- My secret is herein revealed - I'm an old sportswriter
who has been playing the same game for nigh on half a century.
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- In this Internet incarnation, my subject matter has changed
considerably, though the general purpose of my writing really has not.
It has always been my intention to get people to reflect on the folly of
the their own behavior, and these are lessons that can always be drawn
against any background.
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- My first bylined newspaper story hit the streets in 1957.
It was about my grammar school baseball team. Not so ironic that this my
latest effort should be partly about the same game, beloved baseball, which
I once, in my eagerly optimistic youth, regarded as a ritual of cosmic
significance.
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- Now, at a time when shuffleboard would probably be the
more appropriate game for me, I realize that baseball may not be the Zen-like
avenue of transcendence I once imagined it to be, but it nevertheless is
an appropriate sociological barometer of this pathetic hoax that is American
popular culture.
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- So I thought when I watched canonized slugger Mark McGwire
testify recently before a Congressional panel investigating the use of
steroid drugs in professional baseball. His voice crackled. Tears welled
in the corners his eyes. It soon became obvious that here was a man who
had reaped the highest adulation of the unwashed masses and now was about
to commit the public suicide of his glorious reputation.
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- "Based on what my lawyer tells me, I cannot talk
about my past history," McGwire told the puzzled committee. Rep. Charles
Lewis asked for a clarification. "Does this mean you're taking the
Fifth?" the Congressman asked. McGwire squirmed in his seat. His squeezed
throat quested for air as he uncomfortably nodded his assent ... and watched
his lifetime achievements evaporate in a puff of guilt-ridden smoke.
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- The refusal to answer meant the great slugger had cheated
and couldn't talk about it. He had used chemical substances to improve
his physical performance, which helped him break baseball's most hallowed
record, the single season home run mark.
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- It was perhaps the most shattering moment in baseball
history, equaled only by hit king Pete Rose's lifetime ban for gambling
and the 1919 Black Sox scandal, after which eight players were banned for
life for fixing the World Series.
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- But McGwire's case, devastating as it was to his own
previously hallowed reputation, was even more ominous in the future revelations
it foreshadowed - specifically, the implication of fellow slugger Barry
Bonds in the same seamy and dishonest practice of boosting one's performance
with drugs. And with the future of Bonds, a seven-time most valuable player
and the dominant icon in the game today, soon expected to take a similar
turn to the bleak, McGwire's silent self-destruction seemed to augur the
impending destruction of America's national pastime itself.
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- Another nail in the coffin of a contrived and superficial
culture.
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- In my mind, I tried to contemplate a comparative demoralization
in the history of American culture, and all I could come up with was when
U.S. troops had to bail out of Saigon by helicopter definitely with their
tails between their legs.
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- Egotistical America had finally lost a war, and Americans
didn't know what to make of it. It turned out we didn't learn our lesson.
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- Of course, comparing the relatively trivial issue of
an ultimately meaningless form of entertainment to a major conflagration
in which almost four million people lost their lives is a dubious example.
But it's safe to say that a larger number of Americans care about baseball
than care about the lives of innocent foreigners its Army arbitrarily snuffs
out.
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- So in the sense of the debauched and misplaced American
social focus, the two events actually are comparable.
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- But the collective American psyche is not likely learn
the lesson in this new baseball tragedy, either.
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- That lesson would be that cheating and not competing
fairly always catches up to the cheater, even if the scam undertaken seems
undetectable at the outset of the attempt.
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- The comparison to the new fascist American government
storming around the world and obliterating all who oppose is an obvious
similarity. We all may only pray that this Pentagon adventurism comes to
a similarly ignominious end.
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- But I wanted to linger a little longer on the entertainment
level in an attempt to show how robotized and thoughtless America has become,
because when you talk politics these days, most Americans just shut down
and polarize along the border between compassionate consciousness and mindless
dogma.
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- Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis used one of my favorite
examples the other day to demonstrate the decline of American awareness
(and intelligence and compassion) when he wrote about the '60s movie "Seven
Days in May," which was based on a bestselling novel written around
the time of the Cuban missile crisis and worldwide fears of a nuclear war.
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- In that black-and-white classic, Burt Lancaster plays
the demonic General Scott, a right-wing lunatic who is frustrated by the
humane agenda of a liberal president, played by Frederic March. Kirk Douglas
plays the role of the hero, a subordinate of the demented general who alerts
the well-meaning president about the coup that is about to take place,
and the plot is foiled.
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- But the salient feature of the movie is Lancaster's (the
general's) behavior. He is a classic Patriot, focused on enemies and without
compassion or understanding. Even more astounding from the perspective
of forty years later is that he sounds exactly like our current criminal
president, George W. Bush.
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- In the early 1960s, Lancaster's role was excoriated by
both reviewers and audiences for its over-the-top portrayal of an obviously
compulsive maniac. Yet today, President Bush's virtually identical performance
is depicted by today's prostituted media as a legitimate leader with valid
religious convictions.
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- I find this observation to be a perfect description of
the difference between the conscious culture of the 1960s and the comatose
culture of the first decade of the 21st century, as well as a confirmation
of the trend in American movies that principled heroism is no longer a
trait to be practiced.
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- Through its movies, America has descended into a sewer
of viciousness.
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- Speculating on how this pathological and regrettable
degeneration of American culture occurred leads inevitably to the question
of who owns both the media and the educational processes that led to this
diminution of consciousness, this decommissioning of traditional moral
boundaries, this death of the American good guy.
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- Who owns the process that has destroyed the America we
hoped to love, the America for whom we now feel only contempt, mistrust
and fear? Do you care enough about the answer to find out, or are you OK
with the idea that both your livelihood and your life are about to be destroyed?
Let me know your answer at some later date, if you care enough to answer
at all.
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- And let me sketch just one more example of the degeneration
of American culture, this drug-induced deflation of a once-honest populace,
this bogus, superficial patriotism that has been converted by insincere
jingoism into a murderous, emotionalism fascism that now threatens to turn
the whole planet into a radioactive cinder.
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- It's the music. In case you haven't noticed, it's dead.
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- As popular culture of the Sixties mobilized to oppose
the senseless war in Vietnam, numerous popular artists earned vast followings
by standing up to the government's sadistic slaughter of those who were
called "gooks."
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- Recently, I listened one of the many antiwar mantras
that dominated the airwaves in about 1970. "Ohio," by Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young, was about the National Guard murders of four
antiwar students at Kent State.
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- "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.
- We're finally on our own.
- This summer I hear the drumming.
- Four dead in Ohio.
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- Gotta get down to it.
- Soldiers are cutting us down.
- Shoulda been done long ago.
- What if you knew her
- and found her dead on the ground?
- How can you run when you know?"
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- When I listened to this shortly after September 11, 2001,
it seemed pretty inconsequential compared to what had just happened? But
at least the attempt was there, the attempt to inform the world that something
was wrong.
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- What I want to know is this?
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- Where are the songs about the World Trade Center, the
greatest crime in American history, in which our own government staged
a fake terrorist attack and killed three thousand of our own citizens?
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- Not a peep on the radio. After three years, not even
a single syllable.
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- Where are the songs about Fallujah that could rival Gil
Scot-Heron's great classic "Johannesburg," a riveting lament
about the black fight for freedom against the oppression in South Africa?
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- Fallujah. The place braindead American zombies gunned
down old people and children to the smiles of their superiors, and American
newspapers covered it up. Covered up the gas, covered up the napalm, the
destruction of hospitals, the prevention of medical care, then covered
up the soldiers going back in and destroying the evidence that they used
gas and napalm, and God knows what else.
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- What I want to say is this?
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- WHERE'S THE FUCKING SONG, ASSHOLE?!
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- And I'd like to address that question to every musician
in America, in the world. I'd especially like to ask it of so-called legendary
icons like Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan (you nihilistic
twit!) and Eric Clapton (you simpering wimp!), Eminem (don't fall for that
Democratic crap) and Doctor Dre (abandon your mansion and step up now!).
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- The whole music scene, and all the retards who think
they're cool by following it, are nothing but robotic moral cowards who
have abdicated their responsibility to the world. Who will have the courage
to step forward, like all these brave folks in the 9/11 skeptics movement
have done?
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- And when you try to escape into the pleasing triviality
of sports, and confront the reality that baseball's two greatest sluggers
have both cheated to achieve their accomplishments, you should get some
depressing inkling that the whole enterprise is a lie meant to distract
you from the even more unpleasant fact that your government, through its
controlled media apparatus, has stolen your life, fed you with falsehoods,
and deliberately murdered your children with poisoned food, toxic drugs,
and phony wars.
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- So, I think it's time you checked the scoreboard, and
find out what the score really is.
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- America is dead, and the international bankers are getting
ready to pick its carcass. Anybody still walking around is now a willing
zombie waving that flag of mass murder and injustice, the Stars and Stripes.
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- But hey, it's the perfect cloth to drape over your coffin,
although no photographs will be allowed. And hey, what's that sound, everybody
look what's going round ... due to the condition of both the corpse and
the culture, why, that sound is the out-of-control ticking of a Geiger
counter, which may be the real song about Fallujah that nobody apparently
has the guts to write.
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- ------
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- John Kaminski's Internet essays can be seen on hundreds
of websites around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies,
the latest of which is titled "The Perfect Enemy," about how
the Zionist-controlled U.S. government created the terrorist group known
as al-Qaeda. His booklet "The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn't
Believe the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001"
was written especially for those who cling to the government's false explanation
of the events of that tragic day. For more information go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/
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