A chorus of voices, hijacked

I love my hometown.

I say this as someone who, as a journalist there for 28 years, gave it the back of my hand more than once when it had it coming. Who poked fun at it when it had it coming. Who recognizes that, if it is insular and backward and Hooterville on steroids at times, it also can be generous and visionary and a pretty damn good place to live -- even with streets that occasionally change names mid-stream for no apparent reason.

Part of  the Fort's charm, I always figured.

It's why I moved back here after a decade somewhere else and never left, even though I could have. It's my city. It has a good heart in spite of its sporadic outbreaks of bull-you-know-what. And so it dismays me to see what happened downtown last night, when a peaceful protest over the police lynching of a black man in Minneapolis was hijacked by idiots.

I wasn't there, but from the accounts of those I trust who were and from watching the live feed, there seems to have been two separate things going on. There was the protest, and then there was a riot. And one seems to have had very little to do with the other.

The protest was about the murder of yet another person of color.

The riot was about a bunch of mostly white punks who came downtown not to express outrage at a nation that still can't come to terms with race, but for the express purpose of smashing things on a pleasant late-spring evening.

And so they did. They smashed windows (Who the hell smashes the windows of a JimmyJohn's? Their food isn't that bad) and overturned planters and climbed on top of police cars and got tear-gassed, which is what their objective seems to have been.  If that weren't the case, why did so many of them show up with cartons of milk to lessen the sting?

Car keys, cellphone, wallet, carton of milk. Yep, that's how I always leave the house.

The police, mind you, bear some responsibility for what happened, too. They showed up in full riot gear and gassed a crowd that included children because they were blocking traffic on Clinton, which quickly escalated the situation. The more prudent course would have been simply to re-route traffic around the area until people started drifting away. Eventually they would have, because that's what people do.

Instead, they played right into the hands of the idiots.

The worst thing about all this, and about the similar unrest that's happening in cities all over America now, is we're no longer talking about what happened to George Floyd and the continued erosion of trust between the authorities and Americans of color.

We're talking about windows being smashed. And cities burning. And the President of the United States encouraging the summary execution, without due process, of Americans for stealing microwave ovens and big-screen TVs.

Swipe that Blu-Ray and you'll get the needle in Donny John's America, sonny. Or a bullet.

But I digress.

Which of course is the point, isn't it?

To digress. To get off-topic. To make mayhem the lead story, and thereby discredit the real story.

I don't think the idiots smashing things up downtown last night were trying to do the latter consciously, although some may have been. Certainly there's a growing body of evidence now that there's an organized element out there whose goal is to discredit and obscure and smear by showing up to burn and smash and destroy.

For that element, that's what this is all about. It's about muddying legitimate outrage with faux outrage. It's about trivializing the conversation we need to have because that element considers the conversation a threat.

Which is why the rest of us, in my hometown and elsewhere, need to keep having it.

A chorus of voices

I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd. Let's begin there this morning.

I am not the person who should be pretending to expertise on the murder of George Floyd, because I am a white 65-year-old male who grew up in an almost exclusively white neighborhood and went to an overwhelmingly white school system. And so what happened to George Floyd and Christian Cooper and Ahmaud Arbery and Philando Castile and all the many, many others is never going to happen to me.

I am never going to be executed by vigilantes while jogging.

I am never going to have the cops called on me while birdwatching.

I never had to have The Talk with my father, never had to be careful what toy I picked up to avoid getting shot in Walmart, never had to worry about being choked to death in police custody for kiting a check or selling cigarettes on a street corner.

All of that is completely outside my realm of experience. Inside my realm of experience, however, is the knowledge that, as a white man, I can stage an armed occupation of my statehouse and not have to worry about law enforcement doing any of the aforementioned. Hell, they'll hold the door for me.

What a lucky boy am I.

As such, I can watch Minneapolis burn and only pretend I understand it is the boiling over of years of rage at the countless slings and arrows of outrageous indifference. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, riots do not happen in a vacuum. They are a by-product.

And so I can get that rage. But I can't get that rage, if you know what I mean.

What I can do is what Carson Wentz and Zach Ertz have done.

They spoke out, as white Americans and white professional athletes. And that is important, because the murder of George Floyd cannot just be an African-American issue. It needs to be an American issue -- especially in an America whose current president's words and deeds, past and present, have led racists and white supremacists to regard him as a fellow traveler.

And so more than just Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James and other principled men and women  of color need to kneel, figuratively and otherwise. We all need to.

One segment of America should not have to carry this tune alone. The entire chorus should.

"Can't even fathom what the black community has to endure on a daily basis,"  Wentz wrote on social media. "Being from North Dakota, I've spent a large part of my life surrounded by people of similar color, so I'm never gonna act like I know what the black community goes through or even has gone through already. I'll never know the feeling of having to worry about my kids going outside because of their skin color."

Ertz and his wife, Julie Johnston Ertz, a member of the U.S. women's national soccer team, chimed in with this: "Even the thought of trying to come up with the 'perfect' saying is so damn selfish. What I do know is I am so unbelievably sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt the African-American community has endured by another human, and more than anything I am sorry that you feel you are alone in this situation."

And, yeah, sure, those are just pretty words. And words are just words. But you've gotta start someplace.

The key, this time, is not stopping there.

Great decisions in programming history. Not.

Sometimes you'd just like to be in the room.

Sometimes you'd like to be sitting at that shiny table with the panoramic view of the great metropolis on the other side of the windows, and hear how the Big People make Big Decisions. How they get granular. How they circle back around. How they run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

And so here is how I imagine it went when ESPN's Big People decided to give America another splendid documentary to lift its spirits in the time of the Bastard Plague, following up the critically acclaimed "Last Dance":

BIG PERSON NO. 1: Well, boys, what do we do for an encore? America still needs to be uplifted in this time of plague and madness, and we're just the ones to do it! Thoughts?

BIG PERSON NO. 2: How about Tom Brady?

NO, 1: Already in the pipeline.

NO. 2: Oh, yeah. Forgot.

BRATTY JUNIOR BIG PERSON: Tom Brady? Borrrr-ing.

NO. 1 (ignoring the Brat): Other thoughts?

(A cascade of voices, all talking over one another. "Tiger Woods!" "Peyton Manning!" "Brett Farv-ra!" "Big'un Darly!")

NO. 1: Who the hell is Big'un Darly?

UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: Sorry. I forgot. He was just a character in a Dan Jenkins novel.

NO. 2: How about Lance Armstrong?

NO. 1 (rolling his eyes): Gee, I don't know. How about Al Capone?

NO. 2: I'm serious! Hey, the man's a straight-up sociopath! America loves sociopaths! We put one in the White House didn't we?

NO. 1: Yeah, but we're supposed to be uplifting America, not reminding it of how it got taken for a ride by a cheating, lying, wanna-be mafia don. Forget Capone. Why don't we do a 30-for-30 on Luca Brasi?

UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: You know, he was just a charac-

NO. 1: Shut up.

(Brief silence around the table)

NO. 1: Although ...

And here we will leave the Big People to their ruminating, because, really? Lance Armstrong?

Look, I suppose America will watch anything now, because they watched hillbillies with tigers. And I suppose Lance Armstrong is interesting in a slowing-down-to-look-at-car-wrecks sort of way. He's fascinating. He's disturbed. He's fascinating because he is disturbed.

But this is not exactly what America has an appetite for right now, because it gets its recommended daily requirement of disturbed from the White House every day. And so no surprise that the two-part Lance-umentary sank like a stone, at least compared to "The Last Dance." The latter drew ten times the viewers nightly.

Me, I didn't watch. I had my fill of Lance Armstrong back in the days when I was getting bashed by the cycling community for merely suggesting it wasn't unreasonable to wonder how he was doing what he was doing. It was as if I'd pushed down the Pope and taken his lunch money.

Any thinking individual should have looked at Armstrong's narrative and had questions, if not doubts. But even having questions was heresy in those days. And so I heard about it.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

In any event, here's to ya, Big People. Nice call there.

Shoulda gone with Big'un Darly.

Legendary crazy

You know what I miss most about baseball, as the calendar leans in toward June and summer?

 

I miss whining about my relentlessly crummy Pittsburgh Pirates, and then hearing my faithful reader(s) scream "Enough about the (bleep-bleep) Pirates! Nobody cares!"

 

Well ... I do. And this is my Blob. So nyah.

 

Besides, how could I pass up wonderful stuff like Matt Zylbert of the reconstituted Deadspin reminiscing about the signature awfulness/weirdness of the Aught Pirates?

 

Hey, I knew my Pirates were epically pathetic in the '90s and Aughts (Twenty straight losing seasons, y'all! Nobody's EVER done that!). But I didn't know they were also epically strange.  I mean, seriously, bows and arrows? Lloyd McClendon? Randall Simon and Nyjer Morgan?

 

These were some legends, man. These were giants among ginormous losers.

 

Remember when McClendon, the nutso manager who averaged 96.8 losses per season between 2001 and 2005? Remember when he got thrown out of a game and stole first base?

 

No, really. He stole first base.

 

Or how about Simon? Remember that guy? First player in MLB history, probably, to beat up a guy dressed as a sausage with this bat. Interrupted the hell out of the sausage race in Milwaukee that day, it goes without saying.

 

And then there was Morgan, who adopted an alias named Tony Plush. Seven flavors of crazy. Hit a walkoff home run and didn't realize it was a walkoff home run. Used to take dumps in Gatorade bottles.

 

I'd almost forgotten about all that. And I never knew about the bow-and-arrow thing, bored players in the dregs of another crap season showing up with their hunting bows and shooting arrows around PNC Park before games. One guy even got pissed at the clubhouse TV one day and took it out with an arrow.

 

You go an entire decade without finishing within ten games of .500 in any season, stuff will happen.

 

And the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune will fly.

Pick-and-roll ... out

So I'm reading this piece by Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, and she's quoting the executive director of the NBA players' union, Michele Roberts, saying it's time to get the NBA season started again, and now I'm looking at the calendar and thinking heretical thoughts.

Mostly these involve one word: "Why?"

Because, see, in the same story, I read that the likely re-start date is sometime in late July at the Disney/ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, and that they'll have to have some sort of training camp first. And now I'm looking at the calendar again, and I'm thinking more heretical thoughts.

Mostly these involve some version of "What's the point?"

I mean, if you're not going to re-start the season until late July, and you're going to either finish the regular season or jump right into playoff basketball even though the players have been idle since March, and those playoffs are going to be some sort of hurry-up deal because you don't want to rear-end the start of next season ...

Well. It's like the Blob said the other day about the NHL: Half-assery is full assery. And if you're going to have to engage in half-assery just to finish a season every reasonable person understands is lost, it's not worth it. It's time to scrub the mission and move on.

Or, hey. How about this?

Send everyone to Orlando as planned, and go ahead and conduct your training camps as planned. But reset the clock. Instead of re-starting a season that's already dead for all practical purposes, begin the 2020-21 season in, say, early to mid-August. Given that the NBA season lasts longer than the Punic Wars, this would mean it wraps in April instead of the middle of June.

Which is when every self-respecting basketball season should wrap up. And when the NBA season itself used to back when things made sense.

And the plague-ruined 2019-2020 season?

If awarding the championship trophy means that much, haul it out in Orlando and let Adam Silver parade it around for the troops. And let the players all touch it.

But only if they sanitize, of course.

Starved for content

Memorial Day weekend, and let's raise a glass to a Memorial Day weekend Sunday that almost felt like a regular sports Sunday. It wasn't, but you could kinda pretend it was.

There was no Indianapolis 500, but there was a Coca-Cola 600, which used to be called the World 600, which is kind of funny because no one in the world was allowed to be there in person.

There was no baseball or playoff basketball or the Greater Velveeta Open live from Froghair Crick Country Club and Horseshoe Emporium, but there was The Match 2, which was almost the same.

We got to watch it rain on Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson and Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. We got to watch Brady mis-hit golf balls and not be, you know, so damn perfect, except when he holed out that wedge on No. 7.

And we got to listen to Peyton Manning explain why he was wearing a pink shirt instead of being twinsies with teammate Tiger, who was wearing his requisite Sunday red and black.

Basically, it was because Peyton's a Tennessee guy, and red and black are Georgia's colors, and hell no he wasn't gonna wear the school colors of THOSE country sonsabitches.

Or something like that.

Anyway, people loved it. And I suspect part of why they loved it, aside from it being pretty entertaining, was because people were sitting on their couches watching live almost-sports on a holiday Sunday afternoon. And so for a few hours it almost felt as if human beings were masters of their own fate again, instead of being at the mercy of a microscopic red-and-gray virus that looks sort of like an Ohio State Koosh ball.

As athletic directors and ESPN commentators and pro sports czars like to say these days, we are Starved For Content. Which of course also means we're starved for something else.

Normal, I think it's called.

What they gave

I'll wear this cap today, just because. It reminds me of some things.

It reminds me of a cigar shop in, yes, Gettysburg, Pa., and of a warm spring morning, and of everything that lies a stone's throw away up a gentle rise. There are trees and grass and shadowed walkways and graceful monuments there, and concentric circles of granite set flush with the earth. They radiate out from one of those monuments, a geometry of names from Vermont and Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Michigan, and, yes, Indiana.

This is the Gettysburg National Cemetery, just up the street from the cigar shop on East Cemetery Hill. There are 6,000 sons and husbands and fathers buried here, sleeping their eternal sleep. Some of them died in the Spanish-American War and World War I and World War II and many other wars, because that's what happens when human beings get it in their minds to kill, and other human beings are called upon to stop them.

Three-thousand, five-hundred twelve of them died in the Civil War, many of them meeting the last of their days on the slanting fields and rocky outcroppings that surround this place. Interspersed among the granite circles are small square stones bearing only numbers. These are the unknown dead, and there are almost 1,000 of them.

Known or unknown, buried here or elsewhere, they came here from 18 states, from Maine to Minnesota. And they died far from home. Their names were Strong Vincent and Patrick O'Rorke and Elon Farnsworth. Their names were Charles Hazlett and Stephen Weed and Alonzo Cushing, who was just 22 years old when a Confederate bullet hit him in the mouth and killed him in the last mad minutes before Pickett's Charge spent itself on Cemetery Ridge.

Today is about them, and all the others. Today is about the boys who never came back, about Cushing and Vincent and O'Rorke and Pvt. Charles Baker of the 1st Minnesota -- a farmer from Barnesville, Mn., who died as twilight came down on July 2, and the 1st Minnesota was sent on a suicide mission to buy time against an irresistible Confederate assault.

We talk a lot about sacrifice, on Memorial Day. It is the central theme of a day given over to cookouts and relaxing and welcoming the summer to come. And it is perhaps never more central than it is now, when the contrast between what sacrifice is and what it isn't has never been more glaring.

What it is, we can find up that gentle rise in Gettysburg. What it isn't is what we're being asked to do now in the face of the Bastard Plague.

We are being asked to wear a mask when we go to the grocery store.

We are being asked to forego for a time, some of the pleasures of American life.

We are being asked to help stem the tide of a vicious illness that, in less than three months, has already claimed 14 times more lives than were lost on those fields and outcroppings in the first days of July 1863.

And how have some of us reacted to that?

By yowling like spoiled children who've been denied a cookie.

By missing the splendid irony of hollering about "tyranny" and "freedom" while freely staging armed occupations of statehouses.

By harassing, and at times physically attacking, beleaguered store employees who've requested they help out simply by wearing masks on the premises.

The freedom to act like idiots, as with all others, is an American right. But I hope Pvt. Charles Baker is doing triple Axels in his grave, seeing all this. I hope Alonzo Cushing and Elon Farnsworth are themselves yowling in the Great Beyond, wondering why the hell they took  a bullet for these dumb SOBs.

Or in Farnsworth's case, five bullets.

Let me tell you about Farnsworth.

He was a 25-year-old cavalry captain from Michigan when, late on the afternoon of July 3, he was ordered to lead an entirely unnecessary charge by his commanding officer, Judson Kilpatrick. The battle was over, the order made no sense, but Farnsworth obeyed it.

His troop promptly rode into a thicket of Confederate riflemen who hadn't yet withdrawn from their position on the extreme left of the Union line. The boys in gray could hardly miss. Farnsworth was shot five times in the chest and died.

There's a modest monument there now, marking the spot. The last time I was in Gettysburg, I tracked it down. Its very remoteness from the rest of the battlefield speaks to how ridiculous was Kilpatrick's order. There wasn't another soul in sight as I stood in the middle of the clearing where Farnsworth died, and looked around, and thought about how this was last thing in his earthly life he saw.

I think about that now, as I wear this cap. I think about how and why he and all the others died on that day, and on the two previous.

And then I wonder if we deserve it.