The Top Baseball Moments of My Life

I'm not a die-hard baseball fan. But as I sit here tonight wondering if Joe Blanton has what it takes to help the Phillies get back to the World Series (meh) I realize that I actually have a number of fond baseball memories. The best...

* THE ROYALS WIN THE 1985 WORLD SERIES: I don't want to hear your nonsense about Don Denkinger, ok? George Brett, Bret Saberhagen, Steve Balboni, Fred* Frank White: Those were my guys. It was the first time in my youth that I discovered a team with "Kansas" in the name could win something big. I thought we lost everything.

*Fred was a Royals broadcaster. My mistake.

* GEORGE BRETT HITS A HOME RUN IN GAME THREE OF THE 1980 WORLD SERIES: I was 7 years old. I remember nothing else about this game -- the Royals won, but lost the Series -- except that Brett hit a home run and I was sent to bed. And my dad, who got off work at a meat-packing plant at midnight, came home, woke me up and took me to an all-night cafe so I could tell him about it.

* THE 1991 WORLD SERIES: I loved that two "worst to first" teams -- the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins -- played in it. But my fondest memory of it is that Game 6 was played while my family was at Lake Tenkiller in Oklahoma, celebrating my grandparents 40th anniversary. We sat around a fire and listened to the game on the radio; my grandfather was a Braves fan from constant Superstation exposure. It remains the reason I prefer baseball on the radio to baseball on television.

* PHILLIES WIN THE 2008 WORLD SERIES: I'd only moved to town a few months earlier. But the victory celebration on Broad Street was something to behold. Even if I did end up getting shoved by a riot cop.

* BOSTON RED SOX COME FROM 3-1 TO WIN THE 2004 ALCS: It was the previous year, when Red Sox and the Cubs both appeared to be on the verge of reversing their curses in the playoffs, that brought me back to baseball after a sustained absence. But this series was thrilling. I sat with friends at the Red Lion bar in Lawrence, KS to watch the final games. I'm a sucker for the underdog, even if the underdog has a higher payroll than every team but the Yankees -- because, well, I hate the Yankees.

* VISITING OLD YANKEE STADIUM, 2004: I may hate the Yankees, but I appreciate baseball history. So on a vacation trip to New York I spent $100 for a ticket about 15 rows above the third base line. Walking into the park felt like a cinematic experience. I even rooted for the Yankees that night. Bernie Williams won the game -- and the AL East -- with a walkoff homerun against the Twins. And as the crowd exited to the sounds of Sinatra singing "New York, New York," a chant went up: "Boston Sucks! Boston Sucks!" It was everything I could've hoped for.

* MY FIRST BASEBALL GAME AFTER SEPTEMBER 11. It was a Friday night home game for the Royals, sometime in the next few weeks. Friday night games always concluded with a fireworks exhibition: This one was set to Elvis singing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with George W. Bush quotes interspersed into the audio. The combination of Elvis, Bush and explosions in the sky -- and the way it whipped the crowd into a frenzy -- made me think that maybe the War on Terror was going to bring out some very weird sides to the American character.

* THE DIAMONDBACKS WIN THE 2001 WORLD SERIES: Also related to September 11. I was walking the streets of New York, near Ground Zero, right after the Yankees had lost the Series. I'd spent the day immersed in the odors of the still-burning towers -- the flames went on for weeks -- and felt, well, sick of what humanity could do to itself. Then I heard a horn honk. A limo driver rolled down his window to show his Diamondbacks cap to a couple of cops. They cursed at him; he smiled and drove away. And that's when I realized that New York would survive and thrive.

* BILL BUCKNER'S BLOWN GROUND BALL: I rooted for the Mets that year. I'm a sucker for the underdog.

Stacy Lipson, Michael Smerconish and the Problem of Bullying

An old high school friend of mine sent me a Facebook message recently. Following her recent 20th reunion, she told me, a small group of people had gone into Wichita to have a few drinks together; that group included T, a man who had made my junior high years miserable with an unending procession of physical bullying. Even reading his name years later filled me with anger and a kind of dread.

Simply put: I still hate that guy. Even though a generation has passed.

My friend understood. She told me the topic of T's bullying had come up over drinks: I wasn't, it turned out, his only victim. And it turned out that T, a little older and wiser, had some regrets. "He said he hadn't thought of himself as a bully but now, looking back..." my friend wrote. "Anyway he seems like a decent guy now, really."

That is, I guess, a relatively happy epilogue to my childhood angst. But we're in a media moment that is focused on bullying because, well, not everybody makes it to the epilogue. It's a moment that caused Stacy Lipson, a great Philadelphia writer and one of my Tweeps, to reflect on her own childhood experience of victimization:

You may think you understand. But you don’t. You can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it. And if you have experienced it, you know how it feels. The anxiety, fear, and sadness that seem to be a part of your daily experience. The wish that some day, not too far off, the abuse would stop. The wish to be someone else.

I don’t like to talk about what happened to me as a child. I never thought I would need to. But I think it’s important for parents to realize that bullying is an epidemic. It’s not going to go away anytime soon, and once one child starts, the rest can join in. It’s time to do something. Children need to realize the power behind their words and actions, and parents need to make sure that their children are listening. Hard.

Of course, everybody knows that bullying is wrong. Which is why I've been stewing over Michael Smerconish's Sunday commentary in the Inky which strikes what I'd (probably unfairly) call an "objectively pro-bullying" tone. It's not that Smerconish favors beating up weak kids; he just wants to know what the big deal is.

My hunch is that the underlying behavior hasn't gotten any more vicious. Nor has the prevalence of bullying itself increased. Rather, the attention paid to it has.

I went to school with plenty of bad kids who picked on classmates. Today, kids like that have cell phones and Facebook at their disposal. Meanwhile, an increase in absentee parents means the bullies encounter less discipline at home.

And yes, an overeager media has oversaturated many a news cycle with coverage of the latest bullying case with tragic consequences. The result is both a hyperawareness of behavior that has always existed, and an ever-expanding list of what is classified as "bullying."

Yes, coverage of the subject is intense now and, yes, it will go away soon enough. But rather than treat this as a "teachable moment" -- say, how do we get kids and parents to clamp down on vicious and unacceptable behavior -- Smerconish would rather gripe about the spotlight. Maybe he thinks he's being contrarian. But in this case, he's sending the wrong message.

My own childhood experience colors much of my adulthood. My politics derive, in large part, from a hatred of bullies. (Let's just say that George W. Bush and his frathouse personality provoked something visceral in me.) I sometimes fear taking my toddler to the playground because of worries he might be bullied -- or, worse, that he'll end up a bully. And though I'm an exceptionally peaceful guy, I can lose my cool in a major way if I sense that somebody is running roughshod over another. I can see 40 from where I'm at, and yet my feeling is still very intense: I fucking hate bullies.

Stacy, bless her, has done a fine job of reminding us the pain bullies can cause, the lasting damage they do. Michael Smerconish just wants the story to go away.

Mark Boyle's World Without Money

There's something initally Waldenesque and seductive about Mark Boyle's vision of a world without money, but I'm not sure that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Boyle decided to test himself by living for a year without cash, and decided to keep on keepin' on after the year came and went.

What makes the whole endeavour seem a bit of a swindle, frankly, is that while he didn't himself use cash, his existence is made very possible by piggybacking off a world that does, in fact, use money as a way to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

Boyle lives in rural England in a trailer he spotted on Freecycle.org. He feeds himself by growing everything from barley to potatoes, foraging wild edibles like berries and nettles, and occasionally dumpster-diving for luxuries like margarine and bread. He cooks with a wood stove fashioned from large restaurant olive cans; brushes his teeth with his own mixture of cuttlefish bones and fennel seed; and makes paper and ink from mushrooms. He barters labor for rent, Internet service, and whatever else he can't find, grow, or make.

I don't begrudge anybody who wants to escape the rat race, and more power to Boyle for making it happen for himself. But let him try his experiment in some part of the world where the people and the land are poor -- something actually closer to the moneyless society he favors. Guess I'm dubious that such an experiment would be successful; it's cash-based commerce that made Boyle's survival possible.

And it seems plain that, even allowing for the piggybacking on the existing cash economy, Boyle is still very much engaged in acts of commerce. I don't think he'd deny that; he apparently was an economics student at one point. But money is just a way of making the whole business of commerce more efficient. What's wrong with that?

Maybe this:

We couldn't move from what we are today to—even in 10 years' time—living completely moneyless. It's about moving away from complete dependency on money, which is a very insecure position to be in, anyway. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. As more and more people move away from one economic model to another economic model, then the market reacts to that in certain ways and people produce less. It's more about slow evolutionary process than a revolutionary process. And that's quite key to the whole thing. Our whole agricultural system is based on fossil fuels. Each gallon of fossil fuel is the same as 40 man-hours per week. That's a lot of extra man hours. And so if we're going to get back to a way of agriculture that doesn't involve oil, then people are going to have to transition away from some of the jobs that aren't necessary.

The problem, if I'm reading correctly, is that money is efficient. It makes it possible (in a roundabout way) accomplish a whole workweek's worth of tasks in the span of minutes. Sounds good, but as Boyle points out, that has some ripple effects that maybe aren't good for the environment.

Understood. And I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Boyle, however, is unlikely to convince many people that they should return to the Age of Bartering, where existence becomes more difficult and work more arduous. Who wants to live that way? Ascetics like Mark Boyle, I suppose. But environmentalists are never going to win the big fights if the rest of us think that Mark Boyle's vision is the one the rest of us should live by. There's a lot about the modern world to like. We just need to make it work better.

The Irony of Geert Wilders

In America, you fairly regularly see liberals defend the rights of others to express fundamentally illiberal positions. That's why you end up with spectacles like the ACLU defending the right of the KKK to have a march, or anybody at all defending the rights of Westboro Baptist Church to picket with its homophobic signs. There's usually a lot of throat-clearing about how the liberal groups don't really share the ideas or goals of the extremists, and nobody really thinks otherwise.

That's why I'm interested in the case of Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim Dutch politician on trial for saying nasty things about Islam. It's not the kind of trial that would take place in the United States, but other countries have rather stricter limits on free speech. Lots of American conservatives have weighed in on the issue, including this typical entry from National Review:

Wilders compares Islam to Nazism, a provocative stance, to be sure. But how should such provocative criticism be received? With open debate, or with the criminalization of opinion? It is extremely pertinent in the Wilders case to ask whether his trial means that Europe’s commitment to freedom is already dead.

On the face of it, I'm in agreement. Society is best served by letting Wilders criticize Islam; Islam should be more than capable of rhetorically defending itself. But here's the thing I don't see Wilders' defenders acknowledge: the freedom they advocate for him is the freedom he would take away from Muslims.

This is a man, after all, who has called for banning the Koran:

Madam Speaker, the Koran is a book that incites to violence. I remind the House that the distribution of such texts is unlawful according to Article 132 of our Penal Code. In addition, the Koran incites to hatred and calls for murder and mayhem. The distribution of such texts is made punishable by Article 137(e). The Koran is therefore a highly dangerous book; a book which is completely against our legal order and our democratic institutions. In this light, it is an absolute necessity that the Koran be banned for the defence and reinforcement of our civilisation and our constitutional state. I shall propose a second-reading motion to that effect.

That's not it, of course: Wilders has also called for a tax on Muslim women wearing headscarves and a ban on Mosque construction. Fundamentally, though, Wilders' defenders are invoking a freedom of expression for him that he would deny others.

That's not so shocking: Again, see the ACLU's defense of the KKK. What is shocking is that Wilders' defenders barely, if ever, acknowledge this tension. To read editorials like National Review's is to believe that Wilders has merely made some outrageous comments. In fact, he's advocated a course of action that would damage the freedom of Muslims living in his country.

Some American conservatives would, no doubt, suggest that Western societies are dooming themselves by letting radical Muslims take advantage of our traditions of openness. They're fine with some bit of double-standard, in other words, because the double-standard is supposedly needed to preserve the standard at all. It is stirring to see National Review unequivocally defend Wilders' right to speak his peace; when it comes to the rights of Muslims, however, there will always been room for debate.

Netflix Queue: "Space Cowboys"

Three thoughts about Clint Eastwood's "Space Cowboys":

* I'm shocked that Eastood and Tommy Lee Jones could appear in the same movie without Hollywood imploding under the weight of all that laconic.

* The movie was pitched to the public as an action-comedy, but it's a Clint Eastwood action-comedy. This means, among other things, that the movie is somewhat gently paced: It doesn't hit you with the gag-every-five-seconds pace of today's films. It also means, of course, that somebody sympathetic dies at the end. But it's a fun film, so it's a good death. Oh, Clint Eastwood.

* I think I prefer out-and-out science fiction and fantasy to movies set in the real space program. My mind keeps picking out discrepancies between Hollywood-NASA and real-NASA. Too distracting for an old space nerd like me.

Still, an enjoyable flick. Three out of four stars.

Federalist 39: James Madison's Confusing Sales Job

Read all entries in my series on The Federalist Papers here.

Well. No wonder we're so confused.

My writing partner Ben Boychuk and I had the pleasure of interviewing author Ron Chernow this week. He wrote the acclaimed new biography of George Washington, along with an earlier bio of Alexander Hamilton -- he knows something, in other words, about the founding of this country. In our discussion, Chernow repeated his assertion (first made in a New York Times op-ed) that today's Tea Partiers are wrong to claim an exclusive ideological heritage descended from the Founders. In truth, Chernow said, the Constitution was a compromise between competing visions of government -- powerful or limited? Instead of actually settling the question, the Founders fudged it a bit, so that the arguments of the 21st century aren't so different from the 18th.

Nowhere is that tension more evident, perhaps, than in James Madison's authorship of Federalist 39. Madison's intent here is to fend off criticism of the proposed new government as insufficiently federal -- that is, he's arguing against the proposition that the Constitution takes away too much power away from the states and deposits it in the national government.

Wait: That's kind of what the Constitution was created to do. The Articles of Confederation, which gave pride of power to the states, had already proved unworkable as a means of national government. But yesterday's antifederalists, like today's Tea Partiers, wanted to see more power left to the states -- and they were ruthless in suggesting that advocates of the Constitution were lying in their efforts to convince Americans that states still retained considerable power. Here's "A Farmer" writing in Antifederalist No. 3:

There are but two modes by which men are connected in society, the one which operates on individuals, this always has been, and ought still to be called, national government; the other which binds States and governments together (not corporations, for there is no considerable nation on earth, despotic, monarchical, or republican, that does not contain many subordinate corporations with various constitutions) this last has heretofore been denominated a league or confederacy. The term federalists is therefore improperly applied to themselves, by the friends and supporters of the proposed constitution. This abuse of language does not help the cause; every degree of imposition serves only to irritate, but can never convince. They are national men, and their opponents, or at least a great majority of them, are federal, in the only true and strict sense of the word.

Madison has tricky political ground to cover here, then, and he treads cautiously and confusingly. Let's jump to the final paragraph of 39 for a picture of the ambiguity.

The proposed Constitution, therefore is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

Got that?

Now it's true that something can be partly one thing and partly another. But this paragraph -- and the whole paper -- makes me wonder if the effort to sell the Constitution as a document of "limited" government is more a political sales job than a substantive description.

The new government, after all, will have unlimited power of taxation. It will be the arbiter of disputes between the states. It alone has the power to raise a standing army. The one power the states seem to retain over the national government at this stage is whether or not to opt-in to the system. After that, they can shape it somewhat -- through electoral votes and appointments to the Senate -- but there are no real veto points once the national government has made up its mind about a course of action. The states can give legitimacy to the national government; there's no real mechanism for them to withdraw it.

That's not to say the national government has unlimited power overall. It has its spheres of influence, and the states have theirs.

In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

But the national government's spheres of action are biggies. That's why the antifederalists fought the Constitution.

I'm not arguing for all this as a brief for unlimited central government, incidentally. I'm rather haphazardly trying to make sense of this as a pitch at the time, and looking at it in light of what actually happened in America's history. And what I'm seeing here is this: James Madison, whether he wanted to or not, left the door open to a bigger government than what today's Tea Partiers want -- or perhaps he himself envisioned.

How wide? I suspect we'll find that out in the coming papers.

Netflix Queue: "Ichi the Killer"

No.

To elaborate: There's two movies in "Ichi the Killer." One is a sly subversion of superhero myths -- particularly "Batman." We're always told that Batman/Bruce Wayne is kind of a freak, but really: If you were a billionaire industrialist, wouldn't you be tempted to become a city's crime-fighting savior with really cool cars and utility belts? But our "hero" in this movie, Ichi, really is twisted and broken. The villain, Kakihara is reminiscent of the Joker with his facial scars, but takes his penchant for chaos-born-of-ennui to depth that Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger wouldn't have been able to contemplate for a mainstream American movie. And there's a third, very important character: the henchman. For him, the story isn't an exciting villain-versus-hero duel -- it's a tragedy. The subversion extends all the way to the movie's confrontation between Ichi and Kakihara.

Unfortunately, that movie is buried beneath another one so filled with torture-porn style violence and misogyny that I can't possibly recommend it.

I want to like "Ichi the Killer." But despite its merits, it feels harmful.