Southern Rock + Brogonzo = Sad Brogonzo

It's one of these days.

Not much going on here at the office. I'm putting the story list together for next week's edition, but that's pretty pointless, since there's approximately one person here to give it to - namely, the Finch, who's going to be out of town for the entire holiday weekend.

On the other hand, Yours Truly is going to have loads of fun Saturday when Lynyrd Skynyrd, rock's greatest-known cover band, and 38 Special come to Fort Knox to... rock the Casbah? I doubt it. I've been roped into this concert detail, and will therefore be directing traffic in the parking lot all damn day.

Needless to say, I'm not exactly pleased. Oh well.

For now, I'll leave you to whatever it was you were up to before you showed up here and get back to work myself. Mahalo.

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Civilians with rank?

Well, again, Wednesday has come, and as the sun goes down, the presses at the Elizabethtown News-Enterprise will be busily running another edition of the post newspaper off its rollers.

One issue that's become a bone of contention in the office is the ongoing military-to-civilian conversion going on. Here's a quick global breakdown of the idea:

Since, due to the ongoing war in Iraq, the demand for troops in troop-type slots is high, and recruiting numbers are less than inspiring, a program to replace garrison-type jobs once held by soldiers with Department of the Army civilians is in place across the Army.

Sensible, sure. Soldiers are trained and meant to do soldier-type jobs, which, if I can infer anything from the bucket of plastic green army men I had when I was a kid, usually involve carrying a rifle around.

However, practically speaking, it creates a few difficulties, since the process can't happen overnight. For our newspaper, that means gradually phasing out soldiers and replacing them - on a less-than one-to-one basis - with civilians.

In the newspaper business, these civilians are coming in at at least the grade of GS-7, which, I'm told, is "equivalent" to the rank of a second lieutenant in the military rank structure.

Perhaps you can see where the trouble is starting. There is a critical difference between a GS-7 and an O-1. See if you can guess what it is. Take your time, but show your work.

Ready? The difference is that a civilian, being a civilian, is not a soldier, and certainly not a lieutenant. Here at Fort Knox, we have - at least for the time being - the Armor School, where countless new lieutenants, fresh out of ROTC, OCS, and the Academy are studying to become tank platoon commanders. I see them at the shoppettes near the school whenever I go there to buy a fresh pack of Camels, and even though I know they know next to nothing about the Army, save for what they learned in the hallowed classrooms of West Point, I still render proper military courtesy to them, i.e., snapping to attention, rendering the hand salute, and giving the "greeting of the day," which, on Fort Knox, is "Good morning, sir."

For DA civilians, the system's slightly different. Suffice it to say, I've never been required to salute someone who doesn't have four pairs of BDUs hanging in his or her closet.

But someone's decided that there's a certain point in the civilian pay scale where civilians holding that pay grade take on the "rank" of an active-duty officer. How they arrived at that pay grade doesn't matter, but it should, since civilians can be hired at that level, including a couple of the ones who have started working in my office.

Working at a newspaper has never, to my knowledge, been a nine-to-five sort of gig, depending on your beat, and this creates problems as well. Since DA civilians cannot work more than 80 hours a week without incurring overtime, and since department heads are usually not allowed to authorize overtime - at least not for newspapers - that means that anything that happens after 1700 (5 p.m. for you non-military types) or on weekends is pretty much out of the question for civilians to cover.

Since we still have soldiers in the office, that doesn't mean the event isn't going to be covered.

What I'm getting at with this lengthy and self-indulgent rant is that the end result of replacing soldier newspaper staffers with civilian newspaper staffers is that the remaining soldiers get screwed, if I may use a technical term.

It's also a bit of a slap in the face to me, since to get this job, I not only earned a bachelor's degree in journalism, but also attended several months of additional Army training to qualify for my military occupational specialty - 46Q, Journalist. None of the civilians in the office I work in have a BA in journalism, and the associate editor I work for has about the closest thing - a BA in photojournalism. Not quite the same thing. Anyone who knows why the word is spelled "adviser" can tell you about that.

I'm not exactly sure what to do in this situation other than to suck it up and drive on. However, if any salty, long-termers have information, regulation numbers, or advice as to what to do in this situation, or if this business of civilians being treated like Army officers is bullshit or not, let me know. It's hurt the morale in the office, and I think the product - the newspaper - suffers for it.

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And here's my shameless bid to get traffic from the Mudville Gazette. Open Post.

Independence Day is coming - Burn a flag!

Michelle Malkin's found a plan hatching at Indymedia. They're planning a national flag-burning day for July 4. In their words:

So on this Fourth of July we call on you to express your feelings on their "Independence Day" by burning a flag in a nationally coordinated action. Together we will show the elite that we are everywhere and that we completely reject the false principals (sic) this holiday is based on.

False "principals," huh? You mean independence from a colonialist empire? Freedom from international intervention? I thought Independence Day was right up their alley -- well, except for the fact that it's American.

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Time for some new news

Good lord, what to talk about? We have such great choices -- judicial nominee filibusters, a stem cell research bill that's going to be vetoed, and Social Security reform. I'm uninspired.

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Sitemeter reports...

Wow. Based on the sitemeter results for my site, I made the right choice in switching to Blogger. Traffic - both in visits and site views - has spiked a lot. I'd encourage any serious tBloggers to make the move if you haven't done so already.

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Military insignia

Need military unit insignia, clip art, or avatars? Check out The Patriotic Avatar & Document site. They've been kind enough to list me among their Military Blogs roundup, which is pretty extensive.

Here's my old unit patch, from the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea:

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Update: The Mudville Gazette's latest Open Post.

Baseball, Tuesday, Al Franken writes a letter

Uhg. It's 10 a.m. and I'm exhausted. I was up covering the first round of the District 17 varsity baseball championships until about 11:30 last night (Knox dropped to Elizabethtown, 10-3, which is actually an improvement from the regular season).

I'm still tweaking the layout here, so bear with while I continue to settle in. The new Star Wars flick is continuing to generate headlines, and I continue to survive without having rushed out to go see it. There was a time in my life where I would have thought that going was very important, but now is definitely not that time.

What else, what else... ah yes. The judicial nominee filibuster business. I would have tried to treat this earlier, but the topic is so boring that my eyes cross whenever I think about it for more than three seconds, which basically precludes writing anything about it. The only way I've been able to get this paragraph out has been to keenly concentrate on the letterhead of the letter I received from Al Franken ("Dear person I haven't met...") asking me to contribute to Free Press.

Which I don't think I'm going to do. Not because of the fact I think Al Franken is an arrogant blowhard, and not because of the fact that I want Clear Channel to burn, but because I don't have a whole lot of extra cash floating around.

Anyway, I should get back to work. Hopefully the coffee will cut this fatigue down a bit.

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Update: Check out the Mudville Gazette's "Zell Miller" post.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the new home of A Healthy Alternative to Work. This space was at one time used for Smokin' News, but I've decided to merge the two projects, and since Smokin' News was getting no attention whatsoever, I figured the best way to do this would be to just move the tBlog site over here.

It'll take a little while to get all the stuff here set up, but Haloscan comments are now back on, so feel free to make suggestions. Meanwhile, give me a couple days to make the move.

Thanks for reading!

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The Middle East must be held accountable

I think the clearest thing that this Newsweek fiasco has put into perspective is that the anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is not founded on any sort of civilized basis. We're dealing with pure, unadulterated religious fanaticism.

Here's a ThisisLondon piece from earlier today. A quote:

Led by a man on a megaphone, they chanted, "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush". A small detail of police watched as they shouted: "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head."

Demonstrators in Grosvenor Square, some with their faces covered with scarves, waved placards which included the message: "Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow."

This is a demonstration protesting an event that didn't happen, let's not forget. But even if it had happened, the last phrase - "Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow" is telling.

Take a look at this piece by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, titled "Why Islam is Disrespected."

It's strange that in the wake of 17 deaths resulting from riots that were supposedly sparked by this Newsweek piece that the most intense finger-pointing has been aimed at either the Bush administration or American journalism, and not toward the society that breeds the kind of hatred and psychosis that allows murder to happen when an unsavory paragraph is published in a foreign magazine.

Certainly, journalism's standards and practices need a good, hard examination, and it's a shame that the media's Old Guard has been so hesitant to take constructive criticism from any outside source. Trying to excuse Newsweek's gaffe by accusing the Bush administration of deceit is ludicrous on its face, not because of innocence on the part of the administration, but because journalism, as a political entity, has never supposed to have taken its cue - or been granted any kind of ultimate license - from either the goodness or badness of the government and society in which it operates.

But that isn't the point. What's happened is, as the editors of USA Today pointed out in one of the more insightful commentaries published on the issue, a systemic misunderstanding of the Arab world that is now prevalent in western society.What USA Today fails to point out, though, is that the Arab world must be held accountable for its culture.

A certain amount of respect for other cultures is, of course, necessary in any international relations. However, when social policy is driven by fanaticism, there is a failure much more systemic than the one America is experiencing.

As Jacoby points out in his Boston Globe piece, there have never, in recent history, been stories of Christians or Bhuddists rising up en masse, rioting and killing, over perceived "desecrations" to either sect's "Holy Books." There haven't been stories because such things simply do not happen.

On the other hand, because exactly the same thing has happened in the Middle East due to an alleged - and debunked - incident of desecration to the Koran, westerners are wringing their hands and pointing fingers, all the while wondering why we haven't been "sensitive" enough to the "Arab experience."

I don't want to beat this point to death - although that's probably literally what would happen to me if I were to give voice to this opinion in, say, Riyadh - but what needs to happen in the Middle East is a very fundamental change. We can talk about double standards, cultural norms, and the rest until we are blue in the face, but two facts remain: The Middle East, and its supporters, need to extricate themselves from the self-imposed Dark Age they are currently in; and if democracy and/or freedom is going to take root in Iraq or anywhere else in the countries that lie between Egypt and Pakistan, then they must take accountability for the ideology of hatred that is not only supported by the government, it's a packaged product they export.

And let's not forget that the protestors outside the U.S. embassy in London are calling for another 9/11 - another massacre of innocent civilians, despite what Ward Churchill might claim - over a "desecration" that didn't even happen.

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Update: Head over to the Mudville Gazette's Open Post when you're through here.

Update: Michael Jericho has photos over at Odysseus.

Norman Mailer advertises the fact that he's cracked

We're back in the land of idiots again, and I'm going to have to point the finger this time at renowned novelist Norman Mailer, who is currently on the staff - such as it is - of the Huffington Post.

Mailer suggests that what's happened to Newsweek could be an example of "Intelligence 101A," a discreditation of a source by means of feeding them false information:

If you want to discredit a Dan Rather or a Newsweek crew, just feed them false information from a hitherto reliable source. You learn that in Intelligence 101A.

Norm, I'm sorry, but your 82-year-old brain (remember to use numerals, Norm, if the number is 10 or greater) may need a checkup. Mailer writes that this whole thing wound up being too neat and tidy for "one side" - the U.S. government's - to have been a coincidence, and that the entire thing stinks of conspiracy.But even he realizes his accusations are ridiculous, except perhaps as a sequel to Harlot's Ghost:

Obviously, I can offer no proof of any of the above. There still resides, however, under my aging novelist's pate a volunteer intelligence agent, sadly manque.

Well. When someone basically calls himself senile, there's not much left for me to do, I suppose. Is anyone, other than the kids over at The Nation, taking this seriously? Fictional tales - from a novelist, I might add - about "our agents in Pakistan" inciting riots to smear the reputation of an innocent news magazine that acted on intelligence received in good faith from a formerly-reliable source turned federal spy?

Come on, Norman! The only person this could possibly benefit is you, when you come up with the plot of your next anti-American paperweight.

But by all means, keep posting stuff like this up at Arianna's place. Between Norman Mailer and Al Franken, I think they've got a great team together there to punch holes in the hull of a ship that was doomed before she set sail.

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Looking at the Newsweek fiasco

It's about damn time I got heavily into this Newsweek business, since I think I've got a couple valid points to bring up. I know the story has been done to death in the blogosphere, but I think this is a great opportunity to mention a couple glaring inconsistencies, point a couple fingers, and also rip on the Huffington Post to boot.

Let's look at the facts of the case so far. Newsweek publishes a story by Mike Isikoff alleging that U.S. troops had disgraced Muslim prisoners by flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet.The story was met with outrage across the Muslim world, and 17 people were killed in the resultant riots.

After a rather awkward pause, Newsweek retracted the story, but remained under pressure from the White House (at least Scott McClellan) to go further than simply retract the article, suggesting that Newsweek run a piece detailing the rather extensive list of standards and practices the U.S. military has in place to ensure cultural sensitivity.

Okay. In addition to these facts, I think there are a few things we can agree on:

1) Newsweek was hasty and slipshod in rushing this piece to press without fact-checking. Isikoff's source is "unnamed," and whatever information he had should have been backed up by corroborating accounts from people willing to go on the record.

2) The story caused significant damage to the already shaky reputation of the U.S. government and military in the Middle East.

3) It's impossible to flush a Koran - or even a pocket-sized Gideon's Bible - down the toilet.

Here's what I've found in terms of the spectrum of reactions online:

1) The Newsweek-should-burn theory: Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of the 17 people killed in the riots that occurred after the article's publication.

2) The Why-the-hell-should-anyone-think-that-people-are-going-to-be-killed-over-a-Newsweek-story theory: Newsweek may indeed have rushed their story to publication, but how were they supposed to know that the reaction would be death and mayhem?

3) The Newsweek-may-be-bad-but-Bush-is-worse theory: 17 deaths based on false information is much "less bad" than the thousands who have died due to the president's decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

The third view is laughable, and it's the one being trumpeted by Arianna Huffington and her super-celeb-blog-friends at the Huffington Post. Let's get something straight here. Whatever your position on the White House's policies is, there is no instance in which the government's actions serve as an excuse for lesser wrongdoing by the press.

Here's how it works. We elect slimy cash-whores to represent us at the state and federal levels, mostly because we only have the choice between one or more slimy cash-whores. They tend to be the only ones willing to do it. We know they're willing to sell each and every one of us out if the worm turns, and it's the press' job to let us know when that's happening, or when the slimy cash-whores become slimier, greedier, or sluttier.

The first perspective is tempting, but even if Newsweek slandered the United States intentionally, I don't know if they could have predicted the actual reaction from the radical Muslim world.

So there's the second perspective, which basically blames the Middle East for overreacting to something that clearly isn't worth killing anyone over. I like that idea, because we tend to get away from the idea that there is a certain level of psychosis required to saw someone's head off on a video camera, or to fly airliners full of people into skyscrapers full of people, and there seems to be plenty to go around.

But the press ought to have a better sensitivity to what they're doing, as explained by Wretchard inthis post at The Belmont Club.

Times have changed, Wretchard says, and as the military has had to alter their understanding of the acceptability of "collateral damage," so too should the press.

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Who decides whether Terri Schiavo lives?

U.S. District Judge James Whittemore, the federal judge appointed by congress to determine whether Terri Schiavo, a 41-year-old brain-damaged woman who has been in an unconscious state since 1990, should have her feeding tube reinserted, said today that he would not order the tube be reinserted.

This story has been one of the leading headlines across both the blogosphere and network media outlets. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I’m not exactly sure where I stand.

Schiavo is currently in what is described as a permanent vegetative state by neurologists. “No one has ever come back from such a condition, according to the American Academy of Neurology,” the MSNBC story reads.

However, she is alive, and the feeding tube is the only artificial process used to keep her that way. She is able to breathe on her own, from what I understand.

Therefore, removing the feeding tube to “let her die” is literally starving her to death. Not exactly the painless “just letting her go” process some are making it out to be.

National Review Online’s editors say that the case demonstrates that existing safeguards against “assisting suicides” of those who do not want assisted suicide are insufficient, since, they write, the evidence that Schiavo would have wanted to be deprived of food and water if unconscious is “sketchy at best.”

Does anyone have the right to make this determination? There is certainly an element in me that understands the desire to remove the tube – if I were in the same state, I’m certain I’d hope that someone would do that for me. But who could rightly make that determination?

Would it be my spouse, who had legal guardianship, but remarried and had children by someone else in the interim? Would it be my parents, who might disagree with my legal guardian? Would it be Congress, the president, or a U.S. District Court judge?

When it comes down to it, I don’t think any of them have a say in the matter. In fact, not even I would, really. I don’t think the state should subsidize or support suicide, nor should it be left to the state to decide who “wants” to let themselves die.

But this is certainly a tough case.

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BRAC - Could it hit Knox?

My editor stopped by the sports desk today and gave me a present: "Everything You Know Is Wrong." He’s in the process of moving, and, as a newspaper editor of some tenure, has amassed what I can only guess is a huge library. He said more is on the way. Thanks!

A hot-button topic in military communities these days is the Base Realignment and Closure program (BRAC), which was instituted in the 1990s and aims to consolidate military assets – necessarily resulting in shutting some down.

Bases have significant impact on the surrounding community, not the least of which is financial. Federal dollars pour into the paychecks of the servicemembers and civilians who work there, and are in turn eagerly spent.

This article just appeared in the News-Enterprise: Study projects life after BRAC.Apparently, a federally-funded study is going on to examine what the impact on surrounding communities would be if Fort Knox were to, say, shut completely down (like Fort Dix, New Jersey, for example).

But here’s the official line:

Officials say that's not cause for alarm, insisting the study is entirely separate from the 2005 round of Base Realignment and Closure and in no way hints that Fort Knox could be on a list of closing installations.

Maybe... but the signs are ominous at best. Fort Knox Garrison is out of money and talks are underway to get the Fort Knox schools absorbed into the Hardin County district. Not exactly the kind of things that bespeak a flourishing installation.

There are other telltale signs, as well - last year, one of the big stories was the institution of the Warrior Transition Course, a program to retrain former servicemembers from other branches, or Army soldiers with a significant break in service, and enter them into the active-duty Army.

While the course is still running here, there won’t be many more cycles at Fort Knox. WTC is moving to Fort Bliss, Texas, in the near future.Rumors have a tendency to build their own momentum, but unfortunately, the Department of Defense has forbidden base commanders, public affairs shops, and any other representatives from commenting on BRAC.

So nothing on the subject will appear in tenant publications, and, I suppose, no constructive comments will appear in interviews for articles in independent civilian publications.Down the memory hole, as they say.

Now it’s time for the OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed on this website do not necessarily represent the positions held by the United States government, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the Installation Management Agency, the Fort Knox Garrison, the Fort Knox Public Affairs Office, the Turret, or anyone else other than the author, who is a lower-enlisted soldier and ergo has no access to the Truth.

Hooah.

Cue up some more Toby Keith.

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Goodnight, Doctor Thompson.

I’ve been scrounging the wires and blogosphere for more on the death of Hunter S. Thompson, self-professed outlaw journalist, and the author of many strange and pointed commentaries on America and the "American Dream," and it’s hard to find anyone with the words to describe the impact he had on American writing, literature, and culture.

Tblogger juniperflux sent me this link to the Associated Press obituary.

James Lileks responds, somewhat coldly, but with some admiration as well: I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman – meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read "Hell's Angels." That was a man who could hit the keys right.

Sadly, Thompson’s latest writings, the column "Hey, Rube!" on ESPN.com fell depressingly short of his earlier work - Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, Songs of the Doomed, Generation of Swine, The Great Shark Hunt, and many others.

But it is that body of work that will be remembered, along with his legendary ability to project himself into a situation, usually while full of mind-altering chemicals, and become an important part of the story himself, and emerge eventually holding reams of scrawled notes and miles of audiotape that he would turn into a gripping commentary not only on what he’d set out to cover, but the state of American society itself – it was this that he eventually came to call "gonzo journalism."

I came to Thompson late in the game, and probably by one of the cheapest channels - Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. I was in college, at a friend’s house. A party was announced down at the riverside, but a friend and I had noticed the opening credits of the movie, with blood spattering across the black screen to form the title. From the first words - We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold - we were mesmerized. The rest of the crowd filtered away, but Joey and I stayed.

I read the book as soon as I could get my hands on it, and was amazed at Thompson’s almost crazed take on narrative. There are moments of hilarity, fear, and reckless use of drugs, but there was something else in there, too... something that strung it all together, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I went to a conservative Catholic college, but the library had one book by Thompson - his first, Hell’s Angels. Written before he had plunged headlong into the acid culture of ‘60s San Francisco, Hell’s Angels is a chronicle of time Thompson spent with the Angels, who were then a ferocious group of outlaws who claimed that no law enforcement agency in the country could contain them. Originally setting out to do a freelance newspaper piece on the gang, who had gained notoriety in California after allegations of a gang-rape arose, Thompson eventually wound up spending nearly a year with the Angels, buying a huge Triumph motorcycle himself to ride on with them as they cruised the West Coast striking fear into the hearts of citizens and lawmen wherever they went.

I could go on for ages about Thompson’s work, and how each piece somehow captures a weird, specific moment in time, from the minutiae of his hotel room’s furnishings to the greater conflicts plaguing society at the time, but I think this quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, thoughtfully transcribed at Tim Blair, sums it up well:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—that kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ...

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

That was around 34 years ago, and now, on a rainy Presidents’ Day near his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, I offer The Good Doctor my fondest farewell, and sincerest thanks for the impact he’s had on me and, I’m sure, countless others.

He wasn’t understood by everyone, he was hated by some, but I know there are those of us who will miss him dearly.

R.I.P., Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005.

Jose Canseco: Stool pigeon, baseball hero

Well, it's been a while since I updated here, but I figured I'd provide a preview for the upcoming Turret sports commentary -- you know, for all you faithful readers out there.

Jose Canseco: Stool pigeon, baseball hero
By Spc. Ian Boudreau
Turret sports editor

At different points during the ‘80s, I spent time learning how to ride a bicycle, watching “Thundercats,” and reading “Boys Life.”

But for a couple years I devoted untold amounts of change found in the family sofa and my dad’s pockets to baseball cards. I wasn’t very good about keeping them in order or preserved, and I didn’t know a lot of the players. I do remember, however, opening a pack of Upper Deck cards and finding the coveted image of Jose Canseco.

This was in 1988, and Canseco earned the American League’s MVP award while playing for Oakland, and every kid in my third grade class was green with envy when I brought his card to school the next day.

I left the card in my desk that Friday, and found on Monday that someone – presumably from the weekend’s Sunday school class – had stolen it.

My Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame in third grade were up, and Canseco’s would end several years later. In his own words, he was “blackballed” from MLB following accusations of steroid use (as well as other erratic behavior, such as a penchant for handguns).

Well, Canseco is back now, peddling a “tell-all” book called “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big,” in which he calls several members of the 500-plus home run club out for using illegal steroids, including MLB-favorite Mark McGwire and self-professed juicer Jason Giambi.

Canseco’s expressed attitude toward steroid use is blasé at its most critical, and almost adulatory at its least, but he’s certainly aware that he’s adding even more fuel to the flames of the ongoing steroid controversy in the major leagues.

Now, folks may be scratching their heads wondering, “Where does Jose Canseco get off snitching on current baseball players? Isn’t this a case of sour grapes?”

Well, in a word, yes. But it’s a valuable case of sour grapes, if you ask me.
No one might have been willing to publish Canseco’s tale two years ago, but with the recent BALCO testimonies leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, steroids use is a hot-button issue in professional sports now, and suddenly analysts across the country are wondering how to stem the tide of illicit drug use in sports.

The increases in testing and penalties haven’t as yet been very impressive, and it’s only effectively created a system where steroid-users have a couple more hoops to jump through to avoid getting caught.

But baseball is going to be hard-pressed to do anything else. Yet, reputations are still at stake, and the “Canseco Method” may prove to be a more effective deterrent than fines, suspensions, and additional testing.

The danger, of course, is that baseball could turn into a juiced version of bloody Renaissance revolutions in France and England, with accusations flying in one player’s word against another’s. But I’d say that the chance to eliminate performance-enhancing drugs from professional sports is well worth the risk.

And there’s no doubt that we’ll be in for some serious disappointments, whether the league decides to pursue accused juicers or not. McGwire, for example, and his many fans will have to give up his cherished record numbers, or at least learn to live with the dreaded asterisk in the books.

One way or another, baseball’s going to have to start working on a zero-tolerance basis when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs. Whether Canseco makes a few bucks off the controversy is immaterial. I’m just hoping that his book is able to put the fear of public opinion into potential steroid users in Major League Baseball.

And to whoever sat at my desk for Sunday school 16 years ago: I want my Jose Canseco card back.

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