A Journey Along The Wire

This past weekend I spent some time in Baltimore with my girlfriend. No, we’re not addicts or ghetto architecture enthusiasts. I’ve been to Baltimore a number of times before, but I had never spent quality time there. I love cities, and over the past few years I’ve gotten pretty good at visiting cities and experiencing things that make that city what it is, structuring my stay not around the tourist attractions, though there are many worth seeing, but around those things that make it an “authentic” visit.

I didn’t expect to include anything about The Wire in my trip to Baltimore. Of course if you’ve watched The Wire, you can’t separate the two. Baltimore is the main character of that show, one that can be analyzed and dissected just like a flesh and blood character. I love the show, but to me, it’s a show, a product on TV that everything else notwithstanding, is at its foundation entertainment. That in itself isn’t a bad thing, but when I think about the issues the show brings up – poverty, crime, drugs, and the dead end many of our institutitions, even on the good side of the law, become for the individuals caught up in them – I’m reluctant to be a screaming, devoted fan. There’s a difference between liking The Wire and liking Law and Order. Law and Order does deal with important issues and many times those issues come straight from contemporary news. But there’s a difference. You can watch Law and Order and care or not about the issues. It’s a suspense driven show that is carefully constructed to keep you watching through the commercials and each week. But The Wire grabs you by the neck and marches you into the ghettos, both geographically and institutionally, of Baltimore and forces you to stare a problem in the face that most people don’t want to and don’t have to think about – how many of our cities are rotting from the inside out.

My purpose of this post is not to talk about The Wire, but to acknowledge that The Wire has some bearing on where I’d like my professional life to go.

I’m coming to a fork in the road in my professional life. I don’t know what’s down the fork, only that it’s new and, for me, radically different from the road I’ve been on. It’s really a coalescence of everything that has gone into me choosing the field of English as my professional domain. I’ve often understood the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20” as a negative thing, as in a lament that humans are so finite that the only way we can see events clearly and with some amount of objectivity is to look back on them with the benefit of time and perspective. I never thought about the positive aspect of being able to look into our past and see things we didn’t see as events occurred. That sounds like a big “duh” moment, an obvious thing that somehow passed by my meandering mind. But perhaps I needed a past, needed to be the age I am, to understand that in a more than superficial way.

The Wire represents what I want to do with my life. No, I don’t want to make TV shows (though I have many ideas for that medium). Nor do I want to start a drug enterprise or become a cop or run for office. I want to study and write about the African slave trade, pre-Civil War slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, those fascinating 100 years between Emancipation and the Civil Rights legislation, and the modern consequences of all of this culminating in large segments of the black population living in poverty and lacking education and the wherewithall to change their lot. The Wire is an artistic representation of those consequences, and the way in which the show’s creators made a highly watchable work of art that’s main draw is more than glitz and glamour but rather the grime that represents our society’s worst failings astounds me every time I think about it. That’s what I want to do.

And to get there, I have two paths to simultaneously follow as my life progresses – that of the studying and that of writing. I know where I need to go with writing. It’s just a matter of getting there. And it’s only been recently, perhaps most cogently in this post, that I’ve learned what I need to do on that second path. Reading about this subject on my own has only satisfied me so far. I want more. I’ve toyed with the idea for a long time, and nothing caused to me to actively want to do it. But something clicked or morphed or broke because now that I have something that I know I want to do, the best course for me is to leave public education, my home for the past nine years, and teach college.

Game on.

 

Ban Football!

This article is in response to Jenn Engel’s article on Foxsports.com:

http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/Junior-Seau-Dave-Duerson-death-suggests-football-toll-on-health-may-be-worse-than-we-thought-050312

 

            I’ll have to give credit to Ms. Engel for this article. She successfully tricked Fox Sports into thinking she’s a writer and a critical-thinker. Unless Fox Sports has recently allowed any idiot with a computer to write for them, this is the only explanation I can think of for one of the worst articles I’ve read in recent memory. Before I get to the substance (really the lack thereof) of Engel’s article, I’d like to share her second sentence and enter it as evidence that either A) the world is coming to an end, B) the schools in this country have failed far worse than anyone has realized, or C) all of the above.

“He [Junior Seau] launched a bullet into his chest at 43.”

            Though you might want to read that sentence again, and maybe again, I’ll spare you the horror of another confrontation with that desecration of our fair language by telling you that yes, someone actually wrote that sentence, and yes, someone actually paid someone for that sentence, and yes, the world can be a terribly frightening place.

            I looked up launch in the dictionary. I’m a bit of a word nerd, and I enjoy looking up common words to find definitions that I didn’t expect, definitions that add nuance to a word that before seemed to have a clear black and white definition.  I was hoping that perhaps launch had one of these nuanced definitions, and that though Engel’s sentence sounds like a sentence written by a speaker of a foreign language just beginning to grapple with the strange intricacies of the English language, perhaps she did indeed write an awesome sentence that conveyed a meaning slightly hidden under the surface. No such luck. The best definition of launch that applies to Engle’s use of it is:

“to send forth, catapult, or release, as a self-propelled vehicle or weapon.”

Bullets aren’t self-propelled so you can’t launch one.

            I know it wasn’t Engel’s intention to be disrespectful of Seau. She at length defends her use of a TV show to make her point, a defense I don’t think she needed to make. Despite the poor writing and stupid thinking in the article, it’s obvious Engel cares about the human lives she’s writing about. But her sentence is the equivalent of going to a loved one’s funeral  who died in some way from their own hands and talking about the events that led to their death as if discussing a particularly annoying coworker or gossiping about the latest relationship your friend is in. Again, I know this wasn’t Engel’s intention, but her use of that one word cheapens Seau’s death. Seau shot himself. That’s all you have to say. Because to talk in detail about how he did it (as so many did on the day the news broke) is disrespectful and it cheapens the lives we live. And here is how I lay fault at Engel’s feet – as a writer, you’re intimately connected with words. You know their power and their various meanings. You have more responsibility than the average person, especially if you have an outlet to millions like foxsports.com. Though she was trying to convey her empathy and outrage at the loss of human life, she overwrote and instead cheapened the whole affair. Be better, Ms. Engel.

 

            As for the content of the article, the devil is in Engel’s premise. She gets many details right, like the fact that the NFL’s biggest concern is their bottom line and not player safety. Money is indeed the root of all evil, and in a billion dollar industry like the NFL, that much cash inevitably becomes god. But the dangers of football are not like smoking. The comparison is silly and proves her point as well as that type of debater that scores points by merely talking louder than his opponent.

            One problem with the comparison is the way in which Engel links the fading power at the hands of public opinion of Big Tobacco with the current status of the NFL. This is a huge jump to bridge that comparison. At this point, talk of concussions and the long-term unknown effects of them on football players is in the beginning stages of discussion. Despite the Saints’ bounties, the lawsuits seeking to link football’s negligence and former players’ long-term health effects from concussions, and Seau’s death, this issue is a nonissue right now. Members of the media like Engel and the countless talking heads on radio have created this issue, stoking the fire with fear and accusations of brutality that just don’t exist. How can Engel deride the NFL for chasing and protecting their slice of the pie when her kind of “journalism” manufactures controversies to increase her and her employer’s share of the pie? She’s a hypocritical fire-stoker who writes as if she thinks her audience is a pack of drooling apes. From the comments left on her column, I think she’s misunderstood who reads her columns.  

            Before I go further, let me state that the issue of concussions is something that needs to be addressed. Even though football is a violent game by nature, it’s not in anyone’s best interest for our premier athletes to be turned into zombies. And all the more so if there is indeed a link between concussions and suicide. (As an aside, what about boxers? Don’t their brains receive more brutal punishment than a football player? Or at least just as much? And we don’t hear about boxers killing themselves. That’s evidence of the manufactured nature of this link between concussions and suicide.) But regardless, a little more attention could be paid by this from those who have a hand in it.

            A second problem with Engel’s comparison of football and tobacco is how easily she has slipped into extreme thinking. All of a sudden, football is gladiators fighting for their survival against lions and heavily armed slaves. The way she treats football in this article, I expect to tune in once football starts up again and see the field bathed in blood, limbs rotting in the end zone, and mercy killings happening on the sidelines behind partial screens. Engel’s thinking seems to be moving towards that wonderful word fantasists use against things that are too great for them to do anything about: BAN. We have a problem with obesity? BAN salt and trans fats. We have a problem with gun violence. BAN guns. We have a problem with blah blah blah.? BAN blah. There is no nuanced approach to solutions, but a gut level reaction that inevitably does more harm and expands the scope of the problem. Sure, football is rough. But what about it is so brutal, so subhuman that we need to go to great lengths to change it?

            Engel has joined a class of people that I derisively call Do-Gooders. Despite their good intentions in trying to right wrongs and make this world a better place, they seem to think that every wrong in this world can be changed. They don’t seem to get the world is fundamentally a terrible, difficult, cruel place. Sure we’ve made progress in many areas of life, but this new crop of Do-Gooders have an unrealistic morality that seeks to end things that humans have no power to end. And they’re really hard to argue against. Because who can argue for smoking? Who can argue for violent concussions? The point isn’t that smoking is bad for you. Of course it is. But is it a death sentence? No. Though smoking has been made into the current incarnation of a boogeyman, one common evil that we can all rally behind and make ourselves feel better about ourselves and our fears and our inadequacies, it isn’t that bad. It’s enjoyable to many people, and those people aren’t evil for enjoying it. Why can’t we say smoking is not good for you, and let people make that choice. Instead, it’s become common wisdom, a common wisdom that Engel has tapped in to, that smoking is a death sentence and that you’re some kind of health terrorist for even thinking of lighting up. It’s extreme thinking that gives a person the means to put a big boot on and stamp out any unpopular behavior. It’s ego and pride and “I’m better than you” thinking that is so insidious because of its attractiveness. Here’s an example from her article:

“Dirty players do not kill players. Bounties do not kill players. Football kills players. There is no entirely safe way to play the game — not on the level we watch on Sundays — just like there is no safe amount of cigarette smoking.”

The behavior must be stamped out! Watch out for that dangerous football little boy! It’ll kill you! Mother Engel is watching over you and protecting you.

            Please. Whether intentional or not, Engel is demonizing what she sees as wrong. And when you demonize something, people start to wonder just what you’re so upset for anyway.

 

            There are two trends in current thinking that have caused us to have a skewed outlook on life. Evidence of Engel’s skewed outlook include:

“This might be right, or he might have killed himself because of lingering relationship issues or financial problems or all of this or none of it. We cannot know, not for sure. So we have conversations about what we think triggered this tragedy.”

(So we have no idea why he killed himself. But we’re going to make pronouncements and draw conclusions. Based on nothing. That’s top-notch thinking.)

“I am not so sure football is not the next tobacco. And I very well may be peddling a product that causes illness, makes people unhappy and, in extreme cases, makes people like Junior Seau feel like a bullet to the chest is better than another breath, that life has become so difficult or so sad or so something other than what he imagined and, therefore, better ended than endured.”

(So she identifies Seau’s case as extreme. What about the other things she mentions about football that make it some kind of evil that she’s peddling: “causes illness, makes people unhappy.” Right. If a person punches you in the nose, and your nose begins to bleed, that punch caused your bloody nose. Football doesn’t cause illness. Again this is about the speculation that concussions from football have caused later illness. But to jump right to cause illness? And makes people unhappy? Then there’s a lot of people who put a brave face on for 16 weeks plus playoffs every year.)

            As evidenced in this quotes is the two-fold symbiotic trends in modern thinking. One is the intellectualization of everyone. We’ve become so advanced in modern American society – we’re the best at everything, going to college is a norm, getting an advanced degree is fast becoming the norm if it isn’t already, we know so much about the natural world, etc. and etc. – that we’ve in fact become dumb. A piece of paper that says we passed college entitles us to think we’re smart, to think we’re equal with those that do the hard work of becoming what they seek to become, a real learner, a truly educated man or woman, not someone who doesn’t read and consumes mass amounts of sterilized TV. If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer, and if you’re not thinking and reading and doing every day, you have no place on the stage that your degrees supposedly gave you access to. You’re fake, vapid, and a poser. And it’s worse if you do read and study and think all the time and still come to the same conclusions. The intellectualization of American society has instead of making us better, filled our simple minds with ideas too grand for us to comprehend. So we ape it, and we save face by becoming something we aren’t. The lack of humility that goes hand in hand with greater intellectual gains has caused our dummies to pronounce themselves scholars. And we have the balls to say we know something.

            Along with the gross intellectualization of America has come the pussification of America. We’re too soft to handle anything. I think often of my grandparents’ lives and what they lived through – the Great Depression, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, JFK assassination, the advent of nuclear war, and so on, some major disastrous event at nearly every stage of their lives – and I know we couldn’t go through that today. We can’t even take a war in Iraq or Afghanistan, making those wars more about what we can handle and what’s popular with us than what they need to be about. And now we have sports writers proclaiming football too rough. Ms. Engel needs to read “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. In this story, everyone is made to be equal. Pretty people must wear ugly masks. Strong people must walk with weights on them to weigh them down. One of Vonnegut’s main points is that you can’t wholesale make something one way. You can’t do anything about the skills, talents, and advantages that some people are born with. Life is unfair, and humans have no power to change that. Life is rough, and humans have no power to change that. Football is a natural and healthy way to legitimatize the violence that is naturally in us and the world around us. The game isn’t pure by any stretch of the imagination, but it is what life is and to try to fundamentally change it, to make it “safer,” is to go against the natural way of things and create something artificial. And when it becomes artificial, it will die. Maybe that’s what people like Engel want all along.

            For a much better take on this issue, see Buzz Bissinger’s article:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/04/junior-seau-s-suicide-circus-why-we-love-the-violence-of-football.html

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

While reading this article (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/27/arsenio-hall-on-filming-from-l-a-riots-ground-zero.html) about the LA race riots – which happened to be about some guy named Arsenio Hall role in those riots – l noticed an idea that seems to be prevalent despite the vapidity and potential destructive force within in it.

Hall states, “Looking back today I’m not sure how I think the city or the country has changed for the better. Some things have shifted, but many more things have stayed exactly the same. How can you really think or talk of change or improvement when we have situations like the Trayvon Martin case occurring almost 20 years to the day of the L.A. riots?” (Emphasis mine.)

In Hall’s quote is a naïveté that holds back the very progress that many seek. I give him and others who have said this same type of thing credit for desiring change and trying to do something about it. But sometimes it’s best to do nothing when what you do makes the situation worse. And clouding a complex situation is making it worse.

Hall’s quote vaults from an honest acknowledgement of the difficulty of reading the results of a major event to a definitive statement on race relations in America in the last 20 years. The problem lies in Hall’s incredulity that something like the Martin case could happen (and for purposes of this is discussion, let’s lay aside our biases, politics, and any need to have our own side heard. For this post, I’m viewing the Trayvon incident as a black kid was killed and there was a response from the black community of calls for justice. For this, I don’t care who was right or wrong. I’m taking an overall, observational tact to make a larger point. The foundation of my point is that racial tensions still exist.) I would like to ask Hall this: why didn’t you expect this to happen? Because at the heart of his quote is the belief that certain things can be removed from human behavior and society. I don’t think this is a conscious thought in Hall’s mind (and maybe it is) but rather just poor, unfinished thinking on his part. Because there is progress and improvement, which are worthy goals to fight for, but then there’s elimination and that goal has never been attained, nor will it ever.

Racism is a problem of the heart. And though this might sound weird, racism isn’t about race. It’s about power. Racism stems from the same evil that causes a bully to pick on a classmate, the same evil that causes a male superior to harass a female employee, the same evil that causes on to ignore the owner’s beam while harping on everyone’s toothpick, the same evil that causes that juicy tidbit of knowledge to slip out to the right ears with the full knowledge of the pestilence released. It has to do with superiority and pride. These are things that are constants in human history. If we could travel through time, stopping at those times when mankind has made huge leaps of progress forward, alongside those amazing reaches to the heavens, you’d still find the same sins of man holding us back. Only the exterior changes. Beneath the shine of our glistening skyscrapers, beneath the intelligence of our slick phones and computers and TVs, beneath our vast knowledge of the natural world, beneath the beauty of our name-brand clothes and perfect makeup and toned bodies, still lies the cancer that eats away at us all truly getting along. Maybe and hopefully one day we’ll cure the cancer of the body, but the hope created by the successes of that fight has never been replicated on that other, invisible cancer. And though the fight is worth it, it never will.