Christopher Caldwell and Jonathan Mahler
Dear Jonathan,
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StumbleUponYou'll find me less dyspeptic today, maybe. I have a couple of deadlines, so by 8 a.m., I was already three cups of coffee and a half-dozen cigarettes to the good. ("Gee, Daddy's in a good mood!") What's more, March is ycumen in and it's going to be 68 degrees today, thanks to the Sunbelt status conferred on our nation's capital by the crumbling ozone layer. I also notice Steely Dan has brought out its first new album in 20 years. After sneering at premature nostalgics not two days ago, I should confess I'll probably go out and buy it.
There is an astonishing headline on Page 1 of the Washington Post business section: "Ailing Kaiser Tries to Cure Regional Ills." Turned out to be not about Europe's reactionary backsliding--and that would really be the last straw, don't you think?--but about the weak revenues of an HMO's mid-Atlantic division. Close one, though!
Funny how the business pages are supplanting the Op-Eds as must-reading. Five years ago, Newsweek's excellent economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson was one of the most talked-about writers in Washington. With an economy growing at an annual rate of 6.9 percent, his diagnoses don't seem so desperately needed, yet he continues to write top-notch stuff. His column this morning attacked the non-taxation of Internet sales--a ludicrous inequity that favors well-connected high-tech giants over mom-and-pop stores. I've written about this myself, but Samuelson made a half-dozen original points--including that the difficulties states have in taxing the Internet could result in a transfer of revenue-collecting authority from local government to federal.
Does any presidential candidate care? Bush, McCain, and Gore--all of them, at heart, yuppies from the Strip-Mall Belt--back the cyberleviathans of the New Economy. Bill Bradley apparently has more important things to do, like the stoking of ethnic hatred that is becoming the raison d'être of his campaign. The only candidate who has applied any brainpower to the Internet-taxation issue is Alan Keyes, and he's come to pretty much the same conclusions as Samuelson.
Snicker if you want about Bill Buckner, Jonathan. But when I talked about putting him in the Hall of Fame, I meant on a plaque. (His catastrophic error is, alas, already commemorated in Cooperstown, as I discovered when I was covering Hillary's upstate "listening tour" last summer.) Buckner had 2,715 career hits. That's more than the recent limp-to-the-finish-line inductee Billy Williams, more than Ted Williams, and over 500 more than Joe DiMaggio. That's to say, he was an average-Buckner-season-and-a-half from getting the 3,000 hits that would have made him an automatic. When you look at the time he lost--much of 1975, 1977, 1978, and 1981--due to a knee injury that would have finished most players' careers, you can say it's only a spot of bad luck that's kept him from being a unanimous choice. Until that injury, by the way, Buckner could run like a deer: 31 stolen bases in 1974. And he produced more RBI than any other non-home-run-hitter of our time.
By the way, what bugs me about SportsCenter--and other highlight shows--is its fetishization of the home run. You'd almost think highlight and home run were synonyms. "Then in the sixth ... Kerpow!" Home runs derive their drama from context. Isolated from context, they're one of the duller things to watch. I realize this is far from a universal opinion. But wouldn't you rather see a triple, or a pickoff, or a 3-6-1 double play?
Best,
Chris
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Highlights from The Fray:
[The Breakfast Table participants covered a wide variety of serious and political subjects this week, and as usual Fraygrants knew which were the really important topics, and were keen to participate in the life of the mind:]
The reason the quoted verse of the Steely Dan lyrics makes no sense is that you have omitted the central line:
Doesn't that make it crystal clear?
--Ralph Bartlett
(To reply, click here.)
I rather think that Jonathan missed Chris' main point. Baseball teams shouldn't be adopted for their success, or for their failures. There's something mightily strange about growing up in California and rooting for the Yankees. After all, there was hardly any shortage of New York teams on the West Coast - whence the need to appropriate the only one that remained where it belonged? I'm a Red Sox fan because I was born and raised fifteen minutes from Fenway Park, because one of my strongest childhood memories is the glory of '86 (and yes, the pain), and because hope springs eternal at the end of winter. I do, however, want to compliment Chris. He may not be a native New Yorker, but he seems as smugly superior as any Yankees fan whom I have ever met.
--Yoni
(To reply, click here.)
Maybe it's one of those "you had to have been there" sort of things, but I thought The Sure Thing was charming. It was funny without being crude or stupid. And the punchline you were strugling with? After a series of catastrophes, the protagonists find themselves locked out of shelter in a downpour. The girl suddenly recalls that she has a credit card, but "I'm only supposed to use it for emergencies!"
--Bill Altreuter
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To Bill Altreuter:
Actually that was the set-up line. The punch line followed: "Maybe one will come up."
--B.Roman
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You should start and post a list of phrases to be banned from the press henceforth. My three nominees (for now): 1) sloe-eyed; 2) tsunami; 3) "I knew (blank) and you're no (blank)."
--Matt Murray
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Here are some more proposed Taboo Phrases: 1) Its the *******, stupid! 2) Risky tax schemes 3) Move forward 4) Media savvy 5) Sole remaining Superpower 6) Outside the mainstream 7) Go negative.
--John McGraw
(To reply, click here.)