Terry Frei of the Denver Post fired for tweet about Japanese Indy 500 winner

Good post, VB.

If he had just said "I wonder what my father, who fought in the Pacific in WWII, would think of a Japanese driver winning the Indy 500" he'd probably still have a job.

 

I get it if you fought. I think to be in such a brutal type of war, psychologically, you'd almost have to find a way to dehumanize the people you're killing.

But when you are a generation or two removed and living the good life in the USA, come on, man. Japan's hardly even the same country. Neither is this one. What sense does it make to hold anything related to WWII against some racecar driver?

 

Racism has become sort of a catch-all term that sweeps in xenophobia, religious bigotry and other related nastiness under one tent. It's not a change I care for but I don't really get much of a vote in how the language is evolving and get the gist of what people mean by calling it a racist tweet.

 

This is what is meant and intended when I or anyone thinks of or talks about nuance.

People are a reflection of all such experiences, interests and influences -- not just automatically and unequivocally racist, or stupid, or thoughtless in an instant. Frei clearly is a man who has been interested in and influenced greatly by war and history, and his knowledge of both. Hence, he is someone to whom such a thought as he had would have even occurred, whereas it probably wouldn't to the rest of us. But not necessarily just because he's an asshole, and we're not.

 

I can't either, because, by and large, Pearl Harbor, by itself, still stands out more in the hearts and minds of Americans than does German-driven WWII as a whole.

 

He says it's not personal in his original tweet when in fact it was deeply personal.
I've been reading Frei since I was a young child first discovering newspapers in Portland, OR. Disappointed but an understandable consequence. We have to be smart and diligent when it comes to social media.

 

I think he meant he has nothing personal against Sato, specifically.

 

I thinks it's weird and odd that a "sneak attack" targeting military ships and planes is so out of bounds.

 

When you start a sentence, "Nothing personal but" it is never going to end well.

 

I guess I'm still not so sure what is so "dumb[]" about this debate, and it genuinely irks me that what I feel is a reasonable stance is now in danger of being filed under "Evidence that Dick Whitman is a troll/gadfly."

First, Mario Andretti emigrated to the United States in 1955, 14 years before he won the race. His son Michael was born and raised here. Marco was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Besides, the Andretti name is so synonymous with IndyCar racing at this point, no one bats an eye. Come back to me when Joe Sato, third-generation racer, is in the 2055 field and then the comparison is more apt.

Second, Andretti Autosports is a team owner. While we know how important teams are, it's still pretty inside baseball. To the vast majority of sports fans, Takuma Sato won the Indy 500. Full stop.

Third, addressing the point that got the "dumb" tag: I don't know what anyone wrote in 1969 about Mario Andretti's victory, and neither do you. I certainly don't think Terry Frei was covering the race that year, and I know he wasn't on Twitter. So I don't think it's fair to argue that (American citizen) Mario Andretti's victory in 1969 wasn't criticized on WWII grounds, so Frei's post was race-based, when (1) we don't know if anyone raised the point or not; and (2) those writers weren't Frei.

(Related side point: We're really just assuming that an Italian, i.e. a "dago," a "wop" - didn't draw any ire? We have short institutional memories.)

Fourth, as has been pointed out here, Frei very specifically feels connected to the War in the Pacific. His father fought there, and he has written about it.

It was a stupid thing to write. I don't know that it was "racist," and it diminishes legitimate discussions of racism to presume that it was. I get it. This now gets to be another chapter in "Dick Whitman is a troll." You guys and Jones can go whack each other off on Twitter about it, I guess. I feel I have raised a pretty legitimate point. This guy was our colleague, and I'm not ready to presume that he's "a racist," or that his post was "racist." But that kind of nuance gets lost quite often during the mad scramble to be in the enlightened side of a debate.

 

It carried over culturally for decades after WW2. The prime example of this is the "Buy American" concept. I heard for years from people that there was no way they'd buy a foreign car, and they mainly meant the fuel efficient Japanese cars like Datsun. The OPEC energy crises of the 1970s helped break that thought pattern.

I swore I would never buy a foreign car, but then I went on work travel in 1990 and my rental was a Honda Accord. Damn I had fun driving that. 90 mph was effortless. I never looked the same way again at the POS Ford LTD boat that my dad handed down to me.

Which, BTW, I ran to 196k miles until it caught on fire. My own little smallpotatoes moment.

You ever pick up a piece of clothing today, see that it was made in Vietnam, and not think - hmm. Not too long ago we were bombing them. I shrug it off now, because I view it as a good thing.

It is my hope that as the countries of the world are far more connected economically, they are far less likely to go into major conflict again.

Anyway, again, no excuses for the tweets. I just get that some of these past conflicts take a long time to get over.