Bad Role Models

The Harper government is embroiled in their first political crisis, and it revolves around Canadian war dead in Afghanistan. First, the government decided that they would no longer lower the flag over the Peace Tower to half-mast to mark the death of Canadian soldiers. Then they banned the media from attending the return of the remains of the four soldiers killed recently in Afghanistan as the first case in a new policy of keeping the media away from these events.

I think that I basically agree with Adam Radwanski, supporting the flag decision while opposing the media one. I understand why people are up in arms that the government has stopped lowering the flag for these soldiers, but I think on balance it was a bad idea to start lowering it in the first place. We honour Canada's war dead on Remembrance Day and in the run-up to it, which I would argue is a far more powerful symbol of mourning and remembrance than lowering a flag on Parliament Hill.

What worries me about the other decision is not the decision itself: according to the CBC, a lot of soldiers wouldn't want the media there if it was them. I still think the time for privacy is whatever memorial service a family chooses to hold, rather than the military's return of these soldiers to Canada, but I understand the impulse.

What worries me is that this is, for better or for worse, something that the Bush administration has also been doing with regard to casualties in Iraq, and fits nicely into the ongoing narrative of the secrecy of the Harper government. They won't allow ministers to talk to the media about anything other than the Topic of the Day, they have a more suspicious view of the media than any government in recent history, and now they appear to be taking steps that will, whatever the merits of them, hide the cost of our war in Afghanistan.

It worries me. It worries me because I don't get why they're so big on secrecy. It worries me because I think the root of the Bush administration's evil, or at least the reason they've been as horrendous as they've been, is their fanatical insistence on keeping things in the dark. Generally speaking, there's no good reason for a government to insist on governing without letting people know what they're doing-that the Harper government appears to have taken a page from the Cheney crowd is disturbing.

I gotta say, it never would have occured to me.

Colin Burn might not like to look at this, but a guy has recreated the bottom of the tenth of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series using RBI baseball, and the results are weirdly compelling for baseball geeks. He spliced Vin Scully's broadcast up to the video-game images, and thereby demonstrates just how good an announcer Vin Scully is. I know how the game turned out-hell, it was twenty years ago-I have no rooting interest in either the Mets or the Red Sox, the players, in this case, are 1980s video game sprites, and even so Scully's call is perfect in its evocation of the tension of the game.

The guy in question, having spent ten hours fiddling with a twenty year old video game to get the inning just right has landed a job with a film restoration company, so kudos to him. The story can be found here, via Fred Clark.

Now, to precisely replicate the Immaculate Reception using (ironically, he said) Madden...

Happy Belated, Will

Let me not to the marraige of true minds
admit impediments. Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
but bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-Sonnet CXVI

Yesterday was the 442nd anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, as well as the 390th of his death, and apparently the Royal Shakespeare Company is celebrating by performing all of his works.

There are certainly performances I'd take a pass on-I've hated A Midsummer Night's Dream ever since I studied it something like four times in a row in high scool, and there's a reason that Henry VI, King John and Titus Andronicus aren't often performed-but it sounds awesome. They do a thing here and I imagine in most reasonably sized cities where they read all of the sonnets on the 23rd, and one of these years I'm going to find out about it before it happens. Until then, having given you my 2nd-favourite sonnet, here's my favourite:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips' red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts be dun.
If hair be wires, black wires grow upon her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white
but no such roses see I in her cheeks
and in some perfumes is there more delight
than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
that music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go-
my mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
as any she belied with false compare.

-Sonnet CXXX

Good news!

For those of you who smile politely at the baseball posts, I've decided to add a feature that will make avoiding them all the easier for you! Over on the left, you'll note a new section of the sidebar entitled "Blue Jays Obsession Update," which boils the hours of frustration and elation of being a fan of the least hip team in sports into an easy digest that can be skimmed or perused at your discretion. This won't mean the end of agonized posts about the insanity of the Burnett contract or fretting over every non-flawless Halladay start, but it should make them less frequent.

Now, if I could only boil the months Burnett will spend on the DL into a seconds-long sidebar as well...

Take your coat off and stay a while

It's been too long since you've been here, spring.

It was the first real weekend of spring here, as we had gorgeous sun on both Saturday and Sunday. It was, in fact, so nice today that I went for a long walk without a coat on.

This is a big deal for me. Having lived first in Moscow and then in Halifax, two cities where snow in May is unusual but not shocking, I feel underdressed outside without a coat. I generally wear a windbreaker right through the summer. But today, anyway, it was too nice even for me to wear a coat.

So welcome back, summer. Stay as long as you like.

Now that's a ballgame

I'm still happy about last night's Blue Jays victory.

It was nearly perfect-it came against the hated Red Sox, who probably have more players I dislike than the Yankees, it featured a late, improbable, home-run filled rally against good pitching, it was about as well-pitched a 7-6 game as you're ever going to see, and finally, there was a bit of poetic justice, as Beckett's deliberate drilling of Aaron Hill sparked the Jays' eighth inning rally.

Beckett has already shot to the top of the long list of Bosox I Dislike-only Schilling beats him-and it was such a bush-league thing to do that I'm delighted it came back to bite him immediately. And I have absolutely no doubt that the plunking was intentional: Beckett had had great command all evening, it came on the first pitch of an inning following an inning that a Bosox player had been hit (with a curveball, for god's sake) and it was a textbook purpose pitch-a fastball right between the shoulder blades.

So why was it only nearly perfect? Well, A.J. Burnett is hurt again. For those of you keeping score at home, he's now been hurt twice in the first month of a five year contract worth an awful lot of money. He was obviously always the highest risk of this offseason's acquisitions, but the nightmare scenario might be unfolding a lot faster than anyone anticipated. The Jays can contend without Burnett this year, but the long-term outlook without him contributing is decidedly grim.

But for now, I'm happy-they won in dramatic fashion, send Halladay out against the immortal Lenny DiNardo today, and look like they can make some noise. We'll worry about those storm clouds a little later.

Is Babe Ruth still the best ever?

Indulge me.

Way back when, in those heady days when this blog had no readers at all, instead of the six or seven it has now, I wrote a post in which I said that George Bush was "in the conversation" about who the Worst President Ever was. Usually, the conversation's about things like Best Left-Handed Catcher Ever and the like-today it was Walter Johnson vs. Roger Clemens for Best Pitcher Ever-but occasionally things less important than baseball get a look in, and it seems to me, what with articles on this very topic cropping up in places like Rolling Stone and Maclean's, that it might be an idea to take the old blogmobile out for a spin round Buchanan Drive and Hoover Lane in a quest to find the Worst President of All Time.

The first thing you have to do when discussing Bush and his awfulness is to take his political successes into account. Indeed, His Fatuousness Lord Black of Crossharbour argues in his defense of Bush in Maclean's that his successes in themselves refute the charge that he's number 43 with a bullet, and while I don't agree it does have to be addressed that Bush is a two-termer.

Generally, contenders for this particular title-Fillmore, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Grant, Harding, Hoover and Jimmy Carter if you're insanely right wing-are one term guys, who either retired after one term, died in office or were unceremoniously chucked out of the White House by the electorate. There are two recent Presidents who served parts of two terms-LBJ and Nixon-who occasionally get mentioned as contenders, and Andrew Jackson's genocidal Indian policy gets him onto the bottom of some people's lists, but generally the career of a Really Bad President is weak, failure-filled and short. Bush is highly unusual in these respects, because he's been remarkably successful in implementing his agenda (gigantic tax cuts, war in the Middle East, a sweeping expansion of the power of the executive, etc.) and, of course, a two term President.

The reason I think he's in the conversation with all of the weak Presidents overwhelmed by events (Fillmore and Pierce by the slavery crises, Buchanan by secession, Hoover by the Depression) is because he has unerringly charged off like a mad bull in precisely the wrong direction on everything. That he has brilliant political pros working for him doesn't change the basic fact that his fiscal policy is bankrupting the federal government, his domestic policy is regressive, short-sighted and incoherent and his foreign policy is...well, "murderously stupid" may be overly harsh, but it's what comes to mind.

My favourite quote about the Bush Administration, the source of which I've unfortunately forgotten, was that "The irritating thing about this administration is that they are extraordinarily incompetent at everything except politics, at which they are exceptionally good." I think that this is completely right, and I also think that it's why, contra the criticisms of Bush defenders, that Bush's stock is going to go down over the long term, rather than up like Harry Truman's. Right now, Bush is as popular as he is because he has his crack political team on the job trying to make him look good. When we're all significantly older or dead, historians will be able to look at the way Bush cut taxes right into the bone, dragged the US into at least one and possibly two disastrous wars and failed to improve the lives of anybody who wasn't already wealthy when he got in. This is on top of aggressive assertions of executive power unseen since at least the crisis point of the Civil War, if even then, and corruption scandals that get worse by the day.

He's got the total package, and unlike some of the traditional contenders for the bottom slot he hasn't just impotently fidgeted while things got worse but actively made them worse himself. It's hard, I think, for Bush supporters to point at any concrete accomplishments he's had-there's a lot of stuff about how Iraq will get better and the economy will improve, but very little that actually has happened.

The exception to this is the absence of terrorist attacks in the States since 2001, which he should be credited for at least in part. But that's a damn precarious thing on which to hang one's hat: I'm not sure I'd want my Presidential legacy to hinge on playing perfect defence against terrorists for the next two and a half years-particularly if I was contemplating doing something crazy like bombing Iran.

So is he the worst ever? I'm actually inclined to say no, and to give it instead to Franklin Pierce, who was particularly somnolent between 1852 and 1856 as the Civil War first appeared as a possibility on the horizon. James Buchanan, who immediated succeeded Pierce, is also probably Worse Than Bush. But I wouldn't put him any higher than 41st, and to fail to crack to top 40 on a 43-man list is pretty shameful in its own right. Also, it should be remembered that I tend to stick with the old guys on questions like this-I still say Walter Johnson was better than Clemens...

Who didn't like stuff that glowed in the dark as a kid?

We're coming up to the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl.

I'm not entirely sure if this is coincidental or what, but there's recently been a spate of posts on nuclear power on American liberal blogs, all of which take as their starting point this pro-nuke op-ed by Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace. I've long thought that the only realistic solution to the problem of energy production and pollution is a vast increase the number of nuclear plants: a continued reliance on fossil fuels will drown us and cutting back on energy use to the point where windmills and solar panels could power the grid simply isn't going to happen.

My sense is that nuclear power is no longer politically (ahem) radioactive in the way that it was in the late 1970s and 1980s; I think a lot of this has to do with the end of the Cold War and the corresponding retreat of death in a nuclear war as a fear for the public. Moore seems to imply this in his article, saying that he and his comrades "believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust."
This isn't to deny that nuclear power does have the potential to go horribly wrong, as it did twenty years ago in Chernobyl, but it seems to me that faced with the question of how to provide power in a way that doesn't melt the polar ice caps it's the only game in town.

As to those accidents, the technology's a lot better today, and it seems to me that Chernobyl was in many ways an anomaly that's extremely unlikely to be repeated, involving Soviet technology, Soviet administration and reactor technicians conducting unauthorized experiments just to see what would happen. That doesn't make it any less of a tragedy, but a worse tragedy is waiting for all of us if we don't change the way we keep the lights on. And it seems to me, again, that nuclear power's the only plausible switch we can make.

Gosh, just what I always wanted.

In depressing but not overly surprising news, they apparently can't keep Duke lacrosse gear on the shelves down in Durham.

I say it's not particularly surprising because there will always be both mindless defenders of their favourite team and ironic hipsters looking to make a joke who will buy the jersey or hat of a troubled team or player. Lamar Odom and Ricky Williams jerseys for stoners, for example. But I can't figure out why your reaction on hearing that the entire Duke lacrosse team was involved in a rape case with ugly racial and class overtones would be to go out and buy a team sweatshirt. I really can't fathom why you would buy such a sweatshirt as a present for someone, as a woman mentioned in the story did. For her boyfriend. I'm not quite sure how I would react to getting a Duke lacrosse sweatshirt from my girlfriend, but I'm fairly sure that I would be at the very least confused.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wash my O.J. Simpson replica jersey.

The Rodney Dangerfield Province

They just can't get no respect.

The irritating thing about articles like these is that every province wants to be played by Rodney Dangerfield. Quebec, Ontario, Newfoundland...I'm sure Manitobans feel underappreciated as well.

How do they sleep at night?

It's an administration of foxes, in a nation of crows.

I mean, can you believe this, five years on?

Condoleeza Rice, with an election to be won: "These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."

Condoleeza Rice, with a war to sell: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

And this, of course, is one of the saner Bush administration flunkies. You've got Dick Cheney viewing massive tax cuts as some sort of "due" for a congressional electoral victory won by national security fearmongering, Donald Rumsfeld authorizing torture at Abu Ghraib, Bush himself saying that laws prohibiting torture don't apply to him...it's frightening. And now, they have a foil who's just as nutty as they are.

Hang on tight, folks.

With a little bit, with a little bit, with a little bit of bloomin' luck

Donald Rumsfeld buffeted by demands to resign from retired generals.

I really, really, hope he goes. Not so much for the arrogant belief that Iraq could be held by the smaller, lighter army it's his ideological vision to promote, not so much for whatever "errors" that could be attributed to his office in the Iraq disaster, but instead for one entirely deliberate policy choice summed up by one place: Abu Ghraib.

Rumsfeld has emerged as this despicable administration's most unapologetic advocate for torture. Dick Cheney's worked behind the scenes to keep it legal for the CIA, the whole bunch of them are guilty of abetting it, but Rumsfeld is the guy with the pithy quotes. My favourite one is when he apparently asked what was wrong with forcing prisoners to stand for hours on end, noting that he works at a stand-up desk all day.

When all of this is over, and the Bush administration has gone to their graves in deserved ignominy, it will be the enthusiastic application of torture that will stand as the blackest smudge on their completely disfigured record. Presidents have launched disastrous wars before, and the Americans have had more than their fair share of reactionary doofuses in charge of domestic policy. But never before has an administration argued, repeatedly and in public, for the right to treat people inhumanely on the vaguest suspicion that they were a terrorist. I'm not saying that abuses didn't happen before-I'm saying that the people in charge of those abuses had the good grace to be ashamed of them, or at least not to brag about them. And Rumsfeld was the chief architect of this complete abandonment of any fig-like claim the United States had to being better than all the hegemons that went before it.

I am, I'll admit, disturbed by the fact that retired generals may well force a resignation or firing that common decency couldn't provoke before-it's disturbing to think that a Defence Secretary can get away with murder as long as he doesn't tick off the brass. But however he goes, I just want him gone, and I don't care how it happens. Yesterday would be too late.

Shades of Gray Getting Around to A Book He Should Have Read A While Ago: Atonement

Let me tell you a story.

In 1995, a young man named Ralph Parker lost control of his car, going off the road and into a crowd of young people at a bus stop. 15 year old Renee Lee Orichefsky and her 13 year old sister Danielle were killed.

Ten years later, their family, along with their friends and neighbours and a church that sits just behind where the terrible accident occurred held a memorial service for the girls, which I covered for the Herald. It was the most amazing, remarkable, moving thing I've ever seen in my life, and I don't seriously expect it to be topped.

The family forgave him. They forgave him without exception, without grudge or bitterness, and they embraced him after he went, weeping, to the microphone to ask for their forgiveness. They gave it before he went up. They had given it to him, unasked for, in an interview I did with Joseph Orichefsky before the service, because they wanted him to be there. I almost cried watching first Orichefsky and then Parker speak.

I would imagine that perhaps one person, one family in a million, has the capacity for that sort of forgiveness. It took the Orichefskys ten years to do it, which I would argue is a remarkably short time for this sort of thing. And while it was the Orichefskys' mercy that rightly caught the attention, Parker showed what I think was rare courage as well. It was, all around, truly amazing to see.

I thought about that morning after I finished Atonement, which has as its central theme the question of how one atones for, or forgives, the unforgivable. The crime in question, while definitely falling into the category of unforgivable acts, is less so, perhaps, than Ralph Parker and the Orichefskys' tragedy. That said, I don't think that there's much of a difference in the difficulty of forgiveness or atonement or the simple struggle to live with such a wrong either against you or by you unrighted, once you pass a certain point.

McEwan writes marvellously throughout the novel, conveying the experiences of his characters in such sharpness that the book flies by, even as the scenes stick with you. The second and third sections of the book, detailing the British Expeditionary Force's retreat to Dunkirk and the experience of nurses in London after the evacuation respectively, are especially well drawn, and serve to reinforce the characters' sufferings and joys without being distracting. It's a remarkable, remarkable book.

There are some flaws-I thought the character of Cecilia, the third major character, was a little thin, and the coda serves to undermine everything that went before, which was extremely annoying. McEwen at least seems to be putting the question of authors' sins against their characters in the same category as actual sins against actual people, which I thought was more than a little fatuous. That said, "all novels go off the boil at the end," and the dissection of remorse and forgiveness that preceds it more than makes up for it. The prose is a joy, the characters are closely observed, and the central question-prior to the epilogue-is dealt with in a way that seems completely right.

Because, as I say, the vast majority of us are not the Orichefskys, and of those of us who are most, thankfully, will not have to demonstrate it. That said, we must forgive one another our trespasses somehow, or we really will find it impossible to live together. And so we spend a lot of our time half-forgiving people, or being half-forgiven, in a way that's emotionally unsatisfying but necessary. Atonement looks at that dilemma at its most stark, and does it as well as any piece of writing I've seen.

It's a long season

It can be hard to remember not to get too high off of individual victories.

That said, just three short days after inducing the first pessimistic grumble of the season, the Jays have looked enough like a contender to induce unreasonably yeasty optimism round these here parts. The new guys are crushing the ball, Aaron Hill's looked like an above-average defensive second baseman, and the pitching staff, while spotty, has shown flashes of potential. I'll be sorry to see Brian Tallet's indescribably awful sartorial combination of 1840s-esque sideburns, baggy pants and stirrups (I can't find a picture, unfortunately) go back to Syracuse, but his departure will help the team's ERA. Add to that the fact that Scott Downs will no longer be starting, and you have the makings of a good staff.

Tonight's win was exciting not least because it showed the team had some grit; it would have been easy for Pete Walker to implode in the third and allow the Chisox to get up 8-2 or something, and it would have been entirely imaginable for the hitters to fail to well, explode during the later innings. Also, that Vernon Wells is hitting a tear this early in the season is wonderful; generally, he hits like a backup catcher in April and the team predictably suffers for it.

Tomorrow, the last of the new Green Jays makes his debut as A.J. Burnett pitches against Chicago. If he looks good, it might be a very exciting spring.

In the interests of accuracy

I should note that I completely understand why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frightens people.

Confidential to JN

Dude, they're not going to take away your geek licence just because you post in the baseball threads. I write the damn things, and my geek credentials are framed on my wall.

Drat

Via Jay, who is rapidly becoming the Official Ghostwriter of Shades of Gray, I see that John Godfrey, the greatest President in the history of King's College, has dropped out of the Liberal leadership race because of health concerns.

Obviously, the most important thing is Godfrey's health, and I hope he feels better soon. It's also disappointing because Godfrey was my early favourite candidate for the job, and I think he would have made an excellent leader and possible Prime Minister.

Arrgh

So the geniuses at Sportsnet have decided in their wisdom to show tonight's Blue Jays-Red Sox tilt only in Ontario, giving those of us who live in Quebec, the Maritimes and Newfoundland Ottawa Senators hockey instead.

The rationale behind this escapes me. The Senators have very few fans outside of eastern Ontario, and low prospects for growth out here, because Quebec is Habs country and the Atlantic provinces are already split between fans of the Habs, Leafs, Bruins and (in Cape Breton) Oilers. As a rare Flames fan in eastern Canada, I can't imagine Halifax becoming a hotbed of Sens support simply because Sportsnet shows their games on TV, at least as long as CBC is showing the other Canadian teams regularly. Finally, there's no particular reason for Sportsnet to boost the Sens in particular-they're owned by someone else, after all.

Conversely, Sportsnet is owned by the same guy who owns the Jays, and the growth potential out here seems limitless, at least within the confines of Atlantic Canadian baseball fans. But we get hockey anyway.

I really can't wait for the end of hockey season.

Shades of Gray at the Video Store: Dog Day Afternoon

It's remarkable how good an actor Al Pacino is, something I tend to lose sight of as I watch him in his current incarnation rampaging across sets devouring the scenery in movies like The Devil's Advocate and Two For The Money. This movie, I think, shows him at about his absolute peak, not least because the character he plays is both similar to his most iconic roles in that he's a bank robber, and very different, in that he's a complete incompetent and his motivation for robbing the bank-obtaining money for his partner's sex change operation-is about as untypical as you're likely to find in a movie about a bank robbery.

The movie is very well written and brilliantly acted by all of the principals. The phone call scene between Pacino's bank robber and his hysterical partner, played by Chris Sarandon in particular was completely convincing. I Also, one of the first things that occurred to me as the credits began to roll was the remarkable effect shooting the movie with no ambient music had on the tension and realism of the film; I think you get a much better idea of the mixture of boredom and tension at a hostage situation for the lack of background music.

The other thing that struck me was just how hands-off the police seemed to be in the early seventies, at least in comparison to how I seem to think of them today. There's a scene where Pacino gets tackled by a non-police observer of the standoff, and the police immediately converge on the two of them...to arrest the other guy and let Pacino go. Granted, Pacino's character does have a partner in the bank robbery training a gun on eight hostages, but when I compare the behavior of the cops in Dog Day Afternoon to the behavior of cops in modern hostage dramas like Inside Man, they were an awful lot less opportunistic and aggressive. To give one example, in Inside Man Denzel Washington's police inspector, given far less favourable circumstances than the cops in Dog Day Afternoon, tackles Clive Owen's robber chief and attempts to arrest him despite the fact that his confederates still have the hostages under guard.

Conservatives like to talk about how the 1970s in the States saw a widespread shckling of the police, with a corresponding rise in crime rates. I think a lot of things have contributed to a fall in crime rates since the early nineties, but I don't really think there's much question that the police are more aggressive and more respected today than they were thirty years ago. The role the crowd plays in Dog Day Afternoon, I think, demonstrates this at least in terms of popular culture; they're unambiguously on Sonny's side throughout the standoff, and derisive of the police in a way I have trouble imagining a contemporary crowd being.

Anyway, it's an excellent movie, and you should see it if you haven't already. We strive, as always, to provide cutting edge cultural criticism here at Shades of Gray, and today is no exception.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Barry?

Chuck Klosterman, for one.

What aggravates me about articles like these is that they exalt the myth of baseball to the complete detriment of the actual game. As I've said before, no sport has as ridiculously high a standard of purity to meet in the press as does baseball; the scribes who cover it pounce on any show of human weakness from its stars, demanding instead a cardboard myth of all-american heroes and scrappy hustlers. All sorts of things are whitewashed in the service of this myth, like segregation and the gambling scandals of the teens, but in spite of this for some people the myth is still all that matters.

Klosterman even admits as much at the end, quoting an article about Bonds from 2002 to make his point:

"But for the moment, as the crowd settled back into its seats, there were no heroes or demons," Grann wrote while awaiting Bonds' next at-bat, back when his home run total still hovered below 600. "Just baseball. Isn't that enough?"

To which Klosterman, supremely confident that we'll all agree with him, answers "No."

Really? Baseball's not enough for you, sport? Your precious sensibilities demand heroes and demons, tragedy and redemption, a metaphor for The Way We Live Now? Then go and read a book, for Christ's sake, and leave the game to those of us who love it for what it, not for what we pretend it once was.

The Doctor is Ill

Roy Halladay will miss his next start.

While I'm glad to hear that the team doesn't think this is serious, I can't help but remember that he was supposed to be pitching a month after he broke his leg last year, and never came back. Coupled with the team's mediocre 3-4 break out of the gates, I'm feeling slightly less bullish about the boys in blue these days.

Shoot

I missed this while writing the previous post.

Obviously, it's worrying that Ahmadinejad is making provocative statements like "Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries," even he appears to be using a definition of nuclear powerhood that would include Canada, for God's sake. That said, as the article notes this particular announcement still puts them years away from a bomb, and while I'm sure that the clandestine programme is further along there's still time to exhaust diplomacy before launching a second disastrous war.

All Iran, all the time

James Fallows has an article in the latest Atlantic Monthly in which he describes just how bad the situation is vis-a-vis Iran's nuclear programme. As he puts it near the end of the article, "The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the past five years have left us with a series of choices-and all of them are bad."

For the record, I also think it would be a bad idea for Iran to get the Bomb. I thought it was a bad thing when India, Pakistan and North Korea especially nuked up as well. That said, I would clearly prefer a nuclear Iran to airstrikes, if only because a variety of people who know more about this than I do think that airstrikes won't work. I think Matt Yglesias puts it well here, the only way to conceivably get the Iranians to back off involves giving them something. As I understand it, a conventional bombing of suspected nuclear sites might very well not eliminate the programme, which means the only way to be sure of taking out the sites is the nuclear option that's had me so excited lately.

Are they willing to talk? Well, Seymour Hersh says they want to, and while that's far from conclusive I'd say that it's at least some evidence that it really isn't time to saber-rattle in public. It certainly couldn't hurt for the U.S. government to make better use of its back channels-as Fallows says, it would make more sense to do any threatening that needed to be done there, rather than in bombastic speeches by Dick Cheney and Condi Rice.

Thanks, Doc

-Salvador Dali, The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As A Table

Remember, kids, if you've got it, flaunt it.

I guess phone sex worker turnout wasn't high enough

Berlusconi's out, though he won't concede yet.

Notwithstanding the loss of one of the great buffoons of world politics, I can't say I'm sorry to see Berlusconi's back, at least for now. Corrupt, sleazy and right-wing, there really wan't much to recommend him to me except the surreal comedy he brought to politics. See ya, Silvio.

Incidentally, those "masters of minority government," the Italians, have possibly the dumbest electoral system on the planet. The first place party or coalition, by law, gets 340 seats in the 630 seat lower house. The second place party, again by law, gets 277 seats. That 0.1% difference in votes between Prodi's bunch and Silvio's gang, therefore, translates into 63 seats, or 10 percent of the house. Also, what precisely is the point of electing two different house of parliament simultaneously with slightly different versions of party-list voting? It seems designed to produce government instability. While it would be comforting to think that Italy's revolving door politics is a result of deliberate planning, rather than incompetence, it seems like a stretch.

There's good news, though

Yes, the Blue Jays lost yesterday, but even amid the wreckage of Roy Halladay getting knocked around in the eighth, there were bright sides.

Scott Kazmir was a lot of fun to watch, even though he pitches for the freaking Devil Rays. D-Rays manager Joe Maddon officially cemented his status as baseball's first hipster manager. And finally, the last sign of spring was sighted: the first hilariously overblown Rod Black pre-game intro:

"This time of year, people usually watch The Masters (Footage of Augusta National Golf Club, Tiger Woods, Mike Weir, etc, etc.) But today, the Blue Jays have a master of their own on the mound (footage of Halladay)..."

And so forth. It's hard not to like Black, even though he's the most atrocious announcer I've ever heard; he seems like a genuinely nice guy and his intros are to die for. If only there were some way to get the intros without the ensuing three hours of clueless commentary...

Link

link

Incidentally

Sy Hersh was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer yesterday, and the whole interview can be seen here.

The Shadow Presidency

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

-The Shadow

Hale: Nurse, though our hearts break, we cannot flinch; these are new times, sir. There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships. I have seen too many frightful proofs in court-the Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!

-Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Let's try this again.

When I was in grade twelve, the school play was The Crucible. When the play was initially cast, I was to play Governor Danforth, the hard, hanging judge who dominates the Salem witch trials for the last two acts of the play. Then a friend of mind quit and I was promoted one spot to the role of Reverend Hale, quoted above, who starts out utterly convinced in diabolism and related nonsenses and winds up renouncing his role in the trials and preaching against the very idea of witchcraft trials.

I recently read the play again for the first time in the intervening six years, and of course was struck again by how good a play it was and how many good roles there are in it and so forth. I was also struck by the extent to which political hysteria can be and usually is sincere.

By this I mean that the judges at the trials certainly believed, like Hale, that the Devil was alive in Salem, and that it was their duty to root him out, whatever the cost. I rather think that some of the girls who accuse the "witches" by acting possessed also believed they were genuinely possessed, certainly in the later scenes of the play. As Miller himself put it, "the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact."

So you get sincere, frightened people condemning their neighbours to death for witchcraft. And then, three hundred years later, different sincere frightened people blacklisted other neighbours of theirs for being Communists, or suspected Communists. And now, we have an American President willing to use wildly disproportionate military means in a fuzzy, ill-defined "War on Terror" that's already engulfed one unrelated country and threatens to engulf another. In doing so, he's being cheered on, of course, by sincerely frightened people.

Miller puts the crux of the problem with the witch trials, and the Red Scare, and the war in Iraq and the proposed bombing of Iran succinctly: "So often, the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind." When people are calm, they realize, generally, that you can't prosecute or kill someone for their dark thoughts, and that what matters is what people do. When they're frightened, a muttering beggar becomes a witch, a New York playwright becomes a revolutionary in waiting, and an poor country with a military not even within shouting distance of the Americans or Israelis becomes an imminent threat that has to be taken out NOW.

Miller again (all of this is from 1996, believe it or not):

One thing more—something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares.

Obviously, building a nuclear bomb is doing something. But far more important to my mind is the question of whether anything will be done with it after it's built, and whether the possible disastrous consequences of a nuclear Iraq outweigh the well-nigh certain disastrous consequences of bombing the place, with nukes or not.

The final observation I'd make about hysterias like this one is that they create their own momentum: As I've said before, I attribute a significant fraction of the impetus behind the Iranian nuclear programme to a desire to avoid Iraq's fate, and an entirely understandable belief that the only way to permanently deter American aggression is to get the Bomb. This, of course sets off alarm bells in Washington and elsewhere that are in context understandable themselves, and around and around we go. And all of this-well, most of this-springs from a belief that intentions (Saddam Hussein, maybe) are to be taken just as seriously as actions (Osama bin Laden).

So who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? George Bush does, and more importantly, he's gonna do something about it. The trouble is that while the Shadow really did know, George is only guessing.

Two very quick things about Afghanistan

One, I'll bet this new poll is as ambivalent as it is because people aren't sure precisely what we're doing. I, for one, think a debate is likely to move people to favouring a mission with clearly laid out goals.

Second, I find it nervewracking that Stephen Harper is referring to pulling out as "cutting and running" without specifically limiting the term to leaving before the end of our commitment. If you define exiting as defeat, you make it much harder to get out when you need to.

The Streak Continues

Blech.

Well, if it can't end on the West Wing, maybe it'll end in the 2006 Congressional or Nova Scotian elections...

Updated for continuity-based grousing: In what vaguely realistic universe does a Republican presidential candidate win Vermont while losing New Hampshire? It's not 1936 anymore...

Paving the road to Hell

Matthew Yglesias has a post up at TPMCafe regarding Scooter Libby's testimony and the ultimate meaningless of the question of whether the Bush administration "lied," "misled people" or "were careless" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which started me thinking about why exactly Bush thinks he has to bomb Iran.

The section of Matt's post that got me thinking was this bit:

More significant to me has been the president's repeated assertion that he would have made the same decisions then even if he had known everything we know now. In other words, the actual facts about the WMDs are, to Bush, entirely irrelevant in assessing the Iraq War. What he does think the relevant considerations are or were I couldn't quite say, but it means we've got a president who's operating on some sort of extremely reckless doctrine about the proper circumstances for the use of force.

It is, as Matt says, deeply weird that the president says that even had he known Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction he would still have invaded. It would be one thing if he were to say that he couldn't have known, but instead we get this line about how he would have done it anyway. What that implies, to me, is that for George Bush what really matters is intentions, rather than capabilities or actions.

Perhaps the most striking example of Bush's bizarre mind-reading act was, of course, his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, at which he said "I was able to get a sense of his soul." The line on Iraq has essentially boiled down to the pathetic argument that even if Saddam didn't have WMDs, and wasn't capable of manufacturing them, he still wanted them. He talks about the "terrorists" writ large in terms of their completely unachievable goals, in such laughably grandiose terms as "a radical Islamic empire stetching from Spain to Indonesia. Time and again, he and his crowd seem to suggest that what really matters is not so much how much of a threat an organization or country is, but how much of a threat they are in their wildest dreams. So he goes haring off after them, invading countries and destroying civil liberties, in the military equivalent of smashing gnats with a two-by-four in a china cabinet. And when it's over, and there are still gnats buzzing around and there are shards of Lomonosovsky Farfor all over the carpet, he justifies it by saying that the gnats wanted to sting him.

Which brings us to Iran. No one disputes that Ahmaninejad is a seriously nasty piece of work. But he's a figurehead, hemmed in by people who, if no less nasty than he, are at the very least more sensible about what the consequences of a nuclear attack on the Americans or Israelis would be. There's absolutely no need to bomb Iran right now, ESPECIALLY WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. But in the bizarre world of George Bush, his nuttiness by itself makes him as much of a threat as Hitler.

As I say, he's a remarkably stupid man to have risen this far. Let's all hope we're able to laugh about it in ten years time.

Incidentally, one of the funnier dissections of a Bush speech around, The Crazification Factor, was written in response to Bush's dark visions of a Spain-to-Indonesia caliphate. Check it out.

North Side su...What?

CFL football has left Ottawa again, at least for the short term.

After the Renegades were launched in 2002, they quickly became the most rickety franchise in a league not generally known for the stability of its teams, so I can't say I'm terribly surprised at the decision of the league to pull the plug. The arrival of the Gliebermans, Bernie and Lonie, at the helm last May was always troubling given their disastrous track record in Ottawa and Shreveport; if Bernie Glieberman thinks that a CFL franchise is a lost cause, it most definitely is.

I hope the league does, in fact, find an investor for the franchise over the coming year, and that there's a team in Ottawa for 2007 onwards. Ideally, such a team would be named the Rough Riders: you can't really have the CFL without two teams in a nine team league bearing the same name. That said, I'm not terribly sure I'd want to put millions of dollars into CFL football in Ottawa if I had the chance, so we'll have to see if anyone else does.

A Shades of Gray Challenge!

And you guys thought the numismatic stuff was just for fun.

It's not my idea, but it's a good one, I think. Over on the left you'll see a little logo featuring the new breast cancer quarter that the Mint's just issued, clicking on which will take you to the Canadian Cancer Society's web site. The idea, as laid out by Dino at the Blogging Party of Canada, is to donate every one of the special quarters you find in your change to cancer research, along with another quarter to match it.

Obviously, this is unlikely to raise the $30 million that's the theoretical maximum, or even one million dollars, but it's a painless donation that can't do any harm and might, if done by enough people, do some good.

Via the Galloping Beaver.

It's all about the woodrows, baby

Is there anything that makes people so delightfully crazy as money?

I'm talking here about the laws relating to actual physical currency, as opposed to the more generalized root of all evil stuff that I'm sure we're all extremely familiar with. I was poking around reading stuff about the Euro, when I came across the arresting bit of information that there are no banknotes that are legal tender in Scotland. What this means is that a Scottish shopkeeper could refuse to take your money, regardless of whether it was issued by the Bank of England or one of the several Scottish banks that issue their own currency. This is more of a hypothetical possibility than anything else, Scots not generally being noted for their reluctance to take your money, but I find it fascinating. The entire paper economy in Scotland works on a system of IOUs, which I think has a certain 19th century charm.

To compound the weirdness of a country with no legal tender is the fact that these promissory notes have to be backed with something, after all. Which, bizarrely, appears to be Bank of England notes. I find this to be sort of satisfyingly circular: English pounds aren't legal tender, but in order to issue your own pounds in Scotland, you have to be able to redeem them for English pounds.

All of this led to the delightful nugget that the Bank of England, as a result of this goofiness north of the border, has issued notes worth a million and one hundred million pounds for use in intra-bank transactions, which leads to the question of whether such a note would be legal tender in England or Wales. Perhaps it's because I'm a child of the digital age, but I honestly can't see the point of an actual, physical piece of paper worth millions of pounds, or for that matter, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Though it does, I suppose, raise entertaining possibilities for bad heist movies.

The last image all of this raises in my head is the scene in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story where Ben Stiller bribes Vince Vaughn to pull out of the tournament with fifty thousand dollars, opening a brushed steel briefcase to reveal a single bundle of hundreds. I just have this image of someone doing the same brushed steel briefcase routine to reveal a single bill with Woodrow Wilson's visage on it.

Unfortunately, you'd never be able to spend or even deposit your hundred grand, but it's fun to think about. And it would make for some mighty entertaining rap lyrics.

Update: One last bit of numismatic goofiness: United States Notes are a form of obsolete US currency, out of circulation since 1966. But when they were first floated, Congress passed a law requiring there to be 300 million dollars worth of United States Notes in circulation at any given time. So the Treasury department, in order to meet the requirements of the statute, printed 300 million dollars worth of hundred dollar notes and then trucked them around from Federal Reserve to Federal Reserve so that the appropriate amount of money would be in "circulation." This insanity went on for four years until Congress repealed the law. Imagine being on the "pointlessly driving three hundred million dollars across the country" detail.

That's one way to put it

From the Weird Headlines department comes this Italian election primer at the CBC, where we're told that managing to chew through a government every year on average makes the Italians "masters of minority government."

If you want to make the argument that proportional representation doesn't lead to instability, there are certainly all kinds of examples to choose from. Referring to the Italians as "masters" of minority parliament situations, however, is simply too funny for words.

We're gonna party like it's 2004!

I see that Senator John Kerry, of whom I was a fan before it was cool, has been unusually sharp in his criticism of the Bush administration lately. Naturally, the first thought I had was that there were now at least two Senators (him and Feingold) saying that the Emperor has no clothes, and really, George, no one wants to see that. The second thought, of course, was whether this is all a prelude to a Harold Stassen-esque run for the presidency in 2008.

I still think, long after everyone else has left the party, that Kerry would make a truly great President, but I also agree with Laura Turner when she writes that he'd likely "lose embarassingly" to any halfway reasonable Republican candidate. Kerry's problem is that he really is that dreaded species, the "Massachusetts liberal," and his nuanced, pedantic attempts to paint himself as something he wasn't just made him look weak. If he runs as Captain Complexity in 2008, he'll get crushed in the primaries, and if he runs as Kerry Unplugged, his only chance to win over Democratic primary voters, he's going to hammered in November. It also really wouldn't help that he already has an unfair reputaion as a guy who'll say anything to get elected, as his only real chance is to run a campaign totally different in style to the one he lost a year and a half ago.

As everyone knows, this blog has a soft spot for losers: the Blue Jays, the NDP, Kerry, Greg Norman (hey, it's Masters week,) Tony Dungy and his Indianapolis Colts, Grigory Yavlinsky, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. So it will come as no surprise that the guy I really want to see run for President is Al Gore. He's been a consistent critic of the awfulness of the current administration, he'll have had enough time, I think, to pull off the comeback, and like Kerry I think he'd also make a great President. It would also have the added benefit of putting someone who takes environmental degradation seriously in the office most able to do something about it. So while I understand that he's not sure he wants to do it, I hope he changes his mind, not least because...

...I'm pretty sure he's the only Democrat with a chance to beat Hillary Clinton. Don't get me wrong, she'd be a major upgrade on what we've got now, but she strikes me about as conservative as a Democrat can be without actually being Joe Lieberman, and all the hatred she evokes from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy doesn't change that.

My final, absurdly early, totally unqualified opinion about U.S. Presidential politics is sparked by this related post of Laura's:It seems to me that the Bush crowd is exceedingly likely to act in a way that makes Laura's optimal 2004 strategy the optimal 2008 strategy, which is to say that I think they're going to screw up Iran as well. Assuming that the Democrats actually manage to make a united front against Bush administration insanity, the conditions might actually favour a full-throated liberal insurgency in 2008. Which is ultimately why I think it would be so disappointing to settle for Clintonian centrism, when the potential for so much more is there.

Kibitzing

Carol Patterson, the Official Mom of Shades of Gray, china freak, and perhaps the last remaining Chretien Liberal on the planet, has sent me one of her occasional "Mom" emails, urging me to get involved in the Liberal leadership race. Arnold Patterson, Official Grandfather of Shades of Gray and one of the great lamppost Liberals ("put a red flag on that lamppost and I'll vote for it"), will doubtless be sending me an email agreeing that this is a splendid idea and why don't I get involved in the Liberal leadership election?

I, conversely, am a Patterson Liberal: I'd be an enthusiastic Liberal if they ran a Patterson in my riding (it happened in 1968 and 1974, not that it was my riding at the time) but otherwise I'll pass for now, thanks. This is for several reasons, among them the terminally hopeless condition of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party, the great shape of the Nova Scotia NDP, and a sense that at the moment the federal Liberals are sort of looking at a long stretch in opposition. But Mom is right that the leadership race the Liberals are going into is an interesting one, and I'll be paying close attention to what the various contenders have to say.

John Godfrey, for one, in addition to his status as the greatest President King's College ever had, has been saying very interesting things about focussing on the environment and cities. I have a feeling that these two issues are going to be the issue in Canadian politics over the next twenty years or so, as we face our absolute last chance to stop the planet from becoming a swamp and as this becomes even more of an urban nation. Also, if he can get my mother, who hated him as a prof in the 70s, to call him "brilliant," he really must be something.

Also in the brilliant section of the field is Michael Ignatieff, but he comes in with more baggage than Godfrey does, and I'm still uncomfortable, as I've said, with his support of the Iraq war. I realize that he thought it was a good idea for far more honourable reasons than the nuts who were in charge of it, but I honestly don't see, in retrospect, a lot of ways it could have turned out as anything other than a disaster. Also, he hadn't lived here in a long, long time prior to the last election, a point I raise not for nativist or tall-poppy syndrome reasons but because it means, perforce, that he's less in touch with life in Canada than his opponents. It's not a disqualifier, but it is another hurdle. All of that said, Ignatieff is one of the few politicians who could hope to clear it, and I'm interested in hearing what he has to say.

There are other interesting Grits running (Ken Dryden and Stephane Dion, for example) but I have to say that early on my pick from the bleachers would be Godfrey. It should be an intersting race.

You know, I'm starting to wonder about this guy's sanity

I refer, of course, to President Bush, who according to Seymour Hersh is contemplating the use of nuclear weapons against Iran to halt its nuclear programme.

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.

(An unidentified "former senior intelligence official") went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels."

Hersh goes on to say that the top brass is adamantly against using nukes, but that they're probably the only way to be certain of destroying key Iranian nuclear facilities. He goes on to talk about the status of the Iranian nuclear programme and about the increasing tension between hawks in Washington and their dismayed potential allies in Europe.

I assume we all remember how crazy I thought airstrikes would be. Well, if Hersh is right, and the administration is seriously considering deploying nuclear weapons on the battlefield for the first time in 60 years (and the third time in history) you can multiply my sentiment that these guys are crazy a hundredfold. Nuking a Muslim country that, whatever the paranoid fears of neoconservatives, poses no threat to the security of the United States would be about as surefire a way to create legions of terrorists as I can imagine. It makes the invasion of Iraq look like cool, level-headed rationalism.

And it's exactly what you might expect from a President who drivels like this:

Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

Indeed.

You really have to be very, very stupid indeed to compare the threat posed by Adolf Hitler, the supreme leader of the most industrialized nation in Europe, with Europe's best military at his command, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is a subordinate leader of an impoverished nation with a military that spends 1 % of what the United States military does, on far less advanced equipment. Start a world war? The Iranians would be comprehensively thrashed in a shooting war with Israel, never mind the States.

Finally, there's an extremely disturbing note of messianic fervour in the second paragraph, where Bush is said to believe that he must do what "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do." You know, George, if you can keep your head about you when all around you others are losing theirs, it just might mean you haven't grasped the situation.

The fate of the world is in the hands of a stupid, arrogant man who does not listen to people who know what they're talking about. It's gonna be a long, long, 33 months.

Thanks, incidentally, to Jay for pointing out the story in the first place.

And finally, in local news

My particular neck of the woods, known officially as Halifax Citadel, has just been launched into a by-election scheduled for the 27th of June. Expect, therefore, periodic boring posts about the state of play between NDP candidate Leonard Preyra (yay!) Tory candidate (and former leadership postulant) Bill Black (Boooo!) and sacrificial lamb Liberal candidate Devin Maxwell (meh.) A Tory victory would give them a majority in the provincial House of Assembly, so it's a by-election with higher stakes than usual.

In addition, this riding has elected three different parties in three successive elections (NDP in 1998, Tory in 1999, Liberal in 2003) so there's quite a bit of fluidity in the electorate. Finally, given that the new government of total doofus Rodney MacDonald will want to go to the polls within the next year and a half or so, the outcome of this by-election might play a factor in when, exactly, they decide to face the electorate.

A Sports Post That's Not Really A Sports Post

King Kaufman, the World's Greatest Sportswriter, has a column up today (you have to watch an ad, but it's worth it) in which he asks, essentially, just how much are we willing to absolve for the home team?

The jumping off point, unsurprisingly, is Barry Bonds. Bonds has received a hero's welcome during the Giants home opening series after being vehemently jeered during San Francisco's visit to San Diego. Kaufman, who's been one of the most reasonable and intelligent commentators around on Bonds since the steroid allegations began to swirl in earnest, has this to say about the love-in for Bonds on Thursday:

It's one thing to forgive and forget the wearing of a visiting uniform and embrace the new guy on the home team, or to turn on a hometown star when he comes back in road duds. Harmless high jinks. It's another to put aside your values, your sense of right and wrong, when they get in the way of root, root, rooting for the home team.

I think that's about right. To be clear about this, I don't think there's anything wrong with rooting for someone you think is a bad person, or at any rate, someone who has acted badly to play well for the team you support. But singling such a person out for special approbation, as Kaufman cites Giants fans doing with Bonds, is more than a little weird. I don't think the twenty-five guys on the Blue Jays roster are likely to be any better or worse than baseball players as a class. So while I root for them to do well collectively, and while I, like every fan, have personal favourites based on the way they play-Roy Halladay, in my case-I can't imagine that I'd keep wearing my Halladay jersey or rooting for ex-Jays like Orlando Hudson, Carlos Delgado and Dave Bush if any of them were convicted of sexual assault or something.

As, for example, members of the Duke lacrosse team are likely to be. This horrible little story, which Kaufman alludes to at the end of his column about Bonds, isn't just a sports story-there are obvious and important currents of race, gender and class involved as well-but I find the unseemly aspects of locker room culture the whole thing brings to light to be horribly fascinating in particular.

What creates a culture of entitlement so entrenched that these men, if they're guilty, felt they could rape a woman in public and get away with it? How, precisely, do the 44 guys who apparently were around while this was going on but were not themselves rapists not DO ANYTHING to stop it? Does the occasionally nigh-fascist group ethos of sports teams play into the second question? Is Kaufman right to point to the privileges of athletes writ large as a partial answer to the first?

As those of you who know me know, I played four years of varsity level soccer, at a school where athletics, while respected, certainly had no particular cachet and with a group of guys who were a much better group of people than the Duke lacrosse team appears to have been. Those caveats aside, I've certainly seen and participated in my fair share of team-driven stupidities, and I think there's definitely something about groups of young men united in physical activities that leads to "team-building exercises" ranging from the moronic to the criminal.

I certainly don't propose banning team sports or anything nutty like that, but administrators have to be better supervisors of teams if this sort of thing isn't going to be a rare but regular occurence. Our coach at King's used to tell us, at the practice immediately preceding the rookie party, "Remember, (nudge, nudge) there's to be no underage drinking at this thing." I can't help but wonder if the Duke lacrosse coach, who has now rightly resigned, told his boys something similar.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money has links to discussions of other aspects of the whole sorry affair.

So I can't figure this one out

I left my apartment at 9:15 or so, noting on the way out that the beloved Blue Jays held a 6-3 lead over the hitherto hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays. I then went and watched Lucky Number Slevin, my unfavourable review of which is below. I came home to discover that the D-Rays, far from being hapless, had in fact rallied to win 9-8.

So now I've got a couple of thoughts whipsawing at me. On the one hand, I left watching the game to watch a mediocre movie, and in my absence they blew the game. On the other hand, Lucky Number Slevin, mediocre though it was, was a more enjoyable viewing experience than watching the Jays' bullpen blow a three run lead would have been. So I don't know if I should feel guilty or relieved.

Shades of Gray Chipping Away at a Very Good but Very Long Book: Underworld

It took me more than two weeks, but finally, I slew the beast.

Which is not to say that it dragged or anything. On the contrary, Underworld only rarely slips below "gripping" as it tells parts of the stories of I can't tell how many different characters over the course of forty years, from October 3rd, 1951, to some time in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's breakup.

Actually, that's completely backwards. Or rather, it's accurate, but completely misleading. Underworld does begin in 1951 and end at some indeterminate point in the early to mid-90s. But it's not narrated that way, and while the unconventional narrative style takes some getting used to, it ultimately is successful in giving a fuller account of how the characters came to be the people they are by the end of...the plot, I suppose. Which is not the same thing as the end of the book.

At this point, some readers of this blog will be appalled to discover that baseball plays a significant role in the plot of Underworld. Oh no, I hear them moan, he can talk about baseball even in book reviews. When will it end? The answer to which is never. But while I certainly didn't pick up Underworld for the baseball stories, I did think of more significant things about the baseball than about the strands of the interwoven plot dealing with The Bomb, art, J. Edgar Hoover's private life, waste disposal or any of the other many fascinating tangents.

Michael Berube has an essay excerpt up at his website in which he discusses differences in how Delillo deals with narrative and motive in Underworld and White Noise, which I haven't read. I'm clearly not going to tangle with a literature professor on literary theory, a subject I know nothing about, in an essay that is about at least one work I haven't read. Especially since it would be more shadowboxing than actual tangling.

I do think, however, that the seeming absurdity of comparing a baseball playoff game to the Cold War is slightly less absurd that Berube implies. "This, finally, is the real distinction between sports and the rest of our lives: though sports may present complex questions about justice that are also complex questions about narrative, sports offer their fans a form of narrative that is evacuated of motive," he writes. I don't know that sports are evacuated of motive, at least not in a way particularly distinct from any other human activity except making a living. And, of course, the professional athletes in Underworld are doing just that: making a living.

"No one asks Michael Jordan, “why were you trying to hit that buzzer-beater?” No one grills Tom Brady about why he was trying to unload the ball against the Raiders, no one wonders why the New York Giants were trying to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, regardless of whether they were stealing signs. It is for contest, that’s all," Berube continues. Well, sure. But the questions no one asks do have answers. The Giants wanted to win the pennant. And they wanted to win the pennant because they wanted to be the best at baseball. Well, why did they choose baseball? I don't know the answers, but they do exist. Athletes want to win because that's the point of the competition, but they all have different and individual motives for competing in the first place.

So I'd argue that sports in general is less devoid of motive than Berube believes. What about the other side of this particular coin, that of the Cold War? Earlier in his essay, Berube quotes Viktor Maltsev, a minor character in the book, as saying that the Cold War was fought "For contest. You won, we lost." Berube then says that this construction reduces "the Cold War to a “contest” without any motive other than to produce a winner and a loser," noting that there's "Nothing here about democracy or the worker’s paradise, nothing about market and command economies, nothing about NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia or Chile, Pershings or SS-18s, capitalist lackeys or evil empires."

Again, I don't really see what's incompatible between any of these things and viewing the Cold War as a "contest." My point here is not to trivialize the stakes of this "contest," as I'm not actually foolish enough to believe that the World Series is remotely as important as nuclear-armed games of global domination. But in terms of motive, which after all is what Berube is discussing, I don't really see how any of the things Berube mentions establish higher motives than the one that motivated both Ralph Branca and Bobby Thompson-to be the top dog.

"Pershings and SS-18s" are the bats and balls this particular contest was played with, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Vietnam and Hungary its stadiums. "Capitalist lackeys or evil empires" are pretty clearly the geopolitical equivalents of trash talk, and NATO and the Warsaw Pact are the names across the front of the jerseys.

And so we come to the crux: "democracy and the worker's paradise." I don't dispute that there were true believers in both on their respective sides. But was that why the Cold War happened? I can't see it. I can't believe, for the life of me, that the Politburo was motivated by a belief in the World Revolution. I don't like to pretend to be able to read the minds of men long dead, but it's my sincere belief that what motivated the men in the Kremlin from October 3, 1951 on was a desire for raw power, pure and simple. Similarly, given the American record of supporting any authoritarian son-of-a-bitch they could rely on to be anti-Communist, I can't believe that the men in the White House were playing for anything more noble than victory for its own sake-not that I think as Dangerous a Professor as Dr. Berube takes the "freedom and apple pie" stuff at face value either.

"One side goes on, to spin its narrative another day, and one side goes home," concludes this particular section of Berube's essay, and it seems to me that this is a very accurate summary of what happens in all of the contests Delillo describes, from the Cold War to FBI interoffice and cryptosexual politics to chess to the art world to the crimes of the Texas Highway Killer to, of course, the third game of the 1951 National League playoff. All of the participants in these contests have motives of some sort, and at the same time all of these contests can be boiled down to the familiar postseason cliche: "Win or go home."

Anyway, quibbling done (for now), Underwold is a truly amazing book that you should all read. The prologue alone, which deals with the aforementioned third game of the Giants-Dodgers series, is worth the proverbial price of admission (don't jump the gate!) for the way it captures everything I think of when I think about America at the height of its power. Plus it's about baseball. What else could you want?

Shades of Gray at the Movies: Lucky Number Slevin

So a week or so ago I went and saw Inside Man, which I enjoyed, and then later on went out and bought the New Yorker, and discovered that instead of being the reasonably well-crafted thriller I thought I was watching, it was in fact "dumb enough, with large logical holes punched though it at regular intervals, to make the audience feel...clever." Given that one of the logical holes that Anthony Lane felt so clever for having spotted doesn't exist, I feel slightly less dumb for having enjoyed it on the level, but still.

And then I went to see Lucky Number Slevin, and all was well. There's a movie with gaping logical holes in it, I think Anthony Lane and I can agree. And we do! I can't really criticize the performances-everyone is fine-but the dialogue is more than a little too clever for its own good, and the motivation of one major character is completely inexplicable. Which is a problem, because this character drives the plot. So while I thought it started with promise, it was ultimately pretty disappointing.

On the plus side, the performances are by and large all right, and in a bit of trivia that will appeal to the Official Mom of Shades of Gray and no one else, Ben Kingsley's character drinks tea out of what looks to be Lomonosovskaya china. So, if your mother is a china freak, there's about a minute or so where you can think "Hey! I've seen that tea service!" You all can decide for yourselves whether that's worth the price of admission.

Those Crazy Europeans!

Hard on the heels of Silvio Berlusconi's unscientific polling of phone sex workers comes this bit of news about that total doofus Jacques Chirac. Granted, it's from two weeks ago, but quality lunacy like this will never stale:

When M Seillière, who is an English-educated steel baron, started a presentation to all 25 EU leaders, President Chirac interrupted to ask why he was speaking in English. M Seillière explained: “I’m going to speak in English because that is the language of business.”

Without saying another word, President Chirac, who lived in the US as a student and speaks fluent English, walked out, followed by his Foreign, Finance and Europe ministers, leaving the 24 other European leaders stunned. They returned only after M Seilière had finished speaking.

Better than that, though, was the diplomatic explanation for the snub:

Embarrassed French diplomats tried to explain away the walk-out, saying that their ministers all needed a toilet break at the same time.

And this!

When President Chirac had a one-to-one dinner last year with President Bush, he insisted on speaking his mother tongue the whole time, even though the US President could understand him only through an interpreter.

You know, when George Bush is the more polite person at a dinner for two, you know the other guy is being seriously rude.

Finally, Finnish chefs must be crushed:

President Chirac, who recently denounced British food as the worst in the world after Finnish...

Dude. That's over the line. What did Finland ever do to you?

More on debating Afghanistan

Jay, in comments on the post I wrote approving of a parliamentary debate about Afghanistan, says that he disagrees that such a debate is a good idea and that Stephen Harper might have been right when he argued that it might "weaken the resolve of our troops." In Jay's view, "It makes absolutely no sense to have a debate on a deployment when the troops are already in the field."

Generally, I would agree with him that publicly debating an already agreed to military commitment is better avoided than not. There are a couple of points, though, that I'd like to make about debates like this, one of which in my view tips the balance on this particular question.

The problem with the Afghanistan mission is not that we're there. The problem is that the Canadian public isn't at all well informed about what the objectives are or how long we're committed for. As evidence, I would cite Jay's own comment, where he (correctly) says that "we committed for a year (I think)". As I say, he's right-that is how long we committed to stay for, though I can't find the precise date we committed on at this timeline at the CBC. But I don't know when that year began or is scheduled to end, and I don't know what happens after that. Neither, I would guess, does Jay, and if he doesn't know something about Canadian politics and national security it's safe to surmise that 99% of the Canadian public is even more in the dark.

As he correctly points out, it's the Martin government's fault that we're in this fog about the mission to Afghanistan, and I believe that the Harper government is acting in good faith when they balk at debating a deployment that's already underway. That said, we need to have a conversation about the Afghan mission at some point, and I'd prefer to have it now, when a new government can lay out a clean case for the mission, rather than in six months, when who knows what will have happened, both in Afghanistan and in the House of Commons.

Put it another way: there will still be work to be done in Afghanistan when the year-long commitment expires. Both MPs in Parliament and the Canadian public as a whole will be much better able to evaluate whether that commitment is one we should extend if we are given a clear outline of what we're doing over there and what we hope to accomplish. In my view, a parliamentary debate, where MPs can raise questions, hopefully reasonable ones, and equally hopefully have them answered, is a good way to get that outline.

Finally, I'm leery of the argument that we can't have debates about troops in the field because it can be used, by unscrupulous governments, to muffle legitimate and necessary criticism. Again, this should come up for debate at the very least when our current commitment expires. If the government, as I suspect it will, takes the position that we should stay in Afghanistan, what's to stop them from refusing to debate that decision on the same grounds on which they didn't want to have this debate? After all, the Liberals did just that-committing us to an armed deployment in an hot zone by fiat.

None of which is to say that staying in Afghanistan is a bad idea-certainly the current commitment has to be kept, and depending on how things go, I would say that future commitments might be necessary. But we have to talk about it openly, or we wind up not really knowing what we're signing up for.

More Baseball!

I figure it's only polite to let the people who hate the baseball stuff know they can skip this one.

Reveling as I am in the Blue Jays' status as a first place team, I thought I'd try to address some of the responses to the absurdly long diatribe I posted yesterday about salary caps.

Larry-a Boston fan, but I'll forgive him-raises the entirely reasonable question of whether competitive balance exists at levels below winning the World Series. The answer, I would say, is "kinda." Since the wild card was adopted in 1995 (actually 1994, but...things happened) 22 teams have made the playoffs at least once, which would suggest that they can all compete, at least in spurts, under the current disposition. Of the other 8, two (the Phillies and Jays) played in the last World Series before the wild card, and both have competed to make the playoffs since, though Toronto, to my chagrin, less frequently than the Phils. I'd let them out. Montreal was the best team in baseball in 1994 and competitive in 1996 and 2002, despite being deliberately hamstrung by idiot owners. They came out of the gate hot in Washington, and while I think Jim Bowden is an idiot I really don't think any problems they might have competing will be attributable to their market. Milwaukee sucked for a long, long time, but they look very good right now, and will, I think contend in the next year or two. Detroit looks less good than the Brewers, but they too look like a team on the rise, and they could very easily make some noise in the Central. Tampa Bay has only been around for eight years and has been, bar none, the most incompetently run franchise around, but even they look like they're going to be ferocious in a couple of years. I honestly think they're going to be better than my Jays in two years, and I think that might be the case for a while.

Which leaves us with the two franchises that really are sad sacks: Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Both play in legitimately small markets, both were run into the ground by idiot general managers, and both-KC especially-have whined about the unfairness of the system rather than trying to find ways to win. Can they compete ever again?

The answer, I think, is yes, but it's going to take a while.It takes ballplayers a while to mature, as fans of Moscow Rats ace Roy Halladay know, and it's completely impossible, I think, to turn a team around quickly on the cheap. It's going to take good drafting and development, and it's not a surefire thing. But it's the only thing that works over the long term-and as I say, I think that's as true for the Yankees as it is for the Royals.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we forget as fans that "only one team goes home happy," as they say. The idea, that Bud Selig continually used to promote, that every team should enter every season with hopes of winning a championship is nuts. I don't think the Jays are going to win the Series this year. That's not to say that I don't hope it will happen, or that I have no hope of ever seeing them win again, but they're not a top-flight contender this year. Six or seven years ago, neither were the Angels. In the early nineties, the Yankees were a joke. The game is cyclical, and it's never been easier for a team to ride that cycle than it is now.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if a game where teams win, on average, every thirty years is what you want to see. Some people might think that sounds great, I think it sounds like boring mediocrity. Also, I remember reading (no link, because I don't remember where) about how the hyping of the World Series has led to a corresponding cheapening of League and Division titles; given that only one team can win the World Series, this means that more fans wind up disappointed. Look, for example, at how people talk about the Atlanta Braves. What Bobby Cox and co. have achieved is incredible: 11 straight division titles (1994 happened, damn it, and they didn't win) and three more in the four years prior is a display of dominance that ranks among the greatest in baseball history. But all of that is completely overshadowed by their postseason failures. I'm not saying that their many flops shouldn't be part of the conversation, but the Braves are amazing in spite of them, and their fans shouldn't feel as though it's all been for nothing when they choke in the playoffs. As they will do again this year.

Basically, I think we'd be a lot better off if we stopped demanding no-hitters every time we went to the ballpark; the joy of baseball really is in the story the whole season tells, and we should appreciate it for what it is, rather than straining forward for the fireworks at the end.

Here's tae us! wha's like us?

Damn few, and they're all dead.

According to a frankly bizarre piece by Alan Black up at Salon, a recently conducted study in Europe tapped the land of my forefathers as the "worst small country to live in." I don't know exactly what the original list looked like, but it can't possibly have been a worldwide survey; "Scotland: Worse To Live In Than Greenland" seems like a stretch no matter how much you dislike Irn-Bru.

The article does point up two of the great national characteristics of the Scottish people: maudlin sentimentality and historical pessimism. On the first point, it seems almost self-parodic to note that the study came out on National Tartan Day in the States; the notion that Scottish-Americans banded together to honour national symbols that were themselves made up by the colonizing English is alternately depressing, weirdly touching and hilarious.

The other prong, historical pessimism bordering on "self-loathing," as Black puts it, is probably the common lot of small nations the world over, and this survey, placing Scotland at the bottom of the (European?) table in life-expectancy, will provide further grist for that particular mill. Of course any nation whose national diet could accurately be descibed as a mixture of sugar (the aforementioned Irn-Bru) and fat (bacon butties, anyone?), along with a deserved reputation for heavy drinking, will never do terribly well in national health surveys to begin with. There's a whiff of Mark Renton in Black's statement that "the end of the Scottish race seems guaranteed," and I can't help but think of my favourite Billy Connolly bit as well:

This is Bannockburn, where we stuffed the English.

Yes, here is where in 1314 Robert the Bruce defeated "Proud Edward's army, and sent him homeward tae think again."

So they went home, and thought again, and then in 1746 they came back and kicked the shit out of us.

So on the whole, speaking as a 6'2" Scotsman (by descent and citizenship, anyhow) I found the thing more funny than anything else. I have every expectation that in 300 years, people living north of Hadrian's Wall will still be alternately maudlin about Scotland the Brave and despairing about its future.

After all, things can't be too bad. We won the Calcutta Cup this year.

Update: Apparently, Scotland is in fact the second-worst small country in which to live in Europe, beating out Austria. I'm sure that with a little work, though, we can pull through to the bottom by the next such survey.

77% of phone sex workers prefer Berlusconi!

This, via Matt Yglesias, is possibly the funniest political story I've ever seen. I'd like to think that I'm a broad-minded enough fellow that I'd find it hilarious regardless of who the protagonists were, but I can't help but admit that Berlusconi looking like a buffoon makes it specially good.

And no, I can't imagine something this sidesplitting happening with any contemporary Canadian politicians.