Tom Watson

Scene and Heard - Sunday Edition

Did any readers see the Democratic "debate" this week from South Carolina? I saw some of it and made a point to watch some video highlights as well. And it's early, there were eight voices, and Mike Gravel is still in the race - so it doesn'tcount for much, I guess. But I must say I was shocked - by how well Hillary Clinton did, how well Joe Biden did, and how poorly Barack Obama and John Edwards performed: almost the inverse of my debating/style expectations going in. You know I lean mightly towards Hillary, but don't expect a clear win on the debate trail - she's a brilliant woman and a wonk's wonk, and she learned how to grind it out in New York State. But trouncing all those fellas? That was impressive.

In any case, here's a trove from my occasional remainders bin - links and notes:

First, my own stuff elsewhere. I covered the Milken Global Conference in LA last week, and my onPhilanthropy.com mainbar is here (look for the sidebar links, too); a slightly different take for HuffPo is here. While I was there, I had the pleasure of listening to Kirk Douglas and meeting him briefly - an event I described at newcritics. At 90, he's a beautiful old man.

Glenn Greenwald wonders why the Beltway media is so far behind what is an obvious story to him: "When is the last time Democrats were so unified in their defiance of Wise Beltway Wisdom, which endlessly warns them not to adhere to their beliefs too steadfastly or to defy Republican decrees, especially on foreign policy?"

When a certain ex-mayor said this, "America will be safer with a Republican president”...Keith Olbermann systematically took the argument apart, piece by piece. Devastating.

Jim Wolcott bemoans the loss of Rosie on The View and somehow finds some insight into the "post-Imus era" and what it means to the Republican presidential hopefuls. Now that's media criticism.

Like Greenwald and Wolcott, Lance Mannion also sees major woes for the national Republican Party - "If you are an honorable young conservative who believes the rules ought to apply to everybody, there simply is no place for you in the Republican Party."

Over at the increasingly-impressive new Shakesville, Melissa McEwen wonders if Fox News has finally hit rock bottom - "The fact that Fox News’ 'facts' generally aren’t true means that they are regularly sending, with no compunction whatsoever, their ready-made terrorist brigade to harass, intimidate, and threaten people for no reason whatsoever.

In a nice post on academic qualifications in mid-career, I discover that Gara LaMarche and I have something very specific in common: "I am happy to have gone to Columbia because the Ivy League degree allowed a small-town Catholic boy with no connections to be taken more seriously, particularly when I was starting out.  But what I learned or didn't learn there (sorry, Lee Bollinger) has little to do with my subsequent career." Me too!

Neddie Jingo has another one of his wonderful Northern Virgina history/archaeology posts - I love when blogs like Neddie's go hunting in the past.

Lastly, M.A. Peel finds Shakespeare references in Sabah El Kair Iraq—an Iraqi morning show from Al Iraqiya. And we thought they hated us for our cultural freedom.

Dodger Town

As the Jet Blue engines rumbled and warmed, the man with the lighted directional sticks stood on the tarmac at Bob Hope Airport in sunny Burbank and did a boarding gate impersonation of Nomar Garciaparra. Oblivious to his audience along the right side of the jet - and waiting for the pilot to begin the "push-back" from the little terminal - he put his sticks together and stood in against an imaginary hurler. He cinched his trousers, and bandied his legs like one of those old Hollywood movie cowpokes. Took a compact swing. Stepped out. Adjusted wrist guards - pull, twist, nod. Then he stepped back in. Compact swing. This time, a long ball - he watched the flight of the ball, seemingly all the way to Glendale.

Three years after coming to LA as the down-at-the-heels former Boston folk hero who left just as the Sawx ended their legendary drought, Nomar is numero uno in Chavez Ravine, where I watched the Dodgers take on Bonds and the Giants last night, nestled in the second deck that is itself tucked into the hills  of Los Angeles. Garciaparra is the clean-up-hitting first-baseman now, the cool SoCal native who comes to the plate to the funky strains of "Low Rider," and the heavily Latino crowd in Dodger Stadium loves him for his style and production. It's a strange cultural mix really - Angelinos chanting "Nomah! Nomah!" as if they hailed from the streets of Roxbury.

[Photo: Chavez Ravine, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.]

Giants-Dodgers is supposed to be one of sport's great rivalries, but the franchise hatred was on a low simmer at bst last night. Oh, Bonds was booed lustily every time he batted or touched the ball. Two kids in front of me had concocted a makeshift sign that read simply "Steroids." They hoisted it between turns at the nacho tray, and when they heard I was from New York, they talked about their own trip to Gotham in excited terms.

"You been to Yankee Stadium?"

Many times, I answered.

"Yankee Stadium was incredible. What a place!"

Too bad Mayor Bloomberg is tearing it down, I told them.

They looked shocked, as if I'd told them President Bush planned to raze the Lincoln Memorial. So much for tradition.

Besides, I'm a Mets fan, I said. National League, all the way.

"Shea Stadium is a dump," volunteered the man next to me.

I couldn't but agree. Turns out my neighbor, a Mexican immigrant, had arrived in Los Angeles from Chicago two years before the Dodgers. He told mde about the first couple of years at the Coliseum, where they raised a huge screen in right-field to make a homerun down line at that gridiron a bit fairer. He recalled the greatness of Koufax and Drysdale and Campanella and Wills. His friend remembered having Carl Furillo at his house for dinner. "A fine gentleman" whose arm was every bit as strong as Koufax's.

As the less-successful Boston important Derek Lowe allowed the Giants to build a 4-0 lead and the, talk turned to Dodger Stadium itself. Designed by the same architect as Shea and configured in roughly the same layout, it has aged well - much better than the shell in Flushing. The people in Section 148 were clearly proud of their stadium, wedged into the hill at Chavez Ravine and only a freeway exit from downtown LA. The small touches made a difference: polite and uniformed staff, real draft beer, grilled Dodger Dogs, clean rest rooms, an inch or two of extra room in every seat. There was an obvious pride in the old place. Yeah, the fans arrived late and left early. But Dodger Stadium, after 45 years, still seems the place to be. Look, there's Paris Hilton. Hey, it's Larry King. And on the scoreboard: Kirk Gibson and Sandy Koufax. It all felt retro and simple and swell.

When Yankee Stadium is destroyed by Bloomberg to be replaced with a faux near-Yankee model nearby and the ghosts of Ruth and Gehrig have been banished by the Mayor from Boston, Dodger Stadium will be the third-oldest park in the Major Leagues, behind Fenway and Wrigley. There are no plans to replace it.

The former Dodgers owner is Rupert Murdoch - who spoke at the 10th annual Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, which I covered for onPhilanthropy. Murdoch went out of his way to defend President Bush, saying "there's a sort of monolithic attack on him every day of the year" and suggesting that Bush doesn't deserve it, that he's merely a bad communicator. In the next breath, he blamed media (other than his own) and the Democrats for creating an era of pure partisanship.

"The atmosphere is absolutely toxic. You can't really expect anything to be achieved in the next 18 months, and it's a very serious, sad problem for this country."

In truth, Murdoch was pretty much the only prominent voice defending the Bush Administration at Milken; even the conservative economists prett much dismissed the President as irrelevant, and suggested that the global markets have already come to the conclusion that the U.S. is winding down in Iraq.

Frankly, it made Murdoch seemed quaint - the angry, conservative media baron still working in his 90s snit. Fox is, of course, the subject of a rather serious boycott by the Democratic Presidential contenders that threatens to instantly rebbrand the network as a pure partisan opinionfest, removing it from the pantheon of "news" on cable television.

By contrast, the former Fox property out at Chavez Ravine has returned to its roots. All the signs and concession items emphasize a 60s era throwback look. The videos celebrate the history. And Los Angeles, which always feels older than New York to me, is Dodger Town once again.

He Do the Wango Tango

Tony Alva and I don't agree on all that much in the political spectrum, but we do concur on one key point: the world needs less of people like the lunatic former rock star Ted Nugent. The foolish editors at CNN.com, in their immature journalistic twitch to recruit a pro-gun voice to "balance" the anti-gun outcry post-Blacksburg, turned to the hateful 59-year-old machine-gun loving bully with the fake front teeth. Given the platform of millions of web visitors, he "balanced" our national dialogue thusly:

Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.

Anybody see what the evil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.

The once-poetic crooner of such lyrical megahits as Wang Dang Sweet Poontang has now inherited the national Charlton Heston mantle of surly manchild clutching a deadly weapon in gnarled old fingers whilst grinning like a maniac. (He serves as a national board member of the NRA). It's an important position in national politics, where a swath of the electorate reads the frontier-inspired 18th century Second Amendment with a literalism that rivals their parallel interpretation of the book of Genesis.

Of course, the one time the U.S. government tried to put a rifle in ole Teddy's hands, he quickly enrolled in a community college and took a student deferment. This was back in the late 60s, when Nugent was a young guitar-player out of Detroit. He never made the rice paddies of Vietnam, but he did brag to the Detroit Free Press: “... if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed all the Hippies in the foxholes. I would have killed everybody.”

This compelling American patriot he did turn up later as George Bush's ranching neighbor down in Texas, where attitudes towards a man's massive personal cache of deadly weapons is far more - uh - liberal than in suburban Michigan. In fact, Nugent has criticized President Bush for his strategy in Iraq: ""Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them."

The Nugent ranch is a fenced zoological park with all sort of "wild" species that the owner hunts down and kills for "sport." Nugent bragged to Salon that he attains:

"a full predator spiritual erection" from pursuing "bear, lions, coons, housecats, escaped chimps, small children, scared women, and everything else that can be chased and/or hunted."

Catch the violent sexual reference there to women and children, folks? Yet this guy is the celebrity front-man to the pro-gun movement - a very successful political drive to smack down increased regulation of deadly weapons in this country. A movement that all of the Republican candidates for President rushed to embrace before the bodies of Virginia Tech were even cold. Short version: "Terrible tragedy, prayers etc., don't touch the Second Amendment." This was before the candlelight vigils, before the funerals, before the last victim was even removed to the morgue.

Susan Grant is the executive vice president of CNN News Services, which runs CNN.com - the buck for allowing a maniac hater like Ted Nugent a national platform in the wake of Blacksburg stops with her. David Payne is senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com. The executive producer of CNN.com is Mitch Gelman, who once won a Pulitzer for reporting with Newsday. Remember the names - Susan Grant, David Payne, Mitch Gelman, and Ted Nugent - the four horse's asses of the apocalypse. People who promote reason like this in the interest of "discourse":

Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.

Thirty-two people dead on a U.S. college campus pursuing their American Dream, mowed-down over an extended period of time by a lone, non-American gunman in possession of a firearm on campus in defiance of a zero-tolerance gun ban. Feel better yet? Didn't think so.

Ol' Nuge is right about one thing. We don't feel better yet. Well done, CNN.

Phi Beta Con Artist

This is what passes for high-level conservative thought in that bastion of right-leaning American policy known as the National Review:

...thoughts also arise on the killer's being an English major and on the spiritual emptiness of much education nowadays.

That's right, blame Beowulf for the massacre at Virginia Tech. Or Swift or Shakespeare or Dickens. Those English professors at Blacksburg didn't hold the automatic weapon in their hands, but they provided so much spiritual emptiness with their endless lectures and seminars and blue books.

National Review education writer Carol Iannone - she of the snappy "Phi Beta Cons" blog - uses that throwaway line toward the end of a litany of blame. Indeed, she begins her post with this call to action: "Without judging or condemning anyone, we need to learn from this for the future."

After the hand-wringing about slow police response and the lack of a campus-wide warning after the first killings, Iannone trots out another aspect that she says "gnaws" at her:

I am sorry that no one had a gun to take the killer out before he could destroy more lives.

[snip]

We all need to learn to act, and not necessarily to rely on security and responders.  We are supposed to be at war. This was not an act of terrorism but it may as well have been, for the damage it caused. We must be wartime ready. 

Catch that? We are at war, and this episode was war-like in its bloody toll. Conclusion: students should be war-trained. This Buckley intellectual protege, this education expert has more:

And I'm sorry, some will really think me foolish, but I don't think dorms should be co-ed, so that crazed, jealous boyfriends can enter their girlfriends' dorms and kill them and the innocent young men who come to their aid.

That'll solve the jealous boyfriend problem at college campuses, alright. Won't be any more sexual tension if coed dorms are demolished. Your 18-22-year-old youngsters will just calm down and won't mess with those nasty hormonal surges anymore.

And keep them away from Jane Austen, too. Saucy minx that she is.

UPDATE: Another National Review scribe, John Derbyshire, blames the victims. Oh,and another conservative columnist has this take on manliness (hint: blame the gays):

Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.

Trainwrecks and the Madness of Crowds

The war was interrupted again on our national news media elite's menu again yesterday by the violent and tragic events in Blacksburg. The death-count crawls, the local officers in full SWAT turnout gear arriving post-mortem to stand behind skinny trees, the updates on the blustery weather ("it's very windy here, Wolf"), the video of stunned young Americans standing around in college sweatshirts.

One big story at a time - that's what we can handle, according to the suits. Flood the zone with sadness and remorse and plenty of idiocy: Dr. Phil ranting cluelessly against video games (there was no difference, by the way, between the "Dr. Phil" of Imus and the real thing); right-wingers talking about more guns in schools for defensive purposes. Everybody blaming the West Virginia cops.

The whole scene seemed unreal, clean, almost pristine. Virginia Tech, one of the first campuses in the country to launch wireless access (I wrote about it for the Times more than a decade ago), seemed surreally well-kept on the tube, outside of the line of ambulances and the heavily-armed late-to-arrive law enforcement. Hundreds of kids standing around. Very little blood, except for a few still images of victims being raced to medical facilities. A sea of calm surrounding a slow-motion bloodbath.

And what's to be learned from live, wall-to-wall coverage and alerts? Nothing. One madman, one evil diseased mind can do an awful lot of harm to precious human flesh; but we already knew that. Of all the posts I've read, I think Brendan Tween best captures the inherent media failure on days like yesterday; the media, he wrote:

...will be carrying news I don't want to hear about anymore. I know everything I need to know right now, thanks.

Once I heard "man shoots 50, killing 31, self; constable blunders", anyway.

We all need a moment to pause and absorb the magnitude of what has happened, to create our own inner space for something as large as the knowledge that 62 parents will go to bed tonight having defied nature by living longer than their children. With no good reason in the world.

No news show will give taxonomy to the madness of this kind of killer. No news-reader will give insight worth seeing.

UPDATE: Jason Chervokas has an interesting take on the failure of amateur and semi-pro journalists to really advance the story yesterday.

A Confederacy of Dunces

The "national dialogue" is nearly over. No one left to sponsor it, and no network suits willing to put it on the air in any case. Doesn't hit the right demographic any more. Imus is gone, into well-padded retirement or to Rupert Murdoch's morning zoo or to money-bleeding satellite oblivion like Stern. Next week, we'll be on to some other distraction from the obscene, blood-painted alleyways of Iraq. Some other celebrity will fall from grace, or overdose, or reveal a body part.

Imus famously called Dick Cheney a war criminal, hit Halliburton for refusing to contribute to a new hospital for wounded veterans, and has been a long and consistent critic of this dreadful failed war. He's also a gun-toting, Republican, Clinton-bashing apologist for Joe Lieberman. Even at 66, his brand of humor is simple and sophomoric, hearkening back to the some of the coarser skits and voices of the 60s when racial, sexual, and ethnic humor was new and fresh and shocking. Think Rickles and Mason, not Sahl and Newhart.

Yet he insisted on keeping this lame-ass, old shtick even as the rest of his show morphed into an A-list parade of pols and media figures - and even as Imus in the Morning brought the news to the radio each morning with some opinion, some reaction, some juice. Worse, he allowed and encouraged playground bullies like producer Bernard McGuirk to riff crudely on race and gender in the background, while occasionally apologizing with the contrite face of a proud father who really kind of loves his wayward son's antics.

McGuirk killed his sugar daddy, in the end. Killed him dead and put the whole Imus staff on the street. It was McGuirk who regularly used the term "ho" to describe women, particularly black women. See, it wasn't race or gender that lit this spark in the dry tinderbox of aging, old school Imus in the Morning. It was the combination. It was fathers and mothers with daughters who kindled the wider reaction (with a big hand from Al Sharpton). Those Rutgers women, when we all started to actually look at them as real people, were indeed stirring in their poise and accomplishment. Barbara at the Mahablog gets it exactly right, I think:

...there’s a big difference between Imus insulting the political and media elites who are guests on his program and calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” If he and his defenders can’t see that, there’s something seriously wrong with the lot of them.

Did Imus deserve to be fired? Yes, of course he "deserved" it - as if morality and ethics played even the tiniest part in the decisions made by the suits. The pure hypocrisy of Viacom's executive suite was stunning; their "outrage" grew in direct proportion to the dwindling of sponsors. When the calculations included Imus's shrinking ratings, his age, his ill health against future earnings and a likely boycott, the corporate chime rang down the hall from Sumner's office and a suitable lackey was dispatched to dispatch the I-Man - right in the middle of his annual charity drive.

I listened to Imus for about 20 minutes most weekdays over the last decade; it seems like pure rear-view mirror self-excusing, but I never enjoyed the stupid skits and the fake voices. I enjoyed the take on the news. Eleanor Clift describes it well:

His acerbic manner was a welcome contrast to the soft news and banal talk that dominated the morning shows. And he was an oddly compelling figure, ravaged by long ago battles with drugs and drink; he was like watching a train wreck in progress.

No excuses: I'm guilty of tolerating the hate speech, the slurs, the misogyny as much as the guests I loved to hear on the Imus hot seat. Nor was I "blind" to the bad stuff, as some regulars now claim; I was not culturally insensitive. I knew what I was doing. I gave Imus a pass because he delivered in other ways; his show was where the action was in morning drive-time politics.

Yeah, we're winding down the national dialogue on race and gender. It's getting as old as Imus. The portable circus that poses as our national news media will move on to the next town shortly. This was one of those stranger-than-fiction episodes - hell, the Governor of New Jersey was almost killed racing to the big Imus-Rutgers Summit. Maya Angelou spoke out in verse. Al Roker weighed in on his blog. Obama and Hillary dueled to see who could get with those power forwards from New Brunswick first. McCain and Giuliani ducked. Harold Ford and Tim Russert turned coat. Imus did the black friends defense. Then he held up the kids with cancer for the cameras. Then the broken soldiers down at Walter Reed. First he shot himself in the foot. Then he turned the gun on the more vital organs, and fired off a few more rounds. What a circus. Did I mention Maya Angelou?

At the middle was a mean old man insisting over and over again, "but I'm a good person." The skids were greased over time, however, and the old shock jock's legendary misanthropism did him no good. All his "friends" - the A-listers in it to sell books or build personal brands - melted away into the night. As David Hinkley wrote today:

The off-air Imus is happy to admit he really doesn't like people all that much. He's irritable, cranky and profane. Asked if Imus was a mean drunk, his friend Kinky Friedman replied, "He's mean when he's not drunk."

The profiles in courage at Viacom, meanwhile, have a big hole to fill. I'm sure it won't be too hard. After all, just down the dial from the spot where Imus was simulcast, Les Moonves and ole Sumner have another show on right now: "Pimp My Ride." Pimps - procurers and exploiters of women; sexual terrorists. Big man, Les Moonves. Big ethics, sitting on Sumner's craggy lap.

But they're probably tired of the national dialogue over at CBS now. The firing was a sure sign of it. I'll leave it here with Lupica:

Imus himself talked Monday morning about context and proportion and happened to be right. But by then nobody was really listening to one of the most famous voices in this country, one of the most famous voices his medium had ever produced.

Now all those who went after him as hard as they could, who acted as if the only solution was his firing, say they don't want this conversation about race and women and what has happened to the airwaves in this country to end with this firing.

Only they don't get to decide that. Because even after those three words and the perfect storm they caused, the best place to have the kind of conversation they are talking about would have been on the show they just got canceled.

Unstuck in Time

Over at newcritics, we're remembering Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday at age 84. Stop by and share your thoughts.

Dowdy Moody Time

Maureen Dowd is back, but the therapy didn't take. She's still railing against feminism on the national stage and the prominent American woman who is moving steadily toward the Presidency. The Imus regular did more than Don's two weeks, but she shares an ugly disdain for women in power with the I-man and his crappy-headed flows.

Imus often calls Hillary Clinton "Satan" and disparages the 60-something's weight and appearance, oblivious to the irony of his own ravaged, from-the-crypt visage criticizing a far more attractive human being. Somewhat lost in the Reverend Al super-charging of the racial side of Imus's casual, off-handed slur was the pure misogyny of the comment. "Ho" - as in whore - is easily the more degrading portion of the descriptive, the ringing, sex-based noun used by men to debase women, much worse than its semi-racial modifier.

How ironic then that MoDo returns as Imus is departing for his own "break," flailing in yet another embarrassing column as the only woman regular on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Say it again slowly. Anti-feminist, Imus-loving, insider Maureen Dowd is the only women with a slot on the NYT's altar of thought. Way to represent. Dowd was all-aglow at the paper's Tuesday Science Times section on human sexuality (clearly, she wrote, er, on deadline):

As Natalie Angier, The Times's biology expert, noted, research has shown that women differed from men "in the importance they accorded a man's physical appearance, with many expressing a comparatively greater likelihood of being aroused by evidence of talent or intelligence -- say, while watching a man deliver a great speech."

This could explain why many Republican women are so frustrated.

They have been deprived of the bristly excitement of hearing their men on the stump delivering great speeches for quite some time now.

Tongue in cheek? Nah. Dowd believes in the stupid-ass Mommy Party, Daddy Party cliche on Democrats and Republicans. She embraces it.

The Daddy Party, sick with desire for a daddy, is like a lost child. John McCain, handcuffed to the Surge, announced yesterday he has the support of Henry Kissinger. Why not just drink poison? As the Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi slyly said, "Leave it to Mitt Romney to shoot himself in the foot with a gun he doesn't own."

Yeah, the Daddy-lovers are all atwitter - nervous as hell about 2008 because a strong, virile man hasn't flexed for 'em. Meanwhile, the Mommy party - and Mommy herself - well, they're shrill, bitchy, all tied up in an annoying hormonal surge:

Like the panic in the Daddy Party, the crazed sputtering in the once-dominant Mommy Camp is something to behold.

Hillary has been wielding Bill as a bludgeon on support and money. If you were ever behind him, you'd better fall into line behind her. But doesn't that undermine her presentation of herself as a self-reliant feminist aiming to be the first Madame President? If you can only win by leaning so heavily on your man for your muscle, isn't that a benign form of paternalism?

Maureen Dowd cannot put finger to keyboard without attempting to scald the most prominent woman in the country, an even-odds choice for the White House. She recoils at feminism. She writes in crude sexual short-hand, utterly devoid of policy. And while she doesn't wear a cowboy hat, her disdain for women in power is as obvious as Bernard McGuirk's. She's just more long-winded.

As for Imus, I'm a listener; it's the rare forum where crass, soul-lacking politicians actually speak like human beings, where droning network talking heads let slip what they actually think. There's a pattern there, however. Too many easy slurs, too many mean-faced stereotypes. And it's become increasingly tacky to listen to old men do the wacky morning zoo routine in between serious interviews. Grow up. But I agree, basically, with Jim Wolcott's take:

There's a large dosage of hypocrisy here. Imus in the Morning was too popular for too long for everyone in the media to start throwing their hands up in disgust and dismay as if the show were some newly discovered blot on the landscape, a future leper colony. You don't thrive that long on the radio without a lot of people liking what you do--the chorus of disapproval he's receiving this week is so unanimous it reeks of bad faith.

UPDATE: Don Imus has been fired. MSNBC and CBS discovered the viper in their midst. And rapidly over the course of 30 years, they took decisive and morally courageous action to stamp it out. Profiles in courage, all.

The Second to Last Season

Opening Day 2007, originally uploaded by chilcott.

The cranes soar over the old blue fence in centerfield, and you can see the construction guys working the steel only fifty yards behind Carlos Beltran. Shea Stadium lives on borrowed time. Its replacement rises quickly in left and center.

We sat down the left-field line in the sun field, warm despite the cold April breeze. The usual opening day crowd was there: profane, over-served, and wearing blue pinstripes. "Rollins, you suuuuuuuck!" called the man in the Delgado jersey across the aisle, clearly perturbed at the Philly shortstop's preduction of Philadelphia domination in the National League East. Young Mr. Rollins did oblige, however, in living up the my neighbor's poetic description, booting a couple and keeping as huge Mets rally alive in the eighth.

Mets 11, Phillies 5.

In truth, this is a team that's damned hard to keep down. The lineup is deep and professional, and it's topped by the most exciting player in the game today. Jose Reyes is that rare talent: when he's due up, you don't leave the room. And he's driving Yankees fans crazy by being the best shortstop in New York; WFAN has become Jeter Defender Central - and no one's even attacking him.

I'll be among the few who will miss Shea Stadium when they tear it down after next season. I've spent so much of my life there - know every ramp, every concourse, every corner so well. I can remember the first time I came up a ramp in the upper deck and saw that field - deep, deep green; so different than the gray on our television set in 1970. Brilliant green, with Tommie Agee in center and Cleon Jones in left. Koosman on the mound. Couple of hundred games. Even a couple of Jets games back in the late 70s.

Shea was never really finished. It's the same basic design as Dodger Stadium, and went up the same year - now they're two of the oldest ballparks in the majors. They finished the work at Chavez Ravine, however; in Flushing, centerfield was left open. Now you can see the cranes doing their work. Building Citi Field, just a Dave Kingman blast past right-center.

They had a fly-over today for opening day. Which is hilarious, because they have fly-overs every day at Shea Stadium. Delta. American Airlines. Continental. They all do the Big Shea fly-over. So the Navy jet routine was a little louder and a little faster and a little more patriotic, I suppose. But we're used to the jets. The new stadium will actually be closer to the LaGuardia flight pattern, if you can believe it.

It's a New York obscenity that they're tearing down Yankee Stadium, a travesty engineered by the Red Sox fan in City Hall. But Shea probably deserves to go. It's a very old, very care-worn stadium and the sight-lines are terrible. I'll miss it though.

Luckily, Jose Reyes will be batting lead-off at the new field, game one. And he'll only be 25 years old.

More Twitter Poetry

I love Twitter, but not as much for the pure communications side ot it - I'm enjoying the flow of words. And I can't seem to helping pulling a few threads from the seemingly random nature of strangers' posts. So here are a few verses, pulled from Twitter's public stream and reassembled:

Day Begins

Up
Coffee and cleaning
I'm the duty person today at the office

About to pour myself another cup of coffee
Thinking about work
Getting nauseous

Hungry
Instead of staring at three blinking dots
I'm going to make a sandwich

Awake and fabulous!
Crazy pills!
Cooking!

Waking up, beginning the work day
Waiting for the bus
It's cold outside for a pimp

And another:

Worship Technology

Drinking Schweppes
Dreaming of derivative buddies
I have no time to revise my ethics
I am a miner for a heart of coal

Coding a hotkey, and then going to church
I really need to put my music under version control
Will handle all the funky calls that come in
Safe travel, Audio