Fixing what’s broke

Even before the race is run, Robin Miller of SpeedTV suggests for Fox Sports on the MSN home page eight ways to ‘fix’ the Indy 500.

He discusses the purse, the cars (both their boring single-sourced body design and their equally boring single-sourced engines), practice day formats, other driver/owner incentives, the date of the race and the race’s preliminary events. His piece makes good reading, and I commend it to anyone interested in open wheel racing. But the big Gap in the story is Miller’s strange silence on the very best way to rapidly “fix” the historic event. Change owners.

For all his so-called business acumen Tony George has too often done the short-term right thing for his pocketbook and the long-term wrong thing for racing. In the mid 90’s instead of working from the inside with CART, he chose to go into competition with them and formed IRL – all because he didn’t like road races. Thus weakened, eventually CART failed.

So what does George end up doing a decade later? Builds a ticky-tacky road course in the infield at IMS. Meanwhile, events he set in motion after he took over the helm of his family-owned speedway have whittled away at the international fan interest. The last few years the annual event has become b-o-r-i-n-g, so much so that the ‘big story’ this year is that maybe this will be the first year a woman wins! Big deal.

For many years women have been quite capable of outracing men. Gender plays virtually no role when the RPM’s are red-lined. The old saying, “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?” holds true no matter what chromosomes are behind the wheel. The only reason this is news in 2007 is because everything else about the race is old news – and boring and – oh, I don’t know, maybe characterless, colorless, commonplace, drab, drudging, dull, humdrum, insipid, interminable, monotonous, repetitious, routine, stale, stuffy, tame, tedious, tiresome, tiring, trite, unexciting, unvaried, vapid, wearisome, well-worn, and uninteresting might be the best way to put it.

But I could be wrong. Except, when the noise of 33 finely tuned mechanical devices spinning as fast as they are capable of, all coming thundering down the front straightaway, each with umpteen thousand mini-explosions going off in their ‘innards’ every second or so, it should be an exciting moment – and maybe even a significant moment for some. The last few years, it hasn’t.

Unfortunately, in the past 18 years Tony George has frittered away his family’s business and good will, leaving the Indy 500 a prime example on how NOT to run an annual racing event.

Sad.

The Gap between what’s said and what’s meant

“Or, the shame of cheapening and eventually trashing perfectly good words, eventually causing them to become worthless and unusable.”

The Belmont Club’s Wretchard discusses a post from The Smoking Gun (careful, some images therein may be crude and shocking) describing the content of documents allegedly recently captured from al-qaeda in Iraq. The problem with the subject matter is that in former years it could have reasonably be called a “torture manual”. But alas, that term no longer seems to work.

The world is apparently no longer interested in hearing about “torture”, probably because we dirty rotten Yanks are hands down the acknowledged leaders at “torturing” large quantities of prisoners taken in warfare, and the topic is no longer of international interest – unless, of course, more US troops are thought to be caught up in it again. Then it becomes important to discuss.

The problem is quite simple. The rest of us permitted the warm-hearted fuzzy thinkers of the world to misuse and misapply a perfectly good word, “torture”. They were describing – for the most part – torment or humiliation, but were overstating the case – as seems to be the wont of certain overly-liberal wonks – as if what was occurring was actually harming or maybe even permanently disfiguring the subjects of the interrogations and so-called “torture”. I hold that in all but a few rare cases, it wasn’t.

Was it fun to undergo? No! Was it nice and polite? No! Was it reasonably applied? Can’t tell! Has it worked? Probably pretty well! Was it actually “torture”? With few exceptions, No!

The question I have for my liberal friends – the same ones who “tsked, tsked” over Abu Ghraib prison and the camp at Guantanamo Bay – how are they going to respond to (and classify) what is being done by AQ per the “manuals” referenced in The Smoking Gun ? What should they (or we) call that level of interrogation? Or do they even care?

Looking up the word “maim” in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006, shows the following synonyms and explanations:
“—1. Maim, lacerate, mangle, mutilate indicate the infliction of painful and severe injuries on the body. To maim is to injure by giving a disabling wound, or by depriving a person of one or more members or their use: maimed in an accident. To lacerate is to inflict severe cuts and tears on the flesh or skin: to lacerate an arm. To mangle is to chop undiscriminatingly or to crush or rend by blows or pressure, as if by machinery: bodies mangled in a train wreck. To mutilate is to injure the completeness or beauty of a body, esp. by cutting off an important member: to mutilate a statue, a tree, a person. 2. injure, disable, deface, mar.” In my view that is what is being proposed by the found documents.

So my question again is., “What do we call torture when it mains, lacerates, mangles or mutilates its subject”? It certainly cannot be considered merely “torment”, can it? And yet that’s what the sloppy and over-reaching politicalization of certain English language terms has seemed to have brought about.

As ever, I await correction and rebuke. Cheers