Category Archives: Religion

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.

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.

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.”

The Contrarian One

15 Tuesday Feb 2011

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Sting as Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch's Dune, July 20, 2007. TAnthony. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because this is a low-resolution screenshot illustrating a character which is a subject in the article that uses it, and by nature no free version exists.

For the most part, I have protected the privacy of my childhood classmates and friends by not calling them by their actual names in this blog. I have used pseudonyms, code names like “Crush #1” or “Crush #2,” code letters based on their position in my cohort or how I saw them growing up. I don’t apply these rules to the adults I interacted with because they were public figures, authority figures really. That’s been one of my unofficial journalist-esque rules for this blog, and I’m sticking to it.

In this case, however, I’m pushing the envelope a bit. Even though I have no plans on using a name today, I’m using some initials of a former classmate that almost none of my readers will know. But for those that went through Humanities with me and read this post, the initials may make this person obvious. This classmate — and friend, I guess — was one of the few free thinkers I knew in my Humanities days. He wasn’t just smart — we were all smart. He fashioned himself an intellectual, someone who either thought against the grain or refused to get caught up in what he considered the daily stupid stress sandwich of grades, awards, and more grades that was our magnet program. Most of all, the kid was a contrarian, the one and only JD.

Just like with most of my classmates, I didn’t get along with him at first. He immediate came off to me as someone who saw himself above the fray, maybe even better than the rest of us. It didn’t help that JD introduced himself as “half-Russian, one-quarter French and one-quarter English” that first day of seventh grade nearly thirty years ago. For most of the first year, I thought that his persona was an act, an attempt at upper-crust coolness. I didn’t understand how girls — White and Black — liked this guy, zits and all.

Richard Dean Anderson as MacGyver, May 18, 2007. Source: http://www.just-whatever.com/2007/05/18/what-would-macgyver-do/

At various times during our Humanities days, his looks were compared to Sting, and later, MacGyver — actor Richard Dean Anderson’s most famous character. I’m sure that he liked the comparisons. If you meshed the two, you’d maybe end up with a JD, but probably about two inches shorter than the real life person.

At first, I didn’t think that he was all that smart. After all, we ended up in a fight over my outburst of laughter because he said Australians spoke “Australian” instead of English. I always wondered why we fought this week, of all weeks (twenty-nine years ago this week, by the way). It wasn’t as if we hadn’t annoyed each other before. Eventually I did begin to get Mr. OshKosh, as I called JD in my mind — and occasionally, out loud — during our Davis years. He was a deliberate individual, often trying too hard to be one. It was obvious to me that he thought the whole Humanities thing was a joke, that he found school a Sisyphean effort.

Still, even though we had fought — and I somehow managed to win against the karate kid — we’d get caught up in weird intellectual conversations about communism versus capitalism, or about America’s endless cultural corruption. JD would always take the most extreme view of America the ugly, leaving me no choice other than to argue with him or to agree with him, depending on the severity of his argument. He was a devout atheist, at least in argument, indirectly questioning my Hebrew-Israelite and, later on, early Christian beliefs. That he made me question what I thought I believed and what I actually did believe, I appreciated even at the time. I also got the sense that he was constantly questioning his world while casting doubt in my direction.

It was part of the dissatisfaction that I sensed in him all during our six years together in Mount Vernon’s schools. I didn’t know how much of it came from his home life, but my guess by the middle of high school was that we only saw a tip of a very large iceberg for six and half hours a day and five days a week. What was more obvious, at least to me, was that he seemed comfortable in his uncomfortability at Mount Vernon High School, with the flight of his White classmates in ninth and tenth grade, with the hypocrisy of Humanities as academic light in a sea of ignorance while ignoring the elephants in the room.

Despite holding many of his most private cards to his vest, JD was probably one of the five most honest people I knew in all of my education. His body language, his lack of interest in most things in the classroom, his varied cultural and intellectual interests outside of the classroom, his dating habits all but betrayed his closed-mouthness when it came to who he understood himself to be. He was, and has remained, my favorite contrarian.

The Turd Dream

24 Monday Jan 2011

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Russet Potatoes, January 23, 2011. Source: http://www.Fotosearch.com. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the limited use of picture and because its use is for illustrative purposes directly related to the topic of this post.

I found myself at a party one cold and starry evening, standing in an equally cold kitchen. It was really bright in the kitchen, almost to the point of overpowering my eyes. The walls and cabinets were all-white, the counters made of formica, and the floor light blue-and-white tiled. This was in stark relief from the adjacent living room. It was in a red-brown, ’70s dimmed-light den mode, with beads hanging over the doorway leading out of the kitchen to it. It was the kind of party I never had the chance to go to in high school.

But everyone was there. Even people I hadn’t seen since my Davis Middle School days. The class valedictorian and salutatorian, the affluent and middle class types who went to Pennington Elementary, Crushes #1 and #2, members of the Italian Club, and so many others were there. Two of them were peeling potatoes and throwing them into big pots of boiling water. They started slicing and dicing them, laughing as they were throwing the pieces into the bubbling clean and clear liquid.

Except these weren’t potatoes. These were turds, each shaped like a large Russet, being peeled and chopped, looking white but quickly turning crappy-brown upon contact with the air. The two turd-peelers shared the boiled and mashed turds with my former classmates, who were smiling in glee and eating them up with delight. I then looked at this six-foot, trapezoidal pyramid of a rack in the middle of the super-bright kitchen. It was full of turds, stacked on each one of its seven levels. It was enough to feed the guests several times over.

When I sat up from this dream in my small room in a shared row house on Welsford in Pittsburgh and found myself in the present, the first Saturday of February ’90, I gave Mom a call. I told her about the dream in all of its strange details. I asked her what she thought of it. “You’re friends are full of shit,” she said. After laughing so hard that I nearly rolled out of bed, I said, “That can’t be. It’s got to be more complicated than that.”

Yet I knew that Mom was absolutely right. Most of the people I knew during my years in Humanities — classmates, teachers, administrators, family members and neighbors — were full of crap when it came to me. I certainly included myself in that category. I might’ve made sure of or accidentally given myself a couple of enemas between 7S and the University of Pittsburgh. But it would’ve been hard to stay clean around all the filth on which we dined growing up. This was thanks in large measure to our community leaders and all of the racial and socioeconomic strife that was part of everyday politics and conversations at school and at city hall.

What Mom said was ironic, too. For better and mostly for worse, Mom, father and ex-stepfather had crapped up our lives with their baggage. The turds from their lives were the reason why my dreams had grown to be so vivid, so complicated by the time I reached adulthood. Mostly, my dreams and nightmares brought me to anger, as if someone were trying to steal my life from me, which, as it turned out, was how I felt most of the time when I was awake. And that also made me resolute whenever I left my dreams for the conscious world.

This was the final break between my immediate past of Mount Vernon, the whole Hebrew-Israelite and Humanities thing, and all of the ridicule, ostracism, poverty and abuse that came with those things. My past experiences were all now a part of my dream world. It was an occasional reminder that I wasn’t really myself in the relatively recent past.

That was nearly twenty-one years ago. Except for the occasional email from an ex-teacher or ex-Humanities classmate, the only reminders I have of the time before I became myself again are my Boy @ The Window project and manuscript. And though I don’t necessarily see the people whom I grew up with and around as being full of crap these days, I do see how our collective community baggage would make it difficult for many of us to find our way, our calling. Even in the midst of the best education our city had to offer.