This was meant to be an obligatory 'I hate it when people say Happy Holidays' entry, but I'm not quite in the mood. This year, I've discovered that I'm not really one way or the other about the war on Christmas. We've lost that war, and there won't be a rematch, so we might as well move on.
If you don't believe me, let me ask you a couple of questions: do you think about people getting upset when the word 'Christmas' is mentioned on TV? (I'm not asking you if you care that they're upset; I'm asking if you think of it). Are you somewhat surprised when you hear Christmas music being played in a shopping mall or store, then turn to your friend and say, "Hey, it's nice they're playing Christmas music"? Do you get a momentary sinking feeling in your gut (the kind of gut-speak that hits you when you think you've lost your wallet) when you hear the word 'God'?
Now, answer those same questions, but insert the words "Ramadan," or "Buddha," or "Kwanzaa," or "Allah," or "Chanuka." Case closed. The war's over. Saying those words in place of "God" and "Christmas" is more mainstream than Christmas nowadays. Words don't count without meaning, which is to say emotion. The very fact that you have to say "I'm glad they're playing Christmas music" is a sign that the culture has changed for good.
Another example in that vein come from that buffoon on Fox News, Alan Combs. He was giving an interview and when his guest opened with, "Merry Christmas to you," Combs replied with something like, "Thank you for that. I'm not offended. No war on Christmas here."
What a loser. He fell right into the trap the Unserious always do: not being able to see his own pathetic irony even whilst choking on it like last year's turkey dinner. Or in Combs' house, probably tofu with a side order of sanctimony.
The war on Christmas was fought from the inside. It is a self-inflicted injury. Indeed, it is strange that those on the Left despise Christianity and want nothing to do with it. Jesus was all about suffering. Apparently he suffered for everyone's sins, including theirs. It is strange that the Unserious don't dig that. Their idea of a good time is mental self-flagellation on a grand scale.
They beat themselves up for pollution, global warming, AIDS, homelessness, cigarette smoking, Big Macs, oil that powers their SUVs, trees in the forest, owls that live in the trees, trees that fall on trucks and kill a family of four. On and on. Baby seals but not baby humans. Baby ducks but not baby houseflies. Turtles, but not termites. Whales in the ocean, but not poor people in Darfur. I suppose anything is worth saving, as long as you care to look at it as a pet and not a pest.
It makes sense that sooner or later, they would confront the main foundation of Western Culture. No, not football. Christianity. Why bother chipping away at issues like the environment, abortion, and Japanese whaling rights? Going after Christianity is an assault on all Western beliefs at once. Tear it down, and you make every other issue stand naked in the shower.
Ronald Reagan once said that if the US did not stand as one nation under God, it would fall apart. Nobody in the audience booed, and it didn’t make the news as a negative piece about religion in politics. Today, if Harper or Bush did that they’d be villified. Hero of the Left JFK was a warmonger, a womanizer, and loved nukes. If he’d drank more, he would have been my kind of guy. He also said the word ‘God’ a lot, and was the first Catholic president. Today, the Left would cream him for all of the above.
Ben Stein has pointed out that the idea of the United States being an athiest country is relatively recent, but is picking up speed at a frightening pace. That can be applied to all Western countries. England, where they ban their national flag in prisons (it has a cross on it) lest it offend a Muslim inmate. Canada, where Stockwell Day was dragged through the mud as a ‘fundamentalist’ because he liked to take Sundays off and go to church. If that’s the case, then 25 years ago every shopowner in Burlington, Ontario was a fundamentalist. When I was growing up, the only store open on a Sunday was a Becker’s where I could get a freezy.
I was talking to an Australian guy once, and I made mention that Canada was a Christian country. Well, you might as well have clubbed a baby seal right in front of him. But let's face reality: every Western culture has had Christianity as its bedrock faith for the past 1500 years at least. The other religions were more or less around, but they had nothing to do with our ancient regal monarchs, or the founding of any constitution. Islam made a go of it at one point, until they got their asses kicked, and it only became trendy to mention Chanukah in December about 40 years ago.
I remember when I was a kid that the Happy Holidays thing hadn't happened yet. Back then, cards said Merry Christmas, then Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, then Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah. Then the guys at Hallmark probably got tired of surfing the PC tide and said, "Hell with it. Write Happy Holidays on it, print a billion, and sell them into the next century."
I still find it funny that all of these cards are still called Christmas cards. More irony to choke on. We all run around wishing everyone a happy whatever-the-hell, but when it comes to slipping pieces of cardboard into the mail, we still say, "Shit, I forgot to buy Christmas cards." When are we going to start calling them Holiday cards? My guess is 2010. Damn, I forgot. They’re Greeting Cards.
But greeting what?
Christmas Ramble (II)
Life is beautiful because it makes me laugh. You can keep your flowers blooming in the sunshine, and you can throw out the pretty poems. It's laughter that makes the world a damned nice place. Problem is, I have a comedian's bent of only laughing about what makes me angry. It's an old comedy rule: if you want to write a funny routine, don't think about what makes you laugh; think about what makes you angry, and then attack.
I knew a comedian once who made a joke about Poles during his routine. After the show, the hotel management asked him what he was thinking, told him that guests had complained, asked him to explain himself, so forth.
He was a British comedian, and he had a great Limey accent. He looked down at his fingernails for a moment, studied them, and shrugged. Then he looked up at the authoritative figures around him and purred, "Sometimes comedy is...cruel."
When I heard that, I hit the floor.
That comedian wasn't wrong. Comedy is cruel. At it's root, comedy is a mean art. Completely sado-masochistic. Anything in it's path, including the comedian himself, is apt to be spliced down the middle with a blowtorch. I say 'himself,' because women aren't inherently funny. Once in a while a Lucielle Ball or a Phyllis Diller comes along, but most of the time all we get is Ellen DeGeneres. A few yucks and then their shows have to break out the lesbian storyline to try and shock the viewers back into their seats. If the comedian isn't a lesbian, then they try the other route: they get her pregnant. Nine months of semi-giggles later, and the show goes in the can.
The last couple of weeks have had plenty of laughs in. There was Ahmandinejad saying for the 100th time that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust never happened. There was Jimmy Carter releasing a book that compared Israel with Apartheid South Africa. There was the usual lame response from the politicians, saying that anti-Semitism is bad. There was Kofi Annan, saying that the US has to get in step with the rest of the world and stop causing so much trouble. And there was me, laughing.
Laughing, because as that English guy might have said, "What proper fools we are." A Holocaust-denying madman in the desert wants to blow Israel sky high, while the Left's idiot of an elder statesman says the Israelis are the problem. Meanwhile, the leader of the UN says not one word about Iran wanting to vaporize the Jewish state. Instead, he takes a potshot at US foreign policy. And when it's time for us to speak up, we say the usual mumbo-jumbo. Come on, you know the mantra by now. Two words. Outrage and condemnation.
Please. Like the Unserious or the bigots care if we're outraged. It makes no difference to them, because they know that talk is cheap. And condemnation? That won't even get you a cup of coffee at Denny's.
I'm getting pretty tired of anti-Semitism. I don't need to go into the history books to look for it (though I have), and I don't need to read the papers to find it (though I do). No, I look back at examples from my own life, and it is shocking how deeply imbedded anti-Semitism still is. In fact, it has been so shocking for so long, that I've come to realize that it will never end. It will always be around, this curious little monster that is so invasive, some people don't even realize they have the disease.
I was brought up in a Catholic school, and my parents are what you would call 'conservative.' But guess what? I didn't hear one anti-Jewish slur in my household or in my school. One of the great lies of our day is that Christians blame Jews because Jews were the Christ killers. I don't know anyone alive who has told me that they dislike Jews for that reason.
In grade 11, we had to study other religions. Our teacher put Catholicism on the back burner, and we went over Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, and every other 'ism.' I can't remember one slight being levelled at any of those creeds. No one poked fun at the Jews, and our teacher never taught us that they were all that different from us.
When I left that class, I mainly thought Jews were different simply because they didn't read the New Testament and because they didn't believe Jesus was a bigshot. Fine by me. I don't think my friends and I ever discussed it outside of class. We were too busy planning the next party or, this being a Catholic school, watching kilts swish to and fro.
My mom dragged me to Church until I was about fourteen years old. Though my memory of those years is foggy, I'm pretty sure that I would remember a priest railing against another group of people. Not one of them did, ever. I heard a lot of boring sermons in my time, most of them revolving around not doing drugs or committing some sin or other. But fiery rhetoric about Christ-killers didn’t make it to the podium.
My first glimpse of Holocaust-denial came from two people in my high school. I didn’t know they too well. They were friends of a friend and we were killing time, waiting for her. I’m pretty sure they weren’t Christian, but they might have been. Anyway, they were a boy and a girl, and the girl had a German mom. Somehow WWII got brought up, and being young we thought we knew everything about it. I mentioned the Holocaust. The girl looked at me with hooded eyes and said something like, “There’s still an argument about whether that even happened.”
The guy nodded. I was dumbstruck. Not by the guy. It was pretty obvious he wanted to get into her pants, so he would have agreed with her if she’d said the earth was flat. But the girl was a young, vivacious, attractive, smart-sounding chick. I knew she was a grade ahead of me in school, and I therefore knew that she’d already taken Mr. Canham’s class on the war. I knew she’d seen the pictures I’d seen, and read the texts I’d read, and heard Mr. Canham’s lectures on the subject. And learned nothing.
In University, I had a Jewish girlfriend. I was visiting her family and they were all downstairs watching the tube while I took a break and perused the old man’s library. I found a book on Hitler and the Holocaust. I sat down and read it (I already considered myself a WWII history buff and still keep up with it today). And you know, the whole time I’m reading it, I’m thinking about my girlfriend. For the first time, the war became emotional for me. I’m thinking about someone putting a bullet in my girlfriend’s head, or lighting her on fire, or making her eat crap in a ghetto.
While I was leafing through the book, she walked in. She’d told me once that she didn’t like to talk about the Holocaust. Her father had lived through it, and it upset her too much. So I closed the book and looked up at her sheepishly. And then I started to cry. Just like that.
You see, when she walked in the room she was early twenties, pretty as hell, smart as a whip, and had the damnedest smile. It was obvious she had come into the room to see me. Not because she had any big news, not because the TV show they’d been watching was a bore, not because of anything. Just to see me. And I looked up at her face and thought of all those people who died at the hands of those murderous sonsofbitches, and for a moment I saw her there, in a ghetto, persecuted. And I started crying.
She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that if someone laid a hand on her head, I would kill him. Kill him. And you know what she did? She laughed. She put the book away and put her hand to my face, and she told me that no one was going to lay a hand on her head, so relax. She played it so matter-of-factly, and she never brought it up again.
Imagine the dignity in that. The courage, to be the one to say, “There-there, everything’s going to be all right,” when victomhood was hers for the taking. Instead, she comforted me. Incredible.
As time went on, I met a lot of sonsofbitches. I met a Greek man some years ago, and he became a good buddy of mine. And, as anti-Semites do, he waited until we were good friends to open up his thoughts. He told me that Hitler had all the right answers about the Jews. He told me that I didn’t understand it now, but I would when I was older. He wasn’t my friend after that.
I once met a Hungarian girl and I asked her if she was Jewish. She looked utterly revolted. Her face changed into a snarl. She told me no, and then asked, “Do I look Jewish?” And she was worried. Worried that I would say yes. If I had, it might have destroyed her twisted self-image for life. Instead, I told her I didn’t know what Jews looked like, changed the subject, and didn’t talk to her again.
Anti-Semitism runs deep. I don’t know where it grows, but it doesn’t grow in the church. Neither does it grow at the movies. I like Charles Krauthammer a lot, but he was way off when The Passion of the Christ came out. Charles said that it would spread anti-Semitism, and was a massive setback for Jews.
Sorry, Charles, but you were overreacting. I’ve met a lot of Europeans, and therefore a lot of anti-Semites (that isn’t to say that Europeans have cornered the market, though they might; they just expose it much more readily). Two hours of cinema are no going to make someone hate Jews. The Christ-killer theory is a load of bull on both sides of the coin. Anti-Semites are not born of it, which means Jews shouldn’t look to it as a reason for anti-Semitism. I firmly believe that all Jew-haters I have met learned their stuff at a very young age, too young to be let into violent movies made by Mel Gibson.
But what does all this have to do with Christmas?
Good question. I guess I’m just looking back at Christmas past, and bemoaning the fact that Christmas is taking a nose-dive in the popular culture as a spiritual event. Not because I am all that spiritual, but because I liked it when other people were. I liked knowing that people were praying, and giving a little thought to what the spirit of Christmas meant. More than that, I liked knowing that they didn’t have to feel any kind of guilt about it. Christians are not all racist, anti-Semite, whackos. They’re just people.
Christianity is painted as some sort of cult nowadays, which is as sad as it is wrong. Evil things have been done in the name of Christianity before, but it is self-evident that more good has been done than evil. Every Christmas movie, message from the Queen, Christmas story, and Christmas carol sends messages of love, forgiveness, joy, and hope. Can an evil, cynical faith inspire such messages? If so, how? Certainly a Spanish Inquisition from hundreds of years ago doesn’t outweigh Mother Theresa and so many others like her. Does it? Should one feel guilty for praying for someone on December 25th?
I sure know that we don’t need to feel any from the Jews. An email arrived from another old Jewish girlfriend of mine, wishing me a Merry Christmas. If she is supposed to be different because she is a Jew, she doesn’t know that. All she knows is that she is happy for me because I am celebrating something. And she acknowledges that by celebrating me as a person she has known and loved.
Thanks, and Merry Christmas to her. And you.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Friday, December 15, 2006
Thinking Of You
This has been a hell of a long week, with a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Anyway, I just wanted to drop my friends and family a line and tell them that I'm thinking of them, loving them, and wishing them well as Christmas comes up to smack us in the kisser a lot sooner than we thought it would.
And Pete, have a great, big CC and ginger for me, would you?
Later.
And Pete, have a great, big CC and ginger for me, would you?
Later.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
A Study in Senility
Well, what did we expect?
At least the Iraq Study Group (ISG) showed some courage. They decided to drop a bomb of surrender on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It takes chutzpah for the Unserious to do something like that, and it helped turn the evening news into the most bizarre show around: a clip of ISG members saying the US should go to thug regimes Iran and Syria with hat in hand, begging for help, followed by a clip of Roosevelt saying he was going to open up a can of whup-ass on the Japanese.
No coalition of the willing for Roosevelt. Back then, there wasn't much talk of making sure Tonga's security council vote would allow Americans to defeat their enemies. Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Midway, Leyte Gulf, Solomon Islands. Not too many Polish and French (they'd already surrendered) running around during those battles. It was all red, white, and blue. A Japanese admiral said the Americans were filled with a 'terrible resolve,' a resolve which took them all the way to final victory.
65 years on, it would seem that many Americans still have a terrible resolve, though not in the way that Yamamoto meant it. When he said those words, he knew a determined enemy was advancing constantly, and wouldn't give up until they'd won the day. He had little doubt that within a couple of years, Roosevelt's boot would be up his ass. He was wrong. It was Truman's.
No, the resolve today is terrible because there isn't any. The 79 articles that these ISG has-beens came up with is a recipe to do nothing on the one hand, and to appease dictators on the other. It is a shameful, embarrassing document (you can find it on Jim Baker's website; I'd give you the address, but I don't want to help his counter go up).
When former Secretary of State and ISG-man Lawrence Eagleburger was asked today what he thought of the New York Post (good for you, Post) calling them a bunch of "Surrender Monkeys," he replied with a stern, "That was probably thought up by some 20-year-old punk."
Maybe. But does that mean the punk's wrong?
You were a 20-year-old punk yourself once, Larry. At least, I hope so. Being a punk means taking a stand and sticking it to the man once in a while. Punkness takes heft and attitude. Punkness requires, oh, not asking the President of your nation to go to an Axis of Evil country four years later and beg them for help when you know damn well that they're the ones behind this insurgency in Iraq. You're not a punk anymore, Larry, you're just a regular, arrogant coward.
Arrogant, because you think you know it all and can toss others off with one-liners involving the word 'punk.' Coward, because the only new issues in the document you signed involve running away as fast as possible, screwing Israel over by making this a Palestine question, and having a meeting of minds with a dictatorship that hangs people for being gay. (And Larry, nobody uses 'punk' anymore. Just how many times beyond 79 do you have to prove that you are out of it?)
His next flippant comment on Fox News proved what an old fool he is. When asked what he would do if the President didn't take action on even one of the ISG's recommendations, Larry said it was the President's decision. For his part, Old Larry would return to his stamp collection and come back to chat with Fox News once in a while if they wanted him to, hardee-har-har.
That's great. Thanks for your service, Larry. You worked nine months on a report to the US President, and you now place it's importance somewhere behind your stamp collection and being a hack for the cable news networks. Please, Larry. Go back to collecting stamps. Mail someone a letter that contains your last original thought, before it dies of loneliness.
I didn't hold out much hope for the ISG. It sounded pathetic to begin with, the way 'study group' sounded lame whenever a university professor made me go over to a homely girl's apartment on a Saturday to compare notes. There we'd be, the such-and-such study group, put together by a prof who went around the room repeating one through five over and over, until all the ones had to meet at John's, all the twos at Jenny's, etc.
I detested study groups. Every time a professor said the magic words, "Let's split up into groups," I wanted to do a header off the fifth floor of the social science building.
Most of my study groups were garden variety. A couple of gay guys, the homely girl who served Doritoes and owned a lot of teddy bears, a token feminist or two, and me. We'd chat for a few hours about our homework, I'd say a couple of things to piss off the feminists, and then I'd try to get to the bar by last call. Point is, every study group I've seen has been a joke. People walk in with their beliefs firmly in place, and they walk out with them a couple of hours later.
Nobody changes their minds during a study group. Certainly no one learns very much. In fact, I only ever agreed to sign any study group's papers because I knew it was a waste of time to argue a point and, as said, I wanted to make last call. Besides, it wasn't like I was concerned with not getting a good grade. If you had a gay guy and a couple of feminists on your team, there wasn't a chance in hell the prof would give you less than a B+.
A couple of hours of study group pretty much ensured that I would sign anything put in front of me. After nine months, I'm not the least bit surprised that these 10 old-timers found a consensus. Nine months? My God, after nine months of study group, I would have signed away my heterosexuality, told you I wore ladies underwear, and sang 'I Feel Pretty' from the top of my university residence. I'm amazed these old buffoons lasted so long. When a stamp collector is one of your heavy hitters on foreign policy, you begin to wonder who gave them the code to get out of the old folks home in the first place.
By now you're thinking that I'm ripping on the elderly too much. You're right. I am. And they deserve it. Look at it this way: all of that old thinking is long gone. It's over. Those rules of foreign policy and diplomacy are out the window. For one, it is pretty hard to practice diplomacy when the groups you are talking to don't have any diplomats. For another, these terrorists and Islamic fascists don't care what Baker and Eagleburger say.
When Baker was talking to the Russians, he knew they were full of crap, but at least they pretended to listen. Today, the Islamic fascists say, "You want peace? To hell with you. Die, infidel scum!" And we go running to the evening news for analysis of what the terrorist meant by that. Well, he means he wants you to die. Olive branches extended in their direction end up buried in your throat.
In Baker and Eagleburger's day, foreign policy meant two things: Communism and the United States. That was it. The rest was merely details. Name me one important conflict that took place post-WWII that didn't involve some influence of the US and USSR. Name one. (Sorry, British guys, the Falklands don't count. Be real).
Don't cheat by handing me Israel and the Arabs. They were both being supplied by the big boys, and the big boys had a vested interest in which side won, lost, or stayed static. Korea and Vietnam? Wrong. Just because the soldiers didn't speak Russian doesn't mean they weren't partnered up with the Russkies behind the bedroom curtain. Do you think those cute AK-47s were grown in the rice paddies?
The members of the ISG are old, and they are out of their league. This game is faster, younger, and far more uncertain. When Eagleburger was making the rounds, the world spun very slowly. If he talked to a Russian ambassador, the Russian ambassador would get back to him in months with nothing new to say. If the talks went badly, well, we'll have more talks next year. And hey, if those talks don't work out, no big deal. The chances of us ever attacking each other face to face are extremely remote. One thing about the Cold War, there weren't too many American or Russian civilians being killed by the other side.
The ISG group proved their irrationality by talking about the conditions in Iraq getting worse and worse, spiraling out of control. Okay, fine. But tell me, lead foot, exactly what is your definition of 'spiral'? Because you didn't seem to be too quick in getting that report onto the President's desk.
The old boys' diplomacy network is over. We don't have time for nine month reports, conferences next summer, Pan-Arab talks. I'm sorry, Larry and Jim, if you miss the good old days of flying around and rubbing elbows with other guys in expensive suits. I apologize if you miss chatting with your foreign policy buddies over caviar and champagne. You can't drag your old methods into this fight. It distracts us, and it weakens us. Like you, the guys we're fighting while you're collecting stamps also wear pricey vests to wedding parties, except theirs explode and wipe out entire families.
Today's enemy doesn't talk. They blow things up. There is no evidence that they want to hear from us unless it is to accept our conversion to Islam and a capitulation to their terms. To treat them as Eagleburger and Baker treated past foreign dignitaries is lunacy.
The Iraq Study Group was another lesson, and it was a good one. It's time to kiss the old-timers good-bye. They're past their foreign policy prime, seeing a diplomatic world they used to see, living in the dreamland of lost memories. Listening to them is as foolish as it is dangerous.
Say good-night, Larry.
At least the Iraq Study Group (ISG) showed some courage. They decided to drop a bomb of surrender on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It takes chutzpah for the Unserious to do something like that, and it helped turn the evening news into the most bizarre show around: a clip of ISG members saying the US should go to thug regimes Iran and Syria with hat in hand, begging for help, followed by a clip of Roosevelt saying he was going to open up a can of whup-ass on the Japanese.
No coalition of the willing for Roosevelt. Back then, there wasn't much talk of making sure Tonga's security council vote would allow Americans to defeat their enemies. Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Midway, Leyte Gulf, Solomon Islands. Not too many Polish and French (they'd already surrendered) running around during those battles. It was all red, white, and blue. A Japanese admiral said the Americans were filled with a 'terrible resolve,' a resolve which took them all the way to final victory.
65 years on, it would seem that many Americans still have a terrible resolve, though not in the way that Yamamoto meant it. When he said those words, he knew a determined enemy was advancing constantly, and wouldn't give up until they'd won the day. He had little doubt that within a couple of years, Roosevelt's boot would be up his ass. He was wrong. It was Truman's.
No, the resolve today is terrible because there isn't any. The 79 articles that these ISG has-beens came up with is a recipe to do nothing on the one hand, and to appease dictators on the other. It is a shameful, embarrassing document (you can find it on Jim Baker's website; I'd give you the address, but I don't want to help his counter go up).
When former Secretary of State and ISG-man Lawrence Eagleburger was asked today what he thought of the New York Post (good for you, Post) calling them a bunch of "Surrender Monkeys," he replied with a stern, "That was probably thought up by some 20-year-old punk."
Maybe. But does that mean the punk's wrong?
You were a 20-year-old punk yourself once, Larry. At least, I hope so. Being a punk means taking a stand and sticking it to the man once in a while. Punkness takes heft and attitude. Punkness requires, oh, not asking the President of your nation to go to an Axis of Evil country four years later and beg them for help when you know damn well that they're the ones behind this insurgency in Iraq. You're not a punk anymore, Larry, you're just a regular, arrogant coward.
Arrogant, because you think you know it all and can toss others off with one-liners involving the word 'punk.' Coward, because the only new issues in the document you signed involve running away as fast as possible, screwing Israel over by making this a Palestine question, and having a meeting of minds with a dictatorship that hangs people for being gay. (And Larry, nobody uses 'punk' anymore. Just how many times beyond 79 do you have to prove that you are out of it?)
His next flippant comment on Fox News proved what an old fool he is. When asked what he would do if the President didn't take action on even one of the ISG's recommendations, Larry said it was the President's decision. For his part, Old Larry would return to his stamp collection and come back to chat with Fox News once in a while if they wanted him to, hardee-har-har.
That's great. Thanks for your service, Larry. You worked nine months on a report to the US President, and you now place it's importance somewhere behind your stamp collection and being a hack for the cable news networks. Please, Larry. Go back to collecting stamps. Mail someone a letter that contains your last original thought, before it dies of loneliness.
I didn't hold out much hope for the ISG. It sounded pathetic to begin with, the way 'study group' sounded lame whenever a university professor made me go over to a homely girl's apartment on a Saturday to compare notes. There we'd be, the such-and-such study group, put together by a prof who went around the room repeating one through five over and over, until all the ones had to meet at John's, all the twos at Jenny's, etc.
I detested study groups. Every time a professor said the magic words, "Let's split up into groups," I wanted to do a header off the fifth floor of the social science building.
Most of my study groups were garden variety. A couple of gay guys, the homely girl who served Doritoes and owned a lot of teddy bears, a token feminist or two, and me. We'd chat for a few hours about our homework, I'd say a couple of things to piss off the feminists, and then I'd try to get to the bar by last call. Point is, every study group I've seen has been a joke. People walk in with their beliefs firmly in place, and they walk out with them a couple of hours later.
Nobody changes their minds during a study group. Certainly no one learns very much. In fact, I only ever agreed to sign any study group's papers because I knew it was a waste of time to argue a point and, as said, I wanted to make last call. Besides, it wasn't like I was concerned with not getting a good grade. If you had a gay guy and a couple of feminists on your team, there wasn't a chance in hell the prof would give you less than a B+.
A couple of hours of study group pretty much ensured that I would sign anything put in front of me. After nine months, I'm not the least bit surprised that these 10 old-timers found a consensus. Nine months? My God, after nine months of study group, I would have signed away my heterosexuality, told you I wore ladies underwear, and sang 'I Feel Pretty' from the top of my university residence. I'm amazed these old buffoons lasted so long. When a stamp collector is one of your heavy hitters on foreign policy, you begin to wonder who gave them the code to get out of the old folks home in the first place.
By now you're thinking that I'm ripping on the elderly too much. You're right. I am. And they deserve it. Look at it this way: all of that old thinking is long gone. It's over. Those rules of foreign policy and diplomacy are out the window. For one, it is pretty hard to practice diplomacy when the groups you are talking to don't have any diplomats. For another, these terrorists and Islamic fascists don't care what Baker and Eagleburger say.
When Baker was talking to the Russians, he knew they were full of crap, but at least they pretended to listen. Today, the Islamic fascists say, "You want peace? To hell with you. Die, infidel scum!" And we go running to the evening news for analysis of what the terrorist meant by that. Well, he means he wants you to die. Olive branches extended in their direction end up buried in your throat.
In Baker and Eagleburger's day, foreign policy meant two things: Communism and the United States. That was it. The rest was merely details. Name me one important conflict that took place post-WWII that didn't involve some influence of the US and USSR. Name one. (Sorry, British guys, the Falklands don't count. Be real).
Don't cheat by handing me Israel and the Arabs. They were both being supplied by the big boys, and the big boys had a vested interest in which side won, lost, or stayed static. Korea and Vietnam? Wrong. Just because the soldiers didn't speak Russian doesn't mean they weren't partnered up with the Russkies behind the bedroom curtain. Do you think those cute AK-47s were grown in the rice paddies?
The members of the ISG are old, and they are out of their league. This game is faster, younger, and far more uncertain. When Eagleburger was making the rounds, the world spun very slowly. If he talked to a Russian ambassador, the Russian ambassador would get back to him in months with nothing new to say. If the talks went badly, well, we'll have more talks next year. And hey, if those talks don't work out, no big deal. The chances of us ever attacking each other face to face are extremely remote. One thing about the Cold War, there weren't too many American or Russian civilians being killed by the other side.
The ISG group proved their irrationality by talking about the conditions in Iraq getting worse and worse, spiraling out of control. Okay, fine. But tell me, lead foot, exactly what is your definition of 'spiral'? Because you didn't seem to be too quick in getting that report onto the President's desk.
The old boys' diplomacy network is over. We don't have time for nine month reports, conferences next summer, Pan-Arab talks. I'm sorry, Larry and Jim, if you miss the good old days of flying around and rubbing elbows with other guys in expensive suits. I apologize if you miss chatting with your foreign policy buddies over caviar and champagne. You can't drag your old methods into this fight. It distracts us, and it weakens us. Like you, the guys we're fighting while you're collecting stamps also wear pricey vests to wedding parties, except theirs explode and wipe out entire families.
Today's enemy doesn't talk. They blow things up. There is no evidence that they want to hear from us unless it is to accept our conversion to Islam and a capitulation to their terms. To treat them as Eagleburger and Baker treated past foreign dignitaries is lunacy.
The Iraq Study Group was another lesson, and it was a good one. It's time to kiss the old-timers good-bye. They're past their foreign policy prime, seeing a diplomatic world they used to see, living in the dreamland of lost memories. Listening to them is as foolish as it is dangerous.
Say good-night, Larry.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Football (Black &) Blues
Travel makes the days go by faster. I can't decide if that is because I'm busy seeing all kinds of neat, interesting things (statues of famous people, old churches, girls in bikinis, puddles of barf outside a Shanghai nightclub), or if it's just because I miss football.
One thing about football is that it helps you mark the time. From kickoff on Sunday afternoon, to the last whistle on Monday night, all you think about is football. You eat it in the form of chilli and cheese. You drink it in the form of Budweiser beer (unless you had a particularly hard Saturday night, in which case you drink football in the form of orange juice and aspirin). You sleep it in the fitful rest of a man who took a lousy quarterback in the fantasy draft.
The remainder of the week is nothing more than waiting for football to come back around again. You check the injury reports, the stats, the blogs. You watch SportsCenter for the 18th time, never realizing that the highlights won't change: the receiver who dropped the touchdown pass and blew the spread along with your fifty bucks will still drop the damn pass, no matter how many times you watch it.
Football is a love/hate affair. Sometimes it is as boring as a young woman, other times as torturous as a Motley Crue reunion tour. But always it is what we want it to be: a game filled with the expectation of victory, and a chance to watch someone get his clock cleaned.
That is, unless you're traveling.
Travel is a hell of a lot of fun, and you can learn a lot about many people and places. One thing you learn very quickly is that nobody watches football beyond the borders of North America. Not only that, but the sad sacks call a completely different game by the same name.
It would seem to make sense. A bunch of wimps running around on a field kicking a beach ball to each other. They use their feet a lot, so hey, the game is called football. Once in a great while, these masters of the Olympic event 'jogging' will even kick the ball towards a barn-sized net. And, once in an even greater while, the ball will go into said net. After that, the fans sing a song and beat the crap out of each other. Where do I sign up?
When there is more violence in the stands than there is on the field, the activity you are playing is a game, not a sport. And when the game you are playing is 90 minutes long but can still end in a 0-0 tie, you are playing an extremely stupid game at that.
I'm a little bit tired of hearing that sooner or later, soccer is going to be a popular sport in the United States and Canada. It isn't. It never will be. Everytime I sit down to watch a football game in a foreign country (relegated to the back of the bar with the small TV, sans volume) some European loudmouth thinks it's time for a soccer discussion. It goes something like this:
"What are you watching, mate?"
"Football," grumbles the irritable Canadian, as he picks up his tuna sandwich because the place doesn't serve wings.
"That ain't football. That's rugby for women."
"Mmm-hmm."
"Football is what you call soccer."
"Yeah."
"Soccer's big in America now. It's going to be bigger than baseball."
"Why's that?" asks the very irritable Canadian, though he already knows the answer because he's heard it five hundred and sixty-two times before.
"All the kids are playing it. When they grow up, they'll play soccer."
563.
I would wager that right now, some poor Canadian is sitting in a Norwegian bar that has satellite reception, and he is listening to the same garbage.
To the Euro-weenies, let's put something on the record: the kids who play soccer are there because their parents won't let them play a violent sport. Football and hockey are out, and fastballs scare the hell out of mothers, so baseball's out, too. Unless you're over six feet tall by the time you hit grade 11, basketball is also a no-go. That leaves soccer. Your passionate game of kick-the-ball-around is there to raise the self-esteem of children that wouldn't have amounted to a damn on the grid iron, and to keep hockey players in shape during the off-season.
People are not going to watch soccer in North America. It's made up of all the people that got cut from the other sports. Sure, there might be a few kids that played soccer as their first choice, but who the hell wants to watch a guy like that play anything? And just because we did something as kids doesn't mean we're going to keep doing it as adults. Using the old 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' might have worked while hiding in the cushion fort, but it doesn't go over so well on the nightclub circuit.
One thing that does fascinate me about soccer and its fans are the songs they sing. Before the game and after, they trash the USA to no end and make fun of the sports they play. But during the game, virtually all of the songs the Europeans sing (yes, including the O-lay, O-lay, O-lay ditty) were written by American composers. Weird.
Euro-boobs aren't the only ones who don't watch football, yet complain about it constantly. South Africans and Australians are even worse, because they play rugby.
I dig rugby. It's a tough game to play. It was the forerunner of football. Indeed, the Canadian Football League was known as the Canadian Rugby Football Union in 1884, then the Canadian Rugby Union, then the Canadian Football Council, and finally the Canadian Football League in 1958.
The Canadian and American games were both born from rugby, and one of the first recognized football games took place between Harvard and McGill University. There isn't enough time to go into all the ways that the American and Canadian games diverged, but there is enough time to tell the bonehead from Tennessee whom I met that the CFL didn't start in the 1970's, and they didn't change the 4-down rule to 3-downs 'just to be different.' The 4th down appeared in American college ball in 1912. The Canadian game simply kept the 3-down format.
Football came from rugby, but it was a much tougher game than rugby from the start. On-field deaths were not unknown, and a closed fist punch to the face was a legitimate way to bring a man down.
Aussie Rules football might look tough, until you notice that the highlights you see are the only hits that took place in the entire game. Rugby itself is missing two critical elements: the football rule that allows you to hit a man as hard as you can, anywhere on his body, without needing to use your arms, and the ability to blindside the man even if he doesn't have the ball.
Rugby tackles hurt. Football tackles are devastating. But it is the rugby player and rugby fan who freaks out whenever the subject of which sport is 'tougher' comes up. Football fans and players pay this argument no mind for two reasons: we know football is tougher, and we don't watch rugby, anyway.
The pads argument is usually the first to come out. Rugby fans complain that football players wear pads and helmets. This argument stuns me with its idiocy. Do the rugby fans mean to tell me that a game that requires armour in order to avoid serious injury or death is less tough than the one that does not? And do they believe that football started with all of this armour in the first place? Fat chance.
The history of football is actually a history of governing councils trying to keep young men from killing each other. Americans and Canadians took rugby and turned it into the most cruel, barbaric sport imaginable. Since then, it has been a struggle to keep it as sane and safe as possible while still allowing men to beat each other's brains in.
As far as I know, rugby has not changed any of its major rules in decades. The absence of helmets and flak jackets on their players is proof positive that the game is not, on the whole, life threatening (rugby does not allow a tackle above the shoulders, nor does it allow 'hitting,' that is, tackling without using the arms to wrap up).
A quick look at football's history tells you why the game was almost banned on more than one occasion. In 1892, Harvard used a new formation against Yale called the 'flying wedge.' It was developed, oddly enough, by a chess master.
The front line of the offense would interlock their arms and plow forward, the ball carrier behind them. Defenders would have to rip this wall apart to get to the man. It must have been Dislocated Shoulder City. Any defender who fell down was trampled beneath the wedge. Add the face punch into the mix, and these college students would have been a bloody mess.
Which they were. Seven players were carted off the field in what one paper called "a dying condition." There were so many injuries to Yale that they took it personally. The two schools broke off all official contact for the next two years.
The brutality got worse. Wedge formations and the act of dragging your ball carrier forward (in effect standing him up for an especially painful hit) made the game lethal. By 1900, serious injuries and on-field deaths were a regularity.
There's no way that football could be started from scratch today. It's incredible that it lasted at all. Remember that these were college students. Pro football was still small time, and the NFL didn't yet exist. Mothers were shipping their boys off to Yale, Harvard, and Rutgers to get an education, and then watching them come home in a pine box.
1905 was a bad year. 18 college students died playing football, and the game was banned in a number of schools. President Roosevelt finally stepped in and told colleges to clean up the game, or he'd campaign to have football banned outright.
Taking heed, nineteen colleges got together and drummed up some new rules. If you've ever wondered how the NCAA got it's start, now you know (it was originally called the Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States; its specific purpose was to find a way to keep football, and its players, alive). The 1906 meeting invented the neutral zone, wrote up some new laws about tackling, and also codified the laws for the forward pass. With the formal entry of the forward pass, football kissed rugby good-bye.
The new rules were a good idea, but they didn't help much. In 1908, 33 more college players would die playing with the pigskin. Someone has pointed out that with a limited number of schools playing ball at the turn of the century, you had close to a 50/50 shot of buying the farm stepping on the football field. Tough odds.
If the internet, television, and SportsCenter had existed back then, football would have been as dead as the players it killed. No one would have stood for endless highlights of college kids being carried off the field, dead and broken. If it happened just once today it would be dreadful, and the second guessing of the game would be extreme. But thirty-three times in one season?
What's incredible is that our forebears stood for it, and that college students still wanted to play the game. Helmets, pads, and various rule changes throughout the years have made the game safer, but only safer in the quotation mark sense. Today, about 8 players a year get killed playing football. That's from all levels combined, making it small potatoes compared to the old days, though a staggering number of injuries flood the locker rooms each weekend.
Concussions, for one. 40 000 of them are reported annually among high school players alone, and those are only the kids that get treated. Concussions are such a certainty that NFL teams have a chart for each player. If a player gets nailed in the head, they know what questions to ask that particular man in order to find out if he's still got all his marbles. And even if he does, that's not to say that he'll have them later on. Former players report nausea and forgetfulness well after they retire, a chronic symptom of having your head kicked in. It will be with them for the rest of their lives.
But, hey, who needs helmets?
It's insane for us to love this game. Absolutely crazy. But love it we do. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that football is by far the sport with the most injuries, and also the sport with the highest television ratings and fan attendance. Perhaps.
Traveling puts me through intense football withdrawal. I love the game, brag about it, want to jam it down a Euro-weenie's throat every time they crack wise. It says something about me and my culture that I long to see a man carry a ball over a white line, even if he has to destroy himself to do it.
But then, what does it say about the player?
One thing about football is that it helps you mark the time. From kickoff on Sunday afternoon, to the last whistle on Monday night, all you think about is football. You eat it in the form of chilli and cheese. You drink it in the form of Budweiser beer (unless you had a particularly hard Saturday night, in which case you drink football in the form of orange juice and aspirin). You sleep it in the fitful rest of a man who took a lousy quarterback in the fantasy draft.
The remainder of the week is nothing more than waiting for football to come back around again. You check the injury reports, the stats, the blogs. You watch SportsCenter for the 18th time, never realizing that the highlights won't change: the receiver who dropped the touchdown pass and blew the spread along with your fifty bucks will still drop the damn pass, no matter how many times you watch it.
Football is a love/hate affair. Sometimes it is as boring as a young woman, other times as torturous as a Motley Crue reunion tour. But always it is what we want it to be: a game filled with the expectation of victory, and a chance to watch someone get his clock cleaned.
That is, unless you're traveling.
Travel is a hell of a lot of fun, and you can learn a lot about many people and places. One thing you learn very quickly is that nobody watches football beyond the borders of North America. Not only that, but the sad sacks call a completely different game by the same name.
It would seem to make sense. A bunch of wimps running around on a field kicking a beach ball to each other. They use their feet a lot, so hey, the game is called football. Once in a great while, these masters of the Olympic event 'jogging' will even kick the ball towards a barn-sized net. And, once in an even greater while, the ball will go into said net. After that, the fans sing a song and beat the crap out of each other. Where do I sign up?
When there is more violence in the stands than there is on the field, the activity you are playing is a game, not a sport. And when the game you are playing is 90 minutes long but can still end in a 0-0 tie, you are playing an extremely stupid game at that.
I'm a little bit tired of hearing that sooner or later, soccer is going to be a popular sport in the United States and Canada. It isn't. It never will be. Everytime I sit down to watch a football game in a foreign country (relegated to the back of the bar with the small TV, sans volume) some European loudmouth thinks it's time for a soccer discussion. It goes something like this:
"What are you watching, mate?"
"Football," grumbles the irritable Canadian, as he picks up his tuna sandwich because the place doesn't serve wings.
"That ain't football. That's rugby for women."
"Mmm-hmm."
"Football is what you call soccer."
"Yeah."
"Soccer's big in America now. It's going to be bigger than baseball."
"Why's that?" asks the very irritable Canadian, though he already knows the answer because he's heard it five hundred and sixty-two times before.
"All the kids are playing it. When they grow up, they'll play soccer."
563.
I would wager that right now, some poor Canadian is sitting in a Norwegian bar that has satellite reception, and he is listening to the same garbage.
To the Euro-weenies, let's put something on the record: the kids who play soccer are there because their parents won't let them play a violent sport. Football and hockey are out, and fastballs scare the hell out of mothers, so baseball's out, too. Unless you're over six feet tall by the time you hit grade 11, basketball is also a no-go. That leaves soccer. Your passionate game of kick-the-ball-around is there to raise the self-esteem of children that wouldn't have amounted to a damn on the grid iron, and to keep hockey players in shape during the off-season.
People are not going to watch soccer in North America. It's made up of all the people that got cut from the other sports. Sure, there might be a few kids that played soccer as their first choice, but who the hell wants to watch a guy like that play anything? And just because we did something as kids doesn't mean we're going to keep doing it as adults. Using the old 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' might have worked while hiding in the cushion fort, but it doesn't go over so well on the nightclub circuit.
One thing that does fascinate me about soccer and its fans are the songs they sing. Before the game and after, they trash the USA to no end and make fun of the sports they play. But during the game, virtually all of the songs the Europeans sing (yes, including the O-lay, O-lay, O-lay ditty) were written by American composers. Weird.
Euro-boobs aren't the only ones who don't watch football, yet complain about it constantly. South Africans and Australians are even worse, because they play rugby.
I dig rugby. It's a tough game to play. It was the forerunner of football. Indeed, the Canadian Football League was known as the Canadian Rugby Football Union in 1884, then the Canadian Rugby Union, then the Canadian Football Council, and finally the Canadian Football League in 1958.
The Canadian and American games were both born from rugby, and one of the first recognized football games took place between Harvard and McGill University. There isn't enough time to go into all the ways that the American and Canadian games diverged, but there is enough time to tell the bonehead from Tennessee whom I met that the CFL didn't start in the 1970's, and they didn't change the 4-down rule to 3-downs 'just to be different.' The 4th down appeared in American college ball in 1912. The Canadian game simply kept the 3-down format.
Football came from rugby, but it was a much tougher game than rugby from the start. On-field deaths were not unknown, and a closed fist punch to the face was a legitimate way to bring a man down.
Aussie Rules football might look tough, until you notice that the highlights you see are the only hits that took place in the entire game. Rugby itself is missing two critical elements: the football rule that allows you to hit a man as hard as you can, anywhere on his body, without needing to use your arms, and the ability to blindside the man even if he doesn't have the ball.
Rugby tackles hurt. Football tackles are devastating. But it is the rugby player and rugby fan who freaks out whenever the subject of which sport is 'tougher' comes up. Football fans and players pay this argument no mind for two reasons: we know football is tougher, and we don't watch rugby, anyway.
The pads argument is usually the first to come out. Rugby fans complain that football players wear pads and helmets. This argument stuns me with its idiocy. Do the rugby fans mean to tell me that a game that requires armour in order to avoid serious injury or death is less tough than the one that does not? And do they believe that football started with all of this armour in the first place? Fat chance.
The history of football is actually a history of governing councils trying to keep young men from killing each other. Americans and Canadians took rugby and turned it into the most cruel, barbaric sport imaginable. Since then, it has been a struggle to keep it as sane and safe as possible while still allowing men to beat each other's brains in.
As far as I know, rugby has not changed any of its major rules in decades. The absence of helmets and flak jackets on their players is proof positive that the game is not, on the whole, life threatening (rugby does not allow a tackle above the shoulders, nor does it allow 'hitting,' that is, tackling without using the arms to wrap up).
A quick look at football's history tells you why the game was almost banned on more than one occasion. In 1892, Harvard used a new formation against Yale called the 'flying wedge.' It was developed, oddly enough, by a chess master.
The front line of the offense would interlock their arms and plow forward, the ball carrier behind them. Defenders would have to rip this wall apart to get to the man. It must have been Dislocated Shoulder City. Any defender who fell down was trampled beneath the wedge. Add the face punch into the mix, and these college students would have been a bloody mess.
Which they were. Seven players were carted off the field in what one paper called "a dying condition." There were so many injuries to Yale that they took it personally. The two schools broke off all official contact for the next two years.
The brutality got worse. Wedge formations and the act of dragging your ball carrier forward (in effect standing him up for an especially painful hit) made the game lethal. By 1900, serious injuries and on-field deaths were a regularity.
There's no way that football could be started from scratch today. It's incredible that it lasted at all. Remember that these were college students. Pro football was still small time, and the NFL didn't yet exist. Mothers were shipping their boys off to Yale, Harvard, and Rutgers to get an education, and then watching them come home in a pine box.
1905 was a bad year. 18 college students died playing football, and the game was banned in a number of schools. President Roosevelt finally stepped in and told colleges to clean up the game, or he'd campaign to have football banned outright.
Taking heed, nineteen colleges got together and drummed up some new rules. If you've ever wondered how the NCAA got it's start, now you know (it was originally called the Intercollegiate Athletics Association of the United States; its specific purpose was to find a way to keep football, and its players, alive). The 1906 meeting invented the neutral zone, wrote up some new laws about tackling, and also codified the laws for the forward pass. With the formal entry of the forward pass, football kissed rugby good-bye.
The new rules were a good idea, but they didn't help much. In 1908, 33 more college players would die playing with the pigskin. Someone has pointed out that with a limited number of schools playing ball at the turn of the century, you had close to a 50/50 shot of buying the farm stepping on the football field. Tough odds.
If the internet, television, and SportsCenter had existed back then, football would have been as dead as the players it killed. No one would have stood for endless highlights of college kids being carried off the field, dead and broken. If it happened just once today it would be dreadful, and the second guessing of the game would be extreme. But thirty-three times in one season?
What's incredible is that our forebears stood for it, and that college students still wanted to play the game. Helmets, pads, and various rule changes throughout the years have made the game safer, but only safer in the quotation mark sense. Today, about 8 players a year get killed playing football. That's from all levels combined, making it small potatoes compared to the old days, though a staggering number of injuries flood the locker rooms each weekend.
Concussions, for one. 40 000 of them are reported annually among high school players alone, and those are only the kids that get treated. Concussions are such a certainty that NFL teams have a chart for each player. If a player gets nailed in the head, they know what questions to ask that particular man in order to find out if he's still got all his marbles. And even if he does, that's not to say that he'll have them later on. Former players report nausea and forgetfulness well after they retire, a chronic symptom of having your head kicked in. It will be with them for the rest of their lives.
But, hey, who needs helmets?
It's insane for us to love this game. Absolutely crazy. But love it we do. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that football is by far the sport with the most injuries, and also the sport with the highest television ratings and fan attendance. Perhaps.
Traveling puts me through intense football withdrawal. I love the game, brag about it, want to jam it down a Euro-weenie's throat every time they crack wise. It says something about me and my culture that I long to see a man carry a ball over a white line, even if he has to destroy himself to do it.
But then, what does it say about the player?
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