A Town, A Team, A Documentary

The Onion SportsDome (which you probably should be watching) might just be tweaking Odessa (Friday Night Lights : The Book, The Movie, The television show) "High School Football Documentaries a Way of Life In Small Texas Town."

An Open Letter

An open letter to the Odessa American Subscription Manager, but really to all of you who solicit business over the phone --

I recently received a call (in my office, while at work) asking me about (re-) subscribing to the OA. I was happy to do so and we went through the process with one of your sales representatives of getting me back on board.

It is, to be honest, unnecessary for me to subscribe -- I get the paper on campus for free four days a week and if I want it on the weekend, assuming I am in town, I can just buy it. Your subscription rate is too expensive and the paper can pile up if I am away for a few days or if I don't have the time to flip through it. But I like the idea of supporting the actual print newspaper and subscribing to the local paper, even if I already read it, further ties me to the local community.

In any case, when your sales rep -- who was competent and efficient, if a bit tied to her script -- passed me over to you I thought we were ready to finalize the process. Then you started trying to get me to pay right there and then. I get that. I do. But here is the deal -- I'm not going to give you my credit card information over the phone. I have not yet received a newspaper for one thing. But for another, too often these days you pass along your credit card information, and lo and behold, automatic renewal happens at a rate far higher than that of the extra-special bonus rate that hooked me to begin with. I think it's called a bait and switch, though I might be mixing my metaphors for tawdry business behavior.

So once I thought we were clear on how payment was going to work, you decided to chime in with "you know, sir, when the paper does come you do have to pay for it." That's when I responded, not unreasonably I'd argue, with "You know what? Fuck you. Cancel this transaction. I won't be disrespected like that."

You see, you need my business more than I need you. Oh, that's not always the case. My credit card company has me over a barrel. As do my electric and cable companies, albeit for different reasons. But you? A representative of that dodo bird of the 21st century, the local newspaper? You're expendable. At least to me you are. And apparently to most people all across the country. And the funny thing is in class not an hour before our little chat I actually encouraged my students to read the paper and gave them examples of two recent articles from the OA that are germane to our class topic. I guess I won't make that mistake again.

No, my response stands. Fuck you. Fuck you for daring to question my integrity. Fuck you for not understanding when "please send me a bill" means "I'm not giving you my credit card number." And, really, fuck you for not understanding the way this particular transaction works. Oh, I'll continue to snag copies for free on campus. But you've pretty much guaranteed that free is the only way this relationship works from here on out. And take a minute and ask yourself just how many people like me you can afford to alienate.

So, yeah. Fuck you.

Sincerely --
More Customers Than You Think

Oh No, Mojo!

Odessa and Permian High School have come a long way since the days of Friday Night Lights, which revealed a pattern of placing high school football and the guys who played it on a pedestal. Now I always thought that what people missed about FNL is that it told a more universal story than most realized. In many ways Buzz Bissinger's book was less about Permian Mojo than about a society that had elevated high school sports well beyond where they belonged.

Well, whatever progress Permian has made is not going to be helped by a story that has exploded here in Odessa and that has ramifications that we are just now beginning to grasp. I don't want to pile on, so I am just going to direct you here, here, and in the most damning news yet, here and here. There is more to this story than I want to get into here, as I have insight based on knowing several of the named and unnamed principals. But this has the potential to be truly ugly.

On Newspapers

I represent one of those dying cultural anachronisms. I still value, no, cherish, the newspaper. I read a number of newspapers online, and get the vast majority of the information I consume on the internet, to be sure. But I still value the daily newspaper, whether it is the Odessa American delivered to my door every morning, The New York Times delivered on Sunday, the San Antonio Express-News when we are down there, or the ritual of making sure to grab the local paper when I am traveling, unless it comes to the door of a hotel room, which is always a nice surprise.

I grew up reading my local paper and The Boston Globe that my stepfather picked up every day. Without descending into cliche, I love the tactile, tangible element of the daily paper, and I do believe that there are things you catch while reading through the newspaper that you do not when browsing the handy headlines and choosing what to click on when it arrives in your email inbox.

But we keep hearing that the newspaper is dead, and all signs certainly point that way. I hope something happens to salvage the print newspaper, but within a generation I would guess that the daily paper will be greatly diminished, if not an entirely defunct species. In the latest New Yorker, Harvard historian Jill Lepore (whose regular work there is fantastic) has an article on early American newspapers in which a subtext is that the medium's very survival was always in question. The goal may be to reassure, though the realities of this market are rather different from the colonial and early national era. It may not be entirely reassuring, but her piece will at least remind you of the resilience of the daily (or weekly) printed word.

Odessa, The Oil Boom, and Energy Policy

A while back a reader (presumably Canadian -- my sincere apologies -- I forget who) sent along this National Post article on how Odessa is experiencing a boom even as the rest of the country looks at an economy in which virtually all of the fundamentals are decidedly unsound. The "drill, baby, drill" mindset is nonsense, representing shallow sloganeering and empty thought, but will be the vital cog in the local economy in West Texas for a long time. We are not going to achieve energy independence through drilling for oil no matter where we do the drilling. Period. I've long known this and the point was hammered home to me at the Set America Free Energy Summit in Chicago a couple of weeks back. Oil is a fungible commodity and there is no way that we can ever drill our way to a self-sustaining capacity. I am absolutely agnostic about how we move away from oil (I have my preferences -- count me in for supporting the electric car as a first choice -- but adhere to no one true faith) but move away from oil we must.

Overstating the Glow of the Lights

The latest issue of the New York Times' sports magazine, Play has an interesting piece on both Friday Night Lights and the spectacle of Friday Night Lights that inspire the show. Football is fast approaching and so naturally Odessa and the region are getting geared up for another season under the lights. There is no doubting that football is huge in West Texas, and that Permian High is the most prominent program, though in Odessa it appears that the coverage of both PHS and Odessa High are fairly evenhanded (my guess is that Bronchos fans might disagree).

To a degree I take issue with one assertion from Darren Allman, Permian's third-year head coach who played on the Panthers' 1984 state championship team, when he discusses how realistic the television show is:

“The book, movie and TV show are all based on how rabid the people in this community are about high-school football,” he says. “Is that realistic? Yes.” Football is “the No. 1 source of entertainment,” he continues, adding, “It’s what people think about and talk about all the time.”

This represents fiercely insular thinking. Lots of people spend lots of time thinking about football here, to be sure. But football simply is not so dominant throughout the community that we all sit around discussing whether the Panthers can improve on last year's playoff performance. (I think perhaps they can).

For parents and alumni and die-hard fans, of course, local football is huge, as it is in just about any community across the country. But once you escape the penumbral shade of Permian's world, one can live an existence in Odessa quite removed from the black and white wonders of Mojo. And this does not come from a hostile observer -- anyone who has read this blog for even a week nows that I obsessively love sports. But like most things related to high school life, those within its ambit tend to over-inflate the significance of what goes on within.

Of course Coach Allman thinks Permian High football is the be-all and end-all for the community's existence. As well he should as the program's head coach. But one of the problems we as a country tend to have with regard to high school sports is to make them life-or-death, and thus more important than they are. Since 1998 Permian High has made the playoffs exactly once. And by almost any indicator, the community is thriving, arguably more, on the whole, than it ever has. Like a swath of the city's denizens, I'm looking forward to next weekend's Permian Basin Football Preview in the Odessa American. I'm hoping to make my first foray under the lights at Ratliff Stadium this fall. But if I chose to pay the hype no heed, I would not represent a scorned outlier in this community. In a sense, it does Odessa and this region a disservice to imply otherwise.

Back Home

We're back in Odessa and getting settled in. It's good to be back. It's good to be, as I wrote a few months ago, home. Will try to get back into a routine tomorrow.