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A Coup’d’etat

I haven’t hear the phrase “coup d’etat” used in a headline since the 1960’s, in connection with Greece, Chile, and other Latin American countries. It’s time to bring it back into popular usage. What we are seeing in the U.S. right now is either a coup d’etat, or mass lunacy on an unimaginable scale.

Ask yourself this: does the American public have the right to know details about the sex lives of political leaders? Yes? No? Only if the sex includes criminal behaviour? How do we know if the behavior is criminal? If there is a victim, a plaintiff. Is there a plaintiff in the Lewinsky scandal? Not that we know of.

The Republican’s argue that… well, their arguments are so absurd they don’t bear repeating. They always turn the discussion towards the salacious, without offering any details of what exactly the President has done that is so evil that the entire mechanism of government must be brought to a halt in order to confront it. That’s because no such issue exists.

Ask yourself this: do you want the President of the world’s most powerful country to spend his time dealing with the economy, international affairs, and national security, or explaining to a bunch of partisan Republican pit bulls the details of his sex life? This is not as trivial a question as the media would have you believe right now. In fact, this question is an insane question. If you feel that this is a legitimate question, with all due respect, I think you are insane.

I think most people think that this issue really is important because the national media spend all their time and resources covering the story, instead of, say, the fact that Saddam Hussein once again is defying the United Nations arms inspectors. The media cover the story with preposterous obsessiveness because, well, how often do you have a pretense to discuss the President’s sex life on TV? Almost never. But here you have an Independent Prosecutor actually investigating the President’s sexual behaviour and leaking it all over the place– it’s a tabloid’s dream come true. Even Dan Rather came rushing back from Cuba to breathlessly report on the semen-stained dress. Is he insane? Has he lost all perspective? Is he an idiot? I’m beginning to think so.

Yet, most Americans continue to insist that they don’t think it’s important. They’re not sure why it’s in their face every day, but they watch, and then, again, wonder why it is so important? Every time CNN does a “town hall” on the issue, most of the “average” citizens say they don’t care, and the polls confirm that the vast majority of Americans continue to feel that way. Maybe the vast majority of Americans are smarter than you think.

The essential dynamic is this: through the existence of the Independent Prosecutor and their majority in the House and the Senate, partisan Republicans are able to keep the investigation going no matter how utterly, incomprehensibly absurd the whole thing becomes. This is a classic example of what Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, called “the big lie”. You take an absurd proposition, that the President of the United States should be prevented from exercising the functions of his office because an idiot independent prosecutor thinks he may have had consensual sex in the White House, and you simply stand around for seven months and act as if it is unimaginable to think otherwise.

Orin Hatch is now a stand-up comedian. He looks like Buster Keaton with his deadpan face, solemnly intoning into the camera, “Yes, we may have to impeach the leader of the free world if it appears that he has lied about having sex.” I can’t watch him without imagining that the minute the camera goes away, he’s going to collapse into hysterical laughter.

What the Lewinsky scandal and Kenneth Starr’s investigation really means is that the Republicans care so little for the legitimate governance of the state and have so little respect for the electoral process that they are willing to go to almost any lengths to sabotage the Clinton administration. Having lost the election fair and square, they refuse to accept or respect the results. They are using any means at their disposal to destroy the presidency. This is the real story, and the press should be exploring the profound political implications of what is happening here. When is the last time anyone on CNN discussed the following issues:

1. Will the electorate lash out at the Republicans this fall and give the Democrats a majority in both houses of Congress?

2. Will the Democrats take revenge when they do get control of Congress, and thereby chairmanship (and agenda) of the committees that investigate these matters?

3. Will the Democrats bring down the next Republican President the same way? Have you thought about that? The Republicans have established a new benchmark of political brutality. The Democrats are not likely to forgive and forget, and one almost wishes they wouldn’t. Do you think it would be any harder for the Democrats to find a pretense to cripple the presidency of, say, (ha ha) a Dan Quayle?

4. Will the next Presidential campaign focus almost entirely on the sexual behaviour of the candidates?

5. Do you really want a president who can survive this kind of microscopic examination of his personal life?

6. Of the presidents who served in this century, here are the probable or definite philanderers: Franklin Roosevelt,  Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton.

Here’s the “pure” non-philanderers (as far as we know):  Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Walker Bush.

Well? Who do you prefer?

One last absurdist note from the irrepressible Dan Quayle. He thinks that the Republicans should be able to find a candidate in 2000 who can beat Bill Clinton. Well, yes, they might: Clinton can’t run in 2000– he’s already served two terms.

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Stealing Ideas and Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola just received $20 million from a Superior Court Jury in Los Angeles because they jury believed that Warner Brothers stole his idea of a live action version of Pinocchio.

Do you ever get paid for your ideas? I’ll bet. I’ll bet you never got $20 million. But then, this is Hollywood, which will spend $120 million on a movie about Kevin Costner riding sea-doos around an old oil rig.

So a jury decided that this idea– to do Pinocchio with live actors– was so good, so brilliant, so original, that it was worth $20 million. Suppose that just by reading this you got an idea. Suppose you thought, hey, why not do a remake of Bambi with live actors? Or how about a remake of “The Ten Commandments” with a live actor instead of Charlton Heston? Or how about a remake of “The Love Bug” with a DeLorean instead of a Beetle? Or with one of those new sexy Beetles that just came out? With all of the remaining Spice Girls stuffed inside? There– that wasn’t hard.

Now all you have to do is find a lawyer and wait for Hollywood to steal your idea. Wait– you might have to prove that they stole the idea from YOU in particular, and not any other person they might have had lunch with. The trick is, you have to have lunch every day in those exclusive Hollywood restaurants frequented by producers and directors and script-writers. As you’re having lunch, just talk loudly about your great new idea. Someone is sure to turn up. Be sure to keep track of who might be stealing your ideas. And believe me, it is a lot less painful than spilling hot coffee in your lap.

Well, Warner Brothers, hold on to your pants. Here are some ideas that I think are way better than Coppola’s idea about Pinocchio, or even my idea about “The Ten Commandments”.. But don’t try to steal them, or I’ll be suing your asses for more than $20 million!

1. The Three Stooges, in an all-new adventure: Curly, Larry, and Moe star as Microsoft software engineers. Starring Jim Carrey, Reg Varney, and Rip Torn as “Moe”. Come to think of it…

2. A lobbyist from the tobacco industry courageously fights prejudice and injustice and succeeds in bribing 50 Senators to vote against a restrictive tax bill that would deprive us of our freedoms and liberties and prevent gas stations from selling cigarettes to pre-teens. Starring Tom Bosley as Newt Gingrich.

3. A courageous high school student brings a semi-automatic rifle to school and is able to prevent a tragedy by shooting 13 fellow students who were all planning to shoot their class-mates and teachers. Starring Sean Penn, and Charlton Heston as the compassionate, understanding, phys-ed coach, who encourages the student to keep lots of ammunition in his locker since you never know when you will be called upon to defend your freedoms and liberties against encroaching atheists, communists, homosexuals, and unarmed liberals. Ellen DeGeneres plays the depraved lesbian sex-education teacher.

4. Let’s see: we’ve had meteorites, volcanoes, tornados, earthquakes… what else is left? What else? I know. A gang of rugged, individualistic, violent, unshaven criminals (all of whom are the only men who could possibly save the world from some stupid massive improbable disaster or psychotic super-killer)- – form a gang and decide to take over the world and require all soldiers and policemen to carry three-hundred pounds of weapons and work alone when confronting enemies. This would be a short movie– about three minutes, or as long as it takes for them to make up a set of rules for the new world order and then break them because “rules only get in the way” and kill each other. Starring Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris.

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I was watching Larry King on CNN the other night. He had a theologian from some Southern Baptist Academy on, and Robert Schuller, and the President of the National Organization of Women. They were arguing about women, of course.

I learned two thing. Number 1, I will avoid CNN at all costs. The number of commercial interruptions was excruciating. CNN has no shame, no dignity, no self-respect, no honor, and no class. But if they hire any more of these luscious lips to read the news, I’m investing in the company that makes collagen.

Secondly, I am sick to death of these smug, conservative Christians trying to tell me that anyone who disagrees with their archaic social and political views is, therefore, disagreeing with the very word of God. Because, don’t you know, it says right here in Ephesians 22 that women are to submit to their husbands. Simple. Straight-forward. No interpretation required.

This discussion was a little better than most. From a Christian point of view, most feminists probably don’t spend a lot of time reading the Bible, so they don’t argue very well against people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. But Larry King knew his bible a little, and Robert Schuller knew it pretty well, and they pointed out that shortly after Paul tells women to submit to their husbands, he tells slaves to submit to their masters. Larry King asked the Baptist theologian whether he believed that slaves, nowadays, should also submit to their masters. Well, the theologian almost came right out and said that he did. He certainly didn’t clearly, unambiguously declare that slavery was wrong.

What ticked me off–pardon the expression– was his insistence that he wasn’t responsible for his own opinions. He was merely obeying God’s infallible word in the Bible and anybody who disagreed with him was going right up against the word of God Himself. That is a load of horse manure. But people like Dobson, Falwell, & Company say it all the time, as if they just happened to read the Bible that morning, and low and behold, it just happened to confirm my very own opinions.

The truth is that these guys are gut level conservatives. They were conservative long before they ever read the bible, and they only seem to read only the parts of the bible that coincide with their prejudices. They pick and choose whatever it is in the Bible they like and ignore the passages that don’t jive with their middle American patriotic right wing free enterprise presumptions.

There were lots of other verses that Larry King or the feminist could have asked Mr. Knowitall Baptist Theologian to explain. How about these. The point is that literal inerrancy– the doctrine that every word of the Bible (usually the King James Version, no less) is infallible– is pure nonsense, and the truth is that even the most conservative fundamentalists don’t act as if they really believe it. There is always a measure of interpretation, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes more sense to say that the Bible is an infallible guide to the will of the Lord, while allowing for the fact that none of the writers of the gospels foresaw the massive economic, social, and political changes that were going to occur in the next 2,000 years.

Given the social and economic conditions of first century Palestine, Paul would have been no more likely to suggest that women should take leadership positions in the church than he would have been likely to suggest that they go out and get jobs, or put grandma into a nursing home, or start a beauty salon, or go swimming on Sunday, or wear a pant-suit. These ideas would have been meaningless to his audience at the time. It doesn’t mean that women are forever forbidden from doing any of those things.

How do we know how the word of God applies today, then? It’s not all that hard. We know what Jesus means when he castigates the Pharisees, though, Lord knows, we still seem to put up with a lot of Pharisees today. And we certainly know what he means when he says, “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone”. No, he didn’t say it was okay to sin. But he did tell us a lot about those who are quick to reach for stones. I have a feeling that if Jesus met James Dobson today, he’d ask him a question: “How many hungry children did your $180 million a year ‘ministry’ feed today? How many poor inner-city teenagers have jobs, thanks to you? How many of the sick and destitute have seen the inside of your glorious office building in Colorado?”

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Boycott Compaq

Compaq Computers annually sells about 400,000 computers in Canada. I wish that number could be brought down to zero.

Compaq just bought DEC computers for $9 billion. DEC was profitable and the DEC plant in Kanata, Ontario, was among the most efficient computer system production plants in North America.

Do you remember these big corporations demanding tax cuts and a “hospitable” environment for big business? They told us that we had to be efficient and competitive if we wished to retain healthy economic growth. Just like the DEC plant (which manufactures Alpha motherboards for high performance computer systems). They said taxes should be reduced, just like Mike Harris has been doing, and workers need to be well-trained, just as the public education system in the Ottawa area has been doing.

Well, it turns out we were lied to. Efficiency doesn’t matter. Worker training, dedication and loyalty doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the universe of big business. Compaq is removing production of the Alpha systems from the Kanata plant and laying off 1,100 workers, with more cuts to come. Thank you and good bye.

Don’t get me wrong. Nobody should be able to force Compaq to employ workers it doesn’t want. But neither do we have to buy computers from a manufacturer who doesn’t give a damn about its employees. Some people would have you believe that corporations owe nothing to anyone, except for the bottom line. Astonishingly, among their friends are so-called Christians in the U.S. who believe that capitalism is ordained by the bible. Richard De Vos, one of the founder’s of Amway, donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party every year. He knows who butters his bread.

These people act as if their employees, their plants, the transportation infrastructure, the health care system, the education system, etc., comes from nowhere and costs nothing. They certainly act as if they owe nothing for any of these things that make it possible for DEC/Compaq to build a plant, hire trained, qualified employees, transport their products, and make piles of money. The minute they think they can increase their share values by dumping their own loyal employees, they will do it, without the slightest concern for these workers, their families, or their communities.

Well, we certainly don’t need Compaq. The truth is that there are many excellent competitors out there whose products are more reasonably priced in any case. Boycott Compaq! Send a message to the big fat corporate bosses who never cut their own salaries when times are hard: we will reward corporations that display some sense of responsibility towards the communities from which they get their profits.

Boycott Compaq.

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CNN

I saw something really cool today. In the World Cup soccer match between the Netherlands and Korea: a Korean player was given a yellow card for taking too long to take a penalty kick.

Just think: someone made a rule for this incredibly popular sport that requires players to hurry up and put the ball back into play. And this is a game which never stops for a commercial. If you watch only North American team sports and never watched soccer, I need to repeat that to you: they never stop for a commercial.

TSN, of course, does stop. So what do they do? They split the screen into two ugly boxes, one large one on top, and one tiny one on the bottom. They show a commercial, of course, in the large one, and boost the sound way up over the game.

May you never get used to such outrages. The owners and managers of TSN stink. They are pigs. They are greedy and despicable. There is a special place in Hell for them, where they will be strapped in chairs, their eyelids held open with steel clamps, and they are forced to watch 6,778,569 Tidy Bowl commercials over and over again.

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I tried watching Larry King on CNN the other day. They had four guests on to discuss the Southern Baptist’s Convention’s decision that women should submit to their husbands. Larry King, by the way, has been married about five times. His latest wife is 14 years old. No, I’m kidding. I think she is 28. Larry King looks like he is about 60.

The theologian who tried to defend the statement was a liar. He said it doesn’t mean what we think it means: husbands have the greater responsibility because they are servants and must be responsible for Christ for the family. Really. Women should be happy that men have gladly undertaken this terribly painful, heavy responsibility.  In other words, it means exactly what it appears to mean: men are the boss.  Saying that being the boss is a burden doesn’t change that fact one iota.

As I said, the man is a liar. He has poor ethics. He knows very well that “submit” is exactly what the men of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. It is also, probably, what the women of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. They really believe that the immorality of our day and age is largely the result of women living independent little lives without any men around to make them submit to their leadership. Why don’t these people shows some guts and admit that it means exactly what we think it means?

CNN was more appalling than the Baptist. It cut for commercials about every 30 seconds. You might think there is a legal limit to commercials on U.S. television, but that’s not true. U.S. networks can broadcast as many commercials as they want. And if Larry King or any other broadcaster wants to keep his job, he better resist the temptation to look over to his director, drop his jaw, and say something like, “What? Another commercial already? We just had a whole pile of them?”

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Ani DiFranco: the Music Industry at Work

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Ever since the 1960’s, becoming a rock star has been the dream of millions of teenagers. To be rich, famous, and important. To be celebrated, worshipped, lusted for… What could be better? And for those who actually have some musical talent and the drive and determination to stay in the business long enough, the offer of a contract from a record company represents the ultimate dream come true. Who can resist it?

Well, the record companies know that. When they see a young, naïve talent emerging, and they think he or she might be successful enough to become a big star, they offer this person a contact and urge them to sign. If this person is smart enough to question the terms of the contract, the record company is often quick to inform this person that there are thousands of other hungry young talents out there and if he or she doesn’t agree to the terms and sign in a hurry, they will offer it to someone else. More often than not, they sign.

A lot of these contracts are pretty brutal. A lot of singers who you might think of as quite successful, because they have had hit records and performed on television, often come to the astonishing realization that they are broke. How can that be, they ask? I sold a million records last year. Where did my money go? The answer is that the record company has been deducting all kinds of mysterious expenses from their royalties. At this stage, the smarter talents bring in their own lawyers and accountants to examine the deal. What they frequently discover is that they are being mercilessly ripped off. With clever accounting and shrewd lawyers, music publishers are able to find hundreds of ways of adding “expenses” to an artist’s account. Furthermore, the artist finds out that there is very little they can do about the terms of the contract. It’s too late. They signed it. They are now obligated to continue to produce records for music industry executives they have rightly come to regard as vampires.

Ani DiFranco, bless her little heart, was smart enough not to sign. Instead, she formed her own record company– Righteous Babe Records– and is doing quite well, thank you. She discovered, to her surprise, that she could actually make pretty good money without the record company’s huge promotional machinery behind her, and without a beer company sponsoring her tours. How so? Well, you see, Ani gets to keep a fair share of the money you and I pay for each of her CD’s. No surprise promotional fees. No hidden charges. No mysterious administration expenses.

Well, bless her little heart again because when the big record companies saw how successful Ani was, they all came a’callin’ offering her big bucks to step up to the Major Leagues, Ani said NO. Politely, we hope.

Which brings me to a piece of news that filled me with anger and disgust. You see, some of those young, talented artists found that by declaring bankruptcy, they could extricate themselves from those evil contracts and negotiate new, more honest agreements with other record companies. It was the only weapon they had, against an industry and executives we can only regard with the utmost contempt. Well, Congress is considering a major revision of the bankruptcy laws. And low and behold, here come the music industry lobbyists, with big checks in their hands, demanding that the new law include a provision preventing these artists from using bankruptcy to escape their draconian contracts. Most of the Republicans, needing more of those big, fat lobbyist checks in order to get re-elected next November, were more than happy to oblige. Some, though not all, of the Democrats fought the amendment.

Your tax dollars at work, friends. Shame on the recording industry. Shame on the Republicans who sucked up to this deal. Shame on the voters who keep insisting, in poll after poll, that they want campaign reform, and then go ahead an elect the idiot who has the most money for TV ads. Don’t you realize where these liars get their campaign money from?!

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Beware of Young Girls

We’re all familiar by now with the Woody Allen scandal. Woody Allen, the 56-year-old director, was caught having an affair with his adoptive step-daughter, Soon Yi. Mia divorced Woody and sought custody of the children– excluding Soon Yi, presumably.

Our society is so confused about sex. We don’t know what the rules are anymore. The various governments now award survivor benefits to gay spouses; couples bicker in court over frozen embryos; a woman sues the company that makes Viagra because the drug enabled her newly potent husband to leave her and find a new lover; an “independent” (read “Republican Toady”) investigator spends $30 million to discover whether or not sex between consenting adults took place in the White House; a 30-year-old grade school teacher has an affair–and a child–with a 13-year-old male student, and is sent to jail for seven years.

The one thing we do know about sex is that our society has a hysterical obsession with it. Freud would have observed that this hysterical obsession is due to a profound discomfort with the subject, and, indeed, with our own bodies.

The truth is, our society is grossly immature and childish about sex. We want it more than anything else and we get upset and envious when we think someone else is getting more than we are.

Why do you suppose preachers preach more about promiscuous sex than any other sin, including materialism, greed, and racism? Because sex is private. Everybody in the congregation can sit there comfortably and pretend to feel righteous indignation because they know that nobody knows what sexual sins lurk in their own hearts. If, on the other hand, the minister points out that our ruthless greed and materialism and conspicuous consumption is driving one third of world into abject poverty and starvation… well, gee… hope nobody notices my Cadillac or my Hummer in the parking lot, or my three tv sets, or my Rolex watch.

So Woody Allen has sex with his adoptive step-daughter. Some clarity here: apparently Soon Yi is the adoptive/foster daughter of Mia Farrow. After Woody and her became an item, he sort of became Soon Yi’s “step-foster” father. So when Woody has sex with Soon Yi, is this incest?

Well, not really. Incest is sex between a man and his biological daughter. I think our society is relatively straight on that: not allowed. Ever.

So, what is wrong with Woody having an affair with Soon Li? Well, he is in a position of trust over her, and she is a vulnerable young woman, half his age (or less). We frown upon that. We make it downright illegal in many cases, say, for example, a teacher and a fifteen-year-old student.

But wait, Soon Yi is 20-years-old. So she is the age of consent. So is Woody Allen, we think. Did Soon Li have a choice or was she pressured? It’s hard to believe she is not able to walk away whenever she wants. All right. Consensual. Like Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. In both cases, powerful, famous men had consensual adulterous relationships with young, naïve, but awe-struck women. I don’t know of any law against that, because, in our society, adultery is not illegal. It is grounds for a nasty divorce settlement, but not a criminal offense.

Well, let’s look at one more little aspect of this case. I’ll bet a lot of those tabloid readers don’t remember that Mia Farrow was once involved in a little scandal of her own. Mia, you see, is the daughter of John Farrow and Margaret O’Sullivan. Frank Sinatra was a friend of the family, more than twice her age back in 1965. And guess what? Mia and Frank had an affair. Indeed, they were briefly married, until, I think, Frank realized she was a Beatles fan. Since Frank was a friend of the family and more than twice Mia’s age, it might be fair to ask if he wasn’t sort of a father figure (or step-father figure) who took advantage of a position of trust to have a sexual relationship with a vulnerable young woman.

Then we get the kicker.  Mia Farrow, while living with composer Andre Previn and his wife Dory, had an affair with Previn– who was 39 in 1968 (Farrow was 23).  Dory had a nervous breakdown when she found out Mia was pregnant with Andre’s child.  After she recovered, she recorded an album that featured the song “Beware of Young Girls“.  Amazing.  (The song also predicted the fate of that relationship: “one day she’ll go away”.)

One last weird note. Frank Sinatra used to sing a song called “My Way”, which is the anthem of macho egocentric self-sufficiency, but which Frank, insufficient as he was, was not able to write himself. Canadian Paul Anka wrote the song, along with many others like the immortally offensive “Having My Baby”. Paul Anka broke into the business with a fabulously successful single called “Diana”, which, we were told, was a love song about his baby-sitter.

Just imagine a party at some Hollywood mansion. You show up with your wife and your daughters and Jerry Falwell, and circulate among these guests: Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow, Woody Allen, Jimmy & Tammy Faye Baker, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, Paul Anka, Princess Diana and the other Diana, Prince Charles, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Charlton Heston (with his gun), and, just for fun, Dr. Ruth. The leading lights of Western Civilization.

Hey everybody… let’s play twister….

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God and Frank

I often wonder what ultra-conservative “leaders” like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson think of Frank Sinatra. My guess is that they liked Frank. He was the very embodiment of reactionary, repressive, hierarchical thinking. God bestowed that wondrous voice upon Frankie and made him a star. Therefore he was entitled to special treatment, body guards, limos, mansions, numerous wives (including, astoundingly, Mia Farrow), the best suite at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Anyone who thought otherwise was a radical, and dangerous to God’s good appointed order.

Then Frank sings “My Way”. The irony is, of course, is that “My Way” is probably one of the most anti-Christian pop songs ever recorded. It is one of the most explicit statements of utter self-sufficiency and moral relativism.

Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humour? There is something wildly comical about the fact that, in his later years, even with the assistance of a teleprompter, poor addled old Frankie couldn’t even get the words right. All those fans paid big bucks to hear the old crooner mumble incoherently while he tried to remember what city he was in. The old man, trying to assert once again his own personal macho myth of self-sufficiency, needed all the help he could get.

Well, who knows? Maybe Pat Robertson is a Dylan fan instead. Maybe James Dobson comes home from a long day of ranting about the evils of toleration and compassion and flips “Sticky Fingers” on the turntable for an hour of relaxation. Maybe Jerry Falwell hops into his limo and says to the driver, “hey, you got any Ani DiFranco tapes in there?” And maybe Jimmy Swaggart, when nobody’s looking, pops in a CD of cousin Jerry Lee’s “Great Balls of Fire”.

Well, when I get a chance, I’ll look up some of these guys’ web sites and see if I can get any of them to respond to a couple of simple questions: do you like Frank Sinatra? Does he represent to you, as a Christian, a morally acceptable style of entertainment? If you really believe that God appointed you to be a spokesman for the Christian community how come you have rigged your organization so that you are accountable to no one but yourself? Where do you guys get those awful haircuts? When did you run out of Brylcreem? Explain to me why you drive around in a limo surrounded by bodyguards while claiming to be a follower of a man who surrounded himself with the poor and the outcasts and rejected material wealth at every opportunity?

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The Sacrifice Bunt

The Sacrifice

Time and time again, if you are a baseball, fan you will see the following: a team comes up to bat in the late innings of a ball game. The lead-off batter gets on base with a walk or single. The next batter comes up and the manager instructs him to “sacrifice”: bunt the ball to the right side of the infield for a sure out in order to advance the runner to second base. If he succeeds, the colour commentator will rave about him “getting the job done” and “advancing the runner”. After the next two batters strike out and fly out, no one ever says, “Gee, I guess giving up that out on the sacrifice was pretty stupid, eh?”

Does the sacrifice bunt make sense? It must work. Almost every manager in the league does it, often two or three times a game. If everyone does it, it must be right.

The sacrifice bunt emerged as a strategy at a time in baseball history before there was such a thing as a designated hitter. Late in a close game, if a runner got on and the pitcher was the next batter, it made sense, because:

a) pitchers didn’t hit very well (a .200 average was considered good), and,
b) pitchers didn’t run very fast, making them very susceptible to the double play, and,
c) it was usually a good time to bring in a relief pitcher anyway. But nowadays, American League teams use it just as often.

It is possible, with a bit of computer programming and lots of free time, to create a “simulation” of thousands of baseball games. I set up such a simulation once to test the theory that the sacrifice bunt is a stupid strategy. I ran thousands of games in which, after the sixth inning, every time the lead-off batter got on, the manager used the sacrifice bunt. Then I ran the same series of games with no sacrifice bunt. Since there is no way of knowing which hitter exactly is coming up to bat in these situations, I created an average team with a set of batting and on-base percentages that reflected the abilities of a normal range of players.

It didn’t surprise me that the second simulation showed many, many more runs scored than the simulations using the sacrifice bunt. Consider this: the following batter, in most situations, will have an on base percentage (hits + walks) in the neighborhood of least .325. So roughly 1/3 of the time, he will advance the runner anyway, without giving up an out. The next batter has the same 1/3 chance of advancing the runner without giving up an out. And so does the next. And… here is the key point… so does the next batter. Without a sacrifice, you still have three outs to work with. With the sacrifice, you only have two. How significant is that? Consider some other factors. The next batter will, of course, often hit a double, a triple, or a home run instead of a single. With the runner on first, the first baseman has to hold the runner on, leaving a gap in the infield. The pitcher is often distracted by the runner. A fast runner has a chance of stealing the base anyway– I saw Tim Johnson use a sacrifice when he had Alex Gonzalez– a good base-stealer–on first. Finally, with the runner on second and one out, if the next hitter is “hot”, he will get walked anyway, setting up a potential double play. And don’t forget that without a runner at first, the first base man doesn’t have to cover the runner.

I’m not saying the sacrifice never works. But a lot of people make the foolish assumption that the odds of getting the hit you need to score a run are roughly the same after a sacrifice as they are before. In fact, they are substantially less, because one less batter is going to get a chance to drive in that run, and because the sacrifice ensures that the “batter” following a lead-off single or double invariably “hits” a single. In other words, over a season, or even a short series, the sacrifice will fail to achieve it’s desired objective– scoring a run– far more often than simply letting the next three batters do their job.

Well, if a sacrifice is so stupid, why do managers do it? The answer is simpler than you might imagine. Consider the World Series Champions of 1992 and 1993, the Toronto Blue Jays, who were managed by Cito Gaston. I don’t think anybody in this world would think that Cito was a smarter manager than Bobby Cox, one of the shrewdest skippers in the league. Why did he win? He simply put good talent on the field and let them play the way they were capable of. He put Roberto Alomar at second base and watched him make unbelievable fielding plays. He penciled in Devon White in centre field and watched him swallow up every fly ball hit there. He had the finest defensive third baseman in the league that year in Kelly Gruber (’92), and he had terrific pitchers, including Henke, Ward, and Wells, who didn’t give up a single run in relief until the final game. He won in spite of his questionable management. He won in 1993 in spite of the idiotic managerial decision to let Jimmy Key leave as a free agent and so they could retain Jack Morris, who contributed nothing to the 1993 victory. He won because Paul Molitor, John Olerud, Roberto Alomar, and Devon White, had terrific years.

Well, what exactly, then, is the role of the manager? The role of the manager is to call for the sacrifice bunt. What if the sacrifice bunt is a stupid strategy? Then what would the manager do? Send for the closer in the 9th inning of close games?

It’s like the famous question asked of Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones: “Why don’t you sing more often?”

Keith replied, “then what would Mick do?”

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Novell, Software, and Insurance

We recently thought we lost our license disk for Novell 4.11 Intranetware Server. When I called Novell, they nicely informed me that I had to pay $100 for a replacement disk. I told them that that was a little pricey for a disk that cost about $1 to make. They explained that they had a bunch of complete idiots working for them and it took them hours and hours to correctly copy a single disk.

Well, not exactly. But pretty close.

What I thought was interesting was that they wanted me to sign a form declaring that our insurance company had refused to pay for the cost of replacing the Novell software, total of about $5,000.

Excuse me!

We already paid for the license. We didn’t lose the license– we lost the disk with the license software on it. Why, exactly, should our insurance company pay for something we have not lost?

I had hoped that with Microsoft playing the heavy, companies like Novell might take advantage by trying to build up a reputation for fairness and honesty, but this little stratagem stinks big time.