Rudegeair

And Romney bitched endlessly — endlessly — about the rules, and why this uppity fellow on the other stool was allowed to speak before he was spoken to, and why he didn’t get to speak at length on whatever he wanted to speak on because, after all, he is the CEO of the stage. Jesus Christ, I’d hate to play golf with the man. He’s the guy who counts to make sure you don’t have too many wedges in your bag. He knows every cheap subsection of every cheap ground rule, and he’ll call you on every one of them. You couldn’t get a free drop out of him with thumbscrews, and forget about conceding any putt outside two inches. And then, on the 18th hole, with all the money on the line, he kicks his ball out of the rough and denies up and down to the rules committee that he did it. Then he goes into the clubhouse bar and nobody sits with him.

Somehow it has all become about separation, the promising athlete culled from the pack as early as nine or 10, placed with his select peers on travel teams, enthroned on an ever-rising pedestal through high school, isolated from the student body in college, fattened on the myth of his onliness by well-meaning coaches, parents and fans, then pricked and prodded weekly for psychological advantage by those same coaches: THEY don’t think you’re good enough! They don’t respect you! Us against them, you against the world, the cult of self-anointing the athlete as its Ultra Self…. Is it any wonder in 2012 how many players, rather than join their teammates to hug and celebrate after catching a touchdown pass or nailing a game-winning three-pointer, strut away from them and glare? Showed you I’m special! Showed you I’m better than all of them (and even all of “us”)! Is it any wonder that from such soil, no such thing as a sportsman social activist has sprung since the days of Jim Brown, Bill Russell, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Bill Walton?

Tiger Woods took one step down that path, early in his career, in a Nike ad in which his words rolled on the screen—There are still courses in the United States I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin. I’ve heard I’m not ready for you. Are you ready for me?—and, in the wake of a backlash, stopped there. Labor activists who requested Michael Jordan’s support in their quest to improve sweatshop conditions and reduce child-labor abuse in the production of Air Jordans in Southeast Asia got none. “Moral jellyfish,” Dave Meggyesy, a linebacker and antiwar activist with the St. Louis Cardinals in the ’60s, labeled these athletes.

But scores of modern athletes, led by Woods and Jordan, create remarkable charity foundations, raise funds and donate millions. Taken one step further—watered with an investment of time and heart nearly equal to the money—a miracle such as Andre Agassi’s academy for at-risk children in Las Vegas has bloomed in the desert. But when it comes to social action that might step on toes, that might send a shiver down the spine of their publicists or their corporate sponsors, what have American athletes done? “The scared generation,” former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton calls them.

[Then-Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney] Martin ran into even tougher pressure from Lyndon B. Johnson, who tried to browbeat him into easing rates. One version of what occurred, according to Richard Fisher, the current head of the Dallas Fed, who has studied the history, is that “Lyndon took Martin to his ranch and asked the Secret Service to leave the room. And he physically beat him, he slammed him against the wall, and said, ‘Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam, and you won’t print the money I need.’ ” Martin ultimately caved. By the time he retired, in 1970, inflation was a worrisome 6 percent.

I liked rock, but I was always kind of a traditional kid,” [The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn] explains. “That’s what I really liked about Kerouac - he was doing this wild stuff but he played football. I always played tennis and followed sports pretty closely, always had rock’n’roll friends, and then kinda straight non-rock’n’roll friends.” As a teenager, he began to cultivate an ambiguous personal style that has since become a kind of trademark. “I always wanted to be confusing as to whether I was kinda punk or kinda square. I wanted to be the most respectable guy at the punk rock show or the most punk rock guy at the respectable kids’ party.

It is possible to think of the difference between George and Mitt Romney as a series of adaptive changes, in which the original moderate instincts have devolved so completely that Mitt’s response to a rising and angry conservatism resembles Nixon’s far more than his father’s. Perhaps Mitt noticed, following the 1968 campaign intently from Europe, that it was Nixon’s opportunism, his skill at exploiting fears of unsettling demographic change, that won. But it is also true that George Romney’s cherished institutions have lost their power, and the vision in which they would make a better society has collapsed. In Mitt’s politics, his father’s fervent progressivism has become instead an ideologically empty pragmatism that succumbs to whatever his audience wants to hear. What remains is the peculiar character of the current Republican nominee for president, an organization man without organizations.

Observe now the degeneration of a magazine that once published Henry James and Mark Twain into an elaborate loss leader-cum-demand creation mechanism for an event-planning operation whose chief selling point is the promise that you’ll never read about it in the media, where certified Thought Leaders risk the loss of their health insurance for saying anything less than ultracanned and überphony…

Of course The Atlantic is a turgid mouthpiece for the plutocracy, a repository of shallow, lazy spin, and regular host of discussion forums during which nothing is discussed. It is, in every formal trait, a CIA front.

If you listen to let’s say a measure of Rachmaninoff and then a measure of Bach, you know which is which without, you know immediately. And the question is well, why do you know that? They both are following basically the same rules of harmonic, of voice leading. But what happens is that you have in your, the course of your listening, you have taught yourself - you’ve recognized that Rachmaninoff will always solve a certain problem in a certain way. You may not say that to yourself, but your ear will tell you that. And that Bach will do it in his way. And you say, oh, that sounds like Bach or that sounds like Rachmaninoff or that sounds like Stravinsky. And what you’re hearing is let’s put it this way: You’re hearing the predilection of the composer to resolve a technical problem in a highly personal way.

When asked about [entering politics], [Anschutz Entertainment Group CEO Tim] Leiweke offered a cursory denial, but then began talking about how deeply involved he intends to be in the coming Presidential campaign. Last time, he said, he gave money to Barack Obama, but he believes that the President has engaged in class warfare. “Look, I personally came from nothing,” he said. “Someone making me look like a bad guy because I’m making money now? I resent that. I’m really upset about about the way he is positioning this now about protecting the rich. I was never rich in my life. I earned everything, built my life from the ground up, and never got one damn break in my life! I resent the fact that when my mom was sick, and my dad had to pay for her treatment, it took every dime from my dad and broke him as a human being and he was never the same. And then, after we have overcome that, now to make me look like I’m bad, I’m evil, I’m greedy, I don’t give. Terrible!” He went on, “I hugely admire Phil [Anschutz, the 39th richest man in America] for putting everything back in. This is a man that’s never pulled anything out of this campus. Double down, triple down, quadruple down. And then people take shots at him because, they say, ‘He’s a billionaire.’ He’s the most humble man I know.

Astana has been the capital of Kazakhstan only since 1997, three years after [Kazakh leader Nursultan] Nazarbayev told a stunned parliament that a prosperous, independent country like Kazakhstan ought to have its capital “in the center” of the country, rather than on the border. It seemed like a bad idea. Dubai had beaches; Brasilia, which the Brazilian government built by fiat in the nineteen-fifties, had a sunny, gentle climate. Almaty, the old capital, was pleasantly situated in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountain range, and was famous for its apple orchards. And Astana? It was six hundred miles to the north—that is to say, toward Russia—and bitterly cold. Kazakh nomads had grazed their flocks here, until they were annihilated by Stalin, after which the vast steppe turned into what one writer has bluntly called “Stalin’s dumping ground.” It was where he sent the “punished peoples”—the hundreds of thousands of Germans, Ingush, and Chechens deported en masse in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Was the parliament now a punished person? Stalin also sent hundreds of thousands of political prisoners to Kazakhstan. A few hours east of the proposed capital lay the town of Ekibastuz, where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served a term in a labor camp. The old name of the proposed capital was Akmola, “the white graveyard.” This is where Nazarbayev was suggesting that everyone move from Almaty, which means “father of apples.