Bird that Sings

“Broken treaties broken vows
Broken pipes broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling bullfrog croaking
Everything is broken.”
Bob Dylan

As 2012 approaches, nobody needs a clock to know what time it is. It’s a good thing too, because everything is broken; politics, the economy, the climate, even sports.

The era of Spectator Sports as Big Business that began as Big Manufacturing went into decline is itself drawing to a close. Big Sports filled a void; we went from making stuff to watching stuff, but now, right on cue, some of the biggest sports are falling all around us.

Al Davis and Joe Paterno have this much in common; both are from Brooklyn and both had to be carted off the football field, feet first, in the fall of 2011.

When I was a kid, I always had the suspicion that Al Davis was a gangster who was using football as some of kind of front. Actually it was vice versa. Even though Davis—who famously drove his Thunderbird convertible to California in 1959 with a suitcase in the back and eighty bucks in his pocket—ultimately made a fortune in football, making a buck was just a means to an end for Al.

Al Davis wanted to build a football empire. He did too, parlaying his first job as a wide receivers’ coach under legendary offensive football guru, Sid Gillman of the American Football League’s San Diego Chargers, to the head-coaching job of the new league’s Oakland Raiders. At the time Gillman said of his assistant, “Al Davis thinks he’s the smartest guy in football. He’s not . . . yet.”

Davis was soon not only coach of the Raiders, but General Manager and had turned them into a winner too. Then they made Davis President of the League and within a year he had the upstart AFL drafting and signing away players from the established NFL with such abandon that Davis, at least, believed the AFL would soon be dominant.

It was partly out of fear of Pirate Al, that the owners of the NFL and AFL got together and negotiated the Pro football merger of 1966. This pissed Davis off so much he resigned as President of the Junior League and went back to his beloved “Raiduhs” where he resumed complete control of the team’s day-to-day operations.

Along the way the Raiders not only won Championships under a series of Davis’ hand picked successors; John Rauch, John Madden and Tom Flores, but developed the outlaw mystique that made them the bad boys of football. Like James Brown, the Raiders were . . . Super bad.

Davis had assumed controlling ownership of the team long before he took the Raiders to LA in 1982, only to return to Oakland twelve years later in exchange for a King’s ransom. However Al’s second coming in Oakland was not as successful as the first and the whispering began: The Old Man had lost it. Al’s particular brand of football; power running and a, speed-kills, vertical passing game to go along with a take no prisoners, mano a mano defense, was passe´ they said: other teams were out scheming the Raiders; that the game had passed Al by.

Like the Latin American dictator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, who had to sell the Caribbean Sea to the North Americans (they had it shipped away) in order to retain total control over his profoundly shrunken realm, Davis isolated himself in response to the criticism and became increasingly obsessed with proving himself still the smartest guy in the room. It was a sucker’s game and Al must have known, but couldn’t resist the action.

Oddly though, no one was prepared when Al Davis suddenly passed away in mid season: it was shock to everyone; his detractors, his underground admirers, even his players.

No matter how much you might have disliked Al Davis, no one thought he would ever die.

Right about now Joe Paterno must be wishing he were dead too.

Incredibly, I remember Paterno’s first years at Penn State, probably because I was not yet old enough to smoke or drink, but Joe Pa really seemed like he had something to prove back then.

Paterno let us know— through his sycophants in the media to be sure—that just being a football coach was not enough. Joe Pa was building a program that was different we were told: Paterno cared about the players, he wanted them to graduate and make something of themselves outside of sports; the implication being he wanted them to do the important things he would have liked to do if he wasn’t stuck in this stupid college football racket.

That was Paterno’s image but after a while, that’s all it was. To put the best spin on it, Joe Pa was like everyone else: we start out with big ambitions and then in middle age, maybe start talking up what we’ve already done; maybe even try to make it seem like more than it really is.

Joe Pa took his mid-life crisis one step further than most of us though; he decided to make the entire Penn State campus, and in fact much of Central Pennsylvania, a monument to his emerging cult of personality.

When the Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Giants and New England Patriots asked him to coach their teams, Joe turned them down. When the Pennsylvania Republican Party wanted to run Joe for governor sometime around his 1986 National Championship, he turned them down too.

Joe Pa couldn’t leave Penn State and it wasn’t because he was too humble. Mostly, it was because he was a total control freak.

For years—especially the early ones— Penn State featured small to medium sized quarterbacks who couldn’t run and couldn’t throw; whose talents were a mystery except when you realized that they looked a lot like Joe.

Though a great recruiter and self-publicist, Paterno was probably also the worst great coach of all time.

To be fair, some of that was his innate football conservatism: a great Penn State team would rarely stomp their opponent, they would typically eek out a win, and that was mainly because the players would refuse to lose.

What Penn State fan can forget the 1969 Orange Bowl, when Paterno had All-American Charlie Pittman and two future all Pro’s, Franco Harris and Lydell Mitchell in the backfield and still barely beat Kansas 15-14, and that, only because of a great Defense anchored by Mike Reid, Steve Smear, Dennis Onkotz and Jack Ham. It was Joe Paterno and Penn State football at its agonizing best.

By 1998, when the first investigation of Jerry Sandusky began, Joe Pa must have known something about his then defensive coordinator and at least he blocked Sandusky from becoming head coach of the team. Paterno could have investigated Sandusky himself but that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing Paterno probably figured that was the DA’s job. For another, he was too busy trying to protect his program. No, the big question, the one will dog Paterno to the end of his days is why couldn’t Joe let go?

Why, after he dumped Sandusky in 1999, when Paterno was already over 70, did he hang on as coach and more for another twelve years only to witness the complete destruction of everything he had built, of his life’s work?

The answer of course is that he didn’t let go because he couldn’t let go: these guys never do.

On Tuesday, October 18, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Tripoli, Libya and announced that the US wanted Libyan ex-dictator Muammar Khadafy dead or alive, preferably dead.

And so when Khadafy was killed two days later, first bombed by a NATO sortie and then finished off by a band of Libyan partisans, one could only assume—protestations by new Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril to the contrary—that the ex dictator was knocked off at the behest of the First Lady of the Western Alliance.

It doesn’t even seem to be a matter of if; the question is why: Why did Hillary kill Khadafy?

There are three possibilities: one, it was personal; two, Hillary, Barack, Nick Sarkozy and Dave Cameron are great humanitarians whose concern for the safety and well being of the Libyan people compelled them to take out Khadafy; three, it’s the, uh, oil and even—who knew—the water!

But, I hear you shouting, couldn’t the West have had the run of the Libyan oil and gas fields without killing Khadafy? Couldn’t they have tried him in open court as Mahmoud Jibril claims he wanted?

The answer of course is yes, it’s that then they would have had to put up with the “mad dog of the desert” going all delusional and anti-Imperialist while calling them out on their real intentions.

So now Khadafy is dead while the more pliant oil barons of Bahrain are reinforced with a billion dollars worth of new arms to protect them from their Shiite majority.

Meanwhile the Libyan people—at least the ones on TV—seemed pretty relieved to have Khadafy gone even if took NATO and the CIA to get rid of him. They don’t even want to think about tomorrow today, and who can blame them. And even if they get upset, say eight months from now, once they figure out that the West has installed a dysfunctional Islamist kleptocracy prepared to hand over their countries natural wealth to foreign Capital (or at least what’s left of it) who’s going to know?

The always idiotic and sometimes liberal media will be busy with the US Presidential campaign by then, and with Khadafy gone, nobody’s going to think about Libya again for a long, long time.

Personally I’m just proud of our President Barack Obama for his decisive actions in this matter—as opposed to his bungling of the economy(as the always supine and sometimes liberal media is now telling us.)

I hate to admit it but it’s true: I’ll sleep better tonight knowing the mad dog of the desert is dead. As my National Security therapist once assured me, being American means never having to say you’re sorry.

 

 

On November 30, 1967 Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota declared his candidacy for the Democratic Nomination for President against the sitting Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson’s Presidency, born of the assassination of John Kennedy and consecrated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was in trouble over the War in Vietnam.

While McCarthy’s announcement roused a bunch of college students to cut their beards, stop smoking so much dope, and go “clean for Gene,” the official response to McCarthy was much more tepid. The New York Times invariably described McCarthy’s anti-war, protest candidacy as “quixotic;” as in Don Quixote, Cervantes faux knight who “tilted at windmills.”

Then in February of 1968, came the Tet offensive where the North Vietnamese regular Army along with the guerilla Viet Cong of the South launched a coordinated assault on the 500,000 strong American Army in Vietnam, all things considered probably the most powerful Army ever assembled, and suddenly Americans came to the shocked realization that in Vietnam there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

A month later, on March 12th, McCarthy came within a few thousand votes of defeating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary and then on March 16th, Johnson’s biggest political nightmare came true: New York Senator Robert Kennedy, the anti-war brother of the martyred JFK, announced his candidacy for the Democratic Nomination.

Two weeks later Lyndon Johnson, who’d won reelection to his own term as President in 1964 by the largest margin since FDR beat Alf Landon in 1936, officially withdrew his name as a candidate for the Democratic Nomination, having been beaten, not by Eugene McCarthy, but by history.

The “Tet moment” in the context of the 2011/12 Election cycle will probably come with the financial crisis triggered by the collapse of several European Banks in the Fall of 2011. Whether the crisis triggers a world wide credit freeze like in 2008, a sovereign debt default of Italy and Spain or the exit of either the EuroZone’s economically strongest or weakest nations is too early to say, but the cost to the World Economy will be staggering.

Just as the Vietnam War was not going well before the Tet Offensive, the US economy is already in “lesser depression” according to many economists.

While people know–and feel– this, unlike the Great Depression the current economic hardship has not affected either politics or the culture in a meaningful way. We’re still talking in the same political, social and cultural terms we were before the slump began.

This aura of normalcy has been a major achievement of the Obama Presidency but has also proved politically mistaken. Up until now, the guiding principal of the Obama Presidency has been “don’t do nothing stupid,” but in the eyes of many Americans the perception is “they didn’t do nothing” and that especially means nothing on jobs.

Aside from playing along with Big Business, the Banks and Wall Street, the big tactical mistake Obama and the Democrats made— most notably during the 2010 midterm elections— was their insistence that the economy was in a slow recovery rather than acknowledging the signs of stagnation many of the public were living with every day.

Now Obama has discovered we’re in a jobs emergency, but it’s too late: too late to change the politically minimalist narrative of his Presidency and also too late for the half measures he’s proposing. The entire political-economic landscape is about to change and the Administration is not only behind the curve, it’s about to get lapped.

This is the big reason Obama needs to be primaried. Among the blue collar middle class–never Obama’s base– there is already an understanding that there never was no recovery. Crystallization of the knowledge that things are going to continue getting worse for the foreseeable future will likely make Barry One-term unelectable in 2012.

At the very least Obama has to defend his ideas–as ideas–in another political arena and not just against a Republican Party simply bent on destroying him. Obama’s constant back pedaling on everything from health care, to tax cuts for the Rich to protecting Medicare and Social Security have earned him only contempt, both from his ex supporters and his enemies.

As for the up-until-now only imagined anti-Obama candidate in Iowa and New Hampshire, 2012 is going to be a year for insurgents, not incumbents and will favor boldness, rather than the conventional neo-liberal thinking that continues to hold Obama captive.

An insurgent Democratic Presidential candidate has to propose a simple agenda that promotes job growth while symbolizing the underlying problems in both the political economy and culture.

Here are a few suggestions.

1) Compulsory National Service
A National Service program for young people would be made up of two components. One would be the option of military service that would replace the volunteer army. The other option would be either domestic service in an enlarged and re-imagined AmeriCorps-Vista or foreign service in a fully funded Peace Corps.

National Service would not only provide a huge macro economic stimulus giving gainful employment to an entire generation who are currently underemployed at .  . . well, Depression era levels, but provide de-facto job training as well as a reinvention of Citizenship and the Democratic idea.

2) Carbon Tax
A carbon tax would serve several purposes. It would help level the playing field for American products and manufacturing, making them comparatively more affordable by factoring in carbon costs of foreign made products. It would create new American manufacturing jobs while serving as a powerful disincentive against outsourcing existing ones and would also discourage the use of conventional petro carbon based fuels and packaging. A carbon tax would encourage energy alternatives; hopefully before we begin dropping dead in droves on Main Street.

3) Fund National Infrastructure bank/end Bush Tax cuts for the Rich
True, Obama has proposed a version of this as well as new taxes on the Rich. They’re good ideas. The problem with Barry One-Term’s proposal is that he can’t get enough Federal money to make it effective, having already ceded the stimulus debate to Republicans by his timid refusal to address the underlying dysfunction of Finance Capitalism that led to the crisis in the first place.

Instead of Obama’s proposal, his primary opponent should call for enactment of Ed Rendell’s original National Infrastructure Bank proposal, to be fully funded by ending George Bush’s tax cuts for the Rich. This, yet another initiative that Barry One-Term already whiffed on last December.

It was looking pretty grim for the Philadelphia Phillies going into the bottom of the 7th, opening day at a sold out Citizens Bank Park.  Their Ace of Aces, Roy Halladay had already hit the showers and the Phils were down 4-0 to the rebuilding Houston Astros. The deficit wasn’t Halladay’s fault; he’d pitched well, but Phillies fans, sitting on their hands in the forty-degree chill of an April first afternoon, could not be blamed for wondering if maybe they’d been fooled again.

 

The team, picked as recently as two months ago to win their division, if not the National League, in a cakewalk, was looking alarmingly like the mid summer Phillies of 2010; decimated by injuries, without a closer in the bullpen and with holes all over the line-up.

 

And then it happened, it took me by surprise, and I could tell that it stunned them too, by the look in their eyes . . .

 

The Phils scored two in the bottom of the 7th, and then, in the bottom of the 9th, strung together six singles off of Astros closer Brandon Lyon, culminating in a walk off pinch-hit single by John Mayberry Jr.

 

The stadium went wild, the team ran onto the field and the Phillies ended up sweeping the Astros behind Ace#2 Cliff Lee, and Ace #3, Little Roy Oswalt. Was the rumored Phillies juggernaut getting ready to roll?

 

Hard to say, but it sure beats losing. Predictions about this year’s Phillies have been all over the lot, though in fairness, the ones predating the ongoing and ominous knee problems of second baseman, “The Great Chase” Utley, are now moot.

 

In February, Philadelphia Daily News Sports Editor Emeritus, Stan Hochman compared the Phillies coming 2011 run through Major League Baseball to Moses Malone and the World Champion 1982-83 Philadelphia 76ers “Fo’-five-fo’” run through the NBA playoffs that year.

 

A more . . . sober assessment is the game-by-game analysis of my friend, Red “Fred” Trasatti, “the Cookie Rojas of Rock n’ Roll, ” that sees 93 wins for the Phillies and a dogfight with the Atlanta Braves just to get into the playoffs. Meanwhile legendary Daily News columnist Bill Conlin is stubbornly sticking to his 100 win season prediction. Personally I tend to go along with Conlin, but it’s just a gut feeling. The only prediction I’m willing to stand behind is that if Utley doesn’t play this season, all bets are off.

 

Sweeter than wine, softer than a summer’s night . . .

 

Meanwhile out in California, the World Champion San Francisco Giants were opening up against the Dodgers in LA, and their cross Bay, American League rivals, the Oakland A’s, were at home against Seattle, on a rare, “warm San Francisco night.”

 

While the Giants are “the people’s choice” in the Bay Area to win everything again, informed opinion surprisingly tends to like the A’s chances in the AL West better.

 

It remains to be seen. As the A’s demonstrated this weekend against the Mariners, they’re still not a good team, though it’s very early.

 

Even during the Money Ball playoff years of recent vintage, the A’s were notoriously slow starters; typically not gelling until the end of June at the earliest, by which time most of their fans had already given up on them.

 

The big thing with the A’s is that despite how good their trio of young starters, Trevor Cahill, Brett Anderson and Gio Gonzalez, none of them are true Aces yet, and the team’s best power prospect, Chris Carter is still in Triple A, waiting for somebody to get injured. Meanwhile the new three, four and five hitters, David DeJesus, Josh Willingham and Hidecki Matsui are a huge upgrade over the heart of last year’s line-up but don’t compare to 3, 4 and 5’s of the better teams in baseball.

 

If I was Billy Beane, and I assure you I’m not, I’d seriously think about trading Brett Anderson to Texas for the disgruntled, displaced Michael Young, and play Young at 3rd base or Shortstop in place of Kevin Kouzmanoff or Cliff Pennington. At this writing, Kouzmanoff and Pennington are the weak links of an A’s team that still lacks a big time power threat and needs all the offense it can get.

 

As for the Giants, only a fool would write them off, even after their embarrassing opening weekend, losing three of four to the Dodgers. While the Giants did not improve in the off-season they still have the same pitching and intangibles that won them the World Championship last year.

 

The Giants caught lightning in a bottle last year; you’d be crazy to think they can do it again,wouldn’t you?

 

 

Is that God moving in South Philadelphia, or is it only Ruben Amaro Jr.?

Philadelphia Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro’s coup in signing premier free agent pitcher Cliff Lee has sent shock and awe resounding through the baseball world. In fact outside my window at this very moment, the afternoon is darkening, thunder is rolling, and lightning is splitting the sky.

It’s true. I guess it really is a big deal.

For Phillies fans though, the biggest thing is that Cliff Lee turned out to love us as much we loved him in his half a season with the club in 2009. Local fans were apoplectic when Amaro traded Lee to Seattle a year ago this Friday, and only the fact that the GM had just obtained Roy Halladay from Toronto kept the furor from escalating into a full-fledged fan mutiny.

Now, rather than hold the trade against the team, Lee has given the Phillies what appears to be a fifteen to thirty million dollar discount against what he could have squeezed out of either the Rangers or the Yankees.

On paper, (see “Every Season tells a story, Don’t it, below 8/10) this signing gives the Phillies one of the best pitching staffs in baseball history and many scribes are opining that the Phillies are now in the position of the Yankees: that is, needing to win the World Series for 2011 to be considered a successful season.

In my opinion however, these writers (see George Vecsey, NY Times 12/14/10) are missing the point.

As far as Phillies’ fans were concerned, the team was supposed to win it all this year and last year too. That they didn’t, has — slightly — lessened local pressure for a guaranteed World Series win.

My sense is that Phillies fans are just reveling in the moment, and acting … well, uncharacteristically grown up about the whole thing. It’s difficult to quantify but you can’t help feeling that the Lee signing means something special to the Phillies beyond just getting a great pitcher.

The Phillies and maybe even, Philadelphia, are now a destination. This is the kind of thing that only happens once in a long while; when a team becomes truly emblematic of a city and we owe this moment to … Cliff Lee: Bottoms up.

Before we raise out glasses however, I don’t think Ruben June is done dealing yet. Jayson Werth’s signing with the Washington Nationals has not only left the Phillies without a Right Fielder, but also without an everyday, right handed power hitter to protect Chase Utley and Ryan Howard.

Everyone is talking about the Phillies trading Joe Blanton to dump salary, but right now, the trade that makes the most sense for them is something along the lines of Right-handed pitching ace Roy Oswalt to the Chicago White Sox for Right Fielder Carlos Quentin with a prospect thrown in on either side.

This trade may or may not be makeable. For one thing, Oswalt has a no trade clause in his contract and probably would demand that the White Sox, at the very least, guarantee his sixteen million dollar option for 2012. For another thing, although the White Sox could certainly use Oswalt, who along with Mark Buehrle, Jake Peavy, John Danks and Gavin Floyd, would give them the best starting pitching staff — on paper — in the American League, they don’t need him.

We’ll see what happens, but my guess is, something will.