "southern way of life", and to defend their land from the onslaught of Northern aggression.  Union leaders were portrayed, not always wrongly, as drunken, incompetent fools, and the institution of slavery was quite wrongly explained away as one of benevolence, not oppression. Capping it off. the leaders of the Confederacy were portrayed as heroic defenders of the lost cause and tributes and monuments to them went up all over, some even in the north.

No matter how fair-minded the observer, debunking the revisionist history Cult of the Lost Cause is not difficult. All one has to do is read the Articles of Confederation of the states who seceded from the Union (you can find them all online) and right there in black and white, usually near the top of  the documents, is the mention of slavery and its importance to that particular state. The truth, at least as best as we know it today, is that the Civil War did not begin as so many assume, with the Union demanding that slavery be abolished in the South. The issue was the expansion of slavery into the western territories which President Lincoln vehemently objected. Had the Southern states not pressed the issue of expansion, the Civil War may have been delayed or avoided altogether and slavery may have continued for a while until it one way or other, it would have most certainly faded away.


Unlike the popular misconceptions of the causes of the Civil War and the legacies of Ty Cobb and Charles Comiskey, the history of Columbus's voyages to the Americas were not clouded in false assumptions, diversions and outright lies. There was never any question that the results of the European invasion, or expeditions depending upon your point of view, of the Americas initiated unwittingly by Columbus (he never realized that he didn't actually accomplish his goal of reaching Asia), greatly benefited the conquerors, and all but destroyed the conquered, the indigenous people of the so called "New World." What we once viewed as a magnificent accomplishment that ushered in the dawn of the modern age and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit, is now generally viewed as a dark point in history that triggered unconscionable suffering, genocide and the destruction of ancient civilizations. The difference between the way we view the legacy of Columbus today and they way we viewed it in the past is a matter of changing values. Today we are telling the same story but from a different point of view. The truth is that both views of Columbus's legacy are essentially correct.

The most vilified term in academic circles today, next to racism, is colonialism. It's almost impossible to get into any deep conversation about politics, current events, history or just about anything that concerns how we live our lives these days, without the issue of the evils of colonialism coming up. Merely implying that anything good may have come out of colonialism is grounds for at the very least a stern lecture from the rarified world of the cognoscenti. Having just said that, lest you think I am a defender, apologist, or someone who is trying to make a case for colonialism in any form, let me assure you I am not.

The following is my litmus test for judging the merits of anything, asking myself to argue the pros and cons of a particular topic and comparing their merits. Here is my most compelling argument against colonialism:

How would I feel if my country were invaded by another country which enforced its system of rules and government upon us, subjected my people to second class citizenship or worse, and denied us our basic rights? 

You're right I wouldn't like it, not one bit. So why on earth would I advocate subjecting someone else to colonization? On the other hand, here's my best argument in favor of colonialism:

-  -  - 

That's right I don't have any argument supporting colonialism. In my head, the Golden Rule (or whatever you prefer to call the universal gold standard for distinguishing right from wrong), trumps all the fringe benefits that may occur as a result. Wrong is wrong and extenuating circumstances cannot make a wrong a right.

Proponents of a return of colonialism in our time point to liberal democracy, the advancement of science, liberation theology, racial, ethnic and sexual equality, freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and a slew of other ideas and values that have spread throughout the world as a direct result of western colonialism.  Are they wrong? Well those things are all good in my opinion anyway, and whether you like it or not, have all come to us part and parcel as a result of European colonialism.  Yet as far as using those values and attributes as excuses for the continued violation of human rights, then, no, I have to draw the line there.

Which brings to mind this chilling scene from the classic film from 1948, The Third Man, where the character of Harry Lime, as played by Orson Welles, tries to rationalize his evil deeds to his boyhood friend played by Joseph Cotten. Make sure you watch the entire clip as the payoff is at the very end:





Here is a link to an article that chastises as dishonest, a historian favorable to the re-birth of colonialism who happily lists all the glad tidings it has brought to the world, yet failed to note any of the horrors and atrocities of which there were countless.

I get it, but isn't it equally dishonest to only point out the injustices of something we don't like while avoiding any mention of the positive? It is an inescapable fact that our world would be a very different place today, for the worse AND the better, were it not for colonialism. The inconvenient truth historians must accept is this: civilizations of all stripes, both good and evil from time immemorial have been built upon the backs of unfortunate people who suffered greatly in one way or other. This is something we needn't celebrate, nor model our own civilization upon, but need to accept just the same.

I'll give you a personal example of a very inconvenient truth regarding my own life. Had it not been for the events surrounding World War II, a time that witnessed some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known, and the subsequent Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe that was the direct result of that war, my father would not have left his home of Czechoslovakia, come to Chicago, and met my mother. In other words, I owe my very existence, and by extension my children's and God willing that of their children, to World War II.

Do I wake up every morning thanking my lucky stars for the suffering of tens of millions of people in the thirties and forties and advocate for a return of the conditions that led to that terrible time? Of course not. And while I am never unaware of this terrible truth, I do not dwell upon it because it would drive me insane.

Nonetheless it is still a very real fact.

My point is that we should avoid the telling of history simply to fit our own needs, ideologies and belief systems. There is an old adage that says those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But it is essential that we not just know history, but continually question our understanding of it, reject verifiable falsehoods no matter how appealing they may be, and understand the point of view in which that history was told or written. Finally, hard as it may seem, we must learn to appreciate that different tellings of the same history need not be mutually exclusive, but serve to paint a fuller picture of the past, how it relates to the present, and how we can use it to shape the future.

Like everything else in life, context is essential.

Annals of the Game...

In honor of the World Series which begins tonight in Houston, here is a piece I wrote five years ago for a baseball website that never got off the ground, but maybe someday. It was my overview of one of the teams that has to some minds stunningly made it into this year's Series, the Washington Nationals. Some things have not changed since the piece was written, the Nats still haven't won a World Series, in fact until this year they had never won a playoff series. And their first baseman, Ryan Zimmerman who made his MLB debut on September 1, 2005 with the Nationals and has played his entire career with the team, is still there, highly unusual in this day and age.

Some things have changed of course, the team that plays on the north side of Chicago, has indeed made it to the game's promised land since this was written, they did it in 2016.

Unfortunately I never got around to writing about the Houston Astros who had their own long streak of futility until they won their very first World Series in 2017.

Given all that, I'd have to say I'm rooting for the Nationals this year but the thing I'm rooting for the most is that they make it to a game seven, in my mind the greatest event in all of sports.

--

OVERVIEW - WASHINGTON NATIONALS: You may believe that it is impossible to condense every human experience imaginable into a brief moment of time, say about 6 hours and 23 minutes, but I know of 44,035 souls who would beg to differ. Those are the folks who braved less-than-ideal conditions in National's Park in Washington D.C. on the evening of October 4th, 2014 to watch a baseball game. That was game two of the National League Divisional Series between the Nationals and the San Francisco's Giants which ended in the 18th inning after Giant first baseman Brandon Belt put the Giants up for good in the top of the inning, hitting a solo home run off of Tanner Roark. The Nats came back the following game but lost the series in game four in San Francisco, marking the end of yet another frustrating year that began with so much promise.

Baseball fans in Chicago may think they've cornered the market on frustration and futility; 88 years elapsed between the White Sox last two World Series titles and as everybody knows, Chicago's other team hasn't been to baseball's promised land since 1908.

Granted, fans in our nation's capital haven't had to wait quite as long as Cubs fans, yet. Still, several generations of Washingtonians have entered and left this world since the last time a Washington team participated in, let alone won a World Series. There aren't too many around who can remember when Walter Johnson took the mound in 1924 in an unusual relief appearance in the eighth inning of game seven against the New York Giants with the score tied at three. "The Big Train" pitched four scoreless innings into the 12th when, with the benefit of two Giant errors and a miss-played ground ball, the city of Washington saw its first and only World Series championship. Calvin Coolidge, the President of the United States at the time, was also at the game:




That Senators team would make two other World Series appearances: the following year, 1925, and then in 1933. Aside from those three brilliant seasons, the team more often than not languished in the bottom half of the standings in the American League, inspiring the quip from Charles Dreyden which lingered through the two major league teams that would bear the name Washington Senators:

Washington, first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.

After the first Senators moved west to Minneapolis and became the Minnesota Twins in 1961, an expansion team began operation in Washington and carried on the name as well as the losing tradition. That team moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area and became the Texas Rangers in 1972. Washington D.C. would be without a major league baseball team for the next 33 years.

The club that would become today's Washington Nationals began life in 1969 as the Montreal Expos, the first major league baseball team to be located outside the United States. The Expos didn't have any more success on the field than either Senator club, making only one playoff appearance in their 36 years in Montreal, although they did make a serious run during the strike shortened 1994 season when the World Series was cancelled..

Despite being a city with a strong baseball tradition, (Jackie Robinson began his storied career in "organized baseball" there), Montreal is first and foremost a hockey town. The mediocre Expos who played in the "The Big O," the concrete mausoleum that was built for the 1976 Olympics, floundered. In 2001, Major League Baseball came to the conclusion that it would be best for its own good to contract, and that two teams, one from each league would fold. The Expos and coincidentally the first Washington Senators, the Twins, were the clubs scheduled to get the axe. As such they would have been the first teams int he Modern Era to have been eliminated from the. It took a court injunction in Minneapolis to force Major League Baseball into honoring its contract with the city and keep the American League franchise intact and in the Twin Cities. The National League Expos were kept alive only to keep parity between the leagues. That team became the property of MLB and would find itself in Washington in 2005.

Playing their first few seasons in the old football stadium due east of the Capitol Building named after the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the Nats would finish their first year in D.C. with a surprising 81-81 record. Unfortunately that would be their high water mark for six years. Late in that years marked the debut of their stalwart third baseman Ryan Zimmerman who had a splendid rookie year and quickly became one of the team leaders. But he was plagued with injuries in 2008 when the team lost 102 games. Fans thought things couldn't get any worse but the following year, the Nats lost 103 games. There was a silver lining to all that futility as the Nats were awarded the first pick in the first round of the amateur draft for two years in a row. They made good use of those picks. In 2009 the Nats selected pitcher Steven Strasburg. The following year they selected Bryce Harper, a catcher and outfielder.

Strasburg was one of the most touted pitching prospects as a collegiate athlete from San Diego State University under the tutelage of the great Tony Gwynn. Known for his blazing fastball and brilliant control, Strasburg's big league debut with the Nats was one of the most anticipated in history. In that game on June 10, 2010 against the Pirates, he fanned 11 batters, just one short of the MLB record for strikeouts pitched in a debut game. He walked no one.

Unfortunately all those 100 mph fastballs that Strasburg is capable of took their toll. Just one month after his big league debut, he found himself on the DL with an inflamed shoulder. He came back the following month but after pitching three games, he was diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament that would require "Tommy John surgery" and 12 to 18 months of rehabilitation. Strasburg came back to the bog leagues in August of 2011 and pitched brilliantly. But the doctors and coaches wisely made the decision to treat Strasburg with kidd gloves given his condition.

From Las Vegas, Harper, a five tool player, was a phenom at even an earlier age than Strasburg. He earned a GED while in his sophomore year in high school, making him eligible for the amateur draft. By 17 he was enrolled in college and already drafted by the Nationals. His big league debut came on April 28, 2012 at the tender age of 19 as he was called up to fill the spot vacated by the injured (again) Ryan Zimmerman. Harper got his first big league hit and RBI in that game. He finished the year with a .270 batting average, an on  base percentage of .340, 22 home runs, and 59 RBI and was awarded the National League Rookie of the Year Award.

That 2012 season was the year all systems were go for the Nationals. The pitching staff featured Strasburg, looking as strong as ever, Gio Gonzalez who was obtained in a trade with Oakland, and Nationals' veteran Jordan Zimmerman who was drafted by the team back in 2007.
Position players in addition to Harper and Ryan Zimmerman included infielders Adan LaRoche, Ian Desmond, Danny Espinoza, and outfielders Mike Morse and veteran Jayson Werth.

Injuries continue to plague the team yet they got off to a great start and never dipped below .500. The team broke a dubious streak on July 30 when they took over sole posetion of first place in their division, marking the first time that a Washington MLB team held such a place of honor since 1933. Another was broken on Sepember 20 when the Nationals clinched a spot in the playoffs, also the first time since 1933. They finished the season with the best record in baseball, 98-64.

With ten fewer wins, the St. Louis Cardinals, the winners of the National League Wild Card, faced the Nationals in the NLDS. Altough he wasn't injured and in fact playing very well, the Nats' manager Davey Johnson took the unprecedented step of announcing that his best pitcher, Steven Strasburg, would not be available to pitch in the 2012 post season. It was a prudent but very controversial decision. The teams split the first two games in St. Louis and did the same with the next two in Washington. The Nats were just three outs away from winning the series and a chance for the National League pennant with a 7-5 lead over the Cards in the top of the ninth in the deciding fifth game of the series. But St. Louis came storming back with four runs that inning and just like that, the end to another frustrating year of Washington baseball.

--

OK That was then, this is now, the Astros are the favorite to win the series but it's baseball and anything can happen. Go Nats!

Victim of their success?

One of my favorite baseball trivia questions is this:

Which Major League Baseball organization has played the most games as a professional major league team? 

Many people who know the game will automatically name the Chicago Cubs as they were one of only two extant teams to have been members of the very first professional baseball organization, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the predecessor of the National League. The reason the Cubs do not share that distinction with the other team is only because of a twist of fate, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Because their original ballpark, located at what is now the northwest corner of Millennium Park, was destroyed along with much of their city, the team was forced to sit out the next two seasons. That leaves the other team, then known as the Boston Red Stockings as the team who has played the most games in MLB history.

Ah but what team is that today? Well if you know your baseball, you know that the current Boston Red Sox are one of the charter members of the American League, which is several years the junior of the National League, so it can't be them. The original National League BoSox went through a bunch of nicknames as was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, settling on the name Braves in 1912. The Boston Braves, for whom Babe Ruth played his final games, re-located to Milwaukee in 1953, then to Atlanta in 1966, and there you have it.

But I digress. This is about the Cubs, the team who far and away holds the record for the MLB team who has played the most games in the same city. Today the Cubs played the last game of their season. To people like me who have followed the team for a long time, not as a fan necessarily, but merely an interested observer, it comes as no surprise that the Cubs ended the year in disappointing fashion. It may not have been a frustrating, tear your hair out disappointment as it was in 2018, 2017, 2015, 2008 and 2007, or a heart-rending disappointment like 1969 and 1984, or worst of all a gut-wrenching disappointment as it was in 2003, but the fact that the team didn't even make the playoffs this year was disappointing nonetheless.

Today marked the last game behind the bench for their colorful manager Joe Maddon, who in 2016 led the Cubs to their first World Series win in any living person's memory. And this year marked the end of a very long relationship with WGN TV, the local and later super-station who broadcast Cub games for 72 years. 

In case you're interested, the club is forming its own network which surprise surprise, fans will have to pay to watch. Of course in this day and age of the internet, people will certainly find ways to watch the games for free on their computers, so perhaps the change will not be as draconian as some might suggest.

Yet it is still a slap in the face for all the dedicated Cubs fans out there who either don't have cable TV, yes there are still those of us without it, or fans who simply can't afford paying yet another surcharge on top of their already expensive monthly cable bill. 

Clearly for the Ricketts family who owns the team, this is a prudent business move aimed at generating more revenue to invest in the team and one would assume, help put more money in their pockets. As we live in a capitalist society, we shouldn't have a problem with this as a baseball team like any other sports franchise, is not a charitable non-for-profit organization, not by a long shot. The owners don't owe the fans the luxury of giving their product away for free and we the fans shouldn't expect them to do so.

The funny thing is this was exactly the attitude of baseball owners in the early days of TV, back when all TV was free. Most of them understood that while there was some value in advertising their product by showing a limited number of games on TV, the owners were loathe to televise too many out of fear that people would stay home to watch for free rather than opening up their pocketbooks and coming out to the ballpark. In many cases, that's exactly what they did.

Only one owner bucked that trend, Phillip Knight Wrigley, former owner of the Cubs. A few years ago I wrote this piece, a bit of a tribute to old PK, whom I feel deserves much of the credit for the enormous success the Cubs franchise enjoys today.

My point in the piece  was that the current success of the Cubs was a result of largely three things. The first is Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs since 1916. While other team owners left their classic old ballparks, especially in the 1960s and 70s in favor of new, sterile multipurpose stadiums (which themselves have all but disappeared), only Wrigley and the Yawkey family in Boston bucked the trend and retained their beautiful old ballparks. And of the two, only Wrigley insisted, for a few reasons, that all the games in his ballpark should be played during the day. The latter, which many thought was foolish and backwards, ultimately worked to the team's favor because when they finally decided to put in lights in 1986, the whole nation tuned in to watch.

And the whole nation was able to tune in to watch because by that time, WGN who had been broadcasting virtually every Cubs game on TV thanks to Wrigley, had gone national, so folks all over the country could follow and fall in love with the lovable losing team, another one of Wrigley's legacies.

Of course most folks believed that Wrigley was really just a hack, he inherited the team from his father and really didn't make much of an effort to put a championship team on the field. Perhaps that's true. He clearly was more interested in providing a pleasant environment for an afternoon's entertainment for his customers, than he was in putting a decent team on the field. On that rare occasion when a PK Wrigley team, especially in the latter part of the owner's tenure actually was good, it was out of accident rather than design.

But as I pointed out in my piece, had Wrigley followed his peers back in the day, the Cubs may have had one or two more championships under their belts and thus today be just as lucrative as the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies or Pittsburgh Pirates, in other words, successful franchises for sure, but nothing compared to the Cubs.

Had Wrigley been more like his peers, he could very well have decided that Chicago was not big enough for two teams, pulled up stakes and moved south or west as the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Philadelphia Athletics, Washington Senators, St. Louis Browns (actually they moved east to Baltimore)  and the aforementioned Boston Braves all did. How does the Salt Lake City Cubs sound to you?

I think every Cub fan owes a debt of gratitude to old PK for being stubborn and not following the pack. So should the Ricketts family who bought the team while it was already a tremendously successful enterprise. All they had to do was sink a fortune into the team and manage to break a 108 year old curse of mediocrity. For that they should be congratulated.

As for the changes to the ballpark and even more staggering, to the surrounding neighborhood, all I'll say is that the jury is still out.

And as for leaving WGN well, as I said, I'm sure it's a prudent business decision, one that every reasonable owner in their position would probably make. Times change and there simply aren't any PK Wrigley types around anymore who can just do whatever they please since it's their team and they don't have to answer to scores of investors, not to mention 24/7 sports-talk blabber mouths.

Besides there's no arguing with success, or is there?

I do miss the days when you could on game day sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, turn on Channel 9 and know the Cubs would be on or better yet, just head out to the ballpark at Clark and Addison, buy a ticket for a few bucks, and sit practically anywhere you pleased.

It was sure fun while it lasted.

Thank God I'm a White Sox fan.

Lucky Luciano

My dad God rest his soul, was a remarkably predictable man. You could set your clock every June 21st, the official first day of summer, by him saying: "the days will now be getting shorter." Likewise at the other end of the year, on December 21st you could rest assured that he would pronounce the opposite. Three days later on the 24th, after the last present under the tree was unwrapped, (it was our family custom to follow the European tradition of celebrating on Christmas Eve rather than on Christmas Day), he would say: "oh well, another Christmas is over." Never mind that at least according to the church in which we supposedly belonged, the feast of Christmas doesn't even begin until midnight on the 25th.

My father was a contrarian through and through. It was part of his charm as well as one of his most annoying traits. In the seventies, when everyone, and I mean everyone wore polyester flare legged pants with matching shirts and accessories, my father steadfastly stuck to wearing his old, threadbare cotton shirts and straight legged pants. It's funny because when you look at photographs from the time, my father looks remarkably stylish by today's standards while the rest of us in our flashy petroleum product  based shirts, platform shoes and ridiculous bell-bottoms look well, silly to put it kindly. You're probably ahead of me by now and can predict that the minute seventies' fashions went away, and thankfully for the most part never really came back, my dad gave up his straight legged pants for you guessed it. He dug out of the closet all those seventies threads he got as presents during that dreadful fashion era, but never wore when they were acceptable. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that my father was probably the last man on earth to wear a leisure suit.

One bit of contrarianism he practically took to his grave was his disdain for the famous opera star Luciano Pavarotti. whom as fate would have it, as I write these words, has just appeared on my Pandora radio station. Give me a minute to recover from that sudden shock of serendipity.

OK I'm better.

My love affair with opera, which I shared with my mother and to a lesser extent my father, began during my first year of college. The first opera I willfully attended was Puccini's Tosca with Pavarotti singing for the first time ever on stage, the role of Mario Cavaradossi. While he was in town, the tenor visited the record section of the old Marshall Field store on State Street to sign albums. If you didn't know that Marshall Fields at one time sold records, I can assure you this was a very long time ago, and if you don't know what a record album or for that matter what Marshall Fields is, ask your grandmother.

Anyway, I stood in line for about an hour while the Great Pavarotti was greeting his adoring fans and signing their purchases. For my part I selected a recording featuring a selection of famous arias, the first of many albums featuring opera that I would collect over the years. I'm not exaggerating to say that by the time I got to the table where the man of the hour was holding court, I must have been at least the two hundredth person he met, and there were probably the same number of folks behind me. As Pavarotti signed my album, he greeted me as if I were his best friend. I thanked him and with a huge smile on his face, looking me straight in the eye he said with gusto in his strong Modena accent,: "Eeeeseh my PLAYzhure."

Needless to say, from that moment on I was a huge fan of the huge man.

Now as anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm rather obsessive by nature and that album and those that followed got serious playtime at full volume around the house, (I still lived with my parents at the time). My mom was happy to indulge me as she took full credit for my new and to her, acceptable passion because as she liked to tell people, she used to play opera all the time when I was a small child.

On the other hand, while he didn't explicitly say anything, I can imagine all our fawning over Luciano Pavarotti must have gotten on my father's nerves. Very soon he took every chance he got to say that he liked this or that opera singer better than Pavarotti. In fact, his passion for dissing Pavarotti in this fashion, long outlived my passion for "Il Primo Tenore." More than twenty years after I bought my last Pavarotti album, any singer with classical aspirations whose voice would show up whenever my parents and I were together would like clockwork illicit these words from my old man:  "I like him (or her) better than Pavarotti."

I was reminded of this the other day when I read the following question posted to the Quora website:

Don't liberals realize that whenever they criticize the president it only make us in his base support him more?

At first I thought, with all the significant issues out there to cause one to support or not support a politician, how lame is it to base one's support as so many people do, for no other reason than to contradict the opinion of someone else?

Then it dawned on me, the constant drone of complaints against this president, no matter how valid, must sound to the base what playing Luciano Pavarotti four or five hours a day at close to full volume on our home stereo system must have sounded like to my father.

For exactly this reason, many folks who strongly oppose this president,  wisely refuse to publicly comment on him, out of angst over inciting the base.

And yet, this past week having exhibited particularly outrageous and unstable behavior...

DAMN there I go again, I just incited at least three more people who were on the brink of coming around, I simply have to be more careful. OK let me get my bearings...  OM...... deep breath..... 1, 2, 3, another deep breath,,, let it out...whew....good.

OK I have a great idea, it came to me in a dream the other night, here goes:

Each and every American you see, we're all in this really big house together and one group of people, for the sake of argument, let's call them the damn dirty snowflakes, REALLY loves opera, especially Luciano Pavarotti. The love him so much that they play his music at full volume in the house for hours on end. Then there is the other group, let's call them the Base. To them opera is OK in doses but let's get real, at least throw in some Merle every once in a while.

Well the two groups get to fighting over the record player and who should show up from the great beyond, but none other than the Okie from Muskogee himself, Merle Haggard. He tells them that up there in heaven he met this Pavarotti guy, and he's really full of himself, nothing but a big fat commie libtard. "You guys are right to fight those damn snowflakes down here every chance you get, putting them in their place by telling them that Johnny, Conway, Waylon, Hank and me are all better than that stupid Pavarotti."

"Yeah that'll really piss 'em off" cries the base. So whipped into a frenzy were they by their idols Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Janine Pirro, who mercilessly bash the singer left and right, they all got their panties into a bunch over Pavarotti. In fact that's all they could ever talk or think about anymore.

Once they all got to the point of carrying lit tiki torches in the night to protest all things Pavarotti, Merle Haggard shows up again. He tells them they're doing a great job and by the way, he's got a message from the Man upstairs. "He told me to tell you guys down here that Trump's an asshole, forget about him."

Which they do.

Problem solved. 

Thanks Merle.

Thanks Pop.

Mayor Pete

A most remarkable exchange took place a while ago on Fox News. The network which appears to be starting to be take the "news" part of its name seriously, has held a series of "town hall" meetings with some Democratic presidential candidates, at least those who agree to appear on the network. Most notably, Elizabeth Warren has taken a pass on their invitation, calling the network a "hate for profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists"

In one such broadcast, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg took questions from Fox anchor Chris Wallace and some audience members. The part of the broadcast that got the most attention was this exchange between Wallace and Buttigieg on the subject of abortion, especially those that take place during the final trimester of a pregnancy, late term abortions as they have come to be called.

Buttigieg has proven himself to be far and away the most thoughtful and articulate of all the Democratic candidates. His calling out at the first presidential debate of the hypocrisy of Republicans who support the current administration's policy of separation of refugee families at the US/Mexico border, AND still call themselves Christians, has become the stuff of legend.

But here during the Fox broadcast, he raised the bar even higher when he addressed the most contentious, controversial issue of our time, taking the simplistic rhetoric of the president's pandering to the religious right, and turning it on its head.

It didn't start out well. As you can see in the clip, after fielding a question from an audience member and giving a lukewarm response about his support for a woman's right to choose, a position the left has been weary of, Wallace pointedly asked the candidate what is his stance on "late term abortions." Buttigieg muttered something about hypothetical questions which Wallace rightfully called him on. He indicated this is not a hypothetical question, there are 6,000 of these procedures that take place every year in this country. Then, pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Mayor Pete laid it on the line:

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it is that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition, you have been expecting to carry it to term, we are talking about women who perhaps have chosen a name, women who have purchased a crib, families that get most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about health or the life mother that forces them to make an impossible choice...

...that (terrible) choice is not going to be made any better medically or morally if the government is dictating how the decision should be made.

I've written in this space before about how I never felt comfortable with the absolutist ideologies of either the Pro-Life or Pro-Choice movements and struggled for years on how to come to terms with the issue of abortion. It's very clear from that dialog that Pete Buttigieg has struggled with the issue as well. Admittedly my conclusion is not a perfect one and neither is his, which from getting to know him for the past few months, I think he'd be the first to admit. I believe this because also at that first debate, when asked about the difficulties he is having in his city, specifically those relating to the relationship between the mostly white police department and the city's African American community, he responded by saying these problems still exist "because I didn't get the job done."

Imagine, a politician who takes responsibility when things go wrong.

What an idea.

If the primary were held today, I'd vote for Pete Buttigieg in a heartbeat.

Lipstick on a Pig

Housebound again for a week, looking after my ailing mother in the hospital and her dog while camped out at her apartment, I found myself alone with cable TV and a remote at my disposal. The timing was fortuitous as my hiatus from real life coincided with the Robert Mueller hearings last month on Capitol Hill. Being alone meant I could flip between channels to see what the folks on the alternate reality network of FOX NEWS had to say about the hearings, something that neither my wife nor mother can stomach.

Long before his testimony, Mueller made it clear that the entirety of his appearance before two congressional committees would revolve around his report on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Everything else would be off limits. So his answers to questions that went beyond the scope of his intended testimony, as could be expected were , "I can't comment on that." This didn't make for compelling TV as many had hoped, but the former FBI Chief did confirm some rather damning findings of his report that implicated the President of the United States and his staff in having had if not exactly illegal, certainly unsettling, questionable, and unethical dealings with representatives of a hostile foreign government, by soliciting their help in securing his victory in the election. And the findings of the Mueller Report strongly suggested that the president in his firing of FBI director James Comey and other actions, indeed obstructed justice. Over and over again Mueller insisted that it wasn't his or his team's prerogative to indict the president, yet he also made it crystal clear that the report's findings IN NO WAY exonerated the president. What I just said is not personal opinion nor conjecture on my part, it comes from actually listening to Mueller's testimony.

To be fair, not all of Fox's reporting on the hearings missed the obvious in Mueller's testimony. But the usual suspects, the reliable go-to guys who will go to the ends of the earth to cover for all of Donald Trump's shortcomings, kept up the narrative that Attorney General William Barr set in motion last April when in his official summary of the Mueller Report, he insisted that there was nothing in the report to implicate the president in any wrongdoing. Despite comments to the contrary from Mueller himself, Barr who fought to keep the report from going public, insisted there was nothing to see there, and instructed us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The official Trump Fox mouthpieces, the hosts of Fox and Friends, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Tucker Carlson to name a few, kept up the charade. A huffing and puffing, Dobbs couldn't have been more indignant when he spoke of how the evil Democrat (sic) Party will stop at nothing to destroy this very special president. And Carlson flashed his patented  incredulous reaction takes over and over again after showing highly selected clips of Mueller stumbling through his testimony, looking like anything but a credible witness. To be sure, Mueller didn't bring his A game to the hearings. It was clear long before the hearings became a reality that Mueller felt the whole exercise was unnecessary as his scruples wouldn't allow him to reveal any information that was not already disclosed in the report. He appeared as if he relished being in the hot seat in front of the two committees about as much as being in a dentist's chair perched upon the precipice of a cliff 500 feet above the fires of Gehenna. The Republicans on the committees, ever loyal to the president, tried ad nauseam to make the case that it was Mueller and his investigation, not the president and his administration that was suspect of malfeasance. In doing so they shamefully did everything in their power to attack the credibility of Mueller, a war hero who served this nation honorably in a career that has spanned over half a century.

Naturally Carlson and his like-minded Fox colleagues followed suit, and kept showing the rhetorical flourishes of the Republicans and Mueller's hesitating responses to them, as well as montages of his refusal to answer questions out of the scope of the hearings (making him appear like he was trying to hide something), to prove their point. Naturally they showed none of the questions of the Democrats who tried to get at the real point of the investigation, and Mueller's pointed responses that unequivocally suggested the president is guilty of wrongdoing.

It hardly surprised me their coverage did not seem to jibe with what I had actually seen during the live testimony, I've been through this before and Fox, especially the above mentioned celebrities, (it would be an extreme stretch to refer to them as journalists), have a reputation to uphold of not letting facts get in the way of their agenda. But I have to give them credit, they are certainly good at what they do. I can understand how folks who choose to only watch these alternate news guys truly believe that their opinions supporting this administration are justified.

But something seemed hauntingly familiar with watching their coverage of the hearings.

Then it dawned on me. If you've seen the movie The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of a Steven King horror story, you know that it is one of the most chilling, over-the-top, terrifying works of art ever to be recorded on celluloid. If you haven't seen it, this little clip should give you an idea.

Several years ago, some brilliant YouTubers put together an "alternate trailer" for The Shining. As you can see in the following, through the magic of editing, they made the film look like...

Well here,  you can judge for yourself:





So the lesson to be learned here is that by ignoring the stuff you don't want to hear, (the M.O of the lion's share of the current president's supporters), and a judicious helping of Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, anything, heck even the Trump administration, can appear tolerable.

My, the alternate world is such a lovely place.

Have We Learned Our Lesson Yet?

 So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly......

....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....

...it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!"

Donald J. Trump

There in one fell swoop, or more accurately, in three fell tweets, the president threw down the gauntlet, tossed away the dog whistle, and made a clarion call out to his constituents, the 60 million or so Americans who voted for and continue to support him. While it was only in my imagination, I could hear the response of many of them clear as a bell: "right on Mr. President, you tell those bitches to either love this country and tow the line or get the hell out!"

There are many Trump supporters who are deeply hurt by the accusation that everyone who supports this president is a racist. They respond just like their man who tweeted the other day: "I don't have a racist bone in my body."

Whatever.

In my book, if it quacks like a duck, if it waddles like a duck, if it craps like a duck, it must be a duck.

Despite denials from both the man himself and his legion of sycophantic, anatine followers, President Donald Duck Trump in those tweets from last Sunday showed his true colors. Heck some, not a lot, but some Republicans in Congress even had to admit, those were outright racist comments.

In case you've been asleep this week the targets of his latest tantrum are four freshmen members of Congress, all women of color, all with ethnic heritages that have been dissed by the president, and all very much at odds with him. Obviously they're also all American citizens because you don't get to serve in Congress if you're not. With the exception of Representative Ilhan Omar whom the president would like to send back to her native Somalia, it is unclear where the president would like to send the other three representatives. Rashida Tlahib was born in Detroit, U.S.A., Alexandria Ocasio Cortez comes from the same place as Trump, New York City, U.S.A. and Ayanna Pressley originally hails from right here in Chicago, U.S.A. As a person of African American descent, one can assume that her ancestors were in this country, albeit many of them against their will, far longer than the president’s. And it turns out that Ilhan Omar has been in this country longer than the First Lady.

When confronted about the tweets the following day, the president doubled down saying that people who hate America as the four duly elected officials apparently do according to him, are perfectly free to leave.

I haven't heard the slogan "America, love it or leave it" in a long time. It was popular back when I was a child during the years of the Vietnam War, directed at folks who were opposed to the war and the men who did whatever they could to avoid serving in it. Ironically the most celebrated Vietnam War draft dodger we have in this country right now is none other than Donald Trump.

Of course this country has a long, proud history of people fighting for what they believe is right, even if it runs counter to the official policy of the government. In this piece I refused to criticize Trump for his actions during the war because given my feelings both at the time and now about that war, I might have done the same. I did however say that if you chose to avoid service, you’d be wise to keep a low profile when it comes to commenting on other people’s service. The funny thing about Trump is that his supporters are so enthralled with him they believe HE is the true patriot while someone like one of Trump's harshest critics, the late senator John McCain who served with distinction in Vietnam and was a POW for many years, was a traitor.

That is why I have by and large given up on trying to discuss the president with his supporters because verifiable facts, logic and common sense play no role in their thought process, at least regarding this subject. In other words they are going to believe whatever they want to believe, such as more people showed up to Trump's inauguration than any other, Barack Obama put little children in cages on the US/Mexico border, Climate Change is a hoax, John McCain was a traitor, Robert Mueller is a Democrat, Donald Trump is not a racist, and the sky was yellow and the sun was blue, if they also happen to be Grateful Dead fans.

As far as I'm concerned, it's still a free country and by golly people have the right to believe whatever they want, even if it is nonsense. It says so right in the First Amendment. And in a democracy, the people have the right to vote for whomever they choose, from members of the local school council to president. That is their prerogative.

We on the other side can point our fingers until they fall off at Trump supporters, Fox News, the DNC giving Bernie Sanders a raw deal back in 2016, the lack of credible choices of candidates on election day, Russian interference in the election, the Electoral College, or a whole number of other issues. But the truth is this: Donald Trump is president today for one and only one reason, not enough people voted for Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016.

Granted, Clinton was not a universally popular candidate. She and her husband, the former president have a lot of baggage between them. Because of that she was never able to shake off the constant barrage of bogus attacks from Republicans, some of which stuck even with Democratic voters. The final nail in the coffin of her candidacy was FBI director James Comey's eleventh hour announcement that he was re-opening the case concerning her use of an unapproved email server to do government business. Comey immediately backtracked saying there really wasn't much proof of malfeasance after all, but the damage was done. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands Americans who would never in a million years have voted for Donald Trump, decided they couldn't in right conscience vote for Hillary Clinton either. So rather than choosing "the lesser of two evils", they either sat out the election or voted for a third party candidate.

Trump supporters on the other hand, didn't have the same ethical compunctions about their man. I don't believe there has ever been a presidential candidate with more of a documented history than the current president. He had been a public figure for at least forty years before he ran for president. From dozens of allegations of criminal sexual assault, to his associations with organized crime, to his multiple business failures and bankruptcies, to his stiffing of contractors, to his role in perpetuating the birther myth, you name it, Donald Trump's life is an open book, and not a pretty one. His campaign suffered an eleventh hour blow as well when the infamous tape of his bragging about molesting women surfaced. Even that wasn't able to sway his supporters, especially women and Evangelical Christians who simply averted their eyes from his endless moral lapses. "We knew who he was..." they continue to say to this day, "...we just wanted someone who would clean the swamp." Whatever cleaning the swamp means, today those people are perfectly happy with the job Trump has been doing, which this week now includes making openly racist remarks which have in turn been mimicked by many of his supporters. No one should be the least surprised by this, he based much of his campaign on white Americans' fear of the other, whether they be immigrants or long standing citizens who happen to not be white.

We on the other side hope for a miracle, a deus ex machina that will come down and sweep away this president and his administration. Every time I'm at my mom's place and turn on Rachel Maddow (her favorite talking head), she presents some kind of horrible revelation that makes me think:  "OK, now they're really gonna get him." However we are delusional if we think that one day soon, some bombshell of damning evidence will come out that will once and for all destroy this presidency. It won't matter (as many have already alluded) if Trump was one of Jeffrey Epstein's clients in the nineties and had sex with young teenagers, or if Robert Muller rides into Congress next week on a white steed and proclaims that yes Trump is guilty of collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice, or even if it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the president did indeed shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Forget about it, even if those things are revealed, it won't matter in the slightest. Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the lion’s share of Republicans in Congress will all find a way to spin any allegations against Trump, and as sure as it rains in Indianapolis in the summertime, you'll be hearing your Trump supporting friends parroting their words the next morning on Facebook.

As I see it, there are only two ways that Trump won't be re-elected a year from November. One is that we slip into a deep recession and self-interest will shake at least some of the less devoted members of his base.  Hopefully that won't happen. Much less painful and far more pragmatic would be if those of us who do not like this president make a concerted effort to get out and vote for the Democratic candidate, whomever that should be. Like it or not folks, that's the way it works. It may make us feel morally justified to not cast a vote for a candidate we don't feel meets all our expectations, but in the end, that only enables the victory of a potentially far worse candidate. I know this very well because in November of 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader, and I am perfectly willing to admit today, that was a dreadful mistake.

At this writing there are 25 candidates running to represent the Democratic Party in the 2020 presidential election. Some of them I admire, many of them I am indifferent to, and a handful I cannot stand. What they have in common is that all of them have at least one issue, position, act committed in their past, or character flaw that will prevent scores of people from voting for them. On the other hand, in the upcoming election, there is one issue that stands above all others worth considering, Donald Trump.

So here’s the deal: the person taking the oath of office on January 20, 2022 will either be Donald Trump. (assuming he will be his party’s nominee), or one of the 25 Democratic candidates vying for the top spot on the ticket. Therefore any non-vote, or vote for anyone other than the Democratic nominee, will help enable the re-election of Donald Trump. 

In other words, if you cannot in good conscience vote for Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders because one is too conservative, the other too liberal, and both are too old, how will your conscience handle your enabling the continuation of the humanitarian crisis taking place right now at the US/Mexico border? If you cannot in good conscience support Kamala Harris because you favor strict gun control and she is the proud holder of a conceal-carry permit, how will your conscience deal with enabling four more years of the current president appointing judges who will do everything in their power to do away with every resonable gun restriction? If your conscience won't allow you to support Amy Klobouchar for her regretful treatment of her staff, how will it deal with enabling a president who has openly bragged about committing unspeakable acts against women? If your conscience won't permit you supporting Pete Buttigieg because he hasn’t been able to resolve his city’s conflict between the police and the African American Community, or Elizabeth Warren because of her exaggeration of Native American ancestry to get a job at Harvard, how will it handle enabling four more years of this president's making racism fashionable again? 

You get the idea, none of these candidates are perfect, candidates never are. True, the Democratic Party  has work to do in order to convince the public that this time, the selection process of their standard bearer is on the up and up. I don't see a problem as many have suggested, with the candidates waging trench warfare against each other in their campaign for nomination, after all as they say, the strongest steel is forged out of the hottest fire. If the last election is any indication, the next one is going to be a no-holds-barred winner-take-all street fight and the standard bearer and his or her running mate are going to have to be warriors able to withstand tremendous punishment. After the convention however, the Democrats will need to make sure that everyone, from the most conservative to the most liberal member of the party is on the same page as far as supporting their ticket.

But the party can only do so much, the rest is up to us, the voting public. Politics is about coalition and compromise, not my way or the highway. If we pack up our toys and go home because we don't get the candidate of our dreams as so many Democrats did in 2016, we can expect another four years of Donald Trump, pure and simple.

The election is in our hands. Let's not blow it this time.