From The Duke Chronicle
Pipes calls for end to Palestinian aid
by Kelly Rohrs
Pro-Israeli activist Daniel Pipes advocated ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by cutting off worldwide support to the Palestinian cause in a Thursday night speech sponsored by the Duke Conservative Union.
“Diplomacy in a time of war is not effective,” Pipes said. “It just gets in the way.”
The speech, the first of about a dozen campus events dealing with the issue this weekend, did not draw protesters, but the security presence was palpable. Factions of pro-Israeli groups have objected to the Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference that begins today.
About 200 people, many of them from outside Duke, gathered in the Levine Science Research Center to hear Pipes, a columnist for The New York Sun and The Jerusalem Post, explain the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his proposals for ending it.
Although most campus groups have supported freedom of speech and are committed to non-violent discussion about the emotional conflict, officials were prepared for extremist reactions to Pipes’ talk.
Four uniformed officers flanked the sides of the room, and Duke University Police Department Lt. Jeffrey Best said more officers were stationed outside the event. Additional security personnel from Chapel Hill-based Show Pros manned metal detectors that beeped for nearly every person who walked through them.
Several people in attendance were hoping Pipes would offer guidance as to whether Israeli sympathizers should protest the PSM conference, but he only briefly mentioned the event. He praised DCU’s objections to the PSM conference and said the University was “abdicating its responsibility” to students by allowing it.
Most of Pipes’ talk focused on potential solutions to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It is not a cycle of violence. It is not random terrorism. It is not the Hatfields and the McCoys,” Pipes said. “It is war.”
Palestinians seek “to see Israel destroyed in a direct way,” he said. Israel wants to be recognized as a sovereign state by its neighbors. Peace will not be successful until one side is willing to abandon its goal, he said, and the United States ought to change its policy and abandon negotiation efforts to facilitate peace.
Negotiated treaties failed, he said, because the Palestinian leaders did not represent the people and the Palestinian people were not sincere in their promises.
Instead, Pipes said, the United States should promote activities that dissuade the Palestinians to “give up their dream of destroying Israel,” including total financial abandonment of Palestinian causes and lack of official recognition of its leaders.
He added that Palestinian resistance was not the most intimidating threat to Israel. Rather, the growing Arab population within the Israeli state and the weapons of mass destruction from surrounding countries are more dangerous.
Comments and questions from the crowd revealed the diversity of opinion that exists even within the pro-Israeli side. Many attendees who said they were sympathetic to Israel’s position disagreed with Pipes, and a majority of the questions he fielded after his speech challenged the feasibility of his position on the conflict.
“I don’t agree that the only way to end it is to continue showing strength,” freshman Matt Guttentag said. “He didn’t seem to offer any methods of resolving the violence that seemed viable to me.”
Senior Nathan Carleton, DCU president, noted the rational tone of the event as an indication of its success. “Daniel Pipes showed how one can voice a strong opinion about the conflict in a reasonable way,” he said, adding that he offered a balance to the opinions of the PSM.
New York Post columnist Debbie Schlussel, who was supposed to introduce Pipes, did not arrive in time to speak because her flight into Durham was delayed. Instead, Carleton introduced Pipes.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
I've got an idea. If everything's so great in Iraq, why don't they send Wolfowitz and some of the other chickenhawks over there to accompany these troops on their supply runs?
Platoon defies orders in Iraq
Miss. soldier calls home, cites safety concerns
By Jeremy Hudson
jehudson@clarionledger.com
A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel, the troops' relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq — north of Baghdad — because their vehicles were considered "deadlined" or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.
Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County Detention Center, and the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday.
The platoon could be charged with the willful disobeying of orders, punishable by dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay and up to five years confinement, said military law expert Mark Stevens, an associate professor of justice studies at Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C.
No military officials were able to confirm or deny the detainment of the platoon Thursday.
But today, Sgt. Salju Thomas of the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad issued a statement saying that an investigation has begun.
"The Commander General of the 13 Corps Support Group has appointed a deputy commander to lead an investigation into allegations that members of the 343 Quartermaster Company refused to participate in theri assigned convoy mission on Oct. 13," Thomas' statement said.
The investigation team is currently in Tallil taking statements and interviewing those involved, Thomas said in the statement.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson said he plans to submit a congressional inquiry today on behalf of the Mississippi soldiers to launch an investigation into whether they are being treated improperly.
"I would not want any member of the military to be put in a dangerous situation ill-equipped," said Thompson, who was contacted by families. "I have had similar complaints from military families about vehicles that weren't armor-plated, or bullet-proof vests that are outdated. It concerns me because we made over $150 billion in funds available to equip our forces in Iraq.
"President Bush takes the position that the troops are well-armed, but if this situation is true, it calls into question how honest he has been with the country," Thompson said.
The 343rd is a supply unit whose general mission is to deliver fuel and water. The unit includes three women and 14 men and those with ranking up to sergeant first class.
"I got a call from an officer in another unit early (Thursday) morning who told me that my husband and his platoon had been arrested on a bogus charge because they refused to go on a suicide mission," said Jackie Butler of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year reservist. "When my husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major."
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., whose daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
McClenny, 21, pleaded for help in a message left on her mother's answering machine early Thursday morning.
"They are holding us against our will," McClenny said. "We are now prisoners."
McClenny told her mother her unit tried to deliver fuel to another base in Iraq Wednesday, but was sent back because the fuel had been contaminated with water. The platoon returned to its base, where it was told to take the fuel to another base, McClenny told her mother.
The platoon is normally escorted by armed Humvees and helicopters, but did not have that support Wednesday, McClenny told her mother.
The convoy trucks the platoon was driving had experienced problems in the past and were not being properly maintained, Hill said her daughter told her.
The situation mirrors other tales of troops being sent on missions without proper equipment.
Aviation regiments have complained of being forced to fly dangerous missions over Iraq with outdated night-vision goggles and old missile-avoidance systems. Stories of troops' families purchasing body armor because the military didn't provide them with adequate equipment have been included in recent presidential debates.
Patricia McCook said her husband, a staff sergeant, understands well the severity of disobeying orders. But he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
"He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were deadlines ... not safe to go in a hotbed like that," Patricia McCook said.
Hill said the trucks her daughter's unit was driving could not top 40 mph.
"They knew there was a 99 percent chance they were going to get ambushed or fired at," Hill said her daughter told her. "They would have had no way to fight back."
Kathy Harris of Vicksburg is the mother of Aaron Gordon, 20, who is among those being detained. Her primary concern is that she has been told the soldiers have not been provided access to a judge advocate general.
Stevens said if the soldiers are being confined, law requires them to have a hearing before a magistrate within seven days.
Harris said conditions for the platoon have been difficult of late. Her son e-mailed her earlier this week to ask what the penalty would be if he became physical with a commanding officer, she said.
But Nadine Stratford of Rock Hill, S.C., said her godson Colin Durham, 20, has been happy with his time in Iraq. She has not heard from him since the platoon was detained.
"When I talked to him about a month ago, he was fine," Stratford said. "He said it was like being at home."
Platoon defies orders in Iraq
Miss. soldier calls home, cites safety concerns
By Jeremy Hudson
jehudson@clarionledger.com
A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel, the troops' relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq — north of Baghdad — because their vehicles were considered "deadlined" or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.
Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County Detention Center, and the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday.
The platoon could be charged with the willful disobeying of orders, punishable by dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay and up to five years confinement, said military law expert Mark Stevens, an associate professor of justice studies at Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C.
No military officials were able to confirm or deny the detainment of the platoon Thursday.
But today, Sgt. Salju Thomas of the Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad issued a statement saying that an investigation has begun.
"The Commander General of the 13 Corps Support Group has appointed a deputy commander to lead an investigation into allegations that members of the 343 Quartermaster Company refused to participate in theri assigned convoy mission on Oct. 13," Thomas' statement said.
The investigation team is currently in Tallil taking statements and interviewing those involved, Thomas said in the statement.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson said he plans to submit a congressional inquiry today on behalf of the Mississippi soldiers to launch an investigation into whether they are being treated improperly.
"I would not want any member of the military to be put in a dangerous situation ill-equipped," said Thompson, who was contacted by families. "I have had similar complaints from military families about vehicles that weren't armor-plated, or bullet-proof vests that are outdated. It concerns me because we made over $150 billion in funds available to equip our forces in Iraq.
"President Bush takes the position that the troops are well-armed, but if this situation is true, it calls into question how honest he has been with the country," Thompson said.
The 343rd is a supply unit whose general mission is to deliver fuel and water. The unit includes three women and 14 men and those with ranking up to sergeant first class.
"I got a call from an officer in another unit early (Thursday) morning who told me that my husband and his platoon had been arrested on a bogus charge because they refused to go on a suicide mission," said Jackie Butler of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year reservist. "When my husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major."
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., whose daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
McClenny, 21, pleaded for help in a message left on her mother's answering machine early Thursday morning.
"They are holding us against our will," McClenny said. "We are now prisoners."
McClenny told her mother her unit tried to deliver fuel to another base in Iraq Wednesday, but was sent back because the fuel had been contaminated with water. The platoon returned to its base, where it was told to take the fuel to another base, McClenny told her mother.
The platoon is normally escorted by armed Humvees and helicopters, but did not have that support Wednesday, McClenny told her mother.
The convoy trucks the platoon was driving had experienced problems in the past and were not being properly maintained, Hill said her daughter told her.
The situation mirrors other tales of troops being sent on missions without proper equipment.
Aviation regiments have complained of being forced to fly dangerous missions over Iraq with outdated night-vision goggles and old missile-avoidance systems. Stories of troops' families purchasing body armor because the military didn't provide them with adequate equipment have been included in recent presidential debates.
Patricia McCook said her husband, a staff sergeant, understands well the severity of disobeying orders. But he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
"He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were deadlines ... not safe to go in a hotbed like that," Patricia McCook said.
Hill said the trucks her daughter's unit was driving could not top 40 mph.
"They knew there was a 99 percent chance they were going to get ambushed or fired at," Hill said her daughter told her. "They would have had no way to fight back."
Kathy Harris of Vicksburg is the mother of Aaron Gordon, 20, who is among those being detained. Her primary concern is that she has been told the soldiers have not been provided access to a judge advocate general.
Stevens said if the soldiers are being confined, law requires them to have a hearing before a magistrate within seven days.
Harris said conditions for the platoon have been difficult of late. Her son e-mailed her earlier this week to ask what the penalty would be if he became physical with a commanding officer, she said.
But Nadine Stratford of Rock Hill, S.C., said her godson Colin Durham, 20, has been happy with his time in Iraq. She has not heard from him since the platoon was detained.
"When I talked to him about a month ago, he was fine," Stratford said. "He said it was like being at home."
Friday, October 15, 2004
From The Washington Post
An Edwards Outrage
by Charles Krauthammer
After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I've known better than to believe the hype -- and have tried in my own counseling of people with new spinal cord injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this advice have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.
George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for stem cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry referred not once but four times to the "ban" on stem cell research instituted by Bush. At the time, Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous exploitation. But Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died of Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is standing in the way of an Alzheimer's cure.
This is an outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on which I sit, had one of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's, Dennis Selkoe from Harvard, give us a lecture on the newest and most promising approaches to solving the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe reported remarkable progress in using biochemicals to clear the "plaque" deposits in the brain that lead to Alzheimer's. He ended his presentation without the phrase "stem cells" having passed his lips.
So much for the miracle cure. Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly that stem cells as an Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need a fairy tale." Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly exploiting this fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters that stem cells play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.
An Edwards Outrage
by Charles Krauthammer
After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I've known better than to believe the hype -- and have tried in my own counseling of people with new spinal cord injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this advice have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.
George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for stem cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.
Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.
In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry referred not once but four times to the "ban" on stem cell research instituted by Bush. At the time, Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous exploitation. But Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died of Alzheimer's.
So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is standing in the way of an Alzheimer's cure.
This is an outright lie. The President's Council on Bioethics, on which I sit, had one of the world's foremost experts on Alzheimer's, Dennis Selkoe from Harvard, give us a lecture on the newest and most promising approaches to solving the Alzheimer's mystery. Selkoe reported remarkable progress in using biochemicals to clear the "plaque" deposits in the brain that lead to Alzheimer's. He ended his presentation without the phrase "stem cells" having passed his lips.
So much for the miracle cure. Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at NIH, has admitted publicly that stem cells as an Alzheimer's cure are a fiction, but that "people need a fairy tale." Kerry and Edwards certainly do. They are shamelessly exploiting this fairy tale, having no doubt been told by their pollsters that stem cells play well politically for them.
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, UNLEASHED
By Michelle Malkin · October 13, 2004 10:11 PM
9:45ish: Finally, finally! Bob Schieffer asks about illegal immigration...but both candidates bomb.
Bush's perfunctory reference to how he has sprinkled a few more Border Patrol agents across the southern border glosses over the horrendous policies instituted under his Department of Homeland Security that have resulted in undermining those agents. As I noted recently:
When a mobile unit of border agents in Southern California made a series of high-profile mass arrests of illegal aliens in June, prompting the ire of ethnic activists and Hispanic Democrats, Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson iced the agents' efforts and publicly criticized the arrests. Instead of backing his own men and women, Hutchinson assured the open borders lobby that his department would bow to the "sensitivities" surrounding interior enforcement.The retreat has had a devastating effect on border agents' morale -- and our safety. A new survey of border security personnel released this week by the National Border Patrol Council revealed that almost two-thirds of the workforce are demoralized, and nearly half of these employees have considered leaving their job within the past two years. The council noted: "Almost three years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars and endless rhetoric from the top about how anti-terrorism is our foremost priority, only about half of these officers believe that our nation is any safer from terrorist threats."
Meanwhile, John Kerry delivers another empty promise--pledging to "toughen the borders" without giving a single specific example of how he would do so. Like Bush, he ignores the disastrous and deliberate lack of interior enforcement in this country. Has not a word to say about the dismal shortage of detention space for illegal aliens, the continued perilous policies of catch and release, and the deportation abyss created by the likes of Teddy Kennedy and his immigration lawyer friends. (More here.)
As for the economics of illegal immigration, someone in both campaigns ought to be reading Robert Samuelson.
As for amnesty, forget what their lips say. They both support mass pardons of millions of immigration law-breakers and their employers.
More. Of. The. Same.
***
By the way, the hottest issue in Arizona right now is Proposition 200, which would in part require secure identification to vote in elections and to receive public benefits. President Bush could have strengthened his grass-roots conservative base--and scored with conservative Democrats--by endorsing the measure as good for national security, good for election integrity, and good for fiscal responsibility. Last month, an Arizona Republic poll in Phoenix showed that 66 percent of registered Arizona voters support the measure. The poll showed that Republicans favor the initiative by an 8-1 margin, while Democrats approve by a 3-1 margin.
So, why didn't Bush utter a word about it? Because someone at the highest levels of the national GOP elite opposes the vast majority of Americans on this most important issue.
From the Touchstone magazine blog:
IT’S A MIRACULOUS LIFE
By James Kushiner
When I heard about the passing of Christopher Reeve yesterday at 52, I thought about my sister Janice. She died at 35 and I had just returned yesterday from a visit to her grave in central Michigan. I had not been to the cemetery since the funeral nine years ago.
While in Michigan visiting my parents with my wife and son, I drove us all to the cemetery, about 2 hours from my parent’s home. They aren’t able to go there very often, but try to go near my sister’s birthday, which is today.
Janice was born with a congenital heart condition that was supposed to have killed her before her fifth birthday. The doctors told my mother not to expect her to live. A specialist in downtown Detroit instructed her not to hope for a miracle, because miracles do not happen.
Our family practitioner, who paid house calls, on the other hand, said he had seen many miracles of healing in his many years of practicing medicine, so “don’t give up hope.” She grew slowly as a girl, one side of her body a little less developed than the other. I remember a few times she would pass out, grow limp and begin to turn blue after a hard fall as a toddler, and my mother would cradle her and press her and shake her to get her to wake up.
Janice was never healed, but she was a fighter. She attended public school, graduated high school, went to college and earned a degree in social work. She chose social work because the head of the nursing program told her she couldn’t physically handle nursing. After she ended up working in a nursing home as a aide, she decided she could handle nursing, went back to school and received her R.N. some time later.
In her teens she had surgery, and again in her twenties and thirties. She was told by well-meaning people that she would never marry, and certainly never bear children. But she did marry in 1990, though she and her loving husband did not have children. In a sense, she did not need children, for she was without question the favorite aunt of her many nephews and nieces.
She was loved by them greatly, and by her siblings, and cousins, because she had the gift of the joy of life. While she did struggle with depression at times, underneath she seemed to have an unlimited solicitude for the welfare of her family and friends. Each person felt as if Janice was a special friend. You simply felt that she was happy to be with you and alive.
Mom stood at Janice’s grave yesterday and reminded me that no one thought Janice would make it at all, and that we were all blessed to have her for as long as we did. I think she can be proud of Janice despite the handicaps and the many anxieties we faced along the way as she entered hospitals for her various surgeries.
Her attitude and especially Janice’s seem to me to be in stark contrast to the politically motivated remarks made of late about the imperative of killing more embryos so that Christopher Reeve would walk again.
Perhaps in the future some procedure may be developed that might have prolonged my sister’s life, but that’s not the point. Her life was rich and full because she knew each day was a gift, and she found, through her own struggles and searching, a supreme joy in something that all the sick need, and something not needed by those who consider themselves healthy. Spiritually, that is.
In her later years she developed a piety that centered itself on the gift of our Lord in the Holy Communion, something that brought her deeper and deeper into the catholic faith. She understood something stronger than all the diseases of man and mightier than the mortality that claims the young and the old. She knew that the truth the Lord spoke about how those who would partake of the Body and Blood of Christ would be raised up at the last day and have eternal life.
In the early Church, the Lord’s Supper was called the “medicine of immortality” (Ignatius of Antioch, in the first century). This is the healing that the Old Testament prophets promised would come to man, a healing of man's mortality, not simply his diseases. The physical healings Jesus performed were, after all, signs of the true healing. Those whom he healed still, in the end, died, but in the hope of the resurrection.
It is sad when any one, such as Christopher Reeve, fails to avail himself of Christ’s gift of eternal life, and places all his hope in the advances of medical science at any cost. Janice knew this, and because of it, her life was as full as it could be. She was dedicated to the healing arts (and a scholarship for nursing was established by her husband in her name), as a Christian, who also respected the moral limitations under which we must operate, and respected the sanctity of human life. While it is right for Christians to advance in the medical sciences and seek to heal, it is not right to heal by killing new life.
Janice's life was a miracle, all the more, because she accepted an even greater miracle by which we shall be raised to life everlasting. Happy birthday, Janice.
IT’S A MIRACULOUS LIFE
By James Kushiner
When I heard about the passing of Christopher Reeve yesterday at 52, I thought about my sister Janice. She died at 35 and I had just returned yesterday from a visit to her grave in central Michigan. I had not been to the cemetery since the funeral nine years ago.
While in Michigan visiting my parents with my wife and son, I drove us all to the cemetery, about 2 hours from my parent’s home. They aren’t able to go there very often, but try to go near my sister’s birthday, which is today.
Janice was born with a congenital heart condition that was supposed to have killed her before her fifth birthday. The doctors told my mother not to expect her to live. A specialist in downtown Detroit instructed her not to hope for a miracle, because miracles do not happen.
Our family practitioner, who paid house calls, on the other hand, said he had seen many miracles of healing in his many years of practicing medicine, so “don’t give up hope.” She grew slowly as a girl, one side of her body a little less developed than the other. I remember a few times she would pass out, grow limp and begin to turn blue after a hard fall as a toddler, and my mother would cradle her and press her and shake her to get her to wake up.
Janice was never healed, but she was a fighter. She attended public school, graduated high school, went to college and earned a degree in social work. She chose social work because the head of the nursing program told her she couldn’t physically handle nursing. After she ended up working in a nursing home as a aide, she decided she could handle nursing, went back to school and received her R.N. some time later.
In her teens she had surgery, and again in her twenties and thirties. She was told by well-meaning people that she would never marry, and certainly never bear children. But she did marry in 1990, though she and her loving husband did not have children. In a sense, she did not need children, for she was without question the favorite aunt of her many nephews and nieces.
She was loved by them greatly, and by her siblings, and cousins, because she had the gift of the joy of life. While she did struggle with depression at times, underneath she seemed to have an unlimited solicitude for the welfare of her family and friends. Each person felt as if Janice was a special friend. You simply felt that she was happy to be with you and alive.
Mom stood at Janice’s grave yesterday and reminded me that no one thought Janice would make it at all, and that we were all blessed to have her for as long as we did. I think she can be proud of Janice despite the handicaps and the many anxieties we faced along the way as she entered hospitals for her various surgeries.
Her attitude and especially Janice’s seem to me to be in stark contrast to the politically motivated remarks made of late about the imperative of killing more embryos so that Christopher Reeve would walk again.
Perhaps in the future some procedure may be developed that might have prolonged my sister’s life, but that’s not the point. Her life was rich and full because she knew each day was a gift, and she found, through her own struggles and searching, a supreme joy in something that all the sick need, and something not needed by those who consider themselves healthy. Spiritually, that is.
In her later years she developed a piety that centered itself on the gift of our Lord in the Holy Communion, something that brought her deeper and deeper into the catholic faith. She understood something stronger than all the diseases of man and mightier than the mortality that claims the young and the old. She knew that the truth the Lord spoke about how those who would partake of the Body and Blood of Christ would be raised up at the last day and have eternal life.
In the early Church, the Lord’s Supper was called the “medicine of immortality” (Ignatius of Antioch, in the first century). This is the healing that the Old Testament prophets promised would come to man, a healing of man's mortality, not simply his diseases. The physical healings Jesus performed were, after all, signs of the true healing. Those whom he healed still, in the end, died, but in the hope of the resurrection.
It is sad when any one, such as Christopher Reeve, fails to avail himself of Christ’s gift of eternal life, and places all his hope in the advances of medical science at any cost. Janice knew this, and because of it, her life was as full as it could be. She was dedicated to the healing arts (and a scholarship for nursing was established by her husband in her name), as a Christian, who also respected the moral limitations under which we must operate, and respected the sanctity of human life. While it is right for Christians to advance in the medical sciences and seek to heal, it is not right to heal by killing new life.
Janice's life was a miracle, all the more, because she accepted an even greater miracle by which we shall be raised to life everlasting. Happy birthday, Janice.
From The Wall Street Journal:
The Meaninglessness of Meaning
Jacques Derrida is dead, but his baneful ideas live on.
By Roger Kimball
It's not every French intellectual whose death is commemorated by an announcement from the office of Jacques Chirac, the French president. But Jacques Derrida, who died Friday at age 74, was not just any French intellectual. His work, as Mr. Chirac's office noted, was "read, discussed, and taught around the world."
Whether Mr. Derrida was also "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," as Mr. Chirac's office asserted, is a point that has been fiercely contested ever since Mr. Derrida burst onto the intellectual scene in the mid-1960s.
Mr. Derrida (the name is pronounced deh-ree-DAH) was without doubt one of the most famous intellectuals of the past 40 years. His celebrity rivaled that of Jean-Paul Sartre. As the founder, honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine he called "deconstruction," Mr. Derrida was celebrated and vilified in about equal measure. Academics on the lookout for a trendy intellectual and moral high-explosive tended to love Mr. Derrida. The rest of us felt . . . otherwise.
What is deconstruction? Mr. Derrida would never say. It was a question certain to spark his contempt and ire. He denied that deconstruction could be meaningfully defined. I think he was right about that, though not necessarily for the reasons he believed.
But even if deconstruction cannot be defined, it can be described. For one thing, deconstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible. It does this by linguistic subterfuge. One of the central slogans of deconstruction is il n'y a pas de hors-texte, i.e., "there is nothing outside the text." (It sounds better in French.) In other words, deconstruction is an updated version of nominalism, the view that the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and that, at bottom, reality is unknowable.
Of course, if you put it as baldly as that, people will just laugh and ignore you. But if you dress up the idea in a forbidding vocabulary, full of neologisms and recondite references to philosophy, then you may have a prescription for academic stardom.
Stock in deconstruction has sagged a bit in recent years. There are basically two reasons for this. The first has to do with the late Paul de Man, the Belgian-born Yale professor of comparative literature. In addition to being one of the most prominent practitioners of deconstruction, Mr. de Man--as was revealed in the late 1980s--was an enthusiastic contributor to Nazi newspapers during World War II.
That discovery, and above all the flood of obscurantist mendacity disgorged by the deconstructionist brotherhood--not least by Mr. Derrida, who was himself Jewish--to exonerate Mr. de Man, cast a permanent shadow over deconstruction's status as a supposed instrument of intellectual liberation.
The second reason that deconstruction has lost some sheen is simply that, like any academic fashion, deconstruction's methods and vocabulary, once so novel and forbidding, have gradually become part of the common coin of academic discourse, and thus less trendy.
It is important to recognize, however, that this very process of assimilation has assured the continuing influence of deconstruction.
Once at home mostly in philosophy and literature departments, the nihilistic tenets of deconstruction have cropped up further and further afield: in departments of history, sociology, political science and architecture; in law schools and--God help us--business schools.
Deconstructive themes and presuppositions have increasingly become part of the general intellectual atmosphere: absorbed to such an extent that they float almost unnoticed, part of the ambient spiritual pollution of our time. Who can forget the politician who, accused of wrongdoing, said in his defense that "it all depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"?
Although the language of deconstruction is forbidding, the appeal of the doctrine is not hard to understand. It is the appeal of all intellectual radicalism.
Because deconstruction operates by subversion, its evasions are at the same time an attack: an attack on the cogency of language and the moral and intellectual claims that language has codified in tradition. The subversive element inherent in the deconstructive enterprise is another reason that it has exercised such a mesmerizing spell on intellectuals.
Deconstruction promises its adherents not only an emancipation from the responsibilities of truth but also the prospect of engaging in a species of radical activism. A blow against the legitimacy of language is at the same time a blow against the legitimacy of the tradition in which language lives and has meaning. By undercutting the idea of truth, the decontructionist also undercuts the idea of value, including established social, moral, and political values.
There is a lot to be said for the old adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Jacques Derrida is dead. Let us not speak ill of him. But his ideas are still very much alive. They deserve unstinting criticism from anyone who cares about the moral fabric of intellectual life.
Mr. Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, is author of "The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art" (Encounter Books).
The Meaninglessness of Meaning
Jacques Derrida is dead, but his baneful ideas live on.
By Roger Kimball
It's not every French intellectual whose death is commemorated by an announcement from the office of Jacques Chirac, the French president. But Jacques Derrida, who died Friday at age 74, was not just any French intellectual. His work, as Mr. Chirac's office noted, was "read, discussed, and taught around the world."
Whether Mr. Derrida was also "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," as Mr. Chirac's office asserted, is a point that has been fiercely contested ever since Mr. Derrida burst onto the intellectual scene in the mid-1960s.
Mr. Derrida (the name is pronounced deh-ree-DAH) was without doubt one of the most famous intellectuals of the past 40 years. His celebrity rivaled that of Jean-Paul Sartre. As the founder, honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine he called "deconstruction," Mr. Derrida was celebrated and vilified in about equal measure. Academics on the lookout for a trendy intellectual and moral high-explosive tended to love Mr. Derrida. The rest of us felt . . . otherwise.
What is deconstruction? Mr. Derrida would never say. It was a question certain to spark his contempt and ire. He denied that deconstruction could be meaningfully defined. I think he was right about that, though not necessarily for the reasons he believed.
But even if deconstruction cannot be defined, it can be described. For one thing, deconstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible. It does this by linguistic subterfuge. One of the central slogans of deconstruction is il n'y a pas de hors-texte, i.e., "there is nothing outside the text." (It sounds better in French.) In other words, deconstruction is an updated version of nominalism, the view that the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and that, at bottom, reality is unknowable.
Of course, if you put it as baldly as that, people will just laugh and ignore you. But if you dress up the idea in a forbidding vocabulary, full of neologisms and recondite references to philosophy, then you may have a prescription for academic stardom.
Stock in deconstruction has sagged a bit in recent years. There are basically two reasons for this. The first has to do with the late Paul de Man, the Belgian-born Yale professor of comparative literature. In addition to being one of the most prominent practitioners of deconstruction, Mr. de Man--as was revealed in the late 1980s--was an enthusiastic contributor to Nazi newspapers during World War II.
That discovery, and above all the flood of obscurantist mendacity disgorged by the deconstructionist brotherhood--not least by Mr. Derrida, who was himself Jewish--to exonerate Mr. de Man, cast a permanent shadow over deconstruction's status as a supposed instrument of intellectual liberation.
The second reason that deconstruction has lost some sheen is simply that, like any academic fashion, deconstruction's methods and vocabulary, once so novel and forbidding, have gradually become part of the common coin of academic discourse, and thus less trendy.
It is important to recognize, however, that this very process of assimilation has assured the continuing influence of deconstruction.
Once at home mostly in philosophy and literature departments, the nihilistic tenets of deconstruction have cropped up further and further afield: in departments of history, sociology, political science and architecture; in law schools and--God help us--business schools.
Deconstructive themes and presuppositions have increasingly become part of the general intellectual atmosphere: absorbed to such an extent that they float almost unnoticed, part of the ambient spiritual pollution of our time. Who can forget the politician who, accused of wrongdoing, said in his defense that "it all depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"?
Although the language of deconstruction is forbidding, the appeal of the doctrine is not hard to understand. It is the appeal of all intellectual radicalism.
Because deconstruction operates by subversion, its evasions are at the same time an attack: an attack on the cogency of language and the moral and intellectual claims that language has codified in tradition. The subversive element inherent in the deconstructive enterprise is another reason that it has exercised such a mesmerizing spell on intellectuals.
Deconstruction promises its adherents not only an emancipation from the responsibilities of truth but also the prospect of engaging in a species of radical activism. A blow against the legitimacy of language is at the same time a blow against the legitimacy of the tradition in which language lives and has meaning. By undercutting the idea of truth, the decontructionist also undercuts the idea of value, including established social, moral, and political values.
There is a lot to be said for the old adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Jacques Derrida is dead. Let us not speak ill of him. But his ideas are still very much alive. They deserve unstinting criticism from anyone who cares about the moral fabric of intellectual life.
Mr. Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, is author of "The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art" (Encounter Books).
From The New York Post:
GRIEVING MO STANDS TALL
by Kevin Kernan
THE one who needed comforting gave comfort to 56,135 fans last night at Yankee Stadium.
After the Yankees gave away all but 90 feet of an 8-0 lead, Mariano Rivera was again called on to save the October night — this time with two outs in the eighth inning and the tying run at third base.
Enter Sandman. It was time to put all the Yankees' troubles to sleep.
And he did again in the 10-7 victory over the Red Sox in Game 1 of the ALCS at Yankee Stadium. That's what Mariano Rivera is all about. That's why he is the greatest post-season closer of all time.
David Ortiz had just tripled home two runs to cut what was an 8-0 lead to 8-7. The Red Sox had gotten their cockiness back in a matter of two innings and the biggest talker in Red Sox Nation, Kevin Millar, was at the plate.
The clock read 11:07.
Rivera had arrived at the Stadium at 8:49. He smiled as he walked into the building. One of the first players to greet him was Alex Rodriguez and A-Rod gave Rivera a big hug.
No. 42 had just returned from Panama, where he attended the funerals of two beloved relatives electrocuted at his home in Puerto Caimito on Saturday, simply a terrible tragedy.
Rivera is a deeply religious man and this was a situation where his faith is paramount. At 9:52 he walked into the bullpen and Yankee Stadium erupted in cheers. It was the bottom of the fifth and the Yankees were leading 6-0. One by one Rivera's teammates came to give him a hug.
"I wanted to pitch tonight, I was ready," Rivera said later. As for the plane ride here, he said, "It was tough, there were tears coming out of my eyes."
As the score tightened, Rivera began to loosen up. At 11:00 he took the mound in the bullpen for his warmup pitches.
Seven minutes later he was in the game. As always, he was the calm in the middle of the storm. He quickly got ahead of Millar, who happily referred to himself and his teammates as "idiots" a few hours earlier in the interview room.
Rivera fired one more time and Millar popped up to Derek Jeter at short. On this night, as much as Curt Schilling wanted to shut up the fans, there was nothing but cheers for the Yankees in this wild, wild game.
Joe Torre knows about difficult personal times and he knows how baseball can become a cocoon in those times.
The game, Torre said, gave Rivera "a chance to hide for an hour or so." Hiding in front of millions on television and 56,000 fans.
The Yankees added two more runs in the bottom of the inning when Bernie Williams ripped a triple to left for the 10-7 advantage. That's what it takes to beat the Red Sox.
In the ninth Rivera slowly jogged to the mound and went to work, doing what he does best. After a popup there were two singles, the tying run was at the plate in Bill Mueller, but then Rivera got a double-play ball hit back to him and the Red Sox were finished. The clock read 11:40.
"It was tough, leaving my family there," Rivera said. "I came here and the fans and my teammates treated me like a king and that was something special. My fans and my teammates helped me out something special."
"I wanted to stay, but there was nothing I could do back there. Believe me, I wanted to stay back home, but I have a job to do and 24 players waiting for me."
And 56,000 fans. Once again, Mariano Rivera did his job.
"That's the way I am, the blessings and prayers, and being a man of God keeps me humble," he said. "That's what I believe. That got me going."
GRIEVING MO STANDS TALL
by Kevin Kernan
THE one who needed comforting gave comfort to 56,135 fans last night at Yankee Stadium.
After the Yankees gave away all but 90 feet of an 8-0 lead, Mariano Rivera was again called on to save the October night — this time with two outs in the eighth inning and the tying run at third base.
Enter Sandman. It was time to put all the Yankees' troubles to sleep.
And he did again in the 10-7 victory over the Red Sox in Game 1 of the ALCS at Yankee Stadium. That's what Mariano Rivera is all about. That's why he is the greatest post-season closer of all time.
David Ortiz had just tripled home two runs to cut what was an 8-0 lead to 8-7. The Red Sox had gotten their cockiness back in a matter of two innings and the biggest talker in Red Sox Nation, Kevin Millar, was at the plate.
The clock read 11:07.
Rivera had arrived at the Stadium at 8:49. He smiled as he walked into the building. One of the first players to greet him was Alex Rodriguez and A-Rod gave Rivera a big hug.
No. 42 had just returned from Panama, where he attended the funerals of two beloved relatives electrocuted at his home in Puerto Caimito on Saturday, simply a terrible tragedy.
Rivera is a deeply religious man and this was a situation where his faith is paramount. At 9:52 he walked into the bullpen and Yankee Stadium erupted in cheers. It was the bottom of the fifth and the Yankees were leading 6-0. One by one Rivera's teammates came to give him a hug.
"I wanted to pitch tonight, I was ready," Rivera said later. As for the plane ride here, he said, "It was tough, there were tears coming out of my eyes."
As the score tightened, Rivera began to loosen up. At 11:00 he took the mound in the bullpen for his warmup pitches.
Seven minutes later he was in the game. As always, he was the calm in the middle of the storm. He quickly got ahead of Millar, who happily referred to himself and his teammates as "idiots" a few hours earlier in the interview room.
Rivera fired one more time and Millar popped up to Derek Jeter at short. On this night, as much as Curt Schilling wanted to shut up the fans, there was nothing but cheers for the Yankees in this wild, wild game.
Joe Torre knows about difficult personal times and he knows how baseball can become a cocoon in those times.
The game, Torre said, gave Rivera "a chance to hide for an hour or so." Hiding in front of millions on television and 56,000 fans.
The Yankees added two more runs in the bottom of the inning when Bernie Williams ripped a triple to left for the 10-7 advantage. That's what it takes to beat the Red Sox.
In the ninth Rivera slowly jogged to the mound and went to work, doing what he does best. After a popup there were two singles, the tying run was at the plate in Bill Mueller, but then Rivera got a double-play ball hit back to him and the Red Sox were finished. The clock read 11:40.
"It was tough, leaving my family there," Rivera said. "I came here and the fans and my teammates treated me like a king and that was something special. My fans and my teammates helped me out something special."
"I wanted to stay, but there was nothing I could do back there. Believe me, I wanted to stay back home, but I have a job to do and 24 players waiting for me."
And 56,000 fans. Once again, Mariano Rivera did his job.
"That's the way I am, the blessings and prayers, and being a man of God keeps me humble," he said. "That's what I believe. That got me going."
Yankees: In the end, Rivera's heavy heart swells
By Steve Politi
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- His private jet left Panama at 3:30 p.m., and 5 hours and 17 minutes later he stepped out of a blue sedan at the Yankee Stadium press gate. He saw the camera lights and heard the cheering and gave a bewildered smile.
THE ARRIVAL "Hi, guys," Mariano Rivera said.
Hello, Mariano. Everyone was waiting for you.
His long day ended at 11:41 p.m. the way it usually does this time of year -- with the Yankees closer pumping his fist on the mound after recording the four most important outs of a 10-7 victory.
That Rivera made it back to the Bronx at all was impressive. That he was willing to pitch, considering the grief he endured at a funeral for two relatives in his hometown, was remarkable.
That he notched his record 31st postseason save after the Yankees had nearly blown an eight-run lead to the Red Sox in Game 1 of the Championship Series? Routine, he said.
"I would have been upset if I didn't pitch today," Rivera said after the Yankees took a 1-0 series lead. "I needed to pitch, and my teammates needed me there. I was ready."
Imagine the whirlwind Rivera experienced the past four days, the happiness and the pain and the exhaustion. He recorded the final outs of the Division Series-clinching victory against the Twins in Minneapolis Saturday, but before he could celebrate, he was called into the manager's office where he was hit with the awful news.
Victor Dario Avila, a cousin of his wife and a childhood friend, and Avila's 14-year-old son were electrocuted in the pool at Rivera's mansion in Puerto Caimito, Panama. The next day, Rivera was headed home to bury them.
The funeral was held at La Iglesia De Dios De La Proficia, the evangelical church Rivera helped build in his hometown. Once inside, the stoned-faced closer raised his arms and sang songs of prayer with 300 villagers. At one point, he broke down, buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
But the tough part came later, at the airport, moments before he had to board a private plane for the long flight back to the New York area.
"The hardest part was leaving my family," he said. "I wanted to stay with my family, but there was nothing I could do. I have a job to do. I had 24 players and a manager who were waiting for me."
None knew when -- or if -- their closer would return, but they didn't doubt his resolve. When Bob Sheppard, the venerable P.A. announcer, told the crowd during introductions that Rivera was on his way from the airport, the place erupted in cheers.
He arrived in the second inning and went to the clubhouse. Set-up man Tom Gordon saw him but kept his distance ... until Rivera called him over to his locker. Three bouquets of flowers were set up near an exercise bike, a batting helmet and a radar gun.
"I could tell he was okay by the way he sounded," Gordon said. "I told him I was happy to see him. I knew then he sounded a lot better."
Gordon greeted him again at 9:53 p.m., when Rivera walked into the bullpen to bear hugs and high-fives. The game was a blowout at that point. No way the Yankees would need Rivera.
And then, everything started to fall apart. The Red Sox scored five in the seventh and two in the eighth, and with a runner on third and two outs, manager Joe Torre went to the mound to take the ball away from Gordon and put his team in the hands of Rivera.
"Certainly, I didn't want to bring him in in the eighth inning," Torre said, "but we wind up having to do that. He's special, there's no question about it."
Added Gordon: "To be able to put yourself in the fire right away, we were hoping we didn't have to, but that's the type of player he is. He prepared himself to pitch, he got here, and he was able to do that."
Rivera got Kevin Millar to end the threat with a pop-up to short, and then after giving up a pair of hits in the ninth, Rivera coaxed Bill Mueller -- the Red Sox third baseman who beat Rivera with a ninth-inning home run in July -- to ground into a 1-6-3 game-ending double play.
For the Yankees, the victory was complete. For Rivera, the long day was over.
"It was tough leaving my family there," he said. "What I think kept me going was the prayers, and my family. I came here, and the fans and my teammates treated me like a king. That was something special, and I appreciated that.
"They made this happen."
They might argue otherwise.
By Steve Politi
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- His private jet left Panama at 3:30 p.m., and 5 hours and 17 minutes later he stepped out of a blue sedan at the Yankee Stadium press gate. He saw the camera lights and heard the cheering and gave a bewildered smile.
THE ARRIVAL "Hi, guys," Mariano Rivera said.
Hello, Mariano. Everyone was waiting for you.
His long day ended at 11:41 p.m. the way it usually does this time of year -- with the Yankees closer pumping his fist on the mound after recording the four most important outs of a 10-7 victory.
That Rivera made it back to the Bronx at all was impressive. That he was willing to pitch, considering the grief he endured at a funeral for two relatives in his hometown, was remarkable.
That he notched his record 31st postseason save after the Yankees had nearly blown an eight-run lead to the Red Sox in Game 1 of the Championship Series? Routine, he said.
"I would have been upset if I didn't pitch today," Rivera said after the Yankees took a 1-0 series lead. "I needed to pitch, and my teammates needed me there. I was ready."
Imagine the whirlwind Rivera experienced the past four days, the happiness and the pain and the exhaustion. He recorded the final outs of the Division Series-clinching victory against the Twins in Minneapolis Saturday, but before he could celebrate, he was called into the manager's office where he was hit with the awful news.
Victor Dario Avila, a cousin of his wife and a childhood friend, and Avila's 14-year-old son were electrocuted in the pool at Rivera's mansion in Puerto Caimito, Panama. The next day, Rivera was headed home to bury them.
The funeral was held at La Iglesia De Dios De La Proficia, the evangelical church Rivera helped build in his hometown. Once inside, the stoned-faced closer raised his arms and sang songs of prayer with 300 villagers. At one point, he broke down, buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
But the tough part came later, at the airport, moments before he had to board a private plane for the long flight back to the New York area.
"The hardest part was leaving my family," he said. "I wanted to stay with my family, but there was nothing I could do. I have a job to do. I had 24 players and a manager who were waiting for me."
None knew when -- or if -- their closer would return, but they didn't doubt his resolve. When Bob Sheppard, the venerable P.A. announcer, told the crowd during introductions that Rivera was on his way from the airport, the place erupted in cheers.
He arrived in the second inning and went to the clubhouse. Set-up man Tom Gordon saw him but kept his distance ... until Rivera called him over to his locker. Three bouquets of flowers were set up near an exercise bike, a batting helmet and a radar gun.
"I could tell he was okay by the way he sounded," Gordon said. "I told him I was happy to see him. I knew then he sounded a lot better."
Gordon greeted him again at 9:53 p.m., when Rivera walked into the bullpen to bear hugs and high-fives. The game was a blowout at that point. No way the Yankees would need Rivera.
And then, everything started to fall apart. The Red Sox scored five in the seventh and two in the eighth, and with a runner on third and two outs, manager Joe Torre went to the mound to take the ball away from Gordon and put his team in the hands of Rivera.
"Certainly, I didn't want to bring him in in the eighth inning," Torre said, "but we wind up having to do that. He's special, there's no question about it."
Added Gordon: "To be able to put yourself in the fire right away, we were hoping we didn't have to, but that's the type of player he is. He prepared himself to pitch, he got here, and he was able to do that."
Rivera got Kevin Millar to end the threat with a pop-up to short, and then after giving up a pair of hits in the ninth, Rivera coaxed Bill Mueller -- the Red Sox third baseman who beat Rivera with a ninth-inning home run in July -- to ground into a 1-6-3 game-ending double play.
For the Yankees, the victory was complete. For Rivera, the long day was over.
"It was tough leaving my family there," he said. "What I think kept me going was the prayers, and my family. I came here, and the fans and my teammates treated me like a king. That was something special, and I appreciated that.
"They made this happen."
They might argue otherwise.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Putting Words in the President's Mouth
Sixteen obvious points that George W. Bush should make during the Wednesday night debate.
by P.J. O'Rourke
(1) My opponent, Massachusetts senator John Kerry--or, as I like to think of him, Teddy Kennedy with a designated driver . . .
(2) There are two organizations pushing for change in November--al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: "We're going to fix you, America." On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.
(3) Senator Kerry, what do you mean my administration "lost" 1.6 million jobs? Did Dick Cheney accidentally leave 1.6 million jobs in the Senate men's room or something? Did you find them? Have you got 1.6 million jobs that you're hiding, Senator Kerry? And if you're elected, are you going to give them back?
(4) Speaking of jobs, Senator, how come every illegal immigrant who wades the Rio is able to find one in about 10 minutes? Meanwhile, your Democratic core constituency has been unemployed for years. Are your supporters lazy, Senator Kerry? Or are they stupid? Back when Clinton was president, did your supporters think they got their jobs at Burger King because Bill was sleeping with the cow?
(5) You say health care costs are soaring? Well, I'm not the one with a personal injury lawyer on my ticket. I loved the billboards that John Edwards used to have all over North Carolina: "Y'ALL MIGHT HAVE GOT HURT AT WORK AND NOT EVEN KNOWN IT" and "FEELIN' POORLY? LEMME SUE YER DOCTOR!"
(6) Yeah, we're running a deficit. Like Democrats never did that. But at least we're borrowing the money when interest rates are low. It's the same as refinancing your home loan. Not that you'd know, Senator Kerry, since your rich wife paid off your mortgage.
(7) You say that we won the war, but we're losing the peace because Iraq is so unstable. When Iraq was stable, it attacked Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. It attacked Iran. It attacked Kuwait. It gassed the Kurds. It butchered the Shiites. It fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wants a stable Iraq?
(8) No, it turns out Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And how crazy does that make Saddam? All he had to do was tell Hans Blix, "Look anywhere you want. Look under the bed. Look beneath the couch. Look behind the toilet tank in the third presidential palace on the left, but keep your mitts off my copies of Maxim." And Saddam could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld gets elected head of the World Council of Churches. But no . . .
(9) You say I didn't have the answers in Iraq? Well, what were the questions? Was there this bad man? Was he running a bad country? That did bad things? Did it have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Was it going to do more bad things? If those were the questions, was the answer "more time to let international sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections do their job"? No, the answer was blow the place to bits.
(10) You say I didn't have a plan for the post-war problem of Iraq? I say we blew the place to bits--what's the problem?
(11) Yes, blowing a place to bits leaves a mess behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars. A mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons. A mess that can't systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of its own citizens. It's a mess with a message--don't mess with us!
(12) Saddam Hussein was reduced to the Unabomber--Ted Kaczynski--a nutcase hiding in the sticks. Sure, the terrorism by his supporters is frightening. Hence, its name, "terrorism." Killing innocent people by surprise is not called "a thousand points of light." But, as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. The minute somebody sets off a suicide bomb, you can be sure that person doesn't have "career prospects." And no matter how horrendous a terrorist attack is, it's still conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an Air Force.
(13) You say you're going to get our friends and allies to take a bigger role in Iraq. Senator Kerry, what friends and allies? You're a sophisticated fellow. You're well-traveled and speak French. Are there some countries out there that you know about and the rest of us have never heard of?
(14) Let me tell you something, Senator Kerry. I don't blame the U.N. for not supporting me in Iraq. The world is full of loathsome governments run by criminals, thugs, and beasts. When I mentioned "regime-change," hairy little ears pricked up all over the earth. Beads of sweat broke out on low, sloping brows. Blood-stained, grasping hands began to tremble. I had to put poor Colin Powell on the phone to various hyenas in high office and have him explain that America itself needed regime-change from 1992 to 2000. And we didn't bomb the fellow responsible, and we only impeached him a little. Secretary Powell had to tell Kim Jung Il, Robert Mugabe, and Jacques Chirac to quit worrying and look at Bill Clinton and realize the fate that awaits them is a lucrative lecture tour, a best-selling book, and many willing, plump young women.
(15) Senator Kerry, you say you were in favor of threatening to use force on Saddam Hussein, but that actually using force was wrong. The technical term for this in political science is "bullshit."
(16) What are you going to do, Senator, give Saddam Hussein a mulligan and let him take his tee shot over?
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of, most recently, Peace Kills.
Sixteen obvious points that George W. Bush should make during the Wednesday night debate.
by P.J. O'Rourke
(1) My opponent, Massachusetts senator John Kerry--or, as I like to think of him, Teddy Kennedy with a designated driver . . .
(2) There are two organizations pushing for change in November--al Qaeda and the Democratic party. And they both have the same message: "We're going to fix you, America." On the whole, the terrorists have a more straightforward plan for fixing things. They're going to blow themselves up. Although, come to think of it, Howard Dean did that.
(3) Senator Kerry, what do you mean my administration "lost" 1.6 million jobs? Did Dick Cheney accidentally leave 1.6 million jobs in the Senate men's room or something? Did you find them? Have you got 1.6 million jobs that you're hiding, Senator Kerry? And if you're elected, are you going to give them back?
(4) Speaking of jobs, Senator, how come every illegal immigrant who wades the Rio is able to find one in about 10 minutes? Meanwhile, your Democratic core constituency has been unemployed for years. Are your supporters lazy, Senator Kerry? Or are they stupid? Back when Clinton was president, did your supporters think they got their jobs at Burger King because Bill was sleeping with the cow?
(5) You say health care costs are soaring? Well, I'm not the one with a personal injury lawyer on my ticket. I loved the billboards that John Edwards used to have all over North Carolina: "Y'ALL MIGHT HAVE GOT HURT AT WORK AND NOT EVEN KNOWN IT" and "FEELIN' POORLY? LEMME SUE YER DOCTOR!"
(6) Yeah, we're running a deficit. Like Democrats never did that. But at least we're borrowing the money when interest rates are low. It's the same as refinancing your home loan. Not that you'd know, Senator Kerry, since your rich wife paid off your mortgage.
(7) You say that we won the war, but we're losing the peace because Iraq is so unstable. When Iraq was stable, it attacked Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. It attacked Iran. It attacked Kuwait. It gassed the Kurds. It butchered the Shiites. It fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wants a stable Iraq?
(8) No, it turns out Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And how crazy does that make Saddam? All he had to do was tell Hans Blix, "Look anywhere you want. Look under the bed. Look beneath the couch. Look behind the toilet tank in the third presidential palace on the left, but keep your mitts off my copies of Maxim." And Saddam could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld gets elected head of the World Council of Churches. But no . . .
(9) You say I didn't have the answers in Iraq? Well, what were the questions? Was there this bad man? Was he running a bad country? That did bad things? Did it have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Was it going to do more bad things? If those were the questions, was the answer "more time to let international sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections do their job"? No, the answer was blow the place to bits.
(10) You say I didn't have a plan for the post-war problem of Iraq? I say we blew the place to bits--what's the problem?
(11) Yes, blowing a place to bits leaves a mess behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars. A mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons. A mess that can't systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of its own citizens. It's a mess with a message--don't mess with us!
(12) Saddam Hussein was reduced to the Unabomber--Ted Kaczynski--a nutcase hiding in the sticks. Sure, the terrorism by his supporters is frightening. Hence, its name, "terrorism." Killing innocent people by surprise is not called "a thousand points of light." But, as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. The minute somebody sets off a suicide bomb, you can be sure that person doesn't have "career prospects." And no matter how horrendous a terrorist attack is, it's still conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an Air Force.
(13) You say you're going to get our friends and allies to take a bigger role in Iraq. Senator Kerry, what friends and allies? You're a sophisticated fellow. You're well-traveled and speak French. Are there some countries out there that you know about and the rest of us have never heard of?
(14) Let me tell you something, Senator Kerry. I don't blame the U.N. for not supporting me in Iraq. The world is full of loathsome governments run by criminals, thugs, and beasts. When I mentioned "regime-change," hairy little ears pricked up all over the earth. Beads of sweat broke out on low, sloping brows. Blood-stained, grasping hands began to tremble. I had to put poor Colin Powell on the phone to various hyenas in high office and have him explain that America itself needed regime-change from 1992 to 2000. And we didn't bomb the fellow responsible, and we only impeached him a little. Secretary Powell had to tell Kim Jung Il, Robert Mugabe, and Jacques Chirac to quit worrying and look at Bill Clinton and realize the fate that awaits them is a lucrative lecture tour, a best-selling book, and many willing, plump young women.
(15) Senator Kerry, you say you were in favor of threatening to use force on Saddam Hussein, but that actually using force was wrong. The technical term for this in political science is "bullshit."
(16) What are you going to do, Senator, give Saddam Hussein a mulligan and let him take his tee shot over?
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of, most recently, Peace Kills.
From The New York Daily News
Rowling to pick off
another Potter pal
By Corky Siemaszko
"Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling has committed another killing.
"Yes, sorry," Rowling said, when asked yesterday on her Web site whether there would be casualties in her upcoming book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."
While Rowling refused to identify her latest victim, she reassured readers of the wildly popular series about the wizard world that Potter is safe - for now.
Before the publication of her last installment, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Rowling teased readers by revealing that another wizard would fall.
That Harry Potter book - like the four that preceded it - was an instant best seller.
Dr. Alan Hilfer, a child psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park, Brooklyn, said he believes Rowling is trying to protect her readers rather than create hype to boost sales for the sixth book, which will be released next year.
"I think it's an attempt to prepare her audience for a shock, so kids won't be too angry or upset when they read it," he said.
But even with the warning, many readers still were stunned when Rowling killed off Harry's godfather, Sirius Black.
And the 39-year-old British author admitted she, too, cried when she whacked Black, who had helped Potter battle the evil Lord Voldemort.
As for Potter, Rowling told fans in an earlier interview that her teenage hero would survive at least until the seventh and final book in the series.
"He will survive to book seven, mainly because I don't want to be strangled by you lot," she said. "But I don't want to say whether he grows any older than that."
Rowling to pick off
another Potter pal
By Corky Siemaszko
"Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling has committed another killing.
"Yes, sorry," Rowling said, when asked yesterday on her Web site whether there would be casualties in her upcoming book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."
While Rowling refused to identify her latest victim, she reassured readers of the wildly popular series about the wizard world that Potter is safe - for now.
Before the publication of her last installment, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Rowling teased readers by revealing that another wizard would fall.
That Harry Potter book - like the four that preceded it - was an instant best seller.
Dr. Alan Hilfer, a child psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park, Brooklyn, said he believes Rowling is trying to protect her readers rather than create hype to boost sales for the sixth book, which will be released next year.
"I think it's an attempt to prepare her audience for a shock, so kids won't be too angry or upset when they read it," he said.
But even with the warning, many readers still were stunned when Rowling killed off Harry's godfather, Sirius Black.
And the 39-year-old British author admitted she, too, cried when she whacked Black, who had helped Potter battle the evil Lord Voldemort.
As for Potter, Rowling told fans in an earlier interview that her teenage hero would survive at least until the seventh and final book in the series.
"He will survive to book seven, mainly because I don't want to be strangled by you lot," she said. "But I don't want to say whether he grows any older than that."
From the World magazine blog:
Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee writes in the Weekly Standard about 3 infamous late-term abortionists who have contributed a total of $7,000 to the Kerry campaign.
Johnson concludes: "Early this year, Kate Michelman, the longtime president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, told the New York Times, 'Even on the most difficult issues, we've never had to worry about John Kerry's position.'
Like Kate Michelman, Doctors Haskell, Tiller, and Hern know their man."
Abortionists for Kerry
Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee writes in the Weekly Standard about 3 infamous late-term abortionists who have contributed a total of $7,000 to the Kerry campaign.
MARTIN HASKELL, George Tiller, and Warren Hern have several things in common. All three are abortionists who specialize in late abortions. Haskell's name is closely linked with the partial-birth abortion method. Tiller and Hern may be the only two abortionists in the United States who openly advertise their willingness to perform third-trimester abortions.
Johnson concludes: "Early this year, Kate Michelman, the longtime president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, told the New York Times, 'Even on the most difficult issues, we've never had to worry about John Kerry's position.'
Like Kate Michelman, Doctors Haskell, Tiller, and Hern know their man."
The elephant in the room
Michelle Malkin
October 6, 2004
You know what makes me nervous about President Bush? It's not his facial expressions. Nor his verbal clumsiness. I don't care about his alleged weakness at the podium. What concerns me more than anything else is his demonstrated weakness at our borders.
Immigration enforcement is the six-ton elephant in the room. Barely two sentences were devoted to border control in the first presidential debate, despite the fact that the major issue of the showdown was leadership on national security. Both President Bush and Sen. Kerry bloviated about throwing more money at the Department of Homeland Security, while ignoring the fundamental problem: Our immigration laws are being broken en masse because America is unwilling to enforce them -- clearly, consistently and unapologetically -- until it is too late.
The vice presidential candidates are no better. Dick Cheney, alas, has dutifully defended the administration's abominable amnesty plan, which amounts to a mass government pardon of illegal visa overstayers and border crossers and deportation fugitives at a time of war. (We are at war, aren't we, gentlemen?) For his part, Sen. John Edwards supports the just-as-awful Democratic version of this illegal alien incentive policy.
On the same day of the presidential debate last week, alarming news broke in McAllen, Texas, which underscores the illegal immigration/terrorism nexus. The feds have been investigating evidence from a high-level al Qaeda operative that the terrorists were planning to poison our military's supply of MREs (meals ready-to-eat). In the course of the investigation, law enforcement officers initiated a sweep of a McAllen-area defense subcontractor, the Wornick Company, which produced MREs and had been an alleged target of al Qaeda.
Luckily, no signs of sabotage or terrorist infiltration were uncovered. But the place was crawling with illegals (mostly, but not all Mexican) who used falsified ID and employment forms. In an all-too-rare occurrence, an executive from an employment agency that provided workers for Wornick was indicted last week for flouting immigration rules and faking documents. Last year, a measly four employers faced criminal prosecution for immigration employment violations.
There are countless Pollyannas in the political, media and intellectual elite who continue to downplay the dangers of open borders. "Better intelligence" will solve the problem, they argue naively. "We are a nation of immigrants," they preach cluelessly. "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande," they babble pointlessly.
Meanwhile, the patient and undeterred minions of Osama bin Laden dispatched from abroad are here. Others are cooperating with other immigration outlaws to wreak havoc on our security. Not far from Bush's Crawford ranch, there are ominous signs that al Qaeda has teamed up with illegal alien smugglers from Mexico to bring new operatives through the southern border. The feds recently disclosed that suspected al Qaeda operative Adnan Shukrijumah -- a young Saudi pilot on the run since Sept. 11 -- met with the notorious El Salvador-based gang/alien smuggling operation, Mara Salvatrucha.
And in southern Arizona, site of the final presidential debate, the illegal Arab alien smuggling route known as "Terrorist Alley" is as unprotected as ever. Unknown numbers of al Qaeda in America have fraudulent identification, which enables them (like their Sept. 11 predecessors) to blend into the vast sea of 13 million other immigration outlaws who have little fear of getting caught. It doesn't help matters when Bush's own border security undersecretary, Asa Hutchinson, states publicly that it's "not realistic" for his own officers to try to do their jobs and deport law-breakers.
In an even more shameful betrayal, the White House is now reportedly pressuring stalwart House Republicans into scrapping important immigration enforcement provisions of the House Intelligence Bill that speed up the deportation process and bar illegal aliens from obtaining valuable driver's licenses or using easy-to-fake foreign consular ID cards. Why? Because they are politically unpopular with ethnic constituencies.
This race is not just about who is better able to hunt down and destroy our enemies abroad. It's about who is more willing to hunt them down right here, jail them, kick them out and keep them out of our home. President Bush has shown he can stand up to the international Axis of Weasels. He must show the same resolve against La Raza, the immigration lawyers and Teddy Kennedy.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Michelle Malkin
October 6, 2004
You know what makes me nervous about President Bush? It's not his facial expressions. Nor his verbal clumsiness. I don't care about his alleged weakness at the podium. What concerns me more than anything else is his demonstrated weakness at our borders.
Immigration enforcement is the six-ton elephant in the room. Barely two sentences were devoted to border control in the first presidential debate, despite the fact that the major issue of the showdown was leadership on national security. Both President Bush and Sen. Kerry bloviated about throwing more money at the Department of Homeland Security, while ignoring the fundamental problem: Our immigration laws are being broken en masse because America is unwilling to enforce them -- clearly, consistently and unapologetically -- until it is too late.
The vice presidential candidates are no better. Dick Cheney, alas, has dutifully defended the administration's abominable amnesty plan, which amounts to a mass government pardon of illegal visa overstayers and border crossers and deportation fugitives at a time of war. (We are at war, aren't we, gentlemen?) For his part, Sen. John Edwards supports the just-as-awful Democratic version of this illegal alien incentive policy.
On the same day of the presidential debate last week, alarming news broke in McAllen, Texas, which underscores the illegal immigration/terrorism nexus. The feds have been investigating evidence from a high-level al Qaeda operative that the terrorists were planning to poison our military's supply of MREs (meals ready-to-eat). In the course of the investigation, law enforcement officers initiated a sweep of a McAllen-area defense subcontractor, the Wornick Company, which produced MREs and had been an alleged target of al Qaeda.
Luckily, no signs of sabotage or terrorist infiltration were uncovered. But the place was crawling with illegals (mostly, but not all Mexican) who used falsified ID and employment forms. In an all-too-rare occurrence, an executive from an employment agency that provided workers for Wornick was indicted last week for flouting immigration rules and faking documents. Last year, a measly four employers faced criminal prosecution for immigration employment violations.
There are countless Pollyannas in the political, media and intellectual elite who continue to downplay the dangers of open borders. "Better intelligence" will solve the problem, they argue naively. "We are a nation of immigrants," they preach cluelessly. "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande," they babble pointlessly.
Meanwhile, the patient and undeterred minions of Osama bin Laden dispatched from abroad are here. Others are cooperating with other immigration outlaws to wreak havoc on our security. Not far from Bush's Crawford ranch, there are ominous signs that al Qaeda has teamed up with illegal alien smugglers from Mexico to bring new operatives through the southern border. The feds recently disclosed that suspected al Qaeda operative Adnan Shukrijumah -- a young Saudi pilot on the run since Sept. 11 -- met with the notorious El Salvador-based gang/alien smuggling operation, Mara Salvatrucha.
And in southern Arizona, site of the final presidential debate, the illegal Arab alien smuggling route known as "Terrorist Alley" is as unprotected as ever. Unknown numbers of al Qaeda in America have fraudulent identification, which enables them (like their Sept. 11 predecessors) to blend into the vast sea of 13 million other immigration outlaws who have little fear of getting caught. It doesn't help matters when Bush's own border security undersecretary, Asa Hutchinson, states publicly that it's "not realistic" for his own officers to try to do their jobs and deport law-breakers.
In an even more shameful betrayal, the White House is now reportedly pressuring stalwart House Republicans into scrapping important immigration enforcement provisions of the House Intelligence Bill that speed up the deportation process and bar illegal aliens from obtaining valuable driver's licenses or using easy-to-fake foreign consular ID cards. Why? Because they are politically unpopular with ethnic constituencies.
This race is not just about who is better able to hunt down and destroy our enemies abroad. It's about who is more willing to hunt them down right here, jail them, kick them out and keep them out of our home. President Bush has shown he can stand up to the international Axis of Weasels. He must show the same resolve against La Raza, the immigration lawyers and Teddy Kennedy.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Yankees: Time hasn't healed wounds of Lee, Nettles
By Steve Politi
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- Sure, the Yankees and Red Sox hate each other now, but someday down the road, when their playing careers are long over, they will really, really hate each other.
Just ask Bill Lee and Graig Nettles.
The two were involved in some of the most heated games in the history of the rivalry during the 1970s, including a classic brawl at Yankee Stadium in May 1976 in which Nettles threw Lee to the ground and damaged his pitching shoulder.
Both retired from baseball long ago, moved to different corners of the country and started new lives. So Lee has forgiven and forgotten, right?
"Yeah, I keep a photo of Nettles in my back pocket, as a reminder," Lee said in a phone interview from his Vermont farm. "I keep it face down on the right cheek of my (butt). The smell and the view from there are not so good for him."
Nettles, after walking off a golf course near his new home in Knoxville, Tenn., added: "We all got along pretty well. The only people that didn't get along are myself and Bill Lee."
To truly understand the source of their anger, you have to slip back into a different generation. A shipping magnate named George Steinbrenner had just bought the Yankees, which was a franchise in chaos. The Red Sox were the better team, confident they could finally win the big game and end their World Series drought.
(Well, some things never change.)
Bill Lee, a left-hander from Burbank, Calif., won 17 games three seasons in a row ('73, '74 and '75) for the Red Sox, but to most, "The Spaceman" was known more for his outrageous opinions and antics.
"I'm a kind of guy who stirs the pot," Lee said. "That's my goal in life. I've always stirred it and stirred it well."
Nettles joined the Yankees in 1973 and was regarded as one of the finest defensive third basemen in the sport -- and during his 11 seasons with the club, one of the toughest players in pinstripes.
Which made him and Lee natural antagonists.
On May 20, 1976, the animosities came to their apex. The Yankees were leading 1-0 in the sixth inning at Yankee Stadium. With two outs and the bases empty, Lee gave up singles to Lou Piniella and Nettles. Otto Velez also singled to right, and Piniella charged home.
Catcher Carlton Fisk blocked the plate, and the throw from outfielder Dwight Evans was perfect. Piniella, however, was not about to slow down. He plowed into Fisk.
Fisk and Piniella began to trade punches on the ground, and the benches and bullpens emptied. If you thought the Game 3 brawl in the ALCS last year was intense -- the one in which Pedro Martinez went lawn bowling with Don Zimmer's head -- you weren't alive in 1976. This was a different level.
Lee grabbed Velez, who had joined the melee from second base. Mickey Rivers jumped Lee from behind. Then, Nettles arrived and threw Lee to the ground.
"We had had an earlier fight, and (Lee) accused us of fighting like Times Square hookers, scratching with our nails and hitting with our purses," Nettles said. "Well, I wanted to make sure we got some punches in to show him how tough the Times Square hookers were in those days."
Lee said he always suspected that Nettles intentionally targeted him, a hunch he said was confirmed last month when, at a Yankees-Red Sox reunion banquet in the Morristown area, Nettles confessed. (Nettles denies this.)
"It was good to see him, since he's withering away," Lee said of the encounter with Nettles. "He spoke about it, and he said he was doing it intentionally to keep me out of the game. I didn't mind anything in the heat of the battle as long as it wasn't premeditated. The statute of limitations may be up legally, but not morally."
The damage to his shoulder was serious -- Lee finished 5-7 that season and was never the same pitcher (although he did go 16-10 for the Expos in 1979) -- and the rivalry changed dramatically, too. Lee believes it was that moment that things started to shift in the Yankees' favor, and on this point, Nettles agrees.
The night of the game, Lee left the hospital and went to a bar with a few of his teammates. Much to their surprise, he said, in walked Lou Piniella, who sat down, bought them a round and apologized.
Lee was not impressed.
"What else was he going to say?" Lee said at the time. "There were three of us and one of him."
By Steve Politi
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- Sure, the Yankees and Red Sox hate each other now, but someday down the road, when their playing careers are long over, they will really, really hate each other.
Just ask Bill Lee and Graig Nettles.
The two were involved in some of the most heated games in the history of the rivalry during the 1970s, including a classic brawl at Yankee Stadium in May 1976 in which Nettles threw Lee to the ground and damaged his pitching shoulder.
Both retired from baseball long ago, moved to different corners of the country and started new lives. So Lee has forgiven and forgotten, right?
"Yeah, I keep a photo of Nettles in my back pocket, as a reminder," Lee said in a phone interview from his Vermont farm. "I keep it face down on the right cheek of my (butt). The smell and the view from there are not so good for him."
Nettles, after walking off a golf course near his new home in Knoxville, Tenn., added: "We all got along pretty well. The only people that didn't get along are myself and Bill Lee."
To truly understand the source of their anger, you have to slip back into a different generation. A shipping magnate named George Steinbrenner had just bought the Yankees, which was a franchise in chaos. The Red Sox were the better team, confident they could finally win the big game and end their World Series drought.
(Well, some things never change.)
Bill Lee, a left-hander from Burbank, Calif., won 17 games three seasons in a row ('73, '74 and '75) for the Red Sox, but to most, "The Spaceman" was known more for his outrageous opinions and antics.
"I'm a kind of guy who stirs the pot," Lee said. "That's my goal in life. I've always stirred it and stirred it well."
Nettles joined the Yankees in 1973 and was regarded as one of the finest defensive third basemen in the sport -- and during his 11 seasons with the club, one of the toughest players in pinstripes.
Which made him and Lee natural antagonists.
On May 20, 1976, the animosities came to their apex. The Yankees were leading 1-0 in the sixth inning at Yankee Stadium. With two outs and the bases empty, Lee gave up singles to Lou Piniella and Nettles. Otto Velez also singled to right, and Piniella charged home.
Catcher Carlton Fisk blocked the plate, and the throw from outfielder Dwight Evans was perfect. Piniella, however, was not about to slow down. He plowed into Fisk.
Fisk and Piniella began to trade punches on the ground, and the benches and bullpens emptied. If you thought the Game 3 brawl in the ALCS last year was intense -- the one in which Pedro Martinez went lawn bowling with Don Zimmer's head -- you weren't alive in 1976. This was a different level.
Lee grabbed Velez, who had joined the melee from second base. Mickey Rivers jumped Lee from behind. Then, Nettles arrived and threw Lee to the ground.
"We had had an earlier fight, and (Lee) accused us of fighting like Times Square hookers, scratching with our nails and hitting with our purses," Nettles said. "Well, I wanted to make sure we got some punches in to show him how tough the Times Square hookers were in those days."
Lee said he always suspected that Nettles intentionally targeted him, a hunch he said was confirmed last month when, at a Yankees-Red Sox reunion banquet in the Morristown area, Nettles confessed. (Nettles denies this.)
"It was good to see him, since he's withering away," Lee said of the encounter with Nettles. "He spoke about it, and he said he was doing it intentionally to keep me out of the game. I didn't mind anything in the heat of the battle as long as it wasn't premeditated. The statute of limitations may be up legally, but not morally."
The damage to his shoulder was serious -- Lee finished 5-7 that season and was never the same pitcher (although he did go 16-10 for the Expos in 1979) -- and the rivalry changed dramatically, too. Lee believes it was that moment that things started to shift in the Yankees' favor, and on this point, Nettles agrees.
The night of the game, Lee left the hospital and went to a bar with a few of his teammates. Much to their surprise, he said, in walked Lou Piniella, who sat down, bought them a round and apologized.
Lee was not impressed.
"What else was he going to say?" Lee said at the time. "There were three of us and one of him."
Monday, October 11, 2004
From James Lileks:
I flipped on Thursday when Peter Beinhart of the New Republic was on Hugh’s show; if I recall correctly, he countered Kerry’s outright fib about Shinseki by noting that Bush had lied about the war. Well. Now. He was a little worked up at the time, which is not unusual; Mr. Beinhart is a smart fellow, but for God’s sake he goes from zero to hysteria in six seconds. It’s one thing to inch towards the lifeboat when you overhear the crew talking about icebergs ahead; it’s another to run around shrieking like a little girl with a spider in her hair because you’re watching the movie “Titanic” and discover cubes of frozen water in your jumbo Coke. Doom and panic and fear and pessimism over and over and over again, coupled with historical revisionism, slavish devotion to French diplomats and castigation of Anglophone allies: not a parade I wish to join. If he was a bit worked up at the time and tossed the remark out for theatrical purposes, fine. We all toss grenades from time to time. But it's still shrieky nonsense. If Bush lied about WMD, then we are truly living in "1984" - but it's the writers and editors who are willingly stuffing old clips down the memory hole, and doing so of their own volition. If that's the case, who needs Big Brother when you can count on his many little cousins?
Finally, this from the NYT, ably dissected by the Volohkians:
When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
Tony Soprano doesn’t take over schools and shoot kids in the back. The doxies of the Bunny Ranch don’t train at flight schools to ram brothels into skyscrapers.
A nuisance?
A nuisance? I don’t want the definition of success of terrorism to be “it isn’t on the rise.” I want the definition of success to be “free democratic states in the Middle East and the cessation of support of those governments and fascist states we haven’t gotten around to kicking in the ass yet.” I want the definition of success to mean a free Lebanon and free Iran and a Saudi Arabia that realizes there’s no point in funding the fundies. An Egypt that stops pouring out the Jew-hatred as a form of political novacaine to keep the citizens from turning their ire on their own government. I want the definition of success to mean that Europe takes a stand against the Islamicist radicals in their midst before the Wahabbi poison is the only acceptable strain on the continent. Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn't a nuisance. It's war.
But that's not the key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we were.
But when we were there we were blind. When we were there we losing. When we were there we died. We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there. Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nighmares are their dreams.
We have to get back to the place we were.
No. We have to go the place where they are.
I flipped on Thursday when Peter Beinhart of the New Republic was on Hugh’s show; if I recall correctly, he countered Kerry’s outright fib about Shinseki by noting that Bush had lied about the war. Well. Now. He was a little worked up at the time, which is not unusual; Mr. Beinhart is a smart fellow, but for God’s sake he goes from zero to hysteria in six seconds. It’s one thing to inch towards the lifeboat when you overhear the crew talking about icebergs ahead; it’s another to run around shrieking like a little girl with a spider in her hair because you’re watching the movie “Titanic” and discover cubes of frozen water in your jumbo Coke. Doom and panic and fear and pessimism over and over and over again, coupled with historical revisionism, slavish devotion to French diplomats and castigation of Anglophone allies: not a parade I wish to join. If he was a bit worked up at the time and tossed the remark out for theatrical purposes, fine. We all toss grenades from time to time. But it's still shrieky nonsense. If Bush lied about WMD, then we are truly living in "1984" - but it's the writers and editors who are willingly stuffing old clips down the memory hole, and doing so of their own volition. If that's the case, who needs Big Brother when you can count on his many little cousins?
Finally, this from the NYT, ably dissected by the Volohkians:
When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
Tony Soprano doesn’t take over schools and shoot kids in the back. The doxies of the Bunny Ranch don’t train at flight schools to ram brothels into skyscrapers.
A nuisance?
A nuisance? I don’t want the definition of success of terrorism to be “it isn’t on the rise.” I want the definition of success to be “free democratic states in the Middle East and the cessation of support of those governments and fascist states we haven’t gotten around to kicking in the ass yet.” I want the definition of success to mean a free Lebanon and free Iran and a Saudi Arabia that realizes there’s no point in funding the fundies. An Egypt that stops pouring out the Jew-hatred as a form of political novacaine to keep the citizens from turning their ire on their own government. I want the definition of success to mean that Europe takes a stand against the Islamicist radicals in their midst before the Wahabbi poison is the only acceptable strain on the continent. Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn't a nuisance. It's war.
But that's not the key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we were.
But when we were there we were blind. When we were there we losing. When we were there we died. We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there. Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nighmares are their dreams.
We have to get back to the place we were.
No. We have to go the place where they are.
From georgewbush.com:
Remarks by Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in Conference Call Today
Monday, October 11, 2004
ARLINGTON, VA - Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered the following remarks in a Bush-Cheney '04 conference call today:
"For some time, and including when I spoke at the Republican Convention, I’ve wondered exactly what John Kerry’s approach would be to terrorism and I’ve wondered whether he had the conviction, the determination, and the focus, and the correct worldview to conduct a successful war against terrorism. And his quotations in the New York Times yesterday make it clear that he lacks that kind of committed view of the world. In fact, his comments are kind of extraordinary, particularly since he thinks we used to before September 11 live in a relatively safe world. He says we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.
"I’m wondering exactly when Senator Kerry thought they were just a nuisance. Maybe when they attacked the USS Cole? Or when they attacked the World Trade Center in 1993? Or when they slaughtered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972? Or killed Leon Klinghoffer by throwing him overboard? Or the innumerable number of terrorist acts that they committed in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, leading up to September 11?
"This is so different from the President’s view and my own, which is in those days, when we were fooling ourselves about the danger of terrorism, we were actually in the greatest danger. When you don’t confront correctly and view realistically the danger that you face, that’s when you’re at the greatest risk. When you at least realize the danger and you begin to confront it, then you begin to become safer. And for him to say that in the good old days – I’m assuming he means the 90s and the 80s and the 70s -- they were just a nuisance, this really begins to explain a lot of his inconsistent positions on how to deal with it because he’s not defining it correctly.
"As a former law enforcement person, he says ‘I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it.’ This is not illegal gambling; this isn’t prostitution. Having been a former law enforcement person for a lot longer than John Kerry ever was, I don’t understand his confusion. Even when he says ‘organized crime to a level where it isn’t not on the rise,’ it was not the goal of the Justice Department to just reduce organized crime. It was the goal of the Justice Department to eliminate organized crime. Was there some acceptable level of organized crime: two families, instead of five, or they can control one union but not the other?
The idea that you can have an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening. How do you explain that to the people who are beheaded or the innocent people that are killed, that we’re going to tolerate a certain acceptable [level] of terrorism, and that acceptable level will exist and then we’ll stop thinking about it? This is an extraordinary statement. I think it is not a statement that in any way is ancillary. I think this is the core of John Kerry’s thinking. This does create some consistency in his thinking.
"It is consistent with his views on Vietnam: that we should have left and abandoned Vietnam. It is consistent with his view of Nicaragua and the Sandinistas. It is consistent with his view of opposing Ronald Reagan at every step of the way in the arms buildup that was necessary to destroy communism. It is consistent with his view of not supporting the Persian Gulf War, which was another extraordinary step. Whatever John Kerry’s global test is, the Persian Gulf War certainly would pass anyone’s global test. If it were up to John Kerry, Saddam Hussein would not only still be in power, but he’d still be controlling Kuwait.
"Finally, what he did after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, where I guess at that point terrorism was still just a nuisance. He must have thought that because that’s why he proposed seriously reducing our intelligence budget, when you would think someone who was really sensitive to the problem of terrorism would have done just the opposite. I think that rather than being some aberrational comment, it is the core of the John Kerry philosophy: that terrorism is no different than domestic law enforcement problems, and that the best we’re ever going to be able to do is reduce it, so why not follow the more European approach of compromising with it the way Europeans did in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s?
"This is so totally different than what I think was the major advance that President Bush made – significant advance that he made in the Bush Doctrine on September 20, 2001, when he said we’re going to face up to terrorism and we’re going to do everything we can to defeat it, completely. There’s no reason why we have to tolerate global terrorism, just like there’s no reason to tolerate organized crime.
"So I think this is a seminal issue, this is one that explains or ties together a lot of things that we’ve talked about. Even this notion that the Kerry campaign was so upset that the Vice President and others were saying that he doesn’t understand the threat of terrorism; that he thinks it’s just a law enforcement action. It turns out the Vice President was right. He does and maybe this is a difference, maybe this is an honest difference that we really should debate straight out. He thinks that the threat is not as great as at least the President does, and I do, and the Vice President does."
Remarks by Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in Conference Call Today
Monday, October 11, 2004
ARLINGTON, VA - Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered the following remarks in a Bush-Cheney '04 conference call today:
"For some time, and including when I spoke at the Republican Convention, I’ve wondered exactly what John Kerry’s approach would be to terrorism and I’ve wondered whether he had the conviction, the determination, and the focus, and the correct worldview to conduct a successful war against terrorism. And his quotations in the New York Times yesterday make it clear that he lacks that kind of committed view of the world. In fact, his comments are kind of extraordinary, particularly since he thinks we used to before September 11 live in a relatively safe world. He says we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.
"I’m wondering exactly when Senator Kerry thought they were just a nuisance. Maybe when they attacked the USS Cole? Or when they attacked the World Trade Center in 1993? Or when they slaughtered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972? Or killed Leon Klinghoffer by throwing him overboard? Or the innumerable number of terrorist acts that they committed in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, leading up to September 11?
"This is so different from the President’s view and my own, which is in those days, when we were fooling ourselves about the danger of terrorism, we were actually in the greatest danger. When you don’t confront correctly and view realistically the danger that you face, that’s when you’re at the greatest risk. When you at least realize the danger and you begin to confront it, then you begin to become safer. And for him to say that in the good old days – I’m assuming he means the 90s and the 80s and the 70s -- they were just a nuisance, this really begins to explain a lot of his inconsistent positions on how to deal with it because he’s not defining it correctly.
"As a former law enforcement person, he says ‘I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it.’ This is not illegal gambling; this isn’t prostitution. Having been a former law enforcement person for a lot longer than John Kerry ever was, I don’t understand his confusion. Even when he says ‘organized crime to a level where it isn’t not on the rise,’ it was not the goal of the Justice Department to just reduce organized crime. It was the goal of the Justice Department to eliminate organized crime. Was there some acceptable level of organized crime: two families, instead of five, or they can control one union but not the other?
The idea that you can have an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening. How do you explain that to the people who are beheaded or the innocent people that are killed, that we’re going to tolerate a certain acceptable [level] of terrorism, and that acceptable level will exist and then we’ll stop thinking about it? This is an extraordinary statement. I think it is not a statement that in any way is ancillary. I think this is the core of John Kerry’s thinking. This does create some consistency in his thinking.
"It is consistent with his views on Vietnam: that we should have left and abandoned Vietnam. It is consistent with his view of Nicaragua and the Sandinistas. It is consistent with his view of opposing Ronald Reagan at every step of the way in the arms buildup that was necessary to destroy communism. It is consistent with his view of not supporting the Persian Gulf War, which was another extraordinary step. Whatever John Kerry’s global test is, the Persian Gulf War certainly would pass anyone’s global test. If it were up to John Kerry, Saddam Hussein would not only still be in power, but he’d still be controlling Kuwait.
"Finally, what he did after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, where I guess at that point terrorism was still just a nuisance. He must have thought that because that’s why he proposed seriously reducing our intelligence budget, when you would think someone who was really sensitive to the problem of terrorism would have done just the opposite. I think that rather than being some aberrational comment, it is the core of the John Kerry philosophy: that terrorism is no different than domestic law enforcement problems, and that the best we’re ever going to be able to do is reduce it, so why not follow the more European approach of compromising with it the way Europeans did in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s?
"This is so totally different than what I think was the major advance that President Bush made – significant advance that he made in the Bush Doctrine on September 20, 2001, when he said we’re going to face up to terrorism and we’re going to do everything we can to defeat it, completely. There’s no reason why we have to tolerate global terrorism, just like there’s no reason to tolerate organized crime.
"So I think this is a seminal issue, this is one that explains or ties together a lot of things that we’ve talked about. Even this notion that the Kerry campaign was so upset that the Vice President and others were saying that he doesn’t understand the threat of terrorism; that he thinks it’s just a law enforcement action. It turns out the Vice President was right. He does and maybe this is a difference, maybe this is an honest difference that we really should debate straight out. He thinks that the threat is not as great as at least the President does, and I do, and the Vice President does."
Good review by Roger Ebert of Friday Night Lights. One actor who Ebert doesn't single out that deserves to be mentioned is Lucas Black. As a teenager, Black fulfills the promise he showed in the short lived TV series American Gothic and in an earlier Billy Bob Thornton film, Sling Blade. Friday Night Lights is not just one of the best sports movies ever made, it's one of the best at showing the pressures endured by adolescents while transitioning to adults, particularly in a place as sports crazed as Odessa in 1988.
Friday Night Lights
More than a game
By Roger Ebert / Oct 7, 2004
Release Date: 2004
Ebert Rating: 3.5 Stars
"You have the responsibility of protecting this team and this school and this town." -- Coach Gary Gaines
Protecting them against what? We're not talking about war here, we're talking about high school football. And yet as "Friday Night Lights" unfolds, we begin to understand: The role of the team is to protect against the idea that the town is inconsequential and its citizens are insignificant. If Gaines can lead the Odessa Permian team to a state championship, that will prove that Odessa is a place of consequence, a center of power and glory. Well, won't it?
Certainly there are countless citizens in that Texas town who lead happy and productive lives and are fulfilled without depending on high school football. We just don't meet any of them in the movie, which focuses on the team, the coach and the local boosters -- adults who define themselves in terms of their relationship to the team. These people are obsessed beyond all reason with winning and losing, and the pressure they put on the kids and their coach is relentless. "Take us to state, Coach," one booster tells Gaines in a supermarket parking lot. "Or what?" asks Gaines. Or else. "Are we going to be moving again?" the coach's young daughter asks after a defeat. "No, honey," says her mother, but Gaines answers: "possibly."
Gaines is played by Billy Bob Thornton in another great performance in the past 12 months that have already supplied two other proofs of what a skilled actor he is: He played the drunken title character in "Bad Santa," and Davy Crockett in "The Alamo." The man has range, and he has a command of tone, too. Santa was over the top, but his Coach Gaines is a private man, inward, who finds it wise to keep his thoughts to himself. Consider the scene where he's told that his star player's injury won't prevent him from playing. Look at his eyes. He has reason to believe he is being lied to. He has reason to hope he is not. The player is Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), a motormouth with a giant talent that comes wrapped in ego. When one of his teammates accused him of not working out in the weight room, he explains that his gift is "God-given." But in the first game of the season, he injures his knee. He pretends it's nothing. Eventually, the uncle who is raising him (Grover Coulson) takes him to Midland for an MRI, which reveals a badly torn ligament. Boobie dismisses the doctor as a Midland fan "jealous of Odessa," and he and his uncle tell the coach he's ready to play. He isn't. Because he depended on sports for his future, because he doesn't read very well, there is a moment when he sits on the porch and watches some garbage men at work and contemplates his future.
The movie is based on real life, described the best seller Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream, by H.G. Bissinger. It depicts Odessa as a town consumed by high school football; its stadium is larger than those at many colleges. Local talk radio keeps up a steady drumbeat of criticism against Gaines. "They're doing too much learning in the schools," one caller complains.
The movie has been directed by Peter Berg not as character studies but as emotional snapshots. We catch on who the key characters are. Others are never identified. Gaines has enormous focus and can deliver a powerful message at halftime, but he understands better than anyone else that football is only a game. Unfortunately, his job is not only a game, and so he must take football very seriously; his job is not to protect the town and the school, but to protect his family. At dinner parties, in restaurants, everywhere he goes, he undergoes an endless stream of comments, criticism, suggestions, threats masked as praise. The way Thornton plays him, Gaines reminds me of Hemingway's definition of courage: grace under pressure.
There is something pathetic about a grown man still living his life in terms of high school, and that's the case with Charles Billingsley (played with great power by the country singer Tim McGraw). He still wears his ring from Odessa's championship team of 20 years earlier and bullies his son Don (Garrett Hedlund), who is a receiver on the team. When Don fumbles early in the season, Charles actually walks onto the field to chew him out. He slaps him around, trash-talks him, gets drunk and directs a withering stream of sarcasm at the kid -- and has a revealing moment when he tells Don that high school football will be the high point of his life.
I started in journalism at 15, as a sportswriter covering high school football. I thought it was the most important thing on earth. But it was more innocent in those days. At what point in American history did the phrase "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" get replaced by "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"? Today's teams are like surrogate nations for their fans. When your team wins, it enhances you.
Oddly enough, despite all these undertones, "Friday Night Lights" does also work like a traditional sports movie, and there's enormous tension and excitement at the end, when everything comes down to the last play in the state finals. The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.
"Friday Night Lights" reminded me of another movie filmed in West Texas: "The Last Picture Show," set 50 years ago. In that one, after the local team loses another game, the players catch flak everywhere they go. It's gotten worse. I'll bet if you phoned talk radio in Odessa and argued that high school football is only a game, you'd make a lot of people mad at you. The poor kids who play it are under cruel pressure. One of the team members tells a friend, midway through the season: "I just don't feel like I'm 17."
Cast & Credits
Coach Gaines: Billy Bob Thornton
Mike Winchell: Lucas Black
Don Billingsley: Garrett Hedlund
Boobie Miles: Derek Luke
Brian Chavez: Jay Hernandez
Ivory Christian: Lee Jackson
Chris Comer: Lee Thompson Young
Charles Billingsley: Tim McGraw
L.V. Miles: Grover Coulson
Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Berg. Written by Berg and David Aaron Cohen. Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for thematic issues, sexual content, language, some teen drinking and rough sports action).
Friday Night Lights
More than a game
By Roger Ebert / Oct 7, 2004
Release Date: 2004
Ebert Rating: 3.5 Stars
"You have the responsibility of protecting this team and this school and this town." -- Coach Gary Gaines
Protecting them against what? We're not talking about war here, we're talking about high school football. And yet as "Friday Night Lights" unfolds, we begin to understand: The role of the team is to protect against the idea that the town is inconsequential and its citizens are insignificant. If Gaines can lead the Odessa Permian team to a state championship, that will prove that Odessa is a place of consequence, a center of power and glory. Well, won't it?
Certainly there are countless citizens in that Texas town who lead happy and productive lives and are fulfilled without depending on high school football. We just don't meet any of them in the movie, which focuses on the team, the coach and the local boosters -- adults who define themselves in terms of their relationship to the team. These people are obsessed beyond all reason with winning and losing, and the pressure they put on the kids and their coach is relentless. "Take us to state, Coach," one booster tells Gaines in a supermarket parking lot. "Or what?" asks Gaines. Or else. "Are we going to be moving again?" the coach's young daughter asks after a defeat. "No, honey," says her mother, but Gaines answers: "possibly."
Gaines is played by Billy Bob Thornton in another great performance in the past 12 months that have already supplied two other proofs of what a skilled actor he is: He played the drunken title character in "Bad Santa," and Davy Crockett in "The Alamo." The man has range, and he has a command of tone, too. Santa was over the top, but his Coach Gaines is a private man, inward, who finds it wise to keep his thoughts to himself. Consider the scene where he's told that his star player's injury won't prevent him from playing. Look at his eyes. He has reason to believe he is being lied to. He has reason to hope he is not. The player is Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), a motormouth with a giant talent that comes wrapped in ego. When one of his teammates accused him of not working out in the weight room, he explains that his gift is "God-given." But in the first game of the season, he injures his knee. He pretends it's nothing. Eventually, the uncle who is raising him (Grover Coulson) takes him to Midland for an MRI, which reveals a badly torn ligament. Boobie dismisses the doctor as a Midland fan "jealous of Odessa," and he and his uncle tell the coach he's ready to play. He isn't. Because he depended on sports for his future, because he doesn't read very well, there is a moment when he sits on the porch and watches some garbage men at work and contemplates his future.
The movie is based on real life, described the best seller Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream, by H.G. Bissinger. It depicts Odessa as a town consumed by high school football; its stadium is larger than those at many colleges. Local talk radio keeps up a steady drumbeat of criticism against Gaines. "They're doing too much learning in the schools," one caller complains.
The movie has been directed by Peter Berg not as character studies but as emotional snapshots. We catch on who the key characters are. Others are never identified. Gaines has enormous focus and can deliver a powerful message at halftime, but he understands better than anyone else that football is only a game. Unfortunately, his job is not only a game, and so he must take football very seriously; his job is not to protect the town and the school, but to protect his family. At dinner parties, in restaurants, everywhere he goes, he undergoes an endless stream of comments, criticism, suggestions, threats masked as praise. The way Thornton plays him, Gaines reminds me of Hemingway's definition of courage: grace under pressure.
There is something pathetic about a grown man still living his life in terms of high school, and that's the case with Charles Billingsley (played with great power by the country singer Tim McGraw). He still wears his ring from Odessa's championship team of 20 years earlier and bullies his son Don (Garrett Hedlund), who is a receiver on the team. When Don fumbles early in the season, Charles actually walks onto the field to chew him out. He slaps him around, trash-talks him, gets drunk and directs a withering stream of sarcasm at the kid -- and has a revealing moment when he tells Don that high school football will be the high point of his life.
I started in journalism at 15, as a sportswriter covering high school football. I thought it was the most important thing on earth. But it was more innocent in those days. At what point in American history did the phrase "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" get replaced by "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"? Today's teams are like surrogate nations for their fans. When your team wins, it enhances you.
Oddly enough, despite all these undertones, "Friday Night Lights" does also work like a traditional sports movie, and there's enormous tension and excitement at the end, when everything comes down to the last play in the state finals. The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we get all wound up.
"Friday Night Lights" reminded me of another movie filmed in West Texas: "The Last Picture Show," set 50 years ago. In that one, after the local team loses another game, the players catch flak everywhere they go. It's gotten worse. I'll bet if you phoned talk radio in Odessa and argued that high school football is only a game, you'd make a lot of people mad at you. The poor kids who play it are under cruel pressure. One of the team members tells a friend, midway through the season: "I just don't feel like I'm 17."
Cast & Credits
Coach Gaines: Billy Bob Thornton
Mike Winchell: Lucas Black
Don Billingsley: Garrett Hedlund
Boobie Miles: Derek Luke
Brian Chavez: Jay Hernandez
Ivory Christian: Lee Jackson
Chris Comer: Lee Thompson Young
Charles Billingsley: Tim McGraw
L.V. Miles: Grover Coulson
Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Peter Berg. Written by Berg and David Aaron Cohen. Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for thematic issues, sexual content, language, some teen drinking and rough sports action).
From The Chicago Sun-Times:
Edwards has a little growing up to do
By Mark Steyn
In the vice presidential debate, Republicans thought Dick Cheney won and Democrats thought John Edwards won. I can understand both those judgments. In the first presidential debate, however you measured it, George W. Bush performed badly. But in the clash of veeps it was as if each contestant was playing his own game: One guy was playing a tennis match, the other football. If you thought you were watching the Super Bowl, the football guy was clearly the winner. If you thought you were at Wimbledon, the tennis guy was serving aces.
One way to understand their isolation from each other is to picture each one trying the other's game. Imagine John Edwards gruffly running through cool hard-realist evaluations of just the facts, ma'am. Imagine Dick Cheney wallowing in mawkish hardscrabble anecdotes about his impoverished dad sitting at the kitchen table. In fact, Cheney had an impoverished dad, he just doesn't flaunt him the way Edwards does. I loved Cheney's performance because I think he's in tune with the times: grown-up, unflashy, deadly serious. Edwards, on the other hand, driveling on like a Depression-era sob sister about the ''bright light'' of America now ''flickering'' is one of the funniest acts I've seen. I thought he was supposed to be a slick ambulance-chaser, like Richard Gere in ''Chicago,'' but apparently he prefers the Little Mary Sunshine role.
I don't care about Edwards' dad and his heartwarming, sepia-hued vignettes any more than I cared about the mythical ''coatless girl'' he used to cite in his primary speeches: a wee shivering thing whose coatlessness was supposedly a result of Bush-Cheney reducing her parents to poverty. I offered to buy a coat for any authentically coatless girl the campaign managed to produce. Not the most generous offer on my part -- girls' winter coats are $9.99 at Wal-Mart -- but the Edwards camp never took me up on it. Do you recognize this Dickensian image of America? It's true there are some folks who are having a tough time finding work in certain Rust Belt states. In 2003, the U.S. unemployment rate was 6 percent, which is considered high. In Canada it was 7.8 percent; France 9.7 percent; Germany 10.5 percent -- and in the last two cases these levels are permanent features of the landscape, as they would be in America if the Democrats ever get the opportunity to impose the Franco-German high-cost social welfare/government health care system John Kerry admires so much. America's ''bright light'' isn't ''flickering.'' It's Europe where the lights are about to go out, permanently.
So, when John Edwards starts doing his John-Boy Walton routine, I say put a sock in it. If necessary, borrow a sock from the coatless girl, if her dad hasn't sold her socks to raise the trolley-car fare to send her for an interview for the chimney sweep's job at the robber baron's mansion on the other side of town.
I think the Edwards smarmarama is ridiculous. It's all about oil, as the anti-war lefties say, and on Tuesday night the oiliness was practically oozing through the TV screen and all over the floor. If every Democratic candidate was as unctuous and oleaginous as Edwards, gas would be 50 cents a gallon and we could tell the Saudis to go to hell.
But, for all the press raves Edwards gets, real hard votes have been hard to come by. In primary season, he was the insurgent who never insurged; his smarmy condescension was regarded as a winning act by the media bigshots because that's how they treat the American people, too. But, with the exception of second place in Iowa, he was a bust.
And yet, if you're as invested as the Democrats are in reconstructing the cardboard facade of Sept. 10, I can understand why you'd think Pretty Boy did a grand job last Tuesday. That's what my tennis/football analogy boils down to: One team's playing by Sept. 11 rules, the others are running a Sept. 10 campaign. I find it hard to believe that 51 percent of folks in states totaling 270 electoral votes are willing to cast a delusional ballot to return to the fictions of Sept. 10. But, if they are, so be it. If a majority of Americans want to pretend that the U.N. isn't a sewer of corruption and that the French are America's allies, not Saddam's, well, we'll just have to live with the consequences.
Asked about his qualifications to be vice president and thus -- in the event of John Kerry being felled by a grisly windsurfing tragedy -- president and commander in chief, John Edwards talked about what ''the American people want in their president and in their vice president.'' First, he said, ''they want to know that their president and their vice president will keep them safe.''
Oh, phooey. That would be a neat line if the American people had all got lead-poisoning and hired you to file the all-time class-action suit on their behalf. But no president can guarantee safeness in unsafe times. What he can do is demonstrate the necessary will to roll back the threat and exterminate it, and encourage the American people to maintain that resolve, too -- as Churchill did in Britain's darkest hour, after the fall of France and with German invasion imminent, when he told the people ''you can always take one with you.'' In time of war, free peoples don't stay free if they look to a smooth-talking shyster-president to shelter them in the embrace of the nanny-state.
The strongest force in international affairs is inertia. It's everywhere: a continuous pressure from the U.N., the EU, the Chinese, the Arab League, the State Department and half the federal bureaucracy to do nothing about anything -- do nothing about the Sudanese genocide until everyone's dead, do nothing about Iran's nuclear program until it's complete and the silos are loaded, do nothing about anything except hold meetings and issue statements of concern. To resist the allure of inertia will require enormous will, not just from the president but from the American people. After the vice presidential debate, it was said by many on the right that Dick Cheney came over as the grown-up and John Edwards as the callow youth. But that goes for the audience too. Cheney treated the American people as grown-ups, Edwards condescended to the electorate as a nation of coatless girls. He's wrong, I hope.
Edwards has a little growing up to do
By Mark Steyn
In the vice presidential debate, Republicans thought Dick Cheney won and Democrats thought John Edwards won. I can understand both those judgments. In the first presidential debate, however you measured it, George W. Bush performed badly. But in the clash of veeps it was as if each contestant was playing his own game: One guy was playing a tennis match, the other football. If you thought you were watching the Super Bowl, the football guy was clearly the winner. If you thought you were at Wimbledon, the tennis guy was serving aces.
One way to understand their isolation from each other is to picture each one trying the other's game. Imagine John Edwards gruffly running through cool hard-realist evaluations of just the facts, ma'am. Imagine Dick Cheney wallowing in mawkish hardscrabble anecdotes about his impoverished dad sitting at the kitchen table. In fact, Cheney had an impoverished dad, he just doesn't flaunt him the way Edwards does. I loved Cheney's performance because I think he's in tune with the times: grown-up, unflashy, deadly serious. Edwards, on the other hand, driveling on like a Depression-era sob sister about the ''bright light'' of America now ''flickering'' is one of the funniest acts I've seen. I thought he was supposed to be a slick ambulance-chaser, like Richard Gere in ''Chicago,'' but apparently he prefers the Little Mary Sunshine role.
I don't care about Edwards' dad and his heartwarming, sepia-hued vignettes any more than I cared about the mythical ''coatless girl'' he used to cite in his primary speeches: a wee shivering thing whose coatlessness was supposedly a result of Bush-Cheney reducing her parents to poverty. I offered to buy a coat for any authentically coatless girl the campaign managed to produce. Not the most generous offer on my part -- girls' winter coats are $9.99 at Wal-Mart -- but the Edwards camp never took me up on it. Do you recognize this Dickensian image of America? It's true there are some folks who are having a tough time finding work in certain Rust Belt states. In 2003, the U.S. unemployment rate was 6 percent, which is considered high. In Canada it was 7.8 percent; France 9.7 percent; Germany 10.5 percent -- and in the last two cases these levels are permanent features of the landscape, as they would be in America if the Democrats ever get the opportunity to impose the Franco-German high-cost social welfare/government health care system John Kerry admires so much. America's ''bright light'' isn't ''flickering.'' It's Europe where the lights are about to go out, permanently.
So, when John Edwards starts doing his John-Boy Walton routine, I say put a sock in it. If necessary, borrow a sock from the coatless girl, if her dad hasn't sold her socks to raise the trolley-car fare to send her for an interview for the chimney sweep's job at the robber baron's mansion on the other side of town.
I think the Edwards smarmarama is ridiculous. It's all about oil, as the anti-war lefties say, and on Tuesday night the oiliness was practically oozing through the TV screen and all over the floor. If every Democratic candidate was as unctuous and oleaginous as Edwards, gas would be 50 cents a gallon and we could tell the Saudis to go to hell.
But, for all the press raves Edwards gets, real hard votes have been hard to come by. In primary season, he was the insurgent who never insurged; his smarmy condescension was regarded as a winning act by the media bigshots because that's how they treat the American people, too. But, with the exception of second place in Iowa, he was a bust.
And yet, if you're as invested as the Democrats are in reconstructing the cardboard facade of Sept. 10, I can understand why you'd think Pretty Boy did a grand job last Tuesday. That's what my tennis/football analogy boils down to: One team's playing by Sept. 11 rules, the others are running a Sept. 10 campaign. I find it hard to believe that 51 percent of folks in states totaling 270 electoral votes are willing to cast a delusional ballot to return to the fictions of Sept. 10. But, if they are, so be it. If a majority of Americans want to pretend that the U.N. isn't a sewer of corruption and that the French are America's allies, not Saddam's, well, we'll just have to live with the consequences.
Asked about his qualifications to be vice president and thus -- in the event of John Kerry being felled by a grisly windsurfing tragedy -- president and commander in chief, John Edwards talked about what ''the American people want in their president and in their vice president.'' First, he said, ''they want to know that their president and their vice president will keep them safe.''
Oh, phooey. That would be a neat line if the American people had all got lead-poisoning and hired you to file the all-time class-action suit on their behalf. But no president can guarantee safeness in unsafe times. What he can do is demonstrate the necessary will to roll back the threat and exterminate it, and encourage the American people to maintain that resolve, too -- as Churchill did in Britain's darkest hour, after the fall of France and with German invasion imminent, when he told the people ''you can always take one with you.'' In time of war, free peoples don't stay free if they look to a smooth-talking shyster-president to shelter them in the embrace of the nanny-state.
The strongest force in international affairs is inertia. It's everywhere: a continuous pressure from the U.N., the EU, the Chinese, the Arab League, the State Department and half the federal bureaucracy to do nothing about anything -- do nothing about the Sudanese genocide until everyone's dead, do nothing about Iran's nuclear program until it's complete and the silos are loaded, do nothing about anything except hold meetings and issue statements of concern. To resist the allure of inertia will require enormous will, not just from the president but from the American people. After the vice presidential debate, it was said by many on the right that Dick Cheney came over as the grown-up and John Edwards as the callow youth. But that goes for the audience too. Cheney treated the American people as grown-ups, Edwards condescended to the electorate as a nation of coatless girls. He's wrong, I hope.
From washingtontimes.com:
Marah's indie dilemma
By Scott Galupo
"Why aren't you guys huge?" Dave Bielanko of the Philadelphia-based rock band Marah gets that a lot. He never knows quite how to answer, and I don't blame him.
In the etiolated climate of the rock press and music-buff bloggers, explanations for why so-and-so-who's-way-better-than-what's-on-the-radio isn't a rock star range from "The music industry is run by philistines" to "People don't know good music from their elbow."
Oh, but when those attitudes prove false -- hey, is that Modest Mouse in regular MTV rotation? -- the hipsters are just as quick to cry "sellout" or "showbiz whore." They like their Liz Phair poor, indie and hungry, thank you very much.
Who'd want to navigate that minefield?
Mr. Bielanko, the band's singer-guitarist, doesn't play coy about how highly he thinks of Marah, which headlines tonight at Arlington's Iota Club & Cafe. "I honestly think we're one of the best American rock 'n' roll bands right now," he says on the phone from his Brooklyn home.
But he also says, believably, that he's wary of fame and overexposure. "I fear genuinely for a lot of the bands that are doing well," he says. "If things happen fast for you, there's no connection between the artist and fans."
Four albums and hundreds of gigs into a six-year professional career, there's no need to worry about the pitfalls of overnight success. Things haven't happened fast for the Bielankos, who grew up in Conshohocken, Pa., a suburb connected by the Schuylkill River (pronounced SKOO-kill) to downtown Philadelphia, the band's creative and business nucleus, if no longer its home.
Mr. Bielanko, 30, and older brother Serge Bielanko, 32, also a singer-guitarist in the band, lived primarily with their mother but developed an early taste for pop music from their father, a native Frenchman who played drums in a psychedelic rock band called the Troglodytes.
They heard Bruce Springsteen a lot on Philly radio stations such as WMMR and thought classic rock was OK, but they were more into pure punk bands such as the Ramones and the Replacements. Later, Dave Bielanko says, he "re-inspected Bruce and found him to be very punk rock and very street."
By now, Marah's sound warehouses just about every corner of American popular music, including doo-wop, Brill Building girl groups, country and soul. "We're an unusual case scenario," Mr. Bielanko says. "God knows what's going to happen to us."
Stop right there if you're thinking Marah is one of those self-satisfied, relentlessly eclectic bands that doesn't sell records, isn't truly interested in selling records and rationalizes its plight by saying it's better off not being rich and famous.
"I'm not a music elitist at all, and I hate it when rock journalists get like that," Mr. Bielanko says. Frankly, he'd love it if Marah's songs were heard on the radio. But radio stations aren't calling, and Marah still plays small clubs and struggles financially.
Marah is the perfect example of the wide gulf that's separating rock critics and their readers from casual music consumers -- and why that gulf is bad for rock music.
Unlike the movie industry, where there's a decent amount of overlap in art and commerce -- major studios have embraced independent movies to the point that they're producing indie-style movies of their own through boutique subsidiaries -- there's outright hostility between the increasingly insular word of indie rock and the wider mainstream.
I see a damaging, self-fulfilling symbiosis there. (Check out the down-and-out portrayal of the band Brian Jonestown Massacre in the forthcoming documentary "DIG!" to see what I mean.) Others blame radio-industry consolidation and the supposedly monopolistic Clear Channel.
You may disagree, but I think all the moaning about the doldrums of radio -- at a time when exposure of new music on the Internet and in specialty magazines is almost bewilderingly profuse -- is ridiculous: It usually comes from folks who jealously guard CDs they outwardly wish were more popular but inwardly congratulate themselves for discovering.
Where does this all leave Marah, a band that's neither hostile to nor particularly solicitous of the mainstream?
First, the band thrives in the one area that used to be critical for mainstream success -- media attention. The band has gotten more press in the past year than some acts get their entire careers. The novelist Nick Hornby wrote a loving tribute to Marah from no less a perch than the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. ("I can hear everything that I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows," he said.)
Marah also has influential fans in the music business. Nashville roots rocker Steve Earle brought the band into his Artemis Records stable, from which Marah released 2000's "Kids in Philly" and 2002's "Float Away With the Friday Night Gods." (The band released its latest, the superb "20,000 Streets Under the Sky," independently.) And Mr. Springsteen invited the Bielanko brothers to sing the old Eddie Floyd hit "Raise Your Hand" along with the E Street Band in front of 55,000 fans at Giants Stadium last summer.
The band also has garnered a reputation as a stellar live act. "Our job is to rock the club, and you can never lose touch with that, in a primal blues kind of way," Mr. Bielanko says. "It's about having a hootenanny."
In the end, though, it's left to us, the fans, to elevate a band from obscurity. But we need an attitude check. Instead of the kind of the snobbery and accusations of commercial betrayal that greeted Marah's "Friday Night Gods" album, we need to give artists space to, well, make a living -- at the very least, to pitch beyond the horizons of niche-driven indie rock.
Mr. Hornby, in his New York Times column in May, was onto something when he observed that OutKast's gigantic hit "Hey Ya!" last year "united races and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers." What "Hey Ya!" had, and what's missing amid all the smirks and poses of serious new rock music, Mr. Hornby wrote, is "ambition and exuberance."
Marah's got plenty of that, and tonight might be the last chance to see it for a while. Mr. Bielanko says Marah is writing a new album planned for springtime release. "We need to make something called a masterpiece," he says, "and then disappear for a while."
Marah's indie dilemma
By Scott Galupo
"Why aren't you guys huge?" Dave Bielanko of the Philadelphia-based rock band Marah gets that a lot. He never knows quite how to answer, and I don't blame him.
In the etiolated climate of the rock press and music-buff bloggers, explanations for why so-and-so-who's-way-better-than-what's-on-the-radio isn't a rock star range from "The music industry is run by philistines" to "People don't know good music from their elbow."
Oh, but when those attitudes prove false -- hey, is that Modest Mouse in regular MTV rotation? -- the hipsters are just as quick to cry "sellout" or "showbiz whore." They like their Liz Phair poor, indie and hungry, thank you very much.
Who'd want to navigate that minefield?
Mr. Bielanko, the band's singer-guitarist, doesn't play coy about how highly he thinks of Marah, which headlines tonight at Arlington's Iota Club & Cafe. "I honestly think we're one of the best American rock 'n' roll bands right now," he says on the phone from his Brooklyn home.
But he also says, believably, that he's wary of fame and overexposure. "I fear genuinely for a lot of the bands that are doing well," he says. "If things happen fast for you, there's no connection between the artist and fans."
Four albums and hundreds of gigs into a six-year professional career, there's no need to worry about the pitfalls of overnight success. Things haven't happened fast for the Bielankos, who grew up in Conshohocken, Pa., a suburb connected by the Schuylkill River (pronounced SKOO-kill) to downtown Philadelphia, the band's creative and business nucleus, if no longer its home.
Mr. Bielanko, 30, and older brother Serge Bielanko, 32, also a singer-guitarist in the band, lived primarily with their mother but developed an early taste for pop music from their father, a native Frenchman who played drums in a psychedelic rock band called the Troglodytes.
They heard Bruce Springsteen a lot on Philly radio stations such as WMMR and thought classic rock was OK, but they were more into pure punk bands such as the Ramones and the Replacements. Later, Dave Bielanko says, he "re-inspected Bruce and found him to be very punk rock and very street."
By now, Marah's sound warehouses just about every corner of American popular music, including doo-wop, Brill Building girl groups, country and soul. "We're an unusual case scenario," Mr. Bielanko says. "God knows what's going to happen to us."
Stop right there if you're thinking Marah is one of those self-satisfied, relentlessly eclectic bands that doesn't sell records, isn't truly interested in selling records and rationalizes its plight by saying it's better off not being rich and famous.
"I'm not a music elitist at all, and I hate it when rock journalists get like that," Mr. Bielanko says. Frankly, he'd love it if Marah's songs were heard on the radio. But radio stations aren't calling, and Marah still plays small clubs and struggles financially.
Marah is the perfect example of the wide gulf that's separating rock critics and their readers from casual music consumers -- and why that gulf is bad for rock music.
Unlike the movie industry, where there's a decent amount of overlap in art and commerce -- major studios have embraced independent movies to the point that they're producing indie-style movies of their own through boutique subsidiaries -- there's outright hostility between the increasingly insular word of indie rock and the wider mainstream.
I see a damaging, self-fulfilling symbiosis there. (Check out the down-and-out portrayal of the band Brian Jonestown Massacre in the forthcoming documentary "DIG!" to see what I mean.) Others blame radio-industry consolidation and the supposedly monopolistic Clear Channel.
You may disagree, but I think all the moaning about the doldrums of radio -- at a time when exposure of new music on the Internet and in specialty magazines is almost bewilderingly profuse -- is ridiculous: It usually comes from folks who jealously guard CDs they outwardly wish were more popular but inwardly congratulate themselves for discovering.
Where does this all leave Marah, a band that's neither hostile to nor particularly solicitous of the mainstream?
First, the band thrives in the one area that used to be critical for mainstream success -- media attention. The band has gotten more press in the past year than some acts get their entire careers. The novelist Nick Hornby wrote a loving tribute to Marah from no less a perch than the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. ("I can hear everything that I ever loved about rock music in their recordings and in their live shows," he said.)
Marah also has influential fans in the music business. Nashville roots rocker Steve Earle brought the band into his Artemis Records stable, from which Marah released 2000's "Kids in Philly" and 2002's "Float Away With the Friday Night Gods." (The band released its latest, the superb "20,000 Streets Under the Sky," independently.) And Mr. Springsteen invited the Bielanko brothers to sing the old Eddie Floyd hit "Raise Your Hand" along with the E Street Band in front of 55,000 fans at Giants Stadium last summer.
The band also has garnered a reputation as a stellar live act. "Our job is to rock the club, and you can never lose touch with that, in a primal blues kind of way," Mr. Bielanko says. "It's about having a hootenanny."
In the end, though, it's left to us, the fans, to elevate a band from obscurity. But we need an attitude check. Instead of the kind of the snobbery and accusations of commercial betrayal that greeted Marah's "Friday Night Gods" album, we need to give artists space to, well, make a living -- at the very least, to pitch beyond the horizons of niche-driven indie rock.
Mr. Hornby, in his New York Times column in May, was onto something when he observed that OutKast's gigantic hit "Hey Ya!" last year "united races and critics and teenagers and nostalgic geezers." What "Hey Ya!" had, and what's missing amid all the smirks and poses of serious new rock music, Mr. Hornby wrote, is "ambition and exuberance."
Marah's got plenty of that, and tonight might be the last chance to see it for a while. Mr. Bielanko says Marah is writing a new album planned for springtime release. "We need to make something called a masterpiece," he says, "and then disappear for a while."
Sunday, October 10, 2004
From The New York Times:
The Report That Nails Saddam
By David Brooks
Saddam Hussein saw his life as an unfolding epic narrative, with retreats and advances, but always the same ending. He would go down in history as the glorious Arab leader, as the Saladin of his day. One thousand years from now, schoolchildren would look back and marvel at the life of The Struggler, the great leader whose life was one of incessant strife, but who restored the greatness of the Arab nation.
They would look back and see the man who lived by his saying: "We will never lower our heads as long as we live, even if we have to destroy everybody." Charles Duelfer opened his report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with those words. For a humiliated people, Saddam would restore pride by any means.
Saddam knew the tools he would need to reshape history and establish his glory: weapons of mass destruction. These weapons had what Duelfer and his team called a "totemic" importance to him. With these weapons, Saddam had defeated the evil Persians. With these weapons he had crushed his internal opponents. With these weapons he would deter what he called the "Zionist octopus" in both Israel and America.
But in the 1990's, the world was arrayed against him to deprive him of these weapons. So Saddam, the clever one, The Struggler, undertook a tactical retreat. He would destroy the weapons while preserving his capacities to make them later. He would foil the inspectors and divide the international community. He would induce it to end the sanctions it had imposed to pen him in. Then, when the sanctions were lifted, he would reconstitute his weapons and emerge greater and mightier than before.
The world lacked what Saddam had: the long perspective. Saddam understood that what others see as a defeat or a setback can really be a glorious victory if it is seen in the context of the longer epic.
Saddam worked patiently to undermine the sanctions. He stored the corpses of babies in great piles, and then unveiled them all at once in great processions to illustrate the great humanitarian horrors of the sanctions.
Saddam personally made up a list of officials at the U.N., in France, in Russia and elsewhere who would be bribed. He sent out his oil ministers to curry favor with China, France, Turkey and Russia. He established illicit trading relations with Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and other nations to rebuild his arsenal.
It was all working. He acquired about $11 billion through illicit trading. He used the oil-for-food billions to build palaces. His oil minister was treated as a "rock star," as the report put it, at international events, so thick was the lust to trade with Iraq.
France, Russia, China and other nations lobbied to lift sanctions. Saddam was, as the Duelfer report noted, "palpably close" to ending sanctions.
With sanctions weakening and money flowing, he rebuilt his strength. He contacted W.M.D. scientists in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria and elsewhere to enhance his technical knowledge base. He increased the funds for his nuclear scientists. He increased his military-industrial-complex's budget 40-fold between 1996 and 2002. He increased the number of technical research projects to 3,200 from 40. As Duelfer reports, "Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem."
And that is where Duelfer's story ends. Duelfer makes clear on the very first page of his report that it is a story. It is a mistake and a distortion, he writes, to pick out a single frame of the movie and isolate it from the rest of the tale.
But that is exactly what has happened. I have never in my life seen a government report so distorted by partisan passions. The fact that Saddam had no W.M.D. in 2001 has been amply reported, but it's been isolated from the more important and complicated fact of Saddam's nature and intent.
But we know where things were headed. Sanctions would have been lifted. Saddam, rich, triumphant and unbalanced, would have reconstituted his W.M.D. Perhaps he would have joined a nuclear arms race with Iran. Perhaps he would have left it all to his pathological heir Qusay.
We can argue about what would have been the best way to depose Saddam, but this report makes it crystal clear that this insatiable tyrant needed to be deposed. He was the menace, and, as the world dithered, he was winning his struggle. He was on the verge of greatness. We would all now be living in his nightmare.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
The Report That Nails Saddam
By David Brooks
Saddam Hussein saw his life as an unfolding epic narrative, with retreats and advances, but always the same ending. He would go down in history as the glorious Arab leader, as the Saladin of his day. One thousand years from now, schoolchildren would look back and marvel at the life of The Struggler, the great leader whose life was one of incessant strife, but who restored the greatness of the Arab nation.
They would look back and see the man who lived by his saying: "We will never lower our heads as long as we live, even if we have to destroy everybody." Charles Duelfer opened his report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with those words. For a humiliated people, Saddam would restore pride by any means.
Saddam knew the tools he would need to reshape history and establish his glory: weapons of mass destruction. These weapons had what Duelfer and his team called a "totemic" importance to him. With these weapons, Saddam had defeated the evil Persians. With these weapons he had crushed his internal opponents. With these weapons he would deter what he called the "Zionist octopus" in both Israel and America.
But in the 1990's, the world was arrayed against him to deprive him of these weapons. So Saddam, the clever one, The Struggler, undertook a tactical retreat. He would destroy the weapons while preserving his capacities to make them later. He would foil the inspectors and divide the international community. He would induce it to end the sanctions it had imposed to pen him in. Then, when the sanctions were lifted, he would reconstitute his weapons and emerge greater and mightier than before.
The world lacked what Saddam had: the long perspective. Saddam understood that what others see as a defeat or a setback can really be a glorious victory if it is seen in the context of the longer epic.
Saddam worked patiently to undermine the sanctions. He stored the corpses of babies in great piles, and then unveiled them all at once in great processions to illustrate the great humanitarian horrors of the sanctions.
Saddam personally made up a list of officials at the U.N., in France, in Russia and elsewhere who would be bribed. He sent out his oil ministers to curry favor with China, France, Turkey and Russia. He established illicit trading relations with Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and other nations to rebuild his arsenal.
It was all working. He acquired about $11 billion through illicit trading. He used the oil-for-food billions to build palaces. His oil minister was treated as a "rock star," as the report put it, at international events, so thick was the lust to trade with Iraq.
France, Russia, China and other nations lobbied to lift sanctions. Saddam was, as the Duelfer report noted, "palpably close" to ending sanctions.
With sanctions weakening and money flowing, he rebuilt his strength. He contacted W.M.D. scientists in Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria and elsewhere to enhance his technical knowledge base. He increased the funds for his nuclear scientists. He increased his military-industrial-complex's budget 40-fold between 1996 and 2002. He increased the number of technical research projects to 3,200 from 40. As Duelfer reports, "Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem."
And that is where Duelfer's story ends. Duelfer makes clear on the very first page of his report that it is a story. It is a mistake and a distortion, he writes, to pick out a single frame of the movie and isolate it from the rest of the tale.
But that is exactly what has happened. I have never in my life seen a government report so distorted by partisan passions. The fact that Saddam had no W.M.D. in 2001 has been amply reported, but it's been isolated from the more important and complicated fact of Saddam's nature and intent.
But we know where things were headed. Sanctions would have been lifted. Saddam, rich, triumphant and unbalanced, would have reconstituted his W.M.D. Perhaps he would have joined a nuclear arms race with Iran. Perhaps he would have left it all to his pathological heir Qusay.
We can argue about what would have been the best way to depose Saddam, but this report makes it crystal clear that this insatiable tyrant needed to be deposed. He was the menace, and, as the world dithered, he was winning his struggle. He was on the verge of greatness. We would all now be living in his nightmare.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
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