The Grumpy Moderate

The Grump is basically an optimistic person. But this week, with the New Orleans hurricane and its aftermath, the Grump has found himself too sad and too discouraged to blog. A horrible natural disaster, and our response is to set upon ourselves with vitriol and disgust. No one comes out of this looking good. No one.

The Grumpy Moderate has decided to start nominations for the person who makes the most whacked-out public statement during the rest of 2005.

Nominee No. 1 surely has to be the televangelist Pat Robertson, who today recommended that the U.S. government kill Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez. "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said, who also noted that killing the man would be "a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ..."

The Grump thinks that this statement is whacked-out in so many different ways that it's hard to know where to start. For starters, it's a little anti-Christian, isn't it? The Grump isn't an expert on religion, but thinks it unlikely that assassination for political purposes is a central tenet of Christian theology. Plus Chavez is democratically-elected (at least in a South American sort of way), which matters a good deal to the Grump. Who's next, Chirac? Finally, readers know that the Grumpster really dislikes meanness, and publicly stating that you propose to kill someone because you disagree with their politics is really really mean, especially from someone who thinks of himself as a Man of God. (And, no, it doesn't matter that Chavez may, in fact, be an America-hating megalomaniac, Pat; the Grump still doesn't think you should kill him.)

So, the first nominee, Pat Robertson, for a truly whacked out statement by someone who ... wait a minute, the Grump almost said "should know better."

The Grumpy Moderate waits to see how the Right responds to this.

The Grumpy Moderate and his wife (yes, he is happily married) had friends invite them to a showing of the documentary film "Murderball," which is about quadriplegic men playing wheelchair rugby. The Grump and his wife found the movie to be excellent ... entertaining, funny, and insightful ... and highly recommend it.

Today, this story about the film appeared in the Grump's local newspaper. The columnist calls the film "a unique sports film and maybe even a truly great one," but ends the article with this:

Except.

In the waning moments of this powerfully short (85 minutes) documentary, we see Zupan [a main character in the film] introducing wheelchair rugby to severely wounded Iraq war veterans. That's certainly a magnanimous gesture, and the therapeutic potential to those soldiers horribly maimed by the war is obvious.

But the jump from the Paralympics in Athens to the wounded of Walter Reed Hospital is absurdly abrupt and appallingly lacking in context. After all, the wheelchair-bound athletes in "Murderball" got that way through disease and accident. The wheelchair-bound veterans got that way through the deliberate lies and cynical deceptions of the Bush administration.

Then, near the end of "Murderball," there is another cut to an even more out-of-context absurdity: Bush uttering the words "May God continue to bless our country."

A great movie ruined.

The Grumpy Moderate has three things to say about this.

First, the Grump may be old fashioned, but the Grump reads the sports section mostly as an escape. He likes to read about the Giants and the A's and the Niners and the Raiders and the Cal Bears and ... yes, even the Golden State Warriors ... without having partisan politics intrude. A review of a film about sports -- sure, go ahead, put that in the sports section. An unsolicited political rant (left or right, the Grump doesn't care) -- put it on the editorial page.

Second, the Grump read the whole Walter Reed/Bush part of the movie as a subtle criticism of the Iraq War. As the columnist points out, all of the athletes we had seen in the movie to that point had been rendered quadriplegic as the result of disease or accidents (often very freakish accidents). But, the Grump took the filmmaker to say, here was a group of young men who were in wheelchairs not because of disease or bad luck, but because of a political decision. The Grumpy Moderate could as easily see partisans on the right being offended by the scene than partisans on the left.

Third, it seems to the Grump that the ending of the article probably resulted from the fact that seeing and hearing the voice of George W. Bush in the movie drove the columnist into something akin to a rage. The same thing happened to many in the audience with whom I saw the film: The mere sight of Bush, the sound of his voice, caused them to start hissing at the screen. The Grumpy Moderate does not think that visceral dislike bordering on hatred is a good thing, not for politics, not for the left, not for anyone. To have 10 seconds of Bush ruin a film for someone, as it apparently did for this columnist, is, the Grump thinks, extreme.

Especially in the sports section.

Greetings and welcome to the Grumpy Moderate. The Blogosphere seems congested with rightist blogs and leftist blogs, but few centrist blogs, and no (as far as I can find) grumpy blogs. So to fill the niche ... Voila! The Grump's first post is here.

Enjoy, and feel free to comment freely.