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.