call me crazy

The US men's triathlon team didn't do so hot in Athens despite Hunter Kemper having the fastest run split in the race and Andy Potts having the fastest swim. Kemper finished 9th and Potts finished 22nd - Victor Plata finished in no man's land - 27th.

I don't think the results are a case of bad luck as much as they are of bad emphasis.

USA Triathlon - who selects athletes for development and sets the criteria for national team qualifications - seems to think that cycling is not an important part of draft-legal triathlons. Check out the qualifications criteria for the national team development programs. You can make a US national development team without having demonstrated any cycling prowess whatsoever.

I think it's a shame that Kemper came out of the water less than 30 seconds behind the leaders, ran the fastest run split of the day and finished nineth. He just got smoked on the bike. And it may just be a coincidence, but I have always thought it was strange that USA Triathlon's criteria for aspiring national teamster doesn't even mention cycling. Call me crazy.

ok, back to work

If you were reading before my wedding, you'll remember I was just getting into an interesting discussion with Adam Smith. But then, I went and got married and he went and moved and we sort of lost touch and stopped blogging for a bit - marriage and moving may have that effect.

But in between then and now, we did exchange a few e-mails and Adam even wrote a really funny/ironic piece to help me at my day job.

As for our personal beef, here's a recap. He was worried that fundamentalist Christians were attempting to gain power and influence in order to use that power and influence to hasten the end of the world, and I said there may be a few of those folks, but not enough to merit hysteria.

So Adam got in the last word, posting this just a few days before my wedding. After reading that post, which I must confess was only yesterday, I now see that we're onto another topic: strident utopians.

I agree with Adam on this one, but, it seems he is picking on one particular type of utopians (some small % of fundy christians) and leaving others alone (some small % of capitalists, some small % of scientists, some small % of socialists, etc.). Crazy utopians are alive and well in many camps, attempting to bring about what they think is a more perfect world, usually at the expense of other groups. That's pretty much the way history works.

I think Adam and I would agree that it would be more preferable to have "moderates" in charge of everything from the schools to the busnisses to the government. Unfortunately, there's a lot of money to be made and power to be wielded if things were otherwise. So we're left always scrambling to find wholesome folks, whatever their stripes, to struggle against those who have been a bit more tainted by those vapory things - money and power and all those naughty things.

Now it's getting late and I have to go to bed. But, as I sit listening to the 7 train rumble past my front window, I wonder . . . who is this neat-handed buck instructing me on the ways of my borough? Maybe I should add the CitiBank building to my header image to clear up any confusion there.

Fair or not 9/11

I was away for the last two weeks getting married out in Ojai, California. If you've never been there, I would recommend packing your bags and getting a jetBlue flight out there right away.

When I stepped back into the office the other day in NYC, the newsroom was all ablaze with anticipation of Michael Moore's new film. I haven't yet seen the flick, but I'm starting to really look forward to it.

Of all the ink spilled over the release, I enjoyed Slate's the most. Here and here.

A lot of folks are calling it the Passion of the left. That's really interesting. We'll have to do an entry in the near future about the two movies, the passions they represent, and whether or not a majority of Americans can be put into one camp or the other.

Rooting out the bad guys

The Progressive Capitalist aka Adam Smith (no relation, but the blog title does imply at least a philosophical ancestral link) keeps up an insightful daily reader over on the other coast. A few weeks ago he picked up on the WJI story that has now ascended to NPR. Big stuff, eh?

Anyhow, I'm an alumnus of WJI, a Christian organization, and currently on staff at MTV, not necessarily religiously affiliated. Apparently, this sort of non-sequitur begs an explaination. Adam hints at one, but I don't think the answer is that easy. At least not for me or anyone else I've ever met. I have none of those things on my mind and Adam is kind enough to go out of his way not to assign them to me.

I do find some of the questions he raises really interesting. And I've seen pieces of this puzzle coming together for a few years now.

Adam references a piece in *counter punch which sort of spells it all out. I have a similar story to the author, though not exactly. Similar in that, evangelicals are "my people" and I now live and work in a place that finds such people distasteful. Dissimilar in that, unlike Bageant, I find their common-manness to be much more powerful in determining their actions than any sort of cultic or un-critical other-worldliness.

Adam does a much more succinct job of summing up the issue. He cites Dominionists, Reconstructionists and Rushdoonies, equates them with the evangelical masses, throws in a little "Left Behind" and wraps it up with a glance backwards at the carnage wrought by such folks throughout history.

What's not to love? A religous nut here, an Ashcroft there, add a little hocus pokus and we've got us a genocide.

Poor Adam probably got his hands on some Rushdooney. I know a few Dominionists, Reconstructionists and Rushdoonies personally and those guys are a different bunch. They are however desperatley dissimilar to what you'll encounter at a WJI or 98% of evangelical outposts. The nomenclature may be similar, but I'd put them in a different taxa.

Dominionists et al. are so far from being a "large segment of Christian Fundamentalism" - if Christian fundamentalism encompasses all the folks affiliated with evangelicals or even the mythic religous right - that it boggles the experienced mind. If even 2% of these folks where such, I would be surprised.

So we've got what I think is a boogie man built on two divergent sets of peeps who happen to use similar language. Yet, in my opinion, narry the twain shall meet. Folks who read Tim LeHaye are no more trying to usher in the end times than readers of Harry Potter are attempting to enthrone the Wiccans - which would be far more entertaining if true.

However, I will confess that big numbers, like those of confessing evangelicals, or LeHaye readers, would definitely cause a man to lose sleep if he thought they all read and where brave enough to act on Rushdoony. Yet, the fact that they don't is a mysterious and dubious assertion to many people.

Much like Lebowski, the perception abides. And that could have many reasons. The Columbia Journalism Review just did a really interesting essay that I think begins to answer the question.

But I think that there's another reason a bit further down. While this perception of evangelicals is pretty ubiquitous here in NYC, I've never really seen it so in other places I've lived or frequented; Washington D.C., Chicago, Columbus, Indianapolis, even L.A. I think it has a lot more to do with losing contact or interaction with a whole group of folks. While you have handfuls of evangelicals in the midwest metropoli and D.C., you're pretty hard pressed to find them in the Big Apple.

This is a problem. Although America has ostensibly learned the segregation lesson racially, it seems to be forgetting it ideologically. Ah, the comforts of choice. Seems like these sorts of misrepresentations will only grow unless folks deliberately decide to live and work next door to people they disagree with.

I think that if folks were willing to do that, they may find that they better understand the answer to Adam's assertion that history is "littered with the carnage wrought by [religous fundamentalism]."

Actually it's littered with carnage wrought fairly equally by the religous and the non-religous perps (read Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, etc.) Stanley Fish has written, somewhat convincingly, that there is little difference between the two. It's less us/them and more us/us. People are people. Keep your eye on everybody, yourself and your heroes included.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy his own heart?

The A-chip

I've decided to add a new feature to my featureless site. Upon request from a reader, I will now give a little warning notation (*) when linking to potentially objectionable material.

So keep your eyes out for the (*) lest you be served with a #&!%, a gd-ism, an f-bomb or worse. Incidentally, I will try to keep the objectionable posting and linking to an absolute minimum.

the management.