The Weak In Rock

I hate to say it, but John Rocker is right. Sensitivity training is a “farce,” as the Scoobie Doo doppleganger and former big league wingnut was quoted as saying the other day.

Of course there’s another brand of nitwittery going on here - journalists desparate for a controversial quote asking John Rocker, one of the biggest dumbshits to ever handle a baseball, for an opinion on MLB’s sending Ozzie Guillen to sensitivity training for frothing at the mouth about Jay Mariotti. But that’s too much of a digression to deal with right now.

I really hate to say it, but Rocker is 100% right. Sensitivity training, as a method of dealing with someone who is prone to say insensitive things is, frankly, bullshit. Equally wrong are the people who think that we should all collectively just let Ozzie be Ozzie, as so many have said.

The fact of the matter is that Ozzie Guillen, more than likely, does think that calling someone a “fag” is a pretty harsh slap in the face. He didn’t do it because he’s insensitive. He did it because he probably genuinely thinks that accusing Jay Mariotti of being a homosexual is a pretty mean thing. Obviously Jay Mariotti thinks it’s a terrible thing too, otherwise he wouldn’t be continuously writing about the incident in his columns ever since.

The problem here isn’t a lack of sensitivity. If someone honestly believes that gays, blacks, women, baseball fans, nerds or whatever social grouping you’d like to choose is a bad thing no amount of sitting in a sensitivity training class is going to change those beliefs. So it’s not really sensitivity training, is it? It’s more like “how not to put your foot in your mouth and embarass your employer” training.

In a perfect world everyone would love and appreciate everyone else equally. We’d have no racism, no sexism and no bigotry of any kind. If we’re really lucky humanity might reach that state of perfection sometime within the next 100,000 years of our existence, provided we don’t cause catastrophic environmental degradation or otherwise annihilate each other first. The reality of the here and now is that some people don’t like other people and some people have abiding dislike, even hatred, for entire groups of people. Sometimes this is based upon legitimate gripes; I’d say the grieving wives, husbands, sons, daughters and friends of people killed in the WTC and Pentagon on 9/11/01 have a distinct and abiding right to hate Osama bin Laden and his pals, for instance. A lot of the time, however, people hate other people for reasons that defy logic or even common sense.

I propose that Ozzie Guillen called Jay Mariotti a “fag” because Ozzie Guillen doesn’t particularly like homosexual men (if he’s a typical male of his generation he’s probably pretty cool with the concept of homosexual women, but that’s another bit of thinking that defies logic and reason, and another digression best left for another article) and that what Ozzie was doing was not attempting to insult homosexuals by claiming Jay Mariotti is one of their kind and that he therefore needs to go to sensitivity training in order to learn that saying mean things hurts people, but, in fact, he was trying to insult Jay Mariotti by claiming that he is, in fact, gay. See, in order for that to be an insult you actually have to think there’s something wrong with being gay in the first place. Sensitivity training for Ozzie Guillen (or John Rocker for that matter) is then basically like proverbially trying to teach a pig to sing - it annoys the pig and wastes your time.

I do not excuse Ozzie’s behavior. I think it’s pretty unfortunate that such a gifted athlete and leader of other athletes is so stupid and small-minded. But I find it offensive that Major League Baseball thinks that what you do with someone who is stupid and small-minded (and has a big mouth) is send him to a class. Fine him. Fine him a lot of money. Make it hurt. Inflict fiscal damage on Ozzie Guillen and state emphatically that this big ol’ fine is a warning. More of the same behavior gets greeted with another fine and a significant suspension. And at three strikes, in keeping with baseball traditions, you’re out.

The focus in this country with regard to relations between different social groups has been for many years on tolerance. Tolerance is a terrible thing. Tolerance teaches you nothing. If I hate gays but I “tolerate” them then that just forces my hatred underground. So-called sensitivity training isn’t about teaching people to like people they hate, it’s about teaching them to keep their hate to themselves, or hidden behind walls. What we ought to be asking of ourselves and of others is acceptance. And instead of sending our prominent social figures to school for a day to learn how to keep their mouths shut we ought to be telling them what our values are and that we expect them to live up to those values or ply their trade elsewhere.

Sending Ozzie to class because he called Jay Mariotti a fag is assinine. It’s also treating him like a child who has forgotten to put his toys away instead of like an adult who ought to behave like one or pay some harsh consequences.

Technorati Tags: John Rocker, Scoobie Doo, Ozzie Guillen, sensitivity training, Jay Mariotti, homosexual

Ok, I really don’t give a damn about basketball.  If someone gives me tickets to a game I’ll go and I’ll enjoy it, but I never, and I really mean never, go out of my way to pay any attention to the NBA.  That having been said I am a pretty big fan of the ESPN show Pardon The Interuption and Tony and Mike have entertained the heck out of me over the course of the past NBA season with their commentary on the state of the NY Knicks.

Tony Kornheiser is close friends with Larry Brown, the legendary coach that Isiah Thomas and the Knicks hired to try and right a very wrong ship this season.  Kornheiser has consistently said that Brown’s hands were very much tied by Thomas in terms of personnel, and with the personnel that Brown was given to work with he had no hope of winning.  So what has Isiah Thomas done now?  He’s fired Larry Brown and decided to appoint himself coach to serve in the dual role of General Manager of the team and coach.

This is epic nitwittery run rampant.  I guess he figures at least he doesn’t have to worry about his head coach second guessing his draft picks or player acquisitions in the media now.  I’m going to go farther than call Isiah Thomas a nitwit.  The man is a fuckwit.

Over at Deadspin the comments thread on this story is classic.  Here’s my favorite:

a good friend of mine is a cablevision stock holder. the next time i see him, i am going to kick him in the nuts with a rage that i can only describe as palestinian.

Technorati Tags: basketball, NBA, ESPN, Pardon The Interuption, NY Knicks, Tony Kornheiser, Larry Brown, Isiah Thomas, Deadspin

I think everything I post for the rest of this month is going to be about the nitwits of the world. Heck, most of the time they’re monopolizing our attention unwillingly, so let’s give them some attention they probably don’t want. Mmmmkay?

Today the last of the big four record industry behemouths admitted what anyone with three still-firing neurons in the music industry has known for ages - the music you hear on the radio mostly gets there because the labels who release it pay and/or bribe radio programmers to play it. EMI was the last to settle with the Attorney General of the State of New York in his payola case against them all.

The reality of the music business is that it’s so profoundly crooked, so inescapably warped as to be beyond absurd. What the depth of payola in the music biz means is that even the folks signing and marketing worthless shite like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Coldplay, Eminem, et. al. think it’s worthless crap and have no faith that it’s going to get played on the radio unless they pay and/or bribe someone to make that happen.

Let me put it another way - no one ever had to bribe anyone to play any of Elvis Presley’s early records. No graft was required to get Marvin Gaye on your radio. When music is great there’s no doubting it and no need to force anyone to pay attention to it. Great art, be it music, painting, film or even TV is compelling in its own right. The public and the media don’t need to be swindled into paying attention to greatness. Heck, we’ll even pay attention to half-way goodness without anyone shucking and jiving us into it.

The money quote from the Times story I’m referring to here appears at the end:

At the same time, executives developed tactics to deceive radio programmers into believing a song was popular. In a 2002 e-mail message, for example, an executive at Virgin Records, another EMI label, provided instructions to generate false requests for a Norah Jones song, saying the callers should indicate they heard of the artist through a friend or television show. “Please make sure the callers are women 20-28 years old,” the e-mail said. “And please make sure they don’t get caught.”

And artists wonder what’s happening to their royalties? They look at their quarterly statements from the label and see $100,000 in promotional expenses for the quarter and think, “what the hell?” Well, there you go folks. Getting enough people of the right demographic to pick up their phones and bombard radio stations with requests for a record those stations had no intention or inclination to play is going to cost a pretty penny.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - the business model of the record industry is profoundly broken. These entities need to be shut down so that a new paradigm (yes, I actually used that word, I’m sorry) can take its place. Hopefully a new model that doesn’t involve mob tactics to get product sold.

Technorati Tags: EMI, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Coldplay, Eminem, Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye, the Times, Virgin Records, Norah Jones

If you know me or read this space regularly you know that I consider rampant stupidity, or moronitude, the chief problem facing our nation and probably the world.  Some days the level of idiocy that I encounter in a single day is just staggering.  Today is only a little over half finished and I have seen and experienced so much dimwitted behavior, so many systems obviously designed by mental midgets and just so many dumbshits that I really have truly reached my limit.  That our society doesn’t just implode from jackassery really ought to be worthy of some serious study.

Automated transaction interfaces are not new.  We’ve been living with ATM machines and other electronic transaction systems for well over a quarter century now.  And yet stand in any line to use such a device and you’re bound to be stuck behind someone who behaves as if he or she has never seen one before.  Today’s instance of this kind of moronitude occurred in line at the check-in counter for United Airlines in O’Hare Airport.  I ended behind not one, not two, not three but seven, I kid you not, seven people who when faced with United’s “Easy Check-In” terminals just flat out froze up and stood there.  The end result was me missing my flight because by the time I got my turn at the kiosk they’d closed check-in for my plane.  To say that I was ready to commit murder right there on the spot would be greatly understating my feelings.  I wanted to rip out the entrails of the shit-for-brains who spent 15 minutes directly in front of me at the counter pushing one wrong button after another.

The motivation behind United and most other carriers installing these self-service terminals is simple – if people can check themselves in the airlines don’t have to employ twenty people to man the check-in counter.  They can get by with four.  Of course the system only works if the customers are not half-wits.  Bad assumption.  On any given day I will find myself behind someone at an ATM machine who takes ten minutes to complete a simple withdrawal transaction that takes me one.  I’m not superhuman.  Granted, I’m comfortable with machines and computers, but these devices are, as I’ve said, not new.  Anyone with a bank account has been using them for years.  Not only that, they’ve been using them daily.  You’d think they’d get a clue.  You’d be wrong.

What’s astonishing is that these same people don’t cause thousands of deaths a day while doing far more complex tasks like driving their cars.  Some of these people no doubt work in hospitals and pharmacies.  Are they huge nitwits in those contexts as well?  H.L. Menken once said (to paraphrase because I can’t be bothered to look the precise quote up at the moment) that eventually America would get the government it truly deserved.  Perhaps this explains Dubya and the asswipes running the Congress at the moment.

My recommendation to businesses thinking of installing automated transaction systems or in the midst of evaluating the effectiveness of the ones they’ve got – set up a separate couple of windows for the mentally challenged.  Label them something like “Super Happy Fun Counters” or such, or dangle bright shiny things around them to attract the nitwits and display large warning posters over the automated counters that say “FAILURE TO USE THIS COUNTER PROPERLY WILL BE PUNISHED SEVERELY!”

To close, I just want to say thanks to the men and women who caused me to miss my flight today, spend four and a half more hours in an airport than I’d planned and have spend an extra $100 in order to get home at all.

Cheers to you United Airlines in your quest to cut corners and save money.  You’ve made a customer who already thought you were the worst airline in the world utterly convinced that you shouldn’t be in business at all anymore.  I intend to write my representatives in Congress to suggest to them that if they truly believe in market economics and the capitalist system that the next time your sorry piece of shit airline is in financial trouble it should do what all unsustainable businesses run by clowns do – cease to exist.

Huzzah unto you, my fellow travelers who are obviously too stupid and/or distracted to figure out how to use machines you’ve encountered thousands of times over the past 25 years.  I take great comfort in knowing that when the planet runs out of fossil fuels you’re probably too brain-dead to figure out how to survive.  In the neo-feudal society that is, no doubt, in our future I will enjoy collecting taxes from you, my soon-to-be loyal serfs.

So, I’ve been reminded by my fiance’ that I haven’t written anything in this space for quite awhile. My excuse? I haven’t had two thoughts to rub together since then. This excuse apparently doesn’t cut it with her. So, she suggested I write something today about the significance of the symbolism of today’s date and baseball.

Truth be told I’m not paying nearly as close attention to baseball this year as I have in recent years past. For that I credit the anaemic performance of the Oakland A’s, the still early (and therefore mostly non-attention-worthy) state of the season in general and personal circumstances that make family come first (as it should). But Karen’s suggestion got me thinking, and that usually leads to words on a page in my world - or a lengthy discussion that one of my friends, coworkers or family members looks for a quick and elegant escape from.

So, what do 6-6-06 and baseball have to do with one another? My initial thought is nothing. One of the things about baseball that I’m forced, as a devoted fan, to ignore with all my might is the obsessive religiousity of the players. If I really pay attention when my favorite hitters are crossing the plate I’m likely to throw up. Eveyone’s seen Barry Bonds little “props to the big guy” move as he crosses the plate and if you watch the A’s you get to see Mark Kotsay cross himself a couple times during each at-bat.

Mike Sweeney, the only player on the Kansas City Royals who can legitimately be called a star, was once a much better player. Then he found God. Since then he’s decided that winning doesn’t matter. Good thing too, because since he stopped caring about winning the Royals rarely do. One of the reasons Sweeney hasn’t pursued a trade to a contending team is because he’s fairly successfully converted most of the guys on the Royals roster to his view of God and baseball. Tony Muser, who once had the misfortune of managing the God-awful Royals, once memorably said, “Chewing on cookies and drinking milk and praying is not going to get it done… I’d like them to go out and pound tequila rather than have cookies and milk because nobody is going to get us out of this but us.”
The Royals represent the far end of the God spectrum in baseball, to be sure, but their utter lack of success and simultaneous utter godliness ought to give other major leaguers pause. It doesn’t though. God-babbling, religious kooks abound in professional baseball. Jim Bouton mentioned them in his classic baseball tell-all, Ball Four, back in 1970. At the time born-again Christian wingnuts were a small minority in the MLB clubhouse, but he could tell they were on the rise. His opinion at the time was that since the rednecks who represented the majority of white players in the game at the time were no longer welcome to harsh on the black and latino players openly they’d picked Jesus as a way to sequester themselves from the more liberal elements in baseball.

It should be noted that when one speaks of “liberal elements” in baseball one is talking about anyone who reads on purpose, folks who vote Democrat and anyone who might once have accidentally talked to a gay man. Back in Bouton’s day that list would have included anyone whose skin was black or brown. Nowadays though religious wingnutism is an equal opportunity employer. I still suspect the latino players are looser and more fun than anyone else in the game, but that’s just because they tend to be Catholic, and their brand of religion has a safety valve for sinful behavior called Confession. Nonetheless, they’re still praying at the plate regularly.

About the only place one doesn’t find overt Christianity in professional baseball is on the pitcher’s mound. Pedro Martinez does a fair amount of giving props to the Big G and crossing himself, but I suspect that Pedro does that for show. It’s like the big oversized sleeves he used to wear on his uniform when he was with the Red Sox - the mess up the hitter’s mind. I mean, think about it. Say a God-babbling nitwit like Mike Sweeney is facing Pedro - Pedro crosses himself and looks up to the heavens. Sweeney is likely to get psyched out and say to himself “gee, what if the big guy likes him better than me? I haven’t got a chance. Shit, I knew I should have tithed more.”

In all seriousness, if you watch pitchers as studiously as I do you just know these guys are into Satan (like all the best rock bands). Satan is all about the individual and nowhere on a ball field is there less of a team mentality than on the pitcher’s mound. Pitchers don’t sit with their teammates, don’t workout with them, don’t talk to them and mostly don’t even remember they’re there at all (if they did the A’s pitching staff would occassionally remember that throwing it over the plate isn’t that bad a deal if you keep the ball down because you’ve got a great bunch of defensive players behind you).

The Christian god is all about community and your fellow man and all that jazz. Pitchers haven’t got time for that. It’s up to them to strike out the side and win the game. No one else on the team has a stat for wins and losses. If you’re a batter you can have a great day at the plate and a great day in the field but you’re not getting credit for the win or blamed for the loss in the annals of eternal baseball. It stands to reason that pitchers are the most vulnerable to temptation from the dark lord.

Think about it. If I’m Satan and I’m going to try to collect a soul I’m going straight to the pitchers. There’s far more glory and far more potential doom in pitching. Maybe this explains Roger Clemens and his ability to pitch so well into his mid-40s. I can totally see it. Roger has just signed (actually, he was dumped because his game was in decline) to the Toronto Blue Jays after Red Sox GM Dan Duquette famously stated he was in the “twilight of his career” and elected not to re-sign him. Beezlebub visits him in the off-season and makes him a deal - I’ll turn you into the greatest pitcher in the history of the game if you’ll just sign on this line in blood. Running program my ass. Clemens is who he is because of Satan. How else do we explain him getting a fat contract from the Astros to pitch half a season for them this year?

Yes, if there’s any Satanic influence in baseball it resides with the pitchers. I mean, just look at the music they play before most closers enter the game - Hell’s Bells by AC/DC, Fire by Metallica. You don’t see anyone trotting in from the bullpen to the strains of Third Day, do you?

Technorati Tags: baseball, 6-6-06, Barry Bonds, the A’s, Mark Kotsay, Mike Sweeney, Kansas City Royals, Tony Muser, Jim Bouton, Ball Four, MLB, Pedro Martinez, Satan, Roger Clemens, Toronto Blue Jays, Red Sox, Dan Duquette, Beezlebub, the Astros, AC/DC, Metallica, Third Day