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What my musings are all about...

Blogging might well be the 21st century's form of journaling. As a writing teacher, I have always advised my students to keep a daily journal as a way of organizing their thoughts for future writing projects, a discipline I have unfortunately never consistently practiced myself. By blogging, I might finally be able to follow my own good advice.

The difference between journaling and blogging is that the blogger opens his or her writing to the public, something journal- writers are usually reluctant to do. I am not so reticent.

The trick for me will be to avoid cluttering the internet with more blather, something none of us need more of. If I stick to subjects I know: sports and literature, I believe I can avoid that pitfall. I can't promise that I'll not stray from time to time to comment on ancillary subjects, but I will make every attempt to be interesting and perhaps even insightful.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Abraham Lincoln

The Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln. What do you think President Lincoln would think of President Trump?

In this morning's Sacramento Bee sports page, Ailene Vosin asked who'd you'd take in a Golden State Warrior's Coach Steve Kerr and a Donald Trump standoff? Kerr, hands down. Kerr would take Trump and Bannon one on two, and beat them into the ground, hands down. Bigots are crap athletes. The KKK and Neo Nazis couldn't field a team in any sports that could compete at any level, kindergarten included.

Hooray for Eric Reid, "won't kneel but won't stop talking." He's right, there is a huge amount of support for Colin Kaepernick in American across every spectrum of our society, except for a small segment of white males over fifty, mostly those who are under-educated, (and some younger white bigots they've brainwashed, Add to this group aging wealthy whites who are  frightened of people of different colors.

Speaking of colors.  Did you happen to see all the different and wonderfully diverse colors competing against each other at the World Track and Field Championship in London. Shades of skin color is the future, Trump and Bannon, take note. Pure white is on it's way out. Pure any color is on it's way out. We will be a bi-racial world not too long in the future. If you have any doubts, you might want to check out television advertising: biracial couples all over the tube selling products. When it comes to the bottom line, the ad biz is always ahead of the curve.

Joe Kapp     by Tom Meschery

For years I've enjoyed telling the story
about Joe Kapp refusing to run out of bounds
in a crucial game after gaining enough yards,
as all quarterbacks are taught to do to save
themselves from injury. Kapp, a Mexican-American,
said to reporters after the win: Only gringos
run out of bounds. I'm thinking of this moment
in sports while driving home having just
hired a Mexican worker to help me finish
my patio. He is a strong looking man
from Vera Cruz with a wife and four children.
He doesn't look at all like Kapp and the years
between Kapp's game and my unfinished patio
are many, so I'm trying to decide why Kapp
came to mind. Something to do with toughness
I decide.Since growing old I've hired
Mexican workers and always been amazed
at how hard they work the most back breaking jobs,
and I think of the Conservatives complaining
about our borders not being strong enough,
and I'm willing to bet those same Republicans
in a crucial game, with angry linebackers
bearing down on them, would run
out of bounds to save their asses, which
I'd love to explain to the worker who tells me
his name is Jimmy, but Jaime in Spanish,
but I don't speak his language well enough. 



1 comment:

Janice said...

Thank you for this post. Over on LinkedIn, I'm astonished by the people who STILL support Trump. What has gone wrong? I grew up in a fairly integrated community and high school, and had never really encountered racism till I set off to college in 1980, Guilford, Greensboro. The Nazi-Klan trial was underway, and I fell in love with a Bahamian man. The racism on our Quaker campus was galling. As I watched CNN footage, I realized that we had not come so far as we had thought, only buried what we did not want to see.

In Trump, it all rises again.

My granddaughter is a gorgeous, delightful, silly, happy biracial baby, almost 3. Her father, my daughter says, is routinely pulled by local cops on any pretext. How quickly can we change the culture? Not fast enough for her. She'll be an adult in a flash.

I enjoyed the SI story about your life and times. I was raised by a sports maniac--he nurtured my wordlove, and always recommended sportswriters as the best anywhere. Which is how I wound up reading the SI profile about you. Your poetry! It's rare anymore that I actually tear an article out to scan and share with my friends, but I loved it. The writing and the story.

Now I can read your blog, too. Maybe surprise my father with an occasional sports fact that even he does not know. Here's a quick story of HIS favorite moment, from the Washington Bullets, late 1970s, Carter was in office.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-my-dad-sneaked-into-the-white-house/2014/10/10/efc4a9fc-4e66-11e4-8c24-487e92bc997b_story.html?utm_term=.692a00c421de

Thank you.