Anderson, Apathy, and Inanity

The latest media-created non-story story has to do with Arizona Cardinals Quarterback Derek Anderson being caught laughing on the sideline during a game in which his team was getting hammered largely because of his offense's ineffectiveness. It became a massive story (sorry -- "story") when Anderson lost his shit after being asked and re-asked and generally harangued during the press conference after the game.

Thankfully there are voices of sanity out there, and one of them is former NFL player Nate Jackson, who is also a pretty good writer. He holds back very few punches in this piece for Deadspin. Here is the glorious closing paragraph to give you just a taste:

Instead, a grown man was provoked into losing his cool and dropping shitbombs all over the airwaves. So now the manufactured perception is that the quarterback not only doesn't give a fuck about his team losing, but that he can't keep his cool either. So let's run his ass out of town because a couple of emotionally stunted football pedants can't relax and laugh it off. Meanwhile, in his second year as head coach of the Tampa Bay Bucs, frequent laugher Raheem Morris has his team playing better than any Gruden-coached team has in years. Now that's funny.

The reality is that Anderson could have been laughing for any reason -- my assumption was gallows humor of the "if I did not laugh I'd cry" type. We all want our teams to win games. But it gets awfully tiring to hear fans and talking heads try to insert themselves in the minds of players and accuse them of not taking the games -- and thus their livelihoods and reputations -- seriously enough. Derek Anderson may or may not suck ("suck" being a relative term, of course -- empirically he is better at his job than you are at yours unless you too are in the top 30 in your field in the country, and if you are reading dcat almost by definition you are not) but if he sucks it has literally nothing to do with whether he is "serious" enough during games.

UPDATE: Charles Pierce's take is equally worth reading.

On Obama and Africa

At the Foreign Policy Association you can see my latest "Viewpoints" article, "On Obama and Africa," in which I give my take on the Dinesh D'Souza-Newt Gingrich idiocy in which they asserted that Obama is informed by a "Kenyan anti-colonialist world view."

[Cross-posted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

Taking on the Dumb Jock Stereotype (Again)

At Critical Mass, the blog for the National Book Critics Circle's Board of Directors, Deirdra McAfee has a post with which I take issue. I responded in the comments with the following:

I want to take issue with the following assertion in this post:

“A culture that idolizes physical skill (sports of all kinds) and has no use for intellectual skill (the smart or knowledgeable stigmatized as nerds), that places physical passion above all possible other passions, except perhaps that for winning, is not one that believes books are important.”

This is just plain silly. It is possible, just possible, that millions of Americans can value both sports and books. Folks like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway and George Plimpton and John Updike and Doris Kearns Goodwin (the list could go on for pages) all managed to value (and write about) sports and yet still somehow also to care about books. The creation of false dichotomies and strawpersons in a post that would seem to celebrate the intellectual life is ironic, because it shows poor analytical skills and sloppy argumentation, the opposite of what intellectuals are supposed to value.

There are lots of problems with our culture with regard to books. But a passion for sports has nothing to do with it. Blaming jocks is commonplace amongst too many intellectuals, which does not make it any less dumb.

I want to augment this a little bit here. When I was in grad school there were lots of social divisions. One of the more pernicious ones came between jocks (which included former athletes but also simply fans of sports) and non-jocks. And of course the non-jocks possessed that air of superiority that McAfee reveals in her post. Which was somewhat problematic since almost universally the jocks were also the better graduate students in our program. But the very stereotype allowed the non-jocks to feel superior despite the fact thet their superiority was unearned and undeserved. There is something bizarre about certain circles in intellectual life that allows being anti-athlete to be not only acceptable, but to be heralded.

When I wrote that the list of intellectuals who demonstrably care about sports could go on for pages, I was not kidding. Stephen Jay Gould and Gay Talese. David Halberstam and George Will. Michael Lewis and David Foster Wallace. Stewart O'Nan and Frederick Exley. Not to mention those academics who write about sports -- Chuck Korr and Charlie Alexander and James Carroll and Amy Bass and dozens of others spring to mind. And the ranks of those who are predominantly sportswriters yet who write well enough to transcend the stereotypes of that genre warrants more than scorn -- Bill Simmons and Sally Jenkins and Bob Ryan and Bud Collins and John Feinstein and Dick Schaap and Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and Rick Telander and John Ed Bradley and myriad others. (Unless I am misreading McAfee's website and Amazon and Worldcat, she has not ever actually published a book, unlike all of these people, with their crazy sports affinities.)

The idea that sports is the enemy of books or the intellectual life is a muddleheaded argument put forward by people who have decided they are the enemy of sports and who have elevated their prejudice to the realm of virtue. But it's not virtue. It's ignorance. And it is not to be lauded. It is to be scorned.

As a perhaps relevant aside, or at least for the sake of full disclosure, I am a member of the National Book Critics Circle. I also have written a couple of scholarly journal articles on sports, have written at least a dozen reviews of books on sports, am working on a project that may become a book on sports, and have published a book on a sports-related topic. I was one of the jocks in my graduate program, and in some circles of detractors was seen as the jock ringleader. I also care deeply for books, for book culture, and for American intellectual life. False dichotomies and strawmen are dumb. They are also deeply intellectually dishonest and indeed are anti-intellectual.

Patricia Marx is an Ass

You want to know why a lot of people think the east coast (read: New York) intellectual class are effete assholes? How about these opening two sentences from Patricia Marx's brief "On and Off the Avenue" piece in The New Yorker on the arts and crafts store Michael's:

New York is rich in culture, cuisine, and commerce. The suburbs have parking spots and fast food, and they also have Michael’s, the largest arts-and-crafts supply chain in North America.

I love cities. I love the east coast. Outside of its sports teams (and fans) I love New York. I live in West Texas, decidedly not an enclave of the east coast elites. But I am associated with of those folks by background, by politics, by temperament and by preference. Patricia Marx, you are the reason why a mendacious drizzlewit like Sarah Palin can plausibly differentiate "real America" from her stereotype of a segment of the east coast. I hope you drown in a yachting accident. I hate nothing more than when my own side frags me with their idiocy.

Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

So the majority of Republicans don't think Obama legitimately won the election and that somehow ACORN stole it. This is just completely idiotic and unhinged. But I also really do not believe that it is true. This is one of those questions that is so reliant upon party identification and sample size and . . . . but seriously -- are you fucking kidding me? How is it possible that a single human being could think something so monumentally stupid never mind even a poor and surely not representative sample? Even if the margin of error were 30% that would be batshit crazy.

You Take That Back, Sir.

This article in Spin vexed me. Beyond being largely incoherent, it is based on a complete Strawman. Who, precisely, is arguing that "Radiohead can do no wrong"? I love Radiohead. They are in my all-time top five. But I am happy to entertain arguments that their recent output has been too heavily doused in electronica, or that Thom Yorke's vision has overwhelmed that of the rest of the band, or that they should be more prolific, or whatever. I would disagree with some of those points, I would agree with others. But if Chris Norris' article is any indication, the critics of Radiohead are in a lot worse shape than even I thought, and I am of the belief that their argument is untenable to begin with.

Plus, Radiohead is fucking awesome.

The NRO's Descent Into Badness

The sun will rise, the sun will set, and The National Review will continue its descent into farce. National Review Online’s editorial about President Obama winning the Nobel Prize is far from the worst effort NRO has put forward lately. Faint praise aside, we’re going to look at this magnificent piece of scat bit by bit. As is my custom, I will blockquote theirs and preface mine with ***:

Well, that didn’t take long. But it was almost inevitable: the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. As “the world” hated Pres. George W. Bush, “the world” loves President Obama.

*** Scare quotations marks: the domain of shitty college writers and, well, shitty journalists. Good start.

What do we mean by “the world”? We mean the editors of Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. The faculty at Brown University.

*** Brown University? What the fuck? This is an odd non-sequiter. But I see where you are going here. You’re going to list “stuff we don’t like” knowing your readers will all follow you, nodding in rhythm.

The secretariat of the United Nations. We mean Lord Malloch-Brown, not Václav Klaus.

***Oooh – name dropping. NRO hates the rest of the world. Except when it does not.

When President Bush visited Iraq for the last time, a foe of his threw a shoe at him. The shoe-thrower was taken to be “the world.”

*** By whom? One citation, please. I would like one fucking citation asserting that the shoe thrower = the world. Oh, sorry, “The world.”

Hugo Chávez even made laughing reference to him recently at the U.N.

*** This is incoherent. To whom is the “him” referring to in this sentence? We must assume Bush, even though between “him” and Bush come both Chavez and the shoe-thrower, not to mention the passive construction “was taken” which must allude to some subject of some sort, though sentence structure is not a strength in this particular editorial.

Many Iraqis admire and appreciate President Bush. They do not count as “the world.”

*** This is just a peculiar sentence. I am sure some Iraqis admire President Bush. But since it is NRO that is making such hay out of this “the world” conceit, it is perhaps not surprising that they are able to come up with a vague example in opposition. Kudos for defeating that straw man you so bravely created, editors! Now kick him when he’s down.

Very much counting as “the world” is the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

*** Ok. This is really getting to be bizarre. We are talking about the Nobel Prize. So the Nobel Prize Committee is going to play a role. Yet rather than simply go after the Nobel Prize Committee to begin with, the chosen subject of this editorial is “the world.”

They practically define it.

*** For fuck’s sake, learn how to use pronouns. And as importantly, how not to. This editorial (see how it works?) is a complete jumble.

Every year since 1901, the peace prize has been given by a committee of five Norwegians. They are appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting. The Nobel Peace Prize always reflects the consensus of Norwegian politics.

*** This strikes me as generalization, but again, it also strikes me as seeming more damning than it really is. I am not certain what is so shocking about a Norwegian body reflecting the consensus of Norway.

And that consensus is, in a word — a word the Norwegians might well choose — “progressive.”

*** Just when I thought the writing could not get any worse . . . .

Others might call it left-wing.

*** I wonder who these "others" might be.

In any case, the Nobel Peace Prize almost never disappoints the editors of Le Monde, the faculty at Brown, etc.

*** This is the second reference to Brown. This makes absolutely no sense in the context of an editorial about the nefariousness of “the world.” Yet NRO is doubling down on their inapt argument.

The committee has said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

*** Naturally the least objectionable paragraph in this entire piece is almost entirely a quotation.

That is true (at least in part). The Nobel Committee appreciates Obama for his repudiation of all things Bush.

*** Well, repudiating all things Bush makes sense both on the merits and in the politics. Nonetheless, this reductionist argument brings us right back to that straw man again. Poor bastard, being revived only to be beaten up again.

The new president has frozen out America’s allies in Eastern Europe, causing great consternation among them.

*** Actually, the new president has done no such thing. What he did was scrap a program that has never for one brief and shining second shown any signs of working in favor of allocating resources to something that might work. It seems perplexing that now conservatives want to set the bar of international relations down to “consternation” when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Or “the world.”

He has put “daylight” between America and its No. 1 Middle Eastern ally, Israel.

*** Perhaps. Or perhaps he has “put daylight” between America and the utterly unjustifiable policy of continuing to build settlements in the West Bank. These are not the same things. Binyamin Netanyahu is not Israel. And Obama’s view is one that has support in many Israeli circles.

He kept almost mum when Iranian democrats massed in the streets to demand a more decent life — the American focus is on negotiating with the regime.

*** This is reductionist piffle. The internal politics of Iran are first and foremost an Iranian matter. Obama spoke out – not loudly enough for some, to be sure – against the crackdowns on the opposition. The American focus is not on negotiating with the regime – that is a tactic, one of several in the arsenal, which also includes the sanctions that the administration just helped impose. This is the sort of profound dishonesty that has come to characterize The National Review.

He gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, the U.N. official who presided over Durban, that hate-Israel jamboree.

*** Yep. Many of us opposed that move, though reducing Mary Robinson to the Durban conference ignores a far more complex person with a far more complex history. Asserting that the most important thing we need to know about Robinson is her role in Durban is akin to asserting that the most important thing we need to know about Ted Williams was that he was a lousy bunter.

He yukked it up with Chávez, giving him a soul-brother handshake and calling him “mi amigo.”

*** He did no such fucking thing. He engaged in the niceties of diplomacy. Sometimes that involves holding hands with Arab heads of state, sometimes that apparently involves peering into the soul of despots, and sometimes it involves using rudimentary Spanish and not being a dick to foreign heads of state. And who the fuck uses the term “soul-brother handshake” in the year 2009? Honkies, I guess. (Honkies who write for magazines that opposed the Civil Rights Act. But that’s tracing a history of the magazine’s relationship with race that can wait for another day. But don't think I am not on to your little game, NRO.)

He went along with an invitation to Cuba to rejoin the Organization of American States — this despite that fact that the OAS is supposed to be for democracies, not police states.

*** Have you seen the countries on the OAS member list? Haiti? Venezuela? I thought conservatives were the ones who took stock of the real world. That “supposed to” shit is pure “progressive” squishiness I tells ya. Our Cuba policy has been stupid for more than a generation by the way.

He had America rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, under Bush, we bowed out of: because it was dominated by such lovely regimes as the ones in Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Syria, and Sudan; because it existed almost solely to defame Israel.

*** The UN Human Rights Council sucks. It also is almost certainly not going anywhere. Better to be on it and reform from within. We get it though – you’re the one true voice for Israel.

All these moves of Obama, the Nobel Committee appreciates immensely.

*** Holy fucked up syntax, Batman, what is the subject of that sentence?

This is an American president in their own image, the kind of president they will cheer and honor.

*** I know this is supposed to be an insult. It’s not. Just FYI.

For them, Obama is a dream president, just as Bush was a nightmare president. He is the first “post-American president,” as John Bolton and others have said.

*** Ah, yes, the old impugning his Americanness trope. And naturally John Bolton is the most useful person to use to define a president he opposes.

For “the world,” that is a dream president.

*** Seriously – did they farm out the writing of this thing to an intern? And not their best one?

Our Declaration of Independence speaks of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” A decent respect is not a need for approval.

*** And since no one is saying that it is, I have no idea why this quotation and the assertion that follows is included in this essay.

Besides, who is mankind? Merely the Nobel Committee and the shoe-thrower, or Bush-loving Iraqis, too?

*** To whom is this question aimed? Again: Give one citation, just one, from the administration, or indeed from the Nobel Committee, implying that Iraqis do not matter or bolstering the case of the show thrower. You cannot just make shit up. Well, sadly, you can and do. But it’s still made up.

We might ask another question: Whose approval would President Obama rather have: that of the Nobel Committee or that of the Rotary Club in Butte?

*** Well, yes, as far as false dichotomies go, this is a particularly terrible one. Why is Obama being asked to choose?

In recent years, the Nobel Committee has done everything possible to express its abhorrence of Bush and his ways.

*** To which I say: Good job Nobel Committee. George W. Bush was a shitty president. Let’s go have a drink. As long as the Rotary Club of Butte does not want to go – they get priority.

In 2001, they gave the peace prize to Kofi Annan and the U.N. The message, in part, was: “America, you’d better not respond to 9/11 by yourselves, or too aggressively.”

*** Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Going virtually alone in the wrong war at the wrong time was all kinds of dumb, though. I’m no huge Kofi Annan fan, though, so: whatever.

The next year, they gave the prize to Jimmy Carter, and, here, the chairman of the committee was refreshingly candid: saying that they were honoring Carter in order to give Bush “a kick in the leg,” or, in our own parlance, a black eye.

*** What, are your readers so fucking dumb that they would not have been able to figure out that complex leg-kicking metaphor? Actually, strike that question as unnecessary.

A more honorable president might have refused that award, if given for the purpose of bashing the current president.

*** This is certainly my favorite argument: That others should reject the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the equivalent of being pissed at your favorite indie band for having an album that sells a lot of copies and thus spoiling your view of their purity. Jimmy Carter does lots of things that drive me mad. I oppose many of his politics, including many of his views on Israel. But taken as a whole, the man has given his all for humanity. Dispute his receiving the Nobel if you’d like. But to ascribe malign motives for something like this reveals someone as being small and petty. Sand it ain’t Carter.

Another black eye came in 2005, when the committee gave the award to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency. ElBaradei has said explicitly that his goal — his only “brief,” as he has put it — is to prevent military action against Iran. Accordingly, he has repeatedly downplayed that country’s nuclear progress. And the IAEA has repeatedly looked foolish, and blind. In Beijing the other day, ElBaradei said that the number-one threat to peace in the Middle East is . . . Israel, and its nukes.

*** More reductionism. When you use words like “only,” a single exception destroys your case. Given that ElBaradei took his post with the IAEA in 1997, the argument that his sole concern has to do with the Bush administration or its successors is a Goldbergian use of history, which is to say: wrong. Furthermore, the IAEA did work to try to prevent the spread of nukes after 9/11. Again: debate the case on its merits. Don’t lie and misrepresent just to make your case easier to win in the echo chamber. (Especially when you have a decent case.)

In 2007, the Nobel Committee went with Al Gore and the U.N.’s global-warming people.

*** Um, yes. Is there an argument here, or have you just given up?

And now, in 2009, Obama.

*** I have no objections to this sentence. Well, it does not really have a subject. Or a verb. But it’s probably still the best crafted sentence in the essay.

This award will cause people — will cause “the world” — to say that America is back in the fold, back in the good graces of “the world.” After a season apart, under the cowboy Bush, America is a citizen of “the world” once again. In the Nobel Committee sense of “the world,” we are.

*** The funny thing is that there is an argument here that a better writer and more intellectually honest editorial board could have put together. And it could be a good one. But the scare quotation marks, the unwillingness to consider that global opinion toward the United States has improved dramatically with the emergence of Obama (or what some would call “facts” – I can use those little quotation marks too!) and the bizarre and random hopping from lily pad to lily pad have all obscured that argument.

The committee would never have given the award to Ronald Reagan, much as he did for peace, and much as Mrs. Reagan may have wanted it for him. (The committee did award Gorbachev, however.)

*** Gorbachev did more than Reagan did on the issue at hand. And Reagan countenanced Apartheid South Africa and noxious regimes throughout South America. But a Reagan-Gorbachev pairing would have been a good one – and in the future that is the approach the Nobel Committee would take, only to take incredible grief for it.

Years ago, National Review made the editorial quip that the Nobel Peace Prize, every year, should be given to the Defense Department: because the American military was the world’s foremost guarantor of peace.

*** Blah blah blah. It wasn’t as clever as you thought it was then and did not warrant repeating now. In any case, who is the Commander in Chief of the military right now? Or is 2009 the one year it does not hold despite your invoking it now?

A few days ago, there was a rumor that Harry Wu, the anti-Communist dissident from China, would win the peace prize. That was terribly unlikely. Would the committee ever honor Oscar Biscet, the Afro-Cuban political prisoner who is a symbol of hope, defiance, and decency in that country? A virtual impossibility.

*** Counterfactuals are fun. Because they are incontrovertible. Lots of people don’t win the award. John Lewis is a personal favorite of mine. He will never win it. That does not make the exercise an ignoble one.

President Bush gave a Medal of Freedom to Biscet (in absentia, of course); Obama gave one to Mary Robinson. That neatly illustrates the difference between those two presidents, and between types who win the Nobel prize and those who don’t.

*** No. No it doesn’t. It does no such thing. What it does is shows that the editors at NRO sure can cherry pick to make the most fucktarded of arguments in a piece full of developmentally challenged assertions.

Alfred Nobel, a great man, wanted his prize to go to “champions of peace,” men and women who genuinely contributed to peace in the world. He deplored the “absurd and futile efforts of windbags who are capable of thwarting the best of aims.” Can Barack Obama really make a contribution to peace, the way the Reagans of the world genuinely do? Reagan got no peace prize, but he made a huge positive difference, and the world, along with “the world,” should know that Oslo doesn’t always know best.

*** Why was Reagan then not the foundation of this piece? Why did he not appear in the first paragraph? How the fuck can the editors of the National Review have no idea how to structure a fucking opinion piece? (Ronald Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1985 and individuals in his administration brokered illegal arms for hostages deals with . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . Iran!!!!)

Tilting at Strawmen

I am not certain with whom Arizona State University historian Stephen Pyne is arguing in this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. His basic point is that we need to teach history graduate students how to write well, and particularly how to write books. Yeah, thanks Doc. It might be a good idea to teach them to think clearly and to read closely too. But here is the thing: I do not see any evidence that we are not doing this as a profession.

There is an old canard out there that says that academic historians do not write well. And it has been repeated so often, not so much by folks like Pyne, who ought to know better, but by journalists who usually don't know what the fuck they are talking about. I read more academic history than any journalist. I would say that the hit-to-miss ratio is no worse than it is for columnists or reporters, or even for journalists writing books, for whom the writing really ought to be key since they are trying to sell to a non-specialist audience. And this is the key issue -- I am not certain what these critics mean by "bad writing." Sometimes it is actually ok for historians to write to other historians. All specialized writing is not bad, especially when that writing is geared toward specialists. And there is a huge number of very well written books that are no less well written because they do not make it big and end up selling primarily to other academics.

When I work I do so surrounded by piles of papers and documents and books and cd's and all sorts of other junk. I am going to pull out the smallest book pile next to me, without paring it, without even looking at any of the books. Ok, here is what I have: Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty, a book destined to win a number of awards and deservedly so, largely because of the force of the argument and certainly because of the felicity of the writing. Sugrue is a professional historian. He teaches at Penn; Peniel Joseph's Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour. It was reviewed everywhere. I reviewed it for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Virtually every review commented on the high quality of the writing. Joseph is a professional historian. He teaches at Brandeis; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie. Again: Reviewed everywhere, widely praised, largely for the writing. Profesional historian. Yale; Two collections of essays, Freedom North and Groundwork, both edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard. Aimed mostly toward other historians. Like most essay collections the quality of the writing is uneven, but some of them are very good, and those that are not serve another purpose.

This is just a tiny slice of books, all interconnected because they touch upon a theme I am addressing in one small section of one chapter of a book I am writing. I could have pulled from a pile of books on South Africa in the 1980s or 1940s, another on sports and society, and another on race in the US in the 1940s. Putting forward that historians don't write well is a serial idiocy that has gone unchallenged for so long that the assertion has somehow become sufficient. Well it is not. I received an MA from one school, a PhD from another, and basically in between the two (I had started my first quarter at my PhD program first) was enrolled in a graduate program in South Africa for the purposes of a year-long fellowship. At all three of those schools, writing well was emphasized, writing clearly, even if not spectacularly, was a base-line expectation. Perhaps I was just lucky. But I suspect that the assertion of the absence of attention to writing lacks even the rudimentary evidence that a first-year MA student knows is required for an argument.

Winningest Sports Cities?

The Toronto Star produced the following map (accompanying this article) showing the "winningest sports cities" in North America:

Now I fully expected Boston to rank at the top -- I could not even think of a city that would come close. So how to explain the methodology, and therefore the results, whereby Indianapolis (with exactly one championship during the time period under discussion, the period since 2000) ranks number one and three Canadian cities are in the top ten? (With Vancouver being ranked #3 -- do they count the Grizzlies, who did not leave town until after the 200-2001 season, in which the Grizz had a .280 winning percentage? Or the second half of a 1999-2000 season when they were slightly worse?)

First, they are going solely by winning percentage. Which is just inane -- in the time that Indy has won one title between its two teams that count (the Pacers and the Colts) the Boston teams IN THOSE SAME TWO SPORTS have won four championships. And the Red Sox have added two. Winning percentages in sports with actual championships are fairly meaningless as anything other than a rough aggregate. North America isn't the freaking British Premier League. And thank God for that, though relegation in our sports leagues would be awesome.

But how to explain the Canadian presence? Well, despite not counting Major League Soccer -- an exclusion I can live with, though why include the NHL in that case? -- the survey counts THE CANADIAN FUCKING FOOTBALL LEAGUE! That's right -- Vancouver's football team counts as much as the Cleveland Browns just because they are in the position every year of winning their Gray Cup. Any of the worst Cleveland Browns teams of any one of the last ten years (which provides a bevy of options) would take an all star team drawn from the best Canadian Football League team of the last ten years and would rape, pillage, plunder, and rape that team again. This is not even an argument I will have. I am simply right.

Look -- no argument drives me insane more than when some nimrod claims that a great college sports team in any given year would beat the worst professional team in that sport. The best team will have ten to twenty guys become professionals, not all of whom will pan out. The worst professional team still consists of much more talented players all of whom, tautologically enough, managed to become professional football players. Last season's historically woeful Detroit Lions would beat last year's Florida Gators by fifty every time out. But I will make the claim that the collegiate "national champion" (fuck the BCS) in any given year would easily be able to compete in the CFL, which draws its talent from a pool that does not include the 250+ new players drafted into the NFL. The talent disparity so clear between even the worst (real) professional team and the best college team in that same sport is fully mitigated when talking about the talent level in the CFL.

Anyhow, the upshot: The Toronto Star sports section is clearly populated by ridge-browed asstards.

This is why we should probably just take over Canada.

David Barash is a Moron: Idiocy Alert

Well, folks, I have my nominee for the dumbest thing written by anyone anywhere in 2009, and if you think about today's climate of dialogue, that's quite an assertion. My selection comes from David P. Barash, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, whose "The Roar of the Crowd: Sports Fans' Primal Behavior" appeared in March in The Chronicle Review, a publication that most of the time I really like, as it provides an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the life of the mind.

Under ordinary circumstances I would go paragraph-by-paragraph, line-by-line to eviscerate this screed against being a sports fan. But the article does not compensate for its idiocy with brevity, so I'm only going to have to address a few of the lowlights. I will excerpt some of the passages and then will provide my responses -- if you are a sports fan, enjoy:

Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn't religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month's collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.

Note the condescension. But also note that one could replace "spectator sports" with, say, movies (I bet you a thousand dollars Barash prefers the word "film") or theater or music or television, or even literature while making the same argument. In other words, yes, as human beings we sometimes do not make all of our own amusements. Even onanism, intellectual (a skill at which Barash seems particularly well equipped) and otherwise, cannot provide sole intellectual sustenance. Sometimes we rely on others, since we live in communities larger than ourselves, to help facilitate our various enjoyments. Or maybe Barash only watches movies in which he knows all of the participants. Plus sports have an added benefit: They are real. I love movies and tv and the other amusements, but I don't privilege them over sports largely because sports represent real drama played out in real time by real people with immense gifts and who do not have their lines or their blocking written out for them.

Now for the second paragraph:

Not that I would try to stop anyone from root, root, rooting to his or her heart's content. It's just that such things are normally done by pigs, in the mud, or by seedlings, lacking a firm grip on reality — fine for them, but I am not at all sure this is something that human beings should do. In desperation, if threatened with starvation, I suppose that I would root — for dinner. But for the home team? Never.

Ha! See what he did there? Root can have two different meanings! Sports fans can root! Pigs do something entirely different, called "rooting"! David Barash is clever. I'd also bet I can list a whole lot of really really smart sports fans who have a perfectly fine grip on reality. Why, some of them are even in academia. Are they really all akin to pigs? Still, that little "root" wordplay? Priceless!

So instead of sports, he suggests:

Is life so pale, dull, and unsatisfying that it must be experienced vicariously in order to be savored? You might try reading a book, talking with your family, going for a walk, wrestling with the dog, listening to some music, smelling a flower, making love.

Now this is so serially foolish that I really do not even know where to begin. Once again I'll point out the vicarious nature of, say, watching movies or going to the theater. But beyond that, I love his dualism -- if you spend three hours watching a ballgame, for Barash the logical conclusion is that your life is dull. It must be great to be one of David Barash's students, because it means you can get away with saying some really fucking inane, illogical things in the papers you write for him because David Barash is clearly a complete fucking moron. (Hey, he introduced the name calling.) You see, apparently no one who watches sports reads books. (Though I am going to place as an aside that I would bet you a thousand dollars that as a disciplinary imperative as a historian I've read a lot more books in 2009 than psychologist David Barash.) If you watch sports you do not talk with your family. I certainly am not going for a walk with my wife in the next half hour because I will also watch sports today. We own cats, so he's got me there. But if you watch sports and have a dog, sorry -- you have to pick one! Smelling a flower doesn't really take all that much time, but again, the logic is unassailable. And it is a proven fact -- sports fans never have sex. Which is why going to a ballgame is a bit like attending a Shaker meeting -- there are lots of old folks because of the prohibitions against sexual reproduction. If I ever quit on sports though, I am going to root the hell out of . . . (hey, another meaning for root! David Barash, watch yourself. I'm catching on fast!)

Then we get some some ham-handed differentiation between those who participate in sports -- which he sees as admirable, and thank God we jocks have his imprimatur -- and those who watch. Because they are obviously never the same people. People who love sports either only participate or watch, in David Barash's reading-prolific, wife-walking, dog-wrestling, flower-sniffing, cocksman's life. I'm not even going to waste much time pointing out with how absurd his argument is, or reminding you how those who have played the game often love the game in myriad forms. Because later on he drops this little gem:

Of course, there have been athletes who were admirable, even off the field. On balance, however, the probability is that successful athletes number among themselves more than their share of alcoholics, misogynists, sociopaths, and violence-prone dimwits and miscreants. After all, these are adults paid to play children's games, and there is simply no reason why the ability to do remarkable things with one's body — things that are generally quick and violent — should make someone worth emulating in any other way, and probably good reasons why the opposite is more likely.

Now this one absolutely infuriates me. For one thing, it's a pretty fucking brazen assertion without even a scintilla of evidence. And it is an assertion from someone who presumably does not watch enough sports to be making this sort of value judgment. There is also, Dr. Barash, no reason to assume that the ability to do, let us say "semi remarkable" things with one's mind "someone worth emulating in any other way." Therefore following your logic, I would assume that the probability is that successful psychology professors at the University of Washington number among themselves more than their share of pedophiles. The logic is exactly the same. Except that society generally does not give two shits about psychology professors, so their boy-rooting (when you play with fire, Scarecrow . . .) does not end up on Sportscenter or in the newspaper. And naturally a DWI makes news among the famous in a way that someone not getting a DWI does for reasons that ought to be apparent to anyone who understands a rudiment about how the world functions. And yet clearly based on the episodes he observes between stuffing his face in flowers, Barash is capable of drawing an evidence-free conclusion on athletes based on the public embarrassments of a tiny, tiny, minority. And if there is evidence, he doesn't cite it, which in its way is actually worse. Because I at least acknowledge that I have no evidence that Barash is a pedophile (though following much of his logic in this article, I also have no evidence that David Barash is not a pedophile. Work your algorithm magic, Google!).

Then there are literally hundreds of words of really lousy argumentation that are based on evolutionary psychology, including some claptrap about how we can fool the American oystercatcher by placing an enormous fake egg where her real egg is and she'll try to nurture it. And so somehow this is analogous to human sports fans for reasons that I am either too dumb or not dumb enough to divine. (Stupid American oystercatcher! Stupid sports fans -- watching a game you have come to love over the course of your life because it gives you enjoyment! What a silly fake eggsitter you've turned out to be!)

Much later, because Barash is really beginning to grate, and because you just knew it was coming:

Sometimes the rapport of identification can be harmless, not uncommonly resulting in giggles, laughter, yawning. Sometimes it is more sinister. As Koestler emphasized, the acts of greatest human violence and destructiveness have arisen not from personal aggressiveness or nastiness, but from self-transcendence in the form of seductive, mindless identification with a group. Think of Rwanda's Hutus and Tutsis, Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, Nazis and Jews, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Israelis and Palestinians.

Yes! Yes!! YES!!! Godwin's Law! Godwin's Fucking Law!!! "Sometimes the rapport of identification can be harmless" but sometimes -- and surely in statistically significant enough doses to make it worth addressing -- Red Sox fans actually just want to machete some motherfuckers. ("Yankee fans.") That's just how we roll. And the death camps at Invesco Field? They really are something to behold. Seriously: Is he joking with this?

And for the conclusion, which I will take on sentence by sentence:

By we, the fan means the whole deliciously desirable, immensely seductive group.

You can assume that the "we" in that sentence should probably have appeared in quotation marks and refers to the tendency of sports fans to refer to their Gestapo units, er, favorite teams, with a strong sense of identification. The shame!

He means that he is no longer just little old himself, but something larger, grander, more impressive, more important, and thus, more appealing.

Want to debate whether the gendered language is intentional? In any case -- yes, again, many of us actually realize that we are not in and of ourselves a sustainable planet. We have to look outside of ourselves. I, for example, do not have David Barash's ability to regurgitate cud from one of my four stomach units, so I sometimes look outside of "little old myself" (hello, syntax!) and go to a restaurant. You know who else liked restaurants? Idi Amin.

Sports fans, in this view, are nationalists writ small.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazi nonsense. Except that "nationalism writ small" is an almost useless concept given what "nationalism" actually means as either a word or as a historical concept. It would be like referring to "giantism writ small." Given what giantism is, or what nationalism is, the idea of either being "writ small" indicates a desire to use an ad hominem that one does not understand.

Or oystercatchers writ human, which is to say, moved by inclinations less distinct and less automatic than the rigidly stereotyped response to releasers and the obedient superresponse to supernormal releasers that are found among many animals, but inclined to some sort of response nonetheless.

No idea what this means or what the framework for the analogy is. Just asserting an analogy is insufficient. And most professors in our varying disciplines try to stomp out this sort of fatuous attempt to grasp the world through shallow analogizing. Not David Barash. He got a Chronicle Review article out of it.

There is nothing unusual about it, although even now, I must admit, the whole business perplexes me.

This is the first sane thing you've said: Being a sports fan is an enormously common phenomenon. Given that fact, perhaps it's not everyone else who is wrong. Just a little self reflection might have saved us all this headache. You do not like spectator sports. I do not like evolutionary psychology. The difference is, I would not compare evolutionary psychologists to genocidaires.

But an oystercatcher would understand perfectly.

If you have a better nominee for the most fucktarded thing written in 2009, I'd like to see it. David Barash goes into the clubhouse (sports analogy! Achtung, bitches!) with a lead I do not see him relinquishing.

Rogge's Bizarre Rant

Courtesy of longtime reader and dcat friend Donnie Baseball comes this article from Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports. It seems that Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympics Committee has gone after ubersprinter Usain Bolt for his celebratons at the end of some of his races in these Olympics. Suffice it to say that Rogge is a fatuous gasbag. We could spend days explaining why, but here is a taste from Wetzel's column:

Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games.

All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate.

One of the most powerful men in sports turned the world away from his complicity. Instead, he has flexed his muscles by unloading on a powerless sprinter from a small island nation.

Rogge’s ripping of Usain Bolt’s supposed showboating in two of the most electrifying gold-medal performances of these Games has to be one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.

[There's more (I hope this large excerpt does not violate fair usage, but the column is pretty spot on):]

Oh, this is richer than those bribes and kickbacks the IOC got caught taking.

All the powerful nations — including the United States — have carte blanche at the Games. They can pout and preen, cheat, throw bean balls, file wild complaints, break promises that got them a host bid, whatever they want. They can take turns slapping Rogge and his cronies around like rag dolls as long as the dinner with a good wine list gets paid.

A single individual sprinter? Even if you don’t like his manner, that’s whom Rogge deems it necessary to attack, to issue a worldwide condemnation?

“I understand the joy,” Rogge said. “He might have interpreted that in another way, but the way it was perceived was ‘catch me if you can.’ You don’t do that. But he’ll learn. He’s still a young man.”

Perceived by whom? Old fat cats making billions of Olympic dollars on the backs of athletes like Bolt for a century now? They get to define this? They get to lecture about learning?

Bolt is everything the Olympics are supposed to be about. He isn’t the product of some rich country, some elaborate training program that churns out gold medals by any means necessary.

He’s a breath of fresh air, a guy who came out of nowhere to enrapture the world with his athletic performance and colorful personality. This is no dead-eye product of some massive machine.

He was himself, and the world loved him for it.

On his own force of will, Bolt has become the break-out star of these Games. He saved the post-Michael Phelps Olympics. It wasn’t so much his world-record times, but the flair, the fun.

No one at the track had a problem with this guy; they understood he is everything the sport needs to recover from an era of extreme doping. The Lightning Bolt made people care about track again, something that seemed impossible two weeks ago.

“I don’t feel like he’s being disrespectful,” American Shawn Crawford told the Associated Press. “He deserves to dance.”

Apparently, Rogge would prefer 12-year-old gymnasts too frightened to crack a smile.

It got better when, in the same press conference, he pretended to forget all the lies China told him to get this bid, all the troubles, all the challenges, and praised the host nation. Yes, these have been an exceptionally well-run Games from a tactical standpoint, and the Chinese people have displayed otherworldly kindness.

None of which denies the promises broken, the innocent jailed, the freedoms denied — the kind of issues someone with Jacques Rogge’s standing should be talking about.

He has no spine for that. Not for China. Not for any big country. He had to criticize someone, he had to make headlines, he had to show he was a tough guy. So who better than someone from somewhere that can’t ever touch him back?

Yes, Usain Bolt is the problem of the Olympics. He’s the embarrassment. He’s the one who needs to learn.

Sure, Jacques, sure.

As Donnie Baseball sums it up: "It reminds me of what I really don’t like about the Olympics. All the fun seems to have been sucked right out of the quadrennial spectacle."

Bias in the Academy

At Brainstorm, a blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein discusses perceptions of bias on the part of professors by confusing two distinct issues -- what goes on in the classroom and what professors do when, say, they write an op-ed piece. The comments are also worth perusing. At the end of the day, my argument here is what it always is: Most of us have far too much to do with our time in the classroom to be imposing a political agenda, what many students may think of as being ideological may be no such thing, and this is an irrelevant question in the vast majority of college classes that have almost nothing to do with contemporary politics. When it comes to the question of bias in the classroom there is lots of sound and fury, sturm and drang, and gnashing of teeth about what is ultimately a non-issue (and for some reason, the accusers never look in the halls of business schools, or anywhere outside of the liberal arts, which I find curious).

Elitism and Bitterness

I honestly do not have the intellectual energy or patience to spend a load of time on the idiotic accusations against Barack Obama for saying something that, not to put too fine a point on it, is pretty much fucking true. My "working class" (we were, to put it less euphemistically, "poor") background is clear and is a defining aspect of my character: my parents, who had me when they were still kids, divorced when I was young, and my brother and I lived with a Mom who worked in factories or cleaning floors or waiting tables to keep two kids fed and to keep the lights on in a house where the well sometimes ran dry so we had no water. We spent a large hunk of time at our grandparents' farm, which my dad ran. It was a small, family dairy farm, and it went belly up in the mid-1980s when running a small farm was an almost sure ticket to bankruptcy. In other words, try that elitist liberal Democrat nonsense with someone else, because it isn't working on me. And if you think there is not a great deal of bitterness among the working class, left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat, Republican, and undecided, you are living in a dream world.

Now, I would argue that Obama made an infelicitous linkage between that bitterness and the issues of guns and religion. Not because the ties are not there -- they are, in some ways -- but because the situation is more one of correlation than the causality that Obama implied. I find most amusing the question of Obama being an "elitist," which is one of those assertions so stupid on its face that it would warrant mockery were some people not levying the accusation seriously. First off, anyone at that level of politics is an elite. John McCain has been a Senator for a generation. It does not get much more elite than that. Hillary? Please. If her discomfort around real people were any more palpable she'd spray some sort of warning ink on them like an anti-proletariat octopus. But secondly, how convenient -- how cute! -- to make the black guy in the race, who has served as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and worked as a civil rights lawyer, the elitist! To make the most demonstrably religious person in the race first a Muslim and then a dangerous uber-black Christian because of someone else's preachings, and now to imply that he is anti-religious! To make an issue of the fact that he doesn't bowl well! Without belaboring the point, I am going to have a hard time buying that race does not play a role in all of this.

So where does this issue go from here? My guess, and perhaps my hope, is that while it will be a lingering subtext that some will use to Swift Boat Obama, most people, bitter or not, won't let it have a major impact on their decision unless they were already leaning against Obama. There is a long race to go. The Democratic convention is three months from now -- what, in terms of specifics, do you remember about the various day-to-day aspects of the campaign that surely seemed like life or death matters from back in January? The general election is nearly seven months away. How much of the dynamic of the races from seven months ago is still relevant? Nonetheless, for now Hillary and down the road the McCain people will try to keep this "elitism" accusation alive, despite its absurdity, for as long as possible. This is the political environment in which we live and in which they operate. Obama's so-called gaffe is today's annoyance. But there is worse to come as the stakes get higher. This is far from as ugly as this race will get. Mark my words on that.

Knocking Down Down Goldberg

Some of you may enjoy this takedown of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic and this one from Austin Bramwell in The American Conservative. I did. I'm hoping for my opportunity to write about this truly bad book and awful use of history (yes, I've read enough to be able to assert as much categorically), but I am not certain what the odds are that it will happen.

The Unbearable Lightness of Jonah Goldberg

It's almost impossible to state just how fatuous, intellectually irresponsible and dishonest Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism looks like it is going to be. I've written about this book before and had quite the contre temps with Goldberg via email, who chided me for judging a book I had not read, even though my objection was with the title, which I had read, with the publisher's press materials, which I had read, and with the picture on the cover, which depicted the iconic liberal smiley-face with a Hitler moustache, which even a fucking retard could quite clearly read. (He also tried to get all historical on me, snidely mentioning that much of his intellectual foundation came from a book that in his snide words I "really ought to read," Alonzo Hamby's For the Survival of Democracy. One: Hamby's book does not even vaguely provide intellectual cover for him. Two: I was Hamby's research assistant on that book for more than two years. My name features in the acknowledgments and everything. So maybe, Jonah, you "really ought to read" Hmaby's book as well. Had you actually done so you might not have descended quite so far down the slippery slope of fucktardery.)

Well, Goldberg's book, which was supposed to appear a year-and-a-half ago, might be on its way. It seems that he has not tempered his argument all that much despite the delay. Here is the excerpt from his book jacket that has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere:

The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Now I have my issues with education majors and the very idea of most education departments teaching anything but early childhood ed. But this is so offensively, muddle-headedly, noxiously, stupidly insane that it boggles the imagination. Goldberg is of a type with lots of guys who have climbed the ranks of America's intellectual journals, right and left: He's smart but nowhere near as smart as he has come to conclude that he is. He's been given a lot but believes that those gifts are nothing more than a function of merit. And he is so used to a culture of shouting that in a situation where he is supposed simply to speak -- I'm speaking metaphorically about the responsibility serious people take when writing a book -- that he screams incoherently. I've long been unimpressed with Goldberg is my point.

If you want to see a sample of what other blogging critics have said about Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, I'd recommend starting with Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias, where you can get a sample of the screen captures of the dust jacket ( and see that not only female -- I've no idea why it is just female -- education majors, but also the Democratic Party, The New York Times, and Ivy League professors all fit into his "friendly fascist" category) and a link to more captures from Sadly, No. TNR's Jason Zengerle weighs in at The Plank here, citing Kieren at Crooked Timber, who helpfully points out that one cannot receive an education degree from Swarthmore. Jonah Goldberg sloppy with facts? now I've seen everything! I cannot wait to see who crawls up to defend Goldberg, who in this case really is beyond defense.

Dubious Assertions at TMQ and Another Argument For a Playoff in College Football

I used to look forward with great anticipation to Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback. And Easterbrook is so undeniably smart and provocative that I still read his epic columns regularly. But at least three or four times in any given one of his discursive, sometimes self-indulgent Tuesday articles I practically shout at my computer screen. Let me provide a couple of examples from this week's entry. I am going to excerpt judiciously, which I know is always a fraught endeavor inasmuch as context always matters and I want to be honest in my assessments of his arguments. Please go back to the original if you want the whole of each of these sections of his article.

First I am going to start off with an aside that he makes in an argument about expanding the NFL Hall of Fame -- an argument that I fundamentally buy, but the aside embodies the Easterbrook style:

Comparisons of Canton to baseball's Cooperstown, which only admits a few per year, aren't valid owing to the larger number of players involved in football and to its status as the quintessential team sport. (Teammates matter more in football than baseball, thus more should be honored.)

Note the ipse dixit assertion: "Teammates matter more in football than baseball." Do they? In baseball, every single player is going to have his one-on-one moment where he is fully responsible for his teammates. On any given play, the ball can go anywhere on the field where the fielder will be responsible for making a play. Football players work together as units in a way that baseball players do not, to be sure. But I'm not certain how that means that teammates somehow don't matter as much in baseball. Unless, of course, easterbrook knows of a way in which it would be possible for either, say, a pitcher or catcher to function without the other. And I would never argue something so ultimately impossible to prove as that teammates matter more in baseball than in football. Doing so either way is silly, and to simply assert it as fact is fairly representative of Easterbrook's occasional assert-don't-prove writing style.

The second example reveals one of Easterbrook's other signature moves -- mocking those who disagree with one of his assertions even when his own internal logic dictates that maybe those assertions are not all that he believes that they are. In the midst of an argument that itself is full of inconsistencies and dubious assertions, Easterbrook writes the following:

At this point Appalachian State of beautifully rustic Boone, N.C., is not only good, it's the hottest team in college football at any level. Stretching back to last season, Appalachian State has won three consecutive do-or-die playoff games, then won a championship game, then defeated the nation's No. 5 team on its own turf. Short-term, no football factory school has done anything so impressive. BCS defending champion Florida beat Ohio State, but then wimped out by next scheduling Western Kentucky, a cupcake. Preseason No. 1 USC's short-term performance isn't even close to the Appalachian State run: in their three most recent outings the Trojans lost to UCLA, then won a bowl game, then faced a second-echelon team in Idaho. Appalachian State has won five consecutive max-pressure contests – the Mountaineers are the hottest team south of the NFL. And should New Orleans upset the Colts in the NFL opener, Appalachian State would become the hottest team in football, anywhere, period.

Now note that Easterbrook is celebrating Appalachian State's victory over Michigan. And yet in the same paragraph he argues that Florida "wimped out" by scheduling "Western Kentucky, a cupcake." And so on he goes, insulting the teams that the major programs schedule even while celebrating a win by Appalachian State in a game that beforehand had equal "cupcake" implications. Easterbrook clearly loves that Michigan lost a game that he believes they should never have scheduled even though without scheduling them they could have never lost.

The reality, which the Appalachian State win shows, is that the lines between the levels of college football are more blurred than most people would imagine. Appalachian State is a multi-time Division IAA national champion. In any given year I would strongly press the case that qualitatively the IAA National Champion (and a handful of other elite programs at that level) is easily as good as a large number, quite likely a majority, of IA programs (and yes, I realize the NCAA recognizes a far more cumbersome title for the former IA and IAA schools but let's stick with the old titles for simplicity's and sanity's sake). When all is said and done, Michigan may well end up as a top-25 team, probably far more than that. They have a lot less to be ashamed of than most of the college football experts would have you believe. It is possible for Michigan to be a very good football team that just happened to lose to a very good team in a lower division.

And here is another pretty important point: These small schools line up to get a shot at playing the big guys. Sometime David throws a scare into Goliath. And while this past weekend's game in the Big House marks the biggest upset, it was not the only time in recent history when a IAA team knocked off a IA team, or even a BCS conference IA team. (New Hampshire beat Northwestern a year ago, for example.)

To be sure, football probably has the biggest disparity between divisions because of the size-strength-speed-numbers factor, which creates a multiplier effect. But at all levels and across sports the little guys beat the bigger guys, and that includes DIII upstarts occasionally taking down the DI guys, especially in sports such as track and swimming, but also including basketball.

Finally, as long as there is an incentive for the big time programs to keep a pristine record for the purpose of the BCS, these seemingly lopsided matchups will characterize the early stages of the college football season. There is only one solution: A playoff system in which enough teams and conferences are represented that it does not pay off to schedule true cupcakes, but in which the little guys in the IA ranks are not kept out by virtue of the current BCS conferences refusing to play them. Make it a 16 or more team playoff in which every conference gets at least one representative, in which there will be no allowance for IA independents (join a damned conference, Notre Dame!), and that would allow for five at-large berths that would presumably go to schools from the major conferences. Until that happens, the highest level of college football, for all of its pageantry and wonder and greatness, will never really be a sport we can take fully seriously.

All that said, I love seeing TMQ if for no other reason than that it means the NFL season is upon us.

Self-Indulgence Alert!

Cliff May, President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, gives me some props in the FDD "News & Notes," for my recent argument about "The Unbearable Lightness of Howard Zinn."

For the Parents in the Crowd

For all of you mommies and daddies out there, this week's Boston Globe Magazine has a special issue devoted to the theme of "parenting." There are several interesting articles, including an amusing piece on parental sex lives, an article on the lives of the growing numbers of single dads, one on childrens' diets, and much more. One paragraph in one article stood out to me and annoyed me to no end. In what I thought was an interesting piece questioning whether the increasingly prevalent idea of the over-scheduled child is something of a suburban myth, the authors (responsibly) went to the author of a book espousing the case of the too-busy child in response to a study by Yale child psychologists questioning what has now become the conventional wisdom of overtaxed children. Here is what he said:

"Baloney. Nonsense," says Alvin Rosenfeld, Greenwich, Connecticut-based coauthor of The Over-Scheduled Child. "You can come up with any statistical analysis that you want. But I challenge you to go to any upper-middle-class neighborhood and ask 20 moms and tell me I’m wrong. Ask any hockey parent."

Now I come neither to bury nor to praise the idea that kids may or may not be overscheduled. But if this is the best he can come up with, Alvin Rosenfeld, Greenwich, Connecticut-based coauthor of The Over-Scheduled Child, is a jackass. Obviously he has a dog in this hunt. He wants to sell more books espousing his theory. But look at the callous disregard of facts and evidence. Instead, he challenges you to gather anecdotes (anecdotal evidence, by the way, can be fine, but usually to supplement not supplant other data) to find out not how busy the kids are, but rather how busy the parents are. And his topper is to ask hockey parents. (Even in Boston, what percentage of kids do you think play hockey?) So forget those pointy-headed Yale guys. Rosenfeld believes in his argument. And he believes that parents will believe his argument. Even though a good number of those parents will have multiple children, and so they might be run ragged even if the kids are actually functioning in appropriately scheduled worlds. Plus, parents in any era would have answered that they were run ragged. How does that tell us that over time those parents are more harried. (Hint: It doesn't.)In any case, that bugged me and I have thus devoted much more time to it than it deserved.

But the article on parent sex amused me and for those of you with kids, the whole issue will surely be of some interest. (My own inordinate attention to the issue probably stems from the fact that we have our [!!] three goddaughters, 8, 10, 12, with us for the month, and so suddenly these issues are not just abstractions.)