Category Archives: Pop Culture

On Baseball & Hyprocrisy

02 Saturday Apr 2011

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Fenway From Legend's Box, Fenway Park, Boston, June 21, 2008. Jared Vincent via Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/23999911@N00/2607333633 - Permission granted under the terms of the cc-by-2.0 license.

A new baseball season has arrived for this estranged ex-fan of the game. Millions of people celebrate as if this is a rite of spring, like a cherry-blossom festival or an opportunity to spend more time outside. When I see the start of baseball, it merely reminds me to up my dosage of Zyrtec and Rhinocort.

 

But that’s not quite true. It also hits me in the brain and gut with the common mythologies and hypocrisies of America the Beautiful. Especially this spring, with Barry Bonds on trial for perjury — and indirectly, for using steroids, sullying the game, not to mention his Hall-of-Fame record prior to ’99. The guardians of the game — baseball purists like George Will and numerous others, and sports reporters like Pope Lupica and Bob Ryan — supply us with the myths and legends of Babe Ruth, Joe Di Maggio, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Mickey Mantle and Cy Young. Along with their records, those precious records. Of home runs, total hits, hitting streaks, RBIs, strikeouts, wins, stolen bases, games played, batting averages, slugging percentages. The stuff that makes baseball America’s pastime (which should always be written as past-time, or past-its-time), different from all the other major sports.

The hypocrisy comes from this ridiculous notion of keeping the game separate and holy, like the sabbath for orthodox Jews and for the most devout of Christians and Muslims. Except that this game, this most American of games, is about as pure as New York City snow two minutes after hitting the ground. The biggest, most disgusting hypocrisy of all is how most baseball purists will celebrate Babe Ruth’s greatness any day over a Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Reggie Jackson, or Josh Gibson. Or Walter Johnson over Satchel Paige. That sixty-four years since Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, there’s still a color line in baseball’s precious records, as well as among the people who hold them. That alone is a stomach-churning, blood-pressure-raising shame.

But this issue of who should and shouldn’t be in Cooperstown because of the Steroids Era in baseball, well, it presupposes a false dichotomy. That there was a time before, say ’88, where baseball wasn’t dirty, and that with anabolic steroids and HGH, baseball became dirty. But since ’03, baseball’s become clean and transparent again. This is beyond ridiculous. Baseball’s been as dirty as any sport in American history, in fact dirtier, than the other sports put together. Between amphetamines and illegal drugs, pine tar and Vaseline balls, sharpened cleats and headhunting and the exclusion of Blacks, the sport and the individuals involved in it have been seeking and finding competitive advantages for as long as baseball has been a professional endeavor.

Still, the biggest myth and hypocrisy in baseball remains its insistence that its records are sacred, above critical scrutiny and reproach. I have a problem with this, and not just because of the racism that’s built into any records achieved prior to 1947. But because baseball’s sanctimonious bigotry infects any record that’s been achieved in the sixty-four years since. Whether it was Roger Maris in ’61, Hank Aaron in ’74, or Barry Bonds before ’99, much less after.

As long as the guardians of the game remain White, male and overly connected to baseball as patriotic and its records as sacrosanct, baseball’s hypocrisy will know no bounds. “It’s a shame and a pitiful,” as my father would say. And it’s also a reason I hope my son never plays this wretched game.

Dumb, Discussion

31 Thursday Mar 2011

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Inspired by my friends Catherine Lugg (see her recent comments about the Obama Administration and their ignoring of the unemployed) and James Lee via Facebook (running a one-man crusade on our government’s daily hypocrisy), and my Twitter folk, the video above is for all of you. It is my montage to the past thirty years of obfuscation, dissembling, exaggeration, plausible deniability, and spittle-laden spin that is our everyday news and politics. Or, as the post-grunge band Live would say in their “White, Discussion,” (1994) the “decibels of this disenchanting discourse continue to dampen the day/the coin flips again and again and again and again, as our sanity walks away.”

So I put six minutes of video together from President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (1983), a YouTube video “A Tour of Detroit’s Ghetto” from camosilver, and a couple of pictures I took from the Rally to Restore Sanity here in DC back in October. Along with clips from:

  • The Daily Show (with Jon Stewart eviscerating Bernie Goldberg and FOX News via “gospel,” April 20, ’10)
  • Real Time with Bill Maher (one with Keith Olbermann from last year, the other from a couple of weeks ago calling Rep. Ellison’s religion [Islam] one “filled with hate”)
  • Glenn Beck’s insanity on FOX News
  • The O’Reilly Factor
  • Sarah Palin being interviewed by Chris Wallace on FOX News last year
  • ITN’s coverage of the tsunami in northeast Japan earlier this month
  • Protests in Egypt after January 25 (Russian TV)
  • The protests in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of February (Russian TV)
  • Rachel Maddow’s “Home of the Whopper” segment from the Fall ’10 election cycle (MSNBC)
  • The infamous Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson clip accusing all left-of-center folk of causing 9/11 (CBN)
  • President Obama’s Libya speech from Monday evening, March 28 (PBS).

Now I’ve given credit where credit is due and claim fair use under US copyright laws. But if our American public discourse doesn’t look dumb after watching it with Live’s “White, Discussion” playing in the background, I’d dare say that you’ll need to see an optometrist as soon as possible. In fact, I think we all need to get our brains, ears and eyes checked after three decades of being dummied down.

P.S. Also meant to give credit to NBA and Derrick Rose for a clip of his dunk against the Phoenix Suns last year.

Teachers That “Demon”-ize History

29 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Qin Shihuangdi, China's 1st Emperor, book burner and scholar burier (except for historians of the Qin kingdom), 221-210 BCE. In public domain.

As I promised ten days ago in my “This…Is…Jeopardy?” post, this one continues my thoughts about the inability of most students and teachers to appreciate how to really teach and learn from history. To think that what most in the profession call social history has existed for a half-century, yet few outside of academia actually teach history in this manner. That between the schools of education that prepare them, the curricular paradigms adhered to by state boards of education and the rules and regulations at the district and school building level, few history teachers encourage their students to imagine. Or to think critically. Or  to ask “how” and “why” questions.

And we pay for these educational atrocities every single day, in our public discourse, in journalism, in international politics. Not to mention in our idiotic discussions of race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, in just about every endeavor that involves thinking beyond our selfish selves.

Michelle Bachmann Portrait, US Congress, January 14, 2011 - A case in point. In public domain.

The worst example of this for my money was my eighth grade US history teacher, Mr. Demontravel. Or as he preferred in the last three months of eighth grade in the spring of ’83, Dr. Demontravel (he had finished his doctoral thesis on the Civil War. Or as I liked to call him throughout that year, “Demon Travel.”

Beyond the trivia of him finishing his doctorate, Demontravel’s teaching style, while terrible, was also one that remains all too typical in our public school (and unfortunately, some of our colleges as well). His was a class that sucked the life out of history for most of the Humanities students at A.B. Davis. Like most teachers of K-12 social studies or history, it was an important and obscure dates, important names, and key places class.

Unlike most social studies teachers, his teaching methodology was the epitome of lazy. Every class, five days a week, Demontravel would put up five questions on the blackboard for us to copy down and answer using our textbook. At the end of every two-week period, we’d get a fifty-question multiple choice exam made up of those questions written out on the blackboard over the previous two weeks, helping Scan-Tron stay in business.

Demontravel rarely stood up to lecture or do anything else. Lectures for him might as well have been appearances by Halley’s Comet, only the lectures were far less memorable. This process went on unabated for forty-weeks, four marking periods, seventeen exams (counting the final), an entire school year. Calling this boring would only get you into the door of the intellectual famine Demontravel subjected us to in eighth grade.

Over the years, I’ve had hundreds of students complain about various versions of this kind of history teaching. That they hated history, didn’t understand its purpose. Many students have loved my teaching of social history off and on over the past two decades, and have told me so, that there interest in a particular issue or topic was peaked as a result of one of my courses. But there are some, perhaps as many as ten percent of my students (about 200 in all) who would’ve preferred the mind-numbing methodology of teaching history as trivia. For that group, Demontravel would’ve been a preference over being able to

Newt Gingrich, potential 2012 GOP candidate, at CPAC meeting, February 20, 2010. (Irony is that Gingrich, an opponent of social history, was a history professor for eight years before turning to a political career.) Gage Skidmore. Permission granted via Creative Commons and attribution to Gage Skidmore.

understand that, like life, history is full of irony, hurt, passion, hatred, and serendipity.

Maybe this is a losing battle, that most students will never have a teacher with the ability to inspire them to think beyond the trivial when it comes to history. Maybe this is a losing battle because there are far more demons traveling through K-12 as social studies and history teachers than there are people like me, or my late teacher Harold Meltzer, for that matter. I have a feeling, though, that generations from now, future students will look at this aspect of hypocrisy in American education and just shake their heads. They won’t understand why it was so hard to teach the truth of how and why good, bad and ugly things occurred in US and world history.

This…Is…Jeopardy?

18 Friday Mar 2011

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The first class I ever taught was as a guest lecturer my first semester of grad school at Pitt. Larry Glasco, my advisor, had me take charge of his History of Black Pittsburgh course one November Thursday in ’91. It was a task made easier by the showing of the documentary Wylie Avenue Days during the two-hour and twenty-minute class. With about a quarter of the class composed of adult learners, including several who’d grown up in the Hill District during the time frame covered in the documentary, it became a real conversation about experiences with racism and inter- and intra-racial relations in Pittsburgh in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It was a great introduction to teaching.

In the two decades since, I’ve often wish that all of my classes had the kind of intellectual balance that my first class possessed and I as instructor helped provide. Sadly, many times in my journey as a teacher, instructor and professor, I’ve had students who showed as much interest in discussing the hows and whys of history as Glenn Beck of FOX News Channel has in science and the truth.

These students, about one out of every six I’ve taught over the past two decades (about 300 in all) have taken up an amount of my teaching time. They’ve groused about the assignments I’ve given them to do, the exam questions I’ve created to assess their knowledge. They’ve gnashed their teeth about my grading, about how tough I supposedly can be in assigning grades. With papers, short-answer exams, multiple choice tests, even fill-in-the-blank quizzes. There’s been no pleasing this group of students.

Until now. It occurred to me about a year ago. I was watching yet another episode of Jeopardy, and it swung to a history category, one that I would’ve swept if I’d been on the show that day or anytime since the show came back on the air in ’85. That then reminded me of something one of my Humanities classmates from Mount Vernon High School said to me soon after finding out that I was ranked fourteenth in the Class of ’87. “All you can do with history is play Jeopardy,” he said with derision.

That memory then reminded me of how teachers like our seventh through tenth grade social studies teachers taught us. Whether Court, Demontravel (who I’ll talk about later this year), Flanagan or Zini, the idea was to be able to spit out as many date-connected facts, names and battles as quickly and accurately as possible. With no thought about human nature, empathy with the struggles of individuals and groups, or any attempt to explain the processes behind why something happened, like slavery, Jim Crow or Indian removal, for instance.

To satisfy my students who want a high school version of history, I need to come to class next semester and draw a gigantic box on the chalkboard. In that box, I’ll draw six columns by five rows of smaller boxes within this huge box. In the top box of each column, I’ll write in a topic area, say, “Colonial America,” “Expanding Voting Rights,” “‘Eq’-words,” “Myths & Legends,” “My Founding Fathers,” and “Rebel Yell” (this on the American Revolution and the Civil War) across all six. There wouldn’t be any money values, just number values, from 1 to 5 from the easiest to most difficult questions. Daily Doubles would help struggling students make up points, while Double Jeopardy sessions would help the best students solidify their A’s.

This is a great idea, isn’t it? My least interested students can then pretend that they’re learning history by being entertained and memorizing history trivia. My students who need to learn or sharpen their critical thinking skills will find themselves sorely neglected. And my most interested students would be ready to strangle me.

In the end, it’s not worth it to turn my part in this profession into Sony Entertainment, especially for a minority of the students I’ve taught over the years. Besides, I can’t afford to buy Watson to impress my students, or at least, have someone pretend that they have the artificial intelligence of IBM’s Watson by sounding like a teraflop supercomputer.

Dumb Ass Communications, Inc.

08 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Lion and Sun, December 30, 2006. Original by [http://www.cais-soas.com/News/2006/December2006/30-12.htm CAIS

Of all my one-time stepfather Maurice Washington’s get-rich-quick schemes, the one that was the most elaborate, most expensive, most ridiculous of ideas was one that initially had some promise. In the year after he and my mother reconciled while making us all into Hebrew-Israelites in ’81, he concocted the idea of beginning a media entertainment business.

His great vision was to start a business that catered to Blacks audiences in TV and radio land, one that would redefine how media would in fact reach niche audiences. Maurice wanted to call it Sun-Lion Communications, partly after his Hebrew-Israelite moniker, Judah ben Israel, a lion of Jehovah. Of course, the dumb ass didn’t know that he was following a combination of Babylonian astrological, Persian and

Sun Lion Coin, 13th Century, Seljuq Turks. Source: http://mehmeteti.150m.com/thamara/index.htm

Islamic traditions in the process.

The plan grew from an idea at the end of ’81 into a full-fledged business proposal during ’82. So much so that my mother took $2,500 of the precious and pitiful few funds we had and bought a business license to incorporate this Sun-Lion Communications. In fact, she did that this time twenty-nine years ago. The one thing that my mother did right in doing so, that stuck in Maurice’s craw for years afterward, was to get a business license in her name, not my stepfather’s.

That was one of the underlying reasons for the Memorial Day ’82 incident in which Maurice drop-kicked my mother into unconsciousness — besides him being an asshole, of course. My mother may have made many dumb decisions over the years, but she wasn’t an idiot. Maurice had plenty of ideas before. When we first met the blowhard in ’77, Maurice told me and my older brother Darren that he was “a writer, a lawyer and a doctor.” All while driving a Reliable Taxi cab in Mount Vernon. Even at the age of seven, I wasn’t that naive. I knew enough to ask, “So how many books have you written?” But he did write. Street poetry and a few half-worked out plays. With time, focus and a lot of hard work, who knows?

Maurice, though, never wanted to work that hard. After losing his cab driver job on April 30, ’79 because he was literally caught sleeping at the wheel, he’d been unemployed for more than three years. At one point prior to him and my mother separating before becoming a Hebrew-Israelite, Maurice had the idea of starting a restaurant, to which my mother said, “Yeah, if you wanna eat us outta business!” in response.

I digress. After Memorial Day ’82 and spending most of June and July abusing me — I was a witness, to domestic violence, after all — Maurice finally got a job. It was as a part-time security guard for the closed Vicks plant in the middle of Wilson Woods (it’s a school now, I think). Within a few weeks of working the night and weekend shifts guarding the empty building, Maurice found inspiration. He had a “vision from God” that this empty shell was where Sun-Lion Communications would be headquartered, with studios, satellites, soundproofing, and so many other things a media business would need.

Although the idea still had promise (Bob Johnson had started BET only three years earlier, mind you), it was a high-risk business, with national cable in its early toddler stage. Not to mention our own growling stomachs, my mother consistently three weeks behind in rent, and us facing Con Ed’s warnings of our electricity being cutoff because we were $180 behind on that too.

That led to one of my mother and Maurice’s classic 616 arguments at the end of October ’82. In the living room, with all of our run-down furniture, Maurice was bellyaching about my mother’s refusal to put the business license in his name and her lack of emotional support. “I support a candy shop if we had the money, but we don’t,” she said. With Maurice yelling, demanding, “Give me the license, woman!,” I started worrying, as I was in the kitchen, drying dishes from the wonderful dinner of Great Northern Beans and rice. It was the standard meal when the idiot decided that he should play the role of stepfather and father and help feed us.

“How much you think this gonna cost?,” my mother finally asked.

“A hundred million dollars,” Maurice said.

“Man, you must be a fool!” my mother yelled. “With that kind of money, why would I need to start a business? You must think I’m pea-brained idiot!”

“You are!” Maurice yelled as he walked out the living room, went into the master bedroom, put on his clothes and coat and then came back up front, and left.

That was the last time I heard about Sun-Lion Communications. My ex-stepfather was and remains a dumb ass, never having found his way in this world, and about as good at business as he’s been as maintaining a proper diet and good health.

Sexism – It’s Complicated

03 Thursday Mar 2011

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Sexism Hurt Everyone, March 2, 2011. Source: http://dribbleglass.com

I started writing this in response to the contradictions anyone can find in looking at Women’s History Month. Particularly the distance between feminist/womanist rhetoric about girls and women loving themselves for who they are and not how they look. Versus the everyday barrage of images about beauty and achieving it for others’ pleasure, if not for one’s own. Then I realized that this is an issue for women and men, boys and girls, regardless and because of race and socioeconomics. Then I thought that beauty isn’t the only insecurity folks who are blessed or gifted become neurotic about over time.

 

It just proves that most of us, even the most well-rounded, well-meaning and well-adjusted of us, can’t help but be somewhat sexist. And that there are many of us who represent walking contradictions of feminism and sexism who call others on their -ism “isht” but refuse to recognize it in ourselves.

Sexism is complicated by the fact that it often is more than just the mere objectification of women. After all, men can be eye-candy as well, and using the term women in the universal, at least in the Western world, equates almost exclusively to White women. I haven’t even begun to describe the exclusion of the transgender community from this conversation, as well as how embedded middle class and affluent values are in our understanding feminism (but not womanism) in our Women’s History discourse.

Such was the case for me nine years ago at my job as assistant director of the New Voices Fellowship Program at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). (It’s the organization that finds itself under suspension from government grants because of serious financial malfeasance since the beginning of last December — see my blog post from December 2010). We were prepping binders and other materials for a New Voices selection panel meeting when a staff member engaged me in a conversation about how I moved from dating to marriage. It was a question that required me to discuss my progression to serious relationships.

Though I didn’t want to go into major details about my personal life, I did want to give the young man an answer that made sense. So I started with how I saw women when I was about twenty-two or twenty-three (the younger man’s age at the time, by the way), and worked my way forward. I noted how I often interchanged the terms “woman,” “girl” and “chick” when I was younger, but had pretty much grown out of objectifying women in that manner by the time I’d started dating my future wife a few years later.

A female co-worker walked into the conference room while I was in mid-sentence, and the only thing she heard was “chick.” She demanded a retraction on the spot, which I summarily refused. “I’m not going to change a story by using a different term when I know I used that term ten years ago,” I said. I added that the conversation wasn’t really her business, especially since she walked into the middle of it without

Sexism, March 2, 2011. Source: http://swpeng.com

knowing the context of it.

 

She reported my allegedly sexist misdeed to my immediate supervisor, who didn’t know how to respond, so he did nothing. That, at least to me, was actually more sexist than anything I may have said and regardless how anyone could’ve interpreted it. That my co-worker never followed up to discuss why I happened to be using the term “chick” seemed to me a sign that even she knew she overreacted to something that was never an issue to begin with.

A few months later, the young woman had resigned, leaving to work on her master’s at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She told me, in the way of sage advice, that I “needed to open up more and be honest” with younger staff. I just looked at her and wished her well. How can anyone be honest about anything if the first thing we say to each other is to change our stories about our experiences because the words we use can be interpreted as sexist (or racist, or fatist or any other -ist or -ism)?  It seemed to me that if anyone had any serious problems negotiating feminism and sexism, it was my former staff member, not me.

Not that I didn’t realize I had some issues regarding my feminism/womanism versus my own sexism. Most of them have come from what I haven’t said, what I have and haven’t done regarding White women and women of color over the years. As I’ll discuss in my next blog, I’ve had three decades’ worth of damsel-in-distress neurosis (I have no idea what the DSM-IV code is for that).

Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie”

01 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Mr. Mister, “Kyrie” Single Cover, August 8, 2010. Vanjagenije. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the image’s low resolution and because image illustrates subject of this blog post.

Twenty-five years ago this week, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” made it to the top of the Billboard pop charts, making me goofy and giddy beyond belief. March ’86 was the beginning of a great month of music for me. I bought my first Walkman — a Walkman-knockoff really — from Crazy Eddie’s on 47th and Fifth in Manhattan, as well as the first of what would be about 200 cassettes of my favorite music. Not to mention a ton of musical experimentation — most of it bad, goofy and un-listen-able for even the musically impaired.

For many of you, Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” would likely fall into that last category. It was semi-religious rock at a time when the closest thing to that was Amy Grant. It was Creed a whole decade before Creed, but with better musicians. It was a group of studio musicians putting out a breakout album that actually stood apart from the super-serious or super-sugary music of the mid-80s. It was a perfect storm for a sixteen-year-old in search of inspiration beyond the chaos of 616 and the lonely march toward college via Humanities and Mount Vernon High School.

“Kyrie” was one of two songs that kept me in overdrive in and out of the classroom through most of my junior year at Mount Vernon High School. Simple Minds’ “Alive and Kicking” was the other song. It almost became my mantra in the months that straddled ’85 and ’86. Every time I heard that song, especially the album version, was like going on a game-winning touchdown drive at the end of the fourth quarter. Studying was time to throw screen passes or seven-yard slants, to run the ball on a power sweep or on a draw play. It was methodical, the drums and synthesizers, and put me in a determined, methodical mood as I prepared for a test.

But Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” was magical. Short for “Kyrie Eleison” Latin/Greek for “Lord have mercy,” it became my go-to song for every big academic play I needed to make for the rest of the year, even for the rest of high school. “Kyrie” combined all of the elements that my vivid imagination relied on. My faith in The One, my hope for a better future, lyrics that made me think, music that evoked a big play, like throwing it deep and completing it for a game-changing score. It was as methodical as “Alive and Kicking,” but the bigger bass guitar and heavier synthesizers as the background gave me the feeling that God’s grace was with me wherever I went and whatever I did. It was a true underdog’s song.

It was like I was singing a high-falsetto, four-and-a half-minute prayer whenever I played “Kyrie.” Some of my classmates, as usual, didn’t appreciate whatever deeper meaning I saw in the song or in its lyrics. See, my being Black and high-pitched singing to it was another obvious sign of my weirdness. Yet somehow, when it came to music, I didn’t really care what any of them thought.

As I went off to college and became more sophisticated in my understanding of music, I realized that there were some songs I couldn’t completely part with, no matter how goofy or out-of-date the music video was. “Kyrie” was one of those songs for me. I didn’t play it regularly by the time I’d reached my mid-twenties, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t sing to it in high-falsetto while shopping at Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh when the song would come on over the PA system.

Once iPod and iTunes technology became part of my household in ’06, I uploaded the old song and listened to it regularly again. I’ve wondered from time to time what would the sixteen-year-old version of me would think about me at forty-one. I’ve achieved more, and been hurt and lost more, than I could’ve possibly imagined a quarter-century ago.

It’s taken me more than twenty years to fully understand Richard Page’s lyrics about “would I have followed down my chosen road, or only wish what I could be?” The answer is both. Life is a funny and winding journey, even when on the path of the straight and narrow. Christian or atheist or of some other faith, it’s always good to hope that someone is there to watch over us, to protect us, even our younger selves from our older and allegedly wiser versions of ourselves. And that’s what I here now when I listen to — and sing high-falsetto still to — “Kyrie.”