Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Page 20
The commissioner’s exploits grew to the status of legend when he plowed his bicycle into an anarchist demonstrator who was doing his bit against The Machine and Global Capitalism and all that by trashing the vehicle of one Reginald Case, a maintenance worker who had spent his day repairing an air conditioner in a high-rise. Inspecting his damaged Toyota Camry, Case complained, “I didn’t do nothing to nobody.”
I don’t know, but are anarchists supposed to make sense? I spent some time in Somalia in 1997, a country with no government, and encourage anarchists longing for the experience to check it out. Don’t carry with you anything of value.
Breaking up the vandals, Timoney ended up in the middle of a brawl and was left with enough scrapes and bruises to abandon his bicycle, and endear him to lovers of law and order everywhere. The Camry trashers were among 285 arrested that day, effectively clearing the streets of trouble for the remainder of the convention. By the end of the week Ten-Speed’s department had even won approval from the local American Civil Liberties Union legal director, Stephan Presser, someone more accustomed to suing cops than praising them.
“It’s probably smart tactics,” said Presser, speaking of the way Timoney targeted ringleaders of the protests for arrest. “And it probably succeeded, if you look at the speed at which the city resumed to normalcy. I don’t see that there’s a constitutional question here. It just makes good sense on the part of the department.”
It might be wise to cool the mandatory street protests at political conventions altogether, at least until some cause comes along that’s big enough to make them effective. Taking to the streets has only one basic purpose: to advertise a message and rally people behind it. A march is a show of force and mass conviction. Our history shows that when enough people rally it can touch the national conscience and effect real change.
So many groups banded together to protest in Philadelphia last week that any message (other than a kind of adolescent rage) got lost. There were marchers for animal rights, abortion rights, welfare rights, gay and lesbian rights, and economic rights; there were anarchists, opponents of world trade policies, environmental activists, and death penalty abolitionists (many of whom confuse their abhorrence for execution, which I share, with admiration for one Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop-killer, which I don’t). Any of these groups would have accomplished more by simply handing out leaflets at the entrances to the FUC complex. By joining forces they may have fleshed out their number slightly (at most they numbered maybe 5,000), but at the price of reducing their message to a Babel-like muddle.
I marched against the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s, at a time when a huge number of Americans were sharply opposed to continuing that war, and when the cause drew hundreds of thousands of people into the streets at a time. Any protest march that can’t deliver more than a few hundred people for a given cause ought to be embarrassed enough to stay home and continue spreading the word on the Internet. The mostly civil proceedings of the Shadow Convention, hosted by Arianna Huffington across town at the University of Pennsylvania, was at least as effective at challenging the status quo.
I say “mostly civil” because fighting Senator John McCain was booed at the Shadow Convention, the audience disappointed by his decision to temporarily drop his heretofore passionate insistence on campaign finance reform. There was little talk about the issue last week, probably because everyone was too busy eating, drinking, and lining their pockets with gifts from lobbyists—so much money was floating around that two Philadelphia Inquirer reporters stumbled across a $5,000 check made out to the campaign chest of Representative John McHugh, of upstate New York. Other than one oblique reference in McCain’s speech to the need to “reform our institutions,” the straight-talker from Arizona ate crow big-time before a nationwide audience. Meanwhile, the party was busy stuffing its coffers at lavish affairs all over Philadelphia sponsored by monied interests buying access and favor. There were an estimated thousand events hosted by lobbying interests. The Union Pacific railroad laid a half-mile-long track and rolled in 30 vintage cars, quaint portable troughs, wherein they wined and dined politicians and delegates night and day throughout the convention. One fund-raising luncheon alone raised $10 million in soft money for W.
The same sort of thing will be going on in Los Angeles next week (Union Pacific will have its rolling troughs out there as well). For all the high-minded rhetoric spent deploring this state of affairs, I doubt anyone will change it soon. For all of the hand-wringing we do in this country over money’s effect on politics, the truth is that money will always be close to power. Money is the distilled reward for innovation, hard work, and, in this day and age, shrewd investing (like, say, buying an interest in a baseball team for $660,000 and selling it a few years later for $33 million), and those who have it will always be working to protect their interests.
In the old days liberals equated money with evil because the wealthy were assumed to have earned their spoils on the backs of honest, ill-paid labor, and used their influence to buy politicians who kept the workers in chains. Some of that was true, and some big-time corporations still shamelessly exploit labor overseas, but it hardly defines the essence of American capitalism today. Bill Gates didn’t make his billions by lashing programmers to their desks in basement sweatshops. We have every reason to insist that our political leaders operate on some principle besides quid pro quo, but it is unlikely we will ever eliminate money’s influence altogether. It takes money to deliver a message and mount an effective campaign; there is no better proof than the marginality of Nader’s effort. Despite the pervasiveness of soft money, it is just fashionable cynicism to rank the Republicans and Democrats with plutocrats of the ages because they aggressively court donations.
To do otherwise would be suicide. In the Oliver Stonian worldview, W. and Al Gore are just front men for the silent cabal of ruthless, wealthy power brokers who secretly rule America and the world. If you believe it you do belong in the streets, probably armed.
I don’t. If our country was split by one great issue, as it was when Abe Lincoln won election seven score years ago, it would be easier to see how power in America turns on the will of the majority. Today, thankfully, the division on most important issues is small. Both candidates want to save Social Security, although they have different plans for doing so guaranteed to put most voters to sleep. W. probably wants to spend more money building up the American military than Gore does, but even that’s an issue that no longer cuts down strict liberal/conservative lines, since nowadays it is generally the liberals who want to dispatch American troops around the world on missions of great complexity and subtlety, and the conservatives who think we ought to use military force more sparingly, but with violent authority. W. wants to spend gazillions more on a missile defense system that doesn’t work and will make the world a more dangerous place, and he wants to cut taxes and shore up Social Security. Gore will have his own set of favorite boondoggles. There are plenty of issues that divide them, but in the end the one that will decide the election is Bill Clinton’s dick.
W. managed to iron the impish smirk off his face for nearly an hour Thursday night as he delivered the speech of his life. It is essential that he do so, because he knows the election is fundamentally about dignity. We were assured again and again that the Texas governor was brought up right. His brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, casting his state’s delegation vote for W., introduced himself as “the only delegate in this chamber who has had his mouth washed out by the most popular woman in America, been spanked by the president of the United States, and been given a wedgie by the future president of the United States.” There, in a normal Rock-wellian snapshot, was the picture of W. the convention was selling: a well-raised boy with a devilish gleam in his eye.
After a cunningly well-produced short film that showed him driving around his ranch in Texas and chatting happily with Laura on the patio, portraying him as quite simply the best guy in the whole world, lovable Dubya emerged in perso
n at the center of an elaborate stage that took up the whole north end of the hall, equipped with three giant screens and designed to look like the world’s largest home entertainment system. The FUC exploded into the kind of transcendent ovation that can only come from a sense of shared victorious destiny. W. invoked the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and then leavened the presumption with humor: “And, of course, George Washington—or, as his friends knew him…George W.” He saluted his father, his mother, his wife—who had assured us moments before on-screen how “loyal” W. is—and the entire WWII generation, and then sadly assessed the great national error in judgment that unseated the old man.
He spoke mournfully of Clinton in words that Milton might have used to describe Lucifer himself: “So much talent. So much charm. Such great skill. But, in the end, to what end?” What W. promised was a restoration of character and dignity to our national life, nothing short of the kind of president played by Martin Sheen in The West Wing, a president we can be as proud of as George and Barbara are of their boy. And as the ritual balloons ruptured their constraints, raining great blobs of red, white, and blue in slow motion through a shower of confetti and even a mini fireworks display, as the band fired up a victory song, W. all but rose right there from the stage in Philadelphia into the pantheon of the great presidents who managed to serve their entire terms without their penis making it into the headlines.
We could ask for more, but we certainly deserve no less.
THE GAME OF A LIFETIME
DECEMBER 2002
I was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, and even though we moved away when I was very small, it has always been a special place for me. We visited my mother’s family there every summer when I was a child, and it had always seemed to me the idyllic American suburb—big beautiful homes on shady lots, a busy Main Street, a high school which was the focus of the community’s past, present, and future. I had cousins and uncles who had played in the annual Turkey Day game against nearby Kirkwood, and for years I had been promising my family there I would come back and write a story about the event, one of the oldest high school football rivalries in America. The idea fit neatly into a series Sports Illustrated was doing in 2002 about high school sports. It is a story about more than a football game. It’s about the joys of community, ritual, and tradition, and, in this case, the flexibility that is sometimes needed to keep it all alive.
The word spread by electronic teenage drumbeat throughout the leafy St. Louis suburbs of Webster Groves and Kirkwood. Phone calls, e-mails, IMs, pagers—it was big news, and on the Sunday before last it flew: “Jim, did you hear?”
“What?”
“Jayvee is playing.”
“Are you serious?”
“That’s what Ryan Peterson said.”
The call was from Jim McLean’s friend Akyra Davis. She’s a cheerleader at Webster Groves High, so she’s plugged in. It must be true. The Game, the celebrated annual Turkey Day game, the nearly century-old high school football showdown between the Kirkwood Pioneers and the Webster Groves Statesmen, attended by thousands, broadcast on local radio and TV, mentioned from time to time during NFL Thanksgiving Day games, the biggest event on the calendars of both schools, a mutual homecoming, the game that Kirkwood High principal (and ’67 graduate) Dave Holley calls “larger than life itself,” was going to be played this year not by the schools’ varsity squads but by freshmen and sophomores, the scrubs, the jayvees!
Jim could hardly believe his ears. The freckly, fifteen-year-old Webster sophomore running back, a stringy fellow with ramrod posture still waiting for his teenage growth spurt, had been attending Turkey Day games all his life. In this part of St. Louis it was just how certain families spent Thanksgiving. You packed into the stands or joined the crowd that formed a ring on the track at either Webster or Kirkwood (the schools took turns as host), you cheered for your side, and then you went home to thaw out over turkey dinner, walking either a little taller or a little smaller, depending on the game’s outcome.
“I always hoped I’d get to play in the game when I made varsity,” said Jim. “Around here Turkey Day is the biggest deal there is.” But if Akyra and Ryan were right, the future was now. Jim would get his chance in just four days.
Donald “DJ” Jackson heard it on the nightly TV news. It shook him up a little. The way he heard it, which was also how Jim heard it, was that the Webster jayvees were going to square off against Kirkwood’s varsity. “I wasn’t scared,” says DJ, a sophomore who stands just over five feet and weighs less than 115 pounds. “I was nervous, though. Those guys are pretty big.”
It might be daunting, but it made sense. The Webster varsity squad had unexpectedly won its state tournament semifinal game that Saturday in double overtime; DJ and Jim had been there rooting. Led by all-everything junior quarterback Darrell Jackson (“It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Darrell Jackson!”), who is not related to DJ, the Statesmen would play for the Class 5A Missouri championship the following Saturday, downtown in the Edward Jones Dome, where the St. Louis Rams play. This would be only the third time in twenty-three years that Webster had qualified for the state final, and it meant that Turkey Day was suddenly a problem. There were only two days between Thanksgiving and the state final, and both games were too big to skip. Something had to give.
“If it was up to me, speaking strictly as a coach, I’d call off Turkey Day and pick up the tradition again next year,” said Cliff Ice, the Webster coach, a blond, square-jawed man who has something of the hard edge suggested by his name. “But you can’t. The annual game has a life of its own in these two communities. Everybody around here looks forward to it all year long.”
The superintendent of Kirkwood’s school district was on the phone Saturday night, pleading with his Webster counterparts to do something. The same dilemma had arisen twice before. When the Statesmen qualified for the state championship in 1979, they played both the Turkey Day game and the final two days later, and won both. But in the same situation in ’88, Turkey Day was called off. The Statesmen won the state championship that year, too, but the communities of Webster Groves and Kirkwood were outraged and unforgiving. “It was the most depressing week I can remember in all my years at this school,” says Holley, a boisterous cheerleader of a principal. “In both of these towns, the whole week was like a funeral.”
There are places in America where football is taken more seriously, and there are Thanksgiving Day high school football rivalries that are older than the ninety-six-year-old series between Webster Groves and Kirkwood, but nowhere is the tradition so ingrained in the lives of generations of two communities, and nowhere is it more redolent of America’s all but extinct, small-town culture. Turkey Day has featured the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of players who battled for the black-and-orange-togged Statesmen or the red-and-white Pioneers. The local radio station, KFNS, sells tens of thousands of dollars in advertising for its broadcast of the event. Shops and restaurants cater to the football crowds and the hundreds of family reunions the game prompts every year. The friendly rivalry shapes relationships among the two towns’ residents all year round, and not just among the teenagers. Turkey Day is the cornerstone of the two communities’ identities.
“We had protests right and left,” says former Webster coach Jack Jones, referring to the cancellation of Turkey Day in 1988. “I was summoned to a meeting with the principals and the superintendents. They told me that if Webster was ever in such a position again, there would be a Turkey Day game, even if we had to play our cheerleaders against theirs.” Maintaining tradition, it seems, doesn’t mean just dancing the same steps year after year. It sometimes demands, of all things, a willingness to change.
So on the afternoon of November 24, the day after Webster’s state semifinal victory, officials of both schools plotted a solution. The Turkey Day game would go on, but it would be played by freshmen and sophomores from both schools. DJ Jackson, Jim McLean, and the other Webster jayvees got only half
of the story from the teenage drums. They would learn the next day, to their relief, that they would play against Kirkwood’s hastily reassembled jayvee, whose season had ended three weeks earlier. Webster’s varsity could concentrate on its state championship game, and the annual rivalry would continue.
The Turkey Day game would be smaller and less polished, played on raw talent and emotion. “That’s what it will have to be,” said Kirkwood coach Mike Wade. “We sure don’t have time to teach them anything.” The decision would gladden the hearts of about seventy surprised fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds in both towns, most of whom had grown up dreaming of playing someday in the Game, and it would satisfy the communities’ appetite for Thanksgiving ceremony and hoopla—the annual breakfasts, luncheons, banquets, pep rallies, bonfires, and other game-related events. The only losers would be…Kirkwood’s varsity.
The Pioneers hadn’t had as good a season in Class 6A as Webster had in Class 5A. (Webster Groves High is slightly smaller than Kirkwood High.) When the Pioneers were eliminated in the first round of the state tournament, the loss was easier to take because they still had their biggest game ahead. If they could beat Webster on Turkey Day, local bragging rights would be theirs. In these communities, victory or defeat on Turkey Day lasts a lifetime. At the annual breakfast the morning of the game, alumni are invited back to break bread with the young men about to do battle for the Frisco Bell, the big brass symbol of Turkey Day victory that goes to the winner until the next year’s contest. The elders stand up one by one, call out their years, and announce, “We took the Bell” or “We lost the Bell.” For Kirkwood’s seniors, who lost the Bell in 2001, this year’s game was one final chance for vindication. And just like that, it was gone.