Putting aside issues of team and party affiliation, Jim Jividen believes intellectual consistency is the highest possible value.
Melky Cabrera returned to San Francisco for the first time since his suspension last year.
He got booed. Not by every Giants fan, but it wasn’t a minority.
You can’t do that. You can’t have supported Barry Bonds and then boo Cabrera. I know he got suspended and didn’t shake Buster Posey’s hand before he left or some sort of respect the Undertaker bullshit locker room etiquette, but there’s not enough air between the two to boo Cabrera after you supported Bonds.
Unless you only cheered Bonds because he was one of yours.
One of ours, sorry. I’ve been checking Giants fan on all demographic dropdowns for walking up to four decades. Every time a sports analyst wrote something to the effect of “what’s the matter with San Francisco – so forward thinking and enlightened but they can’t see past their own tribal desire to support Barry Bonds,” my response was always – you think a lot of San Franciscans are soldiers in the War on Drugs?
I cheered Barry Bonds, and did so not just because he was one of mine, but because the noise over the steroid era was, first and foremost, part of that war on drugs mentality that locks people up for marijuana and celebrates alcohol as part of an American lifestyle. Drug use has been internalized by most not as a medical issue but instead as a morality play.
We love to find the sin. What’s at the heart of the anti-abortion movement? It gives women too much ability to have sex whenever they want. Why didn’t we bail out foreclosed homeowners? Moral hazard. Pay your debts!
Why don’t we have a vigorous agreement on the value of unions? Do what your boss tells you – be obedient. To God. To your father and then husband. To your boss.
Fish in a barrel, the conservatives. So unprincipled. They only root for their own. Then came NSA surveillance.
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Man, do I not pray at that church. It is everything I do not like.
Cheering for Bonds and thumbing my nose at the professional moralists with the pitchforks fit within my worldview. I cheered for Melky when he came back too.
I’m a Democrat. A lapsed one, largely. I voted for Jesse Jackson and volunteered for Dukakis and then Jerry Brown. I was too far to Clinton’s left to ever give him a vote, but have now given two to Obama.
FDR, JFK – even on the many issues where I’d disagree, I think of myself as on that team.
It’s easy for Democrats to spot conservative hypocrisy. Where were the “all that matters is the federal debt” Republicans when Bush was cutting taxes while getting us into a trillion dollar’s worth of war? When the public option health care provision came out of the Heritage Foundation and was installed in Massachusetts, it was needed to prevent the sin of free riders, and an example of how a health care system centered around private insurers could still work. When it became the centerpiece of Obamacare, the conservative concession that replaced the more left leaning vision of Medicare for All, suddenly it was socialism. And also fascism, somehow.
Fish in a barrel, the conservatives. So unprincipled. They only root for their own.
Then came NSA surveillance.
Let’s go with truth. Or at least intellectual consistency. Give Me Consistency or Give Me Death. Let’s put that on a license plate. |
When it was Bush and the big, bad Patriot Act, the Democrats lined up as guardians of civil liberties. Me too – that’s my side of the street; I’m not suspected of a crime, stay out of my private communications. Democrats opposed overly broad federal government intrusion; Republicans supported it.
And today – when it’s PRISM? When it’s Obama wearing the Authoritarian in Chief hat?
Yeah, somehow the Democrats forgot that civil liberty protection is the reason they became Democrats in the first place. Because my side is now in favor of the very surveillance we used to oppose.
(And drones, don’t forget drones.)
It’s disappointing. Not so much Obama – my eyes were open in voting for him; power gives up nothing without a demand, and I don’t expect even a good Con Law professor to talk about the importance of probable cause in his State of the Union.
Who I’m disappointed in are the fans. I thought we had an agreement on these things. Not all of us – some of us are going to boo Melky and cheer the Defense Department. But man, this has been a discouraging year.
I took a ton of courses in college named Organizational Something or Other; in one of them, a professor specifically asked me what my “highest value” was.
I said loyalty. I don’t recall if I meant it or only said it because I knew he’d view it favorably (he did).
Regardless of motivation, I was wrong.
Let’s go with truth. Or at least intellectual consistency. Give Me Consistency or Give Me Death. Let’s put that on a license plate.
Read more from the Moustache Club of America on Performance-Enhancing Drugs
Mickey Rourke, “The Wrestler,” and Perfomance-Enhanced Academy Awards
Why Barry Bonds’ Conviction Should be Overturned
My Final Thought on the Baseball Hall of Fame
Would You Use Performance-Enhancing Drugs?
Illustration–Flickr/DonkeyHotey