Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I'm back from the epic New England trip, which included much merriment with friends in Boston, some time seeing my dad and other friends in New Hampshire, and a fruitful and productive AHA meeting. The new semester starts tomorrow and with it, I hope, regular posting.

NHS -- 2010 New Hampshire State Football Champions! (With A Hint of Melancholy)

I never got to play for a state championship when I played football for Newport High School. My sophomore year we lost in the first round of the playoffs to a team we had beaten just a few weeks earlier. My junior year Newport began an ill-fated experiment in playing in a league of Vermont and New Hampshire teams, the Connecticut Valley League, that made total sense geographically (I don't think we had a road trip of any more than an hour in two seasons). But the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association was not a fan of our trans-state machinations, and so for two years we were ineligible to play for any sort of postseason berth. Both years we had winning records against teams from schools that were at least twice as big as we were and in some cases four times as big -- each of the New Hampshire schools in the conference would later play in conferences two or more divisions above Newport.

The next year, when I was a freshman in college, Newport went back to the NHIAA with its tail between its legs, entered the normal divisional system (which has changed at least five times in the last three decades) and won a state championship in a tiny division of the state's tiniest football playing schools, and between then and 1995 won at least two other championships. After something of a dry spell (brought about at least in part because Newport continues to be one of the smallest, if the the smallest, football-playing high school in New Hampshire) Newport again emerged as state champions last weekend after crushing a team from Gilford that had defeated my Tigers by twenty points two weeks earlier. The final score was 35-0, all the more impressive because it took place on Gilford's home field. And in typical Newport fashion, residents of the Sunshine Town traveled well -- we likely outnumbered the home crowd by a substantial margin. My junior year we played a pivotal conference game against Lebanon, 45 minutes up the road, and Newport, a town of 6,000 people then as now, had fans numbering in the thousands on the sidelines. (For posterity's sake I should note that I made the first tackle in that game against Labanon's All State kick returner and running back. Yeay me!).

My uncles won a couple of state championships back in the 1970s and Newport won another a few years before I got to the varsity. But because of the CVL experiment I never got particularly close to a state championship in football despite playing for teams that had a record of something like 18-7 in my three years. And while I am proud of my individual track state championships, it's just not the same thing inasmuch as no one actually gives a shit.

I certainly have not long lamented not winning a state championship in high school. I was always better at track than football, and while I was recruited by a few small colleges to play football, once I got into Williams I banished any of those ideas, though I have long regretted not even trying to "walk on" for the Ephs. But Newport winning brought back a bit of melancholy.

Newport is a small high school in a small town. The connection that one has to a school such as NHS is deeply personal, made all the more so by the intimacy of a community such as NHS. I would guess that there have been fewer graduates of Newport High School since I left for Williams than walk the halls of Permian High School this morning. I know the head coach (who was one of my high school teachers, who was then the baseball coach who had been passed over for the head coaching job, who some of the town idiots -- including the AD -- tried to remove a few years ago after his only losing season in nearly two decades, and who is by just about any measure the most successful football coach in Newport's pretty solid football history) and talked to him on Sunday. Most of the players have names I recognize -- I played with their fathers or uncles or brothers. And now they are New Hampshire Division VI State Champions.

Glory To Newport . . .

Selling the Farm

For almost four centuries the Tuttles of Dover New Hampshire have been farming the same plot of land, sometimes eking by, sometimes prosperously, but continuously, and longer than any family in America has operated the same farm. But that epoch appears to be coming to an end as the farm that has been passed from generation to generation since 1632 is up for sale. As someone who grew up splitting time between my Mom's house and my Dad and grandparents' family farm not a mile down the road, these stories always resonate with me. American agriculture is dominated by giant conglomerates that nonetheless like to play up the hayseed angle in order to suckle at the government teat even as their practices make it nearly impossible for the Tuttles, never mind families with lesser pedigrees, to make a go of it.

The Granite State v The Green Mountain State

You wanted it, you got it: The Definitive Guide to Telling New Hampshire and Vermont Apart. It's pretty much all true.

A small sample:

Simply put, Vermont is a little bitch. When you see the V in Vermont, think “vagina” and it will help you get a fair assessment of the state. New Hampshire, in contrast, displays a much tougher persona. As you might guess about the only New England state to host a NASCAR race, its residents are more likely to own guns and less likely to have college diplomas, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when your neighbor is as fruity as Vermont.

That's about right.

The Last Bastion

At The Bygone Bureau Josh Fischel has a great feature on the only high school ski jumping league. This story is particularly close to my heart because I competed in this league back when I was on my high school ski team. My high school has one of the jumps from the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics and we often hosted the state meet, though insurance issues have kept NHS from fielding a ski jumping team for quite some time. As for my own ski jumping career? I was decent enough for a guy picking up the sport as a teenager. A guy a few years ahead of me was a multiple-time Olympic ski jumper and by the time he was in his early teens he could no longer use our jump because he would have out-jumped the incline and thus killed himself. Oh -- and there were only two "agony of defeat moments" that I saw. One came when a friend and teammate wiped out on the ramp in Plymouth, which was humiliating for him and so hilarious to us. The other one came when a jumper from Concord High crossed his tips in the air and we all thought we'd just seen someone die. he walked away with a concussion and broken nose.

Aerosmith, RIP?

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Aerosmith. Although traditionally labeled a Boston band, they actually got their start in the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire, where I grew up. It's tough to be a kid growing up in the area without absorbing the bands full corpus. Furthermore, when Aerosmith was starting out, they were regulars in the local party scene so that the first time I planned to go to an Aerosmith concert my Mom was stunned that I'd pay $20 to see them when she saw them for free every weekend.

One great story (that I've heard from multiple sources) among myriads that people roughly my parents' age tell that created the band's local legend involves Steve Tyler hitting on my Mom. It's an anecdote that embodies both figures quite well. At a party one night Tyler was wearing nothing but a fur coat. He went up to my Mom and sort of embraced her, opened up his coat, and put himself on offer. My Mom's response? "Put it away, Steve."

So despite the fact that it has been a long, long time since Aerosmith put out anything even vaguely relevant, it was still something of a shock to know that the band may be no more. Always racked by fraught internal dynamics (they broke up once before in the early 1980s) it seems that Tyler has decided to walk that way.

Mighty Mt. Washington

People from out west, and especially the Rocky Mountain region, look scornfully at mountains in the east coast. And when it comes to scale, it is true, that nothing out east can compare with even modest peaks in, say, Colorado. But as this New York Times feature reminds us all, New Hampshire's Mt. Washington might seem unimpressive compared to its western brethren, the northeast's highest peak is bad ass when it comes to weather conditions, which dwarf the mountains of the Rockies in severity as surely as those mountains dwarf Mt. Washington in sheer altitude.

The Death Penalty and the Granite State

First off, let me be clear right up front: I oppose the death penalty. I do so ardently. The deterrent argument is absurd, the poor and minorities are disproportionately subjected to its whims, and the consequences of being wrong, as we increasingly know has happened in recent decades, ought to be unconscionable. And so when I saw that New Hampshire is set
to execute someone for the first time since 1939 I had more than a passing interest.

And then I saw that he is black. And I could not help but be cynical. New Hampshire is blessed by having pretty low violent crime rates. But those violent crime rates are not nonexistent. Yet the first person sentenced to death in the Granite State in more than fifty years (and those individuals did not die at the hands of the state because of the Supreme Court's decision more than a decade later that the death penalty was unconscionable) is black, in a state with an infinitesimal black population? Color me cynical.

Now there is the X factor. (And this might get me into trouble.) You see, Michael Addison killed a Manchester cop, and as we all know, killing a cop is a capital offense. But why? Why is a cop's life worth more than mine or my wife's or any of my friends or members of my family or the vast majority of the American population? I know the theoretical argument: Cops put their lives on the line every time they put on the uniform. But this is sort of bullshit. No, let me rephrase that: It's actually complete bullshit. I'd be very curious to know whether more cops died last year at the hands of assailants than did, say, construction workers doing their jobs. And I'd be especially curious to know how many cops killed people "in the line of duty" who maybe did not deserve to die, as opposed to how many, again, let's say construction workers, killed people.

And maybe my bias comes from being a native of a small town in New Hampshire where cops most decidedly did not put their lives on the line, but did take their power to its very puffed-up limits whenever dealing with, well, anyone. I guess at the end of the day, I'm pretty sceptical of the heroism rhetoric. You know what I'm talking about. It's the whole post 9/11 dialogue that has done a pretty good job of chilling dissent. Cops and firemen and soldiers have become heroes not by virtue of what they actually do as cops and firemen and soldiers, but simply by virtue of being cops and firemen and soldiers. In another political climate, this standard would be simply silly, and in reality it is inane and ought to be called as much. People become cops and firemen and join the military for a whole host of reasons. And in the line of duty they act in a host of ways, some, but relatively few, heroically.

In any case, New Hampshire, one of the whitest states in the country, is about to execute the first person the state has put to death since 1939. And that person is a black male. Forgive me for being cynical. But I am calling bullshit on my home state.

The Unbearable Lightness of Broder

In recent days the dean of American political reporting, David Broder, has taken his particular brand of anodyne, tepid centrism to dcat's home state of New Hampshire. In two columns for The Washington Post Broder has made unobjectionable, but also largely uninteresting, arguments about how Granite State voters perceive the fall's races with implications for what that might (or might not! No sense being hasty or rash with conclusions in what is supposed to be America's premiere opinion column!) mean for other swing states. In the first column he implies that Barack Obama has work to do to convince New Hampshire voters even though the evidence he reveals actually seems to indicate that both candidates have work to do and that many voters are yet undecided. Earthshattering! In the second he lets us know that New Hampshire is in play for both presidential and Congressional politics because the Democrats have spent a great deal of tiem an energy there. Well I'll be! (Of course, as he notes, Democrats won all significant elections in the state in 2006, so perhaps this will not be all that surprising news to those who follow politics.)

But hey, who said New Hampshire only matters once every four years during the presidential season. David Broder has cast his eye upon the flinty denizens of the state. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Cracking the Granite State

At The Washington Post EJ Dionne shows how close the presidential contest is likely to be in New Hampshire, and how in a close election the Granite State and other small states might play the role of kingmaker. When I was growing up in the land of John Sununu the idea that rock ribbed republican New Hampshire could be in play for Democrats would have been absurd. And yet given demographic and political changes in the state (which I have always argued was less conservative than libertarian) in recent years and the state's recent trends, I do not quite grasp why Dionne seems to surprised by these changes, especially given that nosedive this administration has taken in popularity and reputation since 2004.

Mt. Washington

There are certainly taller mountains than New Hampshire's Mt. Washington. But there are not a lot of places that are more rugged. The Washington Post travel section featured Mt. Washington and its worst-in-the-world weather

this weekend. Twenty years ago this summer a group of friends and I spent a weekend hiking and camping high in Mt. Washington on a break from a summer program at St. Paul's School in Concord. The weekend still lives within me, and in my mind's eye I'll probably always be 17, surrounded by friends and the Presidential Range.

More on Politics

Sorry the posting has been so light -- it's been a crazy break and in the last couple of days I've been catching up on piles of work while at the same time trying to cobble together my first slovenly time of the break right before the new term kicks in next week.

The last issue of The New Yorker has two worthwhile articles about the GOP race. In "Talk of the Town," Hendrick Hertzberg has a great little piece taking a skeptical approach to the use of religion in campaigns, especially the religiosity of Huckabee and Romney. Elizabeth Kolbert profiles Rudy Giuliani in a way unlikely to change many minds among his detractors (among whom I clearly rank).

I do not have a whole lot to add to the noise about New Hampshire. Both races are fascinating and have been made moreso by the results in the Granite State. I am happy for McCain and hope that he can get redemption for what happened to him at the hands of the Rove-Bush machine in 2000. On the Democratic side we've already heard more than we need to about the Comeback Kid redux but the most important aspect to me is that there is still a race, and that we'll have some time for an actual primary contest as opposed to a coronation for one side or the other. South Carolina ande Nevada represent shifts in geography and demographics, so soon enough we may have a clearer picture. I, for one, would welcome having this nomination process use more of the calendar than recent election cycles have. There is no reason why we need to have our candidates set before Valentine's Day. And maybe continued close competitions will prevent the media from establishing narratives that become self-fulfilling.

Leading the Way

Good for my home state. New England is leading the way on civil unions and gay marriage, and New Hampshire joined with little hoopla.

Iowa and New Hampshire

The Washington Post has a feature on the political cultures of New Hampshire and Iowa. I'm a native of the Granite State, and so I'm clearly biased, but I think that New Hampshire comes across better than Iowa, where the most notable aspects that stand out in the story are the idea of "Iowa Nice" and the fact that Iowa is "family oriented." As for the first element, Minnesotans probably more famously claim something called "Minnesota Nice," which and this brings us to Midwestern stereotypes that in the end aren't very useful. The second assertion is actually quite bothersome. Iowans are "family oriented" relative to whom, precisely? The northeast (and Blue States generally), after all, tends to have lower divorce rates. (And if this chart is to be believed, those nice Iowans commit almost every significant crime at a higher rate than people in New Hampshire. I'm sure they do it nicely. But I'm just sayin' is all.)

Ultimately I'm wary of trying to provide these kinds of generalizations about entire states or regions. Iowa has lots of nice people who love their families, I'm sure. But almost certainly no more so than Massachusetts or New Hampshire or Texas. Claiming to love families is a bit like saying one supports human rights or education. It's the low hanging fruit because no one actually opposes those things. In any case, if the purpose of the article is either to confirm or deny the vaunted status of Iowa or New Hampshire, I doubt this article will shift the terrain of the debate.

Wicked Pissah (Redux)

So South Carolina has announced that the Palmetto State's primary will now be held on January 19. Inevitably this is going to cause New Hampshire to react by moving its date forward, because by Granite State law the First in the Nation Primary is sacrosanct and must antedate all others. Last year in a post called "Wicked Pissah" I commented on this precise issue. I feel that my argument holds up well, plus you can never underestimate just how lazy I am, so I am going to quote the whole thing:

New Hampshire's hold on the first in the nation primary is growing increasingly tenuous, at least as far as the Democratic Party is concerned. I am pretty mixed about this. As a New Hampshire native and still semi-jingoist, I believe that tradition ought to matter, that the particular style of retail politics that the New Hampshire primary imposes on candidates is good for democracy, and that New Hampshire stepped up to the plate long ago when it was not a particular honor to be first but rather a duty and when in any case candidates were chosen by the parties rather than in any meaningful way by the public. Why now should the Granite State be shoved to the side, or at least diminished, in the candidate selection process?


At the same time, New Hampshire is not exactly representative of our great democracy. The state is about 99% white. Ethnically, socially, geographically the state is not as diverse as the presidential selection process warrants. New Hampshire may be the most libertarian-inclined state in the country and so having its citzens choose the candidates for each party's nomination seems to have a warping effect sometimes. I understand all of these points intellectually, even if my heart and sense of loyalty indicate that New hampshire deserves to maintain some status, however honorific, in the primary season.


But here is what I do not want to see happen: A move toward early, frontloaded superprimaries in which the party's choice happens quickly without voters being able to see candidates be hardened by a selection process. I do not want to see retail politics, the politics of the spaghetti supper and pancake breakfast and candidates trudging through the snow and gingerly walking on the ice and giving speeches in high school gymnasiums, give way to the saturation of blanket television ads and speeches in giant auditoriums delivered to the voter only via television, if then.


New Hampshire still has a role to play. Rather than place Nevada's caucus between that of Iowa and the primary in the North Country, why not leave things as they are, but, as they plan, bring South Carolina's primary closer on the heels of New Hampshire's and have Nevada be that week as well, preserving New Hampshire's role, at least symbolically, but allowing candidates to make South Carolina or Nevada more significant as well, thus increasing diversity of voices?

The reality is that the parties are going to have to intercede, they are going to have to ruffle some feathers, and some of these smaller states are going to go away feeling slighted. My guess, not that different from what i concluded last year, is that New Hampshire will be allowed to maintain its status, but only nominally, with a series of larger primaries following New Hampshire's in such quick succession as to push the "First in the Nation" status into practical irrelevancy while allowing the state to maintain its symbolic grip on primacy.

Live (Even More) Free Or Die

New Hampshire Governor John Lynch will soon sign a law that will grant same-sex couples virtually the same rights as straight married couples. This comes just more than a year after the state legislature struck down a ban on gay marriage. I was proud of my home state then and I am even more so now.

New Hampshire was long a bastion of a certain kind of noetheastern reublicanism. long misconstrued (even by New Hampshire citizens) as a conservative state, New Hampshire is actually an independent, Libertarian-leaning state that within the two-party system found modern Republicanism the most appealing option. But Granite Staters are not likely to cotton to the sort of far-right social conservatism that is ascendant in much of the GOP today.

Live Free Or Die.