CLINT EASTWOOD: “GET OFF MY LAWN MINORITIES!”

This was mildly disturbing, yet wholly predictable. A decrepit old white actor who’s lived in a platinum-plated bubble for more than 60 years decides he is going to tell minorities and women to get over this whole discrimination thing.

Basically Clint Eastwood’s entire interview can be boiled down to: “Hey look, Trump says some pretty bad things, but c’mon, making fun of blacks and dames was fine when I was a kid, so let’s just go back to the days when a privileged famous white guy could yuk it up with his buddies and tell off-color jokes and spew sexist rhetoric, safe from the persecution of political correctness. Whatdaya say?”

Don’t you just love it when someone who is literally and figuratively separated from the wrath of racism by bullet-proof glass, concrete walls and – probably – a moat with crocodiles, tells blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and women to stop complaining? Don’t we all feel better knowing that Dirty Harry is on the case making sure that minorities and women don’t get too big for their britches!

Of course being a loyal democrat, I am kind of glad Mr. Eastwood is wading back into the presidential election.  I think we all remember his great foray into the 2012 campaign when he snagged the best actor nod for playing a beloved senile has-been, delivering a cringe-inducing monologue to a piece of furniture.

Keep talking Clint. Your status as a fallen A-lister who has the power to crush republican presidential dreams is secure.

 

OF COPS AND FISHERMAN

This story troubles me. Police waited three hours to take out the Orlando Nightclub shooter?  Three hours in which he shot more people and also allowed some wounded people to bleed out and die?

Obviously, the whole terrible ordeal bothers me. It was gut wrenching and almost impossible to imagine.

 

But the fact that police officers waited and waited to engage – seemingly with no real negotiations going on. Seemingly with no hope to get him to surrender. Seemingly, the cops waited because they didn’t want to engage with an armed man in tight quarters.

Now of course that makes sense.  I wouldn’t want to engage with an armed man in tight quarters – but here’s the thing.  I’m me. A civilian. I’m not supposed to engage with an armed man in tight quarters.

Police are.

We are told time and time again that police risk their lives every day to protect us. We hear that from cops, the media, senators and the president.  We are told that the cops are brave men and women who risk their lives to protect people.

But do they really? 

Let’s unpack the blanket statement that cops risk their lives to protect us.

·         On one hand, of course they do. They wear a uniform that identifies them as police. If you are a bad guy, that uniform can certainly look like a target.

·         The carry guns and Tasers and mace and are sworn to uphold the law and go after the bad guys. That is inherently dangerous and therefore meets the test of someone who is a life-risker.

·         They also engage in high-speed pursuits, domestic violence incidents and traffic stops – all considered highly unsafe events.

But on the other hand, do cops inherently go above and beyond their sworn professional duty to risk their lives for complete strangers?

·         I would love to see legitimate stats (say from the FBI) with painstakingly detail about how many hostages, or injured shooting victims have died in the last ten years because cops were prohibited from directly engaging a bad guy in order to keep themselves out of harm’s way.

·         I would love to see legitimate stats on how many people have been killed or injured by accidental police shootings because the cop’s training and personal decision prompted the use of a gun over non-lethal methods.

·         I would love to see an exhaustive investigation into the possibility that systemic fear of black men by white cops leads to the over-use of deadly force in such encounters.

First caveat: I’m not a cop, never have been. I can only imagine their job. Second caveat; I’m not a cop hater and am profoundly glad they do their jobs and protect people. Third caveat: I don’t want cops taking unnecessary risks in order to stop bad guys.

However, my point of this post is as follows:

Do we overdramatize the role of “hero cop” to their detriment?  If we constantly hear from our leaders that, “our brave men and women in uniform risk their lives every day,” isn’t it inevitable that we feel let down when they don’t? I read the above mention story and wondered: did those poor souls in that Orlando nightclub bathroom go to their deaths believing the cops abandoned them?

I was a lifeguard in high school.  The first thing they teach you in lifeguard school is this: never go into the water unless you know for sure the drowning person is not going to drag you under. If it’s a choice between saving them and risking your life, back away and let them drown. 

Let’s be honest. Cops are taught the same thing. AND THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. I believe that the only way you can have an effective police profession is to mostly guarantee cops that they get to go home at night unscathed.

I’m just advocating that we stop with this unattainable level of hero worship that revs up the expectations far beyond the ability of cops to save everyone.

In Orlando, people died who otherwise might have lived because the cops were not going to risk their lives to save them. That is horrible to comprehend and horrible even to write, but it is the truth. No hero cop with a lantern-jaw and rugged good looks shouted to his brothers in blue: “damn the regulations, I’m going to save those poor people!” and stormed that bathroom in front of a hail of gunfire. The cops waited until a relatively safe tactic was found and then they executed.

Cops have a dangerous job. It turns out however, theirs is not the most dangerous job - that belongs to loggers and commercial fisherman. Cops rank 15^th in most dangerous professions.  Yet we don’t lionize guys who cut down trees or haul in fish. Hell, probably 99.999 percent of all Americans don’t even know those ARE dangerous jobs. And no politician stands before a crowded arena shouting about our nation’s patriotic duty to blindly support the brave men who chop down redwoods or reel in halibut.

And as far as I know, the loggers and fisherman of the world don’t have union leaders, senators and mayors decrying any person who dares criticize their tactics, mistakes and judgements. Nor is there a huge competition between Republicans and Democrats to show which party is more supportive of tree cutters and fish gutters.

Cops deserve our respect and support – no question. However, let’s show them respect and support by accurately acknowledging who and what they are: professionals who do a job and then go home, just like the rest of us. Can cops be heroes? Of course! But so can the logger who risks his life to feed his family or the fisherman who risks his life to pay for his daughter’s education.

 

THE OLD LION CAN STILL ROAR

He looked old and feeble.  Too thin. Slightly reminded me of Paul Newman before the end.  But I can’t think of another speech where physical weakness was so outshined by verbal power.

Bill Clinton, President Bill Clinton, can still bring it in front of a large crowd. As great as Michelle Obama was, and as unifying as Bernie Sanders tried to be – it was William Jefferson Clinton that provided the port in the storm for all democrats during the tumult of their own discord and fear about “that other guy.”

If you are a democrat fence-sitter about Hilary occupying the White House, you have absolutely no doubts the country and the world would become of a better place if he re-took residence in the People’s House.

Look, I get it.  When Bill talks about his love and pursuit of Hillary all those years ago, most of us of a certain age, cringe a little bit and think about a dark-haired intern and a blue dress.  We know the love story of the Clintons is one where a huge chapter bespeaks shame, infidelity and massive public embarrassment.

We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that ALL of our heroes are flawed and human. We know that a “perfect” person is just someone whose secrets have yet to be revealed. And we know that as Bill went on and on about Hillary’s intellect, caring and self-sacrifice, the political image-burnisher was cranked up to 11.

But the man can use a speech like a firefighter uses water to vanquish flames. If our political house is on fire and “that other guy” is wielding a can of gasoline like a drunken madman, Slick Willy can rain down his words of comfort and optimism and extinguish the fire of fear and hate.

I’m old enough to have heard so many political speeches. I came of political age during Reagan, slept through most of Bush Senior’s one term, laughed and then cried at the feebleness of his son’s language butchery and even got to witness in person one of Obama’s stem-winders. 

Clinton is simply the best in modern times. His voice isn’t particularly soothing, his genuineness is questionable and his personal history can tug on the words like a pesky fly – but them man is pure smooth hell behind a podium. End of story.

He’s like Lawrence Taylor bank in the day. Yes, Taylor was a pretty despicable person off the field, and left his fans with a bad taste in their mouths, kind of like the way Clinton’s personal life did for many of us. But come game day, there was no one on the planet you’d want more then LT rushing the left side of the offensive line, and there is no one on the planet you’d want more making the case for our next president than the man from Hope Arkansas.

Like a proud old lion with few, if any, hunts left, Bill Clinton dragged his tired bones onto the stage and let out a resounding and singular roar as only he could.

Blame it on Nat Turner

If I said to you that last night I drove through a “bad neighborhood,” what image would immediately pop into your mind about my stated location? I believe with every fiber of my being that if you are white, the image in your mind would contain one singular element with stark clarity – the presence of multiple black males hanging out on the streets.

Sure, your mind’s eye would be collaged with graffiti, trash, neon liquor store signs and bright marquees for payday loans. But, those are just scenery in a drama where the starring role is occupied by dark skin contrasted against “wife-beater” t-shirts and baggie blue jeans.

If we are being honest with ourselves, we can’t escape the fact that we white men are terrified of black men.

And I think that, more than any other factor, is the heart of our modern day prejudice and racism in America – and more – the singular reason why so many white cops stop, frisk and kill black men. The cop on the street doesn’t hate the black man, he isn’t repulsed by him – he fears him.  In fact, the cop fears the black man more than he fears the possibility of losing his job or losing his freedom if he puts a bullet in the black man’s head.

You can hear the fear in Darren Wilson’s testimony about shooting Michael Brown. "I felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” he said in testimony. You can see and hear it in the cell phone video of Jeronimo Yanez shooting Philando Castile. These white men were terrified of the black suspects before them.

Juxtapose these two tragedies with what happened a few years ago in Nevada with rancher Clive Bundy.  When you boil the entire standoff down to its essence you have a situation where a bunch of white men in violation of the law and with guns were allowed to go about their law breaking so as not to spark a volatile situation. Even though they were armed – with some even taking up sniper positions – the lack of fear on behalf of law enforcement was obvious.

To white cops, a white civilian with a gun is problem to solve. A black civilian with a gun is a nightmare to wake up from.

We all learned about Nat Turner and his rebellion in school. An angry slave and his followers took the law into their own hands and killed dozens of white slave owners. We learned about it alongside thousands of dates and facts and names of historical significance in High School.  And then, many of us, simply forgot about it.

Or did we? Indeed, we forgot about the facts and the how’s and the when’s, but did we forget about the visceral feeling – a black man exacting revenge for mistreatment and abuse and enslavement at the hands of whites?

I don’t think so.  I think many of us feel – at an almost reptilian brain level – the fear of that revenge. We know that through our birthright and through perhaps our own actions, we are guilty of that mistreatment and abuse of black peoples. And we fear it. We fear the revenge, our comeuppance. We fear it because we are great at it, exacting revenge. It’s part of our white American lore. Against Santa Ana at the Alamo, Against the Germans in WW1 and the Japanese in WWII we were hurt, but we can back stronger and vanquished our foe.

Won’t black people eventually seek revenge against us? For what we’ve done or what our ancestors did? We would, if it happened to us.

And so, because of Nat Turner, and because of millions of terrible abuses and mild slights later, we know the bank account of racism and oppression is full.  We live in fear of a withdrawal that, truth be told, we would have made decades ago, if the shoe was on the other foot.

 

MY TOTALLY AWESOME PLAN TO REVAMP THE NBA DRAFT

The NBA Draft kind of sucks. It is nowhere near as exciting as the NFL Draft and by its nature it rewards bad teams and their mediocre to poor management and ownership.

There has to be a better way – and now, there is and it would work like this

Allow players to decide where they play, just like every other business in America.

How it works:

1.       Every NBA team submits a list of 60 NBA eligible players to the league office. The 60 names most often sited create a pool of that year’s selectees.

2.       Any NBA-eligible player not on the initial list is free to sign with any team as a free agent after the selection event is completed.

3.       Have each of the 60 players pick a number – 1-60 – out of a hat. Players select from the hat based on some kind of random computerized process.

4.       The player who selects the #1 can go to whichever team he wants. The player who selects the #2 can go to whichever team he wants, except the team selected by the prior player. On it goes.

5.       Every team gets the same amount of money within the salary cap to sign two players from the pool. The contracts are 2-year guaranteed deals.

6.       If a team and a player cannot reach a deal, the player’s recourse is to forgo selecting a team and wait until the following year. If that happens, he retains amateur status and can back to school or retain pro status and play overseas.

7.       A player can opt out of a team selection, only once.

It solves everything wrong with the current NBA Draft system.

• It stops teams from tanking, because there is no longer any incentive to lose on purpose.
• It creates a system that is inherently fair to players, teams and fans. Players choose the place they want to work, franchises are forced to spruce up their image and winning to attract those players, and we finally end a situation where teams are like plantation owners and players are like the help.
• It would be ungodly exciting for everyone to watch.
• It creates a system where the best of all possible synergies between player and team is created. Players inherently want to go to a place they can succeed.
• It provides more, not less, opportunity for players to succeed and franchises to get it right. Players can find the best situation for them and franchise get to test-drive players for two years and not be forced to lock into a three-year deal on a player that isn’t working out. In the current system, teams hate to give up on a Kwame Brown because it makes them look bad, but if Kwame selected them and it didn’t work out, they can let him go and move onto the next opportunity without blame.

I welcome any additional thoughts and comments.

MAYBE THIS TIME...MAYBE??

Have you ever played a silly game, like tossing playing cards into a hat with a friend and you keep missing the target? And you take a moment, grip the card carefully and exclaim, “OK, this time it goes in.” And then you flip it forward and it misses the mark. Then you say, “OK, THIS TIME!”

And you miss again.  All this is repeated again and again, until you finally make it.

I’ve been thinking about this scenario for the past 24 hours in relationship to the horror in Orlando and our national disgrace related to assault weapons.

Could it be that after so many heart-wrenching mass shootings, after so many funerals and so many ineffectual thoughts and prayers, we might finally actually get the card in the hat and actually do something constructive about the proliferation of assault weapons in our country?

For years, I’ve been saying to myself: OK, this time…this time we will finally take action to reduce the number of assault weapons in circulation.

I really thought after Sandy Hook, after all those kids were killed, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

I really thought after the Aurora shooting, after a massacre in such a general location as a movie theater, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

I thought after San Bernardino, after tragedy struck at an innocuous holiday party for a bunch of low level government bureaucrats, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

Could the massacre at Pulse in Orlando finally be the one?

I get it. The odds of meaningful gun reform are long. Really long.  But, here are a couple of things we may wish to consider.

·         People who steadfastly support the NRA are by their nature, fearful people. True, they fetishize guns and love the macho power of assault weapons, but at their heart, they are afraid. They fear the unknown and unseen madman who can strike at any moment, at any place.

·         At its core, the situation of Omar Mateen is terrifying on so many levels. He was on the FBI watch list, and yet cleared to buy an AR-15. He passed background checks to become a security guard. He lives in a country where he can purchase assault weapons with no problem whatsoever, but was denied purchase of body armor. He was not a member of ISIS, but apparently become radicalized because of a simple website.

Think about that for a second. If Omar Mateen can become a mass shooter, literally anyone can. He wasn’t some crazed loner, like the Aurora shooter, or some mental defect like the Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook shooters.  He was an angry man – apparently extremely homophobic - and easily walked among us.

And the FBI, questioned him in 2014 and didn’t have enough to stop him at all. 

·         And, he didn’t strike some military base or some meaningful target to further the goals of ISIS. He simply cloaked himself in the violent and nihilistic rhetoric of ISIS to carry out his personal homophobic rage on a gay nightclub. He simply exploited the idea of ISIS to vent his hatred of people completely disassociated with that terror group’s designs.

If law enforcement and our intelligence community couldn’t stop Mateen, they can’t stop anyone of similar intent. And if he could be radicalized by ISIS propaganda – really, only for the justification for mass murder against personal objects of disgust – then anyone can.

And so I come back to the idea that this time it might be different. I think Mateen represents a kind of watershed moment of clarity surrounding our feelings of safety and security.  I think many people - maybe enough people - are going to realize that NOTHING could have stopped him from doing what he did and NOTHING is going to stop others from committing similar acts of terror and hate on their own bete noires. And more importantly, many people – maybe enough people – are going to realize that in order to take back a certain level of safety and security we have to at least make it harder for these would-be mass murders to kill us in such great numbers.

Mateen was a literally a stew. A stew of rage, intent, outward normalcy, malleability, access and an assault weapon. There is only one ingredient society could realistically remove from this stew that would have saved lives on June 12 – the gun.

Maybe this time?

 

PARTNERS IN LEGEND

When you swim, the water acts as both benefit and curse. The water provides the resistance that slows and stalls you from reaching the speed you’d love to achieve. But the water is the thing you push against to get anywhere. The curse of resistance is actually the benefit of propulsion.

I thought about that when I heard the sad news of Mohamad Ali’s passing and thought about the legendary partnership between the greatest athlete of the 20^th Century and the greatest announcer of the same era, Howard Cosell.

Their verbal sparring was legendary, to the point of being uncomfortable.  When I was just a little kid and witnessed their heated conversations on TV I thought they were really mad at each other. I thought this big, hulking monster was savaging this obnoxious, verbose yellow-blazered maniac.

It was only later that I learned how those performances were necessary resistance that actually propelled the legend of both men forward.

In order to make his act work; in order for this 1960’s black athlete to be taken seriously as the smartest, most charismatic and larger-than-life figure the world had ever seen, he needed a white foil to take it all out on.

And Cosell was there, along for the ride in its entirely, to be the resistance Ali needed to get to the other side. To become THE GREATEST, Ali needed, perhaps the greatest second banana in history.

Further, the sportscaster only burnished his legacy be being inexorably linked to the most recognizable and famous person on the planet for more than two decades. After all, in the 60’s and 70’s, if Ali walked into a room with Bob Hope, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, Lucille Ball, Joe Namath, Pele, Mick Jagger, Wilt Chamberlin and the Pope – everyone would stop talking, turn around and say, “hey, there’s The Champ!”

Indeed. There would still be a Mohamad Ali without Cosell, but I’m not sure there would have been, “The Greatest.” And, Howard Cosell would still have been a great and revered broadcaster, but not the single greatest in history.

If there is a heaven, both of these giants are together again: the most charismatic superstar and the most articulate broadcaster those of us left of earth have ever seen and heard.