David Wadler’s Assorted Thoughts

Everyone’s favorite icon of female sexuality-cum-cultist is sounding off on the U.S. election. In an article on the ABC News Website, the one-time Material Girl said, “In terms of the elections, I don’t agree with so many things and the decisions that George Bush has made and I’m not happy with the situation in Iraq. I do believe that the American public has been manipulated to a great degree.” I have no quarrel with her there. The part that concerns me is the sentence that follows:

“In the end, we have to say, ‘OK, we didn’t win, but there’s other ways to fix the problems, so now what else can I do to help?’ ”

The reason that I’m troubled by the previous sentence is that it seems to be a rhetorical question. Does Madonna really want to know what she can do to help? She can stop pontificating. This election demonstrated quite clearly that she, Puff Daddy/P.Diddy, Michael Moore, Janeane Garofalo, Sean Penn, and a host of others were absolutely ineffective at rallying the Democratic base. I suspect that there are few things on television more galling that rich celebrities pushing their agendas. Interesting, isn’t it, how the Democratic party — the party that looks after labor unions, the poor, and blue collar workers — has been tagged with the elitist label? If one looks at the Democratic platform, it’s quite clear that this isn’t a policy issue, but a marketing issue. So I urge them to get off the boob tube, dig into their pocketbooks, and put their money where their mouths were.

While there has been no shortage of media coverage about the recent release of Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, I feel compelled to add my voice to the mix. For those of you who have paged through previous blog entries, you’ll note that I don’t write entries on any sort of regular schedule (though I tried, albeit briefly) and that I seem somewhat fixated on baseball (guilty as charged). Perhaps in an effort to avoid polemical emails, I have generally shied away from sharing my political views with strangers via the Internet. Thus far, the only unsolicited mail I’ve received via this website has been positive and affirming. That said, I’ve grown weary of what seems to be an increasingly polarized view of our country, its foreign policy, and its elected leaders. I have a friend visiting from Paris and he is astonished when watching Fox News (“It’s like they’re not allowed to criticize Bush. They just throw away all of the information and say he’s great.”) or any of the other cable news networks (“Why don’t they just tell you the facts instead of telling you what your opinion should be?”) There are so many politicians and pundits being compared to Joseph Goebbels that I’ve lost count.

The cover of this week’s issue of The New York Press asks a rather pointed question: Is Michael Moore a fascist? You’d think if Michael Moore could score with someone, it would be an African American from his home state of Michigan. But Armond White skewers Fahrenheit and takes Moore to task repeatedly for editing decisions that range from lazy to disingenuous. But Michael Moore isn’t a fascist, but rather the embodiment of almost everything that he’s fought. To look at him is to see the stereotypical “ugly American,” unshaven, morbidly obese, and typically clad in ratty clothes and a baseball hat. But Moore’s appearance is not the problem. And though it raises more than a few eyebrows, his hypocrisy, i.e. his wealth, apparent lack of compassion, and status among society’s elites, does not necessarily invalidate his message. Moore’s lack of credibility stems not from his lifestyle or his personality, but rather from his dishonesty.

Irony was lost amid the boos that rained down on Michael Moore after punctuated his “Best Documentary” Oscar speech by lambasting George W. Bush, calling him a “fictitious president.” No matter what your views are on the 2000 election (full disclosure: I think what happened was a travesty, which puts me squarely in the Moore camp), it’s hard to accept anything Moore says as truthful. The documentary film category is supposed to recognize directors who released films that are, in the words of Merriam Webster, “factual” and “objective.” Bowling for Columbine was neither.

I’m not naive enough to believe that anyone is truly objective. Our views and attitudes are shaped by our experiences and they inform everything we say, write, and do. But even if I dismiss objectivity as a requirement, I can’t be so forgiving about Moore’s lack of honesty. Were the Academy to add a category for propaganda, or perhaps, documentary-style editorial films, I wouldn’t object to a film like Bowling for Columbine’s being nominated or awarded an Oscar. But for Michael Moore to indict the media, as he did later in his rant, for not “doing their job” was blatantly hypocritical. Western societies get most of their information from the media, be it the news media, Internet, film, newspapers, magazines, or some other source. Should Michael Moore want to hold CNN to a certain standard, shouldn’t he aspire to that level as well. In the case of a major news organization, there is so much internal accountability that one can almost (but not quite) understand why the reporting is lacking. But for a “documentary” filmmaker, the layers of bureaucracy are far thinner and the director is empowered to deliver the unvarnished truth in a way that a newspaper or television channel can’t. This freedom demands of the filmmaker a great responsibility, a responsibility that Michael Moore was ill-equipped to handle.

Cogent Moore defenders will rationalize away his factual liberties by labeling him a polemicist or a propagandist. I submit that if one accepts those labels, one can no longer take Moore seriously as a documentary filmmaker. The half-truths and outright lies in Bowling for Columbine are, by now, well documented. Among them:

• The scene where Moore opens an account at a bank and walks out with a gun was staged.
• A Charlton Heston speech that was purportedly delivered just after the Flint school shooting actually took place almost a year later.
• The Lockheed Martin facility in Littleton that manufactures “weapons of mass destruction” actually makes rockets for television satellites. Moore was close; he should have said that they launched “weapons of mass distraction.”

The problem with Moore is that he’s become the boy who cried wolf. Roger & Me was an excellent film, and Moore’s rise from behind-the-scenes magazine editor to national (and now international) public figure has been Horatio Algeresque. But every pimply teenager who has read Spiderman knows that “With great power comes great responsibility.” If Stan Lee doesn’t land in Bartlett’s for that, someone isn’t doing his job. What Moore seems to have missed is a lesson that every college student learns, “Power corrupts.” Having risen to prominence in our popular culture, he has a platform the likes of which most will never know. While he assails the corruptive influence of power in those around him, though, Moore remains unwilling or unable to look in the mirror.

Why does this matter? In broad terms, this is important because so many people in this country develop opinions by consuming the information that’s placed before them. Funny pictures and embarrassing sound bytes may be easily digestible, but aren’t necessarily nourishing. French documentary film maker, Jean-Luc Goddard, commenting on Fahrenheit 9/11, said, “Moore doesn’t distinguish between text and image. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But again, the question is “Why does this matter?” Goddard has an answer: “He’s not even hurting Bush. He’s helping him in an underground way. Bush is either less stupid than he looks or so stupid you can’t change him.” That’s an interesting argument, but the issue isn’t simply George Bush, or the U.S.A., or Roger Smith, or any of Moore’s other preferred targets. It’s Moore himself. It’s not inherently wrong for a director to make himself such an important component of his “documentary” film. But Moore’s insistence on branding himself has seriously damaged his credibility even while it’s padded his bank account. His anonymity gone, the film-going audience has little choice but to connect the mistruths in his film’s to the director. And how many times can he cry wolf before we stop believing?

The sad part of all of this is that I don’t totally disagree with Moore. I, too, am upset about the 2000 election, the President’s foreign and domestic policy, and the continued assaults on the Constitution by the current administration and the Congress. In succumbing to his ego and making himself bigger than the issues, Moore undermines the issues he claims to espouse. To his potential detractors, Moore says, “You come at me with anything, we come back with the truth.” Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Related reading:
Newsweek’s look at some questions about Fahrenheit 9/11:

“Pied Piper or Bully”

A Documentary on Michael Moore

A “horrible human being?” Ray Bradbury thinks so.

Harold Reynolds
I used to really enjoy listening to HR on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, but this year, I’ve made the mistake of paying attention to what he’s saying. I think that the problem with many analysts who are former players is that the game came easily and was physically intuitive to them. Consequently, they haven’t had to study the sport in any objective way.

In any case, Harold was talking about over-rated statistics and cited On-Base Percentage (OBP) as an example. He pointed to Jason Giambi, who annually ranks among the league leaders in that category, and explained that the Yankees 1B/DH clogs up the bases. After pointing out a few other players who have high OBPs, but don’t run well, Harold switched gears and talked about prototypical speedy leadoff men. While Juan Pierre could hardly be accused of slowing anyone down, he’s only moderately effective as a leadoff hitter because he doesn’t get on base often enough. At the end of the game, the team that scores more runs wins the game. Run production correlates fairly highly with OBP, but correlation coefficients are likely of little interest to the majority to the retired player analysts on ESPN.

What made Harold’s statement that much more annoying to me is that he cited — just 2 or 3 days later — the Yankees as having one of the most potent offenses in baseball. You’re probably thinking, “But that’s true, isn’t it?” Absolutely, but his rationale was this: The Yankees are struggling and are among the worst in the league in batting average, but thus far, they are among the league leaders in base runners. What’s that mean? All of those high OBP guys have some value. Strange…. Just a few days earlier, getting on base was overrated.

Celebrity Kids
Apple? Please. Why do so many celebrity parents feel compelled to thumb their noses at the general public by giving their children ridiculous names. In fact, Apple is relatively innocuous when compared to Moon Unit, Audio Science, and Pilot Inspektor. For the best of the worst, check out this article.

MythTV
I recently put together a MythTV box, running on Gentoo Linux. I have mixed feelings about both Myth and Gentoo thus far. Getting everything up-and-running was certainly not a trivial process and when Myth was finally working, the picture quality wasn’t very good. I was going to do some tweaking, but I hosed my machine today and will have to get it fixed before I do so.

INDIGESTION
I’ve seen some funny pictures online, but these pictures of 400+ pound competitive eater Eric “Badlands” Booker at the Second Annual Hebrew Institute of Riverdale Hamentashen Eating Contest were hysterical.

DREAM JOB
Making fun of the contestants from ESPN’s “Dream Job” is like shooting ducks in a barrel. Or are they sitting fish? Whatever your mixed metaphor, it�s easy to mock their stumbles and quirks. Dan Shanoff writes a weekly recap column about the show. He has spent the last few weeks apotheosizing Al Jaffe, a network vice president who oversees ESPN�s on-air hiring. On last night’s episode, Jaffe seemed particularly fixated on the contestants’ mispronunciation of several words, including Xavier on two occasions. He later said, “Mispronunciations are unacceptable. We would never hire someone who made the mispronunciations we heard tonight.” This was noteworthy (AND ironic) because the first couple of times he corrected a contestant, Jaffe actually mispronounced mispronunciation. (He said something that sounded like mis-pro-noun-see-ee-aye-shun.)

I also thought it amusing the Tony Kornheiser, a writer for The Washington Post and a real stickler for accuracy talked about people’s “get[ting] hung” for mistakes. The sportswriter cum television personality should have learned in class — he was an English major in college — that while clothing is hung, people are hanged.

Lastly, ESPN.com remains the best sports web site by leaps and bounds, but I am often surprised by a marked lack of editing. In the aforementioned Shanoff column, the word “necessarly” crept into a sentence. That’s no word at all, but rather a misspelling of necessarily. No, it’s not the end of the world, but an organization with ESPN’s resources should be able to pony up for a spellchecker.

BASEBALL NOTES
Baseball has an effect on me that none of the other major sports do. I find football more entertaining, think hockey games are a treat to see in person, and follow the NBA closely. But baseball’s mix of nostalgia and numbers, combined with its status as a harbinger of spring moves me in a way that the NFL, NBA, and NHL don’t…and can’t. I’ve liked baseball long enough to have seen the players transform from long-and-lean (think Keith Hernandez) and (ahem) “stocky” (think Greg Luzinski) into the muscle-bound athletes they are today. I would never argue against baseball�s position as a sporting contest, but I am sometimes reminded that most ballplayers aren�t the physical specimens that their counterparts in other sports are.

In Peter Gammons’s article today, Jose Guillen spoke frankly about having to play some games in centerfield. “I can play there, but I never realized how much running you do. Sometimes if I have to run a long way for a ball for the final out and I lead off the next inning, I’m a little tired. But I can handle it.” ‘Nuff said.

Another interesting thing about the Gammons column was his comment on THG. (I think Peter Gammons is a fantastic baseball guy, but no one is above reproach.) He claims not to understand the outrage over the use of THG, citing the fact that it wasn’t deemed illegal until after the 2003 World Series. If you want to check out my thoughts on baseball’s drug policy, click here or here. For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to rehash what I’ve already said, but rather hone in on a point. Players were advised that they shouldn’t be taking steroids after the last collective bargaining agreement in 2002. Was THG on the list? No. Why not? It�s quite likely that THG didn’t exist when the drug policy was drafted. For that matter, any new designer steroids will not be on a list until after they are discovered. That was the point of THG — to elude detection while providing a boost in strength and recovery time. The spirit of the rule dictates that THG and its ilk are out-of-bounds. No agency can proactively ban all steroids by name because to my knowledge, there are no psychics who can predict which molecules will be manipulated. Therefore, all known anabolic steroids and unknown variations thereof must be banned.

NEYER
Rob Neyer makes a bunch of assertions about Eric Chavez today that range from specious to bizarre. Chavez is a good hitter whom Neyer thinks is a consensus “great hitter.” The problem is that the same writer would argue that Garret Anderson is overrated — certainly from a sabermetric standpoint. As I see it, Chavez’s big advantages over Anderson relate to his age (Neyer appropriately does cite age) and his defensive position. Not only is it harder to find a run-producing third baseman than it is an outfielder, an elite defensive third baseman is much more valuable than a good defensive outfielder. Neyer seems to make a habit of discarding information that doesn’t jive with his preconceived notions. I strongly doubt that he would classify Garret Anderson as a great of “near great” hitter.

One other peeve regarding the article in question. (I have many more peeves, but my fingers are tiring.) Neyer writes, “Let’s run a short thought experiment … Suppose you had an outfielder who hit a home run every time he faced a right-handed pitcher (intentional walks notwithstanding), but batted just .100 against left-handers. Wouldn’t you still be thrilled to have that player, and pay him top dollar?”

Huh? How is this an experiment? I don’t necessarily need a control group for his example, but this is just ridiculous. Neyer asserts (by way of question) that Chavez’s struggles with left-handers don’t substantially diminish his value or his perceived value according to his overall numbers. I would agree with that. But the “experiment” is both strange and terribly unconvincing. The simple argument is this: Chavez murders right-handed pitching. Most pitchers are righties. Chavez will perform at a very high level against most pitchers. Q.E.D.

(If you’re interested, take a look at statistical comparison tool that my friend whipped up recently: http://www.intap.net/cgi-bin/drw/bball-test.pl.

THOSE GOSSIP PAGES
Lloyd Grove wrote about how students “brown-nosed” when dealing with fellow student John F. Kennedy Jr. at Brown University in the 1980s. These comments were related by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour during a “48 Hours Investigates” interview with Leslie Stahl. That may or may not be true, but Grove’s claim that Amanpour attended school with Kennedy is certainly not. Amanpour went to the University of Rhode Island, where she graduated summa cum laude. Take a look at her bio. George Rush, a gossip columnist and Brown graduate at the same paper, is likely readying is evil eye for his colleague. I suppose fact-checking belies the whole business of reporting gossip, eh?