I’m not a soccer fan. When I was growing up, baseball was the national sport—and since I lived three blocks from Yankee Stadium, and the New York Yankees were the most successful professional sports team in history, it was only natural that I should gravitate toward baseball as my sports obsession.
To this day I still don’t understand the intricacies of soccer, but it’s been wonderful watching the World Cup and seeing what is really the only truly international sports contest play out on our T.V. screens. To see South Korea battle it out with Mexico, or Canada go head-to-head against Switzerland—well, that is truly the world coming together. No other sport is like it. Our world is, however briefly, united.
I do believe that Barbara Lee is trying to unite this city. Good for her. It’s a noble instinct, and lord knows we need it. There’s only one problem. She’s not the right person for the job. I don’t think that Barbara Lee is capable of uniting Oakland, because she’s got a lousy track record: for the majority of her long life she’s been on the losing side of a societal debate concerning race. Early in her intellectual career, Lee decided to make race the centerpiece and obsession of her ideology. She thus decided against siding with the better interests of society at large. Instead, she made skin color the be-all and end-all of her politics. Since skin color is something that obviously divides us all—after all, I can’t be Black, any more than Barbara Lee can be White—she therefore chose to be divisive from the very inception of her political career. Now, as Mayor, she’s claiming to speak for all of us—White, Black, Brown, Yellow—but at the age of 79 it’s impossible for Lee to change her spots. She’s been a Black apologist and activist all her life, and guess what? It’s too late for her to claim any stake in what’s good or fair for everyone else. So whenever she utters one of her platitudes about equity, she reeks of insincerity.
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Finally, a word on this homophobia that some of the Giants’ pitchers have been playing with.
Shame! But it’s nice seeing the blowback. The whole town is standing up for the LGBTQ community, which those “Christian” pitchers insulted so thoughtlessly. It’s time for Tony Vitello to hold a press conference, demand that the pitchers be there and apologize, and then put this sorry-ass episode behind us. Just as there’s no room for crazy rightwing religious extremism in politics, there’s no room for it in pro sports. Hey pitchers: If you don’t like gay people, you shouldn’t be playing in San Francisco. Are you too gob-smacked with your Bible to understand that?
Steve Heimoff