Not tonight!

Me: Thank you for having me over for dinner.

Them: Of course.

Me: I brought wine.

Them: Thank you. How thoughtful of you.

Me: It’s the least I could do. So, what are we eating? It smells delicious.

Them: We’re having Indian Curry Chicken Tikka.

Me: Wow. That sounds amazing. I love chicken.

Them: It’s a recipe we heard about on  _____ Chef.

Me: Great. I’ve never really watched too many of those cooking shows. I’m not much of a chef myself. I could ruin cereal, you know? (laughs)

Them: On the show, the announcer said that this dish was first served at the court of Hindu Rajput King Maha Rana Pratap of Mewar in the 14th century.

Me: That is amazing. Well, this wine was once served out of a paper bag and sipped through a straw by King Charlemagne, so … (laughs)

Them: The chicken is seasoned with garlic, ginger, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, cardamom pods, cloves, and hot pepper flakes.

Me: Sounds good to me. This is a great house. How long have you guys lived here?

Them: We are also having balsamic roasted vegetables – zucchini, yellow squash, bell peppers, onions, and eggplant. The zucchini is from a local community garden. The key to a good roasted zucchini is to pick it just before it’s ripe and then to leave it in a marinade for three days or so. That way it doesn’t require too much roasting, but is rather braised, to preserve its natural flavor while getting rid of some of the peatiness.

Me: Well, I look forward to eating it. Did you guys see what Obama said today about unemployment, about how he wants to pass another stimulus package with government money for bridge-building and tax breaks for small businesses? He’s claiming that …

Them: Here’s a sampling of fresh, soft ripened, wash rind, semi-soft, firm and hard cheeses to enjoy as an appetizer. We went with some friends to a cheese-tasting party last week. We tried Bergenost, Colby, Lieserkranz, Provel, Herve, Limberger, Maredsous, Passendale, Rochfort, this Bulgarian cheese called Sirene, three different cheeses from Denmark called Tilsit, Esrom, and Danso, and then of course some Weislacher and Hirtenkase and Tilsit. And we topped the afternoon off with a little White Stilton and Winsleydale for dessert. These are just some simple Dorset Blue Vinneys, but we kind of planned this dinner at the last minute.

Me: That’s fine.

Them: Mmm, these vegetables are going to be perfect. Here, taste the eggplant; it’s just at that peak of succulence before it gets too ripe or too overcooked and takes on a sort of meaty, peaty, gamy texture around the edges.

Me: Mmm. No, it’s very good. You know, I went to a restaurant last week called ____. Have you been there? I really enjoyed their steak. It was delicious. Very juicy.

Them: The chef there puts the most amazing Bernaise sauce on his cauliflower – the flavor lingers just so on the back left-hand corner of your tongue. But their broccoli – I couldn’t quite put my finger on it; it was like it had been lightly dipped in caper butter and left out to dry in the summer sun just two or three days longer than was necessary and everything got infused with a saffron tartness.

Me: Really? I didn’t try that, I guess.

Them: Of course, the most important thing to remember when you’re honey-glazing a thinly-sliced bouillabaisse, especially when the eggs come from grass-fed chickens, is to go easy on the sour cream at first, because that tempers the natural oakey flavor of the venison. What we do is take a pinch of aniseed myrtle and mix it with just a shake of Cumin and a dollop of Lesser Galangol (or at least Indonesian Bay Leaf), and we put it all in the freezer over night. That way the lamb is singed, not calcified, the morel reduction is more like a pâté than diced parsley, and the portobellos are allowed to breathe, which is the key to a good bacon yogurt.

Me: Ahhh, bacon.

Exeuent Omnes

The holy day

Excerpts from The First Year: A Pilgrim’s Notebook

I. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor declared a day of thanksgiving and sent five men on fowling that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labor. And though the governor did ask me to go with the men, seeing, as he put it, I had nothing better to do, I assured him that I was deep in pensive thought on the issue of the upcoming winter and the state of our stocks of cod and corn and waterfowl and that I always did my best thinking with my eyes closed while lying upon my stomach. The governor then shrugged and walked away and so four men did go on their expedition for fowl while I stayed in the village with the women. They four men in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, which is fine, but I did find the reception they received a bit much and mocked it when they weren’t around. “I could have done that,” I told a few people.

II. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms with the throwing of balls and the grappling of bodies, many of the indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, and I tried to tell them that I don’t like deer, that I was fine with chicken, but they did not listen and filled my plate anyway, and so I did feed it to my dog when the indians were looking the other way.

III. We sat around the great fires with the indians for many long hours, our governor having decided that the best course of action in relation to them was one of Christian cheer and mutual respect, the better to ensure our survival during the coming winter. One indian, named Ossagua, wore a great headdress and a stern countenance at all times; I gathered he was a kind of medicine man or spiritual guide. His face was painted garishly with animal’s blood and he wore a necklace of wolves’ teeth. I would have been fascinated by him, perhaps even terrified, if he had ever gone away long enough to give me the chance. Instead, he never left my side throughout the feast. He described in great detail how he spent his days in their village from the time he woke until the time he bedded down for the evening. He sat his children in my lap. He gave me some kind of locket to wear that, as far as I could understand, consecrated our new friendship for eternity. He told me at least ten times that his favorite thing to do was fishing. Over and over again, he leapt to his feet and flopped his hand around and grunted, “Fish, fish.” “Yes,” I assured him. “You like to fish. I understand. How fascinating.”

IV. Ninety indians, fifty pilgrims, and no one thought to make brownies. I’m beginning to regret coming to this new world.

V. On the third day of solemnity, Edward Winslow declared that, before feasting, it would be meet that we all in turn name those things that we were thankful for, the better to enumerate before all, including our new indian friends, that which God had done for us and extol His glory. All assembled agreed this would be a fine and noble gesture. Many did thank the Lord for our safe passage across the ocean; others thanked him for the bounty of the harvest and the joy of religious freedom. When it got around to me, I began coughing theatrically and rose from the table while pointing at my throat, as if I were choking and off to search for water. I did wander around for five minutes thus, and by the time I returned to the feasting table, they were already five people down the line and I was quite off the hook.

Elephant

This Week in Republican In-Fighting

- At a Tea Party rally in Phoenix, Arizona, organized by an anti-illegal-immigrant group called American Citizens United, a scuffle broke out between organizers and two members of the National Socialist Movement. Apparently, one of the organizers became enraged when the Neo-Nazis unfurled an Adolf Hitler flag after being told that displays of racism weren’t welcome. But, Nazis will be Nazis, and so the man with the flag, JT Ready, responded to the protester’s concerns by shoving him to the ground.

- The conservative Club for Growth announced their endorsement of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio over Gov. Charlie Crist in next year’s Florida Senate race. Crist, once considered by many to be the future of the Republican party (not to mention a potential running mate for John McCain in 2008) has come under fire by conservative groups for his support of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan and his recent backpedaling of that support. Rubio, who hates taxes, Castro, and socialized medicine, is now considered by many on the far right to be the future of the Republican Party.

- Venerable three-term Utah senator and conservative Robert F. Bennett announced that, despite his staunch opposition to higher taxes, bigger government, and financial regulations, and despite the fact that he has supported precisely none of President Obama’s initiatives, he has already had to spend $500,000 and air TV ads (after airing none in 2004) to fend off primary challenges from hard-line conservatives. The Club for Growth has come out against Bennett, criticizing him for his support of the 2008 Wall Street bailout and for daring to communicate with Democrats about health care reform. The also don’t like that he has criticized their use of the word “socialism” as a “buzzword” and a distraction.

- South Carolina Republican Representative Bob Inglis told the Greenville News that the old-school Reagan coalition (of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and moderate Democrats) is now “running on fumes” and faces extinction in the face of anti-incumbent pressure from hard-liners and Tea Party agitators. Claiming that these hard-liners are indifferent to abortion and other social issues and would let people without health insurance “die on the steps of the hospital” to make a point about the dangers of socialized medicine, Inglis called on the man from Galilee to draw the distinction between this new breed of conservative ideologues and the breed of conservative ideologues he favors: “I’m thinking there was a guy named Jesus who had some things to say about these kinds of concepts,” he said. “And I don’t want to live in a society that lets a few test cases die on the steps of the hospital.” Inglis is facing a primary challenge from no fewer than three members of his party.

- Finally, Sarah Palin’s biography, Going Rogue: An American Life, was released today and has already being touted as little more than a settling of scores with John McCain’s campaign team, primarily chief strategist Steve Schmidt. She characterizes the campaign as defeatist and poorly managed and Schmidt as an vindictive bully. In response, members of the McCain team have called the book a “fiction” and have reiterated claims that Palin was woefully unqualified for the nomination and refused to prepare for her interview with Katie Couric. Jumping into the fray, conservative columnist David Brooks called Palin “a joke” and said, “I mean, I just can’t take her seriously. We have got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama is trying to handle a war. We just had a guy elected Virginia governor who is probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell: Pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination … believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are just not going to elect a talk show host.”

Tune in next week.

Photo by Mr. Frego

What is to be done with Joe Lieberman?

By coming out last week against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care plan, and saying he would join a Republican filibuster to keep the bill from coming to a vote, the Independent senator from Connecticut finally dropped all pretense of Democratic loyalty. Which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is familiar with Lieberman’s hypocritical, sanctimonious Lewinsky-era attacks on Bill Clinton (and “the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations”); his hawkish approach to national security and the war in Iraq; his indifference to the wishes of Democratic voters in his state in 2006 after they chose Ned Lamont in the primary; and his support last fall of John McCain in the presidential election.

So what should the Democrats do with him?

Well, if Democrats were like Republicans, Lieberman would be hanging in the public square already. If Democrats were like Republicans, he would be riding the back bench of the Senate Chambers Janitorial-Services Subcommittee. If Democrats were like Republicans, Joe Lieberman would be Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Upstate New York Republican House candidate who, late last week, was outed as being ideologically impure by the mob of right-wing scaremongers (including Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and Malkin) and promptly thrown under the bus. After which the bus was set on fire.

Judging by today’s left-wing editorials, that’s exactly what many want to happen to Lieberman as well.

But here’s the problem: The thing that makes the Democratic Party so well-equipped to deal with rapidly changing national demographics and place itself in a position to profit off of them electorally – that being its big-tent, ideologically wishy-washy, take-all-comers, ad hoc approach to governance – is the very thing that makes it unable to handle heresy when it threatens to derail party priorities, like health care. Sure, Lieberman is a traitor. Sure, he’s a hypocrite who once tried to pass a bill that would have gotten rid of the filibuster and who is now threatening to use the filibuster to subvert the will of his constituents. And sure, he is the senator from Connecticut, which is the insurance capital of the world, and therefore any philosophical arguments he can make against a government-run insurance option are tainted to the point of absurdity. But Democrats just aren’t cut out for cutting out the hearts of those who defy them. For months, the Democrats have been held hostage by members of their own party who 20 years ago would have been called Republicans but who were hand-picked by the Democratic leadership to help them retake Congress in 2006. The Faustian bargain Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer made back then was simple: We will once again be in power … but there will be no “we.” The Democrats have no heresy because they have no ideology. Which is exactly the reason they’re in control of Congress.

So what should Democrats do with Mr. Lieberman? Probably nothing. As much as left-wingers would love to see him dropped down a well by Obama and Emanuel and other party leaders, deep down every Democrat knows that it’s not going to happen. That it’s not in their party’s nature. That it’s best to just take Lieberman aside and quietly give him what he wants in order to get health care passed. That the best way to keep their party in power is to continue making its platform as big and malleable as possible and to continue driving Republicans to make theirs even smaller and firmer.

Ideology is a cold bedfellow. Especially on election day.

A day fit for a poem

“Oh, what a glorious day!”

Oh, what a glorious day!
The sky is blue and the sun is shining
And the air is crisp and cool.
The streets are filled with life.
There is so much to be done;
You must laugh and dance and sing and run, run, run, run, run!

My God, what a perfect perfect day!
Come, let’s get out of the house
And greet the outside world.
All God’s beauty is being unfurled
For us, for us, for us!
Can’t you see, this wondrous moment is for us?

What a wonderful, splendiferous day it is!
Don’t just sit there at your desk.
Opening your window isn’t enough,
Neither is smoking a cigarette by the screen door;
This day requires more.
It demands we take a walk outside to feed our soul,
Like a smiling monk with his begging bowl.

How resplendent this day is!
No, don’t take me to the grocery store.
This day requires more.
Seriously, put down your keys,
Leave the grocery list and the paychecks.
You must not take me to the bank today.
Not today,
Not when the breeze is blowing the last memories of summer away.

Oh, most beautiful and wistful day!
I can’t believe you brought me here
On this most beautiful and wistful day,
When the air is crisp as mountain air or the sweet salt air off the ocean,
Why are we shopping for potato chips and moisturizing lotion?
My god, that man must weight 400 pounds
And still he’s buying sausages.
Seething, teeming, beastly, obese humanity! Oh God!
Criminal indifference to the majesty of this day! Oh God!
Don’t forget the bananas. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!

Oh, this tragic, sad, and awful glorious day!
Five o’clock, it’s slipping quite away
Through your fingers like sands by the sea.
Have you no sense of sublimity?
What man would let a day like this go by,
When there’s not even a trace of cloud in the sky,
When the glory is almost too much for the eye,
When each person you see passing by
Is filled with love and warmth?
And yet here you are, inside.
I can’t believe this woman is paying by check.

And what now at the end of this lost and saddened day?
How will you answer for the beauty you missed,
Like a lover in a crowd you never raised your eyes to see?
Never to return is she.
Now that the sun is down and the air is cold,
How can you explain to me
How you let this day go by?
Another glorious day, yet you didn’t care
To marvel at the sky above or feel the wind blowing though your fantastic hair.

Epilogue:
Now the sky is dark and the moon’s aglow
And the stars are a shimmering, majestical show.
So you take off your shoes and turn on the light
And sit down at your desk to waste a glorious night.

There is power in a union

After a relatively quiet summer off-season in the NBA, two big bits of news came in over the last week.

First, the league officially announced on Friday – after unofficially looking the other way since the days of Bob Cousy, short shorts, and fundamentals – that a “player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may take two steps in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” This after a March story on ESPN.com in which Joe Borgia, the league’s vice president of referee operations,  admitted that when it comes to the one-step traveling rule, referees “really don’t reference the rulebook.”

Then, on Tuesday, word came down that negotiators for the league and its referee’s union had reached an agreement on a new contract. If the contract is ratified by a majority of the union’s 57 referees at a vote scheduled for Friday, the men in black and white will be back at work in time for the beginning of the regular season, ending a lockout that began in mid-September.

Coincidence, you think? Arbitrary confluence of unrelated events? Maybe. But then again …

Up until yesterday, the negotiations between the league and the referee’s union had been a complete disaster, with the refs looking for pay raises and increases in severance and pensions and the league looking to give them nothing of the sort. In early April NBA commissioner David Stern pulled out of talks after he and the union’s chief negotiator exchanged insults through the media, and since then the whole thing has been in the hands of lawyers.

Preseason games, meanwhile, went ahead as planned, with replacement refs from the WNBA and the NBA’s Development league scaring the wits out players and coaches and making them long for the good old ways when they knew the names of the people they were screaming at.

But the real season is about to begin, and since both sides have a vested interest in everyone getting back to work (Stern doesn’t need the hassle that will come with inexperienced refs clashing with cranky NBA coaches, and the refs themselves have already missed two paychecks), it makes sense that a deal has been reached.

But what if the change in the two-step rule wasn’t just an arbitrarily timed decision made by league officials but rather a perfectly timed demand by the referee’s union to get themselves back on the court with dignity? What if it was being used as leverage this whole time?

Think about it: You have a rule that no players follow and no referees enforce but the breaking of which drives old-school fans and opposing coaches to distraction. Every time an NBA poster-child like Dwyane Wade or LeBron James is caught on tape taking extra steps on the way to the basket and getting away with it, fans and opponents scream up and down that the league has two sets of rules: one for superstars, one for mere mortals. And who do they scream at? The refs, of course. Never mind that basketball players are so quick and so athletic these days that it’s hard to tell if they’re traveling even in slow-motion replays; never mind that refs are only human and that they’re trying their best to see through a wall of impossibly muscular bodies in order to make calls; never mind, even, that these refs have been told by their bosses not to call players with traveling if they take an extra step. Never mind any of it; when a fan or a coach or a player or a sports writer sees an injustice, he is going to turn his wrath on the man with the whistle in his hand (and not in his mouth).

And who needs that? The one-step travel rule/non-rule was little more than a bludgeon to beats refs’ heads in with, leaving the men and women in black and white in an impossible situation: make the call and face the fury of an angry league looking to keep casual fans and sports-highlight shows interested; miss the call and face the spitting vitriol of the basketball blogosphere.

No, best to use the rule as a bargaining chip in your negotiations. Tell the league you’ll concede on pay raises and severance packages and pension plans for a few years while the economy recovers, but in return demand the league rescind a rule that was absolutely crushing you and yours on a nightly basis.

Then, two years from now, when those contracts are up again, demand that hand-checking and the three-second rule get struck from the books as well. Or out the door you’ll go.

New-media maven

Three years out from an election is a perfectly reasonable time to start polling, right?

After all, if sports writers can argue about which NBA stars should be representing team USA in the 2012 summer Olympics (Brian Scalabrine?) and commentators can claim the 2010 World Cup as a valid topic of conversation while broadcasting from the 2006 World Cup and climatologists can bicker about the lifespans of glaciers and the endangered species that live on them, then surely political pundits and pollsters can have their fun speculating about which Republican is going to take on Barack Obama in the next presidential bout.

Just as I wrote a few weeks ago about the love of the sports fan waiting until the off-season to truly blossom, so too does the life of the political junkie find its greatest joy in the speculative irrelevance of the electoral off-year. When polls have no consequences and editorials have no weight and theorizing is so much crystal-ball gazing, the punditocracy, both professional and kitchen-table-based, can really feel free to let their minds and their mouths run wild, free from the philosophical tethers of, you know, reality.

Take, for example, a poll released this past Friday by Rasmussen: It’s not about health care or the war in Afghanistan or the economy or job performance on Capitol Hill. No. This poll looks at who the favorite is, as of October 2009, to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (which comes with a tiara, the keys to a brand-new Toyota Tacoma, and the thrill of taking on the Barack Obama political machine in the next general election).

According to the poll, as of Friday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the preferred candidate of 29% of Republicans nationwide, followed by Mitt Romney (24%), Sarah Palin (18%), Newt Gingrich (14%), and Tim Pawlenty (4%).

It goes on: “Romney leads all prospects among voters who attend church once a month or less. Huckabee leads among more frequent churchgoers. Huckabee holds a huge lead among Evangelical Christians with Palin in second and Romney a distant third. Huckabee and Romney are essentially even among other Protestants while Romney has the edge among Catholics.

“Romney leads among Republicans earning more than $75,000 a year while Huckabee leads among those who earn less.”

Now, as much as I love this kind of ultra-specific poll-modeling – “While Palin has a slight edge over Huckabee in the all-important Jewish Moderate-Conservatives Who Don’t Eat Cake on Wednesdays demographic, Gingrich is doing surprisingly well with Anorexics Below the Poverty Line Who Think Organized Religion Is the Cause of All the World’s Problems But Who Feel a Deep Spiritual Connection to the Universe and All Living Things in It” – it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the results, printed more than two years out from the first primary, are the very definition of an institutional absurdity.

But in America 2009, absurdity in the defense of relevance is no vice. In our rapidly evolving media environment, ridiculousness is expected and accepted. But what cannot be accepted — what can not be tolerated, what can not be justified — is the sense that a company that bases its reputation on up-to-the-minute analysis is out of touch with the proper tools needed to cull information for that analysis. These days, the only sin in America is not being tuned in. And something about the old-school Rasmussen polling model – “You sir, who will you be voting for?” – smacks of rotting antiquity.

Take Chris Cillizza’s piece in The Washington Post today about the status of the Sarah Palin political identity on Facebook. It may seem like so much new-media fluff to stodgy old guys still married to old-school notions of political relevance, but it also might just prove to be more telling of the status of the Republican political landscape than any 10 Rasmussen polls could ever hope to be. There, Cillizza writes, “As of press time, Palin’s Facebook site had nearly 930,000 supporters … By way of comparison, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) has 82,000 Facebook supporters while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) has 121,000.”

That paragraph right there should be enough to have Huckabee and Romney shaking with fear. If Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign proved anything (as if this point really needed to be proven), it’s that you can’t view new media, especially social-networking, as some sort of cute adjunct to an otherwise traditionally managed campaign. A candidate’s approach to the Internet says everything about that candidate’s understanding of the times we’re living in and the voters who are living in them.

For all her faults, Palin is smart enough to know that having a million friends/fans on Facebook is like having a marketing/information-dissemination army on your side, ready with the click of a mouse to do your bidding. Facebook may have proven to us once and for all that the insignificant particulars of human lives are sources of fascination — both as writers and readers, both as exhibitionists and voyeurs — but perhaps more fascinating (and more important for politicians looking to get out the vote) is that it has shown people to be happy pro bono public-relations advocates for whatever cause, event, band, person, puppy video they deem worthwhile. People love being in the know, Facebook has shown us, and they love letting other people know they’re in the know. And the best way to let other people you’re in the know, and that you knew before they did, is to be the one sending that person what it is they don’t know about but you do.

Cillizza talks about Palin using Facebook to do an “end-run” around the mainstream media and talk directly to her supporters, both actual and potential. Which is true. But it’s more than that: Facebook allows Palin (just like Obama, who knew a little something about being written off by mainstream-media folks and needing to find new unfiltered ways of gaining momentum) to do an end-run around the mainstream PR/marketing/political advertising bureaucracy, putting aside traditional notions of pay-for-play access and huge media blitzes. Instead, all she has to do is throw up the occasional post about her support of Glen Beck, her distaste for Washington insiders, or (most famously) her belief that Obamacare will sentence the elderly to death, and – bang! – she’s got a million people ready, willing, even desirous to spread that message around the world.

In other words, Facebook has not only exposed us as advertisers for ourselves; it’s turned us all into volunteer sandwich-board wearers for others.

So if I were Mike Huckabee, I’d take cold comfort in that 28 when comparing it to Palin’s 930,000. One is just a number on a piece of paper taken three years — and a million media cycles — out from the next presidential election. The other represents virtual bodies on the virtual ground, ready to go to war for their favorite former governor from Alaska.

Especially when going to war means never having to leave your house or even change out of your pajamas.

The Red Sox in happier days

What to expect from the Boston Red Sox this offseason following their first-round playoff loss to the Los Angeles Angels (a tribute to my friend and fellow Unfit founding editor, devoted Red Sox fan Mike “Kanin” Kanin, on the occasion of his birthday):

- Looking to reduce the size of their pitching staff but unable to decide between keeping Daisuke Matsuzaka or knuckle-baller Tim Wakefield, Red Sox scouts are sent out to find a slightly overweight middle-aged Japanese man with a goatee who can throw a baseball 47 miles an hour on only six days’ rest.

- Kevin Youkilis is killed during an argument with Jason Varitek over who has the “cooler baseball name.”

- Three members of the Red Sox coaching staff are arrested after exhuming the corpse of Babe Ruth and taking turns beating it with a baseball bat.

- After second baseman Dustin Pedroia’s complaint that the shoddy state of the infield grass at Fenway Park was the reason he missed turning a crucial double-play in game three of the Division Series, the Red Sox fire their grounds crew and replace them with sprinklers.

- After realizing he’s spent nearly 15,000 hours of his life watching Red Sox games, 35-year-old Framingham resident Mark Shipley divorces his wife, Jenny, and renounces custody of their three children, Lucy, Kenneth, and Mark Jr., to devote more time to watching Red Sox games.

- Citing the success of the team’s 2003 “Cowboy Up” campaign, team General Manager Theo Epstein signs comedian Larry the Cable Guy to usher in new “Git-R-Done” era.

- Designated hitter David Ortiz signs five-year contract extension, telling reporters the Red Sox have the “best post-game deli spread in baseball.”

- Pitcher Josh Beckett grows mustache to go with his Fu Manchu beard but decides he doesn’t like it and shaves it off the next day.

- Wanting to spend more time with his kids, Manager Terry Francona announces that he will coach the entire 2010 season from his rec room via text message.

- In February, Roger Clemens stops by the team’s Florida training camp “just to say hi.”

Howard Fineman

Shame on You, Mr. Fineman
A one-act musical written after discovering that Howard Fineman, Newsweek’s Chief Political Correspondent, Senior Editor, and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, had shamelessly stolen from my Unfit story from Sept. 28, “UNFIT for an Uncomplicated Strategy” (in which I postulate that Barack Obama is employing a rope-a-dope strategy to win the debate over health care reform), for his MSNBC editorial from Oct. 7, “Obama Channels Ali in Health Care Prize Fight” (in which he postulates that Barack Obama is employing a rope-a-dope strategy to win the debate over health care reform).

(Scene: A small cluttered home office in Austin, Texas. A YOUNG MAN sits at his desk, staring at a photograph of Howard Fineman. His mouth is open, his eyes are filled with tears, the palms of his hands are turned heavenward in a pose of infinite pain and disappointment. He has no pants on. On the wall behind him hangs a poster with the words “Ethics of Journalism” written in enormous type.  A MALE CHORUS sits around him, wearing fedoras and trench coats. They each hold a pad of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. A slow dirge plays in the background, like something you’d hear at Yom Kippur services.)

YOUNG MAN (Speaking to the photograph): I can’t believe you did this to me. After all those hours I spent listening to you talk about the Iraq War. Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Chanting soberly): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN: After I defended your position on the political viability of a public option to my friends. Like a fool! Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Still chanting soberly): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN (Getting more agitated): After all that time I devoted to reading your damn columns. How could you do this to me? Fineman!

MALE CHORUS (Their chanting becomes more excitable with each word, as the music starts to build in intensity, volume, and rhythm): Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman! Fineman!

YOUNG MAN (Jumping to his feet and clutching the photo to his chest, he lets out a mighty wail): Oh, Fiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnemaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnn!!!!!

(The music transforms into an uptempo jaunt, complete with tambourines and trumpets. The YOUNG MAN leaps onto his desk. The MALE CHORUS jump from their chairs and gather around him, pencils and pads out, as if taking notes at a news conference. Ripping the photo to shreds and throwing them around the room like confetti, the YOUNG MAN begins to sing)

“I’m Indignant!”

YOUNG MAN:

Oh, Fineman!

MALE CHORUS:

Fineman!

YOUNG MAN:

Though your name rings out at MSNBC
As a man of ethical pedigree,
With your degree in Journalism from Columbia,
Still I’ll tell everyone from here to Northumbria
About your sinister reportorial calumny.
You stole from me!

MALE CHORUS:

You stole from him, you really did,
Oh, Mr. Fineman!

YOUNG MAN:

I am just a simple sort of man
I try to write the best I can
Then you come along with your Newsweek magazine
And distort my theory with your glossy sheen
Stealing from Unfit … what kind of man?!
You stole from me!

MALE CHORUS:

Stop, thief! Stop, thief! Stop, thief!
Oh, Mr. Fineman, you devil, you!

YOUNG MAN:

First I wrote, “Obama rope-a-dopes”
Then you replied, “Obama rope-a-dopes”
Then I wrote, “Health care’s on the way”
And you type, “Should be here any day”
You stole from me!
I’m indignant! Indignant, I say! And I demand satisfaction!

MALE CHORUS (Bending over and putting their hands on their knees, they whisper repeatedly to the music, which is more subdued now.):

He’s indignant. Indignant. And he demands satisfaction.
He’s indignant. Indignant. And he demands satisfaction.

YOUNG MAN (Turning to his computer, he reads from the screen): Look at this here: I wrote, “Now any Republicans who continued screaming and shouting about the danger the president’s health care plan posed to America’s social fabric would come off looking petty: They would be representatives of the ‘party of no,’ disagreeing just to be disagreeable in a time when insurance premiums kept rising, more and more Americans were losing their coverage, and the economy was sinking deeper into the tank.” And then you wrote, “The GOP and the Blue Dogs risk being accused of mere obstructionism on what everyone agrees — after listening to all the talk in recent months — is a deadly serious social and fiscal problem.” (He throws his hands in the air and shakes them like a preacher at an old-time revival church) Indignant!

MALE CHORUS: (Doing the same): Indignant!

(While the MALE CHORUS continues their chanting, the YOUNG MAN returns to reading aloud.)

YOUNG MAN: Let’s see, let’s see. Ahh, here we go: “Then you sit back and let people get used to the good that can come from government involvement in the health care industry – the reduced premiums, the fixed prices, the guaranteed coverage. ” That’s me. Now you: “But the drawn out process also has underscored the depth and seriousness of the problem. Few now would dispute the basic idea that we are spending too much money for not enough good, sensible health care.” (Hands in the air) Indignant!

MALE CHORUS (Throwing their hands up): Indignant! (They resume their chant.)

YOUNG MAN: Okay, let’s see. Right, right, right. Not that. Ahh, yes. (Clearing his throat like an orator) Me: “Now you have to get some version of health care reform passed (not a perfect bill, of course, but one that speaks to the issues you find most pressing), finding common ground among Democrats both left and centrist while leaving Republicans out in the wilderness, now both blindly contrarian and powerless.” And, once more, Mr. Fineman: “Turning the enterprise over to Congress has made for an agonizing process, but I get the sense that his Republican enemies and Blue Dog doubters may be on the verge of punching themselves out.” Indignant, I say!!!!

MALE CHORUS (Jumping up and down like the newly converted): Indignant!

(The music grows even more intense, still rhythmic but now vaguely atonal and primordial, like the climax of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” The YOUNG MAN points to a chalkboard on which are written the words “My Revenge.” He sings and kicks his legs furiously while the MALE CHORUS freezes in a tableau of fear and amazement.)

“Vengeance”

YOUNG MAN (Singing):

Here, sir, is what I plan to do
To exact my sweet revenge on you:
First things first, go to your house,
Find your laptop, grab your mouse,
With fervent animosity
Search your browser history
Prove that you’ve been to my site,
Vindication! Sweet delight!
Then put back on my shoes and socks
And take that laptop straight to Fox
Just in time for Hannity’s show.
And then, my friend, the world will know
That Fineman is a plagiarist
A stinkin’, low-down copyist,
Who read my piece and liked it so
He thought the whole wide world should know,
But better, he thought, to come from he
‘Cause no one’s ever heard of me.
Ha! Ha! Ha!

MALE CHORUS:

Ha! Ha! Ha!

(The YOUNG MAN considers for a moment.)

YOUNG MAN:

Then again, that may be true.
Who’s heard my name? Not you or you?
I mean, who am I to say what’s right?
This might drive traffic to my site.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Howard Fineman, steal away!
We’ve got new stories everyday.
“When you get too drunk to write
Visit Unfit Times. We’ll treat you right!”

(The YOUNG MAN and the MALE CHORUS spin wildly about the room, arms interlocked, as the music turns into a swinging, lewd burlesque number with crashing cymbals and wailing trombones. 15 VOLUPTUOUS FEMALE DANCERS come dancing onstage in a line, waving fans and winking suggestively to the audience. Balloons fall from the rafters. As the music climaxes, a nude HOWARD FINEMAN appears from offstage with a notebook in his hand to run around the stage copying from the notebooks of the MALE CHORUS.)

ALL (Singing):

Steal your stories here at Unfit Times!!!

(Exeunt.)

]]> http://www.unfittimes.com/2009/10/08/unfit-for-ethics/feed/ 1 http://www.unfittimes.com/2009/10/07/1948/ http://www.unfittimes.com/2009/10/07/1948/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:47:55 +0000 Josh Rosenblatt http://www.unfittimes.com/?p=1948

The game at its purest

America is a land of mass psychoses. Witness the Salem witch trials, the Red Scare, the War on Terror. the Birther movement, the popularity of Will Ferrell. There’s nothing Americans like better than indulging themselves in the comfort of communal delusion and calling it shared wisdom.

And none of these delusions is more absurd (or more persistent) than the belief that college athletics is purer than professional sports.

Talk to die-hard college sports fans and they’ll tell you that college athletes play for the love of the game while professionals play for the love of the paycheck. They’ll scream up and down (faces painted, team hand gestures at the ready) that professional athletes don’t care, that they’ve been tainted by the money and the cars and the women, that they don’t try hard, that they don’t play with emotion, that they don’t care about winning, and that they won’t put their bodies on the line and give their all because … well, why bother, right?

This argument makes me so mad I can barely dictate this sentence to my unpaid foreign intern before sending him out to pick up my dry cleaning.

In order to even make it to the pros, you need skills and talent and size and speed and ability and luck, true, but more than that, you need to be so competitive that losing feels to you like death. The faraway dream of professional glory and riches isn’t enough motivation to keep a kid going through years of drills, practices, injuries, games, shame, and general inconvenience. His desire to not lose has to get him through. Athletes who make it all the way to the pros have been winning their entire lives, and the idea that their competitive instincts would just vanish because they’re suddenly making millions of dollars is nonsense. (And besides, when did making money become a cause for criticism in this country? In every other walk of life we look up to people who make money – especially those who came from no money, like many of our athletes  – as examples of the American can-do spirit. We don’t revere amateur rappers or businessmen or computer programmers. Is college sports fandom the last true bastion of socialism in America?)

If you don’t believe me, check out this footage from a recent preseason game between the Utah Jazz and the Chicago Bulls. Again, this is a preseason game. A game that couldn’t be more insignificant. A game where even the 12th man – whose job it is usually to demonstrate his mastery of the ancient arts of towel-spinning, overenthusiastic head-nodding, and chest-bumping – gets a chance to play. Just watch this video and tell me these guys don’t care about winning, that somehow their love of the game and of competition has been tainted by fame and wealth, that they’re nothing more than soulless corporate entities vying for bigger endorsement deals.

Go on – tell me.