MLB Tonight: Glenn Beck Deconstructed

"I'm terrible with sports."

One wonders why Glenn Beck bothered with the preposition and direct object at all. He uses the fact that Sonia Sotomayor once issued an injunction that ended the 1994 Major League Baseball strike as an excuse to try his hand at extended sports analogy, while analyzing anything that occurs to him. It's the same sort of word salad that ensues when you take the elderly out of hospice care for the day and they editorialize about every thing they see outside the car. Only in this case the person who shits himself and operates barely above a signals-recognition level has the second-highest rated cable opinion show.

I'm not even sure why he writes. The pieces are too short to make a point, let alone five. If they're an advertisement for his ad-libbing on TV, they're remarkably faithful to the content but misguided as brainbait. I suppose these things could just be the 30-second homily that ends his show, or he could legitimately be blogging these things intentionally. That seems hard to swallow, though, because of the the last two dramatically carriage-returned microparagraphs in his piece from May 27 (emphases mine):

In honor of President Obama's new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who saved the world by ending the Major League Baseball strike of 1994, I'd like to end with a little baseball analogy.

(I'm terrible with sports, so bear with me.)

Our government needs to keep their eye on the ball when nominating Supreme Court justices. We shouldn't be looking for someone who shows "empathy." Making decisions based on empathy is a violation of the Supreme Court justice's oath and it would lead to some horrible legal decisions based on feeling, not law.

We need China to stand up to the screwballs in North Korea and Iran over nuclear weapons and we need them to buy our debt. In other words, China holds the key to our economic and military future, so why are we talking to them about global warming?

And finally, the gay marriage debate in California: Instead of focusing on this as a states' rights issue, we are making a huge error by looking to international courts to form opinions.

Right now, it's the bottom of the ninth and we are down to our last out and our last strike.

Will our government take strike three looking? Or, will they wake up and save the day with a heroic three pointer on a penalty shot?

It's just a fuckup of such majesty that I literally cannot deal with it. I don't have the brainpower to navigate these kinds of mixed metaphors. Reading this is like doing one of those children's mazes on a McDonald's placemat, only no matter where you turn your pen, someone punches you in the fucking face. Your brain slams against the inside of your skull trying to process it. You get concussed.

Because I can't deal with that, I thought I'd turn to two people who didn't have that kind of problem, two men who really know their way around both punditry and the sports metaphor. Please welcome our guest analysts, Hall of Fame second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds' "Big Red Machine" and host of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, Joe Morgan; and former catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and host of FOX MLB Saturday and The Tim McCarver Show, Tim McCarver.

___________________
See that's the thing. Glenn Beck gets it. As a ballplayer, as a pundit, it's times like this in life that you've just got to dig in, hunker down in the trenches and step lively. The dustoff pitch might be coming, but when it does you've got to dust yourself off and be ready to do the little things, make the sacrifice and swing for those fences. Keep your eyes on the prize and the ball. The left eye doesn't see what the right eye is doing.

You know, he's a real hard-nosed and small-ball and rough-'n'-tumble scrappy player, Glenn Beck is. This is going to surprise you, but the person he reminds me most of is David Eckstein. Believe it. Really scrappy, small guy, tries hard, albino, cries a lot but they're tears that wet down the infield and keep the dust down. Glenn Beck is a cry-hard hitter, because he hits cries a ton and doesn't back down.

I know what you mean, Tim. I do. I believe in saying what you said. You look at Glenn Beck and his tears are something that don't show up in the statistics. There's no crying statistic in baseball and there shouldn't be, because you can literally tell a computer or a robot to cry and they have to because you programmed them to do it, which is actually what makes them explode, because they're electrical. But David Eckstein—and Glenn Beck, I mean—is a machine. Not a Big Red Machine, like I played on, but a crying machine. He really makes Team America better because he pulls them up by their heartstrings.

That is what I have meant for a long time, Joe. You can't look at the box score and talk about tearing up the way Glenn Beck does it, because the box score doesn't talk about crying, doesn't talk about how he's willing to look America in the eyes, in those calm eyes he has. The box score doesn't talk at all. They're just printed words. You have to get a person to say them out loud, and you can't hear a person from a basement. But when you hear them said, you have to read between the lines and examine the fine print. You know what's printed there, in the mind's eye?—heart.

I'm reminded of that movie about the women's baseball team. Remember that one? Starred Tom Hanks, who was in Big. In Big, he put a quarter into a machine and made a wish and became an adult and he learned something about being an adult and a child. I love that movie because he learned to work harder, to get from first to second—in life. You know who sometimes looks a little bit like Tom Hanks? My friend Dave Concepción.

Glenn Beck's got a babyface, but you know who else did? Don Drysdale. Don Drysdale used to say that he had a big babyface. That's what the other teams used to call him, Big Baby Drysdale. They say he sharted once into second base in the 1963 World Series but was called out on interference for being too adorable. Classic case of throwing out the baby with the baserunner before the barn door could come home to roost like a prodigal wolf in sheep's clothing.

Not afraid to get a l'il dirty. That's how you play the game right. Gritty. Shitty.

I'm sure the jukebox jackdaws and the statistics nabobs will tell you that sharting into the bases results in a 3% reduction in headfirst slides, but not when Charlie Hustle was playing. He didn't care if he had just stolen second and laid down a hershey highway coming into the bag. That's the kind of player he was. Hard-nosed and head first and that's what really inspires a team — that and crying.

I had the chance to play with him on the Big Red Machine with him and Davey Concepción, and I have to say, I think it made him faster. He launched like a bat out of hell into the wild second yonder like a rocket from the crypt, and you could tell when he felt the need for that speed he would sometimes show up at second base before the pitch was made to home, and the pitcher just didn't know what to do because you can't go home again.

Did I ever tell you about the time Whitey Herzog and I were in a Cadillac and thought we saw a portal opening up to the steaming feculent maw of Hell? We were so drunk — this was back when you could be drunk on the road as a ballplayer, not like now, when you have to do more training — I tried to drive into it because I thought I could destroy The Devil with Detroit steel. I couldn't, it was a roadside callbox, but that's especially true today. Right now the two devils are socialism and statistics, because they say the devil is in the details and in his bargains. Right now we're replacing our steel resolve with a weak hand that we've dealt ourselves into a corner. The only thing that can break us out is hustle.

Speaking of hustling, I think Beck makes a good point there about getting gay sex and sex before gay marriage. I think about gay marriage as like the infield fly rule, when you have a man on first or second and then another MAN comes up to bat, he either has to get a new base or he's called out. Unless he's really committed to that new base, and it's a woman base, and that's why they don't have that rule in softball.

Gay marriage is gay marriage, and straight marriage is straight marriage. I don't think anyone believes that gay marriage is the same as straight marriage. California isn't going to call straight gay or gay straight, and it's going to be fine. You're not going to see any lifestyle more taxing to live than an another.

That's where you're wrong. I think that—I think taxes are like the sacrifice fly. I think you've got to take yourself out of the game a little, but it lets the team win. But you can't get over the top of the ball. You've got to go deep. No one ever paid an estate tax taking a walk. Is there such a thing as On-Tax Percentage? No. You try walking in a tax. Rich people do all the little things. Go from first to third on a single. Steal. To be honest, most rich people remind me of my friend Dave Concepción.

When the Game of Life gets confusing like this, a lot of the times you'll see a player call for time in this situation, which is funny, because of course they can't stop time. Some have theorized there may be beings who can experience the whole timeline all at once, like seeing the ninth inning at the same time as the first and thinking they exist at the same time. That would be a VERY confusing way of looking at a ballgame, but I think if anyone could handle it, it'd be Bob Uecker. Speaking of Bob reminds me of a TV series called Out of This World, about a girl who could stop time. Amazing fact about that: the concept was revisited recently in the movie Clockstoppers. Which was directed by Johnathan Frakes.

Commander Riker.

Yes! Who I believe used radiation from the Duane Kuiper belt to accomplish that effect in the movie. Of course, it could harm the brain waves of the actors, making them erratic. That would be very similar to what happened to Joe Theismann, when he killed that guy.

Shhhh. I'm Billy Beane. I'm wearing Joe Morgan's skin like a suit. I get pulled over all the fucking time now.

Reminiscent of the movie Dragon Hannibal.

You can't tell me how much that movie made at the box office. It FELT real. To me. To Me as Him. The world he saw around him was imperfect. He saw the game — America's game — broken in two. Rogers Hornsby, greatest second baseman of all time, and he knew he was a racist, that that wasn't the way it is and that things didn't have to be the same, and he had to unite them, the Two Americas. He devoured the evil of The Other in Blake's vision. He became The Dragon. He had to father and give birth to himself. Self-Concepción. He became the Big Red Machine.

I disagree, Joe. There aren't Two Americas. You can split anything with numbers, but we're a whole. Three-hundred years ago a beautiful negress knelt at a crossroads outside New Orleans and wept to the night sky as she held a single rose close to her bosom, vowing to catch in it moonlight as it fell to earth like celestial nectar. Later she drank from it a tonic of her own tears and the night's gentle dew. Near her, in the brush, stood an Indian chief transfixed by her visage, who eventually girded himself to bring her another rose sweetened by the contents of a found honeycomb. The two later married and the child they bore was the first of generations of a tribe that eventually sired me, The St. Louis Cardinals.

Fuck math, fuck numbers, fuck everything. I want to drink blood. I want cum, piss, shit. I want to fill my pants with my piss and squib down a child's playground slide and fire out of it like a lubricated golf ball going *PUH* and launching out a whore's ass. Fuck truth, fuck a flag, stick your dick in a terrarium and fuck a whole microecology, fuck this gay Earth. I will EAT it. I will cut open a still-living bird and put my face inside it and try to snort out its fucking life essence. This is why I should represent YOU as Alameda County Supervisor of Elections.

Thanks to e-crony Rigamarock, who wrote about a third of the chat bits (the bad parts).

Your One-Stop Torture Shop

By now, unless you live in a hole, you probably realize that the United States tortured people. Unless you have your head up your ass, you also realize that this is an ineffective, inhumane and inexcusable practice. And if you've ever uttered a sentence about it on the internet, you probably understand that arguing about it is usually a time-consuming chore.

For one thing, advocates for torture tend not to know a lot of facts about it — this usually explains why they advocate it — leaving you to do a lot of explaining. For another, they tend to hysterically shout out red herrings about fantastic terrors, false equivalencies ("We can either torture, or New York can get reduced to post-atomic ash"), question begging ("60% of the time, it works all the time") or just move the goalposts on you until you give up. Viz.:

Kim Jong Il Enjoys Art Performance Given by KPA Company Soldiers

Pyongyang, May 25 (KCNA) -- General Secretary Kim Jong Il enjoyed an art performance given by soldiers of the Kamnamu (persimmon tree) company of the KPA honored with the title of the thrice three-revolution red flag together with servicepersons of the KPA.

The soldiers of the company known to the whole country as a symbol of Kim Jong Il's loving care for the soldiers put on the stage chorus "Our General Is the Best", story-telling and song "General and Our Kamnamu Company", quartet and chorus "May Soldiers' Song of Happiness Reverberate Far and Wide", poem and song "The Blue Sky over My Country", instrumental music and song "Our Days as Soldiers", solo and chorus "Who Ever Taught Me?", chorus and dance "Song of Coastal Artillery Women", chorus "Footstep" and other colorful numbers of various genres.

Yeah, that's how my PR guys wrote it up. Let me give you my version:


I Would Totally Fuck All These Bitches
by KIM JONG-IL

I didn't have very great hopes when I came out to this event. I know the lead singer: a cute, saucy female officer who I'd seen on parade long ago, determining that I would bone her, if I had the chance. And one other little cadet I know. A full-figured tart who was brought out of the sticks to work undercover security when we had the Burmese foreign minister in Pyongyang (Pig-fuckers are still pissed off about '83), and who's been on duty at my weekend palace ever since. But then as I look about the table at this after-party, it dawns on me that none of the assembled women here are beastly, and that given the opportunity, I would totally fuck all these bitches.

Endut! Hoch Hech!

No reason at all.

Doesn't have to be a reason.

Auto-Tune the News

Here's one of the few bummers about the internet: everyone feels like they have to be a reporter. Remember in high school finding some fucked-up track on an album and having that moment of pleasure in knowing that you knew about this and you would be able to watch an expression of bewilderment and then wonder dawn on a friend's face as you played it for him? That's gone. It's been replaced with the sense that you've got to run that story as soon as possible.

Between Twitter and Facebook, not to mention internet-enabled phones, everyone's broadcasting anything slightly interesting they find at each other, whether because they lack any sense of filtering or because they're need to get to something first and ride some peripheral coolness wave for finding it. Granted, there's always a sense of contact-cool inherent in finding and sharing something interesting — as if it suggests that your role is Bringer of Cool Shit to the village — but the shotgun approach of "z0mg CLICK TIHS LINK!!!!!1" removes the personal aspect entirely.

Donald Rumsfeld, Church Group Member with MSPaint Promote Iraq War as Christian Crusade, Endanger Us All

From GQ:

ON THE MORNING OF Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president... The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine... At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—“would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

By the time you see this, there will be dozens of far more intelligent and informed people delineating what a horrible, nationally and religiously narcissistic and ill-conceived idea this was, but it bears repeating. President Bush had already employed the word "crusade" to describe America's counter-terrorism struggles before these briefings were created. That statement and his subsequent division of the world into a Manichaean vision of Good v. Evil, Light v. Dark, Us v. Them shaped the Islamic world's perception of America's policy as inherently a Christian crusade.

Meanwhile, the American military command structure fostered an increasing perception of itself as a Christian organization, an "Arsenal of Christianity," utterly exempt from the Establishment Clause. Jeff Sharlet describes the growth of this perception in the excellent "Jesus Killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian Military." And while domestically it's important to acknowledge the severe erosion of the military's former agnosticism and its internal hijacking by people determined to defend the constitution by undermining the first amendment, that attitudinal shift has enormous implications internationally.

LOST: Let the Fear in

I have nothing to offer about the recent season finale, so I'll spare you speculation. Instead, I offer you this video a friend of mine first sent me months ago, probably years after it was hip or relevant. The audio is taken from an early episode of LOST. I'm not geek enough to know which one. But, because I'd seen this clip, I understood a point made in tonight's season finale and how it impacted a character. Here it is:


I love this clip. I love how it's creepy and weird and kid-unfriendly. Everything about it is good. Everything is so... crazy. So real.

Great Moments in Green Initiative, Trucking

I was awake this morning at about four a.m., slouched in a camping chair, feet propped up on a table, reading by the back porch light. I've always been habitually nocturnal, but recurring headaches this last week (it's a tumor; I'm going to die) have kept me up to the point of exhaustion. Under most circumstances, I'd take being obliged to be awake as an excuse to read more, but the headaches make print almost unbearable to deal with. On a computer, I can hit CTRL and + and magnify the fonts on a website, or I can type in 24pt. Book text remains stubbornly, space-efficiently small.

For whatever reason, I forced myself to read a book last night, in spite of the headache, to get shit done, to preserve my occasional reputation as someone who can get shit done completely, so that when strangers ask associates of mine, "Who is that man? What kind of man would you say he is?" they can reply, "He is a shit-done getter in such comprehensive ways that his shit-done-ing admits of no incompletion. He's a man who gets. shit. done. Completely."

Youtube Doubler V: You're Going to Die

Previous Doubler Posts:

Youtube Doubler I

Youtube Doubler II
Youtube Doubler III
Youtube Doubler IV:

Youtube Doubler V (Click image):

Or try a semi-familiar but thoroughly satisfying alternate take suggested by my buddy Robert.

'Mr. Mike's Mondo Video'; or, Were You There When They Crucified Jack Lord?

"Well, you see, there is no moral, Uncle Remus, just random acts of meaningless violence."
— Michael O'Donoghue, Least-Loved Bedtime Tales

There's an old saw about how all comedy is really just sublimated aggression. As Krusty the Clown says to Sideshow Bob's brother Cecil, before ordering a "pie job for Lord Autumn-Bottom," the "pie gag only works if the sap's got dignity." You can't laugh at the humiliation if it doesn't rob another person of his self-respect. As beautifully and succinctly as The Simpsons put it, probably nobody's career exemplifies the comedy-as-anger concept better than Michael O'Donoghue's.

Even if the name's not familiar, you can probably quote a dozen of his bits off the top of your head. O'Donoghue was the head writer for Saturday Night Live's first three seasons, and its inaugural sketch set the tone for the show while giving a perfect summary of his own vision of comedy. In it, O'Donoghue sits opposite John Belushi, who's playing a monoglot immigrant trying to learn English. O'Donoghue, pausing twice, reads out the helpful English phrase: "I would like... to feed your fingertips... to the wolverines."

Come to Libertarian Paradise!

For a couple of weeks now, liberal bloggers have had numerous viral images at their disposal, lampooning The Nuge or Glenn Beck, which they've used in response to libertarian commentators shrieking about "socialism." But unfortunately, such tactics merely attack the messenger instead of the message. Even if both are equally noxious, focusing on the former gives the latter a free pass. Now, thankfully, there's just a Youtube video they can link to, that wraps everything up nicely.


What's more, libertarians probably shouldn't complain about the treatment. As the INFO section of this Youtube video provides, the whackjobs at the Von Mises institute — the nurturing ideological bosom for racist, insane and destructive shits like Ron Paul — have long advocated that there is truly a nation that dares to create on this earth the magical realm of Libertopia. They call it Somalia.

Poor political cartoonists: once again, with libertarians, they mistakenly assume that the most offensively stupid and lunatic thing they can imagine will satirize the libertarian perception of reality, instead of merely describing it.

Jersey Bedeviled

For the longest time, I couldn't see the purpose in wearing a team jersey to a ballgame. Do I need to display my allegiance? I already bought the overpriced ticket to get in, and I plan on getting at least two beers at the game, too. That's like the down-payment on a hatchback. Displaying fealty by paying more money to a multi-million dollar empire seemed like a double-toll. Hell, between tickets and taxpayer-funded stadiums, in theory the team ought to run out there with pictures of random fans and the shape of the county on their jerseys.

To a certain extent, I still don't get the jersey impulse, in part because of some of the people wearing them. If you can rest a pitcher of beer on your stomach while standing, there is no message any sport's jersey broadcasts louder than the one your gut does. Football jerseys, as a rule, just seem odd. Baseball's a sport almost anyone can play, but it's hard to picture most people in a football jersey having played the game past 8th grade.

Baseball jerseys just work better. This is a sport where Prince Fielder is a superstar, despite looking like the product of the Michelin Man and an obese anthropomorphic brownie making babies. This is a sport where the 1986 World Champion Mets smoked cigarettes in the dugout. Almost all baseball jerseys look good on women, because they're basically like men's dress shirts; and all women are sexy wearing a man's dress shirt and nothing else.

Clearly, whatever my problems with sports jerseys, I got over them. Or maybe I just got used to them. Maybe the impulse to fit in wore down my snarky asides over dozens of trips to the ballpark. Sure, I often ask myself, "Why are people smaller than I am wearing XXXL jerseys," but now I usually follow that up with, "And where did they get them?"

The more I looked into it, the more I discovered how much of a problem getting team jerseys can be, both in terms of cost and presentation. My buddy Glenn illustrated this perfectly the other weekend when we headed out to the baseball mausoleum to catch the Rays hosting the White Sox. He wanted to wear a Rays jersey to the game and went shopping at the last minute. Balking at $150 for authentic team jerseys, he went to Wal-Mart and got a Rays jersey for $30. It was perfect — well, apart from the fact that the team's name was in cursive and apparently in the sort of electric pastels usually reserved for the side of a waverunner. At the sports bar, later, I think he got a high-five from a similarly economically minded fan.

Remembering Jack Kemp, via Twitter

I never really had much against Jack Kemp, except for most of what he stood for. True, once you peeled back his Chicago School economics, his advocacy for the nonsensical Flat Tax, his belief in the gold standard, his aggressive militarism, his support for the Contras, his anti-abortion stance and his bizarre fear about letting homosexuals teach in schools, he had some good ideas, like supporting affirmative action.

Views like this last one go to explaining how the last 24 hours have produced a hagiography of his "bipartisanship." It's a testament to how much conservatism has pushed rhetoric to the far right in America that someone who holds as many as three or four non-doctrinaire conservative opinions resembles something like a charismatically free-thinking renegade. Personally, having a few good ideas amidst an entire spread of noxiously bad ones suggests little more to me than that someone screwed up somewhere. Kind of like going to a salad bar filled with chum, separated organ parts, dead ants, roofing nails and tire-flattened bluejays, except for one dish of shredded carrots: the question then becomes not, "Where did all these ghastly things come from?" but rather, "Who's the dumbass who forgot to throw out these carrots?"

Alex Rodriguez Is a Smooth Criminal

I love Alex Rodriguez. Except for what he does on the baseball field, everything about him is plastic, incompetent and weird. Most of which is hilarious. Rodriguez might now be an overrated baseball talent, but his deeply underrated career as a whacko public figure is just beginning.

The unraveling began February, when reporter Selena Roberts came forward with the revelation that A-Rod had taken steroids while with the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez admitted to taking them for a couple years because he felt burdened by his insane contract and obliged to put up offensive numbers commensurate with the numbers in his paycheck. This turned out to be a lie. Yesterday, the New York Daily News reprinted information from leaked copies of Roberts' book, A-Rod, which detailed how he had taken steroids in high school, had taken HGH after leaving the Texas Rangers for the New York Yankees and — allegedly, amazingly — even had a quid pro quo agreement with other teams' infielders to "tip" pitches to them in blowout games to help up their offensive stats and bust through slumps.

While the details are somewhat shocking, the fact that more iniquities were revealed shouldn't be. A-Rod's always been a disingenuous bastard; this, after all, was the guy who wanted to be traded to the Yankees to "play for a contender," when it was his ludicrous contract that absorbed his current team's revenue and precluded their fielding a contender's roster. (If contending was really that important to him, he wouldn't have entered high pressure negotiations that created the implosion of his team's ability to pay for good teammates.) But it was the way he handled the February revelations that told anyone paying attention that there was more going on.