Tyson Gay and the dangers of auto-replace

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford's rant of the day for today pointed me to one of the funniest things I've seen in weeks. It seems that the wing-nut Puritan cult that is the American Family Association (Hmm, my family is as American as they come... why don't I see my values represented there?) is so virulently homophobic that they installed an auto-replace filter on their "family-friendly" news feed that changes the word "gay" to "homosexual" wherever it appears in stories that post onto their site. This is merely pathetic until a major athletic figure with the last name of "Gay" starts appearing regularly in news stories, leading to headlines like the one below. Hilarity ensues.

The David Palmer Factor

I wrote back in January ("Where reality and fiction blur") about the possibility -- which even I regarded with some skepticism -- that Dennis Haysbert's four-year run on the television drama 24 playing a strong, courageous African-American president might have laid some of the cultural groundwork necessary for the success of Barack Obama's run for president. As it turns out, Haysbert agrees.

The part that's a little scary, though, is where Haysbert talks about all the people who still to this day come up to him -- the actor who played the president -- and urge him to run. Maybe on a ticket with Harrison Ford...?

The new national security threat: global warming

Here's a conundrum for the handful of far-right flat-earthers who are still trying to deny the existence and/or significance of global warming. What to do when that most rational and conservative group of institutions -- the Bush Administration's own intelligence agencies -- collectively comes to the conclusion that global warming poses a major threat to national security. It's the sort of news that makes you worry about certain peoples' heads exploding...

Of religion and sports bras

I suppose it's part of the nature of blogging that items sometimes catch my eye that might seem on the surface to have no logical relationship to one another. But sometimes they just call out to me, and at least my chosen title is more thoughtful than my second choice: Americans -- Smarter Than We Look.

• The more religious leaders try to narrow our minds to accept only their view of the universe, it seems, the more Americans cling to our tradition of stubborn individualism. MSNBC reports this afternoon that "a new survey finds most Americans don't feel their religion is the only way to eternal life — even if their faith tradition teaches otherwise." Maybe the most startling finding: "57 percent of evangelical church attendees said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life," in direct contradiction to the teaching of most of their church leaders. Thinking for yourself -- there's just no substitute.
  
  
• All this second one really needs is the headline: "Sports bra saves U.S. hiker trapped in Alps." But will she send a thank you note to Brandi Chastain?

The Bush Administration's war crimes

I admit, I have been known to roll my eyes when friends on the left begin frothing at the mouth at all that has been wrought by the dastardly Bush Administration. Yes, it's been a horrible eight years. Yes, the country is crying out for change. But no, verbal bomb-throwing is not going to get us anywhere. The more spittle that apoplectic liberals spray in the general direction of the nation's moderate swing voters in this country, the more likely we are to be watching John McCain's inauguration next January. The best thing we can do, folks, is simply to remain calm and keep pointing out the facts.

There are two reasons for this. One is that yelling and screaming and name-calling doesn't get you anywhere. The other is that it's so unnecessary. One more left-wing flamethrower calling George Bush a war criminal is not news -- hell, at this point, it's practically satire. What's news is when one of Bush's own generals accuses his Administration of war crimes. Now we're getting somewhere!

Tim Russert 1950-2008

One of the strange truths of post-modern America is that people on television sometimes come to feel like part of your family. Even as technology isolates us into individual information cocoons, it brings us into daily contact with certain people, so much so that you can come to feel like you know them.

I never met Tim Russert, who died at 58 today after being stricken at NBC News studios in New York, but that didn't stop him from feeling like family. Insightful, tenacious, balanced, intellectually curious and blessed with a warm wit, he was one of those people I found myself more than once putting on the imaginary list of ten famous people I'd like to have over for dinner. In fact, my lists rarely filled all ten seats; most celebrities seem so insufferably full of themselves that I couldn't imagine their heads fitting in my door.

Russert, by contrast, always seemed so approachable, so human, so real. He was like the neighbor you'd strike up a conversation with in line at the hardware store, and keep it up all the way out into the parking lot because he just had so damn many interesting things to say, and said them with such a unique combination of conviction and affability.

Russert leaves behind a wife and son and a studio full of heartbroken colleagues who have been, somehow, broadcasting all day about the friend they lost quite literally from their midst. After my daughter came in to see if I'd heard the news, she talked about how he'd been NBC's chief political reporter for her entire life. She's thinking of majoring in political science. I like to think I had something to do with that, but Tim probably did, too. His enthusiasm for the political world was contagious. He could make it seem entertaining, yes, but mostly he made it seem like it mattered, like it was a subject worthy of every ounce of the enthusiasm and precision he poured into his work.

Condolences to his family and colleagues on this huge loss. And Godspeed, Tim.

Cell phone nation

The fact that Obama leads McCain 47-41 in the national popular vote in latest post-primary polling is mildly interesting to me at best. After all, it’s five months until the election and we don’t even elect presidents by popular vote. In our system, which awards electoral votes on a state-by-state, winner-take-all basis with just a couple of exceptions (Maine and Nebraska award them according to the winner of the vote in each congressional district), the state polls are the ones the campaigns will be watching.

What I found fascinating about this Mark Blumenthal column about the latest polling is the emergence of a new phenomenon in the polling world – the cell-phone-only household. Pollsters have historically used the phone book to reach prospective voters, but “(a)s of late 2007, one in six American households had wireless service only (no landline) and would thus be missing from traditional telephone samples.” That’s right, more than 16% of American households today don't bother with a standard wired telephone, and the number is growing.

"It ain't over 'til.. " well, Saturday

I met Congressman Charlie Rangel many years ago in Washington D.C. He's a friendly, plain-spoken man of strong beliefs and loyalties who doesn't hesitate to tell it like it is. You've gotta love it when someone inside the Beltway breaks through the haze of rhetoric and spin and offers a dash of uncensored truth:

Mrs. Clinton had initially said she wanted to wait before making any decision, but her aides said that in conversations, some of her closest supporters said it was urgent that she step aside... "We pledged to support her to the end,” said Representative Charles W. Rangel, a New York Democrat who has been a patron of Mrs. Clinton since she first ran for the Senate. “Our problem is not being able to determine when the hell the end is.”

The end, Senator Clinton and her backers now agree, is Saturday, when she will formally suspend her campaign a la Mitt Romney. Not giving up those delegates just yet, but no longer pretending she can do anything but harm her own party by continuing to campaign. Thanks for doing the right thing, Senator.

Obama: "America, this is our moment"

Ted Williams and his speechwriter had a heck of a night last night.

As someone who's written a few speeches in my time, I have a keen appreciation for the fine art of it. It might look easy to some on the outside, but it's not. You have to not just cover the subject matter in a comprehensive, detailed and imaginative way, but also capture the voice and character and cadence of the speaker in such a way that the speech comes out of their mouth as naturally as if the entire thing had been delivered spontaneously.

Barack Obama's whiz-kid head speechwriter Jon Favreau -- who earlier this year described his job as like being “Ted Williams’s batting coach” -- and his candidate hit a home run last night. If you didn't see the speech, it's well worth reading the text here, or watching the video here. It was gracious, statesmanlike, visionary, inspiring, powerful and the adjectives go on and on.

Former Bush press secretary lambastes administration

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, point man for the Bush Administration media machine in the run-up to the Iraq war, apparently isn't feeling too proud today about his role in hoodwinking the American people. In a new memoir he writes that "Over that summer of 2002, top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war... it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage... History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder."

Summing up his three years manning the White House podium, McClellan concludes, "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary." Strong words from the guy in charge of spinning the media into supporting the war. Nice to see he has a conscience, though.

Excerpts are here and here.

"A generational shift in attitudes"

It sure looks that way. Which just goes to show you that human beings have a fundamental desire for fairness and equity that no amount of dogma or propaganda can stamp out.

The Post-American World

I haven't yet picked up Fareed Zakaria's new book, but I expect I will, after reading this very insightful excerpt in a recent issue of Newsweek. The big question I still have about this is, how do we explain this change in circumstance to Middle America? (And the second question I have is, is my first question elitist, or just practical?)

Learning from our children

Fifteen years ago today, the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle simultaneously published an essay I wrote about an issue that was both complex and bracingly simple. I was a young father with a wife and three kids who adored their adopted godfather, my best friend. And he had just come out.

I was happy that my friend had opened up this part of his life to me and my wife. But it was also upsetting to me, because I knew I was living in a world -- an insular suburban heterosexual moms-and-dads-and-2.5-kids world -- which might have trouble accepting my friend for who he was (and is). I knew most of them were good people who would want reflexively to do the right thing; they might just need a little push to understand what the right thing was. So, I wrote.

The California Supreme Court's recent decision upholding gay marriage gives this little flare-up of personal nostalgia extra resonance this week. One of the things that made the Court's decision possible is the changing attitudes of a new generation. Today's generation is asking the same kinds of clear-eyed, fearless questions about sexual identity that the Boomer generation asked about race when they were young, i.e. why should we treat those other people differently?

In 1993, the Bee titled my essay "Learning from our children." We still are.

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Learning From Our Children

by Jason Warburg

On a warm spring evening I sat, wedged into a metal folding chair, in a grade-school auditorium that could have been in any town in America. I sat, watching a roomful of parents and children and trying to figure out who was teaching whom.

It was opening night of that elementary school staple, the spring show. A crowd of adoring parents giggled and cheered as a hundred and fifty alternately terrified and mugging second through-sixth graders flooded the modest hall with a torrent of off-key songs. Video cameras, dotting the audience like ants on a sweet roll, recorded the event for posterity from ten or more vantage points.

My wife and I brought two of our three small children in hopes they would enjoy the show, or at least take a break from the ongoing process of leveling our house one chunk of plaster at a time. Our three-year-old Sarah was indeed mildly amused by the vast noisy spectacle, until she reached her maximum sitting-still time -- about forty-five minutes if it's a really good show -- and commenced one of her fidgeting frenzies.

Minutes -- and a bruised parental shin or two -- later, Sarah was suddenly still, frozen in time except for a widening smile, as a familiar melody rang out. She had been transfixed by the five indelible notes that begin the theme to Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast..

The story of Beauty and the Beast has long captured the imagination of a wide, youthful audience. As told by Disney, it is filled with echoing images of longing and awkwardness, jealousy and compassion, vanity and selfless heroism. This jumble of familiar adolescent emotions is crowned by a collection of unabashedly catchy songs, three of which were nominated for Academy Awards, with the main theme winning.

As we smiled at Sarah's excited recognition of one of her favorites, it struck me that similar scenes of grade-school musical drama must be playing in auditoriums across the nation -- and that this is only the beginning. Over the next thirty years, a thousand Belles and a thousand Beasts will conduct their shy, delicate dances across ballrooms fashioned of painted cardboard scenery and worn stage floors. Millions of parents -- a near-perfect cross-section of America -- will look on, beaming, filling rooms with pride so pure and thick you can taste it.

Few of the players in these scenes will know whom to thank for the warm feelings that envelop them. The name of Howard Ashman, lyricist for not only Beauty and the Beast but also The Little Mermaid and much of Aladdin, is not well-known, yet his life's work has touched the hearts of people of all ages and walks of life. As executive producer as well as lyricist for Beauty and the Beast, he more than any other individual is responsible for its vitality and resonance.

As I considered all of this, a sudden irony overwhelmed me. These young parents, many of whom have a difficult time even speaking the word "homosexual," particularly in any connection with the lives of their children, were joined in chorus with their sons and daughters, jauntily singing lyrics written by a gay man.

As this sunk in, I thought also of our youngest son, at home that night running and playing his two-year-old heart out under the loving care of his godfather, our best friend -- a man I hope each of our children will adopt as a role model, and one who, after foregoing shaving on weekends, occasionally resembles the Beast himself. If our children do emulate this man, they will grow up to be bright, thoughtful, exceptionally witty and gentle human beings. And I expect it will be completely irrelevant to them, as it is to the millions of children so well entertained by Beauty and the Beast, that the giver of this wonderful gift is predisposed to fall in love with another man.

Howard Ashman's legacy is tremendous. We live in a world filled with fears, both rational and irrational. To be a fully functioning human being is to recognize and respond appropriately to the rational, while eliminating the irrational as thoroughly as possible. In producing Beauty and the Beast, Ashman launched a vehicle for teaching an entire generation of movie-goers to banish their irrational fears -- to look beyond outward appearances, even prejudgments foisted on us by others' intolerance, and see to the heart of a person. Ashman died of AIDS in 1991, but his offspring is at work every day now reminding us that the only real beasts are the ones we create when we allow fear to prevent us from recognizing and appreciating the essential human sameness we all share.

At the close of the show, watching a hundred and fifty young faces sway to the music of A Chorus Line, I couldn't help wondering about the five, or ten, or fifteen or more of them who are gay. Will their friends and family be able to accept them for who they are? If so, perhaps it will occur to one or two of them to silently thank Howard Ashman for teaching millions of people that the Beast is ignorance and fear, and the Beauty is inside every one of us.

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(c) Copyright 1993 Jason Warburg

Love is all you need

Congratulations to the California Supreme Court for doing the right thing. The fight is not over, of course, with further legal action and ballot initiatives just around the corner. But for today, it's a great day to be a Californian.

As for the headline above, it makes for a nice symmetry with this one.

Smart car, smart move, smart guy (?)

A diverse trio of items caught my eye in the last 24 hours.

First there's the crash-test report on the tiny Smart Car, which turns out to be one of the safest subcompacts on the road. It still looks a little iffy for long rides on the interstate, but for city driving -- not to mention parking -- this high-mileage, low-emission gadget on wheels is the wave of the future. Just ask all the Europeans who've been using them for years in Rome, Paris and Frankfurt.

Next up, the man who saved the Giants is about to step down. Peter Magowan has done a lot of irritating and flat-out stupid things in the last decade -- anyone want a slightly used $18 million a year pitcher? -- but in 1993, he and his partners pulled off what felt like a miracle, buying a franchise that was set to move to Florida and keeping baseball in San Francisco. Thanks for that.

And finally, R. Kelly once said "I Believe I Can Fly" -- but this guy actually can. No, really, 186 MPH with a rocket strapped to his back. Completely nuts. (Side note: is it just me, or did anyone else start humming the Jetsons theme song while watching this?)

The Elitist Menace and other campaign fictions

I have avoided the entire subject of the presidential election for weeks now due to campaign fatigue on my part. What? The numbers haven't changed? Obama still has an insurmountable delegate lead? McCain is still a smug warmonger? Clinton is still clawing after the nomination like a wolverine on crack?

Ah, but then someone comes along and puts it all in perspective. Thank you, Tom Tomorrow. You're my hero....

All you need is love

I don't always read the obituaries, but every so often something catches my eye. This morning it was an obituary for a true American hero, the fittingly-named Mildred Loving, who played a part in righting a wrong so fundamental that your average teenager today can hardly believe it was ever part of American life. As the Associated Press obituary tells it,

"Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died...

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero - just a bride. "It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work." ...

"The law that threatened the Lovings with a year in jail was a vestige of a hateful, discriminatory past that could not stand in the face of the Lovings' quiet dignity," said Steven Shapiro, national legal director for the ACLU.

"We loved each other and got married," she told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when the case was pending. "We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants."

Yes it should. Who will be this generation's Mildred and Richard Loving? I hope we find out one day soon.

Just because

That is all.

Iron Geek, er, Man

I am such a geek sometimes.

Not exactly a newsflash, that, but I’ve definitely been feeling my geek oats this week in anticipation of catching the new Iron Man movie. Yeah, that’s right, I’m all aflutter over a comic book movie about a guy who puts on red and gold armor to fight bad guys using “repulsor rays” and such.

There are reasons for this.

One is Robert Downey Jr., one of the great actors of his generation (my generation), who came perilously close to flushing his career – not to mention his life – down the toilet back in the 90s with a series of drug- and alcohol-fueled run-ins with the law. A decade later, Downey returns to the big screen as what appears on paper to be the perfect choice to play a desperately flawed hero -- an arrogant, hard-drinking uber-capitalist whose comeuppance forces him to question everything about his life, and convinces him to try to make something positive of it while he still can.

Another, I must admit, is the pure giddy fun of seeing another of my childhood heroes hit the big screen. Yes, I did collect comics all through my grade school, teen and even college years, and no, they didn’t rot my brain, thank you very much. They may have implanted some very archetypal ideas about good and evil, wrong and right, romance and loyalty and such – but what exactly is wrong with that, anyway?

A third is the fact that, while he’s never been my favorite, the Iron Man of the Marvel comic books has for most of his modern tenure been a wonderfully dysfunctional hero, a cocky s.o.b. with major alcohol and intimacy issues, not to mention shrapnel lodged near his heart that could kill him at any moment. All indications are that the movie is faithful to that vision, combining 21st century whiz-bang special effects with an equally three-dimensional lead character whose deep flaws give his heroism dimension and emotional impact.

Or maybe it was just that they closed the trailer with THE perfect song, Black Sabbath’s 1971 industrial music prototype “Iron Man.” Yeah, that was probably it...

The True Meaning of Sportsmanship

A friend forwarded this amazing story this morning. Kudos to the players involved, and a big raspberry to the guy who e-mailed one of the players criticizing women's lack of competitive spirit. Whoever you are, you're exactly the kind of parent I used to despise seeing around the Little League diamond. People who think sports are about nothing more than beating the opponent by any means necessary have no business being involved with them.