Opinion-Columns.com

TAKING A FEW DAYS HOLIDAY---BE BACK SOON

China Announces Program to Dominate Space

Saying "it must secure space to protect the nation from attack," China has approved a national-security directive that moves it closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons.

Yeah well, I thought that might get your attention.

Actually, it’s just Rummy quietly dropping the other shoe and the opening quote is accurate, except that it’s the United States who’s rattling all those sabers.

The actual announcement, according to the New York Times article is: The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.

You can imagine, if you’re Chinese or French, Russian or Japanese, the shock at an announcement that casually indicates our intention to dominate the earth.

Too strong a statement?  I think not.  For whatever reason, Washington has determined that domination of the earth is acceptable policy.  It could be for any number of reasons, including:

• Embarrassment over Iraq, a war that made astonishingly clear that we’re unable to fight more than one conventional war at a time . . . maybe not even that.
• Defense-contractor angst over the end of the Cold War and the need for another trumped-up enemy to develop weapons systems against, in this case the entire world.
• Unwillingness on the part of our own inefficient and financially ruinous system of government-by-congress to deal with the United Nations’ inefficient and financially ruinous system of government-by-nations. 
• President Bush’s confusion over having found Christ and given up drinking, not realizing that the experience, no matter how profound, doesn’t equate to making the world subservient to American interests.
• Penis envy, pure and simple.

World powers and regional dominations ebb and flow and since the founding of our nation it has been policy to leave these cyclical forces pretty much to themselves, exerting pressure here and making alliances there, as it suited our national purpose.  For the most part our international reputation was that of a self-interested country that stumbled through a relatively unfocussed foreign policy, occasionally brilliant and more often harmless enough in our naivety. 

No more. 

With virtually no national debate and without consulting the congress, this thinly-elected sitting president and his Dr. Strangelove Secretary of Defense are preparing to take America to the brink of a form of dictatorship. 

Who controls access to space controls the planet.  If each and every communications satellite (or spy satellite for that matter) cannot exist in orbit without the tacit permission of America, there is no power but our own. Turn the UN into condominiums, it’s over, a goal Bush and Rumsfeld and certainly Cheney would agree suits their narrow and aggressive purposes perfectly.

But does it serve us as a nation and has that question even been asked?  No, it does not and no, it has not.

It does not serve us as a nation because no nation is trustworthy to run the world.  Just as America thrives because of its diversity, so the world thrives.  Just as America struggles with equity, faith and opportunity, so the world struggles.  The question has not been asked because demagogues never ask, preferring to appeal to fright and greed and ghosts in the night. That has been the administration's hands-on-hips, strap-on-the-six-guns stance since 9-11.  Those largely failed policies bring the Air Force, at Rumsfeld’s direction, to ask a new presidential directive to develop and install space weaponry to “assure free access in space.” Not global access, American access.

There are no ghosts in the American night.  There is no other nation capable at the moment (nor are we) to carry out such a program, but its announcement is sure to begin another financially destructive arms race. This wrong-thinking policy will drive nations to their formerly polarized positions . . . positions that crippled productivity and pissed away national resources for fifty years of Cold War.  Eisenhower cries from his grave, “Beware the military-industrial complex,” and here it is in spades. 

The last armaments race destroyed the Soviet Union and made paupers of half the world.  This one will push a financially fragile America into decline, leaving us as Martin Luther King, Jr. so accurately called us, a nation of “guided missiles and misguided men.”

This is not my America.  I have witnessed this mind-set before and seen the misery, the nations made poor, the societies laid waste by this same misguided patriotic zeal of sixty years ago.  My America cannot at the same time espouse freedom and democracy for the world’s peoples, and dictatorship by taking proprietary control of the earth’s space. 

This is no stumbling into a poorly thought-out war, as was Iraq.  This president and his misguided Secretary of Defense have a dismal track-record that has taken us from the world’s most idealized nation to its most despised and mistrusted, even by its allies.  This president, who holds no mandate for anything,  must not be allowed to claim a mandate for everything.

Since its founding, this American nation has been the beacon to the world of freedom and opportunity.  It is on the brink of having that glorious reputation hijacked by zealots, narrowly elected and marching behind the banner of 9-11.

In the name of all that we stand for and have stood for, this upcoming presidential national-security directive must not be tolerated.

Tangled Webs

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
                                                                Sir Walter Scott

The White House is going ballistic over Newsweek’s article alleging abuse of the Koran by interrogators in various prisons where terrorist suspects are held.  And it’s not a quiet phone call to the editor, but a full-fledged attack that blames Newsweek for the riots in Afghanistan that have killed a number of people. It’s a mess, but hard to determine if it’s Newsweek’s mess or yet another example of how badly the ‘wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan have been managed.

There’s probably not anyone who isn’t pretty much sick to death of how the U.S. military runs its prisons.  And so, when Newsweek reports that the Koran has been systematically desecrated, denials don’t have the moral authority one might hope for, as the administration cries foul. Instances of throwing the holy Koran on the ground, kicking it into latrine corners, tearing out its pages and flushing them down toilets began to surface as soon as released prisoners hit the streets.  According to Carol Leonnig’s article in the Washington Post, a former detainee told Russian TV in June, 2004 that “They tore the Koran to pieces in front of us and threw it into the toilet.”

That’s nearly a year ago. The Pentagon issued rules (January 19, 2003) stating that the Koran was not to be placed “on the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas.”

Larry DiRita, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that he was not aware of any credible allegations for the military to investigate.  Hard to know what’s ‘credible’ in Pentagon terms anymore when the agency itself is no longer credible.  There were reported hunger strikes over the Koran issue at Guantanamo and one can but wonder why the Pentagon issued rules about what it denies happened, or at least happened credibly.  The whole issue of credibility is at the heart of the Sir Walter Scott quotation and this government, founded on lies and lying on a daily basis, reaps the harvest of that crop.

Newsweek could have done better. It’s a magazine.  This administration could have done better and it’s the number one power in the world.

It isn’t even close to being comparable.

Poles Apart

What a difference a hundred years or so can make.  The Tom Avery-led five person team (that included an American woman, thereby giving it news relevance) re-created Admiral Robert Peary’s 1909 run to the North Pole, cutting a little less than five hours off Peary’s time.  Exhausted, they made it.

Avery said they did it partly to put to rest the 96 year complaint that Peary couldn’t have done it in that amount of time. When I compare the clothing Peary and Henson wore on their expedition with the modern expedition-wear, I picture the Peary expedition’s thirty-seven days struggling against nature in skins and furs compared to the Avery party’s Gore-Tex and down.  Not to disparage Tom and his group, their trip kept to required detail such as wood and skin sleds, powered only by dogs and human strength.  It was an awesome piece of work.

Before it became mired in the controversy of imposter Fred Cook, who claimed to have preceded Peary to the Pole, the expedition by Admiral Peary event fired the imagination of the world . . . and held it, for years. That’s just not possible today.  In these times we are news savages, devouring our young and thirsting for new bones to chew.  Thus Tom Avery and his brave crew will recede into shadow in a matter of days.  The article reference to ‘his brave crew’ brings up another oddity of explorers, mountain climbers and such . . . those who made it alongside the famous, step for step, hunger for hunger, frostbite for frostbite are blurred into the background focus, relegated as those-who-also-went -along.  I’m reminded of Ginger Rogers’ wry comment that she ‘did every step Fred Astair did, backward and in high heels.’ Sherpa guides on Everest also come to mind, not only accompanying but doing the heavy lifting.

And so, as Avery opens the page to Admiral Peary, another opens that tells of Peary’s  indispensable companion, Matt Henson . . . who happened to be black at a time when being black made one very nearly invisible in such circumstances.  It’s an interesting story, much abbreviated here.

Henson had explored with Peary for eighteen years prior to the trip to the Pole.  They surveyed in Nicaragua in 1890, testing the possibility of a canal route, then caught up again in ’93 to map and explore Greenland.  Cape Henson, in Northwest Greenland is named as a tribute to Matthew Henson by Robert Peary during his North Greenland expedition. After a failed attempt in 1906, Henson and Peary make their successful and world-renowned assault in 1909.  Prior to that gigantic achievement, Peary named Henson as the single man indespensible to the trip and without whom he would not go . . . and then a strange thing happened.

Sent ahead by Peary to scout, Henson mistakenly arrives at the Pole instead of stopping short and when Peary catches up with the rest of the team, 45 minutes later, he is so enraged that he never speaks to Henson again.  Yet three years later he writes a foreward to Matt’s autobiography, A Negro at the North Pole.  Peary was a complicated man, Henson simple.  Peary was ego's captive while Henson focused throughout his life on merely being the best possible at whatever he attempted.

Back in America, Matt wrote an article about the North Pole trip in a magazine called The Worlds Work and delivered a coast-to-coast lecture tour about the expedition, illustrated by lantern slides of his north pole photos.  In 1924 Peary died and Matt Henson went on to survive him by thirty some years.  Twenty-eight years after the historic trip to the pole, Henson is finally elected to the Explorer’s Club based in New York.  Almost forty years after the expedition, The Geographic Society of Chicago awards Henson with a gold medal and cites him as "the first Negro in this country to be honored for scientific achievement in the geographical field."

That seems quaint by today’s standards and yet it was stated in those terms and accepted without apparent offense by Matthew Henson, at age 81.  Six years later Henson wass commended at the White House by the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, for his significant contributions to the success of the discovery of the North Pole.

Times they were a changing . . . finally.

Losing Sight of FDR

Well, that couldn’t happen quickly enough for the neocons, but the fact is, as a society we’ve for the most part lost sight of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was trying to do . . . and did. 

Roosevelt presided over a country flat on its back.  It wasn’t a matter of two-job families struggling to buy their first home, it was no-job extended families losing everything they ever owned.  My old daddy talked about he and mom walking around downtown Evanston, wanting to stop for a cup of coffee and not having a nickel between them.  Daddy was a landscape contractor and when small jobs came his way, he and his laborers searched their pockets for change to buy gas for the truck.  Daddy was lucky he still had a truck.  Whole segments of society had nothing left and, increasingly, that included hope.

Social Security was enacted in 1935 in the heart of the depression, meant to be a life-line to those who approached old age with their finances wiped out.  It was a transference---no doubt about it---from those with jobs to those without.  I’m not sure anyone alive today remembers except by anecdote what the philosophy of those times was and how and why that much-maligned ‘New Deal’ was so important.  It pretty much saved the arts, both written and graphic; kept an entire generation of young people employed and off the streets, brought electricity to isolated farms and held a disintegrating society together by the vision and power of a single crippled man.

My old daddy hated him for it.  Many did and still do, even though they’re too young to know the smell of fear that permeated those times or remember the tap on a kitchen window that asked a sandwich for whatever small jobs were at hand.  My mother made those sandwiches and cut corners for our dinner.  My old daddy hated FDR but loved whoever came to him for help and gave what he could.  He claimed that the New Deal ended private charity and that we were all the worse for it.

But my point is that these depression-fixes were life-lines thrown to the drowning. They were never meant to be retirements in luxury any more than depression-era maternal and child health care was meant to become Medicare and pay for CAT-scans.  We have somehow re-defined these programs beyond recognition through seventy years of nearly uninterrupted prosperity.  Now the affluent scratch at the neediness of the poor in an untidy show of greed that dishonors Roosevelt’s original intent. 

We are not the nation of poverty we once were, but we have poverty enough.  We are not the desperate nation on our back that we were in those times, but we have fellow citizens who are desperate and on their backs. 

Those are the people who deserve protection from the neocon plan that would redistribute upwards the ability to feather one’s retirement nest.  Social Security was never meant as a feathered nest.  There’s plenty of future income to protect a decent standard of living for those whose retirement is in jeopardy, if only the greedy and not-needy would get the hell out of the way. 

To assure fairness, it should be a federal law that any person of means should be able, without exception, to change places with any person qualifying for a Social Security payment.  Changing places, of course, means just that . . . the exchange of one complete and entire lifestyle for another.  Seventy years ago the employed were damned grateful to be employed and more than willing to share with those tapping on the kitchen window.  Then we had $5,000 CEO’s and understood the forces that set men adrift.

Now we have $30 million CEO’s and fight over who will serve and who will eat.

My Plan to Save General Motors

There has to be a plan, because without one GM is a dead-man standing and has no chance whatsoever of surviving in the marketplace. 

Generations of executive hubris are to blame.  Don’t let anyone tell you it’s the foreign competition.  Hubris, saving their corporate asses and not rocking a boat that badly needed new directions are the reasons they’re in such suddenly shallow water and in danger of going aground. 

All that’s past history.  Now to the plan.

• General Motors, over a period of five years, gets totally out of the automobile manufacturing business.  Close down, sell off, consolidate assembly lines and leave Detroit for a hugely slimmed-down corporate headquarters in New York.
• Keep the brands (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac and GMC) and by all means keep the dealership network in place.
• Offshore the manufacturing. 
• Then watch as the stock recovers and GM nameplates repopulate the American roads.

In order to re-achieve brand differentiation and bring back the buyers who want a Cadillac to be more than a glitzed Chevvy, subcontract Caddy’s design and production to Honda.  Essentially, it will be a Lexus with its own signature body design and interior, a few proprietary goodies thrown in.  A hell of a fine car.  Market and sell the new Cadillac through the existing dealership network.  It’ll make ‘em all smile to finally have a great car to sell that’s worthy of the emblem.  Chevrolet goes to Kia (along with Opel) and GMC to Kia’s parent, Hyundai.  Toyota gets Buick and Pontiac.  Saturn gets sold to the highest bidder. Saturn and its manufacturing facilities are probably still worth something.

Actually, when I say ‘off-shore the manufacturing,’ it’s more symbolism than fact, as a good many Japanese and Korean brands are now manufactured in the United States at tax-deferred facilities nearly everywhere but Detroit.  How long has it been since GM had any kind of a break on a new plant, much less a tax break.  So, this kind of off-shoring could (and would) bring manufacturing jobs back to the US in a whole string of new, efficient, cutting edge facilities that would bring a welcome halt to the relentless loss of paychecks to foreign countries.

Getting out of manufacturing may require a bankruptcy on GM’s part to suit union, health care and pension strangleholds, but there are worse choices in the alternatives.  Better  to manage a bankruptcy now than be hauled in, kicking and screaming, a few years down the road.  At the moment, General Motors is cash-rich but that window won’t be open long as market share dwindles and pension and health plans spread chaos across the balance sheet. 

A bold move now could forestall the death of a thousand cuts. On the other hand, GM is not known for boldness and there’s a lot of corporate history that augurs against making the right move in a timely fashion. The failure to imagine is the greatest possible failure to stockholders and employees.

But if Bob Lutz wants to chat over coffee, I’m available.

Photo-Shopping the First Amendment

When I wasn’t paying attention, World Press Freedom Day came and went and now it’s ten days in the past tense, way off what serves for current copy. 

And yet there’s a shocking statistic that bears yanking us all back into taking another look.  Did you know---I certainly didn’t---that in country rank for free and unencumbered press, America is tied with Estonia, Latvia and Barbados at 24th out of the 194 countries ranked.

Barbados?  We rank with Barbados? Nothing against that lovely island nation, but gosh, we used to think of ourselves as leading the pack in that category.  Finland, Iceland and Sweden now lead that most attractive of lists and North Korea, Burma (I refuse to call it Myanmar), Cuba and Turkmenistan bring up the rear.

What the hell is going on? The first thing that springs to our lips when queried about our freedoms is that knee-jerk response that we pride ourselves in our freedom of the press. 

What the hell is going on is the current administration’s foisting off ‘infomercials’ as news stories, the whole ridiculous don’t-disturb-Robert-Novak flap, the pervasive hiding of war-crimes in Iraq, Bushies paying Armstrong Williams a quarter-million bucks to write nice things about No Child Left Behind and a series of successful stonewallings on democracy held in secret (ala Dick Cheney).

It seems the world noticed.

We Americans haven’t noticed all that much, but New York based Freedom House noticed and we sank like a stone on all three of the measurements they feel are basic to a free press in their annual rankings;

• political influence on reporting and access to information
• the legal environment in which media operate
• economic pressures on content and dissemination of news

If we were a fifth grade class, we’d be held back a year for not working and playing well with others.

Ever since the advent of Adobe PhotoShop, we’ve become used to strange heads appearing on bodies other than their own.  Those of us who have the program and like to tinker with computers have all fooled the truth on a Christmas card or baby picture.  We’re comfortable with not really believing that Jeep got to the top of whatever rock it’s shown on and maybe that’s okay, but maybe it’s not, not without a disclaimer. 

It’s dangerously close to PhotoShopping the news to have an actor pretending to be a newsman while ‘reporting’ a ‘top story’ for those watching TV.  We don’t expect the Armstrong Williamses of our society to offer their opinions on an ‘as paid’ basis, but it’s been happening.  Stooges in the White House press room?  Not funny.

In a weird twist, our present day society points accusatory fingers at judges who follow the letter of the law and shrugs off conflicts of interest in reporting by our government, columnists, military, media outlets and virtually anyone who rates a press pass.

Every time there's a jitter, such as the private pilot lost near the White House, the move Dick Cheney to 'a secure location.'  I posit that America's freedom of its press is more in need of a secure location than Dick Cheney.   

Al-Jazeera, an Accidental Ally

Unintended consequences are great levelers of absolute conviction.  The incidental and accidental keep turning over my most deeply held convictions.  That’s just one of the things that make the world (and watching the world) such an interesting experience.  Not always pleasant, sometimes heartwarming and occasionally vicious beyond explanation, but always interesting.

So it is with al-Jazeera, the Arab-language satellite TV station that Washington has vilified over the nine years it’s been on the air.  With the administration playing up coverage of beheadings and Osama bin Laden statements, Americans have perhaps been given a one-sided look at al-Jazeera’s impact on  political directions recently taken by a number of Arab countries.  This most-watched channel in the Arab world covered Palestine and Iraqi elections, gave saturated coverage to the aftermath of Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination, sent four correspondents to cover Egypt’s reform movement Kifaya, reporteded Morocco’s commission on human rights and Kuwait’s movement toward giving women the vote. Four full-time correspondents are stationed in Washington.

That’s a full plate.  That brings news of change to every illiterate Arab, charges conversations over tea in market places, brings dialogue to populations whose only prior example was what was heard in the mosque.  Robin Wright’s Washington Post article quotes Egypt’s aging president, Hosni Mubarak, when he visited the run down, dilapidated headquarters of al-Jazeera . . . “All this trouble from a matchbox.”

That’s where trouble comes from, matchboxes that when struck ignite a firestorm and the Arab world is on edge, a tinderbox next to the matches.  Bitterly disappointed by their leadership but with nowhere to vent their frustration but by joining a communal hatred of the West, even though that doesn’t feel quite right.  How, they wonder, did this magnificent Muslim culture fall so far from grace?

Arab leadership excelles at keeping heads down, making victims of Arabs, because as long as they are victims it’s all someone else’s fault.  Al-Jazeera has tapped the fault in bedrock victim-hood and the crack is slight, but enough to let some light in. 

Light . . . Mobarak's trouble from the matchbox.

Leadership loves control and abhors instability like nature abhors a vacuum, so the Bush administration and Arab strongmen are equally edgy and critical of al-Jazeera.  News and commentary is dangerous, always the first to fall victim to dictatorship. News and commentary shines the Beirut light on Teheran coffee-house conversation.

I suspect that the Arab side of the equation has far more to lose and is losing it, no matter the daily postings of a Bulgarian ‘copter shot down, no matter the day-by-day atrocities occurring in Iraq.  Insurgent Arab fighters in Iraq are a sharpening sword that sends chills to the necks of Royal Families, conservative clerics and dictator-presidents shaking in their ill-gotten boots. Insurgencies feed off discontent and if Iraq and Afghanistan begin to warm to their fledgling democracies, car-bombers may quickly take their business elsewhere and elsewhere means against existing Arab authority. 

That’s a big if, no doubt about it.

Yet revolutions have been built on less and the Arab street is awash in arms.  Despair feeds on ignorance, hope comes with knowledge and information is knowledge.  The Arab on the street has been lied to by so many sides in this decades-long conflict that he believes no official sources and believes less and less what he hears in mosque.  Somewhat surprisingly to al-Jazeera, they have become a force to be reckoned with and I quote Robin Wright’s second to last paragraph:

“A-Jazeera editors and reporters say they are largely responding to the rising ripple of activism in the Middle East, such as Lebanon’s popular revolt. ‘It was really remarkable,’ said Ahmed Sheikh, al-Jazeera’s editor-in-chief. ‘It was the first time people in this region have been able to topple a government.  We were all captivated.’”

If there is a single force that has perpetuated and encouraged democracy in America, it is without a doubt a free press.  Informed, we are unshakable.  It amazes me that, with editors and correspondents thrown in jail across the Arab world, al-Jazeera has  somehow been allowed to remain on the air.  It’s not much of a stretch to see this dusty, dilapidated satellite station as the modern force for change in the Arab world. 

Allah knows they’re ready for it.

Homeland Security’s Insecurity

All those busy-bees at Homeland Security are just so cute.  They’re all in a twit over their inability to get everyone behind their ‘split-second execution by top officials if downwind communities are to be saved.’ Dick Falkenrath, former deputy homeland security advisor (whatever the hell that means), says ‘the federal government currently lacks the ability to generate and broadcast specific, geographically tailored evacuation instructions’ across the country.

Well gee, Dick.  If a nuclear device goes off and dad is downtown at his office, mom is holding down another job and both of the kids are at different schools, no ‘properly generated and broadcast instruction’ is going to mean jack-shit.  I get so tired of all these busy-beaver deputy-whatevers telling us what we’re supposed to do when the unbelievable comes knocking at the door.  A radio broadcast and bullhorns in the streets wouldn’t have made a millisecond’s impact on NYC during the 9-11 disaster. Run those tapes, Dick. See if there was a snowball's chance in hell of broadcasting specific, geographically tailored evacuation instructions to any of those frantic New Yorkers. And that was not nuclear.  It was hell, but it was not nuclear.

In school in the fifties, I remember all that under-the-desk crap in the schools and people actually building underground shelters in their backyards, stocking them with bottled water and canned goods.  The City of Evanston, in which I lived, actually wrote an ordinance that made it illegal for Chicago to evacuate through Evanston because they’d damage the lawns.  Was this urban myth?  I don’t know, we heard it and laughed at the time.  Can you just see the Evanston cops, lined up across Howard Street?

Dick Falkenrath is now a fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is a good thing because fellows like him belong in think-tanks.  Thinking, is a long way from acting.  Thinking is what’s got us all taking off our shoes at airports.  Thinking has the idiot-alert working smooth as silk at Homeland Security but not much else, other than providing yet another layer of confusion to who’s running the bad-guy show.  Laurel (who runs the FBI) and Hardy (the CIA guy) don’t have the cell phone number of whoever’s running Homeland Security these days.  At any rate they weren’t taking Falkenrath’s advice so he moved on and now snipes at his old bosses through Washington Post quotes.

Eight paragraphs down in the John Mintz article  we read “Members of the public who seek information from Homeland Security’s Web site, Ready.gov (don’t you love it?), may not be getting the best advice, experts said.”

Hmmm . . . I guess. 

In a real laugher, the Ready.com site explains that someone a block away from the nuclear blast could save their life by walking around a corner. I love that! Between the blinding flash and the half second before debris pins you to a wall, you’re supposed to go from thinking about what it was that your wife asked you to bring home from the office to making the conscious decision to ‘walk around the corner,’ because someone just lit off a nuclear device where your car was parked.  Next on their list is probably calling your insurance company.

According to the article, ‘Homeland Security officials acknowledge they have lots of work ahead to prepare for a nuclear strike---a task they point out is extraordinarily difficult---but say they have made progress.'

Memo: Go back fifty years guys. The stuff we were told back then wouldn’t have worked either, but a lot of self-important specialists scared the shit out of us anyway.  No sense spending a lot of time and money reinventing the wheel.  People are going to jump into their cars and drive like hell to the first accident-blocked street. 

You can count on it.

Puttin’ On My Derby Hat

Reading the next morning about the Kentucky Derby is almost better than seeing the race. From year to year it’s hard to keep a dry eye, as there’s always a story to break your heart, which I suppose is the real truth behind everything in life. 

Life is a heartbreaker and the Derby is an annual restorative.

Mike Smith (how’s that for an American name?), this year’s winning jockey came back to ride after breaking his back in a spill at Saratoga in 1998.  Not very many come back successfully after that and those who do are apt to flinch in tight spots.  Thoroughbred racing is a business of tight spots among thundering hoofs, goggles splattered and face stung with whatever the track throws up. Spills under those circumstances have a way of replaying in your mind and that edge, that seeing the momentary lane and driving through it has no room for ghosts, it’s temerity in spades.  Son of a jockey, Mike began riding races in New Mexico at eleven years old, which makes this first Derby victory a salute to twenty-eight years in the saddle.  That’s a lot of thunder and a lot of tight spots.

Inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2003, Mike jockeyed the 1994 Derby favorite Holy Bull to a career-disappointment 12th place finish, although he rode the Bull from that ignominious finish to Horse of the Year in 1998.  Whaddya know, sports fans, Smith vindicated his ’94 loss this year on Giacomo and Giacomo, is the son of Holy Bull. 

That’ll bring tears to a glass eye.

This doesn’t have the feel of a Triple Crown year, with a bunch of high-odds finishers and all the favored horses caving in, but who knows?  It’s always a horse race.