“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait ‘til the oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
Cited in the Faith and the Common Good newsletter. Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1847-1931.
…of this page, where a pale head on fuschia shoulders floats in a cold cerulean sea… (It’s just up there, top right corner — the disembodied Spirit of Semi-Constant Scribble. A couple of my nieces have found this site too funny to read, because of that ghostly noggin hovering there. But I swear the shirt was red when the photo was taken.) Even Writing Heads Get the Blues. But in contrast to the rude (and rhyming) epithet so common these days, I have only one thing to say to all of you out there in CyberLand: you can just WRITE me! A couple of you have noted the lack of ready-made comment space on JH.com, but you shouldn’t let that discourage you. At the bottom of that eerily glowing yellow box at left is a Write Me! (don’t bite me) button that gets you to my email address, and the rest is as easy as falling off your front porch.
For one thing, I’m a bit of a grammar-and-spelling freak and am occasionally horrified to see that something sub- or semi-literate has been set free to further corrupt the corridors of cyberspace, placing yet more of the misery of psoriasis on the unsightly shoulders of the information highway, sullying the glistening filaments of the world-wide Web. (Or you may object to overheated metaphors.) I’d be grateful for your help in eliminating errors of grammar or fact, but would welcome even more your reflections, commentary, or a simple “hello from Guadeloupe (Vancouver, Detroit, southern Caledonia…)”. ‘Sall good, as those spunky youngsters (spongy yunksters?) love to say.
No hiding, now. My little stat machine tells me that there are a few of you out there now, and while I’ve been known to talk to myself, it’d be nice to know that there’s somebody out there who can read. And who does.
“What is the supreme virtue for a warrior?” Leonidas, the King of Sparta, was asked.
“Contempt for death,” he replied.
(A writer asked himself the same question about his own artistic struggle. His answer, in the manner of Leonidas, was this: “Contempt for failure.” Is this not the heart of all noble work?)
In the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God), Lord Krishna speaks to a companion about his work.
“You have a right to your labour,” he says, “but not to the fruits of your labour.” Holy detachment! And how can one work actively and yet remain at peace?
Krishna sings:
Give the act to me.
Purged of hope and ego,
Fix your attention on the soul.
Act and do for me.
(And I am reminded of what Bahá’u’lláh, also from the Divine point of view, wrote over 4000 years later: “Ye are the trees of My garden; ye must give forth goodly and wondrous fruits….It is incumbent on every one of you to engage in…arts, trades and the like. We have made this – your occupation – identical with the worship of God, the True One.” Work as worship. Spirit first, even on the assembly line.)
While writing the long rant earlier today, I figured out where that wonderful quote — “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” — came from. What I read about the novel and its author prodded me to order it from the wonderful Ottawa PL. A terrific retro-review for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is yours for an accurate click.
(You’re welcome. Anything else I can do for you?)
I wrote a micro-review of a late-90s book and a 2001 movie the other day, and in the spirit of stale-dated opinion, I remember a conversation I had not long ago. It started off with impressions of a 2006 film called Glory Road, and you can be assured, gentle reader, that my not having seen it did nothing to stop the sociohistorical rant that followed.
Glory Road recounts sporting history that made a societal impact. In 1965, what was then called Texas Western College fielded a basketball team coached by Don Haskins, a young coach who would go on to a Hall of Fame career. (Fear not, sports-loather. This post is not really about basketball.) The remarkable thing about that small-conference team was that it had had black players for several years, in a time when many of the major athletic conferences were still completely segregated. Unranked at the beginning of the year, Texas Western had a wonderful season, and American sport reached a great “tipping point” in the 1966 NCAA final: their all-black starting lineup faced the all-white members of traditional powerhouse Kentucky, and defeated them.
My high school coach and longtime fellow whistle-blower and friend, The Don, saw Glory Road when it came out on video. “Not the greatest movie of all time, but watchable,” he reported. I had avoided it to that point mainly because it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer for Disney and the trailer showed a mid-60s basketball team throwing alley-oop passes off the backboard for splashy, 21st-century reverse slam dunks. Never happened, kids. (Sorry. Nobody was doing that stuff in 1965, least of all when playing for Don Haskins. Sports films so often drive me nuts because they so seldom understand and show the athletes realistically. Argh. But Field of Dreams and Bull Durham were pretty good, so maybe I should actually see the thing. And now back to our regularly scheduled discussion.)
And enough about the jockstraps. What was really interesting to me was The Don’s second comment: “Parts of the story make it hard for me to believe and accept that people were treated like this.” On this score, I could only say that I didn’t doubt the racism at all. Remember Birmingham, George Wallace, Dr. King, the freedom riders for integration, the police dogs, the fire hoses, those enraged white faces? Many of us have seen those grainy news images even if we were too young to directly recall the bitterly fought racial crusades of the 1960s, especially. And pockets of that white resistance/”supremacy” still exist, 40 years later. In ways less blatant and extreme than they once were, we are still deeply racist as a society; North America still behaves as if it is natural for Blacks to live in poverty (or in prison) at tremendously higher rates than those of European extraction do. (It may be that, in Canada, we don’t see quite the graphic evidence of this that Americans can, though our own house is far from tidy; check the stats on our First Nations peoples and the conditions in which many of them live.)
In the public domain in North America, the economic and social disparity is sometimes masked by the high number of African-Americans we can see among the millionaire musicians and especially athletes. However, all we have to do is glance at the crowds to see that those with the money to watch pro sports are almost exclusively white. My observation, far from scientific, is that most of them (like most white home owners) still live in nearly lily-white neighbourhoods. (So do the millionaire black athletes, for that matter.) My buddy noted that the Kentucky coach, while not characterized as a slobbering bigot, was “not painted as a saint”. Adolph Rupp (an unfortunate name, in this context) is a legend in the sport, but should we be surprised if his attitudes reflected what many, perhaps most southerners believed and did in those days?
One of the wisest things I’ve ever heard is apparently the opening line from a novel by L. P. Hartley: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” I think one of our biggest and most complacent errors is to judge historical figures negatively because they believed and/or acted like ‘most everybody else did at the time. Southerners who could rise above the racist structure of their society weren’t average – they may have been quiet ones, but they were rebels, contrarians, even heroes. People today who look back on a time like that and think, I wouldn’t have been like that in those circumstances are kidding themselves. I hope I wouldn’t have been a bigot in 1960s Kentucky, but I don’t assume it. That would have required remarkable luck and unusual parents. Some of our retroactive virtue comes from ignorance, but it also stems from arrogance. Many of us imagine that we are “self-made men” and women, and implicitly take credit for material and psychological advantages and perspectives that others have made possible for us: attitude pioneers and educational agents on whose metaphorical shoulders we stand, which includes our own ancestors, of course.
In the same way, I’m sure many of our children and grandchildren will judge us harshly and perhaps unfairly. I never, they will probably say, would have gotten stupid on drugs and alcohol for entertainment. Addicted to television? What was that about?! How could they have been so short-sighted and materialistic? Can you imagine people being obsessed with portable telephones and the ringtones that went with them? Or with, oh, what was her name, she was famous, Britney Spears? And tongue-piercing? And smoking tobacco in order to belong? And shopping like it was an Olympic sport? And three-car garages? Listen to me, I never would have driven everywhere in petroleum-burning vehicles that led to catastrophic climate change. And I never would have put my country’s luxuries ahead of the welfare of the whole world…
[This piece first appeared on the main “At First Glance” pane of the site, so that those allergic to sport might not miss it.]
It is surprising and encouraging when unlikely dance partners like these get together: global consciousness meets pro football?! (For another similar example – which I also refused to place in JH.com’s jock ghetto — read about Canadian Olympic medallist Sara Renner’s outlook here.)
Leigh Steinberg is one of the top sports agents in the United States. (He is alleged to be the model for the film Jerry Maguire, if that helps you any.) He’s well known to sports fans because he has represented many of the top athletes, including many of the National Football League’s number one draft choices. I heard Steinberg on jock radio during the build-up to the Super Bowl. I hadn’t known until, oh, three minutes ago that he insists that all his clients include some form of community service or charitable giving in each contract they sign. So I was startled – perhaps as much as interviewer Jim Rome – when Steinberg veered from talking about the athletes he represents to a blunt and bright discussion of climate change.
“Global warming is here,” he said, and began talking about the numerous ways in which the monstrous stadiums of the National Football League could become more sustainable, even to the point of being net producers rather than consumers of energy. He is working at “putting athletes aggressively into environmental causes and efforts”. Sheesh. What’s the world coming to when football people jump on the ecological bandwagon?
Well, people are waking up, most importantly those of us living in the Privilege Zones of the planet. It’s a hopeful development, even if it’s not much more than a glimmer in an agent’s eyes. As for me, I sleep with EcoWoman every night – my wife Diana is an environmental avenger and a federal policy analyst – so climate change and other matters of planetary hygiene are standard fare. Suddenly, though, green freaks like us aren’t on the fringes anymore. Canadian newspapers and media outlets, including those leaning to the right, are filled with news and analysis on the threats posed by our consumption of energy and goods, and our bizarre levels of waste. Walmart, of all things, is dedicating itself to environmental leadership. (I know, I know, I was sceptical too, at first, but it’s real.) And think about it: if big business doesn’t get on board, the rapid social changes we need to make just aren’t going to be quick or thorough enough. We need everybody.
Even the NFL: it and other facets of the sports industry are enormous money machines, and have a large ecological footprint. They’re not renowned for walking lightly on the land, but maybe they’ll at least consider changing their shoes. Who knows? Maybe guys will take the bus to the game. Maybe they’ll recycle their beer cans. Maybe they’ll insist on stadium-mounted windmills. A man can dream.
[Other NFL reflections can be found here. Never fear. There’s more to life than sports, but then there’s more to SPORTS than sports…]
We woke up to minus 30 degree temperatures in Ottawa this morning, and ever since local warming ended on about January 15, it’s been crackling cold here. (We were sorry to have missed two weeks of skating and skiiing, but Guadeloupe had its compensations. More on that warm adventure is still to come.)
And because of a small obsession of mine, our Tiny Perfect Backyard Rink™ was ready this morning, and my frisky critter spent nearly an hour wheeling and falling and apple-cheeking before I dragged him in for breakfast and we ran for the school bus. Sam doesn’t know much about hockey, but he loves it. He is six. Everything is amazing except WAITING. (So should it be for all of us.)
I had a great long walk in the chill, bright sunshine, finishing my second reading of The War of Art before returning it to the library. Great stuff, and more on that to come, as well. (It will further my backsliding “don’t buy it ’til you’ve read it” resolution.) After milk and cookies with Wendy, I came home to read about another fine prairie woman, Pamela Wallin. She was Canada’s Consul-General in New York for several years, and I was struck by her assessment of Canada/U.S. relations and why we get so prickly:
“We are obsessed with the Americans, and they are not obsessed with us.”
Ah. Right. There was more, but I found that pithy and complete.
In my typically timeless style — I’m referring to tardiness, not eternal glory — I missed the Ron Howard film A Beautiful Mind when it won all those Oscars in 2001. (Gracious. Ron Howard has Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Film, and Martin Scorcese doesn’t.) It was just before Christmas, actually, that I finally saw it, and I liked it well enough that I watched it again with my girl a couple of weeks later.
An old friend told me years ago that I should see it, partly because of its cinematic merits but mainly because she’d seen pictures of my Dad as a university grad. “Crowe looks just like your father!” It was true: I was knocked out by Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the troubled mathematical genius, John Nash, but there was an extra thrill of creepiness there. My father was in his 50s when I was a young boy. I caught ghostly glimpses of a Dad I’d never known except in black and white photos from the thirties, forties and fifties. And beside that, Crowe was great. He didn’t tower over a so-so film like Jamie Foxx had in Ray – Beautiful Mind is better than that – but there was a family resemblance. I’d forgotten that it won four Oscars, and its best performance wasn’t even one of them.
I immediately went looking for the Sylvia Nasar biography that had inspired the film, and just finished it. And when I note that the movie version won for Best Screenplay, well, it’s interesting. A Beautiful Mind was based on the Nash bio of the same name, but I was startled by how much “creative licence” Hollywood allows itself in recounting a true story. The love angle, besides being much more central than it actually was, was mainly fiction. Almost the entire depiction of Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia, too, is completely invented. (I guess faithfulness to the book would have eliminated a good role for Ed Harris.) Given the Hollywoodization of life, it’s no wonder how little understanding the public has about mental illness!
But’s let’s concentrate on the book, which was superbly told and incredibly detailed. As a case study of genius, as an examination of psychiatric problems and their effect upon families, and as a recreation of critical times and places in mid-century America, Nasar’s book is a brilliant and compelling investigation. Its detailed description of Nash’s mathematics and of his fall into delusion barely slows down the book. I was engrossed, especially once I gave myself permission to skip the hundreds of end-notes in this densely detailed life history.
It has made me think long and hard about many things: how lonely it can be for our leading minds, how fine the line between creative genius and madness, the courage it takes to be an innovator or to live with one. In our dreamy moments, we sometimes think we’d like to be in the forefront of some great idea or cause, but most of us shrink from the cost. As spookily good as Russell Crowe was in the film, the story of the “beautiful mind” of Dr. Nash is best and most interestingly told – hey, have you heard this before? – in a book. The movie was worth the look, but A Beautiful Mind is a better thing when it’s read.
Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war.
Muhammad Ali (65 in January), looking back on his career- and life-altering decision to refuse to go to Vietnam in 1967. Quoted in Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports on-line column.
Artie’s Megtastic Brontoplasm Heavy Definition MonsterScreen (not its real name) loomed at the end of the den. TechBoy was racing around fitting his EarPiercer MaxVol Screamers — these were not your dad’s stereo speakers — the better to further stun the cerebral nerve endings of the only geezer invited to the Super Party. (That would be me.) Eight trays of wings were on the table – one for each of us, as it groaningly turned out – along with crunchies, chewies and slurpies. We weren’t a beer-swilling crowd, but we were ready to assert our North American manhood in every other way we could. After all, da Colts wuz playin’ da Bears for the World Championship of the Excited States of American Football. Hooting and hollering ensued, especially during that wacky first quarter, and Sparky, one stressed-out and neurotic little pup, went canine straitjacket on us. Ya gotta love living room sports.
The commercials. I soon realized I was with a crowd that was at least as interested in the ads as the third-down conversion rates, and I’m not just talking about Artie’s wonderfully excitable Mom. (These guys were more into the technical aspects of the telecast reception than in any Manning-to-Harrison connection. Vafa meditated at length on how the virtual first-down line was generated). Somehow, we were able to get the American commercials – including a stunningly amateur one from Detroit replacement window installers who take fibreglass very seriously – instead of the Global Canuck substitutes. (Take that, CRTC!!) There was a busy and amusing series of Lord of the Flies work-is-a-jungle-riot ads for a job-search company. There was an uncomfortably homoerotic and homophobic (tough double!) spot that I can’t imagine will sell a lot of Snickers bars. As usual, Bud Light has some of the best creative minds in America helping it to sell insipid and slightly poisonous beverages. (Best line of the night: But he’s got a chainsaw!)
And Coke poured more megabucks into helping us to associate sugar, caffeine and gas with our psychological well-being. The incredibly expensive video-game styled ad, in which Joe Cool rights all the wrongs of the street and inspires a giddy festival of urban happiness, was one that I quite liked. It’s a 2007, hyperactive version of the old I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony / I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company. (I know it’s a tooth-rotting soft drink, but I’m a sucker for brotherhood and global harmony.) The chiselled young men I was with didn’t appreciate the “Wonderland in the Coke Machine” ad much, but I could see it through the eyes of the little boys that have lived in my house for so long. It was imaginative, incredibly expensive, and pretty darned cute. I waved a sourpuss white flag, though, for the salute to Black History Month, which appeared to link Holy Coca-Cola with all the most heroic moments and characters in the African American story. Yecch. That was but one expression of the Dungy/Lovie factor, the aren’t we a wonderful country to have black coaches for the all the dark young men that we pay so well to entertain us sentiment. Not to mention that CBS Cares, apparently, about much more than ratings, although the accompanying series of images of beautiful black children and noble black elders seemed, well, just a little too self-congratulatory. But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh: even clumsily celebrated racial progress is racial progress. (I think.)
The game. I like football. My playing days are a foggy image in a cracked rear-view mirror. (The older I get, the better I was. What a great line. Wish I’d written it, wonder who did.) I don’t even watch it that much anymore, though I read more pigskin commentary than is healthy. It was my first time seeing the Lovie Smith Bears, but I’ve seen the Colts several times over the last few years. I’m a great admirer of Tony Dungy, and was anxious to have all the call-in sports radio meatheads stop braying about Peyton Manning being over-rated. (Envy grows like a titanic and atom-powered cancer among low self-esteem sports fanatics.) I was pulling for the Colts.
Early on, it looked like I was rooting for the white-hatted cowboys who were about to be chewed up by the baddies. What a crazy, sloppy, interesting first quarter, so unlike the usual tense blandness. By halftime, though, a Colts victory was looking pretty inevitable, as long as they refused to kick to Devin Hester. I stayed tuned in to the play, though most of my younger brothers had gone to cyber-geek guy talk that I can barely understand. I was a little disappointed (how greedy can I be?) that the Horseshoes couldn’t translate their skill and power into a more dominating final score. It’s a bit mean-spirited, I admit, but I was pleased to think of Edgerrin James – the former star runner for the Colts who left them for extra millions – watching the SB in a football desert. I loved the cleverness of Joseph Addai, James’s replacement, with his quickness and subtle spins and shifts. I was thrilled by that gorgeous toe-dragging sideline catch by Marvin Harrison; one of the unfilmed highlights of my football “career” was an eleventh-grade grab a little bit like that. (In my mental video library, anyway.) The Sanders interception of a one-winged duck thrown by Bears QB “Bad Rex” Grossman reminded me painfully of the worst ball I ever threw to a wide-open, touchdown-ready teammate. (It was grade 12, and that quacking attempt at a long pass was in the air so long I could’ve almost run and caught it myself. The coach switched me to linebacker soon afterward). And I was grateful that the deeply Christian Dungy didn’t echo the Colts’ owner’s proclamation — did you hear it? — of the Universal Creator’s undivided interest in the gridiron success of the Colts. (Such a little God! No wonder so many people find it hard to believe.)
When I was a kid, the ferocity of football was attractive, though it was always the sweet catch, the nimble cut, the tightly spiralling throw or punt that really thrilled me. As an adult, I came to see that football is the best TEAM game there is. In a high school, say, it has the potential to do more for the spirit of a large group of (possibly) undermotivated and emotionally isolated young men than anything short of wars and revolutions. Sorry to go all socio-political on you, but I guess I’m glad that the Colts won without the worst of the in-your-face, look-at-me macho freakshow posturing that takes so much away from the team feeling of football played well. And despite all those fumbles, there was some good football to watch last night, in between the main attractions. Thanks for the High Def, Mr. B. It was good to pretend I was 22 for awhile.