More Vandalism at Saguaro National Park; This Time, the Rangers Respond to Media

My photos of graffiti vandalism two weeks ago at Saguaro National Park

More vandalism of cactuses was reported at Saguaro National Park, where odious graffiti vandals defaced giant saguaro cactuses two weeks ago.

Here's the link in today's Arizona Daily Star to the latest vandalism. 

This time, I see, the crack National Park Service PIO and rangers at Saguaro East actually responded to media inquiries on a Sunday -- rather than trying to cover up the vandalism, as they did two weeks ago when I first reported it to the local media hours after finishing a shift as a volunteer, during which the ranger on duty expressed no interest in my report until I later took it to the local paper and KOLD-TV.

(I was subsequently fired as a volunteer park mounted ranger for "approaching the media" and refusing to recant my sins, an act of official insolence and stupidity that created a considerable amount of hilarity in Tucson, including when the Park Service attempted to justify the firing by stating falsely that I hadn't followed unspecified "procedures" -- even though I had in fact spoken with the ranger on duty who blew me off and made a total of seven  fruitless phone calls to report the vandalism, including one to 9-1-1.)

Let's hope that this time, the rangers at Saguaro National Park decline to go onto their defensive crouches and perhaps redouble whatever efforts they have made to actually find the criminals, rather than trying to block the media and the public from knowing about the trouble. (Which, then as now, occurred in full public view, making the efforts of park rangers like Paul Austin and his trusty PIO Ms. Fisher look even more self-defeating). I also am somewhat surprised that, so far, Park Service headquarters in Washington has failed to take public notice of this disgrace.

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A Federal Agency Fires a Reporter for 'Approaching the Media'

One of the photos I took on Sunday of graffiti vandalism at Saguaro National Park

Here's a sad update on that awful graffiti vandalism incident last weekend at Saguaro National Park in Tucson (see previous post). Yesterday, I was fired as an unpaid volunteer National Park mounted ranger for my role in bringing this incident to the attention of local media after I saw the vandalism last Sunday while hiking a park trail. The vandalism included shocking graffiti defacement of giant saguaro cactuses.

During the five days' time between when I reported the incident on Sunday and when I was fired on Friday, Saguaro National Park rangers repeatedly tried to persuade me to admit that I was wrong in calling attention to the vandalism that I and many other hikers saw Sunday morning on the trail. In several conversations, including a bizarre disciplinary meeting on Thursday, I was asked to recant  and to agree never to "approach the media," whether on duty or off duty. Since I have been a reporter for 45 years, I informed the rangers that this was an absurd request to make of a volunteer who lives in the neighborhood of Saguaro National Park and is a frequent hiker and rider on those trails.

I repeatedly refused the weirdly Stalinist order to recant, including at the disciplinary meeting I was summoned to at the park visitor center on Thursday. That session was run by the supervisor Ranger Paul Austin and by Ranger Andy Fisher, who is the park's PR "interpretive" agent. They evidently didn't have the nerve to fire me to my face; the next day I was fired on the phone by the supervisor of the volunteers, Ranger Michelle Uhr, who told me: "We can't have you representing us as a volunteer anymore."

I resisted the inclination to inform her that I do not represent them. I represent the public, which owns the National Park and has a right to know what happens in that park.

Ranger Uhr is a decent woman, a hard-working law-enforcement ranger who was clearly acting under orders. Ranger Andy Fisher (who has been brazenly misrepresenting the facts to the media) is another story, a low-level PR employee -- a "flack," as we on the other side of the media call people like her  -- who seems not to appreciate the importance of veracity when speaking as a federal employee. She, Ranger Fisher, is an example of the insolence of office, and low office at that. If you wonder how Benghazi and the IRS and media phone-records scandals got out of control on an infinitely larger  scale, just have a look at this sorry performance by a few federal employees trying to cover their butts on the east side of Tucson.


Now, as I said, this was an unpaid, volunteer job, which I did because of my deep love for Saguaro National Park and my enjoyment at being able to meet and assist park users. The Park Rangers do not own the park. We citizens do. So my connection with Saguaro National Park remains unbroken.

Meanwhile, since the Park Service's amusingly clumsy attempt to cover its butt has bumped a weird local incident into national media streams, here is my statement for any media seeking it:

I was fired by park rangers as a volunteer mounted patrol ranger on Friday for "approaching the media" last Sunday afternoon -- hours after my shift as a volunteer ranger had ended. In other words, I was on my own time and acting as a private citizen when I notified the local media about the vandalism -- ONLY after having made numerous unsuccessful attempts to get the Park Service to respond and take my report and photos during the morning.

During my unpaid volunteer shift on foot at the Douglas Spring trailhead from 7-11 am Sunday, after other hikers informed me of the vandalism they saw, I reacted entirely appropriately. I made seven phone calls to the National Park Service and 911 to report the vandalism. In one of those calls, at 11 a.m. Sunday, I spoke directly with the park ranger on duty, Steven Bolyard, and he said that the visitors center had informed him of my earlier calls to them, and that he would "try to get out there this afternoon sometime." He exhibited no interest in the situation. This was after a county sheriff deputy had already been on the scene and spoken with me. The county sheriff's department responded quickly, professionally and correctly to my report. The Park Service did not respond, even after I spoke directly with them.

At 11 a.m. Sunday, as I went off duty, I personally informed Ranger Brolyard that I was considering taking my photos to the media, since no one at the Park Service seemed interested in the report. He raised no objection to that. Nor did Ranger Brolyard state that he himself was going to call an emergency number in Phoenix, for whatever reason.

Now the Park Service, having become defensive because of adverse local and even national media publicity over their failure to respond to the situation on Sunday, is claiming that I did not "follow procedures" in reporting the incident, in that I did not call an additional number in Phoenix that I had been previously told was only for serious emergencies, notably serious injuries or in-progress crimes.

This is what is called a "red herring."

To repeat: I made seven phones calls to the Park Service that morning, and on two occasions spoke with Park personnel, including Ranger Broylard. I also met with and personally spoke with a Deputy Iverson of the county sheriff department, who did take my report. Hence the Park Service had access to all of my phone calls, including those to the visitors center, to Ranger Brolyard and to 911 by 11 a.m. on Sunday.

It is clear to me that the Park Service is saying that I had no right to report the ugly vandalism on Sunday. It is also saying that I failed to follow "procedures," and that I have no right to "approach the media" under any circumstances. This is an absurd thing to say to a journalist.

Besides me, dozens of park visitors saw and photographed the vandalism on Sunday morning. Many of them expressed relief that I was there to make my reports. All of them were horrified.

As a journalist with wide experience for over 45 years in many different roles, including covering law enforcement, I am astonished that the Park Service in Tucson is asserting that it had had the right to try to keep this obvious public display of vandalism from the media, and to try to muzzle a private citizen. What possible explanation can the Park Service offer for foolishly hoping to cover up such an incident?

On Monday morning, when the Park Service in Tucson did finally respond, the response was to issue a report and photos of the vandalism, no different than the ones I had offered them a day earlier.

I have never been fired from any job, let alone an unpaid volunteer one.

But it had been important to me that the principle be affirmed, despite the unpleasantness that taking this stance has caused me personally. as a reporter, I have no desire to be part of the story. But it's important to reaffirm that our national parks belongs to us citizens, not to hired bureaucrats, defensive because they dropped the ball, who seek to block the public right to know.

If the Park Service at Saguaro National Park East wishes to rectify this situation, here is what they can do:

Admit they made a mistake and that they issued incorrect statements. Admit they dropped the ball on Sunday. Apologize to the public, but don't bother with me.  There are lots of honorable volunteer organizations in Tucson.

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Vandalism At Saguaro National Park

More than 15 saguaro cactuses were defaced by vandalism at Saguaro National Park in Tucson

I

What's "Soma?" See below.

[UPDATED]

For over a year, my wife and I have been volunteers with the Saguaro National Park mounted ranger patrol, meaning we ride on horseback in our volunteer park ranger uniforms along the trails and washes of Saguaro National Park on the east side of Tucson.

Usually, the job consists of simply being visible, while being available to give directions or other information to the occasional lost hiker, or prepared to provide water, assistance or simple first aid to hikers who run into trouble, most notably during the brutally hot season in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona.

Occasionally, I also volunteer to be basically the Park Service's version of a Wal-Mart greeter, stationed on foot at one of the popular trail-heads, where I enormously enjoy meeting people bound for the trails, and providing useful information (we had mountain lion sightings last month, and you need to warn some people who don't look like regulars about snakes, bee-swarms and other potential perils to the unwary).

I was doing this starting at 7 a.m. yesterday when a hiker came back from the Douglas Spring Trail and told me that he had seen widespread vandalism. After a few other hikers reported the same, I hiked up a couple of miles myself -- and was appalled at what I saw (see my photos above).

Some moron or morons, with base malice, painted graffiti on rocks, signs and even on saguaro cactuses. I saw big saguaros defaced by these criminals, and I made some calls to various Park service numbers and 911 -- but the only response I got was from a county deputy sheriff, who arrived at the scene and was sad to explain that, while he did not have jurisdiction on federal land, he'd look around on the periphery. Which he did.

I went back onto the trail and took photos of the damage and, after my shift as a volunteer had ended,  I notified some people in the local media in Tucson.  KOLD, one of the local television stations, sent  a reporter and a cameraman to my house near the park, and I took them up the trail for a detailed report on what was obvious to anyone on the trail, which they ran last night. The local paper, the Arizona Daily Star, also asked for my photos and ran a front-page story this morning. At least one other local television station is following up today. [UPDATE: And the story went national after people got back to work and started returning phone calls on Monday]

Listen, I'm just a volunteer. I don't speak for the National Park Service. Staffing at the National Park Service is scandalously tight -- Park Rangers work hellacious hours, and they do it from a deep sense of duty.

This might be a very good opportunity, then, to address some of the effects on beloved institutions like the National Parks created by the budget shenanigans perpetrated by the now-thoroughly-disreputable U.S. Congress, specifically sharp budget cutbacks caused by sequestration at government agencies like the National Park Service. If the National Park Service is upset about not getting out front on this story yesterday, when the media interest became intense, the opportunity exists today and beyond to address the very real consequences of severe budget cutbacks in our glorious national parks.

[Updated: Dismayingly, I found on Monday and later in the week, the official Park Service response was focused way too much on the media -- as if the media could somehow be held back on Sunday till a "press release" had been prepared and cleared through burueaucratic channels, on an incident that had been in full public view, to anyone hiking those trails, for over 24 hours before the Park Service acknowledged it. The reaction of the National Park Service Tucson branch was depressingly of a cover-your-butt bureaucratic nature, mainly because the park dropped the ball on Sunday and didn't try to address the story till Monday, after it had been in the local and even national media.]


There have been other instances of vandalism in national parks, most recently at Joshua Tree National Park in California, where graffiti criminals defaced boulders. The vandalism at Saguaro National Park was less in scope, but rather more striking because as many as a dozen magnificent saguaros were defaced. Just look at those saguaros in the photos above. Some of those very saguaros, stately icons of the Old West in southern Arizona, have been standing in those spots literally since the days when Wyatt Earp and Geronimo roamed this desert landscape.

Incidentally, what's the significance of  "Soma" -- the graffito so unartfully scrawled on several of the cactuses and many of the rocks?

Well, it's probably futile to waste too much time trying to understand the mind of a moron. But one  potential explanation is that our criminal vandal[s] might be making a probably unintended literary allusion -- which I hope will be of good use to them once they are caught and subsequently enrolled in one of those arts classes that are taught in our state prison systems.

From the Wikipedia entry (full link here):

"Soma (Sanskrit सोम sóma), or Haoma (Avestan), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *sauma-, was a Vedic ritual drink[1] of importance among the early Indo-Iranians, and the subsequent Vedic and greater Persian cultures. It is frequently mentioned in the Rigveda, whose Soma Mandala contains 114 hymns, many praising its energizing qualities. In the Avesta, Haoma has the entire Yašt 20 and Yasna 9-11 dedicated to it. It is described as being prepared by extracting juice from the stalks of a certain plant. In both Vedic and Zoroastrian tradition, the name of the drink and the plant are the same, and the three forming a religious or mythological unity.

"... From the late 1960s onwards, several studies attempted to establish soma as a psychoactive substance. A number of proposals were made, including one in 1968 by the American banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur ethnomycologist, who asserted that soma was an inebriant, and suggested fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as the likely candidate. ..."

"...Soma is [also] the name of a fictional drug in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World. In the novel the drug produces both intoxicating and psychoactive properties and is used in celebratory rituals. It is described as 'All of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects." Another drug derived from mountain growing mushrooms is featured in his 1962 novel, Island, in which it is used in a Hindu-based religious ceremony worshipping the god Shiva. Called moksha medicine it is portrayed in a positive light, as a key to enlightenment.

"In the books Junkie and Naked Lunch, author William S. Burroughs refers to soma as a non-addictive, high-quality form of opium said to exist in ancient India.

"In Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, soma is referred to as "concentrated prayer", a drink enjoyed by the gods (who feed on people's worship), such as Odin.

"The single "Soma" by the indie rock band The Strokes focuses on soma and its effects."

Well then, some mystery clues for the constabulary to pursue.

Less grandly, Soma is also an old street nmame for the drug PCP.

But let's forget the fancy allusions. Probably "Soma" is just the name of some moron's gang girlfriend.

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Guns At the Airports (Continued)

Guns found at T.S.A. checkpoints this week

Ho-hum, another week, another haul of handguns that our fellow citizens insist on trying to take onto airplanes.

This week's haul, incidentally, is a record, the T.S.A. says in its weekly blog.

No one in the media pays any attention to this except at the start of a new year when little news items appear noting that a current year's gun-haul at the airports outpaced the previous year's.


Note, incidentally, that the vast majority of the guns being found in passengers' carry-ons are loaded.

And, given these numbers of guns being found, the obvious question is, how many guns, loaded or otherwise, are actually being carried onto airplanes, and not found by the T.S.A.?

Ho-hum?

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Cruise News

Another good reason for me to maintain my record of never having taken a cruise, or considered the idea:

Argentina has been accused in Britain of trying to ‘strangle’ the Falkland Islands by intimidating cruise ships. "At least 12 incidents of luxury liners being targeted have been reported to Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office since November. ...Protesters or industrial action by militant unions are disrupting vessels that have a stopover in islands on their itinerary. ..." (According to a report in the Daily Mail via etrurbonews.)

Only a Brit newspaper, incidentally, would use the term "luxury liner" to describe a cruise ship.

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US Airways Raises Fee for Changing Flights, Matching United Move

US Airways has raised the penalty fee for changing most restricted coach tickets from $150 to $200,  just as United Airlines did last week. The other major airlines are likely to follow, with the exception of Southwest, which doesn't charge fees to change a ticketed itinerary.

The $50 extra fee applies to newly purchased tickets only.

Fees for changing tickets on so-called nonrefundable coach fares are a major source of extra revenue for airlines. In 2011, U.S. airlines raised an extra $2.4 billion in revenue from such fees, according to the Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Full-year numbers for 2012 haven't been reported yet, but the revenue seems to be increasing. In the third quarter of 2012 (the last period that the agency has reported data for), the total raised by domestic airlines on such fees was $652 million, compared with $602.9 million in the third quarter of 2011.

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Hysteria in the Hub

The main headline on the Boston Globe Web site on Saturday was this, "Let the Healing Begin ... Hub Moves Forward."

The issue of fatuous insult to those who lost lives and limbs in that horror aside (what "healing" are we so easily proclaiming, exactly?), and forgetting the annoyance of the Boston media's chronic use of that silly word "Hub" to describe a city of a mere 600,000 (the allusion is to "Hub of the solar system," per Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was evidently drunk when he wrote that about Boston in 1858), I take issue with the questionable notion that the "Hub" should be so ready to move "forward."

Not so fast, Hub of the solar system. Actually, and especially now with the passage of a little time, there might be compelling reason to move backward a bit over last week, to impose better sense about just what the hell happened in Boston, where an entire metropolitan area was shut down while police massed to search "house to house" -- immobilizing the citizenry and businesses to look for a 19-year-old killer who, as it turns out, was found cowering in a boat stored in some guy's yard. As we know,he hid on the boat after somehow managing to escape during the previous night when police, guns blazing, had cornered him and his killer brother.

Wait a minute. Can we ask a few rude questions now? First of all: The guy got away with all those police guns blazing? Nobody is questioning the police performance? Before that, the finish-line mob scene at the Marathon last Monday was also evidently inadequately secured by the police. And nobody is questioning that? (Well, some are, but not in the media. Officers at the NYPD, which knows how to secure a crowd scene, are definitely scratching their heads over how two low-level schmucks with big plans for fame and huge backpacks managed to leave unattended packages, which happened to be bombs, in clear sight on the sidewalk, right at the feet of those crowds.


To its great credit, Salon had this to say on Saturday: "... this week’s spectacle in the Boston area was a testament to the kind of political and media hysteria that, ironically, makes crimes of this sort more likely to happen in the future. ..."

The hysteria had reached full cry after the bombings with the police and political authorities essentially proclaiming martial law in Boston and its suburbs, a stunning move the import of which still seems not to be appreciated in the mainstream media. What kind of a precedent, for example, has this set for the next time there's a nasty bombing or other attack on American soil. Is "lockdown" the new response to danger? What, specifically and legally, does "lockdown" mean, anyway. And why are we so willing to cave to fear and allow constitutional rights to be readily violated?

Besides the dangerous precedent set in Boston by the "Shelter in Place" shutdown and the media

acquiescence, there's another potential disturbing consequence. The right-wing-loon world, always operating in a frisson of anti-government paranoia, has of course seized on the Boston-area police overreaction as an example of what the government is capable of doing with very little provocation to proclaim an emergency. In this case, it was a 19-year-old murderer on the loose. The next time, the way the right-wing media loom-universe is portraying it, this is how the government comes for ... your guns.
 
The atmosphere of hysteria can enable dangerous psychological reactions among unstable but influential lunatic-fringe nut-cases, rabble-roused by  worthies like Glenn Beck, who quickly sprang into action overthe weekend peddling a delusion that the Obama Administration is shielding a Saudi national who was the true mastermind of the Boston bombings.       

And the paranoid conspiracy right-wing extremist site Infowars, which one of the Boston terrorists happened to be a fan of, as it turns out, has genuine photos and video to show graphically just what a government assault on the citizenry looks like.  Here's the link.


Did we really want to provide actual indisputable evidence -- with video -- to fuel these anti-government paranoid fantasies? Did we really want to send a message to two-bit would-be terrorist bombers everywhere: Look how easy it is to shut down a major metropolitan area, terrify the population, and cause staggering financial losses?

Really?

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Most of Us in USA Still Alive, Excluding Al Neuharth

I had a couple of encounters with the legendary Gannett corporate pirate and USA Today founder Al Neuharth over the years, but my favorite occurred sometime in the late 1980s, when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter covering the then gala annual meeting (those were the days) of the American newspaper publishers association.

At the closing reception, I was talking with the late Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, when Al Neuharth sailed up, dressed in his signature black, white and gray ensemble (he always styled himself with that color pattern) -- with open shirt-collar and lots and lots of fancy jewelry. Al loved bling.

Kay Graham shook Al's hand and gave him her best patrician look.

"My, Mr. Neuharth," she said appraisingly, "you're so shiny."

It was hard to knock Al Neuharth off balance, but Kay did it. After some perfunctory pleasantries, he skulked off with his handlers fussing alongside him.

On the Poynter Institute site, Roy Peter Clark has a piece that takes a refreshingly dim postmortem view of the legacy of Al (whom Ben Bradlee despised as a "mountbank') and his invincible "pursuit of mediocrity."  Clark alludes to an old insiders' joke about Al and his style. It went this way, "When Al shows up in his sharkskin suit, it's hard to tell where the shark ends and Al begins."

Coming as it did at the height of the Boston bombings coverage, Al Neuharth's death at age 89 last week received respectful but restrained coverage. Yes, yes, yes, the serious obits all agreed. The man did certainly have an effect on ... uh, newspaper design. Why, he introduced spashy color and ... uh. well, he was pretty good at hiring women and minorities, that's for sure. And well, he invented USA Today, one of the greatest acts of sheer newspapering audacity since Pulitzer and Hearst arrived on Park Row. You must grant him that.

Well, one other thing that Al introduced and invented was sham circulation-reporting standards, after he pressured the main industry circulation-verification agency to accept the idea that "bulk circulation" -- that is, copies of newspapers that are essentially given away free through barter deals with advertisers, or at huge discounts off the cover price -- could be claimed as actual paid circulation. Since the yellow journalism heyday of Hearst and Pulitzer, many newspapers have always hyped their circulation figures, but Al Neuharth refined the hype into art. The obituaries dutifully stated that USA Today was the largest-selling newspaper in America, even though everybody in the industry has known for decades that about half of the stated circulation of USA Today was give-aways at hotels and in other places where travelers have long been accustomed to getting the paper for free.

Under Neuharth, the Gannett media empire grew tremendously, as Gannett rapaciously snapped up prosperous newspapers in monopoly markets (or engineered deals where the markets would soon become monopolies). In over 40 years in the business, incidentally, I have never once heard anyone say that Gannett improved any newspaper after buying it. Just the opposite.

USA Today, alas, has been on a steady decline that's accelerated in the last year, especially as hotels and other places where the paper traditionally has been handed out for free are turning it down because more often than not, USA Today sits untouched in the morning outside hotel-room doors. Still in at least in some areas of coverage, it used to be a contender, and in a few areas like sports, it still is.  My own guess now is that within a year, USA Today will no longer have a print newspaper and will be concentrated, as so much of the Gannett news product now is, in a centralized online operation. My guess is that it will become the great mothership in the cloud from which will rain most editorial functions for the national network of 85 local Gannett papers (which the Gannett company is already referring to not as newspapers but as "community digital information centers.")

That'll be Al's legacy. And all the "Newseums" in the world won't matter. (The Newseum, that preposterous gillion dollar monument in Washington to Al's stupendous ego, his ability to channel huge sums of money, and his disdain for the English language, has devolved mostly into what it was essentially created as: a venue for swanky media parties and corporate events).

And oh, there's also this part of the Al Neuharth legacy, which was curiously unmentioned in the respectful obituaries.

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Correction: An earlier version of this had a typo and stated that the incident with Kay Graham and Al Neuharth occurred in the late 1990s. It was the late 1980s.  Oh and, um, of course, it was Ben Bradlee, not (uh) Ben Brantley! Who says we don't need copy editors?

TSA Caves on Small Pocketknives

TSA Announcement in March. Uh ... never mind

A coalition representing flight attendants unions is hailing a decision by the T.S.A. to postpone its plan to allow passengers to carry small pocketknives with blades smaller than 2.36 inches on planes starting Thursday.

 Acording to a T.S.A. spokesman, “In order to accommodate further input from the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (ASAC), which includes representatives from the aviation community, passenger advocates, law enforcement experts, and other stakeholders, TSA will temporarily delay implementation of changes to the Prohibited Items List, originally scheduled to go into effect April 25.  This timing will enable TSA to incorporate the ASAC feedback about the changes to the Prohibited Items List and continue workforce training."

 
The group, the Flight Attendants Union Coalition said today it would continue efforts to maintain a

permanent ban on knives. The vociferous opposition from unions, which received strong support among some Democrats in Congress, was based on assertions that small knives would constitute dangers to flight crews. The T.S.A., in announcing the decision in March to allow the knives and other items such as hockey sticks, stated at the time that similar items,  such as knitting needles and screwdrivers, have been allowed for years, with no problems.

In caving to union pressure after insisting it would not, the T.S.A. appears to raise questions about its determination to revamp security protocols more toward risk-based intelligence and less on having screeners search for things in carry-ons. At the heart of the T.S.A. rationale about allowing pocketknives (which many travelers use as tools, like small Swiss Army Knives, when on the road) was an assertion by T.S.A. director John Pistole that a small pocketknife poses no danger in the era of reinforced cockpit doors and passenger vigilance about any kind of onboard threatening behavior.

Incidents of unruly or disorderly conduct on board airplanes have fallen sharply in recent years, although many in the media persist in credulously writing about "air rage."

Here's a link to the Web site of the union coalition that argues for continuation of a ban on knives. 

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American Airlines Flights Grounded Today

UPDATED

If you were flying or scheduled to fly American Airlines this afternoon you already know this, but:

American grounded all of its flights this afternoon because of some unspecified computer foulup.

From the American Web site: 

American's network system is experiencing intermittent outages. At this time, we are holding all flights on the ground until later this afternoon, when we will provide another update. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as we can, and we apologize to our customers for this inconvenience.

If your travel plans are flexible, there will be no charge if you would like to change your reservation and we will provide full refunds if your travel plans are not flexible. However, we are unable to make changes to current travel plans until we have resolved this issue.

We will provide another update as soon as we have more information.

Oh yes, American. Please do just that.

UPDATE -- As of 4 p.m. eastern time, the American system was lumbering back, but thousands of passengers were still stuck on planes that hadn't been able to take off. The mess was especially pronounced at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport --not that the Dallas newspaper was of any use. As of 4 p.m. eastern time. Central time, the Dallas News had not a word about the American mess -- in American's home town. The Fort Worth paper did a little better informing the locals.

UPDATE -- Somebody unpleasantly and anonymously pointed out (sorry, lost the comment) that the Dallas News aviation "blog" had updated news on this throughout. Dunno. It sure wasn't part of the general news coverage one could find on the online site, indicating that it was aimed at travelers who are already primed to consult it. The Fort Worth paper, on the other hand, had readily accessible news. I guess my point is that an event like this is general news, not niche news. The same anonymous commenter said that the web site Joesentme.com had timely updates, which was beside the point. I'm sure it did. That's a subscription site with updates and commentary specifically marketed to frequent business travelers, and I am not a subscriber. My point was that this kind of event -- major airline delays caused by a computer problem -- ought to be treated as general "run of the paper" news. It isn't niche news, and some people who make a living in the intensely narrow field of airline news forget that airlines are a major component of the national transportation network. Sometimes airline news is inside-baseball. Sometimes it's actual news. This blog is not aimed at the aviation and business-travel community, except sometimes.


Also, I have always made it very clear here that I am a self-employed freelance writer, and have been for 25 years, and that this blog is a probably insane personal initiative with no relationship whatsoever to any news organization. I'm the sole reporter, writer, columnist, editor and publisher and capital investor. And I don't care at all for "ombudsmen" with slight journalism credentials separating flyshit from pepper, so that position remains unfilled.

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Perspective and Proportion in Security

Hysteria always follows a terrorist attack of any sort. Proportion can get lost in crowd-induced (and media-induced) panic.  


In my opinion, the most sane and sensible security expert in the country is Bruce Schneier. So I recommend his essay today on the Atlantic web site. Here.

Security in Boston?

Boston media sometimes hilariously refer to that city as the "Hub," as if it had a universal importance far in excess of its actual minimal importance in the country or world. But it is a big city, and one would assume (with scant evidence, incidentally) that its police department is up to the job.

But in all of the (often very weak) reporting coming out of yesterday's horrific bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, some obvious questions are not being asked.

Here's a big one, in my opinion: Did Boston police prepare for this event the way a big-city police force should have? Did the Boston cops make serious attempts to fully secure the area of the finish line in the days and hours before the Marathon? Did they perform at international big-city standards?  (Or did they fail to prepare adequately for this event and then, afterward, charge around grabbing   people who looked Middle Eastern, just like in the old days when they used to charge into Mission Hill to toss black kids on the street whenever a big crime occurred?)

In New York for a major public event that draws tens of thousands into a confined urban area like that, the N.Y.P.D. would have assiduously secured the location beforehand. For example, trash cans would have been inspected and secured. Surveillance cameras would be deployed.  Officers trained to identify suspicious behavior would have mingled in the crowd. Disasters might still occur, but the likelihood would be greatly diminished, and the culprits would be likely grabbed.


The bombs that caused death and injury yesterday appear to have been fairly crude, breathless accounts in the media about "powerful bombs" aside. All bombs are powerful, by definition. But anyone who has even been in the proximity of, say, a 500-pound aerial bomb that hits the ground knows the difference between a huge, sophisticated blast and a crude improvised explosive blast -- and these in Boston appear to have been the latter. Deadly, but simple. That is, exactly the kind of bomb that can be placed in a street trash receptacle, or hidden in a package on a corner.

The sort of crude bomb that the despicable Irish Republican Army used to deploy to terrorize London back in the days.

And they should know something about the IRA in Boston, where bars that supported fundraising for the terrorist group used to sell drinks called the Irish Car Bomb.

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Patriots Day 2013 in Boston

It's impossible to say right now exactly what happened in Boston with those horrific explosions during the running of the Boston Marathon today (and made especially difficult by what seems to be to be pretty weak breaking-news performance by the always self-regarding Boston media -- though none remotely as inept as the sad-sack New York Post, which has had howlingly bad reporting all day).

But consider:

Today is Patriots Day, which is officially celebrated on the third Monday in April and which nominally commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Patriots Day is especially near and dear to the paranoid right-wing militia movement in the U.S., elements of which celebrate the day on April 19. The Branch Davidian Waco debacle by the federal government -- long a rallying point for the right-wing paranoids -- occurred on a Patriots Day in 1993. Two years later, on a Patriots Day 1995, the right-wing lunatic Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring 800, in the worst homegrown terrorist incident in  U.S. history.

And today, which is also federal income tax filing day, is Patriots Day in Boston ...


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Ta Ta

Margaret Thatcher and her good garden-party pal, vile murderer Augusto Pinochet, in 1994. Why is this man smiling?

Enough said. But Alex Pareene in Salon today said it very well.

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Hey, NRA: Sister Angelica Explains it All for You

The National Rifle Association,  this time in the guise of a hired "task force" that the firearms lobby hilariously describes as "independent," wants to arm teachers and principals with guns in the classroom, in preparation for the next homicidal maniac who slaps one of those high-capacity magazines into another one of those assault weapons and charges into a school firing on the children.

Hey, what could possibly go wrong with having your social sciences teacher packing heat?

I'm suggesting that the NRA's loud-mouth draft-dodger head Wayne La Pierre and his hired stooges could benefit from what has been shown to be an extremely effective classroom deterrent, a knuckle  sandwich from the likes of Sister Angelica of blessed memory.

Instead, the press-release warrior La Pierre, who has been an NRA bureaucrat since a few years after he cravenly dodged the Vietnam draft while at the same time expressing support for the Vietnam war, is parading around with a new 225-page "report" from a task force composed of people who stand to make money if its recommendations are somehow stupidly adopted (as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out on MSNBC last night).  Of the task force's 13 members, I see from the report, four are employed by an Idaho-based armed "combat reality training" company called Phoenix RBT Solutions.

To no one's surprise, the task force recommendations are predicated on putting guns into schools, not reducing firearms outside of schools. The recommendations are that armed officers be hired for every school in the country, and that states relax gun-carry restrictions to let teachers and administrators pack firearms in all schools.

Of course, besides serving the NRA's main purpose of selling more guns, the plan would peddle some kinds of "training." That is, firearms training from ... corporate interests who make money selling weapons training and defensive strategies. (See Phoenix RBT Solutions, for example) And, of course, there would be a component of  psychological "evaluation" -- that is, intervention into the daily routine of a school by outside interests from the psychology industry, which makes a lot of dough already peddling intervention services to the worried who happen to be covered by insurance or government reimbursement policies. Oh, and police officers and other outsiders would have a daily role in identifying potential trouble within the school, by staying informed through routine interaction with students and teachers. Basically, the police officer at the school would always be nosing around, rather than just standing guard.

On my old block in Philly, we called that a police state.

Yesterday, a gun-lobby mouthpiece named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas mainly distinguished for having been in the forefront of the pitchfork-carriers leading the House impeachment against Bill Clinton, got lots of credulous publicity in Washington. Summoned by the NRA, members of the so-called Washington press corps trooped dutifully into the risibly named National Press Club to sit quietly while Hutchinson sold the seemingly unsellabe.

[To its credit, the New York Times, reporting today on this "news conference," noted that the event,  packed with reporters, had "unusually heavy security," including an explosive-sniffing dog. "A dozen officers in plain clothes and uniforms stood watch as [Hutchinson] spoke; one warned photographers to 'remain stationary' during the event," the Times reports.]

No indication of whether photographers meekly complied, though I'm guessing they did. No information on who paid for those "uniformed officers" (Washington D.C.?) on hand to guard the honorable Asa Hutchinson against the perceived lethal threat from the notebook-and-Nikon-wielding news people.

And by the way, media, can we please stop reporting on staged events like this at the "National Press Club" (which touts itself as the "world's leading professional organization for journalists")  without also providing the information that the National Press Club, its fancy facilities, and its impressive podium, are available for hire to anyone seeking to promote anything in a setting that appears to be professionally sanctioned by journalists. 

From the National Press Club Web site: "...the Press Club is a world-class conference and meeting facility that hosts thousands of events each year for sophisticated clients from around the globe. Our professional staff is expert at coordinating banquets, receptions, news conferences, meetings, symposiums, webcasts and satellite media tours..."

Put simply: "Yo! We're for hire."  Just like Asa Hutchinson and the NRA task force which, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out, included not a single teacher or school administrator.

[For anyone inclined to wade through, here's a link to the 225-page NRA report released yesterday.] 

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Brutal Gang-Rape of American Tourist in Brazil

A 21-year-old female American student was brutally gang-raped in a six-hour attack on a bus in the famous tourist Copacabana beach tourist section of Rio de Janeiro over the weekend.

After the attackers forced other riders off the bus, they drove it to various locations, beating and repeatedly raping the woman and severely beating her male French boyfriend, who they handcuffed and forced to watch the woman being assaulted. Then the Brazilian attackers -- police have identified three males, who were also implicated in a gang-rape of a Brazilian student two weeks ago -- drove around to various ATMs and forced the couple to withdraw cash before dumping the victims 30 miles from Copacabana.

Here's a news link.

The incident was the latest brutal sex assault by local males on a female tourist traveling abroad and, as the Associated Press reports, it "paralleled other gruesome gang rapes against women and tourists in developing countries."

Let me make a little point right here. In Brazil, there is always a loud cry that Brazil is not a "developing country" but rather has evolved into a first-world country, where safety and justice prevail. That questionable assertion underlies the triumph Brazil had in securing the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 2014 World Cup, despite grave concerns about street crime and air-travel safety, not to mention the proclivity in Brazil for reacting to any criticism with cries that it must reflect dark imperialist conspiracies generated by "North Americans" and others.

Is Brazil a modern, developed country, as its booming economy would indicate? Or does that top-level economic veneer merely layer over third-world squalor and political malfeasance in a dystopia where crime is out of control, where "cover your ass" is the default official response, where local media rush to blame foreign victims, where xenophobia defines responses to outside criticism, where foreigners expressing concerns about crime are lectured -- totally falsely -- that crime rates are as high in U.S. cities?

The jury (all irony fully intended, from someone who's had some experience here) is out.

But the evidence about gang rape in Brazil is deeply troublesome. As the Times reports today, the same men identified in the weekend attack were implicated by a 21-year-old Brazilian woman who said they raped her after boarding a similar bus on March 23. She reported the attack to police but, according to the Times, "the authorities were said to have slowly investigated the claim. Two police officials in charge of investigating the March 23 case were abruptly removed from their posts on Monday."

The Times report continues: 

"Brazil has recently grappled with other high-profile cases of gang rape, including one episode in 2012 in Queimadas, a city in the northeast Paraíba State, in which six men were convicted of raping five women at a birthday party. Two of the women were killed after recognizing their attackers.

More broadly, reports of rape in Brazil have climbed significantly since 2009, when the nation’s criminal code was changed to expand the legal definition of rape to include crimes involving anal penetration. More than 5,300 people, about 90 percent of whom are women, registered cases of rape in the first six months of 2012, an increase of more than 150 percent since 2009."

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Meanwhile, international tourists need to pay very close attention to warnings about street crime in countries where crime is out of control, and especially in countries where all forms of street harassment against women, even just the verbal kind that prevails culturally in the Middle East and some Latin American countries, are routine. The U.S. based international group called Stop Street Harassment is helping to sponsor Anti-Street Harassment Week next week, by the way. Here's a link.

And here is a link to the current State Department travel warnings for countries where foreign travelers  are considered most at risk.

And following, in full, is the section on crime from the State Department's current travel advisory for Brazil. I've highlighted some sections in bold-face:

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CRIME: Brazilian police and media report that the crime rate remains high in most urban centers, including the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, and is also growing in rural areas within those states. Brazil’s murder rate is more than four times higher than that of the United States, and rates for other crimes are similarly high.

Street crime remains a problem for visitors and local residents alike. Foreign tourists, including U.S. citizens, are often targets, especially in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife. While the risk is greater during the evening and at night, street crime also occurs during the day, and safer areas of cities are not immune. Incidents of theft on city buses are frequent. You should keep a copy of your passport with you while in public and keep your passport in a hotel safe or other secure place. You should also carry proof of your health insurance with you.
The incidence of crime against tourists is greater in areas surrounding beaches, hotels, discotheques, bars, nightclubs, and other tourist destinations. It is especially prevalent prior to and during Carnival (Brazilian Mardi Gras), but also occurs throughout the year. Several Brazilian cities have established specialized tourist police units to patrol areas frequented by tourists.
Use caution when traveling through rural areas and satellite cities due to reported incidents of roadside robberies that randomly target passing vehicles. Robberies and “quicknappings” outside of banks and ATMs occur regularly. In a “quicknapping,” criminals abduct victims for a short time in order to receive a quick payoff from the family, business, or the victim’s ATM card. Some victims have been beaten and/or raped. You should also take precautions to avoid being carjacked, especially in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and other cities.
In airports, hotel lobbies, bus stations, and other public places, pick pocketing and the theft of hand-carried luggage and laptop computers is common. You should "dress down" when in public and avoid carrying valuables or wearing jewelry or expensive watches. "Good Samaritan" scams are common. If a tourist looks lost or seems to be having trouble communicating, a seemingly innocent bystander offering help may actually be a participant in a scam. Take care at and around banks and ATMs which accept U.S. credit or debit cards. Travelers using personal ATM or credit cards sometimes receive billing statements with unauthorized charges after returning from a visit to Brazil, or discover that their cards were cloned or duplicated without their knowledge. If you use such payment methods, carefully monitor your bank records for the duration of your visit.
While the ability of Brazilian police to help recover stolen property is limited, we strongly advise you to obtain a "boletim de ocorrencia" (police report) at a "delegacia" (police station) if any of your possessions are lost or stolen. This will facilitate your exit from Brazil and assist with insurance claims. Be aware, however, that the police in tourist areas are on the lookout for false reports of theft for purposes of insurance fraud.
Do not buy counterfeit and pirated goods, even if they are widely available. These goods are illegal in the United States, and if you purchase them you may also be breaking local law.
Brasilia: Brasilia has significant crime problems. Reports of residential burglaries continue to occur in the generally affluent residential sections of the city. Public transportation, hotel sectors, and tourist areas report the highest crime rates, but statistics show that these incidents can happen anywhere and at anytime. The “satellite cities” that surround Brasilia have per-capita crime rates comparable to much larger cities. Police reports indicate that rates of all types of crime, including “quicknappings,” have risen dramatically in Brasilia in the last two years. Brasilia’s Central Bus Station or “Rodoviaria” is a particularly dangerous area, especially at night. This location is known to have a large concentration of drug dealers and users. Illegal drugs such as crack cocaine and “oxi” (a derivative of cocaine base produced with cheaper chemicals) have become very common in the “Plano Piloto” area and satellite cities.
Rio de Janeiro: The city continues to experience high incidences of crime. Tourists are particularly vulnerable to street thefts and robberies in the evening and at night especially in areas adjacent to major tourist attractions. There have been attacks, including shootings, along trails leading to the famous Corcovado Mountain and in other parts of the Tijuca Forest. If robbed, do not attempt to resist or fight back, but rather relinquish your personal belongings. At all times, pay close attention to your surroundings and the behavior of those nearby. There have been reports of thieves and rapists slipping incapacitating drugs into drinks at bars, hotel rooms, and street parties. While crime occurs throughout the year, it is more frequent during Carnival and the weeks prior.
Choose lodging carefully considering location, security, and the availability of a safe to store valuables. Do not answer your hotel room door until you positively confirm who is on the other side. Look out the peephole or call the front desk to confirm the visitor. There have been several recent incidents where mass holdups of guests have occurred at hotels and hostels in the city. 
Rio de Janeiro’s favelas are a subject of curiosity for many U.S. travelers. A favela pacification program, instituted in 2008, installed police stations in some favelas, primarily in the Zona Sul area. However, most favelas exist outside the control of city officials and police. Travelers are urged to exercise caution when entering any “pacified” favelas and should not go into favelas that are not “pacified” by the state government. Even in some “pacified” favelas, the ability of police to provide assistance, especially at night, may be limited. Several local companies offer “favela jeep tours” targeted at foreign tourists. Be aware that neither the tour company nor the city police can guarantee your safety when entering favelas.
Be vigilant while on the roads, especially at night. There have been shootings and carjackings on the Linha Vermelha that links the airport to the Southern Zone of the city. In Rio de Janeiro, motorists should be especially vigilant at stoplights and when stuck in traffic. Carjackings and holdups can occur at intersections, especially at night.
Visitors should also remain alert to the possibility of manhole cover explosions. There have been multiple manhole cover explosions in Rio de Janeiro in the past few years, with a higher incidence in the Centro and Copacabana neighborhoods.
Report all incidents to Rio's tourist police (DEAT) at (21) 2332-2924. The tourist police have been very responsive to victims and cooperative with the U.S. Consulate General. 
Sao Paulo: All areas of Greater Sao Paulo have a high rate of armed robbery of pedestrians and drivers at stoplights and during rush hour traffic. The "red light districts" of Sao Paulo, located on Rua Augusta north of Avenida Paulista and the Estacao de Luz metro area, are especially dangerous. There are regular reports of young women slipping various drugs into men's drinks and robbing them of all their belongings while they are unconscious. Armed holdups of pedestrians and motorists by young men on motorcycles (“motoboys”) are a common occurrence in Sao Paulo. Criminals have also begun targeting restaurants throughout the city including, but not limited to, establishments in the upscale neighborhoods of Jardins, Itaim Bibi, Campo Belo, Morumbi and Moema. Victims who resist run the risk of violent attack. Laptop computers, other electronics, and luxury watches are the targets of choice for criminals in Sao Paulo.
Throughout 2012, armed groups in Sao Paulo targeted restaurants, robbing patrons during the peak business hours of 2100 to 2400. These criminal events are not isolated to one area of the city and target both rich and poor neighborhoods.
Efforts of incarcerated drug lords to exert their power outside of their jail cells have resulted in sporadic disruptions in the city, violence directed at the authorities, bus burnings, and vandalism at ATM machines, including the use of explosives. Be aware of your surroundings and exercise caution at all times. Respect police roadblocks and be aware that some municipal services may be disrupted. 
As in Rio de Janeiro, favela tours have recently become popular among foreign tourists in Sao Paulo. We advise you to avoid Sao Paulo’s favelas as neither the tour company nor the city police can guarantee your safety when entering favelas.
Recife: As in Rio de Janeiro, tourists in Recife should take special care while on the beaches, as robberies may occur in broad daylight. In the upscale Boa Viagem neighborhood, carjackings can occur at any time of the day or night.

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Take Me Out Of the Ballgame

A couple of weeks ago, I went with my wife and son and his girlfriend to a spring training baseball game in Tucson between the San Diego Padres and the Arizona Diamondbacks. It will be my last game. Not my last spring training game; not my last game between the Padres and the Diamondbacks.

My last professional baseball game. Let me elaborate.

My father took me to first game at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia in the 1950s. My last game was two weeks ago, at the ridiculously named Kino Veterans Memorial Stadium in Tucson (formerly the also inelegantly named Tucson Electric Park).

Why am I out? Let me count the ways:

1. Class inequity. A visit to a major league ballpark these days has become an exercise in rank status-stratifying, with corporate fat-cats who grab the best season seats (and often write off the costs as business expenses) treated like top-luxury five-star hotel guests, while the rest of the fans are treated like Motel 6 clientele. In the Wall Street Journal on Friday (alas, blocked by paywall), an op-ed piece by Mark Yost, a Journal sports editor, described how he and his 14-year-old son are in the midst of a long odyssey to visit all 30 major league ballparks by the time the boy graduates from high school in 2016, but the joy seems to be going. While ticket prices are soaring even for the cheap seats (and in most cases, you can’t even purchase the best seats if you want because they’re all scarfed up in advance by corporations), a normal fan’s trip to a ballpark these days is like an international flight on an airplane nine-across in the back of coach. “…Even after you’ve shelled out for decent seats – but not the top-of-the-line ones – you’re constantly reminded by the host team that you’re a second-class fan,” Yost writes. Many ballparks are strictly segregated by class, with exclusivity enforced for those  with “premium seating.” In many ballparks, the unwashed majority can’t even set foot in the swanky concourses reserved for those with premium seats.

2.  Racketeering. Professional baseball has become a nasty racket whose sole purpose is to shake obscene amounts of money out of the pockets of the  fans, while treating most of them like marks at a carnival bunko booth. The Yankees payroll for this season is $230.4 million, which is the best example of the astonishing dough that defines baseball, and the vig that the fans need to pony up to keep this racket solvent: The Yankees’ star third baseman Alex Rodriguez, currently in year five of a $275 million 10-year contract that is the most lucrative in the history of sports – a contract that was partly negotiated with the assistance of executives from … uh, Goldman Sachs. Rodriguez is currently injured, and his role this season is uncertain.  Oh, a few months ago, as reported in the Times yesterday, “ Rodriguez’s name surfaced in connection with an anti-aging clinic in South Florida that was suspected of supplying Rodriguez and other players with performance-enhancing drugs. Rodriguez, through a publicist, denied the allegation.”  Another example, same city: Mets pitcher Johan Santana is out for this season with a shoulder injury, though the Mets  will pay him $25.5 million  for this year,  the last year in his monumental six-year $137.7 million contract. Santana also missed the entire 2011 season with an injury.  Closer  to home for me, the fans at the game in Tucson a few weeks ago ( one of only two spring training games played this spring in Tucson, which used to have an full spring-training season with multiple teams), unaccountably seemed to be cheering for the Arizona Diamondbacks in the game with the Padres, the home team because the Padres minor league team plays in Tucson. They cheered even though  the Diamondbacks had skulked out of town two years ago to take a better deal to play their spring training games in the Phoenix area – leaving Tucson stuck with the bill for  a beautiful $38 million stadium built by the taxpayers expressly because of the vibrant spring-training season that no longer exists in town. [By the way, Major League Baseball is also tanking big-time in the TV ratings. Here.http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2013-03-28/news/the-screwball-economics-of-major-league-baseball/]

3. Rampant jingoism. I love the tradition of standing for the Star Spangled Banner right before the home-plate umpire hollers “Play ball!”--  with that beautiful flag whipping in the breeze at center field. It can still seem grand in Tucson, where they have a terrific barbershop quartet sing the anthem, not some caterwauling reality-TV wannabe with a merely casual acquaintance with the notion of musical pitch. But why, two weeks ago, was there hissing in the stands at a few fans who decided to sit down right after the Star Spangled Banner, rather than continuing to stand at attention while some sad-sack “honor guard” from the U.S. Border Patrol (the Border Patrol!) slowly marched off the field like some platoon in a comic opera?  Even worse, there is the practice, which spread in ballparks in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, of requiring everyone to stand at attention during the traditional 7th Inning Stretch, and sing along with a loud recording of that execrable, cynical lardbucket Kate Smith bellowing "God Bless America." Decades earlier, it had been bad enough, actually, when the traditional 7th Inning Stretch became the occasion for the standing and mass singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” back in the 1970s  (the same decade those irritating mascots started showing up, dancing on the dugouts and otherwise annoying those who wanted to watch baseball).  But “God Bless America” bellowed by the late unlamented Kate Smith, with all in the stadium expected to remove caps, stand at attention and join in? It’s like those infernal flag-pins that politicians now have to always have stuck on  their lapels – once you start that stuff you can’t pull it back, because the right-wing loons will scream about a war on patriotism or the flag or God. And they enforce the 7th Inning Stretch jingoism, too. A few years ago at Yankee Stadium, New York cops grabbed and ejected a man who attempted to walk to the men’s room while the holy song was being belted out in the stands. (A lawsuit followed, and the NYPD agreed not to physically restrain anyone from moving about during the sacred singing.). Since then, some ballparks have backed off the forced singalong, but it’s still fairly common, along with the fan pressure to stand at attention with hats doffed -- as if this is the way baseball has always been played.

“God Bless America!” blasting forth at ear-pounding volume! Yo, baseball fans, it’s a ballgame, not at a religious revival!

It is not. There’s a reason we commonly say ballpark, in a pastoral evocation, even when the official name is “stadium.”

Hey, I’m a veteran. I salute the flag! But I’m not inclined to salute the Border Patrol -- and I won’t stand for Kate Smith. Incidentally, Kate Smith and that Irving Berlin bit of jingoism originally infiltrated sports in my hometown in the 1970s when the aging 300-pound songbird hooked up with one of the ugliest, nastiest teams in modern sports history, the brawling Philadelphia Flyers hockey team of those years. In fact, the phrase “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” derives not from a wry comment on opera (as is often assumed) but from the Philadelphia Flyers home games of that era, when Kate Smith bellowed out “God Bless America” as a good luck gesture that began to be played at the end, as well as the start, of the hockey games.

Anyway, that’s it between baseball and me, after an admittedly wonderful half-century fling that started in Philly, in the ballpark, Connie Mack Stadium, in the years when the great pitcher Robin Roberts routinely won 20 games, many by a single little run, in seasons when the Phillies were averaging only about 60 total wins. In an era when the great Richie Ashburn, so persistent at fouling off third strikes in maddening succession that he once fouled off a strike that hit a lady in the third-base stands and, still at bat a few pitches later, fouled off another one that hit the same woman as she was being carried out of the stands.  In the years when you could see Willie Mays on the visiting Giants rear back and fire a long arcing throw from deep center, back toward the 447-foot mark, that could nail a runner headed to the plate on one single bounce, no cutoff man required.

But that was a long time ago, that was before Kate Smith and the dancing mascots and the $25 million a year contracts, and the socially stratified ballparks – or, I should say stadiums.

For baseball and me these days, in fact on what we used to look forward to with such a thrill as Opening Day, it’s three strikes, and I’m out.

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