- Antigone of Sophocles

I’ve seen Michael Jordan play, and you, Kobe Bryant, are no Michael Jordan. Not by a long shot. Also, yelling at your team mates is not leadership (especially when you are playing like shit).

Just because these teams are wearing the same uniforms that Bird, Magic, Russell, West, Havlicek, etc wore, does not make the series special. Those previous finals were awesome because the players played the game beautifully. So far, this Celtic team has not. And this Laker team has only shown signs here and there.

“Oh… well, about Life being a game and all. And how you should play it according to the rules. He was pretty nice about it. I mean, he didn’t hit the ceiling or anything. He just kept talking about Life being a game and all. You know.”

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”

“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.”

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right - I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

–H. Caulfield, Ch 2, Catcher (Salinger).

by hilzoy

The New York Times has a horribly sad article today, which is unfortunately all TimesSelect. Excerpt:

    “The sniper fired. It was a clean shot, if there is such a thing. And down for good fell another American soldier.

    His name was Sergeant James Dean, but everyone called him Jamie. He was the farm boy who fished, hunted and tossed a horseshoe like nobody else. He was the guy at the end of Toots Bar, nursing a Bud and talking Nascar. He was the driver of that blue Silverado at the red light, his hands on the wheel, his mind on combat horrors that made him moody, angry, withdrawn.

    Now here he was, another American soldier, dead. Only Sergeant Dean was killed at the front door of his childhood home, the day after Christmas and three weeks before his redeployment, shot by a sniper representing the government for whom he had already risked his life in Afghanistan. His wife and parents received the news not by a knock on the door, but by gunfire in the neighborhood.

    “If they had just left him alone,” says his wife, Muriel.”

More below the fold.

    “In the summer of 2001, weeks before Sept. 11, Jamie stunned his family by enlisting in the Army; he was 23. A woman had just broken his heart, yes, but he explained that he wanted to experience life beyond installing air conditioners in confining St. Mary’s County. And his younger sister, an Air Force medic, had been talking up the military.

    From April 2004 to April 2005, Jamie served in Afghanistan, far from the Chesapeake Bay. Now and then he’d talk to family members by telephone. “Just, ‘Hi, I’m fine,’ ” his mother, Elaine, says. “Or, ‘It sucks here.’ ”

    Jamie came back quieter in the summer of 2005, with “DEAN” tattooed on his upper back and a cobra tattooed on his muscle-defined arm. But he kept private any changes beneath the skin, his mother says. “ ‘You don’t want to know, Mom,’ he would always say.”

    One night at Toots, while drinking a beer, he met a woman named Muriel whose bluish-green eyes entranced him. The couple became inseparable, cobbling together a family that included her two children, three dogs and a cat. Muriel’s good for Jamie, people said, even without knowing how she was nudging him to get counseling for nightmares so bad they would both wake up soaked in sweat.”

He got into counseling, was put on medication, and things began to get better. Until this:

    “A few days after Thanksgiving, a FedEx truck delivered an envelope to the Dean farm just as Jamie was about to go hunting. It was a form letter of redeployment, as impersonal as a bank statement.

    “It was downhill after that,” Muriel says.

    He withdrew from the present, it seemed. He drank more, and took his medication less. Finally, on Christmas Day, he and Muriel returned from a family gathering with plans to watch his favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, on television. He went out to buy some beer — but went to Toots Bar instead.

    She called him, and he came home, livid. He smashed some glasses, said something about winding up in a body bag, and sped away in his Silverado. He wound up at the family home, alone, talking on a cellphone with his sister, Kelly, saying things like: “I just can’t do it anymore.”

    When his sister heard a gunshot, she called 911. The deputy sheriffs arrived at the isolated farmhouse around 10 p.m. and quickly determined that Jamie was drunk, agitated and carrying a shotgun. He told the deputies to back off. (…)

    Based on something a family member had said, the police knew that Jamie had other shotguns in the house, but they mistakenly believed he was an Army Ranger. “Rambo,” his mother says ruefully.

    At 4:19 in the morning, the police shot dozens of tear-gas canisters, smashing the windows in front of Jamie’s horseshoe trophies, piercing walls decorated with garland. Several minutes later, Jamie fired shotgun pellets in the general direction of a police car parked at least 50 yards away. Then he sat down on the back porch.

    A situation in which an armed man was in his own house, alone and a threat to no one but himself, had now escalated into a military action. On the ground, men with guns; in the sky, the whop-whop of helicopters. Now and then, Jamie would respond to some movement or sound with a shot into the ground or into the air. (…)

    At 12:25, a negotiator talked briefly by telephone to Jamie, who indicated he might come out; “I’m going home,” he said. Then the police cellphone’s battery died.

    At 12:34, Jamie was reached again by telephone, but the volume was low and the negotiator could not make out what was being said.

    At 12:45, the police cut power to the house and began shooting more tear gas through the front and the back of the house.

    At 12:47, an armored vehicle called a Peace Keeper pulled up to the house. Jamie opened the front door and, according to the police, pointed his 20-gauge shotgun at the vehicle. A state police sniper, positioned in a garage 70 yards away, took aim.”

The soldiers killed in battle are never the only people whose lives are taken by war. Happy Memorial Day.

We should mince no words about it. After 9/11, America enjoyed the sympathy and support of the world. In less than six years, this powerful asset has been frittered away. But it doesn’t stop there. In its place, a great wave of hatred is building. And that presents a great peril to us, not just to reputation, but to our security.

These developments are the foreseeable consequence of the Bush administration’s policies. What is the antidote to them? I see in our recent past an excellent model which very effectively addresses these issues. The model I look to is Dwight David Eisenhower’s. A career soldier and battlefield tactician, Eisenhower knew what can and cannot be achieved on the battlefield. He knew that conquering a country is insufficient to governing or transforming it. He upheld the values of the Party of Lincoln – a party which has, to our great loss, all but disappeared from the stage in America. A party which laid the same stress on a commitment to justice that our Founding Fathers did.

Eisenhower said “Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.” He was committed to caution in wielding our nation’s great military power, and careful deliberation and hesitancy before intervening with violence in the affairs of other countries. But he intervened and committed forces abroad when he judged this necessary because other courses had been exhausted or would be fruitless. Most importantly, he recognized that the reputation of America as a country committed to justice was a tool potentially more powerful than any bomb or missile system. Ike appreciated this as an asset he inherited as president and he was committed to pass to his successor. George Bush can make neither claim.

“The U.S., it seems, isn’t that little bar on the right hand side showing ten days of paid leave and zero paid holidays. That bar’s Japan. The U.S. is to the right of Japan — i.e., blank — a country with no legislatively mandated vacation time whatsoever.”
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP6Haq2sJWM