And the Beat Goes On

Patrick McHenry (R-NC) on the bicycle:



OMG, $1 millllllllion dollars to cyclists. And lord knows there's nothing so injudicious as that in the ideal GOP budget. Not that McHenry's taking a principled stand against earmarks that benefit only his own congressional district or anything shady like that.

HT.

Passing the Torch

And just now, Bonds speaks, the stadium still echoing with the mellifluous and generous message Henry Aaron recorded in honor of the occasion, congratulating Bonds. Congratulating Bonds. You'd think I'd be tarred and feather for making the suggestion. But I love the game of baseball, and I won't be deterred from honoring one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game, in company with Ruth and Aaron and Mays, men whom I lack the arrogance to compare.

I watched the first at bat tonight, catching it (deliberately) between other pursuits. Barry roped a double 400 feet to right center field, centering a good breaking ball perfectly but failing to get under it. Barry's second at bat coincided with my going to bed, and I ran in from the bathroom, toothbrush in hand and a mouth full of foam, to watch him lash a single to right field.

It was clear that he was hitting the ball well, very well -- hitting it like Barry hits it. Adjusting during lengthy at bats in those minute increments that are familiar to those who have watched Barry over the years and know what they're seeing, taking a breajing ball inches out of the strike zone on a 2-2 count, fighting balls off that weren't quite in the right location.

And then instead of reading for five or ten minutes and lying down, as I usually would, I decided to mute the television, read a little longer, and see how quick the Giants' line-up came back around. It was fast enough for me to linger, reading a good novel with my glasses on, looking up every so often to check on things.

I have tickets to see the Giants when they visit PNC Park on Monday, and as Barry slumped and time passed I allowed myself a sliver of hope that he would come to Pittsburgh still at or below 755. But when he tied the record over the weekend, I knew it wouldn't last until the thirteenth. Tonight as Barry came up for the third time, I found myself impatient, knowing in my heart that he would hit 756 this week in San Francisco, as it should be, and preferring it to happen when I could watch live.

And so as the count went to 2-0, then to 2-1 (looking) 2-2 (swinging) and 3-2, Barry then fouling off one, and another, I watched his battle, his focus, and I didn't doubt for a second that he would swing for it with two strikes, as he always does, missing far too rarely for the force and majesty of his swing. His sweet swing.

And he hit it, sky high into cavernous right center field, and what I imagine was an ugly scrum in the stands -- as much at least hinted in the video replay -- ensued.

Perhaps portions of Barry's career have been improperly enhanced by steroids, Human Growth Hormone, or amphetamines. History increasingly teaches us that athletes will do anything to exceed their peers, to reach what they imagine is their peak potential, sacrificing their own safety and their integrity, for the ephemeral incidents of dominance, or simply to push themselves over the hump, to make themselves competitive in a crowd of athletes with greater natural gifts. Barry's case is hardly unusual to the sport, or the person. That we do not know the breadth of the problem, that we may never know, does not entitle us to burden one man with the sins of an entire sports-media complex -- and yes, I impeach the whole establishment, for reasons that may or may not be self-evident, but which in any event are too lengthy to consider now.

If it was true of him, it was true of the pitchers whom he always dominated throughout his career, and if true of them than true as well of the outfielders who chased his flyballs, the infielders who reached balls that might otherwise have slipped under their gloves.

In the past weekend, Alex Rodriquez hit his 500th homerun and Tom Glavine pitched his way to his 300th victory. Earlier this season, Frank Thomas hit his 500th homerun, and that threshold, once itself rather rarefied, came closer to reach, as it will continue to do as the big hitters of the past twenty years, steroid-fueled perhaps; more effectively physically conditioned and video- and computer-aided no doubt; beneficiaries of modern medicine and nutrition, diluted pitching talent, shrunken modern ballparks, maple bats, certainly -- as this class of hitters and those who follow retire.

And what other records coincide with the steroid era? Sosa's and McGwire's three-year epic battle for the homerun title, of course; but so does Ripken's 2157th consecutive game played, several perfect games and myriad no hitters, Clemens' dominant rush past 300 victories, Kerry Wood's twenty strikeouts on a hot day in Chicago -- the Boston Red Sox winning the championship that had eluded them for decades upon decades. What of these will remain, what feats can we recognize justly, if we refuse to honor Barry Bonds' achievement?

None, an entire era ripped from the history books baseball adores like no other sport even begins to emulate, an entire batch of American legends, none more venerated than the sluggers, the men who bat fourth in the order, who can change the complexion of a game, of a season, with one perfect swing.

In order to reach 755 homeruns in a 20-year career, one must average 37.75 home runs per season. Taking into account physical and mental development, injury, external conditions like the ballpark one calls home, the hitters who line up behind you, distracting personal problems, this is an astonishing thought, especially in light of the fact that when I was young and learning to love this game, when Barry was just entering the game to much fanfare in My Adopted Fair City Pittsburgh, gangly and fast and more of a scrapper than a slugger, 40 homeruns was a plateau that no one reached for entire seasons on end, a very different time than the pumped up, power-focused era that has coincided with my majority.

Whatever happened happened; and with or without chemical assistance, Barry would have finished his career honored among the same handful of legendary hitters to whom he is compared now, even mired in suspicion and invective. And isn't it telling that only a few of the loudest and least informed naysayers seriously maintain that he ever was not destined to be one of the great hitters, or deny that this event, this night, was something that fits a pattern of mastery established long before anyone has suggested any impropriety on Bonds' part. Whatever Bonds has chosen to do, he's done.

At home plate, Barry's son, Nikolai, stood alone, waiting for his father, his complicated, standoffish, embattled father, professional teammates at a discrete distance ringing the dirt at home plate. The real celebration, Barry's embrace of his son, his elevated hands and his upturned face, having passed in a few seconds, the for-the-cameras festivities ensued. The sound of fireworks past center field, over McCovey Cove, visible eventually on camera, Willie Mays on the field (whom Bonds gestured toward repeatedly, honoring his Godfather and legendary predecessor, perhaps his better), Aaron on the Jumbotron making the only appearance he was willing to make, but doing so with dignity and grace.

And then one of the announcers put Barry Bond's thoughts, pensive on the bench in the wake of the crowd's loving display, to words: "It's over." Until the next time, when I'll be watching if I'm able.

Thanks, Barry, for the memory.

To Market

I am obsessed with my hometown, Montclair, New Jersey, bedroom community for the outrageous wealth newly generated in New York City in the past decade, land of tiny fifties ranches torn down or expanded to more than double their original size, Mercedes and Volvos and Jags (oh my!), no scrap of land undeveloped as the opportunistic (and well-financed) seek to insert interstitial McMansions among the ranches and tudor revivals, no curb uncobbled, no boutique too moderately priced, no sidewalk un-tabled, no BoBo unbeautiful.

When I'm back -- and not infrequently -- whether by bike or by car, I find myself turning spirals around the perimeter of the town, slowly spiraling inward to any of its pretentious shopping centers, eyeing the impeccably dressed scouting the antique stores and design houses on every major corner who in turn eye their quarry -- a magnificent shaker end table, perhaps, or a sleek nickel and glass coffee table like a relic of a Kubrickian future.

The pavement is unfriendly to bikes; notwithstanding nearly universal five-digit property tax burdens, the Powers That Be extend the life of the road surface by sealing it as it ages in tar and gravel, which only smooths over time, and never completely. Moreover it stains shoes and rocker panels, spotting sumptuous floormats in the heat of summer. Nothing one would notice from the supple-suspended air-conditioned splendor of a leased luxury car, windows closed and air conditioning whispering almost inaudibly, radio turned to an investment show on talk radio, blue tooth surgically fused to one's ear beeping from time to time its message of validation.

Does anyone own anything here? Is it all ARMs and leases, a cover story to deflect attention from impending financial ruin staved off by creative borrowing and endless jumps from one overcompensated job to the next, paper wealth or its mere prospect. Financial management and millions of the allegedly wealthy in orbit around the black whole of their own insolvency, falling eternally in perfect equilibrium until finally their orbits deteriorate, one by one, and they disappear into the darkness.

Or maybe they really have this much money, all of them, and I describe my own equally perilous but so much more modest solar system of tiered debt. Perhaps in projecting my own situation onto them, a couple of orders of magnitude greater, I reveal my own desire to believe I am not irresponsible; perhaps I need the wealthy to be overextended and desperate to compensate for my own overextension and occasional desperation.

I am an attorney with impeccable credentials; consequently, my earning potential is effectively limited only by my prerogatives. This is not a pity party. Not even close.

But there is a decadence to all of this, my native surround. And I have trouble determining whether my wonderment at this never-entirely-familiar fact is a product of envy or disgust. I cannot discern -- though I try mightily -- whether I am second-guessing my decision not to return here to make my way in the metroplex of my youth or gloating over my own perspicacity and leaving this place before entering an unsustainable orbit. In Pittsburgh, my finances will right themselves as soon as I make that a priority; in New York, however, I'd be forced to accept, as have my friends and family, a far more precarious existence. At some point it's not about the money, a lot or a little, that passes through one's checking account each month; it's where it goes that matters. So many of the expenses, necessary and merely recommended, that happen here are black holes -- paying rent into one's forties or for a lifetime, leasing what one cannot afford to buy in other areas, the psychic expense of working under the threat of a dozen qualified people looking for your job and just waiting for you, or someone like you, to slip up this much.

And all of this, too, may be a fiction contrived to assuage my ambivalence. Who's to say?

Today I went to my favorite used bookstore south of the Hudson River Valley, a small place in Montclair Center (there really are three centers to this town, as though it were too overlapping ellipses, but only one goes by that name), and negotiated the discounted purchase of a first-edition of Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations. I may not read it for a while -- such painfully elegant writing acts as an obstacle to my own -- but at the discounted price it was a bargain, a fine hardcover first from 1991 in near-fair condition. Then I headed to Watchung Plaza, another town center (and this one more accurately in the middle of things), and ordered a late breakfast from a tin-ceilinged bistro run by Spaniards in an old Montclair store front, their patois behind the display case unnerving as their unlikely trade in hypertrophic bagels. I ate inside, and then took my book, Coupland's Hey Nostradamus, across the street to a small park, where I found a bench in the shade to finish my iced coffee.

On the way home, heading down Bellevue Avenue (just downhill from the third and most northerly of the shopping areas), I spotted two girls, perhaps 14, one tall and one short, both pretty and innocent, walking a beagle like a credulous little brother between them. As I drew even with them, slowing for the red light at Grove Street, they turned to the man driving the car in front of mine and smiled and waved familiarly, with the entirely undirected ebullience of young women in pairs, and I detected in the slow roll of the driver's head no more familiarity with them than I had.

The light turned, the car in front of me passed through the intersection, and I eased forward unhurried to make my left turn, waiting for the girls to negotiate the crosswalk. The other driver gone, they turned as they walked to the car waiting to make the left that mirrored my own and waved and smiled with the same mock familiarity, the same unrequited jubilation, and after a moment they turned their attention my way and continued the ritual as I waited for their passage to open a car-width corridor. I was oddly affected by their unlikely bonhomie -- good neighbors in the land of tall fences.

Head Out of Your Ass, Pennsylvania -- Like NOW

This evening, I was riding home on the bus, and as sometimes occurs in the evening -- never in the morning -- I felt a bit too nausea-prone to try reading. This makes no sense to me, since in the morning my gorge is unstable when I so much as brush my teeth. I can eat, and all, I'm just sensitive. In the evening, though, apparently the bus shakes more or something.

Anyway, these rides when I can't read are interminable, they really are, unless one of my bus buddies is aboard, which is unfortunately rare. It's actually exceedingly rare, because I have never had more than two guaranteed bus conversation partners. No, actually, only one. And she works outside the city now. The other one is lovely and sweet and sings for a band in town that I adore but now she's almost never on the bus, and for some reason, distant acquaintance that she is, when she is around it so takes me aback that I fail to register that it's her until I'm firmly implanted on a seat several rows back and not sure whether to move forward and start a conversation or not -- what if I'm wrong? What if it's not her?

I think this happened yesterday, but it's the nature of the beast that I'm still not sure. Here's what happened: I was just hanging up an awkward phonecall as the bus pulled up in front of the USX tower, and the combination of stimuli temporarily shorted something out such that I didn't immediately move to enter the bus. The driver, fortunately was patient and evidently recognized me, because he didn't close the door. When I boarded, however, he asked, "Everything alright?" Distracted -- at that exact moment I didn't realize that I'd brainfarted and dawdled unnecessarily -- I just smiled and gave the only answer anyone could give to a bus driver posing such a query: "Yeah yeah, I'm fine," smile stretching as the words came out, and turning to head back.

Upon turning, in a seat toward the front, a fair apparition was looking straight at me, wide eyes with upturned corners shimmering, head wrapped in a crocheted hat that almost spherically contained her short hair, smiling so sweetly she might have melted rock. Again, reflex predominated; such a smile when matched to an unwavering top-of-the-eyes gaze (jesus, the eyelashes alone could ruin a vow of chastity) permits only one reaction: hold her gaze, smile back, blush, and get the hell out of those double klieg lights. Which I did.

So unsettled was I by the smile that I sat there staring at her left shoulder for five minutes, imagining she might look back, knowing she would not. Indie kid -- cute red 70's style windbreaker; big bulky herringbone skirt; black tights; trendy sneakerish flats. Not looking back. After five minutes of this, it occurred to me that this must have been her, and now she probably thought me a jackass for not lingering in the aisle to talk.

I'm not talking about what I intended to.

So anyway, bored out of my skull today and unable to read away the ride home, I scanned the ads in the brackets overhead and saw evidence of what I'd somehow forgotten was coming: a notice of service reductions and fare increases taking effect in March, pending some sort of extraordinary relief from the Commonwealth. Which, evidently, isn't going to happen, at least not in a timely fashion. We're not the only ones going down; Philadelphia's (SEPTA's) rate increases and service reductions are in the same ballpark as ours. WTF?

Lower income workers are the lifeblood of any urban community. And mass transit provides the vascular system. All the well-to-do, suburban interests who guard every penny of their swollen incomes like street urchins a crust of bread against any tax that doesn't provide a conspicuous direct benefit to themselves are going to watch their city hemorrhage and bleed out if they don't start acknowledging the importance of the service class.

You can't go cutting weekend service, raising fares without raising incomes, and so on. Sure, on paper, a $.50 fare increase doesn't seem like a lot. But if you're making $6.00 an hour and trying to raise a kid, every penny counts. We can't afford to make this community inhospitable to the very people who keep the city humming. We just can't. It takes a village. And that something hasn't been done about this already demonstrates how out of touch Harrisburg is with the needs of the shining communities at either end of the Commonwealth that represent it in the eyes of the rest of the country.

Oh sure, our buses are turned over regularly and attractive. And let's not forget our busstops, which are now glass instead of plexi, and faux-bronze instead of blatant aluminum, logo'd and newly signed. That's all nice. But what about the laid-off employees. The service cuts. The fare hike. These recent improvements, literally, represent the rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Somebody better go below and shore up the leaks before the whole thing sinks.

People need to get their shit together and right quick, too.

Class Action -- Reform or Emasculation

As some of you surely have noted, I've done an abysmal job of steering this blog away from the politics that threaten to swamp it in due proportion to the degree to which politics threatens to swamp the blog's author. The AP provides an adequate baseline discussion of what the House did today, in decisively approving pending legislation purporting to streamline and centralize the class action process in the federal courts.

The gist of the legislation is that class action lawsuits that used to be subject to the jurisdiction of courts in virtually any state in which an injured party resides, an injury occurs, or a corporate defendant is located, now will have to be brought in already overwhelmed federal courts. Aside from clogging up the system, this will also have the effect of diminishing the frequency and volume of class action rewards, as federal courts have proven far less sympathetic than many state courts to sweeping multi-state litigation.

Needless to say, not everyone's happy, and some people are seeing through the anti-class action attorney rhetoric, which is the same red herring here that it is in most contexts. Speaking of which, this account of what's in store:

"Today we will attempt to pre-empt state class action," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. "Next month we will take up a bankruptcy bill that massively tilts the playing field in favor of credit card companies and against ordinary consumers and workers alike. On deck are equally one-sided medical malpractice bills and asbestos bills that both cap damages and eliminate liability to protect some of the most egregious wrongdoing in America."

Now I could do this at much greater length, could provide any number of sources of discussion on this point, but I don't want to belabor what I see as a couple of simple points I can just gloss over at a common-sense level, each corresponding to a stated rationale for this supposedly ground-breaking reform (italicized descriptions of rationales taken from the same AP article, though they are surely available in any complete article).

1. The president has described class-action suits as often frivolous . . .

Really? How often? Which kinds? And what, precisely, do we consider to be frivolous? How easily we forget Ralph Nader's industry-shaking exposure of the Ford Pinto scandal. How easily we forget the atrocious case highlighted in A Civil Action (which, those familiar with the story will recall, ended with a relatively paltry award). If regulation is insufficient, and the one strong tool consumers have is vitiated or effectively eliminated, how can the people keep corporations in line?

2. [B]usinesses complain that state judges and juries have been too generous to plaintiffs.

Which is to say, if I'm not mistaken, that businesses don't like the jury system. So, when it comes to things like political speech, businesses want to be treated like individuals, but when it comes to being held culpable for misconduct, juries are, what, unqualified? Isn't that the task of corporate defense lawyers -- to make sure juries understand why this egregious suit is being brought against their blameless corporation in violation of all that is good and decent in the world. Oh, wait, what? Your army of $300/hour attorneys can't convince 12 perfectly honorable citizens in Mississippi of that fact? Could that be because it isn't true? Just maybe? Here's my feeling: if a jury can hold a criminal defendant's life in its hands, then I think it can handle doling out an award for a class of people collectively injured by knowing corporate misconduct. Call me crazy . . .

3. Bush: "This bill is an important step forward in our efforts to reform the litigation system and to continue creating jobs and growing our economy . . ."

Reforming the litigation system? In the literal re-forming sense, sure: this is profession-changing stuff. Creating jobs? What, because corporations are going to keep so much more of their money that they'll shower it on new employees? That they'll break ground in entirely new industries? Why has this recovery been mostly jobless? Because corporations are reaping the benefits of enhanced productivity, and because when they don't have to, they choose not to hire more people. Growing our economy? This is zero sum stuff. Either businesses spend that money or lawyers and consumers do. Few corporations are going out of business due to this stuff. Costs may be passed on to consumers, but a few million dollars here and there to attorneys from multi-billion dollar corporations is not breaking the bank. And to the extent serious costs are passed on, it's where corporations have had to change the way they did business. Like, for example, shielding gas tanks to prevent explosions that kill these same consumers. Keeping corporations honest in some industries quite literally saves lives. How's that for the economy?

4. Bush, the GOP and the business community [. . .]have criticized what they see as a litigation crisis that enables lawyers to reap huge profits while businesses and consumers are stuck with the bill.

It stands to reason that our supposedly free-market MBA president would want to redistribute wealth from attorneys to MBA's, doesn't it? Seriously, what they're referring to here is the concern that class action lawyers' clients "get only small sums or coupons giving them discounts for products of the company they just sued," while the attorneys rake in multi-million dollar fees. Indeed, this is often the case.

Many of us have received such coupons over the years, and they are pretty trivial on an individual level. But return to my earlier point regarding corporate culpability. Again the analogy: to an American citizen who lives and breathes, his freedom is his most prized possession. When he commits a crime against an individual or the community, he loses that freedom. Unless he's a corporate executive. Meanwhile, to a corporation qua entity, its bottom line is its most prized possession. All hail the almighty shareholder, right? Well then doesn't it make sense that it is by dipping into its coffers when it steps out of line that we most effectively punish a corporation? Of course. Practically speaking, it's the only way.

That's what class action lawsuits are and have always been about. So yeah, it's relatively unimportant to me that a few years back I received as compensation for years of billing misconduct a coupon good for about $20 of Verizon-sold hardware. But if everyone who received one of those coupons redeemed it, what do you suppose that would cost Verizon? Millions, of course. And yes, the attorneys in that case surely reaped millions. They also probably worked for years and years on that case, like most others. And last I checked, a lawyer's time is pretty expensive. Moreover, if there isn't that financial incentive, lawyers won't take these cases. And if they don't take these cases, consumers have to rely on regulatory bodies to protect them, which these days is pretty cold comfort.

I don't participate in opt-in class actions because I care about what I might get. Rather, I opt in because in so doing, the corporate defendant is forced to justify its conduct. If it has a fair case, and good attorneys, it will convince the jury. And if it doesn't, then it pays. Lawyers make some money, I make virtually nothing, but of crucial importance is the price paid by the corporation. That's what's important. And I guarantee that with a sufficient payout, corporations will wake up and take notice, and change conduct to avoid future liability. And such changes almost invariably favor consumers in the long run.

Lawyers are not the problem here. Neither are juries. It's just another example of corporations doing what they must -- aiming to milk the market for every penny it can get. Corporate political donations to politicians and fees paid to lobbying firms are loss leaders -- and today they have been handsomely rewarded, to the detriment of consumers, who will suffer far more than the lawyers will under the yoke of this corporate-friendly legislation.

Winter Is Cancelled; Come Back Next Year

No one can feing surprise that the brinksmanship in which the NHL owners and players engaged resulted, finally, in the the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 NHL season. But that doesn't make it any less depressing for those of us who actually help to put money in the coffers of NHL owners.

The above-linked article doesn't reflect comments made by an NHL spokesman and broadcast on NPR last night, which suggested an irrational truculence. The Times article quotes the final decisive discrepancy as being about $6.5M per team. That is, the players had accepted a salary cap, one not linked to revenue as the owners originally proposed, and the owners came around as well. But the final cap offer by the union was $49M per team, while the owners refused to go above $42.5M per team. On NPR last evening, a representative of the owners observed that the $6.5M difference per team amounted to a nearly $200M difference between the sides when multiplied across 30 teams.

That math is all fine and good, and I'll even grant that such a cap would tend to draw even those teams with the lowest payrolls up to meet it. This would, of course, have the salutary effect of creating parity, except perhaps for the Rangers, who haven't been able to win lately spending twice the cap on players' salaries. And parity might improve turnout and thus revenue. But my biggest problem was with the spokesman's observation that the $200M gap approached the amount of money allegedly lost by owners in the past couple of NHL seasons. What makes no sense about this is that a $200M gap between the sides could have occurred after any degree of compromising, and any consequent lowering of the bar. If, instead of $42.5M vs. $49M, the sides had bound up over $22.5M and $29M, the gap between the sides still would have been nearly $200M, which still would have resembled the alleged losses of the owners en masse, but of course the owners would have gained $20M per team in concessions in moving down to that level.

I'm no accountant, and there are many numbers in play here of which I know nothing. But comparing the $200M gap between the sides to an utterly irrelevant number and then suggesting that bogus analogy was a decisive factor in canceling a major league sport's entire season over a labor dispute for the first time ever has no explanatory power whatsoever, and can't possibly in any way satisfy the fans that the parties involved in these failed negotiations did everything they could do to reach a compromise and let the players play.

And we have nothing to do but be jealous of the fans of the European teams for which more than half of NHL players are competing this season. It's a shame. It really is.