Month: August 2005

Correct!

If Illini and Illiniwek are out for U. of Ill. teams, per NCAA correctors, so is Illinois out for the whole damn state, says Bill McClellan in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who suggests “Fighting Jews” for the team name, arguing that “Jews are not known for being drunken brawlers,” like the Irish, and won’t be offended.  He has other ideas but concludes with “Fighting Corrupt Pols,” with a nod to past secretaries of state Paul Powell and George Ryan.  May I humbly add that Powell and Ryan mascots would not be out of order.

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Meanwhile, local talent will out, as in Rick Morrissey in Chi Trib bringing to bear all the controlled, saddened but not  angered, school-marmish prudery he can muster on the irrepressible Ozzie, the winningest manager maybe in all Chicago history.  Ozzie greeted a friend vulgarly, effusively, insultingly as “a homosexual . . . a child molester,” IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY — Morrissey, that is, and other writers. 

No, no, no! said Morrissey.  You can’t say that!  It’s not true!  Homosexuals are not child molesters!  Stop, stop!  But Newsday beat him to it, without giving Ozzie a chance to defend himself!  So Morrissey, patient, longsuffering, a born teacher (yes!), reads a version of the riot act to our Winningest Manager:

In a vacuum, the insinuation in his words is that being gay is bad and, worse, that it logically follows that homosexuals are child molesters. I know people who are gay and I can’t imagine their seeing anything playful in that. But Guillen says he meant nothing hateful by what he said and that was my immediate impression. But I did roll my eyes. What if someone in the group were gay?

Morrissey knows people who are gay?  Egad, where did he meet them?  Hey, patient schoolmarms spell things out.  You readers be patient too.  It’s a Tribune writer working his way through something.  It’s worth it.  He elicits THE APOLOGY:

“I have no problem with [homosexuals],” Guillen said Wednesday. “I don’t deal with that. To me, everybody’s the same. We’re human beings created by God. Everybody has their own opinion and their own right to do what they want to do. You have the right to feel the way you want to feel. Nobody can take that away from you.”

There.  Morrissey feels better already.  He still has to work things through, however, slogging his conscientious way:

If an Italian came to this country and used ugly words about blacks, would it be explained away so easily? But Guillen says he comes at it from a Venezuelan perspective.

A little cultural awareness, ok?  There’s more, but Morrissey finally lets the whole thing go with a peroration:

Guillen acknowledged he “said the wrong thing at the wrong time,” but it’s more than that. There’s no right time for what he said. The clubhouse and the locker room might be the last place where men can be men, but Guillen has to live in the bigger world. He’s the manager. He’s not Don Rickles.

“I don’t worry about losing my job,” he said. “I just worry about respecting people. I worry about respecting the integrity of people. I represent a city and a team. I have to be careful what I say and when I say it. But I don’t say anything to offend anybody.”

Did ever Father Morrissey impose such a penance?  Finally, he takes a crack at being Aesop but taking three times the space:

In Ozzie’s world, life is to be lived fully, people are to be embraced and jokes are to be made. Problem is, not everyone gets them.

True!

Anglicans bring Anglican style to Rome

In England and Wales, the Anglicans are coming to Rome:

The ordinariate allows Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church while retaining “a love and gratitude for the Anglican forms of faith and worship.”

The ordinariate website explains that an interim governing council is meeting regularly to oversee the development of the organization. An official governing council will be formed after Easter 2011.

The governing council will have at least six priests, presided over by the ordinary. Half of the membership is elected by the priests of the ordinariate. It will have a pastoral council for consultation with the laity and a finance council.

The council will have the same rights and responsibilities in canon law that the college of consultors and the council of priests have in the governance of a diocese. Out of respect for the synodal tradition of Anglicanism, the ordinary will need the consent of the governing council to admit a candidate to Holy Orders and to erect or suppress a personal parish or a house of formation.

The council will also have a vote in choosing a list of names of a new ordinary to submit to the Holy See.  [Italics added]

These last two items demonstrate a distinctly reformist trend in Roman Catholicism.  Stay tuned.

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another

Heather Mac Donald pinpoints “the opinion elite’s hysteria and hypocrisy regarding anything that can be called ‘profiling’” in a Natl Review Online commentary on Wash Post’s Colbert King on Wash Post’s Krauthammer on how to nab a terrorist.

“The outcry over ‘profiling’ in the defense against Islamic terror is the culmination of a decades-long war against the police,” says she, who is based in NYC and writes a lot about police. 

The fundamental premise of that war is that racism lurks beneath most law-enforcement actions. Thus, any time the police try to categorize people to solve or prevent crime, they are doing so out of bigotry,

Random checks in NYC are “reflexive and idiotic,” said Charles Krauthammer, because they ignore “overwhelming odds” that the terrorist is a young Muslim man with origins in the worldwide “Islamic belt.”  It’s more than odds-ignoring, says Mac Donald; it’s tautological, because it’s Muslim terrorists we are worried about.

Muslims are the ones with ideology and expressed aims in the matter, we might add.  PETA stinks but is not our main concern, though who knows what’s coming.  Mac Donald has more on this, q.v.

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Chi Trib “Daywatch” has this for its lead item:

GRIEVING MOM’S PROTEST. What began as a seemingly quixotic personal
mission for a woman whose GI son died in Iraq has become something of
a phenomenon:

Which jibes too easily with this complaint at C-Log: Conservative Web Log by Monica Crowley:

Whoever said there are always two sides to every story– must not have been talking about national coverage of the war in Iraq.

Turn on the television these days– and you might get the impression that “everyone” in America is against what our military is doing over there…

Whether it’s the mom who lost a son in Iraq… now camped out in Crawford Texas… demanding a meeting with President Bush or the group of so-called “raging grannies” who are joining in protest– calling for an immediate pull-out from Iraq.

The national media is quick to show us these colorful examples of people protesting the war.

For what’s missing, look to local newspapers, she says, quoting a gold-star mother in Warren County OH:  “Justin gave his life for the Iraqi people. He knew that was the price he might have to pay, and I stand behind him 100 percent.”

As for the grieving mom with all the coverage, her family has emailed Drudge saying she “appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the the expense of her son’s good name and reputation” and saying they do not agree with her “political motivations and publicity tactics.”  That’s from the son’s “grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins.”  Let us see how that plays out in (Chi) Trib company’s LA Times — whence the “grieving Mom” story headlined by Daywatch — and other mainstreamers.

Notre Dame Irish

Ken Woodward, Newsweek’s longtime religion editor and a Domer, picks up on the Notre Dame leprechaun issue in Wall St. Journal without mentioning it as such, zeroing in on its name as a form of getting even:

Here’s a suggestion: If the NCAA and other latter-day Puritans are concerned about social prejudice, they ought to investigate Notre Dame. Surely the name for its athletic teams, the Fighting Irish, is a slur on all Irish-Americans. The label derives from anti-Catholic nativists who reviled the poor and mostly uneducated Irish immigrants who came to these shores in the mid-19th century — a drunken, brawling breed, it was said, who espoused the wrong religion. When the fabled Four Horsemen played football for Notre Dame, the team was called the Ramblers. In 1927, the university officially adopted the Fighting Irish, thereby transforming a pejorative nickname into something to cheer about.

If there are Native Americans who feel that Indians or Warriors or Braves is somehow demeaning, they might reflect on the Notre Dame experience. And if the NCAA really cares about diversity and inclusion, it ought to establish an office of Indian Affairs to help Native American athletes with collegiate aspirations. Meanwhile, all paleface Puritan surrogates, beginning with the NCAA, should butt out.

Sweet spot

What a head shot in Sun-Times with the Lynn Sweet column!  Handsome, no-nonsense woman with great hair, teeth, eyes showing through business-like specs, lots of white space, six by four and a half inches.  It’s of Christine Cegelis, with whom I have not been familiar, not having followed Illinois congressional politics carefully.  She lost to Henry Hyde last election with 44.2 percent of the vote — “surprising,” says Sweet, whose own columnist’s head shot, one and a half inch square, is dwarfed by that of her very attractive subject.

However, as an avid Sun-Times reader, I want to know whom to praise for the Cegelis shot.  Alas, I can find no credit for it, such as I find on the previous page (smaller) of the better known Condoleeza Rice, not near as striking as the Cegelis shot.  Thank Mark Wilson/Getty Images for it anyhow.  Scott Olson/Getty Images and Carlos Osorio/AP are two others whom we can thank, for shots that go with stories out of Baghdad and Wilmington Del. respectively. 

And on it goes throughout the paper.  Pix are i-d’d as by so-and-so of such-and-such.  But for this Lynn Sweet column all about a candidate running for office, chattily filling us in on her with result that we think highly of her and like her Air America connection and will give her money, we have this beautiful shot, provided by . . . whom?  By the candidate’s media firm, Adelstein etc., whose Adelstein is quoted calling her Republican opponent “an extreme right-winger,” I say, and why not?  With a “positive” column goes a positive picture.  But why not give Adelstein credit?

Sweet spot

What a head shot in Sun-Times with the Lynn Sweet column!  Handsome, no-nonsense woman with great hair, teeth, eyes showing through business-like specs, lots of white space, six by four and a half inches.  It’s of Christine Cegelis, with whom I have not been familiar, not having followed Illinois congressional politics carefully.  She lost to Henry Hyde last election with 44.2 percent of the vote — “surprising,” says Sweet, whose own columnist’s head shot, one and a half inch square, is dwarfed by that of her very attractive subject.

However, as an avid Sun-Times reader, I want to know whom to praise for the Cegelis shot.  Alas, I can find no credit for it, such as I find on the previous page (smaller) of the better known Condoleeza Rice, not near as striking as the Cegelis shot.  Thank Mark Wilson/Getty Images for it anyhow.  Scott Olson/Getty Images and Carlos Osorio/AP are two others whom we can thank, for shots that go with stories out of Baghdad and Wilmington Del. respectively. 

And on it goes throughout the paper.  Pix are i-d’d as by so-and-so of such-and-such.  But for this Lynn Sweet column all about a candidate running for office, chattily filling us in on her with result that we think highly of her and like her Air America connection and will give her money, we have this beautiful shot, provided by . . . whom?  By the candidate’s media firm, Adelstein etc., whose Adelstein is quoted calling her Republican opponent “an extreme right-winger,” I say, and why not?  With a “positive” column goes a positive picture.  But why not give Adelstein credit?

Labor pains

A poll I recently conducted on behalf of the Public Service Research Foundation found that a 56% majority of workers who are not organized wouldn’t vote to organize — while just 35% would consider doing so. And for America’s organized labor movement, that’s a significant problem.

— John Zogby in Wall St. Jnl 8/8/05

 

 

Sun-Times today

* Neil Steinberg on not being able to tell the late Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw apart, they being “both trim, blandly handsome guys who read the news.”  Or is it Tom Jennings and Peter Brokaw?  In any case, they are or were barely distinguishable, colorless individuals.  On the other hand, what do we want in a reader?

* Mark Brown on not liking Ike cap because it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money, along with dozens, maybe hundreds of highway-paving extravaganzas elsewhere.  It’s an Oak Park project, he lives there, so he feels obliged.  Column is worth reading in part because he quotes a man from Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has hit this highway bill hard.  If it’s a harbinger of more commentary on excessive government spending, it’s interesting.

* U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer quoted on learning, “sort of,” from laws of other countries when interpreting our constitution, as he did in a 2002 Death Row case.  It’s in a speech he gave to lawyers in Chicago.  But if Your Honor pleases, learning is one thing, citing as evidence is another.  This is a rhetorical stunt in which one casually plays down the reality of the situation.  Not entirely honest, Your Honor.

* Story about dangerous Tennessee convict escaped with his murderous wife in which a sheriff’s spokesman said the escapee “has no care or concern on what he does to anyone.”  (Italics added.)  No.  It’s care or concern “for.”  The harassed spokesman is hardly to be blamed.  Ever since Joe Garagiola, baseball announcers have been speaking of one’s record “on the season,” which is Exhibit A, this being summertime, for my case for the Demise of the Preposition.  Yes.  The language will fall to pieces less through misuse of big words than of little ones. 

Tenses too, of course.  The historical present has taken over the presentation of earthy comment and narration by John Madden and others and is finding its way into less frenetic disquisition by non-sports figures.  More to come, I hope, concerning both of these disaster areas — prepositions and tense.

* Jeb Bush of Florida quoted saying NCAA “insults” Florida State U. and the Seminole Indians of Florida by penalizing use of Seminole as name for FSU teams.  NCAA is telling both communities, “You’re not smart enough to understand this.”  The Florida Seminoles have signed off on using their name.  They are OK with it, or as we used to say, it’s OK with them. 

See also, while we are at it, Chi Trib’s Mike Downey on the Notre Dame leprechaun — “No blarney: Leprechaun must go” — as grossly insulting to all red-blooded Micks.  

As a proud Irish-American, I demand that you make the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame get rid of that stupefying, stereotypical mascot of theirs. And that little jig of his. And I mean pronto, if you’ll excuse my use of Indian lingo.

Ladies and gentlemen of the NCAA, I implore you. Do that thing you do. Do what you did Friday, when your executive committee announced that it no longer would tolerate any “hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery.”

A leprechaun is all that.

He is mischievous by nature. He is up to no good. He clearly is abusive. Have you ever seen him treat Notre Dame’s enemies with any kindness?

Etc.  Yes.  Tell it to my O’Hara in-law and the many others who once were ND leprechauns, while you’re at it.  I for one will not be doing so.

* Last but not least, read (right away) Leslie Baldacci’s remarkable broadside against ladies of the office parading downtown as if they were ladies of the street:

Since I started working downtown in July, I keep wondering, “Where is the hooker convention?”

Who can help but notice all the women walking the streets of our city in broad daylight dressed like, well, streetwalkers? Where are they all going? Where’s the party?

Thus it begins.

Ladies [she concludes], if sexual power is what you are trying to muster, you have it all backward. If you squander your power on the street, handing it over to total strangers like it is worth nothing and means nothing to you, it will mean nothing. Lingerie is something you reveal when the time is right to bring a man to his knees. What will you have left in your arsenal when you need the heavy artillery in the boudoir? Nothing at all.

Bravissimo, Baldacci!

Guard’s morale

“Morale Woes Rattle [Illinois Natl] Guard” is James Janega’s banner headline story today in Chi Trib, worth reading because of Janega’s credibility as sometime-embedded battle-scene and behind-scene reporter with months of Iraq-coverage experience.  This story is out of Chicago; it’s based on a 29 Jan 05 memo out of Springfield, “Operation Strength Readiness,” downloadable in .pdf format.  It has a # of names blacked out, and “soldiers fear retribution if they speak out” is a jump-page head:

Soldiers in interviews said they have not raised critical questions over readiness for fear of retribution from Guard leadership.

says the text.  This is Bureaucratic Rot 101, as in my Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics (Crossroad, 1994), where most of the veteran pastor interviewees preferred anonymity.  Most prefer not to be personally rattled, for good reason.

It’s a six-plus-month-old memo, however, sent as Janega says, “to begin correcting the problems,” and deep in the story, including its last paragraphs, are command-level quotes about efforts (one of them at least mildly laughable: special football jerseys for units with top personnel-retention scores) to repair the situation.

The memo . . .  comes as the Army National Guard is undergoing convulsive changes to make it more responsive to sudden wartime call-ups.

Nationally, surveys of returning troops find similar trends, and the number of new recruits has been falling in active-duty military, reserve and National Guard units.

The Illinois Army National Guard in particular has grappled with leadership and staffing issues in recent years . . .

I found those sentences after asking my usual “compared to what?”  Janega has it with this reference to the rest of the country.  It’s a specific enough reference for a newspaper story, which is not an encyclopedia article.  As for what to do and what’s been done about it,

. . . many personnel shortages in units have been fixed since the operations order was drafted, [Guard commander Maj. Gen. Randal E.] Thomas said.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Army has outlined a plan to change its focus to smaller, more easily deployable units. Under the plan, some 7,000 soldiers in Illinois’ 9,100-strong force will be shifted between units, in some cases eliminating understaffed units altogether.

I would like to hear more about this, and maybe I will in future Chi Trib stories, preferably by Janega and ideally with similar eye-catching placement in the paper.  Location, location, location, as retailers say.  Shelf position matters.  News retailers (editors) keep that in mind, don’t they?