Judge James P. Gray

In this blog entry, author Judge James P. Gray makes a case that our drug laws are not working. He explains why–and why he updated his book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

On April 8, 1992 I did something quite unusual for a sitting trial court judge: I held a press conference and announced my conclusions as publicly as I could, both as a judge and former federal prosecutor, that our great nation’s policy of Drug Prohibition was not working – and would never work. 

Since that time the situation has demonstrably only gotten worse. Eventually I became so frustrated about the amount of evidence mandating a change away from this failed policy that I organized my thoughts and wrote a book entitled Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

The first half of the book is intended to make people angry at all of the unnecessary problems we have inflicted upon ourselves and the rest of the world because of the policy of Drug Prohibition.  But the second half of the book was intended to give people hope, because it outlines many of the options we have to that failed policy. In fact, many of those options have been proven to be successful both by our own experience and that of other countries.  In many ways, the response to the book was gratifying because it helped to initiate and perpetuate a full, open and honest discussion about this critically important area.

But now the situation is much worse even than when the book was originally published.  So at the request of my publisher and numbers of others, I have written an updated second edition that traces many of the developments of the last ten years. 

Many of these developments have been predictably disastrous, like the fact that our country still leads the world in the incarceration of its people; that tens of  thousands of people, including many children and other innocent bystanders, have been killed in Mexico and elsewhere not because of drugs, but because of drug money; that the continued obscene profits made by juvenile street gangs and adult gangs like the Hell’s Angels, Mexican drug cartels and other thugs are solely facilitated by the continuation of Drug Prohibition; and that all of these illicit drugs are easier to be obtained by children – if they want to – than it is for them to get alcohol, expressly because the illicit dealers don’t ask for I.D. 

But there have also been some definite signs that people in our country and all around the world are beginning to understand the cause and effect of what is happening.  This realization, along with the fact that many of the options used by some other nations like Portugal and Switzerland are working far better than ours, are evidence that we will see some material and positive changes in the not-so-distant future.

Personally I believe that helping us change away from the failed policy of Drug Prohibition is the most patriotic thing I can do for the country I love.  Further, the most effective way of achieving that goal is to let people know that it is all right to discuss drug policy, and that just because we discuss the fact that we have options to our present failed policy does not mean that we condone the use of any of these drugs.  Please join me in this important effort, and I hope that this new edition of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed will assist all of us in providing a foundation for that positive change.

“We’re all the same.”  With this statement, a teenage girl in Los Angeles voiced her frustration to me.  A racially motivated fight between hundreds of Latino and Armenian boys had wrecked her high school campus just two months earlier.  Why, she and other girls asked, did these “stupid boys” fight when really “we’re all the same”?   

The girls went on to tell me many stories about their lives that were layered with resentment against other racial and ethnic groups at school and in LA.  How has it become so easy for youth to articulate such strong opposition to racial violence and advocate for peaceful humanism, at the same time as they live such highly segregated lives?

While American youth are insistently taught that everyone should get along because of their underlying sameness, they are also embedded in everyday contexts saturated with racism, hostility against migrants, and class hierarchy.  In Multicultural Girlhood, I suggest that youth all too often must adopt these mixed messages of race and ethnicity they are given in the United States.  They are told in schools to be proud of their differences and cultures, but also to remember that we are all the same.  The problem with this form of multiculturalism is that being the “same” is almost always determined through hegemonic forms of whiteness.   Thus, youth of color and youth who have recently migrated to the US – in other words, the girls in my study – see that the values of their differences are no values at all. 

Being “the same” is actually a quest to be white, which they cannot ever achieve.  This becomes a paradox –celebrate differences but behave according to the rules of whiteness that insist that “we’re all the same.”  Celebrate your Mexican or Armenian heritage, but compare yourself to whiteness constantly.

The conflicts that this paradox instigates are all too personally felt by girls, both in terms of their own self-esteem and through their relationships to their families and friends.  They do not understand why they feel deeply uncomfortable or even unsafe venturing into territories at school controlled by “other” cliques.  They sense that girls who they thought were their friends are actually talking about them in hurtful ways in languages they do not understand.  And they tell story after story of the unfair treatment they receive at school, while the kids of other racial and ethnic identities benefit from “special” treatment.  At the same time, they often unwittingly degrade their own families and explain that white kids get all the luck – they get to date earlier, have cooler and more laid back parents, and make a lot more money.

Girls strongly denounced the racialized violence at their school through their multiculturalism, and they pointed to “stupid boys” in blame.  In this way, girls distanced themselves from culpability in the fight and relied on a familiar narrative about the violent perils of masculinity.  Here, too, a paradox emerged in girls’ stories.  They faulted boys’ fighting, placing themselves above the fray.  Yet, they looked to boys to protect them.  They saw boys as the front-line defense in racial solidarity, even though the results were “stupid.”  And they liked boys who fought – fighting, especially over girls, was a supreme form of showing heterosexual desire, in fact.  Boys were sexy when they fought because then it was evidence that boys liked girls.  Coupled with the sexiness of boys’ strength, girls sided with boys from their own racial-ethnic group over other girls when there was conflict between groups.  Racial difference trumped gender solidarity in service to an elevated heterosexism: male strength, female passivity.

In the 21^st century, girls are told that they have special capacities to be whatever they want to be, that they can shape their futures through individual choice and girl power.   Post-feminist messages about girl power show sexy, smart, and smiling girls taking charge of their bodies and aligning together to enjoy femininity.  Ideal girls are never passive, but active in shaping their futures.  Further, girl power’s representations in educational programming or in consumer advertising rely on a rainbow-hued line-up of girls arm in arm.  Certainly the ideal of girls enjoying their diversity and being strong is meant to help girls and to advocate for the undoing of sexism (not to mention to sell millions of dollars worth of girl-centered media and material).  But in Multicultural Girlhood, I explain that no matter the intent of emphasizing girls’ agency, in actuality these sorts of messages place a burdensome responsibility on girls to fix society’s prejudices.  

Girl power asks girls to oppose the very social meanings that also give them their identities.  Girls cannot possibility untangle the complicated paradoxes that shape the everyday spaces of American life and education.  We should not ask them to.  That is why I advocate for a different sort of girlhood in my book – one rejecting the trendy allure of girl power and instead starting with the premise that girls can be conflicted and still merit feminist consideration. 

To this end, I argue that US education should give up on the idealized fantasy that “we’re all the same.”  We must recognize that the spaces of families are increasingly global in scope and come to bear on school life and the racial-ethnic relationships formed there.  And we must contend with the unsurprising fact that all people come to understand their identities and places in the world through processes that are not always self-evident and easily comprehended by any one individual.  The paradoxes that frame American society are not extrinsic but are inherent to self-understanding.  Instead of pushing paradox under the table and calling those who don’t “stupid,” more can be done to expose the definition and appeal of sameness.  In order to “get along” perhaps emphasizing difference is what youth really need.

Hoping that victims will find “closure” in the Penn State sex abuse scandal is wrong. Using the concept of closure helps those responsible for the harm; it doesn’t help victims. What does “closure for victims” really mean when used in these political and criminal cases?

Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State University, is facing multiple sexual assault charges for molesting many young boys. The grand jury report lays out damaging evidence and outrageous details regarding these criminal acts. And those who knew about these crimes failed to take proper action. They did not view the children worthy enough to risk reputations and jobs.

In 2002, a graduate assistant witnessed Sandusky raping a child, approximately 10 years old, in the shower of an athletic facility. The witness was Mike McQueary, former Penn State quarterback and current receivers coach. After seeing the sexual assault still in progress, McQueary called his father who told him to leave the building immediately. So he did nothing to stop the assault and help the child. After waiting a day, McQueary and his father told Paterno about Sandusky. Paterno (after waiting another day) told university officials. A week and a half later, these officials talked to McQueary and then banned Sandusky from campus. Basically this action says, “We’re not going to stop your sexual assault of children, but please do not do it on campus.” None of these people called the police. None of them tried to find out who the boy was and what help he needed.

Not long after witnessing the sexual assault, McQueary was promoted. He eventually became an assistant coach.  Did this job come with the pressure to remain silent?

People are starting to resign and more will surely follow. Reports indicate that Joe Paterno will announce his retirement today. But the problems of sexual assault and bystander silence are much larger than Penn State.  It is not clear whether our society will seize this moment to understand and change the cultural attitudes that allow this abuse to happen. Unfortunately, the calls for “closure” will only inhibit any ongoing conversation.  And that is a travesty for victims.

Victims of sexual assault do not get closure. Effects from abuse stay with people the rest of their lives.  This does not mean that victims cannot go on to have successful and beautiful lives.  Many do.  But they still carry the pain from the abuse. Other victims don’t recover but are lost to severe depression, drugs, or suicide.

We want to believe victims can find closure. Don’t misunderstand what I mean. Victims can heal and learn to live with the experience.  But when we fool ourselves into thinking they have “closure,” then the devastating, long-term effects of abuse do not stay in the conversation.

The undergraduate student body president at Penn State, TJ Bard, released a statement calling for closure: “I believe that the well-being of the victims and closure for all involved should be the top priority.” He has no idea what those victims experienced, and how they continue to manage the abuse. In calling for closure (for ALL involved), Bard is saying that having this story “go away” would be good, especially for Penn State’s reputation.

McQueary’s father wants the case to be resolved, so his son can move on. What will help the young boys who were molested?  What will prevent future abuse? What will make bystanders do more to stop the abuse?

Rather than seeking closure, we need to talk about what we value in our society. Using the misguided idea of “closure for victims” shifts attention away from the perpetrators and the gut-wrenching cultural truths about sexual abuse that we need to face. There should not be closure to this case.  Seeking closure to the case is what the university coaches and officials have been doing for years.

             Merger Games conveys the often unexpectedly dramatic nature of the events that my colleagues and I chronicled from 1994-2003 in a study of a medical merger. That research, and the “reads like a novel/should be made into a movie” book that it generated involved the historic acquisition and union of two medical schools in Philadelphia, The Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP) and Hahneman University by the nonprofit Allegheny Health Care System. We detailed the fate of the merger process when, after a series of voracious acquisitions under the dominion of its CEO, Sherif Abdelhak, Allegheny financially imploded, becoming the country’s largest nonprofit health care organization to declare bankruptcy. The bankruptcy, in 1998, led to the fire-sale purchase of Allegheny’s Philadelphia-area holdings by the Tenet Health Care Corporation, with management and then full control of the medical and other health science university schools by Drexel University. Allegheny’s death spiral also triggered a cascade of state and federal investigations, lawsuits, and civil and criminal indictments.

            The MCP/Hahnemann/Allegheny story has its own particular elements, especially in its cast of players and their organizations and the effort to fuse two medical schools. The lengthy merger process, still underway when the bankruptcy took place, was a tumultuous, tension-ridden, often acrimonious affair. It involved turf wars between the faculties, staff, students, and graduates of the previously separate medical schools, between the medical school and other schools in the  Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, and between the schools and the corporation; educational problems and stresses for the medical students, who called themselves the “merger guinea pigs;” and clashes between the historically ingrained organizational cultures of MCP and Hahnemann, and, most prominently, between the powerful cultures of the academy and the corporation. Riveting as this story is, it is not unique.

             Mergers are rampant, in non-profit and for-profit sectors of health care and in small and large businesses and corporations. Moreover, the merger landscape is littered with failures. Some 60 percent of business mergers reportedly fail; finances are the most frequent reason, followed by an irreconcilable clash of organizational cultures, whose importance is seldom recognized and dealt with before and during an attempted union Mergers, in short, share many common characteristics and patterns that are documented and illuminated in Merger Games. There are lessons to be learned for those considering or undertaking a merger about what a complicated, lengthy, conflict-ridden undertaking this usually is, and why mergers, akin to marriages, may succeed with a great deal of hard work, may have a broken engagement, or end in a divorce.

At this time of the year, football dominates the water cooler conversation as we head into late fall and early winter. Did you see that game yesterday? Can you believe that bad call that cost the game for that team? How did your fantasy team do? From the serious to the casual fan, football is an indelible part of how we spend the fall. Everyone is a Monday morning quarterback.

For me, this time of year always signals the beginning of the basketball season; one that starts in early November and goes through June (hopefully if my Boston Celtics are still playing). My body clock seems to wake up in mid-October as NBA training camp starts. A new season is just around the corner.

This year the conversation centers on the collective bargaining sessions between the NBA owners and players union. Instead of hearing about the surprise player in training camp or whether the team’s defense will improve, the news is about salary caps, revenue sharing, and the cancellation of games. Ultimately it is about how to split a lot of money equitably. These conversations are part of the sporting landscape in the twenty-first century and no sport is immune.

My hope is that these talks can be resolved shortly and everyone’s attention can turn to the game and the players. In recent weeks, my mind has wandered to an earlier period in basketball history when collective bargaining, salary cap and revenue sharing were not in the vocabulary. I have been thinking about the game’s pioneers, most specifically the SPHAS.

The SPHAS, South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, were born in 1918 as a club team and continued playing until 1959. The team’s growth paralleled the development of the game from a club sports to barnstorming to professional game.  The team’s best years were in the 1930s. The team was all Jewish then and overcame the Depression, anti-Semitism, and a World War to propel the game’s growth to a new generation.

As one can imagine, the business of basketball eighty years ago was different. The SPHAS often carried seven players during the season. NBA teams routinely have 15 players under contract. Eddie Gottlieb was the coach, manager, General Manager, and general overseer of all things SPHAS. Contrast that to today when NBA teams have 5-7 assistant coaches sitting on the bench. One is focused on offense, one on defense, one monitors the clock and player foul situations, and one works with the big men and another is focused on the guards. Today the game is highly specialized.

Travel was certainly different. The SPHAS either all piled into Gottlieb’s car or took the train. It was not until the 1950s that NBA teams starting flying. Each NBA team today has a private airplane outfitted with plush seats, televisions, and full service dining. NBA players never see their luggage as they are transported from one city to another.

The money was different then. Very different. Gottlieb signed the players to one year contracts. He paid the players per game. When Joel (Shikey) Gotthoffer started playing for the SPHAS in 1933-1934, he made $35.00 a game. Ten years later, he was one of the highest paid players at $100.00 a game. Gottlieb had a habit of playing his players in cash before the game. If they lost, he had a harder time paying up. As many of the players noted, Gottlieb always kept his word and paid his players.

Earning money playing basketball was a bonus, a little extra spending money the players could take home to their families. They could not earn a living playing basketball and many had full time jobs to support themselves. It is why the games were played on the weekend.

And because these early leagues were weekend leagues, teams did not practice as much as they do today. Players played on their own merits and if a player was not doing his job properly, he was taken out and replaced. The team was the focus. Players passed the ball around until a good shot materialized. Bad shots were frowned upon. Played were expected to keep their opponents from scoring.

It was a different game, but as the NBA owners and players work toward an agreement, hopefully they will take a moment to pause and remember the game’s pioneers like the SPHAS who made today’s game what it is.

Social media seem to be everywhere today. For example, while careful observers have discussed the particular historical, economic, and social contexts that influenced the recent democratic struggles in the Middle East, there is no doubt that social media have played an important role in facilitating the Arab Spring. From Facebook to cell phone photos, social media not only conveyed information about protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, but portrayed powerful images of protest that helped spark struggles throughout the region.

The rise of social media is but one instance of the power of images to influence politics and social movements in our mass-mediated world. The widespread availability of televised and digital images has promoted the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic politics in contemporary societies. Aesthetic politics refers to the role of images, drama, and emotions in shaping politics and public discourse and action. It promotes a more fluid, theatrical, and less centralized understanding of politics at odds with conventional understandings of politics as rational debate or the delineation of clear public policy proposals.

Aesthetic politics can help make sense of the contemporary political scene in the United States. We are all aware of the role of constructed images in electoral politics today, for politicians have to convey sincerity, authenticity, and the like. But this notion of aesthetic politics can also aid us in understanding the Tea Party. Critics from Sean Wilentz to Richard Bernstein tie the rise of the Tea Party to social changes and long-standing movements in American history. They note that in recent years ideas associated with radically conservative groups marginal in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the John Birch Society, have become more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Broad social changes from globalization to the shrinking power of nation-states to control their borders and local economies have played a role in the increase of conservative politics worldwide. Distinctively American factors include the rise of conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the emergence of conservative media from radio talk shows to Fox News. Further, wealthy financiers such as David Koch have provided the resources that allowed the Tea Party movement to become an important player in American politics. Yet these analysts tend to dismiss the Tea Party as ideologically incoherent political know-nothings, as libertarian and religious themes intermingle and many participants decry government spending while advocating increases in Social Security and Medicare. They also have difficulty explaining why Tea Partiers are so angry, and why the movement resonates with many in the public. 

Aesthetic politics can illuminate these issues. Early meetings of Tea Party groups were publicized and coordinated through blogs and Facebook. More significantly, the election of Barack Obama, the great recession of 2008, and the continuing economic turmoil created not only confusion about the proper policies necessary to combat these problems, but also promoted a crisis among many (primarily white, older) Americans about a key identity term, i.e. what it means to be an American. Tea party members seized upon an iconic American symbol, the Boston Tea Party, to define their “Americanness” and anger at the federal government. Demonstrators often dress in tri-colored hats and other colonial costumes, and draw on Revolutionary era imagery, creating flags with slogans such as “Don’t tread on me.” They express their opposition to government spending and taxes through long-standing cultural codes in American life, such as the heroic Founding Fathers, the centrality of the constitution in political life, Horatio Alger stories of rags to riches, and categories of the deserving versus the undeserving.  Obama became a symbol of everything they detested, painted as a big-spending liberal who wanted to illegitimately redistribute wealth to the poor, and who most likely was not a real American (up to 30% of Tea Partyers do not believe that Obama was born in the U.S.). But this political debate was also about tone and emotion, fears and fantasies. As politics becomes theater, dramatic criteria such as emotional identification, dramatic performance, and visual effects become ever more important. The election of the first African-American president played on the complex emotions surrounding race and privilege that have long been a part of American life. The Tea Party tapped into an intense anger fed by cultural and economic insecurity, given voice and image by the emotional outbursts of media figures such as Rick Santelli, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, and Sarah Palin. The Tea Party is as much about rage, vehemence, and authenticity as it is about policy or even facts. As one Tea-Partyer put it, mind-set and values always trump the facts. Such a politics is volatile and not coherent, as fluid as the images on which it is based.  It is no surprise that the U.S. has had three “wave” elections in a row. The consequences of aesthetic politics are not inherently left or right—but we dismiss aesthetic politics as superficial or silly at our political peril.

The overlapping images during our hot August, of the crash of the financial markets and the riots in UK, are exemplary: the old world is crumbling. To say this nowadays seems obvious: you only need to read the newspapers, or to watch tv, to hear the frightened voices of politicians, bankers, and opinion makers. And the university is crumbling with that old world. We could state that we are living in a revolutionary situation, if we rethink its classic definition: global capital’s ruling elites cannot live as they have in the past—workers, the precarious, students, the poor, the productive multitude don’t want to live as they have in the past.

Nevertheless, this was not so obvious some years ago, certainly when I embarked upon the research that would lead to The Production of Living Knowledge—or co-research, as we call it, i.e. the cooperative production of knowledge and subjectivity. Remember how the dominant post-1989 rhetoric was that of “the end of the history”? And then there was the supposed “golden age” of the New Economy, with wealth for all, and the ideological proclamation of the end of the ideologies, which from their point of view meant the end of struggles and possibilities for social transformation.

But as luck would have it, that (never-sealed) history was forcefully “re-opened” in Seattle at the end of the 1990s: Microsoft’s city became the city of the world’s new specter. In the meantime, bubble after bubble, crisis became no longer a stage of development, but a permanent condition of global capital. Today the bubble, and no longer the cycle, is the insuperable form of the economy. And the hope for Obama, which has become hopelessness, makes one truth evident: the Bush nightmare was a continuation of the Clintonian dream by other means.

But what are these bubbles? Let’s consider how they have occurred one after another in the last ten years, with wild rapidity: from the ‘net economy to the subprime crash, the explosion of public debt, and maybe an ecological, or social network bust next. The question is: what is inside the bubble? There is the Internet and networks, i.e. social cooperation; there is debt, i.e. welfare and the social needs—education, communication, housing, healthcare, mobility; there is life, i.e. the production of human by human. The flesh and body of the bubble-financial economy is, in other words, the common.

The crisis of the university is also permanent and insuperable. The growing importance of budget administrators, managers and rating agencies to academic organization and ranking demonstrate the meaning of the financialization of knowledge, the corporatization of the university, and the creation of an education market. And it highlights the intimate connection between the economic crisis on the one hand and the crisis of the global university on the other. But in the book all these topics— the double crisis—are tackled from the perspective of precarious workers, the unemployed, the working poor, the debt generation: that is to say, from the perspective of living knowledge.

And more precisely, from that of common struggles against exploitation, for the self-organization of knowledge production, for the claiming of our right to bankruptcy and to not pay for their crisis. We have had a succession of experiences in recent years: from Italy to California, from Greece to the insurrections in North Africa, and in the last two months in Spain or in Chile. Leading these struggles, a common composition is emerging: young people, highly educated, producers of knowledge, and precarious cognitive workers or the unemployed. Every day they experience the end of school and of the university as elevators of social mobility. Different movements of living knowledge with a common desire: the re-appropriation of the richness produced in common.

Since there is no longer anything to defend, these struggles show us that the double crisis should become a great opportunity. In this way, The Production of Living Knowledge—and I hope it is a dangerous book!—must be a tool to understand, think and act to build up a new university, and a new world. That is to say, a common world.

In Graaff-Reinet as well as many Karoo farming towns, much has stayed the same in the period between submitting the manuscript and its appearance in print. The descriptions I give in Chapter One remain relevant today and the misgivings I express about the change from livestock farming to game farms in the area are also still valid.

However, a new challenge is facing the Karoo landscape, one which has recently come to the fore since the completion of Sonic Spaces of the Karoo.

This blog thus affords me the opportunity to mention this very disturbing development to potential readers. A major oil company is seeking permission to use a vast area of the Karoo landscape (90 000 km) for Hydraulic Fracturing (or “fracking”), a process used to obtain natural shale gas from rock formations situated deep underground. Water, mixed with sand and chemicals, is pumped down a drilled hole into the rock at high pressure. This causes the rock to crack, therefore releasing the gas. Sites are usually active for between 5 and 8 years, after which productivity declines rapidly.

 There are several serious environmental concerns regarding fracking in the Karoo. First, there are suspicions that some of the chemicals used are carcinogenic and therefore harmful to humans and the environment. These chemicals remain in the soil and can pollute the underground water table in the area and ultimately threaten the quality of drinking water (for some time there has been concern about this at fracking sites in the United States and much debate has been generated in the U.S. media as a result). Second, the fact that the Karoo and South Africa generally are already water-deprived areas raises questions of where the millions of liters of water required for fracking will come from. The word “Karoo” derives from an indigenous Khoisan word meaning “dry” or “thirstland;” South Africa receives only 464mm of rain per year in comparison to the world average of 860mm; water is thus already a scarce resource.

As I mention in Sonic Spaces of the Karoo, water is an incredibly precious commodity in this area. It allows town communities to thrive, farming to be sustainable and for the Karoo landscape to yield meat and crops which feed many in the rest of the country. The organic nature of many of these products is much sought after in the urban areas and internationally.

Practically speaking, these arguments in themselves should be sufficient to sow severe doubts about the feasibility of fracking in the area. I expect that water shortages and contamination in the Karoo may lead to some people leaving the area and for those who remain, life will become more difficult. Food security for the rest of the country in turn may be severely affected.

Although I am intensely concerned about these environmental aspects, I am also very aware of what the introduction of fracking will do to the sounds of the Karoo. Will the rural church singing I studied survive? Where will these communities go and how will their music be changed by this dispersal? The Karoo as we know it will change irrevocably; this may be one change that the landscape and its people will not overcome. For those of us whose lives are intertwined with the landscape, its potential destruction is unthinkable.

Website for further information: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/09/idUS380163523920110809

These are great days to be a Philly sports fan. Take Monday, August 29th. The Phillies were in first place by six games. Cole Hamels came back from disabled list and pitching well. The Eagles, having just signed half of the free agents in the NFL, gave Michael Vick a $100 million contract extension. The Flyers are coming off a solid season and have a radically revamped roster that has fans buzzing. The Sixers … well, the Phillies are in first place, and Cole Hamels is back and pitching well.

So these are pretty great days, but they are not the best days. I started to wonder … what was the Best Day Ever in Philly sports history?

October 31^st, 2008 was certainly great: it was the day of the Phillies World Series parade, it was Halloween, the weather was gorgeous, and it happened recently enough that our memories of it do not include Dukes of Hazard lunchboxes or calling our friends on rotary phones. The other Philly teams weren’t offering much cause for celebration on that date, however. The Flyers were in a four-game winning streak, but it came at after a season-opening six game losing streak. The Eagles, though 4-3, were in the late-Donovan McNabb-era malaise, and the dreaded Bengals tie (a 13-13 game in which McNabb admitted that he didn’t understand the overtime rules) was just days away. A very unpromising Sixers season just started. Still, Phillies + World Series = perhaps the second-best day in Philadelphia sports history.

The Sixers finished their sweep of the Lakers to win the NBA championship on May 31, 1983, but that win came a month after the Flyers were swept easily in the first round of the NHL playoffs by the Rangers. The Phillies went on to win the pennant that year, but no one could guess that would happen in May: the Wheeze Kids (Pete Rose, Tony Perez, Joe Morgan, and any other leftover from the 1975 Reds that the team could acquire) were in third place, just off one six-game losing streak, and about to start another one. The Eagles were in the midst of the Marion Campbell era. Let’s move on.

May 19, 1974 and May 27, 1975 were watershed dates in Philly sports history, and the Flyers parades which followed transformed our regional sports identity. But let’s face it: I was riding a tricycle when the Flyers won their Stanley Cups. That was a long time ago, and the Broad Street Bullies exist to fans under 40 as faded newspaper clippings. Older fans may also remember that the Flyers were the only things going on in this city at that point. The Sixers were a fourth-place team both years. The Phillies were on the rise, but they had to be after three-straight last place finishes. The Eagles could be summed up in two words: Mike McCormack.

The best day in Philadelphia sports history was probably January 11, 1981. The Phillies had won the World Series just a few months earlier. The Julius Erving-led Sixers had a 38-7 record and were at the tail-end of a six-game winning streak. The Flyers, though in a mild slump, were 25-11-7 and still skated onto the ice behind Bobby Clarke and Bill Barber (with Brian Propp and Tim Kerr taking shifts for the next generation). And of course, the Eagles beat the Cowboys in the NFC Championship game on that cold January day. A four-parade year seemed possible, even plausible, for a few hours on that Sunday afternoon and for a few days afterward.

This does not feel nearly that good. But we are Philly fans, and we take any good feelings we can get.