Conservatives started Cancel Culture -- it's their sin, not the left's

In 2003, as the invasion of Iraq commenced, administrators at three Albuquerque, N.M. high schools suspended or placed on paid administrative leave five teachers who had displayed antiwar posters in their classrooms, some created by students.

Officials claimed they were violating an Albuquerque Public Schools policy that requires educators to maintain a classroom atmosphere free from bias or prejudice.

One teacher resigned after the incident. Two others, employed on yearly contracts, were not hired back by their school.

Okay, all you valiant opponents of Cancel Culture, this is your cue! But where were Fox News, Patrick Buchanan or Dennis Prager when it was time to defend these teachers and condemn the stifling of debate -- and by one of those bias-free policies they are always denouncing!

That same year CBS caved in to a conservative firestorm and decided not to air its own made-for-TV movie “The Reagans,” featuring James Brolin playing the 40th president in what preview watchers described as a non-flattering light.

The network disgraced the legacy of Edward R. Murrow by punting the movie off to the cable channel Showtime.

And today’s fierce critics of Cancel Culture, or their forerunners in 2003? Surely, conservatives condemned CBS’s dropping its movie as mob rule censoring the airwaves. Nope, conservatives were that mob.

Same comfortable silence from the right in 1995 when ABC radio dropped -- let’s say it -- canceled the show “Hightower Radio,” whose feisty Texas host Jim Hightower attacked factory farming and other chemical-based industries as destroying the land and community economics.

ABC's big advertisers decided 
you won't hear this type
of information.

The multi-billion dollar Archer-Daniels-Midland, one of the key creators of those farming methods, bought myriad advertisements on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

The network openly said that unnamed advertisers felt Hightower’s criticisms were against their interests.

What, those big city eastern network people are censoring a good ole Texas man of the soil?, screamed absolutely no conservative whatsoever.

And this year, Harvard surprised everyone by passing over acclaimed intellectual Cornell West for tenure.

The college offered West, a longtime attacker of colonialism and supporter of the Palestinian cause, a pay raise absent of tenure. That’s a move so contradictory that outside pressure from pro-Israel absolutists and power elites dependent on colonialist exploitation likely prompted it.

West said that’s what happened, though Harvard denies it.

Well, that concludes our Conservatives’ Hypocrisy by Silence Tour, though there are many more examples, such as, JUST IN:

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LINK to: Angela Davis says Butler cancelled her appearance

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Yeah, there are also left-driven episodes, but overwhelmingly they aren’t equivalents, because they’re not about intimidating critics of war or factory farming.

Consider the case of Don Imus, whom CBS radio let go for referring to black members of Rutgers’ woman’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.”

And longtime CBS sports broadcaster and odds maker Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was dropped in 1988 after he made rambling, asinine comments about black athletes owing their talents largely to slavery’s breeding practices. Snyder also said blacks breaking into the coaching profession should be seen by white coaches as a threat to their opportunities.

Was there a better way
to respond than firing Snyder?

Ed Hotaling, an African-American reporter/producer for a Washington, D.C. TV station who recorded and broadcast the remarks, said CBS should not have fired Snyder. Instead, Hotaling said the incident should have cued the network to explore racism straightforwardly.

“I think you have to think a little more broadly than firing a sports commentator for expressing stupid comments about civil rights,” he said. “You should start covering the story and let him learn something.”

Hotaling suggested letting Snyder discuss his remarks and the wider issue of civil rights with black and white athletes on CBS’ football coverage.

“His views would be expressed a little more adequately, I think,” Hotaling said. “They’d have the thing resolved in a positive way instead of a negative way.”

Today's retributive discourse, the wider problem than just Cancel Culture.

Hotaling has the right idea overall. Though as someone who remembers Snyder’s insipid pseudo-history lessons in that 1988 broadcast, I have my doubts that a person so evidently entitled and isolated as Snyder would be open to learning.

And there is also the matter of Jimmy The Greek’s words revealing an incompetence to be a national sports commentator and forecaster (would we want a TV weather forecaster using crickets and supplicating the god Thor?)

Still, what Hotaling suggested in ‘88 is very relevant to today’s controversies. A speaker or tweeter who makes a short comment should be given more time to explain it, but more importantly should be compelled to, in Snyder’s case, talk repeatedly with great black athletes. He could hear them describe the ways in which their success came not from some ghoulish echo from slave breeding, but from their own hard work and sacrifice.

Responding to bigotry should involve face-to-face discussions and persistent attempts to show the offender what they are missing, not instantaneous sanitizing of discourse that may make us feel better, but leaves the hate unaddressed.

 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA

That championship season reframed -- today I see the people, not the uniforms

Glove inventor Andre McCarter (45), teacher 
Dave Meyers (34) and house rehab person Richard
Washington (31) do in my Wildcats for the 1975
national title, but I like these guys today.

Picture a man in Oregon who, in tandem with his wife, rehabs houses for a living, with the couple doing the work themselves of tearing the floorboards and hammering the nails.

Then there’s a person near San Diego who teaches elementary school.

Now think of another person, this one in Indiana, who worked for a steel company and coached youth sports in his city, sometimes driving kids home from practice and driving the team bus to and from games.

And yet another, a man from Philadelphia, works part time as an inventor and comes up with a certain type of glove to improve athletes' dexterity.

These folks sometimes pause from their daily lives of civic and business devotions to recall their college years, when they used to get together and play some basketball.

And the former Indiana farm kid who grew up to coach them was paid a modest salary for job tasks that for a while included waxing a gymnasium floor.

Sounds like a group who only dreamed of the big time, but missed out on lives of fame and glory.

Well, in fact you’ve just read a description of the people who in 1975 won their school, UCLA, the NCAA basketball title -- the last of coaching legend John Wooden’s 10 basketball championships at UCLA.

Their lives of rehabing homes, teaching sixth graders and so forth were what they were doing 20 and 30 years after that night in March 1975, when Richard Washington, Dave Meyers, Pete Trgovich, and Andre McCarter led the UCLA Bruins to John Wooden’s 10^th title.

They allowed Wooden to cap off his dynasty in storybook fashion, beating favored Kentucky 92-85 in the title game in San Diego, ending Wooden’s 27-year tenure at UCLA.

During that stint, the Martinsville, Ind. native and former Purdue hoops star won those 10 national titles while maintaining a player graduation rate of 65 percent (comparable to the student body rate of around 75 percent). For all this, he earned a top salary of $40,000, and that includes all money from endorsements.

Late in his career Wooden also brought in about that much yearly in outside income from speaking engagements and basketball camps, but with that added in, his $80,000 figure was about one percent of what today’s highest paid coach makes.

Kentucky’s John Calipari, who is paid -- wait for it -- $8.1 million, has a player graduation rate of 28 percent (the UK student body rate is 66 percent).

Wooden emphasized to his players passing, footwork and body position, not the glamorous high scoring or fancy one-on-one moves many other coaches favored in the ‘70s to enhance their recruiting in an era of expanding TV coverage of college basketball games.

In fairness to Calipari, he also emphasizes those game fundamentals, but compared to Wooden’s strong emphasis on getting a genuine education, the Kentucky multi-millionaire coach’s program has that 28 percent graduation rate. Among Calipari’s top talent, it’s close to 0, because almost all of his Kentucky stars stay in school just one season, then go pro.

Almost all of Wooden’s greats played four seasons.

The best players leaving after their freshman year, a method called "one-and-done," is widespread in this era; UCLA itself has just a 20 percent player graduation rate today.

Whereas Washington and Meyers were the biggest contributors to the title win in ‘75, another player, Marques Johnson, did go on to great National Basketball Association stardom. But in 1975 Johnson was coming off a bout with hepatitis the previous summer and didn’t go on to become a star at UCLA until about a year after Wooden’s 1975 retirement.

He had a superb NBA career with the Milwaukee Bucks, the team for which Dave Meyers also played a few years before deciding to change careers and earn a teaching certificate.

Meyers didn’t teach gym or do photo-ops in classrooms as a sports celebrity, mind you -- he genuinely taught elementary school for 30 years in Southern California. And Marques Johnson was a devoted family person; wealth and national acclaim did not distract either of these two Bruin products from the obligations and rewards of doing the essential duties of the lives all of us live.

Same for Richard Washington, whose career change came when he realized his pleasant temperament (Coach Wooden had described him as a “passive, easygoing, lovely person.”) just wasn’t ideal for the Type-A pro basketball world after Kansas City Kings teammates politely but firmly told him he needed to push himself harder.

Dave Meyers, after three decades teaching elementary school children, died from cancer in 2015 at age 62. After his death, former teammate Marques Johnson recalled Meyers as “a gentle, compassionate guy."

Sibling Ann Meyers Drysdale recalled that Dave’s decision to leave pro basketball in 1980 after six seasons, though partly because of a back injury, also was because her brother “wanted to be with his family and watch his children grow up.”

Even many of the more basketball-centered John Wooden products have lived notably full lives; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all-time scoring leader, also is a fine writer and commentator. He worked as a newspaper contributing reporter while a teenager in New York City.

Bill Walton attended law school after his basketball days and has long promoted environmentalism and his vegetarian diet. Both former UCLA centers were outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War.

Still, the UCLA Bruin world wasn’t flawless; an L.A. Times investigation in the 1980s revealed that a wealthy UCLA booster named Sam Gilbert was co-signing for loans for some of Wooden’s players, in violation of NCAA rules.

Though the gifting was not used to recruit players, and a shocked Wooden ordered his team to have no contact with Gilbert when he found out, the co-signing continued and Wooden largely looked the other way, the coach acknowledged in interviews late in his life.

From raising title banners to raising his family,
the gentle Dave Meyers, 1953-2015.

Nonetheless, we can long for some lost priorities when contrasting the community minded lives of people like Meyers, Washington and other 1975 Bruins with most of the great NBA stars who won college championships in the years following Wooden’s retirement.

For instance Irving “Magic” Johnson of Michigan State and Michael Jordan of North Carolina have sports-centered identities wrapped in layers of massive PR machines. Neither graduated from college. The egotistical and sometimes brusque Jordan had more say over his Chicago Bulls team’s offense than his coach, and Magic Johnson actually ordered his Los Angeles Lakers team to replace its head coach over the young star’s differences with him.

And the 60-second TV ads Magic did for a fast food chain and Jordan did for Chevy cars earned them more money than Richard Washington or Dave Meyers made in a year of rehabing houses and teaching elementary students.

But for the vast majority of NBA players, having a real world job skill like those of Washington or Meyers would be more valuable than perfecting every great basketball move. Consider that Sports Illustrated reported in 2009 that 60 percent of former NBA players were broke within five years of leaving that supposedly paved-with-gold league. The magazine said the number for former National Football League players was 78 percent.

Those percentages mean John Wooden's $40,000 salary and his stressing of education and life skills more than basketball have never looked better. And "one-and-done" has never looked more dangerously exploitive.

In 1975 I scowled as I watched UCLA win Wooden’s 10^th title by beating Louisville and Kentucky, two of my three favorite teams. This was just after my other favorite, unbeaten Indiana, lost its top scorer to an injury, knocking the Hoosiers out of what looked like a sure title.

My adolescent anguish didn’t last too long; Indiana, Kentucky and Louisville won three of the next five college championships.

Although those titles were redemption, I have since placed more importance on the good character of our champion teams’ stars, such as Louisville’s Darrell Griffith and Scooter McCray, who following their playing years started restaurants and alcohol-free youth recreation centers in our city.

Whereas their Louisville college uniforms and UCLA’s bore opposing school names, I now see that the people who were wearing both are teammates in the contest between good citizenship and “I’ve got mine, you get yours” selfishness. And that is a game in which this nation badly needs a come-from-behind win.

So Richard, Dave, Pete, Andre, Marques -- as much as I could not have imagined 45 years ago that I’d ever feel this way about any Bruin -- I’m now a fan of each of you.

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Brian Arbenz has been a news and sports reporter in Indiana and Kentucky, states whose college basketball success can cloud people's judgment.