It is not insignificant that when Caitlyn Jenner spoke in public last week, she spoke to a room full of jocks. Jocks like herself. The best, the champs, the stars, the MVPs. The unchallenged A-side of the American cafeteria, on another night they are lavished like royalty. Those ESPY Awards? That’s an intimidating crowd. Just watching at home on TV, I feel there’s at least a 20% chance I will get stuffed into a locker.

Let’s be honest: Sports can be a brilliant catalyst for social progress—it happened with Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King and Magic Johnson, among many others, and its crucial lessons of sacrifice and teamwork can ballast a lifetime—but sports can be a backward place, too. Antisocial. Mean-spirited. Bullying. A sports section in 2015 veers between episodes of greatness and plunges of arrested development. The other day a pair of New Jersey fathers were arrested for having a bloody fight at their daughters’ travel softball game.

I mean, you have got to be kidding me. Grown dads.

Caitlyn Jenner’s speech Wednesday night in Los Angeles? This was rarer, bigger stuff. Sports in service of a larger idea. It might not have been meaningful to everyone, but that’s OK. It didn’t have to be meaningful to everyone. That wasn’t really the point.

There was some aggro howling about ESPN’s decision to give its Arthur Ashe Courage Award to Jenner, to which the only reasonable response is: give me a giant break. I never thought I would live to see the day when an ESPY was treated like a Fields Medal, or a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jenner’s award was contrived? You don’t say. Virtually every public awards ceremony is a contrivance—Louis B. Mayer admitted the Academy Awards were at least partly launched as a way to kiss up to filmmakers (“If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted,” Meyer is quoted saying in Scott Eyman’s “Lion of Hollywood”). The ESPYs are designed by a powerful sports network to entertain and relationship-build and to fill the humid doldrums between basketball and football. Over the years there have been genuine, stirring moments—cancer-diagnosed college basketball coach Jim Valvano’s impassioned plea in 1993 to “don’t ever give up,” and the late ESPN anchor Stuart Scott’s poignant speech last year in receipt of an award named for Valvano. But mostly the ESPYs are showbiz, a chance to watch athletes try to laugh at themselves and see how many Gronkowskis can climb out of a party bus.

Naturally, as if on cue, there was a tide of Internet misinformation about Jenner’s selection—a common meme was that ESPN had passed over a deserving military war hero in order to honor Jenner, or had chosen Jenner over the late Lauren Hill, a college basketball player who had managed to play a final game despite a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. This was untrue—Jenner had upset no one’s specific bid for the Ashe award, and the inspirational Hill was honored elsewhere in the evening. Meanwhile, it was ugly how free some Jenner/ESPN critics felt to torque the legacy of Ashe, a groundbreaking athlete who led a life of extraordinary grace and compassion. Ashe’s own daughter, Camera, applauded the selection of Jenner. “She is the epitome of courage,” she told the New York Daily News.

Backlash was expected, of course. Those willful misrepresentations exposed the intertwined currents of antipathy and ignorance surrounding Jenner’s story. This was not going to be easy.

And yet here’s the thing: Jenner got up there on stage in Los Angeles and made it look easy. Even if it was not. Even if she said “this transition has been harder on me than anything I could imagine,” a sober reminder of an experience not uncommon to her. Jenner spoke about a transgender teenager, Sam Taub, who had not long ago taken his life. Another, Mercedes Williamson, found stabbed to death in Mississippi.

It was a tough speech to a tougher room, but Jenner crushed it. “I’m clear with my responsibility going forward—to tell my story the right way, for me to keep learning, to reshape the landscape of how trans issues are viewed, how trans people are treated,” she said. “And then more broadly to promote a very simple idea: accepting people for who they are. Accepting people’s differences.”

It is very rare in American life you can actually hear the wheels of the culture grind forward in real time. But that’s what was happening here. Sports prefers to stick with archetypes—matinee idol quarterbacks, underappreciated linemen, stoic coaches, flaky pitchers. Jenner herself fit neatly into a formula: Olympic champion, symbol of American excellence, flag-draped icon from the 1976 Montreal Games. But every so often an athlete arrives with the power to change the status quo, because the athlete is undeniable. That’s what made this powerful. Jenner’s not an outsider. She is in the club.

She is also, by her own admission, flawed—that Vanity Fair cover story is unvarnished about Jenner’s past shortcomings as a husband and a father. But in her speech, Jenner made it very clear: She is suited for this moment. People may find her comfort in the spotlight off-putting or dislike that she’s doing a reality-TV show or cringe at the narcissism empire built by the Kardashian clan, but this role she is assuming in the mainstream? Not for a person who shrinks. “If you want to call me names, make jokes, doubt my intentions, go ahead, because the reality is, I can take it,” she said, reminding the audience she was the MVP of her high-school football team (perfect). “But for the thousands of kids out there coming to terms with being true to who they are, they shouldn’t have to take it.”

Jenner’s OK with all of the noise. With the ignorance. With, frankly, the hate (if you spend hours rattling around the Internet writing crude things about Jenner, it’s time to go take a long, contemplative walk in the forest). She’s OK with the people who say they’re fine with Jenner but just don’t want her story “in their face,” which intentionally or not, is a position that tacitly denies a person their right to live a visible and recognized life. She’s OK with the ludicrous accusation that attention to Jenner takes away from other deserving sports stories—nobody’s talking less about the amazing Jordan Spieth or amateur Paul Dunne (holy smokes Paul Dunne) at the British Open or Mike Trout or U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team or goodness knows the NFL because Jenner decided to tell her story. (Spaceships could be hovering over the Washington Monument and it would not curb coverage of the NFL.)

Jenner is OK with all of that, because she knows—agrees!—this is not about her.

But Jenner said it best:

For the people out there wondering what this is all about—whether it’s about courage or controversy or publicity—well, I’ll tell you what it’s all about. It’s about what happens from here. It’s not just about one person, it’s about thousands of people. It’s not just about me, it’s about all of us accepting one another. We are all different. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing.

That’s what Caitlyn Jenner said last week in public, and with courage. End of story. And a beginning, too.

Write to Jason Gay at [email protected]

Where have I been?

Out.

What have I been doing?

Nothing.

Otherwise, I might have noted that Donald Trump is one scary sumbitch. Or who the hell is that woman running against McCain, and for heaven’s sake why. I did pause to wonder why we don’t settle for mutually assured destruction in the Middle East, specifically Iran. After all MAD worked well in the Cold War. Why not in the Middle East?

Speaking of war, does any politician in this country ever take note that come September We the People have been at war for 14 years? A google search on the question of how many Americans have died since 9/11 came up with the number 6,600. Whoever is elected in November, 2016 will be our third war president and offer the prospect of another 8 years of war, death, destruction and drones.

Where have I been?

Hiding.

Governor Ducey recently said Arizona excelled at water conservation. It is true south of the Gila. As the Salt River Project routinely floods lawns via canals by the acre-foot, it’s questionable whether it is true of the state as a whole. Tucson was certainly a water conservation pioneer. It was accomplished by increasing water rates. This was not a penny-ante increase. It led to the great dearth of Tucson lawns and the use of recycled water in some golf courses and playgrounds. It was an enormous increase. And it elicited an enormous response. This is a blog post from four years ago that celebrated the four council members who voted to increase rates and thereby were booted from office or left for acting responsibly.

 

Tucson’s recall election of January 1977 had all the sense and feel of a mob lynching rather than an exercise in representative democracy.

Three members of the city council were trounced and booted from office. They were guilty only of  [Read more…]

Drag out your copy of the White Album and listen to “Happiness” while you read this piece.

I had no idea that white males in this country were so downtrodden. My heart bleats (in this case it’s just gas). Read this.

We liberals hold that there are few more evil arch conservatives than the billionaire Koch brothers who are reportedly about to spend $900 million to elect equally evil, right-wing candidates.

However:

In 1974, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, a libertarian conglomeration of economists and political scientists and other scholars of the Libertarian persuasion. You should, therefore, consider Cato as the offspring of the Koch boys.

What’s more:

The Cato Institute has for years advocated unrestricted immigration. It is at the heart of its free-market argument. Cato (and Koch) for decades have held that Dreamers and their families in all the countries in all the world ought to be able to roam free to work where they like as they like. This should be true, according to Cato, for immigrants in Africa and the Middle East seeking to work in E.U. countries. Here is a Cato video of one of its scholars advocating unrestricted immigration.

This is not an extreme argument, the Joe Arpaios of the world notwithstanding. Indeed, it is rational. Immigration enforcement has cost billions and thousands of dead Mexicans and Central Americans. The waste of blood and money has been staggering. And the worst of it is that it continues.

We note that one of the bikers in the Waco kerfuffle made bail. It was set for all 170 hog lovers at $1 million, the judge being one of those bench sitters who takes exception to nine deaths.  Thing is, we don’t know whom shot who; the whoms might include the cops who apparently knew there was a pow wow in progress and had some inkling of trouble. So far whom only knows.

The bail thing raises the question of whence comes the dinero, dude?

I figure he/she must be stock market whiz.

OK, this is pissy. I admit. But could you call it something other than “Deflategate”? Please? In the great scheme of world history, letting the air out of a frozen football ranks pretty low on the scandal totem pole. This business of labeling every tom, dick and harry scandal trivializes a great historic presidential scandal. Watergate led to the eviction of Richard Milhous Nixon from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Deflategate’ has led to our-game suspension for Tom Brady.

I happen to think that the worst of Tom Brady’s sins will not necessarily include letting air out of a pigskin. Lying about it is much worse. The suspension by the National Felons League will cost him a few hundred grand. In one sense it seems harsh. Doubtful Brady needed less air in the ball, particularly given the fact that New England left the entrails of the Indianapolis Colts all over the Northeast. The score was top heavy, the game was boring, the Colts defense abysmal. The best you could do was drink a lot of soda and fill up on chips and salsa. It was a game that made the commercials fascinating and engrossing by comparison.

Watergate, in great contrast, was the height of political drama — “what did the president know and when did he know it” and the wiggle-waggle eyebrows of a country lawyer from North Carolina.

Call it something else, like the least of the NFL’s problems.