"I'm Just Saying...."

Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you found you saying, “I’m just saying”? We do that when we think maybe the person we have told something to have not quite gotten our point. Another application is if you want to merely make one point.  Goes like this, “I’m just saying reality TV is not really reality TV. Finally, “I’m just saying” can mean you are simply tossing out an idea for consideration, probably with your opinion attached.

With this in mind I have a few things “I’m just saying” about:

I’m just saying:

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•            It wouldn't be good for Mitt Romney’s campaign if he has in fact squirreled away his money in off shore Cayman Island Swiss bank accounts so he doesn't have to pay taxes on them! I mean it’s not doing him any good not releasing the tax returns but at least it could be less damaging than the potential worse news if he did. I’m just saying what’s going on Mitt?

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•      Why do Americans need guns and heavy armor? Second amendment rights were designed to protect settlers because they couldn't trust that the newly founded U.S. Government might not want to become a Monarchy again with a King. Also, danger from Indian raids and pushing westward were reasons to have guns.  I’m just saying do any of those reasons apply today?

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•                A political pundit on public radio was asked why Americans would want to elect Barack Obama a second time and he said so we could have 4 more years of the same. Do many people want 4 more years of the same? How much has really gone right?  I’m just saying if he’d done the job he said he would do, wouldn't he be ahead by 20 points?

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•         Is Joe Paterno being treated more harshly than Jerry Sandusky? Sandusky is salted away but all memory of Joe is being eradicated / obliterated.  Joe foolishly and selfishly kept silent but Jerry was the one that committed the crimes, right? I’m just saying where is the sense of proportion?

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•            Collegiate sports should be a part of the college experience not above it like they have been for so long.  I’m just saying a slap upside the head (Penn State) is maybe what they all needed.

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•     The professional team the Miami Heat won the NBA basketball championship a month ago and was declared World’s Champions. So why do the same players play again in the Olympics to determine a world’s champion? I ‘m just saying the Olympics should use amateur players.

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•           T he opening ceremony to the Olympics was so weird. A disjointed jumble of British history and British icons that few outside the US and Britain would know. A nice symphony orchestra version of Chariots of Fire disrupted by Rowan Atkinson’s shenanigans rendering the classy orchestra to comic bit players. Kids in pajamas singing God Save the Queen, gargoyle like evil balloon figures and a 35 minute tribute the British National Health Service?  I’m just saying it was 4 hours of weirdness.

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•            Scientists have to come up with some explanation of this summer’s heat (and last summer’s and the summer before that). Is it cyclical (1936 for example was a summer as hot or hotter) or is it a growing trend that indicates the US will get even more drought ridden and hot as each year progresses? When do we begin to make plans to move to Seattle or Canada? Over 2,500+ hottest days on record just in the month of July in the US. That’s a lot of cities melting. I’m just saying it’s not humorous chit chat anymore.

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•        When do the social media networks finally collapse? Like all new (and maybe good) things it reaches a peak of popularity (housing market, Glee, American Idol) and then either slides rapidly into oblivion or totally crashes. The stock for Facebook, Twitter and so forth have dropped significantly in the last 3 months and there have been enough cyber crimes to make people pause and ask what am I doing? What are we all doing? There was the Greek athlete the twitted her way off the Olympic team as an example. I’m just saying maybe it’s not healthy to know everything about what other people are thinking and doing 24/7.

What are your “I’m just saying’s?

"Aurora"

Yet another senseless mass murder occurs in the U.S.  The young man that killed 12 (so far) in Colorado (James Holmes) turned out to be the “loner”, the “reclusive”, the “seemed like a nice guy to me”.  I’ve heard this before; it’s déjà vu all over again. How many men in America fit a profile similar to this, thousands upon thousands? Yet, 99.999% do not plan murder for months, booby-trap apartments, wear head to toe Kevlar and go kill people. What made the most sense to me was what this killer said when he was arrested. He said he was doing what the Joker would do or words to that effect. What he meant became instantly clear to me and to anyone that saw the Batman movie where Heath Ledger played the character of the deranged Joker. If you saw that particular movie you know what this killer was up to.

In that movie, Ledger’s critically acclaimed performance as the evil Joker was based on this premise:  random murder, mayhem, booby-trapped people, explosives, and robbery was not so much about getting money as it was to disrupt people’s lives. To create such chaos that people would never see the world the same way. They would be forced to change themselves and society. In simpler words he was doing it to show a) it could be done b) that you can’t control or even understand the perpetrator c) you cannot stop someone that wants to do this and d) it simply makes “crazy” a new fact of life.

Joker delights in terror, he delights in mayhem, he delights in catching people off-guard, he delights in out smarting the cops and he defies authorities to stop him. Batman does finally stop him (we are left to think only temporarily) but not before he stabs, shoots, explodes, booby-traps, robs and terrorizes people. Joker says society needs people like him to pull them out of their catatonic state and be forced to ‘deal” with things, rethink things and find out who they really are.

Consider James Holmes now. He arms himself (6,000 rounds) catches people off-guard, attacks people feeling safe (what could feel safer that a midnight movie in Aurora, Colorado?) he bursts in, throws gas canisters to create mayhem, he randomly kills and wounds people, he booby-traps his apartment in hopes of creating yet another spectacular event with death and madness. There was no way of knowing ahead of time, no way to predict, no way of stopping him beforehand (barring some miracle where a security officer intercepts him, which is why he chose a midnight movie). He becomes Heath Ledger’s Joker in real life. Don’t forget he did not try to wound anyone; he was trying to kill every person that ended up wounded.

Will he be institutionalized because he is clearly insane (thinking he is Joker) OR will it be proven that his systematic and calculated plan to do a “Joker-like” crime was more evil and a play for fame than insane. Acting like you are crazy doesn’t make you crazy, it may mean you are a disaffected genius looking to prove you are smarter than everyone else. What is the old saying, “crazy like a fox”? I have no idea what it will be in his case. It used to be that people just jumped off bridges and did themselves in. But now they see that taking them out only gets them a small article on the back page of the newspaper; taking out lots of other people gets them the front page.  I am sorry to say it but “crazy” has become a fact of life.

To say I am sad for all those affected, not only in Colorado but his San Diego connections (parents & friends) is as big an understatement as I have ever said. 

"Institutional Culpability"

I wrote about the problems at Penn State and the whole creepy mess in a previous piece. Since that time it has come to light that not only was Sandusky guilty X14 but now the trial is over. Also, now coming out in the 285 page FBI report is how much JoPa knew all along as well as the PSU Athletic department and School Administration. Coded e-mails, texts and phone calls all point to a head coach that in reality was not even close to his professed ignorance over the whole thing. It was a failure of individuals: Sandusky, Paterno, Spanier, and Curley for sure. I really hate suggesting this but did Mrs. Sandusky or Mrs. Paterno know anything? To be sure they had nothing specific to do with the events but in all those years did Mrs. Sandusky never have a hint, hear whispers, or know anything her husband?

I mean could she be married to and be a confidant of Jerry Sandusky for years upon years and know absolutely nothing? I suppose it’s possible she didn’t because it’s not the kind of thing you discuss with your wife and Jerry might have been careful to not say or do anything around her.

More troubling is Mrs. Paterno. She was at games, went to athletic department dinners and events, knew other coaches wives, and I have to believe Joe shared things with her to get things off his mind. If she knew of something did she have a responsibility to act? Should she have told Joe in no uncertain terms “you do something about this right now”! As I say, I don’t know but it is inconceivable (to me) that this could be “out there” for years and only 5 adults and 14 victims know about it. People talk, rumors start up based on a lot less than this. That leads me to the main point of this piece: Institutional culpability.

Protecting the legend, protecting the legacy of, protecting the Universities reputation, and protecting the “friend-colleague-perpetrator” is almost as big a crime here as what Jerry Sandusky did. The thinking is: we can’t let Jopa’s reputation be tarnished. We can’t allow Penn State’s squeaky clean image to sustain any damage. At all costs keep the illusion up. Look the other way, don’t talk about “things” you may have heard or seen, and most of all hope Jerry Sandusky isn’t caught in a hotel room or in a bathroom with a kid. Even if Jerry is caught we’ll go into damage control and claim no knowledge of anything.

The thinking also is: we win football games! We make millions upon millions of dollars from football generated revenue and it’s used across the board in all sports. We can’t let the goose that lays the golden eggs disappear. So, the cover up is on and the coded e-mails referring to “the incident” or to “that problem” are written, being careful to never use Jerry Sandusky or Joe Paterno by name. This cover up was in place for over 13 years and would have continued except one of those pesky victims came forward to blow the whistle. Ah yes, those pesky victims. What about the victims? Years of guilt, shame, fear and above all anger. What about their lives? How many didn’t come forward? We know of 14 victims and another one could well have been Jerry’s own son. All these people were put upon by a clearly emotionally warped man. Who knows how many others are out there afraid to forever be referred to as one of “Jerry’s Kids”. All these kids sacrificed for Joe Paterno’s reputation, for Penn State football, for maintaining the cleanest school in America image, for making a shit-load of money.

What about the great young men that played there and gave their all? Are they ashamed to say they played under Paterno and/or Sandusky? What about those Penn State grads those not in athletics? Do you tell people you graduated from Penn State or do you wait a year or two? 

When a large enough stone is thrown into the water the ripple effect is tremendous and goes on and on for a long, long time. I saw a picture of a college coed at Penn State listening to the 285 page FBI report on the Penn State institutional cover up and she had tears in her eyes.

Joe Paterno’s statue will probably come down, his name will all but disappear for an un-determined number of years and then a movement will attempt to restore his reputation. He wasn’t evil, far from it. There are countless men all across the country that he coached that swear by him and how much he did for them. Life isn’t black and white. No one is all good or all bad. The danger lies in trying to construct an image of someone as being all good. Paterno was a really good (x’s and o’s) coach and probably a good husband. Beyond that he had as many flaws as anyone else. Why not just accept that, admit it and act accordingly.

Stop trying to make athletic coaches God! Stop placing more value in wins that you do human beings, stop creating mythologies around a coach or program. Stop, Stop, Stop!! Even the Wizard of Westwood, John Wooden, the late UCLA basketball coach is mythologized. He carefully cultivated his image of the Baptist Minister from Indiana, with his specs and his rolled up program and perfect mannerly presentation. Wooden apparently walked on water at UCLA or so the University would have everyone believe. No one dares to say otherwise, the icon is in place. The statue (if there is one) stands like a monument to perfection. Hardly! A book or two has already been printed that shows some warts on the icon. Another one is in the works right now that reveals “Coach Wooden” as not always the humble, selfless person he sold to a willing public. He wasn’t very nice or respectful to those that played for him but weren’t the big stars. If you could give him something (wins) he treated you well if you were a sub on the bench you were a sub in his life and one he didn’t have to even acknowledge much. He didn’t walk on water; the statue is a little wobbly. UCLA doesn’t want this book to come out needless to say.

I am not slamming Paterno and Wooden as two bad men. Their plusses far outweighed their minuses. They certainly could coach. But institutions like Penn State and UCLA have to let go of the “coach as god” thinking and the coaches themselves have to resist the temptation of being portrayed as flawless. Paterno could have turned in Sandusky in 2001 and Coach Wooden could have either been nicer, more respectful to his subs or at least admitted later in life that he should have been and apologized to those players. They could have, you know? They should have, you know?

"Scrooge"

One of the most beloved stories of all time is Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”. Virtually everyone knows the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge visited by 3 ghosts and the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley. Almost everyone also knows Scrooge has a catharsis, repents and we are led to believe lived the rest of his days loving others and in turned being loved. Not as many people know that Dickens wrote this story near the peak of his fame and intended it to be more than a Christmas tale of doing good deeds for others. Dickens was so traumatized as a child of 12 seeing his father tossed into debtors prison that he spent the rest of his life obsessed with not ever being poor and also pointing his long quill at the English Government for allowing decent people to be tossed in prisons, children routinely sent to forced labor prison camps for stealing a loaf of bread, children executed on hearsay testimony of adults and countless other societal outrages. Scrooge was the (one-man) representation of the English Government, the English legal system, the English class struggle.  Dickens wanted Scrooge’s redemption to be his countries redemption. History shows us his country didn’t change as much as Dickens would have liked. So much for 19^th Century England, what about today? What about today? 

Scrooge has lessons for us in this time and place too.  People can change can’t they?   

Consider:

One thing we can say about Ebenezer is he took care of himself.  He built up and ran a prosperous business, amassed money and security. Is there anything wrong with that? Of course not. We should learn how to take care of ourselves. We should save money (English call it “put a nickel by” for a time when we will need more money than we have. We all know those days come around. Working hard, and moving forward, is taking care of us.

However, Scrooge only accumulated money and financial security. He thought that was the end all be all: game, set, and match. This is where we must go farther. We have to get outside ourselves and see it’s more about the person across from us than it is about us.

The reason (in the story) that Scrooge is floating above the city, transparent to others is because Scrooge had to get outside himself to see others.  In doing that he understands life is a balancing act. Taking care of us keeps us going; taking care of other people is our lasting foot print in this world.

Scrooge made a promise to God, or the Universe (take your pick) and to himself that he would change, that he would help others and according to the story “he was true to his word”. A person hasn’t really changed unless the change is permanent. A New Year’s Resolution? Going on a Diet?  These aren’t changes; they are reminders to us from us that we need to change.

A memo to self is not change. How do we get outside ourselves (let’s assume we won’t be visited by 3 ghosts)?

Well the next time you see your kid(s) hug and kiss them. You cannot do it too much. No one has ever said, “You know, your honor, where I went wrong was when I was a kid and my parents hugged and kissed me too many times”. You have a spouse or GF/BF? Then find a way to let them know they have done something you have appreciated.

Beyond our own personal connections find someone each day that you can extend a simple, small kindness to. Just one word from you could make all the difference to someone else. If you don’t run into anyone today, don’t worry you will tomorrow.

The lesson, of that great story, is not that we should buy lots of presents at Christmas or that we should feel guilty at trying to be financially secure. The lesson to me is that there is something just as important (or more?) and that is routinely getting outside us, seeing others and helping others in some way.

"Bad TV"

I heard the other day someone going on and on about how good the TV show Seinfeld was. I was not part of the conversation but if I had been I would have told them I didn’t like that show. That led me to thinking how many other TV shows so many people thought were great and I thought were dumber than dirt. So here is (in no particular order) my list of 5 all-time head-scratchers:

1.      

Seinfeld: Highly rated, and on for many years. I personally know people that think this was the best TV sit- com ever created. But why? The show is about a group of friends living in the same apartment building in NYC. Some of the characters work some don’t. They get together for mindless chatter, joke lines you can see coming a mile away, and personal issues that are nothing more than narcissist rubbish. It’s all about the star jerry Seinfeld, the best looking of the people the smartest, the coolest and the most Jewish. The men around him are nincompoops that make Jerry look good. That’s the whole point of the pointless show: sell Jerry Seinfeld. His girlfriend Elaine alternates between being sincere, caring and a complete airhead. It’s 30’s something’s showing us why 30 something’s have always been described as being purposeless.

2.     

  Lost: I tried to hang in there with this evening “suspense” drama of castaways on an island “not on most maps”. They got there because their plane “experienced mechanical failure”. Two clichés and we have only gotten to the first 15 minutes. Of course only the quirkiest, shadiest, meanest, most misunderstood survived the crash. We are led to believe some prehistoric monster is on the island, we hear roars, something lumbering through the forest but never actually meet T-Rex. By the end of the first season, the monster on the island all but vanished from the script. Now the stupid people doing stupid stuff take over. It went from Jurassic Park to Lord of the Flies and by the end of the last season, deaths and re-born again people, underground nuclear bombs, flashbacks on flashbacks made it more confusing than your mother’s goulash. It’s like the creator had a clever idea and then took LSD and kept on writing.

3.      

Any Survivor Show: Oh boy, were/are these highly rated. Survivor Trinity Island, Survivor Bemidji, Survivor Del Mar………and all of them so artificially and blatantly stupid I thought: surely this must be a spoof, a joke of how tough times are in the real world……yes? No! The shows were presented as a serious quest to get a million dollars by torturing themselves, each other but mostly the TV watchers. It’s not a reality show if the participants know they are being filmed. It’s not reality when the participants are being coached what to say and do. Eating raw snails, doing stupid challenges, earning points, torches, the melodramatic voting someone off the Island is right out of Japanese Kabuki Theater. If a person thinks this is reality, if they think that these poor people are starving, if they think that the back-stabbing treachery isn’t orchestrated for ratings then that person must also have seen Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway and thought I’m so glad that nice UPS man was finally saved because  he went through hell.

4.      

There’s something about Raymond: So many people just laugh and laugh and laugh. What a funny show. HUH? It was highly rated and on for many seasons. I watched 2-3 episodes and concluded it was just a redo of The Honeymooners (circa 1950’s with Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows) but a bad redo. Gleason as Ralph Kramden was witless, dumb and he knew it. He was a NYC bus driver for God sake and his best friend was a sewer worker. The humor was that Ralph and Ed were always doing stupid things, thinking stupid things and they backfired making them look like the loveable asses they were and the moral to the shows were the suffering wives that saved them from themselves and kept the marriages together. Raymond, on the other hand, is a weasel, always trying to hide something, lie about something, whine about something, and complain as if his life depended on it. Raymond has no back-bone, can’t talk to his suffering wife face to face. In other words he’s not dumb like Ralph he’s a modern wussy husband. It’s all a set up for the Stand Up comedian Ray Romano to do one-liners. Hey Ray just come out and do your stand up. Oh I forgot the money is in the stupid sit-com.

5.      

The Biggest Loser: I totally get what is supposed to be the value of the show. To show people out there in America that you can get it together and lose weight and feel better in every way. MY objection is on two levels only. Number one: it exploits people in their worst place for ratings. Watching these people suffer, bare their souls admit weaknesses, get mad at themselves is just too, too much to watch. I won’t watch people undergo surgery without anesthetic either no matter how good the surgery is for them. My second objection is that it’s a contest. It’s not enough that you are losing weight, trying to regain control of your life but you have to try and beat others out in the process. Shouldn’t the show be called the biggest winner? These poor people even when they win they are called losers. This is just the Jerry Springer Slob Show. Exploitation is exploitation.