Category: Current Affairs

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Today’s Tour Mystery

Phil Liggett just looked at a picture of a T-Mobile rider struggling off the back of the peloton on today’s (the 10th stage’s) final climb. “That’s Ullrich!” he gasped, meaning Jan Ullrich, the great racer known more as a perennial Tour also-ran. But it wasn’t Ullrich — it was one of the T-Mobile domestiques who was done with his turn in the peloton for the day.

But that’s just a small botched detail in today’s race. The truly impenetrable mystery for Liggett and OLN announcing partner Paul Sherwen is why Lance Armstrong’s team has been riding so hard at the front during the latter parts of the stage. The guys have been utterly mystified about it, guessing that perhaps it has to do with Lance’s fear of one of the riders in a breakaway that, coming off the second-to-last climb of the day was 4 or 5 minutes ahead of the main field.

But as the charge up the long last climb has developed, it’s apparent that Discovery has something else in mind: They’re applying as much pressure as possible to the rest of Lance’s rivals — all riding behind Discovery in the same group — to prevent any of them from making an attack. It’s like sucking the air right out of their lungs — they just don’t have much left to launch their own moves. And right now, inside 12 kilometers to the finish, it looks like the tactic has worked — most of the front group has blown up and dropped back.

Long way to go to the finish, though ….

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‘Spigot Flow Report

In person, I think I’m loquacious and logorrheic as ever, given half a chance. In the last little while, though, the blog output has flagged. Thinking a lot about some things, but feeling a little overwhelmed about what to say about them, or whether to say anything at all. This quote from “The Thin Red Line,” spoken during much more dire circumstance than I’ve ever experienced, has come to mind: “What difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?”

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OLN and the Tour: The Little Things

It’s a small thing I want to complain about — a very small thing in a world where dozens of people are killed in terror attacks every week, where our nation is sending young people into an ill-defined and badly executed war, where so many of us struggle with personal challenges large and small just to get by from day to with our sanity intact. With that preamble spoken, the further piece I want to say is: It’s a damned shame, and very strange, that the race announcers on the Outdoor Life Networks Tour de France coverage are so bad at their jobs.

I’m hooked on the race, and I’ll watch every day, the daily cascade of meaningless froth from the two play-by-play guys (Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen) notwithstanding. Granted, they have a tough job. They’re sitting in a booth at the finish line every day and trying to cobble together some meaning from the live TV pictures they’re seeing and radio reports they’re hearing. But having conceded the task is difficult, it’s still sort of shocking how shallow, careless and sometimes flat-out wrong the duo is.

Just one case in point that won’t mean anything to anyone but a dedicated watcher/follower of the Tour: During Saturday’s stage, Lance Armstrong’s team collapsed. Everyone knows that now, because both Lance and smart commentators have been talking about it ever since the stage was over (Lance’s take in a post-race interview: “It was a bad day for the team.”).

But while the saga was unfolding — when the OLN guys had this amazing drama right in front of them — they apparently had no idea what was going on. What a viewer saw was Armstrong alone in a large group of riders from other teams who freely took turns attacking him (trying to get away from Armstrong by making sudden rapid accelerations ahead of his group); he was left to respond himself to every challenge, which involved “covering” the attack, or matching the quick accelerations of his rivals to make sure they didn’t get away. The disappearance of all of Armstrong’s teammates, who ordinarily would play a role in covering the moves from other teams, was stunning and recalled his very tough 2003 Tour, when he was repeatedly left by himself to deal with a rather large and very hostile group of competitors.

Sherwen and Liggett picked up on the attacks, because that’s what the pictures showed. But about the more important development that wasn’t on camera, they said nothing. The equivalent in baseball announcing terms would be if the announcer decided to tell you only what he saw happening at home plate. A lot of what’s important in a game happens right there. But you only see the game if you take in the rest of the field.

That’s all. That’s the end of this OLN complaint and this broadcasting day.

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The Next Justice

Last night at dinner — celebrating Kate’s birthday with our friends John and Debbie — Bush’s impending Supreme Court nomination came up.

“How many emails have you gotten from the Democrats about Sandra Day O’Connor?” John asked.

Well, not hundreds. But a steady stream from MoveOn and other liberal groups. The messages complement the “progressive” protests that greeted the news that O’Connor was retiring and that Bush is finally getting his dreaded chance to pick a real right-winger for the court. MoveOn PAC, the explicitly partisan arm of the liberal interest group born here in Berkeley of software money, is calling on its supporters to hold house parties this weekend to talk up a campaign to convince Bush to do the right thing and pick a middle-of-the-road justice.

I don’t want to be dismissive of a noble effort. But I will be, anyway.

First: Just what are these action groups and protesters thinking? That they’re dealing with a bunch of people who can be reasoned with, whose consciences are open to appeals based on democracy’s finer points? If so, they’re even further out of touch than they look when they go in front of the cameras shrieking about Bush’s imminent destruction of the republic.

The people they’re dealing with are like, you know, the Emperor and Darth Vader from “Star Wars.” Your puny democratic principles. Just wait till the Death Star gets done with them. This crew thought next to nothing about committing us to a struggle in Iraq that they know casually intimate will last, gee, for another decade or more. So: appeals to reason and conscience? Not in this life, though one can hope they have a reckoning during their next turn on the wheel.

Second: The protests and house party ideas — the notion that this is a pragmatic approach, a way to jawbone the president and his ideologues toward the political center — are just kind of loony. Fact is, Bush will be exercising an executive prerogative, just the way almost every other president has done. There’s absolutely nothing in history or The Good Book of Common Decency that requires him to do what his political foes consider the right thing; or to care what they think, for that matter, unless they have the votes to make a difference.

It’s kind of disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Just how would it look to the Democrats/liberals if they had one of their own in the White House right now and the religious right was mounting a crusade to keep a Roe-friendly “out-of-the-mainstream” nominee off the court? They’d be heading to the barricades to defend the president’s prerogative, I imagine.

Someone named Ben Brandzel, under whose name today’s MoveOn PAC e-missive was sent out, points to O’Connor’s nomination and unanimous (99-0) confirmation in 1981 as “a great example of how this process is supposed to work.” Moderately. Reasonably. Everyone goes home happy. And you get a justice who respects abortion rights.

Except that’s not how it really happened in O’Connor’s case. She was one of four consecutive nominees who won confirmation with zero “nay” votes on the Senate floor: John Paul Stevens, O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy all got unanimous approval, and so did Antonin Scalia, the arch-conservative.

The streak was broken with David Souter. He was confirmed 90-9, with the no votes coming from MoveOn-type senators (Kennedy, Kerry, Alan Cranston, Bill Bradley and others) who expressed concern Souter would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, he’s turned out to be, along with O’Connor and Kennedy (seen as a Catholic conservative going in) what most would consider a MoveOn-friendly moderate. Citing O’Connor’s 99-0 vote as evidence of how the process of friendly moderation is supposed to work is simply misinterpreting the record.

What would seem more reasonable for the panic-mongers to do at this point … is to wait and see who gets nominated. Then, the shrieking can have a specific target and might actually prevent another Clarence Thomas from getting on the court.

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July 1, 2005

Iraq, 835th Day:

“… It is indeed better to fight here. If Iraq has become a training ground for terrorism, so be it. It is then fortunate that the best military in the world just happens to be here ready to locate, close with, and destroy them before they spread. Here in Iraq we are a target for terrorism. Good! They know where to find us, and we invite them to do so. We are wining this fight. One shot at a time. One block at a time, one pair of shoes on a child’s feet at a time, one vote at a time, one free election at a time. To a soldier this is simply duty, nothing more. To the Iraqis, this is a gift, paid with the blood of youth, paid for in missed anniversaries, paid for in bitter combat, paid for in the hopes and dreams of Americans being forever extinguished on streets called, Haifa, and 60th, in towns called Dora, and Karadda. In a country called Iraq, in a place once called the cradle of civilization. We are the light by which the new democracy of Iraq will traverse through the darkness. We are Americans!”

From a U.S. soldier’s blog: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

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Bush’s Numbers

The New York Times is out with its latest poll on how we, red states and blue alike, feel about our commander-in-chief/village idiot. Here’s the lead:

“Increasingly pessimistic about Iraq and skeptical about President Bush’s plan for Social Security, Americans are in a season of political discontent, giving Mr. Bush one of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and even lower marks to Congress, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll.”

“Season of political discontent.” That’s got a ring to it. But does it actually mean anything? On its Web site, the Times publishes 21 pages of poll results. The statistics apparently include all the questions asked in its most recent survey as well the past results when the same questions were asked. It’s interesting to look at what people were saying a year ago.

Then, the Times poll found that 42 percent of respondents approved of the way Bush was handling his job, and 51 percent did not. Today’s dramatic change: 42 percent approve and 51 percent do not.

Let’s look at Iraq. The Times asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?” A year ago, 36 percent said they approved and 58 percent said they disapproved; today, 37 percent approve and 59 percent disapprove.

(The poll’s historical numbers on Iraq seem to show how much we like a winner, how much we’re swayed by a good TV picture, and how ephemeral wide popular support of the war has been: The high point for Iraq support in this poll came in a survey done April 11-13, 2003, immediately after U.S. troops entered Baghdad and we all got to watch that Saddam statue getting pulled down: 79 percent said they approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq and 17 percent disapproved. The support numbers stayed in the 70s through late May ’03 — the month Bush declared victory — but fell into the high 50s in July. September 2003 marked the first time the poll found more respondents (47 percent) disapproving than approving (46 percent). And in fact, the approval number has risen above 50 percent just once since — the week after Saddam’s capture in December 2003, when it popped up to 59 percent, only to fall back into the 40s by mid-January.)

The point is, if we’re in a season of political discontent, it’s nothing new. The real question you need to unravel is how, with numbers like this, did Bush get re-elected. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that, but some of the elements of an answer are out there: The public’s low regard for Congress (current approval number, according to Times poll, is 33 percent; and the rather confounding finding that people approve of Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism (52-40 in the current poll).

And beyond the numbers, there’s the fact the Democrats can’t seem to find the utterly perfect candidate that everyone seems to think they need as an alternative to Bush and his crew of nation wreckers. I wonder if people, in their discontent, would consider Kerry now?

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Greatest Americans

All right — it’s hard to resist the temptation to mock The Discovery Channel’s "Greatest American" series, to say that it’s just another opportunity to see our clueless fellow rubes and yahoos at work. Not that I don’t believe that. Please enter as people’s Exhibit A the appearance of George H.W. Bush and First Lady Babs and George W. Bush and First Lady Laura — four Bushes in all — in the original top 100 nominees list; meaning that there were only 96 candidates for Greatest American not named B-u-s-h.

But pointing out the drooling superficiality of that first list is just too easy. People’s B: Tom  Cruise. Yes, I loved the underwear dance in "Risky Business," too. But still.

See? That is too easy. And besides, it’s actually interesting to see who survives the media-mediated winnowing process to rise to the top.

The process is down to the Top 25: Muhammad Ali, Neil Armstrong, Lance Armstrong, G.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Walt Disney, Tom Edison, Albert Einstein (if I’m not mistaken, the only non-American-born figure in the group), Henry Ford, Ben Franklin, Bill Gates, Billy Graham, Bob Hope, Thomas Jefferson, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Abe Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Elvis, Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Roosevelt and, separately, her husband, Franklin, Geo. Washington, Oprah, and, collectively, Orville and Wilbur Wright.

What I’m struck by at first glance:

–How the first 125 years or more of our history vanishes. Only five of the 25 are truly pre-20th century figures (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln and Edison), and they’d be on absolutely anyone’s greatest hits list. Heck, if they’re on money, they must be great.

–The two Armstrongs: I can’t understand how Neil makes it. Maybe he makes the grade because, as far as we know, he didn’t wet himself when his big moment came. But how, except for the luck of the draw, can he possibly be distinguished as great from any of the other first-generation astronauts? If you need someone to specifically represent the incredible accomplishment of getting to the moon — an OK idea — you need to recognize another immigrant: Wernher von Braun.

Then there’s Lance: Fine. He is a most excellent champion, a peerless model of the will to transcend and win. But his appearance on the list is due only to his recent run of victories in the one race that more than a tiny, tiny club of Americans know about. How many of the voters could name the first American to win the Tour (or know the story of his miraculous comeback from a brush with death)? How many could name another U.S. pro cyclist — just one, without looking (I declare that the readership of this blog is not representative of America At Large for the purposes of proving my point)?

–The two Roosevelts: It’s rather astounding that both members of a couple made the Top 25 list in their own right. You gotta have FDR — he meets the money test, for pity’s sake (until Reagan takes over the dime, anyway). And even if the current Bush is in the process of trying to abolish much of FDR’s legacy, he guided the nation through one of its most perilous periods. But Eleanor —  I’m of two minds about her, and neither of them is filled with a lot of factual information. You kind of get the feeling she’s there because, well, we’re not quite clear about or comfortable with any other accomplished American women who don’t have talk shows. Susan B. Anthony, anyone?

(Here are my top 5 from that list of 25: Lincoln. King. Parks. The Wright Brothers (well, I just read a fine book about them, "To Conquer the Air"). And FDR. )

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Iraq: The Next Generation

One: A long Chicago Tribune piece (the version I saw was reprinted in the Tallahassee Democrat; Democrat?) on a debate going back to the late 1980s about re-configuring the U.S. armed forces to fight the kind of war we’re in the middle of now. The story focuses on proponents of a philosophy called “fourth-generation warfare” who have been highly critical of the Pentagon’s persistence, even now, in developing and maintaining a war machine designed to fight a big tank war against a great power like the Soviet Union:

Nearly 16 years ago, a group of four military officers and a civilian predicted the rise of terrorism and anti-American insurgencies with chilling accuracy.

The group said U.S. military technology was so advanced that foreign forces would be unlikely to challenge it directly, and it forecast that future foes would be non-state insurgents and terrorists whose weapons would be suicide car bombs, not precision-guided weapons.

“Today, the United States is spending $500 million apiece for stealth bombers,” the group wrote in a 1989 article that appeared in a professional military journal. “A terrorist stealth bomber is a car with a bomb in the trunk – a car that looks like every other car.”

The critics conclude that despite some well-meaning attempts at adopting new tactics in Iraq — trying to train troops in the rudiments of the local language and culture (which doesn’t seem like such a new thing, really) — the war has gone so far down the wrong road that it’s doomed. One of the critics, who sounds like an ultra-conservative war-hawk type, says simply: “There’s nothing that you can do in Iraq today that will work. That situation is irretrievably lost.”

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Whitman’s War, Our War

As I was saying — May 31 is Walt Whitman’s birthday. I’ve always been struck by his Civil War poems, their brevity and power, the immediacy of them, the empathy in them, the unflinching way he conveyed the suffering he saw and the suffering he took in. For instance, this scene from “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown“:

“We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building;

’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads—’tis now an impromptu hospital;

—Entering but for a minute, I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made:

Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,

And by one great pitchy torch, stationary, with wild red flame, and clouds of smoke;

By these, crowds, groups of forms, vaguely I see, on the floor, some in the pews laid down;

At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;)

I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily;)

Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene, fain to absorb it all;

Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead;

Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood;

The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms of soldiers—the yard outside also fill’d;

Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating;

An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls;

The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches. …”

Whitman was writing for an audience for whom this kind of loss was familiar. When the Civil War ended, every American knew someone who had been killed or wounded (rough arithmetic: 4 percent of the male population counted in the 1860 census died as a result of the war; that’s one in 25 men in the entire country; that ratio in today’s U.S. population would equal 6 million deaths). When Whitman wrote about the horror and tragedy of a field hospital, he was describing a scene that involved his readers in a very personal way.

The Whitman war poem — especially his picture of the field hospital — came to mind in part because, in the midst of my Memorial Day reading, I just happened across a piece from an American military doctor working in a combat hospital in Iraq. It’s immediate and moving in its own way:

“They wheeled the soldier into the ER on a NATO gurney shortly after the chopper touched down. One look at the PJs’ [pararescuemen’s] faces told me that the situation was grim. Their young faces were drawn and tight, and they moved with a sense of directed urgency. They did not even need to speak because the look in their eyes was pleading with us – hurry. And hurry we did.”

The piece isn’t Whitman. For one thing, a lot of the it’s given over to marked pro-war rhetoric and a sort of “Top Gun” meets “ER” attitude that seems a little foreign to the humanity of the situation. And the author is writing about a scene that most of us aren’t personally connected to and probably don’t want to think too much about. That in itself makes it worth the time to read and ponder.

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Memorial Day …

… Is almost over. I whiled away part of the patriotic three-day weekend watching some of the Turner Classic Movies “all war flicks, all the time” marathon. Saw almost all of “A Bridge Too Far,” which is extraordinary for its overuse of big-name actors and big-time pyrotechnics in the service of perhaps the last romantic World War II feature. Saw parts of “M*A*S*H,” which has aged amazingly well. Saw parts of “Patton,” which seems ludicrous to me now. Beyond my personal political leanings, I think the war-themed movies just look different in the post-“Saving Private Ryan”/”Band of Brothers” era, when there’s been an effort to bring something like combat verity into the movies and television.

For a film about such a famously hard-nosed character, “Patton” comes off as little more than a romantic caricature in which one great man spends a couple hours strutting around in front of a bunch of cardboard cutouts. That’s the way it looks now. Then — it came out the same year as “M*A*S*H,” 1970 — it was enormously popular and a big winner at the 1971 Oscars. It’s hard to say why looking at it now, though of course the period is suggestive: Vietnam was unpopular but not yet recorded in the “not-won” column, and the movie features a hero who built a reputation for driving tanks through any opposition, damn subtlety or consequences. “M*A*S*H” spoke a lot more directly to the anti-war audience then, and because of its grim humor, frankness about the business at a combat hospital, and Robert Altman’s handling of a great ensemble of actors, it still seems fresh.

That leaves “A Bridge Too Far,” which is almost embarrassing to watch. The stock upbeat theme music. The star-studded cast. The stiff upper lip in the face of insuperable odds. The impassive, smugly superior Nazis (this time with a reason to be smug and superior). The nobility of defeat and massive casualties. It’s good that Hollywood has almost quit making this movie, or this kind of movie (from the trailers, Mel Gibson’s “We Were Soldiers Once,” looks like an attempt to give Vietnam the same heroic treatment).

But it makes you wonder, a little, how Iraq will be turned into a big-screen treat. (The best clue: Go rent “Three Kings.” More pleasingly flashy entertainment, less reality — but we’re OK with that.)