Sports Articles

Even if you never had heard of Israel or the Jewish people, it would have been child’s play yesterday to identify exactly where my colleague Frederik Sisa jumped off the rails in his rant against war and against Israel in particular. Thirteen of Mr. Sisa’s first 14 sentences demonstrated his disappointing, but unsurprising, unwillingness to engage the world. Often a model of crystallized thinking, Mr. Sisa gives in to his reflexive feckless liberal tendencies. He surrenders, instead, to base emotions, the spinal column of liberal doctrine. Blindly, he swings a coarse club against war, against religion, and especially against Israel. These are the first three commandments to which all modern liberals must pledge unswerving fealty or face unattractive expulsion, the price that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) is paying this summer. Theoretically, Democrats are as smart as Republicans. But, being liberals, they are required to soak all of their feelings in a pool of cynicism before presenting them publicly. Perennial cynicism makes it easier for liberals to be anti, to be against what the other side stands for instead of offering a counter proposal. Chronic cynicism discourages the development of ideas.

I am sorry that Bud Furillo, my old sports editor at the defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, did not embrace his own oblique advice and quit sportswriting in favor of a wider career in journalism. Given his powerful gifts for brashness, flamboyance and flashpoint writing, he could have become a major smokestack in latter-day journalism. Instead, his final column before his death was about a prizefighter named Windmill.

Since the Middle East war floridly flared to a high flame last week, my keenest disappointment came one recent day when my ears were listening to the radio. Tuned to a political commentator with whom my thinking aligns 95 percent of time, I was jolted by a Jew-hating caller. It is scarcely germane that the caller was granted two minutes for a screed. As a stylish propagandist, the caller laid out a perfectly reasonable sounding condemnation of Israel’s existence and its historical conduct. His mellow tone deftly belied the caller’s insidious motivation. His smoothness could have co-opted a farmer in Nebraska or a scholar in Berkeley. What was crucial was the feeble response by the barely interested commentator. He said calmly he would check out the incendiary charges. I was stunned. Effectively for me as a Jew, the caller had just said my wife was a prostitute. That should have flushed out fire, but it did not. Instead, the commentator, a religious Christian, was disinterested in the case to the point of boredom. Not his fight, he implied. Mom’s wise words from my childhood came volleying back to me: In the end, the only vote you can count on is your own.

The easiest victory that City Hall has scored in the past two years was the whuppin’ that the Redevelopment Agency put on the 40 or so residents of the two mobile home parks on Grandview Boulevard. The good news is that not much has happened to the elderly and poor along Grandview since a dreary night last October when, it was said, at least one key member of the Agency privately determined to punish those fearsome 80-year-olds for the intolerable indecision they had displayed. The storyline that evening in Council Chambers was that those sinister senior citizens — who often find it challenging to travel farther than the edge of the grounds — needed to be shown, for keeps, who was boss. The park residents, who are not very unified even though a number have lived there for years, could not decide how to vote. Faced, they were told, with eviction in the short term or the long term as City Hall moved to reshape the neighborhood, they were confronted with a terrible conundrum. It would have rattled a sharp 21-year-old couple. Should residents choose to be included in the City Hall-sponsored renovations of the grounds? This may or may not have guaranteed them a place to live in their even older age, on the park site or elsewhere, location to be decided. This option came with a certain-sized check, valued differently for each resident. The worth of the check would be decided somewhere in the cloudy future, months from now or several years away.

With a son and daughter-in-law residing near Jerusalem, and their first child due at any hour, you can imagine the tension in our home this weekend in view of the renewed Mideast war. “How can I relax,” my wife asked this morning, “when I am reading about terrorists?”. Meanwhile, Israel’s reliable enemies busily were reporting for duty. At the very hour my wife was worrying, Reuters was reporting from Rome: “The Vatican strongly deplored Israel’s strikes on Lebanon, saying they were an attack on a free and sovereign nation.” This is the same Vatican where the last Pope hugged and kissed Arafat. As the cadence of war becomes more voluble throughout the Middle East, the drumbeat is increasing in Culver City to bring American troops home from Iraq.

It was not exactly like entering a burlesque theater and recognizing the back of your father’s head in the front row. But close. There was a bizarre juxtaposition for me on Wednesday night when the First Amendment lawyer Stephen Rohde addressed the Democratic Club. For the last four years, I have been covering businesswoman Lynne Davidson’s free speech case against City Hall. This has led to numerous interviews with Mr. Rohde, who represented Ms. Davidson. Yes, I knew the liberal Mr. Rohde had carved an enviable national reputation as an influential upper tier advocate of free speech. Yes, I knew he had been Southern California president of the American Civil Liberties Union. He frequently speaks around the country on ACLU matters. But since he was Ms. Davidson’s attorney, and since I knew Ms. Davidson, I felt a sense of camaraderie. The camaraderie may have been ephemeral. But there were commonalities. Ever congenial, the first time we spoke was Mr. Rohde called me back as I was driving in Santa Monica. We shared an extended conversation. A few weeks ago, I had occasion to telephone him, off the record, about a Letter to the Editor in a newspaper of our mutual acquaintance. He has appeared in and on The Front Page.

Council Chambers cleared out faster in mid-meeting on Monday night than my family reunions used to when a certain former wife, packing a mere pinch of talent, would announce she was prepared to perform a dramatic reading of Plato. Demonstrating that he retained a measure of good taste two thousand years after dropping dead from smoking unfiltered cigarettes, Plato would cringe, too. The problem, as noted on a thousand previous occasions, is that the members of the City Council act like wind-up yentas every Monday night. Is there anyone among you who doubts that when they die, the most thankless task of the friendly, neighborhood mortician will be closing their mouths? In life, they didn’t have much practice. Our subject today is whether Mayor Gary Silbiger, Vice Mayor Alan Corlin, members Carol Gross, Steve Rose and Scott Malsin are too gassy every time their tushes hit the chairs across the dais. Before you plunk down a wager on the correct answer, it is yes. They have whirled so far out of control with their undisciplined loquacity that they are driving people away. I am reminded of one of my sisters. She begins talking about 5 minutes before she dials my number.

Aside from the fact that unions outlived their perceived usefulness 80 years ago, the main reason I stand squarely against most — not all — unions is that in leadership and membership, unions cater to the lowest denominator, a recipe for criminal behavior. When I was growing up, I thought “corrupt union” was one word. Greasy union bosses, acting as if they were Betty Crocker in a spanking white apron in their favorite kitchen, doughy rolling pins in hand, adroitly blend strands of ignorance and corruption into a tasty concoction. They place their creamy criminal-type pie in the oven and bake until the membership is very, very well done. “Yes, master, I believe that Wednesday is Tuesday, and I shall never doubt you again.” Union, in a huge number of cases, is euphemistic for mob. Thugs lead mobs. “Slicker than deer-guts on a doorknob,” was the way one gentleman of my acquaintance referred to the leaders of his union. Union leaders who aren’t thugs often are dumber than fence posts, the better to be manipulated by their puppeteers behind the curtains. To pose arguably hyperbolic, there may be less corruption inside prisons than in many unions. One dumb shepherd leading many sheep who are even lighter in the loafers. Further, if bigotry is not openly encouraged, it is routinely made to feel welcome.

There is a limit to the patience of even a mild-mannered moderate as he leans back in his favorite easy chair, draws on his pipe, and, amusedly, watches a liberal cat chase a ball of yarn back and forth across the carpet in the den. The ball of yarn is global warming. The cat represents liberals. Being cool cats, they spend their lives (usually harmlessly) chasing global warming or another sweet-sounding cause back and forth across the carpet. They don’t gain ground. They don’t lose ground. They just want you to notice that they are chasing the ball of yarn to save mankind from this year’s designated disaster. If only they could take a seat in the audience with the sensible people, they would see how foolish they are. Whether they believe the yearly bulletins they frantically issue on political conspiracies, on food scares and on weather scares is not known. Having thrown over all of the traditional underpinnings that guide normal people, liberals, with oodles of time to kill, conduct permanent searches for causes to fill in the gaps in their need-starved lives.

As Diane and I were strolling in stride with the human carnival that is Venice Beach on the holiday afternoon, it occurred that those who seek entry to the Boardwalk probably should be subjected to a taste test. In two hours, I saw almost two persons who displayed good taste in dressing themselves. His and hers tattoos remain the rage of the incivil set, and this childish, attention-seeking defacement of otherwise unattractive bodies still is managing to upstage an abysmal lack of taste in casual clothing. From teens to middle-agers who should know better, 95 percent of the jammed Boardwalk’s worth of beachgoers were giving zoos a bad name. You could throw up cage bars around many of these beachgoers, and they might not even notice. They would become immediate, if unwitting, attractions.