These Are Not The Roids You're Looking For

Like Scottish tartans and Christmas all traditions are fake, but one of the things I like about America is how transparent the country has always been about the fakery. The Thanksgiving Parade in NYC is about marketing a department store. Saint Patrick's Day was invented by German-American beer companies as a way of getting their loyal customers to drink even more. But sometimes people forget that these traditions are completely bogus and solemnity descends like ether before a Civil War amputation. One of the most solemn and talked about occasions every year is the election to the Baseball Hall of Fame which gets treated like a Presidential Election when really it should be seen as something like the Academy Awards or better yet the Golden Globes or my favourite, the Razzies.

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The closed shop of the Baseball Writers Association of America or BBWAA (apparently these literary geniuses can't spell the word baseball) and the Veterans Committee and other special committees elect players (and also managers and, yawn, umpires, journalists and officials) deemed worthy to stand next to Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Christy Matthewson and Walter Johnson - genuine superstars who were the first inductees. The motto of the HOF is: "Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations"; but the steroid era has made a farce of that. We now know that at least a fifth of all players were taking steroids up to 2004. How do you compare the numbers of a steroid player to a non steroid player of this or another era? (Or come to that today's players to players of the segregated era?) You can't.

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It's impossible to say when the steroid years began except possibly by examining photographs of Barry Bonds's head over the decades, but my guess is the early 1990's and that means you're going to have throw out twenty years of data if you really want to "honor excellence." Though they won't will they? They'll sweep it all under the rug and pretend everything is fine. But thats ok, we should let them do that but we should also stop pretending that it means anything. The Baseball Hall of Fame was set up in Depression Era Cooperstown as a tourist attraction on the, at best dubious, claim that local boy Abner Doubleday "invented baseball." Like the Oscars, which appeared at roughly the same time, the whole thing was a wheeze to drum up business. It still is. The HOF is a private organization, only tangentially connected to Major League Baseball and who it puts it in its hall of heroes should not concern us in the slightest. The Babe was great because he was the Babe, not because he has some ridiculous plaque in a silly museum in an out of the way town in upstate New York.

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Remember Mr. Blackwell's list of the worst dressed women in America? It used to be a one line AP story that would raise a titter from the anchors during the "happy chat" portion of the local news. That's the way we should treat elections to the Baseball Hall of Fame. "Mary, I see that A-Rod is in the baseball HOF." "Oh, really, well now we have Dan with the weather."

Down With The Kindle!

I know all the arguments: it saves trees, it allows out of print authors (including me) to be actually read by peope, it permits errors to be fixed after publication, you can carry a thousand books around in one device, it's even a boon for the blind...And yet I hate the Kindle, I hate the look of it, I hate the name of it, I hate even the idea of it. Kindle reduces books to their raw text and books for me are so much more than the words in their pages. Books have a tactile quality, an innate puissance, a beauty all their own. Some books, especially older ones, have a smell, a history, an aura. Most of my books are second hand and they are idiosyncratically filled with marginal notes, dog ears, phone numbers or just years (sometimes decades) of blood, sweat and tears. I love books as objects not just as carriers of a message or a meme. I love the different covers that books can have in different editions. (Here's an entire blog about the various covers JG Ballard's Crash has had over the years, covers that Kindle will never fully convey.) The Kindle 2 has been getting great reviews but I have a feeling that as it becomes standard it will be just another excuse for publishers to make books cheaper and nastier or not publish them in a paper form at all. Mark my words if we let this happen 10 years from now bookstores (if they still exist) will have a self help section, a Stephen King section and a coffee shop.
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Sunday morning update: depressing news on this (though not to him) from Andrew Sullivan

More Drunken Stupid Micks

After my post last week (see below) about Martin McDonagh's use (or not) of negative Irish stereotyping, I was reluctant to return to that topic any time soon until I read a piece in the Guardian about a new play at the National Theatre in London which satirises various denizens of the East End through the centuries (including Huguenots, Jews, the Irish and Bangladeshis) who are all mocked "by use of the most absurd caricatures of their type." The play has kicked up a real furore in England especially among certain Muslim communities, but as one observer in the Guardian points out "it is particularly offensive towards the Irish and Bangladeshis." I haven't seen the play called England People Very Nice but apparently the Irish stereotype is that they are drunken, stupid, oafish and clumsy. This was a popular trope for English writers and comedians well into the 1980's even appearing in such sainted comedies as Fawlty Towers; but its been dead for a while and I have to say that I'm surprised to see it surface again.
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It reminds me a little of an ugly incident in my past. On my first day at Oxford back in October 1991 I turned up at the porter's lodge of my college and the middle aged porter looked up my name on his clipboard and gave me the key to my assigned room. I carried all my stuff to the room and found that the key didn't work. I lugged all my stuff back and told him that the key was the wrong one and after a bit of grumbling he gave me a different key. Again I schlepped the stuff, tried the new key and again it didn't work. I went back and told the key keeper. After this second attempt the porter then unleashed an extraordinary tirade of anti Irish venom that would have done a sergeant major proud. In decidedly un-ironic tones he told me that I was a stupid Irish navvy of questionable parentage who wouldn't know the difference between a key and a horse's arse - this peppered with the lively use of the f word in its verb, noun and adverb forms. I was too stunned to reply (it was the first five minutes of my first day) and a second later he suddenly said "oh McKinty not McCleish" and gave me the correct key without so much as a sniff, never mind an apology.
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Martin McDonagh's take on Irishmen may be an interior critique to which he is entitled but Richard Bean the author of "England People Very Nice" was born in Hull and appears unqualified to take such liberties. I wonder how much of Mr. Bean's satire is really satire and how much is very ancient prejudices bubbling atavisticly to the surface. Unlike America I don't think Britain changes that much over time. The next Prime Minister of the UK is going to be an Eton and Oxford educated member of the aristocracy and the last time they had an Irish PM it was the Duke of Wellington who said of his Irish roots "just because a man was born in a stable it doesn't make him a horse." Indeed.

My Own Stimulus Plan - Terraform Mars

The war in Iraq is going to cost about 1 trillion dollars. The Bush bank bail out was 800 billion dollars. President Obama's stimulus plan calls for 800 billion in various public works projects and the new bank bailout plan will cost 1.5 trillion. What else could we have done with those 4 trillion dollars? We could have terraformed Mars and made it habitable for humans. According to the Mars Society a manned mission to Mars would cost about 150 billion - so we could easily have done that and provided hundreds of thousands of engineering jobs the way the Apollo programme did; but terraforming the planet would be an even more ambitious step. We'd have to divert comets into the atmosphere to give Mars more water, we'd have to seed the surface with hardy lichens and mosses and eventually bioengineered plants, we'd have to pump in CFC's to melt the polar ice caps. It's pricey to do all that but it's not 4 trillion dollars pricey. If everything went to plan Mars could have a high altitude breathable atmosphere in a few generations and although it does not have a magnetosphere (hats at all times and no T shirts) people could live there. Why go to Mars? Humans need to expand into space in case of a catastrophic comet strike like the one at the K-T boundary which exterminated the dinosaurs. But also because we need frontiers, challenges and new goals. It's the same reason we go to the bottom of the ocean or the tops of mountains or to Ballymena. Some scientists think that Venus too could be successfully terraformed and perhaps even Saturn's moon Titan. The nearest star system is only four light years away and with a 2o percent light speed nuclear impulse drive or a solar sail we could be there in a couple of decades. Millions of jobs, a common goal for humanity, a lifeboat for civilization and of course dusky Martian princesses a la Edgar Rice Burroughs - what exactly is the downside of this?

Is Martin McDonagh Irish Enough?

One of my favourite films of last year was In Bruges, a black comedy about two hitmen on the run hiding out, er, in Bruges. It was written by Martin McDonagh the Oscar and Tony winning playwright who was born in London of Irish parents. McDonagh is up for best original screenplay at next week's Academy Awards and if there's any justice in the world he'll win. However in the last few weeks I've begun to hear mutterings on blogs and in a couple of emails that McDonagh is an Englishman who, like the unfortunate Shane McGowan, "exploits" a certain Irish persona for economic gain. This Punch magazine persona is certainly not true today and probably was never true to begin with: the comedic, drunken, loquacious, sentimental, professional or stage Irishman. Of all places the anonymous writer of McDonagh's Wikipedia entry seems to have provided the best summary of the controversy:

McDonagh has his critics - especially within Ireland - who view his work with suspicion. His English birth and London childhood have caused many to question his credentials, validity and sincerity regarding Irish life. Many Irish scholars feel that his work is in fact stage Irish. A review by Elizabeth O'Neill for RTÉ said :"A modern day Synge or an English chancer? Martin McDonagh's plays have been courting controversy since The Beauty Queen of Leenane took the world stage by storm in 1996. Audiences have been divided roughly into two camps; those who think he's captured the black humour and zeitgeist of a postmodern rural Ireland, and those who see him as making a mockery of Ireland and the Irish by lampooning that caricature of old, the 'stage-Irish' fool."

Of course no one likes stereotypes but I think McDonagh is being picked on because of his 'Englishness' - always the bogey man for a certain class of critic. I suspect part of the problem is the entirely mistaken notion that the Irish represent some sort of unique genetic group who have maintained their purity throughout the centuries. If you spend a mind numbing ten minutes or so reading the comments on any of the Irish related YouTubes you'll know that this view is deeply held. It's ridiculous of course. Ireland is just as much a genetic mixed bag as every other country in Europe. In fact peer reviewed studies in the last year have proven that the Irish, Welsh, Scots and English are virtually indistinguishable genetically. The gate keepers of Irishness are on very shaky ground when they try to exclude people with planter names (Gerry Adams) or Norman names (the entire Fitzgerald clan) or anyone who's spent the majority of their life living outside the 32 counties (Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Swift, etc.) and both the Northern Irish and Republic of Ireland football teams sensibly apply the grandmother rule: if your granny (or granda) was born in Ireland then you're Irish and that's an end to it. So let's keep London born McDonagh and just to balance things out I'll gladly swap all four of those proud non tax paying Micks in U2 for him.

The Long Hot Summer

It was 46.5 C in Melbourne today. Thats about 116 o F in old money. It's in times like these that you go out onto the stoop and fry eggs on the porch just to see if you can. (You can.) According to the news this is some kind of record for Melbourne; the city is ringed by bush fires, train lines are buckling, roads are melting. The fires have actually killed people in New South Wales and the air here smells of smoke. My sanity hasn't been helped by my daughter who, like all Australian school children apparently, has been brain washed into the Abba cult. Until the CD player met with an unfortunate accident I heard Waterloo 11 times today. The opening lyrics have been burned into my frontal lobes:

My my, at waterloo napoleon did surrender/Oh yeah, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way/The history book on the shelf/Is always repeating itself/Waterloo - I was defeated, you won the war/Waterloo - promise to love you for ever more/Waterloo - couldnt escape if I wanted to/Waterloo - knowing my fate is to be with you/Waterloo - finally facing my waterloo.

The entire song is premised around the fact that Napoleon surrendered at Waterloo which of course he didn't. Not even the Old Guard surrendered as anyone who has read Les Miserables will recall (Victor Hugo spends about 47 pages praising the officer who shouted "Merde!" after the British had politely asked if he wanted to spare his men further suffering). I think the key to understanding Waterloo is when Benny and Bjorn admit that the "history book [is] on the shelf." Swedes have largely been absent from the exciting bits of European history for the last two centuries but really that's no excuse - get the book down and give it a read chaps. I'm also not a fan of the song's gloomy Scandanavian acceptance of destiny and fate; around the same time as Abba were reaching their apotheosis John Lydon, in the best traditions of British empiricism, was saying that the past was not a good indicator of the future .

Herring v United States, A Defeat for Hollywood

Ever seen that episode of Law and Order where the cops do an unlawful search and a judge throws out the evidence and the prosecutors have to find a different way to prosecute the guilty defendant? Of course you have, because that's every episode. Every episode of L&O, L&O SVU, L&O C.I. and dozens of other shows and movies where Mr. Movie Narrator Voice says "He got off on a technicality, now she wants revenge." Well now Hollywood screenwriters are going to have to buck up their ideas because by a 5:4 decision in the case of Herring v United States the rules of evidence have been changed. The old rule laid down by the Warren Court in Mapp v Ohio 367 U.S. 643 (1961) included the famous "fruit of the poison tree" analogy where CJ Warren said that evidence obtained illegally should not be heard in court because it was the good fruit of a "poisoned tree." The purpose behind the law of course was to deter police corruption and assure defendants of a fair trial.

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Apparently CJ Roberts has been jonesing to change this law since 1983 when he was a pencil pusher in the Reagan administration. And now writing for the majority in Herring Roberts has said that evidence 'accidentally' obtained illegally can be used in court, even evidence obtained illegally with a degree of negligence.

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Yes of course it's a boon for corrupt and lazy coppers but think of the poor screenwriters - it's a disaster for them. Are they still making Law and Order? If so, mark my words: it's toast.

Chick Lit We Can All Embrace

This falls under the category "Damn, I wish I'd thought of that!" A chick lit novel that is made of awesome: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. This is from the press release:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice)

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for finding me my beach book this year.