Two Guest commentary by Kent Carlson and Douglas Burns
The “we-don’t-get-no-respect-chorus” is off key
By Herb Strentz
Go figure!
The University of Iowa football team was 9-0, and shouts of jubilee and celebration were drowned out by whining, “We don’t get no respect.”
Go figure!
The Hawkeyes were ranked as one of the top teams in the nation by any poll you wanted to mention, and boosters complained, “We don’t get no respect.”
Go figure!
Now that the wheels came off against Northwestern, and the Hawkeyes are still a best-ever 9-1, the “no respect” stuff still is hollow — partly because it was a phony argument to begin with.
As early as the fourth game of the season — against Penn State — on network television, sportscaster Brent Mussburger was raving about how great the Hawkeyes are, what a coaching genius Kirk Ferentz is, and how Iowa is a team to be reckoned with. And those were his understatements.
Yet the whining about respect began about that time.
Nine games into the season, Mark May and Adam Rittenberg of ESPN spoke glowingly of the Hawkeyes. But you couldn’t find reference to them by the whiners. And the regional issue of Sports Illustrated gave its cover to the Hawkeyes — not a jinx, but recognition of a good season and a tribute to Ferentz and a team that understood itself far better than the “no respect” crowd did.
Linebacker Pat Angerer, defensive back Tyler Sash and Ferentz are among those in line for national post-season honors. “No respect?”
Go figure!
OK, near as I can figure, all the whining about lack of respect for the Hawkeyes was driven by two factors (1) Iowans are better losers than winners; (2) Sports news and commentary differs from much of journalism.
(1) Let’s face it; Iowans have more and richer experience with losing than with winning! We have learned to be good, stoic losers, still expressing support for athletic teams and coaches and looking forward to the next game or the next season. The response to the Northwestern loss will be that way.
(2) The “We-don’t-get-no-respect” mentality is abetted by the nature of athletics today and magnified by Internet postings and talk shows. Whining is part of the scene, right along with trash talk and posturing. Lost in the tumult is the advice attributed to Penn State coach Joe Paterno, “Look, when you get into the end zone, try to act like you’ve been there before.” Even the exceptional, like Michael Jordan, admit to routinely over-reacting to criticism to stoke themselves up for the next game. Whereas many journalists try to maintain an arms-length relationship with news sources, in sports coverage we embrace sources and even become their advocates. So it is routine for sports columnists and reporters to press for higher salaries and better contracts for coaches — something that would be heresy for reporters covering the mayor or governor. Moreover, the nature of sports coverage and commentary engages readers and viewers far more than, say, coverage of city hall or the school board. The downside of such engagement is focus on giving the audience what it wants in terms of devotion to a news source and nourishing hopes for victory.
It’s interesting, and commentaries such as this can be dismissed as taking sports coverage too seriously and not joining in the fun and diversion of good-natured give and take.
Like others frustrated with the “We-don’t-get-no-respect” silliness, I’ll plead guilty to asking more of sports coverage than the us-against-them mentality.
Take for example, something serious, like the issue of head injuries in football, particularly in the National Football League. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, testified before Congress on head injuries, but that received little or no coverage in the Iowa sports community.
A week before there was an Iowa angle in a New Yorker magazine article about head injuries in football and their link to the early onset of Alzheimer’s and other cognitive ills. It was in the Oct. 19 New Yorker and after reading it you’ll not be able to watch a football game the same way.
The Iowa angle? Here’s part of what was said about the examination of the brain of Iowa and Minnesota Viking great Wally Hilgenberg, who died Sept. 23, 2008, of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“Look at the hippocampus. It’s wall-to-wall tangles. Even in a bad case of Alzheimer’s you don’t see that.”
A lot of us are more troubled by concerns with head injuries than we are by concerns of the we-don’t-get no respect crowd.
But, hey, it’s all just fun, isn’t it? CV
Herb Strentz is a retired administrator and professor in the Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication and writes occasional columns for Cityview.
Political Mercury
By Douglas Burns
Lazy citizenry opens door for city hall hijackings
Back in the mid-1990s a then highly active and visible member of Iowa’s Christian right laid out his movement’s strategy for me.
The plan: take over one small-town school board and city council at a time. Voter turnouts in these elections are often low and it’s easy to put together a group, say 100 or 200 voters working in unison, to sack the systems of local government in Iowa through surreptitious write-in campaigns, this operative told me on a Saturday morning in the Memorial Union at Iowa State University.
Of course, the Christian right has expanded its influence in Iowa but not exactly in the way my source suggested.
When I see low election turnout numbers like the ones in many Iowa cities last week, I recall that conversation and shudder.
In many local elections in Iowa, turnouts don’t climb out of the single digits.
Some are uncontested in the sense that there are not two or more candidates for each office running traditional, open campaigns. But there are lines on the ballots to write-in votes.
An organization or an individual with an agenda literally could have taken over a city with a shadow write-in campaign of less than 200 votes. The motivation could have been localized, a plan to, for example, fire the police chief or city manager or public works director or all three.
Or to kill a new public library.
Or gut an action plan for new infrastructure so as to reduce property taxes, which would probably be the most likely.
The inspiration for a write-in plan could be more broadly ideological with folks wanting to, again, for example, pass a city ordinance supporting legalized marijuana, which would fly in the face of state and federal laws but still make a statement as Breckenridge, Colo., just did.
An evangelical or liberal church could seek the seats to foist its worldview on the city.
There is, of course, separation of church and state. But there are ways, like use of zoning, that religious groups could employ to change the way certain businesses they don’t like do business.
Religious zealots, if they had the seats, could also use council meetings, high-profile public venues, to pass non-binding resolutions on matters from abortion to homosexuality. Such resolutions are now appropriately used to honor retiring firemen or voice support for other cities, such as New York in the wake of 9/11 or eastern Iowa after the recent flooding.
The city hall church-takeover scenario is not far-fetched. A committed congregation likely could keep the write-in tactics under wraps until the election. It would take so few votes to do this.
Once such a council and mayor were in office, the public couldn’t simply say, “Wait a minute, we didn’t want this.” Iowa doesn’t have recalls, so we would be stuck with them until the next election.
Iowa Code does provide for the removal of elected officials if they engage in extortion or corruption or, in a nod to the 19th century, are publicly intoxicated.
So if council members used the under-the-radar tactics to gain power, there would be remedies if they gave sweetheart deals to companies doing business with the city in exchange for kickbacks — big-city machine antics of the variety made infamous in places like Chicago and New Jersey.
There’s another reason you should always vote.
In my career, I’ve had the great privilege of interviewing hundreds of military veterans. A few weeks ago I attended a military retirement ceremony in Omaha, Neb., for a close friend. Like other people, I was busy this last Tuesday, and there’s a case to be made that journalists shouldn’t vote at all in elections. But when it comes to voting, I think of my friend and all the servicemen. It is an insult to them to fail to fulfill our obligation by voting in every election.
In Iowa we don’t have long voting lines like in Cleveland. Thanks to the good people at my polling place, I was in and out in about three minutes (and some of that time was spent chatting about whether a neighbor could park in my driveway this week).
In the end, these exceedingly low election turnouts open the possibility for a hijacking of the system and our way of life and identity as cities. People with narrow self-interests or wild ideologies or simply plans to move to a bare-bones, stripped-down local government would prevail.
And if it happened, the victors could laugh at a city of fools as they do whatever they darn well please. CV
Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa newspaperman who writes for The Carroll Daily Times Herald and offers columns for Cityview.
