The New York Sports Media Strikes Again

In anticipation of the MLB League Championship Series, New York Times columnist Bill Rhoden offers up this truly inane column opining that baseball needs a Yankees-Dodgers World Series matchup to take the game back to its roots and "recover a portion of the trust" that it has lost in the wake of the P.E.D. scandals of the past several years. Say what?!?!? Even for a member of the notoriously egocentric New York media, this statement boggles the mind. How, pray tell, would a matchup between teams starring Alex "A-Roid" Rodriguez and Manny "I was just trying to get pregnant" Rodriguez, two of the biggest fish yet netted in the steroids crackdown, restore trust in the integrity of the game? If anything, a series featuring two superstars who were just busted for using THIS YEAR would remind viewers of MLB's disgraceful recent history of ignoring and/or tacitly enabling steroid abuse. I'm not naive enough to believe that no player on either the Phillies or the Angels has ever used steroids, but as far as I know neither team has a player who's publicly known to have been busted, which is not the case with the Yankees or Dodgers.

Furthermore, Rhoden ought to realize that outside of New Yorkers of the Baby Boom generation or older, nobody gives a New York subway rat's you-know-what about having a World Series that hearkens back to the so-called golden era of the game, when subway matchups between New York teams were a regular event. The 2000 World Series, the one featuring the Mets and the Yankees, was one of the lowest rated on record, which certainly suggests that sports fans outside of New York don't care about New York teams nearly as much as New Yorkers seem to think they do. If the matchup ends up being Yankees vs. Dodgers, it will likely get better ratings than a Phillies-Angels series would, but only because 1.)it would involve the nation's two largest media markets, and 2.)lots of people outside New York (including me) despise the Yankees and will tune in to root against them. History will have nothing to do with it.

As a Philadelphian, of course I'd like to see the Phillies against either A.L. team over Yankees-Dodgers, but even failing that I think I'd rather watch a "Three-Hours-In-Hellish-Freeway-Traffic" Series between the Dodgers and Angels than have to suffer through the orgy of self-indulgent New York baseball nostalgia a Yankees-Dodgers tilt would engender. As for restoring my trust in the sanctity of the sport? I fear that horse has left the barn, but if it is possible, it'll take a lot more than a historically resonant World Series matchup to do it. Like, say, publicly identifying every player who has been caught using performance enhancing drugs since testing was instituted, and banning players who test positive from making All-Star teams, winning postseason awards, being eligible for the Hall of Fame, or otherwise being recognized. I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I am rooting passionately against both the Yankees and the Dodgers, and, thus, I guess, against the best interests of the game, as well as purity, mom, and apple pie. Oh, well. Go Phillies!

Orwell Was Right...

...War Is Peace.

With impeccable timing and an exquisite sense of irony, the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner has approved a modest increase in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. I'm not sure what would constitute a prudent policy in regards to that country - the place is a mess and if there is such a thing as a prudent policy, it's quite likely it would be impossible to pick it out from what look like at present a very bad set of options without the benefit of a functional crystal ball. But there's no doubt that escalating the American military presence in the country is going to result in a longer war and more people, Afghan and American, getting killed. If these are the actions of the man who's done the most for the cause of world peace in the last year, the cause of world peace is in serious trouble.

Am I Missing Something?

Not to be the turd in the punchbowl or anything, but what, exactly, has Barack Obama done to merit a Nobel Peace Prize, other than be beloved of the international demographic of cosmopolitan liberals that decides the award? The Prizes awarded to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore may have been (alright - were) dubious, but at least those two were devoting a good deal of their time to something that could be construed as conducive to world peace. Obama has not done so. He has not figured out how to pacify intransigent regimes in Iran or North Korea, nor made any headway in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians to stop blowing each other up, nor resolved the Mexican standoffs over Kashmir, Taiwan, etc., nor really accomplished much of anything on the peace front. That's not to fault him - these problems have persisted for decades or centuries despite the best efforts of lots of smart, dedicated people for the reason that they're incredibly difficult to solve - but I hardly see how one even begins to justify giving him a Nobel Peace Prize. The award is especially hard to fathom when one considers that with few substantive differences from George W. Bush, Obama has continued to prosecute the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in some cases more aggressively than his predecessor did. Bush was pilloried as a war criminal and the biggest threat to peace since Hitler by the very same liberal European elites who have now deemed Obama the person who has done the most for the cause of peace this year. What gives?

It all makes sense as soon as one acknowledges that in the court of international opinion the criminality of an action is determined not by whether it actually violates law or morality but by whether the party responsible has the right political allegiances. See also Polanski, Roman. I love the smell of rank liberal hypocrisy.

Ridin' the storm out

Sendai (along with the rest of Japan) is currently undergoing a severe battering from a typhoon, by some accounts the strongest in more than a decade. The storm did not result in the cancellation of classes at my school (in fact very few students were absent), but it did crumple the cheap plastic umbrella I took out into it this morning like a piece of plastic wrap, as well as shut down the trains for the day after I'd arrived at school (it's home by bus today). Looks like I won't be doing anything outdoors tonight or tomorrow - maybe I'll finally get around to uploading the rest of my photos from Indonesia.

Wanker Alert!

British writer Sebastian Horsley has over the course of his adult life slept with more than 1,300 prostitutes, at a cost of more than 115,000 pounds, a personal history he reflects upon in this rather annoying blog post. There are very few forms of writing I find quite so grating as an overwritten personal essay, and this one (like so many essays on the topic of sex) is overwritten in every sense of the word, with dubious ideas expressed in bloated, inapt metaphors conveyed in prose so purple you could dye a violet with it. Case in point:

In English brothels you shuffle into a seedy room so dim you can only meet
the girl by Braille. But in New York last year I sat on a four-poster bed while
10 girls paraded in front of me one by one, like bowls of sushi on a carousel.
“Hi,” they would say, “I’m Tiffany”, “I’m Harmony”, “I’m Michelle”, and I would
rise and kiss them. It was so touching, so sweet, so kind. There should always,
no matter what, be politeness. It is the way the outside world should work,
selfishly but honestly.

Everything about this paragraph irritates me, to the point where I don't know where to begin in criticizing it. While I suspect that Horsley chose to compare the women he was scrutinizing with sliced-and-diced raw fish precisely because of the de-humanizing ick factor, self-lacerating irony doesn't make him sound any less like a serial killer. And while I agree with his conclusion that prostitution is a selfish-but-honest act, to assert that this is how every interpersonal relationship ought to work is absurd. It says more about Horsley's personal limitations and hangups than it does about society, intimacy, or any other topic that might be worth the reader's time.

This latter problem plagues the entire essay. A good personal essay explores through the window of firsthand experience a situation into which any reader can project sympathies. A bad personal essay is an exercise in smug navel-gazing, and despite Horsley's self-denunciation as a "sleazy bastard", that is precisely what his tract is. It is rather irritating when self-satisfied "family values" types lecture society on the topic of sexual mores, but no less so when a man who's never quite managed to discover the connection between sex and love that exists for most well-adjusted adults asserts that the rest of society is full of shit because it goes on acting as if such a connection is real and doesn't engage in the same disreputable activities he does in order to reject it. Unlike Horsley, I haven't found women with whom I've been involved interchangeable, nor does the prospect of actually communicating with a sexual partner fill me with horror, and observation tells me that this is the case for most people - very few people, after all, eschew pursuing real relationships, with all their talking and companionship and flowers and other aspects which Horsley finds so distasteful, so that they can instead cultivate a taste for hookers. While quite a few people seem to have trouble remaining faithful to their partners, it's never been an issue for me, and though sex for its own sake has its appeal, I find it ultimately a rather empty and transitory pleasure and not one I've ever been motivated to pursue at the expense of all others. The experiences of people like Horsley are obviously different, but the fact that he personally finds monogamy difficult, emotional bonding impossible, and casual sex something worth spending thousands of dollars in pursuit of does not mean that everybody does. And yet from one narcissist's quite obviously anomalous experiences, grandiose conclusions about the state of society and the nature of humankind emerge.

Even more troubling is Horsley's dismissal of the idea that prostitution might just be exploitative with a glib "I don't believe this", and his accompanying wish that it remain illegal so that he can continue to enjoy the thrill of being a bad boy. Obviously he's never taken a break from screwing to talk to the women he's paid to be with, or he might have been given cause to wonder to himself why so disproportionately many come from backgrounds of abuse and dire poverty. And for a self-proclaimed connoisseur, he seems awfully ignorant of the means by which his favorite product is produced and brought to market, with not a single word acknowledging the fact that prostitution is one of the main drivers in the persistence of human slavery, nor even a nod to the abuse, violence, and psychological ruin that social science suggests inevitably come with it. It is every bit the "squalid power game" he claims it isn't - he's just paid to avoid having to see the squalor or struggle to exercise the power.

It's fine and well to question social norms, and I happen to think there's a credible argument to be made that paying a prostitute to get no-strings-attached sex is less immoral than deceiving a woman in a dating situation to get it. "Less immoral" is not equivalent to "more moral", however - in my view the dishonest seducer and the john are both cads worthy of contempt, with the question at issue being who deserves more. There is a good reason that prostitution elicits disgust from a good portion of the population in even the most tolerant of places. Horsley might have enough self-awareness to understand why his behavior marks him as a dirtbag, but he obviously hasn't given much thought as to why it that the vast majority of society frowns upon it. Writing about prostitution as if it were nothing more than a payment scheme to get him out of the responsibilities that come with intimate relationships or a parlor game that allows him to play the role of an authority-flouting social rebel betrays both deep ignorance of the subject, and an inexcusable indifference to its moral implications. Horsley imagines himself a no-B.S. truth-teller, but what he actually is is a sad and deluded manchild with a pathetic addiction of which he is nonetheless proud. Why did he sleep with 1,300 prostitutes? I don't care nearly as much as he seems to expect that I should.

David Letterman's Very Hot Seat

On the one hand, David Letterman's admission that he's had sex with female employees of his show, a confession forced by the alleged blackmail attempt of a CBS news employee who'd obtained proof of the affairs, is hardly surprising - as we're all well aware by now, lots of powerful people have zipper problems, and while it's certainly not the case that all celebrities cheat on their spouses, you don't have to be a hardened cynic to believe that there are lots of rich and famous people who observe their marital vows somewhat less than scrupulously. That said, it is surprising when certain classes of celebrity whose power and standing depends on their reputation get themselves embroiled in such affairs, and late night talk show hosts, like politicians, are one of these classes. David Letterman has made a living ridiculing powerful people, often for their sexual improprieties (see his tiff with the Palin family from earlier this year), so when he gets caught with his pants down it has a particular whiff of - well, hypocrisy's not quite the right word, but - irony. As is often acknowledged and I've said before, America is certainly a forgiving culture, particularly when it comes to the foibles of celebrities, but I have a hard time seeing how Letterman's career rebounds from this. The next time a John Edwards or a Mark Sanford gets caught sticking his penis where it doesn't belong, Letterman is put into a huge bind. There's no way he can joke about it without reminding everyone watching of his own misdeeds, and that sort of elephant in the room kills comedy. But if he doesn't touch it in favor of sticking to safe subjects, his humor loses its bite and topical relevance. He's really placed himself in a pickle.

In addition, he's now wide open to counterattacks from his targets, as well as sniping from his rivals (no doubt Sarah Palin is smiling a frightening smile of satisfaction on her plasticine face at this very moment, and I'd be surprised if Jay Leno isn't already writing jokes at Letterman's expense right now). I feel bad for Letterman's wife and five-year-old son - nothing makes a tawdry family affair more fun like having millions of people find out about it just after you yourself do. For Letterman himself? Not so much. I've intermittently enjoyed his humor over the years (though I'm far from as big a fan as some people), but it often had a mean-spirited edge that made it uncomfortable, and if that rebounds upon him now, he has nobody to blame but himself.

Not So Fast

So Nike says they haven't signed an endorsement deal with Michael Vick after all, only that they're providing him with free equipment. This leads me to wonder - was the initial report in error, or did someone at Nike re-think the public relations implications of hiring a convicted dog-killer to endorse their merchandise?