I’m a sports fan, and I “collect” stadiums (stadia?). Especially major league baseball, NFL football, and NHL hockey. My goal, before I die, is to see a baseball game in the home stadium of every MLB team. It would be an added bonus if I could do the NHL and NFL venues, but right now, I’m focusing primarily on baseball.

Problem is, I keep forgetting where I’ve been, and losing count. Therefore, mostly for my own reference (and because I expect few others to be interested), I’m posting a list of venues attended below the fold. I’ve ordered them in roughly the order in which I first visited them, to the best of my ability to recall.

However, if you have comments concerning favorite (or least favorite) venues, feel free to leave them.

MLB: (29 venues in 23 cities for 25 home teams [one since moved, four parks since demolished]; 24 of current 30 teams, 80% complete; 23 of current 30 ball parks, 77% complete)

1. Milwaukee County Stadium, Milwaukee Brewers (Defunct)
2. New Comiskey Park, Chicago White Sox, guessing 16 Apr. 1997 — White Sox 9, Orioles 3; it snowed
3. Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati Reds (Defunct), guessing Sep. 1997; Pete Rose Jr. appeared in the game
4. Bank One Ballpark, Arizona Diamondbacks, Best guess: 17 May 1998, Diamondbacks 8, Pirates 2
5. Olympic Stadium, Montreal (Defunct), 12 June 1999 — Devil Rays 5, Expos 3
6. Miller Park, Milwaukee Brewers, 8 Apr. 2001 — Brewers 8, Reds 4
7. Wrigley Field, Chicago Cubs, guessing spring 2001 — rain-delayed game
8. Great American Ball Park, Cincinnati Reds, 11 May 2003 — Reds 7, Brewers 5
9. Coors Field, Colorado Rockies, 23 May 2003 — Rockies 10, Giants 7
10. (Old) Busch Stadium, St. Louis Cardinals (Defunct), 1 Jul. 2005 — Cardinals 6, Rockies 0
11. Tropicana Field, Tampa Bay Devil Rays (Shithole), 13 Sep. 2005 — Yankees 17, Devil Rays 3
12. Ameriquest Field, Texas Rangers, 3 Jul. 2006 — Rangers 6, Blue Jays 1
13. (New) Busch Stadium, St. Louis Cardinals, 29 Sep 2006 — Cardinals 10, Brewers 5
14. AT&T Park, San Francisco Giants, 6 May 2007 — Phillies 8, Giants 5
15. McAfee Coliseum, Oakland A’s, 11 May 2007 — A’s 8, Indians 2
16. Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia Phillies, 17 May 2007 — Brewers 3, Phillies 2
17. Kaufman Stadium, Kansas City Royals, 26 Apr. 2008 — Royals 2, Blue Jays 1
18. Fenway Park, Boston Red Sox, 20 Jun. 2008 — Cardinals 5, Red Sox 4
19. Yankees Stadium, New York (Bronx) Yankees, 22 Jun. 2008 — Yankees 4, Reds 1
20. Shea Stadium, New York (Flushing) Mets, 23 Jun. 2008 — Mariners 5, Mets 2 (AL Pitcher Grand Slam game)
21. Turner Field, Atlanta Braves, 25 Jun. 2010 — Braves 3, Tigers 1
22. Minute Maid Park, Houston Astros, 31 Jul. 2010 — Astros 6, Brewers 0
23. Safeco Field, Seattle Mariners, 15 Jul. 2011 — Rangers 4, Mariners 0
24. Nationals Park, Washington Nationals, 20 Aug. 2011 — Phillies 5, Nationals 0
25. Citi Field, New York Mets, 21 Aug. 2011 — Brewers 6, Mets 2
26. Angels Stadium, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Thu., 19 Apr. 2012 — A’s 4, Angels 2
27. Petco Park, San Diego Padres, Fri., 20 Apr. 2012 — Phillies 4, Padres 1
28. Dodgers Stadium, Los Angeles Dodgers, Wed., 24 Apr. 2012 — Braves 4, Dodgers 2
29. Progressive Field, Cleveland Indians, Sat., 5 May 2012 — Rangers 5, Indians 2

NHL: (7 venues in 7 cities, 7 home teams, 23% complete)

1. The Arena, Carolina Hurricanes, 18 Dec. 1999 — Hurricanes 4, Thrashers 2
2. Fleet Center, Boston Bruins, 2 Nov. 2000 — Bruins 5, Blackhawks 4
3. United Center, Chicago Blackhawks, 25 Feb. 2001 — Blackhawks 6, Maple Leafs 4
4. Gaylord Entertainment Center, Nashville Predators, 4 Feb. 2006 — Predators 6, Blackhawks 0
5. Air Canada Centre, Toronto Maple Leafs, 2 Jan. 2006 — Maple Leafs 3, Penguins 2 (OT) — Sydney Crosby’s Canadian Debut
6. HP Pavilion, San Jose Sharks, 8 May 2007 — Red Wings 2, Sharks 0 (Playoff game)
7. Rogers Arena, Vancouver Canucks, 26 Feb 2011 — Bruins 3, Canucks 1

NFL: (7 venues in 6 cities, 5 home teams)

1. Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans Saints (Pre-season), Sat., 20 Aug. 1994 — Packers 13, Saints 10
2. Milwaukee County Stadium, Green Bay Packers (Defunct), 11 Sep. 1994 — Dolphins 24, Packers 14
3. Tampa Stadium, Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Defunct), 10 Dec. 1995 — Buccaneers 13, Packers 10 (OT)
4. Lambeau Field, Green Bay Packers, Mon, 9 Sep. 1996 — Packers 39, Eagles 13
5. Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati Bengals (Defunct), 20 Sep. 1998 — Packers 13, Bengals 6
6. Paul Brown Stadium, Cincinnati Bengals (Pre-season), Sat., 24 Aug. 2002 — Saints 31, Bengals 23
7. Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City Chiefs, 14 Dec. 2008 — Chargers 22, Chiefs 21

NBA: (2 venues in 2 cities, 2 home teams, 7% complete)

1. Bradley Center, Milwaukee Bucks — Guessing 1993; they played the Lakers when Vlade Divac was there
2. Fedex Forum, Memphis Grizzlies, 11 Feb. 2011 — Grizzlies 89, Bucks 86

IHL/AHL: (2 venues in 2 cities)

1. Bradley Center, Milwaukee Admirals
2. Riverfront Coliseum, Cincinnati Cyclones, 31 Dec. 1999 — Admirals 3, Cyclones 2 (SO)

Pacific Coast League (AAA): (1 venue)

1. Autozone Park, Memphis Redbirds

International League (AAA): (1 venue)

1. McCoy Stadium, Pawtucket Red Sox, Fri., 11 May 2012 — PawSox 5, Clippers 1

Southern League (AA): (4 venues in 4 cities)

1. Joe Davis Stadium, Huntsville Stars, 19 Jul. 2008 — Stars 4, Smokies 2
2. Pringles Park, West Tenn Diamond Jaxx (Southern League North Division playoffs), 3 Sep. 2008 — Mudcats 7, Diamond Jaxx 1
3. Trustmark Park, Mississippi Braves, 24 Jun. 2010 — Braves 2, Bay Bears 1
4. AT&T Field, Chattanooga Lookouts, 26 Jun. 2010 — Lookouts 4, Barons 2

NCAAF Div 1: (1 venue, 0 home teams)

1. Liberty Bowl, 31 Dec. 2003, Utah 17, Southern Miss 0; 31 Dec. 2004, Louisville 44, Boise State 40

NCAAF Div 3: (1 venue, 1 home team)

1. Van Male Field, Carroll Pioneers

Champ Car World Series (defunct, 2 tracks)

1. Molson Indy Vancouver, Vancouver, BC, 26 Jul. 2003 (qualifying only)
2. Gran Premio Tecate, Mexico City, Mexico, 11 Nov. 2007 — Bourdais, Power, Servia

American Le Mans Series (1 track)

1. Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, 10 June 2001, Conagra US Road Racing Classic

IZOD IndyCar Series (1 track)

1. Kansas Motor Speedway, 27 Apr 2008

Previous Updates:

1. 20 May 2007: Add Philadelphia Phillies
2. 27 April 2008: Add Kansas City Royals
3. 25 June 2008: Add Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and New York Mets
4. 23 July 2008: Add Huntsville Stars (AA)
5. 2 Sep 2008: Add West Tenn Diamond Jaxx (AA)
6. 16 Dec 2008: Add KC Chiefs (NFL), and add dates and scores
7. 31 Jul 2009: Added some more dates and scores
8. 25 June 2010: Add Trustmark Park (Jackson, MS AA)
9. 27 June 2010: Add Turner Field, AT&T Field (Chattanooga AA)
10. 2 August 2010: Add Minute Maid Park
11. 20 June 2011: Add Rogers Arena, Fedex Forum; added scores & dates
12. 21 June 2011: Linked box scores for MLB games (Thank you baseball-reference.com!); added Kansas Motor Speedway
13. 6 July 2011: Corrected score for 1996 Packers-Eagles game, thanks to commenter W. Block, and added link to box score.
14. 1 August 2011: Added Safeco Field (Mariners)
15. 22 August 2011: Added Nationals Park (Nationals), Citi Field (Mets)

But you can kind of see the logic behind it. Such people are a drain on society. They could be dangerous. They’ll transmit their drug-using, welfare-depending, no-home-owning ways to the next generation. We need to stop that.

The problem, of course, is that this is just a rationalization for . . . sterilizing people who are black, Hispanic, and poor. Given the pitifully meager and ill-spirited pittance we actually provide for programs aimed at poor, homeless, or drug-addicted people, and the lengths we go to to keep them out of our neighborhoods and public facilities, providing a Final Solution to the problem they represent won’t actually change anything for the rest of us. The program can’t be justified by the benefits it supposedly provides. But the problem is not the tactics, just the focus.

We ought to be pushing birth control for the true parasite class, the ones who actually do take up vast amounts of public resources, drag down the economy, and destroy standards of living for decent and productive citizens. We need a “Project Prevention” for the over-breeding scum who have drained our paychecks and our dignity as a society generation after generation. It’s time.

Sterilize the Rich

Break the Cycle!

We could have a better America in just one generation.

Think about it.

Nobody except conservatives since the dawn of time. Secondary boycotts – boycotting the supporters or enablers of those who are the primary source of some disapproved act – have been ubiquitous on the right wing. Eight years ago (aaaaggh!) I wrote about the insatiable penchant of wingnuts for boycotts on ideological grounds – follow the link and you’ll see that most of those listed are secondary boycotts, aimed not whoever did whatever it is they hate so much, but those who advertise with them, employ them, or even allow them into their places of business. It’s a much older story than that; threats of boycotts have routinely been used against those who in any way do business with abortion providers, including those who provide their cleaning services, pick up their trash, or even do construction to build the clinics. Secondary boycotts are a specific tactic recommended in the anti-abortion harassment manual Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, which has been in circulation for 20 years. Then there was the threatened boycott of CBS by the entire Republican Congressional caucus when Dan Rather included a forged document in his otherwise accurate reporting on George Bush’s military desertion, specifically to force that private business to fire one specific employee they had targeted (Rather). One might include the orchestrated, nationwide assault on Planned Parenthood, supposedly to prevent funding of abortion services from funding sources that don’t pay for abortions, but which have the (intended?) effect of destroying healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of women. Or the time during the GW Bush administration that the RNC informed all the K Street lobbying firms in Washington that they would have no access to Congress or the White House if they employed any former Democratic staff as lobbyists.

It’s certainly true that secondary boycotts can be pernicious, and in some ways unfair. (Though why you are supposed to overlook the fact that a given entity actively supports people or practices you abhor is not clear.) I have blogged several different times about how destructive they can be – in each case in defense of right-wingers, even the most repulsive wingers of all, against other right-wingers, because they’re the ones who constantly employ this tactic. (I’ll admit, too, that I’m somewhat ambivalent on the issue. As noted above, there is a reason to object to those who support those you object to. But at least my objection to Adler and the WSJ is not intended only to benefit one side of the political spectrum.)

But whatever you think about that, the articles linked at the top of the post are offensive in their stupidity, unfairness, and historical ignorance. The left never invented secondary boycotts. The tactic is in no way “new” (for one thing, it was the subject of Constitutional labor-law litigation close to 100 years ago). And most of all, it has been a constant, ceaseless, and far-reaching tactic of the right wing for decades. The Wall Street Journal only noticed when it finally affected their 1%-er lackeys ALEC, Limbaugh, and Beck. I defy anyone to find a WSJ editorial defending women’s health clinics against secondary boycotts to make their services unusable, or public universities against legislative assaults on their budgets for sponsoring liberal student groups, or even major corporations like Disney or McDonald’s for treating gays and transgendered persons with dignity.

In the same way that right-wing delusionality and projection constantly ascribes their own behavior to the left, suddenly the few, recent secondary boycotts that have been aimed at the most vicious and destructive figures on the right become a “new” and supremely abhorrent tactic – one that has been practiced with abandon for decades by the right wing without objection from the same sources.  Why should we care about them now, when they never cared about anyone else before?

UPDATE: Fixed typos.

UPDATE: Here’s a new one: harassing the neighbors of the in-laws of the landlord of an abortion clinic. That’s because stalking the landlord’s children at their elementary school didn’t work. What do we call this? A tertiary boycott? Quaternary? How long would you be willing to hold your breath waiting for the Wall Street Journal to show any sympathy?

He’s a typical mainstream journalist lifer, rotating between right-wing news outlets (US News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal) and center-left magazine-style venues (TNR, Slate). He managed to change sides on the Iraq war not once but twice, and recently won the Hillman Prize for advocacy journalism for his magazine series (and now book) on income inequality in the US. He’s everywhere on the commentary and opinion blogs. And he writes an opinion column for TNR in which he attempts to be profound. It’s the latter that catches my attention right now.

When have you ever thought to yourself, about any important issue, “Well, as Timothy Noah says . . .”? Apparently Timothy Noah thinks that to himself with some regularity, and it bugs me. Particularly, it bugs me not simply because he writes drivel but because he’s getting paid to write that drivel and I’m not. I mean, we’re used to the gratingly stupid shit that comes up on the wingnut welfare circuit – National Review, World Nut Daily, CNS News, Regnery, and their “think” tank sponsors – but if lefties (more or less) are getting paid to write obvious inanities, hell, I can do that.

Here’s Noah on three burning issues of the day:

Clinton on Caro on Johnson

“I think it’s pretty clear that [in his review of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ] Clinton is not addressing these remarks to you, or me, or Caro, or Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, or Times executive editor Jill Abramson, or any other Times reader save one (though the rest of us are welcome to listen in). He’s addressing them to the 44th president of the United States.”

Upper-Class Internships

“Opportunity should not be bought and sold, even (perhaps especially) to benefit causes that purport to be charitable.”

The Hunger Games

“I’ve been struggling to understand why it is that I found The Hunger Games, which I saw last week with my teenage daughter, morally repugnant.” [Seriously, Tim? This required a lot of thought for you?] “Nowhere in the film is it suggested that if 12 moral individuals were told to kill one another for no reason other than to amuse the masses, then the only choice consistent with any notion of ethics that I’m familiar with would be to refuse and be executed.”

This ceaseless stream of platitudinous superficialities gets you a paycheck from The New Republic (as Chloe Sevigny kept repeating every five minutes in the movie Shattered Glass, “the inflight magazine of Air Force One!”). Apparently all that is required is an marginal ability to read, and no ability to understand anything.

The Clinton review is obviously political exhortation. Do you think Bill Clinton sits around doing literary criticism just for the hell of it? When he writes “power ultimately reveals character. For L.B.J., becoming president freed him to embrace parts of his past that, for political or other reasons, had remained under wraps”, he couldn’t be clearer what he’s talking about. And since there’s only one person in the entire world who is in a position to use the lessons from a Democratic president’s efforts to pass landmark progressive legislation, it’s not like identifying this person requires some kind of blinding insight. The suggestion that LBJ was a master interpersonal politician, and that Clinton emulates him and Obama does not, is hardly any more original. Noah offers absolutely nothing to this discussion. He’s like that annoying guy in the movie theater who insists on saying what’s happening on the screen, because he thinks you won’t understand it if he doesn’t explain. Shut up, Noah – you’re in the way.

On the fact that unpaid internships at powerful and prestigious institutions are actually being auctioned off – that’s right, it’s gone beyond rich kids working for free to get access and privilege; they’re now paying to work for free so they can get access and privilege – Noah’s only observation is that this undermines “meritocracy”. (That he uses that word, and apparently believes in what it means, ought to be proof enough of his establishment hack status.) The unfairness of the “internship” game in itself, or the nexus of class and political power or business opportunity, get no recognition in his two-paragraph piece. The fact that such institutions care so little about “merit” that they’re willing to guarantee positions without knowing who will buy them apparently implies nothing to Noah. Nothing about this situation moves him to criticize, or analyze, or even seemingly notice, the bankrupt system it feeds and arises from; he just thinks it’s bad to actually sell access outright – why restricting access only to those who can afford to pay to work for free is worse than giving access away only to those who can afford to work for free is an exercise for a much subtler thinker.

It’s the Hunger Games bushwa that really prompted this. Noah states outright that – while sitting next to his teenage daughter – he couldn’t figure out what bothered him about a film featuring teenage girls (and boys) being hunted and killed for sport. After putting a lot of thought into it, and consulting better writers, he finally comes up with this thin gruel: because the audience empathizes with the kids, but also enjoys the movie, “The Hunger Games wants to have it both ways”. See, the film fails to have a strong message. Well, honestly, since I haven’t seen the film I don’t know if that’s true or not, but neither does Timothy Noah. For one thing, he seems to think the film’s message is something about the draft. (“Perhaps there’s an intended parallel with the forced recruitment of child soldiers, or, more provocatively, with any government’s drafting of young adults . . . . But the first is an obscene form of savagery . . . . And the second has been necessary in the past” . . . what was that about trying to have it both ways, Tim?) From the reviews I’ve read of the books and the film, it seems obvious to me that the film is about power politics, not combat taken literally. A ruling class lives in luxurious self-indulgence while exacting tribute from a much larger population enslaved in a desperate struggle for subsistence, occasionally dragging some of them off for reality-TV blood sports: sound familiar at all? Taking the plot literally, focusing only on the violence, misses the actual conflict it portrays. For another, he works in an awkward reference to Rodin’s sculpture of the Burghers of Calais as his personal moral cry from the heart, appealing to the author and producers to throw in some refusal-to-participate-in-evil as a moral touchstone. Except that Burghers of Calais isn’t about the refusal to participate in evil; the Burghers sacrificed themselves, but they were never asked to do anything bad, so the choice being made there is completely different. Noah understands Rodin just as well as he understands this movie, which is to say not at all. Which, again, raises the question whether, in thinking that the problem with a movie about forcing teenagers to hunt on another to their deaths for the amusement of the upper class is that it might be too much fun to watch, Noah has put his finger precisely on the crux of the matter. I’m tempted to think it’s the hunting-each-other-to-the-death thing, and the upper-class-kills-lower-class-for-fun thing. Either way, though, it’s obvious that Noah has a painfully literal comprehension of everything he sees on the screen, and we have to believe either that this movie is really that dumb, or he’s not really seeing all there is to it.

That last point is pretty much what we have to believe about everything he writes. In just the last week he’s produced three short pieces in which he persists in saying that everything he sees really is just what it looks like. Sometimes he’s right (yes, Clinton was throwing a hint to Obama!); sometimes he’s wrong (no, The Hunger Games really isn’t just about the military draft). But when he’s right he has nothing to add (if it’s what it looks like, we can just look at it; nobody in the world needed Noah to point out the Obama parallel in Clinton’s book review), and when he’s wrong . . . sheesh.

But I don’t really mind. I just want The New Republic to know that, if it’s blindingly obvious literalism and a complete lack of critical insight they want, well, I’ll do my best.

I’m not saying that happened to anyone I know. I’m just saying that, if it had happened, it would have been awkward.

The right wing seems to think these parallels are especially embarrassing to Obama. Their theory seems to be that this negates the charges against Romney while leaving the Obama team with egg on its face. I’m not sure they really understand what game they’re playing.

First of all, the parallels aren’t really in Romney’s favor. Eating dog is accepted behavior in some societies, including the one Obama was living in at the time, and anyway he was a kid. Making your family pet do a 300-mile wingwalker act while ignoring the fact that it’s shitting itself in fear is not accepted American behavior, and Romney made a considered decision to do this as an adult and pet owner. And of course we treat pets differently from the way we treat food animals; I’m sure Romney eats cows, but it would be odd if he tied one to his car, and it’s odd that he doesn’t understand that. The polygamy thing is another case in point: it’s legal in Muslim societies, and was made explicitly illegal in America. Maybe that’s good, or maybe it’s bad, but the comparison only points out the fact that Obama’s dad was a product of a foreign culture which Obama has repudiated, while Romney’s family deliberately broke with their own religion on the major doctrinal point that made that religion a part of the American mainstream, and left America in order to evade US law and pursue a fringe branch of a minority religion that continued to embrace a practice that was abhorrent to Americans. (In his defense, Romney’s father rejected that line and came back to the US, and Romney himself has always been a “mainstream” Mormon. So Romney and Obama can both claim that they themselves were not involved in their forebears’ practices.) In both cases, Romney himself, or his family, deliberately undertook a practice that makes Americans queasy (in one instance fleeing the country to do so), while Obama was simply exposed in his youth to practices that were not out of the mainstream for their culture, and which he has never continued as an adult.

But the real question is not whose cultural ancestry or pet-keeping practices are weirder. The question is what role does this play in the campaign, or, for those of you with consciences, what role should it?

The obvious implication is that these historical anecdotes are embarrassing to the extent that they reveal bad behavior: that whoever’s polygamist past is worst is thereby at a disadvantage. Thus, the political role of these stories is to serve as “dirt” on their respective subjects, and the purpose of raising them in the campaign is to dirty the reputation of the opposing candidate. That’s how the right wing is playing this: “maybe Romney makes his dog ride coach, but at least he didn’t eat it!” But that’s not how this really works.

First of all, few voters are going to change their minds about either candidate after hearing these stories. To the extent that they do, the dynamic works against Romney because people have been hearing “scary Muslim” stories about Obama for 5 years now and still don’t care. But more importantly, these kinds of stories can only work on the kind of people on whom these kinds of stories work. That is, the “Obama the scary Muslim” stories work on people who are bigoted against Muslims, while “Romney the weirdo Mormon” stories work on people who are bigoted against Mormons (or just leery of Romney because they think he’s different from them). The thing is, these people all come from the same part of the political spectrum.

The people who hate Muslims are the same kind of people, and mostly the same people, who hate Mormons. None of those people are voting for Obama anyway. The anti-Muslim bigots would vote for Romney, until they remember that he’s Mormon and find themselves caught in a bind between two forms of their own bigotry. Which is the whole point: reminding people that Romney is Mormon doesn’t affect Obama voters or swing voters; it affects GOP voters (mostly evangelicals) who can’t swallow a Mormon even if he’s also a right-winger from their own party. (And reminding people that Obama is a Muslim also doesn’t affect Obama voters, because they’re not bigots and he’s not a Muslim anyway.) So the longer these kinds of clashes go on, the more it antagonizes the GOP base and leaves the Democratic base chortling with schadenfreude. The purpose of the cultural anecdotes is not to prove that one candidate or another has bad character; it’s simply to remind people – meaning GOP base bigots – that Romney’s a weirdo Mormon, to allow them to make their own decisions whether or not to take that into account (knowing that they will, because they’re Republican bigots and that’s what they do).

So the next question is: is that any way for a mature and responsible political party to behave? We can grant that that’s kind of a counterfactual in the American case, and we can even grant that it would be preferable not to have political elections determined by such concerns. But still . . . I’d argue that the answer is “yes”. Given the dynamics that drive the parties, this kind of wink-and-nod shit-stirring is not only appropriate but arguably contributes to a better and more mature campaign environment.

Figure it this way: the Republican party not only thrives on, not only promotes and manipulates, but exists largely for and because of racial and religious resentments that they deliberately stoke and take advantage of. Some of those resentments are anti-Mormon. Now they’re stuck with a Mormon candidate – a really, really Mormon candidate who explicitly rejects the separation of church and state. The religious bigotry that the GOP openly courts and deliberately escalates now comes full circle into their own base – the evangelical resentment and paranoia they’ve been pandering to for decades includes as its target the formerly negligible group from which they have now chosen their own presidential candidate. Every reminder of Mitt’s Mormonic tendencies inflames the rejectionist inclination of the religious right that makes up a significant fraction of the GOP base. But the delicious thing about this is that it’s a problem entirely of their own making.

This issue could have been avoided completely if the GOP had not embraced bigotry and religious extremism. If they didn’t have religious bigots in their base, noting the religious beliefs of their candidate wouldn’t have an effect on the electoral race. And it still wouldn’t if they simply repudiated religious bigotry now. But repudiating religious bigotry, and their bigot base, would mean sacrificing about half of their own voters, almost all of their elected officials, and the party’s stance on almost everything from birth control to abortion to women’s rights to defense, the budget, and even the environment. So they’re not going to do that.  They’re going to take their lumps in the presidential race, however bad it gets, but be very careful not to confront or criticize the elements of their own base who are threatening their own candidate with criticism or simply by staying home on election day – because the GOP fully intends to keep milking religious bigotry for every possible cause for the foreseeable future. (Of course, they’re never nominating a Mormon again.) But this situation does at least highlight the degree to which religious extremism has been built into GOP DNA.

I expect (though I wish I could be surer) that Romney will lose the election, and I’m certain that whatever happens he will come out with significantly lower evangelical support than otherwise expected. To the extent to which the Democrats can encourage evangelicals to vote their own (twisted) religious consciences – which is to say reject their own candidate because he’s not a mainstream Christian – that’s good for the country, both by helping elect a better candidate and by raising the price to the GOP of their own divisiveness and bigotry. Is this itself a form of pandering to bigotry? Well, it’s allowing the religious right to pander to its own bigotry. Again, they could completely avoid the cost to their own political party of acting out of bigotry by simply not acting out of bigotry. Letting bad people hurt themselves has got to be preferable to letting them hurt innocent people, especially when they can easily avoid hurting themselves just by changing their own ways.

The other thing to note is that, unlike most of the stuff about Obama, all the stuff about Romney is simply true. He has not been slandered, but he constantly complains that he has when people simply make factual statements about his religious identity (or other obvious truths: his wife, who spouts off her opinions about the problems of working women, has in fact never worked outside the home a day in her life; the Obamacare plan is in fact modeled directly on Romney’s own healthcare plan for Massachusetts). Romney’s a Mormon. Mormon, Mormon, Mormon. It’s true. The only people who care are evangelicals who are convinced Mormons are going to hell, and can’t bring themselves to vote for one – all of whom happen to be GOP voters, and in some cases party officials. They’ve got a Mormon candidate. A Mormon, Mormon, Mormon. They’ve got to decide whether their political desires will override their religious prejudices – a problem that wouldn’t exist at all if they simply weren’t prejudiced. But they are. And their candidate’s a Mormon, Mormon, Mormony, Mormon. Whether this conflict convinces some of them to be more open-minded, or convinces a lot of them to let their candidate lose to indulge their personal prejudices, that’s a win for America.

Mormon, Mormon, Mormon.

Now, the obvious implications notwithstanding, I don’t really suspect Ted Nugent actually has the gumption to do anything violent in memoriam of the broken dreams of Mitt Romney, or that he literally means people should re-enact Braveheart by cutting people’s heads off with swords, or that his identification as a black Jew at a Nazi/Klan rally is the product of any deeply considered political analysis. He just likes the way he sounds, saying these things. But you have to admit it sounds pretty crazed, and is unlikely to sound any better even if it were made comprehensible.

The Huffington Post summed up the situation with this masterpiece of non-sequitur:

The Secret Service is reportedly investigating Nugent in the wake of his Saturday tirade at the NRA convention in St. Louis. Nugent’s hits include the 1977 classic “Cat Scratch Fever.” He has endorsed Mitt Romney for president.

Yes, all worrisome facts, to be sure, but it’s the “investigated for assassination threats” thing that gets my attention. Did I mention that Ted Nugent has been a member of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association for almost 20 years? He’s well-known for his unhinged pro-gun rantings, and for stunts like brandishing assault weapons on-stage at his concerts while insulting Obama and Hillary Clinton and screaming “suck on my machine gun!”. This apparently is accepted behavior at the highest levels of the NRA. It’s certainly popular with the membership. (One source notes that in some elections he received the second-highest vote total of all Board membership candidates.) The remarks above, about beheading “criminals”, were made at the NRA’s national convention this week, speaking in his capacity as an elected official of the organization.

The list of NRA Board members is long and filled with truly frightening levels of insanity. Nugent stands out, though. He has been talking openly for years about violence in the context of how much he hates Democratic politicians.  Now he’s making unmistakable veiled threats, or not even threats but clear, if indirect, statements of his own intention to commit violence, and exhortations of others to do the same, against specifically named high officials of the government. Proving that there is at least some final limit to the doctrine of IOKIYAR, somebody finally took notice, and now he’s “meeting with” the Secret Service.

Let’s dwell on that a bit: a long-standing elected member of the Board of Directors of the NRA, and one of their most vocal spokespeople, is being questioned by the Secret Service for implied threats of criminal violence, and open advocacy of murder, directed at the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and unnamed members of the Congress of the United States, issued at an NRA function. The Republican presidential candidate he explicitly endorsed in the course of making those threats refuses to repudiate him. The NRA itself has issued no statement, and certainly taken no action, regarding the fact that one of their Board members is – however implausibly – issuing threats of political assassination and is now under investigation as a threat to the President of the United States. This is OK at the NRA. This is how they are content to conduct their political business, and to be represented by their own officials at their own functions.

Is it imaginable that a governing-board member of any other major political organization could even be suspected of being a potential political assassin? Or that that body would accept that suspicious behavior in its own most visible operations, and take no action to distance themselves from those statements and the person who made them? If one of the board members of the AMA went crazy, began ranting about “socialized medicine” (not in fact unprecedented behavior at the AMA), and then advocated cutting people’s heads off and implied that the highest elected officials and Cabinet members of the administration should be shot like animals, is it likely that the AMA would endorse that as the kind of image they want to present? Would Major League Baseball – about as shameless an organization as you can find – openly hint at assassinating the President? Hell, oil companies don’t even do that. How would the US Chamber of Commerce – whose members no doubt secretly fantasize about exactly the same thing – react if one of them were hauled in by the Secret Service for screaming – at a gun show - that they were going to go on an illegal violent rampage against the election of Barack Obama?

When you think about their behavior in comparison with that of even reasonably normal human beings, you begin to see just how crazy and extremist the NRA is. They have a suspected assassin on their Board of Directors, and don’t care! Of course Nugent’s not really going to shoot Obama. (It’s not impossible some of his addle-headed fans will go over the line, and then of course he’ll declaim all responsibility, but personally he’s probably not a threat.) He’s probably not going to face charges. But he’s enough of a blowhard that he has to be taken seriously as a threat by the people whose job it is to take insane violent people seriously. No normal person gets that far, whether or not they go on to shoot anybody. No normal person makes veiled threats of violence as an expression of political belief. Nugent does it routinely, and has been doing for years. (And so do many others on the right wing. It’s a staple of conservative political rhetoric.) The NRA openly tolerates it, gives him an official platform for it, and refuses to do anything about it. They are an organization that is perfectly content to operate in that role – a role that would be not just unusual but unimaginable for any responsible interest group. That is who the NRA is, and that is the state of the pro-gun faction in the US.

Thanks to my penchant for blindly signing up for anything I’m asked to, I somehow got on a mailing list for one of those marketing companies that arranges test screenings of new movies. At too-frequent intervals, I get invitations to appear at a local theater for a special pre-release VIP screening of some movie I’ve never heard of, the name of which is usually buried three levels deep in the signup form. These are the screenings you sometimes see at theaters, where you’re just trying to get to your movie and the entire lobby is filled with a line of kids snaking out the door to the sidewalk, being yelled at by a bunch of young people wearing matching polo shirts and holding clipboards, milling around like obedient sheep who have obviously already gotten used to a long wait.

But seriously – other than teenagers who are easily excited and can’t afford regular tickets, who does this? I’m supposed to go through some complicated signup procedure for this totally random movie, turn up at a specified hour at the theater and stand in line for up to another hour taking instructions from ex-cheerleaders, being dutifully careful not to have anything with me that takes pictures or records audio (like, say, every cellphone, iPad, and laptop computer in existence) so as not to possibly infringe on the precious intellectual property rights of the producers of “Jackass IV Redux: 3D!”, and then wait to find out if I will actually be allowed to see the movie since the theater is overbooked and simply having an invitation only gives me the right to stand in line, not actually see the film. If I’m lucky, I do get to go into the theater to see a test version of a movie that’s still in post-production, and then spend another half hour filling out response cards and surveys for the benefit of the producers (I’m working for them, now). And all this for a movie which I don’t actually know I would want to see even if it were finished yet.

I keep getting these invites but I’ve never once attempted to take advantage of (or, let myself be taken advantage of by) one. I need to see about getting off some mailing lists.

I don’t have anything important to say. This story caught my eye today, though, and I felt moved to comment.

It seems that gut-wrenchingly sappy hack Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Light™”, died last week. Nobody noticed, because nobody cared. But the stories that have been rounded up on him are startling, even granting that you knew how schlocky he was to begin with.

For those who have been living in the bliss of undeserved safety, let me explain that Kinkade was a painter – with real technical skill – who specialized in doing kitschy garden scenes, often featuring cottages and winding paths with cute little bridges, marked by improbable amounts of yellowish-white light streaming from every window or plausibly luminous or reflective surface. His cottages often looked as if they were on fire. They were invariably surrounded by flowering bushes and sprays of water that appeared to be fluorescent. Most have a kind of 19th-century air to them (though, weirdly, he also did a NASCAR series – and you haven’t seen NASCAR until you’ve seen NASCAR as interpreted by Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Light™”). He traded in an openly manipulative sentiment, selling old-fashioned fantasies to old-fashioned people, often with an explicitly conservative Christian message attached (and I mean attached: you could buy reproductions of his paintings with Bible verses on little plaques screwed onto them). He became insanely popular with evangelical Christians, and did over a hundred million dollars of business a year; he is often said to have sold over 10 million of his crap-awful “art products” (see below), and it is estimated that 5% – 10% of all homes in America have at least one of his “products”, though that may be an overestimate because most people know better and those that don’t tend to buy multiple copies.

Aside from just having unforgivably sleazy taste and goals as an artist, though, he plumbed the depths of schlock in truly original ways. Obviously, nobody can sell 10 million paintings. You can sell 10 million prints, but then it’s hard to call each of them an “original”. What Kinkade did was create prints of his horrid paintings and then have hired workers – “master highlighters” – daub white paint on them in a few spots each to increase the eyeball-searing light effects and allow him to sell them as “hand-painted”. He also created his own franchised chain of (for want of a better term) art galleries selling only his stuff, and marketed an increasing range of knockoff “art products”, featuring reproductions of his paintings on coffee mugs, glow-in-the-dark nightlights, posters, and in a huge range of differing frames, print sizes, textures, and reproduction media. Eventually he started selling his endorsement for traditional-styled furniture, Christian-themed straight-to-DVD movies, and a line of ghostwritten Christian-style romance novels set in quaint little villages filled with cottages and rose gardens, which get uniformly awful reviews. He even endorsed at least two “planned communities” (tract developments) that supposedly reflect the architectural themes in his paintings and are marketed using his name.

But all was not well in fake-nostalgic treacly kitsch paradise. For reasons not explained, his marketing machine went bankrupt not long ago, and he wound up in bitter legal disputes with his distribution chain, in which – shockingly – he was charged with fraudulently playing on his victims’ collectors’ Christian sentiments to get them to buy his crap. Hard to believe, I know. Eventually, it led to this:

Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of “natural causes.” This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman’s breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, “This one’s for you, Walt!”

Kinkade’s explanation: “there may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don’t recall”. OK then.

This set of articles at Salon is just staggering. Multiple DUIs, increasingly unhinged and schlocky marketing plans, disgruntled ex-employees, and, over it all, the pervasive evidence of just plain not giving a shit about anything except making money and promoting himself. (Yes, he gave himself the nickname “Painter of Light”, and then trademarked it.) Two of the articles at that link review one of the planned communities marketed under his name (“Hiddenbrooke flacks describe the community as being merely ‘inspired’ by Kinkade. Says Fran Leach, marketing director for Taylor Woodrow: ‘We couldn’t build a Thomas Kinkade home because it’d be priced prohibitively’” – the prices are $400,000 and up, and the homes completely lack trees or landscaping), and the first of a series of novels he claims to have “co-authored” (nobody believes this) that seem to have been intended as a writing cue for angry reviewers (from Amazon: “the plot sags under a surfeit of trite, blatantly proselytizing Christian subplots and syrupy sentimentality”).

It’s in no way surprising that sleazy manipulative right-wing Christians turn out to be tasteless, self-aggrandizing frauds, or criminal hypocrites. But Kinkade’s an interesting case. His real crime – aside from whatever financial complications he got into, which aren’t very clear – was simply a total lack of serious intent in anything he did. One-time Lean Left antagonist Joe Carter wrote this interesting piece about Kinkade a couple of years ago, noting that he was not only a competent painter but had shown signs of real artistry early in his career, and then slid into superficial commercialism. Quotes from Kinkade himself made it clear he was only trying to give his audience what it wanted, meaning what would sell. Toward the end it just didn’t matter: movies that nobody would watch, books he didn’t write, and a second planned community (apparently now defunct) whose developer announced its “homes will be reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade’s charming cottages” – the homes were seated in one of the most expensive gated communities in America, and ran from 6,000 to 11,000 square feet at prices up to $8 million. Since nothing about Kinkade’s sterile fantasy world was real to begin with, it just didn’t matter whether his “art products” were fake knockoffs of his own work, or he really wrote his own books, or the “Kinkade community” homes he kept flogging looked anything like the houses they were supposedly based on. Kinkade sold fakery – sentimental fantasy scenes that were as unreal as the saccharine white America of 1950s sit-coms; by the end it was as if he were in a competition with himself to see just how far from reality his fakery could get, but since it never touched reality to begin with he could hardly be said to have degraded himself. (OK – pissing on Winnie the Pooh – that’s bad.)

It is often commented on that Kinkade’s paintings – especially the garden scenes, not the city crowd scenes – virtually never have human subjects in them. He explained that he felt having a particular subject would be distancing for people who didn’t feel that subject represented them (an interesting implication regarding how he expected people to react to his paintings), but many critics have found something symbolic in it, too. There is something anti-human about them – not just the absurd, almost Maxfield Parrish-like fantasy elements, but their incessant idealization of a particular type of English country village lifestyle completely devoid of any questions of class, economics, or time period. (Why do millions of American right-wing Protestants long to live in an unheated cottage in an 1890s Anglican parish during the destruction of the piecework system that put most of those cottagers out of their homes? Because they have absolutely no idea what any of that would mean, and never gave it a moment’s thought.) Kinkade’s non-existent cottages in n0n-existent villages are the equivalent of Tolkien’s hobbit Shire, and have the same kind of appeal to dreamy fantasists who are sure they would love to live there but have not the slightest idea what such a life would be like (backbreaking subsistence farming, and no electricity – oh, and being enslaved to evil by the Dark Lord); in this, they actually benefit from the fact that their fantasy can’t come true. Putting a real person in these other-worldly fantasy scenes would break the illusion (see the hilarious parody images from the Salon link above). It isn’t just that it would disorient the viewer – it would force the viewer to realize that Kinkade’s paintings not only aren’t from the 21st century, they aren’t from anywhere or any time at all.

And that finally sums up Kinkade’s depressing, in some ways sadly funny, career. Creepy Christian schlock-meister turns out to be a depraved drunk and fraud? Not news. But that the pandering fantasism of his fake-art empire should be so openly manipulative, and so unabashedly unreal, was unique. He sold an impossible vision of paper-thin superficiality, and was shallower even than his own paintings in the way he went about it. Then he started behaving like a drunken buffoon, and finally died suspiciously young. One has to wonder what his sycophantic fans will make of this. I imagine many of them – a number that reaches into the millions – will be shocked by this utterly unshocking story arc. But viewed from the long perspective, it’s obvious that he finally died as he lived – or as he chose to live from the point when he abandoned his once-authentic art career and became the only thing he ever aspired to, or cared to share with his legions of slack-jawed purchasers: Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Himself™.

Please excuse me while I do my I was right, neener-neener happy dance.

My shocked face!