Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 211 Editor's Choice: 44
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Would you like some nuance with that myth?
[Read the article: Sound and fury on the campaign trail]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is remarkable the degree to which historical events that occurred within living memory (certainly my living memory) become such a myth that it cannot even be given the slightest nuance without a bunch of ignorant idiots in the media turning the mention of the nuance into "controversy."
The myth would seem to work like this: one day Rosa Parks was tired and didn't want to give up her seat on the bus, and so Martin Luther King, Jr. arose out of nowhere to lead all African-Americans to the promised land through a campaign of non-violence where Dr. King's personal sacrifices, like being jailed in Birmingham, were the most prominent, ending in his martyrdom in Memphis. As a result, de jure racism in America was eradicated.
It didn't quite happen that way. And the efforts and sacrifices of many besides Dr. King were critical to the results. And, sad as it may be to say, by the time he was shot, Dr. King had been reduced to a lonely and not particularly prominent voice to both whites and blacks in America.
This is not to denigrate his qualities, his sacrifices or his own successes. But there were thousands of others who were doing a lot of the legwork of the civil rights movement not just with him, but often while fighting his tactics and his strategy every step of the way. Some of those people are still alive to talk about it; others were brutally murdered in small Southern towns while trying to get voters registered.
LBJ, on the other hand, is thought of as a failed President who took Camelot and turned it into the malaise of Vietnam. To compliment him is heresy. And yet, with his eyes open to losing the South for the Democratic Party for a generation, he caused the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which allowed the South to be transformed from an economic backwater) to get passed (again, with a lot of help from others.
Both men were great risk-takers, as much in their private lives as in their public lives. And frankly I see little of either of them in Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
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When all you have is a hammer. . .
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]. . . every problem look like a nail.
Everything they describe in the Mitchell Report, every recommendation they make, everything discussed in the Congressional hearing, the whole thing is based on the premises that (a) these are performance-enhancing drugs; (b) the way to deal with them is drug-testing; and (c) more drug-testing is always better.
If you read the whole list of players implicated in the Mitchell Report, you will see that these were not players for whom a new wing of the Hall of Fame would have needed to be built if only a few tattle-tales had done a Greg Anderson. They were, in the main, marginal players for whom steroids or HGH at best did marginal things. King is absolutely right: the real message here is that a lot of players have messed up their future health for minimal if any benefit. But so long as Bonds and Clemens--who were both locks to be first-ballot Hall of Famers before either took a single drug--are the focus of the discussion, that message is seriously diluted. And the media, who remain as complicit as MLB or the Players' Association, aren't exactly helping here.
Why Congress should stick its nose into seventy years of labor relations law to deal with a problem caused in major league baseball-when it has ignored for even longer the weird anomaly of baseball's antitrust exemption and its effect on, for instance, the fisc of major league towns blackmailed into spending tax money on stadiums, is beyond me. Why Congress would turn something over to management, whose interest is in anything but the long-term health of the players, just to score political points, is beyond me as well. Moreover, it's not happening in a Democratic Congress in an election year. This is just posturing.
If you read the Mitchell Report, it works on the assumption that the state of the art in drug testing is what baseball needs. But the Mitchell Report is an historical report and essentially every allegation of drug abuse it describes predates the current drug testing regime. So there is no indication that there is a crisis other than a public relations crisis. Baseball would do a far better job for itself by better policing who gets into the clubhouses and what its players ask the clubhouse attendants to do (not just running background checks on a bunch of underpaid flunkies, but actually keeping tabs on their activities, and paying them enough so that they don't depend on the ballplayers' tips), than just doing more tests that there are people out there who can find ways around.
But that isn't a punitive enough headline for Congressman Shays, I'm sure.
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The Price of the Debasement of Language
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There isn't a whole lot of difference between Kelly Tlighman's insensitivity toward the use of "lynch" and Bush's use of "crusade," I mean apart from one being a remark by an obscure sportscaster on an unwatched channel and the other being the remark of the so-called leader of the free world in a situation of great geopolitical importance.
In both cases, it's a matter of someone not having the brains to understand that a word that might just be another synonym in the circles they frequent having real meaning, and very negative, meaning to others.
Sportscasters, sadly, seem to be taught that allowing a nanosecond of airtime to far unmarred by their words is a far greater sin than using that nanosecond to think. That doesn't excuse it, but it does describe the pressure they are under that leads to such insensitivity and stupidity. Presidents, of course, have no such excuse.
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The first time I was in Kentucky
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was in Covington, at the Cincinnati airport. My "time" in Kentucky consisted of walking two gates down to make a quick connection.