Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on ICE and the New ‘Loutocracy’)

“Minneapolis is today’s Birmingham. Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts. The administration requires an addition to the typologies of government: loutocracy.

“For a glimpse of what government of, by and for louts looks like, find on the internet the video, taken by a citizen in Minneapolis, in which a participant in the excitement of a melee — tear gas and other instruments for combating citizens — exclaims: ‘It’s like Call of Duty! So cool huh?’ Call of Duty is a video game, away from which some new agents were perhaps lured by the signing bonuses, some up to $50,000, that have fueled the agency’s breakneck expansion….

“Policing is a hard, dangerous profession. Done well, it demands of its practitioners discipline and judgment, and deserves from society a respect approaching reverence. The current administration, by erasing the distinction between police work and military operations — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will, “With This Loutocracy, Assume It’s Lying About ICE Until Proven Otherwise,” The Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2026

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Herman Cain and the ‘GOP’s Descent Into Vaudeville’)

“The GOP’s descent into vaudeville began with the 2008 vice presidential nomination of Sarah Palin, it accelerated in 2011 when [Herman] Cain was taken seriously as a presidential candidate, and it reached warp speed with the party’s capture by the man who takes Cain seriously as a maker of monetary policy. Cain’s certitude about his economic nostrums is inversely proportional to the study he has invested in the subject, which probably has involved less effort than he recently invested in organizing a PAC to promote Trump’s reelection. Cain’s and his nominator’s boundless confidence in their economic beliefs demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It is named for two Cornell psychologists who in 1999 described the bias by which the lower a person’s intellectual ability, the more the person tends to overestimate it.”— George F. Will, “The Cain and Moore Nominations Are Two More Tests for Republicans to Fail,” Washington Post, Apr. 10, 2019

(Photo of Herman Cain speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 11, 2011, taken by Gage Skidmore)

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Football, ‘A Waning American Romance’)

“Autumn, which is bearing down upon us like a menacing linebacker, is, as John Keats said, a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Actually, Keats, a romantic, did not mention that last part. He died before the birth of the subject of a waning American romance, football. This sport will never die, but it will never again be, as it was until recently, the subject of uncomplicated national enthusiasm.”— George F. Will, “Football’s Enjoyment is on a Fade Pattern,” The Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2017

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Baseball’s Metrics ‘Quants’ in the Moneyball Era)

“As a game of distinct episodes—pitch by pitch, out by out, inning by inning—[baseball] generates an ever-richer sediment of data as new technologies yield ever-more refined measurements: spin rates of pitches, ‘tilts’ (angles of break) of sliders, launch angles of swings, exit velocities of balls coming off bats, and so on. These measurements are massaged by a new generation of mostly young and well-educated front-office ‘quants.’ All 30 teams have analytics departments; the Astros have a ‘director of decision sciences.’ Many of these savants’ baseball-playing careers peaked in Little League. They work, not always harmoniously, with their teams’ managers, who are expected to use the data when putting together lineups and making in-game decisions.”— George F. Will, “The Game You Knew Is Gone” (review of Keith Law’s Smart Baseball), The Wall Street Journal, June 17-18, 2017

The image accompanying this post comes from the 2011 film Moneyball, with Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and Jonah Hill as assistant GM Peter Brand—a composite character largely based on Paul DePodesta, who was reluctant to be named on film.  Brand is the epitome of the “quant” discussed by Will.

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Sinatra, ‘The Greatest Singer of American Songs’)

“Frank Sinatra should be celebrated for his craftsmanship. Of geniuses, we have, it seems, a steady stream. Actual craftsmen are rarer and more useful because they are exemplary for anyone with a craft, be it surgery or carpentry. Sinatra was many things, some of them — libertine, bully, gangster groupie — regrettable. But he unquestionably was the greatest singer of American songs.”— George F. Will, “The Frank Sinatra We Remember,” The Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2015

Today is the 100^th birthday of Frank Sinatra, baby. Forget it at your own risk.

One who seems to have done so, at least according to a good number of true believers, is columnist George F. Will, who came in for considerable flack from aficionados who perceived a slight of the Chairman of the Board in that sentence about “regrettable” failings.

Let’s grant right now that Will could have made more of Sinatra’s fierce opposition, early in his career, to racism, at a point when such a stance could have posed grave risks for his career, or of the singer’s legendary generosity, manifested publicly and privately (he came to the aid of a number of entertainers experiencing severe financial difficulties, including Woody Herman, Duke Ellington and Lee J. Cobb).

But—there’s really no way to get around it—Sinatra was a bully, someone who could not only turn on people close to him for years, but also capitalize on friendships with Mafia figures to order beatings of people who rubbed him the wrong way, including comic Jackie Mason and author Dominick Dunne.

Every one of us who has ever suffered or fought off a bully can never forget it. And when professional muscle is enlisted to do the bullying—well, I don’t see how you can look the other way, do you?

So, let’s grant that, too. We are still left with the Wills assertion--that Ol' Blue Eyes was "the greatest singer of American songs"--which makes so many people defend Sinatra no matter what, while making others regard the singer as an infinitely fascinating mass of contradictions.

You can certainly count me among the latter group. As I searched for past posts of mine about Sinatra, I was surprised to discover that the number of times I’ve written about him has probably only been exceeded by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Bruce Springsteen and Steven Sondheim. Considering how I regarded him when I was a teenager in the '70s--a hopelessly square representative of everything the older generation stood for--that's quite a turnaround--and, of course, a tribute to his extraordinary talent.

For what it’s worth, below are links to my considerations of different aspects of his career and life:

*From Here to Eternity: The Godfather-propagated legend of how Sinatra landed his Oscar-winning, comeback role of Maggio—and what was the more likely, prosaic truth.

*Guys and Dolls: Why the singer hated, hated, hated that movie’s co-star, Marlon Brando.

*Carousel: Why Sinatra felt such an affinity with "Soliloquy," the epic centerpiece of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—and why he walked away from the role of Billy Bigelow onscreen.

*Billie Holiday: How the example of “Lady Day” (whose 100^th birthday was also celebrated this year) proved crucial in Sinatra’s mid-career decision to refashion himself from youthful crooner to world-weary interpreter of song.

One last thing. You'll notice that to accompany this post, I haven't chosen one of his jaunty, "I've Got the World on a String"-style images, but one showing an infinitely more vulnerable side. This comes from another film for which he was Oscar-nominated, The Man With the Golden Arm, about a drug addict. 

The author of this post from the blog "More Stars Than in the Heavens" got it right in noting, "There’s real desperation in every second of his screentime here – the kind that, frankly, no actor can learn." It's the same type of desperation and pathos he mined in "saloon songs" such as "One More for My Baby (and One More for the Road)". 

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on a Ballpark’s ‘Loudest Noise’)

“At a baseball park, the loudest noise should be supplied by the spectators.” ―George F. Will, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (2014)

Will’s starting point for this remark, as indicated by his subtitle, is his beloved, venerable Wrigley Park. Mine in this photo is the far newer PNC Park, home of baseball’s Pirates, which I saw one morning, several hours before gametime, on a visit to Pittsburgh last year. (For another angle on this latter park, see this other image I took and posted last year.)