Sicko Tangents ...

Editor's note: Another mostly non-sports blog. Sorry, what can I say? I spent the whole day driving up to River Falls for Chiefs camp. We'll try to pick up the defense blogs tomorrow.

I spent a big chunk of Sunday driving from Kansas City to River Falls, which means I spent a lot of time thinking about stuff like decency. Well, I actually spent a lot of time listening to the wildly underrated Ben Folds’ “Rocking the Suburbs” CD. That’s a good album.

I especially like, “Fred Jones Pt. 2,” which I take to be about an editorial cartoonist at a newspaper who has been shoved out after 25 years. I don’t know if this is what it’s about (I suspect not), but the lyrics do point this way. We know, for instance, that for “Twenty-five years/ he’s worked at the paper,” and we know from the end – when John Mcrae from Cake joins in – that Fred Jones is an artist of some kind. “Fred gets his paints out and goes to the basement.” He’s an artist of some kind. I’ll make the leap.

This fits my feelings at the moment because I have a good friend, an editorial cartoonist, who just a week or so ago was let go. Yes, we have a tangent coming. It’s both sad and a travesty what’s happening to editorial cartoonists in America. These artists were once the lifeblood of newspapers. The good ones could change the world. The cartoons of Thomas Nast helped bring down Tammany Hall in New York. That’s the most famous example, but there are many others. I can remember having my own opinions shaken and stirred by certain cartoons (I remember, for instance, being young and seeing a two-panel cartoon. The first panel showed a gunman sticking up a family, and it read, “Guns don’t kill people.” The next panel said “People kill people.” And it was the same gunman and the same family except now the man was holding up the family with just his finger. I’ve never again heard that statement without thinking about that cartoon).

Cartoonists are disappearing. It’s no secret that newspapers are struggling, and cartoonists are our canaries in the coal mine. Already many of the biggest and most respected newspapers in America have done away with local cartoonists – they are considered “luxuries.” Now, I’m no businessman. I obviously could not make the hard decisions necessary to run a newspaper in today’s world. But it breaks my heart to see an essential and unique newspaper tradition die. My friend is a tremendous cartoonist, good enough that though I often disagree with his opinions, I am moved by his ideas and the way he draws. Now, his newspaper will run the same syndicated cartoons every other paper runs. It’s the same story across America. It’s just another step, I’m afraid, toward newspapers becoming homogenized and, then, irrelevant.

OK, welcome back from that tangent. The original point is I was thinking in the car about lots of stuff, but mostly I was thinking about decency. You know there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t get an email from someone who thinks I’m too nice in print. Of course, to be fair and balanced, there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t get an email from someone who thinks I’m a complete jerk. So it’s isn’t unanimous that I’m too nice. But I’d say the “too nice” emails outnumber the “jerks.”

The “too nice” emails are not compliments – many of them are significantly nastier than the “jerk” emails. The writers as a whole don’t believe that I am really too nice. They are using “too nice” to mean that I’m “too soft,” a “wuss” or “sissy-boy” or, well, you can probably come up with more appropriate words. I understand the point. There’s this feeling that if I would be harder on the local teams, I might affect change – I could get bad managers fired, lousy general managers to quit, crummy owners to sell the club – and by being nice, I am in fact, allowing this legion of losers to get away with things. They believe that, in the sports realm, I am soft on crime.

I don’t agree with any of that – I think people are always looking for easy labels and “too nice” is mine – and anyway, I can’t change. I think there is only one unbreakable column rule and that is: You have to be who you are, no faking allowed. My column is – to the best of my ability – me. But I’m off on another tangent here.

The point is that I think there is a segment of society that believes that “too nice” means “pathetic.” Decency equals weakness. Sportsmanship is for losers. I realize that these three statements are quite different, but I think there are many strong believers in each.

Another tangent (I sure wish I could do those David Foster Wallace footnotes -- that would make this a lot easier): “Sportsmanship for losers” comes from an email I got a few years ago after the 2004 playoff game when Mark Bellhorn hit the ball off a fan’s chest in left field. It was (by replays, anyway) clearly a home run. But the ball bounced back into play. At first the umpire ruled it a double. They eventually conferred and changed it to a homer. A guy sent me an email about Hideki Matsui, who was in the outfield and clearly had seen that the ball was gone (his initial reaction showed that he knew the ball was gone). The emailer thought Matsui should have told the umpire he blew the call and that it was a home run. I thought this was interesting as in quirky as in crazy. And my first reaction (I’ll bet a few of you had the same reaction) was, “Are you insane? Could you imagine how they would react in New York if they knew Matsui had admitted that was a home run? They might have rushed the field.” My initial reaction was confirmed by several New York friends who said they would have been first in line. And there you go – sportsmanship is for losers.

ANYWAY, I was thinking about all this (it’s a pretty long drive). And it got me to the whole point of this blog which is: Michael Moore. You never saw that coming did you? I just saw the movie “Sicko,” and I have plenty of thoughts about it that I will not share because this is not a political blog. It is a promotional blog for my book! Really! Anyway at the end of the movie there’s a scene that cut through me. Moore had finished pronouncing (in his own inimitable way) that pretty much every country in the world, including Cuba, has a more humane health care system than we do. The sledgehammers were out.

And then Moore showed, what he called, “the biggest anti-Michael Moore Web site.” Apparently there are quite a few out there. This one, I take it, is the Louvre of anti-Michael Moore. Well it seems – and I may get some facts wrong on this, but I am shooting for the larger point – that one of the bloggers on this site was going to have to close down the thing because his wife was sick, and they owed $12,000 in medical costs.

Michael Moore in narration said that nobody – not even this guy he despises – should have to give up first amendment rights because America doesn’t have Universal Health Care. He anonymously sent the guy a check for $12,000 (he showed the check in the movie) and the site is still going strong today, tearing up Michael Moore.

Now, some things are obvious up front:

1. Michael Moore is obviously grandstanding here. Not only does he get way more than $12,000 in publicity for his check, but he gets to cast himself as the good guy against the anti-Michael Moore villain. That’s worth way more than 12 grand.

2. It made for a pretty arresting end to his movie, and I can tell you that if I had Michael Moore’s money, and someone said, “I’ll give you a good ending for your column for 12 grand,” there would have been plenty of times that I would have jumped.

3. He managed, for 12 grand, to make this anti-Michael Moore guy look small, probably the most priceless part of the whole thing.

So, all that’s a given. But … but, but, but, but. He did give this guy 12 grand. He did, best I can tell, change the dynamics of life for this family. He did an altogether decent and kind thing, even if his reasons were less so. I remember an interviewer once saying to Jerry Lewis something like, “Well there are those who say you only do these Muscular Dystrophy telethons for your own ego and to keep yourself in the spotlight. There are those who say you don’t care entirely about the kids; you care more about your own career.” To which Jerry Lewis gave one of the all-time brilliant answers. He said (I'm paraphrasing):

What do you care why I’m doing it? Am I raising millions to help sick children? What difference does it make what my motivation is?

I went to the anti-Michael Moore Web site to see how the guy was handling this obviously uncomfortable thing. I had to go back several weeks to find anything at all about it – mostly the site (as I read it) is filled with rather shrill counterpoints that paint Michael Moore as something between Ken Lay and the Devil, though not quite as honest as either one. Now, I really have no problem with this at all … the guy obviously feels it is his life’s calling to expose Michael Moore, and I think everyone should have a hobby. Eventually I found a blog referring to the check, and the blog (not surprisingly) talked about how Michael Moore had tried to manipulate everything with his money, it explained that this guy had received other donations from truly good-hearted people, and that anyone who thinks what Moore did was good or kind is a brainless sheep.

Well, that’s one way to handle it. I was thinking about this. I wonder how I would react in this guy’s situation. I’m not sure I feel that sort of animosity toward anybody, but if I think about it … OK, let’s say Ann Coulter. Let’s say I was doing the No. 1 anti-Ann Coulter Web site on the Internet, and then my wife got sick, and she (I mean Coulter here) anonymously donated the money necessary, and then she (Coulter again) wrote all about it in her newest book, “Why Liberals Should Burn at the Stake (Drowning is Too Humane)” or whatever she (Coulter) might call it. How would I react? Would I stop doing the blog? Should I stop doing the blog? Should I write with a little less venom? Should I do exactly what I was doing before?

Here’s what I think I would do: I might write the same general blog, with maybe a touch more sensitivity. I mean, how could you help but see the person who altered your life with a different eye? But I would have a letter on the front page that read like this:

Dear Michael (we’ll move on from the Ann Coulter thing – I don’t really hate her either):

Thank you. It’s obvious that I do not like your politics or your methods. I feel it is important that I unveil what I consider to be your lies and contradictions. But I want to say here that, whatever your motivations, what you did helped my family. Thank you.

Is that weakness? Maybe it is. I don’t know.