Originally posted December 31st, 2003
By Michael Konik
With the Iranian city of Bam nearly obliterated by an earthquake and now buried in rubble, devout Muslims must be asking themselves how this latest catastrophe (40,000 souls estimated dead) fits into their God’s grand plan. Jews could wonder something similar about the holocaust û but that tragedy could at least be ascribed to the cruelty of humankind, not a perverse Supreme Being. Ditto the victims of Pol Pot, “The Crusades,” and the Spanish Inquisition, and every other mass murder of innocents at the hands of demented tormenters.
Natural disasters are harder to explain. Surely the “God moves in mysterious ways” explanation doesn’t provided much comfort (or cogent explanation) to those who lose loved ones in a massive shifting of tectonic plates. Surely God wasn’t eliminating an entire city of mostly devout Muslims in order to teach a lesson of some kind.
Originally posted December 22nd, 2003
By Michael Konik
The other night a proud music producer played for me a new recording of his latest protege, an enormously talented diva who could sing like Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and the Mariah Carey, among other putatively wonderful songbirds. Not only could she hit the high notes, he assured me, she had tremendous stage presence, movie starlet looks, and nearly perfect pitch.
And, oh yeah, she was only 11-years old.
I listened to this lassie’s debut CD with interest — which quickly transformed into mild queasiness, and then disgust.
Nearly every song the pre-pubescent girl sang was of the “you’re the best man I’ve ever had, baby” variety. I heard emphatic declarations of “you make me feel like a natural woman,” and “give it to me one more time.” (I was assured that her proud parents supervised the young chanteuse’s repertoire.)
Never mind that a pre-teen singing about feeling like a . . . → Read More: Junior Idols
Originally posted December 21st, 2003
By Michael Konik
The sports world is aghast – as it often seems to be û that athletes in disciplines as diverse as track & field, football, and baseball are ingesting “designer” steroids that allegedly make the competitors bigger, stronger, faster, and, thus, eminently more endorseable. Since an organization like the NFL can’t possibly claim that it’s looking out for the health of its combatants, America’s top sports presenter invokes principles like fairness and “level playing field” to decry the use of pills that “make” the user better.
What these drugs actually do is quicken the recovery process after a strenuous workout, when muscle tissue is broken down and then re-grown. Merely swallowing the additives in question will not turn you into Barry Bonds. You must spend the requisite time in the weight room, putting in the hours of lifting and grunting, reveling in the burn of lactic acid. Many of these “growth . . . → Read More: Performance Enhancing Drugs
Originally posted December 18th, 2003
By Michael Konik
Giving to the needy is supposed to be a virtue. Indeed, it’s once of the sacraments of most religions. In our venal world, being charitable – sharing with those who don’t have what you have – is akin to secular holiness. How much someone gives to charity is a powerful if imprecise barometer of how good a citizen he is – particularly when he is on trial for corporate malfeasance. Giving to charity is a curiously efficient way to absolve oneself of a multitude of sins.
Professional sports organizations like the PGA Tour, an immensely profitable business based in Florida, generate tens of millions of dollars for charity. The NFL’s chief charity beneficiary, the United Way, banks even more. (Which is useful, since the officers of the United Way must keep fuel in the private jet and fresh wax on the chauffeured Town Car.) A key part of these sports . . . → Read More: Against Charity
Originally posted December 12th, 2003
By Michael Konik
From the Department of Delicious Irony we get news that the late Strom Thurmond, the perpetual Senator from South Carolina who died in June, had fathered a child out of wedlock with a black teenager. That child, Esther Mae Williams, is now in her sixties, and for the first time in a life of secrecy she is publicly acknowledging the identity of her daddy.
Discovering that a man of upstanding morals has been very naughty is nothing new. We half expect our leaders and exemplars to succumb eventually to lust and venality, if only to prove their humanity. What’s noteworthy about Senator Thurmond’s long-hidden dalliance is that he made a career as one of the last and most outspoken segregationists. He was “Old South,” a pillar of racial separatism who spoke forcefully of the need to keep blacks and whites in their respective places û which is to say, far . . . → Read More: Strom und Drang
Originally posted December 11th, 2003
By Michael Konik
My barber was incredulous. “Do you believe it, Mikey?” he said, gesticulating with scissors alarmingly close to my ear. “Only three more weeks and this year is over. I can’t understand how this year went by so fast. It seems like we celebrated New Year’s just yesterday.”
Franco is in his late-forties. His eldest daughter is going to college next year. He’s losing his hair and his youthful good looks. His days are accelerating.
For all of us they are. It’s a universal phenomenon, it seems: The older you get, the faster life seems to race away. If there’s a scientific explanation for this, I don’t know what it is. (Something having to do with string-theory and quantum physics, perhaps.) I do know, however, that the older we get, the more acutely we’re aware of mortality, of the impending end. We see death more frequently as we get closer to . . . → Read More: It’s Almost Over
Originally posted December 9th, 2003
By Michael Konik
Many tears were shed this past weekend in Los Angeles, and the lachrymal mourning wasn’t over starving Africans or bleeding Afghanis. The crying – and the whining and the righteous indignation – was inspired by a college football ranking system that kept the USC Trojans out of the putative national championship game, the Sugar Bowl, and relegated them to the still-lucrative but less climactic Rose Bowl.
In two polls – one of football coaches; one of people who write about football – USC was thought to be the #1 college football team in the nation. But the system used to nominate the top team, the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, considers more than a dozen factors to determine college football supremacy, including a heavily weighted amalgam of computer-derived power rankings that analyze in Zeroes and Ones what callers to sports talk radio analyze in semi-literate grunts. The BCS system found . . . → Read More: The ‘Broken’ BCS
Originally posted December 2nd, 2003
By Michael Konik
Drugs like caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are legal (and more or less woven into the fabric of daily American life.) Drugs like cannabis, cocaine, and LSD are not (and those who use them are more or less consigned to the squalid fringes of society.)
Paying a woman to take off her clothes and display her breasts is legal (and the staple entertainment at “Gentlemen’s Club”s from Honolulu to Houston). Paying that same woman to insert those same unclothed breasts into a stranger’s mouth is not (and those who would engage in such mischief are hardly considered “gentlemen.”)
Playing Bingo in the church basement is legal (and a time-honored way to “give back” to the parish.) Betting that the Giants will beat the Jets by more than four points is not (and those who would wager on such a proposition have the stain of degeneracy upon their character.)
Originally posted November 20th, 2003
By Michael Konik
Every third movie poster features one of our beloved celebrities brandishing a gun.
Every other hip-hop song on the radio features one of our beloved thug-poets declaring his intention to “cap” his victims with a “nine,” among other convenient weaponry.
Every Sunday (our day of rest and worship) three of our beloved television networks broadcast nearly 12 hours of professional football, in which armored warriors have collisions that would decapitate the average office worker.
But what calamity might follow should our children (not to mention the rest of the populace) glimpse a bare breast, a penis, or , heaven forbid, two consenting adults making love?!
Those who strive to keep sexual content (or even non-sexual nudity) out of the public eye would do a far greater service to our mangled society by focussing their prohibitive efforts on images of violence. The same celebrities who campaign for various noble causes — . . . → Read More: America’s Violence Fetish
Originally posted November 19th, 2003
By Michael Konik
The other night in Los Angeles, it was possible to see faintly the Leonid meteor showers with the naked eye. A bright gibbous moon made the show less spectacular than it will be tonight, on the 19th, when the moon will be on the wane. The light we saw shooting across the sky was thrilling to astronomers because it was “young,” only a few hundred years old.
Events like these remind me of something I feel every time I gaze upon the stars: This universe is too large for me to get my meager mind around. No matter how much I read about space and physics and what time really means, I can’t comprehend how short our human existence is and how long everything else is.
Which then gets me thinking this: Our lives are too brief to worry much about anything. It’s all utterly inconsequential in universal terms. Only . . . → Read More: The Dust of a Comet
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
