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.

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THAT GORILLA...

Many have written this before: when it comes to sympathizing with animals or people, animals always win.

·         NFL players beat wives and girlfriends, but only Michael Vick still elicits protestors outside stadiums because of his dog fighting past.

·         This ..\Pictures\child.jpg image was a singular and world-wide tragedy, yet a ton of hard right politicians and people in the US and Europe still won’t accept refugees, but imagine if this body lying face down in the surf was an adorable baby hippo or panda bear fleeing some torturous animal park or zoo?

·         Babies, and toddlers and mothers and fathers are gunned down at staggering levels in the US to a collective national yawn, yet a lion named Cecil, gunned down by a trophy-hunting dentist sets the internet on fire in protest.

A few days ago, when Harambe, the gorilla was shot in order to protect a child who had somehow gotten into the enclosure, social media blew up with outrage at the parents, the zoo, and the very practice of caging animals. It is now THE story in the world.  More clicks and reads than the missing Air Egypt plane, more attention than ongoing atrocities in the Middle East and Africa, almost (imagine!) more attention than Donald Trump.

Why?

Why do we literally stop everything, place our outrage and shock for human tragedies on hold and pick up our collective white-hot anger for the perceived wronging of an animal? Why do we instantly forget about dying kids, mutilated brothers and sisters, mangled corpses of once-thriving family members, because some whale, primate or large cat is killed, imprisoned or harmed by Homo sapiens?

I think I finally know why.

No, it’s not because of our humanity and kindness for animals. No, it’s not because the innocence of animals strikes deep into our hearts. No, it’s not because we hold ourselves to higher standards of stewardship over the fauna of the earth.

We do it – we rage more against the killing and mistreatment of animals vs. people because it’s easier.

At the end of the day, accounting for the endless violence and mistreatment and hatred people inflict on other people is just too hard. In response, we instantly latch onto the simplicity of people hurting animals.

In war, when a drone strike mistakenly takes out an innocent wedding party, or US soldiers accidently shoot civilians, or bombs drift too far afield and destroy a hospital, there exists significant complexity. Complexity around the rules of war, the rules of engagement and the blurred lines between civilian and enemy combatant.

With inner-city violence, there is complexity as well. Complexity about guilt or innocence, the role of police, the role of guns and the role of poverty.

In short, caring deeply about people we don’t know personally is harder than caring for animals we’ve never met.

People come with faults and prejudices and meanness and hate. Animals do not. There are many people who are “not on our team” – people outside our class and station and ethnicity and nation of origin. Animals aren’t on anyone’s team and therefore are benevolent free agents that we can instantly care about.

If I care about a single young black teen gunned down on the incredibly violent streets of Chicago, must I care about all street kids – even thugs and gang-bangers?  If I care about massacred civilians in Syria, do I also have to care about the “bad guys” who are legally targeted by our military? If I care about the wife or girlfriend abused by a famous athlete, must I care about all victims of domestic abuse, even if they live in my neighborhood or are a part of my own inner-circle? For many people, that gets complicated very quickly.

But caring about a lovable gorilla, or a majestic lion, or a stable of fighting dogs?  That’s easy.

The same calculous that makes it so difficult to really care about unknown humans works fine with animals.  We can care about the euthanized gorilla, because we can care about ALL gorillas.  We are decidedly pro gorilla and there are no exceptions or caveats with that caring.

Because no gorilla ever did us wrong, we can go ahead and love them all. No strings attached.

Yet isn’t it strange that unconditional love is really only paid out by us when it comes to inter-species affection. As people, we find it so much easy to care for animals then our own kind.

Keep It Simple for the Stupids

I think it is all because of a preternatural need for simplicity.

The rise of Trump and xenophobia and nationalism are simply tools to help keep back complications.

We are overthinking it all. Forget all the talk and prognostications about what the US presidential election “is all about.”  Forget what the “Brexit” means or what Putin is doing in Eastern Europe.

It’s all about simplicity. Many crave order and easy to understand explanations.  They deeply need to be able to comprehend without thinking too much.

Donald Trump appeals because he says incredibly simple things. Donald Trump appeals to many people’s most basic nature that was instilled in them when they were seven-years-old:

“Dad, can I watch TV?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

 “I’m going to build a wall on the Mexican border and Mexico is gonna pay for it.”  But how are you going to do that? “Don’t worry, I’ll just do it.” 

The racism, the nationalism, the bullying…those are all symptoms, not the true underlying reason for Trump. The reason Trump as legitimate contender to become president exists is because he provides simplicity for those who can’t handle complication.

Like the ancient peoples who looked up at an eclipse and, instead of pondering the complex movements of celestial bodies, decided on a simple story about an angry god, Trump offers the easier path for their minds.

Current rules of engagement, perhaps even political correctness, and standards of journalistic decency don’t allow The New York Times or ABC News to say it – but Trump offers simple words to people not smart enough to grasp complexity.  White American men without college degrees in largely rural areas are among the dumbest humans walking the earth. That just so happens to be the demographic which keeps pulling voting levers for The Donald.

And so, this group has thrown their lot in with a man who obviously can’t and won’t do what he promises.  That’s not the point. All politicians lie and swindle, Trump just does it so much simpler. At least they can follow what he is saying for longer than their normal attention span allows.

Jeb Bush talked about the complexities of the global economy; John Kaisch talked about reforming the tax code; Marco Rubio talked about evolving social mores…but Trump talked about keeping Muslims out and making China pay us more and allowing guns everywhere. And Jethro and Molly and all the other unemployed drywall contractors and DMV clerks lapped up the simplicity like a sweet tonic.

Jethro and Molly, when interviewed by CNN election coverage said: “Trump just makes sense, while those other career politicians don’t.” But what they really meant was: “We don’t understand the complex words those career politicians are saying, but we can understand the simple words of Trump. And so, we will vote for him.”