Masters of Distortion

I like news. When I watch the news on KITV or KHON or KHON or any other K-something, I feel like I’ve learned something, which I believe to be the general idea of having news in the first place. Why then, do I hate cable news? The answer is, well, it’s not news.
Cable news today is a whole different animal. This ain’t your daddy’s news. Cable news prides itself on being able to deliver issues “that matter”. Many cable news outlets often use that or similar terms to promote their 24/7 tabloid stations. By cable news, I mean CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and their ilk. What these stations really pride themselves on is the shallow and the sensational, all the while simplifying issues to sound bytes and debates to shouting matches.
The main type of stories I find cable news presents are stories already in the public’s eye, the more controversial the better, which they can exploit for viewership, all the while simplifying it and presenting grown men to debate it until they’re red in the face. For example, take Barack Obama’s recent comments about Western Pennsylvanians being “bitter” and “cling[ing] to guns and religion”. The cable news shows had a field day with it. Conservative hack Sean Hannity (picture), who specializes on catching liberals with their pants down, was more than happy to spread his bile by misinterpreting Obama’s comments. Hannity stated “What he’s saying to Middle America is ‘Hey, you’re a bunch of gun-toting, bible thumping bigots.’”.
One thing Hannity does here is assume that Western Pennsylvania is wholly indicative of the middle class of America, when in reality it is a working class area hit disproportionately hard by a loss of manufacturing jobs, like much of the “rust belt”. The struggle of these people is specific to their situation, and the comments of Obama, while not artfully phrased, are not entirely false. The second, more minor thing he does is substitute in his own word, “bigot”, which Obama never used in his speech. Bigot sounds ugly and less observant viewers are lead to think that Obama actually called Western Pennsylvanians bigots.
The problem with this is that it becomes a runaway train. Pundits say things like “Obama called Western Pennsylvanians bigots” and people listening, who aren’t well informed, assume that Obama said that word for word, when in fact it is a paraphrase of what the pundit believed Obama said. Pretty soon, the actual speech is forgotten, replaced by five word sound bytes. Since sensational news sells, the news networks sensationalize their sound bytes, and the tiniest slip up can become a national fiasco.
Another example of such distortion came when Democratic nominee Howard Dean gave his now infamous campaign speech on the heels of a disappointing 3rd place finish in the Iowa caucus. Dean said:

“Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York … And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! BYAW!!!”

This unexpected show of emotion was pounced on by the cable news networks. They used it to portray Dean as an out of control spazz who couldn’t keep a lid on his emotions. Now, all Dean really did do was utter one incoherent syllable, but that syllable was broadcasted 643 times in the next 48 hours on the cable news networks, resulting in a pretty damning 643 incoherent syllables. One, and I’ll let him pass, but 643? That’s the mark of a crazy man!
Now for the back story. Okay, the scream at the end was bizarre, but one thing about the speech was that he was in front of a very large, very loud crowd. To make himself heard, he had to practically scream himself hoarse. To one at the event, he was trying to make himself heard, but his microphone, picking up only his voice, made it seem like he was unnecessarily loud. The speech was typical stump speech material if presented at a normal decibel level, and the cable news shows knew this, but somehow omitted it in their portrayal of the “Dean is a freak” story.
I’m not defending Howard Dean. He should never be in the White House. He is cold and callous, and such a figure doesn’t make you feel comfortable. But the reasons for why he was ousted from the race are unfair. His sin is so much less substantial than a sex or corruption scandal, so it shouldn't have had the same effects. Yet it did. The cable news networks have a responsibility to the public to present news truthfully, but all to often they sacrifice truth to create a more sensational story and boost their ratings. This is the type of stuff that hurts America, and I sincerely wish it would stop.

Ode to Rich Harden

Okay, a bit of background here. My favorite MLB baseball team, the Oakland A's, have an extremely talented ace pitcher named Rich Harden who unfortunately is the most oft-injured and fragile MLB player this side of Carl Pavano (Yankees fans will know what I'm talking about). A full season for an MLB starting pitcher is 34-35 starts. Harden has 38 starts over three seasons. Last year he made four. When he's pitching, he's one of the best, the key word being when. So far, he's gotten through one week of the '08 season, yet he was inexplicably scratched from tomorrow's start against the Blue Jays and replaced Given his history, us A's fans have a familiar sense of foreboding regarding Mr. Harden, and many have predicted another long Disabled List (DL) stint. I have put the feelings of A's fans worldwide together, in poetic form.

To Rich...

You are quite a talent,
To hitters you're hell,
We'd love a Cy Young,
Yet you love the DL.

You have a super arm,
And a knack for throwing K's,
But I see you'll be out,
For at least ten more days.

It's really not fair,
I can scream, I can pout,
But while you're still hurting,
This team's bottoming out.

Now it's not all your fault,
But it pains me to say,
I expected much more,
By how much you get paid.

So who's your fill-in today?
It's some Double-A scrub,
So get better soon,
Or we'll really be in troub...le.

Mission Update

Hello to all. This is Nathan Price, missionary on assignment in Honolulu, Hawaii, fresh off of spreading the word of Christ from the belly of Africa, the dreaded Congo. I have been sent to lead the young souls of Punahou School toward the path of the lord, but I must say it has been difficult thus far.

I've been told that the juveniles of this institution are among the finest in this great nation, but their indifference to the word of our lord is astounding. Do not these souls, obviously the sons and daughters of heretics and sinners, possess but a thought to the sacrifice of Christ? They are empty, hardened, obsessed with nothing but the material things in this world, content to foul their air with swearwords and flatulence, part of a game they seem to like calling "safety" or "doorknob". Do not these children have a sense of decency?! I see the girls, as young as 13, flaunting their bodies openly, without but a thought to self respect. They are but WHORES in training!!! They must realize the depth of their SINS!!!

I cannot hope to enlighten them if they remain closed off and cold. Even at the young age of fifteen many of them are too far gone for me to rescue. They need to help themselves, for when such pitied souls stray from the path of god, they must realize it and REPENT!!!

I'd have more luck converting monkeys, whose empty, blank minds can be molded, than with these pitiful souls, befouled and corrupted by pop culture. This could be my hardest mission yet. - Nathan Price

Steroids Beyond Sports

With all the recent attention on Roger Clemens, a good number of prominent people have echoed the same message towards America's young public.

"What kind of message does this send our children?"

Honestly, the naiveness of this question is somewhat astounding. For one thing, the repercussions of steroid use in professional baseball are relatively minor outside of the realm of professional baseball. With all the negative publicity regarding steroids, I find myself hard pressed to see some little leaguer saying he wants to grow up and juice all day. In fact, evidence shows that kids are generally turned off or not affected by steroid use in pro sports, as 99% of teenagers said they wouldn't consider steroid use because a pro athlete does. The stigma of being caught doping in today's sports culture is huge. Doping in baseball is a huge crisis for baseball, but its main role for anti-steroid people is mainly as a scapegoat. The facts also say that a vast majority of teenagers who do dope do so to improve their body image, not to throw a 90 mph fastball or flatten a running back. This goes against what so many people have said about steroids. The real cause of rampant steroid use among teens is not in sports. It comes from a deeply rooted and embedded ideal in American culture as to what attractiveness is.

Think about it. Now days, how many rappers do you see that look like blobs, or twigs, or even average joes? Most rappers look like they're auditioning for a Mr. Olympia contest, with muscles bulging off their half-clad bodies. Surely looking like a bodybuilder is not key to being a good rapper, but the music world today would make you think so. It is an American ideal for men to be incredibly muscular and defined, and that's so basic it seems redundant for me to bring it up. Places like the music industry and Hollywood are some of the biggest users of steroids, all to achieve that often unreachable ideal body. This image is what kids today see and strive for. The biggest reason sports are so often brought up is because it's convenient. A player's performance is easily reflected in the statistics, and the incentive to use steroids in sports is obvious and easy to see. But it is less likely to cause steroid use among teens than the constant subconscious message from the media that anything less than a six pack and huge biceps is ugly. This is the primary place from which male teens base their use of steroids. This is where much of the focus needs to be.

An Unfair Game

What if I told you that one single player in professional baseball made more money each year than the entire 40-man roster of another team. That one man's salary was greater than forty men's salaries combined. Such is the case in major league baseball, the only major American professional sport to not create some sort of hard salary cap. The above scenario is real. Alex Rodriguez, star third baseman of the New York Yankees, made more than 25 million dollars last year. The Tampa Bay Rays had a total payroll of just over 24 million dollars. This means, in short, that when the Yankees and Rays square off one of the dozen times each year that they do, Alex Rodriguez can stand on the third base bag, look towards the Rays' dugout, and say with certainty that he makes more money than all the people in there combined.

Baseball, along with basketball and football, form the "big three" of American professional sports. Both football and basketball have a strict salary cap system in place, to put everybody on a level playing field and allow small market teams the same opportunity to retain key players as bigger market teams. A salary cap is a system where every team in the league is only allowed to pay their players a certain amount of money, to ensure equality. If not for the salary cap, teams like the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA and the Indianapolis Colts of the NFL would never be the teams they are. Both teams are among the most consistent in their respective leagues, and they both got that way by having very smart management and an efficient front office. At the same time, big market teams like the New York Knicks or the Chicago Bulls have bumbling, inefficient management, and are punished for it by atrocious play. The hard salary cap of the NBA makes sure that bad teams aren't able to bail themselves out by reaching into their deep pockets and waving fistfuls of money at free agents. Without a salary cap, the Spurs wouldn't be able to retain a franchise player like Tim Duncan, nor the Colts with Peyton Manning, robbing them of their nucleus and forcing them into a continuous state of rebuilding.

This is the case with many small market baseball teams. Good scouting is considered essential to a successful franchise, but the truth is that lots of money can certainly make up for it. Take the case of Johan Santana, by consensus the best starting pitcher in the league. Santana was drafted, trained, and brought up through the system of the Minnesota Twins, a team with the 12th lowest payroll in the league. Santana is obviously a great player, but this past off season there was no doubt the Twins would trade him. Trading away the face of a franchise, especially when the franchise has a chance to contend, would seem silly in any other league. However, when the big dogs of MLB come calling, you really have no choice but to listen.

The Twins are in many ways a model franchise, possessing good scouting and a deep farm system, having brought up solid players like Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau, Joe Mauer, Joe Nathan, Francisco Liriano, and the aforementioned Santana. Yet when it came to negotiating for Santana, they had very little ground to stand on. Santana's rich suitors, the Yankees, Red Sox, and the Mets, didn't need to say it, but the message was clear. "If you hold onto Santana through 2008, we'll just come calling after the season when he's a free agent. Then instead of getting some unproven prospects from us, you'll get nothing at all." The Twins had to give in, eventually trading Santana to the Mets for a package of four minor league prospects. In any other league, the Twins could have dismissed such an offer and taken one that really was equal or in their favor, but instead they realized that they had to take the offer or be left totally in the dust.

The main reason why Santana was traded came down to demographics. New York's population base is close to 20 million people, while Minneapolis has a little over 3.5 million people. This disparity ensures that the Mets, no matter what, will be able to bring in more money each year than the Twins. That's why the Mets were able to pay 45 million dollars more than the Twins last year, and it's why they were able to throw Santana a massive contract that the Twins couldn't hope to compete with.

Due to the above factors, many small teams are doomed to a future of cyclic rebuilding. This cycle means scouting prospects, then drafting them and grooming them into major league players. After a couple of leagues in the majors, the contracts of these players will expire. If they have become elite players, The George Steinbrenners and John Henrys of Major League Baseball will show up and offer absurd sums of money to jump ship and go play for them. The small team will receive prospects and draft picks in return, and just that soon they're back at square one. To succeed as a small team, you need patience and brilliant management. It doesn't take a genius to realize that Johan Santana is good today, but six years ago Santana's skills weren't as obvious. Award the guy who had the foresight to see Santana becoming a superstar, not the guy who was rich enough to buy him away when he became one.

It seems totally unfair to reward teams just for being rich, but that's how baseball is. Are the Yankees so successful because they have the best management in baseball? No, it's because they're so goddamn rich, and they can afford to poach premier players from other teams. I'm not saying the Yankees' front office is stupid, but it certainly makes your job a lot easier when you have almost 300 million dollars in the bank.

So I've stated my case. The aristocratic system of major league baseball is only matched in absurdity by the BCS (college football fans will know what I'm talking about). Baseball, get with the game. It's time to award smart management, because teams that know how to scout, train, and conduct business should be the real winners. The Colts are among the NFL elite because Bill Polian is a brilliant general manager. Money doesn't get in the way. A team from some cow town like Indianapolis wouldn't survive without the salary cap. A salary cap is essential to allow all teams an equal opportunity to compete, and it's time baseball got in line with that type of thinking.

Auschwitz

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

No, strange isn't the right word here. The thinking that created this horrible place is beyond strange. It makes you question how human beings could do such things to other human beings. It makes you distrust humanity itself. It makes you fear that such a monster exists somewhere in the deep recesses of everybody's mind. It makes you sick, and for me, I simply cannot believe it existed.

This place is called Auschwitz. It was the largest and most terrible of the Nazi concentration camps. At its peak, thousands of people were unloaded from trains each day and marched into gas chambers to be murdered. The thinking behind constructing a complex purely for killing people is so ghastly it quite simply could not be possible. I wish with all my heart that Auschwitz was a myth, just so I could take solace in the fact that humans anywhere could not be so despicably cruel. Just the premeditated nature of the Auschwitz death camp is appalling.

People condemned to die at Auschwitz were transported in over packed trains in squalid conditions like animals. They were often times shipped to Auschwitz in the dead of winter, and in the exposed carriages prisoners were exposed to bitter cold, resulting in frostbite and hypothermia. Once unloaded at Auschwitz, the prisoners were divided between slave workers who would end up doing almost all the dirty work and those sent to die immediately. They were told that they would be given a chance to shower, and instead were led into the gas chambers, where they were poisoned by zyklon B gas.

After the prisoners had died, the slave workers were sent to search the bodies and check for anything valuable. Jewelry, necklaces, even gold teeth were taken from the corpses and sold by the Nazis to fund their empire. The bodies were then burned and emptied into mass graves. The terrible work led many slave workers to lose their minds or to commit suicide. Throughout this entire horrid process the Nazi leaders never blinked. 60,000 people were killed in Auschwitz in a little over four years.

Auschwitz still stands today, as a symbol to the horrors of the Nazi's mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and many other ethnic groups. It is a testament to how human beings can do such unspeakable acts without flinching. It is simply beyond my comprehension. The calculated killings of six million people during Nazi rule in Germany has stood for eighty years as the worst genocide in human history. It is impossible to believe. Auschwitz is what is left of a way of thinking that is so horrendous that it is impossible to believe it actually happened. It has already happened though. It is there to warn us that it is our responsibility to make sure that such an act never happens again. Never again.

The Grotto

After our Harkness Discussion today, I think that my understanding of the major points in Robert Olen Butler's piece "The Grotto" has changed. I think the most significant new concept I heard was one that was also stated by Mr. Adams in our most recent chapel. That point is that we have a lot in common with people that at a first glance may look totally foreign and different. This became clear when Clara mentioned to Masud in the grotto that her mother had recently passed away, and Masud also said that his mother had passed away only a year ago. The grief of these two very different people was the same. One person was a white woman from Alabama, the other a Muslim man from Egypt, yet they both felt a profound sense of loss when their respective mothers passed away.
Another point that was brought up in the discussion was whether Clara was at all snobbish towards the Egyptians, even at a subconscious level. I can't imagine two places more different than southern Alabama and Egypt, so obviously both sides were set for a culture clash. Clara is certainly a bit wary of the Egyptians, suspecting an ulterior motive from Masud in the Grotto, even though he was very respectful. I think this misunderstanding and disdain between both sides was meant to highlight that what we notice here are the differences between the two cultures, and not the common experiences and emotions both come to feel, if you dig a little bit deeper.