I am a few years younger than the first Facebook users. Four years younger than Zuck. I remember when Facebook opened up to high school students, and the outrage the day News Feed popped up. I am the perfect age for Facebook the way a 13-year old girl in 1964 was the perfect age for the Beatles. I have a unique position on the generational landscape to claim knowledge of Facebook, and I’m here to say that most of the articles I’ve seen about it are way off.
There’s plenty of ink shed on the topic these days. Facebook, as all humans know, is planning an IPO. The $100+ billion forecasted valuation predicates on the fact that in about seven years Facebook has become a global institution claiming a seventh of the species as users, and it hasn’t even begun to monetize yet. It could prove to be a truly earth-changing platform. But it’s not yet.
I think Facebook is often described in monolithic and mysterious terms because many people writing about it were never part of its core demographic and don’t understand it well. You have to suppress laughter at press such as the article in this month’s Atlantic, entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” It’s one more skirmish in a years-long battle to academically conquer social media. Step one in this fight is acknowledging its résumé. It seems unacceptable now to discuss the phenomenon of Twitter without referencing Arab Spring, for example. But like all résumés, the accomplishments look better on paper than they do in practice. Revolutions have succeeded plenty of times before the #locationoftheriot was so easily shared. Social networks have existed as long as there have been common fires to eat around.
The theme that I keep hearing about Facebook is that social connections are somehow much different than they used to be. Society will no doubt assimilate this new technology consequentially, but as of now, it just seems too trivial to make a real impact. The connections I have on Facebook fall into two camps: people I know in real life and people who could disappear from this earth without me being the wiser. The latter are like constellations in the sky, individuals revolving in the ether with names I knew briefly. They only exist in news-fed wall posts. The familiar group divides into many layers, like our own atmosphere: some people are near and essential; others are distant but active acquaintances. The line where it dissipates into inert background is blurry. This is exactly the same as social circles before Facebook, with the sole, but crucial, difference being the ease with which I can choose to re-access, and rarely, re-engage, these individuals. Most of the time, though, you choose not to for the same reason that people rarely used to flip to the bottom of their rolodexes and dial for the hell of it. The only difference between that and the Facebook roster is that loaded term ‘friend,’ which throws a lot of the older crowd off. They’re not real friends, Pop. We know the difference.
You get your $100 billion dollars’ worth from stalking, really. Whether creeping the fuck out of myself by digging around a profile or clicking on enviable pictures while drunk and lonely, this is the game that Facebook has changed. The only thing is, I don’t stalk when I’m not motivated by non-Facebook factors to do so. What’s crucial to understand is that the primary non-Facebook-factor-that-leads-to-Facebook is boredom. Yes, the onset of a crush will send me to Facebook. So will planning a party. (I’ll get to this later.) The overarching difference between my experience and the way it’s portrayed is that in my day, Facebook was universally recognized as a waste of time.
I say that positively, in the sense that “building interpersonal connections” in your common room when you have a paper due tomorrow is still a waste of time. I also mean that in the negative, like when you’re sitting at a 35° angle alone at the library, killing time on the internet until your brain rounds into clutch mode. This is what Facebook was immediately embraced as and invented for. That it will become something much important, we are all certain, but for now it’s not. My point is that for all the fretting, Facebook is A) merely an enhancement on real interactions, and B) almost entirely a diversion that its core users understand is fundamentally non-essential. Most everyone my age understands that if Facebook is the foundation of a relationship, you do not have that relationship.
Like many new conveniences at their advent, social media has been somewhat binged-upon, though I am far less guilty of this than the guy who’s making a Facebook account for his divorce law firm. This should temper over time. The days of people posting way more than they intended are already leaving us. Most Facebook users have become adept at projecting their identities in the short while that it has been a necessity. It’s pretty simple: put up attractive, safe pictures of yourself and exchange wall posts once in a while. (Facebook profiles are also like constellations in that they often look nothing like what you think they should.) Even the girls that post pictures of themselves peeing in front of forty of their friends understand what they’re doing to the extent that they understand things. As social media matures, I maintain that online life will acquire more the degree of modesty employed in everyday life and this stuff will continue to disappear.
My mom recently suggested I “poke” someone. Not having been there at the massive rough-hewing of Facebook protocol, there’s no way she would know that poking is never, ever called for. Another day, my student debt servicer told me to Like! them on Facebook. Why the hell I'm supposed to develop a deeper relationship with the bane of my existence is unclear. This is what I’m talking about. Facebook right now is still in the experimental phase, but since many of its users are late to the game, they don’t know that the experiment has already been conducted by the vanguard. I think that Facebook is going to lose some of its luster as it leans away from the intrepid bong architects and more towards the student-loan-company set, and will eventually settle into a role as a social version of Microsoft Outlook. It’s very useful for that—inviting, changing plans, rallying consensus, etc. But this is not what these commentators will let it be. They must make it into a new discovery of fire, and it’s just not that. Facebook is a tool by which I can transpose my extant life online. More than anything, it’s a personal diversion not far above (and sometimes secondary to) solitaire on my phone, and the same goes for the other billion people. What it will become, no one knows. For now, chill out, everybody.
Showing posts with label Lenny DeFranco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lenny DeFranco. Show all posts
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Player/Haters
This week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell came down hard on the New Orleans Saints for knowingly allowing former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams to operate an illegal bounty system. Opinions around the league generally sympathized with the penalty; the Saints’ infraction, while possibly committed by other teams at other times, was considered egregious enough to warrant some of Führer Goodell’s iron-fisted flexing. Then a tape surfaced of a bounty-mode Williams instructing his defense to do things like take out Michael Crabtree’s ACL and re-concuss Kyle Williams (poor, poor Kyle Williams). Surprisingly, the speech was widely defended. Many players agreed that incentivizing a career-ending injury specifically was wrong, but the rest of it, well, that’s football! Although the league community mostly abides the league's punishments, this knee-jerk defense of football’s violence offers a good opportunity to mull the state of Roger Goodell’s years-long campaign to make the NFL safer.
Rules protecting offensive players, especially quarterbacks, have been multiplying for years. Often these rules are met with derision. Players like James Harrison, who if not for football would no doubt be out injuring people in other ways, tweets angrily in lament of his emasculated sport. The notion (among defensive players like Harrison and Bernard Pollard, anyway) is that the attention on Bountygate is yet another Goodell encroachment into the sanctity of a game so violent that defenders are arguably incentivized to injure the opposition by the very signing of their contracts.
The two commonest reasons for why players oppose Goodell’s hard line on injuries are 1) that he’s unconcerned about player safety and is merely looking to protect himself from liability, and 2) that he’s ruining the spirit of the game by reducing the degree of danger. I have problems with both of these assertions.
Roger Goodell’s efforts to make football a safer sport have been heavy-handed and capricious, but most outraged player reactions make no sense. Football needs to change. I’m sure the vast majority of players understand that rules developed when offensive linemen were Tony Romo’s size cannot continue to apply to a league full of Suhs, Ngatas, and Mario Williamses without cataclysmic injury becoming commonplace. So if the prospect of legal culpability is what’s compelling the commissioner to proactively prevent player injuries, well, could there be a more ringing endorsement of the legal system? Or of the commissioner? If it is Goodell’s CYA instinct that allows little DeSean Jackson to live to see and actually recognize his own grandchildren, then the system of accountability works. That Goodell’s interests lie more with the owners than safety for the players’ sakes is no reason to oppose his efforts to make the game safer. Outrage would be better spent on the league’s desire to extend the season to 18 games, or on their shameful record of denying worker’s comp claims.
I get the frustration. Football players, specifically defenders, are coached all their lives to intimidate, destroy, and dominate. Those who succeed at the highest level are the ones who that the most. The league instructing them to soften up is tantamount to telling them to stop doing their jobs so well. Given the intense, perpetual pressure to maintain one’s position and the clearly improvised punishments for illegal hits, their exasperation is understandable. But because players are immersed in executing the coaching they’ve received their entire lives, they make poor theorists on changing that coaching. Roger Goodell has a better vantage point and a keen sense of his responsibility as a businessman, if not a humanist, to do so. So let James Harrison get smash-smash-angry about a new rule. It’s not his job to wonder how differently he’d play if he were penalized in high school for dangerous hits. It is the league’s. Moreover, I think players would welcome change if they honestly weighed an awkward paradigm shift against the prospect of better post-retirement lives.
The fans should have a much easier time dealing with such a shift. We’re always hearing that Americans love football for the violence. I personally disagree. To me, football is most entertaining as a skillful, gladiatorial chess match. Would you rather watch an overtime featuring all of the best players playing at a peak level, or one in which they’re injury-hobbled and replaced by backups? This bloodlust we’re supposed to have is a waste of physical talent. Michael Crabtree is one of the world’s best route-runners, so that’s what I want to see him do. Anyone can tear an ACL. The same goes for baseball, by the way. I would much rather watch small ball—fast base running, smart play calls—than roidoids’s smacking BP all day, which is supposedly what we like. I register my dissent.
Anyone moaning about rules enacted to protect defenseless receivers need to wonder how many Darryl Stingleys would have to accumulate before the James Harrisons of the world permitted the game to change. And don’t forget that sociopaths like him are more vociferous in their reaction to safety-geared rules than other players for obvious reasons. A quarterback can’t tweet “Finally my dam knees r protected ! !” because he’s supposed to be a warrior. Still, I bet many players are quietly glad that the game is rounding a corner. The rules of football need to change in order to avoid tragedy, and I think in the process will preserve what I find most compelling about the sport. As long as they reform the game fairly and concretely, I commend the NFL for taking steps to achieve a new standard of safety, no matter what the motivation. Players should too.
Rules protecting offensive players, especially quarterbacks, have been multiplying for years. Often these rules are met with derision. Players like James Harrison, who if not for football would no doubt be out injuring people in other ways, tweets angrily in lament of his emasculated sport. The notion (among defensive players like Harrison and Bernard Pollard, anyway) is that the attention on Bountygate is yet another Goodell encroachment into the sanctity of a game so violent that defenders are arguably incentivized to injure the opposition by the very signing of their contracts.
The two commonest reasons for why players oppose Goodell’s hard line on injuries are 1) that he’s unconcerned about player safety and is merely looking to protect himself from liability, and 2) that he’s ruining the spirit of the game by reducing the degree of danger. I have problems with both of these assertions.
Roger Goodell’s efforts to make football a safer sport have been heavy-handed and capricious, but most outraged player reactions make no sense. Football needs to change. I’m sure the vast majority of players understand that rules developed when offensive linemen were Tony Romo’s size cannot continue to apply to a league full of Suhs, Ngatas, and Mario Williamses without cataclysmic injury becoming commonplace. So if the prospect of legal culpability is what’s compelling the commissioner to proactively prevent player injuries, well, could there be a more ringing endorsement of the legal system? Or of the commissioner? If it is Goodell’s CYA instinct that allows little DeSean Jackson to live to see and actually recognize his own grandchildren, then the system of accountability works. That Goodell’s interests lie more with the owners than safety for the players’ sakes is no reason to oppose his efforts to make the game safer. Outrage would be better spent on the league’s desire to extend the season to 18 games, or on their shameful record of denying worker’s comp claims.
I get the frustration. Football players, specifically defenders, are coached all their lives to intimidate, destroy, and dominate. Those who succeed at the highest level are the ones who that the most. The league instructing them to soften up is tantamount to telling them to stop doing their jobs so well. Given the intense, perpetual pressure to maintain one’s position and the clearly improvised punishments for illegal hits, their exasperation is understandable. But because players are immersed in executing the coaching they’ve received their entire lives, they make poor theorists on changing that coaching. Roger Goodell has a better vantage point and a keen sense of his responsibility as a businessman, if not a humanist, to do so. So let James Harrison get smash-smash-angry about a new rule. It’s not his job to wonder how differently he’d play if he were penalized in high school for dangerous hits. It is the league’s. Moreover, I think players would welcome change if they honestly weighed an awkward paradigm shift against the prospect of better post-retirement lives.
The fans should have a much easier time dealing with such a shift. We’re always hearing that Americans love football for the violence. I personally disagree. To me, football is most entertaining as a skillful, gladiatorial chess match. Would you rather watch an overtime featuring all of the best players playing at a peak level, or one in which they’re injury-hobbled and replaced by backups? This bloodlust we’re supposed to have is a waste of physical talent. Michael Crabtree is one of the world’s best route-runners, so that’s what I want to see him do. Anyone can tear an ACL. The same goes for baseball, by the way. I would much rather watch small ball—fast base running, smart play calls—than roidoids’s smacking BP all day, which is supposedly what we like. I register my dissent.
Anyone moaning about rules enacted to protect defenseless receivers need to wonder how many Darryl Stingleys would have to accumulate before the James Harrisons of the world permitted the game to change. And don’t forget that sociopaths like him are more vociferous in their reaction to safety-geared rules than other players for obvious reasons. A quarterback can’t tweet “Finally my dam knees r protected ! !” because he’s supposed to be a warrior. Still, I bet many players are quietly glad that the game is rounding a corner. The rules of football need to change in order to avoid tragedy, and I think in the process will preserve what I find most compelling about the sport. As long as they reform the game fairly and concretely, I commend the NFL for taking steps to achieve a new standard of safety, no matter what the motivation. Players should too.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Inappropriate
When I was in fifth grade, our class was put through the rite of passage that is federally-mandated drug prevention education, or DARE. I assume the DARE program has since died at the hands of a thousand academic studies on its futility, but in those days it was all they had to keep us off drugs. The method was simple: scare the living shit out of us on so many fronts that we didn't know what was what. Drinking was bad. Drugs were bad. Friends turned bad. Pot was the worst of all, because it was sure to lead you from the rewarding life you led as a fresh-faced student to a hoodie-wearing, sunken-eyed loner, which I later learned was also the effect of high school.
We didn't particularly focus on cocaine in DARE. That substance, which would eventually emerge as the partying teen's true rubicon, was at that time too far outside of our spheres. When we touched on it, it was with a hysetrical ninety foot pole. One such day, I was late getting out of class and my teacher and I were the only ones left in the room. I mentioned that I knew a song about cocaine, thinking of the the track that my dad always, scandalously, skipped in the car, leaving only the scintillating opening chords ringing in my brain as the sucky "Wonderful Tonight" replaced it, forcing me to explore it in stolen moments alone with the CD player. This song was explosive; danger of the sweetest kind. My teacher looked at me with a look that at the time I interpreted through DARE-induced paranoia as grave concern, one that was a comforting interview away from a call to DCFS, but that I now understand was "Is this kid really trying to have this conversation?" She dropped her eyes to the bag she was packing, and disinterestedly asked me, Oh, what song. Seized by fear, I knew I had let too much slip. I was going to splinter our family with my loose lips if I didn't shut up. I refused to answer. My eyes blank and wide. As her glance shifted from distracted to askance, I blurted out that I did not, and at no point did ever, know the name of that song. Who's it by, she asked. "YOU know..." I hinted. It was THAT song. How could there be so many dangerous cocaine songs in the world? Clearly we were talking about THAT song. She grew visibly confused by my sudden anxiety. "Who's the artist?" I boiled over. "Eric Clapton!" at the top of my lungs. Who else, idiot? She jerked back a little, refocused on her bag, and said, "Oh. I was thinking of Prince." I still don't know what the hell she was talking about.
We didn't particularly focus on cocaine in DARE. That substance, which would eventually emerge as the partying teen's true rubicon, was at that time too far outside of our spheres. When we touched on it, it was with a hysetrical ninety foot pole. One such day, I was late getting out of class and my teacher and I were the only ones left in the room. I mentioned that I knew a song about cocaine, thinking of the the track that my dad always, scandalously, skipped in the car, leaving only the scintillating opening chords ringing in my brain as the sucky "Wonderful Tonight" replaced it, forcing me to explore it in stolen moments alone with the CD player. This song was explosive; danger of the sweetest kind. My teacher looked at me with a look that at the time I interpreted through DARE-induced paranoia as grave concern, one that was a comforting interview away from a call to DCFS, but that I now understand was "Is this kid really trying to have this conversation?" She dropped her eyes to the bag she was packing, and disinterestedly asked me, Oh, what song. Seized by fear, I knew I had let too much slip. I was going to splinter our family with my loose lips if I didn't shut up. I refused to answer. My eyes blank and wide. As her glance shifted from distracted to askance, I blurted out that I did not, and at no point did ever, know the name of that song. Who's it by, she asked. "YOU know..." I hinted. It was THAT song. How could there be so many dangerous cocaine songs in the world? Clearly we were talking about THAT song. She grew visibly confused by my sudden anxiety. "Who's the artist?" I boiled over. "Eric Clapton!" at the top of my lungs. Who else, idiot? She jerked back a little, refocused on her bag, and said, "Oh. I was thinking of Prince." I still don't know what the hell she was talking about.
Friday, February 24, 2012
A Brief and Obvious Defense of Mitt Romney’s Scandalous Days as a Capitalist
Spare yourself the agitation of rationalizing the Republican candidates’ attack on Mitt Romney’s private equity days. You’d be foolish to put any opportunity for easy populist points past this crop of Git Offamah Propertys, especially in the midst of a vicious nomination cycle. It’s too bad Romney wasn’t a fixed income wiz or commodity speculator or something, because we could all stand to bash those effigies a little bit longer. Instead he was a venture capitalist, a good one by most accounts, and it’s wrong to make him stand trial for following capitalism’s best practices.
The kerfuffle started when Romney dropped another deuce on his own campaign by stating that he liked “to be able to fire people” who weren’t performing up to standards. The opposition immediately jumped on him: Vulture! Heartless! Profiteer! I was waiting for Perry to cry “socialist agenda!” but apparently he has a better grasp on that term than I thought. The irony is that Romney implied absolutely nothing offensive. Termination, just like the failure of an insolvent business, is inherent and necessary to capitalism. Seeing a group that is this close to describing all the nasty things they would do to free enterprise, lashing out at one of its fundamental mechanisms, was infuriating. What do they think capitalism is? we all fumed. The entire line of attack on private equity and Romney’s wealth exposes the fallacy of capitalism’s place in the dogma of these candidates. Like justifying the Patriot Act as a defense of freedom, “capitalism” in this crowd is a buzzword for a sales pitch, nothing more.
Private equity is a poor target with which to start discussing the inequalities of high finance. Yes, the industry attracts some predators. But few investment vehicles provide nearly as much economic good as venture capital. Rather than being parasitic like most Wall Street trading, VC has the potential to produce tangible results out of ailing businesses and land failing ones as softly as possible. It is almost pure capitalism, worlds away from the artificial financial culture wherein economic cataclysm is merely volatility. From what I’ve heard, Bain was a highly-regarded firm more interested in building than stripping for parts. When a company’s balance sheet sags to the point that these types of investors are brought in, the company generally faces death without the kind of (often long-anticipated) cuts that Romney joked about on the stump. Average workers sometimes lose jobs, but so do managers who prove ineffective or too costly. All of it is geared toward rebuilding a functioning business. An incoming VC consultant's role is no more heartless than that of any manufacturer, currently the most romanticized occupation in economic America. Both are after two goals: to maintain quality and get leaner. Lower outflow is simply what a profit-driven system rewards. Anyone with a problem with those two goals should look to change the incentives, not their pursuers.
The Republicans, of course, are not looking to change any incentives. They just want to draw blood. The only thing this asinine episode revealed is how unsubstantive claims made during a no-holds-barred election can be. Look for more of this in the general election. Prepare to hate democracy, Americans.
The kerfuffle started when Romney dropped another deuce on his own campaign by stating that he liked “to be able to fire people” who weren’t performing up to standards. The opposition immediately jumped on him: Vulture! Heartless! Profiteer! I was waiting for Perry to cry “socialist agenda!” but apparently he has a better grasp on that term than I thought. The irony is that Romney implied absolutely nothing offensive. Termination, just like the failure of an insolvent business, is inherent and necessary to capitalism. Seeing a group that is this close to describing all the nasty things they would do to free enterprise, lashing out at one of its fundamental mechanisms, was infuriating. What do they think capitalism is? we all fumed. The entire line of attack on private equity and Romney’s wealth exposes the fallacy of capitalism’s place in the dogma of these candidates. Like justifying the Patriot Act as a defense of freedom, “capitalism” in this crowd is a buzzword for a sales pitch, nothing more.
Private equity is a poor target with which to start discussing the inequalities of high finance. Yes, the industry attracts some predators. But few investment vehicles provide nearly as much economic good as venture capital. Rather than being parasitic like most Wall Street trading, VC has the potential to produce tangible results out of ailing businesses and land failing ones as softly as possible. It is almost pure capitalism, worlds away from the artificial financial culture wherein economic cataclysm is merely volatility. From what I’ve heard, Bain was a highly-regarded firm more interested in building than stripping for parts. When a company’s balance sheet sags to the point that these types of investors are brought in, the company generally faces death without the kind of (often long-anticipated) cuts that Romney joked about on the stump. Average workers sometimes lose jobs, but so do managers who prove ineffective or too costly. All of it is geared toward rebuilding a functioning business. An incoming VC consultant's role is no more heartless than that of any manufacturer, currently the most romanticized occupation in economic America. Both are after two goals: to maintain quality and get leaner. Lower outflow is simply what a profit-driven system rewards. Anyone with a problem with those two goals should look to change the incentives, not their pursuers.
The Republicans, of course, are not looking to change any incentives. They just want to draw blood. The only thing this asinine episode revealed is how unsubstantive claims made during a no-holds-barred election can be. Look for more of this in the general election. Prepare to hate democracy, Americans.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Review of Life by Keith Richards
I had been intrigued by this book on enough shelves and in enough train passengers’ hands to jump at the mint copy owned by a friend of mine. “Like getting to corner Keith and ask him everything you always wanted to know about the Rolling Stones, and him be, like, COMPLETELY honest, you guys!! :-)” (giddiness mine) read the back cover’s review by “Fuck and Run” songstress Liz Phair. A bit of false advertising, but not far enough off the mark that I felt that I wanted to know more about the Rolling Stones by the end. My frame of mind going into the book was as follows: “I like the Rolling Stones OK. Their now-generic brand of appropriated American music is pleasing to me. They helped create the bad-boy rock n’ roll image, especially guitarist Keith Richards, whose merit I have never appreciated apart from his bafflingly continued existence. I will read this book.”
Turns out Keef is pretty smart. A ghostwriter helped organize the memories, but the glittering confidence with which Richards sublimates his past no one could fake. The book opens with a ferociously witty recollection of his lower-class British childhood. Animating these pages is a sense of escape, of him looking back on what he got away from, not just as a rock star, but as a vulnerable witness to England's postwar gloom. Then the Rolling Stones start to kick in, and the story starts to fall into “and the rest is history” type parlance. Liz Phair isn’t quite right, though; one question I would want to ask someone like Keith Richards is if he ever reflected on the preposterousness of a life so unbelievably superior to the rest of the human race. If you grow up like me, for example, you learn that some people are famous, and we treat them this way. Some people are rich, and they have this. Some people are poor, and we feel sorry for them like this. I know where I am in that social suspension, and it comforts me. How does a rock star justify his Olympian status? What is your opinion of life when the only one you know turns out so fabulously so effortlessly? What could you think of the world when the only one we have serves you? Keith shows none of this awareness. Richards was always, as far as I can tell, a supremely average guitar player. Some of his riffs are great, but then again, if you spend an entire career in one style of music, you better come up with some good stuff. There’s a story in the book about how once on stage Keith tried to start a song and couldn’t remember “which one” of his hundreds of intros it was. Probably because most of them sound almost entirely alike. Yet Keith never really shies away from accepting the praise he expects of you. He thinks he’s a great songwriter, and though he never says it, a really artistic visionary genius type. I wouldn’t expect him to make concessions to those of us who once paid $100 to see him at Soldier Field only to be confused as to which song was playing because they were all so similar, but, Jesus. He really thinks he earned all of this? I’m not scolding, I’m just saying it never comes out. When Pete Townshend writes his book, it will be chock full of that kind of introspection, because Pete was the most aware human being ever to play on a rock stage. He was also addicted to heroin for significantly less time than Richards was, which probably helped.
Starting at an early point in this narrative, there is mention of a drug on every single page of the book. Keith’s use of drugs is fascinating, as is the way he recollects them. First of all, he never says, Kids, don’t do drugs. He’s not repentant: “You’ve got a body. It’s supposed to work” is his mantra of health. Whatever keeps your boat afloat. Heroin is remembered as not that big of an issue—he had easy access and just went cold turkey whenever he needed to. What’s funny is that as his addiction elapses, his recollection of the drug changes. His first cold turkey was described as basically an annoying slumber party with Gram Parsons, the experience of heroin withdrawal NBD. By the time he finally cleans up for good, it is traumatic. He speaks of that experience (and everything else apart from 5-sting open tuning) insouciantly these days, but it’s hard not to detect the sheen of selective memory as he glosses over a description of a fireplace bloodied by his hands trying to dig out of the room he was turkeying in for the millionth time. He never describes heroin with the fear and awe that you usually see, that you kind of like to see. Not, “It had me hooked,” but, “I was hooked.” He takes responsibility. He never considers going to rehab, because he can do all the dirty work on his own. He owns himself and his decisions, and that’s admirable even if being addicted to heroin isn’t.
I don’t think he is even now aware of how pathetic a junkie he was. While Richards waxes freely about artistic inspiration and expanding horizons and how great he is at playing with open tuning, (congrats) you realize that this guy toured the world with a revolver and 500 rounds of ammo, slept with it under his pillow—and who’s going to attack him?—and who fell asleep while driving his family on the highway and almost collided full-speed with a tree. He must have been an insane, distant motherfucker, and yet he wonders why Mick Jagger couldn’t stand him by the end of the seventies. Like I say, kind of a pathetic junkie.
There’s no denying, though, that Keith Richards has one of the most epic lives a real person has ever lived. He’s not been around the world, he’s been in the whole world. Like, well, I’m kicked out of that hemisphere, I think I’ll live in Australia for a while. He has had the ultimate male fantasy. He travels freely, faces and bests epic dangers, befriends interesting people, and loves women all over the place. He has serious romances in places he’ll be for a week total, welcomed as a god wherever in the world he can think to go.
Ultimately, Life is an adventure story, and that's what makes it so much fun. It dragged on in parts, but on the whole was incredibly engaging. His narration slips into solipsism occasionally, and he’s not particularly incisive about himself, but he makes up for it in spades with his Kentish charm. Maybe that’s the point: his success is due in part to the fact that he never second-guessed himself, and always was confident. Ok Keith, I got you.
Turns out Keef is pretty smart. A ghostwriter helped organize the memories, but the glittering confidence with which Richards sublimates his past no one could fake. The book opens with a ferociously witty recollection of his lower-class British childhood. Animating these pages is a sense of escape, of him looking back on what he got away from, not just as a rock star, but as a vulnerable witness to England's postwar gloom. Then the Rolling Stones start to kick in, and the story starts to fall into “and the rest is history” type parlance. Liz Phair isn’t quite right, though; one question I would want to ask someone like Keith Richards is if he ever reflected on the preposterousness of a life so unbelievably superior to the rest of the human race. If you grow up like me, for example, you learn that some people are famous, and we treat them this way. Some people are rich, and they have this. Some people are poor, and we feel sorry for them like this. I know where I am in that social suspension, and it comforts me. How does a rock star justify his Olympian status? What is your opinion of life when the only one you know turns out so fabulously so effortlessly? What could you think of the world when the only one we have serves you? Keith shows none of this awareness. Richards was always, as far as I can tell, a supremely average guitar player. Some of his riffs are great, but then again, if you spend an entire career in one style of music, you better come up with some good stuff. There’s a story in the book about how once on stage Keith tried to start a song and couldn’t remember “which one” of his hundreds of intros it was. Probably because most of them sound almost entirely alike. Yet Keith never really shies away from accepting the praise he expects of you. He thinks he’s a great songwriter, and though he never says it, a really artistic visionary genius type. I wouldn’t expect him to make concessions to those of us who once paid $100 to see him at Soldier Field only to be confused as to which song was playing because they were all so similar, but, Jesus. He really thinks he earned all of this? I’m not scolding, I’m just saying it never comes out. When Pete Townshend writes his book, it will be chock full of that kind of introspection, because Pete was the most aware human being ever to play on a rock stage. He was also addicted to heroin for significantly less time than Richards was, which probably helped.
Starting at an early point in this narrative, there is mention of a drug on every single page of the book. Keith’s use of drugs is fascinating, as is the way he recollects them. First of all, he never says, Kids, don’t do drugs. He’s not repentant: “You’ve got a body. It’s supposed to work” is his mantra of health. Whatever keeps your boat afloat. Heroin is remembered as not that big of an issue—he had easy access and just went cold turkey whenever he needed to. What’s funny is that as his addiction elapses, his recollection of the drug changes. His first cold turkey was described as basically an annoying slumber party with Gram Parsons, the experience of heroin withdrawal NBD. By the time he finally cleans up for good, it is traumatic. He speaks of that experience (and everything else apart from 5-sting open tuning) insouciantly these days, but it’s hard not to detect the sheen of selective memory as he glosses over a description of a fireplace bloodied by his hands trying to dig out of the room he was turkeying in for the millionth time. He never describes heroin with the fear and awe that you usually see, that you kind of like to see. Not, “It had me hooked,” but, “I was hooked.” He takes responsibility. He never considers going to rehab, because he can do all the dirty work on his own. He owns himself and his decisions, and that’s admirable even if being addicted to heroin isn’t.
I don’t think he is even now aware of how pathetic a junkie he was. While Richards waxes freely about artistic inspiration and expanding horizons and how great he is at playing with open tuning, (congrats) you realize that this guy toured the world with a revolver and 500 rounds of ammo, slept with it under his pillow—and who’s going to attack him?—and who fell asleep while driving his family on the highway and almost collided full-speed with a tree. He must have been an insane, distant motherfucker, and yet he wonders why Mick Jagger couldn’t stand him by the end of the seventies. Like I say, kind of a pathetic junkie.
There’s no denying, though, that Keith Richards has one of the most epic lives a real person has ever lived. He’s not been around the world, he’s been in the whole world. Like, well, I’m kicked out of that hemisphere, I think I’ll live in Australia for a while. He has had the ultimate male fantasy. He travels freely, faces and bests epic dangers, befriends interesting people, and loves women all over the place. He has serious romances in places he’ll be for a week total, welcomed as a god wherever in the world he can think to go.
Ultimately, Life is an adventure story, and that's what makes it so much fun. It dragged on in parts, but on the whole was incredibly engaging. His narration slips into solipsism occasionally, and he’s not particularly incisive about himself, but he makes up for it in spades with his Kentish charm. Maybe that’s the point: his success is due in part to the fact that he never second-guessed himself, and always was confident. Ok Keith, I got you.
Friday, January 20, 2012
RINO on Records
Andrew Sullivan’s article "How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics" is a welcome, necessary voice. Yes, it reads like brazen pro-Obama propaganda that would topple The New York Times in an earthquake of eye-rolling were it published there. But since it comes from the adjectival grab-bag that is the British gay libertarian baldy Andrew Sullivan, its credibility heightens. Moreover, his piece seems to use Obama’s presidency as a proxy to affront the straw man tactic in general.
Sullivan’s piece is a wonderland of statistics, references, and other evidence compared to what we hear in the Republican nomination campaign. The process to determine the GOP candidate that the media most feels like covering has been a dual-front war against Mitt Romney’s comical lack of charisma on one side and the specter of a devilish, socialist President Obama on the other. The facts that have been employed in both theaters have been suspect where not absent. At a New Hampshire town hall meeting on January 5th, new Romney fan John McCain found himself waist-deep and sinking in an anecdote that needed a quick end. He acheived it by segueing his passing utterance of the word ‘run’ into, “Just like this president can’t RUN from his record!” To which the bored audience recognized the applause sign and dutifully, rotely, riled. This type of record-bashing is common in an early campaign, but there seems to be precious little specificity on what, exactly, these Republicans are bashing. President Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than his predecessor did in eight years—too many—yet the debates are full of criticisms about his “record” on immigration laxity. It is at best intellectually lazy and at worst a straight-up lie. Andrew Sullivan challenges that.
I don’t doubt that Sullivan believes every word of his article, but I’m sure his attitude clouds about the ones he left out. This isn’t intended to be the whole story about the first term of President Barack Obama. Such an article would more likely be a large book, one that rolls all of Obama's questionable triumphs and demoralizing concessions into a context that includes both our empire and institutionalized racism eyeing their respective home stretches. “Do you think Obama’s doing a good job?” It’s a complicated question. So if Sullivan seems to be strangely un-nuanced about his support of the president, it’s because that’s not really what the article is about. It’s a rejection of the GOP’s “radical” narrative, a baseless maligning of the type that, untrammeled, legitimizes a parallel reality.
Sullivan backs off many criticisms of the administration with eloquence and conviction. (And again, evidence.) He does a good job of contextualizing Obama’s successes and not simply qualifying them. One would hope that in political peacetime this article’s premise would be something of a bipartisan baseline consensus from which to diverge on constructive criticism. Instead, we’re stuck with a greenhorn president leading the world's most powerful nation in spite of the opposition using him to live out a rape fantasy. Some may contend that a defense of Obama’s record by our most publicly RINO commentator is predictable, but I prefer to think that Sullivan, like me, feels queasy at the thought of aligning the conservative elements of his politics with that of hatefulness and paranoia. A classic conservative is someone who wants to improve society using existing structures, to ‘conserve’ the good and eliminate or mitigate the bad. Essentially, this is the mechanism of capitalism. What currently passes for conservatism is much more in line with what was formerly known as nihilism or sabotage, a cynical desire to destroy almost all the structures society constructed to self-improve. I contend that Sullivan’s British acculturation removes him from the team-identity aspect of American politics, leaving his ideology more free-floating and currently baffled by the Republican party. While his article would never be confused for a libertarian tract, Sullivan betrays none of the conservative identifier by showing more interest in constructive dialog than partisan bombast.
Sullivan’s piece is a wonderland of statistics, references, and other evidence compared to what we hear in the Republican nomination campaign. The process to determine the GOP candidate that the media most feels like covering has been a dual-front war against Mitt Romney’s comical lack of charisma on one side and the specter of a devilish, socialist President Obama on the other. The facts that have been employed in both theaters have been suspect where not absent. At a New Hampshire town hall meeting on January 5th, new Romney fan John McCain found himself waist-deep and sinking in an anecdote that needed a quick end. He acheived it by segueing his passing utterance of the word ‘run’ into, “Just like this president can’t RUN from his record!” To which the bored audience recognized the applause sign and dutifully, rotely, riled. This type of record-bashing is common in an early campaign, but there seems to be precious little specificity on what, exactly, these Republicans are bashing. President Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than his predecessor did in eight years—too many—yet the debates are full of criticisms about his “record” on immigration laxity. It is at best intellectually lazy and at worst a straight-up lie. Andrew Sullivan challenges that.
I don’t doubt that Sullivan believes every word of his article, but I’m sure his attitude clouds about the ones he left out. This isn’t intended to be the whole story about the first term of President Barack Obama. Such an article would more likely be a large book, one that rolls all of Obama's questionable triumphs and demoralizing concessions into a context that includes both our empire and institutionalized racism eyeing their respective home stretches. “Do you think Obama’s doing a good job?” It’s a complicated question. So if Sullivan seems to be strangely un-nuanced about his support of the president, it’s because that’s not really what the article is about. It’s a rejection of the GOP’s “radical” narrative, a baseless maligning of the type that, untrammeled, legitimizes a parallel reality.
Sullivan backs off many criticisms of the administration with eloquence and conviction. (And again, evidence.) He does a good job of contextualizing Obama’s successes and not simply qualifying them. One would hope that in political peacetime this article’s premise would be something of a bipartisan baseline consensus from which to diverge on constructive criticism. Instead, we’re stuck with a greenhorn president leading the world's most powerful nation in spite of the opposition using him to live out a rape fantasy. Some may contend that a defense of Obama’s record by our most publicly RINO commentator is predictable, but I prefer to think that Sullivan, like me, feels queasy at the thought of aligning the conservative elements of his politics with that of hatefulness and paranoia. A classic conservative is someone who wants to improve society using existing structures, to ‘conserve’ the good and eliminate or mitigate the bad. Essentially, this is the mechanism of capitalism. What currently passes for conservatism is much more in line with what was formerly known as nihilism or sabotage, a cynical desire to destroy almost all the structures society constructed to self-improve. I contend that Sullivan’s British acculturation removes him from the team-identity aspect of American politics, leaving his ideology more free-floating and currently baffled by the Republican party. While his article would never be confused for a libertarian tract, Sullivan betrays none of the conservative identifier by showing more interest in constructive dialog than partisan bombast.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Tebow Time Has Been Moved to 3:16
I hope to my Lord Jesus Christ that Saturday night’s divisional round playoff game between the Patriots and the Broncos will end the accursed era of Tebow Time. I think I stand a good chance. Tim Tebow himself will probably have a good game at quarterback, what with facing the abysmal New England defense. He will employ his only two football moves: faking a run and then backtracking, his crane-like throwing motion unfurling a 30-yard softball, or actually running. His efforts, however, will be found unequal to the offense led by science’s most perfect prototype of the pocket passer, Tom Brady. When the Patriots have the ball, there will be no anguished lobs or QB keepers run through defensive ends and linebackers. Instead, precise pigskin beams will emanate from the center of New England’s pocket-womb like Heidegger’s da-sein and find their way to Deion Branch and Wes Welker as though there were no other possible outcome. Brady’s passing will compensate for his defense and the Patriots will win. And I’ll be happy, because we can then stop talking about Tim Tebow for another few months.
I don’t hate Tim Tebow, because he seems like a genuine guy and he’s never done anything bad to me or, possibly, any living creature. He just irks me. Part of it is how bad of a quarterback he is. Over the course of one of the greatest college football careers in history, Tebow excelled at a number of skills that have almost no application in the NFL. By the time the Broncos drafted him, he was the most intriguing cube-shaped question mark in American sports. Could he be an NFL quarterback with that shitty arm and accuracy and release? Would his desire to win trump all obstacles as it heretofore had? Can’t he just play running back? After a much-needed incubation period (in which Kyle “Bowlcut” Orton found himself starting over two of the decade’s most highly-touted college players) the Broncos decided it was Tebow Time. And things started to just work out. Just as Adrian Peterson’s dad and Donovan McNabb’s mom became honorary members of their sons’ teams, so did the Lord join the party in Denver. Miraculous finishes that sometimes had little to do with Tebow started becoming regular and Denver’s season was resurrected. Questions such as “maybe this win over the [Vikings/Dolphins/AFC West shitshow] wouldn’t have been as thrilling if we had put up some points” were relegated to people like me who don’t believe the Good News.
And ultimately, Tebowmania does cleave along those lines, which is the second thing I don’t like about Tim Tebow. His miraculous finishes and improbable success is exactly the kind of narrative that his fellow Christian faithful can’t get enough of. The more materialistic among us have a hard time believing that it was the presence of one underdeveloped quarterback’s “determination” that led Marion Barber to lose his mind in the last minute of a game or the Jets to uncharacteristically suck. But we are unable to argue with Tebow’s results, which frustrates us hugely. Tebow empowers the faith crowd with not only his prominence and success, but the nature of his success. I don’t like it when I find myself questioning whether God actually intervened in an NFL game. It throws my cosmology off. I especially don’t like imagining a stereotypical Southern Methodist family cheering his every broken tackle as a triumph over us infidels.
The worst aspect of Tebowmania, however, he is not responsible for in the least. I remember watching pre-NFL Draft coverage in the early part of 2010. Two analysts were commenting on Tebow’s chances as an NFL quarterback, and eventually one of them resolved the discussion with something to the effect of “well, he’s got his life way more figured out than I do! Who am I to advise him.” Why would he say that? Was it because Tebow was a vastly famous person already and stood a good chance of playing professional sports for millions of dollars? No, it was because of his religious beliefs. In other words, here was a near-50 year old man envying the wisdom—not the football ability, but the wisdom—of a 22-year old kid based on the fact of the kid’s religious conviction.
I don’t doubt that the media would have the same respect for Tim Tebow if his abiding philosophy was based around social justice, or the environment, or civil rights, or any number of other potential cornerstones of a worthy role model’s credo. I do think that it would be a more complicated relationship. Instead of talking about his faith all the time—not only a wholesome topic, but a planted flag on one side of an important American fault line—Tebow would talk about injustice. No one affiliated with the escapist cash cow that is the NFL wants that. So it’s probably true that at least part of Tebow’s fame is that what he’s proselytizing is Christianity. But I don’t like nonreligious people commending him for having that faith. From the reverence I hear describing Tebow’s devotion, I get the sense that the public that this story is being sold to is one to whom deep personal conviction is a foreign thing. As if we, so cynical about the world and our place in it, admire someone like him just for being able to believe in something publicly and unapologetically. Tebow gets much less credit for being a great NFL runner—something that few people can do—than for his “demeanor,” or “attitude,” or “mentality,” all code words lending toward a portrait of a very settled, confident belief, which is something all of us could do. I have no doubt that Tebow’s visible confidence is a result of his faith. It just makes me have less respect for those who could very well choose to try on a conviction of their own and instead commend him for having one.
I don’t hate Tim Tebow, because he seems like a genuine guy and he’s never done anything bad to me or, possibly, any living creature. He just irks me. Part of it is how bad of a quarterback he is. Over the course of one of the greatest college football careers in history, Tebow excelled at a number of skills that have almost no application in the NFL. By the time the Broncos drafted him, he was the most intriguing cube-shaped question mark in American sports. Could he be an NFL quarterback with that shitty arm and accuracy and release? Would his desire to win trump all obstacles as it heretofore had? Can’t he just play running back? After a much-needed incubation period (in which Kyle “Bowlcut” Orton found himself starting over two of the decade’s most highly-touted college players) the Broncos decided it was Tebow Time. And things started to just work out. Just as Adrian Peterson’s dad and Donovan McNabb’s mom became honorary members of their sons’ teams, so did the Lord join the party in Denver. Miraculous finishes that sometimes had little to do with Tebow started becoming regular and Denver’s season was resurrected. Questions such as “maybe this win over the [Vikings/Dolphins/AFC West shitshow] wouldn’t have been as thrilling if we had put up some points” were relegated to people like me who don’t believe the Good News.
And ultimately, Tebowmania does cleave along those lines, which is the second thing I don’t like about Tim Tebow. His miraculous finishes and improbable success is exactly the kind of narrative that his fellow Christian faithful can’t get enough of. The more materialistic among us have a hard time believing that it was the presence of one underdeveloped quarterback’s “determination” that led Marion Barber to lose his mind in the last minute of a game or the Jets to uncharacteristically suck. But we are unable to argue with Tebow’s results, which frustrates us hugely. Tebow empowers the faith crowd with not only his prominence and success, but the nature of his success. I don’t like it when I find myself questioning whether God actually intervened in an NFL game. It throws my cosmology off. I especially don’t like imagining a stereotypical Southern Methodist family cheering his every broken tackle as a triumph over us infidels.
The worst aspect of Tebowmania, however, he is not responsible for in the least. I remember watching pre-NFL Draft coverage in the early part of 2010. Two analysts were commenting on Tebow’s chances as an NFL quarterback, and eventually one of them resolved the discussion with something to the effect of “well, he’s got his life way more figured out than I do! Who am I to advise him.” Why would he say that? Was it because Tebow was a vastly famous person already and stood a good chance of playing professional sports for millions of dollars? No, it was because of his religious beliefs. In other words, here was a near-50 year old man envying the wisdom—not the football ability, but the wisdom—of a 22-year old kid based on the fact of the kid’s religious conviction.
I don’t doubt that the media would have the same respect for Tim Tebow if his abiding philosophy was based around social justice, or the environment, or civil rights, or any number of other potential cornerstones of a worthy role model’s credo. I do think that it would be a more complicated relationship. Instead of talking about his faith all the time—not only a wholesome topic, but a planted flag on one side of an important American fault line—Tebow would talk about injustice. No one affiliated with the escapist cash cow that is the NFL wants that. So it’s probably true that at least part of Tebow’s fame is that what he’s proselytizing is Christianity. But I don’t like nonreligious people commending him for having that faith. From the reverence I hear describing Tebow’s devotion, I get the sense that the public that this story is being sold to is one to whom deep personal conviction is a foreign thing. As if we, so cynical about the world and our place in it, admire someone like him just for being able to believe in something publicly and unapologetically. Tebow gets much less credit for being a great NFL runner—something that few people can do—than for his “demeanor,” or “attitude,” or “mentality,” all code words lending toward a portrait of a very settled, confident belief, which is something all of us could do. I have no doubt that Tebow’s visible confidence is a result of his faith. It just makes me have less respect for those who could very well choose to try on a conviction of their own and instead commend him for having one.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Mad About Newt
In one way, Newt Gingrich is exactly what the Republican Party needs. Despite a nasty habit of fabricating facts and a borderline psychotic persona, he is almost certainly the smartest candidate in the current GOP field. Of course, the bar for conservative wit has lowered to a level that candidates don’t have to rise to meet so much as not fall into the subway and be electrocuted by. A nimble-minded Republican would be a refreshing choice to run against Obama. Gingrich has picked up on this opportunity. Just as Perry and Bachmann advertise themselves as decimal points, luxuriously rounding off the world’s complications, just as Romney runs as the human incarnation of troubleshooting software, so does Newt Gingrich advertise himself as most able to beat President Obama in a debate. Still, many on the right are uncomfortable with him.
The strangest resistance to Gingrich emerges from the backrooms of the all-important GOP establishment. Why do so few Republicans take him seriously as a challenge to Obama? I suspect that their rejection of Gingrich isn’t entirely to do with his unpopularity amongst independents. The party bosses must also see that his lack of charisma represents an unvarnished vision of Republican ideology’s worst qualities, and that such a vision is appalling.
The prototypical conservative icon is a charming, accessible success story. He or she must be able to relate the ideology of self-help and -sufficiency with a friendly beckon and a wink, a role model who wants you to join the club. Without the personal attraction of “come with me,” all that’s left is, “you’re on your own.” Bootstraps rhetoric only works on an emotional level when its messenger is someone you trust and want to be like. Nobody wants to be like Newt Gingrich. Americans got sick of his political style when he was in his prime, let alone now that he’s an old curmudgeon whose waist and personal history are tied in a fight to carry more baggage. This personal unlikability destroys his ability to spin the small and fearful Republican worldview into a charismatic idiom.
Gingrich’s presentation isn’t steeped in the discomfort and paranoia that founds the conservative gospel—it is that discomfort and paranoia. Instead of professing the endurance of the American dream, Newt’s message for the idle poor is to grow a work ethic. He wants to out-activist the runaway judiciary (?) by arresting them. He’d rather fantasize about invading Iran than advance a single constructive goal for the Middle East. Gingrich serves raw the cynicism that underpins the policies that the eventual nominee will dress up in economic positivity and toothy smiles. That transformative ability either eludes or doesn’t interest him. He is not well-suited or willing to tell the poor that reduced benefits will help them or that a “defense of marriage” is not an assault on gays, because he’s an arrogant asshole and he’d obviously be lying. These sentiments do not fare well exposed to air unprotected. This is why the Republican Party has no use for him as a candidate.
Even more unappealing is Gingrich’s insistence on running for a type of role he will never be able to fulfill, for the above reason, while foregoing other essential but less public ones in which he would excel. His notorious delusion of grandeur comes into focus here. There is a hallowed place inside the GOP for political operatives like Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz. If Gingrich stuck to that shadowy line of work, he’d be a hot commodity. He has, you would imagine, valuable political intuition and the wattage to be able to project big ideas in a way that would make Rick Perry’s head explode. Yet Newt declines such a life. He needs to be in the spotlight, setting America on a righteous path that he himself falls woefully short of, or else he’s nothing. Well then, he’s nothing.
Newt Gingrich is unelectable because he too-accurately embodies the fear—and the Realpolitik—that defines the modern Republican Party. These things personify into a portrait of an untenable politician and a hideous person. Mitt Romney will wield the same rhetoric and push the same buttons, but he will hide it behind focus-grouped sound bites and his trademark blandness. Gingrich may have a future infusing his myopic vitriol into a pretty young face. On his own, he is conservative misanthropy incarnate.
The strangest resistance to Gingrich emerges from the backrooms of the all-important GOP establishment. Why do so few Republicans take him seriously as a challenge to Obama? I suspect that their rejection of Gingrich isn’t entirely to do with his unpopularity amongst independents. The party bosses must also see that his lack of charisma represents an unvarnished vision of Republican ideology’s worst qualities, and that such a vision is appalling.
The prototypical conservative icon is a charming, accessible success story. He or she must be able to relate the ideology of self-help and -sufficiency with a friendly beckon and a wink, a role model who wants you to join the club. Without the personal attraction of “come with me,” all that’s left is, “you’re on your own.” Bootstraps rhetoric only works on an emotional level when its messenger is someone you trust and want to be like. Nobody wants to be like Newt Gingrich. Americans got sick of his political style when he was in his prime, let alone now that he’s an old curmudgeon whose waist and personal history are tied in a fight to carry more baggage. This personal unlikability destroys his ability to spin the small and fearful Republican worldview into a charismatic idiom.
Gingrich’s presentation isn’t steeped in the discomfort and paranoia that founds the conservative gospel—it is that discomfort and paranoia. Instead of professing the endurance of the American dream, Newt’s message for the idle poor is to grow a work ethic. He wants to out-activist the runaway judiciary (?) by arresting them. He’d rather fantasize about invading Iran than advance a single constructive goal for the Middle East. Gingrich serves raw the cynicism that underpins the policies that the eventual nominee will dress up in economic positivity and toothy smiles. That transformative ability either eludes or doesn’t interest him. He is not well-suited or willing to tell the poor that reduced benefits will help them or that a “defense of marriage” is not an assault on gays, because he’s an arrogant asshole and he’d obviously be lying. These sentiments do not fare well exposed to air unprotected. This is why the Republican Party has no use for him as a candidate.
Even more unappealing is Gingrich’s insistence on running for a type of role he will never be able to fulfill, for the above reason, while foregoing other essential but less public ones in which he would excel. His notorious delusion of grandeur comes into focus here. There is a hallowed place inside the GOP for political operatives like Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz. If Gingrich stuck to that shadowy line of work, he’d be a hot commodity. He has, you would imagine, valuable political intuition and the wattage to be able to project big ideas in a way that would make Rick Perry’s head explode. Yet Newt declines such a life. He needs to be in the spotlight, setting America on a righteous path that he himself falls woefully short of, or else he’s nothing. Well then, he’s nothing.
Newt Gingrich is unelectable because he too-accurately embodies the fear—and the Realpolitik—that defines the modern Republican Party. These things personify into a portrait of an untenable politician and a hideous person. Mitt Romney will wield the same rhetoric and push the same buttons, but he will hide it behind focus-grouped sound bites and his trademark blandness. Gingrich may have a future infusing his myopic vitriol into a pretty young face. On his own, he is conservative misanthropy incarnate.
Friday, December 16, 2011
An Epitaph for Occupy
Three months ago, I exhorted Occupy Wall Street to focus its message and prune some of the lunacy it invited. I wanted a sharp ideological tack to puncture into the mainstream and really make itself relevant. That—criticism? no, prescription—was soon joined by a chorus loud enough to lift the commentary to the increasingly permeable “meta” plane and was suddenly itself the debate. And now, at the end of the year, what have we to show for any of it but the academic musings that began, sustained, and now commemorate what could have been a very meaningful event? The global scope of the protests validated the fundamental discontent that drove the Occupiers into the streets. Probably the most important effect of the Occupy banner has been its injection of equality language and social restlessness into the West’s bloodstream. The world of this writing is more aware than it was on September 16, 2011. And still, I feel compelled to register an epitaph for Occupy, a necessary protest that wasted its traction on nowhere to go. It couldn’t get out of its own way because it didn’t know where that was.
The message was nonexistent. The stunt of the actual sleep-in gave the protest a platform, but it whiffed its chance by muddling its goals. A chorus onstage also has a platform, but it doesn’t reach the audience until its voices come together and says one thing. Occupy said nothing by saying everything. The dubious excuse started to arise that there was just too much to fix for specificity. “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands,” said Dr. Cornel West. “You’re talking about raising political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what’s going on through a different set of lens.” So…what are we supposed to do with that? Talk amongst ourselves? A movement can’t be an art project; it can’t let its meaning be assigned to it. Such an attitude is an artifact of our “awareness” culture, a marketing construct that resets the goal of ‘curing’ a disease to ‘raising awareness’ of it, to absolve consumers the failure of medical science/global charity/etc. while keeping the donations flowing. Occupy either did or should have sought to be a real agent of change, but the fact of the matter was that there was no way to draw a line from the end-the-Fed Paulite to the Marxist protesting alongside each other, incuriously applauding forth each other’s spittle. At some point, the agent of change must specify the answer to “What is the first thing that should change?” if anything is to change. They couldn’t, so nothing did.
The protest generated dizzying media interest, most of it due to the novelty of the “Occupation of New York City,” as the General Assembly’s manifesto turgidly stated. In reality it had all the substance and flair of John and Yoko’s Bed-In. But it worked, temporarily. I originally thought that the physical occupation of Zuccotti Park was only a preface to the more considered, flannel-lined movement that it was sure to spawn, that sleeping in the park was not the source of its power, but rather a PR move. We soon found out there were no PR considerations aside from the slogan-swollen rhetoric of vague redistributive tendencies. There was only the hope that capturing the interest of the world writ large would lead it to take up the fight that Occupy was afraid to. The clock expired when it became clear that the event itself was central to the media attention. The sit-in sat in for any discernable agenda, leading Zuccotti Park to become the fulcrum around which debate formed (legitimate use or not?) and opinions vacillated (I sympathize but can’t they leave?). The plane of the discussion they hoped to spark was thus fatally compromised. Occupy Wall Street used the park to good effect in the beginning, but never expanded past it, which meant that the inevitable end of the “occupation” meant the inevitable end of the line.
Then there were the protests in the other cities. The Zuccotti eviction showed weary mayors across the world that this was not a group that was going to particularly defend itself, and a blanket settled across the movement like the thick cover of snow that never fell on a single sleeping trustafarian. Occupy’s death marked little else besides the United States’ first foray into austerity protests, a veritable industry in Europe. Ultimately, though, Occupy will be remembered as a lost opportunity to change the discussion. It will be remembered as a failure to marshal widespread support into anything tangible, which is exactly what so many of its supporters feared from the outset. We can attribute this to a general lack of leadership, but more importantly, Occupy failed to grow up because it was never willing to admit that its aspirational relevance required the jettison of many of its founding die-hards.
The reason an organized, maintained political realization of Occupy was needed was that Wall Street is simply not Tahrir Square. The American powerless are not dictated so much as they are cogs in a machine that they are free to change if they’re able to muster enough commonly-interested voters. The Arab Spring doesn’t face the fundamental “first step to change” question that perplexes Western progressives because the removal of autocracy is the clear answer. Here, nothing is clear. Our problem is a general usurpation of popularly-intended governance for the benefit of the powerful, but solving such a problem is not easy. The voice of dissent cannot rise to equal the squeals of the elite without speaking together. This solidarity is what Occupy fell short of fostering.
Occupy’s fatal flaw was that it aspired to be a surging, compelling force instead of a political one. The General Assembly’s perfectly usable manifesto was never given the platform befitting a guiding charter, or even a definitive statement, because it didn’t really want to have one. OWS started an impressive discussion, but did not adequately articulate its dissatisfaction, let alone steer the conversation. The window in which the American public is willing to hear these arguments doesn’t open often, and it has shut once more. That chance slipping away is the unfortunate and utterly precedented legacy of Occupy.
The message was nonexistent. The stunt of the actual sleep-in gave the protest a platform, but it whiffed its chance by muddling its goals. A chorus onstage also has a platform, but it doesn’t reach the audience until its voices come together and says one thing. Occupy said nothing by saying everything. The dubious excuse started to arise that there was just too much to fix for specificity. “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands,” said Dr. Cornel West. “You’re talking about raising political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what’s going on through a different set of lens.” So…what are we supposed to do with that? Talk amongst ourselves? A movement can’t be an art project; it can’t let its meaning be assigned to it. Such an attitude is an artifact of our “awareness” culture, a marketing construct that resets the goal of ‘curing’ a disease to ‘raising awareness’ of it, to absolve consumers the failure of medical science/global charity/etc. while keeping the donations flowing. Occupy either did or should have sought to be a real agent of change, but the fact of the matter was that there was no way to draw a line from the end-the-Fed Paulite to the Marxist protesting alongside each other, incuriously applauding forth each other’s spittle. At some point, the agent of change must specify the answer to “What is the first thing that should change?” if anything is to change. They couldn’t, so nothing did.
The protest generated dizzying media interest, most of it due to the novelty of the “Occupation of New York City,” as the General Assembly’s manifesto turgidly stated. In reality it had all the substance and flair of John and Yoko’s Bed-In. But it worked, temporarily. I originally thought that the physical occupation of Zuccotti Park was only a preface to the more considered, flannel-lined movement that it was sure to spawn, that sleeping in the park was not the source of its power, but rather a PR move. We soon found out there were no PR considerations aside from the slogan-swollen rhetoric of vague redistributive tendencies. There was only the hope that capturing the interest of the world writ large would lead it to take up the fight that Occupy was afraid to. The clock expired when it became clear that the event itself was central to the media attention. The sit-in sat in for any discernable agenda, leading Zuccotti Park to become the fulcrum around which debate formed (legitimate use or not?) and opinions vacillated (I sympathize but can’t they leave?). The plane of the discussion they hoped to spark was thus fatally compromised. Occupy Wall Street used the park to good effect in the beginning, but never expanded past it, which meant that the inevitable end of the “occupation” meant the inevitable end of the line.
Then there were the protests in the other cities. The Zuccotti eviction showed weary mayors across the world that this was not a group that was going to particularly defend itself, and a blanket settled across the movement like the thick cover of snow that never fell on a single sleeping trustafarian. Occupy’s death marked little else besides the United States’ first foray into austerity protests, a veritable industry in Europe. Ultimately, though, Occupy will be remembered as a lost opportunity to change the discussion. It will be remembered as a failure to marshal widespread support into anything tangible, which is exactly what so many of its supporters feared from the outset. We can attribute this to a general lack of leadership, but more importantly, Occupy failed to grow up because it was never willing to admit that its aspirational relevance required the jettison of many of its founding die-hards.
The reason an organized, maintained political realization of Occupy was needed was that Wall Street is simply not Tahrir Square. The American powerless are not dictated so much as they are cogs in a machine that they are free to change if they’re able to muster enough commonly-interested voters. The Arab Spring doesn’t face the fundamental “first step to change” question that perplexes Western progressives because the removal of autocracy is the clear answer. Here, nothing is clear. Our problem is a general usurpation of popularly-intended governance for the benefit of the powerful, but solving such a problem is not easy. The voice of dissent cannot rise to equal the squeals of the elite without speaking together. This solidarity is what Occupy fell short of fostering.
Occupy’s fatal flaw was that it aspired to be a surging, compelling force instead of a political one. The General Assembly’s perfectly usable manifesto was never given the platform befitting a guiding charter, or even a definitive statement, because it didn’t really want to have one. OWS started an impressive discussion, but did not adequately articulate its dissatisfaction, let alone steer the conversation. The window in which the American public is willing to hear these arguments doesn’t open often, and it has shut once more. That chance slipping away is the unfortunate and utterly precedented legacy of Occupy.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Debt on Arrival
Well people, we didn’t blow it. Our economy is still crappy, our jobs are still scarce, our manufacturing is still gone, but at least we didn’t blow it. Never fear; the road ahead promises to be just as gut-wrenching as the one we concluded. Read on for six thoughts on last weekend’s thrilling debt deal.
Two Things That Will Change:
The way real legislation will be written: supercommittees. A supercommittee is a representation of a representative body, a small group in which compromise is easier than in a larger group. Supercommittees have been created and tasked by the big recent laws—the health care bill, the budget deal, and this debt deal—with hammering out the compromises that Congress is woefully unwilling to entertain. Delegating such groups minimizes the presence of fanaticism in the creation of a law. Powerbrokers don’t like dealing with crazy ideologues, so the process to determine the most important part of a bill—the details—will simply go higher up. Look for more supercommittees to come. Obstinacy may play well in rabid home districts, but Washington will respond by simply sending the job of legislation above the heads of those who proclaim a total disinterest in taking it seriously. This isn’t a good thing; it centralizes power into a shadowy backroom controlled by party bosses.
Negotiation. Brinkmanship rewarded, insanity prized. Wingnuts could not be hotter right now, and they get things done by taking their one-half of one-third of the government and going home. Unfortunately, there’s still the most powerful country in world history to run, so legislative work will be done, just not, you know, well. With inflexibility rewarded as it was in the debt deal, why not make a stand on every single issue?
Two Things That Won’t Change a Goddamn Bit:
The debt. The agreement doesn’t even reduce spending, let alone the debt. It shares at least two qualities with the health-care bill: a mind-numbing debate that explored the most avant-garde limits of functional governance and a total failure to address health care spending. You can cut all the food stamps you want, but until the entitlements are addressed, the debt trajectory isn’t anywhere near sustainable. However, our debt load feels especially heavy due to anemic growth, so that needs to be our primary concern before we arbitrarily reject the cheap cash that has financed our economic supremacy for seventy years. Intelligent investment will help much more than indiscriminate cuts, but either way, the debt is not going anywhere soon.
Obama’s spine. The debt crisis confirmed that we know exactly how Obama will deal with political battles for the next five years: he’ll avoid them. His main priority on this debt deal was nothing policy-wise, nothing that he could defend with reason or numbers or passion. What he wanted most was to avoid having this fight again. Considering he had the benefit of all logic, popularity, and all that is good and holy on his side, he has poor chances on more debatable issues. Remember, the contention wasn’t what to do with the debt; it was whether to throw the U.S. Treasury in default or not. His earlier pliancy also assisted the fabrication of the debt ceiling debate: if he hadn’t let April’s budget deal anchor so far to the right, most Republicans wouldn’t have even considered picking this fight. But again, why wouldn’t they? He hasn’t meant business yet, and he may never start.
Two Things that Should Change:
The two-party system. We need to add more parties to our political system. To the extent that they aid the political process, parties are supposed to represent groups of common interest, and the GOP and Democrats do not internally have common interests. The “split in the Republican Party,” for example, is due to the fact that the main goals of its corporate base and the populist base essentially oppose. Having more parties allows the free flotation of alliance, so that the issues are debated more for their own sake than as part of a strategy between manichean polar blocs. It also allows for voters’ voices to resonate more in the legislative process, because they could vote to be represented by parties with interests more closely aligned to their own.
The debt ceiling. The truth is, the bond market is going to decide when the United States reigns in our debt, not an arbitrary number like 14.3 and not vague threats on entitlements. Furthermore, the debt ceiling is legally inconsistent. Congress tells the Executive branch how much federal money to spend on what, yet a debt limit simultaneously deprives it of the ability to do so. In such a scenario, one law will be ignored in the name of the other. This probably won’t be abolished, however, because it’s an easy soapbox for politicians to stand on while not actually risking the economy.
Two Things That Will Change:
The way real legislation will be written: supercommittees. A supercommittee is a representation of a representative body, a small group in which compromise is easier than in a larger group. Supercommittees have been created and tasked by the big recent laws—the health care bill, the budget deal, and this debt deal—with hammering out the compromises that Congress is woefully unwilling to entertain. Delegating such groups minimizes the presence of fanaticism in the creation of a law. Powerbrokers don’t like dealing with crazy ideologues, so the process to determine the most important part of a bill—the details—will simply go higher up. Look for more supercommittees to come. Obstinacy may play well in rabid home districts, but Washington will respond by simply sending the job of legislation above the heads of those who proclaim a total disinterest in taking it seriously. This isn’t a good thing; it centralizes power into a shadowy backroom controlled by party bosses.
Negotiation. Brinkmanship rewarded, insanity prized. Wingnuts could not be hotter right now, and they get things done by taking their one-half of one-third of the government and going home. Unfortunately, there’s still the most powerful country in world history to run, so legislative work will be done, just not, you know, well. With inflexibility rewarded as it was in the debt deal, why not make a stand on every single issue?
Two Things That Won’t Change a Goddamn Bit:
The debt. The agreement doesn’t even reduce spending, let alone the debt. It shares at least two qualities with the health-care bill: a mind-numbing debate that explored the most avant-garde limits of functional governance and a total failure to address health care spending. You can cut all the food stamps you want, but until the entitlements are addressed, the debt trajectory isn’t anywhere near sustainable. However, our debt load feels especially heavy due to anemic growth, so that needs to be our primary concern before we arbitrarily reject the cheap cash that has financed our economic supremacy for seventy years. Intelligent investment will help much more than indiscriminate cuts, but either way, the debt is not going anywhere soon.
Obama’s spine. The debt crisis confirmed that we know exactly how Obama will deal with political battles for the next five years: he’ll avoid them. His main priority on this debt deal was nothing policy-wise, nothing that he could defend with reason or numbers or passion. What he wanted most was to avoid having this fight again. Considering he had the benefit of all logic, popularity, and all that is good and holy on his side, he has poor chances on more debatable issues. Remember, the contention wasn’t what to do with the debt; it was whether to throw the U.S. Treasury in default or not. His earlier pliancy also assisted the fabrication of the debt ceiling debate: if he hadn’t let April’s budget deal anchor so far to the right, most Republicans wouldn’t have even considered picking this fight. But again, why wouldn’t they? He hasn’t meant business yet, and he may never start.
Two Things that Should Change:
The two-party system. We need to add more parties to our political system. To the extent that they aid the political process, parties are supposed to represent groups of common interest, and the GOP and Democrats do not internally have common interests. The “split in the Republican Party,” for example, is due to the fact that the main goals of its corporate base and the populist base essentially oppose. Having more parties allows the free flotation of alliance, so that the issues are debated more for their own sake than as part of a strategy between manichean polar blocs. It also allows for voters’ voices to resonate more in the legislative process, because they could vote to be represented by parties with interests more closely aligned to their own.
The debt ceiling. The truth is, the bond market is going to decide when the United States reigns in our debt, not an arbitrary number like 14.3 and not vague threats on entitlements. Furthermore, the debt ceiling is legally inconsistent. Congress tells the Executive branch how much federal money to spend on what, yet a debt limit simultaneously deprives it of the ability to do so. In such a scenario, one law will be ignored in the name of the other. This probably won’t be abolished, however, because it’s an easy soapbox for politicians to stand on while not actually risking the economy.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Paul McCartney at Yankee Stadium
Note: This was written for a Chicago publication on the above date.
When The Beatles’ tour of major league baseball parks invented stadium rock in 1965, the sound equipment was primitive. Fifty 100-watt amplifiers, useful mostly for a bit of at-bat organ music, were muddy and easily outmatched by the screeching of fifty thousand kids. Settling into my seat at Yankee Stadium on Saturday night, I thought of this as my eyes ran up and down the tall speaker towers suspended over the enormous stage’s corners, powerful digital sound monitors calibrated to long perfected specifications. I thought of the practiced crowd outside the stadium, the efficient security rollout, the fact that every protocol of the Rock Concert had been fine-tuned and beatified (Beatified?) in the minds of music lovers since those first, wild shows. To consider that the act I was about to see had incepted all of this, something which became an enormous cultural substrate unto itself, I felt like Lao Tzu shaking hands with the Tao.
Three hours later, Lao Tzu’s socks were blown off. If you are debating going through the effort to catch Paul McCartney at Wrigley, the answer is that if you’re wondering, you must. McCartney was stellar on this second night of his 2011 tour, and he will be stellar on July 31st and August 1st at the Friendly Confines. There will not be a bad seat in the house. He will be taking over for Marlon Byrd in center, and the crowd will be in base-hit territory just past the infield. The sound and lights will be perfect. And the Cute One will be so on point in every way that you’ll wonder if this wasn’t the Ron Santo era.
As Paul McCartney came onstage to a dutifully thunderous ovation and paced through “Magical Mystery Tour,” the pre-show historicism that had gotten me so primed sublimated into magic with the opening plunks of the set’s third song, “All My Loving.” It was chilling; we’re so accustomed to knowing this music from its perch in the public domain, or from its role as the simultaneous base and pinnacle of the rock pyramid, that to then comprehend that this belonged to the guy in front of us made the distance between me and the man himself disappear, and it became Paul fucking McCartney! before my eyes. It was like watching Paul of Tarsus do a table reading of Corinthians.
From there on it was completely rockin'. The evening never felt like a tribute to vestigial grandeur. The songs were performed flawlessly and energetically. Even now the setlist looks comically perfect, the template for what every rock concert might be if there were no such thing as self-awareness. By the time “Live and Let Die” had me headbanging like an idiot, the scale of the occasion had melted into euphoria.
His musicianship, his showmanship, and his durability all play into the phenomenon Paul McCartney has never stopped being, the perfect blend of back-end talent and front-end pizzazz that have endeared him to reporters, aficionados, and fans for his entire career. (The publicity-weary Beatles notoriously resented him for it.) He’s still an unrepentant ham. He asked if we were having a good time often enough to put a teenager losing his virginity to shame. Some stage banter fell flat, but come on, the guy is almost 70. His famously ageless voice—one of the best in rock—absolutely soared on “I’m Looking Through You” and “Helter Skelter.” He trilled his voice between songs to show off his range, he darted around the stage to show off his fitness, he rubbed his still-full hair constantly; I was afraid he might pop a boner just to show what else never left.
The real star of the night, however, was McCartney’s songwriting. I need add nothing to the oceanic praise of this particular legacy of the Beatles but to comment that McCartney lives up to his own hype simply by owning this preternaturally powerful music as no one of lesser talent could. This alone justifies the admission. Add to the top of that a concert of supreme passion, hosted by one of the great showmen of the past century in top form, and a different sort of historical merit suddenly arises. We only have Paul McCartney for another few years, but we do have him now. This was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen, and believe me; it was in spite of the size of Yankee Stadium. Wrigley Field is going to feel like the Cavern Club.
When The Beatles’ tour of major league baseball parks invented stadium rock in 1965, the sound equipment was primitive. Fifty 100-watt amplifiers, useful mostly for a bit of at-bat organ music, were muddy and easily outmatched by the screeching of fifty thousand kids. Settling into my seat at Yankee Stadium on Saturday night, I thought of this as my eyes ran up and down the tall speaker towers suspended over the enormous stage’s corners, powerful digital sound monitors calibrated to long perfected specifications. I thought of the practiced crowd outside the stadium, the efficient security rollout, the fact that every protocol of the Rock Concert had been fine-tuned and beatified (Beatified?) in the minds of music lovers since those first, wild shows. To consider that the act I was about to see had incepted all of this, something which became an enormous cultural substrate unto itself, I felt like Lao Tzu shaking hands with the Tao.
Three hours later, Lao Tzu’s socks were blown off. If you are debating going through the effort to catch Paul McCartney at Wrigley, the answer is that if you’re wondering, you must. McCartney was stellar on this second night of his 2011 tour, and he will be stellar on July 31st and August 1st at the Friendly Confines. There will not be a bad seat in the house. He will be taking over for Marlon Byrd in center, and the crowd will be in base-hit territory just past the infield. The sound and lights will be perfect. And the Cute One will be so on point in every way that you’ll wonder if this wasn’t the Ron Santo era.
As Paul McCartney came onstage to a dutifully thunderous ovation and paced through “Magical Mystery Tour,” the pre-show historicism that had gotten me so primed sublimated into magic with the opening plunks of the set’s third song, “All My Loving.” It was chilling; we’re so accustomed to knowing this music from its perch in the public domain, or from its role as the simultaneous base and pinnacle of the rock pyramid, that to then comprehend that this belonged to the guy in front of us made the distance between me and the man himself disappear, and it became Paul fucking McCartney! before my eyes. It was like watching Paul of Tarsus do a table reading of Corinthians.
From there on it was completely rockin'. The evening never felt like a tribute to vestigial grandeur. The songs were performed flawlessly and energetically. Even now the setlist looks comically perfect, the template for what every rock concert might be if there were no such thing as self-awareness. By the time “Live and Let Die” had me headbanging like an idiot, the scale of the occasion had melted into euphoria.
His musicianship, his showmanship, and his durability all play into the phenomenon Paul McCartney has never stopped being, the perfect blend of back-end talent and front-end pizzazz that have endeared him to reporters, aficionados, and fans for his entire career. (The publicity-weary Beatles notoriously resented him for it.) He’s still an unrepentant ham. He asked if we were having a good time often enough to put a teenager losing his virginity to shame. Some stage banter fell flat, but come on, the guy is almost 70. His famously ageless voice—one of the best in rock—absolutely soared on “I’m Looking Through You” and “Helter Skelter.” He trilled his voice between songs to show off his range, he darted around the stage to show off his fitness, he rubbed his still-full hair constantly; I was afraid he might pop a boner just to show what else never left.
The real star of the night, however, was McCartney’s songwriting. I need add nothing to the oceanic praise of this particular legacy of the Beatles but to comment that McCartney lives up to his own hype simply by owning this preternaturally powerful music as no one of lesser talent could. This alone justifies the admission. Add to the top of that a concert of supreme passion, hosted by one of the great showmen of the past century in top form, and a different sort of historical merit suddenly arises. We only have Paul McCartney for another few years, but we do have him now. This was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen, and believe me; it was in spite of the size of Yankee Stadium. Wrigley Field is going to feel like the Cavern Club.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
An American Love Letter to the FIFA School of Drama
I’ve been watching quite a bit of World Cup soccer the last few days, and I have a very well-chewed bone to pick. The quality of play is high, which obviates a refrain that familiarly rebuts most American soccer criticism: “Well it’s not like that in good soccer.” And indeed, that excuse may yet hold water, considering the widening gulf between the talent of national teams and that of the hyper-capitalist-nightmare behemoths of the Champions League’s upper echelons. But it’s good enough, and my main problem—shared by most Americans watching this June—has been a hallowed tradition of futbol for as long as there have been three referees and only one that mattered. The F word: faking. I have had enough.
To assimilate soccer into a sports-enjoyment lexicon full of football, basketball, baseball, and hockey, the American Sports Fan (ASF) requires a plugin to make it compatible. Before each game, or, God help us, proudly asserted Soccer Observation, the ASF must run a worldly, cultured magnet over his or her brain to polarize all its sports leisure ions toward the Beautiful Game. This reorients the need for constant scoring toward the existentialist desire to see creative passing culminate in nothing necessarily tangible. We put on our patient hats and learn to appreciate the movement of the ball—more idiosyncratic and alive than the balls of American sports—and allow tension to build naturally, to be viscerally released with every goal. We also gain a sort of zen appreciation for frustration. Goal-line stands, missed field goals, rebounds, and clutch strikeouts all have something very American in common: a change of possession. I take control by virtue of your failure. In soccer, there is no such judgment. With goals so difficult to come by, an attempt at achieving one is almost always a positive, with little more regret than a rueful look back at missed opportunity. These new aesthetics must be adopted by the American soccer viewer to enjoy the game he already understands. But magnetization is not always perfect, and the most glaringly difficult thing for us to watch is the diving and faking.
Is this a bad thing? Is this mean old Americans being ignorant of the wider world? Hell no! I intend no hyperbole in saying that it is fully disgusting to watch a man who represents literally millions of compatriots feel no shame in feigning injury. The squeeze of the eyes, the spent and defeated collapse, the tragic grab of the leg, and act on the blood-stained grass to illustrate the injustice of a prime physical specimen, ruined. The bared teeth and the covered-face lament, as if to say, “Something beautiful has died today—but don’t we all?” Immediately followed by a jaunty post-whistle jog and swift, full recovery. A world-class athlete cheated, destroyed, and resurrected in the span of forty seconds. Maybe with the help of a stretcher, even. I can’t stand it. I’m not saying that the player would not have been knocked to the ground, or that his momentum was not thrown off, or that a foul wasn’t committed. I am saying that he should be ashamed of himself, and the soccer world should be ashamed for embracing this.
Only the athlete’s code of honor can change this. It cannot be legislated away. Diving is a compulsory yellow card already, and although there is no FIFA regulation about spending time writhing on the ground, it would likely be difficult to enforce without calling the player a histrionic liar. This is something that, I feel, we Americans got right. A football player gets up after a hit; if he can physically muster it, even quicker after a bone-crushing hit. The idea is, don’t give them the satisfaction. World Cup players should want to appear as strong as possible. The World Cup is very much a nationalistic flotsam downstream from centuries of European infighting; it is a replacement for blood. This isn’t the model U.N. People really care about these 90 minutes, and the glory you are able to bring to your country through your talent. And they choose to respond by playing up the severity of an injury for a mere set piece opportunity.
Referees base their calls almost entirely on that moment of contact. The drama afterwards is at first concerning, then afterwards, annoying. If a player gets fouled, especially if they are thrown to the ground, they could get the call and get back up. Essentially, whatever the actual benefit of playing raped is, it’s not worth the concession of dignity. You already got the call. You already get the ball. What possesses players to, at this point, not even show weakness, but invent a weakness to display? I will never understand this. And American sports fans will never like it.
These guys are going hard. I understand that. They’re running miles per game and sprinting into challenges and fifty-fifty balls that every instinct of the brain advises against. But such is the stage of the competition, and my American sentiments say that the stage should dictate how players comport themselves. In the park, with your friends, taking a breather to languish on the ground is different than having a flag on your chest and cameras on your agonized face. The language that the world uses to describe soccer on the international level is replete with “passion,” “pride,” “battle,” etc. Getting carried off on a stretcher and returning to full form not a minute later—a common sight in 2006—would suggest that the second one of those grandiosities needs a bit of exercise.
Of course, the world will not take my advice. Players will continue to flop and squiggle on the ground with O-faces until they feel like doing their goddamn job again for probably as long as they’re paid obscene amounts to do it. There is a bright side to this, though.
The idea of rooting for the United States through and through seems like kind of a funny idea in the soccer world. American fans abound, but until recently, most rooted for another country, one that held soccer close to its heart and stood a reasonable chance of success. This might change, however, if the U.S. national team were to embrace the American aesthetic of toughness, strength, and mental focus. This country is already on the precipice of fully accepting soccer. Wouldn’t it be great if all of us American soccer fans could root for our home country knowing that we were the one team that played the style we like to see: tough, fast, skillful, sans flopping and theatrics? If we fielded a team that keeps in line with the ideals of American sports, and avoided the hysterics just to get a referee’s favor?
I want soccer to be accepted in this country, but the truth is that I somewhat agree with some “ignorant” criticisms. The fact of the matter is that the reason the United States has avoided embracing soccer is primarily that the way the rest of the world plays it does not appeal to our conceptions of masculinity. We value skill and endurance, sure. We do not value being a bitch. But the United States doesn’t have to play soccer that way! We can do it the way we want to do it; we can establish the American style as one that does not shy away from challenges and which plays physically. Most of all, we can show the world that they would be best served if they spent less time falling down than they did getting up.
And Clint Dempsey: cut it out.
To assimilate soccer into a sports-enjoyment lexicon full of football, basketball, baseball, and hockey, the American Sports Fan (ASF) requires a plugin to make it compatible. Before each game, or, God help us, proudly asserted Soccer Observation, the ASF must run a worldly, cultured magnet over his or her brain to polarize all its sports leisure ions toward the Beautiful Game. This reorients the need for constant scoring toward the existentialist desire to see creative passing culminate in nothing necessarily tangible. We put on our patient hats and learn to appreciate the movement of the ball—more idiosyncratic and alive than the balls of American sports—and allow tension to build naturally, to be viscerally released with every goal. We also gain a sort of zen appreciation for frustration. Goal-line stands, missed field goals, rebounds, and clutch strikeouts all have something very American in common: a change of possession. I take control by virtue of your failure. In soccer, there is no such judgment. With goals so difficult to come by, an attempt at achieving one is almost always a positive, with little more regret than a rueful look back at missed opportunity. These new aesthetics must be adopted by the American soccer viewer to enjoy the game he already understands. But magnetization is not always perfect, and the most glaringly difficult thing for us to watch is the diving and faking.
Is this a bad thing? Is this mean old Americans being ignorant of the wider world? Hell no! I intend no hyperbole in saying that it is fully disgusting to watch a man who represents literally millions of compatriots feel no shame in feigning injury. The squeeze of the eyes, the spent and defeated collapse, the tragic grab of the leg, and act on the blood-stained grass to illustrate the injustice of a prime physical specimen, ruined. The bared teeth and the covered-face lament, as if to say, “Something beautiful has died today—but don’t we all?” Immediately followed by a jaunty post-whistle jog and swift, full recovery. A world-class athlete cheated, destroyed, and resurrected in the span of forty seconds. Maybe with the help of a stretcher, even. I can’t stand it. I’m not saying that the player would not have been knocked to the ground, or that his momentum was not thrown off, or that a foul wasn’t committed. I am saying that he should be ashamed of himself, and the soccer world should be ashamed for embracing this.
Only the athlete’s code of honor can change this. It cannot be legislated away. Diving is a compulsory yellow card already, and although there is no FIFA regulation about spending time writhing on the ground, it would likely be difficult to enforce without calling the player a histrionic liar. This is something that, I feel, we Americans got right. A football player gets up after a hit; if he can physically muster it, even quicker after a bone-crushing hit. The idea is, don’t give them the satisfaction. World Cup players should want to appear as strong as possible. The World Cup is very much a nationalistic flotsam downstream from centuries of European infighting; it is a replacement for blood. This isn’t the model U.N. People really care about these 90 minutes, and the glory you are able to bring to your country through your talent. And they choose to respond by playing up the severity of an injury for a mere set piece opportunity.
Referees base their calls almost entirely on that moment of contact. The drama afterwards is at first concerning, then afterwards, annoying. If a player gets fouled, especially if they are thrown to the ground, they could get the call and get back up. Essentially, whatever the actual benefit of playing raped is, it’s not worth the concession of dignity. You already got the call. You already get the ball. What possesses players to, at this point, not even show weakness, but invent a weakness to display? I will never understand this. And American sports fans will never like it.
These guys are going hard. I understand that. They’re running miles per game and sprinting into challenges and fifty-fifty balls that every instinct of the brain advises against. But such is the stage of the competition, and my American sentiments say that the stage should dictate how players comport themselves. In the park, with your friends, taking a breather to languish on the ground is different than having a flag on your chest and cameras on your agonized face. The language that the world uses to describe soccer on the international level is replete with “passion,” “pride,” “battle,” etc. Getting carried off on a stretcher and returning to full form not a minute later—a common sight in 2006—would suggest that the second one of those grandiosities needs a bit of exercise.
Of course, the world will not take my advice. Players will continue to flop and squiggle on the ground with O-faces until they feel like doing their goddamn job again for probably as long as they’re paid obscene amounts to do it. There is a bright side to this, though.
The idea of rooting for the United States through and through seems like kind of a funny idea in the soccer world. American fans abound, but until recently, most rooted for another country, one that held soccer close to its heart and stood a reasonable chance of success. This might change, however, if the U.S. national team were to embrace the American aesthetic of toughness, strength, and mental focus. This country is already on the precipice of fully accepting soccer. Wouldn’t it be great if all of us American soccer fans could root for our home country knowing that we were the one team that played the style we like to see: tough, fast, skillful, sans flopping and theatrics? If we fielded a team that keeps in line with the ideals of American sports, and avoided the hysterics just to get a referee’s favor?
I want soccer to be accepted in this country, but the truth is that I somewhat agree with some “ignorant” criticisms. The fact of the matter is that the reason the United States has avoided embracing soccer is primarily that the way the rest of the world plays it does not appeal to our conceptions of masculinity. We value skill and endurance, sure. We do not value being a bitch. But the United States doesn’t have to play soccer that way! We can do it the way we want to do it; we can establish the American style as one that does not shy away from challenges and which plays physically. Most of all, we can show the world that they would be best served if they spent less time falling down than they did getting up.
And Clint Dempsey: cut it out.
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