Sports, Education, Apocalypse

It’s game 2 of the Eastern Conference Championship between the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat. Leading his depleted team against a heavily favored opponent with home court advantage, point guard Rajon Rondo explodes with 44 points, 10 assists, and 8 rebounds. After the game, reporters ask him to comment on his record night. He responds: “It’s irrelevant. We lost. It’s as simple as that.” 

The Celtics came back and won game 3 in Boston. But in this series, the joy of victory is not proportional to the agony of defeat. Even a win feels strangely irrelevant. Almost nobody believes that Boston can win this best of 7. And if they’re going to lose, who cares about the route they take to arrive at that final result? Like Rondo says, a loss is a loss, plain and simple. Losing in 7 games can be worse than losing in 4.

But I’m a pessimist. And I’m also a spectator. From the perspective of individual players, is a truly high-level performance ever really irrelevant? Just this year there were rumors that Rondo could be traded. Even in a loss, he made a clear statement about his value as a player by putting up such commanding numbers. In a way, it’s his value to the team that allows Rondo to downplay the significance of his performance so much. He’s a starter, and currently considered the most important player on a team with three other talented (though aging) stars. He has the luxury to take a team-first, win-first attitude, because his own position as a player is relatively secure. Not so for many athletes. Marquis Daniels, a Boston bench player who made a decent contribution to the game 3 victory, probably would have been pretty happy with his performance even had the team loss. He played significant minutes and was a difference maker on the court for the first time in the post season. For “role players,” personal success is never irrelevant. 

Recently I read the classic football book North Dallas Forty (more on this later). It recounts a week in the life of a wide receiver who plays for a football team that is obviously a fictionalized Dallas Cowboys (the author, Peter Gent, played for the Cowboys in the late 60s). The narrator is a former starter who has been demoted to the bench and sometimes doesn’t get onto the field for whole games. He describes the agony of this situation, explaining how he routinely roots for the opposing team if it means the coach will put him back in the game. The world of team sports the narrator describes is a Darwinian environment in which even the most popular and powerful players are constantly watching their backs. 

We are witnessing something akin to this individualistic fight for survival in the Giants’ offseason. A few weeks after winning the Super Bowl, it’s every man for himself, with players leaving for better contracts elsewhere and Osi Umeniyora again bogged down in an ugly (though very recently resolved) contract dispute. Eli Manning can play for the team. After winning his second Super Bowl (and Super Bowl MVP award), he said he was just happy for his teammates. But Mario Manningham, who made an exceptional catch to start off the game winning drive, needed a quality Super Bowl performance for himself. He was a free agent this year and has left the Giants for a more lucrative contract with San Francisco. 

For all players, and especially for those players who are not superstars, individual playmaking matters, win or loss. Moreover, there isn’t always a stark divide between playing for a team and playing for oneself. I’d like to think that Rondo’s monster game 2 helped the team, if not in the immediate game. It certainly had the home court fans in a frenzy last night, cheering wildly when Rondo took his first free throws and booing Lebron James. When the Heat’s shooting statistics dipped from the end of the first to the end of the second quarter, the announcers suggested that the fans might actually be making a difference, by disrupting the communication between Heat players and the sideline, where the coach was calling out plays. There’s no way they would’ve been so loud had game 2 been as lackluster a loss as the first game, instead of the crushing overtime loss that it was. 

And maybe for everyone, Rondo, his teammates, and the fans, the fact that game 2 was a loss will become ever less important as the years pass. There’s a good chance that even if the Heat beats the Celtics, as everyone anticipates, they will then lose to the Spurs in the finals. And then what? Will the team that rendered Rondo’s performance “irrelevant” become irrelevant itself? No. Things cannot always be dependent on the final outcome. As a fan at least, you have to appreciate the good even when the result is not ideal. 

And bracketing my sometimes emotional pessimism, there’s another way one really can’t consider game 3 irrelevant. Even if it’s not enough to advance to the finals, Rondo’s playmaking was so remarkable, with some “how did he do that?” passes and a signature “fake out” of the defender while driving to the basket. If nothing else, I don’t see how anyone could watch a game in which Rondo plays at or near his highest level and not recognize this truth, as conveyed by David Foster Wallace in his 2006 article about Roger Federer: “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.” When it comes to these moments of beauty, winning or losing is what’s actually irrelevant.

I’ve lived in New York City for over five years. But I only feel like a New Yorker on very particular occasion:, when I’m walking down the street and I see old guys wearing clothing that marks them as fans of the New York Giants. These are the moments when I genuinely identify with people who have spent decades in this city. 

But I’m a terrible New York sports fan. My urban allegiance runs no deeper than a single team. While New York fans are supposed to hate all things Boston, in basketball I root for the Boston Celtics. I like the players and their personalities: the aging “big three” of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen, and the prickly point guard Rajon Rondo. The athletic personalities, the on-court mannerisms, of these four players are so familiar to me, even though I rarely watch games during the regular season. In a very particular way, I know these four people, though they don’t know me. Following the careers of athletes can be a little bit like reading everything published by a particular author. Authors have their recurring themes and syntactical rhythms. Players have their trademark moves and their particular way of carrying themselves during a game. Every book, and every game, has its own narrative tension that keeps us flipping the pages or watching the screen. But within those unfolding narratives there is a different kind of pleasure, that of recognition. There is Paul Pierce grimacing after manipulating his opponent into fouling him. There is Kevin Garnett pacing intensely and talking to himself after a play. There is Ray Allen, running around the perimeter to get open at the three point line. There is Rajon Rondo driving to the basket but, at the last minute, dishing out a pass to a teammate that the opposing players have ignored. 

Without Pierce, Garnett, Allen and Rondo, will the Boston Celtics still be the Boston Celtics? Of course there will continue to be such a team, but it won’t be the one I once rooted for. Even if Rondo stays while the older players leave, the continuity will not be there. Ringo Starr alone is not the Beatles. My days of following the Boston Celtics will probably be over. And so it is that my husband and I are splurging to take a bus to Boston, spend the night in a hotel, and go to a round two playoff game between the Celtics and the Philadelphia Sixers. This might be the last season that this Boston Celtics team exists, and we’ve never seen them live. 

But it’s a funny impulse, in a way, to want to see a team live. Television is what has fostered the familiarity I have with the Celtics’ players. It’s how I’ve watched the games and it’s how I have come to know not just the playing styles, but the facial expressions, the bodily habits, and even the voices of the players and their coach. Way back in the upper decks, going to a game is a different kind of experience. It becomes less about the individual players and more about the team, the fans, and the city. Of course I’ll be rooting for Boston, and even wearing my one Celtics t-shirt, acquired after the team won a championship in 2008, but amidst the TD Garden fans, I will be both a participant and an observer. In watching basketball, I’m something between a flaneur and a fan. I genuinely wish the best for the team, but I remain relatively detached.  My detachment, however, is mediated by my relationship to sports as a commodity product, made accessible through television and ancillary sports media. What does it mean to be a critical spectator when you find yourself in this kind of relationship to a sport, a team, and a commodity culture? 

Tomorrow night, this question won’t matter. I’ll just be hanging on every basket. 

I recently read the first two books in the Hunger Games series and saw the Hunger Games movie. I also watched snippets of the NFL Draft these past few days, making it hard not to draw comparisons between the draft and the “reaping.” 

In the post-apocalyptic dystopia of the Hunger Games, a totalitarian state holds an annual reaping, selecting a boy and girl child (aged 12-17) as tributes from each of 12 districts to battle to the death, over the course of weeks, in an expansive arena. The Games are staged as a media spectacle. The contest engrosses the decadent urbanites of the capital and subdues the residents of the district through fear. The Hunger Games, explains the author - though it hardly needs explaining - “is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that’s what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there’s also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that’s what I find very disturbing. There’s this potential for desensitizing the audience.” 

Commentary on the books and the movie has not shied away from Collins’ explicit criticism of reality television. But as far as I can tell, there has not been much thoughtful discussion about parallels between the Hunger Games and the best and oldest form of reality television: sports. A quick google search for “hunger games sports” did reveal an extremely creepy and uncritical mash-up of pro sports and the concept of a Hunger Games-style gladiatorial death match, complete with a roster of real-life athletes from around the US and a description of the imagined circumstances under which they would die in the arena. At the other end of the spectrum, a Huffington Post writer, in discussing the Hunger Games, makes the comparison lurking in my thoughts in an overly heavy-handed manner: “Our society is held together by a craving for violence. What is, say, middle-school football, after all? We should ask: Is it tolerable for us to send our young boys into a game that breaks legs, destroys knees, causes concussions and otherwise changes the course of life forever?” 

The sports comparison puts me, as an ardent fan, on the hot seat. This is part of the value of the series: it encourages us to think critically about our own consumer choices, especially as they relate to media. And the books and movie are themselves objects of media consumption, adding a layer of complexity to the reading or viewing experience. 

I thought The Hunger Games was a good movie. It gives the viewer (at least the one who has read the book first) a satisfying experience. Because the book deals so much with what goes on in the heroine’s head, I worried that the movie would externalize her thought process in an awkward way. Instead, the movie lets actions speak for themselves and leaves it to those who know the full story to add in details. If the movie had aimed at greatness it might have been terrible, but it aimed at mediocrity, and it was good. 

But what could have been? For a movie adaptation to be great it has to add something to the original (as with The Orchid Thief). There was huge and obvious potential for this. The movie could have exploited the very sophisticated way in which the audience assumes the subject-position of the fictional viewers in the capital as they both watch the Hunger Games. Like the capital-viewers, the movie audience watches a screen, follows a narrative, takes sides, and comes away entertained. The trope of screens within the screen could have been a powerful way of highlighting the uncomfortable co-identity between real and fictitious spectators. Instead, the movie does not often show the Games being viewed on screens. When it does, the viewers are the exploited and potentially rebellious residents of the districts, not the titillated and superficial viewers of the capital. We most often see the people of the capital as a live, mass audience - an audience that recalls not our own society of media spectatorship, but the fascist mass spectacles of Nazi Germany. By not showing the hated people of the capital as viewers of events mediated by screens, the movie lets its own audience off the hook. 

Of course, there is a limit to the co-identity between movie viewers, who watch actors and actresses, and the fictional viewers, who actually watch young people kill each other. But if the audience goes away feeling entertained but not uncomfortable, the movie has failed to fulfill its potential. Part of that potential is to remind people of the importance of being critical viewers and never forgetting the humanity of the people, the real people, appearing on their screens. 

The men who were recently “reaped” in the NFL draft are all “careers,” like those characters in the Games who volunteer as tributes in order to seek their fame and fortune. But let’s not forget, they are still men.

I was delighted by a controversial reading comprehension story on the recent eighth grade NY State English Language Arts examination. That is, I like the story, but it doesn’t inspire much confidence in high stakes testing. 

The story is being called “absurd.” Here is a summary. A hare challenges a pineapple to a race and the pineapple accepts. Other animals bet money on the pineapple, thinking that it must have a trick up its sleeves. The race starts and the hare zips toward the finish line, while the pineapple does not budge. After losing the race, the pineapple is eaten by the animals that bet on its victory. The moral: pineapples have no sleeves.

Although students were reportedly confused by the story, it has become the subject of a Facebook page and has received many “likes.” I’m not surprised, this kind of humor makes sense to young people. It is exactly the kind of random, seemingly pointless, humor that drives the TV show Family Guy. Also, for the sake of comparison, a joke told to me by my 12 year old cousin-in-law last weekend: 

Why did the airplane crash?

Why?

Because the pilot was a loaf of bread.

It takes a certain kind of cultural literacy to process the story or the joke. One problem with reading comprehension tests is that they purport to test literacy, but the relationship between literacy and cultural literacy too often goes unacknowledged  by the test makers. Another problem is that the questions meant to test comprehension assume that there is only one correct way to read the story. 

This was apparently one of the questions that students had to answer about the pineapple story:

Why did the animals eat the pineapple?

a. they were annoyed

b. they were amused

c. they were hungry

d. they wanted to

The story is entertaining, and maybe even a little profound; it’s the question that is truly absurd. And the most absurd thing of all is the fact that students and teachers will be harshly judged based on performance on this test. The push to rate teachers based on “performance,” to publicly shame them for poor performance as judged (largely) by student test scores, to erode their job security and deny their dignity, it is based on the assumption that state exams are dependable metrics and not, ahem, pieces of shit.  

In other testing news, the state is finally considering revising the Global History and Geography Regents examination, not because the examination is rubbish (though it is), but because too many students are in danger of not graduating because they are unable to pass. One would hope that if the examination is revised (to become two tests, instead of one that covers two years of material), the entire content and structure of the test will be reconsidered. But this isn’t likely as the revisions will undoubtedly be done on the cheap. 

The pineapple question was part of a test designed by Pearsons, a for-profit company with a $32 million contract with the state. Apparently, the story was based on the tale of an eggplant and a hare by one Daniel Pinkwater, who was paid some nominal fee for his masterpiece. His comments about the original, and the process by which it became state examination fodder, are well worth a read. 

The apocalypse is everywhere one turns these days. From recent movies like Take Shelter and Melancholia, to zombie fiction, to academic books, like Elaine Pagels’ Revelations, to articles that discuss everything from a possible “football apocalypse” to an apocalyptic turn in library erotica. In this year of the supposedly foretold Mayan apocalypse, with anxieties rife in life and global affairs, the end of days cannot be escaped in popular or high culture. 

Elaine Pagels’ study of the Book of Revalation, according to book reviews, makes the point that the apocalypse has always been political, though the politics of evoking the apocalypse change with the times. By tracing apocalyptic thinking back to the first centuries B.C., Pagels study raises a question that may be outside the scope of her ambition: how culturally specific is apocalyptic thinking? Buddhism has a concept of an Age of Dharma Decline, but while devotees of Pure Land Buddhism seek rebirth in the land of Buddha, the end of the world as we know it does not seem to loom in Buddhist thinking the way it does in Christian thinking. 

I wonder if the current high tide of apocalyptic thinking in popular culture, in particular, is manifesting itself in cultures outside the monotheistic traditions of Judaism/Christianity/Islam? And if not, what other cultural resources are drawn on to work through anxieties and indignation over the current state of the world? At an academic conference I attended last weekend, I learned that a certain medieval genre of Chinese tales of the supernatural and the strange has reasserted itself in popular culture, and serves as an outlet for critiques of state censorship, amongst other things. The supernatural tale in the medieval period could serve as a critique of social mores and official corruption; just as the apocalyptic has always been political, so has the supernatural. Is the ghost story the apocalyptic tale of China? One clear difference between the two cases is that “superstition” is a clear target of criticism for China’s secular state, while apocalyptic thinking manifests itself quite forcefully in mainstream American politics. 

The former New York Giants running back, Brandon Jacobs, who signed this week with the San Francisco 49ers, was booed by his own team’s fans during the only NFL game I’ve ever attended. Jacobs did not run well for much of the year, and watching the game against the Dolphins, fans were especially frustrated with his lack of production because of comments he’d made in a recently published magazine article. “I come out to win,” said Jacobs. “It’s up to them [the coaches] whether or not they want to use me. I just can’t wait to get a true opportunity to get out there and show myself again…It’s going to have to be for another team, but it is what it is.” Many people viewed this as an inappropriate comment to be making in the middle of the season, and didn’t feel like Jacobs’ production warranted this type of self-righteous dissatisfaction. So when Jacobs played poorly in his first game after those comments went public, the fans booed. 

After the game, Jacobs shot his mouth off again. Despite his team’s narrow victory, he grumbled: “I’ve nothing positive to say. The most positive thing: I got family at home and I got a fast-ass car being delivered on Tuesday. That’s it.” 

In the end, this mid-season controversy would prove a forgettable footnote to a championship-winning year for the New York Giants. Brandon Jacobs would make critical contributions to the Giants’ success. In the week after the Dolphins game, Jacobs ran well, caught passes, and scored a touchdown. After the game, he was at the center of a delightful locker room celebration, caught on video and posted online, in which he even hoisted up the often-grumpy looking Coach Coughlin. After that night, the Giants started a losing streak. But when they turned things around with a win in Dallas, Jacobs was again an important piece of the puzzle, rushing for over 100 yards and two touchdowns. Then in the play-offs, facing the Falcons in the first round, Jacobs had an early game-changing 34-yard run and also helped the Giants convert a fourth down. His teammates were on the sidelines egging him on: “Keep running it big back because there’s nothing they can do to you. Trust me, we play defense, they don’t want to hit you.” 

As Jacobs returned to some semblance of his once spectacular run game late in the season, his mouth-flapping public persona also soared to new heights. “It’s time to shut up, fat boy,” he said to Jets’ coach Rex Ryan after the Giants beat their fellow New York team in a must win game.

That same week, before another must win game against the Cowboys, Jacobs declared that Dallas fans “are loud, obnoxious and just bad.” His candid remarks climaxed with a spectacular post game interview following the super bowl, in which Jacobs, cradling his two small sons in his arms, said of the Patriots “We decapitated them. They can’t wear that crown anymore.”

And even then, Jacobs wasn’t finished yet. He had one more controversial headline left in him as a New York Giant. During the Giants’ victory rally, reporters asked him about Tom Brady’s supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen, who had made disparaging comments about Brady’s wide receivers dropping passes. Jacobs replied, “She just needs to continue to stay cute and shut up.” 

That last nugget got reported by websites and news sources that don’t usually cover football. There was a fair amount of huffing and puffing about sexist football players. The irony was that Jacobs and Bundchen have a lot in comment. They both have high profile jobs that are centered upon the physicality of their bodies. They are both objectified by their admirers and by the press. Jacobs caught a lot of criticism for his comment, and later apologized. But nobody will be apologizing to him for saying, over and over, in so many words: just play football and shut up. 

The NFL has a sexist sports culture, that’s for sure. But in a league in which numerous players have been accused of things like sexual abuse (including rape) and child abuse, it’s easy for me to feel sympathy for Jacobs. It’s impossible to know for sure, but he seemingly has a tender, loving relationship with his wife and their children. Years ago, when his wife  was pregnant with their first child, Jacobs put a football under his jersey after scoring a touchdown, simulating pregnancy as a tribute to his wife. (He was called for unsportsmanlike conduct and fined $5,000). 

Kim Jacobs is often in the front row of the stands watching her husband play. In last year’s regular season game against the Patriots (if I recall correctly), Jacobs ran the ball into the endzone for a touchdown and then ran straight past the uprights to leap up and give her the ball. After the Giants’ playoff game against Green Bay, there he was, going over to the stands to embrace her. And after the super bowl, there she was again, with their adorable children. He didn’t choose a partner for the traits of cuteness and silence either. His wife has a Masters degree and encouraged Jacobs to get his BA. 

The reports about Brandon Jacobs’ frustrated comments after the Giants game against Miami all made fun of his taking solace in a “fast-ass car” after playing poorly. Nobody emphasized what he said first: “I got family at home.” 

Brandon Jacobs, don’t stop talking. Especially since this is farewell. The next time you meet the New York Giants on the football field, you’ll be a competitor, not a teammate. On that occasion, I hope you’ll be running your mouth and not your legs.

Treyvon Martin was suspended before his life was extinguished. The 17 year old was shot in the chest by a neighborhood watch captain while he was walking back from a convenience store to the house of his father’s girlfriend. He was unarmed and evidence suggests that he had shown no aggressive behavior toward the man that shot him. That man, who claims self defense, has not been arrested or charged. 

Treyvon Martin was staying with his father because of his suspension from school. The details of that suspension, however, are murky. Today, the Miami Herald reports that the suspension was for 10 days and quote’s Treyvon’s mother as saying “He was not suspended for something dealing with violence or anything like that. It wasn’t a crime he committed, but he was in an unauthorized area [on school property].” An earlier article from the Orlando Sentinel says Treyvon had been suspended for five days, and quotes one of his teachers as saying “He was suspended because he was late too many times.” The discrepancy is odd, but both accounts agree on the fact that the school had not accused the student of violent or criminal behavior. 

A suspension of five days, not to mention ten, is a harsh penalty.When I was a high school student in an urban public school in the 90s, my school had a policy that 11 absences in a single class meant an automatic F. The rule encouraged attendance, but also, to my mind, acknowledged the fact that if you do not go to school, you cannot succeed in your classes. Poor attendance is one of the biggest problems that my husband confronts as a public school teacher in New York City. He estimates that an average of 30% of his tenth grade students are absent on any given day, and around 50% are often absent from certain classes. With all of the emphasis on teacher effectiveness these days, not enough people are talking about the problem that you cannot teach if your students do not come to class. 

Suspensions have always struck me as an unfortunate disciplinary tactic. Suspensions for tardiness and truancy seem especially counter-productive. Suspensions also disproportionately impact black students. Around the same time of the Trayvon Martin killing, the New York Times reported on a data pool collected by the Department of Education that showed “black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled” but “accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once.” Civil rights activists are concerned that harsh discipline tactics are a part of “the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color.”

Schools need to be able to punish misbehavior. Here is the story behind a recent suspension at my husband’s school: a girl entered my husband’s classroom while class was in session even though she was not in that class. She wanted to talk to her friend. My husband stood between the girl and her friend with his arms crossed and asked her to leave. She responded with outrage, said he was invading her personal space, and threatened to spit in his face and punch him in the face. My husband says that the girl received a five day in-house suspension. This behavior was seemingly much more egregious than whatever Treyvon did to warrant his 5-10 day suspension.

Who could have known that suspended from school, Treyvon would go stay with his father, and staying with his father, he would be confronted by a paranoid, gun-wielding neighborhood watch volunteer and shot to death? But we do know this: students who are chronically absent from class will do worse at school. Attendance is a big enough problem without schools mandating that students stay home because of disciplinary infractions. Long suspensions should not be the punishment for student behavior unless that behavior is criminal, violent, or threatens violence. 

Update (3/29): The shooter and his lawyer argue that Treyvon was the aggressor and that the shooter, Zimmerman, sustained injuries. This story invites skepticism, but whatever happened between Zimmerman and Treyvon Martin does not warrant a teenager getting shot in the chest with no repercussions for the shooter. It is now reported that Treyvon had been suspended numerous times from school for such offenses as tardiness and, in the most recent case, having an empty baggie with marijuana residue in his backpack. Neither of these things sound like offenses inviting a suspension. 

- Don’t watch any games before the tournament starts. Don’t read anything about the teams.

- If you are waiting in line at a Dollar Rental Car agency and you happen to watch the final minute of a game in which Florida State upsets UNC to win a conference championship, choose Florida State as your NCAA champion.

- Choose other upsets based on: a vague dislike of teams that are always good (Duke), an appreciation of school names that have a nice ring to them (Marquette, Gonzaga), and random notions about interesting match-ups (Michicagn - Michigan St). 

- Check scores on the internet while working. Grumble when Wichita St keeps you from achieving a perfect Day 1. Marvel that writing words down on a piece of paper actually causes you to have an investment in the outcome of games. 

- If you are in a betting pool, make sure to get your trash talk in early. Your bracket is a house of cards and it will collapse very soon. 

- If a 15th seed wins a game, root against your own bracket to cheer for the underdog in further rounds. Lehigh v. Norfolk St in the final four!

- Enjoy a genuine sense of achievement if your bracket does well, as if your random guesswork and whimsy is a sign of inner genius. In the more likely scenario that your bracket does poorly, you have nothing to lose. 

Here comes a scandal to fill the void left by the end of the NFL season, or alternatively, to dampen the enthusiasm of free agency and draft speculation. It’s about money. It’s about violence. It’s about extraordinary hubris. It is, of course, the New Orleans Saints’ “bounty system,” through which players were paid, sometimes by coaches, for targeting and injuring opponents with on-field hits. Despite some whimpers of “everybody’s doing it,” the public reaction has been harsh: the coach and GM should be fired; this is criminal activity; this is yet another indication of the moral decrepitude at the heart of the game. 

The NFL finds itself in a precarious position. It must tread a thin line between sanctioning violence as a routine part of football and condemning systematic breaches of “the rules.” You can injure an opposing player with a tackle, but you cannot do so and expect remuneration according to an organized awards system. The Saints will be penalized harshly because they crossed this line between sanctioned violence and anarchic abuses. 

A pertinent comparison is the military. The military, like the NFL, sanctions violence but has rules governing where and when and how violence can take place. As in the case of the NFL, these rules are sometimes broken. As in the case of the New Orleans Saints, military rule breaking can be systematic and supported by individuals up the chain of command. 

The war on terror has its own bounty scandal. In a published memoir, Pakistan’s president, General Musharraf, bragged: “We have captured 689 [alleged al-Qaeda operatives] and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars.” Amnesty International later reported that the US bounty system paid up to $5,000 “for every ‘terrorist’ turned over to the United States” and that many of these alleged terrorists were eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay. Did the US military break the rules? According to Amnesty International: “Offering rewards for the capture of suspected criminals does not violate international standards,” but “it is the combination of doubtful grounds for arrest and the prolonged detention without charge or trial that reinforces the gravity of the human rights violations that characterise the indefinite detention of people in Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA centres.” The indefinite detention continues. 

The NFL makes much of its support for the military. It encourages viewers to conflate heroism on the football field with heroism on the field of battle. But the real grounds for comparison between football and the military are to be found in the dark underbellies of two institutions that sanction violence. Recently, there has been some buzz around the idea that the NFL may ultimately prove unsustainable. The League will face litigation from former players suffering chronic health problems, such as those caused by CTE. Parents will discourage children from playing football because of the debilitating toll of concussions in particular. If we are ready to discuss the economic and moral unsustainability of the NFL, let’s also take a good hard look at the current state of the US military. 

The post-apocalypse is going to be an awfully dusty affair by many accounts.

The earth depicted in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is dusty. “The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it” (15). It is the dust that devastates life on the planet, beginning with owls and other birds and nearly wiping out humanity as well. Survivors, numbering in the thousands, remain “constellated in urban areas where they could physically see one another, take heart at their mutual presence” (17). In this dystopia, empathy for other living things is the core of a major religion and ownership of animals is a moral mandate, as well as a technique of social distinction. Those unable to afford a living animal settle for convincing electric versions. The live animal - electric animal dichotomy sets up the book’s key ethical problem, somewhat familiar to those who have seen the movie adaptation Bladerunner: should empathy extend beyond the living? To androids, for instance?

In addition to dust, the world of Androids is burdened by something called “kipple.” A character, John Isidore, explains: 

“‘Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more’” (65).   

Kipple, in other words, is trash. But it’s more than trash. It’s the detritus of a world that’s been emptied of people, a world in which a massive apartment building might be occupied by a single man. Kipple is so much more vivid in my imagination than the post-apocalyptic dust. Because I have experienced the accumulation of kipple - usually in the vicinity of my workspace. One need only think of a house that’s been deserted and is starting to run down, full of its departed inhabitant’s possessions. Now multiply such a home to an entire city, with just a few thousand people left to fight back against the oppressiveness of a landscape in which life ever dwindles. Kipple increases as the population decreases.   

“‘No one can win against kipple,’” Isidore explains, “‘except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over” (65). 

Someday, we’ll all die or go away. And then many of our possessions will become so much kipple; some possessions already are kipple. But it would miss the point to see the concept of “kipple” as merely anti-materialist, a critique of the wastefulness of consumer society. Dick’s story is about the relationship between people and things and the ways in which things become animated by human feeling. It is possible to see an android as a thing that can be “retired” without a guilty conscience. A rogue android is like the match folder emptied of matches - it has served its use and can be discarded. Alternatively, one can look at an android as a person that even merits love. Two characters in the book treat certain androids as people. Both characters also encounter confusion over the status of certain animals - alive or machine. Androids treat these characters with cruelty; they are unable to return human empathy.

But whether or not things can feel is perhaps not as important as whether or not humans feel for things. If androids are unfeeling, humans have made them so. If things become kipple, it is because humans are not using them and not loving them. 

In June 2005, the New York State Regents Examination in Global History & Geography asked test-takers to consider the fact that there are both expected and unexpected outcomes of war. This, along with the revelation that “many different reasons for wars exist” served as the “historical context” for a Document Based Question (DBQ). The eight “documents” presented to students contained information related to the Crusades, World War I, World War II, and the Persian Gulf War. 

I’d like to draw attention to Document 2 (p. 13): three paragraphs taken from “Legacy of the Crusades,” Aramco World, VII, May 1956. Although students taking the exam would have no way of knowing this, the publication Aramco World was the in-house magazine of the Arab American Oil Company. This company was formed in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and jointly owned by Standard Oil of California and Texas Oil Company (Texaco). According to the website of what is now Saudi Aramco World (the company was fully nationalized in 1980), the publication was “launched…in November 1949 as an interoffice newsletter that linked the company’s US offices with ‘the field’—primarily Dhahran, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.” As the company and the magazine grew, Aramco World provided “Historical, geographical and cultural articles” that “helped the American employees and their families appreciate an unfamiliar land.” 

If I were to teach this source, it would be in a lesson about bias. From the document, we will read that during the Crusades “each side made major contributions to the culture of the other” and that the conflict “removed for good the wall of ignorance that had always existed between Europe and Asia.” I would encourage students to ask what self-interest might have shaped this depiction of the Crusades in a magazine published by a US company operating in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. If a student points out that the US is currently at war in the middle east, sparking a debate about the merits of “cultural exchange” in the context of contemporary military aggression, I would be satisfied knowing that my students were thinking critically and making connections between the past and the present.

Encouraging critical thinking is never the intention of Regents Examination DBQs. The Aramco document on the Crusades is presented as an authoritative and transparent source. In preparation for composing their essays, students are asked to write down “one positive, unexpected outcome of the Crusades on Western civilization” and “one positive, unexpected outcome of the Crusades on Muslim [Moslem] civilization” according to the document. This is reading comprehension, not history. Document Based Questions do not ask students to use evidence to construct or critique a historical narrative. Instead, students read discreet, intentionally chosen sources in order to mine units of information that will flesh out a narrative skeleton determined for the students in advance. 

Preparing high school students to take these examinations which they must pass to graduate necessitates the occasional employment of teach-to-the-test strategies. These strategies impoverish the history curricula and, even worse, task students with learning “history” in a manner that is antithetical to the way in which professional historians approach their craft. These days, student test scores increasingly determine whether or not students graduate as well as the job security of teachers. It is shameful that social studies educators in New York must choose between helping students get a diploma and teaching students to think like historians. 

This is my inaugural post of “Rants about Regents,” wherein I expose how the Global History examination is bad policy and bad history. 

Update: After writing this post, I viewed other recent exams and found that “Legacy of the Crusades,” Aramco World is again used in the June 2009 DBQ. Interestingly, this time the citation does not give the volume number or date, as if the Regents are intentionally trying to mask the fact that they are using out of date materials. More on this later. 

I’m troubled by the lack of local media response (particularly the New York Times) to recent reports of systematic NYPD surveillance of Muslims. Surveillance of businesses, mosques, and student organizations has taken place with no probable cause for criminal activity. Or rather, probable cause, in the eyes of Mayor Bloomberg and Police Chief Kelly, is synonymous with being Muslim. To me, this is a clear abuse of civil liberties and something that citizens need to know about. 

As a student, I feel sympathy and concern for other students who have been targeted as a part of this surveillance. But at a town hall meeting I attended last night at Columbia University, I was given the impression that the university hopes to keep this issue in house, and is characterizing it as a student issue. This is not a student issue; it is a civil rights issue. But because the surveillance has directly impacted Columbia students, making them feel unsafe in the academic environment and making them feel like “second class citizens,” as more than one person commented last night, the university should take some proactive measure. Because of the dearth of media reporting, I did not learn about this surveillance until I received an email sent out to members of the Columbia community from President Bollinger. Students are calling on the president to send a similar letter, a public letter, to Mayor Bloomberg. The university has not agreed to do so. 

As my anonymous hobby-blog, I like to keep this writing space well away from my academic life. The “education” component of Sports, Education, Apocalypse is supposed to reflect my interest in K-12 education and policy - which I’ve actually written about all too little. But since President Bollinger has not committed to making his condemnation of the police surveillance public, I have decided to publish his letter (received February 24), in full, here on this blog:

When I went to nfl.com to buy a NY Giants Superbowl Champions t-shirt, I couldn’t help but notice the weirdness of NFL pillow pets, the unravelling of which invites, first, an excursus on team names and their classification.

The 32 NFL team names seem to have a natural order to them, one that invites a fairly simple division into the categories of bird, beast, man, and other. The categorization of certain names as “other,” however, is the first indication that things are stranger than they seem, and a slight amount of research confirms the suspicion. Suddenly the potential categories multiply and one must consider new taxonomies. 

One is then reminded of the apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia Foucault attributes to Borges in the preface of “The Order of Things.” The encyclopedia divides “animals” into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

One could create a taxonomy of NFL team names almost as strange, and it would still contain a certain historical logic:

(a) named after a poem or song, (b) industrial, (c) winner of a contest, (d) birds, (e) colors that are more than colors, (f) offensive to Native Americans, (g) discourages pictorial representation, (h) categories of people, (i) alliterative, (j) predatory, (k) arbitrary, or all of the above.***

Let’s consider just one of these categories: (g) discourages pictorial representation. Here, we are moving away from the problem of classification to the problem of equivalences, and this brings us closer to the heart of the matter - the weirdness of NFL pillow pets. Some NFL team names, especially those that evoke birds and animals, have an obvious thing-ness about them. In these cases, the name - thing equivalence is often concretized by a pictorial representation on the helmet: a panther on the Panthers’ helmet, a dolphin on the Dolphins’ helmet, and so on. 

Other team names are not so easy to reify. You could have a picture of a factory worker with a can of meat to represent the Green Bay Packers, but that’s a little unwieldy. So Green Bay settles for the letter “G” on their helmet. The Cleveland Browns fits into the category of (e) colors that are more than colors. The team name pays homage to the organization’s first coach, a man named Paul Brown. What pictorial representation can you possibly go with? 

The need to establish equivalences between teams and “pillow pets” introduces its own conundrums. The only pillow pet that, to my mind, is completely comfortable in its own skin - or its own synthetic fibers as the case may be - is the Chicago Bears pillow-bear. A plush teddy bear wearing a Chicago jersey just feels right. Other teams that have bird or beast names also do pretty well establishing pillow pet equivalences. The Philadelphia Eagle “pet” is very cute, so much so that one can imagine the baby eagle of the pillow pet getting eaten by the fierce-looking eagle of the team logo in a savage act of eagle cannibalism. 

The Rams pillow-ram looks as glum as Eeyore. It must be due to the team’s 2-14 record last season. 

Now what do you do with the teams that don’t have bird or beast names? Some of these teams still evoke animals. The strangest case in this category belongs to the Washington Redskins. At first, I did not comprehend why Washington’s pillow pet is a pig. But a little research revealed that 1) a former offensive line coach used to call his players “hogs,” and 2) because of this, certain fans started to cross dress and wear pig snouts to games. Fan culture is strange. 

Then there are the teams that don’t naturally bring any animal to mind. For the majority of these teams, the pillow equivalence of choice turns out to be a bear. Now this is just not right. We are used to thinking of clothing as something that only superficially represents one’s self. So you can put a NY Giants outfit on a bear, but it is still a bear. The NY Giants pillow pet is like my husband. When he watches games with me, he roots for the Giants, but deep down, he’s all Bear. At the very least, they should have chosen a neutral animal to represent non-animal teams. I vote for monkeys.

But in the end, cross dressing hogs and the overrepresentation of bears do not trouble me all that much. What I can not accept is the fact that two teams have human pillow pets. Giants = bear, Patriots = bear, Packers = bear, Raiders = bear with an eye patch, and on and on. But then the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers are represented by men, and even worse, I’m pretty sure that the men are supposed to look like quarterbacks Tony Romo and Ben Rothlisberger. By what logic are two, and only two, pillow pets men? Is this not disturbing? Parents! Keep these things away from your children! I am not just saying this because the Cowboys and Steelers are two of my least favorite NFL teams.   

Post-structuralist thought encourages us to reflect on the fact that equivalences are not natural. By investigating the historically contingent ways in which equivalences are established can therefore reveal the subtle workings of power. And so I ask, is there a pro Chicago Bears conspiracy lurking behind NFL pillow pets? What unintended consequences might arise from the anthropocentric rendering of the Steelers and Cowboys “pets”? Will a person think, the Steelers are so manly they can only be represented by a man; or will they begin to think of the Steelers players as diminutive and tame? The new NFL season is half a year away, but in homes across the land, the pillows are quietly molding the minds of fans.  

An idea for a story that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world:

Biological warfare dramatically reduces the global population and leads to widespread infertility. Whatever is causing the infertility disproportionately impacts the ? chromosome. An extreme gender imbalance results.

Let’s say artificial insemination is not an option (at the very least, sperm cannot be frozen). What will the future be like with an ever dwindling number of males? I imagine male children raised apart from society in insemination centers with women making mandated trips there for the sake of reproduction. It will be important to produce as many babies as possible and take great care to keep male children healthy and virile. Female children will still be raised at “home,” in whatever small social units arise within the all female community.

This is the premise. Perhaps the plot will turn on the rivalry between three camps. One wants to preserve the status quo. Another thinks males, few though they are, should be integrated into the larger community. A third wants to do away with males altogether and plots a coordinated attack on insemination centers, even in the knowledge that success will result in the end of man and woman both. Within this framework should nestle some intimate story of relationships - perhaps a love triangle, involving all women, of course.  

One can also ponder what would happen if the gender imbalance swung the other way: many men, few women. But somehow, I don’t think such a society would last.