The Naked Fobi

Take My Ball and Go Home: USA, FIFA and What to Do Next

2010-12-03T03:03:00.001-08:00

The old poker sharp’s maxim says that if you can’t spot the sucker at the table, you’re the sucker. On Monday, when I read reports of the technical strength of the United States’ proposal for hosting the 2022 World Cup, I could only but shake my head, knowing that at FIFA decisions are not made on the basis of any sound process. With the naïveté of lamb being walked to the slaughter, Sunil Gulati expressed confidence in the bid and the propriety of the selection process.

So, I woke up early Thursday morning with the dread of a man facing a death sentence; disaster seemed inevitable. In a few hours, FIFA would announce the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and by 7am I already knew what to expect. A year ago, the betting favorites to host the tournament were England and the United States, respectively. By Wednesday, the lines had shifted dramatically, with Russia a prohibitive favorite (2/7, if you care about such things) for 2018 and Qatar heavily picked (2/5) to take the 2022 World Cup.

In the aftermath, American fans have been incandescent with rage on internet chatboards, and people have second-guessed what we did, wondering how such a tiny dot of a country had outmaneuvered us. People pointed to Bill Clinton’s rambling presentation, or to the fact that Morgan Freeman accidentally skipped a page in his speech. Others in the media noted the slick CGI stadiums presented by the Qatar delegation and the presence of Zinedine Zidane and a host of paid celebrity endorsers, but it still made little sense. Sure, Qatar had very pretty stadiums rendered wonderfully on a computer, but the United States had twice as many rendered in brick and steel, not to mention every other logistical matter ironed out.

There was an unseemly aspect to it, as two petro-rich nations took the prize, despite real doubts over important aspects of their respective bids. In Sports Illustrated, Grant Wahl, a reporter not known for hyperbole, spoke what everyone suspected when he said, “Choosing Qatar and Russia is the biggest indictment possible that FIFA is not a clean organization. The message here is that petrodollars talk.” (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/grant_wahl/12/02/3thoughts.wcbid/index.html#ixzz172FP09JQ)

Let me be blunt. In the next twelve years, all manner of defenses will be given for awarding Qatar the World Cup, but the simple fact remains that FIFA’s choice was not unorthodox, or outside the box, or about leaving a legacy. No, selecting Qatar is a completely indefensible decision. In fact, as a host nation, it is so incomprehensibly insufficient that, not only should it not have won, but no honest body should ever have taken it seriously. Before my making my larger about where to go from here, it is important to understand that Americans have a right to be outraged. This is not sour grapes or being a sore losing; had the United States lost to Australia, for example, that might make sense. But, for several reasons Qatar’s bid simply does not pass muster.

First, size does matter. Qatar has a population the size of metropolitan Austin, Texas, three-fourths of whom are workers imported, mostly from Pakistan, and eek out meager livings. Final numbers are not yet available, but most estimates are that at least 350,000 people went to South Africa for the World Cup. If we assume similar numbers for Qatar, that means that a country of 1.7 million people will need to accommodate a 21% increase in its population over night. As a point of comparison, this would be the equivalent of the United States having the entire nation of France show up for a month.

Moreover, there is a ludicrous aspect to the fact the airport will need to triple in size, nine additional stadiums will need to be built in a state the size of Connecticut, and one of the host cities does not even exist yet. Lusail, a city ten miles north of Doha currently exists only on paper. Qatar had such a dearth of hosts for potential matches that they had to create a city from scratch. While Qatar’s reported $50 billion budget may allow this, it is not ideal and, at any rate, FIFA should have ethical reservations about burdening any nation with these kinds of white elephants.

Second, lest we forget, this is soccer tournament, and some mention should be given to the fact that there would be an enormous competitive advantage to all of the nations placed in Group A along with Qatar. Critics of this argument note that in 1994 the United States was not a soccer power, nor was South Africa in 2010. Both of these nations had much more illustrious footballing pedigrees than Qatar, though. The USA had qualified on its own merits in 1990, and South Africa had also been to previous World Cups and won the African Cup of Nations. Qatar, the 89th best team according to FIFA rankings, has never gone to a World Cup, never placed in the top four in the Asian Cup, and has not even won a match in the Asian Cup since 1988. Though twelve years is a long time to build a team, without an embarrassing bevy of Brazilian imports, Qatar certainly looks to get run over rather substantially in what has likely become realistically a 3-team group.

Much has also been made of the heat, and rightly so. All of Qatar’s stadia are outdoor venues. The plan to keep players and, to a lesser extent, fans cool in games relies upon an as yet untested solar-powered carbon-neutral air conditioning system. Even supposing that it works, there are still real concerns about the health of players during training, and as several observers have pointed out, you cannot air condition the entire nation. With temperatures in July and July usually topping 110 degrees, this is a legitimate concern.

Finally, there are some vexing political complications. Qatar’s bid played up the tournament’s ability to transform a region. Qatar is among the more progressive states in the Middle East, but that is very faint praise indeed. Israelis still may not travel there, and unmarried women under the age of 35 are typically required to have a male escort in order to receive entry. Israel performed well in its 2010 qualifying campaign, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that FIFA may well face the sticky situation of having to persuade Qatar to allow a team from a nation that it does not recognize to participate in contravention of its own laws. When faced with similar situations, such as Shahar Peer being barred from participating in the WTA’s Dubai Open because she was Israeli, many sports bodies have not shown the courage one would hope and expect.

England and the United States are rightly outraged to be on the outside looking in, and this is particularly vexing because there is real reason to doubt the legitimacy of the process. When, last month, reporters from England duped two FIFA Executive Committee members into soliciting bribes, what was shocking was not so much that they did it, but how eagerly and easily they made the demands. For more than a decade, very serious allegations of bribery and payouts have tainted FIFA. By all accounts, the bids for the United States and England were clean, fair and by the book, which sadly may have meant that they were, by the nature of the process, doomed from the start. I understand fully that observers around the world will point to the anger in London and Chicago as evidence, not of a corrupt process, but of two petulant powers who are miffed that they did not get their way. Despite this, the United States and England are right to want a process that is transparent and fair. If the United States was punished because it did not line selectors’ pockets with lucre, or if England was penalized for having an honest and aggressive press, then these are legitimate areas of concern that go beyond just bruised egos.

The question now is, “now what?” There are three paths that England and the United States can take. The first option is to simply acknowledge the nature of the game, accept the unwritten rules and develop a more, shall we say, creative approach to bringing in bids for major sporting events. The United States is not without sin when it comes to buying sporting events; the Salt Lake City Olympics demonstrate this. That said, the aftermath of that scandal, which included mass resignations, Congressional hearings and federal prosecutions, demonstrated that if nothing else the United States government cares about bid impropriety.

Getting into the corruption business carries with it a particular danger for Americans, though. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act places uniquely stringent rules on Americans doing business overseas. In other words, Qatar does not violate its own laws by bribing or attempting to bride a FIFA official in Zurich, but an American would. This has often been a bone of contention among American businessmen who point out that “bribe” is a very culturally-specific idea for a practice of gift-based respect-showing that plays a crucial part in many African and Asian cultures. The argument goes that if buying a Rolls-Royce for a Tahitian or Cameroonian FIFA member would not violate the recipient’s own cultural sense of propriety, what harm is there in such a transaction? More aggressively put, it may be a net moral negative for Americans to be disadvantaged because federal regulations require us to more aggressively export our sense of morality beyond our shores.

Setting aside the question of its legality, morality or propriety, there is the very practical point that this is a fight we likely cannot win. After all, if Qatar is willing to spend $50 billion to host the World Cup, how much of their seemingly endless supply of petrodollars would they be willing to secure the votes of the people who decide the Cup’s host? The World Cup will be the biggest thing in the Qatar’s short history, and it could never mean that much to America. We would lose bidding wars because, though we have a lot more money, we tend not to want to waste it on vanity projects and bribes.

It would seem, then, that perhaps the only way forward is to work to clean up FIFA. The problem, though, is twofold. First, FIFA claims that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of any courts and will impose harsh sanctions on nations that attempt to subject FIFA to its laws and rules. There are some exceptions to this that FIFA has allowed, and many kinds of disputes are handled, by agreement, at the Court of Arbitration for Sports. That said, FIFA claims, as the IOC has before it, that it may not be compelled to answer subpoenas or to appear before legislative tribunals such as Congressional Hearings. As a legal matter, the veracity of this claim is somewhat murky. In the 1990s, American sprinter Butch Reynolds was involved in a lengthy court battle with officials from track and field’s international governing body and the IOC. Though the case was ultimately dismissed on a procedural technicality regarding jurisdiction, the courts seemed to suggest that, while an international body such as the IOC may remain beyond the reach of American courts, its sponsors that do business in the United States can have their funds seized or attached.

Again, the law in this area remains murky, but if the US Soccer Federation wanted to engage in a legal battle over the propriety of bid process, and it could meet certain jurisdictional thresholds, it could force FIFA to cooperate with such a suit because if it did not, FIFA could lose a default judgment and have the judgment taken directly from its sponsors, like Adidas, VISA and Budweiser that have substantial business interests in the United States.

If US Soccer did not want to become involved, there are ways for the United States government to take on FIFA corruption. Statutes like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and RICO provide federal prosecutors with broad and powerful weapons for bringing down corruption, and because the United States takes a much more aggressive stance on the limits of its jurisdiction that other countries do, FIFA’s actions involving American entities (US Soccer) could well make it subject to US law. Again, there is the question of FIFA simply refusing to cooperate or threatening to ban the United States for interfering in FIFA functions, but such an approach would prove foolhardy since, ultimately, FIFA cannot win a game of chicken against the US government because America is not as fearful of being suspended or expelled from FIFA as other nations might be and the financial repercussions, which would include lost revenues from the United States (the largest purchaser of tickets to the last World Cup) and severe penalties for FIFA sponsors who do business in the United States would utterly devastate FIFA. The doomsday scenario would be that entities such as Adidas, XEROX, VISA, Budweiser and all of the other FIFA sponsors might have to make a choice between continued association with FIFA and doing business in the United States.

The more substantial problem with attempting to clean up FIFA, though, is that it will likely backfire. An astute observer will note that the United States has not won an Olympic bid since the federal government investigated the IOC in 2002, with New York City losing out to London for 2012, and Chicago losing out to Rio de Janeiro for 2016. Many of the higher-ups in the IOC were apoplectic that they had to answer for their practices, and the suspicion is that the United States may not receive another Summer Olympics for a very long time as a way of punishing our temerity. One can imagine that if Sepp Blatter were dragged in front of Congress or, worse yet, into federal court, that the US might never host another World Cup.

Neither cheating nor reforming FIFA through investigations are viable options, but there is one more radical move that could work to make international soccer more fair and open: the United States could simply leave FIFA. On its face, this may sound outrageous, but there is some precedent for this. In the early 1990s, the fourteen biggest club teams in Europe banded together because of frustrations with how UEFA, the governing body of Europe, ran international competitions. The key breakthroughs for this group came when they began making plans to form their own midweek European league that would largely be beyond the control of UEFA, and for which UEFA would receive no revenues. Seeing this as a threat to its financial position, UEFA acceded to many of this group’s demands.

If the United States could muster enough support from among the most important soccer nations, then threatening to leave FIFA might produce productive results. Nations like England, Spain and Italy have long expressed frustrations that FIFA does not properly recognize that a very small minority of nations produce the overwhelming share of revenues. Add this to the growing concern over ethics, and it may be feasible to put together a bloc of 5-6 important nations willing to threaten leaving FIFA.

Indeed, the success of the Qatar bid presents the potential for an ominous future for FIFA’s larger members. More and more small federations are beginning to flex their muscles in international soccer. From the inclusion of more teams from marginal leagues in the Champions League, to the death of the United States – Mexico rivalry brought on by the desires of CONCACAF’s Lilliputian members to have a structure that allows them to play more games, the rise of micro-teams threatens the quality of the sport. The idea of one nation, one vote has proven to be quaint, in the worst sense of the word. That Barbados has the same number of votes as Germany, or that Qatar occupies equal (or, apparently, superior) station with the United States does not make sense, particularly given that the revenue that sustains international soccer comes from a few select large and wealthy nations to the many small poor nations.

By threatening to break FIFA’s monopoly, large nations can restore order to the system. Transparent bidding that takes into account the quality of the product and the interests of players and fans and a leadership structure more akin to the United Nations, with something like a Soccer Security Council consisting of the nations that support the game financially and organizationally, is the only system that makes real sense going forward.

This is admittedly a real long-shot, but in the aftermath of their disasters, the United States and England need to think about finding ways to take the kind of drastic steps needed to reform FIFA. Qatar’s successful bid is nothing short of an international scandal, and as the press in England has set their teeth to the issue, it seems likely that more impropriety will be uncovered. FIFA has to change, and if it will not change willingly, it must be forced to.

Juan Williams: My Thoughts on a Completely Silly Controvsery

2010-10-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Occasionally in life you find yourself siding with people with whom you would rather not be allies. In a limited sense, the recent Juan Williams mini-conflagration has put me in this position. I have thought about what Juan said, and in the end, I just cannot find anything wrong with it. I know that NPR’s stated justification for firing him was that he had stepped beyond his role as a news analyst and violated the terms of his contract that prevented him from engaging in punditry. This is a naked post facto justification, and one that really does not get at what, to me, is the only interesting question in this whole mess: was Juan Williams wrong to say what he said? I say ‘no.’

To recap, on FOX’s O’Reilyey Factor, said the following:

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

When I read this, it comes across to me as an honest statement that could serve as a productive first step in a dialogue about tolerance. In fact, by all accounts Juan Williams is someone whose actions and words demonstrate that he has a genuine respect and compassion for Muslim-Americans, and nothing either in this statement or the totality of his body of work would suggest that he would in any way abridge any right or privilege that Muslims have.

What is true is that his initial feelings on encountering a Muslim on an airplane are not perfectly in line with his actions. In other words, in his statement he says that he gets nervous… and that’s it. At some point those rational aspects of his brain kick in and he understands that his fear is largely unwarranted. This is an entirely normal process, and one, frankly, that we as a society should *want* to have happen.

I travel probably more than just about anyone I know, and I’d like to think that I do treat people with a genuine respect, and I can tell you that, particularly 8-9 years ago, I experienced something just like what Juan Williams experienced. But, upon realizing what I was thinking, I chided myself, put on my headphones, read SkyMall and went to sleep. As I thought about it later, I didn’t at all beat myself up for what I thought and felt because those feelings were uncoupled from any action that actually hurt anyone, and I had at least the bare minimum of intelligence to understand that that initial reptilian response was not the most important mental function that occurred with respect to my encounter. At some point, something a little more complicated than my limbic system kicked in and replaced fear with reason.

In a world in which we are trying to get people to be more accepting and respectful of others, it is both stupid and counterproductive to castigate people for their initial feelings. Stupid because it is largely a fixed biological response based on the enormous amount of (often incorrect) information that leads to fear, and counterproductive because it makes people feel bad about that one single part of their behavioral process that neither harms another person in itself nor necessarily has to lead to an action that does.

One of my favorite stories to tell is how, many years ago, I was kicked out of the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. The basics of the story are these: in order to enter the museum, you have to pass through one of two doors: one marked “racist,” the other marked “not racist.” Obviously, everyone will attempt to pass through the “not racist” door… but, it’s locked and you *have* to pass through the “racist” door. We’re all racist...or so they say. We’ll, sometimes I get in a mood, and on that day, I was in a mood. I told the tour guide that the doors were bullshit, that I wasn’t a racist. She replied that we all think racist thoughts and know racist stereotypes. I said, “so what? If I say the phrase ‘sex with dead people,’ and you hear it, and that phrase goes through your mind, it doesn’t make you a necrophiliac.” Thoughts uncoupled from any action are simply not relevant; as human beings, it is our ability to use logic and reason in a way that supersedes basic emotions like fear that separates us from the lower species. Lust does not make me an adulterer or rapist; rage does not make me a murderer; fear does not make me a bigot. Well, like I said, I was in a mood. The “not racist” door had, for some reason, a lock at the bottom that allowed it to be opened (fire hazard?), so I opened it and went through. The tour guide was irate, and security escorted me out and asked me not to come back. Museum of Tolerance indeed. In my snarky letter that I wrote when I got home I suggested that they change the name to “Museum of Irony.”

People are free to feel whatever they want, and we should actually encourage people to express how they overcome their fears and trepidations and find it within themselves to treat people as equals. I will tell you honestly that if there is some kind of thought purity test, I would fail it. Vile, angry, mean-spirited and ugly thoughts pop into my head more often than I would like to admit, but I rarely act on them. Had Juan Williams’ fears been paired with an action, then he would be in the wrong. But, just feeling something is never wrong. In almost all arenas of life, feelings are almost completely irrelevant; actions are the thing.

Pimpin' Ain't Easy

2010-08-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

The USA Today Coaches’ Poll was released this morning, with Alabama predicted to repeat as BCS Champions. In the NBA, Las Vegas has installed the Miami Heat as the heavy favorite. These two teams, on the surface, are very different: the Heat a composition of high-priced free agents come together to bring fun, flair and excitement to the NBA, and the Crimson Tide, a much more joyless and disciplined bunch captained by a taskmaster coach who would rather scowl than smile, glare than wink.

What unites them, though, are a series of news stories over the past month that revealed and complicated how we think about athletes in America and how to judge the complex relationship between players and the entities for which they play. Two metaphors were used, each outrageous in its own way, that demonstrate how those who control teams and athletes still see them in highly problematic ways. Alabama head coach Nick Saban, bemoaning the role of agents in players’ lives, referred to them as no better than, “pimps,” while Jesse Jackson in response to Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s impolitic letter brought up the spectre of slavery.

Taking the Saban example first, in order to fully appreciate this metaphor, we should be clear about what it is that a pimp does and is. A pimp is such an odious figure because he profits off of using the bodies of those he controls for the enjoyment of others. The abused give most of the money back to the pimp, and in the end will almost invariably end up washed up, strung out and used up, but this of no concern because there is a steady pipeline of new people to replace the old. Does this sound familiar? Indeed, from this perspective, Saban is right to point out the presence of pimpery in college football, but he should have pointed the finger at himself, not the agents.

This is an explosive charge to level, and the natural response is to point out just how shady these agents are, skulking about campuses trying to lure players to sign with them. Again, it bears mentioning just what it is that these odious agents do. The agents who find themselves in violation of NCAA rules usually get into trouble for giving players money in exchange for some additional consideration when they turn pro. To find this morally objectionable is to have thoroughly bought into the foolishness offered by the NCAA. Put another way, in what other area of life is it wrong to give someone money as part of a bid to get them to sign with you. For example, law students at elite schools often take summer jobs paying them up to $2,000 a week, mostly to do a few easy assignments, play golf and go on firm trips, all with the purpose of trying to get that student to sign with the firm upon graduation, at which point they generally get a hefty signing bonus. Yale Law School does not decry the role of legal recruiters in spoiling their students, but the NCAA would want you to believe that a player agent who gives a player money in order to convince them to sign a representation contract with them is somehow an odious and reprehensible person.

This naturally begs the question: what is the purpose of the NCAA rule prohibiting agents from contacting players or giving them money? These rules exist as a system of control designed to maintain the power of the institution over the players. Both basketball and football are littered with successful college coaches who failed at the professional level. These failures usually have much less to do with X’s and O’s, and more to do with the fact that a professional athlete generating and earning millions of dollars will not tolerate a control freak yelling into his ear, nor should they. If you look beyond even this narrow argument to the broader structure of the NCAA, you see myriad rules concerning things like transferring to other schools and prohibitions against alumni giving players money that are designed to put the player in a clearly subordinate position to the coach and the university.

This is not to bring up the debate about whether college athletes should be paid by universities. This money does not come from schools, but rather circumvents the school, which is of course precisely the danger that the schools fear. The natural retort is to point out that students are compensated well enough, given a free education, room and board. Setting aside the fact that many of these athletes are in fact on partial scholarships, there are two major points here.

First, there is the question of what is “enough.” Nick Saban is set to make $16 million over the next your years. At the University of Alabama, the cost of tuition, room and board is roughly $19,000, or $76,000 over the course of four years. To those of you without a calculator handy, Nick Saban’s compensation is 210 times larger than that of a scholarship player. I understand that coaching is a difficult job that requires very rare and specific skills –after all, Ice-T reminds us that “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy”- but to suggest that his contribution to the success of the Alabama football team is 210 times greater than, say, Heisman Trophy winning running back Mark Ingram is to strain credulity beyond belief. Second, compensation in the form of goods and services is not really a defense. The payment-in-kind argument that says because the athlete is fed, housed and taken care of he needs nothing more ignores the fact that he cannot negotiate his terms and smacks of a certain uncomfortable kind of servitude, which brings us to the related case of Lebron James…

The first thing that must be said about Jesse Jackson’s comments regarding slavery is that in many obvious and important respects, Lebron James’ situation differs acutely from that of a slave. Slavery was an all-encompassing system of abject evil and depravity that by design broke the body, mind and spirit of blacks for the purpose of white wealth. It was a comprehensive system –physical, psychological, mental, sexual. Lebron James may well die with a billion dollars in the bank, will have traveled the world, met many famous and wonderful people and had a wonderful life. Obviously, to speak loosely of Lebron and slavery in loose terms is to do grave injustice to Mr. James’ own forefathers’ suffering.

That said, beyond the court, the Lebron-Wade-Bosh combination speaks volumes about how the modern athlete is less willing to allow circumstances to dictate their career. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the creation of this NBA Superteam was largely the brainchild of the players and their agents. In a very real way this represents a victory of labor over ownership. That Dan Gilbert was irate was no doubt partly fueled by the fact that his franchise lost tens of millions of dollars in value the moment that Lebron spoke his infamous words to Jim Gray, but it also stems partly from a sense of ownership that Gilbert felt he had in Lebron himself.

What complicates Jesse Jackson’s slavery comments is the larger truth that the tumultuous relationship between owners and players is not really a racial one, and in fact extends back to a point where blacks were not even allowed to play in the major white leagues. In 1911, the great pitcher Walter Johnson wrote an article entitled, “Baseaball Slavery: The Great American Principle of Dog Eat Dog,” in which he decried the lack of player power within the major leagues. He characterized baseball as an example of, “the employer tr[ying] to starve out the laborer.” Unable to ever become a free agent, he joined many others in the short-lived Federal League that gave players greater power and higher pay. Going back into the 19th Century, the earliest teams were run and owned by the players themselves. In other words, one can view Lebron’s Decision as the culmination of a long process within sports in which players have slowly fought for the lion’s share of the money that their skill, intelligence and muscle produce. It was, in this sense, particularly poignant when Curt Flood’s widow noted that her husband would have been proud.

Just as Lebron’s wealth complicates any metaphorical relationship to slavery, so too does it make it hard for the average working man to see Lebron as a working man whose crafting of his own career’s destiny is a victory for labor over ownership. Nonetheless, in the end that is what it is.

With the NFL and NBA collective bargaining agreements set to be negotiated over the course of the next year, we will likely see this century-old fight between athletes and owners press forward. At the college level, athletes are also influenced by this new ethos of dog-eat-dog capitalism, and will want their fair share of the monies that their efforts have generated. Just as I do not fault Lebron for making his career his own, I will never impugn the Reggie Bushes of the world for breaking a rule that should never have existed. Reggie’s only sin was getting caught, and when measured against the larger exploitation that occurs on college football fields, I simply have no patience for the sanctimony of the Nick Saban’s of the world who would line their own pockets with lucre earned by the sweat and blood of another’s brow, only to prevent that person from seeking a coin of their own. Lebron James and Nick Saban are both two insufferable egos, but I prefer the preening self-congratulation of Lebron James over the sneering condescension of Saban because at least Lebron’s solipsism does not come coupled with hypocrisy.

Unhappy About Dutch Tactics? Get Over It.

2010-07-12T04:36:00.000-07:00

As soccer pundits put together their post-mortems on this World Cup, media around the world are piling on the Dutch for their tactics in the Final. From every sports page across the world have come lamentations and protestations that Holland did not play the game the right way; they did not play (ugh… I hate this phrase) the beautiful game. To these people and their histrionic protestations, I offer this advice: get over yourselves.

It has become accepted gospel in soccer circles that two of the great teams in soccer history did not win the World Cup: the Netherlands in 1974 and Brazil in 1982. I remember sitting at a bar in Salvador listening to a Brazilian go on and on about Socrates and the rest of Brazil national team, and how it was a great injustice that the better team did not win against Italy. My only reply, which produced some incredulity in my drinking companion, was, “Better team? Apparently not.”

I like pretty passing and flair as much as the next guy, but if Brazil didn’t have the guile or onions to unlock or break the Italian defense, then how good could they really be? And, while ‘Total Football’ (as annoying and overused a phrase as ‘the beautiful game’) might have been an important leap forward in the evolution of soccer, how good were the Dutch really if they lacked the discipline and killer instinct to finish off West Germany instead of trying to put on a clinic. Those were flawed teams, and we know this because they lost.

With proper respect to Herm Edwards, you play to win the game. Not to be pretty, not to “play the right way,” and not to impress the fans in the stadium and a worldwide audience- no, the object is to kick a ball into a net more times than your opponent. As overwrought sportswriters have become enamored with particular styles and displays of flair, they have forgotten the central truth that these things are incidental –and not central- to the game of soccer. To say that the 1982 Brazil or 1974 Holland teams were among the great teams of all time is only slightly less ridiculous than saying that the 1979 Harlem Globetrotters were among the great basketball teams off all time because Meadowlark Lemon could hit half court hook shots or bounce in free throws between his legs.

Getting back to Holland, they saw that Switzerland had beaten Spain by playing rough. The Spanish midfield is immensely talented and quick of foot and mind, but they are also diminutive to the point of effeminacy and do not hold up well to tough physical challenges, often becoming too in love with play-acting and diving. The Switzerland-Spain game was not pretty, but it provided a useful template. It would not make for pretty soccer, and the 700 million people watching around the world would likely not like what they saw, but the obligation of the Dutch team was not to ESPN or the fans around the world; their principle obligation was to each other to find a way to win. So long as the Dutch did not seek to hurt anyone (which obviously excludes Nigel De Jong’s Bruce Lee moment in which he chopped down Xabi Alonso with a kick to the chest), the accumulation of yellow cards by Holland does not bother me. Spain plays a quick-passing game based on timing and flow. Put their little midfielders on the ground a few times, and this gets broken up.

No sport is as obsessed with its style of play as is soccer. In football, we appreciate nasty defensive teams, and even respect the aesthetic of a low-scoring defensive struggle. Though the NBA changed its rules to prevent it, most hoops fans will give at least begrudging respect to the Bad Boy Pistons and Riley Knicks for playing dirt- er, I mean, giving a hard blue collar effort. Sure, most fans would prefer Lakers Showtime, but the problem is that there was only one Magic Johnson, and it would have been unfair to force to every team to play a style in which they could not win simply because the television audience preferred it. Similarly, Holland did not have an Iniesta or Xavi, but it does hav van Bommel and de Jong, so it would have been folly for the Dutch to engage in a flowing and pretty game with the Spanish when they had the thugs to play differently.

Of course, the reason that soccer fans are so particular about style is that, with so few goals scored in a game, if you are going to appreciate the sport you have to love the thousand moments that do not necessarily lead to a goal but that slowly tilt the tactical advantages one way or another. A basketball game will give you 100 or so made shots, a football game will usually provide you with 6-8 touchdowns, etc. But a soccer match might require you to commit two hours to see one or no goals. If the long goalless stretches are not compelling, soccer can be a truly awful game to watch. Nonetheless, the obligation to produce these kinds of games is with FIFA, not on the individual teams. No manager should ever eschew a tactic (again, provided that it places no player in too great a danger of injury) that will maximize his chances of winning. If FIFA decides that particular tactics hurt the marketability of its game, then outlaw them. Otherwise, if a team chooses to use them, deal with it.

Two Concluding Notes:

In the run-in to the World Cup, South Africa took more than its share of criticism. To be fair, I will admit that I myself had doubts that they could pull it off. People questioned the ability of an African nation to handle the immense logistical challenges, as though the tournament were being held in the DRC. There was sometimes a whiff of racism to the worries, and almost always a haughty Western condescending tone.

Well, egg on my face; this has been a spectacular World Cup. The organization passed the tests, and more importantly the citizens of South Africa were committed to making the Cup an overwhelming success. No violence, no huge organizational snafus, and stadiums that were mostly filled. (no World Cup is all sold out) Only a genuinely grumpy bear would find fault with this tournament. Maybe the vuvuzelas were a little annoying, but to be honest by the end of the tournament I had come to almost… like them.

Really, most of the things that people complained about were not South Africa’s fault. Speaking of which, here are my suggestions for improving the 2014 World Cup:

1. After the group stages, the eight group winners and 8 runners-up should be re-seeded from 1-8 and 9-16, respectively. One problem that plagues the final games of the group stage is that often teams have no reason to look for a win. I remember sitting in Durban’s glorious stadium watching a genuinely awful match between Portugal and Brazil. This should have been a marquee match-up, but these two teams were content with a draw that would send them through to the next round. It ended in a terrible 0-0 draw. If Brazil or Portugal had an incentive to win so as to avoid playing a tougher playoff opponent, they might actually have pressed for a goal. To many of the last group stage matches involve eliminated or all-but-eliminated teams or teams that have already secured their place against a team actually playing for something. This would help to alleviate that. It would also help to provide more balance to the knockout stages. Really only Holland and Brazil were on one half, while the other half had Germany, England, Spain, Portugal and Argentina. There is no reason that Holland-Brazil, for example, should be a quarterfinal match, except that that was what the ping-pong ball said might happen.

Had FIFA used this method and used its standard tie-breaking methods the tournament would have looked like this:

Winners
1. Argentina
2. Holland
3. Uruguay
4. Brazil
5. Germany
6. Spain
7. Paraguay
8. USA

Second
9. Japan
10. Chile
11. Portugal
12. England
13. Mexico
14. Ghana 4
15. Korea
16. Slovakia

The playoff match-ups:

1 Argentina
16 Slovakia

8 USA
9 Japan

4 Brazil
13 Mexico

5 Germany
12 England

2 Holland
15 Korea

7 Paraguay
10 Chile

3 Uruguay
14 Ghana

6 Spain
11 Portugal

2. Fix the officiating. Use an electronic ball that automatically records a goal or use instant replay of goals. This is common sense and doesn’t require much more comment. FIFA also needs to use stricter standards for picking its officials. No offense to the Malian professional soccer scene, but the US was robbed of two points against Slovenia because it had a ref who had no experience with matches at this level. This just isn’t acceptable. Players wait their entire lives for a chance to play in the Cup, and they should have the benefit of excellent refereeing irrespective of confederation politics.

3. Fix the ball. I actually doubt that Jabulani was that bad or different. Most soccer players miss most of the shots that they take on goal, and having a ball to blame is all too convenient. That said, FIFA should have its ball ready and available for the entire World Cup qualifying campaign. Give teams two years of playing with it in a variety of conditions. If everyone has used the ball, it doesn’t matter what new technological innovations Adidas adds –target seeking radar, wings, thrusters- if everyone knows and has played with the ball, it’s fair.

Also, a small thing: let people in the stands keep the ball. Whenever a ball went into the stands, the people are expected to throw it back. People who tried to keep the ball got a quick visit from armed security guards. This seems heavy handed. You paid for a ticket, and FIFA is practically printing cash on the World Cup. They can afford 5-6 extra balls per match.

4. Fix the Ticketing. I’ve written about this before, but FIFA’s ticketing system is idiotic, counterintuitive, frequently crashes and is in need of an overhaul. FIFA as an organization is massively corrupt and nepotistic. To wit: the monstrosity that is FIFA’s ticketing portal is run by Sepp Blatter’s son, and not well. Open it up to bids. If Ticketmaster can sell 500,000 *N’Sync tickets in 15 minutes, you can find someone to manage this.

5. Bring Greater Transparency to the Qualifying and Seeding. In the same way that it makes no sense to unveil the ball just months before the Cup, it also makes no sense to keep many aspects of qualifying and the Cup itself secret or unknown. Before the tournament starts, make clear the formula for who gets seeds and how teams will be allocated to groups. There were rightly cries from small nations in Europe in the final stage of qualifying when the newly unveiled rules helped to give the big powers more favorable routes to South Africa. Similarly, it seems unseemly for nations not to know precisely how to go about earning a seed until just a few weeks before the World Cup draw, particularly since the rules almost always favor established soccer powers. Can you imagine David Stern not unveiling the structure of the NBA playoffs until 75 games into the season? That would be ludicrous. An important aspect of any competition is for all participants to know the rules before the thing begins. This is just basic stuff.

Got Balls?: The Art of the Penalty Kick

2010-07-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

As the World Cup Final looms, no clear consensus has yet arisen as to who people think will win it all. What people seem to agree on, though, is that they hope the match will be decided before it comes to penalty kick shoot-outs. Soccer purists hate penalty kick shoot-outs. They seem like an unfair way to settle a match after two hours of often intense play, and the final victor seems a bit arbitrary in the end. Or, so the argument goes. Myself, I have never disliked the penalty kick. Perhaps as an American raised on the idea of free throws deciding basketball games and field goals deciding football games, this just seems normal and reasonable.

In this tournament, we have already seen two matches decided by penalties: Uruguay-Ghana and Japan-Paraguary. In the letter match, I remember watching as Yuichi Komano prepared to take the third penalty kick in Japan’s match against Paraguay. He looked every bit the calm and confident striker, and the kick he took reflected it. He elected to put the ball in the top corner where the goalkeeper couldn’t get it. He wasn’t trying to get the keeper to dive the wrong way, or guess which way the keeper would dive and put it in the other direction. No, he would fail or succeed based on his own ability to strike the ball with purpose and accuracy. In the end, he missed, putting the shot just off the crossbar, but I respected his moxie and, for lack of a better terms, the ballsiness of his shot.

You can tell a lot about how someone takes a penalty kick. Who can forget the nonchalant chip that Zidane used to beat Bufon in the 2006 World Cup Final. It was an act of supreme haughty arrogance that presaged his oddly calm meltdown later that match. Or, what fan is not frustrated by the run-stop-run-stop-run technique that Cristiano Ronaldo uses to try to get the keeper to move in one direction so that he can put it in the other. This annoyingly cheeky approach perfectly fits with a player whose sublime otherworldly skills are too often overshadowed by his silly antics.

Of course, by now everyone knows that the Ghana-Uruguay match was decided by PK’s. Asamoah Gyan, fresh off of knocking the United States out of the tournament, allowed the moment to get the best of him, rushing his kick and sending it high. To the extent that we value nerve and poise as important ingredients in athletic contests, we could in the end but conclude that Uruguay were the deserved winners, if for no other reason than that they could master themselves and find a place of calm as they took the most important of the likely millions of kicks that they have had in their lives. Watching as the last two Ghanaians offered up lame and almost perfunctory efforts, I felt justified in thinking that the stage was simply too big for them.

Penalty kicks take your measure. What will you do? An effective kick to either of the top corners will beat any goalkeeper, even if they guess right. But, then you risk being the goat who couldn’t put the ball on frame (apologies, Roberto Baggio). You could take a safer shot, and hope that the goalie doesn’t guess right. Safer, perhaps, but then you are leaving the matter to someone else. Is there a more difficult decision to make in sports? The fate of a nation’s hopes and dreams will settle on your level of confidence in your ability to place a ball or fool a goalie. Given my personality, I always prefer players who decide to make the goalie irrelevant, pick a corner and go for it. Be the author of your own destiny. Easy for me to say, though, from the comfort of my desk with no cameras or a stadium full of people who will love you or hate you depending on your next move.

Two of the last four World Cup Finals have been decided by penalty kicks. In 1994, Roberto Baggio’s infamous miss gave Brazil its fourth star. In 2002, had French coach Raymond Domenech not subbed out Thierry Henry for David Trezuguet, France may well be defending champions (Henry missing a PK seems a near metaphysical impossibility). Small moments that changed soccer history. Given Spain’s inability to score goals and Holland’s propensity to make things rather more dramatic than necessary, this final could well come down to the dreaded spot kicks. If it happens, I’ll sit back and enjoy the spectacle, anxious to find out what kind of man David Villa, Carles Puyol, Wesley Sniejder or Mark van Bommel are. To me, this is the essence of sports: put the man to the test and discover his mettle.

Once More, This Time to the Beach

2010-07-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Were you there? Did you sit, pensively but noisily in Lofuts Versfeld Stadium, biting nails while America seemingly wasted its chance at World Cup glory? Were you there? Did you explode with cheers of beer-soaked joy as Landon did perform his magic? Were you there? Did you march into Melrose Arch with Solo cups and ping-pong balls and march out with an comically large bill and local celebrity status? Were you there? We were there. We were there for the matches, the beer pong, the late nights, the braais, the van rides, the shabeens and the too-close encounters with animals that would eat us. We were there.

Life is operatic in its rhythms; you sit and suffer through long stretches of mundane sing-song, awaiting and preparing for the transcendent musical moments that make your patience worthwhile. In those arias, those wonderful moments you cheer for and revel in, you experience a kind of profound joy at having been touched by something almost celestial. This morning, as the last of the World Cup crew headed out the door and back to America, the curtain fell on this performance. As I sat in bed, taking in the silence, I knew that just as all things in life must pass, so too did one amazing month. To say that it was epic would be to do disservice. Homer wrote epics, and this was not that. The Iliad had much less alcohol; The Odyssey much less foolish revelry.

I increasingly get the sense that my life going forward will forever be chopped up into four-year increments, filled with years in which I somehow manage to occupy my time while waiting for the next World Cup. Work, money, love, death, children, job, politics and the myriad quotidian bits of minutiae that fill a life get washed out in the bright light of glorious moments spent with friends. Those things are but interferences and distractions from who we really are and what we were really meant to do and be.

But, with three years and eleven months until the next go-round, I realize that it’s now time to get back to all of the boring things that fill most of a life, but also make the amazing moments possible. I mostly take from this a feeling of deep gratitude that I was one of the few who got to live this wonderful month. If more people could find the courage to break from their lives and live thusly, they would be happier, though perhaps it would dilute the special uniqueness of my own experience. The fewer the men, the greater the share of glory, no? So as I conclude, I offer this bastardized tidbit from The Bard:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Vashi and Karl, Bryan and Aaron,
Loosh, Lloyd, Matt, Curtin, Mike and Christian,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And no World Cup shall e'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that pours beer with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in America now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That drank with us in South Africa!

For the Love of God, Do NOT Root for Brazil.

2010-06-29T03:43:00.000-07:00

When the clock read 120 minutes at Rustenburg, American fans were naturally crestfallen. Americans drawn to soccer for the first time by the spectacle of the World Cup will, I imagine, mostly stop paying attention now that they do not have a national rooting interest. Others, though, will look for new teams to support. Understanding this, I feel compelled to perform a public service: do NOT root for Brazil.

Shocking, I know. Nike commercials in airports and endless streams of idiotic drivel about joga bonito have convinced simple-minded fans that Brazil is a fun, free-rolling and entertaining team that plays soccer the right way. Their fans dance, play drums and bring loads of pretty women in skimpy clothes. What’s not to love? Well, as a dedicated hater of Brazilian soccer, I will offer the soccer newbie five reasons not to root for Brazil. And, since you may be new to this whole soccer thing, I’ll do it in a way that you’ll understand.

1. If you hate the Yankees, you should hate Brazil.

Like the Yankees, Brazil is the unquestioned master of their sport. Indeed, their success has been remarkably similar- in 109 years of professional baseball, the Yankees have won 27 titles (a 24.7% championship rate); Brazil has gone to 19 World Cups, winning five of them (a 26.3% championship rate). More than that, both teams act with an air of preening smuggery that is completely unappetizing to all of their fans. Like the Yankees, Brazil seems to get all the calls and all the luck, and will rarely pass on an opportunity to tell you how amazing they are.

2. If you hate the Red Sox, you should hate Brazil.

Having lived in New England for 6 years now, I have grown weary of the angst-ridden articles and news reports about the Red Sox. Boston fans drone on and one about every bit of minutiae involving their team, and lose all perspective about what their team is and means. Similarly, Brazil fans, newspapers and television programs devote endless solipsistic adoration on the every movement and development of their team. Though Brazil has won 5 World Cups, if you spend much time with any Brazilian fan, you’ll begin to forget that they also came up short in 14 others.

3. If you hate Manu Ginobili, you should hate Brazil.

Yes, I know Manu is Argentine, but in his approach to his sport, he is utterly Brazilian. Every NBA fan not in San Antonio hates Ginobili because he refuses to play an honest brand of basketball. Similarly, though there is no doubt that Brazil is massively talented, they are also infuriating in the degree to which they flop about and go to ground at the slightest provocation. The hulking Brazilian centerback Lucio, who is almost always the biggest and roughest player on the field, has no compunction about cynically throwing elbows or kicking ankles, but the moment a 150 pound midfielder breathes on him, he falls to the ground as though struck by a sniper. He will invariably roll around on the ground for several minutes, making a naïve viewer certain that he had suffered a compound femoral fracture or dislocated knee… But no! Miracle of miracles, the awarding of a free kick has healed him.

More shamefully, against Turkey in the 2002 World Cup Brazil was on the business end of a whooping until Rivaldo drew a mendacious red card by fooling the referee into thinking he had been hit in the face when in fact nobody came anywhere near his ugly mug. American fans might remember that in 1994 Brazil was in a tight 0-0 match against the US. Frustrated at the temerity of the American team to actually try to beat them, Leonardo, the Brazilian left back, unleashed an ugly elbow that broke his skull.

The real Brazil is not Ronaldinho doing tricks or Roberto Carlos dancing with a ball through an airport. No, this team cheats, flops and pulls every dirty trick in the book in order to win.

4. If you hate Tim Tebow, you should hate Brazil.

No sporting figure in America has caused as much division of opinion as Florida’s Hesiman-winning quarterback. People who hate him will often groan at his over-the-top religiosity and the degree to which he was over-hyped. Well, if you are looking for an over-hyped religious zealot, you need look no further than Brazil’s midfielder Kaka.

At one point, Kaka was being touted as the best player in the world. At this World Cup, I have had the pleasure of seeing Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Kaka play. Kaka is not even close to being in their class. In fact, he is probably only the 5th or 6th best player on his own team. Ronaldo scares his opponents any time he is on the field; Messi dazzles with the ball at his feet. Kaka… well, he is sometimes pretty okay.

In Brazil, though, Kaka is loved more than any active player. Part of it is because he is pretty, and part of it is because he passes on no opportunity to tell you about Jesus. In fact, under his jersey he wears a shirt that says, “I Belong to Jesus.” That may or may not be true, but what is true is that Kaka does not belong in any discussion of the world’s truly elite players.

5. If you hate Duke, you should hate Brazil.

In my youth, I hated Duke. They made me so angry that when they won, I would sit fuming for hours. No basketball team infuriates more people than Duke, and let’s face it a big part of this has to do with class and race. Duke’s students are (perceived to be?) very rich, very white, very privileged and very smug. I remember that, while working at Duke, the school’s employees were almost all UNC or NC State fans. When I would ask them about it, they would reply almost in an air of bemusement, ask me why in the world any working class black person would root for Duke.

For the Brazil-Portugal match, I sat in the Brazil rooting section. Surrounded by yellow jerseys and green wigs, I noticed something. My brothers and I were the only black people in that section of the stands. For the next few minutes, we played a game of “Where’s Negro?” trying to spot the black people. Not one. In a nation that is, depending on the survey and methodology, between 45% and 75% black, this is shocking. I had sort of expected to see lots of hues of browns and blacks, but the Brazilian crowd was so white that it made a night at the Yale Club seem like a Nation of Islam rally.

In an American context, there is always a bit of an uncomfortable aspect of the fact that so many sporting events involve mostly white people watching mostly black people. In the Brazilian context, this is even more troubling because the mostly white Brazilian upper class has constructed a powerfully efficient hegemonic race system that marginalized blacks, but celebrates their bodies as laborers, sexual beings and athletes. Sitting in an all-white crowd of people from a mostly-brown nation felt very uncomfortable.

At any rate, if Cameron Crazies infuriate you because they are a bunch of privileged, suburban white kids who drive BMW’s and wear Izod, then the rich Brazilians who travel to the World Cup will provide ample fuel for your angry fires.

In many ways, I know that I am fighting a losing battle. Simple-minded fans will always just choose a winner, and because Brazil has become suddenly hip, they will choose the yellow jerseys of the Brazilians. I urge you, though, do not do this. In this World Cup, Germany, Holland and Argentina have all played attractive and attacking soccer. Choose them. Ghana is the last African nation standing. Choose them. Spain plays with class and flair. Choose them. Portugal has the world’s best player. Choose them. But please, just do NOT root for Brazil.

The Travails of Being an American Soccer Fan

2010-06-27T03:17:00.000-07:00

It is hard to piece together a consistent and coherent assessment of the average fan experience for this World Cup. On the one hand, even everyday folks that you meet will go to extraordinary efforts to help you out, but on the other hand they usually do so because some gaping hole in event planning has left said fan in a difficult position. In this sense, today’s USA-Ghana match exemplified many of the highs and lows of South Africa’s 2010 World Cup.

With kick-off at 8:30pm in rural Rustenburg, I first had to go to the FIFA Ticketing Office in downtown Johannesburg. There is nothing intuitive or intelligent about how FIFA sells, allocates or distributes its tickets. Setting aside the problems associated with selling tickets almost exclusively online on a continent where fewer than 10% of people have access to a reliable internet connection, to say nothing of a VISA card, the site too often crashes and falls victim to myriad maddening errors that will often cause you to lose your order. Even when you do successfully order your tickets, you have to physically pick them up at a downtown office in a process that requires standing in three different lines and sometimes waiting several hours.

Outside of the FIFA Ticketing Office has become something of a World Cup ticket bazaar, with maybe 500 or so people lingering about at any given moment trying to exchange, buy or sell tickets on a largely officially ignored black market. Unlike the official route, I found the black market much easier to use. I had tickets to a Brazil match that I did not want to see (I’ve had quite enough of their insufferable preening, diving, and cynical play), and walked around until I saw a man with a sign that said he had Mexico-Argentina tickets. We talked for 30 seconds, looked at each other’s respective tickets, swapped, and went on our way. The entire process took 5 minutes, and though unstructured, was smooth, fair, transparent and simple. FIFA could learn a lesson here.

Navigating South Africa can be an often frustrating experience. Many of the amenities of life are genuinely first rate, but just as soon as you find yourself marveling at something wonderfully done, you will rapidly encounter an example of stupefying incompetence. I had just returned from Durban where I witnessed the tepid and shameful display that Portugal and Brazil put on in that city’s wonderful new stadium. Moses Mabhida Stadium is a genuinely gorgeous edifice, even more so in person than on television. That match ran smoothly, and small things like the placement and number of food vendors and bathrooms had clearly been thought out. And, though the stadium is in the middle of bustling city, intelligent planning had made it so that there was really very little congestion even right after the game ended.

For everything wonderful that can be said about Durban and its stadium, so too could I offer a litany of failures of Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, an architectural disaster whose aesthetic and practical shortcomings are so comprehensive that one is shocked that they actually managed to remember to put grass on the field and seats in the stands. The stadium is situated about three hours north of Johannesburg, a description that might lead you to believe that there is something like an actual human settlement in Rustenburg; there is not. In fact, what you have is a vast wind-swept tract of land, dotted by the occasional hut, barn or ramshackle house. A single road leads to Rustenburg, and with one lane of traffic in either direction, the drive can often slow to a standstill because African roads are filled with large trucks that cannot get above 20-30 miles per hour. Given the openness of the land surrounding the stadium, ingress and egress to the stadium should have been a simple matter, but in fact once you are in Rustenburg you have to park in one lot, then get transported by bus to the stadium, which is some 5-6 miles away. Understandably, this process can take upwards of two hours to get from parking lot to your seat. After the game, when 40,000 people all lined up to get on the buses, it created a bottleneck that still had not begun transporting many fans to the parking lot three hours after the match had ended. Having lived in a college town in which 100,000+ people would arrive and leave smoothly for football Saturdays, it was shocking to see that this venue would fail so comprehensively to manage the fairly simple affair of getting people into and out of a stadium literally surrounded by miles of empty grassland.

Maybe being in South Africa for so long caused the American team to pick up on some of the schizophrenic characteristics of the nation. Sitting in the stadium and watching the US give up to maddeningly soft goals to a scrappy, but clearly third-rate, team was frustrating enough, but having to do so while trying to drown out the constant din of the vuvuzela, which is much louder and more annoying in person than on television, was too much to bear. By the final whistle, I was incandescent with the rage of a disappointed fan.

On such bad days, I try to pull some lesson or positive from the experience, and as my car slowly rumbled along the backroads of Gauteng Province, I did make one concession. Cecil Rhodes, the mineral magnate who helped to construct the modern South African state, famously said that, “to be born English is to win the lottery of life.” What was true of England in the 19th century is doubly so of America today. The level of American dominance across the range of human endeavors, combined with our naturally insular nature –particularly in sports- means that we rarely know what it is to lose in an undertaking that we care about. So, as I walked silently from the stadium to our car, suffering the insults and taunts Ghana’s fans –all told, not a classy bunch at all- the inner imperialist wanted to retaliate with insults of my own. But, I held back and smiled, knowing that the imposition of humility is perhaps a good thing. Through such encounters, we remember a broader world filled with people with the talents that are often better than ours.

That humility, though, was short-lived. Ever optimistic and forward-looking, Americans never see losses as losses, but rather as detours on the path to ultimate success. In the parking lot, conversations turned to thoughts about what the team would look like in four years. In 2014, our strikers will know how to score, we’ll sort out the left back position, we’ll have a genuine stud at defensive midfielder. A fan in a USA astronaut costume erased the dry erase board hanging from his neck that said, “Mission: World Champions 2010,” and replaced it with, “Mission: World Champions 2014.” On an otherwise dour, dire and despicable day, his unwavering optimism made me smile and think, “damn, I love America.”

USA Superfans

2010-06-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

Walking away from the impossibly rustic and comically rural Royal Bafokeng Stadium, I took in the scene and felt a sense of redemption after years of something like shame. No, I refer not to the gutsy 1-1 draw that the US took from Rustenburg; rather, I have in mind the apparent death of the American Soccer Superfan.

Let me explain. Four years ago, after a long day of watching soccer in a Dusseldorf fan zone, three of my friends and I retreated to a local bar. As with this year, the World Cup had coincided with the NBA Finals, and wanting to catch the action, we asked the bartender to change one of the televisions over to the game. With a wide grin, the bartender said, “yes, I will do this. Nowitski… the best player in the NBA!” Choosing to ignore the laughable factual error, we were all pleased that a day of drinking, making friends with locals and soccer would be capped by a 1:30am game of championship basketball.

But, it was not to be so easy. From the corner came a voice that angrily bellowed, “basketball is rubbish, mate!” Turning to see the commotion, I saw a group of American soccer fans in full regalia, complete with an incongruous collection of scarves from various Premier League teams that they apparently supported. They told me that during the World Cup nobody wanted to see basketball. Groaning, I knew that I had once again encountered one of the most vexing figures in American sports: the American Soccer Superfan. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not some Jim Rome rant taking pot-shots at soccer; I love soccer. I grew up playing the game on the dusty streets of Cameroon and followed it through the pre-Internet Dark Ages when doing so meant paying $250 a year to get months-late copies of FourFourTwo, signing up for every American soccer newsletter I could get my hands on or staying up until 3am to watch highlights on Mexican TV.

But, in my journey through the American soccer universe, I kept meeting different version of that guy. He wears Lotto shoes and too-short shorts. Forgetting which side of the Atlantic he grew up on he speaks nonsense like, “rubbish, mate.” He will show up to an LA Galaxy – DC United match with a Glasgow Rangers jersey and, somehow, think that that makes sense. And, most annoyingly, he adopts the British tic of being unable to distinguish single entities from plural ones. England *are* a good team? There’s more than one England? God save us all… In much the same way that an Ultimate Frisbee player takes pride and happiness from the fact that he spends his afternoons playing a sport that nobody cares about (or has any earthly business caring about), the American Soccer Superfan seems to draw an inordinate oddball pleasure occupying an ignored space in the American sporting landscape. There was a certain earnestness combined with foolishness that always made me bristle. As a result, I am fairly certain that in my life I never talked about “training,” the “pitch,” or said the word “nil.” Preferring my Webster’s to my Oxford, I assiduously spoke of “practice,” the “field,” and somehow managed to find the strength to summon up the extra syllable required to say “zero.” Through high school, college and throughout my adult life, this guy has haunted me, and I often found myself in the difficult position of loving soccer, but being embarrassed by the all-too-serious yet all-too-comical ragtag group of folks with whom I would be grouped.

When the draw for the World Cup was conducted last winter, I knew that the USA-England match had a particular potential to produce embarrassing moments. For too long, American Soccer Superfans had modeled themselves after British fans, adopting their lingo, singing knock-off version of English songs, and otherwise trying to mimic what they saw from British fans. So, when I stepped off the bus in Rustenburg and saw a group of English fans taunting a group of American fans with a “who are ya?” chant followed by a song that involved impolite comments about Bob Bradley and Landon Donovan’s relationship, I worried that I was about to have one of those moments. No doubt, some sad collection of American fans would reply with a lame version of a song we had stolen from them, at which point more of the ubiquitous English fans would join the inevitable retort, and us few proud American fans would have to retreat in shame.

Instead, I experienced a moment of near perfection. At the conclusion of their song, the English fans stood with their arms crossed awaiting the American response. Instead of allowing the situation to devolve into a pathetic Sharks-versus-Jets sing-off, though, an American fan simply shouted, “hey Churchill, if I wanted to hear a song, I’d go to Broadway.” Laughter erupted from the American fans. In justified dismissive bemusement, they turned their backs on their English antagonists and returned to the more immediate issue of barbecue. Befuddled, but not beaten, the England Boys Choir offered one more volley: a typically atonal “at least we won the World Cup.” Now agitated that their sausages and burgers had been interrupted by an infliction of some kind of Simon Cowell version of World Cup fandom, a single American fan turned around and shouted, “GDP, GDP, GDP!” More laughter from American fans. Unable to draw their American fans into one of their idiotic glee club competition sing-off, the English scattered and America claimed the day.

Throughout the day, I saw and heard signs that the American soccer fan had entered the mainstream. They wore regular shoes, understood and used American verb conjugation, talked about the full range of American sports and looked and acted just like the fans you might see at a Steelers, Mariners or Knicks game. Americans of every age, race and background were represented, and they were all utterly normal, completely American. No superfluous “u’s” or inbred heads of state here. It was a revelation. What I saw was a soccer fan base that had begun to accept the game on its own terms, as Americans. They no longer wanted to be England-Lite, and it no longer made sense to think that in order to enjoy soccer you had to take on the trimmings of our British brothers. Instead, in recognition of the fact that we have a sports and fan culture as wonderful, robust, dynamic, fun and dedicated as any on the planet, that night we cheered like Americans, acted like Americans and strutted around the expanses of cow pastures that surrounded the stadium with perfect American pride. Meat pies, the queen and football were replaced by mom, apple pie and… soccer.

For me, June 12th will forever be linked to something more than a result earned on a soccer field; I will remember it as the night when the American soccer fan evolved into something more and better, stripped of the pretense of Anglophilia and more in line with who we are as a people and how we watch and celebrate sports. While I will gladly pay homage to the efforts of the American Soccer Superfan who carried the sport when nobody else cared, the species has now evolved, and something better has displaced him. Respect him in his obsolescence, but do not mourn him and do not linger over his corpse. We are not yet the greatest soccer nation, and probably not even yet a good one. But, by infusing our sense of ourselves into how we play and watch soccer, we’re on the right track.

Act Like You've Been There Before

2010-05-31T07:21:00.000-07:00

Three blocks from my father’s house in the Mbankolo quartier in Yaounde there is a large clearing. Surrounded by all sides by a steep embankment and offering a scenic view of the Palais de Congress, local boys and men gather here to play soccer on the dusty clay field. The play is fast, the tackles are hard, the goals are rare and hard-won. In the dry season when the sun beats down for months on end without rain or relent, the temperatures will routinely exceed 105 degrees. As a result, at the end of a match, the participants will be caked in sweat and the ubiquitous red Cameroonian dust. If you watch for a while, and see someone score a goal, you will see the finisher and his teammates run, dance, jump and act with restrained joy.

Lest you think that this is something just reserved for the Land of Roger Milla, I can tell you that I’ve been around the world, and seen roughly the same things everywhere I’ve ever been. I saw a kid do a backflip on the beaches of Salvador, Brasil after scoring a goal. I’ve seen a group of boys break out in dancing after doing whatever it is that elicits joy in this odd game while playing cricket on a Cape Town parkground. And, in a million gyms in a million American cities, people celebrate, whoop, holler, dance, flip, jump, point, talk smack and act with any sense of decorum. Good, I say, sports is meant to be joyful and emotional. Dance when you win, celebrate when you score, and make merry at every excuse. Life is too short, and often too dour, to live with a determination to keep a pole permanently entrenched in your ass.

But, not everyone holds this view. This year the NCAA has passed a new tougher sanction against almost any act of celebration. Now, if you celebrate after scoring a touchdown, the penalty is no longer 15 yards on the kickoff; the new sanction is that the ball is placed on the 15 yards upfield from the incident of the celebration and the touchdown is taken away.

Imagine it: 4th and goal from the 14 yard line, 8 seconds left in the Dr. Pepper National Championship Game, (brought to you by Pacific Life, played as part of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl for the Sears Trophy, to be presented in the ESPN Postgame Show, brought to you by Gillette—because, after all, given the corrupting influence of money, the game must remain amateur) and the quarterback for State U rolls out, avoids a sack, cuts inside and right before being leveled by a vicious hit from the Big State middle linebacker, lofts a perfect pass to the wideout, who brings it down with tippy-toes against the sideline. Touchdown! State U wins! State U wins! Wideout, overcome by joy, runs to the endzone, joyously high-fiving everyone; the quarterbacks picks himself off the ground, takes his helmet off and runs toward his wide receiver, hugging him. Four years of work, for this moment. But wait, a flag! Personal foul, excessive celebration, and since there is no time on the clock, Big State wins!

Don’t think that this could happen? Well, remember back to the amazing Santonio Holmes catch in the Super Bowl followed by his Lebron celebration? Under NCAA rules, the Steelers would be minus one trophy right now. (Would the Cardinals have felt like they actually won something? It reminds me a bit of Montell Griffin receiving Roy Jones’ championship belts while sitting, still mostly knocked out, after the referee DQ’s Jones because the last punch that Jones landed was while Griffin was knocked out, on one knee.)

Why precisely people get wound up about celebrations is beyond me. As someone who enjoys to play sports, and who played organized sports before, having someone on the other team never made me mad; losing to them always did. Much of how the civilized (white) world sees this is through the prism of 19th century British aristocratic sporting notions. Celebrating, indeed joy itself, was seen as lowly and undignified. Winners and loser simply shook hands and went off to the club to drink tea and plot the rape and murder of millions of brown and black people.

It always amuses me when announcer says, after an outlandish touchdown celebration, “act like you’ve been there.” The reply that Deion Sanders gave is too true: nobody who has actually been there has ever said ‘act like you’ve been there.’ You just ran away from 11 very large and strong man and scored a touchdown; in my book, you’ve earned the right to pull out a Sharpie and sign the ball.

What is true, of course, is that there is a complicated racial element to this. The line between joyful innocence and thuggish classlessness often comes down to perspective. The teams that all caused the most consternation among the anti-celebration stick-in-the-muds-the Michigan Fab Five, The U- were all very black and very scary (to white people).

No man in sports is as big a curmudgeon as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, so I imagine that within a few years we may see the NFL adopt this ridiculous rule. Nothing that Terrell Owens, Chad Ochocinco or Steve Smith ever did on the field ever hurt the NFL. Quite the contrary, really. Let’s just hope that this NCAA rule is one year and done.

(Now that I finished my blog for the day, I’m going to do my favorite celebration dance ever. LIGHTS OUT!)

Officer, Stop That Negro! He Stole My Job!

2010-05-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

In 1946 Ed Stevens was a middling first baseman for a pennant-contending team. The young player from Galveston, Texas had had a solid rookie year, batting .272, but his sophomore campaign ended with him thirty points off the pace he had set in his initial year. Nonetheless, as a young major leaguer he was a completely serviceable and adequate player. The next year, though, he found himself relegated to spot duty, and a year following that he found himself traded to Pittsburgh. By 1950 he was out of baseball. What happened to Ed Stevens? Jackie Robinson.

In the spring of 1947, several white players on the Brooklyn Dodgers famously got together and wrote Branch Rickey a letter urging him not to integrate the team. Furious, Rickey gathered the team and pointedly told them, “he’s coming. Get used to it. He will make all of you very rich men.” Rickey was partly correct. On the road and at home fans –black and white- packed the stadiums to Robinson dazzle on his way to National League Rookie of the Year. The team would eventually vanquish their great nemesis, the New York Yankees in the World Series and the Dodgers and many of its players, got rich. Ed Stevens, a signatory of that infamous letter, though, did not.

Robinson, and the influx of fabulously talented black players for whom he served as the vanguard, would raise the collective level of play and grow the pie. There is no doubt that black players greatly enhanced the quality of play in Major League Baseball, but middling players like Ed Stevens knew all too well that the pie may have grown, but not the number of slices. Jackie took his spot (and rightfully so); Ed Stevens was the very living embodiment of the opportunity costs of freedom.

To be clear, I am *not* making an argument against open opportunities. Rather, what worries me is that people talk about race and freedom in a way that does not fully acknowledge that, while there will be a net social gain, there will also be specific casualties. A rising tide lifts all boats, but it also creates waves that often submerge the weaker vessels. Pies, tides, boats, and slices- the blunt truth is that these metaphors do not adequately make clear the sense of loss that people experience when opportunities are opened and they lose out in this race. Again, I understand that the greater tragedy in the Ed Stevens saga was that Jackie ever had to go through what he did, or that we never got to see an in-his-prime Satchel Paige face Ted Williams, or that the Grays never got a chance to dominate the Ruth-era Yankees –as surely they would have. I have no compunction about living in a world governed by the law of the wolf: the strong and fit prevail, the weak perish. So, what’s the problem?

Given the nature of my current scholarship, I often find links between the respective stories and situations of South Africa and the United States. While I have been away in South Africa I have been made well aware of the increasing unrest in the Afrikaner community at its perceived sense of loss. That this has occurred simultaneously with the Arizona debate is something that is marvelously complicated to think about in terms of the basic motivations of us-and-them and dominance-and-loss that undergird both of these situations. In South Africa, Afrikaners –white descendents of Dutch settlers who established and ran South Africa for the six decades preceding democracy in 1995- see themselves out of power and culturally marginalized.

The easy answer is to say, “deal with it or go away.” This is insufficient as an approach; their fears have to be assuaged. When apartheid fell, an Afrikaner politician smugly said, “let them have Parliament, we will keep the banks.” To be frank, for the initial steps into freedom, it could only have been this way. Apartheid had made a point of breaking black organizations, stifling and localizing black business and skewed its education system to relegate blacks to very basic service jobs. There simply were not qualified blacks to run banks and handle the myriad and numerous complex infrastructural, professional and technical roles that a modern state like South Africa had to maintain. So, Afrikaners and their companies continued to dominate the South African economy.

Rather rapidly, though, a cohesive black and Coloured middle class emerged and grew, and on the streets of Cape Town and Sandton one can see the nouveaux riches blacks in BMWs, Mercedes and the occasional Bentley. Many of them have gotten rich off of government contracts that had been previously been the near-exclusive domain of Afrikaners. On the other end of the spectrum, poor whites, which the old National Party government had so assiduously protected, now find themselves facing the vicissitudes of their black and brown countrymen in the shantytowns. In 2000 when I worked in Johannesburg, you would never have seen a white beggar. Now, I see them with some frequency.

The South African economy is sound, the country is modernizing and by all measurable indications except crime, the country is doing better than at any point since the early 1970s, but Afrikaners feel increasingly marginalized. For good reason: they are marginalized. There is no great injustice at all in the fact that 5% of the population no longer controls the country and its economy, but the fact of it presents real problems. In recent years, the number of armed Boer militias has grown, and there is an increasing sense of hostility and venom in the way that Afrikaners talk about the ANC government and the way that many blacks talk about Afrikaners.

As an outside observer, I am reminded of the old saying that “you can be right or you can be happy.” By all accounts, the government of South Africa owes these people nothing. On the other hand, their continued economic and technical indispensableness makes them capable of causing enormous mischief if they continue to feel marginalized. Like the white Arizonan who sees his state turning a little browner every day, the Afrikaner has lost something –if for no other reason than that he thinks he has. That what has replaced what they had is much better is absolutely true, but perhaps also not entirely relevant to the continued proper and smooth functioning of the state.

As I write this, I feel a bit like I am skipping through a minefield. Even in America, where undoubtedly our racial discourse is more sophisticated than anywhere on earth (if you doubt that for a moment, talk about race with a European and you’ll want to cut your own wrists. It’s like explaining particle physics to a kindergartener- they simply lack sophistication on these matters), we use facile analysis to get past uncomfortable tasks. This is particularly problematic when we are talking about minority versus minority conflicts that do not allow us to discuss race in the easy Jackie-Robinson-triumphs-for-America narrative. For example, since Hollywood has existed as the source of American entertainment and culture (as surely it is; sorry New York, you are so 19th century) there have been real problems with both the portrayal of minorities and their representation. Everyone wants more blacks, Hispanics and Asians in executive positions and on screen, but at whose expense? With respect to executive positions, have you ever heard a black or Hispanic actor or director say that there needs to be fewer Jewish executives? Sure, it happens all the time, and never goes over well.

I can remember on a personal level how taken aback I was when I visited Cal-Berkeley to see if I wanted to accept its offer to get my Ph.D. there. The school is 45% Asian in a state that is about 11% Asian in a nation that is about 4% Asian. It was not dispositive in my decision not to go to Berkeley, but the fact that the school was only 3% black at the time and was so completely different, demographically, from what I would encounter in the rest of my life played a role. (as did, to be honest, the fact that relations on campus and in the state between blacks and Asians was not good) In the same way that it was bad for blacks to be under-represented at Berkeley, I think that it is bad for Asians to be over-represented at Berkeley. In fact, I suppose that if you think about it, if under-representation bothers you, you would have to take exception to over-representation as well; they are two sides of the same coin. But, it seems somehow wrong to say that there are too many Asians at Berkeley. If you are going to increase black enrollment, though, these seats will likely have to come, at least in part, from the Asian slice of the pie.***

Race is more tribal and complicated than we like to make it out to be, and there probably is not an easy set of solutions where everyone wins. We need to get rid of the notion that nobody loses when society opens up. We need to just accept that the costs of freedom come in many forms, and one of them is that you are more apt to have competition from people against whom you formerly did not have to compete. The idea of a rising tide lifting all ships is nice, but sometimes we also have to understand that a better analogy for freedom is lifting a floodgate.

Thinking about Arizona and the losers in the great race to freedom, I wonder if there are ever days when John McCain wakes up and curses LBJ for passing the 1968 Civil Rights Act…

*** The story of how there came to be so many Asians at Cal-Berkeley is in itself an amusing story. When Prop. 209 was being debated, whites in California were outraged that blacks were taking “their” seats at state universities because of affirmative action. Well, once 209 outlawed taking race into account in admissions, the number of whites in the top schools dropped precipitously because the number of Asians rose so sharply.

Take that whitey.

I Ate All the Pies

2010-05-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

Back in Seapoint and back doing my thing in South Africa, I have a week to prepare for the arrival of nine of the people I love the most in the world and my brother Aloysius. (baby, you know I love you) From the moment my plane lifted off from Dusseldorf International Airport in late June, 2006 I have been plotting these few weeks.

I shudder to look at the pictures from the soccer bacchanalia from four years ago. I left at least 20 pounds heavier than I arrive, most of that made up of beer, German sausages, Kinder chocolates, Toblerone bars, Argentine steaks and Burger King. If I ate a vegetable that month, it was either because it was on my Whopper or I made some terrible mistake. I tried to keep track of the number of beers I would drink that month, but after 4 days my number was 67, and I was too drunk on the fifth morning to keep going. I estimate that it was probably 320 beers in 28 days, which is not that impressive until you consider that I had to take about 5 no-beer days because I felt too terrible to press forward. The 11 euro paddle with 12 beers on it was a piece of genius that made my life much easier.

When I arrived home, my long-suffering and wonderful ex-girlfriend Tiffani gave me a very skeptical look… sort of like, “who is this chubby fool who ate my boyfriend?” When she washed my clothes, I complained that my jeans didn’t fit anymore because she had washed them on “hot.” Incredulous, she grabbed a handful of belly fat and said, “it’s not the washing machine, buster.” I had enjoyed my World Cup so much that for the next two months, I had to wear large untucked shirts and use a clothes pin to my pants up because I could not button the top two buttons on my jeans. About a week after getting back to America, I was in the North Carolina heat sweating and someone said, “something smells like beer.” It was me. It was awesome.

As I have noted, I am trying not to make this World Cup extravaganza as utterly destructive to my body. I began by making a real effort to get into good shape by the start of the Cup. Though I will almost certainly get smoked by my more fit brothers, this was more or less a success in that I am much slimmer than I was 6-8 months ago, have bigger muscles and have enough cardiovascular fitness to pretty easily pound out five 10-mile runs per week. In the end, though, my body was in such a state of disarray that meeting my World Cup goals won’t happen. Like Charlie Davies, I lost my fitness race, but by September I should have all of my abs visible in their entirety, and my arm veins will extend from hand to deltoid.

That said, I worry about the carnage that this Cup will do to me. I am 4 years older, and I may not be able to get drunk three times in a day like I could when I was 24, like I was at the last World Cup. Because while I have lost my muscle beach challenge, I will certainly dominate at the various drinking games that we have devised.

Later this week, I will have a proper World Cup preview, but today I focus on my World Cup Fobi Starting XI predictions:

Aaron McGee: Most likely to hear English fans sing “who ate all the pies?” as he walks into the stadium. McGee is usually fit, but he claims that he hasn’t exercised in a year. This is not a good sign.

Bryan McGee: Most likely to use this opportunity to finally and firmly establish his role as the dominant brother. Bryan has trained hard for this moment, and now is his chance. His older brother is weak and out of shape.

Lloyd Fobi: Most likely to cry after losing (again) to Brian Fobi in beer pong. Lloyd is a good guy, a good father and a smart soccer mind. But, he handles alcohol like an 87-pound girl and his aim and strategy in beer pong suck.

Vash: Most likely to hide from a Nigerian street bookie after Brazil gives up a late goal and doesn’t cover the spread in their 5-1 defeat of North Korea.

Brian Fobi: Most likely to use this opportunity to finally and firmly establish his role as the dominant brother. Brian has trained hard for this moment, but now is not the right time. His older brother is strong and in peak condition.

Matt Wade: Most likely to get drunk and wander off into Soweto. I think that when Matt arrives, I’m getting him a gun. South Africa is not the place to wander off, and if some shit pops off, he’ll need to be packing heat.

Mike Coggins: Most likely to have his Air Force commission revoked for picking against America. That’s right, Mike “Osama Hussein” Coggins wants America to lose and hopes that the Obama children die. Ridiculous.

Brian Curtin: Most likely to become a soccer superfan for life. I have worked on him for 4 years, trying to get him to come over to the Dark Side. By July, he’ll be buying Revs season tickets, flying to Barcelona to see Champions League Games and staying up to 4am to watch J-League matches on the internet.

Aloysius Fobi: Most likely to present the stiffest challenge to my beerpong supremacy. His skills don’t come to close to mine, but as my older he has a permanent place of residency in my head. Could be a psych-pout job here.

Karl P-E: Most likely to bathe regularly. His girlfriend is showing up for the last half of the Cup, so he cannot be the heaping pile of poop and sweat that I plan to be. Also, KPE also will have the most “exasperated at Brian Fobi” moments. Him and Brian Curtin feel the most comfortable at pointing out and calling me out on my foolishness. I don’t like this.

Christian Long: Most likely to go to South Africa and actually have a legitimate cultural experience. The man is going to game parks, planning on seeing things and truly taking in South Africa. I am planning on getting drunk and watching soccer. This says much about our relative levels of maturity.

Just the TiP.

2010-05-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

The children of immigrants live in two worlds; we are completely American in ways that immigrants themselves cannot quite be, and we are also infused with something of a foreign sensibility and approach to things that my regular-old-American friends are not. I know the things that make me Cameroon, and the things that make me American. I still carry a few Gallic affectations, and like many people from my part of Africa, I am very quick to anger and even quicker to forgive. One thing about me that is quintessentially American, though, is that I am obsessed with the idea of “becoming.” To paraphrase Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of Cleveland, “I ain’t what I wanna be, I ain’t what I’m gunna be, but thank God I’m not what I was.” The rough stereotype of Europeans is that they find enjoyment in living as they are, whereas Americans are always focused on tomorrow and making themselves better or doing great things. The French would never be the first to put a man on the moon, but they would also never allow the creation of unlivable and ugly cities like San Jose to exist.

Thinking about your life as a process of becoming, you naturally divide things into stages. I know that, for me, 1997 was the most important year of my life. As a junior in college, I had finally settled on my major. After coming three credits away from earning my journalism degree (I sometimes still think about taking that one last class to get the degree, but with two undergraduate degrees, a law degree, two Masters and an eventually-to-be-completed Ph.D., I don’t think my problem is too few diplomas), I switched to History, thanks in large measure to the encouragement of two professors. I had no clear idea of what to do with this new pursuit, though.

After a few summer spent in the potato fields of eastern Oregon, that summer, I took a job at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program (TiP), primarily because it did not mean that I would have to spend all day digging irrigation trenches in 107-degree heat or loading 4 tons of boxed French fries into freezer cars, 40 pounds at a time. That summer, I met Graham and became fast friends for reasons and under circumstances that for some reason I cannot at all remember. Summer jobs in college are full of people you meet and never see again. At some point in October, though, for some reason I emailed him. We exchanged a few emails and I was excited to learn that he would be coming back the next summer.

We both worked as TA’s, which was probably the best job to have. You didn’t really have to do any preparation for the class, you still got to do a little bit of informal teaching, and you had afternoons and evenings largely free to do whatever you wanted. In the years before the University Risk Assessment Gestapo put in place a bevy of needless rules regulating the lives and time of TA’s, the nights were spent largely in drunken merriment, usually concluding with burritos under the starlight at Cosmic Cantina or a smoking session at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. When you’re 21 years old, you can be drunk an tired at 3am and still make your 8am wake-up and be ready to go at 9am, only to repeat the process again 4-5 per week.

My summer of 1998 was marked by two great events: the World Cup in France, and the arrival of Jonah, Matthew and Sarah. Jonah and Matthew knew Graham from Kentucky, and Sarah entered our orbit, probably because I was awesome and people wanted to be around me (with no countervailing narrative, I like that this is what will get saved for posterity). There were some fantastically memorable matches that summer: Beckham’s red card against Argentina, the Holland-Brazil semifinal and Zidane’s unexpected domination of the final against Brazil immediately come to mind. We would all race from our classes, which ended at 4pm, and head straight to the Alspaugh common room to catch last 65 minutes of these games. When we were treated to weekend games, the sessions watching soccer would inevitably be followed by staff-student matches in which I played the role of Jaap Stam, even though in my mind I thought of myself as something more skilled and elegant.

On a more personally substantive level, that summer was important for me because I encountered people who shared a lot of my thoughts on what a good life would look like, who had a plan to get it, and who were markedly smarter than me in terms of the body of knowledge that they possessed and the sophistication and variety of ways that they applied it. Though my ego can often run rampant, I also see enormous value in having friends who are quicker than me. Life is like tennis, where playing with better players makes you better; sadly, too many people see it as like boxing where getting into the ring with better opposition will only leave you hurt. People who know me, know that I will talk a lot, but that summer I felt compelled to listen, if for no other reason than that few things that I had to say could match what I would encounter if I let others do the talking.

My decision to go to graduate school was planted during that summer, and though I wouldn’t muster the courage to act on it for five more years, I do know that but for Graham, Sarah, Matthew and Jonah, I’d be a lawyer right now. Not that there is anything per se wrong with the law, but it was never a good fit for me, temperamentally or intellectually. So, all those girlfriends who were annoyed that I never bought them anything (ahem, Ms. Bulgaria) you can blame the Kentucky Four for my relative pecuniary poverty.

Taking a step back, a great many of my friends and buddies come from my TiP network. I met my Yale friends Aaron, Brian and Michael Coggins because I knew Dave Gimbel from TiP, and there are probably 10-15 former students with whom I am in somewhat-regular contact who come from TiP. Nick, Andrew, Banu, Matt, Jill, Bart, Mark… too many names and people come to mind, all of whom had an enormous and positive impact on me.

In other words, as I have progressed, as I have become whatever it is that I am to eventually become, my trajectory has to a great degree been defined by too-hot summers spent in Durham, North Carolina. I’ve been to most of the places in the world that I’ve wanted to see, and have to this point lived an interesting, varied and engaging life, but I do believe that if heaven is a place and space where you get to live your favorite days over and again, then I can imagine that my reward for good deeds will be to wake up in my hot and muggy room on the second floor of Brown, eat breakfast in the dining hall with Sarah, Jonah, Matthew and Graham, and head to the common room with beers and bourbon to watch the Brasil-Nederlands World Cup semifinal. Laughing with every Brazilian dive, groaning with every Kluivert near-miss, and somehow finding the time and opportunity to talk about everything from Flying Circus Greek v. German philosophical soccer matches to the wonders of the Final Four to their impending trips through Italy and Germany- that would be my moment.

Girl Fight

2010-05-16T15:03:00.001-07:00

About ten years ago, my then-girlfriend and I went to see a movie. I was told that it was a movie about girls boxing, and being a big fight fan, I was somewhat excited to have avoided having to watch a genuine chick-flick. The movie, ‘Girl Fight,’ followed the travails of Michelle Rodriguez’s character as she trained to become a top female boxer. Some 5-6 years before ‘Million Dollar Baby,’ I rather enjoyed the first half of the movie. But, I was duped.

The reason that this girl, Kim, wanted to see the movie was because she had heard that in the climactic scene she has to fight her boyfriend for the Golden Gloves crown. Since the movie is almost a decade old, I have no qualms about dropping a plot-spoiler. Basically, she falls in love with the top 154-pound prospect in Los Angeles. He is supposed to be something like the next coming of Oscar De La Hoya. She can’t find enough top women to fight, so she enters the male Golden Gloves competition, but none of the men want to fight her, so she makes it to the championship without having to fight anyone where, of course, she has to fight her boyfriend.

This movie triggered an enormous argument between Kim and I because in the end, she beats him. Her argument was that since boxing is divided by weight class, two comparably sized fighters- one boy, one girl- would be an even match so long as they had comparable skills and training. I said –no, I KNOW- that this is absolute bullshit. It’s not quite a metaphysical certitude that a top male Golden Gloves prospect would beat any female fighter, but it’s pretty close. I pointed out that even Laila Ali said as much, and that she had made it clear that she would lose if ever put in the ring with a trained male boxer. At the time, I found it annoying to have to argue something that was so obviously clear. Being the boastful person that I am, in a personal chivalric low, when Kim claimed that she was a better athlete than I was, I told her that I could spot her 20 points in a game of basketball and still beat her in a game to 21. To her credit, it was close; I won 21-20.

I think that no reasonable person would argue that there are any real sports in which top female athletes could beat top male athletes. I am pretty sure, for example, that the worst player in this year’s men’s NCAA Tournament could dust Candace Parker or that Usain Bolt could jog his way to a 20-meter margin in the 100 meters. I’ve always known that this is true, but I also don’t think that it matters much. For example, to someone who wants to start watching soccer, I’ve always thought that for a novice or casual fan, women’s soccer is much more interesting. There is more scoring and because the defenders are not as fast as in the men’s game, the players operate in more space and can do more. And, for old-school basketball purists who like passing and team play, women’s hoops offers a certain kind of enjoyment. More importantly, in all ways except pecuniary, the value that female participants get from playing sports at a high level is precisely equal to, and in some ways greater than, what men get.

That said, I have always felt very uncomfortable playing sports with women. Back at U of Michigan, I used to go to the CCRB (Central Campus Recreational Building, aka, “The Crib”) to play hoops. I am a very middling player, but because of my height and decent athleticism, I will rarely completely embarrass myself. For about two months, though, every time I went to play, there was a tall girl from Virginia who insisted on guarding me. She was about my height, but I would guess about 40 pounds lighter. Not really wanting to muscle her, when she guarded me I would just step out to the wing and pass the ball off when it came to me. When she was on offense, she would insist on posting me up, and the rather uncomfortable prospect of having a rather unattractive giant of a woman jam her butt against my junk usually left me playing some very soft defense. I didn’t like it, but she insisted on guarding me, and I could never convince anyone to switch with me.

Then one day one of my teammates complained and mocked me because I had “let a girl check me out of my game.” The girl smiled and said something like, ‘it’s okay, I played college ball at Virginia.’ Annoyed, I decided to actually play her. She wasn’t strong enough to get post position, not fast enough on the wing to get around me, and couldn’t jump high enough to get her shot off. I probably scored 16 of my team’s 21 points, and I probably didn’t miss. In my life I have only ever dunked on four people, and she was one of them. I still remember that I got the ball at the right wing, dribbled baseline, spun to my right took a step (or four) and dunked on game point. She fell over like Vlade after meeting Shaq. When I went for the customary high-five from my teammates for having won the game, my teammate just left me hanging and shook his head. One of her teammates said, ‘damn bro, take it easy. She’s a girl.’

This still happens from time to time. I’ll be playing in a pick-up game and a girl will show up and I’ll get stuck on her. I’m faced with going Juwana Mann (under-rated comedy) on her or being her bitch because I refuse to play defense or shoot. I don’t like this, and I am always a little inclined to say, “listen Rosie the Hoopster, it’s cool that you want to play, but this clubhouse is men only.” Instead, I just hope that she misses her free throws or that she is on my team-- girls are often good passers, and I always like somebody who can get me the ball. Beyond that, I don’t really have a strategy for how to play them.

To put a bow on this rant, about two years after watching ‘Girl Fight’ with Kim, I was working out in boxing gym in L.A. A girl showed up and asked to do walk-down drills with her. A walk-down drill is basically an in-ring footwork drill where one person tries to corner the other person. It’s a way of practicing to be able to control the ring and keep your opponent where you want them. When it came time for her to hound and me to fox, she was actually not bad in terms of footwork, and I could tell from her technique that had polish as a fighter. But, at the end of the last drill, when she had walked me into a corner, the trainer –a grumpy little Brazilian man- asked me to do shoulder roll drills with her. I had done this before, and hated it. Basically, you lean against the rope and the other person hits you in the side and shoulders, and you are supposed to practice a defensive technique where you roll your shoulders and fall back into the ropes to deflect most of the punch’s energy. Against strong fighters, you can never fully deflect a punch, and so I would often go home with sore and bruised arms and shoulders. She really wailed on me for 45-second bursts, but as I leaned and rolled I for the first time had a concrete notion of the power difference between male and female boxers. Even when she put everything into the punches, it just didn’t quite hurt.

Her and I became gym buddies, and a few weeks later I watched as she completely dismantled another female fighter. She was beaming with happiness, and as I talked with her afterwards, I could see that I was probably wrong to discount her abilities as a fighter; she was in that smelly-ass gym for all the same reasons that I was and that everyone else was. Like me, at that moment in her life she wanted to test herself in a way that some bullshit session at a Crunch boxercise class could not provide. (as an aside, I’ve never quite gotten the point of people who do non-contact “boxing” workouts. To me, it seems like playing basketball without being allowed to shoot or playing tennis by yourself. I guess it’s a way for girls and men worried about bruising to pretend that they’re tough for an hour three times a week?)

I remain deeply conflicted about playing with or against women in a serious sporting endeavor. On the one hand, I have the same respect for their undertaking that I do for what men do… so long as it stays within the context of a female-only game. But that seems on its face to be dismissive. And, on a personal level, if you ever want to completely check me out of a basketball game, just have a girl guard me.

***********************************************************************

These are first-ever footnotes for this blog…

1. The most likely response to this is to note that Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. That was an important event, but Riggs was 55 years old and three decades removed from the height of his skills. She should have beat him; my point isn’t that no woman can ever beat any man.

2. My sister Catherine will likely note that in my junior year of high school she beat me in a game of P-I-G. She didn’t, in fact, beat me. She never ‘proved’ the ‘G’ which every P-I-G player knows is part of the game. I will applaud her decision to only shoot lay-ups, though. Clever.

The Problem With Average

2010-05-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

With the release of Jamarcus Russell, Raiders fans can rightly assume that Jason Campbell will become the starting quarterback for Oakland. My friends who live and work in our nation’s capital, will laugh heartily at this turn of events. For while the Raiders feel that they acquired a quarterback for mere pittance, Redskins will tell you that they unloaded a 20-32 quarterback problem and picked up a 4th round pick to boot.

I’m not a Redskins fan, but I don’t hate them either. In fact, for all the reasons you might guess, I rooted for them in 1987 to win the Super Bowl, and took away from that game more pride and joy than any (white) Redskins fan could possibly imagine. But, when Doug left, so did my allegiance. At any rate, I feel I’m in a pretty good position to judge Jason Campbell.

Yes, Campbell was 12 games under .500 as a starter, but surely all of those losses can’t be blamed on him. In fact, his (lies, damned lies, and…) statistics are actually really solid. Not great; solid. Twenty touches, 15 INT, 3,600 yards, 64%- not Canton stuff, but the guy isn’t a bum either. When you further understand that he never had the same position coach or offensive coordinator for consecutive seasons, and those numbers look a lot better. But, I don’t think that looking at these numbers really fully explain the frustration that Washington fans had with Campbell.

Sports fans see things in black and white; in athletics, you are either a champion or a bum, a hero or villain. You win it all, or ultimately your season was a disappointment. Given this, we don’t really have a way to understand a guy who is pretty good, but not great. In other words, Campbell isn’t one of the 5 best quarterbacks in the league, but he isn’t one of the five worst either. In fact, because I do this sort of thing, I actually ranked all of the starting quarterbacks using my own judgment (flawed, I know) and I had Campbell ranked 18th among the 32 likely starters; in other words, he is precisely average.

Fans don’t know what to do with average. He will rarely show you flashed of brilliance that make you think that he is winning games. As a result, you tend to focus only on the mistakes that he makes. On the other hand, guys like Campbell don’t make so many terrible mistakes (yes, Redskins fans, I stand by this) that you can easily categorize them as bums. This tension creates the sense that a guy could be more and better than he is, but this isn’t fair. I genuinely believe that any Redskins fan who accepted that their quarterback was average would not have been unhappy in the end.

Average isn’t something anybody should ever strive for, but it also isn’t –by definition, really- the worst thing that somebody could be. So, the next time a Redskins fan laments that they wish they had Manning or Brady, remind them that they could have had Russell.

Gay Persian Huckleberries and the Agony of Defeat

2010-04-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

There is a great scene at the end of Tombstone where Wyatt and Doc are conversing about Wyatt’s impending gunfight. Wyatt had rashly accepted the quick-draw expert Johnny Ringo’s invitation to a draw at dawn, and in the clearness of the morning recognized the stupidity of the act, telling Doc, “It all happened so fast with Curly Bill… I didn’t really have time to think about it, but I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. I can’t beat him, can I.” Doc, too much of a friend to ever lie, just tells him, “No.”

About a month and a half ago, I challenged my brothers to a contest that I am becoming increasingly aware that I cannot win. The rough sketches: the challenge is who can be the most “ripped” by World Cup. Aloysius, my older brother, was in excellent physical condition when I issued the challenge: six-pack, strong arms with full vascularity, and even those rib muscles that boxers have. Lloyd, my younger brother is one of those African dudes who just doesn’t add fat, as his body somehow possesses an enzyme that turns Krispy-Kreme into protein, McDonalds into HGH and ice cream into testosterone. I, as I have detailed in past posts, was a pathetic lump of lard and shit; an athlete hiding under a 75-pound fat suit. The winner “got” to be Leonidas for Halloween 2010, 2nd place has to be Xerxes, in full make-up wearing gayness, and third place has to be Wonder Woman.

So, believing that my impressive ability to grow a beard would make me better suited to lead the Spartans than to be an 8-foot tall god-king or fly an invisible jet, I set about working out hard. My task was and is monumental; I not only had to catch up to where my brothers were when the contest started, but I had to somehow account for whatever gains that they made in the last 2 months. So, I set out to get to work. On about half of the days I do two workouts –swimming or running in the morning, some form of weight training or plyometrics in the evening. And, I put on muscle, lots of muscle. I decided that I didn’t want bulk, so most the training is push-ups and pull-ups, though on Fridays I do indulge in a body-destroying workout focused on legs (to kick-start testosterone since leg muscles are the biggest), chest, arms and shoulders.

In two months, I’ve made enormous strides. Whereas before the idea of running more than a mile pained me, now I sometimes say, “I’m going for a light 8-mile jog up the hill and back.” An hour later, I feel refreshed, not tired. I can do 16 reps of 225 pounds on the bench, in an average workout I might do more than 200 pushups, and 250 ab moves. But, I’m only down to 17% body fat, and the 6-pack remains an elusive Yeti, seen only in certain light, at certain times of the day, and never with the clarity or cutness I’d like. In other words, I’m going to lose.

Yes, I am going to lose. Aloysius will beat me, Lloyd will beat me, and come October you will see me in a brown wig, red underwear and a blue bedazzled top with a yellow rope and silver headband. But, like Wyatt Earp, I’m not backing down. I can’t beat these guys, but I’ll still show up at the ravine to take my bullet like a man. I won’t make it easy, though. I have 45 days to train my ass off, and I will train the shit out of this old, flabby broken down corpus. I will draw inspiration from the beatdown that Apollo gave Rocky, knowing that my goal is to train so hard that I’ll make it to the bell and force my opponents to earn it. (I will scoff at any mention of Rocky II or any other part of the Rocky franchise that makes mention or relies upon Rocky being better than Apollo. I consider those non-canonical aspects of the franchise)

There is no honorable defeat; just defeat. The lessons we learn in defeat are never preferable to the glory we find in victory. So, I will redouble my efforts to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but I am under no illusions. I cannot win; I will lose. Aloysius, Lloyd- you can coast in because you are in no danger of being bested. Rest, enjoy your month and a half before the World Cup. Have some brews, take a few extra rest days, make a few visit to Voodoo Donuts for a cock’n balls or a bacon maple bar. You’ve already won, and you but to collect your prize.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, fret not. Johnny Ringo ends up dead and Wyatt lives a long happy life.

I’m your huckleberry.

O Telefone

2010-04-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

When I was a young kid I would occasionally get telephone calls form relatives who wanted to chat. My mother would hand me the phone, we would talk for a few moments, and when I was done I would just hang up and walk away, even if the other person was in the middle of a conversation or even in mid-sentence. Even back then, I really did not like talking on the phone.
As I’ve gotten older, I have never really warmed to talking on the phone. I never call people just to talk, and see the phone as a purely functional devise to exchange information. If you speak to every one of my girlfriends, they will all tell you that I probably never called, and when they called me I would pretty quickly start scheming of ways to get off the phone. I would find, though, that despite my monosyllabic replies, deep sighs, and insistence on dead air, these abused women would rarely get or take my hint and would insist on dragging a telephone conversation out of me.
I am not sure why I hate the telephone so much, but I do hate this device. I have no problem texting, I will gladly write you a long email, and do like in-person conversations. But, being chained to a telephone just rots my soul and agitates me to no end.
Understanding this, I have decided to make an important move. When I get back to America, I am going to be telephone free. I may keep a phone to text- haven’t worked out all the details- but if you want to call to talk to me, then I just won’t be available. I am fairly certain that this will cause me some problems, but the joy that I will get from never having to talk on the telephone will more than counteract this.
I also know that this is sort of an oddball thing for someone to do, and that people will bristle at it. In time, people will get used to it. So, next time you hear my voice, it will be accompanied by the wonderful experience of seeing me.

Checking the Box

2010-04-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

Living in South Africa is interesting in so many ways. The most germane for me are the many ways that South Africa’s own struggles, difficulties, triumphs and accomplishments offer a lens through which to see America and, in some cases, myself.

In South Africa, the most vexing problems concern redressing the economic inequities that remain from the apartheid era. In many respects, the country remains a first world white economy supported by black labor and run by black politicians. This difficult reality makes the job facing politicians complex. In increasing black wealth, politicians cannot be seen to be taking it away from whites, or at least not to a degree that they feel disinvested from the country and therefore just decide to leave, taking their money and various kinds of much-needed expertise with them. We are often told that when economies are properly managed, a rising tide will raise all ships. As a general proposition I do not doubt that that is the case, but I also feel in a case like South Africa, remedying apartheid will require something more akin to a zero-sum game in which black progress is paid for by whites.

Against this backdrop, I had a long conversation a few weeks back with a white South African about South Africa’s version of affirmative action (this is not the phrase they usually use; they prefer to talk about black empowerment, but it is essentially the same thing). The conversation brought up the familiar and well-worn pros and cons, and eventually settled upon the one question that almost every white person will want to know with respect to a black person who has had some particular kind of achievement: did *you* take advantage of it?

In my various rants against Yale or how black students are generally treated, people will mistake my thoughts on this issue, so I’ll just lay them out. When asked whether I “checked the box,” indicating that I’m black, and thereby putting myself in play for affirmative action, I have three reactions, each which gets to a different point. The third one is what people generally want to know about, but bear with me.

The first point is brief. Whether or not I checked the box is not really important in terms of deciding whether special consideration of some kind is proper. For example, speaking specifically of university admissions, I think that a great many things that get factored into the equation –SAT, GRE, geographic diversity, for example- are not really germane to the question of who most deserves a slot in the school. Nonetheless, on my applications to college I of course noted that I came from a rural farming town in the middle nowhere and I also took the SAT. I can sympathize with the notion that the admissions process is not the moment to take a principled stand; the purpose is to get in. If Yale wanted people with purple hair, I would not have written a lengthy letter the Admissions Department detailing the idiocy of their policy; I would have dyed my hair purple.

On a related note, to ask the question of whether I checked the box is to ask whether I did something unfair to unsettle an otherwise fair system. Having taught at a wealthy private school, I know full well the advantages of wealth vis-à-vis access to higher education. I never had highly trained SAT preparation teachers, private tutors, or an admissions consultant. I wrote my own essay and my only preparation for the SAT was reading the book of sample questions on the way to take the test. What then to make of my 1370 as compared to a 1450 from someone who understood the admissions process and had a year of private preparation for the test. (before you mock my score, note that I took the test in 1993, and the test has been completely rewritten, with a rather substantial rightward shift in average scores) This is to say nothing of the qualitative differences between Hermiston High School and the Oakwood School, where I taught. My point is not that affirmative action helps to correct glitches in the system, but rather that the system is closer to being comprehensively broken and festooned with rather random and imperfect indicators of potential. And, of course, this ignores the question of whether the mission of a university is to offer its slots only to the highest achieving high schoolers –however measured- or to perform a higher social function with respect to the creation of a particular kind of egalitarian society.

While I do believe that everything I have said above is true, I also recognize that it is a bit of a dodge. So, did I check the box? Well, it’s complicated. When I applied to colleges, I certainly did. I got into some colleges I was interested in and got rejected by others, but more because I really did not put much time into my applications. I filled out all 10 applications in a weekend, took the SAT a few weeks later, and then that was that. Law school and graduate school offer me a more interesting way to see this issue.

In the years between when I applied to college and when I applied to law school, California and Texas had outlawed the use of race as a factor in admissions. I happened to apply to law school at Texas, Cal-Berkeley (Boalt) and UCLA. Not only did I not check any box, but at no place on any of these applications was there a mention of my race, even obliquely. I got accepted into these three schools, but got rejected at Stanford and Yale, two schools with very aggressive affirmative action policies. There is perhaps a qualitative difference in these groups of schools, so I would point out two things. First, in 1997 when I was applying, Berkeley had a top-5 law school; it has since plummeted. Second, I also got into Columbia, Harvard, NYU and Duke, four schools that are roughly in the same league as Yale and Stanford. (though honestly, not quite) At any rate, when I went to Michigan Law School, I felt comfortable with the notion that I would have gotten into Michigan with or without checking the box.

The same process occurred with graduate school. I got into the top two of the top three programs that considered race as a factor in admissions –Yale, Columbia- and the top two that did not –Berkeley and UCLA.

Having said, all of this, there are, I suppose, two points to make. First, I’ll admit that it is an argument against affirmative action that I feel compelled to explain my place at Yale. This does not actually bother me much. When people talk to me about Yale, they frequently get the impression that I think I got in because of affirmative action; this is not true at all. If I am being genuine, I really cannot know the answer to this because there is no white Control Brian Fobi to test the hypothesis. My grades were excellent in law school, I got a near-perfect GRE, and I had strong and interesting work experiences. My criticisms and frustrations have more to do with how I was treated *after* I was admitted, and not before. It is subtle, but it is important not to conflate these two stances. In other words, my own experiences do not lead me to a conservative critique of affirmative action in education, but rather to a personal criticism of how well-meaning liberal white folks are blissfully unaware of their own prejudices because, well, they could never be prejudiced.

Second, I try my best not to care. Even if my admission was entirely unfair and unjustified, I’ve never seen a single instance of corruption within an otherwise entirely corrupt process as at all problematic. Whether we realize it or not, we all check boxes every day. Born in America? That’s an advantage you had nothing to do with. Born tall, pretty or rich? Same thing. Just because those boxes do not actually appear on Page One of the application form does not mean they are not decisive factors in your life’s trajectory.

So, I’ll progress through my life comfortable in the knowledge of what I’ve done and am and fairly certain that I’m not here “because” of my race. Will I check the box again in the future? Absolutely. If you don’t fight for every large and small advantage in life, you are making a mistake.

Healthy, Wealthy, Wise.

2010-04-12T18:10:00.001-07:00

When I arrived in Cape Town, I pretty quickly settled into a routine in which I got up very early and went to bed early as well. I ate meals from a pretty small list of ingredients, and I became incredibly productive and happy. I could do this because I was really left completely to my own devices. One thing that I have long known about myself is that I can function pretty much solo for long stretches of time with no real degradation in my level of happiness and large increases in my productivity. When I was a kid, I did a year in Cameroon and that was very much a solo effort, and in graduate school I would spend long stretches of my day in my room by myself reading.

It’s good to have Brandon back in Cape Town, but I’ve also had to come to figure out what to about my schedule. In many ways I’ve already crossed a tipping point from ‘young’ to ‘old.’ I prefer to be in bed relatively early and to be up with the sunrise, whereas Brandon rarely gets up before noon and stays up basically until the sun comes up. Given that we have separate rooms, this is not a problem except that it’s a little difficult and rude to lock the door from midnight to 6am in order to keep a schedule. But, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly grumpy of late, and I think that I need to institute a hard asleep-by-midnight rule if I am going to maintain my productivity.

Getting to this point is something of a realization. For six weeks I had been incredibly adept at focusing on my work, managing my quotidian affairs, working out, and otherwise doing well. But, with a disruption in my sleep schedule I have become much less energized and capable. In ‘Seinfeld,’ the fact that old people get agitated late in the day plays an important role in Elaine undermining Jerry’s father after he joins J. Pederman. Fifteen years ago, I laughed at this, but now it’s sort of my reality.

Evidence piece #45 that I’m not old, but I’m older.

Terre'Noire?

2010-04-09T02:28:00.000-07:00

Sitting at a bar a few weeks ago, I had an interesting and frank conversation about race in South Africa with a German expat who had lived in Cape Town since 1994, and three South Africans of white, black and coloured extraction. At one point, the German man, who had come to South Africa in order to open a business in order to help the new post-apartheid government, sighed and said, “I worry about this country after Madiba dies.” Madiba, known to most Westerns as Nelson Mandela, has not really been seen in public in recent years because at 91 year old he is certainly in the winter of his long and illustrious life.

The black man, a Zulu, said to him, “Do not worry. You worry about things that you cannot know. We know what will happen when Mandela dies, this country will go to civil war.” Taken aback, I looked at all three South Africans and they each sort of shrugged or nodded in knowing recognition of what they thought of as true. I couldn’t really believe it until recently.

Last week, the racist leader of an Afrikaner (the Dutch-descended ethnic group that implemented apartheid) separatist group, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, was hacked and beaten to death by two black men who worked on his farm. Now, this is one of truly odious dudes on the planet, and I can’t say that I’m really sorry that he is dead. He had several convictions for assaulting blacks, had tarred and feathered an historian who questioned the Afrikaner version of history, and led a revolt against the advent of genuine democracy in South Africa. In other words, good riddance; addition by subtraction. (side note: my French speaking friends will wonder if “Terre’blanche,” which means ‘white land,’ is a pseudonym. It is not; it is his given name that he was born with. It is just one of the odd coincidences that the man who pressed for a separate white state has this name. It would be as if Robert E. Lee were named “Bobby LeaveMySlavesAlone.”)

My point is not to mourn the loss of someone whose death, and even the manner of it, seems somehow perfectly fitting within the larger karmic structure of the universe, but rather to point out that this incident has offered a moment of some angst to a growing number of South Africans. More than any time since the early days of Mandela’s presidency, whites are starting to worry about their place within Africa. When recently Julius Malema, the leader of the ANC Youth League, who is generally considered next in line for the presidency of the South Africa sang, “kill the farmer, kill the Boer,” whites quite naturally had reason to feel some discomfort about the future of the Rainbow Nation.

I tend to think that this will not happen because, frankly, both blacks AND whites are doing better than ever in South Africa. Even with the recent economic downturn that South Africa, like the entire planet, suffered, the standard of living in South Africa is higher than it’s ever been and there is much to lose. And, one also has to think that the moral leadership that Mandela showed will serve as a key part of the South African constitution in the years to come. But, I agree that there is real reason for concern, for four reasons.

First, South Africa remains basically a 1-party state. Elections in South Africa are free and fair, but both because of the ANC’s historical role and the goodwill that comes with that and the fact that opposition parties always manage to shoo themselves in the foot, the ANC has ruled South Africa since 1995. Fifteen years is too long, and all the problems of entitlement that come along with this kind of unchallenged position can produce very stark us-and-them schisms. Now, there are whites in the ANC, and the ANC is not a per se black party, but as a practical matter it is seen, and it increasingly thinks of itself as, the party that promotes and protects black interests.

Second, the ANC is corrupt. This is not shocking given the previous point. More and more scandals are piling up daily, and people rightly worry that South Africa is drifting towards becoming the kind of kleptocracy that characterizes the rest of the continent. The ANC’s top leadership have engorged themselves on fat contract kick-backs and for some industries like telecommunications and utilities, there seems to be a pay-to-play mentality. In other words, the ruling black elite has reason to protect their position from all challenges.

Third, the ANC’s leaders are, across the board, quite terrible. I have increasingly come to think that Mandela is the greatest leader in 100 years. He was more than the perfect person for the perfect moment, he was the *only* person who could have both assuaged white fears and bolstered black confidence all while handling the impossibly complex task of transforming a nation that had become fractured, violent and financially bankrupt, all while doing so within the structure of a government that had not been putting its energies into governing for 20 years; it had been too busy stamping out blacks.

As great as Mandela was, his predecessor were terrible. Thabo Mbeki was a petty and stupid man whose intransigence in the face of overwhelming evidence on the AIDS issue likely cost literally millions of lives. That he has not been fully recognized and castigated as the destroyer of a generation of South Africa is vexing and puzzling. His successor, Jacob Zuma, is in many ways equally small-minded and was almost certainly a rapist and petty graft artist.

Looking ahead, the future is bleak. Julius Malema, the likely next president, is as overly proud without cause as politician you will encounter. He has a worrying tendency to rail against journalists, to view dissent as disloyalty to the nation and to show a remarkable lack of understanding or sophistication on an array of issues.

Fourth, there is a frightening and increasing tendency to resort to racism as an explanation for everything. When, for example, Malema took heat for his foolish song, he blamed the controversy on racist whites and foreigners seeking to discredit South Africa. While Mandela assiduously avoided these kinds of recriminations, this song has become a too-frequent refrain in political discourse. Mbeki said that AIDS was a sham invented by whites to scare blacks from having sex, and Zuma characterized legitimate concerns over South Africa’s crime rate as racist whites who were just afraid of black people.

When I saw how Mbeki or Zuma would constantly deploy racism as their shield for racism, I assumed that this would pass with the ushering in of a new generation of leaders who cut their teeth in the years after the struggle. The problem, though, is that as a purely political tactic, it works. Blaming white has powerful resonance in a nation with such a disparity of wealth. A recent UN report noted that if white South Africa were an independent nation, its standard of living would be higher than Spain’s, but that if black South Africa were an independent country, it would be one of the 25 poorest countries on earth. If you live in the Cape Flats and are one of the estimated 47% of black South Africans without a job, the white man in the Audi who lives in a comfortable Camps Bay home is an all too easy villain. This makes it hard to think of a future in which the race issue will not be a powder keg upon which the nation is built.

The great fear is that South Africa will descend into Mugabeism. Indeed, the fact that Malema got back from Zimbabwe and praised Robert Mugabe is unsettling (of course, he dismissed this concern as just coming from stupid white racists and foreigners trying to cause trouble). Suppose, for example, that a legitimate political party formed that challenged the ANC’s political position. Would Malema or his narrow-minded cabal of fools be willing to introduce Mugabe’s virulent version of racism in order to stay in power, even at the cost of tearing the nation to tatters? I have seen nothing from him or his ANC cronies that would make me think that they possess the wisdom to foresight to prevent this from happening.

Despite all of this, it must be said that whites and blacks have worked together remarkably well in order to construct that is the most promising and wealthy nation in Africa. This is a truly wonderful nation. But, Nelson Mandela remains the sun in the South African firmament, and as that sun sets, the dark shadow of something sinister grows longer. So profound and deep is the love and respect for this man that the idea of a descent into Mugabeism is unthinkable. But, when the Great Man is gone, all bets are off.

Thoughts on Cape Town

2010-04-02T02:47:00.000-07:00

Having spent some time in Cape Town, I feel like I’m starting to know the place a little bit. In a lot of ways, the United States and South Africa are very similar, and indeed I could write a very long blog talking about how our histories, tastes, dispositions and complicated racial structures very much resemble each other. But today I will focus on something much more quotidian. Here are my observations and complaints about life in Cape Town.

Since much of what I say will come across as a bit whiney, I will start by stating what should be obvious: the city is gorgeous and I really like it here. I chose to be here, and though I occasionally get headaches or annoyed by things that I cannot do, every person should come here at least once before they die.

1. South Africans love sports. They have one of the top rugby and cricket teams in the world, and bars are frequently packed with locals drinking Black Label Lager and watching SuperSport’s coverage of Indian League cricket or Super14 Rugby.

But...

South Africans are terrible at basketball. It is nearly impossible to find a court, and when you do find one, you get a pretty comically soft version of the game. It’s obvious that they play the European version of the game where people don’t touch each other. When I was playing a game in Johannesburg a few years back, I blocked out a guy on a shot and he fell down. He looked at me all scared like I had just stabbed him and everyone was like, “brother, take it easy. Don’t be so rough.” Incredulous, I pressed on playing as my coach had taught me. When I later blocked a guy on a lay-in he called foul despite the fact that I had never touched him. He admitted that I had not touched him but his team insisted it was a foul because I “had disrupted his cylinder.” I had never, and likely never will again, hear that call. I would die of laughter of someone called that at the Rucker. I can just imagine that fool with the megaphone going apeshit.

I had a debate with a South African friend about contest between the US and South Africa. We would play them at rugby and basketball. We would then add up the scores. I’m pretty sure that we would get destroyed by them in rugby, but Lebron and Kobe could cover that spread.

2. You can get some pretty bomb-ass chicken in South Africa. Nando’s is rightly famous, but equally good are the myriad Indian and Pakistani restaurants that you’ll find around. Humorously, South Africans love KFC. They have KFC’s everywhere… I mean EVERYWHERE. I would bet that there are more Kentucky Fried Chicken’s in Cape Town than there are in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s also funny that the several people refer to KFC as just “Kentucky,” as in “I am going to Kentucky to get some chicken, you want some?”

BUT…

The KFC doesn’t have biscuits. You can buy little baguette loaves, but no flaky delicious KFC biscuits. I have tried to explain to locals that the biscuits are the best thing about KFC, but they don’t really understand what biscuits are because they don’t really have an equivalent here, and “biscuits” in South Africa are what we call “cookies.”

AND…

I cannot find good Mexican food here. This kills me. There was a Mexican restaurant around the corner, but *nobody* was ever inside. Finally, I tried it and was not impressed. It was out of business the next week. My first stop once I’m back in America is to go Chipotle and say that I want “everything.” When they ask me, "what do you mean'everything'?" I’ll pull a Gary Oldman from “The Professional” and just scream, “EVERYTHING!” (great scene!)

3. The internet is fast… but super expensive. I spend at least $250 a month on internet, and I still have to ration myself. You buy internet by the GB or MB, and 5 GB costs about $140. Needless to say, I haven’t been able to download the tons of (completely legal from iTunes) television shows and movies that I used to, nor can I stream sports or TV. The activities eat up my internet. This one thing is the source of 95% of my South Africa-related headaches.

4. The World Cup will be huge. Everyone I talk to is excited about it, and it seems like about a third of people are planning to make a lot of money during it. Prices are going through the roof, and everyone has some kind of scheme. My driver Paul is Malawian and is staying here until the World Cup so that he can cash out and then head back home.

BUT…

The fact that so many people are trying to soak foreign tourists may mean that foreigners will stay away. I watched the Manchester United – Liverpool match with this dude from the DFB, which is Germany’s national soccer association. Over the course of beers, he described to me that his job was to scout South Africa and put together the official German travel guide. He said that based on his experiences and conversations, he was not going to recommend that German fans come down. At any rate, he said, Germans had already decided it was too expensive. Of the 115,000 tickets that Germany could have requested, they asked for only 35,000. They sold only 6,000.

What seems true is that a lot of Americans and Brits are coming, very few non-South African Africans are coming, and nobody really knows about people from the rest of Europe or Asia (though I imagine that not a lot of North Koreans are going).

5. South Africans are not very risk-averse. I notice that South Africans almost never wear seatbelts. If you read in the paper you’ll always see these tragic headlines about 7 people dying in a crash. I can probably count on one hand the number of South Africans who buckle up. Perhaps because I was raised during a time of ubiquitous public service announcements urging me to buckle up I am overly sensitive to this, but it does strive me as odd.

Also, I swim a few times per week at the local outdoor pool at Seapoint Pavillion. The water is only about 4.5 feet deep, but about two weeks ago I had to save a man from drowning. It was pretty anticlimactic, as I just sort of stood up, grabbed him, lifted him out of the water, and then plopped him on the ledge. The more I noticed, though, the more that I noticed that a lot of people really had no business in the pool. Even at the ocean, I see people who can’t really swim playing in water much deeper than they should be in. Like so much in South Africa, there is an enormous racial breakdown in terms of swimming ability. In this way they are like America, I suppose.

Also, most of the black Africans at the Pavillion swim in their underwear. I suppose that there is no real reason to see that as odd, but it seems odd to me.

6. A lot of things here are super-cheap. The dollar gets you 7.25 Rand, and the exchange rate really works in your favor. There are a lot of everyday things that cost very little. Groceries, eating out, beer and entertainment typically cost about half of what they do in America, sometimes much less.

BUT…

Some things in South Africa cost *way* more than they do in America. I had to get a new power cord for my Mac, and it set me back $230. I wanted to buy some Ray-Ban sunglasses, and they would have cost $450 here, and the same pair sold at the Portland Sunglasses hut for $114. An iPhone is $900, though it is not sim-locked. You also have to cope with the fact that there are some things that you just can’t get here. Try finding size 13 shoes and you’ll be on a daylong errand that produces nothing.

My Sports Bucket List

2010-03-31T04:57:00.000-07:00

As I was planning out some thing for this year’s World Cup extravaganza, I realized just how much money and time I put into watching sports. I’ve taken a sort of haphazard approach to sports watching, so I decided to make a plan for live sports that I will watch in the next four years.

My guidelines:

1. Travel to interesting places
2. See a range of sports.
3. Things I’m not much interested in seeing:
-Hockey, golf, the Olympics
4. See some of the teams that I love play games.
5. See big rivalries.
6. I will likely see a lot of local Portland sports, so I didn’t bother to include those.
7. No sporting events that are stupid, not really sporting events or gimmicky: cricket, the French Open, opening ceremonies (if I hear the word “pageantry,” I will kill somebody)

So, with that in mind, here is my sports Bucket List. Feel free to add suggestions and let me know which, if any, you want to join me in going to.

2010:
World Cup 2010 in South Africa
Arsenal v. Manchester United
Civil War @ Oregon State
Texas v. Oklahoma
US Open Tennis
Yankees at Red Sox, Fenway
Red Sox at Yankee Stadium

2011:
Australian Open
Wimbeldon
Real Madrid at Barcelona
Lazio v. Roma
Michigan-Ohio State, at Ann Arbor
Civil War, at U of Oregon
First Round of NCAA Tournament in Vegas

2012
European Championships (soccer) in Poland-Ukraine
Champions League Final
Manchester United v. Liverpool
Alabama-Auburn
African Cup of Nations
Pac10 Hoops Tournament
Duke-UNC @ Cameron Indoor

2013
-All four races in the Triple Crown
-A heavyweight title fight (hopefully the division will be better by then)
-Tour de France, and participate in L’Etape where amateurs can race on mountain leg of the Tour.
-The Super Bowl
-The Black Super Bowl (NBA All Star Weekend)
-Dodgers at SF Giants

A Very Weighty Issue

2010-03-27T12:06:00.001-07:00

When I first got to South Africa, I did a bunch of measurements of myself in order to track my fitness progress. I brought a scale with me from the US that had a body monitor, and I also used a the body fat monitor and scale at my gym here in Cape Town to verify the results.

The relevant data to start with was that I weighed 261 pounds, with 31% body fat. I looked it, too.

Since then, on most days I do two workouts. I either swim for about 1.5km in an outdoor Olympic-size pool, or I run up steep hills near my house. It’s a 4 mile run that is half steep climbs and half descent. In the evenings, I do either plyometrics, push-up/ pull-ups, a leg workout (no weights or light weights, high reps), and an arm and shoulder day. On Fridays I go extra nuts with a morning swim followed by a run. In the evening I do a full-body weight-lifting routine that is a combination of the 12 exercises that I hate the most. I begin with fireman step-ups (25 reps each leg, 60 pounds in each hand, step onto and off of the bench, with a leg raise at the top- heels never touch the ground—try it, it’ll kick your ass). My heartrate monitor goes crazy, and by the end of that murderous stunt, I am usually at about 188 bpm, and the legs are shaking jelly. Repeat 3x. From there, 11 more insidious exercises.

Yesterday I took my measurements again. And I again did it twice, once at home and once at the gym, because I was a little shocked. I weighed 258 pounds, with 21% body fat. At first, I was a little disappointed that I only lost 3 pounds, but then I did the math. (I am not a math genius, so this could be wrong)

February 17th: 261 pounds x 31%bf = 80.9 pounds of fat (yikes!)
March 26th: 258 pounds x 21%bf = 54.18 pounds of fat (still, yikes!)

Fat loss: 26.72 pounds

Now, unless I am missing something, this would mean that I have gained about 24 pounds of muscle in 6 weeks. That seems, frankly, physiologically impossible, but I do notice that I have a lot more muscle and considerably less fat… and I weigh the same, more or less, as before. My arms are definitely bigger, and running up those hills has given me a more Black booty. I’ve also noticed that sleeping on side feels different because when I rest my head on my shoulders, my head is at a different angle.

I’m not really sure what to think of all this. I have been eating *a ton* of food because, well, when you do two intense workouts per day you get hungry. Because I am like that, I fall into patters. This is what I eat almost every day:

Breakfast: 2 eggs
Bowl of almonds and raisins
2 apples
bowl of grapes

Snack: Protein shake:
-3 scoops protein powder
-2 bananas
-2 pears
-1 guava
-3 cups rice milk
-mint leaves
-handful of raspberries
-green tea ice

Lunch:
Steamed chicken
Steamed veggies
3 cups of rice
banana

Snack:
Protein shake:
-3 scoops protein powder
-2 bananas
-2 pears
-1 guava
-3 cups rice milk
-mint leaves
-handful of raspberries
-green tea ice

Dinner:
-2 avocados
-small baguette
-banana
-steamed chicken breast

Like I said, I did not think that it was at all physically possible to gain this much muscle in this short a time, and since the only thing I’m on is food, creatine and protein powder it is a shocking development.

Perhaps those with math or physiology knowledge can point out the error in my ways. There could be technical problems with the machines, but both said the exact same thing.

Yale.

2010-03-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

I am a student enrolled in Yale University, but I do not live in New Haven, and have no plans to return to it full time. One of the many things that I have had the time to sort out in my Kaapstad solitude is that I don’t really like Yale; in fact, on the whole I loathe it. That statement requires some parsing: I have met a lot of really amazing people at Yale, and I know that having the imprimatur of intelligence that the Yale degree represents will in some way help me in my career, whatever that might be. But, having gone to three universities, I do know that this one is my least favorite, and by some distance.

Though a black person can only but feel a deep ambivalence about going to a school that still has the occasional Confederate flag flying and the odd unreconstructed to deal with, I genuinely value the education that I received at Washington & Lee, and understand in retrospect that the school provided exactly what I needed at precisely when I needed it. And, I loved Michigan. The two years I spent there were a lot of fun, and I hit my stride academically. When I think, for example, of the kind of place that I would like to raise a family or teach, Ann Arbor is the image in my mind.

I entered Yale with some degree of excitement, and in the days before classes I met my friends with whom I will likely always be close. Really, over the course of on-again, off-again time at Yale, I have met a lot of good people, and I have very little bad to say about the students I met. I do not, though, have good thoughts about the university itself or my department in particular.

When I was being recruited, I got several calls from professors form Yale, urging me to come. I got a similar treatment from folks at Columbia and Berkeley (had an awesome hour-long conversation with one professor, most of which was spent filling out his NCAA bracket… why didn’t I go THERE?). But, that was basically the most extensive and nicest conversation that I’d have with anyone at Yale. In fact, once I got to Yale I tried in vain for a few months to get an appointment with the person who would be my advisor, to no avail. Always too busy.

The next substantive conversation came from a departmental administrator (I am being intentionally vague here) during my first semester. A few weeks into the start of class, I got an email from Administrator saying that they wanted to talk to me. I replied that I wasn’t one to stand on formality, so I told them to just email whatever information I needed to hear. They insisted that I go to see them, and let me know that it was not a matter of choice. So, I showed up, and waited to have my audience. About 30 minutes later, I sat down, and they proceeded to let me know what Yale’s minimum standards for advancement were and they insisted that I let her know that I understood them, as though having just heard them I would be confused. Incandescent with rage, when they asked me how things were going, I just said, “I think we’re done here,” and left. At this point there would have been reason neither to have concern for me or to think I was the second coming of Herodotus or Thucydides. Grades hadn’t come out, and none of my classes had asked enough of us to have formed any opinion about the likelihood of my excelling or failing out of Yale.

I stewed about this for some time. I was never in any danger of not getting the grades I needed to get. I earned the requisite number of “Honors” grades needed with a few semesters to spare even though by then I had long decided that these people were not my friends, and I would sit in class, lay low, shut the fuck up, get my grades and do my own thing, never looking back. I had no interest in being a star graduate student, whatever that means, or even to stand out in any way. In fact, I looked to distance myself because I thought that a shining light is a bright target.

I remember an interview with John Thompson where he said that black folks are only useful if they’re indispensable. There is truth to that. In the same interview, he said that he always told his athletes to recognize that people will always try to use them, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you understand this, and look to use them in return. He told Allen Iverson, apparently, that he would use him to win a championship, but that Iverson needed to use him to rehabilitate his image, get a degree or get to the NBA.

There is a profound truth to these ideas. I entered into my relationship with Yale thinking that it would be more human and warm, and was quickly disabused. But, in that cold truth I found something purer to hold onto. I was not important to Yale because I had already served my purpose. Whatever box my presence allowed them to check, either on some particular form or in their content liberal consciences, was checked simply by my presence. Beyond that was of no particular weight to them either way. But, I also recognized the truth in Thompson’s second statement: I needed to use Yale to get my degree, get the shine that comes with an Ivy League degree, and use that as leverage to do my thing.

So, I’ve left New Haven, and I’ll likely finish the process of writing my dissertation in Oregon or some other location, flying into the Lion’s Den when I need to. But, once I get my parchment, you can have my slice of Yale. It can burn behind me, for as much as I care. They’ll never get my money, my love, and I can’t imagine I’d ever let Brian, Jr. go there. This is perhaps a cold way to look at the world, but it is true. I would have preferred a relationship with a school wherein I thought people actually cared about me, but I also know myself well to know that I don’t need that.

(**Let me point out that I have nothing but nice things to say about my advisors. They’ve been very good about help when I’ve asked for it, and in my mind they are bright spots in a very dark place.**)

(Not) Teaching History in Rwanda: Why History Can Kill

2010-03-23T05:14:00.001-07:00

While reading about the fight over how American History will be taught in Texas schools, I came across an article about the debate over history in Rwanda. The government there has struggled to come up with a History curriculum that pleases all parties and moves the country closer to reconciliation. The problem, at base, is that the collection of scholars and government types cannot agree upon a narrative that is both factually accurate and productive towards accomplishing the vital task of national reconciliation; likely this is because such a story cannot be told. [Briefly, in the early 1990s a decades-long feud between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis turned into a nasty genocide that claimed millions of lives, spilled over into four countries and unsettled a large swath of east Africa]

The government of Rwanda has begun to move towards a solution of sorts: they blame the Belgians and French. Certainly, these two nations are very much implicated in the genocide. Indeed, before the Belgians came to Rwanda, “Tutsi” and “Hutu” did not exist as distinct units; both sides thought of themselves as members of the Banywrwanda, and in fact the distinction was imposed by the Belgians because they preferred to deal with the Tutsi, whose more European facial features are the source of the name “Tutsi,” or “long nose.” They installed a Tutsi monarchy and protected it, even though this artificial group was a minority. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the French constantly agitated and meddled in regional affairs, eventually setting the sides on a path to war, a bitter reconciliation and, eventually, genocide.

That said, it was not French who wielded machetes and chopped Tutsi children to bits, nor Belgians who labeled the Tutsi “cockroaches,” and declared that Hutu Power would not be satisfied until “all the graves are filled,” a goal that the Hutus nearly accomplished. Similarly, it was Tutsis who abused the Hutus throughout the 1960s and 1970s, excluding them from government and often going on killing sprees –though much smaller- of their own. In other words, the guilt falls very much at the feet of the Hutus and Tutsis themselves (though, certainly in this case mostly the former).

This truth, though, makes for an uncomfortable history for a nation to write about itself. So, for the last decade history simply has not been taught in Rwanda. It is still too raw a nerve with too much at stake for too many people. Indeed, I can’t think of a single country that has ever had the courage to institute its own form “je m’accuse” education.

Though Germany, Japan and the US South faced something of this issue in their own moments of defeat, there are a few things to point out. Rwanda- or more accurately, the Hutus- were never “defeated.” Germany could look around and see the ravages of an annihilated nation. The veracity of the claims of National Socialism were tested in the gauntlet of war and found wanting, and acutely so. As a matter of imposed and accepted law, Germany *had* to rebuke Nazism. So too in the South was their (temporary and partial) genuflection to the Northern perspective on history imposed on them. [Japan’s rather ridiculous and offensive denials and rewriting of history is another matter for another blog…] Rwanda, though, must decide, on their own, what they will think about their great national sin.

Rwanda is not the only country in Africa facing this problem. I came across something rather unusual in my dissertation research. The particular section of my project I was working on concerned how the dark period of South African history –that is, up until about 1995- is now covered in South African schools. I was rather surprised to find out that from 1997 until about three years ago, South Africa basically dismantled its history education in public schools. It discouraged local schools from teaching it, it eschewed the creation of a national curriculum, and made it bureaucratically and financially burdensome for top students to study it in high school or university.

Mandela, who certainly knew history quite well, understood that his primary concern was creating a nation from fragmented and contentious parts. Though we often think of history as an indispensable part of the nation-creating or nation-maintaining process, it can also have the precisely opposite effect. How would Mandela tell the schools to treat the voortrekkers? Many Afrikaners saw them as heroic pioneers who defied odds, conquered a wild land and carved out a nation. A Zulu would be decidedly less kind, and tell you that they are a murderous and racist lot who stole their land and stripped them of their wealth and dignity. In the Venn diagrams of those two histories, only the bare-bones of facts and dates overlap. So, Mandela wisely put the question aside until white were a little more comfortable with the idea of black rule and blacks were a little less inclined to want to exclude white voices from the process of history-making (and teaching).

Ask any high schooler in America why you study history, and they’ll trot out the well-worn phrase, “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Santayana’s caveat, though, is a complicated matter when the wounds are still fresh; in fact, it’s probably precisely and completely the opposite of true. An honest and frank history of Rwanda would point out that Hutus acted as blood-thirsty savages worthy of only the harshest scorn and opprobrium. But, what Hutu parent would want their children to learn this? Though they might need to hear, they don’t want to. In places like Rwanda or the Balkans there is a nasty kind of death spiral that happens when bitter enemies argue about history; no event, tragedy or retaliation is sui generis. Each side can always point to preceding antecedent cause, the unbearable offense of which must be avenged. History would not stitch together a nation, it would rend it.

As someone who is pursuing a Ph.D. in History, it may seem odd for me to agree with any plan that tells people not to study history, but for now they should put down their History books, pick up a math book, and return to these events later on. This is intellectually lazy, perhaps, but the causes of peace, unity and reconciliation must supercede this concern.

I wonder, though, what this means about how I think about teaching History in America… ?

Precious, Revisited. (Already?)

2010-03-16T01:21:00.001-07:00

I got a lot of very thoughtful responses to my blog post yesterday, though most of it came in the form of private emails to me or on my facebook page (and from Chris Patil’s facebook page- thanks, man), so you won’t see all of them posted on this blog. A lot of the emails covered the same ground, so I thought I would write a sort of generalized reply to what I said yesterday. Let me just preface by saying that the beauty of art is that it prompts discussion, so I am very happy people are talking and have opinions. Every single email or post I saw, even the ones I disagreed with, made me think about this movie. I wonder if this is a grenade movie, where ten years from now I’ll say, “I think I liked that movie.” I doubt it… but maybe.

Two More Cents:

I do think that it is relevant to explore the motivation for a piece of art. Motivation and perspective are often indispensable to understanding a piece of artistic production. I would occasionally hear white people grumble that if a white comedian said the things that Dave Chappelle said, they would get castigated for it. My answer is, “yes, of course. And rightly so.” Someone’s position, and the perspective that comes with it, are sometimes the only thing that separates insightful comedy from mean spiritedness, social commentator from just being a dick. People have personal motivations that fuel and motivate their artistic production, and I think it’s important to understand that.

Wanting to know why Oprah and Tyler Perry made this movie is a legitimate question; I would even say that you can’t understand the movie without really getting to that. In the end, this movie is about wealthy blacks offering a perspective on poor blacks. The lack of story arc is part of the movie’s approach, and it is really more anthropological or documentary than cinematic in that sense. In other words, offering a commentary on the plight of poor blacks is not incidental to the movie or just the background against which the movie is set, it *is* the movie. I will return to this point momentarily.

In his book, “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman famously asked whether it is better to be a “C” student in Ohio or an “A” student in Bangalore. There was a time when this question had an easy answer: the former. Now, not so much. Similarly, such is the case with black-white relations. In 1950, a child born to a black doctor would have had a much rougher go than a child born to a white factory worker. In the debate about whether Obama killed racism (or, more fairly, whether his ascendancy to the Presidency signaled its death), people over-simplified what racism was. As a general matter, most kinds of racism are dead in America: in my life I have rarely encountered mean-spiritedness that comes from a disdain for my color. There are a range of historical or cultural ignorances that I still encounter, but as a basic matter as someone with graduate degrees from Yale, I operate in a world that is mostly beyond that.

Racism is, today, best understood as the fossilized remnants of an era when black people’s social and economic aspirations were suppressed. Now that those mechanisms are gone, though, black folks are kept down by the same things that keep their poor white brothers and sisters poor: a lack of social mobility in America. Basically, people’s social class is largely a function of their parents’ social class. Two or three generations after arriving in America, the station of a family is pretty much set, and though exceptions happen, they are rare. Given this, the answer to the question that I asked in the previous paragraph is that, if you wanted to bet on which child would be more successful, you would pick the son of a black doctor, and not the son of a white factory worker.

I know that this particular view of racism is not popular among my black brothers and sisters, and I see there being two reasons for this. First, a lot of older people’s experiences were quite different. They lived through an era of genuine and all-encompassing racism that limited their lives and ground them psychological, physically, sexually, mentally and emotionally. Second, there is a property interest in blackness – for the most part available only to middle class or wealthy blacks, incidentally- that fights to preserve the old perception of racism. Part of maintaining this interest, though, requires that a wide range of perceptions about poor blacks remains in place.

Now, finally returning to “Precious” (a long and winding road to this point!), what irks me is that this movie can only be seen as intending to shine a light on “Black America.” Whose Black America? Oprah’s, Tyler Perry’s, Robert Johnson’s. One of the sad ironies of post-racial America, whatever you take that to mean, is that blacks are largely the authors of our own coonification. “Madea” is in some ways less pernicious because, setting aside its coonery, nobody would actually say that it is good from an artistic perspective. “Precious,” though, makes pretensions to artistic merit, so the messages it sends slip past our walls like a Trojan Horse. In this way, “Birth of a Nation,” which was hailed as an artistic marvel, is an apt metaphor. This is ugly but true: the simian portrayal of blacks in that movie differs very little from what we get in “Precious.” The only difference, near as I can tell, is that Griffith had white actors do the dirty work, whereas here we have a hulking black teenage girl doing the task.

I measure these words, but I believe them… As I watched “Precious,” I just kept looking at the screen thinking, “are these people human?” And that, for me, encapsulates my core problem with the movie. Its central purpose is to show the plight of the poor black, but in doing so strips them of any human quality. I recall Hernstein & Murray’s “The Bell Curve,” whose main theory was that you have a permanent underclass largely determined by their low cognitive abilities. Recognizing this, they said, we need to structure our social policy in a way that recognizes their innate inability for upward mobility. Reading this, I disagreed with the premise, but also probably understood that if the premise were true, so too would be their conclusion. “Precious” presents a comprehensively hopeless world of precisely the kind that Hernstein and Murray depict. Precious will not succeed; she cannot.

The South that Griffith offered us in “Birth of a Nation,” is one in which whites had to rescue their states from stupid and incapable chicken-eating lazy blacks. Hernstein and Murray present a more nuanced, and only slightly less damning, version of that story. Many blacks, they noted, are quite smart. (“phew!” says Obama.) But most of them are not, and we need to recognize that as a matter of government policy. Oprah, Tyler Perry and Robert Johnson complete the process. They are precisely those Special Negroes that “The Bell Curve” suggests might exist, and they offer themselves as a sort of bridge between America and the black unter-America and all of its wonderful cultural marvels (“they are a very musical people,” as Winthrop said…). In exchange for a place of privilege, Bob Johnson will give you some mindless booty-shaking music, Perry gives you a buffoon in drag, and Oprah offers you an Oscar-worthy movie that reduces black people to inarticulate protohumans living off of white largesse.

This kind of racial jockeying is a common and recurring theme in American history. In Latino America, there exist tensions between people from various nations living in the US, and between recently-arrived immigrants and more long-established ones (that there are Mexican “immigrant” families that have lived in California for 350 years is often forgotten). In the black community, this same fight takes place, often with skin tone (though this is less so as in years past) as the decider of rank. We are much more Brazilian in this sense that most would acknowledge.

+++++

I’ll end on a positive. Mo’Nique really was amazing in her role. (I think it was) Ben Kingsley joked once that they should give an award for best actor in a bad movie. If such a thing existed, I would give it to Mo’Nique. The girl can act. Seeing her every Saturday morning at 4am on Amateur Night at the Apollo, I was not really prepared for that. She was amazing, really.

Why I Hated "Precious."

2010-03-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

I watched “Precious” last night, and did so with a great deal of anticipation and some small amount of expectation. After all, I had heard lots of good things about the performances of Monique and Gabourey Sidibe, as well as the bit roles played by Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey. The fact that Tyler Perry was a producer on this movie should have offered ample warning to stay away from this movie, but, his brief appearance as an admiral in Star Trek did not ruin that movie, (though it did conclusively demonstrate that Star Fleet does not have a don’t-ask, don’t tell policy) so I figured that it would be okay.

First, what I liked. The performances of Mo’nique, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz were very good. I think that Mariah Carey is slowly putting together a body of work that will allow us to rightly forget the trainwreck that was “Glitter.” And Mo’nique delivered her lines with a gravitas that shows she can handle serious roles. Generally speaking, I liked their scenes.

Now, to the more substantial issue of what I didn’t like. The movie was terrible; I lack the capacity to, in words, express the annoyance I felt at having wasted two hours on it. In a movie, the most important thing that a writer and director have to do is to make the audience feel some connection with the protagonist. Often, it is helpful if the character is likable or you can identify with their struggle. In this case, I pretty quickly started detesting the dim-witted, blank-faced Precious who, despite the atrocious abuse she suffers, never at all manages to make the viewer feel any kind of real and substantial sympathy for her. I also found myself asking, “what’s the point of all this?” She suffers abuse after abuse, and it is clear that society and her immediate family have failed her comprehensively, but that is not the makings of a movie. What is her story? What development does she undergo? What is her journey? Without any real sense of progress in the character, seeing someone simply beat up by society takes on more of a sense of a snuff film than real movie-making. (I suspect that this is really the underlying intention, but more on that in a bit)

Precious begins the movie as a rather comprehensively stupid girl with a tough life and a baby. She ends the movie as an only slightly less comprehensively stupid girl with a tough life, AIDS and two babies. The last scene where she walks down the street with her two unfortunate offspring is, I think, supposed to make the viewer feel as though she has triumphed. After all, she is reading at a 7th grade level! I just shook my head, knowing that that particular girl had no business caring for a child, let alone two, one of whom has special needs. One can imagine “Precious 2,” and it would involve her son in jail and her daughter in some kind of institute while mom wheels around in her chair after losing her legs to diabetes. The final scene is in fact disgusting and completely dysfunctional.

Before moving on, let me just address, for lack of a better term, the elephant in the room. Precious is enormously fat. She is the kind of fat where her fingers look like overstuffed sausages and seem not to move properly. She is the kind of fat that turns her face into something slightly horrific and over-inflated, with enormous oceans of fat robbing it of its ability to show anything more than one emotion. Though movie stars tend to have healthy bodies and beautiful faces and wonderful bodies, a well-acted role in a well-conceived and executed movie can make you instantly forget, or never notice at all, someone’s physical deviations from the Hollywood ideal. Peter Dinklage in the “The Station Agent” comes immediately to mind. Though, just as someone that small can never go unnoticed for being that small, so it is too that nobody as fat as Gabourey Sidibe is can ever not have her extreme obesity be an issue in a movie. The problem here, though, is that without a strong movie or a compelling story around her, it’s all you notice. My frank suspicion is that she got her Oscar nod in large part because she is just different looking than any other actress. For my part, I found her performance insufferable.

Returning to the movie itself, I wondered why black people love it so much. On its face, it actually paints a pretty dark picture of the black community. With the exception of two well-meaning lesbians and a male nurse, every black character is some combination of fat, stupid, scheming, lazy, hostile, loud, promiscuous, sexually deviant or victimized. I am not one to insist that every movie with black people involve Malcolm X rescuing the ghetto from whitey, or that it has to focus on only black professors and professionals finding some kind of deeper meaning in life or curing cancer. Quite the contrary, really. I think, for example, that the portrayal of black characters in “The Wire,” was fair and good. They showed the full range of human emotions, abilities and shortcomings as anyone else. So, Stringer Bell was smart and savvy, but the circumstances of his life meant that he could only express those traits within the world he knew. The characters in “Precious,” though, seem only able to absorb punishment and survive, in the barest most minimal biological sense of that term. They are not complex, dynamic, capable, strong or smart. They are only victims who make terrible, terrible choices.

As I thought about this movie, it did begin to make sense why Oprah and other well-off blacks would love this movie. Those in the black community who have made it do not really have much use for authentic positive role models for how to succeed, but over-simplified (and frankly offensive) caricatures of the plight of black people is extremely important. It is probably true to say that for people like this racism does not in any way exist as an actual fact that impacts their lives negatives, but it is a powerful tool for silencing white critics, getting access to advantages that they in particular do not need (that rich and middle class blacks, and not poor blacks are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action offers an example), and for providing themselves with an enormous ego boost: damn, look what we escaped from!

“Precious,” like Tyler Perry movies, presents a ridiculous niggerized version of black people: chitlin’ eating, jive-talkin’, scheming, lazy, stupid, licentious coons. But, from the safety of a comfy black suburb, it sure does make you feel good that you’ve come so far. And, it offers a subtle reminder to your rich white friends that you’re something special for escaping this. The only cost is that it cheapens and simplifies black cultural output, and in the resulting caricature of blacks we do not examine the growing chasm in the black community between those who have made it, and those left behind. It is activism on the cheap to love this movie.

A Team for Every Season

2010-03-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Sunday school told us that a man cannot serve two masters; sports fans would certainly testify to the trust of this. After all, I have never met anyone who roots for both Ohio State and Michigan, Duke and UNC or Manchester United and Truth and God; they are simply completely oppositional entities that cannot be reconciled.

Throughout my life, my rooting preferences have been complicated. Growing up in Oregon, I naturally pulled for the University of Oregon. (The fact that I’m not retarded nor a registered sex offended precluded me from rooting for Oregon State) Though I root for my college team, I can’t recall the last time College Gameday showed up in Lexington for Washington & Lee vs. Randolph Macon. My three years at Michigan solidified my support for Oregon, which did make things a bit uncomfortable when the Ducks and Michigan played twice in a four year span. I likened the game to watching my mother and wife fight. But, with no real conference rivalry (and the fact that Oregon lit them up both times) there is not much preventing me from rooting for both the Ducks and Wolverines. Indeed, since Michigan almost never plays night games, and Oregon is on the West Coast, I rarely even have to vote with my remote control.

The Trailblazers, though, pose a much more complex problem. I grew up raised by a Lakers fan. So, from 1984 until now, I have closely followed the ups and downs of that particular franchise. And, if I might add, I am a highly knowledgeable fan. If you give me a year between 1986 and 2010, I can tell you the Lakers starting five, and give you a pretty good breakdown of their season stats and playoff performances. While living in Los Angeles, I often encountered people (usually girls, but that another time…) who told me they were, “the world’s biggest Lakers fan,” a fact about which I was highly skeptical. Asking them to name the lineup for the 1987 Lakers –probably the franchise’s greatest ever team- usually got a lame response. They rarely took kindly to me telling them that they were full of shit and should just buy Clippers tickets. I once attempted to confiscate a poser’s hat. Lesson: don’t drink and talk sports smack to large football players.

Naturally, growing up in Oregon as a Lakers fan put me in something of a hated minority. At the height of Drexler-Kersey-Porter Blazers, Portland consistently fielded one of the top 2-3 teams in the league, played an entertaining brand of ball, and had the loudest and smartest fans in the league. I remember going to a wedding in 1989, which the bride had foolishly scheduled during the playoffs, that was ruined because none of the men wanted to dance (bravo!) because they preferred to catch the end of Game 1 of the Finals.

In many ways, though, the fate of those Blazers mirrored that of the Knicks of the 1990s. They were exceptional, but just as Jordan blocked the ascendancy of the Knicks, so too did Magic almost always relegate the Blazers to a Conference Finals exit, probably most painfully in 1991 when the Trailblazers might have had the toughest and best team in the league, but lost a very cagey series to the Lakers, highlighted by some incredibly heady plays by Magic down the stretch.

I delighted in these series, and I would strut the halls of HHS in Lakers gear letting the suckers know what time it was –probably in those words. As I went off to college, retirement, HIV and a few dud drafts reduced Showtime to something miserable, and only when I went to law school had the franchise put to rest the pitiful Lake Show days and returned to championship form. Of course, it was perhaps only fitting that when the Lakers made it back to the Finals, they did so at the expense of Paul Allen’s billion-dollar Blazers. That it happened in a 4th quarter of a Game 7 that was filled with shenanigans and referee chicanery cut particularly deeply for Rose City residents. (If we are to believe recent allegations, the game was in fact completely crooked. I remember thinking at the time that the Blazers were too good to give up a 15-point lead in 11 minutes…)

I say this as a lengthy way of pointing out that one cannot be both a Lakers fan and a Blazers fan. There’s too much history and bad blood. But…

Something odd happened when I left Oregon for Virginia to go to college. Looking for a closer connection with my roots, I started pulling for the Blazers whenever they weren’t playing the Lakers. In time, they had become my second favorite team. I say this knowing that the idea would absolutely offend real fans from both teams and all fans of the idea of genuine sports loyalty.

Something additional happened when I recently started watching the current iteration of the Blazers. This is a good young fun team. They play an attractive brand of basketball, their players are good citizens, the Rose Garden is a fun place to watch a basketball game and they seem to have real potential (though, I still think that Roy isn’t quite good enough to be the best player on a championship squad). By contrast, the Staples Center makes a mausoleum seem like a Guns ‘N Roses concert, their fans are often pretty ignorant and crappy, and aside from Pau Gasol (yeah, I know, he’s ugly, but a nice guy) there aren’t really any likeable players on the squad. Kobe Bryant is a force of nature, and I am in awe of his abilities as much as any athlete on earth, but I am pretty sure that he is not a good human being. I love him… but I don’t like him. I don’t think anybody does, actually. Does he have friends? *A* friend?

I am on the verge of switching the positions of the Lakers and Blazers, and given that the Lakers are at the pinnacle of the league, it seems a propitious time to do so, as it will allow me to avoid the accusation of being a sunshine soldier. I still love the Lakers, and the Lakers are still, for me, the example of what a basketball team should be- just not *these* Lakers. If I die, I want to be buried a James Worthy #42 jersey (and Arsenal shorts, Michigan underwear and an Oregon hat), but if the Lakers and Blazers meet in the playoffs this year –which seems likely- I’ll probably end up pulling for the Blazers. (of course, in vain)

I am at peace with the idea of this decision because, frankly, I think it makes more sense. If you root for a team irrespective of the players who constitute it, you are, as Jerry Seinfeld quipped, just rooting for a piece of clothing.

But, it is not that simple. I wonder if my desire to drift more towards black and red has much to do with newly strong desire to be attached to my home, and the things in it. This might represent a move away from those things that made me happy as a young person, but that no longer seem to make sense. As Charlie Sheen said in Platoon, “Elias [Roy] will be fighting with Barnes [Kobe] for … possession of my soul. There are times … I feel like a child, born of those two fathers.” I still have a few months to decided, I guess, who is my basketball daddy.

How I'm Doing

2010-03-08T12:36:00.000-08:00

When I arrived in Cape Town two weeks ago, I knew that I had a lot to do, and frankly questioned my ability to do it. I am essentially juggling four balls: editing essays to pay the bills, working on my dissertation to get that Ph.D., working on my movie, and helping friends with their fledgling company. Sprinkle in working out, all the quotidian demands of living –cooking, cleaning, grooming, shopping- and the rather Herculean task of trying to organize a sometime unresponsive group of ten people for the World Cup, and I began to wonder whether the day had enough hours.

I was curious as to how long I had been here, because frankly it feels like it’s been at least a month or two, but in fact it’s been 15 days. I’m sure part of this is the imposed solitude of my schedule; I guess I can understand why it’s so unpleasant for prisoners to be thrown into the box. As I flew to South Africa, I dreaded the enormous amounts of alone time that I would have. And, it was really only today that I began to feel something like a lightening of my spirit, produced in large measure by getting stuff done. Freed from the distractions of television, my day is governed by a 10-item checklist I make the night before.

Now, though, I’m feeling almost Amish in my belief that, through sustained and uninterrupted hard work, I am improving myself. By choice, my days are long and exhausting, and I sometimes wish I had one or two fewer things to do. But, seeing my checklist items get scratched out one by one is amazingly fulfilling.

I told a friend that my life now is a little bit like Will Smith in “I Am Legend.” I wake up at 6am, do 2 hours of work, then swim or run for 90 minutes. Between then and 6pm, I alternate between my myriad tasks, then do 2 hours of my plyometrics and weight training routine. Then, back to work until 1am. Though I do have two new buddies-a dude from San Diego and a girl from Denmark- I told them I don’t have a phone so that I can stay focused on my work. In 15 days, I have met people to do things exactly four times.

Today, I finished my three pages of my dissertation (my first *real* pages; not bullshit introductions or conclusions, but real honest writing and analysis). Three down, 247 to go, eh? I also mashed out four hours subtitling for a series of interviews we did in Brasil. It is tedious work, but this is the first time I had really heard the nuance of these particular interviews, and there are some real nuggets of gold; this movie, whenever it gets done, will be good. I am not really hoping this is the case; I’m starting to know it.

Tomorrow I meet with each of the three researchers I hired to help me out with my project, and I’ll probably finish this batch of subtitles as well. Then, on Friday I am taking a special private tour of the Parliament in order to learn more about the guy I’m writing about. Officium vocat.

If anyone asks you how I am doing, tell them that I’m getting lots of sun, that I am exercising the weakness from my body, that I’m getting my academic mojo back, that I’m cracking hard on my movie and doing my best to fill up my bank account, now and in the future. Yep, good ol’ Brian is doing pretty well.
☺

The Science of Food

2010-03-04T14:07:00.000-08:00

I try not to write blog posts about things for which I have no knowledge. Given that I am perfectly adept at making a fool of myself while remaining firmly within the confines of my supposed areas of expertise, I understand all too well that statements beyond the worlds of sports, politics, law and history are doubly likely to make an ass of me. That said, let me discuss science, or at least my version of it.

Every time I come to Africa, I lose weight. Not a little weight, a lot of it. Last time I went to Cameroon, I lost 35 pounds in 6 weeks. When I went to South Africa in 2006, I lost about 25 pounds in three weeks. Last winter I dropped about 25 pounds in a month. I’ve never gone to Africa with the intention of losing weight; it just sort of happens. When I think about it, it doesn’t necessarily make sense, given conventional wisdom about diet that Americans are given. I eat a lot in Africa, and I even eat a lot of things –like red meat, ice cream, chocolate and fried foods- that you probably shouldn’t eat if you’re trying to lose weight. And it’s not exercise, either. On two of my five trips to Africa I ran every day, but there was not much difference in the weight I lost, or the rate at which I lost it. I lose about 5 pounds per week, almost irrespective of what I do or eat.

Last time I was here, though, I sort of realized something. I bought a big bottle of Orangetiser Soda (basically carbonated “orange drink” of Dave Chappelle fame) and looked at the label. In South Africa, the ingredients are as follows: Carbonated Water, Sugar, Orange Juice, Lime Juice, Apple Juice, Food Coloring. By contrast, in the United States, Orange Fanta has: carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, citric acid, sodium benzoate, modified food starch, natural and artificial flavors, sucrose acetate isobutyrate, sodium polyphosphates, coconut oil, yellow 6, brominated vegetable oil, ascorbic acid, red 40, dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate.

Several things struck me. First- why is there apple in orange soda? Well, as a drinker of a lot of juice in South Africa, almost all kinds of juice have apple in them. Apparently it’s a cheap fruit to add to get sweetness. Second, with the exception of “food coloring” I knew what all the ingredients were. Third, whereas everything in the US is flavored with high fructose corn syrup, in South Africa everything uses sugar.

Obviously, a lot of things go into health and nutrition, but I’ve noticed that when I’m here eating in a very particular way, my body pretty quickly moves to a natural weight of about 215 pounds; in the US, it’s hard for me to stay below 245. This is an enormous difference, really. While making no particular effort to stay fit, I’m at 215 in Africa, and while exercising regularly and trying to watch my weight, I’m 30 pounds heavier in America. Indeed, it’s funny to see pictures of me after I ran a triathlon looking chubby, and pictures of me chilling at a beach in Africa looking thin, knowing that I busted my ass getting ready to swim, bike and run that day, but in Cameroon my exercise was a few miles running 3 times per week and lot and lots and lots of fried chicken.

In the US, there is a lot of talk about the degree to which overweight people simply cannot control their weight; the fact that no other country has our particular issues with weight, though, would seem to indicate, on the surface of it, that we are making food choices that make us fat. I am slowly realizing through personal experience that what Americans get fed makes this an almost impossible mission for a lot of people, myself included. As near as I can tell, there are the differences and similarities in my diet in America and the US.
Differences:
-No high fructose corn syrup (haven’t seen a single thing here that has it)
-Very little dairy- Only dairy I get is cheese on a burger or pizza and ice cream.
-No preservatives- I buy all of my fruits and veggies fresh from vendors
-Everything I eat here is a food. You rarely come across an ingredient where you need a chemistry degree to know what it is.
-No packaged foods
Similarities:
-Same portions
-Same rate of snacking
-Same amount of fried foods
-Same amount of salt
-Same amount of candy and sweets

I understand that food science is an enormous industry, and that much has been written about the evils of high fructose corn syrup as a food, and the industry as a lobby. The slimmer version of myself in the mirror makes me think that there is real truth to the idea that this stuff is not just unhealthy, but in fact it’s a real poison.

It is going to be hard to change the way I eat when I get back to America; packaged food is just so convenient, and high fructose corn syrup is so omnipresent that it will be tough to avoid, but I feel certain that I need to do this. Basically, I’m going to have to create a stricter definition of food, and stick with that. I’ve always rolled my eyes at hippies who don’t eat regular people food, but the fact is that it’s a price I’m willing to pay to be the Africa version of Brian Fobi while in America. It’s amazing to think that if I lived in Africa all the time, I would be 215 pounds all the time, without trying. I want to be that in America, but it will take a lot of work. I used to assume that that work would come at the gym, but it’s more likely to come at the grocery story or, more correctly, the local farmer’s market.

On the Evil Machinations of The Dance Gestapo (Sie werden tanzen!)

2010-03-01T15:00:00.001-08:00

I think that, as much as anyone I know, I’m not really sure what people think of me. I can be nice, funny and occasionally generous, but I’m also prone to moodiness, shortness and mean jokes. People who knew me when I was in high school or before will tell you that I was sort of unmanageable, and you never knew which version of me you’d get. As I’ve gotten older, I’m still just as prone to feeling the same sense of moodiness, but I’m much better at identifying when I’m feeling surly and finding a way to not lash out.

But, we are all imperfect beings. I know myself well enough to understand that I will almost always get grumpy when people insist that I do things that I do not want to do, and that that grumpiness will escalate rapidly when people insist that I do things. The most common example occurs at nightclubs or other social settings involving dancing. In fact, next to you telling me about your dreams (insufferable) nothing will annoy me more than you asking me to dance. But, I always politely decline at first. After all, a girl asking you to dance is a reasonable enough thing to do, so I would never snap at someone who asked once.

The problem, though, is that nobody ever just asks once. People frequently seem incapable of accepting that I don’t like it, and don’t want to do it. So, the girl will ask twice, and a third time, and then say something like, “come on, you *have* to dance.” Dancing is a singular activity in this way. If I asked you to talk with me, play cards with me, throw a baseball with me, or any other activity under the sun, and I declined several times, you would not persist. But those who would have me dance will not relent. Often, they act as though I am playing coy, just waiting for enough demand and adulation to be thrown my way to get me to boogie; in fact, I am usually incandescent with focused annoyance, particularly when groups of people then come together to insist, grab my arm or try to corral me into the dancing pen.

I’m not sure how odd I am in that I just don’t like dancing. I’ve had girls tell me that not dancing is like not talking. To which I tell them that in exchange for me not dancing, I will gladly suffer their silence. Others say that a man’s ability to shimmy vertically will tell you about his proficiency in doing so horizontally. I suppose it’s not for me to say whether these things are true; but more importantly, I guess I just don’t care enough about the impediments that this behavior presents to my amorous aims to change my behavior. Besides, I’m not entirely sure that it is much of an impediment. If I can get a girl to talk to me, I can usually convince her of my wit and charm; if I were to dance, I could only convince her that 230 pounds repeatedly stepping on high heels is painful.

I do, though, have some situations in mind where I will dance. These are usually related to sports victories or brief moments of triumph where displays of unbridled frivolity seem appropriate. But, a touchdown dance lasts 5 seconds, at most, and is over before I’m bored. Songs, at four or five minutes, are an interminable torture.

This might be the grumpiest blog post I’ve ever written, but in this instance I feel justified. So, if in the future, an occasion calls for dancing, feel free to ask me once. When I decline, accept whatever weak excuse I give and don’t press the issue. And, if I say something like, “you know, if you were cuter, I would, but no thanks,” don’t be angry with me. You really did bring it on yourself.

Doesn't Anybody Stay In One Place Anymore?

2010-02-25T15:05:00.000-08:00

I am in Cape Town, very much the other side of the world, and very much by myself. In many respects, the journey to this place and moment has been difficult and trying, and as I begin the difficult tasks that these four months here require, it’s hard not to feel a little overwhelmed at just the thought of it.

Before I left, I had to get a new passport, and the chatty older gentleman noted that I had filled my old passport, so they would get me an 80-page passport so as to save me hassle. I thanked him, but immediately thought, “do I *want* to fill this thing? When I got my last passport, I was 23 years old, and the world was a place to be aggressively explored and known; let my shoes step off every port, let my lips taste every local brew, let my nose take in every foreign smell, and let my ears ring with the unique rattles of every new city and nation. Now, the thought of another transoceanic flight exhausts me, and I find myself feeling attached to a place: home, Oregon.

As I sat in Johannesburg’s labyrinthine Tambo International Airport, I looked at my newly stamped passport. The new passports have pages adorned with various images and sayings somehow evocative of America, and the first page on my visa book, now adorned with South Africa’s gaudy immigration stamp, had a picture an old 18th century warship with a quote above it saying, “It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who not risk cannot win.” I smiled; a fortuitously times that these 120 days have a mission, vital to my future. I draw energy and focus from the sense of enterprise.

So, at least for now, I live a solo life, governed by a schedule I set for myself. Like Will Smith in I Am Legend, I wake up early every day, perform my work and break up the monotony with a downloaded TV show (no, not Shrek) and a long run in the shadow of Lionshead. I read, I write, I do my thing on the computer editing bay, and I eat piles of brown rice, plain chicken breast, raw vegetables and fresh fruit, comfortable in the monotony of it, understanding that this is what must be done, and done well.

I Was Wrong: "The Last Word," Revisited

2010-02-15T01:39:00.000-08:00

“Die Folgen unsrer Handlungen fassen uns am Schopfe, sehr gleichgültig dagegen, dass wir uns inzwischen "gebessert" haben." -Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

At the very height of the New England Patriots' run, fans came to expect a certain weekly storyline. Come about Wednesday, the Patriots would draw inspiration from some insult or show of disrespect. A hapless cornerback would guarantee a victory against them, the Vegas oddsmakers would install them as heavy underdogs, or some coach or player from the opposing team would make some less than completely adulatory comment about the Patriots. In response, the Pats would proclaim that they could not tolerate the insult to their skills and achievements, and would play with a focused frenzy that almost invariably produced a win. In time, other teams came to understand this pattern, and would give the Patriots nothing to work with, forcing the Pats to go to more ridiculous lengths to find fuel for their insult-propelled football machine. I can imagine Tom Brady reading the Boston Herald interview in which Bill Cowher called Brady, “the best quarterback he ever saw,” only to have Tom exclaim, “what the fuck? What about the QB’s he DIDN’T see? Is he saying that Unitas is better than me? And he did NOT just compare me unfavorably to Norm van Brocklin! Oh snap, that is a complete lack of respect!” So frequent were the Pats complaints of disrespect that I naturally assumed that they had signed Aretha to play defensive line. (in fact, they did. To wit: http://www.afrobella.com/wp-content/afrobella%20images/aretha1.jpg and http://nimg.sulekha.com/Others/thumbnailfull/vince-wilfork-2009-11-18-23-12-49.jpg )

As I observed this, I always sort of rolled my eyes, incredulous to the notion that some external insult or prompting could in fact propel someone to be and do better. For better or worse, I had always lived my life with an internal sense of motivation, and I could not imagine a scenario in which an insult motivated me to try hard or caused me to rethink important aspects of how I live my life. Recent events have caused me to rethink this.

Recently, I reached out to an ex-girlfriend. It had been some time since we talked, and I hoped to establish friendly relations with her. To this point, I had always operated under the belief that I could be friends with any of my ex-girlfriends. After all, since none of these romantic relationships ended in circumstances that would obviously preclude friendliness (that is, because of infidelity or physical abuse), I assumed that she would want to be friends. I was wrong. Over the course of a weeks-long email exchange, I received a fairly comprehensive list of my offenses. At every point, I offered a vigorous defense and counter-attack. When my worthy opponent did not relent in the face of my arguments, I wrote her off as some crazy chick blind to my obvious wonderfulness and ungrateful for having been exposed to it.

Perhaps more than most people I have dated, I understood this girl, so her sustained and insistent criticism bothered me, and even prompted something of an existential crisis and comprehensive reexamination of my life's trajectory. Looking for reassurance of this girl’s insanity, I wrote to a few female friends, rather certain that they would back my assessment of things. Instead, they (nicely) told me that I was quite wrong, and that my ex-girlfriend had legitimate and myriad reasons to feel hurt and offended at my apparent insensitivities. More importantly, two particularly close female friends made clear to me the veracity of another of her underlying complaints: I had not been living with a sense of mission, drive and ambition commensurate with whatever talent and potential I might have. Too comfortable in the trappings of an Ivy League education and the dazzly sparkliness of making a movie, I had allowed my life to stall.

In the initial few days after my ex-girlfriend’s harsh words, I felt a profound sense of motivation. I stayed up working into the early morning, woke up early and could only think about work and the things I needed to do. Sleep felt like a guilty indulgence, and my agitation propelled me through 19 and 20 hour days. As someone who had always been internally motivated, this was a very upsetting feeling, knowing that someone had, as my dad would say, “gotten my goat.” I can’t really speak to why this particular instance of girlfriend bulletin-board material bothered me so much, but in the weeks after it, I began to carefully and in detail write out my plans for the future in the immediate, intermediate and long term. I was an odd sort of bureaucrat for my own one-man state, setting targets and goals, making rules for myself, and giving myself incentives for meeting various markers.

What remains to be seen is whether any external motivation can make me do what I need to do in order to be the person I hope I can be. But, if the example of Tom Brady is anything to emulate, then I will let me ex-girlfriend serve as that thing that prompts me to do and be better. Of course, on a serious note, it is sad that we no longer have an association, particularly given her ability and willingness to let me know where I had gone astray. Such people are priceless, and losing them is immeasurably sad. If I have the discipline and strength to continue with my regimen, then at some point in the future, I will owe here some compensation, or at least a genuine thank-you. Sadly, it seems that my own actions have made it impossible to thank the very person who has served as the impetus for me to improve and advance myself.

The consequences of our actions do indeed have a tendency to grab us by the nape of our neck, despite our protestations that we have since reformed.

**********************

One of the things that I realized is that in order to make rapid and real progress on my dissertation, I need to write more. Writing my morning blog entries has in the past really helped me to write the kind of structured and intelligent prose that History requires. Blogging is my form of verbal expurgation, clearing my mind for higher level stuff. We’ll see if I keep my goal of four per week, this time motivated be a realization of the need for it, and not just the vanity of the exercise.

A Morning Well Spent

2009-12-13T01:52:00.001-08:00

Sometimes it's fun to argue about small things.

Me, in an email to friends:

You are up by one point late in the game, and for the sake of argument, let us say that you have a good (but not great) offense, and a good (but not great) defense. You score a touchdown to go up 7 with, say, 2 minutes left. Do you go for two or kick the extra point?

Now, in my 20 years of watching football, I have never (!!) seen a team go for two, which to me makes no sense. Here is my breakdown of why you should:

Go For 2:

If you make it: Game is over, you have pretty much guaranteed that in making it a two-possession game, you win.

If you miss it: You are still up 7, and let's be honest few coaches have the balls to go for two to win a game, so your real worst- case scenario is still probably a tied game and overtime.

Go For 1:

Yes, you do require a team to convert a 2-point conversion, but most teams do this at about 60%+, so it's not that tough, and certainly easier than getting an onside kick and
getting the ball back.

My friend from Alabama insisted that no coach in his right mind would pull this stunt, but to me I can't see why not. If you have a chance to win the game, take it. Sometimes the seemingly safe bet is the wrong bet.

Am I wrong?

~Brian

REPLY FROM KARL:

Here's why your opponent is correct, and it has nothing to do with football. Coaches are fired for making "incorrect" decisions. If the 2 point conversion fails, it will be viewed as a coaching error (regardless of the decision's football merits) because it is unorthodox.

On purely football terms, I think it makes a difference whether you're playing college or NFL because NFL overtime is more of a crapshoot.

REPLY FROM GRAHAM:

Setting Karl's point aside, I still say you go for one in most situations. This needs to be thought of in terms of making a tough play. The kick is the easy play, going for two is the tough play. Either you take the easy play, go up 8, and force your opponents (if they manage to score a TD) to make the tough play, or you force yourself to make the tough play and, if you miss, allow your opponents to force OT with the easy play.

I'm sure we can imagine scenarios in which it makes sense to do what coach Fobi wants, but in general, I say take the point.

REPLY FROM MICHAEL

Oh Dr. Fobi and your game theory questions.

Draw out the risk/reward scenario as a 2x2 box matrix. What you'll find is that your assumption of the 60% of making a 2-point conversion is the critical factor. If that number is say 33% (or any number less than 50%), you'll see that kicking the 1-point is the best option (because the other team is likely to fail a 2-point to tie). For any value over 50%, you'll see that your original 2-point option is correct. This of course depends on both teams having roughly the same chance of 2-point success.

Realistically it depends on how good YOUR team is at 2-point conversions. If your team is >50% then you take the 2-point as you suggest. If your team is suspect then go for the 1 regardless of the other team. That way at least you get a tie and can go to over time. You can figure in how good the other team's offense/defense combination is to see if overtime is weighted one way or the other in the same type of 2x2 matrix and work backwards.

Mike

REPLY FROM ME:

But, that neglects to include the fact that at this point, the two teams tasks are in decidedly different positions. Wouldn't the 2x2 matrix have to take into account your success at making 2-pointers and the other team's adeptness in the two minute offense AND their ability to score 2 or kick a PAT? In other words:

My math is:
Make it= 60% chance of success

Their math is:
(chance of scoring TD in 2 minutes) x (the chance that they will make PAT or 2PT)

~Brian

REPLY FROM MIKE:

It's easier if you assume that each team is basically the same (has good/good offense/defense with equal chance of success in OT and of 2-point conversions), then I think you start with a 2x2 matrix of just what happens in regular time, since in OT they have the same chance of everything (again assuming they are equal). In that case the most important matter is chance of 2-point success in a single 2x2 regular time matrix.

If you DON'T assume that there is equal everything, then I believe you start with a 2x2 matrix of JUST what happens in OT. That gives you the basic chance of your vs other teams success in OT and you can plug that into a new 2x2 matrix for the regular time portion. In that case it matters both what the chances are for 2-point success (both yours and the other teams) as well as the chance of winning in OT from the first matrix.

REPLY FROM KARL

The funny thing is, the coaches do have those cheat sheets, they have a lot of data at their disposal, but they still seem disinclined to take certain chances, like going for it on fourth and 1 when you're within field goal range.

Part of it might be that the data isn't completely helpful (if going for it on 4th down were normal, the data might well change). But part of it seems to be that coaches aren't making purely rational decisions. People have visceral reactions to risk. That's why you get guys like your 'Bama fan who simply can't conceive of a situation where it makes sense to go
for the two point conversion.

REPLY FROM JONAH:

We need to hook the bama fan to a memory-scan machine or find a therapist and find out whether he (he?) ever got burned, either as a fan or while betting or as a player, in this situation. an important emotional angle here is that if your team goes for two and gets it, the win is guaranteed but is less tied to a game-ending situation. It's a de facto win, and unless it's a game of serious consequence, that might water down the rush of victory. if you don't get the two, though, and still win, you end up winning but with a sense of possible doom until the clock hits zero. ...and if you end up losing, you just took a punch in the stomach.

personally, i think a lot of it has to do with a sense of ambivalence about the idea that a two-point conversion can be used to make the game "over." same thing with fouling in b-ball when up by three at the end of a game. it seems "unsportsmanlike" somehow. (now brian's really gonna blow up!)

REPLY FORM BRIAN C:

I don't have too much to add here, so I'll just be a homer and point out that Belichick, in the (home) game against Atlanta earlier this year, went for it on 4th and 1 from the Pats' own 24, up only 6 in the third quarter. I'm sure it helps that he has a LOT of leeway with the fans about his decision making... reinforced by the fact that he's pretty often right, as he was in this case. :)

I remember reading an article where he was asked about that study that encouraged more 4th down conversion attempts. Couldn't find it online, but did find a book excerpt:

"I think I understand some of the points that were made in there and I think he has some valid points," Belichick said after reading Romer’s study in the summer of 2002. "There’s sometimes an emotional aspect, and momentum, if you will, to those decisions, but I’m not sure how to calculate that. One of the points he was making was that if you go for it, particularly when you’re inside the opponents’ twenty, even if you come up short, you’ve got them backed up, they got eighty, ninety yards to go. Do the mathematical percentages of them scoring in that situation versus you getting the ball, and so forth and so on, and that’s a valid point. On the other hand to go down there and get nothing out of it, psychologically there’s an impact there on your team."

"I think that some of those are legitimate points and you just have to evaluate the situation to your team, the team you’re playing," he added. "I see where a lot of that’s coming from."

I still think heads would explode if he went for two to be up 9 in a late-game situation. I'd love it, personally.

REPLY FROM ME:

I hate (x5000) when people foul with 3-point leads at the end of a game. I know that we've gone a bit far afield here, but I think that it is like guys flopping at the end of soccer matches to bleed the clock out. I'm not sure what the rule would look like to prevent this, though Kobe did punish the Warriors this year by hitting a three point shot and getting fouled at the end of a game.

That's right, if there is one person who can clean up sports, it is Kobe Bryant. Kobe and Bellicheck... the defenders of honor and good in sports? Go figure.

Back to the point, I think that the 2-pt conversion is more honorable because instead of breaking the rules to prevent end-of-game drama, you are actually playing within the rules to end the game. Now, that obviously leads to a more complicated question as to whether rule, convention and practice have made fouling in basketball and flopping
in soccer part of the game. Have at...

~Brian

REPLY FROM NICK:

"Breaking a rule" is just an option to take the liability. I can't see a functional difference b/w "playing within the rules" and "breaking the rules" besides some clear intent to harm. Maybe it goes against some sort of "spirit of the game," but I appreciate creative application of the rules, of which penalties are a component.

Shadow Ball

2009-12-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

A great many people have no particular reason for choosing the teams they do. Growing up in Eastern Oregon, my brother’s best friend was a big Cowboys fan, my best friend pulled for the Chargers, and among my little clique, I had Celtics, Lions, Giants and 49er fans. We were all Oregon-raised, and the only thing that seemed to unite us, sportswise, has a shared refusal to join in rooting for what passed for the local team: the Seahawks.

My stepdad, who raised me, was, equally inexplicably, a Rams fan, and I grew up an Oilers fan. An odd mulit-generational moment united us in our choice of teams. He grew up in an era in which only HBCU’s had black quarterbacks, and the Rams’ rather bold decision to start James Harris made him a life-long fan, even though he has had to sit through more than three subsequent decades of almost unmitigated failure, frustration and folly. I, in turn, settled in the Oilers in 1991 –the year I first became an NFL fan- after seeing Warren Moon lead Houston over the Chiefs by shredding their vaunted secondary for 527 yards.

Now, I understand that there is a problematic aspect of choosing a player because of his race, but even these many years later I still find myself doing it. If you told me that I had to put together a team with the fate of the universe on the line, I would tell you that I would want Randal Cunningham at the helm. I have always felt that Donovan McNabb was treated differently, and had to handle more pressure than anyone in the league. I even have a soft spot for Michael Vick, dog-fighting and all.

It’s not hard to understand why, I suppose. The victories and failures of black quarterbacks are in many ways emblematic of what the race has, on the whole, gone through. James Harris represented something of the first iteration of black football helmsman. In the era of The Jeffersons, the vanguard of black achievers often found themselves in lonely country, unable to ever be good or mediocre; they were excellent or gone, and success had to come without the support system of peers to buttress you or trailblazers to lead the way. The 1980s saw something of a regression for the black community, and, just as Jesse Jackson served as a sort of reigniting of hope in politics and thereby pave the way for today’s Obamas and Corey Bookers, so too do today’s generation of quarterbacks give rightful praise to Doug Williams and his masterful performance in the Super Bowl as being the moment that made them believe they could do similar things.

Even now, the black quarterback’s journey runs parallel to the larger societal situation. Certainly, no quarterback can say, like 20 years ago, that they could not get a break solely because they are black. But, the NFL or college starter still finds themselves treated differently and subject to pressures that the Mannings and Bradys of the world would never see. One cannot, for example, imagine a black quarterback being the recipient of the kind of adulation that Tim Tebow receives, nor would Peyton Manning or Tom Brady ever had to deal with the foolishness and racism of a Rush Limbaugh. No doubt there still also exists a pressure to put promising young black players at other positions. Much as with the election of Obama, or the business successes of hundreds of prominent black businessmen, one cannot allow the shining successes of top minorities to allow us to believe that all is fine for the masses of folks below.

So, now I find myself again rooting for the Titans/Oilers, again helmed by the third iteration of Warren Moon. But, in actuality it’s not moon that Young reminds me of, it’s a raw Randall Cunningham, a player who in his own right is sort of a tragic figure. Only once, very late in his career, was he gifted with any other offensive playmakers. He was perhaps the most under-utilized talent of his generation and, all told, might have been the best player I’ve ever seen play. My dad, watching Cunningham do his magic against the Giants, gave me a sheepish chuckle and smile when I told him that Cunningham might be the best I’d ever seen. “Sure son,” he quipped, “but that’s just because there a hundred brothers from a hundred small towns who never got to throw the rock.”

What the Civil War Tells Us About SEC Football

2009-12-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

As the nation unraveled in the aftermath of the 1860 election, all eyes fixed on South Carolina, the most pugnacious and truculent of Southern states. Reflecting on the sheer madness of what was about to ensue, a Richmond reporter famously quipped that South Carolina was “too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” In many respects, this could often have been rightly said of the South as a whole. Throughout American history, the South has been seen as an odd entity within the larger American body politic; at the same time, though, it remains utterly mainstream American, with a history as integral to the founding, maintenance and success (an failures, to be sure!) of the Republic as any region. This tension in which the South is both utterly American, yet completely marginal makes the region an inscrutable mystery to the observer. It is perfectly within the proper conception of the South to note that the most quintessential American town, the fictional Mayberry, was in North Carolina, while at the same time noting that most of the South would seem like a foreign landscape to any visitor from the north or west more familiar with any of the great metropolitan centers on either coast.

This tension has produced any number of ramifications for both the nation and the region, and they are both unique to the region and operate in a rather predictable manner. The Southern man often sees their institutions as completely integral to, separate from and better than broader national endeavors. As someone who has followed Southern history, I see the chest-thumping in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) as completely within this paradigm. We are told, repeatedly and vociferously, that the SEC plays the best football in the nation, and is utterly dominant and a class above all other conferences. Faster, stronger, better and more entertaining, the SEC plays a brand of football more akin to the NFL than NCAA. Or, so we are told.

Two observations about this Southern football exceptionalism are instantly obvious. First, this is a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, fans of college football were largely fans of their particular conferences. With bowl tie-ins, it was a rare and special occasion in which you actually saw your team play a great team from another conference,
and most people had little, if any, real abiding interest in the goings-on of other conferences, and how highly or lowly another conference was regarded did not really impact your team. If, for example, you won the Pac-10, you went to the Rose Bowl, and that was that. In this context, the recent obsession (largely unrequited) that LSU, for example, has with USC would make no sense. The only real exception to this rule was Notre Dame, a team that has rivalries across the nation, and thus provided something of a harbinger of the intense feelings that football nationalization would bring.

Second, the need to trumpet its own conference remains largely a Southern phenomenon. Even when USC traveled to SEC West Champion Arkansas and dropped 70 on them, neither Pac-10 fans nor USC supporters saw this as evidence of conference superiority. In a part of the country in which regional identity remains a minor thing, there simply is not the same ingrained propensity to see match-ups between teams as referenda on entire regions or conferences. Of course, had LSU invaded the Coliseum and similarly dismantled a Pac-10 power, the narrow view taken by USC would not have been taken by LSU’s fans. Californians –and Oregonians, of course- are proud of and love their states, but Westerners have not gone through war, Reconstruction, poverty and a protracted and bloody racial conflict in the same way that the South has, so whereas an acute inferiority complex remains and integral part of the Southern psyche, the Westerner gains nothing on a psychological level by proclaiming that nobody plays college football like they do out west. On the other hand, history, psychology and memory in the South make it all but inevitable that Southerners would fixate on their own conference and proclaim its superiority.

Interestingly, though in high profile match-ups the SEC has more often played Big Ten teams, its fans reserve their most vitriolic rhetoric for the Pac-10. Again, this also fits within the larger conception of how Southerners see themselves and why so many of them see the Pac-10 as the antithesis of what they are. SEC schools, with the exception of Vanderbilt, are all located in small backwater towns, whereas Pac-10 teams are all within an hour or so of major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Phoenix. This rural-urban conflict makes Pac-10 success even more insufferable to the largely rural South. Indeed, politically, economically and socially these two regions could not be more different.

Of course, the unanswered question is whether the SEC is actually better than the Pac-10. On the Pac-10 side is the pretty clear advantage that they have had in head-to-head games in the last 15 years. Winning a little better than 60% of the games would suggest that it is the better conference, or at least fatally wound the notion that the SEC is clearly the top conference in the land. Think of it as a corollary to the old Federer-Nadal Rule: if you can’t even beat your principle rival, how you can claim to be the best?

On the SEC side of the argument, they point to their recent dominant performances in the BCS Championship games. The SEC wins titles. This is not the moment to offer a detailed attack on the BCS, but suffice it to say that BCS has enormous flaws in how it picks teams. Among the biggest flaws is that SEC teams have made it to the title game usually by not scheduling a single difficult non-conference opponent. Florida is particularly guilty in this respect. In other words, if you win the SEC with one or no losses, you will make it to the title game. Though Alabama’s game against Virginia Tech this year was a notable exception, if you stack up the non-conference schedules of the top Pac-10, Big Ten and SEC schools over the last ten years, the SEC schools would, in fact, be quite embarrassing.

Going into the bowl season, we will certainly hear a lot about SEC speed, and how the SEC teams dominate all comers from other conferences. Likely, the fact that this year’s SEC entrant, Alabama, was wood-shedded by Utah last year will be ignored. In the end, it is not much worth much effort to try to argue against SEC dominance, not because it isn’t true but because Southerners are simply psychologically and historically predisposed to oppose any notion that suggests that it is anything but a singularly unique and exceptional conference. Similarly, Pac-10 fans should just ignore the rabble coming from Tuscaloosa, Gainesville, Knoxville and the rest of the SEC hamlets because it will continue for reasons that have a lot more to do with Appomattox and Gettysburg than anything that ever happened on a football field.

Das Obamareich

2009-08-16T17:41:00.001-07:00

It has come to this…

In a post a few weeks back, I noted how one of the constant frustrations of teaching History to high school students is their unusual fascination with the Nazis. For every argument one might make, it seems that there is a cautionary warning that emanates from a dark corner of Das Dritte Reich. It usually amused me to hear students bicker about which side of the argument more closely resembled the pure paradigm of evil; it was a measuring stick against which to judge every argument. What is slightly amusing among high school students has become completely intolerable in contemporary adult political discourse.

This week, we were all treated to a health care debate that somehow morphed from a rather wonkish discussion of cost containment, insurance, and public-private competition into an ugly donnybrook in which Nancy Pelosi called Republicans “brown shirts” (a reference to the Nazi SA: toughs who initially went to political rallies and roughed people up) and protestors showed up to Obama speeches with signs that likened Obama to Hitler. Any reasonable person can only but come to the rapid and right conclusion that both sides had deployed an inapt metaphor that both grossly mischaracterizes their opponent and also demonstrates an acute lack of understanding as to what the Third Reich did and was.

Those who study the Holocaust and exert much effort into making sure that that horrible era remains a part of our conception of the world and the limits of human depravity often deploy the phrase “never forget.” I would humbly suggest that now is the time for us to forget. We have, it seems, over-learned the lessons of National Socialism. Every charismatic political figure is a potential Hitler, every attempt to use diplomacy or compromise when dealing with a despot or madman returns us to Munich, every diplomat who urges restraint is a spineless Neville Chamberlain. Indeed, it would seem that every slippery slope conceived in the last sixty years ends in Nuremberg in 1936, Poland in 1939 or Auschwitz in 1943. A tax raise cannot be to simply generate revenue, we are told; rather, it must end in the subjugation of our national rights under the jackboot of fascists. Yes, a 1% capital gains tax hike, a .05 cent per liter soft drink tax or a rollback of the tax bracket to 1999 levels will, somehow, set us down the path oppression, war and genocide.

On some level, this is understandable. If ever a pure villain could exist, it is the Nazi regime. Efficient in their murderousness, always smartly dressed and filled with beguiling propagandists, they were the closest personification of Lucifer that we could imagine. So, when some poor fellow in Arkanbama gets really steamed at Obama and he looks for the perfect label to slap on his President, Hitler works well as hyperbole. Some years ago Jesse Jackson held a funeral for the word “nigger,” and perhaps it is time to start digging a six-foot hole for our use of Nazis in the public discourse. After all, when was the last time you heard a Nazi analogy that made sense? I cannot recall one. Quite the contrary, in fact. The moment someone brings them up, they are almost certainly talking rubbish. (to wit: this blog) On the other hand, I have heard the example of Nazism used to argue against everything from the national highway system (Hitler built the autobahn!), to the space program (Hitler built the V2 rocket! Werner von Braun was a Nazi!) to national health care (Hitler wanted a public option?). Our fixation with Nazism has, in part, helped to justify our misadventures in the Balkans and Iraq and helped to create the zero sum good and evil world that makes reasonable accommodation impossible.

As many of you know, I have no particular love for Obama, but (and it’s sad I have to even say this) it is completely ridiculous to compare him to Hitler. Even supposing that he was everything that the far-right believed him to be, and even supposing that he accomplished every nefarious end to which he is supposed to be working, he would come nowhere near Hitler in either degree or kind. Having studied German history, I would assert that he is more of a Gustav Stresemann than anyone who every walked the halls of Hitler’s Reichskanzlei… but, I’ll save that nerdy discussion for another time.

For now, I will make this promise. You will never hear me compare anything to Hitler, to the Nazi Party, to the Third Reich or to the Holocaust. It is as irresponsible as it is ridiculous. In fact, unless you want to have a nerdy discussion about tank battles, air power’s impact on industrial production or the training of military dogs, I won’t even mention the Nazis.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that I won’t use historical hyperbole to describe people I don’t like. After all, we all know that that muthafucker Paul Pierce is worse than Stalin, and Coach K is the Mao of North Carolina…

Helen

2009-07-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

Photographs are profound and strange little things. When I look back on my life and the events it has contained, I do so in a way inescapably intertwined with the visual records imprinted on the 3x5 papers stored in the dusty and old family albums. I cannot imagine my mother as a child existing in anything but black and white, frozen with a knowing grin that would, from time to time, surface in my interactions with her as an adult. And though my memories of being in Cameroon as a young child with Aloysius, my older brother, are far too distant to be anything other than a manufactured memory, I have in my mind the sepia-toned recollections of him and I loving life and each other on a dusty apartment complex in Site’ Vert, Cameroon.

My grandmother died this morning. The event, we are told, took place in her sleep. Though this manner of exit is perhaps most merciful, I get the distinct impression that she would not have liked it. Though quick with jokes, she could be a difficult and cantankerous woman, and as such I cannot think that she would have liked going softly into the night without one last rage against the light’s dying.

I did not really know her until lately. Sure, she was around me growing up, but I knew her as a small child knows a grandparent. Only lately, when recent visits had given her the comfort that I was progressed enough in life to be treated as something more an equal did I learn the circumstances of her life and, by extension, the true contours of her character. In some long conversations over Yahtzee, she told me of her youthful days and her move to Los Angeles, where she had planned to be an actress. She lived off Melrose, and worked hard to improve her singing, performing around the city while waiting for her big break. Her photos from those days, cracked, brown and only slightly resembling the woman I knew, show a young beautiful woman seeming on the verge of something.

Then, she met a tall thin man some two decades her senior, with a fiancée to boot. A major studio had recently given her a screen test, and with Homer, my grandfather, soon to leave town on his railroad job, she faced a decision: stay for the screen test, and perhaps be in the movies, or join him on the next train north to Oregon. My existence is evidence of the choice she made. My grandfather died while I was still quite young, and the only real fact that I truly remember about him is that he liked to eat oatmeal and watch Good Morning America. He was simple, in the best sense of the phrase. Excavated photos of their life together always show him with an easy country smile, always thin, always tall; her, with more active and squinted eyes, clearly the more intellectual nimble of the two, with a sharp tongue to match.

These stories surprised me, and for some time afterward I had a hard time reconciling the young beautiful actress living alone in the big city with the old woman who went to church daily and bought me over-sized Hanes underwear for birthdays and Christmases. But, I suppose such is life: none of us are really ever all one thing or all the other. We are amalgams and chameleons. Though my grandmother told me about that sassy 19-year-old would-be starlet, I could never really know her. She was gone, left behind on a train platform in Glendale, California, exchanged for a life with Homer, three daughters, nine grandchildren, seven great-children and innumerable schnauzer dogs, replaced one after another when they died, and all named Sweetie.

One picture of my grandmother stands out in my mind. My mother took it on a vacation to the Oregon coast some 25 years ago. While watching my brother play, grandma stands, arms crossed, looking out. I don’t know why that picture strikes me. It certainly doesn’t fit with my recollections of her appearance –her hair is quite short. I think it is because, in some sense, she always had her arms crossed. Inscrutable and often evasive about the facts of her life, she preferred not to be known. She resisted divulging where she was or what she was doing before she turned up in Los Angeles, and inquiries into my family’s ethnic past reveal only that she thinks she has some Indian blood. I also wonder if, looking out as she did into the dark waters, she plays out alternate scenarios in her head about her choice to leave Los Angeles. Of course, counterfactuals yield their mysteries even more grudgingly than Helen herself, and she could never know.

Now, whatever thoughts or dreams she had are gone with her, and I, and we, are left with just the memories and mysteries. We will bury her, and a man with a Bible will speak with too much certainty about the places she now is, and the processes she is now undergoing under the protection of celestial beings. That immortality may or may not exist; who am I to know the contours of the shore on the other side of the dark waters? But, she lingers on in photos, and in the bits of her that are in my blood and matter. In time, the photos will fade, the people who are in them will also disappear, and her blood will diffuse. But for now, I will remember a cold summer day on an ocean beach not far from where I now sit, playing in the water with my grandmother, Helen.

Resquiescat in Pace

The Last Word

2009-04-30T07:19:00.001-07:00

I had a friend, some time ago, who seemed to break up with women with whom he went out with surprising ease. Once, during a study group, he said, “I have to take care of something,” and then picked up the phone and broke up with his girl, using no more than 100 words to end a 5-month relationship. I say that he “seemed” to break up with women easily because, invariably, about a month or two later he would get drunk and write them a nasty letter and mail it to them (yes, mail. Not email.). In this letter, he would detail her sins and suspected acts of sluttiness, usually using no fewer than five or six pages of notebook paper. I thought it was odd, but he maintained that this was typical man behavior, and told me that I was odd for not wanting to launch one last fire bomb at an ex, just so that she would wake up every day lamenting what she didn’t have.

I have, of late, had occasion to contemplate the nature of moving on, and one thing that eludes is the need to have the last word. When a relationship has run its course, both sides have openly acknowledged as much, and the time comes to shake hands and move on, I really can’t see much point in convincing the other side that I’m right, or even of imparting to them my side of the story. If nothing else, if they don’t get it by now –and, obviously, if it has come to this point, then don’t- they won’t ever get it. The more personal observation for me is that, in my advanced age and cooled soul, I can’t see myself being so angry about any particular situation that I would feel the need to inflict my opinion on someone else when they may be happier leaving the situation believing whatever nonsensical notions they held about me and us. Think of it as my contribution to Gross National Happiness. Magnanimous, no?

If I were to guess, I would say that the counter to my position is that in order for a love affair to work, both sides need to inject it with a great deal of heat and passion, and passion is non-logical. And, once you operate in service of purely emotional needs while within the confines of a relationship, it would be unusual to change the nature and patterns of the association that one has with their erstwhile amour simply because the romantic relationship has changed.

I can see the logic of this approach, and in some senses I would condemn myself for intentionally trying to always keep myself at mild. I do think, additionally, that I am better off for not engaging in insulting and ugly post break-up behavior because I would be very good at it. In high school, I made two girls cry with quick and too-cutting comebacks to playful remarks, and sometimes whiskey has the effect of making me saying hurtful things with too great skill, and if given the venue of six pages, I could probably reduce someone rather comprehensively.

My Soccer GOAT List

2009-04-10T06:14:00.001-07:00

A very lazy post today...

I had a GOAT (Greatest of All Time) sports discussion with a friend of mine recently, and I came away making the point that the "of all time" business was a little silly. Different eras, different styles, and the fact that I really only ever saw highlights of many players who played before, say, 1984, make it quite impossible to make such a list. I instead thought that the argument should be limited to the best players that I ever saw. With that in mind, I begin the first of my five-part series, which I will intersperse with other blogs. Today's topic: soccer.

Here is my "Greatest of My TIme" list. The criteria that I used are that, 1) I had to have seen them play several matches over the course of several years; 2) I would try to stay as true to what a coach would want to field as possible. In other words, 11 strikers is a little silly; 3) I don't necessarily give credit for longevity. This isn't the hall of fame, so I'll take what I consider the player's best 3-5 years and use those. Finally, I like a 4-4-2 lineup. Keeps it simple.

Starting XI:

GK: Gianluigi Buffon
-Sitting 5 meters behind him in the Italy-Ukraine World Cup QF match was the highlight of an otherwise cruddy match.

DF: Dunga
-Brazil doesn't get enough credit for its national teams' defenses, but Dunga is rightly praised as brilliant.
Rio Ferdinand
-Perhaps laughable, but every time I see him play, he is really rock-solid. I even prefer him at his best to John Terry.
Dennis Irwin

Fabio Canavaro

MD: Genero Gattuso
-In nine years with the national team, he has scored one goal. In 10 years at Milan, he has scored seven goals. But, every team needs a Gattuso to frustrate and agitate, and he is the best at this. For a guy who really isn't very good at kicking, he's a hell of a soccer player.

Zinedine Zidane
-Not much to say here; I think he falls just short of the GOAT conversation, but when he was on, he was peerless.

Diego Maradona
-I didn't see him in 1986, but his efforts in 1990 were good enough to make the list.

Ruud Gullit
-Probably the first soccer player that I loved. Thought about putting Cristiano Ronaldo on this list, but I frankly find him insufferable, despite his amazing skill.

FW: Thierry Henry
-People who know me would find this the least shocking of all the picks.
Rivaldo
-This guy was amazing, and but for some poor career choices, I think that his career would have been more productive. But, a World Cup and a few FIFA Player of the Year awards aren't bad.

On my bench:

FW: Marco van Bastern
FW: Roger Milla
-Mostly to keep my family happy, but still, if ever a man was a super-sub.
FW: Patrick Kluivert
-I know, his career trajectory took a premature downturn, but don't forget that in his prime he was amazing.
MD: Patrick Viera
MD: David Beckham
MD: Luis Figo
MD: Ryan Giggs
MD: Philip Cocu
D: Jaap Stam
-This guy just always sort of impressed me
D: John Terry

Fond Recollections of Bruises, Bloody Noses and a Broden Rib

2009-04-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

In his piece, “Miles Gone By,” William F. Buckley talked about giving up sailing because his advancing age no longer allowed him the vigor and energy needed for this pursuit. Though certainly not as old as Buckley was at the time, and probably not as infirm, I have of late had cause to think of the passing of stages of life and the meaning that such transitions have. Of course, I can still do most of the things that I could do at my physical prime, which was probably about eight years ago, but I do none of them as well and few of them as often. Wordsworth, in his “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” suggested that the trade-off of advancing incrementally, though certainly interminably, towards physical oblivion is that the “years that bring the philosophic mind,” come at the cost of being less capable of engaging the world that we come to better understand.

What Buckley experienced after he took his boat on its final voyage I feel whenever think back on a dank, hot and crowded gym in south Los Angeles. Lincoln was a slight and wiry, but freakishly strong Pernambucan man who trained newbie would-be boxers like me who showed up. At 25 years old, most of the new boxers were about ten years younger than me, but I picked up the basics as easily as anyone. At the time, I was a slim 223 pounds, which put me firmly in the heavyweight division that consisted of fighters from 200 pounds and up. The “and up” is important because even in his little venue all of the people against whom I sparred were 20 pounds or more heavier. Sometimes their weight advantage took the form of stomach paunch that shielded them from my jabs, and other times it took the form of additional sinews that added snap and power to the punches that they sent my way. This left me the difficult choice of losing 24 pounds to fight lighter men or toughening up. I elected the latter option.

People box for any number of reasons. Some do it because they see it as a profession. One does not decide to pick up gloves and headguard at twenty-five with misapprehensions of becoming a professional fighter, and certainly this was the case with me. At any rate, my skill simply prevented it. Others do it because they love the pain that the sport metes out. No kind of training is as difficult as boxing, and as I would learn in my first three round sparring session, skimping on road work, heavy bag time, the vomit-inducing abdominal routines or the footwork drills would have serious consequence within the squared circle. In my time in the gym, I noticed that the Mexican fighters seemed to relish this aspect of the sport. They took the pain, pushed forward and viewed a step back or a defensive posture as an affront to their manhood.

To be frank, I did not like the pain. Hated it, actually. In my first ring session, after taking a few shots below the belt from a large man who, moments earlier, had shown me pictures of his newborn daughter, I turned my back to him. Lincoln was enraged and stopped the session, and rightly so. Boxers never turn their back because it exposes the back of the head and the liver, two parts of the body which when hit can in the case of the liver cause enormous pain, and in the case of the head cause death or paralysis. Instead, a boxer rolls their shoulders to avoid shots. (To the unfamiliar, you do the move by tucking the chin next to a raised shoulder, which you then pull slightly down and into the body, as if making a half effort to touch attached chin and shoulder to the opposite hip) When I protested that my sparring partner had hit me below the belt, Lincoln punched me in the groin (hard), and said, “this not golf, this place not country club, he will hit you, maricon!” Just what I needed to hear, I redoubled efforts.

Other people come to the gym because they want to inflict pain on others. This never really applied to me. In my sessions I had no abusive father or licentious priest to mentally place in the stead of the man standing in front of me. I wanted to inflict the pain primarily because this would prevent me from being the recipient of my opponent’s evil designs: the law of the wolf. I came to recognize that boxing is not well-performed while angry, something that does not always seem apparent to the casual fan who sees the savagery of it. In a small gym like this, though, there were certainly those who saw the ring as their venue for venting their rage, and I suspect that I took some pancake sized bruises because Johnny got an earful for not remembering date night or Chavez’s father hit him as a child. The patient and trained fighter can always deflect angry passion, and sometimes when I saw the existentially agitated man trying in vain to penetrate the defenses of someone craftier and calmer I thought of Melville’s famous description of Ahab:

“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

I enjoyed the late afternoons I spent in the gym, and though I can remember few of the names of the men I trained with or fought against, I do miss the sense of fraternity and accomplishment that these moments gave me. Christina, the girl I dated at the time, would always shake her head in concerned befuddlement when she saw bruises and wonder why. Without a clear understanding of why I did it in the first place, I still cannot answer this question, but now, some seven years on, I only know that I miss it. I was never fitter than I was then, and the training infused me with a kind of mental sharpness and suppleness, confidence and all-around steeliness that no activity that I now undertake gives me.

Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is an appointed time for every activity, and at 32, now is not the time re-learn the footwork, hit the heavy bag, and put myself in front of someone who places the sum of his life’s rage on the delivery end of a pair 8-pound Everlasts. So, in its absence I will seek something else to fill that gap in my soul –perhaps Wordsworth’s philosophic mind- all the while treasuring the moments in which, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “in my youth my heart was touched by fire.”

Me, Or Something Like It: Facebook as Amateur Performance Art

2009-03-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

Facebook fascinates me. The nature of my life and work means that I spend a lot of time at my desk, and when writing, or editing or research becomes tedious, facebook offers a quick diversion. I used to have a big bowl of Tootsie Rolls on my desk that performed basically the same role, giving me something to do in the pauses in which my brain reloads and prepares for my next output of genius. But in deference to my teeth and pancreas I jettisoned the sweets, replacing them with something equally saccharine and devoid of actual quality content.

One thing that I haven’t quite figured out about the site, though, is how seriously to take people who take it very seriously. Former students who leave profile messages like “Lance wonders if his broken heart will ever heal!” or “why are men such dogs?” perplex me, and seem completely at odds with my own approach, which is to play to my most puerile and immediate distractions; so, instead of offering a real emotion or assessment of my life’s trajectory or my current mood, I’m much more likely to say, “Brian wonders why they call it taking a dump- you’re not really taking anything. They should call it leaving a dump.” And, if you ever see that I have apparently left a status update that reveals something profound or deep, then you’ve probably just missed the movie reference or song quote.

I recognize fully, though, that my approach to facebook is, at base, no different than people who approach the endeavor with such complete earnestness. The authors of most facebook status messages really want their audience to see themselves as they see themselves, or likely more accurately, how they wish they saw themselves. Facebook pages are a kind of aspirational self-image projected out to friends. See, I travel to interesting places, have lots of friends, feel complex emotions, am as clever as you… I do this too, but in a slightly different way, and when I became fully conscious of it, I put my facebook page on steroids and allowed it to be the source of immense amusement.

Armed with my iPhone facebook ap, I offer constant updates on my life, almost all of them false or at least massively overstated. My profile pictures also offer a puffed up version of some rather mundane daily events. I’m eating pie, muthafucka! [guitar riff! I’m extreme!] Why show a boring picture of me for my profile? After all, that says nothing about me, you know, as I *really* am. I do not root for Michigan sports, I AM Michigan sports; it is a description of me that is profound and existential… so, why not have the Fab Five as my profile picture. I want people to look at my facebook page, so I make a fan club so that everyone can take part collectively in the most ridiculous and inflated version of my aspirational self image: Brian Fobi, superstar. I am a badass mutha who spits fire and karate chops al Qaeda terrorists. I am a man’s ladies’ man, a genius, an athlete, raconteur and generall all-around badass… or at least that guy with the Brian Fobi facebook profile is.

I wonder what we’ll think about facebook in the years to come. Some years ago, in its early stages, I remember joking with a girl, saying “we’ll take a picture together, and tomorrow when it’s on facebook, we’ll look on it with fondness knowing that it’ll be on there forever.” She seemed not to get my sarcasm (good for her), and was genuinely excited about the prospect of what an ordinary photo meant for her and her apparent relationship to perpetuity. Facebook has almost destroyed the concept of voyeurism because millions of people now want others to track their hourly or daily doings, skim through their pictures, and know everything about their moods, frustrations, and triumphs. I enjoy it too, of course. Who wouldn’t? But, in realizing the fundamental dishonesty of facebook, I’ve created a sort of alter ego that allows me to get the gravy, sans the grief of having to risk people knowing your actual thoughts and emotions. Brian Fobi: based on a true story! My facebook page seems to represent and chronicle the life of someone whose general appearance, behaviors, and triumphs mirror my own, but is also largely a creation of fiction. I suspect that most of my (smarter) friends get my joke, but I also know that part of the joke is, itself, disingenuous. Sure, part of the pleasure of having a facebook fan club is laughing at how silly it is, but the other part of the enjoyment actually comes from having a fan club… even a fake one. The layers there say lots of things, but mostly it would suggest that it makes my approach to this particular social network, my little bit of performance art, fundamentally the same as the undergraduate girl who posts her drunken bikini pics, celebrates the arrival of her new Lexus in ways that mangle syntax, capitalization, grammar and modesty beyond recognition, and uses the “single” and “in a relationship” status as a weapon against her tanned and Pomaded boyfriend who himself laments that “chicks are stupid sometimes.” I’m not being meta or clever… just sort of douchey and pompous. But, it amuses me.

The "No, Nothing" Party

2009-03-16T11:09:00.001-07:00

Where is Hamilton When You Need Him?

Out of power, the Republican Party has suddenly begun a search for principles. Abortion, an issue that they more or less ignored for eight years, has again resurfaced as a hot-button issue, they have decided to dig in their heels to try to offset the momentum of history by opposing an expansion of gay rights, and they have begun to trot to some of their favorite old canards from the 1980s. Somehow, they’ve even found the nerve to drag out Reagan’s old line that, “the nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” This line wasn’t really funny when it was first deployed, and time hasn’t improved it in this respect. Moreover, that anyone would have the temerity and too-short memory to drag out this line of thought post-Katrina is more than a little shocking; the thousands who died suffered from too much government intervention?

It probably isn’t fair to attack an applause line for its faulty logic, because these statements are obviously meant to bypass the frontal lobe and access the more reptilian parts of the brain buried deep in the skull. That said, I think about this for two reasons. First, recent history has had so many “really, you’re being serious?” moments emanating from the GOP that I can’t much tell anymore how to distinguish simple verbal bluster from the party’s core philosophical and policy beliefs. Second, the fact that lines like this get so frequently deployed is a sign of something more basic wrong with the Republican Party: its lack of a real intellectual core.

Almost every policy debate in American government comes down to answering the question of whether the task should fall within the scope of tasks that government perform or whether it should be left to private enterprise. Competing interests have engaged in a tug-of-war that has been with us since Hamilton-Jefferson, and at various moments myriad tasks been done either publicly or privately, depending on the mood of the particular of the sovereignty performing the undertaking. Americans have resisted most (perhaps all?) stated formulations or tests for deciding when a task should be done publicly or privately, and rightly so. Instead, we take a sort of ad hoc approach, the outcome of which is decided by some mixture of practicality, political pressures, and our natural national suspicions about what kinds of things the government should do and what it should not. As such, pronouncements like “government is best which governs least,” are both almost instantaneously obviously logically flawed and counter to the national disposition. (This statement is especially stupid to me. I wanted some brazen Democrat to point out, in the aftermath of 9/11, that the government’s failure to act must have, by this standard, good government. We did nothing, we are good Republicans!)

The Republican approach, as does an approach from the other end of the spectrum that sees government as always the answer, has the benefit of simplicity but has the disbenefit of being too often wrong. In the current climate any argument that depends on the competence and intentions of private actors cannot be taken seriously, and dogmas that take this stand have little place in a responsible national discourse.

In a nation that has succeeded so spectacularly in so many ways, in seems silly to have to point out the many ways that America’s governments have been equal to the monumental tasks they have faced. In the last century, the government has won two world wars, put a man on the moon, spread democracy, killed communism (almost…get with it Cuba!), produced an amazing system of public universities doing cutting edge research across a broad range of fields, built an interstate highway system that is, to date, the single largest engineering undertaking in world history. Our post office is profitable, cheap and efficient, the government invented the internet, and goods and services move across a state borders with relative ease.

This is not to say that all of these undertakings function perfectly. One could, as Milton Friedman has, argue that private universities do a better job of educating students. Some do, of course. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Tulane University’s New Haven campus (sorry Scot) offer better overall educations than, say, Cal State Fullerton. And, our highway system has, in its efficiency, had a number of externalities related to urban sprawl. In the case of private universities, though, most good private school are priced beyond the means of most Americans, and for every elite private school, there are two that are below the standard offered by large flagship state universities like Cal-Berkeley, UVa and, of course (!!!) the University of Michigan. As to the highway system, there is no reason to believe that private highways would have prevented to the problems we now face and there are many reasons to believe that they lack the scope of power to solve them.

These arguments have come to the forefront because, at present, we have seen an enormous expansion of the federal government and, through federal largesse, the constituent state sovereignties that make up the federal union. As Obama pushes to expand the influence of the federal government in the economy, he has publicly faced a great deal of pressure from conservatives who assert that government intervention cannot save the economy; rather, it will certainly only make it worse. As I have often said that I don’t much understand economics, but I do have some familiarity with economic history, and this suggests to me that conservatives are off the mark.

Most surges in the American economy have historically come about through some combination of federal intervention and a paradigm shift in how the American economy works. For example, Hamilton’s national bank completely transformed the national currency, credit, trade and business system, allowing us to expand beyond the narrow limitations of Jefferson’s vision. (People who fear bank nationalization would be wise to read about Hamilton and the soaring success of this particular endeavor) In the 19th Century, federal legislation and active intervention (including, oops, the removal of Indian tribes who stood in the path of American expansion) allowed for the building of the railroads, which created a national marketplace and the first generation of titan businessmen whose fortunes were not derived from slavery. In our century, the technological boom sparked by the advances needed to beat the Wehrmacht and Tojo’s navy, along with the subsequent GI Bill allowed for a mid-century period of growth. This is to say nothing of the federal enforcement of civil rights laws, which allowed for the full entrance of racial minorities and women into the American economy. The economic benefits of equality are too infrequently discussed, but it should not be diminished.

As the Republicans rebuild their party, I sincerely hope that their insistence that government is the enemy is merely a rearguard action of a party in retreat, and that as they reform their skirmish lines, they find a way to offer a more reasonable countermeasure to Democratic rule. Unlike other people who will call them out for hypocrisy after 8 years of profligacy, I prefer not to do this because I do not begrudge people for attempting to return to their ideological roots. I do, though, fault anyone for clinging to foolish ideas, and this idea is especially foolish. Moreover, I am always made a little uncomfortable about people creating a too-stark distinction between people and government. I believe, as did Lincoln, that in a democracy no real distinction exists between people and government. Government, of, for and by the people is not just a hollow motto; it must exist as a powerful and central tenet of all who support the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

L.A. Fitness

2009-03-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

Approaching a week in Los Angeles, and I am rapidly remembering how much and why I dig this city, and the West Coast, so much. This was never actually meant to be much of a vacation, and indeed I brought along a great deal of work to do while here. The most important objective was to put in long hours on the bike and to do some intense(ish) hill running in preparation for May’s Wildflower Triathlon.

My friend, Aaron, with whom I am staying, works as a Neuroscience professor at USC, and as he is still getting his lab set up, we have some latitude about coming and going from lab. Our days start at 7am with a run up to Griffith Park Observatory, which is great. To the unfamiliar, GPO offers some excellent and intense hill running with alternating views of complete wilderness and downtown Los Angeles. Though I’ve lived in Los Angeles, I still get a minor thrill out of rounding a bend of a steep hill and seeing close up the Hollywood sign that overlooks the city.

From 9 until 5pm or 6pm, we work in Aaron’s office. Me, looking at tape and Aaron working on grant applications and the myriad administrative duties that startup (upstart?) scientists have to deal with. Then, in the evening it’s off the L.A. Fitness for our second workout of the day. The thing that is immediately obvious in L.A. Fitness, and in Los Angeles in general, is the degree to which the attractiveness bell curve in this city is so markedly right-shifted as compared to New Haven, and even New York City. The 60th percentile 25 year old female in downtown Los Feliz would be the most beautiful woman in New Haven, and given the level of physical fitness that most young people exhibit around these parts, I suspect that the same would be true of men too.

A lot of people would be intimidated to be surrounded by people who look this good, but beyond the pleasure that eye candy affords, I find that on an internal level I like what it does to me. My worst tendency is that I will often adjust my efforts to my surroundings. Whether in school or in sports or in other endeavors, I figure out what the minimal effort that I need to achieve a particular goal is, and from there I simply hit that target. This is why I always try to set very high goals (Yale Ph.D., triathlons, etc.). I lack the capacity to either fail or excel at anything; my pride is too large to countenance failure, and my laziness is to profound to contemplate excellence. I know that whatever I do, I’ll probably be at about the 60th percentile, but since I am also somewhat obsessed with having long-term success, I know that in order to do this, I need to set lofty goals and surround myself with people who reset my internal sense of the average. Put me on an island with the 100 smartest people in the world, and I’ll perform at the 60th percentile in that group. Put me in the Special Olympics, and I’ll perform at the 60th percentile in that group, too. So, in Los Angeles, surrounded by people whose own level of physical fitness far surpasses my own, I feel compelled to reach deep(ish) and achieve at my traditional just-above-middling level. The benefit is that if I’m more fit than 59% of people at L.A. Fitness, I’ll still be fitter than 97% of people in America, which is good.
So, with my new sense of motivation, I wake up just a little earlier so I can rock out 80 pushups before going on the run. In my desire to become better, slimmer, meaner and leaner, I reach into the deep and dark recesses of my psyche for motivation on the long hills, and I hear Coach Wellman’s command to, “take the pain, put it in an envelope and mail it to the girl who broke your heart and the man who stole her from you!” [As an aside, I only now, when writing this, realize what a tortured soul he must have been!] The fact that such girl, or the appertaining man, does not exist, doesn’t matter, I suppose. Threats and insults needn't be real to motivate, and any evil or angry thought will do when trying to summon the adrenaline for that last three 60 pound bicep curls.

And, since I am staring at the Hollywood sign right now, I’ll end with something from a great movie that touches a bit on the craziness of self-perfection…

“June twenty-ninth. I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be 50 pushups each morning, 50 pullups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.”

With that, it’s time to go drink a beer and eat some In-N-Out...

The Curious Cases of Bobby and Alex

2009-03-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

From my –that is, my friend Aaron’s- new office in Los Angeles, I’ve decided to write a quick note while his computer downloads my software so that I can go back to video editing. A sickness, some business, and a purple run of writing creativity have distracted me from blog duties of late, and I know that my millions of fans are quite beside themselves (himself) with sorrow. Recent conversations have revealed that apparently brevity is not my strong suit, and that the clever reader skims my non-pithy expurgations; to that, I reply only that a clever reader would never read my blog to begin with. Ha! Take that! But, I digress, since insulting my readership is not the way to grow this undertaking (the fewer the (wo)men, the greater the share of glory!).

At any rate, let me take a few moments to reflect on two individuals who, outwardly, seem to have not much in common, though together I think that they say something about the immigrant experience, or at least my take on it: Alex Rodriguez and Bobby Jindal. Certainly as physical and intellectual specimens, they are polar opposites. Alex, the chemically-induced hulk of a man, capable of only the simplest of thoughts and the most selfish of actions, and Bobby Jindal, whose rickety and almost sickly figure, overly earnest mannerisms, general ingénueness give the impression of something of a mix between Pip from “Great Expectations” and Milhouse from “The Simpsons.” But, sloppy character sketches aside, each of them this week engaged in behaviors that made me think about the scope and nature of assimilation and patriotism.

Piyush “Bobby” Jindal was featured on 60 Minutes this week, and gave a series of answers that seemed a little perplexing. As to whether he had ever experienced any manner of discrimination growing up in Baton Rouge, he said that he had not, and that the people of Louisiana were always more interested in what you did than in what you were. Then, as to whether he kept any of his Indian customs alive in his house, he simply said that they did not- they were just a typical American family. The implication apparently being that he created a clear dichotomy between “Indian” and “American.” I suppose that given what I know of his biography –his decision to go by ‘Bobby,’ his conversion from Hindu to Catholicism- I am compelled to come to one of two conclusions about him: he is either a very shrewd and ambitious politician who became who he needed to become in order to get elected in the Deep South, or he is a genuinely and massively naïve man. But more on this shortly.

The other story that caught my eye was Alex Rodriguez’s decision to play for the Dominican Republic in the upcoming World Baseball Classic. I tend not to go too overboard on the whole patriotism thing, but it did irk me to see that Rodriguez, who is perhaps the best baseball player in the world, chose to play for the Dominican, and not the United States, the nation in which he was born and, not incidentally, the nation to which he is a citizen. There is a distinct difference between a player who leaves one club to go and play for a rival, and a man who explicitly turns his back on his country and announces that, at least on some level, he holds an allegiance higher than that to which he holds for the United States.

As a soccer fan, I have often encountered this particular situation, mostly from my Mexican-American friends. When the US plays Mexico, they will openly and unashamedly root for Mexico, and I will get visibly agitated with them, telling them that you should never root against their own country. Again, as a History Ph.D. student, I know the complex walls-and-mirrors relationship that Mexican-Americans have with both Mexico and the U.S., and I understand that nationality is a constructed reality, and I know that jingoism can be dangerous, but I still believe it a near-inviolable truth that individuals have an obligation to their country, and that chief among them is loyalty. Again, I recognize that I tread lightly around the “America: love it or leave it” position, but I have a deep an abiding belief that nation must mean more than geography; it has to be a shared vision of the future, a dialogue and engagement with the great national myths and histories, and a commitment to fellow countrymen and the patria itself that we stand shoulder to shoulder in both taking on challenges and enjoying moments of national celebration. For these reasons, I think that Rodriguez’s decision is a disgusting act that demonstrates his moral emptiness in a way not even revealed by his recent cheating scandal.

I cannot say that I was vexed by Jindal’s relationship with his Indian roots in the same way that I was by Rodriguez’s expressed connection with the Dominican Republic, but it did perplex me. Both Jindal and Rodriguez are second-generation Americans, and their respective approaches mark out two extremes of the assimilation process that, I think, should be avoided. Of course, this particular issue has some resonance with me because, born as I was overseas, and having a father who maintains citizenship to another country, I think about this quite a bit. I think that I have come to a comfortable understanding of these competing pulls on my sense of self, and I feel utterly comfortable expressing that I am fully and unequivocally American. That said, I also have come to a real appreciation for how one’s personal history and family bloodline can inform and add texture to how one thinks about and approaches life in America and the appertaining set of obligations and expectations. Indeed, it can even provide motivation for an important set of secondary pursuits that allow one to come into more meaningful congress with people from the old country. In my case, I enjoy flying back to Cameroon, I have started a small charity that is building a computer lab in Cameroon, and I send back remittances to family members. These things make me feel good and add flesh to my sense of identity. That said, in the unlikely event of a Cameroon-America war, there is no question for whom I would take up arms, and in the more likely event (it’s happened a few times) that Cameroon and the USA compete in some sporting event, I always without hesitation root for the United States.

In many respects, I understand that the process of assimilation is complex, and places enormous psychological and emotional pressures on people trying to balance competing notions of what and who they are. I am fortunate in this regards because I grew up without an accent, and appeared to all casual onlookers like a typical, if slightly brown, American kid. In the end, those immigrants who do stay (one of the rarely told stories of American immigration is how many people change their mind and go back home. It is a large number.) find a way to negotiate this complex path, and in the end they typically come to the same place: they honor their roots, but fully embrace their new American identity. The degree to which we Americans trust this simple fact is quite unique and fascinating. Many Irishmen who stepped onto New York City’s docks in the Civil War were handed citizenship cards then, a few seconds later, were given draft cards inducting them immediately into the Union Army. Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor and his Austrian past was framed much more frequently as an example of the American dream than as a reason not to vote for him. He is American, despite his kooky accent.

My natural inclination is to poke around Jindal’s head to try to figure out what kind of man runs from his heritage so comprehensively. In the black community, the notion of passing has a long and complicated history, and though it comes close to explaining Jindal, it doesn’t quite fit. He is less passing than trying to be “one of the good ones.” Of course, that too fails because most Americans don’t know enough about Indian-Americans to have formed anything like a stereotype that goes beyond Apoo from The Simpsons. In other words, there isn’t much to run from here.

Perhaps, in the GOP, where it realizes that it can’t be a white Southern party and win, they know that they can’t get black folks to join them, so Jindal is the next best thing. He’s dark enough to allow the Republicans to say that they aren’t a racist party (anymore), but he is just so darned aw-shucks Louisiana and decidedly nonblack that Southern whites would entertain voting for him.

The Undiscoverd Country

2009-02-20T09:36:00.001-08:00

(I wrote this as an email to friends about a year ago. The bulk of it was written on a SwissAir jet from Malabo to Zurich when the events were still fresh in my mind. I offer this repeat because additional events have caused me to reflect on this moment; I shall address this tomorrow)

I had initially planned to write this last update about Africa while still in Cameroon. My feeling, then as now, is that being in Africa is such a unique experience that you can really only write about while there; once you’re back home and breathing the cool air of Connecticut the smells, the sights, and the sensations that you encounter seem too distant to access in a way that makes for an honest, accurate, or compelling writing. But with the story unfinished, and with the final week in Cameroon so packed, I nonetheless feel compelled to let you all know how things ended up, even if this entry reflects a little mental fatigue and distance.

After a month of filming and fighting, the nerves of the crew members had gotten a little frayed. We hadn’t accomplished everything on the shooting checklist, but I also understood that we were all getting a little annoyed with one another, so I canceled the last five days of shooting so that they could go to the beach and I could go to the mountains to see my family in Bamenda.

The drive from Yaounde to Bamenda is quite scenic as you ascend into the heavily forested mountains. While on this trip I had the chance to see one of my dad’s foresting operations. Though I have some vague desire to see that people reduce, reuse and recycle, I can’t rightly call myself an environmentalist. After all, I keep the water on when I shave, I still miss the old Styrofoam-packed McDLT (hot side hot, cold side cold!), and the fact that I always have at least a dozen appliances on gives me a carbon footprint more akin to Sasquatch than a dainty ballerina. That said, seeing a logging operation did impact me.

The trees are enormous, sometimes 10 feet in diameter and hundreds of feet high. When the loggers finally cut through the thing, and it starts to fall, what strikes you is the sound. It doesn’t so much come down with a single great crack, but rather with a long and loud deep moaning. It sounds so freakishly human that I know the sound will stay with me for as long as I live. As the tree goes from upright to horizontal, the sounds and sights give evidence of the degree to which the tree has become intertwined with the life of the forests. Birds, monkeys and the myriad small mammals that live in the canopy scramble to leap from their falling home, yelping, chirping and screeching along the way. The hundreds of thick vines that climb the trunks of the trees and interweave between the branches prevent the lumber from falling in a single motion. Rather, it comes down in spurts, and as you see the vines holding up the tons of wood you can see them stretch to the breaking point before snapping. It reminded me of the often-used moment in movies where two people being pulled apart keep their hands clasped until finally their fingers lose their grips and the hands get jerked apart. What I saw was the living and active embodiment of an ecosystem; you don’t just cut down a tree, you are tearing a hole in the fabric of a rich, complex, intertwined and fragile superorganism. But, as Shakespeare noted, the world must be peopled, and in order to do that men must lure women into hot tubs, and hot tubs need mahogany decks, and this means that Cameroon must be deforested. The circle of life. Hakuna Matata. More than anything else, the trip gave me the sense of what the vast majority of Cameroon looks like. Only 3% of the nation is populated, and most of the nation is blanketed with trees and grass, not civilization.

The idea behind my trip to Bamenda was that I would visit my scores of aunts, cousins, uncles, and my grandmother, Mangui. Before we left, I heard that she had become ill, so I looked forward to seeing her in the first time in more than a decade. When I arrived at the family home I found my grandma in bed and not quite with it. I sat on the left side of her bed, and my father, my cousin Vincent, and two of my aunts sat on the right side. She grabbed my hand; given her frail state I was a little shocked at the strength with which she took and held it. My pidgin isn’t great, but I could understand her well enough. She asked if I was Brian from America. I answered in the affirmative, but I was struck by two things. First, like many older Cameroonians, she had always had problems pronouncing my name because the “br” sound does not exist in her dialect, so she had always previously called me “Bline.” Second, I had never heard her refer to “America” before. Instead, she always talked about “white man land.” With a great deal of effort, she insisted on telling me that I needed to start a family, to build a house, and take seriously the new status of family elder that I had recently been given. We spoke only briefly after that, and then I left to go to bed.

The next day, I stopped in to see her again, but she was in a bad state, and could barely acknowledge my presence. I left to go buy some presents for friends. While at the local craft store, at about 2 PM, I noticed a small statue of a woman in a CWS dress. It wasn’t really remarkable, but I asked my driver Pius about it for some reason, and he told me that CWS was the Catholic Women’s Society. When I returned home, my cousin Vincent told me that Mangui had died at about 2PM, and that her last requests were that there be plenty of beer so that visitors and mourners could enjoy themselves when they came to the house and that she be buried in her CWS dress.

My family treated me very oddly after she died, constantly reminding me that Mangui had held on for days because she heard that I was in the country and wanted to see me. They also stressed how lucky I was to have seen her just before she died, a fact which in Cameroonian custom is extremely important. They spoke to me as though I were the single beneficiary of a unique and powerful spiritual blessing, a fact which they insisted gave me special status in the family. I came to learn that during my entire visit she had constantly asked about when I would visit, and had also resisted going to the hospital partly to avoid missing me. This was all both flattering and confusing. I had neither seen nor spoken to her in more than a decade and she had at least 50 grandchildren, so why my presence in particular was so important perplexed me, and continues to. I was sad that I did not know her better; after all, she was so highly esteemed and people talked about what a smart and incisive person she was. I wonder what parts of me had come from her.

In the aftermath of a death, the Cameroonian custom is that friends and family show up at the house to mourn. Cameroonians do not weep in the same way that Americans do; there is no polite Presbyterian crying, instead the female mourners cry at a volume and intensity that, as an American, I was not really prepared to handle. They yell, fall to the ground, pound the earth, and if you are nearby they grip your arms and shoulders and then lean on you with such ferocity and intensity that if you are not prepared for it, you will both crumple to the ground. I honestly don’t know which approach is the better approach to the acknowledgment of death. On the one hand, our more sedate approach seems more dignified, whatever that means, but what use has dignity or stoicism when you want to honor and deal with the extinguished life of someone you love?

The fact that this provided the punctuation to my stay in Cameroon makes the entire trip hard for me to understand. I have never been able to derive larger lessons from death, and though I know every metaphor for talking about it, the simple fact remains that no metaphor will ever work because no metaphor can provide an explanatory structure for a process that beyond the basic biological realities nobody can completely grasp.

Though my grandmother had not yet been buried, I nonetheless had to leave Bamenda and make my plane back to the United States. Before I left, all of the female members of my family gathered, they stood circle around me, and as is custom they sang some farewell songs for me, then all placed hands on me and offered prayers and blessings. I’m a fairly hard-hearted person with a giant lump of coal where my heart should be, but hearing these songs so sincerely sung, and hearing each woman offer a prayer for me, and then going through the process of speaking with, hugging and kissing on the head each of my aunts and cousins, I came away deeply moved. It was the most profound feeling that I have maybe ever felt.

Drained physically by the unrelenting sun, drained mentally by the wrangling to handle the logistical problems of filming, and drained emotionally from dealing with the events surrounding politics and family matter, I headed back to Douala. I felt pretty empty and numb on the plane to Zurich, and slept the entire way back to New York. Even now, several days later, I don’t quite have my bearings. It sounds unusual to say it, but despite the bickering on the trip with Brandon and Daniel, despite the violence, despite the problems with passports and visas, despite the myriad guns I had pointed at me, and despite the death of my grandmother, these last five weeks have been amazing and transformative in a very important way. My only concern is that I won’t have the energy to take care of business in Brazil, which is only two days away…

Compassion

2009-02-19T12:07:00.000-08:00

In the summer before my freshman year in college, I took a job working for Lamb-Weston, an enormous agricultural company that processed potatoes. My job entailed taking potato samples from fields scattered about eastern Oregon, Idaho and southern Washington. As a result of this job, I am the rare man at Yale who can speak with some intelligence about blight and about a dozen other ailments that plague potatoes. The job was mostly driving from location to location. On a good day, our sample list would have a few fields in Oregon, a few more in Washington and then a final set in Idaho. Eight hours of sitting in a car, two hours of work, and ten hours of pay.

The downside of this job, though, were the long stretches of time spent in the car with my boss, Jason. He was nice enough, but his life had taken a hard turn with the discovery that his wife was unfaithful. He was nervous, melancholy, prone to hours without talking, and his constant sighing and twitching gave the distinct impression of man whose internal mechanics had become dominated by a great spring that had been over-twisted and at any moment might fly apart, doing great damage to himself and whomever happened to find themselves in his immediate vicinity. I always tried to guess his age based on context clues, but he had a face of a man upon whom Fate had piled too much; the crevices that framed his eyes gave him a constant squint, and the lines from side of nose to side of chin drew his face into a constant frown, even on those occasions when one of my dirty jokes could trigger a smile. He must have been far younger than he looked.

At some point in that summer, his conversations became a little dark, and he spoke a little too openly of what he might do were he ever to catch his wife in flagrente delicto. Partly because, at 17 I simply lacked the wisdom or bravery to properly respond, and party because his own withdrawn nature preferred it, by mid-summer we would sometimes go an entire day without saying more than ten words to each other, including “good morning” and “see you later.” His nerves made him too edgy to listen to music, so he instead preferred to listen to talk radio. So, from 7am to just after noon, I got a daily dose of Rush Limbaugh. (I wasn’t allowed to nap, because my ‘goddamn snoring makes me want to kill someone.’ As the only other person in the car, I preferred not to press my luck)

I still remember one particular story that provided Rush with a great deal of amusement. A grocery chain in San Francisco (oh, it couldn’t be more perfect for Rush!) was losing a lot of money because homeless people kept stealing their grocery carts, so they put trackers on them and every few days they would go out and round them up, taking them from homeless folks who had filled the carts with whatever it is that crazy people feel the need to collect. In hearing about this, and after their protests failed to get the store to change its policy of reclaiming its property (if, as Puffendorf says, all property is theft, what to make of a re-theft of stolen item that was itself an act of theft? I digress…), a group of good San Francisco liberals raised funds and provided the homeless people with free grocery carts of their own. Rush, as you might expect, milked this story for days, delighting in the shallowness of liberal compassion and the false sense of accomplishment that these people had for seeming to solve a problem without in any substantive way improving the lives of the people to whom they were giving shopping carts.

Looking back, the story does a good job of illustrating something about both poles of the American political spectrum. Rush was right to poke fun at the ineffectual liberal response, but his own approach to the situation offered nothing in the way of a solution of his own. Indeed, one might rightly point out that Reagan’s policies as governor, and later President, with respect to mental health had done a great deal to create the problem of homelessness in the first place. In one story, then, we can see liberal self-satisfaction, conservative lack of compassion, liberal ineffectualness, conservative lack of ideas, liberal disrespect for property rights, and conservative lack of understanding of the historical preconditions of a problem. (I should note that having listened to literally hundreds of hours of Rush, I offer only the slimmest of praises to him because he was generally incapable of stumbling across insight, and this instance is just a case of a very fat monkey hammering on a typewriter and managing to accidentally reproduce a line of Hamlet)

As to the issue itself, I am deeply ambivalent about homeless people, particularly beggars. On the one hand, I can recognize that life’s cruel vicissitudes have conspired to place them in a difficult situation, but I cannot believe that should place them beyond the scope of the rules that must govern a civil society. Every time I return to New Haven, I am reminded of how annoying it is to be pestered twice per city block for a bit of change, often from people who seem less truly downtrodden, mentally disturbed, drunk or high, but are, rather, just very very lazy. In the end, I simply don’t give money; I tell myself it’s because I’m not actually doing them any good, but in reality I am fairly certain it’s because I find their presence annoying and the permissiveness of a city government that doesn’t sweep them up and take them to some manner of mental health, drug treatment or penal facility disdainful.

In this respect, I wonder if I am excessively hard-hearted. If one reflects on the requirements of all the great world religions, one sees a consistently expressed requirement to give alms to the poor, to assist the beggar. Jesus preached to give to the poor, Mohammed made alms giving a requirement of Islam, etc. I worry that I am simply allowing my understanding of economics to cloud the issue by asking myself whether giving a homeless man a dollar is indeed the best way to help him. Is it greed that keeps my quarter in my pocket, or is it in fact a genuine desire to help them? I suspect that if it were the latter, I would take that quarter I would have given to the beggar and instead supply it to a soup kitchen.

In the end, I think that my hard-heartedness has something to do with the time I spent in Africa. On the streets of Cameroon, one sees people begging who, for example, are suffering from leprosy, have no legs, are blind, or have been disfigured by conditions or accidents that, in America, would have been corrected fully at birth. This scene seems, to me, more akin to what Jesus and Mohamed saw in their day than what I see on the streets of New Haven. The panhandlers one encounters mostly seem physically capable of work, are well clothed, are but a few blocks from a soup kitchen and homeless shelter, and otherwise do not present the picture of infirmity or hard luck that should trigger in me a desire to do charitable acts.

In the Great Depression, many people in the country took to the roads and rails in search of work, and the image of the wandering hobo became something of an icon for that era. As the economy continues to spiral down, I doubt that I will see many more people on the streets of New Haven begging because these people differ from the hobos who took to the streets in the 1930s. When jobs are plenty, they will be on the corner hustling for dollars, and my suspicion is that few, if any, will ever actually work or even try to get a job. They seem to fall into several categories: mentally ill, substance abusers, and the lazy. If they are mentally ill, I lack the capacity to help them; if they are substance abusers then my money will only further their pathology; if they are but lazy, then I choose not to support that lifestyle.

There are policy approaches that work, and I support them, but in the end I’ll keep my loose change because I can’t shake the feeling that in giving them some bit of money, I’m only trying to assuage my guilt, much like the kind liberal from Marin County who bought the homeless man a shopping cart.

Obama's Braccae

2009-02-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

As the Roman Republic, and later the Empire, expanded to incorporate more far-flung territories and peoples it had to confront and overcome the myriad problems associated with stitching together a multiethnic, multinational polyglot empire. Though like all human enterprises it ultimately fell apart, it did manage this complex task quite well, as evidenced by the fact that its duration can be measured in millennia, and not mere centuries or decades. They did much better in this respect than, for example, their Greek predecessors who operated with an open disdain for non-Hellenistic cultures. (we get our word “barbarian” from the Greek insult that all non-Greek speaking peoples sounded the same, apparently only ever saying ‘bar bar bar bar’)

One sentiment that the Romans encountered is something that Americans know quite well; as new peoples were absorbed protectors of the old order took offense whenever the new peoples clung to old customs. For example, as the Romans pushed out the Gauls from the Transalpine, they encountered peoples who wore braccae, or pants. The Romans thought that pants were effeminate, preferring to wear tunics. Over time, though, the old tribal residents of the Transalpine (that is, the area on either side of the Italian Alps) became Roman citizens, and some of them took places in the Senate. The newly minted Roman aristocrats had to don togas, the traditional vestments of the Roman nobility. Though bad college parties have taught us otherwise, togas are not just white bedsheets tied around the waist with a cut extension cord. Rather, they are fairly complicated and one must be expert in how to put them on and wear them. Indeed, like most clothes of distinction (think, tuxedo, kimono, hoop dresses, the white Princeton dinner shirt, etc.) they are intended to portray the wearer’s station through their sheer impracticality. One cannot plough a field in a toga, do housework in a kimono, or work in a factory in a dress that takes four attendants to put on. Anyway, over time, naturally, these new Romans eschewed the toga for their preferred braccae, something that caused great outrage among those who took this as an insult to the history and honor of Rome. These fears were unfounded, and the Republic did not crumble because northern Italians preferred pants to skirts.

As I am wont to do, I offer this as an unnecessarily lengthy lead-in to what is really on my mind. The internet is abuzz with criticisms made by Andrew Card, Bush’s former Chief of Staff, because Obama and his administration often remove their jackets in the Ova Office, and even have casual dress on weekends. This, to hear Card express it, is a grave insult to the dignity of the Office of President and the men who have occupied it. I think that he is, obviously, over-reacting. More importantly, Card has a rather incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the history of the clothes of the men who occupied the White House. For reasons that I won’t reveal just now, this is one of those few subjects about which I have something like a comprehensive knowledge, so forgive me as a dwell on this point at some length.

First, it needs to be noted that there has been a long and varied relationship between Presidents and fashion. Washington made a point to remove his martial attire and instead wear the silk knee britches and longcoat of a civilian. This set the standard for the day, and Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the handsomest and most nattily-dressed Founder refined this look by also eschewing European kid gloves and adopting a slightly gussied-up version of the colonial three-point hat. These choices were important because they signified that the new nation would be run by men who had, like Cincinnatus of Roman fame, put down their weapons and lent their efforts to the construction of a democracy. Colonial hats, like Franklin’s decision to go wigless and wear a pelt hat, paid homage to the yeoman who would provide the foundation of the American Republic. Though in a fit of inexplicable silliness John Adams, who had no real military experience, took to wearing a sword, these general approaches to dress held firm. In fact, in the early American Republic, one did not want to come across as too European or aristocratic in their dress. Even Thomas Jefferson, who loved European fashion and was as close to a patrician as early America had, took to wearing fur hats, shuffling about the White House in slippers, and in those days if you knocked on the front door of the White House, Jefferson would often himself answer the door in a robe looking unkempt.

The modern Presidential attire owes most of its stylistic influence to George Bryan Brummel, one of the great fashion figures of all time. A dandy, raconteur, unrepentant gambler and near unequaled conversational wit, in the early 19th century, he did away with short pants, replacing them with long trousers, introduced the plain blue or black waistcoat, and insisted on simple and elegant white shirts and ties. This new look initially scandalized the London fashion scene until Crown Prince, and future king, George IV took a liking to it, thus relegating the knee pant to history’s dustbin. (but if you’ve seen Frank Kapra’s 1927 movie ‘Long Pants’ you know that short pants remained the favored dress for children for some time) Though he likely did not intend it, Brummel’s innovative approach to fashion had the effect of democratizing fashion, and many of the people who constituted England’s growing class of merchants, industrialists and professionals could now afford to dress like an aristocrat. More importantly, perhaps, was that the new fashions did not require much in the way of learning how to wear the clothes.

It is because of Brummel that portraits of Lincoln, for example, show him in long pants and long jacket, rather than the short pants of the kind that Washington wore. And, in case Card thought that Obama’s sins were unique and particularly horrendous, he should remember that Lincoln often did not wear shoes in the Oval Office, and his dusty and ill-fitting clothes and unruly hair led more than one person to compare him to a clothed ape. But, Lincoln nonetheless managed to steer the ship of state effectively despite his fashion deficiencies.

FDR became the first President to leave behind the long coat for the short coat. In a minor historical irony, in so doing he followed the example of Gustav Streseman, the German Chancellor and Foreign Minister who secretly rebuilt the German army during the 1920’s. At the time, the short jacket was seen as a more informal style of dress, and no respectable politician would make an official appearance out of his long coat. Gustav, annoyed by having to change coats depending on the function, instead chose to always wear a jacket that resembles what we today wear, though he always wore a waistcoat or vest with it. For someone like Roosevelt trying to hide his Knickerbocker roots and come across in a slightly more everyman fashion, ditching the long coat was smart politics.

If you look at how Presidents have dressed, you in fact do not see a consistent pattern. Rather, each President uses their dress to convey important messages to the nation. For example, at JFK’s inauguration, he wore a morning coat and top hat, something that had in fact been long out of fashion. But in doing so, he told the nation’s 30 million descendants of Irish immigrants that they had arrived in the fullest sense. Clinton often went jacketless in the Oval Office, and indeed sometimes wore jeans and golf shirts on weekends, projecting a more Baby Boomer sensibility that was less concerned with rules and conventions for their own sake. Bush, in establishing a stricter dress code was intentionally attempting to counteract this sensibility; it was a profoundly conservative move, attempting to hearken back to a mythical past that never really existed.

I see Obama’s dress code in much the same light. Obama probably saw that, yes, Bush had an exceedingly well-run White House. Meetings began and ended on time, and things within the White House ran smoothly and according to plan. Of course, the Bush administration also demonstrated rather comprehensively that a well-run White House can produce a disastrous series of outcomes. What use, after all, are meetings that end on time if they produce foolish decisions? The Obama approach seems infused with the kind of pragmatism that has served as the guiding principle of his campaign and style of personal leadership. His dress code is strict enough to prevent the sort of frat-house disorganization that permeated the Clinton administration while avoiding the unnecessary stuffiness of Bush’s approach.

Of course, like the Roman Senator who bristled at the sight of braccae, this is not really about suit jackets. The real issue is that conservatives are upset about a new people in government using a new style of government that is, for better or worse (something that I have previously discussed, no need to ruin a nice moment of Obama praise with me a curmudgeonly quip) distinctly different from the one that preceded it. The aesthetics are an excuse for criticism, not a real cause for it.

Beyond this, any particular criticism about fashion is foolish if for no other reason than that fashions change, and along with this change comes changes to how people perceive messages sent through fashion. For example, consider the following. Most American men tie their neckties with a four-in-hand knot and pull the tie somewhat tight to cover the top button on a shirt. When one sees the top button undone and the tie loosened, the man is probably either at the end of a long day or otherwise letting it be known that he is relaxing. We even say that when someone is a bit high-strung they are “buttoned up.” But, 100 years ago, this sensibility would not have made sense. The necktie today has no practical purpose; it is purely decorative. But, originally dress shirts did not typically have a top button and the tie actually tied (and thus, the name!) the shirt closed. The only shirts with top buttons were worn by working men who did not wear ties or who wore ties but engaged in activities in which wearing a tie so tightly that it kept the shirt closed was not practical or comfortable. The point here is that the image of the loosened tie as the symbol of the weary and well-worked is an example of the evolution of fashion that speaks more to the fact that ties are a vestigial accessory than to anything else. One does not, for example, see someone in the White House drop their pants to their knees because pants, like the neckties of old, perform a function. (Insert Bill Clinton joke here) Today, someone loosens their tie and unbuttons their top button, but 100 years ago you would not do this because your dress shirt did not have a collar button and, at any rate, you tied your tie a bit looser.

The undercurrent of all of this is that for the most part Americans appreciate that politicians at least attempt to appear like the average working man. This is not a new development, and though it does incur some disingenuousness from politicians and the occasional disastrous electoral decision (ahem, Bush), this impulse is a good one. It’s very democratic and taps into our best republican (in the Jeffersonian, not the GOP’ean, sense) impulse. In every election cycle, there will invariably come a televised debate (usually in a primary) where the candidates ‘get real’ and remove their jackets, roll up sleeves, sit on stools and talk to some borderline moron that they have to pretend to like and empathize with. Though always a completely canned moment, it at least, for a moment, puts the candidates in a position to fear the masses – not the violence of the masses in the way that Europeans kings did, but rather to fear the impulses and fears of the masses who wield their votes like old-time peasants held swords and pitchforks.

But, all of that said, I do have one minor complaint about Obama’s dress policy. He can let his minions wear whatever they want, but he should always wear a suit. Always. He should work in a suit, eat in a suit, bathe in a suit, nap in a suit, make love to Michelle in a suit (I am presuming his suits have well-placed zippers) and work out in his suit. The reason is that he wears a suit better than any President in our history and it’s just a bad aesthetic choice to ever not wear one. In fact, truth be told, I am on a new workout routine that is designed to slim down, get length, lose muscle and fat, and otherwise look sleek because in looking at Obama I realized that in the right hands a well-cut suit is a powerful thing. McCain, who for reasons that I feel bad in faulting him for, looked like Quasimodo next to an unusual and perfect combination of ballerino and two-guard when standing next to Obama, each in their suits. He shouldn’t surrender this advantage.

I don’t want to end my blog here because, in what is already a pretty gay blog, that last paragraph is super-gay. So, I’ll point out two things. We Americans get a great deal of our fashion sensibility from the English. This is a bad thing. As anyone who has ever seen an English court or Parliamentary session knows, the English believe in tradition for its own sake, so they often wear wigs and comical red outfits and huge hats. When the British were the colonial lords of India, their lawn clubs often had special refrigerated rooms because despite 115 degree heat, the British man would nonetheless dress in shirt, vest, tie, jacket, long pants and hat. Upon arriving at the club drenched in sweat, he would change into a set of clothes kept refrigerated at the club. Now that is just stupid.

Finally, a well worn history of fashion joke. A French officer once asked a British officer why they wore red coats. The British officer noted that the British Empire depended on natives believing in the invincibility of the British Army, and a red coat would hide bloody wounds received in battle, making the natives believe that the solder was bulletproof. “You see,” the British officer said, “it acts as a bit of camouflage that in covering our blood makes us seem powerful.” The French officer was impressed, blurting out, “That is a wonderful idea!” The next day the French officer wore brown pants.

Be Weir of Hermiston

2009-02-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

Whenever I tell people that I’m from Oregon, they will invariable get the wrong idea. I will get one of two follow-up questions: are you from Portland? Or, are you from Eugene? The answer to both questions is ‘no,’ and the Oregon that people imagine –lush, wet, verdant, progressive, hippie- exists several hundred miles down the river, a million figurative miles from where I grew up. Hermiston, my home town, is small and conservative burg located 40 miles from the next city. Instead of tall pines and the imposing Cascade Range, the backdrop to my childhood was blue sky in every direction. On the high desert plains of eastern Oregon vastness and emptiness can overwhelm, and the fact that no interposing landmark, hill or mountain prevents the eye from seeing as far as the eye can see gives one a sense that they exist in a place unconnected from a larger world. New possibilities do not exist, and one must constrain the limits of ambition to this particular island or, if one is quite adventurous, to a neighboring blip on the archipelago (full acknowledgement to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) such as Kennewick, Pacso or Pendleton.

One of the ironies of my own life, I suppose, is that the attitude that I needed to blaze a trail out of Hermiston –self reliance, stubbornness, confidence in my capacity to become - are also the very traits most instilled in me by Hermiston. Indeed, I think that I am fairly forward-looking and optimistic person, enamored of what a well-laid future can bring; again, something that I got from my time in Hermiston. Standing sentry over the one highway entrance into the city is an enormous (well, relatively) water tower proclaiming “Watch Hermiston Grow!” The town itself takes its name from “The Weir of Hermiston,” the incomplete Robert Louis Stevenson novel; the founders wanted to make plain that Hermiston would always be incomplete, the model of Christian industry, in which townspeople strived to perfect their city, themselves, moving ever toward an unattainable goal. I have, like all people, a thousand memories from my childhood and adolescence. In terms of understanding our particular and current situations, it’s impossible to disentangle the influences of youth from the decisions we make as adults. I imagine that some metaphor like ‘childhood loads the gun, we pull the trigger’ works well enough. I sometimes think about particular decisions that I’ve made or political or moral stands that I stake out and try to link them to some childhood seminus. Sometimes I make real revelations about myself, other times it’s just idle daydreaming.

In my brief career representing clients as an attorney, I did volunteer work representing criminals in Johannesburg. On many occasions I have been out with women that, to some extent or another, I am dating and going through the whole get-to-know process. When I tell them about I worked with poor kids who needed schools, I get a few credits; when I tell them I worked with HIV-positive rape victims or orphans, a few more. But, whenever I mention that I also represented murderers and other violent criminals, those accumulated credits got wiped away by what many people see as a deplorable act- I go from Mother Teresa to the heir to the foul throne of Cochrane.

When I was a sophomore in Hermiston High School, I was in many respects a pretty normal kid. I had my friends, and seemed to be coasting along well enough. Hermiston High School had an open lunch policy, and students often went to Pizza Hut, McDonalds or Taco Time to eat. My school was a bit unusual in that there was not a clearly delineated ‘popular’ crowd; in fact, my older brother’s group of friends had previously occupied that role, but with their graduation the school drifted towards an unusual kind of apartheid with tense relationships between cowboys and Mexicans serving as the impetus for a great deal of the friction, which often broke out into fights of varying degrees of violence. As one of four black kids in the school, I was neither fish nor foul, so for the most part I existed outside of this little maelstrom of adolescent identity politics. But, as I learned, having no attachment to a larger group put one in danger of being singled out for abuse by those in a group.

This is not a tale of bullying in a classic sense. Though I was different, I was also bigger than most of my classmates, was very good at returning insults and, more importantly, projected a pretty easy-going aura that, altogether, made me a bad target for bullies who, after all, feared losing a fight as much as anyone. But on one particular day, a group of about ten or so Mexican gangsters, who were seniors from the high school across the river, stole my friend’s Pacers hat on our way back from Pizza Hut. There were four of us, and I think that we pretty much figured that unless we let them keep the hat, we would get our asses kicked. So, we punked out and slinked back to school to nurse our prides.

A minor incident, to be sure, but it didn’t end there. When our friend Matt (a cowboy) found out what had happened he was incandescent with rage, and promised us that we would get back at them. Not sure exactly what that meant, we all agreed and felt excited to redeem some lost pride. We had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into. The next day, Matt told us to meet him at his truck, and he showed us a large duffle bag filled with clubs, brass knuckles, knives, and three pistols. Matt tucked one in his pants, gave me one, and gave another to a third friend. We were going to find these guys who took our buddy’s hat, fuck’em up, and get our hat back.

Looking back, the profundity of our stupidity shocks me. Any reasonable mind would look at this situation and instantly recognize that nothing could come from it but bad, but we loaded into Matt’s track and went out in search of revenge. The thing that strikes me looking back is that I really didn’t think about it- and I mean that in as close to a literal sense as possible. If you had asked me, I would have admitted that it was a bad idea and put the gun back in the bag and gone to Taco Time. I did not feel peer pressure, in any real sense; rather I just did it. The complete lack of contemplation perplexes me even now. I was not then, nor have I ever been violent, and, of course, taking such a rash act would be today impossible for me to even contemplate for more than the briefest fraction of a moment.

Guns loaded, pockets full of myriad instruments of mayhem, we slowly rolled the streets looking for the boys who had done us such disrespect. That day we got incredibly lucky, and we found nothing, so after a few hours of looking in vain we did what we should have done anyway: went to lunch. I’m not sure what would have happened if we had found those kids. I would still like to think that even as an incomprehensibly stupid 14 year old I would have known better than to brandish or use a firearm, but I cannot say the same thing about Matt, who seemed out for blood. And, as anyone with a fairly cursory knowledge of the law knows, his sins would also be my own, and I likely would have found myself in a bad way in a bad place. No college, no law school, no fancy Ivy League degrees; instead, ‘three hots and a cot’ and a nightly dose of sexual assault at the Oregon Correctional Facility would likely have been my lot. But nothing did happen. I never touched a pistol again, went through high school incident-free, went east for college, and had a pretty standard life filled with what, in my moments of pride, I see as real acts of philanthropy and human decency.

There is a line between sympathy and permissiveness, and this little experience has made me a little more understanding of how it is that smart people –particularly smart young people- can make bad choices. I think that working with murderers (and my current prison docu project, as well) is my way of coming to grips with this particular realization about human nature caused by one experience some 18 years ago. I can’t imagine a situation in my own life that would today propel me to do something very violent, but I also perhaps recognize more than most that we all live life teetering on a razor’s edge, and the briefest of nudges can send us tumbling off. If I had followed through with my ridiculous act, people would have looked at the situation and wondered what happened. I was a good student, had no history of violence or trouble, and came from a house with two working, nonviolent, non-drinking, non-drug using, law-abiding and loving parents, a brother in an elite school, etc., etc. I just made a profoundly flawed choice. All of that said, whatever punishment I received likely would have been deserved.

I rarely tell this story, and I’m not entirely sure what compels me to think and write about it today. I suppose that some might think that some fossilized remnant of that boy exists still, but mostly what occurs to me now is how little that person resembles me- sort of a continued consciousness in a completely new and different mind and body. And, I think that the fact that most people are a little surprised when I tell it speaks to the fact that I’m not that person anymore. Of course, perhaps that’s just my Hermiston talking; blind and optimistic belief in the perfectibility of us all that leads me to believe that I could and did change.

Either way, you would be well served not to steal my hat.

Ripped Fuel Induced Hypergraphia

2009-02-03T22:17:00.000-08:00

I hate sleep. I mean, I love it, but it’s probably been six or seven years since I’ve woken up not feeling at least a little guilty for sleeping past some point that I think a productive person should not sleep past. Only on those too-rare occasions where I am out at 2am and up at 5:30am do I feel some lessening of guilt for having needlessly frittered away something so finite and precious. I play a complicated game with my body. On nights where I will put in less than four hours –the number that I have grudgingly accepted as my somnolent body’s requirement- I set three alarm clocks, each of which requires me to get out of bed. The body, it seems, resents this particular kind of abuse, and long stretches of this kind of deprivation are sometimes met by shakes, the occasional nosebleed or an inability to make my eyes focus.

Sometimes, though, and this is actually pretty rare, I can’t get to sleep when I have an empty slot in my calendar, an obliging bed, and a sore body. On such occasions, as tonight, I have long since figured out that if I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep; better not to fight it. I simply turn into the slide, take a RedBull, chased by some Ripped Fuel, and try to do something that is either productive or will keep my busy until the reappearance of the sun resets my circadian rhythms and gives me the energy to set my foot more heavily on the gas pedal.

The problem I encounter on these occasions is that the hours between 2am and 10am are pretty lonely territory, and one has to find a way to self-amuse. These can be long and fretful moments; isolation and quiet can dredge up the entirety of one’s self-conception, preying especially upon those aspects of our lives that we otherwise evade through motion and industry. As a younger man, I felt motivated to succeed, excel, and be somebody, whatever that meant. On reflection, I think that I mistook that sense of drive for an individual purpose akin to actualization or larger contribution; but, as I’ve come to a more substantial reckoning with the world and my place within its machinations, I worry that my motion was a form of evasion from those things that stalked. Through obsessive need to seek out, confront, understand, and master the world, I thought that I could find some truth with both personal implications and global applicability, and in so doing I dodged and dashed a more realistic assessment of the world.

I think that, at a rather too-late age, I’ve passed from childhood into adulthood because I’ve abandoned my childhood dreams of accomplish things that I now realize are very much beyond my grasp. This realization does not come with a sense of sadness, loss, anger or bitterness. Except for those rare people who are not, we are middling minds, and middling minds live middling lives; but middling and happy are not mutually exclusive, or so I hope. An older friend once admonished me that I would not be a promising young man forever. Too true; more true, is the fact that by this point I am what I will be, and my happiness will not depend on me attempting to reach beyond this, but in coming to a fuller understanding of the limitations of my potential. The trick is acceptance without resignation, but I actually think that I’ve got that pretty much down.

In some sense, this conversion offers me a clear avenue to amusement, and perhaps to happiness (in the way that this idea goes beyond simple amusement). I think that I constructed much of my worldview based on what I wanted to do and become- goals which are largely unrealistic and, more importantly, tainted by a sort of optimism unmoored from reality. This offers me the rare chance to work through all of my views on the nature of things that interest me and, from the ground up, rework and reform them.

More than anything else, the thing that interests me is government and the nature of a functioning democracy. (yes, a clumsy and sudden transition, I know) So, I think that I will dedicate my sleepless nights and early dawn hours to unraveling my thoughts on this particular subject. A friend recently sent me a somewhat angry email about my thoughts on states’ rights, so I think that I will start there. I’m feeling more like an expurgation than a sensible argument at the moment, so you will forgive my likely occasional lack of coherent structure, logic, adherence to grammar and syntax, etc. Maybe if, after some months, I stumble into some gem of an idea Ripped Fuel will offer me an endorsement.

Completion of My Thoughts on the Nature of States Within A Federal System

On the Great Seal of the United States, there reads the simple Latin phrase, “E Pluribus Unum. Translated, “from many, one,” it expresses the transformation of thirteen often contentious colonies into one, perhaps indivisible, nation. This indivisibility has been tested throughout America’s brief history, and as one might expect from a large and diverse nation our divisiveness has often become intense; so intense that in many instances a breakup of the union has been contemplated, and in one instance, or thirteen instances, depending on how you look at it, it was actually attempted. While the great strength and vitality of the American nation has many times proven the veracity of the ideals enshrined in the statement “E Pluribus Unum,” what remains inconclusive is whether the converse notion of “E Pluribum Unus,” from one, many, in other words secession, is still a legally valid option for an aggrieved member of this federal republic.

I think that much of the thinking regarding the issue is flawed, and secession, as a legal concept, has not been destroyed by history and precedent. The issue of secession is not isolated merely to the events that precipitated the Civil War, rather the issue has been present throughout American history. Benjamin Franklin, greatly upset by his own inability to get the Canadian colonies to rejoin the revolutionary cause fought tirelessly against further defections. Both New York and Rhode Island threatened to secede from the revolutionary cause shortly after the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and the issue was again thrust onto the national stage sixty years later with the Nullification Crisis of 1832. Even the Twentieth Century has seen its share of secessionist rhetoric. Responding to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board, decision and the subsequent unrest it caused in Arkansas, Gov. Orval Faubus characterized the federal response as “naked force being employed by the Federal Government against the people of my state, under military occupation and ruled by the force of the Federal Government.

With federal troops occupying a Southern town, and with Southern politicians using phrases like “interposition” and “nullification,” many observers believed that a second civil war was not an unrealistic possibility.

Despite the persistent threat of disunion, it is commonly believed that the issue of secession was settled conclusively in favor of those who, like Abraham Lincoln, believed that the union could not be dissolved, and that secession was not just an illegal act but a legal fiction and a legal impossibility. The typical line of thinking asserts that Antebellum Americans referred to their country by saying “the United States are,” implying a looser collection of nation-states that had formed a lax confederation. They note that we now say, “the United States is,” a grammatical oddity that reflects our sense that we have become a single entity. While very interesting, this appears to not in fact be true. A very cursory examination of important Antebellum United States literature offers not one instance of someone saying or writing, “the United States are.” Fascinatingly, even Jefferson Davis’s own memoirs uses the phrase “the United States is.” Another often given version of this piece of grammatical history is that in Antebellum America people more often said “these United States,” instead of the more modern “the United States.” This too is a bit of a fiction. Attempting to find the source of this particular frequently repeated chestnut is difficult. The Constitution, after all, refers to “The United States.” So does every other pre-Civil War document that I came across including, but not limited to: The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, The Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina, and the secession declarations of Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia, the personal papers of Jefferson Davis, and the speeches and writings of John C. Calhoun. If one would find such grammatical evidence, one would expect to find it here.

Nonetheless, the myth persists that after the Civil War, Americans would be heard saying incorrectly, from the point of view of grammar, that the United States “is,” implying that the war had made a singular entity out of what was once many smaller ones. The Civil War, it is said by many, settled the issue of the constitutionality of secession for good. This line of thinking is, to be blunt, quite wrong. As will be demonstrated, the Civil War did not prove that the Southern secession of 1860 was unconstitutional (as if an armed conflict could settle such a matter), rather that it was merely unsuccessful. In fact, a thorough reading of the history of secession and Reconstruction demonstrate that in many ways the actions of the federal government during and after the Civil War only endorsed the idea of the legality of secession.

Before beginning to delve into the arguments that support the idea of secession there is one thing need be said. Many of the gravest crises in American history have involved the issue of race, and this is particularly true with respect to the notion of secession. The secession crises of 1832 and 1860 revolved around the issue of white supremacy, and in many ways the issues of secession and racism, in the American context, are hard to separate. I deal exclusively with the former issue, and any indication that it may give that tends to support the legality of the actions of the Southern states in no way is intended to support the morality of their justification for taking those actions.
The approach I will take will be look at the history of secession in America and attempt to interpret that history so as to discover the legality of the act of secession. This will include an examination of the ideological stands of John Calhoun and Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Crisis of 1832, an exploration of the debate between Lincoln and the secessionists, the legal precedent regarding secession, and the post-Civil War actions of the federal government.

The Nullification Crisis of 1832

The first constitutional crisis involving a threat of secession in America occurred during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. Ostensibly a disagreement about tariffs that placed a disproportionate economic burden on the South, but really about a growing Southern agitation about slavery and the North’s reluctance to allow slavery to move into the new federal territories in the west, the issue quickly escalated into a bitter feud between President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun. Calhoun, often acting surreptitiously, urged South Carolina to pass an ordinance of nullification, and then in 1832 to convene a state convention to consider the issue of secession.

Much like his ideological progeny, Calhoun saw secession not as revolution but as an alternate reading of Constitutional provisions. Calhoun subscribed to the “compact theory,” first put forth in Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively. The resolutions were written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the Federalist Congress. While the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions never explicitly advocated secession as an option, they stressed that the Constitution had to be governed by the law of compact. Madison noted that:

“The powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.”

Expounding on this point, Jefferson stressed that each state had reserve to itself:

“the residuary mass of right to their own self government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unathoratitive, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers.”

As one might imagine, the resolutions were by no means universally accepted. While almost every state south of Maryland either explicitly or silently supported the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, every state legislature north of Maryland explicitly rejected the constitutional logic of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. Rhode Island’s legislature explicitly stated that, “for any state to assume [the power to nullify a federal act] would be an infraction of the Constitution of the United States.”

New Hampshire, alarmed that the specter of rebellion and secession had been raised announced that New Hampshire would “defend the Constitution of the United States against every aggression, either foreign or domestic.” In the end, the laws were obeyed, largely because urgent international troubles with France made Southern states unwilling to press the issue. So, this particular debate over nullification and secession ended where it would stay for the next sixty-five years: a regional ideological rift.

With this crisis only thirty years passed, John C. Calhoun once again raised the issue nullification and secession. Calhoun insisted that, “ours is a Federal Government, a Government in which not individuals, but States as distinct sovereign communities, are the constituents.” Even though the Constitution’s preamble begins with the phrase, “We the People of the United States,” Calhoun believed that it was formed by the States, and that the citizens of the several States were bound to it through the acts of their several states; that each State ratified the Constitution for itself, and that it was only by such ratification of a State that any obligation was imposed upon its citizens. This naturally put several questions at issue. He asked, “Is this a Federal Union? A union of States, as distinct from that of individuals? Is the sovereignty in the several States, or in the American people in the aggregate?” He believed that the terms of union, -federal, united- all imply a combination of sovereignties, a confederation of States. They never apply to an association of individuals. After all, whoever heard of the United States of New York? The sovereignty is in the several states and our system was, for Calhoun, a union of twenty-four [now fifty] sovereign powers, under a constitutional compact.

Thus, Calhoun believed that South Carolina, like all states, had the right to deal with the federal government as an equal, and in many ways as a superior. For this reason he urged his home state to convene a convention to consider nullification, and later on an unsuccessful attempt to press for a convention to consider the issue of secession. After the nullification convention Calhoun declared that, “It is of the opinion of the people of Carolina that it belongs to the State which has imposed the obligation to declare, in the last resort, the extent of [the obligations of the Constitution], as far as her citizens are concerned; and this upon the plain principles which exist in all analogous cases of compact between sovereign bodies. On this principle the people of the State, acting in their sovereign capacity in convention, precisely as they did in the adoption of their own and the Federal Constitution, have declared, by the ordinance, that the acts of Congress which have imposed duties therefore null and void. The ordinance thus enacted by the people of the State themselves, acting as a sovereign community, is as obligatory on the citizens as any portion of the Constitution.

In response, President Andrew Jackson stated unequivocally that, “disunion by armed force is treason.” In the end, South Carolina elected not to attempt to secede and it announced that it would delay making a final determination as to whether or not to nullify the federal taxation scheme. The reasons for this have nothing to do the strength or infirmity of Calhoun’s constitutional stance, but rather are a combination of the fact that in the end South Carolina got a more favorable tariff and that President Andrew Jackson was still an immensely popular President, and seen as a friend of the South. As such, continued open defiance of the President, who had threatened to hang any person who attempted to subvert the authority of the federal government, was seen as bad politics. Also of great importance was the fact that John Calhoun’s political star was beginning to wane very acutely. First, Calhoun’s long tenure in the Senate had made him many enemies. Second, and more importantly, Calhoun’s involvement in a petty scandal involving the wife of one of Jackson’s friends cost him much of his political capital. Even though South Carolina elected to remain in the union the South Carolina legislature did fire one final shot over the federal bow by adopting a resolution that stated, “that each state of the Union has the right, whenever it may deem such a course necessary for the preservation of its liberties or vital interests, to secede peaceably from the Union, and that there is no constitutional power in the general government, much less in the executive department, of that government to retain by force such state in the Union.

There are two main lessons that can be learned from the Nullification Crisis of 1832. First, secession, or at least the threat of it, can serve a valuable purpose in a federal system. South Carolina, and the South generally, were greatly agitated by many of the moves that were made by the North and the federal government. Because the threat of secession was lurking in the background for the first hundred years of the union, the South, though greatly outnumbered and in many ways vastly poorer, got many concessions from all branches of the federal government. Second, and more directly relevant to this inquiry, the Nullification Crisis, or at least Calhoun’s stated opinions regarding it, provided the ideological foundations for the secessions of late 1860 and early 1861.

Lincoln and The Secessionists

Twenty-seven years after the Nullification Crisis the omnipresent North-South tensions again exploded. The bloodiest, and most important, war in American history was the result. In the aftermath of the Civil War the federal government was greatly aggrandized, and for the first time in American history the concept of American citizenship was constitutionalized. Though the state-federal relationship was doubtless forever changed, the question of the legality of secession was not. As the slavery crisis escalated throughout 1860 the South began to resurrect Calhoun’s arguments in preparation for what was seen as a foregone conclusion: if Lincoln won, the South would secede. After winning the White House, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln obviously openly and vigorously objected. It was Lincoln’s firmly held belief that the union was “perpetual,” and he acted accordingly upon assuming the office of the Presidency.

Because Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address contains perhaps the clearest extrapolation of the contemporary anti-secessionist political philosophy, it is worth some examination. Lincoln began by asserting that he was not a usurper of states’ rights, and that with regard to the emancipation of Southern slaves, he had “no lawful right to do so, and no inclination to do so.” Lincoln then turned to the legality of secession:

“I hold it in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government power ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, being impossible to destroy it, except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was in fact formed by the Articles of Association in 1774...continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all then thirteen states expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was to form a more perfect Union. But if destruction of the Union, by one of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity. It follows from these views that no State can lawfully get out of the Union, that resolves ordinances to that effect are legally void; and are insurrectionary or revolutionary. I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken.”

Lincoln’s argument as presented in his Inaugural Address has many flaws. First, Lincoln attempts to avert the secessionist claim that the Constitution is a broken compact by asserting that union is not dependent solely upon the Constitution because there were antedating cementing documents that demonstrated the presence of a union. Unfortunately for Lincoln, these documents do very little to support the impossibility of secession. The first document Lincoln mentioned was the 1774 Articles of Association. This document, which represented only 11 of the colonies (The colony of Georgia did not assent to it, and only half of Delaware agreed to it.) was in fact merely a letter sent to the king that began by stating that Americans were, “His Majesty’s most loyal subjects.” And they were, at any rate, was mostly an attempt by the interested colonies (and interestingly, Quebec) to clarify their reasons for wanting to limit the importation of British goods. Exactly how a document that is essentially about economic relations between some of the colonials and their masters in England represents evidence of a union is most unclear at best.\

The second document to which Lincoln calls attention is the Declaration of Independence. Beyond the problematic issue of quoting a document whose very purpose is to assert that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive to the ends for which it was established it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government,” Lincoln also misjudges the character of what the Declaration created. The two concluding sentences make clear what Lincoln missed. They state that the various colonies “as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

These two sentences make clear that the one of the purposes of the Declaration of Independence was to announce the creation of a military alliance consisting of fully independent, though cooperating, nation states. This is nothing like Lincoln’s indissoluble union.

Lastly, Lincoln attempts to assert that union was established by The Articles of Confederation in 1778. This is a particularly tricky portion of Lincoln’s argument. Unlike the United States Constitution, the Articles of Confederation provided for a “perpetual union,” between the member states. These terms of confederation, however, were in fact not perpetual, lasting only until 1787 when the United States Constitution replaced the word “perpetual” with “perfect.” At any rate, even if the Articles of Confederation did create a union of some type, it was not of the powerful and cohesive secession-proof type of union that Lincoln seemed to contemplate. The Articles of Confederation guaranteed that every state would have, “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” In the end the Articles created what was closer to a European Union style confederation than a cohesive single nation.

Lastly, Lincoln asserts that the Constitution cannot possibly allow secession because one of its primary purposes was to create, “a more perfect union.” Lincoln links the term “perfect” with the idea of perpetuity. This is a logical leap that is out of line with both the history and wordings of the documents as well as the actual dictionary meanings of the terms. When the Constitution states that the purpose of the new document was to form a more perfect union, it means that the Constitution is intended to fix the substantial problems with the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, Black’s Law Dictionary gives the following definition for “perfect:” complete, finished, without defect; brought to a state of perfection. One of the problems with the Articles of Confederation, however, was not the issue of perpetuity. Unlike in the Constitution, this particular attribute was guaranteed by the Articles Confederation. In fact, to the extent that one views this clause as a way to interpret ambiguous terms in the Constitution it would seem that the framers of the Constitution at least implicitly rejected the idea of constitutional immortality.

If Lincoln’s view of the Constitution’s durability is incorrect, what, then, is the correct view? Some answers may be found in the thirteen declarations that proclaimed the various seceding states to be independent nations. The first thing that these documents attempted to do was to offer a distinctly different account of American history from that given by Lincoln. South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina being the first and most thorough declaration of secession, it will be explored in some detail. In its declaration South Carolina begins its historical exploration by noting that the Declaration of Independence, as was stated above, contemplated very separate and independent states. Furthermore, upon reaching peace with England, Article I of the Treaty of Paris proclaimed that His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, [etc.] to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES.

Second, South Carolina asserts that the very process of constitutional ratification that occurred after the 1787 Constitutional Convention supports the claim that the states were thought to be separate and independent entities at the time. When the Constitution was submitted for ratification by the various states it required only nine states to ratify the document, but upon getting nine signatories it would be applicable only to those states that agreed to sign onto it. In fact, there were two holdout states, and in the intervening time between ratification of the other eleven and the ratification of the last two states those two states acted as completely separate and sovereign nations.

Thirdly, and most importantly, South Carolina stressed that the Constitution was a compact between the member states, and as such must be governed by the law of compact. The Declaration of Secession stressed that the union was subject to a fundamental principle, namely the law of compact, saying:

“We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other and that each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.”

The contractual breach about which South Carolina was speaking was, of course, the issue of Northern states refusing to return, or at least frustrating Southern demands for, fugitive slaves, in direct contradiction to Article IV of the United States Constitution. South Carolina asserted that this clause was “so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made.” Thus, with a material breach of the contract South Carolina felt that it was within its rights as a sovereign state to withdraw from the union. What seems clear at this point is that there existed no concept, antecedent to the adoption of the United States Constitution, of an indissoluble union. What is less clear is whether the Constitution created one. This question was confronted head-on by the Supreme Court on the very eve of the Civil War.

Kentucky Vs. Dennison & Other Instances of
Federal in Support of Secession

After South Carolina seceded in late 1860 President James Buchanan openly rejected the theory put forth by the South Carolina declaration, but did nothing to prevent the state from seceding. As a states-rights Democrat with Southern leanings, Buchanan believed that the government did not have the power to interfere with a state attempting to leave the union. In Kentucky v. Dennison, The United States Supreme Court, in an opinion clearly written with President-Elect Lincoln as its main audience, declared that the Constitution was an agreement, the interpretation and ultimate enforcement of which is left to depend upon the fidelity of the State Executive to the compact entered into with the other States when it adopted the Constitution, [and there is] no power delegated to the General Government to use any coercive means to compel.

Kentucky v. Dennsison involved a suit by the state of Kentucky, less than a year away from making its own attempt to leave the union, against the governor of Ohio who was refusing to turn over fugitive slaves in violation of Article IV. Though hardly a friend to fugitive slaves, Chief Justice was asserting his belief that the federal government lacked the authority to force a state to comply with its wishes, the implication clearly being that the freshly-seceded South Carolina could not be coerced back into the union.

Lincoln paid no attention to this decision, again announced that the union was perpetual, and undertook actions to preserve the union, which included re-supplying federal troops in Ft. Sumter. To many, what followed was a trial by battle for secession. In the end, it is often said, the theory of secession was disproved and defeated and a new type of federalism was born. At the conclusion of the Civil War the victorious Union demanded that all the states of the Confederacy renounce secession. South Carolina, ever defiant refused to renounce the doctrine of secession, instead choosing merely to repeal their Ordinance of Secession.

If one examines the events of the Civil War, however, it seems that all that was proved was that the Southern secessions of 1860 and 1861 were unsuccessful rather than illegal. The Union, even though Lincoln professed to believe that it was indivisible, acted in many instances in ways that suggested that the South had in fact seceded. Admittedly, throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction the North often took steps to refuse the legitimacy and actuality of the Confederate Secession. By refusing to recognize the Confederate War debt, by refusing to declare war on the Confederated States of America, and by refusing to follow basic international laws with respect to the conduct of recognized belligerents the Union was sending the message that the South had not in fact seceded from the Union. These actions, though mostly symbolic, tend to support Lincoln’s view of secession; that secession was illegal, impossible, and did not in fact occur.

These actions symbolizing the perpetuity of the union, however, are greatly outweighed by other actions taken by the United States federal government during the Civil War and Reconstruction. First, there was the Emancipation Proclamation. President Lincoln had, in his First Inaugural Address, declared that the rights and privileges of the states stripped the President of any power relating to the emancipation of slaves. If, in fact, South Carolina and the rest of the Confederacy had not seceded then Lincoln would not have had, constitutionally, the power to free the slaves. This is evidenced by the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves in West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico or any of the other slave states that were at that point part of the Union. Clearly, it is true that Lincoln did this because he wanted the rebellious states to have an incentive -the preservation of slavery- to rejoin the union, but nonetheless the fact that he undertook this measure means that he contemplated the states in question as being outside of the Constitutional order. In other words, they had seceded.

One other point is worth mentioning before continuing on. At the conclusion of the war the former Confederate States had to go through a series of measures to be re-admitted into the union. The obvious point here is that if, as Lincoln asserted, a state could not leave the union then there will never be cause to readmit any state. The very idea of readmission assumes that a party has left, which is in direct contradiction to Lincoln’s words. The obvious retort to these arguments would be to assert that not recognizing secession in 1861 would have been to ignore an obvious truth. Here an important distinction needs to be made. Lincoln, as he asserted in his various speeches, believed that attempting to secede was “the essence of anarchy, and as such was not a legally recognizable act.” Article III, contemplates that various individuals will, from time to time, take actions detrimental to their nation, and Article IV, recognizes that at various moments the United States may be required to intervene in the affairs of states to insure domestic tranquility. Instead of attempting to work within the Constitution to achieve the same ends the Union chose to act extra-constitutionally. Whatever the practical constraints on the situation may have been in the end Lincoln and the Union chose to treat the Confederate states not as states filled with rebellious elements, but as states that had in fact left the compact known as the United States Constitution.

All of this focus on history may seem, to some, to be misguided. The argument could be forcefully made that much has changed in American jurisprudence since Appomattox, and the state-federal relationship detailed above, has been drastically changed by a greatly augmented federal government and much-minimized state governments. Furthermore, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which for the first time constitutionalized the notion of a national citizenship, makes hash of Calhoun’s outdated states’ rights arguments. The retort to this set of arguments involves two assertions. First, the lengthy detailing of the history of American secession detailed above serves only to demonstrate that the going into the Civil War secession was an issue that was still very much debated, and the Civil War did not kill the notion of secession, rather in some ways it gave it some credence and weight.

Second, the subsequent transformation of the American system of federalism in many ways has very little to do with the issue of secession. It is important to remember that all of the major documents that either explicitly or implicitly supported the idea of strong sovereign states approached the issue from the standpoint of the theory of compact, and as such the issue of secession could only be raised, according to the secessionists, in instances in which that compact had been breached. As such, the current constitutional structure is of very little importance because it is, at its heart, still an agreement between the states. Though the nature and interpretation of the contract between them may have changed somewhat, it remains as true today as was at the end of the Civil War that secession was only ever considered to be an option when the primary pact from which the parties were seceding -the Constitution- was being violated. This point is obvious upon a reading of any of the declarations enunciating the immediate causes of secession. All of these documents detailed the perceived violations of the Article IV of the Constitution. If, then, the concept of secession survived the Civil War then it must still be alive today. Granted, the augmented powers of the federal government, through constitutional amendment or otherwise, would today mean that many of the grievances against the federal government in 1861 are no longer valid, but that does nothing to diminish the core truth that secession has yet to be proved to be an illegitimate action.

There is, however, one way that the idea of secession could have an impact on the new state-federal relationship. In an era in which states are becoming less powerful the implicit threat of secession could help to equalize the imbalance of power between the state and national governments. Throughout the early first half of the Nineteenth Century the South, though outnumbered by states hostile to the idea of the spread of slavery and of a different mind when it came to tariffs, was able to win some moderately favorable compromises with respect to the lowering of tariffs and the spread of slavery to the new federal territories. Many politicians, especially after South Carolina flirted with the idea of secession in 1833, worried enough about secession to treat Southern concerns favorably in every venue from the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Supreme Court. The problem, of course, was that finally the talk of secession eventually became secession itself. But, with no issue currently in American politics as contentious as the issue of slavery was in the 1860s it seems unlikely that the implication of secession could ever mature into something more serious.

Even after this lengthy discussion about the validity, and even value, of secession one truth remains more certain than ever; in today’s America, secession is a practical impossibility. If nothing else, the Civil War and its aftermath brought America together as a nation and accomplished the one thing that makes secession highly unlikely; it gave Americans, in all the states, a love of and loyalty to their country. Because most Americans do not consider secession to be an option, it is not one. In this sense this entire exploration is less about trying to give disgruntled states an alternative -because secession is today an unthinkable possibility- and more about trying to put the act of secession into proper historical perspective. From time to time one hears faint rumblings of Hawaiian sovereignty or Texas separatism movements, and maybe one distant day these rumblings will amount to something more. But, until that day America remains one nation, practically indivisible. E Pluribus Unum.

Whereas the Steelers Stink...

2009-02-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

There is an apocryphal story of John C. Calhoun, the (in)famous American Senator, Vice President and Yale alumni. Known as a rather stiff and cold man, he one day felt as though he had not given his wife sufficient love and attention and set out to write her a love letter. Unfortunately, after writing only “Whereas,…” he could go no further and abandoned his effort. That story always amused me, partly for what it said about the man, but also because it says something sort of interesting about the nature of love. Calhoun tried to list his wife’s best qualities, and simply couldn’t do it. This should not lead one to believe that he did not love her, or that he did not appreciate her; rather, like most people he probably just loved her because he did, and had never bothered to create anything like an actuarial account of her qualities.

People who treat love like the NFL Scouting Combine, accumulating a list of things that their potential mate has to have seem, to me at least, a little silly. I remember one female friend who had a list of “musts” that was probably 20-25 items, and I only thought to myself, “you’re not nearly pretty enough to pull that off. One of two things will happen: you’ll burn the list, or die lonely.” When I think of the females in my own orbit, I will sometimes in passing thing, “Jane X is really smart, is funny, is cute enough… I wonder why we never dated?” Then, I’ll see her and remember that, you know what, I just don’t really like her like that. On paper, it works, but whatever illogical combination of pheromones and hormones just isn’t there. But, that girl who I know is bad for me, who might not be particularly bright, or who is otherwise obviously wrong for me… well, she’s the one I want, the one I’ll date, and the one who, afterwards, I’ll wonder what I was thinking. This isn’t always so, or even mostly or often so. It’s a random thing. You like who you like and want who you want, and you will, I think, back-justify her qualities based on the fact that your brain (or other more southerly region) tells you that you’ve gotta have her. I don’t say this as a complaint, because in a larger sense it doesn’t much bother me, but rather as an observation about the nature of love and attraction.

All of this is preamble to my thoughts on the Super Bowl. Regular readers of my blog (both of you) will remember that some months ago I decided I would set about on a logical process of choosing an NFL team to root for. Based on a set of criteria that I selected, the Steelers were my choice. The more I watched them, though, the more I disliked them. I grew to hate their QB, I found their style of play insufferably boring, their coach was a gutless grandstander who only ever spoke in faux-covering-up-for-my-own-insecurities macho coachspeak, and their wide receiver happened to be a player against whom I had rooted since his days at the Ohio Penitentiary for Special Needs Children and Reform School, known to most as THE Ohio State University. (Yes, it makes perfect sense to put an accept on a definite article. It’s not AN Ohio State University, it’s THE Ohio State University)

So, I had the rather unusual experience of choosing a team and then jumping off the bandwagon right as they were on the verge of winning it all. So, tonight they won the Super Bowl, but I rooted passionately for the Cardinals, whose players all displayed much more style, class and creativity in a losing effort than THE Pittsburgh Steelers showed in winning. (Ah, so this is what sour grapes taste like).

I’m going to go back to being an Oilers / Titans fan. They will, again, break my heart in creative ways (28 inches from a Super Bowl, blown 19 point lead, blown 32 point lead…), but now that Pacman is no longer on their roster they have nobody on their team as odious as the preposterously named Santonio Holmes or as boorish and cliché in his approach as Mike Tomlin.

Random other thoughts:

1. Kurt Warner is a sure-shot Hall of Fame QB in my book. His numbers and accomplishments stack up very well against just about every QB not named Joe Montana.
2. My friend Dave’s assertion that Hines Ward is Hall of Fame material might not even rise to the level of laughable. I have given the statistics of Hines Ward and Chris Carter, the best eligible WR not in the Hall of Fame.

Hines Ward 800 receptions; 9,780 yards, 72 TD
Chris Carter 1101 receptions, 13,899 yards; 130 TD

Monday morning, the basketball season(s) begins in earnest. Get well Bynum, we’ll need you!

Can't Find a Better Man

2009-01-30T19:35:00.001-08:00

In the spring of 1994, I was a high school senior, preparing to graduate and begin the next stage in my life. My academic career at Hermiston High School was unremarkable, to say the least. Completely disinterested (yes, this is the correct usage of this word) in schoolwork, and blithely naïve to the challenges of the real world, I operated with a sense of unfounded optimism and happiness present only in the very young who have not been made to come to a full account of the world. At some point, while watching television I heard that Kurt Cobain died.

To hear Kurt Loder tell it, music changed, and perhaps the world shifted on its axis. I did not feel much beyond bemusement at the overwrought coverage that his suicide triggered, and I likely felt a little annoyed that Yo! MTV Raps and Beavis and Butthead were preempted to show shots of people in Times Square, Seattle, and Insert-Generic-European-City-Here, crying and lamenting the death of music. Even at that tender age, my irony-ometer blipped loudly as I heard Tabitha Soren talk about how Nirvana changed how people accessed music, how he had been the anti-rock star, and that Nirvana represented a new iteration in the development of rock. That was likely why they won MTV’s (a wholly owned subsidiary of VIACOM) Video of the Year.

Growing up in northern Oregon, I had lived through the Seattle explosion. During my junior and senior years, my friends and I would often skip school and see the various acts, many of them now lost to oblivion, play around Seattle, Yakima and Portland. Many of my memorable experiences from youth came while looking out on the Yakima Valley and the mountain passes trickling into Tacoma and Seattle, all from the back of a pickup truck or the passenger seat of Derek Michael’s undersized VW Rabbit. The sense I got from folks around the Northwest was that Pearl Jam was much more loved, and to this day I consider Ten a much better album than either In Utero or Nevermind, but Back East Nirvana tended to get more love. If you were much around the music scene then, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Portland and Seattle crawled with people from Back East who landed at Sea-Tac, and immediately headed to Eddie Bauer (before it was Eddie Bauer) and kitted up in plaid shirts and cruddy jeans then went to Starbucks (before it was Starbucks). Man, they would tell you, this was it. Seattle / Portland was the spot! None of that bullshit establishment that infected life Back East, people here kept it real (well, “keep it real” hadn’t been invented yet…)

The locals tended to take it all in good humor, and there was even a famous hoax played by a number of local bands. When a New York Times reporter asked them about their influences, they just invented supposed local bands with preposterous names like the Vainglorious Turd Farmers and Cheetah Girl’s Vasectomy. The hoax worked, the story ran, and people Back East took comfort in the fact that somewhere people did not take themselves so seriously, and perhaps were more authentic- as though authenticity can have a locus and a people. I think a lot about my political sensibilities and the gears that turn that particular machine. I think that I am more aware of myself as a Northwesterner than most Americans are of their region, save those who live down South. Part of this, of course, has to do with the fact that I spent my college years in Virginia, and to the extent that my classmates defined themselves by place, so too did I. But I also think that part of this identity stems from my witnessing the fetishizing of the Northwest as some sort of liberal utopia, where men subsist on granola and organic micro-brew, the cars run on rainbows and hope, and people never shave, bathe, or do much except read books, make software, and drink and smell like coffee.

Of course, like all regional stereotypes, this one is silly. Most Oregonians bathe regularly. But, though I left feeling an enormous chasm between my comprehension of the world and their own, I do feel that going to class and living primarily with people from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida gave me a deeper appreciation for, not just the fact of regional diversity in America, but of its value. Though I frequently make this mistake myself, I chafe at the notion of ignorant flyover states, the Southern rube or the arrogant New Yorker. I have been to 49 of our 50 states (Hawaii, build a bridge!), and having lived extensively in Los Angeles, Oregon, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina and Connecticut, I have had exposure to the pace and flavor of life in all of our nation’s regions.

The Constitution is a tricky thing, and to be frank every political party and interest group combs over it, looking for just that part that will help them. Everyone extols the genius of our Founders, but quickly forgets elements of this genius at inconvenient moments. Republicans were certainly guilty of this in myriad ways, and now that Democrats have come to power, they have picked up right where the Grand Old Party has left off. One wonders, when reading through the legislative agenda of the Democrats how many, if any, still believe in the notion of federalism. Every problem is national, every solution is national. The original primary sovereign, the state, has become subservient.

The loss of vibrant and powerful states is not just some minor technical matter. On the one hand, it is representative of a larger push within the United States toward homogenization, political, cultural and otherwise. A great failing of liberal dogma is that it sees true diversity (not just its skin-deep proxy) as threatening to national unity. In the same way that I have in the past argued for the important place of individuals having a unique sense of their ethnic heritage, so too would I argue that people should feel encouraged to develop a local lifestyle, politics and worldview. That Montgomery, Alabama and San Francisco are so different is not to America’s disbenefit.

The most important argument in favor of the federal system relates to the notion that by having 50 unique and robust governments, individual states can experiment, and when one state comes across a solution others will mimic it, or at least adapt it. With a unitary government, we lack this capacity. Take, for example the current economic crisis. Obama has deployed a trillion dollar scheme (this word used intentionally) that may or may not work to treat the immediate symptoms that ail America, but I do not think that anyone has asserted that his plan represents either a cure or the first step in a curative process. But, for lack of other options, this is what we have. Indeed, the truly frightening thing is how little confidence people seem to have in the process and how nobody can explain in detail how, if it does work, it will have worked. At the national level, nobody has any ideas, not the least of which an overmatched uncreative President who has learned that the economy, more complex than the simpletons who voted for him (me included, I suppose), cannot be charmed with the Svengali of a perfectly-delivered piece of rhetorical rubbish.

Though states operate under immense financial pressure caused in large part by the expansion of the federal government, they have nonetheless begun to address some of the more systemic, long-term, comprehensive and complex problems that America confronts. In California, for example, Governor Schwarzenegger has laid out an ambitious plan that will completely transform how the state creates and uses power, and thereby making the necessary adjustments to the economy to allow it to compete in the future. Such a transformation cannot take place on the national level because, while California politicians can afford to annoy Ford, GM, Exxon or BP (to varying degrees), no President can get elected without taking care of these interests.

Chief among the downsides of regionalism is the sense of suspicion that gets created about the competency and intentions of people from other pars of the country. If anyone has ever read (no, not watched) The Wizard of Oz, you understand this dynamic. Dorothy, the innocent Kansas farm girl, goes to Oz (New York City) to find her way home, only to discover that the man behind the curtain is a fraud and she had, on her feet, the means by which to get home (her silver, not ruby, slippers: the silver standard). Frank Baum and W.W. Denslow might wonder about the current financial crisis and our approach to it. It does not require one to become a conspiracy theorist to point out that most of the current economic advisors putting together the trillion-dollar bailout cut their teeth and built their careers in large banks; the same large banks that now are asking for and receiving enormous bundles of cash for purposes unspecified.

We are made to believe that it is all very complicated, beyond our ability to understand, but so vitally necessary that we must quickly give over our money before things get worse; no time to talk it out, just hand it over! I am perfectly willing to concede that many of the intricacies of this crisis elude my understanding. That said, I do believe that I have two superceding perspectives of the matter that make me resistant to trusting the wisdom of the current path. First, at its heart, capitalism requires the process of creative destruction. Institutions that made poor decisions, must be made to pay, and we should replace the notion of “too large to fail” with a more sober metaphor that we are amputating gangrenous limbs from the national corpus. Business, as nature, abhors a vacuum, and if you want smarter insurance companies and better cars, let AIG and Ford go gently into the night, replaced by newer and smarter companies. Yes, there will be enormous collateral damage, but I wonder whether that damage can equal the damage that comes from borrowing and spending irresponsibly at a scale heretofore unimaginable. Second, history suggests that nations recover from huge economic downturns not through upticks in spending and borrowing, but rather through some larger paradigm shift. It seems that instead of letting the undergrowth burn, we are putting off a larger conflagration until some future, indeterminate point. Better to let the fire consume, that we might sooner rebuild with something better.

I don’t romanticize the wisdom of the Nebraska farmer or the Utah miner because, frankly, when it comes to the economy they don’t have the slightest clue. What is apparent, though, is that neither Henry Paulson nor anyone on the new Obama team have many good ideas either. It would take an enormous faith in the strength of federalism for Obama to cede control of this issue to the states. Given his lack of courage and his largely unfounded belief in his own ability to solve problems, he also remains temperamentally indisposed to such a move. My guess, though, is the current economic crisis has come about because of an accumulation of problems small and large, many of which (not all, by any means) that either can only be fixed by states or would at least be better handled at that level. We have all been shaped by the particular circumstances of our upbringing that, in large measure, reflect sensibilities gained in reaction to more local problems and solutions. Whether in Oregon or Alabama, California or New York, or somewhere in between, somebody has some solutions, but they likely will not get heard unless we open up the process by reinvigorating the states.

The Unfortunate Disappearance of the Race Man

2009-01-26T07:50:00.001-08:00

In 1947, Major League Baseball had begun a transformation that would change the nature and trajectory of its sport, and help to set the country, and a race, on a new path. Of course, this is the year that Branch Rickey and the Dodgers famously integrated baseball. Rickey was a progressive man, but more than that he was shrewd. He had seen Negro League teams fill Yankee Stadium, Shibe Park, Comiskey and the Polo Grounds. His own Ebbett’s Field had, in 1945, hosted sold-out games. Perhaps more importantly, he understood that, in terms of its on-field quality, the Negro Leagues offered a better product. The Yankees had recently been swept in a 5-game exhibition, and overall Negro League teams won 7 in 10 games that they played against MLB opponents. So, it is no mystery that when, in 1947, the American and National Leagues created the new Rookie of the Year Awards, it was for its first decades largely dominated by black players, and that though they have played for only about half of MLB’s existence, five of the top six home run hitters are black. What the history of baseball would look like if players like Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Satchel Paige (his younger version, at least) played in the Majors cannot be known, though I suspect that replacing the romantic aura of apocrypha with real statistics that demonstrated that, for example, Charleston was a lifetime .400 hitter with power both ways, or that James “Cool Papa” Bell had stolen 200 bases in a season, all against MLB competition, would have rightly changed how we today think of Ruth, Cobb, Williams, et cetera.

But all this is known, and this story tends to fit a rather simple understanding of integration and America’s irreversible march towards racial reconciliation and a perfection of our Great Union. What this kind of simple thinking ignores are the real costs of integration. Indeed, ignoring costs and consequences is the classic liberal folly (which is almost certainly less odious than the classical conservative follies, but that another day…). There are two kinds of costs. On the one hand, if you happened to play first base before Jackie showed up, in 1947 you were out of a job. This kind of cost is, to most right-thinking people- not that big of a problem. We are Americans, and we live by the law of the wolf- if your legs are not swift enough to track prey or your teeth are too dull to bring it down, you do not eat, you starve, you die. And rightly so. Though it makes sense from a political perspective to address the fears and failures of these people, in a fair world they are the cause of their own marginalization.

The other kind of cost gets to a more complicated problem. Consider the aforementioned Negro Leagues again. In 1972, twenty-five years after joining the Dodgers, Jackie Robinson was honored at the World Series. Old and angry after a decade of unrelenting abuse in the Majors, he saw the situation and his contribution to baseball with a properly ambivalent manner. Sure, MLB was much improved by the infusion of players like Mays, Aaron, and Clemente, but the number of blacks making a living in professional baseball had never been lower. More importantly, with the extinction of the Negro Leagues, there were no black managers in baseball, no owners, and no front-office personnel. Six decades and two years after Jackie integrated baseball, there are still relatively managers, and no owners, in baseball. From a particular perspective, integration has done more for whites than blacks.

Of course, one cannot honestly contemplate this issue without acknowledging that black players made more money in MLB than in the Negro Leagues, and there is an accrued non-pecuniary benefit that comes from having the fullness of your personality acknowledged. And herein lies the struggle. To someone with even the roughest understanding of the history of the race, this question of integration versus separation, pride versus genuflection, a shared single national identity or a self-conception that places race at the heart of a personal understanding of politics, society, nation and self, has long been the source of debate within the black community. It is Frederick Douglass versus Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey versus W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King.

For a lot of reasons, the integration model seems to have won out completely. Part of this has to do with the deification of Martin Luther King. Now, whenever simpleton reporter wants to know “whither the black man?” he will invariably ask, “what would King think?” My answer is always doubly “who cares?” One, because though I am an historian, I do not suffer from historical necrophilia (in its strictest Greek translation), and when presented with a question, I do not seek to séance an answer from the dusty bones and worm-riddled flesh of some fallen hero. Second, Martin did not have all the answers, and many of the problems facing America could be more directly answered by wondering, “what would Malcolm think?” But, I suppose, more largely, there has been an enormous cost to making Martin a national hero, as opposed to a Negro hero. In the national conversation, the angry Martin, the frustrated Martin, the suspicious Martin has been largely subsumed by the postage stamp Martin, the we-shall-overcome Martin. Essentially, blacks are now made to worship a neutered and happy Martin, and this has become the model of the Good Negro.

On a personal level, I am about 45% convinced that Brown v. Board of Education was a net negative for the black race. The world in 1954 was a bleak one for blacks, but there were important positive signs. When one controls for income, for example, in 1950 blacks actually tended to be more likely than whites to graduate high school or college. Black businesses had begun to grow, and a distinctly black culture had developed that essentially fueled America’s massive cultural output in the 20th century. Indeed, likely most of what you have on your iPod today –hip-hop, gospel, rock, country, jazz, blues, swing, ragtime, heavy metal- is essentially a creation of the insular and vibrant black community of the previous century.

Indeed, if you look at the problems plaguing black America today, they largely stem from massive trend reversals that occurred during this period. The core problems with blacks are basically as follows: blacks have kids out of wedlock, they don’t progress in their educations, they don’t start businesses. If one were to suppose a world in which integration did not occur, and that the trend lines that developed up to 1954 projected out to today, none of these things would be an issue. Indeed, slavery did not destroy the black family- in 1950 it was largely in tact, divorce rates were much lower, marriage rates much higher, very few children born out of wedlock. In 1950, black colleges, while not properly funded were in fact producing graduates who were community leaders and had self-pride and pride of race. In the 40’s and 50’s, the black community even had a term for these people; they were called “race men.” They saw their role in life partly as uplifting the black community, and took pride in their culture and heritage. I would posit that almost every problem that now faces Black America is the result of the death of this concept.

I understand the natural response to this point. This kind of approach is hateful, is un-American, is destructive. I would disagree. I do not find anything at all wrong with taking pride in one’s racial or ethnic heritage, nor with the notion that we first look after our own. We live our lives at the center of concentric circles of obligation: self, family, friends, community, nation. To insert one’s group, race, tribe or affiliation into this mix does not constitute an important paradigm shift. In fact, it is notable that most race men served in the military, and believed that an important part of black history was the black man’s insistence that he be allowed to fight and serve the nation.

The reason that I say that I am only 45% convinced of this perspective is that I must account for the psychological burden that comes from living in a nation that explicitly reduces your humanity and marginalizes you a non-citizen and quasi-human. I would be both disrespectful of their pain and too clever by half if I glossed over this trauma. On the other hand, I think that had Brown not happened, blacks may have won their fight to see separate-but-equal applied to the letter. In such a scenario, Alabama would have had to have funded its black colleges equally, provided perfectly equal accommodations, etc. This could not have lasted, and I suspect that in time this enforced paradigm would have forced whites to have sought terms with blacks, thus effectively bringing about a more respectable integration in which blacks were less begging, and more operating from a position of strength: no red-lining, expand state assistance and farm subsidies to share-croppers, etc. In this respect, Malcolm assertion that King’s movement was a beg-o-lution, and not a revolution, has some traction, especially looking back.

In the new racial orthodoxy, there is much that blacks do not, and should not, complain about. BET is now owned by VIACOM, Motown by Sony, and very few loci of black culture are controlled by blacks. The coonery that one sees on television, in music and on film are the expected outcomes of this paradigm. We are all now to embrace this post-racial ethos, secure in the knowledge that by giving up our core identity we can assume a new one, a purer one. I am naturally skeptical.

Some months ago, when President Obama was merely Candidate Obama, he answered questions about his level of “blackness.” Given the degree to which he had assiduously run from the brown skin that stalked him, and given his rather pathetic “One America” drivel, the question was appropriate. He said something to the effect that, “when I am trying to get a taxi in New York, I know I’m black.” Well, this answer is facetious and disgusting. First, it is almost certainly a lie in the same way that Tiger Woods’ mythical country club that refused to allow him to play was a lie. It raised the spectre of an anachronistic version of racism that, frankly, resonates with white liberals, but has neither a basis in fact nor any real relevance to the identity or problems of blacks today. One can imagine the good liberal white woman in New York City exclaiming, “oh the humanity! And I thought that we overcame?! Oh, Dr. King must certainly be upset to see this!”

Obama is not a race man, in any sense of the phrase. Rather, he is the manufactured version of what the New Negro, the Good Negro is supposed to be. He embodies all of the best stereotypes of blacks: he is cool, he sure can give a sermon, and he seems to have some kind of magical powers that surround him. And, of course, he embodies none of the bad ones: he is more effeminate than the manly threat posed by the Black Menace, he is post-racial, he isn’t filled with ideas about how to change America (come to think of it, he has no real ideas whatsoever). He is polite, neutered, safe, non-threatening, simple and lovable.

The ancient Chinese used to have a saying that it took three generations to build an empire, and one to ruin it. In some sense, one can see this in the black people. From slavery, you have seen three basic building phases: Reconstruction established a national black community and consciousness; the pre-WWII era established the intellectual foundations of the black moment; WWII gave a sense of pride and purpose. Now, the integration era has brought about the almost comprehensive collapse of the black community in America.

Now, to be clear, I’m not a black separatist. I don’t think black people should pack up and head back (as if that word applies!) to Africa… I’ve been there, and they don’t want you. My only point is that now blacks must come to a more realistic assessment of their position in the United States. Post-racialism will both destroy your core identity and leave you without solutions for how to move forward. Blacks have to be more assertive in reclaiming ownership of their cultural output (BET, Tyler Perry… you’re gone), asserting dominion over their history (sorry, King did not die to save White America) and begin taking more seriously the basic ethical approach of the mid-century race men. This, while never losing sight of the role that they have played, and must continue to play, in the construction of the nation- a fact from which they should draw both pride and an allegiance to the larger national goals. In other words, I believe sincerely that taking pride in your past and race and having a profound attachment to the United States are not mutually exclusive.

Mostly, the black race needs real voices (not necessarily “leaders” that is mostly white construction of an improper understanding of blacks as some sort of distinct tribe operating within the borders) of strength and authority. Not the hucksterism and dishonesty of a Sharpton, not the anachronistic marches and liberal nonsense of a Jackson, and certainly not the cowering pathetic disguised as towering rhetoric of an Obama. Real men, with real pride, real ideas, real commitment to the race as a race. The nation risks losing the distinct voice and culture that blacks in America have always provided, and when that happens it will be bad for the American; post-racialism is essentially the creation of a single hegemonic and bland pseudo-culture, and I want no part in that.

Bourbon, Vodka and Late Night Ruminations...

2009-01-16T21:22:00.000-08:00

Over the course of my life I have received many gifts from friends and family, and though they range in sentimental and pecuniary value, I have appreciated them all in a genuine way. Of all of these, though, I don’t think that any of them have had as much impact on me as two gifts that my parents gave. As a young child, my mother gave me a book about Jackie Robinson. I suspect that part of this stemmed from her desire to find a way to, as a white woman, raise a black child in a way that both remained true to her own values and heritage while at the same time instilling me with a sense of the things that I would need to know in order to navigate a world not fully willing accept me. This book meant the world to me because it represented the first real example of a black person who was fully intelligent and in charge of their own destiny. I loved, and continue to love, Jackie Robinson in a very profound way, and I believe that no athlete accomplished as much with so much riding on his performance as did Jackie. Indeed, I do not think that it is hyperbole to say that but for Jackie, there could not have been an MLK, and but for MLK Mr. Obama’s success would not have been possible.

The second gift came much later in life, and taught me things that went beyond the public arena of sport and celebrity and triggered a deep inner realization. My stepfather, who raised me, gave me a box set of DVDs of all of Muhammad Ali’s professional fights. I received these DVS right before I left to do my legal work in South Africa, and to be honest I was a little annoyed to have received the gift. I removed the DVDs from their cases, and put them in a manila envelope and stuffed them in my suitcase before catching the 10PM to Johannesburg. Some months into my stay, as I rearranged my apartment I came across these DVDs. I remember with great clarity that it was the first Saturday after the 2000 election, and all of the television channels were devoted to hanging chads, Broward County and all manner of rubbish that I had had my fill of. So, instead of suffering through more, I found a way to run the laptop through the television in a way that circumvented the DVD zoning and allowed me to watch Ali.

Genius is a rare thing, and as I watched the entirety of Ali’s career over the next three days, I came to a profound respect for the man’s life and talent. I know that people make much of his stance against the Vietnam War, but as a source of object lesson, his in-ring career ended up teaching me much more. To see a man go from raw wunderkind, to a professional at the very peak of his physical and mental prowess, to a determined veteran who won by sheer force of will and guile, to a hollowed shell who took unnecessary and brutal beatings at the hands of lesser men was akin to taking the catbird seat to the life of a Renaissance master.

I know that boxing has become passé; those who despite the violence in American life point to it as an anachronistic sporting relic of a less civilized age. Those who crave a purer form of mayhem will instead flock to mixed martial arts and the unleashed mayhem that that sport can sometimes provide. I, though, have maintained my love of boxing because it is, I believe, the last sport that asks existential questions of its participants. MMA lasts but a few rounds, and even in this very harsh sport no fighter is really every presented with the harsh choice: you have been pummeled for 10 rounds, and your arms ache, your lungs burn and you have no reservoir of energy to call upon… will you quit? Nothing in sports will put you to the question quite so directly, nothing in sports will so explicitly test the sternness of your stuff, and no sport requires the assiduous attention to rigor and detail in training that boxing demands. There is a reason that when we wonder whether someone has the mettle to meet a task, we ask “will he answer the bell?”

In my Ali videos, there was a moment in the Rumble in the Jungle, the iconic Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire (now DR Congo) after the second round that sent a chill through me. It was apparent that Ali had decided that he would press Foreman, the younger and stronger man, to test his chin and his resolve early one. It seemed that Ali banked on the fact that by throwing all of his best stuff at the heavily-favored Foreman, he could wound him early or at least fluster him into abandoning his gameplan, and thus open the door for the more seasoned Ali to outthink him through 15 rounds. Through the first two rounds, Ali threw lead rights, jabs, and uppercuts and Foreman… all to no avail. As Ali stood in the corner between rounds two and three, he had a look on his face that revealed everything. He never broke his gaze on Foreman, but you could see his mind was elsewhere, as if he acknowledged to himself that in always professing himself The Greatest, he had in fact begged the gods for just such a moment against which to test himself. His man was bigger, stronger, meaner, determined, younger and fifteen feet from him. His greatest test, his biggest opportunity, his most dangerous opponent. For a brief moment, you can sense fear, then a quick transformation to something more determined, resolute, and strong. He had asked himself the existential question, and reassured himself that he could and would press forward. He WAS The Greatest, he COULD take the best that Foreman had to offer. He would not lose.

I sometimes think about the Rumble in the Jungle in those moments that test my resolve and talent, and though my own particular set of skills do not rise to the level of genius that Ali displayed in the ring, I take some limited comfort in knowing that there is value in looking into the abyss, and that champions can experience fleeting moments of self-doubt and even fear. I allow myself to accept the possibility of not just defeat, but of something more complete and akin to spiritual and existential annihilation, knowing that from this precipice I can step back and return. In many ways, I indeed feel disappointed when the troubles that confront me do not raise to the level of existential crisis, and I sometimes lament that my life has too few challenges that threaten me in a more profound and complete manner. But, I also understand that these questions can never be avoided, only delayed.

My Friend

2009-01-15T23:52:00.001-08:00

I had forgotten how much I loved writing in the absolute oppressive heat. In reading back through my journal entries that I wrote in Cameroon, the short stories that I popped out in Brazil, and even the dialog sections that I ironed out while working for the kind people at Duke over the summer, I see a kind of crispness that evades me in the colder months. In fact, what I generally learned in my last trip to Cameroon was that the heat suited me. In six weeks, I dropped 25 pounds, felt energized all day, and found myself constantly finding ways to get out and about in the tropical, even as the city burned from political violence.

Now, as I am moving one step closer to being something like permanent, I am beginning to idealize my traveling just a little bit more. The memories of pistols pressed against my temple, of an AK-47 stuck in my solar plexus, or of the drunken and tired men with their fingers on a .50 machine gun asking me for the passport, seemingly unaware that they were gripping a live gun with safety off… all of those moments recede away and I can really only remember the 10,000 beautiful things that I saw, smelled, tasted, heard and did. Spending teenage years making mischief in the Lycee Bilangue, or climbing up Mt. Febe for ice cream dominate my memories of Cameroon.

But, that said, I am also acutely aware of what my travels have cost me. When I left for England, so many years ago it seems, I had a real life grown-up type girlfriend, a happy life at Yale, and three almost-perfect friends in New Haven with whom I wasted too many hours. My long journeys, though, have exacted a steep price. The girl is gone, I have spent something like $90,000 making my film, the kind people at Yale no longer view me as their Brown Jesus who will save all of academia, and I have spent far greater time away from my friends than with them.

Of course, choices are not abstractions. They can only be evaluated against the cold speculation of what might have been. Though I do not regret the money, am not particularly concerned about what Yale thinks of me, I do miss being away from my friends. This is sort of a revelation for me. Growing up, I never minded spending time by myself, and through my quick wit, toilet humor and occasional ability to dazzle teachers and females with smart things always meant that I had friends, I kept a tight circle. In fact, when at the age 13 I was punished by my father for refusing to speak French (I understood it, could speak it, could write it, but was just stubborn), he sent me to work on a farm in northwestern Cameroon where I mended fences, basically by myself. Though I would sometimes go three or four days without seeing anyone, and then only to collect more rice and meat, the only thing that really bothered me were the ant bites and the chimpanzees that threw corncobs, rocks and poop at me with a startling degree of accuracy.

Now, though, my best friend in New Haven has headed west, back to the Golden State. I am neither alone nor lonely, but I do miss my friend. I have no doubt that, as with my law school friends with whom I go to Mexico or the World Cup, I will continue to see Aaron regularly enough. But, a friendship loses something when not updated with quotidian drinks, commiseration, jubilation, and conversation. This understanding has particular weight with me because I understand too well what I’m giving up. I tend to do two things that always get me in trouble, and Aaron always managed to temper these bad tendencies. First, I live too much in my own head. Tall stacks of books, miles of tape in need of editing, or notebooks that beg for dialog and plot pull at me, and I can sometimes forget and shut out the world, to my detriment. Aaron, who is sort of a perpetual commotion machine, was often the impetus for a more extroverted approach.

Second, I can often act rashly. Bored when, after a few weeks, I basically figured out that graduate school would be a painful bother filled with papers I did not want to write, books I did not want to read, and conversations that I did not want to have, all while waiting to work on things that I actually wanted to do. Numbed by this environment, and perhaps too swayed by reading about the bonding experience of war, by chance I walked past an Army recruitment station and signed up. I did not want to be an officer. I just wanted to jump out of things and shoot things. And, but for Aaron this is what I would be doing today. His persistence in making the point that I was being an idiot wore the stupid off me, and after a not insignificant (yeah, double-negative…whatever) amount of wrangling, I became a civilian again, and have since been restored to a state of reason.

So, life moves forward, and we are rightly made to understand that the things we know in life have no permanence. Momentum carries us forward in life, and the intelligent do not resist it, knowing that the lack will bring about a kind of spiritual death. But just as growth allows us to become better and renewed, so too do the things we shed leave holes that scar, but do not disappear. I miss my friend Will, I miss my friend Karl, I miss my friend Ted, and now, I miss my friend Aaron.

And this, from someone who abhors sentimentality.

...Perchance to Dream

2009-01-13T00:04:00.000-08:00

Few things are as insufferable as someone telling you about their dreams. “Oh man, Brian, when the lasagna started talking to me it was crazy!?” I have tried pretty much every trick to get people to stop telling me about their dreams, but people seem particularly resistant to the idea that dreams are almost always incoherent and are completely uninteresting to anyone except the person who had them. “Then I was like, oh snap, it wasn’t Angelina Jolie, it was my third grade teacher!”

I can remember one ex-girlfriend sharing the excruciating details of one seemingly interminable dream involving a family reunion, a judge for whom she clerked and something about a Clark Bar. Halfway through her epic Russian novel of a dream, she asked me what I thought it meant. Exasperated, I could only manage, “I think it means you’re gay.” Holding true to the form that repeated itself throughout our relationship, she did not find my quip as amusing as I did and replied, “you’re just saying that I’m gay because you want a threesome.” She was correct to assign an ulterior motive to my statement, but to be honest, at that point I would much rather have had her silence and celibacy than a threesome and the resumption of Part 27 of the Tales of the Clark Bar.

Now is where I tell you about a dream that I had Saturday night. Here it is: it was a warm and beautiful morning in Salvador, Brazil and I was running along the beach and everything –cars, people, the ocean- was completely mute except that I could hear Frank Glazer’s performance of Trois Gymnopedies, a very melancholy but beautiful piano piece. That’s it. What stood out to me about this dream, though, was not the dream itself –which, with its acute lack of Adriana Lima was entirely uninteresting- but rather that it was the first dream that I can remember having in at least two years.

In my more lazy and somnolent days, I had dreams all the time, usually involving silly delusions of grandeur: scoring 8 goals in the USA’s 13-0 victory over England in the World Cup Final (Rio Ferdinand always cried… not sure why), scoring 73 points in Game 7 wins over the Celtics, being naughty with Adriana Lima while playing Tecmo Bowl… that sort of thing.

But, I think that dreams are really only given over to people who sleep. Work has forced me to reduce my nightly intake to about 3-4 hours now, and I get restless after being in bed more than 6 hours. I can remember as a law school student, certainly what I would consider the apex of my physical fitness, I was a prodigious sleeper. I could not be bothered by my 9AM Torts class (attended five classes, got an A-, still can’t fully explain res ipsa loquitur), and unless beer, sports, or women lured me out, I was bonked by midnight. Indeed, in my 2L year I invented the wonderful phrase “1PM in the morning.”

I miss my dreams, because as much as hearing about the idiotic unconscious ramblings of friends and family, I find my own endlessly fascinating. I’m not sure if the recent recurrence of a dream was a one-off affair or the reintroduction of a trend, but I do hope that my dreams are here to stay. My mind needs the nightly enema that dreaming provides, and those micro-seconds where the mind goes meta trying to figure out if what is happening in a dream is real or not are quite precious. (I won Powerball and Paul Pierce fell in a vat of acid, all on the same day? Wow! Oh wait…is this a dream?)

Too many writers and poets compare sleep to death, and in some ways only dreams and the presence or absence of permanence separate the two. Perhaps given my fear of death, I have avoided sleeping so as to avoid injecting my active mind into a death-like scenario… or perhaps this is the kind of rubbish amateur psychoanalysis that I should reserve for figuring out why I always dream about corndogs and driving a train through the Chunnel.