Got Nothing to Say?

What to do when you want to say something but you can't put your finger on anything to say? Sounds like blogging and songwriting are not too dissimilar in that respect. Many don't want to make the effort to say something if there's nothing particularly important to say. On the other hand, having nothing to say doesn't get in the way of a great many who go right out and say it; in fact, saying nothing has been done entertainingly at times in both the written and musical media (and if you want to see it elevated to a real art form, look no further than politics).

If there's an answer to the above question, I guess it's this: when in doubt, ponder. It may seem like pointless noodling before you get into it, but it gets your mind's wheels moving, and the destination you didn't see when you were mentally parked may present itself while in motion.

I fear pointless or fruitless action, which may explain why I've always been a procrastinator. This world of limited spare time tends to reinforce that behavior in me. There are times to risk the discomfort, break the familiar pattern, and discover what's lurking in the mind. What you find to say may be important, or it may discover the rock underneath which something important lies waiting to be uncovered.

Droopy Pants and Drippy Laws

Drought has gripped much of the south, while Texas, Oklahoma, and the upper midwest are plagued with storms and excess rain; either way, food prices are pressured upward. On top of the continuing violence in the Iraq mess is the rising boldness of the reformulating Taliban in Afghanistan, who has now taken to kidnapping foreigners. The sub-prime home lending crisis has crept into the general housing market, crimping everyone's home values and drying up credit. Misery and injustice are all-too-abundant.

But what has got Atlanta burning? Baggy pants, if the city council is to be believed.

Yep, Atlanta's city council has proposed an amendment to their indecency laws that bans baggy pants worn to reveal boxer shorts, the kind that urban black culture has made either popular or epidemic (your call). Ladies, wearing that waistline where your thongs show would also be illegal. Councilman and co-sponsor C. T. Martin said "I don't want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to go. I want them to think about their future."

Their future? We're not talking about a full-torso tattoo. The solution is a lot easier than salt and a stick of butter.

Personally, the half-covered-seat look is just butt-ignorant. How many folks have felt an inkling to get a staple gun and affix some yahoo's britches up above the crack line? And it certainly doesn't look any better on some of the local appropriatin' white dudes where I live.

But the Atlanta amendment, and the similar local ordinances that have passed in Louisiana, is more ignorant than the look it combats. I think we can have a mature discussion of the value issues of hip-hop culture without resorting to dress codes. Besides, all of us adults drew the ire of our parents' generation with the way we dressed and groomed ourselves, from ten-inch pompadours to mod hair to purple hair, from spiked dog collars to the first Madonna look to the once-innocuous flannel shirt.

Though part of me may cheer a beating back of something that just looks stupid to me, we've had way too much government intervention the past few years. And, as I suggested above, we've got a lot more important things to be concerned with.

Overlooked Civil Rights Pioneer Dies at 90

I read today via Rational Review News Digest of the death of Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a woman who refused to give up her bus seat a decade prior to Rosa Parks' more famous act of civil disobedience. I'd never heard of Kirkaldy's act, which occurred on a Greyhound bus from Gloucester to Baltimore in 1944. She was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white couple and for resisting arrest. The former charge was appealed -- she willingly paid the $100 fine for resisting because she kicked the officer who tried to remove her, saying "Sometimes you are so enraged, you don't have time to be afraid" -- and the U. S. Supreme Court in 1946 struck down the Virginia law that mandated racial separation on buses as an invalid interference in interstate commerce. Kirkaldy was represented by an NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall, later to become a Supreme Court justice himself.

Kirkaldy died last Friday at age 90 at her daughter's home. Her case did not get the notoriety that Rosa Parks' case did, but it led to the first Freedom Ride in 1947, where 16 civil rights activists rode buses and trains in the South testing the Supreme Court decision, and eventually to Parks' famous act in 1955. President Bill Clinton gave Kirkaldy the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001, the second highest civilian honor a president can bestow. Asked where her courage to not change her seat came from, she is quoted as saying "I can't understand how anyone would have done otherwise."

In an age where courage in the face of governmental power has been lacking until lately, Kirkaldy's passing deserves notice and her actions deserve spotlight.

Props to Glavine and Rodriguez

As a postscript to my earlier post "The Scandalous Sporting Life," let's note credit where it's due to this weekend's milestones achieved on the diamond. Tom Glavine reached the 300 win plateau yesterday, only the 23rd pitcher to earn 300 in MLB. Also, Alex Rodriguez not only reached the 500 home run mark this weekend, he became the youngest player to get to 500. Already, A-Rod has been hailed as the best hope to reach -- honorably -- the all-time home run record and eclipse that other guy who just tied Hank Aaron's mark of 755 this weekend.

Sometimes It's 'How' Before It's 'What'

The empty page before me now
The pen is in my hand
The words don't come so easy, but I'm trying

- Kerry Livgren, from "On The Other Side" by Kansas

This examinant ode to being stuck while writing always comes to mind when I'm, um, stuck while writing. I wonder, often impatiently, why ideas don't come when my conscious mind wants to create and express but my subconscious acts like it wasn't consulted.

Approaches to writing may vary, but I see it primarily in two camps. The one I historically belong to is reliance on motivation. There's just something you find that you have to say, and the writing becomes finding the best way to get across that which you just have to express. The other camp I have started dabbling with, what I call mining your experiences and interests in the hope that you find something that strikes your fancy. You're not particularly moved to write; you just sit your ass down and play with ideas or things that happened or how you see things that happened.

A songwriting book I once read by Kenny Rogers decried the former camp, stating that a certain writer of the First Edition's hit songs did not rely on "fickle inspiration" but on a regimented schedule of writing. My historic mistrust of that camp aside, I believe that it all depends on what you're comfortable with. So I'm dabbling with the mining approach along with the motivation approach to see if I can get comfortable with mining and still produce the level of writing I'm used to. And just maybe I can do away with the dry patches where I'm less inspired and can still create something worth the effort.

All this assumes that real life doesn't get in the way . . . as it does at least occasionally.

Never did decide what to say this time . . . just some thought on how to go about saying something, even when you're not sure and the mind starts as blank as the page.

The Scandalous Sporting Life

While we view the looming potential constitutional crisis in Washington, let's not forget that professional sports are broadly involved in scandal. Not forget? Hell, we can't avoid it.

Major League Baseball seems positively embarrassed by Barry Bonds. He's about to break Hank Aaron's all-time home run mark, and only San Francisco Giants fans seem the least bit excited. MLB plans no commemoration if/when Bonds passes Aaron, and fandom has passed judgment on the BALCO-fueled superstar. Someone give him a t-shirt that reads "World's Biggest Asterisk" and be done with it.

The NFL has its own headache with Atlanta Falcons star quarterback Michael Vick, who has been indicted on federal dogfighting charges. With his reported involvement in both dogfights and the cruel execution of losing dogs, few people want to wait until his trial to kick him out of football.

Perhaps the worst scandal is just breaking with NBA referee Tim Donaghy accused of betting on games he officiated. The league's first point-shaving scandal, as the sports press is viewing it, has commissioner David Stern spinning like crazy, calling Donaghy a "rogue, isolated criminal" and hoping the NBA can ride out the storm. Stern has cause to worry, as Donaghy's Pete Rose moment, for which he is being investigated by the FBI, strikes at the very integrity of the game.

Speaking of integrity, don't get me started on the Tour De France, which is seeing doping scandals this year that make last year look like an expedition of Boy Scouts trying for their cycling merit badges.

Throw in NASCAR Nextel Cup crew chiefs that have been suspended for bending rules that got caught in inspections (is Dale Jr.'s chief Tony Eury back yet?) and you have a season of athletic cheating that makes it seem that the halls of Washington have integrity.

Counterveiling Force

OK, so there hasn't been an offering here for awhile. I chalk it up to the principles of counterveiling force.

A great deal of frustration was relieved -- lanced like a boil -- with the 2006 mid-term elections. When one sees a political leadership so blindly beholden to patronage, so seemingly pursuant of theocracy, and so ruthlessly in pursuit of consolidating power in the executive branch under cover of fighting terrorism ... and when mainstream society voices support of this leadership on either religious or patriotic grounds, to the extent that dissent is made to appear disloyal to the country ... well, faith in one's fellow man ebbs and contingencies get considered to relocate to relatively dismal urban areas that at least have free thinkers.

These frustrations also acted as a burr under the personal saddle, prompting me to express my outrage into written opinions on the web and in letters to the editor of several newspapers. It was my way to stand and be counted for rational thinking, for the America I had always known before the current administration. It was my individual attempt at a small bit of counterveiling force.

The 2006 mid-term elections served to change the scenery. Instead of managing to scare the American public into falling back into blind faith, the Bush Administration and its party started to get crushed under the weight of its own hubris. A Congressman from Florida known for his stances on child protection became embroiled in a male page scandal. Combined with a book on how the Administration used the religious right while scoffing at them behind their backs, it made the conservative Christians who re-elected Bush in 2004 stay at home in 2006. Support for the Iraq war melted away as the body count mounted without much progress to show, and Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were seen with a certain disconnect from reality and with a fresh doubting of their competence in prosecuting the war. Democrats narrowly took back the Senate and comfortably captured the House.

There's not the sense in my mind that our country and society are heading down the road to hell without brakes. That is thanks to the counterveiling force of the legislative branch now controlled by Democrats, who now put a check on the executive branch's excesses. The principle of counterveiling force, as I hazily recall it from college, holds that no power will get so great that a counterveiling power will not rise to check it. That principle has been bourne out once again, and while it has made me undermotivated to express opinions at the same rate as before, I rest significantly easier because of it.

Miami - Florida International Redux

The unseemly brawl between two football teams from colleges in metropolitan Miami got me thinking about the spoiled brats that pass for athletes among amateurs in such marquis sports locations and among the professional ranks. The fight that broke out at the Miami-Florida International football game on October 14 seemed less like a rivalry gone bad (let’s face it, FIU shares a city with “the U” not a level of program) than an indulgence of posturing that rose to thuggery. It’s the culture of elite programs, elite leagues, and elite media markets that accepts, and often encourages, the chest-thumping, indulge-me-cause-I’m-just-that-good way of thinking.

The Miami Hurricane football program has had a history of thug posing, which made their loss to straight-arrow Jo Pa’s Penn State squad for the 1986 national championship that much sweeter. Yet the intimidating swagger is becoming as commonplace in sports as the next rap CD cover. And the more casual it gets, the bigger the blowups are when things get out of hand.

Examples: the Ron Artest-led fight at the Pacers-Pistons game that carried into the stands and earned Artest a season-ending ban; Mike Tyson, who if he spars with a female boxer on his el-lame-o “world tour” will do in the ring what he used to do to ex-wife Robin Givens and other female conquests, not to mention the threats to eat Lennox Lewis’ children and the actual bites taken from Evander Holyfield’s ear; and don’t get me started on TO, the NFL’s answer to Barry Bonds in extreme talent and zero likeability, except Bonds didn’t try to kill himself or publicly feud with teammates.

Perhaps these are factors behind the NBA refereeing change that debuted in the current pre-season where virtually any gesture toward a referee’s call is subject to a technical foul ... a throwback to the pre-1970s college era where a player had to hold up his hand (horrors!) when a foul was called on him. Commissioner David Stern reportedly wants to get control over players’ deportment toward referees, something he saw as a negative in the eyes of fans and, therefore, bad for business.

Perhaps Stern is dealing with the harvest of pushing the NBA as an urban/hiphop culture sport to sell tickets. But while it could be argued that the NBA influences athletes in all major sports, the fact is pro and amateur athletes in many sports appear to show a deeper, exaggerated sense of self-importance and act as if their opponents (and sometimes their teammates) are theirs to intimidate.

We don't always know where the line is, the one that once crossed is too much. We endlessly debate whether Pete Rose should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame or forfeit a sure spot in Cooperstown because he bet on baseball. But incidents like the Miami-FIU brawl remind me that we should find a collective sense of where that line of behavior is and say "enough" when an athlete crosses it.

Calling the Kettle Black: Bush, Rove, and Fred Phelps

Why do we stay so polarized? How can it be possible in the first place for cynics to grab hold of the public eye and the power of the government with divisive tactics and positions that once upon a time would be relegated to the end of the political bench? In explanation, let me tell you about a subject I know no small bit about.

The Rev. Fred Phelps, leader of a cult that calls itself the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, has jumped from my old Topeka stomping grounds to the national stage. Preoccupied with homosexuality, Phelps and his mostly-extended-family congregation became moderately well known nationally, and infamous locally, by picketing the funerals of gays who died of AIDS, churches who didn’t take a hard line against gays, parks that were supposed to be locations for gay trysts, and eventually any large local public gathering. His picket signs were garish, graphic, and blunt; the most famous signs were “God Hates Fags” and “Fags Burn In Hell.”

Phelps did what I thought wasn’t possible to grab national headlines; he became even more extreme in his paranoia of homosexuality. He and his WBC followers started picketing the funerals of U. S. soldiers from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, publicly stating that their deaths were God’s punishment of a country that tolerated homosexuality. The reaction of the country outside the Great Plains was all the explosive outrage the middle class can muster. The very idea that a group could picket fallen soldiers in a time of war flew all over the patriotic citizenry and offended sensibilities regarding respect for the dead.

But the rest of the country is learning what Topekans are too familiar with. As deranged as he is, Fred Phelps is a lawyer and a brilliant one. Further, his sons and daughters are lawyers. They have thwarted nearly every legal attempt to rein in their practices. A judge in Kentucky just threw out that state’s law that prohibits protests within 300 feet of funerals.

Moreover, the Phelps Clan (as I “affectionately” call them) utilize a crass but effective strategy. They make their extreme statements, and when the inevitable outrage comes from reasonable people, they bully back against those critics as being enemies of freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Between the constant drumbeat of their hate-filled diatribe and the threats of legal action against any who would oppose their statements and actions, the Phelps Clan wears and demoralizes casual criticism against them until they’re resigned to put up with the Phelps’ extremist conduct.

Karl Rove probably didn’t study the Phelps Clan’s methods. But it’s hard to tell from the way President George W. Bush’s political strategist has transformed political discourse in this country. Rove has done with the Bush presidency as Phelps has done with his anti-homosexual crusade: taken positions that the center sees as extreme, then attack those who react against those positions.

Campaigns no longer run to the center as the conventional wisdom has always dictated. With an evenly divided country, Rove chose to emphasize controversial hot-button issues for the far right (e. g., abortion, same sex marriage) that alienate the center but whip the conservative base into a frenzy and motivate them to go to the polls. With Rove, it’s all about how many of your base can you turn out on election day, not how many in the center can you get to come to your side.

And so it was that in the tight 2004 presidential election the people of southern Ohio decided that Bush should be re-elected over John Kerry. Not, according to exit polls, because Bush was seen as more effective in the war on terror or the war in Iraq. Southern Ohio went for Bush because he was against gay marriage, and a plethora of state constitutional amendments for same sex marriage bans held up and reinforced homosexuality as the great social boogeyman.

As for demonizing the opposition, Bush has demonstrated a mastery not surprising for the reputed loyalty enforcer for his father George H. W. Bush. The Iraq war was sold to America with questionable WMD intelligence reinforced with constant imagery of mushroom clouds and dirty bombs. Critics of the Iraq war were compared to Nazi appeasers. Outrage at Bush’s warrantless wiretapping was met by Bush charging that Democrats don’t want us to listen in on the terrorists.

This is government without consensus, an elbow-your-way-to-the-front approach that cuts the knees out of those who dare speak in opposition. It’s the inevitable fruit of doing the outrageous and casting those who react indignantly as being the “real” extremists.

Extremes in the Cross and the Crescent

Religious extremists make my butt tired.

Pope Benedict quotes an obscure Byzantine emperor who called the Muslim faith evil and one that was spread by the sword. Muslims worldwide failed to hear the "I quote" before the passage, and they riot and burn churches. Then Al Qaeda puts forth a statement that the Pope and the West are "doomed" and that eventually our choice will be "conversion or the sword." Um, didn't that statement just appear to validate the Byzantine's view of Islam? "How dare you say we're violent! Convert or die!" Anyone else see the illogic?

Yet some Christians seem bent on proving Rosie O'Donnell right. While I plow through a flurry of forwarded e-mails calling on everyone to send a Christmas card to the ACLU and bury them in mail, I read about Christian Zionism (which in part holds that the establishment of Israel is part of Biblical prophecy) and its support by GOP head Ken Mehlman and Sen. Rick Santorum. It was Santorum, speaking in July at the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) first Washington-Israel summit, who invoked this belief in a call to stop negotiating with Iran and take action against it. CUFI is a newly formed political organization that tells its members that supporting Israel's expansionist policies is "a Biblical imperative." CUFI was founded by John Hagee, the head of the 18,000 person Cornerstone Church in San Antonio who believes that "a nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty."

No wonder I often feel like I'm walking between two big rabid dogs, hoping neither of them takes notice of me and decides to bite.