Sherry Chandler » And I’m in trouble with the Tombstone Blues
And I’m in trouble with the Tombstone Blues
Nascar with accents? Frank Deford is hard-nosed about the Olympics. I can hardly believe I’m linking to a sports commentator but I learned something from Mr. Deford this week. The torch run was started by the Nazis. Who knew?
Of interest to Kentucky voters, NPR asks What’s taking a bite out of Atlantic City casinos? Also Racinos. I leave it to you to decide whether this was an opportunity lost or a bullet dodged.
The Greatest Silence, a chilling interview with Lisa Jackson. Official site here. Rape as a weapon or war and genocide is as old as the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 20, for example:
13And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:
14But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.
It was also used by the Greeks. It was over the services of a woman prisoner that Achilles was sulking in his tent, after all. I personally think it will go on as long as we have war. Men, guns, and testosterone add up to rape and, in this film as in other reports I’ve read and heard, men sometimes use their guns to commit rape. It’s one of the reasons war is not a satisfactory instrument for foreign policy.
It is also one of the reasons women need to stand up against misogyny in all of its forms, whether it manifests itself in popular culture, in our Democratic primary, or among our own armed forces and military contractors.
Joan Walsh says Thank you, Rush Limbaugh! and invites certain people to desist from reading Salon. Via
Go watch this Al Gore video posted by Chet Scoville at Shakesville.
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2 Comments
1. Harry replies at 10th April 2008, 5:18 pm :
Deford says:
“The Olympics has really ended up as a festival for those sports that nobody much cares about for the other three years and 50 weeks. The showcase is track and field. How many of you can name a single American track athlete? How many of you can name a single track athlete from any nation? The Olympics is a symphony orchestra without the violins and brass.”
Firstly, part of the beauty – one of the chief beauties – of the Olympics is that it’s a festival for the sports that no-one much cares about normally.
And the fact that Americans don’t like ‘track and field’: well, OK then. I can name lots of current track and field athletes, some British, some American, a few Kenyans and Ethiopians, a few Swedes, Canadians… and I’m not even an athletics nut; I’m just generally interested in sport in a country that cares about athletics. As so often before one has to point out: the world is not America.
America doesn’t understand international sport, generally. You don’t compete enough against other countries, all your main sports are basically internal to the US: baseball, basketball, ‘football’, ice hockey. Even in motor racing, you have Indycar and NASCAR while everyone else follows Formula One. There is no international honour in basketball which is more valued than winning the NBA, so of course international basketball seems like a sideshow. People in countries like the UK, who grow up watching soccer, rugby and cricket, think of competing for your country as the highest pinnacle of sport; and international sport is a regular part of our calendar, year in, year out.
The Olympics is a fabulous event, for all the hypocrisy and spin and corruption that often surrounds it. Simon Barnes, the [London] Times sportswriter, points out that during the Games you can travel around a city, from venue to venue, and whether you find yourself watching handball or judo or table tennis or yachting or discus or diving, for the people in front of you, this is perhaps the most important day of their lives, and certainly the culmination of four years of training and preparation and hard work. That’s magical. Roll on 2012.
2. sherry replies at 11th April 2008, 9:48 am :
Thanks, Harry, for making the pro-Olympic case. I agree that we in the United States have a terrible case of Narcissism and I really didn’t mean to be flogging Deford’s point, though as one who identifies redneck I was amused by the Nascar with accents phrase. Mostly I find Deford a bit of a blowhard, and I am less than indifferent to sports. I was just struck by the irony of the torch run having come from Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl and now it’s become this great symbol of unity and internationalism.
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