What seems to be lost in the controversy surrounding Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth’s home run mark is that the current record–and the only one that really matters–looks more and more unattainable.
The soon-to-be forty-three-year-old Bonds has hit only 5 homeruns in the 35 games the Giants have played so far this year. At that pace he will only hit 23 over the course of the full 162-game season (only, of course, being a relative term–23 homeruns is not a bad year). That would put him at 731 for his career, 24 short of Hank Aaron’s 755. Now whether the dropoff in Barry’s production is due to age and bad health or now being off steroids, that means the earliest he could expect to challenge Aaron is the end of next season–assuming no further drop off in production and that he does stay healthy. And when you’re 44, as Bonds will be then, those are big ifs.
So maybe, hopefully, Aaron’s mark will stand and there will be no controversy over a possibly steroid-tainted record.
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I was watching a television show last week, and, once again, until he dies in a shootout, a criminal gets away with murder (literally) because of diplomatic immunity. Infuriating! Diplomatic immunity (or at least the Hollywood cliché of diplomatic immunity) may very well be the single most misrepresented concept in all of film and television. And talk about chicken vs. the egg! I wonder which came first: has Hollywood so misrepresented the concept that the general public no longer understands how it truly works, or did the general public’s misunderstanding result in Hollywood’s misrepresentation?
So for those of you who don’t understand how it works, here’s the lowdown. Just because somebody is a diplomat does not mean they can break our nation’s laws willynilly. Diplomatic immunity is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Diplomatic immunity means that the person in question is to be treated as subject to the laws of his or her home country. So a diplomat would not receive diplomatic immunity on any charge that is also illegal in his or her homeland. Diplomatic immunity only applys to those crimes in our country not illegal in the person’s own nation.
Writers, please get it right. Accuracy will make for better stories, and maybe the public will be educated in the process.
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