(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)

There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once considered a career in journalism.

You can describe the game and gin up excitement with personal mannerisms the way television anchors increasingly do, or you can quietly shed light on the science of the game the way Cone (inset) does. He represents the difference between reporting as theater and reporting as insight.

When Cone tells you wrist and elbow action is as important as finger location in throwing strikes, you know a lot more than when another reporter tells you that you’ve just seen a changeup, which the camera has probably already told you. (more…)

Hickory dickory dock, Pillory Clinton is determined to turn back the clock, now borrowing $6.4 from herself in her Energizer Bunny effort to convince us we’re not ready to elect an African-American. That’s her message. She can disguise it with talk about Barack Obama’s inexperience and empty eloquence, but the message is we’re not ready to put racism behind us.

This quintessential power elitist and Washington insider will seemingly pillory the Illinois senator for anything she thinks will stick, including his so-called elitism, which is a scintilla of her own. In the name of giving us a real choice, she has buried the real issues under a heap of non-issues, such as her guileful gas tax holiday and the Jeremiah Wright flapdoodle. In the guise of being ready on Day One to take over she has demonstrated not only a startling hubris and pettiness but Washington dirt-mongering as usual. (more…)

There are many ways to walk down a street in New York City.

You can walk like the Grim Reaper, caring less.

You can walk as if people are supposed to notice you and reward them with an ostentatious, What’re you lookin’ at?

Or you can smile at the faces and demeanors you like and hope for the best. That’s not unlike taking an experimental drug. If it works it just may give you a new lease on life. If it doesn’t work, you’re just another unsung hero.

There are many other styles. Oblivious is good, if you’re seven feet tall or old and brittle. (more…)

Books have been written about why Americans vote against their best interests. I approach the question through the offices of my failing cook top. Leafing through Consumer Reports, it’s apparent to me I must spend at least $700 to replace it decently. That got me to thinking about all the other little marvels in CR and how Americans pay for them. Or not.

Here’s the disconnect, as I see it. If the corporados keep on dismantling the middle class, cutting wages and benefits and pensions, and shipping our jobs overseas, who are they going to sell all these goods to? Nothing wrong with publishing CR in Urdu and Chinese, of course, but this suggests another disconnect. (more…)

It’s often said Americans’ favorite fast food is the burger. I don’t believe it. I think it’s herring, red herring. I think the electorate these days hardly ever sees a diversionary tactic it doesn’t want to swallow in a single gulp.

You name it, the mythological connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and 9/11, single-payer national health care as socialized medicine, Social Security going bankrupt, gay marriage, right to life, family values, support the troops—all tactics to blind us to the simple fact that the gap between the rich and poor is growing every day, the middle class is disappearing, the government has been stolen by corporados, our elections are corrupted, and the republic is being turned into an imperium.

Some of these red herrings are whoppers, pure and simple, such as the Saddam-9/11 connection and national health care as socialized medicine. Other red herrings contain a truth twisted to suit politics. For example, the Social Security System will go bankrupt only if we fail to raise the current $97,000 annual income to which Social Security tax is applied. The slogan, support the troops, has been twisted to mean that you can’t support them if you disagree with President Bush’s war policies.

Other red herrings are legitimate issues in their own right, such as gay marriage, right to life and family values. They’re red herrings because they’re used to whip up a frenzy in certain political bases while blinding the members of those bases to the fact that their economic futures and their civil rights are being abridged. It’s like bumping into a busy man on the street to distract him from the fact you’re picking his pocket.

I think we love red herrings for the same reason we love fast food in general—it’s quick and easy. True, we get fat and sick, but that’s later. Meanwhile, lies and half-truths taste better than truth. Besides, we don’t taste the food, we taste what we put on it, and in the case of politics, the salt and fat is spin.

We can’t keep on wolfing down fast food and stay healthy, and the republic can’t keep on swallowing red herrings and stay healthy.

—DM

—

A calamity has befallen me as a baseball lover. One expects calamities of old age, of course, but not absurd calamities. I’ve begun to find it too painful to watch the other side lose. It doesn’t matter which other side.

I’m a Yankee fan, and this season has been harrowing. There has been the exhilaration of watching
Alex Rodriguez make history and yet dreading his post-season clutch-ups. There has been the sorrow of watching the noble Joe Torre under obscene pressure from the front office. There has been the exquisite anguish of wondering what keeps going wrong with the Yankees’ chemistry. And finally there has been the recognition that I no longer wish anybody to lose. What I really enjoy is seeing the winners pour out of the dugout in pure joy.

True, I like watching the Yankees win more than I like watching The Tribe win, but the more familiar a team is to me (the Red Sox, say) the more I enjoy their triumphs. If you had told me when I was twenty that the only part of the game some old man liked was watching the winners celebrate I would have put it down to senility. But I can still write a satisfactory poem, so it’s hard to think myself senile. On the other hand, maybe that’s how senility is: you can win a Nobel Prize one day and be a silly fool the next day or maybe even on the podium. (more…)

Every spring a grand obsession to suppress the lowly dandelion berserks Americans. I’ve never understood it. I love dandelions, their indomitable sauciness. Perhaps Americans are offended by them in the way they might be by flecks of dandruff on a black canvas by Robert Motherwell. Perhaps dandelions offend the purist in them. To me they redress the unrelieved boredom of the greensward.

I’m perfectly willing to tend my roses, to fertilize trees, shrubbery and flowers, but why I should poison the beloved earth to ruthlessly track and kill the wondrously complex dandelion is beyond me. They cheer me as much as birds at their feeders outside my kitchen window in winter. I understand why golfers despise them, about as much, that is, as I understand golfers.

There’s a grass seed advertisement running on television now in which a woman brightly chirps, We don’t like dandelions. Perhaps it was the dark mood I was in, but the comment reminded me of all those hot topics, like gay marriage, our society uses to divert itself from the simple task of treating each other decently, a task from which no religion could honorably dissent.

I understand why they’re not the favorite flowers of baseball and tennis players, since they don’t abide rules. But as a gardener I’d much rather spend money on another rose bush than walk run around executing these guest stars scattered on the grass, to borrow a phrase from Omar Khayyam.

—DM

When President Clinton said gravely and with seeming candor, I did not have sex with that woman, his disservice to truth was foul enough, but his disservice to decency was worse. What I hold against this man who in many ways I admire are the words that woman. He owed Monica Lewinsky better, and he owed half the human race much better.

Now when I watch Attorney General Alberto Gonzales trying to convince us that he didn’t directly have a hand in the run-up to firing eight federal prosecutors because they weren’t supporting the Administration’s effort to convince us of widespread Democratic Party vote fraud, it reminds me of all those months President Bush told us he was just following the advice of his commanders in Iraq.

There they are, our chief lawyer, and the commander in chief, the decider, telling us they’re just heeding their underlings. Imagine Alexander the Great taking his commanders’ advice at Gaugamela. This is chicken government, if you can call it government at all.

For a president who effects a swaggering style this is certainly the cheesy story the schoolyard bully hands the cops. Just doing what I was told. The President from the get-go set up his generals as fall guys, and he’s still doing it. And now we have his attorney general doing it.

We deserved better from Bill Clinton and we deserve better from The Decider Ltd.

Is there a pattern here?

—DM

You can tell a lot about the turns your life took and didn’t take by remembering the childhood games you liked and didn’t like. I didn’t like Hide-and-Seek because I didn’t think anybody would come looking for me. The more I think about this the more I remember there weren’t too many playmates I wanted to come looking for me.

The point at which the game went bad for me, really bad, was when I learned to hide too well. I hid so well I lost myself and went home without me, and the boy who grew up wasn’t me. I was still hiding in the sea oats along Great South Bay.

Then there was Skip to My Lou. It’s a game of stealing partners. A boy stands in a circle of skipping partners. He picks one of the girls and her partner takes the boy’s place in the circle. Every group has its politics. I knew which girl I was supposed to pick, and I didn’t want to pick her. The consequence of picking the wrong girl was ostracism, which was preferable to sucking up to the powers that be. I think the game imbued me with a lifelong aversion to playing anybody’s game for any reason. Since it was a game involving a circle it was necessarily a game of insiders, which may have instilled in me the conviction I was a born outsider. Circles may very well sign eternity, but they also seal out outsiders, and consequently I have never felt comfortable in them. Whenever I meet a rigged game or a stacked deck I think of Skip to My Lou.

There was a 1931 movie called Skip the Maloo, which is how it sounds when most people say My Lou, but the movie didn’t shed any light on the game or its origins. Some people say Lou is Scottish for love. I have a friend who thinks it may be French for place, in which case one might be skipping to fabled Medieval land of Cockaigne.

Ask me who I picked. The girl I wanted to pick, of course. And, boy, was there a price! Story of my life.

(Note: An old friend, Davis Oldham, writes to remark that when the
lyrics of Skip to My Lou are published a stanza that exemplifies modernist poetry and is redolent of William Carlos Williams‘ work is often omitted:
Little red wagon painted blue
Little red wagon painted blue
Little red wagon painted blue
Skip to my lou my darling.)

—DM

Do violent games make people violent or are violent people drawn to violent games?

Back in the 1960s my two daughters used to watch The Three Stooges
on television every Saturday morning. One Saturday one of them—I can’t remember which one—hit the other one with a skillet, just as she’d seen
the Stooges do.

I thought of that recently when I read an interview with a New York City homicide detective who said the hardest part of his job was trying to get his mind around the fact that a fourteen-year-old couldn’t get his mind around the fact that he’d terminated a human life.

I myself “killed” an untold number of people in childhood games, remorselessly, with no second thoughts. And that was before video games. It’s true I didn’t grow up to kill anybody, but I’m convinced I might have had a great deal more empathy for others had it not been for those games. They certainly don’t teach us to walk in each other’s shoes, do they?

I said I didn’t grow up to kill anybody. I also didn’t grow up very fast. In fact, I’m still trying to grow up. I have a sense about what helped me grow up. Books did, violent games didn’t. I think baseball did, I’m not so sure about hockey, both of which I love.

My guess—I’ll be long gone before there’s any evidence one way or another—is that violent games, and all video games, are slowly and surely reorganizing the architecture of the human brain. If I could choose the architects, the designers of violent games wouldn’t be among them. I don’t trust such people, not even when they say they just do it for the money. They could do a lot of other things for money. People rob banks for money. These people may be robbing human evolution; we don’t know for a fact they are, and we don’t know they’re not.