Sept. 11, 2001 started out as a beautiful day, in Ripon, New York City and Washington, D.C.
I remember almost everything about the entire day. Sept. 11, 2001 is to my generation what Nov. 22, 1963 was to my parents and Dec. 7, 1941 was to my grandparents.
I had dropped off our oldest son, Michael, at Ripon Children’s Learning Center. As I was coming out, the mother of one of Michael’s group told me to find a good radio station; she had heard as she was getting out with her son that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I got in my car and turned it on in time to hear, seemingly live, a plane hit the WTC. But it wasn’t the first plane, it was the second plane hitting the other tower.
As you can imagine, my drive to Fond du Lac took unusually long that day. I tried to call Jannan, who was working at Ripon College, but she didn’t answer because she was in a meeting. I had been at Marian University as their PR director for just a couple months, so I didn’t know for sure who the media might want to talk to, but once I got there I found a couple professors and called KFIZ and WFDL in Fond du Lac and set up live interviews.
The entire day was like reading a novel, except that there was no novel to put down and no nightmare from which to wake up. A third plane hit the Pentagon? A fourth plane crashed somewhere else? The government was grounding every plane in the country and closing every airport?
I had a TV in my office, and later that morning I heard that one of the towers had collapsed. So as I was talking to Jannan on the phone, NBC showed a tower collapsing, and I assumed that was video of the first tower collapse. But it wasn’t; it was the second tower collapse, and that was the second time that replay-but-it’s-not thing had happened that day.
Marian’s president and my boss (a native of a Queens neighborhood who grew up with many firefighter and police officer families) had a brief discussion about whether or not to cancel afternoon or evening classes, but they decided (correctly) to hold classes as scheduled. The obvious reasons were (1) that we had more than 1,000 students on campus, and what were they going to do if they didn’t have classes, and (2) it was certainly more appropriate to have our professors leading a discussion over what had happened than anything else that could have been done.
I was at Marian until after 7 p.m. I’m sure Marian had a memorial service, but I don’t remember it. While I was in Fond du Lac, our church was having a memorial service with our new rector (who hadn’t officially started yet) and our interim priest. I was in a long line at a gas station, getting gas because the yellow low fuel light on my car was on, not because of panic over gas prices, although I recall that one Fond du Lac gas station had increased their prices that day to the ridiculous $2.299 per gallon. (I think my gas was around $1.50 a gallon that day.)
Two things I remember about that specific day: It was an absolutely spectacular day. But when the sun set, it seemed really, really dark, as if there was no light at all outside, from stars, streetlights or anything else.
For the next few days, since Michael was at the TV-watching age, we would watch the ongoing 9/11 coverage in our kitchen while Michael was watching the 1-year-old-appropriate stuff or videos in our living room. That Sunday, one of the people who was at church was Adrian Karsten of ESPN. He was supposed to be at a football game working for ESPN, of course, but there was no college football Saturday (though high school football was played that Friday night), and there was no NFL football Sunday. Our organist played “God Bless America” after Mass, and I recall Adrian clapping with tears down his face; I believe he knew some people who had died or been injured.
Later that day was Marian’s Heritage Festival of the Arts. We had record attendance since there was nothing going on, it was another beautiful day, and I’m guessing after five consecutive days of nonstop 9/11 coverage, people wanted to get out of their houses.
In the decade since then, a comment of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has stuck in my head. He was asked a year or so later whether the U.S. was more or less safe since 9/11, and I believe his answer was that we were more safe because we knew more than on Sept. 10, 2001. That and the fact that we haven’t been subject to another major terrorist attack since then is the good news.
Osama bin Laden (who I hope is enjoying Na’ar, Islam’s hell) and others in Al Qaeda apparently thought that the U.S. (despite the fact that citizens from more than 90 countries died on 9/11) would be intimidated by the 9/11 attacks and cower on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, allowing Al Qaeda to operate with impunity in the Middle East and elsewhere. (Bin Laden is no longer available for comment.) If you asked an American who paid even the slightest attention to world affairs where a terrorist attack would be most likely before 9/11, that American would have replied either “New York,” the world’s financial capital, or “Washington,” the center of the government that dominates the free world. A terrorist attack farther into the U.S., even in a much smaller area than New York or Washington, would have delivered a more chilling message, that nowhere in the U.S. was safe. Al Qaeda didn’t think to do that, or couldn’t do that. The rest of the Middle East also did not turn on the U.S. or on Israel (more so than already is the case with Israel), as bin Laden apparently expected.
The bad news is all of the other changes that have taken place that are not for the better. Bloomberg Businessweek asks:
So was it worth it? Has the money spent by the U.S. to protect itself from terrorism been a sound investment? If the benchmark is the absence of another attack on the American homeland, then the answer is indisputably yes. For the first few years after Sept. 11, there was political near-unanimity that this was all that mattered. In 2005, after the bombings of the London subway system, President Bush sought to reassure Americans by declaring that “we’re spending unprecedented resources to protect our nation.” Any expenditure in the name of fighting terrorism was justified.
Six years later, though, it’s clear this approach is no longer sustainable. Even if the U.S. is a safer nation than it was on Sept. 11, it’s a stretch to say that it’s a stronger one. And in retrospect, the threat posed by terrorism may have been significantly less daunting than Western publics and policymakers imagined it to be. …
Politicians and pundits frequently said that al Qaeda posed an “existential threat” to the U.S. But governments can’t defend against existential threats—they can only overspend against them. And national intelligence was very late in understanding al Qaeda’s true capabilities. At its peak, al Qaeda’s ranks of hardened operatives numbered in the low hundreds—and that was before the U.S. and its allies launched a global military campaign to dismantle the network. “We made some bad assumptions right after Sept. 11 that shaped how we approached the war on terror,” says Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. “We thought al Qaeda would run over the Middle East—they were going to take over governments and control armies. In hindsight, it’s clear that was never going to be the case. Al Qaeda was not as good as we gave them credit for.”
Yet for a decade, the government’s approach to counterterrorism has been premised in part on the idea that not only would al Qaeda attack inside the U.S. again, but its next strike would be even bigger—possibly involving unconventional weapons or even a nuclear bomb. Washington has appropriated tens of billions trying to protect against every conceivable kind of attack, no matter the scale or likelihood. To cite one example, the U.S. spends $1 billion a year to defend against domestic attacks involving improvised-explosive devices, the makeshift bombs favored by insurgents in Afghanistan. “In hindsight, the idea that post-Sept. 11 terrorism was different from pre-9/11 terrorism was wrong,” says Brian A. Jackson, a senior physical scientist at RAND. “If you honestly believed the followup to 9/11 would be a nuclear weapon, then for intellectual consistency you had to say, ‘We’ve got to prevent everything.’ We pushed for perfection, and in counterterrorism, that runs up the tab pretty fast.”
Nowhere has that profligacy been more evident than in the area of homeland security. “Things done in haste are not done particularly well,” says Jackson. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes in his new book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, the creation of a homeland security apparatus has been marked by waste, bureaucracy, and cost overruns. Gartenstein-Ross cites the Transportation Security Agency’s rush to hire 60,000 airport screeners after Sept. 11, which was originally budgeted at $104 million; in the end it cost the government $867 million. The homeland security budget has also proved to be a pork barrel bonanza: In perhaps the most egregious example, the Kentucky Charitable Gaming Dept. received $36,000 to prevent terrorists from raising money at bingo halls. “If you look at the past decade and what it’s cost us, I’d say the rate of return on investment has been poor,” Gartenstein-Ross says.
Of course, much of that analysis has the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It is interesting to note as well that, for all the campaign rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama that we needed to change our foreign policy approach, President Obama has changed almost nothing, including our Afghanistan and Iraq involvements. It is also interesting to note that the supposed change away from President George W. Bush’s us-or-them foreign policy approach hasn’t changed the world’s view, including particularly the Middle East’s view, of the U.S. Someone years from now will have to determine whether homeland security, military and intelligence improvements prevented Al Qaeda from another 9/11 attack, or if Al Qaeda wasn’t capable of more than just one 9/11-style U.S. attack.
Hindsight makes one realize how much of the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented or at least their worst effects lessened. One year after 9/11, the New York Times book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers points out that eight years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, New York City firefighters and police officers still could not communicate with each other, which led to most of the police and fire deaths in the WTC collapses. Even worse, the book revealed that the buildings did not meet New York City fire codes when they were designed because they didn’t have to, since they were under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And more than one account shows that, had certain people at the FBI and elsewhere been listened to by their bosses, the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have caught our intelligence community dumbfounded. (It does not speak well of our government to note that no one appears to have paid any kind of political price for the 9/11 attacks.)
I think, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek argues, our approach to homeland security (a term I loathe) has overdone much and missed other threats. Our approach to airline security — which really seems like the old error of generals’ fighting the previous war — has made air travel worse but not safer. (Unless you truly believe that 84-year-old women and babies are terrorist threats.) The incontrovertible fact is that every 9/11 hijacker fit into one gender, one ethnic group and a similar age range. Only two reasons exist to not profile airline travelers — political correctness and the assumption that anyone is capable of hijacking an airplane, killing the pilots and flying it into a skyscraper or important national building. Meanwhile, while the U.S. spends about $1 billion each year trying to prevent Improvised Explosive Device attacks, what is this country doing about something that would be even more disruptive, yet potentially easier to do — an Electromagnetic Pulse attack, which would fry every computer within the range of the device?
We haven’t taken steps like drilling our own continent’s oil and developing every potential source of electric power, ecofriendly or not, to make us less dependent on Middle East oil. (The Middle East, by the way, supplies only one-fourth of our imported oil. We can become less dependent on Middle East oil; we cannot become less dependent on energy.) And the government’s response to 9/11 has followed like B follows A the approach our culture has taken to risk of any sort, as if covering ourselves in bubblewrap, or even better cowering in our homes, will make the bogeyman go away. Are we really safer because of the Patriot Act?
American politics was quite nasty in the 1990s. For a brief while after 9/11, we had impossible-to-imagine moments like this:
And then within the following year, the political beatings resumed. Bush’s statement, “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy,” was deliberately misconstrued as Bush saying that Americans should go out and shop. Americans were exhorted to sacrifice for a war unlike any war we’ve ever faced by those who wouldn’t have to deal with the sacrifices of, for instance, gas prices far beyond $5 per gallon, or mandatory national service (a bad idea that rears its ugly head in times of anything approaching national crisis), or substantially higher taxes.
Then again, none of this should be a surprise. Other parts of the world hate Americans because we are more economically and politically free than most of the world. We have graduated from using those of different skin color from the majority as slaves, and we have progressed beyond assigning different societal rights to each gender. We tolerate different political views and religions. To the extent the 9/11 masterminds could be considered Muslims at all, they supported — and radical Muslims support — none of the values that are based on our certain inalienable rights. The war between our world, flawed though it is, and a world based on sharia law is a war we had better win.
In one important sense, 9/11 changed us less than it revealed us. America can be both deeply flawed and a special place, because human beings are both deeply flawed and nonetheless special in God’s eyes. Jesus Christ is quoted in Luke 12:48 as saying that “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” As much as Americans don’t want to be the policeman of the world, or the nation most responsible for protecting freedom worldwide, there it is.
Today in 1956, London police were called to break up a crowd of teenagers after the showing of the film “Rock around the Clock” at the Trocadero Cinema.
That prompted a letter to the editor in the Sept. 12, 1956 London Times:
The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm loving age group and the result of its impact is the relaxing of all self control.
The British demonstrated their lack of First Amendment by banning the film in several cities.
The Beatles had the number one album today in 1965 thanks to the help of record-buyers:
The Beatles had the number one U.K. single three years later:
The number one single today in 1976:
The number one single today in 1982:
Today in 1987, Peter Gabriel won several MTV Video Music Awards for …
The anniversary everyone knows about today (more on that in the next post) has one music link. Comic book illustrator Gerard Way was walking to work in New York when he witnessed the World Trade Center attacks. The attacks inspired Way to start the band that would become My Chemical Romance:
Today in 1962, the BBC banned playing the newly released “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett on the grounds that it was offensive. To use today’s vernacular, really?
Eleven years later, the BBC banned the Rolling Stones’ “Star Star,” but if you play the clip you can hear why:
The Kinks had the number one song today in 1964:
The Supremes had the number one song today in 1966 …
… while the number one album was the Beatles’ “Revolver”:
The number nine song today in 1994 is a strange-sounding song about a strange incident in the somewhat professionally strange career of Dan Rather:
Birthdays start with Jose Feliciano …
… who was born one year before Danny Hutton of Three Dog Night:
Barriemore Barlow of Jethro Tull …
… was born one year before Joe Perry of Aerosmith …
… who was born the same day as drummer Don Powell of Slade:
Mr. Mister drummer Pat Mastelotto …
… was born one year before Johnny Fingers of the Boomtown Rats …
… who was born one year before Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama:
The rock group Jefferson Airplane titled its first greatest-hits compilation “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane.”
Rolling Stone magazine was not being ironic when it polled its readers to decide the 10 worst songs of the 1990s.
I’m not sure I agree with all of Rolling Stone’s list, but that shouldn’t be surprising; such lists are meant for debate, after all. To determine the “worst,” songs appropriate for the “Vinyl from Hell” segment that used to be on a Madison FM rock station, requires some criteria, which does not include mere overexposure (for instance, “Macarena,” the video of which I find amusing since it looks like two bankers are singing it).
Before we go on: Blog posts like this one require multimedia, so if you find a song you hate on this blog, I apologize. These are also songs that I almost never listen to because my sound system has a zero-tolerance policy — if I’m listening to the radio or a CD and I hear a song I don’t like, it’s, to quote Bad Company, gone gone gone.
My blonde wife won’t be happy to read that one of her favorite ’90s songs, 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” starts the list. (However, the techno version clearly should be on the list.)
To demonstrate that rock musicians are not like you and me, here is the lead Non-Blonde, Linda Clifford:
“I wasn’t really a big fan of my band,” she said. “I didn’t like the record at all. ‘Drifting’ was the only song I loved. I did love ‘What’s Up?’ but I hated the production. When I heard our record for the first time I cried. It didn’t sound like me. It made me belligerent and a real asshole. I wanted to say, ‘We’re a fucking, bad-ass cool band. We’re not that fluffy polished bullshit that you’re listening to.’ It was really difficult.”
My definition of “worst” includes such criteria as poor performance (William Hung’s “She Bangs” occupies its own level of musical hell), poor-quality production (Dave Edmunds’ “I Hear You Knocking,” which, apparently deliberately, sounds as if it was recorded on a pre-World War II wire recorder or was phoned in on land line from the middle of Africa), a substantial annoyance factor (for instance, the singer’s voice), general stupidity (two words: “Disco Duck“) and a concept that fits the category of “Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should” (for instance, most actors’ records, about which more momentarily).
Next on the Rolling Stone list is a song that MTV’s Kurt Loder described perfectly as “dopey but irresistible,” Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” which shouldn’t be on the list either because it’s actually cleverly written:
Dion has made an entire career of sappy ballads. Rock groups that make the strategic decision of recording their own sappy ballads in the interest of increasing record sales deserve inclusion on any worst list, including the entire post-Chicago career of Peter Cetera.
Other examples from this hall of shame include Kiss …
… and Alice Cooper …
… and Styx …
… and Starship …
… and Aerosmith …
… and Bryan Adams (who recorded a contemporary song for a movie set in the 13th century):
Being from the ’80s, I’m more likely to include songs like this on my list, and if you disagree, well, shaddupa you face:
I’ve written before that I’m a fan more of songs than of groups, which probably shows itself in my daily “Presty the DJ” posts. (Here’s a hint: If you notice that a song of a performer on a particular day isn’t there, either that’s because (1) the post is already hellishly long or (2) the blogger doesn’t like the song.) I confess to judging songs on how they sound — music and lyrics — rather than just lyrics. (Which is fortunate for Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, because the words of “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” depict an unrecognizable war.) I hate Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” not merely because of its blatantly anti-American lyrics, but because Springsteen’s singing on this song sounds like someone running a cheese grater across his teeth, accompanied by bizarre Chinese-sounding keyboards. (“Born in the USA” is not evidence of one of Springsteen’s strange musical obsessions, bells, heard prominently on “Born to Run.”)
Since I’m a fan more of songs than of groups, in the same way I don’t like every song of every act (such as the dreck, starting with “If You Leave Me Now,” of Chicago, my favorite rock group), I don’t hate every song of every act, except for Air Supply, one of whose singers, to paraphrase Aerosmith, sounds like a lady. Guns N Roses comes close, however, because singer Axl Rose is the singing equivalent of the broadcasting term known as “puking.” And why the local radio station’s morning host chooses to play “Sweet Child O Mine” at 6:40 a.m. every Monday remains a mystery, other than its function of motivating me to get out of bed so I don’t have to hear it. (Their Friday counterpart is the Scissor Sisters’ “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing,” which is merely an earworm co-written by Elton John, who plays the piano on the song.)
Michael Bolton deserves numerous inclusions on the hated-it list for not just the sappy nature of most of his work (with one exception), but also his voice, which sounds like he’s trying to tear his retinas. (Or yours.) Barry Manilow lacks Bolton’s hemorrhoid-shredding voice but (withthreeexceptions) has the same diabetes-inducing discography. Opposite Manilow is Frankie Valli, who has done somegreatmusic, but whose voice has occasionally been the musicalequivalent of a godawful annoying TV commercial. (Some might say if it’s annoying but you remember it, the commercial has done its job, but not if you refuse to buy the product being sold because of the commercial.)
You may have concluded by now that I am not a fan of, to use Paul McCartney’s phrase, silly love songs, whether upbeat or downbeat. (Replace “silly” with “stupid” in the lyrics, and that song makes perfect sense.) Dan Hill and I share the same birthday; that does not change my opinion of the vomit-inducing “Sometimes When We Touch,” which I will not dignify by linking to it.
Songs can be annoyances as well because they are non sequiturs. I don’t know about you, but when I think of hanging tough, I do not think of New Kids on the Block. Why the Beach Boys would sing of an Indiana town in a movie about a bartender on a tropical island … well, a lot of the ’80s don’t make sense. (Another example is Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain,” a musical self-ripoff of their superior “D’Yer Maker,” on their final album, “In Through the Out Door,” which includes the suicide-inducing “All of My Love.”) And can anyone say what this song is about? (Not to mention: What music genre is this? Techno-country?)
Country music is stereotyped as a variation on the theme of my-dog-died my-wife-left-me my-truck-blew-up my-roof-caved-in let’s-go-get-drunk. So why singers and songwriters decided on their own to create the teen tragedy genre of pop songs (also known as “death rock” or a “splatter platter”) is beyond my comprehension.
The most famous of this genre is probably “Teen Angel,” in which boyfriend stalls car on railroad tracks and pulls girlfriend to safety, only to watch in horror as girlfriend goes back to car and gets smucked by a train. (She was going after his class ring.) Or perhaps it’s “Tell Laura I Love Her,” in which a love-smitten young lad enters a car race intending to win enough money to buy a wedding ring for Laura. Laura’s boyfriend doesn’t get smucked by a train, he gets smucked by another (or perhaps his own) race car, and his racing career and wedding plans go up in flames.
Or perhaps it’s “Last Kiss,” another fatal car drive song first sung by J. Frank Wilson and banshee-sounding backup singers, and then covered by Pearl Jam (which makes one think Eddie Vedder lost a bet):
Many bad songs are covers, songs that were re-performed whether or not they should have been. If the song isn’t very good (for instance, Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way”), you are usually guaranteed the remake will be even worse, particularly if it mangles a rock classic along the way:
Even if the song is a classic, it can be ruined by a bad performance:
Curiously (or maybe not), the aforementioned songs-performed-by-actors category mostly seem to include covers. (For whatever reason(s), singers seem to be able to act better than actors can sing.) John Lennon and George Harrison surely are rolling in their graves every time someone plays this:
And if the world wasn’t interested in hearing Captain Kirk sing, then why did Mr. Spock (who sounds like a cross between B.J. Thomas and Bruce Springsteen) feel the need to sing too?
On the other hand, this was the best version of Morris Alpert’s intolerable “Feelings”:
Actor David Soul, the latter of “Starsky & Hutch,” lacked the paint-peeling voice of the captain and first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. His one chart-reaching recording was merely another drop in a sea of sap:
The ’80s have, unfortunately, several examples of the actor-as-singer oeuvre:
Europhiles and those who look down at the U.S. claim that the Old World has much more sophistication, class and taste than the New World. I reply to that assertion with the observation that David Hasselhoff has released 17 albums and 16 singles. None charted in the U.S.
Speaking of actors singing, I’m not sure where to put “MacArthur Park,” which was written by one of the great American pop song writers, Jimmy Webb. Actor Richard Harris’ version of “MacArthur Park” proves that, had Harris been required to sing for his supper, he would have starved to death:
What rescues this odd song (which was inspired by Webb’s relationship with a cousin of Linda Ronstadt) is its arrangement, particularly the orchestral break (from 4:52 to 6:20), for which the song won a Grammy in 1969. (The Grammy surely was not for Harris’ singing.) The orchestral break led to this SCTV sketch:
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs gives Harris’ version the honor (if that’s what you want to call it) of being Barry’s worst song of all time. (I would have chosen, from Barry’s list, Paul Anka’s “You’re Having My Baby” or Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey” myself.) To prove that the bad reviews are the result of the performance, “MacArthur Park” has been covered more than 50 times, including Donna Summer’s number-one disco version …
… and Maynard Ferguson’s horn version …
… and Weird Al Yankovic’s own interpretation:
Obviously the definition of “worst song” is a matter of personal taste. Here’s a rule of thumb: A song should make your worst-music list if the song makes you want to (1) shoot any music device on which it’s playing, (2) shoot the performer(s), or (3) shoot yourself so you never have to hear it again.
Today in 1926, Radio Corporation of America created the National Broadcasting Co.
The number one single in Britain today in 1965:
Today in 1971, five years to the day after John Lennon met Yoko Ono, Lennon released his “Imagine” album:
The number one album today in 1976 was the second time Fleetwood Mac released an album named “Fleetwood Mac”:
The winner of the best video award at today’s 1992 MTV Video Music Awards (made memorable because Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic threw his guitar up in the air, and his guitar knocked him unconscious on the way back down):
Birthdays begin with Otis Redding …
… born one year before Luther Simmons of the Main Ingredient:
Doug Ingle of Iron Butterfly …
… was born one year before Bruce Palmer of Buffalo Springfield:
I looked into my backyard upon getting up this morning, and it was colored green and gold.
The season opener for the Super Bowl XLV champion Green Bay Packers is tonight against Super Bowl XLIV champion New Orleans. The Packers won Super Bowl XLV over Super Bowl XLIII champion Pittsburgh, 31–25.
(As I write this, by the way, I am planning no additional post today on President Obama’s much vaunted jobs speech tonight. Obama will say nothing he hasn’t already said, and nothing that in its proposed form will pass Congress. Those who watch the speech will be wasting your time.)
Before we move on to whether the Packers will be the NFC representative at Super Bowl XLVI, right down Interstate LXV from Chicago (which will not be visiting Super XLVI unless they buy tickets), we should pause to recall how truly amazing winning Super XLV was. Just getting to Super Bowl XLV required winning five consecutive games — the last two regular-season games and three road playoff games, two against teams that had beaten the Packers earlier that season.
The Packers limped into the playoffs with the sixth NFC seed, and no NFC sixth seed (I’m glad I’m writing this and not saying this) had ever gotten to the Super Bowl. Teams fight to win games so that they can host playoff games, not play them on the road, and the Packers had not won a single road playoff game since the 1997-season NFC Championship.
And this was after a regular season in which the Packers had (seemingly inexplicably) lost to NFC North doormat Detroit, lost a home game, and lost their best running back and tight end. To think the Packers, one of the youngest teams in the NFL, were a Super Bowl team in early January seemed like the little boy presented with a barn full of horse manure who digs in excitedly under the rationale that there has to be a pony in there somewhere.
Dallas defensive lineman Larry Cole once described a rookie quarterback’s taking the Cowboys to an improbable win as a “triumph of the uncluttered mind.” Maybe one of the youngest rosters in the NFL didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be able to get to the Super Bowl. Maybe this is the football gods’ payback to Packer fans for the 2007 season, when the Packers should have gone to the Super Bowl but did not after the unspeakable home NFC Championship overtime loss to the New York/Jersey Giants; they shouldn’t have even gotten to Super Bowl XLV, but now there is a fourth Lombardi Trophy at Lambeau Field.
Several things are now certain. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ 2009 season proved that he could play quarterback as well as any quarterback in the NFL. (He now has as many Super Bowl rings as Brett Favre.) Coach Mike McCarthy may look like a second-generation bar owner, but has not merely the technical expertise (including adaptability, given that without running back Ryan Grant the Packers may have had the worst running attack of the previous 28 Super Bowl champions) but the motivational art to win under difficult circumstances. (One of the greatest motivational moves in the history of the NFL came the night before Super Bowl XLV, when McCarthy had his players sized for their Super Bowl rings.) And after more than half a season of utter confusion, the Packers now know how to play the 3–4 defense (or coordinator Dom Capers’ diabolical variations thereof).
The reason no one has repeated as a Super Bowl champion since Denver won Super Bowls XXXII (which we won’t discuss here) and XXXIII is that, to quote a longtime sportswriter, winning one Super Bowl means you play 16 Super Bowls the next season. Inevitably some of the Super Bowl ring-wearers decide they had a bigger role in the team’s success than they actually did and head to (financially) greener passages. Add to the fact the kind of luck that follows around champions usually lasts just a season.
On the other hand, short of a Rodgers injury beyond one probably-going-to-lose-anyway game, could the Packers have had a more calamitous season injury-wise than 2010? The Packers’ leading rusher in 2010, Brandon Jackson, had all of 703 yards. The team averaged 100 yards rushing per game, 24th in the NFL, and was outgained on the season. (Somewhere Vince Lombardi is demanding “What the hell is going on out there?!”) The Packers’ offense ranked just ninth in yardage and 10th in scoring.
No Packer coach has gotten much of a reputation as being a defensive genius. (Lombardi, Mike Holmgren, Mike Sherman and McCarthy were all offensive coordinators before going to Green Bay.) But remember the axiom that offense wins games but defense wins championships, and consider that Capers’ 3–4 defense was fifth best in yardage and second best in points, and that the Packers were second best in turnover ratio. And, by the way, they played the second half of Super Bowl XLV without their defensive leader, cornerback Charles Woodson, and did not fall apart.
Go back two paragraphs to the paragraph about the offense, and consider that injured running back Ryan Grant and tight end Jermichael Finley are itching to contribute to a Super Bowl team. The Packers won a Super Bowl with a far-from-great offense that is likely to get better. The team appears to be reaching that promised land where the upward sloping graph of experience and the downward sloping graph of skill meet.
My crystal ball (which correctly predicted 6–10 in 2008 but refused to bow to the Super Bowl hype and predicted, uh, 8–8 last year) sees a 12–4 season, with losses at Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and the New York/Jersey Giants. That should be enough to win the NFC North, even with rapidly improving Detroit and always-difficult Chicago. (Although the Bears could have a 2011 crash like the Vikings had a 2010 crash — literally in the case of the deflating Metrodome.)
Atlanta is probably the most skilled team in the NFC, and Philadelphia spent big on the free agent market to improve. They appear to be the Packers’ biggest roadblocks on the way to Super Bowl XLVI, along with possibly tonight’s opponent, the Saints. The conventional wisdom says one of them will get to Indianapolis and not the Packers. Then again, I didn’t get around to predicting a Super Bowl until the NFC Championship game, so call me a pigskin pessimist.
Today in 1966, NBC-TV aired its first episode of Star Trek.
Todd Lohenry logically passed on these 15 fun Trek facts:
In keeping with the aforementioned statistic comparing crew apparel and sudden death (does the Federation’s counterpart to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration know this?), the apparel industry has picked up on this trend:
Today in 1956, Harry Belafonte’s “Calypso” went to number one for the next 31 weeks:
Today in 1965, Daily Variety included this ad:
Madness! Running parts for four Insane Boys age 17-21.
The ad drew 437 would-be Insane Boys, including Stephen Stills (who ended up working with David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young instead), Paul Williams (who wrote a lot of songs and acted a bit, including as Little Enos Burdette), Danny Hutton (who went on to form Three Dog Night) and Charles Manson (and you know what he ended up doing). The four winners were Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith:
The number one single …
… and album today in 1973:
Today in 1977, Jimmy McCullough took wing, leaving Wings for the Small Faces band:
Birthdays begin with actor Peter Sellers, who also recorded two records:
Patsy Cline:
Kelly Groucutt of Electric Light Orchestra …
… was born the same day as Ron “Pigpen” McKernen of the Grateful Dead:
Dean Daughtry played keyboards for the Atlanta Rhythm Section:
David Steele was a Fine Young Cannibal:
As for the other momentous event of Sept. 8, beam back here in one hour. To not do so will be … illogical.
It is with great disappointment that we have learned of the efforts of some conservatives on the national level to try to dictate to Wisconsin conservatives their choice for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Democratic Senator Herb Kohl. This is a tremendous opportunity for Wisconsinites to elect a second conservative senator worthy of holding the office, and one that Wisconsin conservatives will take very seriously. This is not only a choice of ideology but of character, and it is our responsibility to bring Mark Neumann’s lack of character to your attention. While we do not question Neumann’s past contributions to conservatism while he was a Congressman, his actions during last year’s campaign are completely unbecoming of a conservative candidate.
We respectfully request the national conservative groups and individuals to take a second look at their endorsement of Neumann. We ask that since many of them missed the opportunity to come to Wisconsin during the recent battles over collective bargaining for state employees and the recall elections, they come to Wisconsin now to talk to true Wisconsin conservatives to find out what they think of Neumann before attempting to foist their choice upon Wisconsin. …
If the past election in Wisconsin has shown national conservatives anything, it is to trust in the faith of Badger State conservative activists. We had the foresight to supply the movement with current leaders and rock stars like Janesville Congressman Paul Ryan, Ashland Congressman Sean Duffy, Green Bay Congressman Reid Ribble, Governor Scott Walker, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, and even Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.
That is just in the past two years, and we assure you, there are plenty more where they came from.
Yes, I know, he’s really conservative. Neumann is not just Tea Party conservative; he’s Mark Neumann conservative. …
Now when it comes to the final round, I’d have to say Mark Neumann is as right of center as Tammy Baldwin is left. There’s no need for a middle-of-the-road candidate. If you put those two up to the voters, Neumann wins. This state is still reeling from the damage the left created over the last few years. It’s a chance to get another genuine Tea Party conservative into the U.S. Senate.
Several things are going on here, beginning with a demonstration that national conservatives and a state’s Republican Party are not the same thing, for those who assume that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is a giant monolith. Neumann made few new friends and made some enemies in the state GOP for the way his gubernatorial campaign broke Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican,” erasing much of the goodwill generated by his two terms in Congress and his record therein.
The Club for Growth has the right to endorse, or not, whomever it wants. And as a self-described economic conservative and social libertarian, I am quite sympathetic to the Club for Growth’s goals, “getting more and more pro-growth, pro-market policies enacted by our government by truly supporting pro-growth candidates.” (Of course, one would have to look hard to find an anti-growth conservative; that cannot be said about liberals.)
There is, however, a delicate balance between ideological purity and electability. The Club for Growth has been criticizing Thompson for his John Kerry-like zigzag on ObamaCare. As secretary of Health and Human Services, Thompson helped lead the way for the vast expansion of the “homeland security” (a term I despise, by the way) federal apparatus in the days and years after 9/11. Thompson’s record as governor does not particularly fit the definition of “fiscal conservative,” even though few people cared around election time.
Elected officials in legislative bodies have the luxury of being able to vote with consequences only to their own reelection. (See Obama, Barack, “present” votes.) Elected officials who have executive roles have to make decisions and deals to get things accomplished, realizing the axiom that the perfect is the enemy of the good. When Thompson took office in 1987, Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature; all he had was the nation’s most powerful gubernatorial veto, a recovering economy, and the legislator’s traditional fear of becoming an ex-legislator. Thompson wasn’t the governor for 14 years by accident.
Neumann, meanwhile, is 0 for 2 in statewide races, having lost the 1998 U.S. Senate race to Sen. Russ Feingold the same year Thompson was elected to his fourth term in office. (Which means that the same charges that Thompson is yesterday’s political news could be applied to Neumann too.) Neumann lost two 1st Congressional District races before squeaking in in 1994 and narrowly getting reelected in 1996, which suggests at least likability concerns if not electability concerns. Neumann had plenty of opportunity to run for Senate or governor in the intervening 12 years; he had the right to not run, but it does make one wonder why he didn’t try to take on Feingold or Kohl before now.
The Democratic alternative appears to be either socialist U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–Madison) or former U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen (D–Appleton), which for non-Democrats may be like the Iran–Iraq War or a Bears–Vikings game in that one wishes both could lose. It is possible that the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate may not be entirely to the liking of conservatives generally or the Club for Growth specifically. It is guaranteed that Baldwin or Kagen or any other Democrat won’t be to their liking. In order to accomplish what you want to accomplish, you must first win.
Thompson isn’t my first choice for the Senate nomination (and truth be told, I don’t have a first choice at the moment). If Thompson gets the nomination, however, I would probably vote for him. I’m not sure I can say the same thing about Neumann. Neumann might turn what should be a sure thing — against either as left-wing a politician as exists in this state, or the doctor with the two-digit IQ and an allergy to the truth — into an upset loss, which would negatively affect the Republicans’ ability to capture the U.S. Senate. And the Democratic leadership of the Senate is a good reason to vote Republican next November.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 