And speaking of boxing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…which we were the other day, in the comments section on this thread in which I’d said I couldn’t stand the sport—caused me to recall the single worst moment of boxing history I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness.

It occured on June 28, 1997. Does that ring a bell for any of you boxing aficionados? I was with my husband and son visiting my husband’s family, which had paid to watch the Tyson-Holyfield rematch on TV. Yes folks, I got to see the famous ear-chomping in real time, an experience that was a great deal worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than having merely heard about it afterward and watching the replay.

I hadn’t remembered, until I looked it up just now, that Tyson was angry at Holyfield for a head-butt that Tyson thought intentional but that the ref (and most onlookers) considered accidental. Nor did I recall that Tyson came into the ring for the crucial round without his mouthpiece and was ordered to put it in before the action began (so the bite seems to have been planned with malice aforethought; Tyson spit out the mouthpiece again right before he lunged forward to make a meal out of Holyfield’s ear). I do remember my perception that Holyfield had been dominating Tyson in the earlier rounds, and that Tyson had a wild look of desperation in his eyes.

I also hadn’t remembered that Tyson was allowed to continue with the fight after biting Holyfield, a decision almost as shocking as the bite itself, and which enabled him to go on to take a chunk out of Holyfield’s other ear (which fortunately was later surgically re-attached after being found in the ring where Tyson had spit it out—no cannibal, he!).

Mike Tyson is a brutal and angry man. The fact that he’s also clearly troubled, and that his childhood was a vale of tears, goes a little way towards explaining him but certainly does not excuse him. For example, “According to an interview in Details [Tyson’s] first fight was with a bigger youth who had pulled the head off one of Tyson’s pigeons.”

After the Holyfield debacle Tyson should have never been allowed in a ring again. But he was too valuable a money-making commodity to ban forever, and so he fought another day. I couldn’t bring myself to watch a YouTube video of the moment, or post one here; it’s just too repulsive.

Will Wisconsin be our Greece?

The New Neo Posted on by

The bill that restricts collective bargaining for public service unions has been passed in the Wisconsin Senate and the protesters were carried out of the capital building by Madison police, while Wisconsin Republicans receive death threats and there are rumblings of a general strike.

There is no question that this is a front in a larger war. How bad it will get is anyone’s guess, but the unions big shots are well aware of what is at stake. That’s why so much outside money and so many outside agitators have been thrown into the fight. It’s also why Democrat senators have been so desperate to get their way that they’ve taken the unprecedented step (at least, as far as I know) of leaving the state rather than let the democratic process go forward in the usual manner. And although President Obama has been silent lately (as is often his wont), he tends to go quiet while letting others do the dirty work for him.

Peter King McCarthy

The New Neo Posted on by

Ten years ago, shortly after 9/11, I would have been surprised at the furor over Rep. Peter King’s daring to suggest a House hearing on homegrown terrorism that focuses mostly on Islamicist terrorist groups in this country. But not any more.

Here’s a sampler of the way it goes:

This committee cannot live in denial,” King said, accusing critics of trying to “dilute” the focus by turning attention to groups other than Al Qaeda.

“Only Al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation,” King said.

He said the hearings “must go forward, and they will.” He said backing down would amount to a “craven surrender to political correctness.”

But Ellison warned that they could unfairly increase suspicion of Muslim Americans by lumping them together with violent extremists.

“When you assign their violent action to the entire community, you assign collective blame to a whole group,” Ellison said. “This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating.”

But from the time of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, nearly everyone has bent over backwards to make sure the Muslim community as a whole is not targeted. Even the evil George Bush hardly ever used the word “Muslim” or “Islamic” when he spoke of the terrorists, in hopes of holding off the PC crowd, although he had fat chance of ever doing that.

But that hasn’t stopped the allegations from liberals and the left. Just Google “Peter King McCarthy” and you’ll get tons of links making that comparison.

Lost in the fray, of course, is the fact that the abrasive McCarthy was often correct: there were a great many Communists in the government who were seeking to undermine this country, and almost all of McCarthy’s accusations turned out to be true when the Soviet files were opened and confirmed them. His name has become a synonym for “witch hunt,” but witches of the Salem sort are imaginary (pace, Wiccans) and Communists are most assuredly not (see this).

Speaking of those Communists and the nefarious Joe McCarthy, one of the first articles that comes up in a “Peter King McCarthy” search is this piece by Joanna Molloy, which appeared in the NY Daily News back in December of 2010, when the King hearings were already being discussed. Its headline, not atypical of the genre, is “Pete King’s plan to grill Muslims is flashback to Joe McCarthy’s Hollywood witch hunt for Communists.”

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? I’ll give you a bit more of the article:

Rep. Pete King’s proposal to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims is something straight out of the Bad Ideas Department.

Make that the Worst Ideas Department.

Just substitute the word “movie” for “Muslim” and you’ve got McCarthyism. As in Sen. Joe, who called in actors from Lucille Ball to Judy Holliday simply because they had had naughty liberal thoughts.

McCarthy found nothing on Holliday, but ruined her life and scores of others in Hollywood.

Molloy may write for the Daily News and I may be just a lowly blogger, but even I know that Molloy (and, presumably, the entire editorial staff of the Daily News, which not only did not catch her error but highlighted it in the headline) is confusing McCarthy’s investigations with the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with which McCarthy was completely uninvolved.

It’s a common misconception among the uninformed, and a common assertion among the propagandists on the left who would make use of their ignorance. What’s more, to be a little bit nitpicky here, was Judy Holliday’s life actually “ruined” afterward? As a child of the 50s, I seem to recall her being in a ton of shows and movies afterward. And in fact that’s correct:

In 1950, Holliday was the subject of an FBI investigation looking into allegations that she was a Communist. The investigation “did not reveal positive evidence of membership in the Communist Party” and was concluded after three months. Unlike many others tainted by the Communist scandal, she was not blacklisted from movies, but she was blacklisted from performing on radio and television for almost three years.

In 1952, she was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to “explain” why her name had been linked to Communist front organizations…

In November 1956 she returned to Broadway starring in the musical Bells Are Ringing with book and lyrics by her Revuers friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Jerome Robbins, for which she won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. In 1960 she starred in the film version of Bells Are Ringing…

Holliday went on to a few more movie and Broadway roles before she unfortunately died of breast cancer in 1965, at the age of 43. No doubt Joe McCarthy was responsible for that, as well.

Burglar/intruder calls 9/11 on homeowner

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of those “stupid criminal” things. But this one is in a class by itself.

It’s not really clear what this guy’s intent was; that’s why I wrote “burglar/intruder.” He does seem a bit unbalanced—or, as the homeowner succinctly says, nuts.

NPR’s Vivian Schiller: two strikes and she’s out

The New Neo Posted on by

We last heard of NPR’s Vivian Schiller (not to be confused with NPR’s Ron Schiller) in connection with the network’s Juan Williams firing. She survived that controversy. But in one of those hubris/nemesis moments, she’s been asked to leave by NPR as a result of the recent James O’Keefe’s sting.

In this case, Vivian Schiller doesn’t seem to have been directly involved; she may be the fall guy. However, it’s not that she’s not guilty of maintaining the climate there in which Ron Schiller’s remarks found a comfy home. But note I wrote “maintaining;” she certainly did not create it, nor do I think that climate will change once she’s gone, although I applaud her departure.

No, the only thing that might change at NPR is how free employees and executives might feel to express those views—even in private, because now they know they might be speaking to impostors rigged with recording devices.

One of the reasons this is happening at present is quite simple: it is part of a battle being mounted by the right against funding for NPR. The right has long maintained that NPR has a strong leftist ideology, and the Ron Schilling tapes offer excellent evidence for that charge to those who might somehow have still remained unconvinced. NPR can hardly afford (literally) to allow such a perception to go unchallenged, and thus Vivian Schiller must go in a vain attempt to give the appearance of outrage and change.

In other but related news, Ron Schiller isn’t going to the Aspen Institute after all. He’s toxic at the moment, and rightly so.

Ohio matters, and other news

The New Neo Posted on by

This is good news if true, because Obama has not been so very popular in Ohio lately. Ohio does seem to be a vital state in presidential elections, especially close ones: remember 2004? Here’s a 2009 article that discusses the importance Ohio has played historically in presidential elections.

And here’s some bad news on a different (although not utterly unrelated) topic.

And remember this event that occurred forty years ago (completely unrelated, I might add)? I do. You might have noticed that I’ve never written an article about boxing. That’s no accident; it’s a sport I can’t stand. Your mileage may differ.

Political pranking: now its NPR’s Schiller

The New Neo Posted on by

In a sort of tit-for-tat for the recent Governor Walker-Koch Brothers phone prank, NPR executive Ron Schiller was caught on tape saying some interesting things to people posing as Muslim donors but who were really in cahoots with James O’Keefe.

The moral of the story is (a) if you’re in public life, beware of even private conversations, unless you know for certain the people you’re speaking to are exactly who they say they are and politically aligned with you; and (b) people tend to say outrageous things (or acquiesce to them) in order to please those they think might be potential donors.

That said, don’t think I’m absolving Schiller of blame. Not at all. It’s just that nothing he says is the least bit shocking. This is NPR, after all. Anyone who listens to it even for a moment (as long as it’s not Car Talk, which I find both amusing and apolitical, despite its Cambridge origins) ought to know its biases.

Here’s my favorite part of the exchange:

At their lunch, the man posing as Kasaam told Schiller that MEAC contributes to a number of Muslim schools across the U.S. “Our organization was originally founded by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America actually,” he says.

Schiller doesn’t blink. Instead, he assumes the role of fan. “I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air,” Schiller says, “it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”

If you wanted an encapsulation of the perniciously defective reasoning that passes for thought among some of our liberal “elite” (and I use that last phrase only because it’s a favorite of Schiller’s, who is “most disappointed…that the educated, so-called elite in this country is too small a percentage of the population, so that you have this very large un-educated part of the population…”), you could hardly do better than that. The irony of the Muslim attitude towards those “female voices” is rather lost on Schiller, I’m afraid.

[NOTE: Schiller is leaving NPR for the Aspen Institute, a change apparently made before the video surfaced. NPR is “appalled” at his comments on the tape. Perhaps they are appalled–that it surfaced at all.]

Opera and kids

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I went to a performance of a highly condensed (one hour long) English-langauge version of the opera “Hansel and Gretel” at Boston’s Wheelock Family Theater.

I was one of the only people in the crowd without a child or two in tow. The entire theater was alive with squirmy little ones, but I was happy to see that so many parents remain willing to take their kids to such old-fashioned dinosaur-type entertainment, and for the most part the kids were able to concentrate on it and seemed to enjoy it.

Why did I go? I’ve long had a fondness for that particular opera. Despite its childish orientation, its music is very beautiful. When I was little we learned some of the songs in first or second grade, although I had no idea of their operatic origins and didn’t become aware of them till years later when I happened to take my own child to a production and was surprised and delighted to hear the familiar tunes.

I loved the songs so much as a child that every time we had music class I was hoping they’d have us sing them again. But alas, it was rare that they ever came up, and I never thought to make a request.

Now I can listen whenever I want, courtesy of YouTube. It’s a peculiarity of the opera that the roles of the children are not only sung by two adults but by two women, with a mezzo soprano dressed as Hansel. It’s a bit weird, but once you accept the convention it works.

Here’s a beautiful concert version sans costumes, in which Kathleen Battle seems to have been overwhelmed by her own voluminous sleeves. They are singing the Prayer Song, one of those I learned so long ago, except that they are singing in the original German rather than English:

Although the opera’s composer Englebert Humperdinck created a lot of other music, it’s “Hansel and Gretel” that made his name (which, by the way, was stolen in the 60s by this strange guy). The opera was popular from the start, and incorporates lovely folk tunes into a powerful almost-Wagnerian orchestration. The libretto was written, appropriately enough, by Humperdinck’s sister:

In the 1890s, [Englebert Humperdinck’s] sister, Adelheid Wette, had written a libretto based on the Grimm fairy tale, and asked her brother to set it to music as a Christmas entertainment for her children. Later, Engelbert and Adelheid decided to turn this modest home project into a full-scale opera. Hansel and Gretel premiered on December 23, 1893 at Weimar. It was an instant hit and remains an everlasting masterpiece. The composer Richard Strauss, who was the assistant conductor for the premiere, called it “a masterwork of the first rank.”

If it’s good enough for Richard Strauss, it’s good enough for me.

The Wisonsin fleebaggers: will they or won’t they?

The New Neo Posted on by

Return to work, that is?

Only their hairdressers know for sure.

Wisconsin is an important front in a battle currently going on across the country in many states, and in many to come. The unions know it and Tea Partiers know it, although I’m not sure how many others are paying a lot of attention. It’s been stalemated for quite some time, and no one is sure how it will turn out.

[NOTE: The hairdresser reference above was just an attempt at levity (and changing the subject). For those not old enough to remember, it comes from a famous 50s Clairol ad campaign featuring the lines, “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Apparently it was taken from the original Yiddish spoken by its originator’s mother-in-law to be, “Fahrbt zi der huer? Oder fahrbt zi nisht?,” which translates roughly as, “Does she colour her hair? Or doesn’t she?”]