On
January 31, 2000, Baseball commissioner Bud Selig suspended--with
pay--Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker until May 1st. Rocker
committed the unpardonable sin of engaging in politically incorrect
speech. Compare his 2½ month suspension with that of Lenny
Randle, who, in 1977, got 30 days for punching his manager.
But
what did Rocker actually say?
Explaining
to a Sports Illustrated reporter why he would never want to be
on a New York team (this itself is heresy), Rocker remarked that
riding the subway to the ballpark was like riding through Beirut
and you might have to sit "next to some queer with AIDS, or next
to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, or
next to some mom with four kids."
Replace
"queer" with some more acceptable word, and you have three entirely
credible scenarios, as could be confirmed by any regular passenger
of the New York City subway system.
He
then added that you can walk down any block in Times Square, and
not hear anybody speaking English, commenting, "I'm not a very
big fan of foreigners. How the hell did they get in this country?"
Not
a fashionable sentiment, to be sure, but one that is no doubt
widely held.
I
guess Selig feels that he can save baseball, already suffering
from falling TV ratings and aging demographics, by playing the
big PC enforcer. Only, Bud, don't ask the fans what they think.
Too many of them would probably agree with John Rocker. And while
you're at it, you'd better remove Ty Cobb from the Hall of Fame.
After all, Cobb was a notorious racist and misogynist.
As
a matter of fact, the Director's Guild of America (DGA) did something
pretty close to that...
In
November, 1999, the Guild unanimously voted to rename its D.W.
Griffith award the Lifetime Achievement Award. The reason, of
course, was Griffith's 1915 film, "The Birth of a Nation."
Even
for Hollywood, ground zero of political correctness, removing
Griffith's name was a stupefyingly ridiculous act.
Quite
simply, Griffith is the father of the American cinema, and single-handedly
created Hollywood. Besides "Nation," he made over 400 other films.
It is bad enough that this miserable industry cared so little
about its founder that it cast him out, watching him die a pauper;
but defaming him in this manner just proves that no matter how
bad Hollywood gets, it can still get worse.
If
"Nation" is condemned as being too favorable to the Ku Klux Klan,
it should be pointed out that everything portrayed in the pic
really happened. The South got shafted during Reconstruction,
there really were carpetbaggers and scalawags, and semi-literate
former slaves were put into high office.
Perhaps
we should remind our clueless DGA friends that President Andrew
Johnson, Lincoln's successor, was impeached on trumped up charges
because the Radical Republicans controlling Congress during Reconstruction
felt that he was being too soft on the South. But Johnson was
only carrying out Lincoln's programs. In fact, this writer is
convinced that had Lincoln not been assassinated, he too would
have been impeached--or at the very least threatened with impeachment--for
the same reasons.
In
the meantime, vicious hate speech on the other side gets a free
pass.
In
December, 1998, while a guest on Conan O'Brien's TV show, noted
liberal intellectual Alec Baldwin was expressing his angst about
the Clinton impeachment, and Henry Hyde:
"If
we were in other countries, we would ... all of us together would
go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death!
We would stone him to death!"
Baldwin
wasn't done: "No, shut up! I'm not finished! We would ... go to
their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would
kill their families!"
Baldwin
later said that it was a joke. But try joking like that about
any of our PC-protected groups, and see how far you get.
And
then there's Harvard historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose 1996
best seller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," included these gems:
The
German is "generally brutal and murderous in the use of other
peoples."
In
the Soviet Gulags, the "cruelty of the guards did not even begin
to approach that which the Germans inflicted on the Jews."
The
German is a "member of an extraordinarily, lethal political culture."
The
Germans are..."pathologically ill...struck with the illness of
sadism... diseased, sadistic, psychopathic... in thrall of absolutely
fantastical...beliefs that ordinarily only madmen have..."
It
must be said that Goldhagen's worthless tome was savagely criticized
by Jewish historians Ruth Birn and Norman Finkelstein, among others.
Yet, it is regarded as scholarly enough to be on college course
reading lists all over the country. Naturally, it received huge
praise at essentially all of the elite media outlets.
Only
under an atmosphere of full PC can a virulent and fraudulently
conceived screed proclaiming hatred for the entire German race
be promulgated in the name of human rights.
But,
a young relief pitcher for the Braves must be punished--harshly.