* RADIO RANT: Women's Rights vs. Animal Rights?

Paul Zeise, a beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has created a new round of controversy in the Michael Vick saga by uttering the following on a Pittsburg talk show: "It's really a sad day in this country when . . . Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman [rather than running a vicious dog-fighting racket] . . . . Had he done that, he probably would have been suspended for [only] four games [rather than a year] and he'd be back on the field." To me, the meat of this new controversy is that several national sports commentators have come to Zeise's defense (e.g., John Fricke), via at least the implication that the current atmosphere of "political correctness" has led to a privileging of wild animals over our own women.

On one important level, these people are right, of course: Kobe Bryant and the legion of athletes charged with rape and spousal abuse have been getting mere hand-slaps from their leagues & teams, as the patriarchal game of wink-wink continues. They should be getting much more severe penalties. However, this issue is really independent of the Michael Vick episode; and the stance above, in its ostensible attempt to be anti-sexist, reveals once again an utter anthropocentrism: i.e., a human (woman) is more important than another animal. I, for one, believe that being instrumental in the violent deaths of many individuals of another species is a greater crime than the sexual abuse of any single member of our one species (whatever the gender). There, I've said it. Zeise, Fricke, et al. are wrong; it is hardly a "sad day," but a positive evolution in the general consciousness, in my mind. What is sad is that this debate seems to force one to pick & choose between women's rights and animal rights. But again, they're separate issues.

Of course I'm completely wrong in the "separate issue" thing, but this twist of an admission takes the argument to entirely different level. A major tenet of ecofeminism is that what the patriarchy does to women and "animals" (and to Natives and the environment) comes from the same source, an imperialist White male need to identify and ostracize an Other, including a propensity to commit violence against "her"—to maintain at last a master/slave, Self/Other, civilization/nature hierarchal binary, to reassure the Self of its superior status. What is truly surprising, then, is that these commentators are speaking of the two crimes as if they were fundamentally different things!

* Twins Surge?

As usual, the Minnesota Twins are making some noise in the second half of the season—despite Johan Santana's complaint about no major moves before the trading deadline. Unfortunately, they have two (pretty) good teams in the division to catch now (or several more teams in the wild-card race), and I don't think they have the pitching this year to make up for an inconsistent offense. But it is good see Joe Mauer's bat back; and Justin Morneau is simply a monster. But it'll boil down to timely hitting from the Jason Bartletts and Nick Puntos of the world, finally. (Remember who got the game-winning hit in the extra-inning Game 7 of the 1991 World Series? A relative nobody named Gene Larkin.)

But it was the 1987 World series champions that I most loved: with Puckett, Hrbek, Gaetti, Brunansky, and Viola. I wrote a song for/about them a few years later (country/folk chords & rhythm):

Big Kent Hrbek, well, he's our man--
We jut call him Hrby--
And Kirby Puckett's loved by the fans--
We just call him Kirby--
And Garry Gaetti, let's give him a hand--
We just call him the "G(ee-ee)-Man"--
The Twins'll take the Series with just these three:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."

They're Minnesota's blessed trinity:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G"--
For other teams this trio spells tragedy:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G"--
Over the shoulder or over the wall--
With a glove or a bat, they can do it all--
We could challenge the division with just these three:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."

At the start of ev'ry season, they're in first place:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G"--
They'll spoil it for someone when they're out of the race:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."--
Over the shoulder or over the wall--
Can't believe what they can do to that baseball--
The Twins could play the spoiler with just these three:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."--
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."-- [repeat & fade]

(The song's lyrical progression is based on the old baseball anecdote about beloved Chicago Cub, Ernie Banks: at the beginning of each season, he'd always say, "We're gonna win the pennant!"; midway through the season, he'd say, "We'll finish in the upper half of the league!"; and finally, when the Cubs were mired as usual in the cellar towards season's end: "We're gonna spoil it for somebody!")

* RADIO RANT: Jammin' w/ Junior to Judas Priest

ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd is quickly climbing the marble steps of my pantheon of most obnoxious radio personalities because of his dogmatic tone, his blithe "I'm right/you're wrong" certitude. When he reported this morning that the Jets had changed to Mozart as their training-camp music of choice and Cowherd lauded the move, an emailer objected that such a preference might connote a certain racial & cultural bias. Cowherd said simply (I paraphrase): "Nope. I'm right, and you're wrong: more smart people listen to Mozart [than to, say, hiphop & metal]. It's just a fact." Well, if you define "smart" people as those with a college degree and all that, no doubt a greater proportion of them listen to classical music. But that's because they've been conditioned by their socio-economic milieu to think that highbrow music is better. There is no cause/effect here: they didn't become 'smarter" (and ergo more future-college-worthy) because Mumsy played Mendelssohn in Sonny's nursery. The real cause&effect involves the monied class's traditional music of preference, a preference that has of course been imparted to their offspring. The actual scientific study, if I recall, simply found that exposure to the elaborate formalism of music from the Baroque and Classical periods of European concert music aided in the development of the brain in early childhood—and this makes perfect sense. But it is hardly a cultural-valuing endorsement of good old Eurocentric art: I'd guess that there are many types of "world" music that would fit the bill just as well here. Did they have their test subjects listen to the complex polyrhythms of African tribal drum groups? To the complex counterpoint of original Dixieland? (To the lyrics of Ozzie Osbourne?—just kiddin'. That the cause of MY stunted development.) I just hope the study was well controlled: obviously, if they just picked parents who "naturally" played Classical music to their kids, versus those who jammed out with junior to Judas Priest, there are a lot of other causal issues involved—again, largely socio-economic.

* Atlas (SHRUG!)

Teddy Atlas: now there's an articulate commentator for the sweet science of the squared circle. His too-obvious modus operandi: 1) Let's repeat that ONE point about a certain fighter's most obvious strength or weakness for 8 or 10 rounds (e.g.: "His strength is getting inside, and he's not doing it"); 2) let's try a metaphor: but make it so tortured that even a college freshman in English Lit cringes; 3) let's refer back to the fact that I (Teddy) once trained Mike Tyson, to attempt to recuperate any ethos that still remains.

* RADIO RANT: OverOverstatingstating the Obvious

The quandary of 24-hour cable sports news and of sports-radio-talkshow news &—especially—play-by-play commentary: why must these guys & gals forever be spouting the hackneyed & obvious? (Examples among myriads: the number of home runs Babe Ruth hit, either in his career or his best season; what the offsides rule in hockey [or soccer] is; the last year the Cubs won the World Series; how many feet a receiver needs in-bounds for a legal catch in college football; which NBA center "always" outplayed Wilt Chamberlain, even though Wilt scored 100 points in a single game; when a baserunner shouldn't risk making an out at third base; what a Maryland "Terrapin" is; what a rotten bastard Ty Cobb was, personally; why/how the NFL has surpassed baseball as our national pastime; etc., etc.) The most blatant criminals in this regard include Brent Musburger, Tim McCarver, Joe Morgan, and John Madden, and most of the ESPN and FOX Sports newswriters. We (sports fans) KNOW all this! Those who don't know such stuff aren't even watching/listening, because they obviously care little or nothing about sports in the first place. In sum, you're wasting all of our time in aiming this so-called enlightening info at an audience that doesn't exist. . . .

* John & Martha VI

À propos the Michael Vick dog-betting fiasco:

* RADIO RANT: Dog Eat Dog; Rich Wear Fur

The outrage by the talking heads on sports talk radio and cable news regarding the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal was understandably vehement—but so self-righteous. That is, all these people can be "right," but for the wrong reasons. "How inhumane! I'm a dog lover! All Americans love dogs!" But when the occasional "nut" called in suggesting that shooting deer and pheasants is no less barbaric, such discourse was dismissed as beyond the pale. Worst has been the pompous&supercilious attitude of ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd, whose elitist/urbanite biases distinguished themselves: pit-bull fighting is a despicable sport practiced especially by the poor, the rural, and the Southern (and the—shshshsh—black). You're so right, Colin. You city folk are immune to such first-hand visceral cruelty, with enough money to distance yourself from the inhumane (such an ironic term) factory farming that provides you with your veal parmesan and chicken Kiev, while your pasty-skinned lazy Euro-jet-trash-of-a-wife can't decide whether to wear a dead fox or mink, to cover her pastiness.

All this outrage is also completely anthropocentric: that is, it's all about us humans—including "man's best friend." There would certainly have been less outrage if Vick had been involved in cockfighting. Or how about terrapin matches? (Yeh, probably very lengthy affairs.) Or cricket bouts, to the death?! My point is that, if humankind has an innate biophilia (love of all life), it's still quite mammalo-centric: we love the animals that remind us most of us, that have fur, and cuddly babies . . . and maybe milk that we can feed to our own babies. And so, following my niece & nephew around the zoo gift shop last week, I wasn't surprised to see that nearly all of the stuffed animals were mammals. The few birds seemed unnatural and stiff and "distant"; the reptiles and insects were intentionally rubbery and "alien."

In fact, though my book-in-manuscript spends pages on end explaining the poets' age-old obsession with birds, I'm still rather surprised when people actually grow attached to them as pets. (I refuse to do so, being against caged birds in general.) But my wife, for one, treats her budgie as her best friend, though it shits on her shoulder all the time and bites the hell out of me when I show up. (Well, at least we and birds are both vertebrates: so, yeh, birds still kick ass on locusts as pets.) But I wonder if the average human mourns as much when his/her lovebird flies out the window in the middle of winter and never returns, compared to when old Fido gets run over by the neighbor's car. Birds, I guess, are somewhere between our mammal-compatriot dogs and cats—and that goldfish whose tombstone is the toilet-bowl lid. ("Mom! Where's Jimmy? He's not in his bowl!")

I've wandered far from Michael Vick to illustrate how problematic "animal rights" is. I don't even like that term ("rights" is a human legal construct, after all), preferring Lawrence Buell's phrase, "nonanthropocentric ethics." But that won't fit into a talking point or on a bumper sticker.

[Added same night:] Wow: it's pretty fascinating to learn, then, that Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank's reaction to his quarterback's legal problems has been belated because the fellow has been on vacation. In Africa. On safari.

* RADIO RANT: Sopranos End on Low Note?

I've never seen The Sopranos. (No HBO.) But from the shock & outrage on the morning talk shows (including sports talk shows, where everyone apparently feels qualified to don the hat of "Culture Critic" at will), there seems to be a great disconnect between the mainstream "philistine" and the postmodern in art. "There was no closure! Bah! Wah! Nothing freaking happened." Again, I didn't see it, but these reactions gave me a feeling of déjà vu: these were exactly my Intro to Lit students' reactions to short stories by, say, Donald Barthelme (and even Chekhov and Joyce, for that matter). "I missed the point, Tom. What happened?!" Well, stuff happens in these texts, on a more subtle level than in a Harlequin romance or detective potboiler—but no, there isn't some salient climax & denouement tying it up all nicely with a bow. There are many mannerisms of postmodern aesthetics that I'm none too fond of; but I do appreciate the implicit philosophy that there is no ending to life & nature—and therefore art & story; to expect/require one is only the imposition of a psyche & culture conditioned to do so. (Kinda like finding a gargoyle's face in a tree stump [see next blog], eh?)

* RADIO RANT: Fox Sports Flag-Wavers

I have nothing against Memorial Day in principle. (Well, maybe I do: are "we" supposed to be honoring U.S. troops who died in the 19th-c. "Indian Wars," too?) But I consciously had sports talk radio on in the background today to escape all the flag-waving on the cable news networks. However, Fox Sports Radio's segues today are little more than an extension of the Republican-P.R. arm of Fox News. Besides these constant reminders to remember our troops (including quots. from G. W.), how many sports-talk people have I heard in the last few days say something like—"Without our men in uniform, we wouldn't have the freedom to even be talking here." Ah, and what a freedom that is—to deliberate on whether the Yankees can make up a 12-and-a-half-game deficit in the American League East. John Fricke–whom I usually consider one of the more intelligent & articulate personalities on FSR—even said today that, without the troops, we wouldn't be able to enjoy "our braughts and beer"! And we wouldn't be able to surf for internet porn, and droolingly follow the tabloid reports on Lindsay Lohan, and freely & bravely choose—between Coke and Pepsi.

Obviously, our "freedoms" are much more limited than we commonly think, by the sheer ideological force of the discourses in which we live, speak, and act. The founder of French surrealism, André, once wrote, [Quot. of the Day:]

The man who cannot imagine a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

But, au contraire, the person who does imagine such things today is deemed psychotic. Politically, the U.S. political spectrum from the most radical liberalism to the most reactionary conservatism is but an iceberg-tip of ideational possibilities. Musically, the same old chord progressions and clich$eacute; lyrical hooks are recycled over and over, as if the really new would blow open the "doors of perception" that corporate capitalism must keep closed, or else. . . . I'm going to take a nap now, to better consider the opportunities of pRuNe CiRcUsEs and SiLiCoN lIzArDs. . . .

Wait—there's Memorial Day, on TV right now: it's Pat Boone, dressed in an American-flag suit, hawking his new book. Hmmm. I think he just called me a communist.

* RADIO RANT: "fair & balanced," stupid & wrong

Never mind that their top-of-the-hour radio news already offers the least content of any radio network, FOX News has now added these minute-or-so "human interest" segments at the end of (some of) their news feeds, apparently to placate or anaesthetize those who can barely stand more than a minute or two of world-news reality. Each one ends with—"from the audio archives of Fox News Talk," but they sound more like new segments made expressly for this purpose, as epilogue to their news. (For one thing, none of the voices are recognizable as known talk-radio people. [And, for better or worse, I should know!])

Well, the only two of these segments I've heard are just plain "stupid & wrong." #1: a fluff interview of Serena Williams, in which the interviewer begins, "You're probably the favorite at Wimbleton this year . . . ." Well, sentimental favorite, maybe, and perhaps the only woman tennis player the person-on-the-street knows, but I doubt if she'll even be seeded in the top four this year, unless she kicks ass at the French. Or—IF this is truly a dated archive from, say, two years ago, no such context is provided, and so the interview/story remains problematically misleading in its ostensible timeliness.

If #1 was a mere quibble, perhaps, witness #2. "Archive from the past" or not, in this segment, FOX truly shines: it's another fluff piece, this time on Ernest Hemingway, in which the speaker "ernest-ly" tells us that the famous American novelist and big-game hunter won the "Nobel Peace Prize" in 1954. (I have heard this segment at least three times, so I'm not mistaken.) Hmmm. No, his Nobel was for Literature. His major efforts at "peace" seemed to have consisted mainly in displacing his own internal battles into an external war upon other species.

[Added 6/6/07:] I've now heard several other of these segments, including a hard-hitting exposé (NOT) on the 1960's cartoon, The Banana Splits.

* RADIO RANT: ELLinois & SAYRicuse

Another sportscaster bugbear of mine is the pronunciation of college names. I'm not even qualified to comment upon the regionalist phonemic vicissitudes of (the Universities of) Missouri, Louisville, and New Orleans; but what does bug the hell out of me is how Illinois so often becomes "ELL-uh-NOY" and Syracuse becomes "SAYR-uh-KYOOZ" in mainstream sports-media discourse. Maybe some new "great vowel shift" is occurring that I'm unaware of, and maybe even the majority of the people at these institutions/places actually pronounce them this way, but it still grates upon the mind's ear. . . . Hmmm, the phrase "ELLinois and SAYRicuse" is so lilting that it begs for a song lyric; e.g.—

DAH-duh-DAH—gotta pay their dues
At ELLinois and SAYRicuse—

—but who's got time to even pick up the guitar (then GarageBand) nowadays? . . .

* "DE-fense! DE-fense!"

It's fascinating how football as a prototypical American discourse has injected its machismo into the very language: thus the normal iambs of preVENT and deFENSE become the stronger trochees of PREvent DEfense. . . .

* RADIO RANT: Imus/"Sports Talk Studs" II

I have nothing original to add regarding the whole Imus/"nappy headed ho's" controversy—except by noting how frequently Imus was actually defended, in backdoor fashion, on the call-in talk shows, by white callers who inevitably began, "What Imus said is reprehensible, BUT . . . ." (e.g., hey, it's a 1st-Amendment free speech issue; hey, black rappers use this language, too; etc.). It's just scary how it immediately became a black-and-white blame-game issue; furthermore, it's hard to imagine, in this context, that the timing of the announcement of the Duke soccer players' innocence was coincidental.

Predictably, the initial outrage against Imus was also widely sounded on national sports talk radio, including in the guise of none other than Jim Rome. But Rome should recall his own 1994 ESPN-talk-show escapade, in which he continually questioned NFL quarterback Jim Everett's bravery in the pocket by insisting on calling him "Chris" (as in Chris Evert, the female tennis player) to his face. (A physical melee ensued.) This is a much more subtle example of misogyny than Imus's, no doubt, but isn't teasing a fellow by calling him a woman's name an implicit demeaning of women, too, and homophobic besides? "Translation: "You're a woman! Effeminate! Weak! Cowardly! Not a real ['manly'] man!" Is it any wonder that Everett jumped him immediately? (Not to reinforce some macho attitude, but heck, I'm pretty sure Chrissy Evert coulda takin' Romie out, too.)

* RADIO RANT: Sports-Media Gripes

1) The slo-mo replay in football of a passing play, over which the play-by-play analyst is screaming, "Look, the quarterback's got all day to pass! All day!" (Uh, of course he does. It's slow motion, fellah.)

2) The inevitable tone of surprise and reverential awe in the baseball announcer's voice when he relates how much higher a certain player's batting average is with runners in scoring position. Uh—don't you think there's a reason there are base runners? Yes: the pitcher's already in trouble, doesn't have his best stuff; no wonder, then, that our mighty batter takes him to the wall for a stand-up double. . . .

3) How did, say, a count of two balls and two strikes ever become an "even count"? I know it's sportscasting tradition and all, but the hitter actually has only ONE more strike and he's out, but TWO more balls for the walk. Advantage to the pitcher. (This is really quibbling, I know, but it's bugged me all my obsessive-compulsive life.)

4) Finally, the diction errors (although these have become less common among local-yokel sportscasters with ESPN's "standardization of usage," as it were): a) pronouncing "asterisk" as "asterik," without the second s; 2) saying/writing "sure up"{1} (as in—"The Yankees need to sure up their bullpen pitching"); it's "shore up," as in a brace, buttress, or bulwark. [Added 4/30/07:] (I just did a Google search for "sure up" and "infield," and the # of results was staggering.)

{1} Believe it or not, I have (or had) an old baseball-yearly magazine that used "sure up" exclusively and throughout—indeed, dozens of embarrassing times, if I recall. And then there were all the comma splices and dangling modifiers; I swear, this hack writer must have been the editor's brother-in-law or somethin'.

* RADIO RANT: "Sports Talk Studs"

It was curious to listen in on how the John Ameche vs. Tim Hardaway flap played out a few weeks ago on sports-talk radio. Ameche had just "come out of the closet" after having retired from the NBA; fellow NBA alumnus Hardaway, when asked about the possibility of a gay teammate, said, "I hate gay people."

As expected, Hardaway's remark was lambasted nearly unanimously by ESPN, Fox Sports, and local-affiliate radio-heads—with good reason, of course. But what strikes me as curious about the whole affair is how disingenuous, even hypocritical, this whole chorus seemed, given the day-to-day blatant macho heterosexism that characterizes most of the "talent" in the syndicated sports talk media. The interminable adolescents-in-an-alley sexist wink-wink double entendres about women, the frequent admonishments to "man up" and to "show you got a pair," come across finally as desperate appeals of "Look at me! I'm a manly man (though I may well be in sports 'journalism' because I wasn't even 'man' enough to make the high school varsity team)!" The shtick on ESPN's morning show between Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic—the former casting himself as a metrosexual "sissy man," much to Golic's consciously exaggerated manly-man chagrin—may seem to be an exception, but it ultimately only reinforces the heterosexist ideology. But the heterosexism really deconstructs itself in the banter between many a radio-sports-talk-show team, as their interchange becomes "embarrassingly" (to them, if they were conscious of it) "homosocial"—to use Eve Sedgwick's term—even homoerotic. (A welcome exception: at least Dan Patrick can be consciously self-ironic about it.)

Of course, this is just one manifestation of sports fandom as the great homosocial outlet for the American male. . . . Come now, we don't look forward so desperately to next Saturday afternoon w/ a six-pack and the boys just because Whatsamatta U. is playing South-South-Central Missouri State, do we? Hey, and if it's football, we get to watch other men throw their bodies against each other. Woo-hoo! "Go—uh—Big Red!" . . .