Cost Effective

 The Oakland Athletics' final out in their final home game came coincidentally as school was letting out on the day that my principal returned from an "emergency meeting" about the district's budget. Those of us with any experience dealing with Oakland Unified winced in anticipation. The pop up was caught and the team stayed on the field, knowing that they would not be coming back here. There was nothing quite so immediate happening at school. 

Just that looming sliver of Oakland dread that things were not necessarily going to end happily.

This is about the time that a fourth grader came around the corner to let us all know that the boys' bathroom was flooded. I knew that our substitute custodian had gone home for the day. I knew that it would still be another two to three hours before the evening custodian would show up, leaving a gap of time during which half of the after school program kids would have to wade through the half-inch of water that had accumulated on the floor without a drain. 

I set my backpack down. I went to the custodian's closet and grabbed a plunger and a squeegee. I spent the next half hour making the boys' bathroom habitable once again for the boys who needed a place to go. Someone had to do it. 

Here in Oakland, that is the way things work. I can see that the deficit that has blossomed in the wake of creating a district jam-packed with small schools, charter schools, and every effort that had been made to increase the learning potential of the students in these classrooms was costing money we did not have. And that raise that we all got after our last strike? That was money the district did not have. But the negotiations for making things work for the kids of Oakland led us here, to a place where we cannot afford to do public education the way we had set out to do it. Declining enrollment was the biggest arrow people would like to paint pointing directly at the Oakland Unified School District. Anybody looking at the outside looking in will see that there are too many people doing not enough work for the price we are paying. This idea isn't lost on anyone looking at most anything happening in and around Oakland. Silicon Valley is not the fuel that keeps our fires burning. This is a port town. A swirl of diversity and ever-changing community that absorbs and evolves. This is the working class mirror of the city across the bay, San Francisco. 

San Francisco built a new baseball stadium for their Giants. They built a new basketball arena for Oakland's Golden State Warriors. Their schools are struggling to pay their bills. They might have to close schools. And I wonder who is cleaning out their boys' bathrooms. 

Final Score

 Dear John,

Sorry it took me a few days to respond to your letter. Thank you for taking the time to address us, the fans of the Oakland Athletics, and for giving us all your vision for the future, and the past. Thank you for making an effort to try and explain why after fifty-six years of baseball in this town you have decided to leave for the much more hospitable climes of the Nevada desert. 

Thanks for nothing. 

In your letter, you say that you have tried your very best to keep this team in Oakland. Yet each time some sort of compromise was worked out with the city, there were new conditions imposed and all the while you kept looking for other places to have your team, because you are the owner, play. To be clear, you have it in your means to build a new baseball stadium just about anywhere in the world. Three billion dollars would be a nice pot of money to put a diamond in that other city by the bay. 

But that's not the way you roll. You need the city to come up with the cash and the infrastructure to pay for your illusory temple to the Gods of Baseball. Rather than strike a deal that would keep the A's in Oakland until you can get any kind of sweetheart package in Las Vegas, you found the folks up in Sacramento willing to provide you with a minor league stadium in which you can field your team until such time as the greedheads in Sin City come around to your line of thinking. The line of thinking that anyone would be pleased and excited to be the recipient of the team you ground into the dirt over the past eight years. 

This is not the team you reference in your letter. This is not the Ricky Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Moneyball Oakland A's. This is not the twenty-game win streak A's. Around the time that everyone in organized baseball started using Sabermetrics to put a team on their field, the difference that made Oakland unique disappeared. The overriding issue returned to the obvious: money. You have to spend money to make money. You have to spend money to win games. 

John, you didn't spend the money. You priced yourself once again at the very bottom of the Major Leagues in payroll. By more than twenty million dollars. If you had been saving up to help get a new stadium built in Oakland, it might have made sense. Instead, you created a vacuum of talent. Vacuums suck. And even the most die-hard fans of the game were hard-pressed to find their way out to the ballpark. 

Now that Field of Dreams is dead. Your billions are safe, but not the weekly paychecks of the security, the vendors and all the ancillary businesses that were employed by the Oakland Athletics. Your fortune, handed to you by your father, is in pants. Not in baseball. Your future is secure. Your legacy as one of the worst owners in professional sports is secure. 

You made my son cry. I fully support his burning impulse to punch you in the head if he ever encounters you in some chance meeting. 

Thank you for your whiny excuse of an explanation. But it doesn't hold up. 

Thank you for nothing. 

Vanishing Point

 My wife imported a saying she attributes to her grandmother: "The house doesn't eat anything." We are not particularly sure if this is an accurate translation from the native German, but this phrase has served us well since the late twentieth century. 

Which is why the loss of my wallet was so infuriating. Not the initial loss of the wallet my wife brought me all the way from Italy. That one was "lost" a great many times, but turned out to be simply "misplaced." I set about preparing to replace credit cards and drivers license only to discover that this treasured bit of memory was lodged in the back of my closet, or stuck in the seat of my office chair. This was always a great relief because I don't carry a lot of money in my wallet, but I do carry the memory I spoke of earlier. There were parts of my history, ranging from photographs of my father to the receipt for my wife. The tiny slip of paper that showed that I had paid for our marriage license. Those, along with several other scraps of ephemera were under safekeeping as long as I could reach around to my back pocket to be sure that they were still there. 

On Sunday morning, it became apparent that the easy answers were no longer available. The night before, I had gone out to the ballpark with my family for one last look at the home team. When I awoke and started to put my day back together after a weekend of bouncing around, having fun, I realized I could not account for my wallet. I searched all the usual places. I looked in some unusual places. I called my son to see if it had made its escape into the back seat of his car. It quickly became apparent that the culprit was me. Or rather, my shorts. On any number of occasions my wallet has slipped from the back pocket of this particular pair of comfy cargo shorts. Please don't ask why, with all the pockets available I insisted on placing that most valuable fistful of leather in my back pocket instead of any of the Velcro-enhanced enclosures offered up to me by my odd sense of fashion. The best answer I can muster is "habit." 

So after a day of retracing and searching and researching, all of those prior preparations to replace missing items went into full effect. I canceled credit cards. I ordered a new drivers license. And the most difficult phase, I began to imagine a world without all those bits of paper that I had held onto for so long. 

The next evening, my wife went out to speak to a neighbor who, upon hearing about my plight, offered up her fifteen year old son's old wallet. Once again my wife came through in an odd pinch. The following day when my new credit card appeared via express delivery, I went to stuff it into this new tiny bit of luggage, but it was nowhere to be found. 

It was as if the gods were telling me that I was not ready to take on the responsibility of having a wallet again. Sorry, they said, but you're not grown up enough for this level of authority. Once again, I tore through the house, with the words of my wife's grandmother ringing in my head. Two hours of flipping over couch cushions and looking under furniture after the horizontal surfaces that made sense were exhausted revealed nothing. Had the gods vaporized this replacement gift to humiliate me further?

As I was brushing my teeth, getting ready to surrender to the circumstances, I decided there was one last place that had not been investigated. I asked my wife to help me toss our bed to see if the escaped wallet might have somehow ended up tangled in our sheets. 

The house didn't eat anything. It was right there where, I can only assume, the cat put it to wreak some sort of revenge on me for not giving him the attention he feels he deserves. 

A new age began the following morning. This slightly used wallet that now holds a replaced credit card and little else is the beginning of a new era, one that involves secure fastening of my back pocket. 

Cognitive Decline

 When you've lost Cronkite, you've lost Middle America. This was the opinion Lyndon Johnson shared with his advisors in response to Walter Cronkite's lack of support for the war in Vietnam. It was an acknowledgement of the importance of the voice of a generation. Most trusted news source back in the day? It wasn't even a contest. 

Which is what I was thinking about when I read that the candidate for "president" who has been convicted of thirty-four felonies whined at a MAGAt rally in Pennsylvania, "Where's Johnny Carson? Bring back Johnny." 

A couple of points here: First and perhaps foremost, Mister Carson retired from broadcasting in 1992. He retired from this material plane in 2005. Secondly, Johnny was famously apolitical in his monologues. But even that restraint was tested as Richard Nixon's presidency began to implode after the 1972 election. In 1973, Johnny's monologue included this bit: “President Nixon, according to his wife, likes to play the piano late at night in the White House. Did you see that in the paper? True. Plays the piano late at night. … The President is going to- is going to form his own group. Did you hear that Tom? Called the Watergate Five.” Later that same year, he let this one fly: “You know, it is really hard to believe how many people have resigned from the White House today. One of the reporters from New York Times called the White House today, and on the other end he heard, ‘Hello, this is President Nixon. I'm not home right now, but when you hear the beep, will you leave your name and address?’ It's getting very strange.”

So I suppose what I am suggesting here is that Johnny Carson must be seen as a very tame commentator for late night TV compared to the current lineup of Fallon, Colbert and Kimmel. Even Jimmy Fallon who famously gave the former game show host a pass just a couple months before the 2016 election, preferring instead to muss up The Donald's Do. Since then, the landscape of late night has changed to a much less hospitable place for the adjudicated rapist. He is the butt of most of the jokes being told after your late news, with those bits going viral thanks to social media and early bedtimes. Stephen Colbert is pulling no punches. Jimmy's still mostly playing nice, but the material is so abundant it's almost impossible not to fall into it. 

And then there's Jimmy. The Orange One saves special distaste for ABC's late night host. Jimmy Kimmel, the man who once suggested during last year's Oscars that he was seeing the twice-impeached former president's comments on social media and wondered aloud to those watching, "Isn't it past your jail time?" 

So the insurrectionist felon has lost the late night hosts. He can always savor the memories of Johnny Carson, who once described the MAGAt in chief in a series of monologues from the 1980s. 

Get Over It

 The Middle East is exploding. In bits and pieces. Sometimes very large pieces. 

Sri Lanka has a new president.

Russia and Ukraine continue the war that is now in its third year. 

Migrants feel "less welcome" as far-right groups surge in popularity. In Germany.

The world is full of problems, but Marge Taylor Greene's boyfriend and conservative journalist Brian Glenn chose to use his bully pulpit to explore the downfall of the salad bar at Jason’s Deli in Wilmington, North Carolina. Taking his highly developed investigative skills on the road, Marge's boy toy reported to anyone who cared to listen about how he was denied a second trip to the salad bar. He posted a video in which he whined, “When did Jason’s Deli start just doing one trip to the salad bar?” Glenn said. “Just one. It’s a big plate, a big bowl. But just one time. They told me it’s after COVID. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to Jason’s Deli and I have gotten multiple salads, over and over and over." He closed, asking viewers to "let me know what you think.”

Well Brian, since you brought it up, here's what I think: I think you need a real job. I think you don't fully understand the ethos of a salad. Americans have long since forgotten that the initial notion of having "just a salad" was to limit their intake of food. It is a uniquely American notion this "all you can eat" thing. And Brian just happens to be, for better or worse, uniquely American. It is for him and his kind that the trough should be piled high and it's best to keep your hands and feet out of the way when the machinery is in motion. Even though he was open to the idea that in a post-COVID world making multiple trips to the same bin to get your fill of chickpeas doesn't make a lot of sense, Brian was still having a hard time accepting this change in his feed. 

There is currently a hotly contested presidential race going on right here in the good old U.S. of A, and one might imagine that there are more pressing issues than multiple trips to the salad bar. It's just a short hop over the fence to start complaining about how immigrants are getting first pick of all the neighborhood pets. 

Oops. I probably shouldn't say that too loud. Brian Glenn will be on the case. 

A Tale Of Two Cities

 We went to San Francisco last Friday night. To be more precise, we went to San Francisco's baseball stadium, also known as Oracle Park. Formerly known as Pac Bell Park, SBC Park, and AT&T Park, this was the venue our family went to see local punk heroes, Green Day. We have a history of making this trip, with the most recent being just two years ago. Before that, we have attended shows of theirs in many and varied sports arenas around the Bay Area. Green Day is something we can all agree on, even though my wife has on occasion expressed mild frustration with being hectored by Billie Joe to get her hands up in the air. Nevertheless, our fandom is a family affair, and we rocked into the night and stayed up way past the parents' bedtime. 

Somewhere along the way, the lead singers of one of the opening bands who also hail from 'round these parts, Tim Armstrong of Rancid, noticed a banner hanging from the stands that expressed displeasure with the pending move of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas. It was a pretty straightforward punk expletive directed at John Fisher, the owner of the baseball franchise directly across the bay. Not to be outdone, Billie Joe Armstrong included similar sentiments as he shared his feelings about coming home to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his band's major label debut and the twentieth anniversary of their epoch defining rock opera, American Idiot. Billie was happy to be home, but very unhappy about the A's moving away. 

As it happens, my family of three also had tickets to go see one of the last ever home games of those same Oakland A's the following night. We piled into our son's car and drove down to the Oakland/Alameda Coliseum, formerly known as Ricky Henderson Field as well as any number of corporate shills willing to pay for the privilege of having their name stapled to the scoreboard for a limited amount of time. We went to the ball game for a chance to see our team, the one with whom our son had grown up, one last time. For many years we had made a practice of attending at least one home game, my son and I, usually around Father's Day. It was always a treat to sit in the stands and wile away a day, having a hot dog and shelling some peanuts. And in all those years, we compiled a solid streak of attending games that the A's won. This isn't to suggest that we were lucky charms or anything, but in sports we know it's best not to mess with a streak. 

That streak came to a crushing end as we watched the Yankees dominate the home team ten to one. It was hard to get a full accounting of the attendance, but in a fairly full stadium, the Yankee fans seemed to outnumber those of us in our green and gold. It wasn't like in the olden days. It wasn't like with Brad Pitt and Moneyball. It wasn't like when the Oakland A's twenty game winning streak back in 2002. It was almost as if the ownership was trying to make it easy to just slink out of town unnoticed. 

We noticed. It brought tears to my son's eyes. It was the only baseball he's ever known. As we were invited down to the field with the rest of the faithful to watch the postgame drone and firework show, we tried to console him. This place would always be part of him, part of his story. Just like the music of Green Day. Just like the hills that rise up behind the stadium. Just like the bay around which we live. 

Welcome home. 

Chip Off The Old Block

 If your government should happen to shut down on you, it probably doesn't have anything to do with you. Don't take it personally. The nincompoops currently at the wheel of the ship of state certainly don't. As has been the case so often in the past, the political wrangling currently underway for control of the direction we go is nothing new. And has essentially nothing to do with printing Social Security checks or keeping our National Parks open. 

Nope. This one is another in a series of partisan wrangling being used for leverage to pass legislation that will keep the lights on and the doors open but will also attempt to squeeze in some suspect bits that would most certainly aid one side over the other. In this version of our story, Republicans of a certain stripe would very much like to attach the SAVE Act to the paperwork needed to keep the EPA inspecting our food along with a myriad of other services. 

Sorry. I forgot to explain the SAVE Act. It is a piece of work from a real piece of work known as Representative Chip Roy from Texas. Chip isn't his real name, but it certainly sounds more Texas than "Charles Eugene." He worked for such luminaries as Rick Perry and Ted Cruz on his path to becoming a lawmaker in his own right. He brought all that MAGAt baggage with him: denying climate change, an insistence on the existence of a "deep state," and the entrails of The Freedom Caucus.

Which of course means that the "crisis on our southern border" lives rent-free in his head 24-7. This, in turn, brings about his scribbling the SAVE Act: Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. The main purpose of this attempt at reforming our democratic process is to require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration. What's that? You wonder why this is necessary since being a citizen is already a requirement for voting in the United States? Well, this is Rep. Chip's fear-filled brain we're talking about, so if there is a way to keep Mexico or Haiti from stealing an election from the Irish and other decidedly less brown folks. If that sounds a little harsh, let's keep in mind that Rep. Chip is also the guy who said that the current state of border security would bring about "the end of Western Civilization." 

Of course, one might argue that shuttering the United States Government for any period of time might have a similar effect, since agencies like the Border Patrol will be impacted by this now somewhat commonplace game of chicken being played in Congress. A confusing set of circumstances, since it was this same herd of far-right sheep who followed their orange shepherd's demand to vote down the bi-partisan border bill that would have strengthened control down El Paso way. 

Timing is everything in government, I suppose. But time once again is running out.