Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

I like Fidel Castro and his beard

Well, actually, no, I don’t. But, what if I did? Would that disqualify me from working in a largely Cuban community?

That’s the crux of the issue in Miami today, where the Marlins suspended their manager Ozzie Guillen for positive comments he made about the aging former dictator. Guillen is reported to have said to Time magazine:

“I love Fidel Castro … I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last sixty years but that [expletive] is still there.”

The substance of the comment is comical — it fails to take into account Castro’s actual legacy (health care for all Cubans on the one hand and death sentences for opponents on the other) and treats Castro’s survival as though he were a gang banger on some urban backstreet.

Guillen has long since given up the right to be taken seriously. He’s been hot-headed and loose-lipped and often makes little sense when he makes incendiary pronouncements. But he has the right to support Castro if he wishes, regardless of whether he manages a team that plays its games in Little Havana. Has Guillen gone too far, as Dick Shoenfield says? It’s an absurd question. No further than any other time he’s opened his mouth.

But the obscene over-reaction to Guillen shows how strong the old anti-communism still is, even as the old communism has given way to a sort of market-socialism (neither free market nor socialist) in China. In a sane world, Guillen’s comment would have gotten little play. Guillen, as I said, is not exactly the second-coming of athletes like Muhammad Ali or even Carlos Delgado, intelligent athletes who made clear their political beliefs — and who also were the victims of sports’ McCarthyist streak.

Do the Marlins have the right to suspend him? If he was speaking as Marlins’ manager, as a representative of the team, then it’s the Marlins’ call, I guess, and certainly not the press corps’ — even if I think all of them should just let Ozzie speak his mind.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Mets may be better than we think

The Phillies are still the team to beat, regardless of the big moves made by their division mates, by the virtue of their big-three at the top of the rotation and Jonathan Paplebon at the back of the bullpen. But the team is going to struggle to score runs, at least until its two injured superstars come back. And those superstars – the unfortunately fragile Chase Utley (106 games missed over the last two years) and Ryan Howard – are both in their 30s. The rest of the team’s most important position players – Shane Victorino, Jimmy Rollins, Carlos Ruiz, Placido Polanco – are over 30, as well.

The team struggled at times last year to score and finished a mediocre seventh in runs scored and eighth in homeruns. It may have more difficulty this year. It won 102 games because of its pitching; the pitching remains the class of the league, but the margin for error for the team is much smaller than it has been for the last few years.

The Braves finished second a year ago and failed to make the playoffs after a horrible swoon in September. It is built on a mix of youth – Freddie Freeman and Jason Heyward, much of the rotation – and age – Tim Hudson and Chipper Jones – and is not nearly as good a club as many observers think.

First, the team’s best player, Jones, is at the end of his career and brittle. It’s best pitcher, Hudson, is proving to the same. It’s power-hitting second-baseman, Dan Uggla, is coming off a career high in homers, but a career low in nearly all other categories. Plus, he has no range and is a liability in the infield.

The Braves had the fourth lowest ERA in the league in 2011 – but that was built on a remarkable three months to open the season. The team fell to the middle of the pack in July and August and its pitching staff fell to near the bottom of the heap in September. So, what happened? Jair Jurrjens and Tommy Hansen pitched badly in August and then did not pitch in September. The Braves blew an 8.5-game lead in the wild card race and failed to make the playoffs.

It raises questions about the Atlanta pitching staff and the overall makeup of the team and leaves me wondering just how good a team the Braves are.

Washington has a young stud at the top of the rotation. A solid infield and a passable rotation. Jayson Werth cannot be as mediocre as he was last year, though he will never be worth the money the Nats tossed at him. If Michael Morse comes back healthy – and hits like he did after the all-star break last year and Brad Lidge can pitch like he did a few years ago, the Nats could challenge for the wild card.

The Marlins made the biggest splash of the off season. The question is whether the team around Jose Reyes is good enough to contend.

Reyes’ acquisition means that Hanley Ramirez, whose reputation has taken a huge hit, moves to third. This could be a good move for him long term – he never was a particularly good defensive shortstop – but his attitude was a major question mark, even before he was forced to move over. Plus, he’s coming off his worst big-league season, which in turn came off a rather non-descript 2010. Ramirez, therefore, has to be viewed as a question mark for now.

They have a couple of decent young power-hitting outfielders and Emilio Bonaficio gives them a speedy one-two punch at the top of the order. Add Heath Bell and Mark Buerhle to a pitching staff that includes the fragile but nearly unhittable Josh Johnson and you can see why the Marlins are favored to contend.

Contention, however, is going to depend upon a return to prominence by Ramirez, Johnson’s health and the continued growth of guys like Morrison, Stanton and Sanchez.

That leaves us with the Mets, who are off to a 3-0 start. What to say about them? New York is probably a better team than observers are anticipating, though they remain likely to finish last in the division.

The reason is the large number of question marks: How healthy is Johan Santana and can he reclaim his Cy Young form? Which Mike Pelfrey will we see? Can Jonathan Niese continue his growth? Is there enough talent in the veteran bullpen to get the team through the end of close games?

If the good Pelfrey shows up – the 15-game winner — and Niese shows consistent growth, the Mets rotation will go four deep. Dillon Gee could make it five and give the Mets as deep – if not as good — a rotation as any team in the division.

And I like the potential of the line-up with David Wright looking for a big year and the young sluggers Ike Davis and Lucas Dudas appearing ready to make their mark. The new shortstop, Ruben Tejada, has a big-league glove, but remains a question mark with the bat, while second-baseman Daniel Murphy has a big-league bat but a terrible glove. And Josh Thole is still young.

Left and center field are problems. Jason Bay is done. He may be a good guy and he’s had a solid career, but he has become a liability in the lineup. The new centerfielder Andres Torres is brittle and not very good when healthy. Recent call-up Kirk Nieuwenhuis could find himself playing an important role and maybe joining his fellow Mets farmhands (six in the regular lineup at the moment) in the mix.

Ultimately, the East is the Phillies to lose, but nothing is set in stone. My prediction right now is the Phillies will be followed, in order, by the Marlins, Nationals, Braves and Mets, though I wouldn’t count any team out at this point.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Source of confusion

In an otherwise informative — if overly deferential — piece on Iraq’s shadow over current intelligence community reviews of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, there is this seemingly balanced quotation:

“The intelligence analysts I’ve dealt with have always been willing to engage in debates on their conclusions, but there is top-down pressure to make the assessments come out a certain way,” said John R. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former ambassador to the United Nations in the Bush administration.

The quotation itself is not problematic, or not necessarily problematic. We’re it properly contextual iced, we would have a better understanding of what Bolton is saying here.

By describing Bolton only as the former ambassador to the U.N. and not as undersecretary of state at the time that the Bush administration was cooking the intelligence books on Iraq, we are left with an impression that Bolton is just a diplomat with concerns. He isn’t. He was a major player in pushing us into war and remains a hardened hawk. His comment should have been placed in this context so that we could better understand the backstory that motivates his criticism of “top-down pressure” — which is something he did not have issues with back in 2003.

Rockwell was right

In 1984, Rockwell — the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. — had a hit with the novelty song “Somebody’s Watching Me.” The song, about a sense of paranoia, peaked at no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and then was promptly, and deservedly, forgotten.

Rockwell, however, was on to something, and the song’s chorus tells us why:

I always feel like
Somebody’s watching me
And I have no privacy
I always feel like
Somebody’s watchin’ me
Tell me is it just a dream

Rockwell, it wasn’t a dream.

Today, we live with the specter of a federal government wiretapping our phones and encouraging our neighbors to spy on us. Our due process protections have been eviscerated in the name of an amorphous war on terror and the separation between domestic and foreign security has been all but removed.

And now, as The New York Times details this morning, police departments have gone a step farther, to a more pernicious invasion: the tracking of cell phones.

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

Some may view this as a necessary evil, arguing that you have nothing not worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong and that we need these aggressive measures to keep us safe. But that argument excuses a whole array you bad behavior one the part of law enforcement and other government agencies.

The notion of limited government is being debated in the courts right now, focused on the president’s health reform legislation and, particularly, its requirement that everyone purchase insurance. The mandate — of which I am not a fan — appears to me to be constitutional.

But expanded surveillance, which is happening because technological changes are outpacing the court’s ability or desire to control, is exactly the kind of abuse of police power that the Founders feared when they appended the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. For the first, fourth and fifth amendments to mean anything, they must extend to modern means of communication. The Founders knew nothing of cell phones and computers, GPS systems, credit cards, but they have become a central part of our lives. The requirement that law enforcement have probable cause needs to be enforced better in the digital realm if the liberties we hold dear remain alive.

It’s all political; it’s all poetry

Poetry’s scope is big enough to encompass all of human experience. And yet, too often, political poetry is cordoned off from the lyric.poetry as though it were a poor relation.

I remember reading Adrienne Rich’s “Power” in grad school. The poem — about the different kinds of power and the toll they take on body and soul in a patriarchal society — manages to be angry and political, even as it maintains the highest of artistic standards.

Adrienne Rich, who died Tuesday, understood that it is all of a piece. Whether she was writing poetry or essays, she ignored the arbitrary distinctions we too often make in art between the political and the personal.

As the Times points out:

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.