For the Next Tournament of Champions Jeopardy Is Going Old School

 

In the first five full seasons of the post-Trebek era on Jeopardy I've seen a lot of changes on how the show does things. I haven't been against every damn one of them but I've against a lot of them. Yet over the last year or so I'm become resigned to the possibility that this was the way things were.

So imagine my astonishment – and delight – to know that for the next Tournament of Champions Jeopardy is getting back to its roots. After every Tournament of Champions has tried to shift the format to its most elastic this year we are going back to basics.

The official eligibility period for the 2027 Tournament of Champions ended at the conclusion of the 2025-2026 season. For the first decade of Jeopardy that was the standard, then it became more elastic overtime and it may end up shifting again. What is different is that for the first time since the 2021 Tournament of Champions Jeopardy is going back to the format that millions of fans like myself loved and rejoiced in.

There were certainly hints of it during the 2025-2026 season, in both Champions Wild Card and a variation of it in the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament that year. But I'll be honest, I really thought it was a bone that was being tossed to traditionalists and not something the show would ever go back to. I've never been so grateful to be proven wrong.

Whenever the next Tournament of Champions takes place it will follow the format that all Tournaments during the Alex Trebek era following: fifteen participants facing off in five quarterfinal matches with the five winners advancing along with four wild card spots for the high scorers among non-winners. We will then have the three semi-final matches that will lead to three winners and then – well, honestly I don't know about that part yet.

 But whatever method they choose whether it's a two game total point affair or they go back to the first to three winning the tournament, I don't think I care. Because ever since the Second Chance and Champions Wild Card tournaments were established, despite the admitted talent of such players as Juveria Zaheer and Long Nguyen (both of whom more than proved themselves in the last Jeopardy Masters) the bad has outweighed the good. Endless postseason aside, it has done much to diminish the overall effect of the Tournament of Champions as being about the best of the best, even if in none of them have any of the winners even made it as far as the finals. Last year the show did much to limit their presence and it is likely that will continue in the postseason this January.

There's the also the fact by expanding the roster at all and adding the byes they were limiting the ability of many of the best players to advance. That much can't be blamed on the format – the one thing you can predict about a Jeopardy Tournament is that you absolutely can't predict who'll win – but it definitely was a factor.

Now in what seems to have been a moment of clarity for the producers they have restored order to a system that many fans, even at its best, felt was chaotic. And they may have actually redeemed themselves in the minds of many, certainly myself by listening to us.

And even those who might complain about going backwards will be hard pressed to be annoyed considering just how many incredible Jeopardy players are here. Because this has been a season of super-champions and some of the best Jeopardy players in history.

So Jeopardy fans with authority here is your official roster for the 2026 TOC – at least so far:

Jamie Ding, 31 wins, $885,605

Harrison Whitaker, 14 wins, $374,999

Caleb Groen, 12 wins, $346,968

Adam Remsen, 12 wins, $306,415

Tristan Williams, 10 wins, $222,902

Chris D'Angelo, 8 wins, $194,201

Peter McFerrin, 6 wins, $147,399

James Denison, 4 wins, $99,400

Will Riley, 4 wins, $80,403

Greg Shahade, 3 wins, $74,602

James Hirsh, 3 wins, $67,418

Ron Lalonde, 3 wins, $53,501

Mina Kimes, Celebrity Jeopardy All-Stars Winner

And apparently Jeopardy made a mistake in last year's Champions Wild Card. Late in Double Jeopardy Stella Trout bet everything on the last Daily Double. Her response was ruled incorrect. However the producers realized within one day of the game ended that Stella's response should have ruled correct.

Had that happened she would have gone into Final Jeopardy having locked up the Wild Card Tournament and would have gone into the 2026 Tournament of Champions.

So in a mea culpa of epic proportions Stella is getting yet another Second Chance and has been invited to participate in the 2027 Tournament of Champions. Honestly given just how well she played in Champions Wild Card all the way through hard to pretend she hasn't earned it.

The last spot will be determined in the same fashion it was back in Season 42 postseason with the Second Chance Tournaments and the winners going to compete in Champions Wild Card for that final spot. Once I know the official roster so will you.

This was already going to be a thrilling Tournament even before the eligibility requirements were set up. For the first time we will have a roster of super-champions competing in an Alex Trebek style Jeopardy format. This will lead to a greater level of strategy then the post-Trebek style tournaments which have basically been win or go home for every quarterfinal match. We haven't seen this play out since the 2021 Tournament of Champions and it'll be interesting to see how all the players handle it.

There's also the storylines involving so many of the participants. Tristan was defeated by Chris and Chris was defeated by Peter. Greg famously defeated Jamie Ding so there's the possibility of James Holzhauer-Emma Boettcher type narrative if they face off.

Then there are the personal narratives. Chris D'Angelo revealed that his efforts to get on Jeopardy were the source for the Emmy winning TV movie Quiz Lady which means if this goes a certain way we may see a fictional version of this tournament streaming on TV. Ron LaLonde is Ray LaLonde's identical twin brother and Ray LaLonde was a super-champion who failed to advance past the quarterfinals. So Ron might be trying to avenge the family honor.

And of course Jamie Ding's incredible performance in which he became the fifth best player in Jeopardy history both in games and money won in his original run has already become one of those players whose fame has transcended Jeopardy. Just this past summer he appeared on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with Ben Affleck and has already made quite a few pop culture lists before.

But as Jeopardy fans know being a super-champions means squat in the Tournament of Champions. Ryan Long and Jonathan Fisher famously couldn't get past their quarterfinals and Mattea Roach was flattened in her semi-final against Andrew He. And in addition to Ray LaLonde, Cris Panullo who himself was ranked fifth in money won in his original appearance couldn't was trounced in a runaway victory in the 2024 Tournament of Champions by Jared Watson.

Whenever the 2027 Tournament of Champions happens (the eta is either January or February) it will be of epic performance. New breed super-champions in an old school format.

It also means (heh heh) that Matthew Riggle will have a longer wait for his appearance to the Alex Trebek stage. So I'm going to wait until the end of October to give my first official report on whose going to be appearing on Jeopardy in the 2028 Tournament of Champions. There have been some developments there but I'll save that for later.

Back to the Island: Lost Character Study - Introduction: Why When It Came to TV During Its Run The Rules Never Applied to Lost

 

Author's Note: For the purpose of this articles and the ones that will follow in this particular series I will be doing comparisons only with series whose runs overlapped with  Lost's original run between September of 2004 and May of 2010.

I was as big of fan of the TV shows in the first decade of the 21^st century as any critic and indeed millions of other viewers both then and now

I might have issues with how The Sopranos played out but I devoured the first four seasons at least. I spent years loving The Wire and while I came late to it Deadwood ranks as my favorite among the first crop of HBO masterpieces. I devoured the final seasons of The Shield; I was at Dexter from his first kill, and I watched the masterclasses that were Mad Men and Breaking Bad though I came a little late to the latter masterpiece.

I should mention there are also many series from this period I've rewatched multiple times. Not just Deadwood and The Wire but also 24 and Battlestar Galactica. And I think Damages is just as good as any of the series that debuted during this period. So the question is why, of all of these masterclasses in great television, do I rewatch Lost like clockwork every two to three years?

I think a lot of it has to do with what was fundamentally different about Lost then almost all the other shows I've mentioned. In all of these shows we were spending week in and week out rooting for villains.

Now to be clear, in some of these shows like The Wire and Deadwood, there were more than a few genuinely good characters along with the bad ones and 24 managed to have a clear action hero among the political drama. But I think we're well past the point where we as critics have to admit the term 'antihero' was a way to justify that week in and week out, we were watching a horrible white man do horrible things to other people and most of the time it involved brutal violence.

Let's not kid ourselves any more. Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey and Walter White were killers and drug dealers who committed violent atrocities  on a weekly basis and would regularly lie to their wives and children about what they did. Don Draper cheated on both his wives weekly, was an absent father to his children, and was a terrible boss. And Dexter Morgan was a serial killer who even by the time of Season 4 (which is where my cutoff is for these articles) had let an innocent man take the wrap for his killing, was lying to his sister and his colleagues, and whose wife did get killed because of his inaction.

I will confess to being as guilty of it as anybody. I never for a moment engaged in the kind of toxic masculinity where I considered women such as Carmela Soprano and Skyler White the real monsters because they committed the unspeakable crime of being wet blankets. (I need that to be clear.) But I thrilled in watching the horrible actions of these, ahem 'white male antiheroes' as much as anyone else. Much of it was due to the incredible writing, directing and acting that filled all of these series to be sure and I probably did the same compartmentalizing as every other viewer and critic did during this period. And I'm not saying that these dramas suffer by comparison in hindsight; they're still as great now as they were then.

But at a certain point for all of the leads of these shows, even the leads themselves often admitted they were beyond redemption and they'd never really been anything other then monsters. Some like Dexter Morgan knew it from the start, for some such as Walter White they only acknowledged it after everything was over and some like Tony Soprano figured they couldn't change. It doesn't make many of these series anything less than masterpieces (and indeed a recent New York Times piece has named many of these shows among the best of 21^st century so far) but it is something then even their creators have acknowledged were flaws.

And I think that's part of the reason I do keep coming back to Lost like clockwork in a way I just don't with any of the shows above. (Out of the 100 shows they listed Lost ranked 18^th for the record.)

During my most recent rewatch of Lost I worked on what was a rough draft of episode recaps in which I included some of my thoughts after nearly 20 years. When I got to the final season, my analysis was much on the subject here and I'll quote one of my more relevant points below:

In LA X ‘Locke’ dismissed everyone on the plane as ‘weak, pathetic and irrevocably broken’. We all know he was speaking from a place of contempt in that but there is one word that is accurate and that’s ‘broken’. Darlton referred repeatedly that all of the characters on the series were not just physically lost but emotionally so and no one will dispute that fact.

‘Broken’ could also be used to describe so many of the major characters in all of the other dramas that we met in the first decade of Peak TV. Tony Soprano was famously so, and you could say the same for everyone he associated with. Al Swearengen and most of the members of Deadwood were to a certain extent many in ways the characters on Lost could not handle. By the time Lost was getting nominated for Best Drama in its final three seasons we had been introduced to Don Draper, Walter White and Dexter Morgan all of whom it's safe to say had pieces missing. That said I think it's safe to say that in the entire run of Lost, the series never had a character anywhere near as morally bankrupt as these characters: the closest is Ben and he is anywhere near as villainous as any of the characters I’ve listed on a good day.

By comparison there isn’t a single character on Lost who even comes close to the definition of the antiheroes we were getting before, during and after the revolution. All of these characters are flawed but I would never have called any of them anywhere close to the level of monstrous that we were getting in Breaking Bad or The Sopranos.

This may be one of the reasons it has been easier for me to return to Lost multiple times over the years than many of the other shows I’ve mentioned. All of them are of high quality to be sure but the enjoyment we get of these shows is of a darker layer than Lost’s.

I should mention that in Back to the Island Emily St. James posits a prominent theory among TV critics that a series can be summed up by a single word. I disagree with her on that, in large part because I reject any idea of trying to simplify any great work of art in as few words as possible.

For that reason it's reductive to use a word such as 'broken' as a catch-all term for all the characters in Lost despite the truth of it because it’s a term that really could apply to almost every other protagonist I've mentioned in my writing. Indeed I suspect that may have been one of the justifications that many critics, both professional and online, used to justify rooting for all of these horrible men during this period. You could argue that Vic Mackey was doing what he had to do in a broken system; that Tony Soprano was broken because of who his mother was; that Dexter Morgan was a serial killer because he was broken as an infant.

All of this is true but it's as much a reason why the viewer condoned, if not outright justified all the horrible things they were doing. And it provided cover for any viewer who those viewers who were experiencing the vicarious thrills from watching them do increasingly violent and horrible things season after season.

That gets back to what Emily St. James argues is one of the overriding themes of Lost: redemption. That may be the biggest difference between Lost and all the other shows that were airing while it was in its original run and it was certainly vastly different from the dramas that would air in the decade to follow. All of the characters on Lost were broken and many of them thought at the beginning and indeed for much of their arcs on the series that they were beyond saving. But for the characters who managed to survive until the end of the series you could see with each season that they were trying to find a way to deserve a second chance. A lot of the time they were knocked back but they kept trying to find a way to move forward season after season.

Lindelof said that in addition to being physically Lost, all the characters were also emotionally lost. And that is a theme that Nikki Stafford came back to quite a bit during the final volume of her Finding Lost series. I'm not saying that isn't true of all the characters in the other series that I listed above (and in this series of articles I'll mention others of that era that have applications here) but the difference is that even before we first met the majority of them, they were convinced they were beyond saving and their actions in the series were all about them going further and further into the dark.

By contrast all of the characters on Lost were trying to find their way back to the light, and for all of them it meant different things in ways that were less clear cut then the journeys on shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. At a certain level its easier to watch series like that repeatedly then watching brutality, bullying and killing. (To be clear there wasn't a shortage of that on Lost but the writers never drowned you in it the same way it did in those shows.)

Stafford also argued that none of the characters were black and white; they were all gray. The idea that no one on Lost is either fully good or fully bad is also a common theme in Back to the Island. And while that's true I'd argue with every single character on Lost they were trying to do the right thing rather then the wrong one. I suspect that's why the writers named so many of their characters after philosophers who were asking these very questions about the nature of man. You don't name your characters after Locke, Rousseau and Hume if you're trying to tell a story about villains. (Don't worry; I'm not going to send you back to your college textbooks for these articles.)

In the articles that will follow I intend to look at the journeys of the characters who made it all the way to the final season of Lost and who'd been on the series since the first or second season in some form. I'll try to compare them to the kind of characters we were getting on television during the era Lost was on the air, why some of them took more abuse from fans then others, and my own personal views of their difficulties and their strengths as well as how my individual opinions of them have changed in the more than twenty years since I first encountered them. By necessity some of this will involve ground I've cover before in previous articles but since that is inevitable in almost every book I've read on any TV show, I don't feel that bad. I'll still do my best to avoid repetition.

This concludes your Orientation session. Namaste and Good Luck. (I'm sorry, I just couldn't help myself.)

 

Decision 2026: Governor's Edition Why The Race For Governor In Alaska Might Be More Significant Then This Peltola Phone Banker Thought

 

As I've referred to more and more in many of my columns about politics the last few months since June I've been working the phone banks to write and help get Mary Peltola elected to the Senate in Alaska. I've explained my motivations, why I think she's the kind of Senator the country needs going forward and even what the significance is.

However I may have mentioned that the organization I'm working for is Alaska Democrats. And while our main focus has been the Peltola campaign as we enter the homestretch our calls have focused on the two other Alaska Democrats running for statewide office: Bill Hill, who's trying to take back the At Large Seat that Nick Begich took from Peltola in 2024 and the governor's race. It's that race I'd like to focus on for this article.

Now to be very clear I have priorities. As I mentioned in my previous article on the subject it is far more important that we win as many of the governor's races in the Midwest as possible and it would cause a political earthquake if  either David Jolly in Florida or Gina Hinojosa in Texas , both who are incredibly competitive so late in the campaign were to win their governor's races in those states. And I don't pretend its not more important nationally for Peltola or Hill to win seats in Congress then if the Democrats win there.

But that doesn't mean a win in the governor's race wouldn't have a certain amount of importance either. For one thing no Democrats has won a  gubernatorial race in Alaska since 1998 when Tony Knowles won reelection. But beyond the symbolism of being the first Democrat to win this office in the 21^st century there's a good case that it might show a path for Democrats to be able to win in the kinds of small states much of their party has been dismissing for the last twenty years. And if they can take two of three critical offices in the same year, it would be another in a line of showing how much the Democrats are taking their strategy to rebuild serious at a statewide level and moving away from the approached they've tried in the aftermath of 2016.

Throughout this cycle we've seen many states that Democrats have lost for year with attractive candidates running for both Senator and Governor: Josh Turek and Zach Lahn in Iowa, Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton in Ohio, James Talarico and Stephanie Hinjosa in Texas. All of them have two attractive candidates for statewide office which neither  can be easily labeled with the label "radical leftist', each of whom can complement and lift the other up on the campaign trail. (The same can't be said of other combinations such as Angie Nixon and David Jolly in Florida or Abdul El-Sayed and Jocelyn Benson in Michigan where I suspect ballot splitting will take place.) But Alaska offers the most instructive lessons because it involves a state that has been electing Republicans across the board for far longer then most of these states and is much smaller in terms of population. Forget New York: if they can win here Democrats can win everywhere.

So let's have a brief discussion about the Alaska governors in the 21^st century – and to maintain my pledge when phone banking I'll start after Sarah Palin left the governorship.

In case you forgot Palin resigned in 2009 and her lieutenant governor Sean Parnell succeeded her. In 2010 he won election in his own right with 59 percent of the vote against the Democratic opponent. At the time it was a primary that involved the Alaskan Independence Party, the Democratic Party and the libertarian Party of which Ethan Berkowitz won and would receive just 37 percent of the vote. This was the first time in Alaska's history where any party won three consecutive gubernatorial elections.

Four years later Parnell chose to run for reelection. His running mate as Lieutenant Governor was the Mayor of Anchorage Dan Sullivan. The Democrats nominated businessman Bryon Mallott. However Alaska has a fairly strong independent party and the former Republican Mayor of Valdez Bill Walker, ran as an independent.

By this point Parnell's approval ratings were in the toilet and even Sarah Palin was taking issues with the tax cuts he'd paid for the oil and gas industry. So on September 2, Walker and Mallott merged their campaign to run as a single independent ticket, with the Alaska Democratic Party endorsed. It would take nearly a week for the media to officially call the race but on November 15^th Walker was declared the winner by a remarkably close 2 percent. Combined with Mark Begich's defeat in the Senate, it was only the fifth time in the last 50 years when an incumbent governor and Senator from different political parties from the same state were defeated in the same election cycle.

Of course no one noticed because of the red wave that had swept the country during the midterms, and if they did it was because of Begich's defeat in the Senate in which Dan Sullivan had won a crowded Republican primary before narrowly beating him.

Walker faced a statewide budget deficit and proposed reinstating a statewide income tax as well as reducing annual payments to qualified state residents from the Alaska Permanent fund. This move was deeply unpopular and doomed his chances of reelection. In 2018 when he was trying to run for reelection he faced a series of controversial problems in the leadup to his election included an unpopular plea bargain involving an FAA air traffic controller accused of kidnapped and sexually assaulting an Alaska native. Finally on October 16 Mallott resigned because of 'inappropriate comments' that neither he nor Walker detailed.

Walker was a facing challenge from the Democratic Party already when Mark Begich had entered the campaign which had led him to withdraw from the Democratic primary and run as a fully independent bid. This split was expected to favor Mike Dunleavy, who ended up being the Republican nominee for governor. However 3 days after Mallott resigned, Walker announced he was suspending his campaign and endorse Begich though Walker's name was still on the ballot.

It didn't make much of a difference as Dunleavy won with 51.44 percent of the vote to Begich's 44.4 percent. All of the polls had favored Dunleavy from the start of the campaign and there were no surprises. In a night that was a disaster for Republicans on a gubernatorial level as much as Congressional (the Democrats won seven states that Republicans had held governorships the previous election) that Dunleavy was the only Republican to flip a governorship counted for less then nothing nationally.

Dunleavy was a good governor when it came to things such as natural disasters like wildfires and the 7.1 earthquake that struck Alaska three days before he took office. But he also used his line-item veto authority to make cuts to the University of Alaska and the budget of the supreme court. As early as July of 2019 there was a recall petition signed. Despite having more than sufficient signatures the state Attorney General (appointed by Dunleavy) issued an opinion against. The recall effort proceeded but it never had sufficient votes in either 2020 or 2021 to get enough signatures to put it on the ballot in November. Still going into his reelection campaign in 2022 he was one of the most popular governors in the United States. As Governor crime had dropped 31 percent with violent crime dropping nearly 16 percent.

By the time Dunleavy ran for reelection in 2022 Alaska had officially adopted ranked choice voting. As I may have explained all candidates would run in a non-partisan blanket top four primary with the top four candidates making it to the general. In the first round Dunleavy received 40 percent of the vote, Democrat Les Gara received 23 percent and Bill Walker received nearly as much running as an independent. Charlie Pierce, another Republican, rounded out the ballot with 6.5 percent.

Because of Dunleavy's immense popularity all polls ranked the race as Likely Republican. While Dunleavy's margin had dropped to just over 50 percent it was more than enough to avoid a runoff and a second round of voting. Dunleavy became the first governor of any party to win reelection since Tony Knowles in 1998. But again if people were paying attention to Alaska it was because of Mary Peltola winning a full term to house and Lisa Murkowski just barely winning reelection over a Republican challenger because of her voting to impeach Trump in 2021.

Like the majority of states Dunleavy was term limited from running for reelection in 2026. The field involved 17 candidates and the combination of non-partisan primary and the ranked choice voting system have been credited with more positive campaigning. As a result candidates have been emphasize areas of agreement.

The Republican field was far more crowded then the Democratic one and the primary led to the two top vote getters being Democratic Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the former state representative from Alaska's 35 district and Tom Begich, the former minority leader of the Alaska Senate and the Uncle of the Republican representative in Congress Nick Begich III. (Like I said holiday dinners in the Begich household must be interesting). After he finished second Begich withdrew from the primary and endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins.

Kreiss-Tomkins is facing three Republican candidates in the general: Bernadette Wilson, a waste management company founder and conservative activist, Dave Bronson, mayor of Anchorage from 2021-2024 and Treg Taylor, Attorney General of Alaska during much of Dunleavy's last four years in office. Taylor faced scrutiny because of financial disclosure that didn't comply with Alaska state law and the Lieutenant governor briefly declined to certify him for the ballot. However four days later she reserved herself.

A large part of the reason the race is favored to go to Kreiss-Tomkins (or JKT as he's referred to in Alaska) is because he has been leaning towards bipartisanship and making it clear that politicians of all alignments are welcome in his cabinet. By contrast Wilson, who is the leading candidate among Republicans has been criticizing bipartisanship and has been calling both Taylor and Bronson to drop out and urging her supporters not to rank other candidates.

While all three Republicans generally agree on most issues there are key difference on two critical points. Wilson is the only candidate advocating for a return to paying out full Permanent Fund dividends, something that Dunleavy campaigned on but was unable to implement as governor. The Republicans also differ on the issue of data centers. Bronson and Taylor are generally supportive of the issue, portraying them as an economic opportunity for the state, provided they generated their own electricity and didn't drive up energy costs. Wilson is opposed to data centers, highlighting their environmental impact – a huge deal in Alaska. Kreiss-Tomkins had advocated for a moratorium on the issue until a regulatory framework can be developed. (It has to be said that he has received large donations from the AI industry which may give credence to Wilson's allegation about his trustworthiness on the issue.)

Because of the divided Republican field JKT has been building a lead in the polls ever since the primary. In polls in the first round JKT he polls with 48.8 percent of the vote, nearly twice as much as his nearest opponent Wilson. In a potential second round he maintains that lead with Taylor's votes likely going to Bronson. Most polls indicate in a head to head challenge he would easily beat Wilson, with the weighted average currently showing him ahead by nearly six points.

JKT does have virtues. For one he'd be only 37 if elected which would make him a fairly young man to become governor. He was elected to represent the 34^th district for the first time when he was 23, dropping out of Yale in order to run. His first race was so close that it took a month to call, winning by just 32 votes. In his freshman term he introduced House Bill 216, which made 20 Alaska Native languages state languages which was signed into law in April of 2014. He's also done a lot of good work for Alaska helping found Outer Coast College in Sitka. A college that is built on ''academics, labor and self-government." It's curriculum emphasizes bridging Western and indigenous ways of knowing. He was also vital in forming Alaska's Covid-19 simulation program Covid Act Now. In both cases these programs were helped with Republican governors.

No one will confuse JKT with Mamdani but I'm inclined to look more favorably on his accomplishments before running for Governor than my current Mayor. He's only three years older than Mamdani but has far more qualifications to be governor then Mamdani had when he ran for Mayor and he's done more for his state in a decade in public service then Mamdani has accomplished in his career. He certainly has a far harder row to become Governor than Mamdani ever did running for Mayor in New York.

I don't pretend that  if JKT wins it will matter to anyone outside of Alaska the way that Peltola's victory in the Senate will or Bill Hill winning in Congress. But as of today JKT has the best chance of winning in almost every political survey of the three major candidates running in this cycle. His gubernatorial run is currently ranked Lean Democrat in most polls where as Peltola is still considered mostly in Toss-Up to Tilt Democrat and it looks increasingly probable that Begich will win reelection.

And the fact America – not just the Democrats – need more competent elected officials in every major political office. Having endured a decade of  bigoted near-fascism from the major force in Republican politics and an increasing lean towards left-leaning populism from the bigger forces in Democratic politics, the country at large is exhausted by both. The country at large is exhausted by demagogues and showboats and by and large wants to go back to an era where its elected officials is quiet, competent professionals who do their jobs without making everything about appealing to the loud rage of one side or the other. I personally would welcome a return to an era where elected officials both ran for office and did their jobs with no drama and publicity.

To that end I have no problem doing my part to see that JKT becomes governor much as I am helping Mary Peltola become Senator.  Voting for quiet competence may not be as public as some candidates but that's the point. I think America wants its elected officials to be good at their jobs, work across the aisle and get things done with as little fanfare as possible. That's as true in the least populated states as the most populated ones and I hope we can get that.

There's A Good, Competent Show In Line of Fire So Why Did The Writers Bury It With An Unnecessary One?

 

 

There are two series in NBC's new drama Line of Fire: the one that the previews and advertising leads you to think you're getting – a competent Blue Bloods type procedural set in DC instead of New York –  and a show that seems determined to remind you of the worst parts of everything associated with Scandal and House of Cards. Having seen the first three episodes there's a part of me that wonders if the writers started out with the first idea and perhaps because so much of network drama is done in the influence of Shondaland felt an obligation to throw in a serialized – and totally unnecessary – subplot that I think even Olivia Pope and her Gladiators would say: "Yeah, this is just too ridiculous!"

The much stronger show is the family dynamic. It centers on the Hollingsworth family, which involves a family that is involved in nearly every part of the federal justice system. Mike (Peter Krause) is one of the legends in Secret Service, Jane (Hope Davis) is a U.S. Marshal, Claire (Kat Cunning) is an FBI agent, Micah (Tommy O'Brien) is a secret service tagged to the President's detail and Russ (Taylor Bloom) just got started in the Justice Department proper as a probationary.

So the first impression would be that of the Reagan clan but when they sit down to family dinner in the Pilot, it's the first one they've done in five years and none of the children seem happy to be in the same room with their parents. With good reason. We've already seen Mike bully his son as part of the detail and emotionally blackmail Russ so that he can information he can't access normally. Jane calls in Claire for backup on a case of a Marshal being killed to buttress her opinion but when Claire tries to take it further Jane essentially demonstrates no motherly instinct and honestly seems determined to ignore her.

At the start of the series Mike is about to retire and its clear he doesn't want to do that. (The show naturally forces him to stay on active duty for reasons I'll have to get into later.)Both he and his wife don't have any problems using their son as a font of information to due their own jobs and are perfectly fine using his brother and sister as leverage to get what they want from him, even if they have no capability to do it. This is a pattern with both parents: they may serve the government and the law but both truly feel that the rules of agencies get in the way and are perfectly capable of leveraging any professional or personal relationship they have in favor of their own means.

You get the feeling that all of the Hollingsworth children have been emotionally exhausted by their parents lives and that they all might have gone into law enforcement as a way to try and either win their approval or even spend time with them. And after three episodes I wouldn't put it above either parent for pushing their children into these fields with the promise of emotional affection but really playing the long game and having resources they can use when they eventually exhaust all their friendships and personal contacts. Both Krause and Davis are very good in playing the kind of overbearing people both professionally and personally who know that they are on the right side of things and will never let anyone, least of all their own children, forget it.

The result is a dysfunctional family where the siblings will often get drunk and relate just how they've inherited the worst parts of both their parents and it's killed them professionally and personally. The best part of Line of Fire are the times the family is capable of working together towards a better goal and showing those signs of affection. We see this when Mike says he proud of how Micah managed to stop an attack on the President by doing the kind of work he wouldn't have done or when Jane admits that some of the worst parts of Claire's tunnel vision came from her side of the family. And when Russ admits he told his boss about taking documents home he says: "Someone in our family has to do the correct thing instead of the right thing.) That implication hits home with Claire who says that this is why Russ is the best of them.

All of these are good elements and I could see a competent, possibly very good, procedural if the writers would follow it. The problem is that in the final ten minutes of the Pilot the writers essentially bury all of their good work with a series of revelations so ridiculous you genuinely wonder if they were thinking when they put them in.

In the Pilot Claire is about to introduce her family to her current boyfriend Noah who she's been seeing for nearly a year but hasn't introduced them to her family. She ends up taking him against her will and it unfurls in a disastrous family dinner in which Noah asks about one of their brothers. We're told he's Jack and that he committed suicide five years ago. This leads to Noah and Claire having a huge fight and Noah storms out.

So far, so good. The problem is Noah comes back to Hollingworth home at the end of the pilot and starts looking around suspiciously. Then he unfolds one of the family pictures and sees Jack. It turns out Jack is his next door neighbor. He then turns around to see Jack who cold-bloodedly kills him.

We don't even have time to process this when the agent in charge tells them there've been a series of killings of law enforcement officers and that as a result Mike's retirement has been postponed. Then Jane shows Mike a small-folded crane and tells them that Jack did this and that they've been lying to their family about this.

This in itself is a lot to take in. But then in the second episode we learn that Noah was in fact a deep cover CIA agent who'd been called to get close to Claire. We've also learned from various contacts that Jack was undercover and had been lying to his parents about how to find him and that the last contact he had was a year ago when he committed suicide. At the end of the episode we see Jack taking pictures of Claire with the agent in charge.

Then we learn that there are clearance issues as to why Noah was doing and why and in the midst of all of this we see Jack going to an AA meeting, meeting someone, then trying to get a job at a doctor's office in the same strip mall where an undercover investigation is taking place. And by this point I'd wondered what the hell the writers were thinking with this storyline.

Even with Scandal and 24, the writers were very careful with how they did things in their bigger storylines. Even Shonda Rhimes didn't start the B613 storyline until Season 2 and was smart enough to limit her 'game-changing revelations' to one or two an episode. I don't know of any cable or streaming drama in twenty years that forces the viewer to reveal so much is a deception in the first episode and then keep building on the incredulity. I don't even think the most outlandish soap opera would put this many twists in a single storyline.

And what aggravates all the more is that Line of Fire doesn't need this to be a good show. The individual stories are fascinating enough. (Well, except for the fact that Micah seems to be having an affair with the President's daughter he's detailed with protecting which very well could be a bridge too far there.) The way that the writers deals with individual stories – the killing of a U.S Marshal and her prey involved with a cartel, an armed robbery that leads to a suspect who hasn't committed a robbery in three years, last night's story about grand jury intimidations that have led to two murders – are all strong plots on their own. And the way the Hollingsworth's either collaborate or clash can be brilliantly done and often quite funny. When Claire is at home working on the grand jury links and then first members of the pool and then the entire family end up all helping her, it has a genuine comic snap. And all the more so when Russ introduces his new girlfriend (who naturally he's been keeping hidden from everybody) and she takes it all in stride, because she's from a family of lawyers. "Most families have board games nights," she says as the chaos builds with a shrug.

Krause and Davis are also very good at showing how while they are separated they can't quit each other. While Jane has spent much of the last several episodes in a relationship with a Senator (Campbell Scott) and seems to be on the verge of moving in with him in the Pilot, Mike makes it very clear this is a bold decision "considering last night the bed you woke up in was mine."  

The problem is that this entire ridiculous subplot seems to have been dragged in for the sole purpose of making the Hollingsworth family come together again when a smarter writer would have been able to do so without putting in so many ridiculous twists. When the family dynamics play off it almost works but then the writers bury it with another ridiculous plot twist.

I'm not prepared to give up on Line of Fire just yet. If it can get through this ridiculous storyline and move forward, it could be the solid procedural it clearly wants to be. I saw this play out after the laughably bad first season of Alert: Missing Persons Unit ended and one got a much better second and third season once they decided to try and forget about it. There's enough good stuff in it to make the show watchable, even if I can't recommend it to my readers in good conscience. In other words I'll keep getting in the Line of Fire but other people shouldn't at least, not yet.

My score: 2.5 stars.

How in Lanterns Damon Lindelof is Still Asking Questions About Destiny & Free Will And Whether Superheroes Deal With The Same Thing (Lost 20th Anniversary Series Adjacent)

 

 

"They come. They fight. They corrupt. They destroy. And it always ends the same."

Any fan of Lost remembers the first time they heard those words spoken by Titus Welliver in 'The Incident'. This nameless man will eventually become the Smoke Monster, who will be known as the force of all evil on the show, who has been menacing  the survivors of Oceanic 815 since the Pilot, who has been manipulating them and countless others on the Island for millennia, and who seems to be the ultimate force of darkness on all of Earth.

I've rewatched this series quite a few times in all the years since and will continue to do so. But one of the questions that I keep thinking now is: Did the Man in Black ever really believe what he said? Or was this just something he remembered his mother saying when he was a boy and despite everything she did to him, he still believed it?

The question of free will and destiny is at the center of Lost and its really been at the center of every show Damon Lindelof has done in all the years since. And it's very much at the center of Lanterns, the much-anticipated, highly rated, critically acclaimed and hated by all comic book fans who don't want a moral grey area in anything, least of all comic books.

There are many reason to enjoy Lanterns but as a Lost fan I find myself thinking that this is Lindelof returning to one of those great philosophical questions that not nearly enough great television actually tries to deal with: Do we have any power over the choices we actually make? Or is our path set in stone by decisions that were made by greater forces long before we were ever born? Considering that Lanterns is all about superheroes, aliens and beings that are pretty much gods by our standards it makes the discussion all the more interesting. If it ends up polarizing the fan base as it unfolds, well, we all know that Damon Lindelof has no problem doing that and has to have got a skin so thick that he wouldn't need a magic ring to protect him from the slings and arrows of the internet.

In an earlier review I've said that a great franchise show is ideally one that is made for people who might never watch anything based on a franchise. Comic book based series have less room for this than almost any other series and I think it's significant that Lindelof is associated with one of the all-time classics of the genre 2019's Watchmen. That series was about a lot of things and very few of them had to do with Alan Moore's classic comic book which is why he took his name off the series and I suspect is one of the reasons it works so well.  He's done another classic limited series since then (Mrs. Davis) and now he's back doing the same thing with Lanterns.  It deals with a cop drama, alien invasion, supernatural beings, forces beyond our control and fear. Very little of it has to do with the ring, the lantern and the suit which has causes DC fans to hate this and is one of the most appealing things about the show to me.

And at the center of it are two men who are the parallels of destiny and free will. Hal Jordan seemed to be handed the ring and didn't earn it; John Stewart was driven through it from the moment he was a child. Both men dealt with forces that were larger than them, both of them have major parent issues (this is a Lindelof show, after all) and both of them have no trust in the other. The only difference between this and Jack and Locke is that it took three seasons for Jack to try and kill Locke and in Lanterns it only took four episodes.

Some have made the argument that in 'Outkast' the writers leaned in too hard about why it's so difficult to be a black man in America when it came to why John Stewart was driven towards the ring. There's truth to that but there's also clearly a parallel to how figures such as Daniel Faraday and Desmond Hume (among others) were driven towards a destiny they had no control over by dominant females such as John's mother, Bernadette and the Guardian (Laura Linney). Both Bernadette and the Guardian are clearly pushing him to something that's more in their interest then John's, stripping his free will away day by day until John doesn't question his path one bit. Every bit of John's life was pre-determined before he began, even his choice to join the military instead of art school. His regimen is being trained to follow orders to the point he no longer recognizes it when he finally achieves it.

There's a clear argument that in the first half of Season 1 John (Aaron Pierre) is pursuing the ring not so much for himself but to please his parents and then the Guardian. He says over and over that Hal didn't do a thing to earn, it was handed to him. But Jon has clearly never had a chance to ask if he actually wants it. The decision was made by his parents who were clearly being manipulated by the Guardians who never trusted Hal in the first place. (Whether that was justifiable based on Hal's actions is moot: the Guardians had started the vetting process for his replacement even then.) They were trying to push on the idea what it meant to be special for some higher purpose and if they had any regrets about it we don't really see it.

 Even as the climactic events in Rushville unfolded they seemed less interested in what was happening to anyone else or even their son; all they wanted to know was whether he'd gotten the ring. This is mirrored when John brings the Crystal Heart of Zoe to the Guardian and shows it to her. She looks at it and pushes it aside. All she says, in a neutral tone,  is: "We all make mistakes." And considering we've just seen the body count of humans and aliens as a result of their 'mistake' it shows how little they truly care about humanity, only their own interests.

(As a Lost viewer I should add that scene between Hal and the Guardian really reminded me of the confrontation between Ben and Jacob at the end of Season 5 when Ben reminds Jacob of all his years of service and Jacob's response is a dismissive: "What about you?" The Guardian's lucky John just walked away; in my opinion he would have been justified in putting on the ring, manifesting a knife and stabbing her in the chest.)

This is mirrored in Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler). In 2016 Hal seems arrogant not just to John but to basically everybody in Rushville. He's had the ring for twenty years and he thinks that gives him certainty that he must be 'the chosen one',  a theme that comes up a little bit in Lost.  There's an egomaniacal brazenness to him that makes him feel he's invincible and he treats everyone he meets in person with barely veiled contempt.  This certainty leads to the horrible consequences of his determination to get Zoe and prove to the Guardians that he alone should be the Green Lantern. As a result the horrible events of Rushville are very much on him. Even before this its become clear he has very little respect for orders, the chain of command or even right or wrong.

But – and this is the genius of Lindelof and his writers – there is a reason for why Hal is who he is. He makes it clear to Jon that this is a lonely life and that you have to get used to losing people and not having human connections. He tells John that being the only Lantern for Earth, there's no one else he can talk to about the burden placed on him and none of the other Lanterns even speak English. There are no perks about the job anymore; he probably doesn't know who Hal Jordan was before he got the ring.

And in a very real sense many, if not most,  of his actions are justifiable. The Guardians were lying to him about why John was there and John was willing to maintain the lie to Hal's face. He has no doubt that the Guardians wanted John to kill Hal after he took the ring from him (that they never say so directly doesn't mean it any less probable). He was right about an alien menace in Rushville and that everybody in town was lying to him about what was going on.  He was right that Zoe was the Manhunter and that John had been compromised like everyone else in her orbit. Hal was right about practically everything – including his last words to John. "They replaced me. They'll replace you."

By the time we move to 2026, we know Hal was right. When Jon refuses the ring the Guardians chose to pass it on to Guy Gardener, who makes his first appearance in the sixth episode. Interestingly this is one of the rare occasion where Gardener's previous appearance in the DCU (Superman in 2025) actually is a buttress for one of Lindelof's key themes in Lost.  Nathan Fillion made it clear Gardener was just as arrogant in his own way as Hal or John. ("Supes couldn't be here, but you got on an upgrade," he says to a young boy at the climax of the film) but there's a certain good-naturedness and humility to him that we don't see in Hal or John.  The Justice Gang ("Not Our Name," Hawkgirl tiredly reminds him) is essentially the DC version of 'Live Together, Die Alone' that was the thesis of Lost.  And for all his self-confidence Gardener clearly gets the importance of teamwork in  a way that Hal never did and John never got.  There's a good argument that by the time we meet him he's still around because he understands that fact – and as if to drive the point home, Hal has died alone and Jon very much is when the action resumes.

There's a larger argument that Guy, even at his most foul-mouthed in his encounter with Jon in the jail, has a better eye on the big picture than Hal or John ever did. He makes it clear that he's spent much of the last decade doing damage control in part because of what happened in Rushville and the stain it left on the Lantern. Tellingly neither Hal nor Jon seem to give much a damn for the new Lantern and even a decade after the fact still refuse to acknowledge who's responsible. John says that Guy owes him because 'what you have is because of me.' This indicates that despite everything that pursuit of the ring cost him there's a part of him that still wants it.

In 2026 Jon has broken off ties with both his parents who clearly don't feel any remorse for their actions. In their mind the events in Rushville and all the lives lost pale to  what they did. And John seems to have engaged in the compartmentalization Hal did. When the waitress of the café lies for him and demands reparations Jon pretends not to recognize the nine-year old girl who was horribly scarred. (At the end of Season 1 he atones in more ways than just the money) As he walks through Rushville in a town that hates his guts he doesn't seem to care how traumatizing his presence is. And everything he does is in a sense manipulative: he doesn't care about proper respect being paid to Hal, all he cares about is getting the ring so he can figure out who killed him.

In the penultimate episode we get the clearest parallels yet between Lanterns and Lost.   Hal Jordan is a hologram of himself and has no idea of what the last decade was like and what his relationship with John was. He has a fair amount of his cunning still in play and is capable of manipulating John to get what he wants, first to talk to Carol and then to go to the safe.

During this period secrets about John's life are becoming clear, including just how bad his relations with his family is. Ironically now that Hal actually wants to know about John's life, John has no desire to share it and now that's he dead Hal is capable of telling John everything he wanted to hear as a trainee.

By the time they end up traveling to the wreckage of the planet John learned about ten years ago John is forced to confront some of the true horrors of his life. He faces what is his greatest fear, which is the truth about himself: he never really wanted to be the Lantern and everything he's done has been to please his parents, something he still can't do. When Hal ends up saving him John doesn't want that.

Hal then confides his real secret: his father committed suicide. We saw him talk about it during the flashback in 1975 when he gives him a 'fail-safe key' and it is everything he has and a note. We learn that this is the trauma passed down from the Jordan's. "I wasn't fearless because I'm brave," he tells John. "I'm fearless because I'm broken."

We can't help but remember how the Man in Black in Locke's body described him "as weak and pathetic and irrevocably broken…just like all the people Jacob brought here." And given everything we've seen about John Stewart to this point, it's clear that he's just as broken as Hal was long before he ended up being the trainee. One is reminded that Jacob said he didn't bring anyone to the island out of a happy existence, that "you needed this place as much as it needed you."  But that leaves out the fact that Jacob, much like the Lantern Corps, may have been manipulating its members their entire lives to serve their end. And as we've seen over and over the ring doesn't make you whole.

What's clear is that by the time John and Hal reach Sinestro that they've finally figured out how to work as a team in a way they couldn't when the two were alive. And the relationship that John has really been searching for his whole life becomes real after John manages to take Sinestro down. Hal says: "Nice arm, kid" and the parallel to Hal in the aftermath of his father's death is made clear.

The clearest parallel in the Season 1 finale to Lost deals with some of the revelations in the final two episodes. In What They Died For Jacob tells Kate that the reason her name was crossed off the list of being the guardian of the island is because she became a mother. We know from Across the Sea that every happened because Jacob and the Man in Black were raised by an insane woman, who killed the real mother of the twins when they were infants and essentially took away all their choices in favor of purposes they never truly understood.

Kate Austen parallels Kerrey because neither had the choice of becoming a mother but they both proved that wasn't a qualification to be a great mother. Everything we've seen about Kerrey parallels what we see Kate when it comes to Aaron: she raised her son well and did everything possible to protect him from the world. And when the truth was revealed about her son's parentage everything she did was to protect him.  She admits it wasn't premeditated and while she doesn't acknowledge she doesn't deny that she called John because he might be the only person who can figure out what she did and that he may be the only person who can be objective about doing the right thing.

And that's where John's action in the season finale most parallel the idea of free well versus destiny. John talks about 'programming' with Noah in a way that parallels everything he's gone through but he also argues that he had free will. This was true when he decided not to take the ring back in 2016 and it guides his actions here. He chooses not to follow Noah's wishes and kill him. He chooses not to turn Kerrey into the authorities. When he confronts Guy he says he's choosing to take a different path then the Guardians. And the oath he says in the final moments involves the word choose as well. That of course is the clearest parallel between the climax of Lost. Jack chooses to take Jacob's place for the final battle and Hurley makes the decision to take over the burden, even if he believes its only temporary.

Those who are fans of how the Green Lantern is portrayed in DC will have many reasons to loathe what Lanterns was in the first season. As someone who had no real attachment to the comic but who deeply admires both great television and the work of Damon Lindelof, Lanterns comes across as a triumph both on its own merits (like all Lindelof shows it is superbly written, directed and acted at every level) and as it explores the same philosophical arguments that have always made each and every one of his TV shows a joy for two decades.  That's more interesting to me than whatever Easter eggs comic book fans look for and its why I hope its renewed for a second season even if they choose to review bomb it on various websites.  I might not swear an oath to it, but it's definitely a light shining out in the often blackest day and darkest night  of television.

Coalition for the Sane: The Issue Voters Care About the Most Is The One the Left Cares About The Least

 

 

Every so often, particularly the closer we get to election day, I'll read an article in the Times or Reuters or some other publication where reporters actually talk to voters about who they're voting for and why. I like these articles because it's one of the few times that our media actually talks to people like people instead of talking around, over and above us.

There's a common theme this year when these papers talk to ACTUAL working class voters such as building managers, fisherman, and small business owners. That theme is how much harder it is for them to either do their jobs or make ends meet. Some of it has to do with the trade war Trump started, some of it has to do without his immigration policies have made it harder for them to find workers to do projects, some of it has to do with just being able to pay their bills. The common thread is, to quote James Carville, the economy, stupid.

The Democrats are expected to do well in this election cycle because they are playing in to the idea of affordability,  something the President basically considers a fake issue. Many of the people interviewed are former Trump voters who are considering either voting Democrat, or if they have no stomach for it, sitting the election out. In either case the circumstances for a blue wave are growing more and more likely by the day.

I mention this because I've read a lot of articles online at this site and others. And there are a lot of things that inflame the readers here: DEI policies, the policies of ICE, laws against transgenders, the administration of history, Gaza, how Trump is corrupting the Justice system…well you know most of them better than I do. And yet somehow I haven't read a single article here or indeed in most left-wing journals talking about economic issues and how they hurt everybody.

They have a lot to say about capitalism and how its destroying everything that is good and pure. But the closest they'll ever get to talking about economic issues is how the one percent have too much money. They'll argue about how broken capitalism, how much the rich have corrupted every part of our American system and made it a wasteland. Yet I find it telling that most of their article are more about the evils of the 'One Percent' and how to help the other 99.

I've mentioned in previous articles that the left really has no economic policy to speak of beyond money is the solution to all the problems in society and the way to get that money is to tax the rich.  This is the attitude of the activist, which as has been established is usually a college-educated and relatively rich white person.  How the wealth of the one percent ends up getting to the rest of America has never been established by the progressive.

Most of their arguments are based on taxing the income of the wealthy, which is a false narrative. The argument for a wealth tax has occasionally been floated by some states but as we've seen it rarely gets out of the state legislature or is struck down, as Mamdani's second home tax was by an appellate court last month. And because the wealthy have more resources then you or I they can easily relocate to other states or countries where the tax laws won't reach them and the money certainly won't get to those who need them.

The larger problem is that the Sanders and AOC's of the world have never explained how, having taxed the top one percent, that money then gets to those who need it, particularly those I mentioned below. Which brings us to the real issue: the left has never really cared about helping the poor so much as they have hurting the rich.

Far left political issues have always targeted the wealthy and the system itself and blamed them for what is wrong with society while the far right has historically attacked minorities for what's wrong with America. And whether it's the Dixiecrats or the Southern Strategy of Nixon, the right's method has always been more successfully in getting votes. This is the difference between the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders and the right wing populism of Trump: one couldn't win the Democratic nomination; the other won the Presidency twice. What's hurt the Democrats the most in the last decade is that they've spent far too much time trying to follow the Sanders model rather then try to win back the working class which the left, despite ostensibly wanting to help, considers beneath them in every respect because they are working class.

  The exit polls of the 2024 election made it very clear that the plurality of all voters – over 40 percent of them – made their choices because they were concerned about the economy. This is nothing new: economic well being has always been a good talking point whether Reagan is asking "Are you better off then you were four years ago?" or Clinton campaigning on that very message.  But because the left is mainly made up of people who themselves are well off in the American hierarchy – maybe not in the one percent, but definitely no lower than ten – it's almost always the least important issue to them.  Academics like Nikole Hannah-Jones and celebrities like Mark Ruffalo can yell about the racism and unfairness of America because they can afford to do so. It's highly unlikely someone who trying to decide between whether to pay for their medical insurance or water bill in Mississippi gives a crap about transgenders being allowed to use bathrooms in his state. He's more concerned about his own life.

If the left wonders about the well-being of these people, it's only in an abstract way: why do they vote against their economic interests instead of Republicans who promote culture wars? But they're not really interested in getting them to vote Democrats because most of them are annoyed Democrats aren't left-wing enough for their states. That Democrats have realized that they can only win with economic issues has earned them the slur of 'neoliberal' and that there's no difference between the two parties. Which is another way of saying: neither party is sufficiently progressive for me.

It might seem glib to look at so many of the issues the far left raises as vital, whether they are campaign finance reform, policing, immigration as  simply 'rich people problems'. But the fact it is easier to decide what issues are vital to you the more money you have and conversely the richer you are, the easier you can put a wall between yourself and the rest of the world. Not to sound like a broken record but the reason the conservative movement is more successful then the progressive one in terms of effective control of every level of politics is because they've always realized they need to spend the time and energy to manipulate the voter in order to achieve their goals. The progressive movement, by contrast, sees the process beneath them and wants the voter to realize on their own how badly their being abused and exploited and come to the left on their own. Both sides no doubt hold the average voter in equal contempt but the conservatives are much better at hiding it because they need them.  The progressive actually holds the voter in contempt for being dumb enough to fall for the manipulations of either side.

The other major problem with the left is that they spend the overwhelming majority of their time focused on causes that, however noble and important they are, nevertheless are abstractions to the overwhelming majority of Americans. And because that nearly all of them are so massive that the only power the average person in this country has to do something real – voting – can do very little to fix them, the average person chooses to focus on more concrete realities that affect their day-to-day lives. There's nothing wrong with this in theory and practice, but almost to an individual the average progressive tends to use this as  a cudgel to argue the worst possible thing about the masses, usually using it as code for them being bigots.

In the aftermath of the 2024 election the majority of progressives chose to dismiss Trump's electoral victory as confirmation of the foolishness of the average voter because they cared about 'the price of eggs'. To them that was code for them being idiotic at best and racist at worst, which has been their blanket assumption of so many working class voters at least for the last decade.

During that same cycle the cause that was by far the most important to the progressive was Gaza. To them this election was a mandate not on American democracy or the Democratic administration but rather foreign policy in Gaza. (To be sure then as now many of them believe that electoral politics can't solve the problem in Gaza, but let's let that go for now.)

The problem is, even for the most devoted people to the cause, what is happening in Gaza is an abstraction where is the price of groceries is a reality that affects more people in their daily lives.  As I illustrated above working class voters care far more about economic issues while college educated and upwardly mobile ones care far more about things like Gaza.  And while I grant you it is unlikely the voters will be able to change what happens on either issue with their votes next month they are all voting in America, not the Middle East. It's not racist or wrong for Americans to care more about issues that affect their lives more than ones that don't.

Gaza is just the most recent of which the left cares about: the Justice Democrats platform as I've illustrated has more to do with social justice then economic well being and by its nature has only appealed to those who are inclined to agree with left-wing policies to begin with. That has always been a much smaller percentage of Americans then the left insists it actually is but the left doesn't see a problem with it. The Democratic Party does – and to their credit have spent much of 2026 trying to run candidates who will listen to the voters I've mentioned above rather then trying to win over those who have only a minor allegiance to democracy in the first place.

The power of the vote, to send a message to those in power every two years, has essentially been taken for granted by the masses for so long that even the most educated tend to forget both how relatively recent it is to world history and how relatively few countries practice it. The far left, more then the right, tends to treat it not just with disdain but actually uses it to argue it’s a fraud and an illusion to hold the populace in chains. That they have yet to come up with an alternative – not even a better one, just a different one – in all the years I've been reading them is another in the seemingly endless line of obstacles as to why they've failed to succeed as a political force in America.

But what has become clear in the last decade is that the average citizen does take it more seriously then it did. The average voter turnout rate for both Presidential and midterms have been at their highest levels in decades as Americans are realizing yes, elections do have consequences and that they want their voices to be heard. That the extremes on both sides have made it clear how little use they have for the message when it goes against what they want is honestly irrelevant because elections aren't about what they want but what the voters want.

If next month's elections go according to the polls the Democrats will have succeeded because they've heard the complaints of what the voters in the articles I've read as well as countless others and are trying to find candidates who will hear them on economic issues which is what they care about. If this annoys the progressives who care about every issue but this one, well, we've spent a decade listening to them and the voters have made it crystal clear that its not their first priority. The left can afford to care about other things, but the vast majority of Americans can't. Until they realize that, they'll basically keep doing what they've always done because they can afford to.

 

 

 

Yankees Vs. Red Sox Greatest Rivalry in Sports…Now, Part 2: How The 2003 Postseason Would Have Convinced a Die-Hard Atheist that There Was A Devil

 

As my readers know from my articles on baseball my household – particularly my mother – is a Yankee household. I never quite inherited the title mainly because by the time I started watching the sport seriously around sixteen I was watching baseball as a fan of narratives.

To be clear, while I devoured box scores with a passion and watched the records that were being set in the steroid era  (I was as oblivious as any fan was, for the record) my real focus didn't begin in earnest until the postseason which was about to shift from the division race to the wild card race. At the time this was met with derision from every single sportswriter and broadcaster at the time and I imagine that there are still quite a few Boomers who think it's an abomination.

As I've written before I thought it was an improvement. As I've written a couple of times before the idea of the season long pennant race for one league, much less both, is sepia toned. This was especially true when the Yankees were in their period of dominance between 1921-1964 but it was never that common for the National League much of the time either. Many of the things purists deride, such as divisional races, had done much to make the sport more competitive. Between 1978 and 1987 ten different teams won the World Series, something that had never happened before in baseball history. For the first time the possibility of any team winning the World Series was becoming closer to a reality and as we've seen in the 21^st century, it's led to the breaking of some of the larger championship droughts in history and several expansion franchises finally win the World Series after going for decades without one.

Of course I didn't know that in 1996. Then I was very much rooting for the Yankees as they finally broke the longest gap between championships in their history when Joe Torre led the Yankees to their first World Series victory in eighteen years. And I was as much a fan of Jeter and Bernie and Jorge and Petite as any New Yorker was back then.

I was also in awe of them in 1998 as they had what was the greatest season in American League history going 114-48 and sweeping towards the World Series.

By 1999, the luster was beginning to dim. By 2000 I was pulling for the Mets in the Subway series. And by the fall of 2001 I may very well have been the only person in America not pulling for the Yankees to win their fourth consecutive World Series.

This is public knowledge in my family; in fact my first byline was an op-ed I wrote for Newsday in 2002 'Rooting against the Yankees is an act of love.'  In it I argued much of is had to do with my mother's die-hard devotion to the team. With the benefit of hindsight I'm pretty sure that had less to do with it then her.

The truth of the matter is dynasties in sports can be infuriating if you don't happen to be a fan of the team. It had to have been exhausted for the seven other teams in the American League during the 1920s, thirties, forties and fifties as well as for so many of the franchises in the National League that had to face them and usually lose year after year. There's a reason the Broadway show was called Damn Yankees and not Go Senators! – hating the Yankees in the 1950s was something that could be universally understood if you didn't live in the Bronx. And when your name is synonymous with winning I'm pretty sure it’s a big reason the rest of the country hates New York with a passion.

During this same period I was started my pattern of looking for narratives in the postseason. I would root for Cleveland because they hadn't won a World Series in forty years and until 1995 wouldn't make the postseason at all. The Mariners hadn't won during that period when they were starting to become a force of nature (unfortunately right when the Yankees were in resurgence). And I'd root for the Orioles and the Rangers for the same reason.

My problem with dynasties wasn't just held to the Yankees. Much I admired and loved the Braves pitching staff I wasn't thrilled that they were making it to the World Series every year and were always winning the NL East. I pulled for the Padres, who'd never won a World Series, the Cubs for obvious reasons, and back then it was easier for me to pull for the Mets. (I've essentially given up on them, though every so often they do surprise me.)

Now it wasn't like the Red Sox were doing poorly during this period. They won the AL Wild Card in 1995 and again in 1999. They frequently contended for the division title and they sometimes got close to both. But I'd basically stopped taking the Red Sox seriously after Roger Clemens went to Toronto (and of course later the Yankees.)

I should be honest, despite the fact I'd watched Ken Burns' Baseball multiple times by that point, I was still very skeptical of the idea of a curse. By this point I'd read a lot of other histories of baseball, the World Series and many seasonal ones. And even by 2002 I'd noticed a pattern that, in the aftermath of the 2004 World Series, other writers would put in various books on the Sox.

In 1946 when the Red Sox won their first pennant in 28 years, their opponents were the St. Louis Cardinals. Between 1942-1944, as I've written, the Cardinals won 106, 105, and 105 wins respectively, three consecutive National League Pennants and two World Series. Much of the 1944 team was facing off against the Red Sox and they won their third World Series in five years.

In 1967 the year of the Impossible Dream, they faced the Cardinals again. There was no question who the better teams was that year as the Cardinals had, even with Bob Gibson missing much of the summer with a broken leg, run away with the National League Pennant. This was a team with four future Hall of Fames, Gibson, Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda and Steve Carlton and they'd won the World Series over the Yankees three years earlier.

In 1975 the Red Sox ended up facing the Big Red Machine, which is of course one of the greatest baseball dynasties in history. The Reds would have the best win-loss record of any National League in the 1970s. They'd win six NL West Titles, four NL Pennants and 2 world series during that period. That year they'd won the NL East by 20 games over the Dodgers. They were powered by Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan to win 108 games.

And while every Red Sox fan of a certain age will gnash their teeth at this the New York Mets in 1986 were by far the best team in baseball that year. They went 108-54, which was the best single season record any team had during the 1980s. The Philadelphia Philles who came in second, finished 21 and a half games behind them. That year the Red Sox were 95-66. And need I remind you the Angels were beating you 3 games to 1 in the ALCS that year and were down to your last strike in Game by before Dave Henderson saved your season? (Those who know baseball history are aware there were more tragic consequences to that for the Angels that year, but I won't relate it here.)

And to be clear, Bill Buckner only lost Game 6 for you. You could have won Game 7.  Just a reminder.

So if you think about there wasn't so much a curse hanging over the Red Sox during this period but the simple fact that every time they made to the World Series they ran smack into a much better team. Teams that should by any measure have made mincemeat out of the Red Sox each time. And a couple of times it nearly was. In 1967 the Red Sox were actually trailing the Cardinals three games to one before winning the next two games to force a game 7 and we all know the lore of Game 6 in 1975.

I get that the curse of never being able to win Game 7 fits a certain narrative but it leaves out the fact that the Red Sox didn't win Game 7 before the curse. To be clear you won in the first World Series in 1903 but that was a best of 9. In 1912 the Red Sox won the World Series when they won Game 8 (too complicated to explain) They won in 5 in 1915 and 1916 and in six 1918. So winning Game 7 was not something Red Sox hadn't really done in the 20^th century.

And I'm not saying that to shame the Red Sox fans, just telling you that just made you like basically every other team when they get to the postseason. Baseball is like that. Grover Cleveland Alexander can strike out Tony Lazzeri in 1926 and the Yankees can come back to sweep the Pirates in four in 1927. The Mets can complete a miracle over the Orioles in 1969 in five games and the Orioles can come back to beat the Reds in five in 1970. Kirk Gibson can hit a home run to stun the A's leading the Dodgers to a five game sweep and in 1989 the A's can sweep the Giants. That's how baseball works.

And I would still believe that…had I not watched the 2003 Championship Series for both the National League and American League that year. Because I'm convinced both those series might cause the most die-hard atheist to think to themselves: "This can't be chance! God is playing dice with the universe and every time he rolls for the Sox and Cubs it comes up snake eyes!"

During the early weeks of October of 2003 much of America seemed seized by the potential of something that even non-baseball fans would have realized the significance of: a Red Sox-Cub Fall Classic. I remember that the Times, which even then was notorious for not covering sports of any level with the detail most papers did, were running the scores of Red Sox and Cubs postseason games next to the masthead on the daily issues.

And by the second week of October it seemed increasingly probable. In the ALCS the Red Sox were, for the first time in franchise history,  facing the Yankees in a postseason series while in the NLCS the Cubs were facing off against the Florida Marlins.

Now even though my home was a Yankee home I was paying more attention to the Cubs during that nine day period. Why wouldn't you?  That the Red Sox were facing their all-time rivals in a postseason series was a secondary story to the fact that this was the first time the Cubs had gotten even this far in the postseason. Winning their first pennant alone would have been a bigger story then anything else, considering it had become a punch line for every comedian.

The games overlapped quite a bit during that period. And when the Cubs took a three game to one lead it seemed inevitable. Even their losing Game 5 in Miami actually seemed fitting. They would clinch the first pennant in 58 years at Wrigley Field.

I was alone at home on October 14^th 2003 – my parents were at the opera that night.  Mark Prior, who seemed like he was going to be a future Hall of Famer started and the Cubs took a 1-0 lead in the first. They held it and added a run in the sixth and the seventh. As the top of the eighth began the Cubs were just six outs away from the World Series.

Now Game 6 has of course gone down in history because of Steve Bartman's catching a foul ball that if Moises Alou had caught it would have put the Cubs four outs away. He became such a figure of abuse in the aftermath of what happened and the scapegoat. But as someone who saw the entire inning unfold everyone knows none of that was on him.

Yes it was an eight pitch at bat to Mark Pierre and yes Alou might have been able to retire the side and yes the Cubs got angry about it. But that alone can't be blamed on what happened next.  I remember watching the entire disaster unfold and the idea of blaming Bartman for what it happens is as much a straw man argument as blaming Bill Buckner for the Red Sox losing the World Series in 1986.

I saw everything go wrong. The double play that Gonzalez messed up, the hitting that Derek Lee did, the fact that Prior was kept in far too long, that the relief pitching went up in smoke and that the Marlins then proceeded to bat around. It was a complete and utter shitshow but trying to blame Bartman for the Cubs mistakes is beyond the point.

And again as with Buckner it was only Game 6. The Cubs could have rectified the whole thing by winning Game 7. And it looked like that might happen when Kerry Wood hit a three run homer in the second to tie the game. The Cubs took the lead 5 to 3 and held it for two more innings. Again the Cub Manager kept his starting pitcher into long and that ended up destroying Chicago's hopes.

Now I wasn't even a Cubs fan but watching that eighth inning unfold I felt the wreckage as deeply as anyone who'd spent their entire life on the West Side of Chicago. I'm pretty sure I was shouting thins like "No!, How Could You?" and "How the Hell Could This Happen?!" in some variation for that horrible twenty minutes. I was, however, more tolerant then those at Wrigley Field for a clear reason: at no point did I blame Bartman. In fact I wouldn't even learn Bartman's name until several months after the fact when he became the most notorious sports fan in history.  (Law and Order actually did an episode where a Bartman-like character was the victim of a bar brawl and Briscoe couldn't work up sympathy for his death.)

Bartman's name has since been cleared by history, most recently in a monologue by Oliver Platt in The Bear during the Season 2 finale. But when Game 7 ended I felt the ashes so much more deeply than I had. So imagine less then twenty four hours later I had to watch Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.

It was clear just how bad the blood was from the start. The two teams split the first four games pretty much evenly. It was clear just how much bad blood there was a bench clearing brawl that was lowlighted by Don Zimmer charging Pedro Martinez in Game 3 and the game ended with a Fenway groundskeeper scuffling with two Yankees. The Yankees left Boston up three games to two, needed just one win to clinch their sixth American League Pennant in eight years.

The game took place the same day as Game 7 of the Cubs-Marlins series and I'll be honest I don't think I gave the Red Sox a chance.  These were still the Red Sox. Now there had been signs that they were no longer the losers of old. In the ALDS of 2003 they were trailing two games to zero against the Oakland A's. Then they came from behind to win three straight, winning the last two games by one run. This went against what I was used to from the Red Sox over the years and I may very well have given them a credit for being a good team.

But these were The Yankees. Sure in 2002 they had lost a postseason series for the first time in four years to Anaheim (which was on their way to their first ever World Championship) but they'd won 101 games that year, tied with the Braves for the best record in baseball. They run through the Twins in the ALDS (even back then Minnesota had a habit of being a punching bag for the Yankees) and having seen most of their season on YES (which was a relatively new network back then) I had no reason to believe history would be any kinder to the Red Sox now.

And I'll be honest I was still focused on Game 7 of the Cubs-Marlins game. I honestly can't remember if I was even really listening as it played on the radio that afternoon. But when the Red Sox ended up winning 9-6 I do remember telling my parents that the Red Sox had a bad history when it came to winning Game 7.

Again in the first century of their existence the Red Sox had won a Game 7 twice. The first time was in the 1903 World Series when the series was Best of 9. The second was when they'd clinched the American League Pennant against the Angels in 1986. I knew their history in Game 7. To overcome that seemed too much to believe.

Still I did watch because it seemed to feature an all-time match up Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens. Clemens said he was planning to retire in 2003 (he'd turned 41 that year) and everyone thought this might me the last game he'd ever pitch. Pedro was starting to slow down but he was still the best pitcher in the game, having lead the American League that year in ERA, strikeouts and winning percentage.

As we all know the Red Sox started the game out on hot. Trot Nixon hit a two run homer in the second and the Sox put up one more run.  They would be ahead 4-0 before Clemens was removed and Mike Mussina came in to relieve. But it didn't seem to make a difference against Martinez. By the 7^th inning the Red Sox were ahead 4-2. After they got an insurance run, the natural move would have been to take Martinez out.

So I was stunned to see Martinez pitching the bottom of the eighth. This move has deservedly become the stuff of backroom talk even after the curse was reversed the following year.  The Red Sox had capable relievers and Martinez had experienced problems pitching into the late innings. He'd already thrown over 100 pitches.

Martinez got the first out. Then he gave up a double to Jeter and a single to Williams. Then Little went to the mound, everyone assuming he would take Martinez out.

The moment that Little left the mound and kept Martinez in, that maybe the first time in history I believed in a curse. Not so much of fate but the fact that the managers of the Red Sox historically had made these kinds of bad moves before to the teams detriment, particularly with pitching.

In 1948 with a one-game playoff against Cleveland, Joe McCarthy chose as his starter Denny Galehouse, who was 8-7 and hadn't started in three months. Galehouse didn't last three innings and the Indians won 8-3. Galehouse would never pitch in the majors again.

In 1949 with the Yankees and Red Sox tied on the final day of the season McCarthy had taken out Ellis Kinder for a pinch hitter with the Red Sox down 1-0. The Yankees would score four more runs, 3 of them on a bloop pinch hit by Jerry Coleman off Tex Hughson who hadn't pitched in three months. Hughson never pitched in the majors again either.

In the one game playoff in 1978 after Bucky F---Ing Dent homer Zimmer took Torrez out when Thurman Munson came to the plate. Torrez had already struck Munson out three times that game. Munson hit a double of Mike Stanley to drive in Mickey Rivers to make the game 4-2. He then kept Stanley in during the eighth when Reggie Jackson hit another home run., the insurance run that made sure the Sox would lose 5-4.

So the fact that Little had this time blundered by leaving his pitcher in didn't make me any less certain that he had just signed Boston's death warrant for 2003. And that's what happened  Matsui would hit a double and then Posada hit a bloop that drove in 2 runs. At that moment I knew the Sox had lost. The rest was just waiting for them to be buried.

That Aaron Boone was the one to do it in the eleventh is part of Yankee lore and their long history. Like every Red Sox fan I suspect they all knew the game was over the moment Little kept Martinez in the game. The rest was just details.

Like any baseball fan I've had some postseasons that have left me emotionally spent but few have left me in such devastation as the aftermath of that week in October 2003. I have no memory of watching the World Series that following between the Yankees and Florida which the Marlins would win in six games and if I did, it left no emotional impression on me. Oh I was fine by Thanksgiving – the TV season had begun in earnest and I was watching 24 and Gilmore Girls and all the other shows that kept be going – but it was a bitter pill to take.

And honestly like any sports fan I had no idea this was the bitter waters we had to go through before we reached the sweet – an era of competitiveness in baseball unlike any in the sports history and one in which the Red Sox would lead the way.

In the next article I will go in depth with the 2004 postseason which everyone knows about but nevertheless can never be forgotten.