Thank you, Charles Pierce:
Damn it, I’m tired of this. In 1962, I hid under my desk at school for 10 straight days in October while the United States and the Soviet Union decided whether or not to lob nuclear missiles at my young ass. And why? Because a year or so earlier, a bunch of expatriate Cubans and some CIA cowboys launched an invasion of the island. Which prompted Nikita Khrushchev to take the genuinely insane step of installing nuclear missiles in Cuba to forestall any future enterprises of that sort. Which led to my being under my desk, mumbling Hail Mary’s at 78 r.p.m.
For going on 60 years now, the foreign policy of my country — and a good bit of its domestic politics as well — has been held hostage by a band of noisy irreconcilables in South Florida. The embargo is a joke to the rest of the world, the Helms-Burton Act a modern farce, ignored by such radical Marxist nations as Canada, Mexico, and Germany. The success of the exile community in Florida is a remarkable story, but, Lord knows, it’s not without its darker side. With the inexcusable aid of several U.S. presidents, and according to documents gathered by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, that community has harbored outright terrorists, including the men allegedly behind the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 78 passengers (including the Cuban national fencing team). By way of comparison, many Irish-Americans who conspired to arm the IRA during the Troubles wound up in prison. Here, though, President George H.W. Bush went out of his way to pardon one of the men alleged to have helped arrange the bombing of the airliner. The rules always have been different, because of the investment — covert and otherwise — that the U.S. has made in destabilizing Castro, and the centrality of Florida to just about every presidential election of the past 40 years.
Operatives from Miami were hip-deep in the Iran-Contra mess. The Cuban community in Miami went mad over the Elian Gonzalez affair, and the outrage over that controversy was central to some of the hooliganism surrounding the recount in Miami-Dade County in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. The first generation of émigrés are strong and they are politically active, and nobody ever says no to them, and it’s past time for them to get over themselves, a feeling that more than one survey has noted is shared by the grandchildren — and now great-grandchildren — of the original émigrés. This country doesn’t owe them or their tender feelings anything anymore.
My god, we’re doing business in Vietnam. The butchers of Tiananmen Square are the country’s primary landlords. We’d be building electronics factories all over North Korea if that country’s leaders weren’t all completely nuts. The émigrés who came from Cuba in the wake of the revolution can be proud of what they built, but they had it a lot easier than did, say, the Hmong people of Southeast Asia, whom the United States sold out at the end of the Vietnam War, breaking all kinds of promises about repatriation and leaving them to be slaughtered until, finally, we allowed some of them to come over here and farm chickens in Arkansas on the cheap for corporate agribusiness. And yet we can’t come to grips with a sensible policy for one small island in the Caribbean because a bunch of old men in Florida are carrying a grudge against one old man who refuses against all odds to die?
Hall of Fame goaltender Ken Dryden lays out a pretty compelling call to action on concussions in which Gary Bettman will need to resist his “hockey guys” who “forget that hockey’s natural evolution was once toward a jammed-up, goalless future until some president or commissioner intruded unnaturally with player substitutions and the forward pass”:
Gary Bettman said in his online video interview with the Times that he hasn’t talked to the doctors at Boston University. I hope he does soon. I also hope he has spoken with Derek Boogaard’s family and friends to hear, really hear, about what his life was like. And with Paul Kariya, Eric Lindros, and Keith Primeau — in depth — or with any of a number of players who have had their careers ended early, about what life felt like after their injury, and what it feels like now. Or — in depth — with Sidney Crosby. As hard as it was in the 10 months of recovery after his injury — the pain and discomfort, the unknowns, the hopefulness, the crashing disappointments — now must be his darkest time. It was the sheer routineness of this latest hit. So invisible amid the action that observers assumed it must have been from a collision with his teammate Chris Kunitz. So routine it was only on replay: Crosby and Bruins player David Krejci yapping at each other from their player benches — what could’ve caused that? — then running the action backwards; Crosby and Krejci shoving at each other on the ice after the whistle — what could’ve caused that? — and backwards some more; Crosby skating toward the puck near the boards; Krejci, the puck in his skates, bent over, his back to Crosby; as Crosby bumps him, Krejci turns slightly, his left elbow striking Crosby in the visor. It was the kind of light blow that is exchanged without notice or consequence hundreds of times in a game. Krejci, in everything that follows, looks befuddled —Why is he so mad? What did I do? But knowing how he feels, Crosby knows.
If after 11 months this is all it takes …
I hope Bettman and Crosby have a good long talk.
There are debates among doctors, now played out in the media, over the correlation between hockey’s blows to the head and CTE, between blows suffered now and a player’s long-term future. These debates will continue. But there can be no debate about the impact of those blows on players now. Almost every day there’s someone new — this week it’s star Flyers’ defenseman and tough guy Chris Pronger and his teammate Claude Giroux, the NHL’s leading scorer — both gone and for who knows how long. The debate about CTE is important, but it’s a distraction. The debate over fighting is a distraction. This is about head injuries. This is about what we can see. This is what we absolutely know. This is about now.
Bettman and the NHL cannot wait for science. They can’t hide behind science, using it as their shield. They must move, and move quickly, out of Stage 2 to Stage 3. No amount of well-modulated, reasonable- and responsible-sounding words change the fact that a hit to the head, whether by elbow, shoulder, or fist, is an attempt to injure that needs to result in expulsion or suspension. No amount of hopefulness and crossed fingers will change the fact that the NHL, like the NFL, must begin to imagine and introduce more “head-smart” ways to play. Bettman needs to be Bettman. We look back on those people 50 years ago who defended tobacco and asbestos and think, How could they be so stupid? Bettman and the NHL cannot wait for this generation of players to get old just so they can know for sure.
Dryden also says Bettman is the best NHL president or commissioner he’s dealt with “as a fan, a player, an administrator, and a fan again.”
“If we’re going to have a real discussion about the place of public religion in our public spectacles, then let’s have one instead of some mushy, Wonder Bread platitudes about how great it is that Tim Tebow talks about Jesus and doesn’t get caught doing strippers two at a time in the hot tub. If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels. If we keep faith with those American values, then we might just let him off the hook enough to see if he simply can become a better quarterback than Andy Dalton.”
“There is always something a little nauseating in large spectacles of conspicuous public piety, but watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once. It was as though the players and coaches had devised some sort of new training regimen to get past the awful reality of what had happened. Prayer as a new form of two-a-days. Jesus is my strength coach. Contrition in the context of a football game seemed almost obscene in its obvious vanity.”
