Sonny Goes Green

It seems Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue now fancies himself a champion of environmental preservation. No word yet on whether he and Al Gore are planning a spring tour.

At a recent Republican Governors Association conference, Sonny fired a rhetorical shot at Florida, one of the states battling for rights to the waters of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers.

In Georgia, Perdue said, "you have a ... pristine undeveloped coastline with marshes there that people love to look out on. And then I come to Florida and I see the developed coastline all the way around from Jacksonville all the way up to Tallahassee, I really wonder how we can be preached at as Georgians over environmentalism and water."

But wait – there’s more:

"Utilizing the endangered species act as a weapon in this battle is somewhat disingenuous,” Perdue said. “We know what this is about; we know it’s about the bay and the quality of the bay and the oysters and that very powerful, very loud political constituency. Let's don't try to make it about a federal law that really it's not all about, about mussels or about sturgeons."

At least we didn’t have to wait too long for the inevitable “mussels and sturgeons” shoe to drop.

OK, time out. Let’s break some of this down.

The governor’s contrast between Georgia’s coast and Florida’s is accurate – as far as it goes. For that matter, he could have taken the same shot at Alabama, the other principal combatant in this water war. Alabama’s beaches are far more beautiful than Georgia’s – whiter sand, clearer, bluer water. But before Hurricane Frederic finished pounding the Gulf beaches in 1979, Alabama was already pimping its coastline to high-density developers eager to bulldoze away modest beachfront houses and pack as many people and bucks into a wall of high-rises as they possibly could.

If Georgia’s barrier islands have remained relatively unspoiled and unexploited, it’s quite possibly in spite of Sonny Perdue, not because of him.

Documents and e-mails collected by Morris News Service last summer, according to the Augusta Chronicle, “show a governor's office at times intimately involved in the debate over legislation to extend the Jekyll Island Authority's lease in hopes of luring private developers,” and “point to ties between the governor's office and lobbyists for developers interested in Jekyll's profit-making potential.”

Drafts of the authority’s plans, and memos of meetings between JIA officials and Perdue, go back as far as 2004, the Chronicle reported. Those records show, among other things, involvement by Perdue’s office in lobbying for federal legislation to remove some of Jekyll from federally protected status for barrier islands where the government does not underwrite flood insurance – a moot issue for undeveloped areas.

So here’s what we have:

We have Georgia’s governor accusing Florida of preaching “environmentalism” over an issue that is at least as much about economy as about ecology.

We have the old “people versus mussels and sturgeon” bit, which was a lie from the get-go, is a lie now and will still be a lie the next few hundred times politicians toss it out for the consumption of the simpleminded.

And we have the final, overarching irony: This fight over water with Florida and Alabama has never been about the needs of “Georgia”; it’s about the insatiable consumption of sprawling metro Atlanta – more specifically, the convenience and profits of . . . yep, you got it -- developers.

As inspirational defenses of Mother Earth go, this one pretty much gets drowned out by bulldozers.

***

Ebbs and eddies

Vocabulary update:
The political and social convictions of conservatives are “values.” The convictions of anybody who disagrees with them are “biases.”
Please make a note in your political glossary.

***
Spot the moron
How can you pick out the slowest, stupidest customer with the biggest, most complicated order in any fast-food drive-thru line?
Easy. Look for the one right in front of me.

***
Red (state) elephants
Republicans are like Alabama fans. They never lost a game they weren’t cheated out of.
Of course, so far this season Alabama hasn't lost a game -- period. Meanwhile Auburn, my team, bites the bag.
Let’s change the subject.

***
You’re breaking up
Am I the only one who hates – I mean hates – speaker phones?
If I call you at a busy moment and you’re willing to talk to me while you multitask, OK. I appreciate your time.
If you call me, please do me the courtesy of picking up the damn receiver.
Of course, the minor irritant of a speaker phone is negligible compared to the monumentally infuriating experience of picking up to: “Please hold for Mr. Too Important To Be Bothered Dialing The Number Of An Insignificant Twit Like You.”
Please tell Mr. Too to . . . never mind.

***

Howling in a vacuum

Hello again. As Chief Broom says at the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: I been away a long time.

Actually, it hasn’t been all that long; I last checked in here not quite three weeks ago. That’s an eye blink in geologic time, but apparently forever in blog years.

Mostly I’ve either been immersed in or desperately trying to avoid the elections.

But something related to national elections in general -- though totally irrelevant to the 2008 elections in particular – came across my desk last week: a packet from an outfit called National Popular Vote. It’s got a Web site and an impressive bipartisan roster of backers, and the general idea is that the Electoral College system of electing presidents pretty much sucks.


The NPV folks make the point – and it’s a matter of historical record -- that there have been elections when the system put minority (as in votes, not race) candidates into office, and a couple of close calls when the holder of a substantial majority of popular votes could have lost by a narrow edge in a single significant state.

F’rinstance . . . Four times in 55 elections, most recently in 2000, winners of the popular vote lost the presidency. (Clearly there was more to Al Gore’s loss than just the flaws in the Electoral College system, but that’s another story.)


In the most recent election, even though President Bush led by more than 3.5 million votes nationwide, a shift of just 60,000 of those votes would have elected John Kerry.


Those are rare and extreme scenarios, and you could make the case that even a tainted election, or a revival of Bubonic Plague, would have been preferable to the Bush presidency anyway. But that’s not really the point here.


The more universal problem is that in an all-or-nothing system like the Electoral College, citizens on the losing side of even the slimmest popular vote margin are effectively disenfranchised.




Case in point: I currently vote in Alabama. My vote for Barack Obama will be the civic equivalent of howling in a vacuum, because Obama has about as much chance of winning a presidential race in Alabama as I would.


Yet even in Alabama, somewhere between 40 percent and not quite half of the people who go to the polls on Nov. 4 will pull the lever or touch the screen or punch out the chad for a guy who won’t take a single electoral vote in the state. Tens of thousands of people will make the purely ritual civic gesture of casting a Democratic presidential vote in a state 100 percent of whose electors will be Republican.

The NPV folks are right. That sucks.

The problem hits both ways, of course: A Republican in Massachusetts or Minnesota is just as homeless in most national elections as a Democrat in Alabama. And aside from the obvious unfairness of a system that leaves literally millions of Americans literally unrepresented in choosing the leader of the free world, it’s one hell of a deterrent to voting.


I’m not sure the NPV folks have the right idea, either; you can make that call for yourself. Their idea, as I understand it, goes something like this:


The Constitution gives states the power to decide how they allocate their electoral votes. Under the NPV formula, if enough people in a state go along, the state enters into agreement with other states to give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most popular votes nationwide, thereby ensuring that the winner of the popular vote wins the presidency.


Here’s the rub: The NPV plan is that the system would go into effect only if enough states with enough electoral votes to elect a president under the current system agree.


Got that? A proposal to change the current Electoral College system of electing presidents would depend on a majority of votes as apportioned by . . . the Electoral College.


Personally, I have my doubts. It’s still an all-or-nothing system, and the thought of all my state’s electoral votes going to whoever the rest of the country prefers doesn’t make me feel any less disenfranchised than what we have now. I still think a formula for proportional distribution of electoral votes could be workable.




Meanwhile, I’ll just go to my local polling place – still the fire station, I think, unless they’ve changed it again without telling anybody, in which case some belligerent county bureaucrat will respond to any and all complaints by insisting with huffy righteousness that there was more than adequate notice and if a few hundred voters didn’t get the memo it was their own fault, etc. etc. etc. – and plug in a futile Democratic vote that goes round and round and round and comes out for McCain. While I’m at it, I might buy a lottery ticket, too.










Oh, wait – I still can’t do that in Alabama.

*

Hotel California

You probably saw the story a couple of weeks ago about how celebrities (and let’s use that word guardedly) were already coming out (and let’s use that phrase guardedly) for their presidential candidates of choice.

As a general rule, the political insights of movie stars or musicians or jocks don’t tend to be especially insightful, although there are of course exceptions; some are smarter and/or better informed than others, as is the case with the rest of us.

Most of the time, Hollywood political endorsements come off as exercises in pure self-indulgent, self-important posturing, and when egos get in the way, that can backfire pretty loudly. Remember that Kerry-Edwards fundraiser back in 2004, with Whoopi Goldberg cracking lame sexual puns on the president’s name? Yee haw.

Do prominent people get more attention for their political stands than the rest of us? Yeah. Of course. But the effectiveness of those stands, at some basic level, should come down to whether or not these people know what the hell they’re talking about. The idea that somebody has political acumen because he or she is pretty or can remember lines or plays a kickass guitar is as self-evidently stupid as the idea that somebody is a role model for your kids because he can take a running back’s head off.

If you vote for a Democrat because Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon tells you to, or for a Republican because Patricia Heaton or Kelsey Grammer tells you to, you are – not to put too fine a point on it – a complete cretin. Give your vote to somebody better equipped to use it responsibly. Like your dog.

***

The gorilla in the room

As the U.S. economy seemed ready to go into full meltdown, there was all the usual speculation and debate about causes, reactions, solutions and, of course, blame.

But something has struck me as increasingly curious ever since this financial crisis began in earnest: The number of ways some have found to talk about this without ever mentioning pure, naked greed.



It’s the proverbial gorilla in the room, and yet some of our fellow Americans seem determined to come up with other explanations, any other explanations, except the silk-suited one dragging its hairy, ring-studded knuckles across the floor in front of us.

It’s a classic Occam’s razor issue: The simplest and most obvious explanation is probably the right one. Money was there and now it’s gone. Tens of millions of people have less, and a supernaturally lucky few somehow have way, way more.

It would be stupid to deny that plain bad judgment – some of it, surely, prompted by the best of intentions -- and simple economic bad luck are a big part of the problem.

It’s even stupider to argue that some plain old-fashioned robber barons at the center of all this haven’t known exactly what they were doing.

Like the drooling dimwits who claim people “blamed Bush for a hurricane” in deploring his clueless and callous incompetence after Katrina, there will be those who insist that holding boardroom thieves accountable for this economic disaster is mere scapegoating. The inevitable sanctimonious protests of “class warfare!” will come echoing down from penthouses where there are those who want you to believe class wars can be waged, and economies looted, only from the bottom up.

Wherever this economic crisis proves to be a matter of circumstance or of honest human misjudgment, let all thought of blame be dismissed as moot. Wherever human fingers have been gleefully dipped in the till of the American economy at our expense, let the owners of those fingers rot in prison and fry in hell.

***

Couldn't watch

It’s been reported that when Yankee Stadium was being built in 1922-23, the sounds of construction were clearly audible at the Polo Grounds, the National League Giants’ longtime home just across the Harlem River in upper Manhattan. It must have been a galling distraction to manager John McGraw, who detested the American League in general, and Babe Ruth in particular.

***

Our family’s first real vacation came in the summer of 1964. There are lots of things about those three weeks to Canada and back I remember, but few more vividly than New York, and none more vividly than Yankee Stadium.

We were staying at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street. When Dad came into the room and asked if we wanted to go see the Yankees that night, my brother and I did a whoop, and our mother probably did a silent sigh of relief. (Even midtown Manhattan would be relatively quiet with the two of us out of pocket for a few hours.) I did my best Whitey Ford windup, which I thought was pretty good until my smartass kid brother pointed out scornfully that Ford was a lefty.

It would be the first major league game either of us ever saw in person, and the last until the Braves came to Atlanta a couple of years later. It was a doubleheader with the White Sox, and we sat down the third base line. The Yanks swept; Ford pitched the second game; Pepitone homered. Mantle, Maris, Kubek, Richardson all played. It was the last year of that great Yankee dynasty of the ‘50s and ‘60s; Bob Gibson and the Cards would stop them cold that October, and the Yankees wouldn’t make it back to the Series again until the mid-‘70s.

When it was over, we walked past the outfield monuments to take the train back to Manhattan.

***

I should have watched Sunday night’s farewell to the Babe’s Cathedral, but I couldn’t – I just couldn’t.

In a world that keeps changing and morphing and vanishing too damn fast, one of the few things that for me all but defined permanence – something that was there long before I was born and would surely be there long after I die -- has been Yankee Stadium.

Wrong again.

I know the old ball park has deteriorated; even the renovation that saved it once is now more than 30 years in the past, and a friend who saw a Yankees game there just a couple of years ago described it perfunctorily as “a dump.”

There are no doubt a hundred perfectly logical and rational reasons why the Bronx’s most familiar and visible landmark since 1923 can’t be saved, and not one of them is good enough. All of them together wouldn’t be.

I bet even McGraw is pissed.

Ebbs and eddies

Vocabulary update
Any criticism of Sarah Palin, any unflattering account, however factual, of her record, her past or her own words, is “vicious” and “hate-filled.” It is anti-woman, anti-Christian and anti-working mother.

Please make a note in your political glossary.

Give it a rest
Some readers of my newspaper column have suggested that I’ve pushed the connection between contemporary Republican rhetoric and 1950s Red-baiting Senate witch hunter Joseph McCarthy one time (OK, maybe two) too many.

One offered to buy me a ticket to Russia or China (irony is clearly not this political analyst’s long suit); another expressed the wish that I’d been around when McCarthy was in his heyday (actually I was, but I was about 2 years old) so the good senator could have exposed me for the crypto-Marxist that I am.

They might have a point – not about Russia, China or Marx, I hope, but about overplaying the McCarthy card. Believe it or not, I’m probably as tired of evoking that shameless sleazeball’s memory as some folks are of hearing about him.

So here’s the deal: I’ll stop mentioning McCarthy when right-wing pols stop using him as a role model.

Sports spots
Auburn’s “win” against Mississippi State last Saturday night was excruciating. My impression, after three games, is that this supposedly explosive new offense is not just bad, but virtually unwatchable.

One more time seeing that unit break the huddle, line up over the ball and then break formation to stand around cluelessly to wait for a sign from the sidelines would have had me throwing something through the screen of an almost brand-new TV.

The look on Tommy Tuberville’s face as that travesty of a football game dragged on suggested that he’s starting to suspect he bought a bill of goods in O-Coordinator Tony Franklin. If Tubs saw any more offense or any more coordination than the rest of us did, he’s keeping it to himself.

Does Auburn now have its very own Dan Henning?

*

Piety Parade

A characteristically detailed essay in the Sept. 8 issue of The New Yorker raises the always-hot issue of faith-based voting.

In “Party Faithful,” author Peter J. Boyer’s big-picture implication is that Barack Obama has a realistic chance to wrest large chunks of a dependable core constituency away from a Republican Party still lukewarm toward, and skeptical about, the religious convictions of John McCain.

With the up-front acknowledgement that I am among the world’s worst political handicappers and analysts, I’m not so sure Boyer is right. More to the point, in this specific context I’m not sure I care.

Both McCain and Obama – as Boyer notes and every observer is well aware – have “values voter” problems. McCain first alienated his party’s right wing by condemning its two highest-profile evangelical polemicists, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, as “agents of intolerance"; he soon thereafter alienated the political center by accepting the endorsement of wing-nut End Timer John Hagee.

Obama, of course, has – and deserves – a Jeremiah Wright problem he will never completely shake as he tries to convince Americans in the political center, where elections are won, that he respects and shares their convictions.

Boyer’s essay begins with a detailed analysis of how Karl Rove engineered a “Catholic strategy” for George W. Bush, using as his blueprint Ralph Reed’s earlier success in mobilizing evangelical Protestants. That a lengthy essay on the politics of faith begins on those notes should tell us something about what we’re really dealing with here.

This is election-as-jihad, an exercise in chest-thumping public piety that has probably always been with us, but which has become a cynical political science over the last 30 years or so.

It hijacks the language and postures of faith -- not faith as a defining value system that might tell us something profound and authentic about the men and women who would lead us, but as a carefully and calculatedly crafted tool – one shaped suspiciously like a wedge.

With this tool gripped firmly in hand and waved high aloft for all to see, politicians swagger through campaigns not like Lincoln and Douglas debating for an Illinois Senate seat in 1858, but rather like the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn gleefully exploiting the Christian charity of gullible hicks at a tent revival.

Boyer concludes that Obama has “begun to transform the faith-unfriendly Democratic image that made the Republicans’ 2000 and 2004 strategies possible.” It’s a transformation which even Rove claims to admire:

“The overt hostility of some elements of the Democratic Party is being usefully scrubbed away by Obama,” Rove tells Boyer. “And, for that, everybody in America ought to be thankful.”

So Karl Rove looks approvingly on Barack Obama’s appropriation of the rhetoric of faith. For that, everybody in America ought to be skeptical.

*

FearFest 2008

"We live in a dangerous world, and we need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001...”
-- President Bush, addressing Tuesday night’s session of the Republican National Convention.

If you expected to be spared having 9/11 wagged in your face, you should’ve been watching something else.

Here’s one of the “lessons of Sept. 11” we’ve all learned: Republicans will be conflating the misbegotten tragedy in Iraq with the terror attacks of 2001 for as long as there’s anybody still listening. They feed on fear, with the same shameless ravenousness of Democrats feeding on economic resentment, and the most terrible and terrifying day in the memory of most living Americans is just too rich a dish to pass up.

So it’s the muscular Republicans against the wussy leftists, patriotism against treason, victory – however they choose to define that, however long it takes and however many more lives it costs – against “retreat and defeat.”

None of which alters the reality that George W. Bush’s “understanding” of the lessons of 9/11 has cost more than 4,000 precious American lives against the wrong enemy in the wrong war in the wrong country, and the “dangerous world” he and his apologists keep trying to frighten us with (as if we needed their help for that) has only become more so.

Thanks, Mr. President, but we’d rather hear “lessons of September 11” from somebody who’s actually learned some.

***

Driving in to work this morning, I saw something I’d never seen, although I’m apparently behind the curve on this one.

Dangling from the back of a pickup truck on Railroad Street in Phenix City was a pair of big, shiny metallic balls.

No, not the kind Captain Queeg kept clicking together in “The Caine Mutiny.” I mean the anatomical kind. As in testicles. As in “Look at my really, really manly truck.”

And I thought those stupid decals of cartoon Calvin urinating on something were pretty much the low-water (so to speak) mark in vehicular adornment.

I checked this out on the Web (don’t even ask what I Googled to get there), and it turns out that not only have they been around a while – there’s an online company you can order them from (don’t ask me what its Web address is, either) – but politicians in several states have actually tried to get them outlawed.

Yeah, that needs to be at the top of the political agenda.

One Web posting offered this commentary . . .

“For me it poses this question: Who is worse, the pathetic mouth-breathing cretins who actually buy these things, or the terminally anal-retentive church ladies who think the law is meant to be used to punish stupidity and bad taste?”

I won’t even try to improve on that.

***

From the GOP convention to a truck flaunting oversized fake male genitalia. Why was that such an easy transition?

***

Same Old

A Georgia Democrat might well look at Joe Biden and see . . .

Mark Taylor.

Not that the senator from Delaware chosen to be Barack Obama’s running mate bears any physical resemblance to Taylor, the Rubeus Hagrid of Georgia politics, “The Big Guy” who served as lieutenant governor under Zell Miller and, as the most recent Democratic gubernatorial nominee, got trounced by the eminently underwhelming Sonny Perdue.

Not that Biden and Taylor, though both Democrats, are even political soul mates to any great degree.

But no matter what else Biden is – experienced, intelligent, eloquent, able – he is part of an entrenched Democratic establishment that has been a consistent loser for most of the last 30 years.

Think of the last election for governor of Georgia. The Donkeys’ choice came down to Taylor and Cathy Cox – a youthful, energetic and relatively new presence among Georgia Democrats. Cox was finishing up two stellar terms as Georgia secretary of state, in which office she shone in spite of following such Georgia luminaries as Ben Fortson and Max Cleland. When she ran for re-election in 2002, she received a higher percentage of the general election vote than any other Democrat.

But when it came time to pick who would take on Perdue, the Democrats did what Democrats always do – pay political dues. They went for the Good Ole Boy. Paying political dues and making socially significant statements is what Democrats obviously prefer to more mundane political achievements – like, for instance, winning.

White With Foam

I wanted to write something patriotic for my next installment, and anticipation of the weekend gave me the perfect subject:

Beer.

Fact is, after decades of watery, cheap-grained, hop-deficient mediocrity, some of the best malt beverages on the planet are now Born in the USA.

I first considered writing about this a long time ago, when some reverse-snob columnist whose name and paper I’ve long since forgotten took a shot at beer snots and their (our) disdain for mass-produced swill in favor of “fancy imported micro-brews.”

What a nitwit. Microbrews are (a) mostly domestic, and (b) not hyphenated, and most aren’t especially fancy. In fact, the rise of microbreweries is a profoundly American story – the triumph of incentive, free enterprise and the readiness to fill an almost empty market niche.

A friend of mine who is a home brewer – a damn good one, I might add – gave me an interesting short course in the history of American brewing. According to his account, American breweries before Prohibition made beer pretty much the way it had always been made, especially German and Austrian lagers. The familiar names of American brewers – Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst – were the names of European families that brought Old World brewing arts and standards to the U.S.

With the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, the demand for (legal) suds was so huge and enthusiastic that American brewers soon figured out that they could cut back on expenses – especially hops, the costliest ingredient in brewing -- without hurting consumption.

(The closest contemporary parallel I can think of is the Great “Light” Beer Scam – a now decades-long running con by which brewers water down beer and sell it at the same price.)

Big-volume imports like Heineken, Bass Ale and Guinness provided limited alternatives, and at premium prices. You didn’t have to be a Pat Buchanan-type economic xenophobe to wish for more and better domestic choices.

Enter the American entrepreneurial spirit – small regional breweries that made batches of really good, well-crafted lagers, light and dark ales, porters, stouts. Some grew into major-market competitors like Samuel Adams; others stayed regional with relatively modest, but extremely profitable, volume.

The results have been every free-market apostle’s best argument: A big enough variety of brews to satisfy every taste, and enough competition to curb the prices of domestics and imports alike. Even the major brewers, whose post-Prohibition corner-cutting created the niche that the micros rushed in to fill, now produce specialty products to compete with the upstarts encroaching on their profits.

A great American named Benjamin Franklin famously said something to the effect that “Beer is God’s way of showing he loves us and wants to see us happy.”

So hoist the cold one of your choice – even, if your taste buds are so tragically atrophied, a “light.” It’s the American Way.

*

Freedom isn't free -- in Arizona, it can cost you

PHOENIX -- A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred Arizona from using a state law to prosecute an online merchant who sells shirts that list names of thousands of troops killed in Iraq.

Here come those meddlin’ fedrul courts again, throwing that damn Constitution thing in the way of some good old-fashioned Red State patriotism policing.

Seems there’s this guy in Arizona who sells T-shirts that, under the heading “Bush Lied – They Died,” list names of Iraq war dead -- the political effectiveness, taste and basic decency of which are certainly debatable.

What isn’t debatable, except, apparently, in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, is that the message -- like it, hate it or ignore it -- is political speech and the names of troops killed in Iraq a matter of public record.

That didn’t stop Arizona from passing a law last year that made it illegal to sell any product that uses troops’ names without families’ permission. The other three states have passed similar laws.

Defenders of this unconstitutional nonsense have no doubt argued passionately that gag laws like this (and laws like this almost always make me gag) need to be upheld because these soldiers died for our freedom. Which, of course, they did.

The irony never quite sinks in.

Hello ... and goodbye

I wanted to launch this Web journal on a more upbeat note, but the death of Braves announcer Skip Caray is one of those passages I just can't let -- well, pass.

Probably the two most legendary Skip moments were ones I didn't hear -- at least not live, although I've heard them in promos and ads and retrospectives ever since. There was the Francisco Cabrera single to win Game 7 of the 1992 National League Championship Series against the Pirates; I watched that one from about five rows behind the Pirates' dugout at the old Atlanta Stadium. (add the "Fulton County" part yourself, if you absolutely must be that anal about it.)

But all the way home, the car radio kept me pumped up with repeated replays of "Here comes Bream! Here's the throw to the plate! He is . . . SAFE! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win!"

The other, of course, was the Braves' one and only ascent to the mountaintop, when Marquis Grissom squeezed Carlos Baerga's fly to left center to nail down Tom Glavine's pitching masterpiece and the 1995 World Series. I was in the center field bleachers for that one, but it was Skip and, I believe, Joe Simpson who echoed a back-and-forth "Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!" to radio listeners who were either ecstatic Braves fans or casual dial surfers who must have thought they had picked up a really bad Meg Ryan impersonation.

My favorite Skip moment was neither of those. This must have been the late '70s or maybe 1980, when Skip (and, in fairness to his memory, quite a few others) still sported polyester on-air wear and a bad white-guy 'fro. The Braves -- a truly wretched franchise in those days -- were at Wrigley Field, and a young Dale Murphy had hit a grand slam to help beat the Cubs.

Skip was doing (or rather, trying to do) one of those on-field postgame TV interviews with Murphy, and a Chicago heckler was giving Caray pure hell. He was barking out drunken insults about Skip's jacket, his hair, his team, whatever incoherent flotsam drifted across his sodden brain . . . and Murphy was laughing so hard he was about to blow a gasket. Skip tried to soldier on -- pausing every few seconds for a "Yeah, yeah, OK, buddy, I hear ya!" to the heckler, which only made Murphy laugh harder; Caray was reduced finally to a desperate and futile plea of "Could ya help me out here, Murph?"

I honestly don't remember whether they finished the interview or not; I was laughing so hard that the station had gone to an old movie by the time I recovered.

Skip Caray's wasn't the kind of personality you do treacly eulogies about. He wasn't a warm and fuzzy guy, at least not outside his inner circle, and his edgy style sometimes did a header over the edge. As a call-in show host he was a snarling disaster; Skip was one of the few people who could suffer fools with even less patience than I can -- and his standards for what constituted a fool were, from all indications, pretty inclusive.

People who knew him (and I never did, although I've have loved to meet him) say he had a softer side and a bigger heart than he let on or got credit for, and I take their word for it. I understand he and his wife Paula adopted disabled animals that were too much trouble for most people to bother with.

This much I know: In what is clearly a lost Braves season, the silencing of the voice that has defined my summer nights for more than 30 years is easily most devastating loss of all.