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Dave Marash  – February 4, 2022 |  View this email in your browser

Backward and Forward
February 4, 2022

Sometimes my addiction to the sports page pays off in belly-laughs, sometimes in belly-aches.
 
The renaming (or as it is called these days, "the re-branding") of the Washington Football Team (once, the Redskins) provided both.
 
I guess the football team needed something other than its superbly generic Washington Football Team, universally shortened to the WFT, which suggested it was really WTF for dyslexics. But the Washington Commanders?
 
An excruciating laugh for the claim that the choice "honors" the military community that plays such a part in Washington life and culture.  I'm sure it does convey the same honor and reverence that the slur "Redskins" bestowed on Native Americans.  I mean, what could be more honorific than to adorn the logo of a team in a league of Bears and Panthers, Lions, Rams and Dolphins? Welcome to the zoo.
 
It does speak multitudes that the one franchise not some rich slugs' plaything, puffed up with tough-guy nicknames like the Giants and Raiders, Titans and Buccaneers, or hilarious misnomers like the Saints, the community-owned Green Bay Packers that actually honors working-class locals.
 
What about the Pittsburgh Steelers, you ask?  Well, look at the logo.  It pays no honor to people stoking furnaces or cooling ingots; it mimics the corporate signature of U.S. Steel.
 
The best thing said so far about the Washington Commanders was Norm Ornstein's suggestion that their mascot should be General Custer.
 
As for baseball's newly-branded Cleveland Guardians, I guess they "honor" police officers, no more a bad thing than honoring the military and every bit as necessary as counting coup on the Redskins.  The Indians may not have been a slur, in the way a franchise of Jerusalem Jews would be "less worse" than the Yids, but their mascot and logo "Chief Wahoo" could have been selected and drawn by Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose honorific for a Holy City ballclub might have been The Space Lasers.
 
Oy! Or Haha. Or both.
THIS WEEK: WALKING AWAY FROM A LEGACY OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION; DIRTY MONEY DOES LONDON, AND REAPPEARS IN FILTHY WALLETS AROUND THE WORLD AND TWO PLACES WHERE ANIMALS ARE HONORED IN SPORTS AND KILLED IN LIFE.
This Monday's guests on HERE & THERE, the team of Jerry Redfern and Karen Coates have made a superb documentary about Laos called Eternal Harvest. The "harvest" is thousands of unexploded bombs tossed there by the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1973. What keeps the series of lives lost or badly damaged when they explode "eternal" is America's refusal to make a serious attempt to clear what we sowed. Redfern and Coates prosecute a case as strong as the film they made to prove it. You can find the show here.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we took two looks at the global epidemic of kleptocracy.  Columbia University and Chatham House scholar Alexander Cooley focused on London, for decades a safe haven for ill-gotten gains from the Soviet Union and its surviving fragments Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.  Pull the plug on the money laundry for political malefactors, it is said, and much of the economy of the city of London and the UK will go down the drain.
You can find Tuesday's show here.
You can find Wednesday's show here.
On Thursday, the guest was reporter Jimmy Tobias, whose original appearance came last August.  His plea for Floridians to offer real Panthers the respect they give the ice hockey team named for them, and for North Carolinians to spare living wolves even as they cheer the State University's Wolfpack is very well argued. And it got fresh print this week, when some (choose your expletive) shot a species-endangered Mexican grey wolf after Donald Trump's border wall kept it from finding a mate in Mexico.  The wolf will survive, but at the cost of a missing leg. But at least its head won't wind up on Eric or Don Jr's trophy wall. You can find the show here.
NEXT WEEK: ANOTHER PAIRING OF A FAILING PENAL INSTITUTION AND A REAL-LIFE "WORST CASE" FAILURE; PERHAPS THE BEST SPY STORY YOU NEVER HEARD AND A REPLAY OF A SECRET REVEALED IN JUNE, BUT STILL SHOCKING IN FEBRUARY.
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque, the local jail for the city and its surrounding Bernalillo County, has been notorious for more than 25 years for its overcrowding. Now it's also renowned for its under-staffing, particularly in its medical and mental health services.  On Monday, reporter Cecilia Nowell talks about her coverage in The Nation of the death of one prisoner, a homeless Native American woman named Joleen Nez.  She died on her first night after admission to the detox unit of the MDC. Hers was the eighth death at the jail in a five-month period of 2020, the fourth loss of life in the detox unit.
 
On Tuesday, investigative reporter Austin Fisher of Source NM shares what he's learned doing a series of stories about the MDC, and particularly about the disastrous dysfunction of its medical services.  One particularly grievous aspect to the story is the revolving door of medical service providers in which one bungling company, Centurion, cut and ran from its contract while under fire for among other things presiding over those eight deaths in five months.  Its replacement Corizon had previously been run out of New Mexico for its past failures in the state prison system.  When the changeover was announced, an outside expert predicted it would make things worse. Fisher presents evidence the prediction was accurate.
 
Wednesday, we bring you Dave Lindorff and his investigation, also published in The Nation, of a true and truly incredible story of nuclear espionage. The extremely damaging spy in the Manhattan Project was unpunished, in part because his older brother was no spy, but the lead designer of missiles for the U.S. Air Force.  In this case, blood was not only stronger than water, it was stronger than J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI. Don't miss this!
 
If you did miss last June's HERE & THERE with William Arkin, don't make the same mistake again.  Arkin, justifiably legendary as an investigative reporter on national security subjects, wrote in Newsweek about America's secret army, literally off the books and beyond accountability, and growing, growing growing.  Don't we have fun!

— dmarash

 

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