E Wayne Ross

When baseball free agent Carlos Delgado signed with the New York Mets a couple of weeks ago Mets manager Willie Randolph said: “”Carlos is a great hitter, but we liked the whole package.” But, Randolph and the Mets really weren’t interested in WHOLE package because they aren’t intersted in his politics.

At his coming out party as a Met, the media bombarded Delgado with questions about his protest of the U.S. war on Iraq. Delgado’s refusal to stand on the field during “God Bless America” the past two seasons attracted nearly as much attention as his home runs.

In 2004, when Delgado was playing for the Blue Jays he told the Toronto Star: “I think it’s the stupidest war ever. Who are you fighting against? You’re just getting ambushed now. We have more people dead now, after the war, than during the war. You’ve been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You’ve been looking for over a year. Can’t find them. I don’t support that. I don’t support what they do. I think it’s just stupid.”

But now that he’s been traded by the cost-cutting Florida Marlins to the Mets, the slugger said he has no problem with Randolph’s rule that Met players “stand at attention and honor the flag.”

In a web-only article for The Nation David Zirin reports on the “Silencing of Carlos Delgado” and his decision to break from his anti-militarist convictions and the path blazed by the baseball great and social justice activist Roberto Clemente.

The Silencing of Carlos Delgado

by DAVE ZIRIN

[The Nation,posted online on December 7, 2005]

Sometimes sports mirrors politics with such morbid accuracy you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or hide in the basement. Just as the Bush Administration shows its commitment to democracy by operating secret offshore gulags and buying favorable news coverage in Iraq, the New York Mets have made it clear to new player Carlos Delgado that freedom of speech stops once the blue and orange uniform–their brand–is affixed to his body.

For the last two years, Delgado chose to follow the steps of his personal hero, Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates great and the first Latino elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and use his athletic platform to speak out for social justice. Clemente blazed a trail for generations of Latino ball players by standing up for the poor of Latin America and never accepting being treated as anything less than human. Delgado’s contribution to this tradition of pride in the face of conformity was to refuse to stand for the singing of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. This was his act of resistance to the war in Iraq. “I think it’s the stupidest war ever. Who are you fighting against? You’re just getting ambushed now,” Delgado told the Toronto Star in 2004. “We have more people dead now, after the war, than during the war. You’ve been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You’ve been looking for over a year. Can’t find them. I don’t support that. I don’t support what they do. I think it’s just stupid.”

Delgado’s anti-militarist convictions grew from spending time and money to help clean up the small island of Vieques in his native Puerto Rico. The US Navy had used Vieques for decades as a bombing-practice target, with disastrous results for the people and environment.

When asked by the Star if he was concerned about taking such a public stance, Delgado, then a player for the Toronto Bluejays, responded, “Sometimes, you’ve just got to break the mold. You’ve got to push it a little bit or else you can’t get anything done.”

But now, Mets’ management is pushing Delgado back into the mold. The shame of this is that despite a guaranteed contract and support in the streets, Delgado isn’t pushing back. He said at the November 28 press conference announcing his trade to the Mets from the Florida Marlins, “The Mets have a policy that everybody should stand for ‘God Bless America’ and I will be there. I will not cause any distractions to the ballclub…. Just call me Employee Number 21.” And we saw him grin and bear it when Jeff Wilpon, son of Mets CEO and owner Fred Wilpon, said, “He’s going to have his own personal views, which he’s going to keep to himself.”

If opposition to the war were a stock, Delgado bought high and is selling low. There couldn’t be a better time than now, a better place than New York City, or a better team than the Mets for Delgado to make his stand. Instead, he has to hear baby-boy Wilpon say to reporters, “Fred has asked and I’ve asked him to respect what the country wants to do.” One has to wonder what country the Wilpons are talking about. The latest polls show Bush and his war meeting with subterranean levels of support. Delgado could be an important voice in the effort to end it once and for all.

He also might have received significant organizational support from Mets General Manager Omar Minaya, the first Latino GM in Major League history, and from Willie Randolph, the first African-American manager of the Mets. Randolph even told reporters, “I’d rather have a man who’s going to stand up and say what he believes. We have a right as Americans to voice that opinion.” But Minaya merely commented curtly, with an artic chill, “This is from ownership.” But Delgado still caved.

The frustrating fallout of all this is evident in media attacks on Delgado for refusing to continue his act of protest. At first glance, it would be welcome to see, for example, Newsday’s Wallace Matthews’s writing, “Even if you disagree with his politics, Delgado’s willingness to break out of the mold corporate America loves to jam us in set him apart from the thousands of interchangeable young men who thrive athletically and financially in our sports-crazed culture…But no. One of the few pro athletes who had the guts to say no is now a yes man. And the silencing of his voice, whether you agree with it or not, is not a victory for democracy but a defeat.”

But where were the critics when the then-protesting Delgado was being booed as a visiting player in New York? And where were they when radio commentators suggested he “just shut up and play”? For those of us who amplified his views, and used his stance to speak not only about the war but also the plight of Vieques, his silence is bursting our eardrums.

Ironically, one of the parts of the press conference that was genuinely touching was Delgado’s thrill at finally being able to wear a jersey with the number 21 of his hero, the great Roberto Clemente. When it came to political principle, Clemente was a giant who never backed down in the face of bigotry: He lost his life in a 1972 plane crash as he was delivering aid to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua. To Clemente, the Wilpons of the world were little more than mosquitos buzzing in his ears. Delgado could have been our Clemente. Instead, to use his own words, he is just Employee Number 21.

In an apparent effort to disprove that humans are evolving, two Kansas men beat up the University of Kansas religion professor whose proposed course on the “mythology” of intelligent design sparked an uproar last month.

Inside Higher Ed: reports Professor Paul Mirecki was treated Monday for injuries during what law enforcement officials are calling an “aggravated battery” on him.

“Mirecki reported that while driving on a rural road, he pulled over when two men in a pickup truck seemed to be following him too closely. While Mirecki expected them to pass, they too pulled over, and attacked him. While he was briefly treated at a local hospital, he was able to teach at the university later in the day.

A spokeswoman for the Douglas County sheriff’s department said that “aggravated battery” means either that a beating was particularly intense or involved an object.”

Mirecki had proposed a course called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Other Religious Mythologies.” The title itself angered intelligent-design proponents, who objected to being lumped in with “other religious mythologies.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Japan’s Top Court Turns Down Professor’s Censorship Claim

The Japanese Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an appeal by a professor at the University of the Ryukyus, in Okinawa, seeking damages against the government for censorship of a textbook that he helped write in 1993. Observers see the ruling as upholding the education ministry’s right to screen and alter textbooks.The ministry’s screening of textbooks aroused anti-Japanese rioting in China earlier this year after Japanese education officials released a list of approved textbooks that the Chinese viewed as whitewashing Japanese war crimes and injustices before and during World War II (The Chronicle, May 27).

In last week’s case, the professor, Nobuyoshi Takashima, contended that the education ministry had trampled on his freedom of speech in ordering changes to chapters in a high-school textbook on modern Japanese society in which he suggested that Japan should have paid more attention to the feelings of its Asian neighbors. A district court agreed in 1998 that some of the changes were illegal and awarded him a monetary settlement. The Tokyo High Court overturned that ruling on appeal. The Supreme Court upheld the Tokyo court’s decision.

“I have fought 13 years and the ruling is as unacceptable as it is superficial,” Mr. Takashima said after hearing the verdict. He had asked the court for $10,000 for the mental anguish he suffered as a result of giving up his project to publish the original book.

Kazushige Yamashita, director of the division in charge of textbook screenings at the education ministry, said that the ruling was reasonable because it confirmed the legitimacy and need for the screenings.

Mr. Takashima’s case is the second prolonged case involving textbook issues to come before the Supreme Court. In 1965, Saburo Ienaga, a professor from the Tokyo University of Education, the predecessor of Tsukuba University, sued the government for censoring his textbook. That case did not reach the Supreme Court until 1997, when the court ruled against Mr. Ienaga’s assertion that the ministry’s vetting system violated the Constitution. However, the court did rule illegal the ministry’s demand for Mr. Ienaga to delete a description of the biological experiments that the Japanese army conducted on Chinese people during World War II.

Japanese courts have found government-ordered changes unlawful several times, but they have never ruled that the system itself illegal.

The Daily Telegraph reports that “a poem in a school textbook has been removed by embarrassed education officials in Pakistan after it was found that the first letters of each line spelt out “President George W Bush.”…

“An education ministry spokesman said it had no idea who wrote the poem nor how it found its way into A Textbook of English for 16-year-olds last year.

The acrostic is highly embarrassing for President Pervez Musharraf, who is already under fire at home for being allegedly pro-American and supporting the US war against terrorism.”

I guess that’s what you get when the U.S. donates money to transform the curriculum into something “closer to western ideals.”

Pakistan’s U.S.-friend philosophy—called “enlightened moderation”—seems to be neither.

In today’s edition of The Province, Michael Brown reports on Iraq war vet turned war resister Joshua Key.

Key is (or was) Private 1st Class in the U.S. Army. He served an eight-month tour in Iraq, decided he couldn’t return for another tour or duty and fled Canada.

Key says “I was pro-government. I was very right-wing,” when he signed up for the Army. He left his minimum wage job as a welder in Oklahoma City and then found himself in Iraq.

At the time he agreed with the “reason and cause.” “Weapons of mass destruction, that pretty scary shit,” Key told The Province. “My wife thought the same thing I did” “You’re going to do the right, so go do it.’ But it was all a lie.”

Key described how as part of “quick-reaction force” he would blast through the doors of Iraqi civilians homes, rounding up men and boys as young as 13, zip-cuffing them and loading them on to U.S. Army trucks to never be seen again.

Key says, “I’d raid these people’s homes with satellite photographs from CIA and military intelligence and I never found anything. There was nothing found in their homes and I did 100 of these raids.”

“In Ramadi, that’s where I saw most of the things that were unreasonable, no reason or justification for it,” he says.

Brown reports that “Key says he saw bodies on one side of the Euphrates River and their heads on the other, and U.S. Army soldiers kicking them about “like soccer balls.”

In July, Key crossed into Toronto and joined the War Resister’s Support Campaign. He is now living on Gabriola Island, home to many American war resisters.

Unlike the the Vietnam era, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared that “Canada should be a refuge from militarism,” thus opening the doors to American war resisters, there has been no similar declaration regarding the U.S.’s illegal war in Iraq.

While Canada does not officially support the war in Iraq, it is providing support in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, as well as 31 “frontline advisors.”

The cases of three American war resisters are currently being adjudicated. Jeremy Hinzman and Bandon Hughey were denied refugee status and have appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. No decision has been released on the case of Ivan Brobeck.

Key’s lawyer points to the uniqueness of his case, since Key can speak to the both the legality of the war and to war crimes allegedly committed by U.S. soldiers because he was an active combatant in Iraq and witnessed atrocities first-hand.

Key’s story, as originally published in Le Monde, can be found here.

Well, it is the USA…Teacher under investigation for alleged liberalismTeacher under investigation for alleged liberalism
November 25, 2005

BENNINGTON, Vt. –The school superintendent whose district includes Mount Anthony Union High School has labeled “inappropriate” and “irresponsible” an English teacher’s use of liberal statements in a vocabulary quiz.

“I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes,” said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.

The question referring to the president asked students to say whether coherent or eschewed was the proper word. The sentence would be more coherent if one eschewed eschewed.

Another example said, “It is frightening the way the extreme right has (balled, arrogated) aspects of the Constitution and warped them for their own agenda.” Arrogated would be the proper word there.

Chenkin, 36 and a teacher for seven years, said the quizzes are being taken out of context.

“The kids know it’s hyperbolic, so-to-speak,” he said. “They know it’s tongue in cheek. They know where I stand.”

He said he isn’t shy about sharing his liberal views with students, but invites vigorous debate in the classroom.

“Never once have I said, ‘OK, you’re wrong,'” he said. “Instead, it’s, ‘OK, let’s open this up. Let’s see where this can go.'”

Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union Superintendent Wesley Knapp said he would not want his children subjected to such teaching.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” he said. “They (teachers) don’t have a license to hold forth on a particular standpoint.”

Knapp said he was recently informed of the situation and that it was a personnel issue that he took seriously.

Principal Sue Maguire said she hoped to speak to whoever complained about the quiz and any students who might be concerned. She said she also would talk with Chenkin about the context of the quiz.

“I feel like this needs to be investigated,” she said.

Information from: Bennington Banner