alias Bruce.

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

I'm interested in losers.

I think they are more interesting than winners.

Well, no, I don't mean exactly that. Because winners are interesting in unexpected ways, too. Winning, you realize, rarely turns out to be what the winner expects it to be.

But what I mean about losers is that they are so unexplored and under-exposed. A team or a candidate or a contestant wins The Big Prize and we learn all about their long struggle, their inspirational grandmother, their hard personal choices, their personal daily routine for getting up in the morning and making green tea or oatmeal and doing their Winning Work. Winners want to talk about being winners and reporters want to report about winners and readers and viewers want to know about winners. For a few days or months or years apiece, anyway.

But losers don't always want to talk about losing, and when they do we don't hear enough about it. And we should, because I think it tells us a lot more than winners do.

For one thing, one of the hidden truths about winners is that they were losers, sometimes for a very long time, before they were winners. They tried and lost, tried and lost, again and again, while nobody was watching. They were invisible to nearly all of us while they scuffled along, disheveled and disreputable, and for years and years they kept on doing what they did, in the shadows, for reasons that I'm betting would excite us and teach us a ton if we only knew. That is, before they were suddenly pronounced "winners" by TV hosts and media columnists.

Moreover, losers who never end up winning have a lifetime of that kind of story. Decades and decades of sacrifice and failure and delusion and hope and screaming fights in the kitchen and quiet -- or crazed -- acceptance. If they don't give up, anyway. And even if they do finally give up and let it all go, that in itself is a hell of a tale to be told.

I'm thinking about all of this because my town, Baltimore, is still in shock from watching the Ravens miss a chance to go to the Super Bowl this year after kicker Billy Cundiff missed a 32-yard field goal with 11 seconds left against the New England Patriots. For you non-footballers, translate 32 yards as "a kick you can make with your eyes closed." A newspaper photo showed Cundiff, moments after his life-altering miss, walking toward the sideline, head down, body deflated, the picture of numb defeat. News coverage in the following days had him saying all the true and expected things: he couldn't explain it, he had no excuses.

But that photo of Cundiff raised all the other questions for me: What happened when he and his wife put their kids to bed after that awful day and shut the door to their own bedroom and were alone together with that moment? How does he weave that reality of public failure and humiliation, the worst nightmare of his entire career as an athlete, into the fabric of what is meaningful in his life? How does he see himself? What does he need from his life partner and his friends? How, if at all, does it change who he becomes and what he builds? How does he carry it, use it, release it, feel it? How will it affect the next year, 10 years, entire remainder of his life?

That's what I want to know.

 

Good for the Penn State Board of Trustees for firing Joe Paterno

in the wake of the horrible sexual abuse scandal there. The entire situation is tragic, but the board acted promptly and rightly in asserting its authority at a school where, as with many big-time football powers, the coach and the athletic program are virtual deities.

In the case of the legendary Paterno, he is as iconic a coach as there is, with more wins than any other major college football coach and a well-deserved reputation as a football titan. But, like many titans, it appears he overestimated himself. He apparently thought he could still dictate the terms of his future at Penn State -- even after having displayed 10 years of reprehensible cowardice regarding the now-public allegations that former Penn State defensive coach and Paterno friend Jerry Sandusky sexually abused at least 8 boys. Essentially, after being told in 2002 by an eyewitness about Sandusky's allegedly sexually molesting a 10-year-old boy in the locker room shower, Paterno simply told his boss and then, when his superiors did nothing, kept his mouth shut for 10 years -- giving Sandusky a decade in which he allegedly continued to ruin more young lives through his access to young boys via a charity he runs for vulnerable youths. The university was sufficiently convinced of Sandusky's dangerousness to bar him from school locker room facilities -- but, for some odd reason, did not feel moved to protect potential victims outside of the university by going public with the embarrassing news about the allegations against one of their own.

Paterno's implicit message, as revealed in his own defense: Hey, I told my boss about this. I followed the rules. If they choose to hide the problem and not tell the police, why should I stick my neck out and bring down my football program by going to the police myself? Well, maybe now Joe realizes why he should have: because preventing 10 years of rapes of children is more important than protecting the brand name of Penn State football.

Paterno apparently thought he could outmaneuver the Board of Trustees by pre-emptively announcing yesterday that he would retire at the end of this season. But he badly underestimated them. The outraged board replied by swiftly and correctly handing Paterno his head, effective immediately, and by just as appropriately booting Penn State President Graham Spanier. Two of Paterno's bosses, Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, have now been indicted for perjury and failing to report the incident to law enforcement. The grand jury says that Spanier also knew about the allegations against Sandusky and kept quiet, but at this point neither he nor Paterno have been indicted.

There are, of course, politics here. Paterno has been angering the board for years with his imperial behavior. His latest stunt, trying to escape the scandal via his sudden statement of retirement without consulting with the board, no doubt angered them more. And Paterno and President Spanier have reportedly tussled for power for years.

But the politics don't alter the facts. Paterno and Spanier are out on their ears because they failed the most basic test of responsibility for the welfare of young people and for the character of the university. And Curley and Schultz have been indicted because failing to be honest about an alleged sex crime on campus and to report it to authorities is, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general, illegal.

But what this is really about is that college football, at the big football schools, is a business. It pulls in big money from alumni benefactors. It generates media hype. It attracts students. It builds a college's brand. It is a collusion among frenetic high school and college coaches, see-no-evil college administrators, the NCAA, the NFL, and glory- and money-hungry athletes. It is an industry, and its ruthless needs trump quaint concerns like ethics, academics, respecting women, and safeguarding the interests of young people in general.

The most tragic thing about the Penn State debacle is that more young people were, according to the charges, set up to be sexually brutalized and traumatized in the ensuing years in part because a coach and several administrators were afraid to damage their venerated football program.

The second-most-tragic thing is that, in the midst of a Great Recession and the kinds of vast suffering and plutocratic brutality we've not seen since the 1930s, thousands of students at Penn State now feel moved to near-riots involving toppled lampposts and overturned cars not because American society is sinking toward peonage and fascism but because they are losing their football coach.

Penn State is perennially rated as one of the nation's top party schools by Princeton Review. It was ranked the #1 party school in 2009, when this episode of the popular radio program This American Life provided a glimpse into the circus-like aspects of student life there.

One can wonder, too, how administrators could have worked for 10 years to bury this awful Sandusky issue without word leaking out to anyone on the Board of Trustees. I mean, these are heavyweights we are talking about: the board's vice chairman, who made the announcement of Paterno's firing, is CEO of U.S. Steel, for God's sake.

Still, it's good to see that even as crowds rage on campus, the Penn State Board of Trustees appears to be awake, sober, and willing to act.

Here is where I stand on the February 6 Super Bowl:

I don't care.

I don't care who plays.

I don't care who wins.

This is not because my home team Baltimore Ravens were knocked out of the AFC championship race a week ago (in a game I didn't watch and didn't know the outcome of until I heard about it the next day). It also is not because I have any kind of grudge against the Packers or the Steelers, who will play for the NFL trophy next month. Nor is because of any dislike I have for football.

Rapists, spouse abusers, thugs and dog-killers aside, I like football. I like to listen to a good game on the radio, or watch it on a TV hung high on the wall in a hotel bar, or pull my car over at a high school athletic field on a fall day and watch kids give it their all, however awkwardly, while 100 people in the bleachers scream their lungs out for something that matters to them. I played freshman football for seven minutes in high school (I was fast as all get-out, but not strong enough to do anything useful once loaded down with what felt like 70 pounds of pads and gear). In our neighborhood sandlot games -- tackle, with no equipment, in which we tried to heroically injure ourselves while cute girls watched -- I loved taking off on a long post pattern in pursuit of a missile lofted by our street's best quarterback, Girard, who could throw a ball farther than anyone I ever knew. And yes, when the Ravens won the Super Bowl some years back my girlfriend and I were screaming, along with the rest of Baltimore, for the ragtag gang of improbables who pulled themselves into a winning team in a city still recovering from having its long-beloved Colts -- one of the last of the real teams in the NFL -- literally stolen in the middle of the night.

Anyway, you get the idea. I like the game.

What I couldn't care less about, though, is the roster of self-worshipping, smack-talking multimillionaires who now rotate themselves through a list of investment-grade corporate franchises that call themselves "teams." With few exceptions, the only team-like thing about them is their logo. But you don't need for me to rant about this. What is uninspiring and uninteresting about corporate sports has been talked about to death, and it is excruciatingly obvious to most of us, and to the extent that we watch, root, scream and throw crumpled napkins at the TV it is in spite of the nature of Sports Inc., not because of it. A year after the Ravens' Super Bowl win, when the team that had busted its ass to a championship broke up as players scattered throughout (or out of) the NFL, I stopped caring about whether the Ravens won, or who they beat.

So I may or may not watch Super Bowl XLV. The Roman numerals are getting sillier and sillier. On the night that the NFL championship is decided, what I've had for dinner will mean more to me than who won.

But a high school or college matchup where seniors are playing the last game of their lives before they move on to become software engineers or auto mechanics or teachers or attorneys? Now that's a football game.

There is a recent photo of Tiger Woods that seems to capture

everything about the public mess of his life.

The Getty Images pic appeared in the Washington Post last Saturday. I would reprint it here with credits, but it does not seem to be available online.

In the photo, Woods is standing in dense fog on a steep weedy embankment at the PGA Championship at Wisconsin's notoriously treacherous Whistling Straits course, waiting for his turn to make a shot. His body is seen from the side but his face is turned directly toward the camera. His hands, empty of golf clubs, hang as if in search of something to do. The overall effect, with the fog and the high weeds and Woods's awkward stance on the steep slope as he peers toward the camera as if surprised by the photographer, is of a man who looks a little lost.

I know, I'm reading a ton into this. It's only a photograph. Woods may have been totally focused on the terrain and at ease in the moment.

But symbolically at least, the image in that photograph summons up for me the archetype of the lost black celebrity. There he is. All alone. In thick white fog. Standing in high weeds on a steep slope. Looking around at what to do next.

Plenty of we non-famous professional black men have our own versions of this: The isolation we sometimes feel in a white-dominated business world that rewards what it sees as our "safe" (read: "white") affect and punishes what it sees as our "dangerous" (read: "black") affect. The rage that can come with feeling both envied and exiled in that world for our perceived primal gifts of prowess and high-octane mannishness. The desire to both sip from the crystal glass of sherry and smash it against the wall.

In that photo, Tiger looks so alone. What black man, besides his father, was there to usher him through a lily-white world in which he could learn to carry the force of his blackness without becoming Mandingo or a gelded Unhealthily Nice Negro or, worse, both? What black men did he have in his corner -- in the exclusive clubhouse bars and the country-club locker rooms and the lounges of five-star hotels and the stream of sumptuous parties and limos and jets -- to mentor him on how to be all of himself without being sucked into a default script of cultural obedience or shallow rebellion?

A friend of mine speculates that Woods's spectacular sexual acting-out was his inner revenge against his lack of a childhood: the ironclad requirement, from an early age, that he be perfectly disciplined, that he be a golf success machine, that he be a zen master of both golf and noble, sponsor-friendly public behavior. Who knows? My friend may be right.

But somewhere in there I see a black man, alone, with only a racist society's myths about black angels and demons for guidance.

I get it that LeBron James didn't simply leave the people of Cleveland at the altar;

he left them at a turnpike rest stop. And I get it that being abandoned by a home-state hero (James is from Akron) inspires a special depth of heartbroken fury. And I get it that James's packaging his announcement as part of a phony interview on ESPN was not only tacky, it was also insulting to hometown fans and management: they deserved better than being treated as just another part of an audience of millions while being given the seven-year kiss-off.

I get all of that. And I get how the Cavaliers franchise has been hurt, how the King James revenues are now lost to the local economy, how the fans have been kicked in the teeth.

What I don't get, though, is how, to some, so much of the City of Cleveland's self-image and self-interest can depend on the doings of an overpaid, under-educated, semi-articulate lummox who is awesomely talented at getting a ball through a hoop. All due respect to James's brilliance at the game. But Cleveland is a city, not a stadium. If the Cavs win an NBA championship, Cleveland schools won't improve, crime won't go down, the soul of neighborhoods won't be redefined, and major industries won't flood the city with a tide of new prosperity. What makes Cleveland Cleveland is not created -- or lost -- by the presence or absence of a LeBron James.

I know that a certain kind of athlete or team can inspire a city and become a symbol for much of what it loves about itself. And losing them can rip through a town's heart like a wrecking ball. Look at the venerable Baltimore Colts, who for decades were smash-mouth ambassadors for their blue-collar town, where I now live, and who crushed psyches here when their owner sneaked them away to Indianapolis literally in the middle of the night. The true greats can, if not define a town, at least symbolize it.

But, say what you want, LeBron James is no Johnny Unitas or Michael Jordan. James will never be a true athletic hero, the kind a town can wrap itself around, because he doesn't have what it takes: the bottomless desire, the lion-like heart, the limitless love of the game and its meaning to people. Go back and watch the footage of Jordan winning by flat-out wanting it more than any other human on the court; Jordan turning championship games around through pure force of competitive will; Jordan devilishly smiling while passionately delighting in his own impossible gymnastics like a god at play. Sorry, but even a super-conditioned and outrageously gifted performer like King James is not worthy to carry one of Jordan's magic rings.

I have a lot of family in Ohio, including Cleveland. I'm no stranger to the place. I have told my share of Cleveland jokes. It's not exactly the scenic or cosmopolitan capital of the United States. But it became what it is and what it can be without the help of a basketball player. The mayor of Cleveland got it right when he told the Washington Post (7/10/2010) that James's departure, although unforgettable, "is not going to make or break Cleveland." So did the fan who said, "We'll cry for a few nights, but we'll get over it." But another fan got it wrong when he voiced his fear of what Cleveland stands to lose by James's leaving: "There was a sense of hope, a sense of pride. He put Cleveland on the map."

If LeBron James is what it takes to build hope in Cleveland, that town is in big trouble.

Saints Go Marching.

Even if you don't care about (or don't like) football or you were rooting for the Colts, you gotta love that New Orleans has this to celebrate. And man, what a classic game. Peyton Manning is the best quarterback in football right now, but Drew Brees was awe-inspiring last night. To see the Saints rise up and play as they have is just amazing. Here in Baltimore, there is no love lost for the formerly-Baltimore Colts (if you don't know how their owner literally sneaked the team out of Baltimore in the dead of night, read it here), but Manning is a great player and apparently a very nice guy. Personally, I like the game but don't care much about the corporate teams any more. But when the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl a few years back the collective hysteria here, in the wake of having lost the Colts, was sw-eet. And, Colts and Ravens aside, seeing the Saints win feels like a kind of redemption, too, after all that New Orleans has been through. Now if we can just start to level the real-life playing field in that city. Party on, New Orleans. You deserve it.

My Sirius XM Radio Interview.

Bruce On Sirius XM

Here is my December 15 interview on Sirius XM Radio on Bob Dunning's show. We talked about the Tiger Woods debacle, the Obama presidency and whether or not to say "Merry Christmas" on the radio. I enjoyed it and I guess he did, too; I'll be back.

Incoming.

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday, whether you took part in a gathering or just enjoyed the time off. I did both.

There are new posts I want to put up, including one looking at what happens when colleges start treating their young enrollees as "customers" instead of as students -- it's not pretty -- and another asking questions about everyday things I can't figure out. Not to be evasive. But they're coming soon.

Meanwhile I notice, upon returning to the land of media, that Tiger Woods and his bizarre car crash seem to be in the crosshairs of every news operation, which is sad. But, as perhaps the most squeaky-clean demigod in sports, Tiger is the perfect target for rabid curiosity about any domestic or personal dirt that might be behind this weird incident. His silence further heightens the hunger.  And he sure hasn't helped his desire for privacy by thrice reneging on agreements to (voluntarily) do a sit-down with police investigators, which only spurs more speculation. I kind of wish he'd just go ahead and say something, even if it's embarrassing or painful, so the story can start to lose steam that much sooner.

Back in the world of actual public events, we all await President Obama's entreaty on Afghanistan, for which all indications are that the U.S. will 1.) send enough troops to raise casualties and escalate trauma but not enough for victory (because troops can never resolve this conflict and we wouldn't have enough to send there even if they could) and 2.) make a token try at providing non-military support to stabilize the country even as we further destabilize it with points of military intervention. It's not looking good. I wish Robert McNamara were still alive so that he could stand on the White House lawn and yell warnings up to the Oval Office.

More soon. I hope your week starts well.

He's Ba-ack.

I don't know if he killed Nicole and Ron. I think he did. But that's not exactly the point.

After all, his infamous acquittal was much more about how white police treat black men than it was about his purported innocence. A million writers, including me, have killed a zillion trees publishing screeds about the meaning of the O.J. trial, and I think we've said enough about the Trial of the Century.

But now he's back, this time as the heavy in the kind of pulp narrative you might find in a sodden discarded paperback half-submerged in a putrid gutter puddle in Times Square. It's got all you'd expect to find in a story after drying it on the fire escape and using latex gloves to flip through the stained pages: Allegedly stolen sports memorabilia, a big-time dealer hunkered down in a swanky Vegas hotel, an ex-jock's armed posse bursting into the room, a clandestinely-made audio tape of the ambush in which the wronged football kingpin is heard to declare, "Think you can steal my shit and sell it?"

I don't know any more about what O.J. did this time than I knew last time. But I am sure of this:

Orenthal James Simpson is the poster child for the impermissible rage of the black American male. By this I mean the you'd-better-behave-yourself-Mandingo rage of an ex-slave who is simultaneously erotically mythologized and publicly flogged for failing to grin with sufficient innocence and frequency in Caucasian company. The psychoanalyst and writer Franz Fanon named a book for this 40 years ago: Black Skin, White Masks, in which, writing from an anti-colonialist black perspective while living in mid-20th-century France, he managed to pretty well anticipate the torment of a 1970s All-American jokey-Negro football-star Hertz Rental Car spokesman who stowed his rage and violence in a crawl space like a gun.

It is a cautionary tale, this nice-black-man syndrome (<plug:> I devoted a chapter to it in my new book </plug>), and the story generally does not end well. The landscape is littered with corpses (walking and otherwise) of black males who took to heart the overseer's strict three-track training regimen for their rage: work it out on the cotton or playing field, or explode and self-destruct, or swallow it and either eat themselves alive from the inside or let it out at home. It looks as if O.J. picked each of these three dead-end doors at one time or another. To paraphrase what a (black male) friend of mine remarked yesterday, What this pissed-off ex-gridiron hero needs is some serious black male initiation. But that's another chapter in the story.

Meanwhile, the networks are again approaching O.J. mania, and the throngs at the gallows may get their second shot at this conspicuously bad nigger after having been cheated the first time, and the cries of "It's a set-up!" from parts of the black side of town (I've already heard some of this in recent days) may echo yet again.

Watch for that white Bronco.