Saddam's very own party
Nick Cohen
Monday 7th June 2004
D-Day for British politics - Respect, the alliance between the Muslim Association of Britain and the Socialist Workers Party, shows how ugly the far left in Britain has become, writes Nick Cohen
Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? Maybe, I replied. It was depressing that a totalitarian party was in the saddle, but that's where the SWP always tries to get. Why get excited?
Oh there are lots of reasons, said the BBC hacks. The anti-war movement wasn't a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba'athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn't this a story?
It's a great story, I cried. But why don't you broadcast it?
We can't, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won't let us.
Radio silence was imposed on the sinister and in many ways right-wing behaviour of the far left and has continued into the campaign for this month's elections. With the exception of the New Statesman and Tribune - and the Harry's Place website at hurryupharry.bloghouse.net - no one has found it worth noting that, for the first time since the Enlightenment, a section of the left is allied with religious fanaticism and, for the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact, a section of the left has gone soft on fascism.
At first glance, Respect - the Unity Coalition (the name under which the Muslim Association of Britain and the SWP have united) offers the best chance the far left has ever had of winning a European seat. One million people demonstrated in London against the war last year - two, if you believe the march organisers.
Not much has changed since then. Read the liberal press and you will find that the rage of middle-class liberals and British Islam burns as brightly as it did in February 2003. As I have argued before on these pages, that rage is morally ambiguous. Disgust at the Bush administration has pushed liberal opinion around the world into the shameful position that it would not back the opponents of Saddam Hussein. The result of the breakdown in international solidarity is that an Iraqi or Kurdish socialist is more likely to get a fair hearing from the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times; the Daily Telegraph than the Independent.
You might predict that Respect would benefit from representing in extreme form what patriotic Tories, Liberal Democrats and a large chunk of Labour supporters believe. It is foolish to pre-dict election results in the week before polling day, but if the opinion polls are a guide, Respect has blown its big chance. George Galloway may just scrape a place in the European Parliament if turnout is very low. But I wouldn't count even on that.
The beneficiary of the great left-wing revolt against Blair has turned out to be the right. The Tories are doing better than they have done for a decade. Voters disillusioned with established politicians are turning to the United Kingdom Independence Party rather than to the left. The reactionary shift should not be a surprise. The only unanswerable anti-war argument was the generally conservative, Little England case that it is no longer in Britain's interests to tag along behind the United States. Meanwhile, the betrayal of comrades - exemplified by the unwillingness to choose whom to support in the struggle between Ba'athists and Islamists on one side and what democratic forces there are in Iraq on the other - fits more easily with conventional right-wing foreign policy than the internationalist concerns of the left.
Then there is the nature of the Respect alliance. It's all very well to say, as I did above, that the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition reflects in extreme form what millions think. But quantitative change can become qualitative, and the far left has reduced anti-war protest to absurdity, not to say ignominy.
For a start you would have thought that a principled anti-war movement would have done everything it could to distance itself from Saddam. A first and essential step would have been a decision to have nothing to do with Galloway. He had flown to Baghdad and greeted a tyrant who modelled himself on Stalin, while emulating the racial extermination campaigns of Hitler, with "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability". Yet there he was on stage as the star speaker at last year's anti-war rally in Hyde Park, and no one in the crowd booed or threw an egg. Since then, this modern Mitford sister has published his autobiography, I'm Not the Only One (unfortunately he's right on that), which is packed with apologetics for Saddam's slaughters of Kurds, Shias, democrats and socialists.
Even this performance has not embarrassed his backers. Galloway has become Respect's unique selling point. His pinched face adorns its propaganda, and the uninitiated might believe that Respect is simply the George Galloway Party.
The price you pay when you ally yourself with religious fundamentalists is a downgrading of the aspirations of women and gays. The Muslim Association of Britain, the British branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that Galloway was a man it could do business with when he told the Independent that "abortion is morally and ethically wrong". These comments, the association said, as well as Galloway's "statements on faith and God in the same interview, will surely be welcomed by British Muslims who see Respect as a real alternative to the main political parties".
As for gays, well, they are being told that they must know their place. A few weeks ago, there was a nasty incident when members of Peter Tatchell's OutRage! group joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Their placards read: "Israel: stop persecuting Palestine. Palestine: stop persecuting queers". The slogans had been inspired by the arrest and torture of Palestinian gays by Hamas and Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. When the demonstration went into Trafalgar Square, the gay protesters were surrounded by an angry crowd of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican priests and members of the SWP, and were variously denounced as "racists", "liars" and "Zionists". Say that Palestinians should be freed from theocratic tyranny as well as Israeli occupation and you're an American, or, worse, a Jew.
The feminists used to say that rape isn't about sex: it's about power. And, mutatis mutandis, the same applies to the SWP. You join them in a coalition because you think you share a belief in a common cause. But it is never about opposition to war or the British National Party. It is always about the party's power. The leaders of the anti-war movement have calculated that power will come from tying themselves to the Islamist resurgence.
An optimistic sign amid the gloom is that increasingly, people on the left are realising the moral and intellectual barrenness of the strategy, and are walking away. Globalise Resistance, a hard-core anti-capitalist group, has had its independent members resign in protest at SWP domination. There is a long-running scandal on the Birmingham left about the treatment of Steve Godward, a working-class socialist who was sacked by his managers for his part in the firefighters' strike, and then hounded by the SWP because he would not parrot the party line. Most significant of all has been the decision of the Green Party to reject all invitations to form an electoral pact with Respect on the grounds that it did not want to throw away years of building an "open, democratic" organisation to ally with people who weren't too keen on openness or democracy.
The Greens and the Liberal Democrats look as if they will take most of the anti-war vote. But there is a tender part of my heart that hopes that they don't, and that Respect scores a sensational breakthrough on Thursday. For if it fails to capitalise on its huge advantages, the only course for the left will be to take a long, hard look at itself in the mirror and confront what it has become. And you would not wish that hideous punishment on anyone.
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
Friday, June 04, 2004
Twenty Years Burning Down the Road.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Born in the USA, the album that finally brought Bruce Springsteen to the mass audience he had been deserving since the beginning of his career.
It’s interesting the think about how following Springsteen, and by extension, music in general has changed since 1984. That year I had been a Springsteen devotee for around 6 years, having come to the party late with Darkness on the Edge of Town being the album that turned me into a true believer. Between Darkness and BITUSA there had been two other albums: The River, the double album tour-de-force, and Nebraska, the album that saw Springsteen sketching out characterizations of outsiders in stark, acoustic outlines.
In between albums, in those pre-internet days you searched for what crumbs of information you could find. You had to rely on print publications for news. The occasional article in the New York Times could provide nuggets, as could then new national paper USA Today.
Goldmine, Rolling Stone, Bomp. New York Rocker, Crawdaddy, Creem: these were the magazines you turned to for the best information. Answering classified ads in those magazines brought amateurishly copied lists of bootlegs in the mail from which you ordered live albums, hoping that you had chosen the right dealer and that the LPs that arrived on your doorstep wouldn’t be warped and that the vinyl wouldn’t have so much surface noise as to be distracting.
There were the occasional Bruce contributions to other people’s albums between the work he did himself. Southside Johnny’s Hearts of Stone, the No Nukes film and album, Dedication by Gary U.S. Bonds. These were albums that had Bruce content that served to keep the spark alive.
I remember Cathy Collette calling me one day at the Record Bar at Four Seasons Mall in the spring of 1984 to let me know that the new Bruce single was going to be played. That record was Dancing in the Dark, and it sounded poppier, less aggressive than much of his work. It was a sign that he was going after it all with the new album. And while he didn’t get a number one single out of Born in the USA (Dancing being kept out of the top slot by Prince’s When Doves Cry), it became the first album to ever have seven top ten hits come from it. That’s still an amazing feat.
Information on the tour opening night was provided by some friends who had made the trek to St. Paul, and by the aforementioned NY Times and USA Today. Then it was waiting for every couple of weeks to bring a new issue of Rolling Stone, to hope for a big story in a monthly or a feature in a newsweekly. And every quarter to get a new issue of Backstreets for the big blocks of information. There were no boots quickly available, and it was several months before North Carolina got its own Bruce shows, with two in Charlotte and two in Greensboro in January of 1985.
How different things have been since the E Street Band reformed. You could look on the internet every night and get set lists of shows while the shows were in progress. Within a couple of days copies of each show were generally available. And thanks to the generosity of traders and to the easy access of digital technology, the shows of the last couple of tours have been readily available on CDR for free. All of this might not have been available without the audience Springsteen gained from Born in the USA, providing him with the financial ability to have clout with the record company so he could follow his muse and continue to make important works of art that inform the lives of the people who follow him. This year Springsteen will be 55, and age dictates the tours won’t go on too many more times. For the 20 years since Born in the USA debuted, it hasn’e been a dark ride, and it’s impossible for me to imagine my life without the album or Springsteen’s music as the soundtrack.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Born in the USA, the album that finally brought Bruce Springsteen to the mass audience he had been deserving since the beginning of his career.
It’s interesting the think about how following Springsteen, and by extension, music in general has changed since 1984. That year I had been a Springsteen devotee for around 6 years, having come to the party late with Darkness on the Edge of Town being the album that turned me into a true believer. Between Darkness and BITUSA there had been two other albums: The River, the double album tour-de-force, and Nebraska, the album that saw Springsteen sketching out characterizations of outsiders in stark, acoustic outlines.
In between albums, in those pre-internet days you searched for what crumbs of information you could find. You had to rely on print publications for news. The occasional article in the New York Times could provide nuggets, as could then new national paper USA Today.
Goldmine, Rolling Stone, Bomp. New York Rocker, Crawdaddy, Creem: these were the magazines you turned to for the best information. Answering classified ads in those magazines brought amateurishly copied lists of bootlegs in the mail from which you ordered live albums, hoping that you had chosen the right dealer and that the LPs that arrived on your doorstep wouldn’t be warped and that the vinyl wouldn’t have so much surface noise as to be distracting.
There were the occasional Bruce contributions to other people’s albums between the work he did himself. Southside Johnny’s Hearts of Stone, the No Nukes film and album, Dedication by Gary U.S. Bonds. These were albums that had Bruce content that served to keep the spark alive.
I remember Cathy Collette calling me one day at the Record Bar at Four Seasons Mall in the spring of 1984 to let me know that the new Bruce single was going to be played. That record was Dancing in the Dark, and it sounded poppier, less aggressive than much of his work. It was a sign that he was going after it all with the new album. And while he didn’t get a number one single out of Born in the USA (Dancing being kept out of the top slot by Prince’s When Doves Cry), it became the first album to ever have seven top ten hits come from it. That’s still an amazing feat.
Information on the tour opening night was provided by some friends who had made the trek to St. Paul, and by the aforementioned NY Times and USA Today. Then it was waiting for every couple of weeks to bring a new issue of Rolling Stone, to hope for a big story in a monthly or a feature in a newsweekly. And every quarter to get a new issue of Backstreets for the big blocks of information. There were no boots quickly available, and it was several months before North Carolina got its own Bruce shows, with two in Charlotte and two in Greensboro in January of 1985.
How different things have been since the E Street Band reformed. You could look on the internet every night and get set lists of shows while the shows were in progress. Within a couple of days copies of each show were generally available. And thanks to the generosity of traders and to the easy access of digital technology, the shows of the last couple of tours have been readily available on CDR for free. All of this might not have been available without the audience Springsteen gained from Born in the USA, providing him with the financial ability to have clout with the record company so he could follow his muse and continue to make important works of art that inform the lives of the people who follow him. This year Springsteen will be 55, and age dictates the tours won’t go on too many more times. For the 20 years since Born in the USA debuted, it hasn’e been a dark ride, and it’s impossible for me to imagine my life without the album or Springsteen’s music as the soundtrack.
Thursday, June 03, 2004
From the good folks at Backstreets.com:
FIRESTARTER
20 years of Born in the USA
One score years ago, Bruce Springsteen brought forth on this continent a little record called Born in the U.S.A. (And we do mean record, not CD.) Yes, this week -- specifically Friday, June 4 -- marks 20 years since Springsteen's radio-ready follow-up to Nebraska, since the bandwagon started rolling, since the buttshot heard 'round the world captivated an icon-hungry planet.
By the end of June 1984 the album would reach number one, Arthur Baker would remix "Dancing in the Dark," and the soon-to-be-massive Born in the U.S.A. tour would debut in the heartland. And now: the "new kids" in the E Street Band are 20-year vets (gold watches go to Nils Lofgren, joined 5/15/84, and Patti Scialfa, joined 6/25/84), and all of us are a full generation burnin' down the road. Feeling old yet? But after the album's seven Top Ten singles and over 24 million copies sold worldwide, Springsteen continues to imbue songs like the title track with new life, from acoustic blues to stadium-rattling blowout. Little ol' Courteney Cox has done pretty well for herself too. Long may you run, BUSA, long may you run.
- June 2, 2004
FIRESTARTER
20 years of Born in the USA
One score years ago, Bruce Springsteen brought forth on this continent a little record called Born in the U.S.A. (And we do mean record, not CD.) Yes, this week -- specifically Friday, June 4 -- marks 20 years since Springsteen's radio-ready follow-up to Nebraska, since the bandwagon started rolling, since the buttshot heard 'round the world captivated an icon-hungry planet.
By the end of June 1984 the album would reach number one, Arthur Baker would remix "Dancing in the Dark," and the soon-to-be-massive Born in the U.S.A. tour would debut in the heartland. And now: the "new kids" in the E Street Band are 20-year vets (gold watches go to Nils Lofgren, joined 5/15/84, and Patti Scialfa, joined 6/25/84), and all of us are a full generation burnin' down the road. Feeling old yet? But after the album's seven Top Ten singles and over 24 million copies sold worldwide, Springsteen continues to imbue songs like the title track with new life, from acoustic blues to stadium-rattling blowout. Little ol' Courteney Cox has done pretty well for herself too. Long may you run, BUSA, long may you run.
- June 2, 2004
From the washingtonpost.com, another great column by Thomas Boswell:
NHL On Path For Major Collapse
By Thomas Boswell
The NHL is not just in danger of a long labor lockout or a lost season. Professional hockey, though it seems oblivious to its mortal risk, may be on the brink of losing its place as a major team sport.
Last week, after a 2 1/2-hour meeting with the head of the NHL Players Association, Commissioner Gary Bettman was asked if the NHL would open training camp for next season without a new labor agreement. "We cannot live under the collective bargaining agreement for any longer than its term," Bettman said.
That's not an announcement of a lockout by NHL owners for next season. But it's about as close as you can get.
"While there was candid discussion, it would be misleading to suggest that there was any progress made or to characterize our discussions as productive," said Ted Saskin, the union's senior director. No more talks are scheduled.
At about the same time, washingtonpost.com, the Post's Web site, ran an online poll asking which teams would be in the Stanley Cup finals. The largest response -- 42 percent of users -- was: "Didn't realize the NHL playoffs were going on." The NHL just doesn't get it. Both the owners and players are living in a parallel universe of complete delusion. Because they love hockey, they think everybody cares about it. Because they can't imagine a world without the NHL, they don't realize the majority of sports fans care little whether the NHL even exists.
If you doubt it, check the TV ratings for the Finals From Nielsen Hell between the Calgary Flames and Tampa Bay Lightning. If the Weather Channel had a power outage, its ratings would still crush the NHL's numbers.
In almost every respect, the fight between the NHL's owners and players mirrors the battle in baseball that led to the strike of 1994 and the cancellation of the World Series. The financial issues, long-standing personal animosity and hard-line rhetoric could hardly be more similar.
However, there is one huge difference.
Baseball is America's national pastime. Hockey is Canada's national pastime. Yet the NHL is counting on American fans and American dollars to come back to the NHL the way they came back to baseball. What business would take such a bet-the-industry risk? What union would tempt such career suicide for its members?
No one should doubt the seriousness of both sides, certainly not the owners who are already firing team employees or not replacing those who quit. Teams including Washington, Carolina, Dallas, Florida, Edmonton, St. Louis, Anaheim and Phoenix have laid off or plan to lay off a substantial number of employees. At last count, the Caps had fired four people in hockey operations, while seven people in other departments had quit.
After a lockout and a lost season, which is currently considered the highest probability outcome, there would certainly still be an NHL in some form. But what form would that be? How many teams would it contain? What would its attendance be? Just because baseball is in excellent health after a fundamental breach of trust with its customers, that should not serve as some sort of subliminal message to hockey's owners and players.
Here's the kicker, the wild card, the enormous factor the NHL seems not to have considered. The imminent danger for hockey is that if it does anything as destructive as baseball did in '94-'95, the NHL may lose its status alongside the NFL, MLB and NBA as a major professional team sport.
"Major" is a vague but invaluable distinction conferred in the public mind. Some sports, some events, are major. Some aren't. There's no election, no referendum. Nobody calls to tell you on the day you move from one category to the other. But, over time, it happens. And for years hockey has been slipping back toward "minor." In its most recent TV contract, the NHL accepted terms that were comparable to the Arena Football League.
Once a major sport falls back into the pack of wannabes, it never recovers. Once, prize fighting and horse racing were huge national sports, far bigger than hockey has ever dreamed of being. Does hockey understand that if it shrinks in popularity as much as boxing and horse racing that it will not just be small, it will almost be invisible? Can you say, bowling? Actually, that would be an insult to bowling with its large participant base.
Hockey's owners think they can freeze the sport for a year to save money, then thaw it out in a wonderful new world with a hard salary cap, a docile union and a fan base that will gradually forgive everybody. Hockey players apparently think it's smart to call this bluff. Perhaps only those in an insular culture like hockey could believe this.
The awful TV ratings for the Stanley Cup may, in a bizarre way, serve as a wake-up call. Before the finals, the NHL's ratings were one-fourth that of the NBA. Now, the Lightning and Flames, two small-market teams, are further shrinking those figures. Games 1 and 2 tied for the lowest Cup ratings on cable since 1990. Games 3 and 4 were two of the lowest for hockey since broadcast network numbers began.
Aside from dedicated hockey fans, how many know the Flames' best player, and perhaps the best player in the whole sport, is Jarome Iginla?
And how many realize he's the first black captain of an NHL club? The NHL has many nice stories like this that are worth sharing with a wider world.
But, after a lockout, how many will still care?
Pro hockey better realize what many of us understand intuitively.
Most people can do without the NHL. The sport survives off the adoration of a relatively small hard core. After a lost season, plenty of fans might express a preference for a less cluttered sports scene in which the NHL came back as a much less visible game.
Sometimes a slap in the face is useful. The NHL needs to understand that, if it goes away for a year, the sports public -- which has so many games, seasons and athletes -- may discover it prefers a world with far fewer pro hockey highlights on TV or NHL stories in newspapers and magazines.
With a year to think about it, we might ask whether we really needed to know so much more about the NHL than we do about women's golf or college lacrosse or pro soccer or NASCAR or who knows what?
Why, we might ask, is the NHL covered like a major sport? What's so important about it? If few missed it when it was gone, why treat it as a major sport when it comes back?
So, NHL, do you feel lucky? Go on, take a season off.
Make our day.
NHL On Path For Major Collapse
By Thomas Boswell
The NHL is not just in danger of a long labor lockout or a lost season. Professional hockey, though it seems oblivious to its mortal risk, may be on the brink of losing its place as a major team sport.
Last week, after a 2 1/2-hour meeting with the head of the NHL Players Association, Commissioner Gary Bettman was asked if the NHL would open training camp for next season without a new labor agreement. "We cannot live under the collective bargaining agreement for any longer than its term," Bettman said.
That's not an announcement of a lockout by NHL owners for next season. But it's about as close as you can get.
"While there was candid discussion, it would be misleading to suggest that there was any progress made or to characterize our discussions as productive," said Ted Saskin, the union's senior director. No more talks are scheduled.
At about the same time, washingtonpost.com, the Post's Web site, ran an online poll asking which teams would be in the Stanley Cup finals. The largest response -- 42 percent of users -- was: "Didn't realize the NHL playoffs were going on." The NHL just doesn't get it. Both the owners and players are living in a parallel universe of complete delusion. Because they love hockey, they think everybody cares about it. Because they can't imagine a world without the NHL, they don't realize the majority of sports fans care little whether the NHL even exists.
If you doubt it, check the TV ratings for the Finals From Nielsen Hell between the Calgary Flames and Tampa Bay Lightning. If the Weather Channel had a power outage, its ratings would still crush the NHL's numbers.
In almost every respect, the fight between the NHL's owners and players mirrors the battle in baseball that led to the strike of 1994 and the cancellation of the World Series. The financial issues, long-standing personal animosity and hard-line rhetoric could hardly be more similar.
However, there is one huge difference.
Baseball is America's national pastime. Hockey is Canada's national pastime. Yet the NHL is counting on American fans and American dollars to come back to the NHL the way they came back to baseball. What business would take such a bet-the-industry risk? What union would tempt such career suicide for its members?
No one should doubt the seriousness of both sides, certainly not the owners who are already firing team employees or not replacing those who quit. Teams including Washington, Carolina, Dallas, Florida, Edmonton, St. Louis, Anaheim and Phoenix have laid off or plan to lay off a substantial number of employees. At last count, the Caps had fired four people in hockey operations, while seven people in other departments had quit.
After a lockout and a lost season, which is currently considered the highest probability outcome, there would certainly still be an NHL in some form. But what form would that be? How many teams would it contain? What would its attendance be? Just because baseball is in excellent health after a fundamental breach of trust with its customers, that should not serve as some sort of subliminal message to hockey's owners and players.
Here's the kicker, the wild card, the enormous factor the NHL seems not to have considered. The imminent danger for hockey is that if it does anything as destructive as baseball did in '94-'95, the NHL may lose its status alongside the NFL, MLB and NBA as a major professional team sport.
"Major" is a vague but invaluable distinction conferred in the public mind. Some sports, some events, are major. Some aren't. There's no election, no referendum. Nobody calls to tell you on the day you move from one category to the other. But, over time, it happens. And for years hockey has been slipping back toward "minor." In its most recent TV contract, the NHL accepted terms that were comparable to the Arena Football League.
Once a major sport falls back into the pack of wannabes, it never recovers. Once, prize fighting and horse racing were huge national sports, far bigger than hockey has ever dreamed of being. Does hockey understand that if it shrinks in popularity as much as boxing and horse racing that it will not just be small, it will almost be invisible? Can you say, bowling? Actually, that would be an insult to bowling with its large participant base.
Hockey's owners think they can freeze the sport for a year to save money, then thaw it out in a wonderful new world with a hard salary cap, a docile union and a fan base that will gradually forgive everybody. Hockey players apparently think it's smart to call this bluff. Perhaps only those in an insular culture like hockey could believe this.
The awful TV ratings for the Stanley Cup may, in a bizarre way, serve as a wake-up call. Before the finals, the NHL's ratings were one-fourth that of the NBA. Now, the Lightning and Flames, two small-market teams, are further shrinking those figures. Games 1 and 2 tied for the lowest Cup ratings on cable since 1990. Games 3 and 4 were two of the lowest for hockey since broadcast network numbers began.
Aside from dedicated hockey fans, how many know the Flames' best player, and perhaps the best player in the whole sport, is Jarome Iginla?
And how many realize he's the first black captain of an NHL club? The NHL has many nice stories like this that are worth sharing with a wider world.
But, after a lockout, how many will still care?
Pro hockey better realize what many of us understand intuitively.
Most people can do without the NHL. The sport survives off the adoration of a relatively small hard core. After a lost season, plenty of fans might express a preference for a less cluttered sports scene in which the NHL came back as a much less visible game.
Sometimes a slap in the face is useful. The NHL needs to understand that, if it goes away for a year, the sports public -- which has so many games, seasons and athletes -- may discover it prefers a world with far fewer pro hockey highlights on TV or NHL stories in newspapers and magazines.
With a year to think about it, we might ask whether we really needed to know so much more about the NHL than we do about women's golf or college lacrosse or pro soccer or NASCAR or who knows what?
Why, we might ask, is the NHL covered like a major sport? What's so important about it? If few missed it when it was gone, why treat it as a major sport when it comes back?
So, NHL, do you feel lucky? Go on, take a season off.
Make our day.
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Ross Thomas Redux
The article posted yesterday about Ross Thomas prompted me to pull out the first book of his I ever read, Chinaman's Chance, and to begin reading it again. I picked it up in the first Avon paperback edition back in the late 70s, I believe. I can't remember if I discovered it on my own at News and Novels in the Kroger Shpping Center on West Market Street in Greensboro, or if then manager Keith Ferrell introduced it to me. Keith certainly was an enthusiastic booster of Thomas. Either way, I was immediately taken with Thomas' writing. Chinaman's Chance has to have one of the finest opening paragraphs ever to begin a thriller:
What great examples of clear, arresting prose his novels have left.
The article posted yesterday about Ross Thomas prompted me to pull out the first book of his I ever read, Chinaman's Chance, and to begin reading it again. I picked it up in the first Avon paperback edition back in the late 70s, I believe. I can't remember if I discovered it on my own at News and Novels in the Kroger Shpping Center on West Market Street in Greensboro, or if then manager Keith Ferrell introduced it to me. Keith certainly was an enthusiastic booster of Thomas. Either way, I was immediately taken with Thomas' writing. Chinaman's Chance has to have one of the finest opening paragraphs ever to begin a thriller:
"The Pretender to the Emperor's throne was a fat thirty-seven-year-old Chinaman called Artie Wu who almost always jogged along Malibu Beach right after dawn even in summer, when dawn came round as early as 4:42. It was while jogging along the beach just east of the Paradise Cove pier that he tripped over a dead pelican, fell, and met the man with six greyhounds. It was the sixteenth of June, a Thursday."
What great examples of clear, arresting prose his novels have left.
Monday, May 31, 2004
One of our finest social commentators in defense of Cos.
Some blacks stand tall against the buffoonery
by Stanley Crouch
On Sunday, HBO is premiering a film called "Something the Lord Made."
It takes on much greater significance than it normally would because of the flap Bill Cosby has caused among willfully deaf, dumb and blind Negroes who deny that at least part of the trouble many black people find themselves in is due to low educational goals and self-destructive values.
The HBO film is about a black genius who was central to expanding the horizons of medicine through innovations in heart surgery.
The depiction on television of a black intellectual is itself a major event, because most popular media would lead one to believe that brains in the heads of Negroes are as rare as fangs in the beaks of chickens. That was why it was so hard for Cosby to sell his revolutionary TV show, which ran counter to the buffoonery of black situation comedies. Audiences had not seen black people portrayed like Cosby's Huxtable family. The show was even attacked by Negro numbskulls and condescending whites as "inauthentic."
The central character of "Something the Lord Made," remarkably portrayed by Mos Def, is Vivien Thomas, a black man who is unlike the accepted clichés. He is quiet and introspective. He does his job and takes care of his wife and children, no matter the difficulties. There is no cursing, no strutting, no avoidance of correct English as though it were the plague.
Had this movie been made in the late 1930s or early '40s, it might have inspired a young Cliff Huxtable to go into medicine. At the time, of course, it would have been astounding to see a black medical innovator made the subject of a movie. That was a time when Hollywood celebrated only Caucasian giants like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
This is a different era. The people who argue for black buffoonery now are no longer white. The dominant voices are black, because the depiction of black stupidity and decadence has turned into a billion-dollar cash cow in the world of rap. Even successful black people celebrate and defend this pollution.
Cosby is not that kind of a man, and, as "Something the Lord Made" shows us, neither was Vivien Thomas. He worked against the limitations of American racism and became a colossus of 20th-century medicine. It was not easy, and a weak man would have been crushed by the disrespect. Thomas endured with quiet dignity and was central to a surgical revolution. In the process, he did not get gold chains or gold teeth. He achieved immortality.
We need more people like Bill Cosby and Vivien Thomas. They make those with limited expectations quite, quite uncomfortable. Good.
Some blacks stand tall against the buffoonery
by Stanley Crouch
On Sunday, HBO is premiering a film called "Something the Lord Made."
It takes on much greater significance than it normally would because of the flap Bill Cosby has caused among willfully deaf, dumb and blind Negroes who deny that at least part of the trouble many black people find themselves in is due to low educational goals and self-destructive values.
The HBO film is about a black genius who was central to expanding the horizons of medicine through innovations in heart surgery.
The depiction on television of a black intellectual is itself a major event, because most popular media would lead one to believe that brains in the heads of Negroes are as rare as fangs in the beaks of chickens. That was why it was so hard for Cosby to sell his revolutionary TV show, which ran counter to the buffoonery of black situation comedies. Audiences had not seen black people portrayed like Cosby's Huxtable family. The show was even attacked by Negro numbskulls and condescending whites as "inauthentic."
The central character of "Something the Lord Made," remarkably portrayed by Mos Def, is Vivien Thomas, a black man who is unlike the accepted clichés. He is quiet and introspective. He does his job and takes care of his wife and children, no matter the difficulties. There is no cursing, no strutting, no avoidance of correct English as though it were the plague.
Had this movie been made in the late 1930s or early '40s, it might have inspired a young Cliff Huxtable to go into medicine. At the time, of course, it would have been astounding to see a black medical innovator made the subject of a movie. That was a time when Hollywood celebrated only Caucasian giants like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
This is a different era. The people who argue for black buffoonery now are no longer white. The dominant voices are black, because the depiction of black stupidity and decadence has turned into a billion-dollar cash cow in the world of rap. Even successful black people celebrate and defend this pollution.
Cosby is not that kind of a man, and, as "Something the Lord Made" shows us, neither was Vivien Thomas. He worked against the limitations of American racism and became a colossus of 20th-century medicine. It was not easy, and a weak man would have been crushed by the disrespect. Thomas endured with quiet dignity and was central to a surgical revolution. In the process, he did not get gold chains or gold teeth. He achieved immortality.
We need more people like Bill Cosby and Vivien Thomas. They make those with limited expectations quite, quite uncomfortable. Good.
What a pleasant surprise, to find a fine appreciation in the Boston Globe of one of the best suspense writers ever,
Grand master of the thinking man's thriller
Dialogue, details, description, action -- Ross Thomas did it all
By Richard Gillis
During a career that spanned three decades, Ross Thomas produced 25 novels that many consider the finest political thrillers ever penned by an American. Starting in 1966 with ''The Cold War Swap" -- a spy story that garnered an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery -- each new Thomas outing attracted more critical acclaim than the one before. He was revered by his peers -- top-drawer mystery writers Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, and Lawrence Block have all written encomiums. Bill and Hillary Clinton claimed to have read ''gazillions" of his books. The New York Times once anointed him ''America's Best Storyteller." To pick up just one of his books, as his fiercely loyal fans would attest, is to risk instant addiction.
Sadly, for most of the past decade this was virtually impossible. Following Thomas's death in 1995, all but one of his novels were allowed to slip out of print. Because today's tax code discourages publishers from maintaining extensive back titles, Thomas's books, steady but never spectacular sellers, disappeared. Nonetheless, contemporary critics and writers continued to regard him as a grand master of the thinking man's thriller, a member of the pantheon that includes Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald.
Happily, this gap is now being filled. Last year, St. Martin's Press began reissuing Thomas's novels, and to date has brought back into print a third of his oeuvre. Whether you're a confirmed fan, or have yet to discover Thomas, this is reason to celebrate.
Exhibit A: ''Out on the Rim." Originally published in 1985, this may be the jewel in Thomas's crown. Shadowy political interests hire a band of wily mercenaries to bribe a Philippine rebel leader into leaving the country. Led by intrepid con men, the group embarks on an intricate mission that moves faster than a Grand Prix; it's a high-octane, crisscrossing race to the finish line. In typical Thomas fashion, the characters are cunning and duplicitous, the plot unpredictable, and the dialogue razor-sharp. The resulting chaos is a joy to behold.
Another dazzler is ''Briarpatch" (1984), which earned Thomas his second Edgar. In it, Washington lawyer Benjamin Dill returns to his Midwestern roots to arrange his sister's funeral. Mixing business with grieving, he undertakes an investigation into her mysterious demise, uncovering a trail of deceit that leads to the highest levels of power. The plot is far too complex to summarize. Suffice to say that if you've ever wondered what happened to all that US weaponry left behind in Vietnam, Thomas provides an intriguing, not entirely implausible answer.
Both novels provide quintessential windows into the world of Thomas. It's a shadowy place where political power and big money intersect, and where all the important plays are made behind the scenes. The adversaries -- morally compromised heroes confronting irredeemable villains -- are invariably brilliant, treacherous, and cynical. Deception is the order of the day, or rather night, since an inordinate amount of the action occurs between midnight and dawn. Thomas takes you into the hotel rooms, corporate suites, and political offices of the people who know the score, the way the game is played, and exactly which levers to pull.
Make no mistake. For all their worldliness, these are not the burnt-out cases one finds in the pages of Graham Greene or John le Carr. Tough as nails, these guys (and not a few gals) run the gamut from congressmen to con men, political fixers to third-world dictators. They combine an outsize appetite for life with an eye locked steadily on the prize, and they play the game with a zest that is refreshing, inventive, and bold.
When asked to account for his novels' verisimilitude, Thomas replied, ''I sat in the back rooms where the deals were cut."
So how did he come to sit in those back rooms? His biography offers a few clues.
He was born and raised in Oklahoma City, the Depression-era son of a failed building contractor. World War II deposited him in the Philippines, where he saw combat. After the war, he earned a degree in English from the University of Oklahoma. It is from this point forward that his life diverges from the conventional, assumes its interesting arc, though at the time it doubtless seemed a series of random turns -- public relations consultant, campaign manager, union spokesman, foreign correspondent. Exposed to political intrigue, he acquired a worldview that was ironic and cynical, which gives his novels their distinctive sardonic tang. In the mid-'60s, with six weeks to kill between gigs, he knocked off ''The Cold War Swap," earning comparisons to le Carr.
Thomas never looked back -- or stopped to catch his breath -- producing roughly a novel a year over the next three decades. At one point, when his publisher feared overexposure, Thomas simply adopted a pseudonym. For all his inventive plots, it is Thomas's literary style that elevates his work above genre. His language is calibrated to an almost technical precision. Combining an eye for detail with an ear for perfect pitch, he juggles dialogue, description, and action with equal verve.
Thomas accomplishes what few writers can do -- he actually makes you feel smarter and wiser (and yes, a bit more cynical) after you've finished one of his devilish entertainments.
If you've never read Thomas before, do yourself a favor -- pick up one of the newly reissued titles, strap yourself in, and enjoy the ride. Better yet, pick up several. If you're like most fans, you'll want to jump into another as soon as the one you're reading screeches to a stop.
Richard Gillis is a writer living in Cambridge.
Grand master of the thinking man's thriller
Dialogue, details, description, action -- Ross Thomas did it all
By Richard Gillis
During a career that spanned three decades, Ross Thomas produced 25 novels that many consider the finest political thrillers ever penned by an American. Starting in 1966 with ''The Cold War Swap" -- a spy story that garnered an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery -- each new Thomas outing attracted more critical acclaim than the one before. He was revered by his peers -- top-drawer mystery writers Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, and Lawrence Block have all written encomiums. Bill and Hillary Clinton claimed to have read ''gazillions" of his books. The New York Times once anointed him ''America's Best Storyteller." To pick up just one of his books, as his fiercely loyal fans would attest, is to risk instant addiction.
Sadly, for most of the past decade this was virtually impossible. Following Thomas's death in 1995, all but one of his novels were allowed to slip out of print. Because today's tax code discourages publishers from maintaining extensive back titles, Thomas's books, steady but never spectacular sellers, disappeared. Nonetheless, contemporary critics and writers continued to regard him as a grand master of the thinking man's thriller, a member of the pantheon that includes Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald.
Happily, this gap is now being filled. Last year, St. Martin's Press began reissuing Thomas's novels, and to date has brought back into print a third of his oeuvre. Whether you're a confirmed fan, or have yet to discover Thomas, this is reason to celebrate.
Exhibit A: ''Out on the Rim." Originally published in 1985, this may be the jewel in Thomas's crown. Shadowy political interests hire a band of wily mercenaries to bribe a Philippine rebel leader into leaving the country. Led by intrepid con men, the group embarks on an intricate mission that moves faster than a Grand Prix; it's a high-octane, crisscrossing race to the finish line. In typical Thomas fashion, the characters are cunning and duplicitous, the plot unpredictable, and the dialogue razor-sharp. The resulting chaos is a joy to behold.
Another dazzler is ''Briarpatch" (1984), which earned Thomas his second Edgar. In it, Washington lawyer Benjamin Dill returns to his Midwestern roots to arrange his sister's funeral. Mixing business with grieving, he undertakes an investigation into her mysterious demise, uncovering a trail of deceit that leads to the highest levels of power. The plot is far too complex to summarize. Suffice to say that if you've ever wondered what happened to all that US weaponry left behind in Vietnam, Thomas provides an intriguing, not entirely implausible answer.
Both novels provide quintessential windows into the world of Thomas. It's a shadowy place where political power and big money intersect, and where all the important plays are made behind the scenes. The adversaries -- morally compromised heroes confronting irredeemable villains -- are invariably brilliant, treacherous, and cynical. Deception is the order of the day, or rather night, since an inordinate amount of the action occurs between midnight and dawn. Thomas takes you into the hotel rooms, corporate suites, and political offices of the people who know the score, the way the game is played, and exactly which levers to pull.
Make no mistake. For all their worldliness, these are not the burnt-out cases one finds in the pages of Graham Greene or John le Carr. Tough as nails, these guys (and not a few gals) run the gamut from congressmen to con men, political fixers to third-world dictators. They combine an outsize appetite for life with an eye locked steadily on the prize, and they play the game with a zest that is refreshing, inventive, and bold.
When asked to account for his novels' verisimilitude, Thomas replied, ''I sat in the back rooms where the deals were cut."
So how did he come to sit in those back rooms? His biography offers a few clues.
He was born and raised in Oklahoma City, the Depression-era son of a failed building contractor. World War II deposited him in the Philippines, where he saw combat. After the war, he earned a degree in English from the University of Oklahoma. It is from this point forward that his life diverges from the conventional, assumes its interesting arc, though at the time it doubtless seemed a series of random turns -- public relations consultant, campaign manager, union spokesman, foreign correspondent. Exposed to political intrigue, he acquired a worldview that was ironic and cynical, which gives his novels their distinctive sardonic tang. In the mid-'60s, with six weeks to kill between gigs, he knocked off ''The Cold War Swap," earning comparisons to le Carr.
Thomas never looked back -- or stopped to catch his breath -- producing roughly a novel a year over the next three decades. At one point, when his publisher feared overexposure, Thomas simply adopted a pseudonym. For all his inventive plots, it is Thomas's literary style that elevates his work above genre. His language is calibrated to an almost technical precision. Combining an eye for detail with an ear for perfect pitch, he juggles dialogue, description, and action with equal verve.
Thomas accomplishes what few writers can do -- he actually makes you feel smarter and wiser (and yes, a bit more cynical) after you've finished one of his devilish entertainments.
If you've never read Thomas before, do yourself a favor -- pick up one of the newly reissued titles, strap yourself in, and enjoy the ride. Better yet, pick up several. If you're like most fans, you'll want to jump into another as soon as the one you're reading screeches to a stop.
Richard Gillis is a writer living in Cambridge.
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