13.1 SlapFacts About Half Marathons
Monthly Archives: January 2020
Ernest Goes to Impreachment
I awoke today to the above headline from U.S. News & World Report, which asserted that Donald Trump had assembled a legal impeachment team that resembled “Made-For-TV” entertainment, including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, the feckless prosecutor who considered a blowjob high crimes and misdemeanors two decades ago.
At first, the team surprised me. Didn’t Trump spend, literally, months eviscerating Starr publicly for being as incompetent as, well, Trump (just without using the name)?
Then I punched myself in the nose for being surprised. I should be lobotomized for expecting a modicum of consistency from Trump. Perhaps I have been. Maybe that’s why Trump sniffles so much; he’s trying to breathe in the fumes from the evaporated brains of those who hear him speak.
As is often the case with a slackwit like the president, I often find myself questioning whether there is intent hidden within the idiocy. And while Trump himself likely doesn’t know how a hat works, his GOP overlords may have subtly shifted political tactics on the American populace — particularly the under-educated and over-churched.
After all, does it not seem reasonable that the vanguards of the Republican Party (McConnell, Graham, Murdoch, the Koch Bros., etc.) would take a political pathway that’s been effective for decades, the “Southern Strategy,” and morph it into an easily digested Flintstones chewable for an American sub-strata that still holds to those principles — namely, Trumptards and Evangelicals?
Of course, it isn’t politically expedient to brazenly play on race-baiting. So this isn’t The Southern Strategy. Say hello to the GOP’s Simpleton Strategy. It’s like the Southern Strategy, only with way more better.
Consider, for a moment, GOP presidential tickets going back four decades. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won consecutive terms decisively, despite popular ridicule of our president co-starring with a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo. The notion of that as a deal-breaker now seems quaint.
Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, took the Simpleton Strategy a step further, with dimwit Dannie Quayle as vice-president. Remember when Quayle tried to spell potato on a chalkboard? Again, in the context of today, with a president who spells “smoke” “smock,” the error seems cute. Back then, though, we must have demanded some level of intelligence, because Bush-Quayle lasted one term.
It was in 1996 that the GOP made its last attempt to scaffold a respectably intelligent ticket: Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Dole was a Senator, Kemp the former Secretary of Housing. Easily the highest combined IQ on the GOP ticket in decades. They were trounced by Clinton-Gore, winning just 159 Electoral votes, the lowest since Goldwater in 1964.
And with that went the last double-sanity ticket.
Since then, the GOP has seamlessly blended the Southern Strategy of the 50’s and 60’s into the Simpleton Strategy we see today. After the Dole-Kemp fiasco, we got Mensa shoo-in George W. Bush — twice. (“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”)
That was followed by John McCain and Sarah Palin, a VP pick McCain later admitted regretting in an HBO documentary shortly before his death. You remember Sarah. The everywoman, a workaday mom who just liked to hunt wolves from helicopters after soccer practice.
Then there was old Mitt Romney. Here’s what the GOP offered: A president who, among other things, believes that God lives near a planet called “Kolob,” that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, that we should baptize dead people, that drinking caffeine is a sin, and that it is sacrilege to wear underwear created by anyone other than Mormons. And Republicans were stunned he and Paul Ryan lost to a black man.
So they have returned with their Simpletonest Strategy yet: Prop up a game show host and Evangelical afraid of women to the nation’s highest pulpit, and have them sing “Witch Hunt” in acapella.
And it may work in 2020. Simple is easier than smart. Keep in mind, as the 24/7s lament unenlightened districts, as the House asks voters to look up facts, as Democratic contenders bathe in a miasma of name-calling and Wokeness, this simple math question: Which is more likely to turn out voters — Playing to the lowest-common denominator, or praying for the highest?
Careful you don’t pass out holding your breath in solemn reflection.
The Hail Mary Quarterback Sneak
The strange case of Aaron Hernandez — the pro football player convicted of murder before dying by suicide — may be the least eye-opening illumination of a slaying ever committed to film.
On a police-procedural level, the events of the past decade explain how the NFL star brazenly walked the edge of murderous madness, making him perhaps pro football’s first serial killer (O.J. was nothing more than a jealous ex).
What remains as mysterious as pi’s square root is why. Hernandez never confessed to all the murders, and hanged himself shortly after the conviction for one. Still, he’s such a mystery that he’ll be the subject of two mini-series this month: Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and Aaron Hernandez: An ID Murder Mystery premiere Jan. 15 and Jan. 20, respectively, on Netflix and Investigation Discovery. As non-fiction films, both are hindered by the sport’s cavalier attitude toward violence — a rein that prevents both series from galloping.
What both unwittingly uncover, however, is how football does more than shrug at violence. It holds an inherit machismo obsession that creates the very cauldron of violence from which criminals emerge (Simpson, Jim Brown, Michael Vick, anyone? The list is frighteningly long.)
Neither, however, clearly answers the singular question at hand: What prompted a young man with seemingly boundless opportunities to throw his life away?
Instead of an answer, what viewers get are plenty of salacious but conflicting details, which don’t bring us much closer to understanding why.
Netflix’s Killer Inside makes a more valiant effort to find the truth, at least in terms of probing causes of his behavior. Investigation Discovery follows with Murder Mystery, a more dutiful tick-tock of the criminal trial (its primary sources are journalists who followed the case), complete with the usual cheesy reenactments — a tactic that Killer Inside also employs, just a bit more judiciously.
A star athlete in Bristol, Connecticut, Hernandez grew up with a stern father who also played football, becoming a standout in high school and at Florida before being signed by the New England Patriots.
Small wonder that widespread shock greeted the news in 2013 when Hernandez was charged, and later convicted, in the murder of Odin Lloyd, the 27-year-old boyfriend of his fiancee’s sister, and subsequently accused of a separate double homicide.
With a $40 million NFL contract and an outwardly enviable existence, as a friend says, “None of it made sense.”
Both programs try, mostly in vain, to make sense of it, contemplating a host of potential contributing factors, the most serious being CTE, the brain injury caused by repetitive contact that has plagued many football players.
As Killer Inside (and what’s with the unimaginative title? Why not Killer in the Huddle?) makes clear, the league’s emphasis is on protecting its multibillion-dollar product, as opposed to promoting the health and safety of players. Those conflicting goals prevent a full-throated discussion of the dangers.
Other motivations, however, are raised, in some respects undermining — or distracting from — that central thesis. They include the assertion that Hernandez was conflicted about his sexuality, particularly with a high school friend and teammate, Dennis SanSoucie.
Hernandez’s brother, Jonathan, also later spoke about abuse by their father, who died when Aaron was just 16, which resulted in a rift between Aaron and his mother.
In terms of the presentation, the most illuminating wrinkle in Killer Inside involves having access to audio of phone calls Hernandez made from prison, providing modest insight about his post-arrest state of mind and relationships with those closest to him.
For all that, these overlapping documentaries yield an inconclusive portrait. While there’s a tendency to indict football, at every level, for exploiting young talent, there are so many variables baked into Hernandez’s particular tale as to muddy that message.
The Aaron Hernandez story thus remains a tragedy that has defied, and continues to, simple explanation. While documentaries frequently connect their subjects to larger truths, Aaron Hernandez and Killer Inside ultimately feel at least as preoccupied, to varying degrees, with wading through its smaller tabloid trappings.
Both of the films’ ultimate failures are captured in one of Hernandez’s phone calls, taped by prison officials. In it, Hernandez refuses to say goodbye to his daughter, only “talk to you later.” He then discontinues the call, marked by an automated operator that says “The calls hung up.”
Somehow, it feels like we were cut off, too.
