A Stickey Wicket, Wot?

Yours truly knows more about the game of cricket than is decent or proper for an old Italian-American kid from western New York. Hard to explain really; only that back in my New York City days I fell in with a cadre of very sociable Australians (and, really, is there any other kind?) who had a team and needed fielders. I was hooked after my first match and played regularly for the next seven years.

Maybe someday I'll write a book about it. But for now I thought it would be useful to call some attention stateside to the cricket World Cup, now being played in venues across the West Indies.

The horrible murder of Pakistan's coach, an Englishman named Bob Woolmer, following the Pakistani team's defeat by Ireland (a similar case in the baseball universe would be the Dominican Republic getting booted from world competition by Poland) attracted some limited sports page attention in the U S of A last week. Woolmer was found strangled in his Kingston hotel room, and while suspicion has not fallen on an individual, there has been a cloud surrounding Pakistani cricket for years. Not only are players included, and dropped, from the national team on the whims of the generals who run that country, but gambling (a practice which is forbidden by the Koran, btw) for huge amounts on various aspects of a match, which don't necessarily include the outcome, has caused serial corruption scandals involving south Asian gangsters with the Pakistani, Indian, and, a decade ago, South African teams.

Woolmer was by all accounts a modest, thoughtful and softspoken man. He had just finished a book on the art of coaching. A former Test player for England, he had in his career as a player and a highly regarded international coach, managed to find the fault lines of the game as it has grown, some might say metastasized, over the last 30 years (the rest of this paragraph will be understood only by followers of the game): the Packer Circus, the outlaw Tour, coaching the South Africa side during the Cronje debacle, and afterwards Pakistan.

Now this.

Also notable has been the early exit of India from the series. Though Bangladesh and Sri Lanka battle on, this has been a disaster for asian cricket, the International Cricket Committee, which manages the World Cup, and Rupert Murdoch.

HUH?? I hear the three of you whisper, and I will explain. The News Corp. paid a bloody fortune for the satellite television rights. The subcontinent has over a billion people, a very large percentage of them cricket mad. India alone accounts for some 40 percent of revenue for the game. Missing India and Pakistan from the World Cup is a financial hit on par with what would happen to potential audience and ad revenues in baseball should the World Series be between, say, Kansas City and Washington - times twenty. This loss has evidently put the ICC in real financial straights.

Now for all I know ol' Rupe is rolling in dough, rooting for the Aussies to prevail for their third straight Cup (and it looks like they will), and cares not a fig for the fortunes of Pakistan and India. All I'm saying is that life is full of risks and surprises, and that the Dirty Digger is no more immune to shock and disaster than the GOP crime machine he has supported for so long.

The End Of The Party

Let's recap, shall we? The Senate votes to put an end date to the Iraq project, without any help from Ms. Collins of Maine and Mr. Oleaginous-Boob of Minnesota. ('Bye guys.) That squalid little man then goes before a convention of cattlemen (whose job is to raise dumb animals to kill them) and huffs about his coming veto. Speaker Pelosi tells him to take a few deep breaths and calm down (which, she knows full well, will only serve to enrage him further.)

Meanwhile, Shiia cops in Iraq kill dozens of Sunni citizens during their off hours, in such a way so that it is reported in the Times with the same disappointed aplomb they generally reserve for police violence outside Queens nightclubs. Then, just skimming the cream from the top of yesterday's shit avalanche, the Saudi King calls the Iraq project illegal in front of the Arab League.

Wow. For the Saudis were the Bushes' first and, now, last friends in the Middle East. Everything Bigus Dickus did in the region was done for them, or at least because of them. Our hegemony was their hegemony, but, as the poet said, things have changed. One wonders if this sauve qui peut attitude now current in the House of Saud has anything to do with the reported production declines in their largest oil field. (NB, Sauidi oil production numbers are an official state secret.) I imagine we'll find out.

The United States Attorney purge nows appears to be the last failed circuit of systemic collapse, looking now beyond the help of Executive Privilege to shield it from the sights of outright criminal prosecution. (Gonzales is still there because they can't find anyone else acceptable to their designs for the job. A crusading, independent AG-Fitzgerald anyone?-is inevitable and spells the end of the GOP machine.) Turns out there are laws against interfering with ongoing criminal investigations and, in another building, using the GSA to further the end, or rather ends of the Party.

Yep, all over now, though the way out will be disgusting. Aside from their fractured and insane base, the wingnut money sources, and rapidly aging population of sympathizers, once the GOP collapses into sticks and rags, the stench of failure and criminality will linger over the debris for a while, maybe decades. Just as it has taken a quarter century for the Democrats to recover from the media narrative, deserved or not, of their fractious and ineffectual nature, identifying the GOP with a certain brand of rudeness, incompetence, and pathetic criminality might stretch nearly to mid-century, that is, if there's anyone around to pay attention.

Nodes In Passing

As much as I like the job K. Drum does with his blog, let me just repeat here Symbolism in politics is NOT useless.

La tout Chicago is abuzz over the N.Y. Times' short report on our stupid transit system. I get the feeling that their bureau chief is one on my Blue Line neighbors. Now we have to endure elegant posters crowing about Dailey's dream of the Olympics here in 2012, or 19 or whenever while the public transit system collapses into rust.

And you Mets fans (And, Dahrling, you know who you are), I hope you are ready for a slow start to the season. I think the starters are good, but will need time to stretch it out. Fielding and hitting seem solid (koff, koff Wright, or wrong). The relievers. . . well. . . that Smith kid looks promising. I think a sidearmer in the bullpen is a beautiful thing, but I am seeing .500 ball through May.

For Sale Signs and Portents

Lately I've been too distracted from everyday events to muster much matter for these pages. Not having daily deadlines, I don't need to repeat the obvious, or question the undeniable merely for form's sake. I note with pleasure Speaker Pelosi's great victory yesterday. The tide runs neither as quickly nor directly as many would like, but run it does and it has turned.

The expectation of fast, indeed miraculous, results, inculcated by generations of TV ads, has made Americans a very silly people, and it is a flaw shared throughout our political world. It got us into Iraq, and has curdled the question of What to Do Next. The aching need to turn the channel away from the bad and boring news, and the disgusting and doomed GOP junta, has also led to an absurdly early start to the presidential campaign season.

Each and every campaigner has had their own unique screwup, their own stumbles out of the blocks. For connoisseurs of the polished fatuous, the GOP candidates offer riches in that regard beyond simple reckoning. The Democrats, as always, offer more earnest sitcom fare, but their front runners also seem to be missing the plot.

The point is that everything has changed. Barak Obama's early success is not that he has especially articulated positions telling America this is so (in fact, he strikes me as a fairly status quo kind of chap), but rather his very person symbolises the change afoot. This may yet prove his making, and he might become a good president. But before that happens he will have to find a point where his actions in the real world come more in line with the picture most carry of him in their heads, or he will end up looking as sorry as Hilary. In other words he will have to risk a great deal in articulating a break away from business as usual. If he can't then he does not deserve the job, even if he ends up with it.

Our decline will be certified if the next Prez - who will certainly be a Democrat - has not the imagination, the will, or the skill to direct the country through some very hard times. Of course certain reservoirs of wit and imagination are also called for from the broad public. And, thanks to TV, the question of the location and volume of such reserves is an open one.

I've drifted, as usual, from the point I was first leading to, which is how the old-guard media react to unanticipated events. Exhibit one this morn is an article from the current Chicago Tribune expressing gob smacked surprise over a dramatic drop in local home sales. The said confounded analysts in the piece have very likely not spent the last year wandering around Chicago, noting all the signs on all the empty condos and storefronts, and all the condo buildings still going up because the financing for them came through two years ago.

No, they and the Trib had smaller fish to fry, and now neither institution can quite figure out why things have not worked out the way they were meant to. It is a mystery, i'n'it?

Look Homeward, Asshole.

Like the tax charges that took down Alfonse Capone and Charles Luciano, it looks like the bastards are taking a real fall for something other than their real crimes. If John Danforth is really being talked up as the next AG, then the creeps are cooked. You might consider the Yale Divinity School grad and current Episcopal minister to the the anti-Rove, and the end of all that that big-brained fat head's dreams.

I had been thinking of Danforth as VP material, frankly, and this move may be to keep him away from that post once Bigus Dickus inevitably gives way, which I predict will happen, gee, by Labor Day. Danforth was front runner for the job in 2000, but BD ended up giving it to himself, remember, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Danforth is the only Repub who has any hope of saving that dumb party now, mainly because he had, so to speak, washed his hands of Washington early in the reign of that tiny, squalid man. (His experience interviewing for the number two job must have been eye-opening, or maybe gorge-rising.) Anyway, it will be interesting to see how he will be treated by the big cadre of death-loving morons who still run that vast and stupid criminal enterprise.

For the Justice Dept. caper has neatly shown just how criminal and stupid they are. And, you know, if there wasn't a dirty war on they probably could have gotten away with it. But nobody feels like dying for petty men. Forceful, resolute, and, even if simple, grand? Yes. Petty? No.

UPDATE: Word just arrives of another trip to hospital for Bigus D. So now he's out by, what, the Fourth of July? Easter?

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

Big hair! Nudie suits! An electric banjo! Dolly and Porter. . .

The Downside Of Oops

James Kunstler has been warning about the collapse of the mortgage market for simply yonks now, so it was refreshing, sorta, to see an analysis in the Times today proposing just what's in store.

Not pretty, I can assure you. 'Course no one who reads Kunstler is at all surprised by this news, but the Times writer gets to talk to more playas than our blogoland Cassandra, name names, and write all sorts of lines one can read between with no small interest.

Basically, if home sales don't pick up in the spring, the financial markets face a drop that no one has any sense of the depth and darkness of, other than Very.

As it is never meant to genuinely inform citizens as to the workings of Commerce, I love financial journalism for its metaphoric weight. So much about money can stand for other things social and political. Like this:

“I guess we are a bit surprised at how fast this has unraveled,” said Tom Zimmerman, head of asset-backed securities research at UBS, in a recent conference call with investors.

Call this Mr. Divide's First Rule of Living: Things are fine until they're not fine.

Then for pure drama, you can't beat:

“There are delayed triggers in many of these investment vehicles and that is delaying the recognition of losses,” Charles Peabody, founder of Portales Partners, an independent research boutique in New York, said. “I do think the unwind is just starting. The moment of truth is not yet here.”

Hmmm... a quick, unexpected collapse, delayed recognition of losses, the unwinding only just begun, a pending moment of truth. Golly, you'd think these financial smartasses were Republicans. Oh, wait. . .

UPDATE: The dependable Kevin Drum, who has in his own quiet way been following mortgage meltdown news for a while too, just posted this up, dusting the fingerprints of one A. Greenspan on the lenient lending policy, and the reason for it, which has led to this day.

Stories With Legs, Soldiers Without

It didn't take long. From today's Wash Post: 'It Is Just Not Walter Reed' Soldiers Share Troubling Stories Of Military Health Care Across U.S.

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."

Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.

Here's the whole thing.

Another story I bet won't go away is the one regarding the ousted federal prosecutors. Like the thrown-away veterans, it strikes at the hollow heart of the GOP narrative, this one being the Law-and-Order valve. Josh Marshall has been doing yeoman service keeping track of the playas. Here the fires are mainly local, but fierce, and bid well to combining in a larger conflagration likely to burn no one outside elected GOP officials.

Aside from utterly undercutting fundamental GOP values, the danger to the repubs in both cases is the combined national profile and local nature of both stories. As mentioned in the post previous, they allow citizens unwilling or unable to criticize the administration to this point a focus of their unease. The stories are also invitations to every local TV station and smalltown paper within stumbing distance of a VA hospital to do their own investigation. And they will, they will.

Voyage To The Bottom Of TV

Part of the fun I have while traveling is watching TV, something impossible for me to do at home. This last trip, where I got to spend parts of three nights and two early mornings in the company of that one-eyed glowing demon, was notable for the floor-to-ceiling coverage of the continued Anna Nicole/Brittany sob stories. But beyond that, I was really surprised by how relentlessly awful TV has become in the last couple years.

And it isn't the trash talk shows, poorly done, reflexively violent dramas, and perplexedly unfunny sitcoms that bother. Those have been staples for centuries. No, what has really turned the medium into a psychic colostomy are the bottom-feeding ads, with messages deftly at-odds with the otherwise relentless social and economic cheerleading which is the networks' stock in trade. Get-rich-quick schemes, debt reduction services, quack remedies and exercise plans, all brightly lit and poorly acted dramas of dragnet despair. Piled on top are "news" shows without any to speak of, relentlessly cheerful morning shows that offer women, for that's who's watching, more hectoring than advice and companionship and so-called "history" and "arts" channels in tune with U.S. weapons systems, ghosts and Vegas weekends more than, say, Jefferson, Goya, and the Norman conquests.

Wanna know my favorite show? American Chopper. Why?? I hear a couple of you yell, because it is the only show on TV purely about the act of artistic creation. Those men may have to hide behind troglodyte personas, not own up to how bright they really are, and produce objects that are, at best, noisy curiosities, BUT they are visionaries, artists nevertheless, who begin with an idea, draw it out, then make it real with subtle touches of a very hard, industrial process. I think David Smith would have had a blast with those big apes, and they with him.

But that is the sad state of our culture when the only artists on TV not mocked, scorned or held up to envy are three gearheads from Oakland. And the only, I hesitate to use the word, scientists in the house are two dweebs who go to extravagant lengths to blow shit up to prove or disprove urban legends.

It's all noise, and, here's my point at last, the reason being is that fewer and fewer people are watching. This has caused an automatic doubling-down by programmers, a strengthening of the potion that more and more are finding unappealing in the first place. TV has never had to compete with any other medium before. Now that it has to, we see that it can't. What it delivers best are discreet segments of social arbitration, best done with sports. When times were good, and there was no other game in town, TV did double duty as a referee of bigger contests, but now the internet has taken that whistle away.

I'm an old-fashioned coot, and what I found I liked most were the shows where people sat at desks and spoke into microphones. Authors on C-Span, and, my guilty pleasure, Don Imus.

Yeah, I know, a meat head. But a tortured, ex-Marine meat head, a myopic hog who does find his share of acorns. Imus's rage is generally impotent, as is any you will hear broadcast (which was the real message of the movie Network, btw - a point forever ignored by those who want to see it as some call to arms vs. the quo status.) But Don was in an especial dudgeon, and rightfully so, over the Washington Post's disgusting report of the treatment of wounded soldiers and Marines at Walter Reed. Yo-ho, I thought, never seen him quite like this before. Even that asshole McGurk looks embarrassed. This is a real story.

And, indeed, judging by the White House's panicked reaction over the last few, it is. Why? because it is something that both left and right can agree on, and which strikes directly at the "Support the Troops" hogwash the war party has been using to prop up its dumb agenda from the get-go. It allows those who have had no psychological means of criticizing the war to this point to do so. It is the Katrina of the Defence Department and it has just begun. Walter Reed is only the start, the flagship of a broken system, and like every single one of their putrid misadventures, the war criminals have no answer for it.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents. . .

The great John Candy, who passed away this week in 1994. He is dearly missed.



Gee, remind you of anybody??