Tag: law

Limitless Barry Bonds in the Asterisk Nation

Barry BondsThe federal trial of Barry Bonds began in March 2022 in San Francisco. Part of the trial focused on Greg Anderson, who started being Bonds’s trainer in 2000 and who allegedly supplied Bonds with steroids and then refused to testify against Bonds. Like Pres. Bill Clinton before him, Bonds had legal troubles that centered not on his actions but on the issue of whether he lied about them. The case examined whether Bonds lied to a grand jury when he said that he thought the substances Anderson gave him were legal. (UPDATE:  Following the trial, the jury did not reach a verdict on the perjury accounts but found Bonds guilty of obstruction of justice and he was sentenced to probation.)

Outside the legal debate about perjury, though, an ongoing debate continues about Bonds’s baseball legacy. One of his biggest defenders has been Giants fan and singer-songwriter Dan Bern. In addition to writing some articles about Bonds, Bern has written at least four songs about the slugger: “73,” “Asterisk Nation,” “Rincon,” and “Year By Year Home Run Totals Of The Great Barry Bonds.”

Dan Bern’s Songs About Barry Bonds

My two favorites of these songs are “Rincon” and “Asterisk Nation.” “Rincon” is about a journey to a town to see where Bonds may or may not have a contact for buying steroids, or at least that is how I interpret the beautiful song.

“Rincon” paints the most complicated portrait of Bonds among Bern’s songs.  It is a more personal story, more about the narrator than about Bonds, and its ambiguity also makes it one of Bern’s most human and best songs.  Like all great songs, it is about something deeper than what you might hear upon the first listen.

“Asterisk Nation” is a much more pointed commentary, where Dan Bern tells us that if we want to point the finger at Bonds, then maybe we should also be pointing it at ourselves. “Asterisk doctors, Asterisk patients, Asterisk erections, Asterisk elections, Asterisk wars. . . Telling Asterisk truths to an Asterisk nation.” Don’t many of us take pills, caffeine, alcohol, medication, etc. to alter the way we exist? And, if so, is it so wrong that Bonds may have used a drug that was not illegal at the time to make him better at his job, like you having that afternoon cup of coffee?

Limitless Bradley Cooper Robert DeNiro

Dan Bern’s song also evokes a new movie released just a few days before the trial of Barry Bonds begins. The movie Limitless (2011), starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, is about a man who is given a drug that lets him use 100% of his mind. If you could take a drug that would give you super-human abilities, would you?

There is not a video for “Asterisk Nation” on YouTube.  But you may listen to the song from a Dan Bern live performance from 2006 below.

Dan Bern Asterisk Nation Live 2006-11-09

{ Asterisk Nation – Dan Bern (live 2006-11-09)}

Finally, Dan Bern’s “Year by Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds” is brilliant for how simple it is.  The song recounts exactly what the title suggests, listing those home run totals.  While the 73 home runs in 2001 does stand out, the list illustrates that Bonds was smashing a lot of home runs even before the era where we suspect he was using performance-enhancing drugs.

In the video below, Bern performs “Year by Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds” as a sing-a-long at a school.  (His lesson to the kids is how they may use a song to help them remember pieces of information, like a list of numbers.)

Defending Barry Bonds?

I do not completely buy Dan Bern’s defense of Barry Bonds. One must wonder whether or not it is fair for some players to use steroids against the rules when there is a limited number of spots for major league baseball players. If some use steroids, other potential major league players may lose their jobs to cheaters. And is it fair if someone who holds a record does not get credit because someone else did not play by the rules?

Still, Dan Bern does make me see Barry Bonds in a different light. I now see Barry Bonds as a tragic human being. During his run at perhaps the greatest record in baseball, he must have anticipated for years the glory of the moment. Instead, as the time approached and left, he was treated like a pariah, perhaps partly deserved, perhaps partly not.

Then, when he wanted to continue playing after the 2007 season, no team would hire him when he was still playing great baseball. And why is he so hated while Lance Armstrong is so loved? I am sure racial biases are at work, but there are other complex factors too.

Sure Bonds did whatever he did for himself, but we all gained the entertainment, both from his incredible playing and from later having fun debating about steroids. Ever since he was a kid with a professional baseball-playing father, Bonds learned that society would pay him large amounts of money to run around on a field and hit a ball with a stick. If society is set up so we pay millions of dollars to people who play games, while social workers and teachers barely scrape by and other people are homeless, is it such a great sin by comparison that he took some medicine to play better? Is his sin worse than ours for creating such a society?

Barry Bonds was always there for our entertainment, and like the rest of us, he is a flawed human being. His steroids helped entertain you, and I received a topic for a blog post today. And we do not even have to suffer the health consequences from taking the drug.

While I enjoy discussing the morality issues involved because I love baseball and debates about morals, what it ultimately comes down to for me is one question: Who am I to judge him? And perhaps the most interesting part for me is wondering whether he has any regrets and whether or not he would do everything the same if starting all over again. Maybe some day we will get answers to these and other questions from him, but probably not for a long time, if ever.

I am going to try to cleanse my mind of thoughts about tainted baseball records by watching a video from the 1996 Home Run Derby before Barry Bonds allegedly started using steroids, back when we were all much more innocent. Man, he was good against. . . Mark McGuire.

What do you think of Barry Bonds? What should be done with his home run record? Leave a comment.

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    Happy Birthday Homer Plessy: A Change Is Gonna Come

    After Homer Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, Plessy was then arrested. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

    Happy St. Patrick’s Day this March 17, which also is the birthday of Homer Plessy, who was born in New Orleans on March 17, 1862 and is one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.  His work and action of trying to take a train led to one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history.

    Homer Plessy’s Train Ride

    Thirty years after his birth, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on a Louisiana railroad on June 7, 1892. Plessy, who was part African-American, was working with the civil rights group Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans to challenge segregation laws.

    The Committee had notified the railroad of what was happening.  And when Plessy sat down in a car for white riders only, a conductor asked him about his race. Plessy was then arrested.

    Plessy v. Ferguson

    railroad tracks

    Plessy’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.  In the case, Plessy overwhelmingly lost by a vote of 7-1.  In the case, the Court upheld the state’s segregation law under a doctrine permitting “separate but equal” facilities.

    Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority, claiming that if one views separate facilities for the races as implying one is inferior, that was “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” (163 U.S. at 551.) Justice John Marshall Harlan, who was from Kentucky, was the lone dissenter on Plessy’s side.

    “A Change Is Gonna Come”

    Sam Cooke’s famous song, “A Change Is Gonna Come” may have been partly inspired by an incident similar to Plessy’s that happened in the same state. According to Peter Guralnick’s Cooke biography Dream Boogie, in 1963 Cooke and his band tried to check into a segregated Holiday Inn hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana.

    The clerk would not let them check in.  Cooke argued with the clerk until his wife and others convinced him to leave because they feared reprisals. Soon thereafter, the police tracked them down and charged them with creating a public disturbance.

    Cooke wrote and recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come” the same year as the hotel incident. In the song, Cooke wrote, “Somebody keep telling me ‘don’t hang around.’ / It’s been a long, a long time coming, /But i know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.” Other national factors also inspired Cooke to write the song, such as Bob Dylan’s songs and sit-in protests taking place in the south.

    The Legacy of Homer Plessy

    Homer Plessy died on March 1, 1925, so he did not get to see Plessy v. Ferguson, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, overruled. But his cause did eventually win. The Supreme Court overruled the case in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, which was later followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    Not long ago, the descendants of Homer Plessy got together with the descendants of Louisiana Judge John Howard Ferguson, the other named party in Plessy v. Ferguson. The two families created the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation to work for equality.

    Around 60 years after Homer Plessy took a seat on the train, another person helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement like Plessy did, by refusing to give up her seat in 1955.  In that year, Rosa Parks’s refusal led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a landmark moment in the struggle for Civil Rights.

    When years later Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Rosa Parks sought comfort in listening to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” She said Cooke’s voice was “like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me.” (Guralnick, p. 651.)

    There is a little of Homer Plessy’s voice in the song too.

    What do you think? Leave a comment and give a Stumble if you like.

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    The Leopold & Loeb Trial and Alfred Hitchcock

    On January 28, 1936, Richard Loeb was killed in prison. Loeb was half of the infamous murdering pair Leopold & Loeb.  The two men and their crime inspired both the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rope (1948) and a later film, Compulsion (1956).

    In 1924, the media focused on the issue of the death penalty due to the high-profile crime and the “trial of the century.” Two young students from the University of Chicago — Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – were charged with the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks.

    The Crime and Trial

    It was a ridiculous crime. Leopold and Loeb were intelligent, but fashioned themselves as superior to everyone else.  So, they wanted to see if they could accomplish “the perfect crime.” They couldn’t. Police soon found them because Leopold had dropped his rare type of glasses next to the body.

    Clarence Darrow Clarence Darrow, the attorney for the two students, turned the murder case into a referendum on the death penalty after Leopold and Loeb both pleaded guilty. When the 67-year-old Darrow argued for the students’ lives, the local paper reported that a mob “fought like animals to . . . hear Darrow speak.”

    In Attorney for the Damned, Arthur Weinberg explained that several newspapers from around the country published Darrow’s twelve-plus hour plea in whole or in part. The attorney was successful. The two were sentenced to life for the murder and ninety-nine years for kidnapping, but no death penalty.

    After the Sentencing

    Loeb was killed in prison after nine years of incarceration.  But Nathan Leopold lived to be paroled in 1958 at the age of fifty-three. Leopold apparently was quite remorseful for the murder and tried to give something back to society.

    While in prison, Leopold volunteered to be infected with malaria for a study of the disease. After parole, he moved to Puerto Rico, worked at a church-operated hospital helping others until his death.  He eventually married and earned a master’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico.

    Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

    Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rope (1948), which was originally a play, has parallels to the Leopold & Loeb crime.  But the movie is highly fictionalized.

    Rope features two students who murder another student to show they are superior intellectuals. They hide the body in a trunk.  Then, they use the trunk as a table for a dinner party as a way to show how they are more clever than everybody else.

    The movie stars Jimmy Stewart as a teacher who attends the party. Do the boys get away with murder? I am not going to ruin it for you.

    Alfred Hitchcock filmed the movie in a unique style with extended takes between cuts.  Ultimately, though, he referred to Rope as a failed experiment. Jimmy Stewart was not happy with his performance either.

    Rope received mixed reviews. It also faced problems as some cities banned it for perceived homoerotic content. Today, though, many critics, like Roger Ebert, praise the movie and argue it is underrated, especially for the way the movie was filmed.

    Filmmakers do not make cheesy trailers like this one anymore.  The trailer for Rope features one of the actors in character talking directly to you about the movie. I wish they still made trailers like this one.

    The trailer for Rope sort of ruins the ending of the movie, so be warned.

    Compulsion With Orson Welles

    The movie Compulsion (1956), directed by Richard Fleisher, also was loosely based on the Leopold & Loeb case. In the movie, Orson Welles played defense attorney Jonathan Wilk, a character inspired by Clarence Darrow.

    Below is a video featuring the defense attorney’s argument before the court. Wilk’s argument is much shorter than Darrow’s 12-hour speech.

    Because modern movie directors think we have short attention spans, the 10-minute speech here is probably longer than you would see in most modern movies, which is a shame. As Darrow knew, it sometimes takes some time to tell a moving story.

    What do you think of the movies Rope and Compulsion? Leave a comment.

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    Steve Earle’s “Ellis Unit One” & Justice Stevens

    Not long after he retired, former United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was in the news for writing a book review, followed by an appearance on 60 Minutes. The attention on Justice Stevens and his changing views on capital punishment remind me of Steve Earle’s haunting song, “Ellis Unit One.”

    In several appearances after he retired, Justice Stevens described how he changed his mind about the death penalty. Over time, he came to conclude, as the New York Times summarized, that the Supreme Court has “created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”

    Justice John Paul Stevens
    Justice Stevens was on the Supreme Court in 1976 when the Court, in effect, established the modern death penalty.  In 1972, the Court held that the nation’s death penalty laws violated the constitution, but in 1976 the Court upheld new death penalty laws. In those cases and in cases throughout the decades, Justice Stevens voted to uphold the constitutionality of the death penalty. But in his final few years on the Supreme Court, he came to conclude that the death penalty system was unfair and constituted a pointless taking of life that does not serve society.

    At the time, Justice Stevens joined two other U.S. Supreme Court Justices who voted to uphold the death penalty in 1976 but by the end of their careers had changed their minds: Justices Harry Blackmun and Justice Lewis Powell.  More often than one might guess, over time, some who advocated for and implemented the nation’s death penalty — judges, prosecutors, police officers, wardens, legislators, executioners — eventually conclude that the punishment is unfair, racist, useless, risks executing innocent defendants, and that society would be better off replacing the death penalty with life in prison.

    The news about Justice Stevens reminded me of a song that tells one of these stories, Steve Earle’s “Ellis Unit One,” which appeared on the soundtrack for the 1995 movie Dead Man Walking and is one of the most moving songs ever written about the death penalty.  The song is told from the perspective of a prison guard.  The guard describes getting transferred to death row at Ellis Unit One, the Texas prison unit that housed condemned prisoners at the time the song was written.

    The narrator does not say what he thinks about the death penalty. Steve Earle’s genius here is to understand that the description is enough.

    Well, I’ve seen ‘em fight like lions, boys
    I’ve seen ’em go like lambs
    And I’ve helped to drag ‘em when they could not stand.
    And I’ve heard their mamas cryin’ when they heard that big door slam
    And I’ve seen the victim’s family holdin’ hands.

    Many of the judges who have condemned people to death may have had dreams similar to the one described in “Ellis Unit One”: “Last night I dreamed that I woke up with straps across my chest / And something cold and black pullin’ through my lungs.” Having such a heavy responsibility may haunt one’s dreams, even if the judge is confident in the choice made. Similar dreadful dreams may have led Justices Stevens, Blackmun, and Powell to renounce their earlier decisions.

    When we read about a horrible crime and have the normal initial human reaction to want the perpetrator killed, we often ignore the death penalty system’s toll on the many people it touches, including the guards, the wardens, the judges, the lawyers, the families of the victim, and the families of the condemned.  Whether or not we agree with Justice Stevens, one must acknowledge the costs caused by the continuing use of capital punishment.  While Justice Stevens’s change of heart reveals the legal and practical issues surrounding the death penalty, Steve Earle’s poetic song exposes some of the human toll.

    Bonus Song Information: The reference to “the Walls” in the song is to the nickname for the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas, about twelve miles away from Ellis Unit.  It is where the Texas inmates are executed.

    Bonus Alternate Versions Information:  In addition to the soundtrack version of the song, Earle has another outstanding version that is a demo with The Fairfield Four providing background singing. The Fairfield Four version appeared on the EP Johnny Too Bad and Earle’s collection of random songs from various side projects, Sidetracks. The latter appears to be available as an import, and the former seems hard to find and overpriced for an EP, but you may hear a clip with the Fairfield Four through the “Johnny Too Bad” link.  This version is worth seeking out.  Finally, a live version of the song is on Steve Earle’s Live At Montreux 2005 album.

    One of Cleveland’s favorite son performers, Michael Stanley, also recorded a version of the song. As a former Clevelander I have the required fondness for MSB, but his version is inferior to Earle’s. As his version progresses, he adds instruments and background singers to the point I thought he was going to break into a full-blown uplifting rock song with a last-minute stay of execution. Still, Stanley has good taste in choosing to cover such a great song, and perhaps it merely suffers by comparison to Steve Earle’s excellent versions. And some may prefer Stanley’s voice and his cover. Leave a comment to let me know what version you like.

    Has anyone ever started talking about a Supreme Court Justice and ended up talking about Michael Stanley?

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