Damascus Gate

Last night's game was a disaster (7-2 BoSox victory) and at this point today doesn't look like it is going to turn out any better. Whatever happened to our pitching staff? I believe I have to turn my attention from one topic that makes my blood boil to a different topic that makes my blood boil. Politics.

Today's post is dedicated to any of my left leaning bretheren who find themselves in thrall to 9/11 conspiracy theorys. Read the book "Damascus Gate", by Robert Stone. I picked it up thinking it was a literary work dealing with the Middle East. It turned out to more of a political potboiler. More LeCarre than Greene. However, it is extremely well written.

The story involves an American reporter in Israel, Chris Lucas who is looking, without much success, for a "big story". He's in the right place and eventually he gets the right story and a little bit more in the bargain. It all comes about when he decides to co-write a book with a local psychiatrist about something called "The Jerusalem Syndrome". It describes people who come to the Holy Land and become hyper religious and then begin to think God has a special job picked out just for them, usually something destructive.

In Lucas' attempts to research this subject he gets involved with a kind of screwy cast of characters and a plot to destroy the Haram esh-Sharif, the Temple Mount, to make way for the building of the Third Temple. Which in the Christian world is one of the signs of the coming Rapture, and for Jews is something that has to happen in order for the Messiah to arrive. So it's kind of a win-win deal, unless you happen to be Muslim. Then you're kind of SOL, because one of you holiest shrines has just been blown up.

At this point you may be asking, what does this have to do with 9/11. Well, I don't think it gives too much away to say there is a government angle driving this whole plot, and it seems totally plausible the way it is laid out.

My thought after reading the book was that I could see how this kind of thing could be set up, by the government, and have mistakes happen and all of a sudden something you thought you could control turns into two burning buildings in Manhattan and 3,000 people dead. As I said at the beginning I don't buy into any of the improbable conspiracy theories surrounding Bush and 9/11, but after reading "Damascus Gate", I had to give it a little more thought.


Personal to Muggs - "You're mother's still the only other woman for me." Love, Dad

Why Dick Allen?

As a youth, I became a White Sox fan during the Dark Ages of '68-'71. During that time the White Sox finished a combined 129 games out of 1st. Gail Hopkins was our excuse for a star. They were bad times indeed.

Then in '72 a stranger arrived in town. He was a big man and carried a bigger bat. Dick Allen. He hit .308 with 37 HR's and 113 RBI that first year. The Sox finished 87-67 and 5.5 games out of 1st. Did I mention - he carried one of the biggest bats in baseball? I was mind blown.

During that season he had a game where he hit two, count 'em, two inside the park home runs. The following month he became one of the few to hit a homer into the centerfield stands at Old Comiskey (35th & Shields). It happened to be a day when Harry was broadcasting in the bleachers ("Where's my net?"), and the ball missed him by a couple feet. He even earned the AL MVP that year.

Anyway, during that season Richie "Dick" Allen became my first, and to this day, only honest to god, true baseball hero. The kind of a hero 11 year old boys are supposed to have in baseball. Of course, he was far from perfect. In keeping with the times, he was more than a little bit of a flake and a renegade, but somewhere inside that appealed to me as much as his exploits on the diamond.

There have certainly been better ball players over the years. Even on the Sox I long ago surrendered the title of "Greatest Sox Player Ever" to the Big Hurt. But for one magical season, in the mind of an 11 year old boy, Dick Allen and his badass bat was "the best there ever was."