alias Bruce.

Dog Days, Part 2.

Sandra Kobrin has a piece in Women's eNews that will get you thinking even more deeply about the Michael "Dogslayer" Vick episode.

It turns out, according to Kobrin, that for years star athletes have been getting off with wrist-slaps, or no professional penalties at all, for beating their wives and girlfriends. She cites a roll call of NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball players who have been arrested and convicted on domestic violence charges with few or no league consequences. Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets, for instance, pleaded guilty to spousal abuse and was not punished by the NBA. Ron Artest of the Sacramento Kings was suspended for 72 games for fighting with fans, but got a mere two-game suspension and a $600 fine (that's chewing-gum money in the NBA) after pleading guilty to a domestic violence charge. Adam "Pacman" Jones of the NFL's Tennessee Titans was suspended for the 2007 season after a series of arrests, most recently a bar brawl in which he bashed a stripper's head against the ground, according to Kobrin. But the NFL has yet to suspend any players who have been convicted of domestic violence, of whom there have been many.

What it comes down to is that dogs outrank women when it comes to teams penalizing athletes for acts of abuse.

My guess is that this is news to you. It was news to me.

One likely rejoinder to this observation is that domestic violence is a personal (read: unrelated to athletics) matter, and that the proper place for its consequences is in the courts.

But just a moment. Abuse of dogs is not a team-related infraction. Nor is fighting in bars and giving head-bashings to strippers. And yet in these cases teams feel compelled to add their own punishments on top of a judge's or jury's verdict. They do so, quite reasonably, because these acts reflect on a player's character and on the reputation of the team.

So how, exactly, does a 200- to 300-pound athlete's beating the stuffing out of his wife or girlfriend rate exemption from this moral calculus?

Anyway, read Kobrin's piece. It adds an entirely new dimension to the Vick case.

Thanks to Karla Scott for the tip on Kobrin's article.

Jena 6, Part 2.

After my August 16 post on the events in Jena, Louisiana, I emailed the Jena 6 Defense Fund and received a reply that you might find useful. It read, in part:

It would be wonderful if you could write letters, maybe to your local newspaper and also send emails to all your friends. Basically, all help is appreciated and very much needed as we continue to generate momentum around this case and build support to reverse this grave injustice.

Resource Websites: colorofchange.org, freethejena6.org, and the online
petition http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?aZ51CqmR .

Also, if you or anyone you know is able to DONATE, you can send a
check directly to the Jena 6 Defense Committee, PO Box 2798, Jena, LA
71342. It is an account the families have set up, and the families
themselves vote on how to spend that money to best secure freedom for
their children.

You can help us right now by spreading the word to everyone you know
about the injustice here in Jena. The more people who know, the better
chance we have of freeing our children.

Construction in Progress.

Welcome to the new home of alias Bruce. This site has my most recent posts, and by mid-September 2007 it will also have fully updated links and archives. Meanwhile, for older posts and links, click here or go to http://home.earthlink.net/~aliasbruce . The old site will remain up until this new site is completed. Thanks for visiting. And stay tuned to this space.

Dog Days.

Except for that one week of 100-degree days I'm trying to forget, it's been a cool August here in Baltimore. But down in sweltering Atlanta, Michael Vick is in the frying pan.

You know the story: the star Atlanta Falcons quarterback has pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges and could do jail time and forfeit his NFL career. The stream of evidence in the case reads like an audit of an abattoir: dog carcasses carted out in coolers from Vick's property in rural Virginia; dozens of living dogs seized in various states of physical trauma and abuse; dogs having being executed by gunshot, electrocution and, in one reported instance, being slammed to the ground. Vick, who has already been sued by a woman for allegedly knowingly giving her herpes, looks more the cretin every day.

The two main threads of public and pundit reaction seem to be, on the one hand, What a despicable human being Vick must be, (e.g., Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins), and on the other, Why Michael Vick? Why a black celebrity? Dogfighting involves tens of thousands of people nationwide. And the cows and chickens we happily devour suffer at least as horribly as Vick's dogs. (e.g., the Post's Courtland Milloy.)

These are not mutually exclusive arguments. I agree with both. What is interesting to me, though, is, as a friend said to me the other day, how much more vehement many whites seem in their outrage about Vick's alleged cruelty to dogs than about, say, the current Jim Crow happenings in Jena, Louisiana (see my 8/16/2007 post). We could make a long list, actually, of atrocities that take a back seat to Vick in the current mainstream conscience: our nation's deliberately delivering vaguely-suspected subversives into the clutches of nations that torture; the civilian and uniformed casualties in an Iraq war championed by a vice president who actively avoided military service and whose personal pension is funded in part by one of the war's largest contractors (I heard a German journalist observe recently that this offense alone would suffice to have a leader yanked from office in Germany); the consistency with which the riddling of suspects' bodies with 40 or 50 police bullets seems confined to black males (heard of an unarmed white male shot 51 times by police lately? And if you're prone to argue that the involvement of nonwhite officers in the Sean Bell shooting pre-empts charges of racism, you may be interested in my post of 11/29/2006.)

There are plenty of reasons why we Americans tend to sit and blink dumbly at atrocity. One is that atrocity is an everyday feature of our current affairs of state. Another is that our junk-news industry so deluges us with tales of the personally awful -- crimes and events too horrible to even contemplate -- that if we allowed ourselves to authentically care we'd end up in a psych ward or on a prescribed regimen of antidepressants (hmm.). Yet another reason, I think, is that our effective disenfranchisement as voters (face it: how much influence have we non-rich voters had on health care policy, the Iraq war, funding of education, and tax breaks for the wealthy?) tends to flip our engaged-citizen switch to "off."

And it is also true that most of we humans feel a primordial attachment to the fellow creatures we call "animals," whether as pets or livestock or subjects on Animal Planet, and when we see animals being abused it hurts us in a way that transcends race or gender or any other detail of humanness.

But to get back to race and dogfighting, I think there is another reason -- a big one -- why some whites who merely shake their heads at Jena will sit up and shake their fists at the mistreatment of Michael Vick's dogs: It's easy.

When it comes to cruelty to dogs, it's easy to invest in outrage. It's easy to put your hand on your moral spigot and let loose a flood of righteous anger. It's easy to congregate with friends or coworkers and vent, from the heart, your feeling of sickness and physical revulsion at the suffering of animals subjected to such human wickedness. Practically everyone you know will agree with you. So will your congressperson and your senators and your president. You can even make your voice public, if you choose, with no fear of being chastised or ridiculed, no questioning of your personal mettle or patriotism, and no risk of ending up on a no-fly list or a warrantless wiretap roster. You don't even have to exert the effort of expanding your knowledge or experience. Everybody knows that dogs should not be made to suffer.

It is not easy, however, to look at the town of Jena and reflect upon what it means that Jim Crow standards of justice are alive and well within the United States. It is not easy to hold your gaze on a city park filled with homeless people and think about why this is so. It is not easy to make the conscious comparison between the windfall tax breaks for the rich and the catastrophic underfunding of drug treatment that creates a 6-month wait for a homeless and HIV-vulnerable addict begging for a temporary bed at a rehab facility. It is not easy to dare to inquire about the actual reasons why so many young black men find gang culture and its violence irresistible. And it is not easy to be at ease with yourself if you contemplate any of these things and fail to act.

So Michael Vick's barbarism becomes this moment's flash point for righteous conscience. Next month it will be something else equally undemanding of effort or risk.

And as for the untouchable and unbearably itchy racial realities that underlie Americans' every waking moment -- well, hey, what can you do?

Jena-cide.

Imagine a tiny town so racist that a large, spreading shade tree at the local high school has been recognized for years as a hanging-out spot exclusively for white students.

OK? Now, imagine that a black student decides he wants to break the color line and hang out under the tree. He's nervous, so he goes to school officials to make sure there won't be a problem. The officials assure him that he has every right to relax under that tree, and that it will be fine. The black student then goes and takes a place under the tree.

The next day, three hangman's nooses are discovered hanging from the boughs of the tree.

Racial furor ensues. The principal recommends that the three white students who hung the nooses be expelled, but he is overruled by the board of education and the (white) superintendent of schools, who calls the act a "prank."

Meanwhile, an arsonist torches the high school. Racial skirmishes break out. A white person aims a gun at a group of unarmed blacks. He is not charged, but the blacks are arrested for theft when they disarm him and take his gun. A group of white youths attack and injure a black youth at a white party. They are not prosecuted. Days later, a white student taunts the black youth who was injured. A group of black students then attack the white youth. He suffers facial bruises and a concussion, but is well enough to attend a social function the same night. The black youths, however, are prosecuted and charged with attempted murder and conspiracy, with a potential sentence of 100 years in jail. On the eve of the trial, amid growing outrage, the charges are abruptly reduced to aggravated assault.

The first of the six black defendants, a 16-year-old football star, is convicted of aggravated assault after three hours of deliberation by an all-white jury selected from an all-white jury pool. During the trial, the defendant's (black) court-appointed lawyer challenges none of the white jurors selected and calls no witnesses. The conviction carries a maximum of 22 years in prison. The scheduled sentencing hearing, however, is postponed, again reflecting escalating rage over the case.

The other five black defendants remain in jail awaiting trial.

Welcome to the town of Jena, Louisiana, population 2,971 (as of the 2000 census), where the above events took place between September 2006 and July 2007.

Mychal Bell, the convicted 16-year-old, is still awaiting sentencing, rescheduled for September 20th, 2007. The fates of the remaining five may well rest on national attention generated in the coming weeks and months.

Jena is a town where whites once gave white supremacist David Duke more than 60 percent of the vote. It is apparently one of those tucked-away places where the white citizenry, having gerrymandered the town's black minority (12% of its population) into virtual disenfranchisement with a carefully-drawn ward border around the "black" section, enjoys a sleepy obliviousness to American civil rights happenings of the past 100 years. The Jena town librarian, for instance, who is white, had this to say to Democracy Now!:

BARBARA MURPHY: We don't have a race problem. It's not black against white. It's crime. The nooses? I don't even know why they were there, what they were supposed to mean. There's pranks all the time, of one type or another, going on. And it just didn't seem to be racist to me.

You get the picture. No need for me to pontificate here about this Lilliputian version of 1950s Selma, Alabama. What needs to happen right now is for people like you and me to make ourselves aware of the heinous goings-on in Jena and to lend our voices, our money and if possible our bodies to the chorus of opposition. A swell of national outrage -- Al Sharpton has already made it to Jena, and so far hundreds have traveled there to march in protest -- has already burst Jena's Jim Crow time capsule. Support for the "Jena 6" is snowballing via the Internet and alternative media. The town fathers seemingly don't know what hit them, and attention is only just beginning to build in the corporate media.

Want to know what is actually going on down there? Interested in supporting those fighting for 20th- (let alone 21st-) century legal standards in this impudent little burg? Here are some places to start:

Watch a Collateral News report of the sequence of events, from the beginning, that led to the trial of the "Jena 6."

Read a Democracy Now! transcript of interviews with Jena residents and principal figures in the case.

Watch an NBC News report on the Jena situation.

Read an AlterNet update, one of the most recent available, on the latest Jena developments. It also includes an interesting mixture of reader posts, some of them from Jena residents.

Watch a video of Al Sharpton's speech to a packed and enraged black audience in Jena.

Listen to an NPR News and Notes interview with a journalist and with the mother of one of the "Jena 6."

Watch a video segment of Democracy Now! detailing events in Jena.

Sign an online petition protesting the Jena affair.

Mail a contribution to:

Jena 6 Defense Committee
PO Box 2798
Jena, LA 71342

or email the Committee at jena6defense(at)gmail.com .

Dick Cheney Comes Clean on Iraq.

For a truly flabbergasting peek into Dick Cheney's clarity about invading Iraq, watch a video clip from a 1994 Cheney interview now being circulated by MoveOn.org as part of their fundraising campaign. It really must be seen to be believed.

Way to Go, Karl.

Dag, it ticks me off how smart Karl Rove is.

I am not saying that Rove is infallible. He managed, for instance, to squander every golden nugget of America's post-9/11 global goodwill on Dick Cheney's can't-miss investment in colonizing Iraq. He broke government (think tax cuts and military spending booms, think Katrina) badly enough to lose both the Senate and the House in 2006. And he blew the immigration policy battle for Bush.

But there is a reason why Karl's forehead bulges like a perspiring proboscis over his beady eyes. The man is a mutant brain with a body attached. As Samuel L. Jackson exclaimed to a nimble-minded character in Pulp Fiction just before he popped him, "Check out the big brain on Brent! Man, you a smart motherfucker!"

Except that Karl is too smart to be taken down – not for outing a CIA agent, not for "losing" millions of potentially incriminating emails, not for ignoring subpoenas. That's why all of the current talk about Rove being "forced out" and his "losing" his position leaves me far less than convinced.

It seems to me that with even the current crop of hapless Senate hounds now closing in on him, Karl did the perfectly brilliant thing. He quit, thereby removing a major incentive for some high-profile Democrats having held him in such hot pursuit: the political allure of bagging the active brains behind the White House's galling flurry of feints, pivots and lies. If Dick Cheney is the amoral soul of this Administration, Rove is its tirelessly Machiavellian brain. And I am afraid he has played this particular elusive move just right.

It seems such an obviously right maneuver when you think about it: How does one escape being pursued as the biggest, fattest strategic target in the White House? Leave the White House.

I do think that Nancy Pelosi has it right when she says that nothing will change in Rove's role as W's chief seer and political advisor. He will simply telecommute, and perhaps pick up some extra tax deductions for his home(s).

But I also think that plenty could now change politically when it comes to the Senate's chasing down Rove. In a Senate that already barely has what it takes to get its teeth into the leg of an actively crooked top White House official, how much fierceness will an investigative committee be able to muster in going after a schlumpy private citizen named Karl who has shed his trophy credentials?

I certainly hope I'm wrong. One could make the argument, for instance, that Rove's new status as a (faux-) private citizen will make him an easier target for Senate investigation because he will enjoy less political protection. And one could also make the case that Rove's jumping ship is really about shielding the White House from whatever subsequent legal ills befall him personally. That, after all, would be classically Rovian strategy.

But this smells more devious than a Scooter Libby take-the-fall gambit. This smells like Karl in peak form: hiding in plain sight while befuddled Senators, denied the prestigious prey they had encircled, find their gaze wandering and their hunger for the kill waning.

Like I said, it ticks me off. I hate the way that mean and selfish agendas often free brilliant people to let their intelligence run wild, unencumbered by conscience.

Why did Karl have to go into politics, anyway? Why couldn't he have become a chess master?

Or better yet, a mechanical engineer obsessed with designing better bridges?

Too Awful to Watch.

It has gotten to the point where it actually makes my skin crawl to see W make a public appearance at the scene of a horrible disaster: his creepy, bumbling lack of sincerity, his mangling of even the most trite of truisms, his blazing hypocrisy.

Here is part of what the President of the United States had to say on the occasion of his August 4 visit to the Minneapolis bridge collapse site, according the August 5, 2007 New York Times:

Expressing condolences to the families of the victims and "prayers to those who wonder about whether they'll ever see a loved one again," the president promised to make it a priority to rebuild the bridge "in a way that not only expedites the flow of traffic but in a way that can stand the test of time." Mr. Bush took a 10-minute helicopter tour of the wreckage, where he could see the remains of a school bus, a truck and other vehicles. "Our message to the Twin Cities is we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible," the president said. "We understand this is a main artery of life here, that people count on this bridge, this highway system, to get to work."

So the nation's chief executive, with ample coaching, is able to offer boilerplate "prayers," to say aloud that the bridge should be "rebuilt quick," to express his understanding that "people count on it to get to work," and to stumble his way through a wreckage of parallelisms to the effect that a new bridge ought to "expedite traffic" as well as "stand the test of time."

I hate to go here -- it seems so unfair, like putting an eloquent champion up against a brine shrimp -- but just imagine, if you can stand the pain of the comparison, what a Bill Clinton would likely have been able to spontaneously offer the people of Minneapolis in this setting, with his eyes clear, jacket unbuttoned, tie loosened, no notes or prompts, and yes, maybe an unfortunate but at least competently-derived stain on his tailored pants.

But that was then. Now we're talking about a truly presidential scandal: The crushing irony (chastely ignored by much of the press corps) of a president slashing funds to cities and states, easing regulations on industry, weakening government safety standards, and then sidling up next to a rotted bridge to offer "prayers" for the dead and to chirp about construction that "can stand the test of time."

I guess this is what a collapsed presidency looks like.

Barry Bonds: Beyond the Asterisk.

(I'm back from another blog-free zone. As always, thanks for your patience if you've been watching for a new entry, and thanks for reading.)

Any time now, Barry Bonds will break Hank Aaron's revered record of 755 career home runs.

When he does, Bonds' name in the record books will immediately, and maybe permanently, be dwarfed by a giant neon asterisk, with a disclaimer reading something like, "Forget this punk. He cheated to get here."

Me, I think the asterisk belongs there, big and blinking as the Times Square sign, and it couldn't have been earned by a nicer guy. As a baseball fan, I stopped caring about the Barry Bonds and the Mark McGwires and the Sammy Sosas and the other hulked-up megasluggers when baseball went giddily corporate and "performance-enhancing" substances became the clubhouse version of Wall Street hardball. I still love listening to a game on the radio, but honestly, I couldn't care less about most of the players or their multi-hundred-million-dollar teams, including my hometown Baltimore Orioles.

But here's the thing.

There is another kind of rigging of the record books that has been going on, officially, in major league baseball for more than 50 years now. I hadn't stopped to think about its significance until I ran across a little snippet of a piece by Jonathan Cohen in the June 18, 2007 issue of The Nation, entitled "SI Cooks the Books."

As Cohen points out, the cockroach in the ointment of today's high-minded moralizing about Barry Bonds is that a good number of baseball's official historic demigods -- Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, to name just two -- earned their stature unfairly and unethically. That is, whether they approved of it or not, they played in a sport that legally excluded arguably the finest athletes in the game: the Satchel Paiges and the Josh Gibsons and the other greats of the Negro Leagues. This isn't to deny Ruth's or Williams' greatness. But the fact is that they and all other white players of the segregation era enjoyed the protection of being shielded from competing against black players whose abilities would have, literally, changed the complexion of major league baseball.

Cohen puts it downright bluntly:

"When 30 to 35 percent of qualified athletes are not allowed to play because of the color of their skin and are replaced by others who most likely would have been in the minors if segregation had not been in effect, the statistics are sharply skewed."

So all of a sudden Sports Illustrated's recently-named "all-time" team (which deliberately excludes Bonds), as well as baseball's official pantheon of all-time record-holders, don't look quite so legit.

This isn't to defend steroid use. I have already told you what I think about Barry Bonds.

But which is the greater injustice: One player immorally breaking a home-run record thanks to the advantage of self-medication, or generations of players immorally setting "all-time" records thanks to the advantage of racial exclusion?

You decide.