Mel-Anon

Born losers

New Dem hotshot Barack Obama caused quite a stir earlier this week with a speech at Jim Wallis' Call to Renewal conference (Street Prophets has the full text here).  Surprising given the Midas touch Mr. Obama's deft hand for politics has had in the past two years that this speech has drawn sniping from both ends of the partisan spectrum.  Of course, you're going to have the usual suspects who think a core tenet of Christianity is no marriage for two dudes, but Obama is also getting the runaround from some folks on the left, who think he's gone fishing in the fundamentalist pond.  (Again, SP with some left-blog reaction.)

To say the relationship between the secular left and the religious left in America is uneasy is putting it midly.  There are justifiable reasons for such an impulse.  No one really wants to duplicate the unholy marriage of convenience between our respective counterparts on the other side.  The key difference, I believe, is that, for the most part, we have the same aims.  So I don't understand why there seems to be so much hostility from some people toward courting religious people. 

Perhaps, as one writer I read recently put it, they fear that all religious folks, regardless of their present ideological leaning, have an inner time bomb of irrationality that will inevitably erupt and turn us all into mirrors of our fundamentalist theocratic brethren.  This, I would think, should be quashed by looking at the same truth that has often helped to keep the progressive religous movement ineffectual in the past; it's quite the nebulous hodgepodge of people to begin with.   At any one time you might have progressive evangelicals and Catholicsx, mainline Protestants, UUs, liberal Mennonites and Quakers, and those are just the Christians.  The idea that these people are going to band together and stage a hostile takeover of the American Left similar to the one fundamentalists pulled on the right is pure paranoia. 

The stated goal of many of the popular left-wing blogs is to get Democratic politicians elected.  I am ambivalent about this idea, but again, I think it has a justifiable impulse.  There are some, however, who think this can be done by sticking to an straight-forward secularist gameplan.  They may be right, eventually.  But they need to win now, before the slide reaches an irreversible conclusion, and they can't be too picky about who their allies are.  If they are backing Mark Warner, after all, they can't be too inflexible. 

If they want to throw the religious progressives under the bus after that, well, that will be a good problem to have. 

Sub-Standard

As you've probably figured out by now if you've read this blog for any length of time, I rarely cheer for an American team in any kind of international competition.  Call it the very American impulse of cheering for the underdog.  One exception* to this rule is the US soccer team, partially because they are rarely expected to do well, and partially because every four years we are guaranteed to get some right-wing pundit groaning about how soccer is subversively instituting nihilistic socialist values and other de-man-lification into American youth. 

This year's version comes courtesy of neocon rag The Weekly Standard, and it would look like brilliantly executed satire if experience didn't tell me they take it quite seriously. 

Soccer is the perfect game for the post-modern world. It's the quintessential expression of the nihilism that prevails in many cultures, which doubtlessly accounts for its wild popularity in Europe. Soccer is truly Seinfeldesque, a game about nothing, sport as sensation.

Most soccer matches end in scoreless ties (or nil, nil in soccer parlance), 1-1 deadlocks or 1-0 victories. A final score of 2-1 is regarded as a veritable outburst of offense, an avalanche of goal scoring that leaves exhausted fans shaking their heads and pining for the old days when teams knew how to play strong defense. A score of 2-0 is said to be a crushing victory (or defeat) of Carthaginian proportions rendering national shame and humiliation and potentially resulting in coup d'etat, or even war.

Someone (I've forgotten where) pointed out that a 14-7 game of American football is basically 2-1, so it should seem football could get rid of the "low-scoring" bugaboo by making each goal artificially worth more points.  This article is silliness, of course, but it does reinforce something I've long maintained; the sports we enjoy have a deep reflection of our cultural values.  Americans have given up baseball for American football and, consequently, declined down the path of crass overconsumption, commercialization, and militarism.  At least during the more moribund moments of a football match there is something happening,  Is there a game where the ball spends less time in play relative to the time needed to complete the game than American football?

I noticed that the same authors also have a piece gloating over the South's victory over the canuckocommies in the Stanley Cup finals.  They might want to avoid getting wrapped up in too much symbolism given that, although the franchise may be located in the heart of conservative dreamland, its members are from all over the world, but predominantly from Canada.  (Although after Martin Gerber's performance against the Canadians at the Olympics this year you could probably feel the unease for awile.)   Rookie goaltender Cam Ward was born and raised in Edmonton itself.  But such is the mercenary nature of professional sports.  One wins for oneself, regardless of how little connection one has to the community that consequently claims your for itself.  I can understand the cynicism this inevitably causes in some people, although perhaps I'm still too naive to indulge in it myself. 

*Okay, two exceptions.  I became quite fond of the US water polo team at the 2004 Olympics. 

Death sentence

From Slate this week: 

In the kind of coincidence that Paul Auster would call fate, today is also the fifth anniversary of the best bad celebrity interview of our time.

So does that make it the best interview of a bad celebrity, the best example of a bad interview of a celebrity, or the worst example of an interview of a celebrity?

Again I ask, where are the parents editors?

You got your reasons

Many a pundit has wondered over the years why futbol can't seem to gain momentum in the United States, and with the American team being eliminated from the group stage of the World Cup today, the questions of whether the game's popularity will further diminish will once again be asked.  Well, I've thought about it, and think I've found the solution. 

Commercials. 

For whatever reaosn (presumably staunch traditionalism) football has never succombed to pausing games for media timeouts.  The game must go on, and if the teevee heads want to miss a goal to cash some checks and face the outraged public later, I suppose they'd be welcome to it.  (None do, that I'm aware.) And nothing is as firmly American as the teleivision timeout.  Not baseball, not apple pie, not Chevrolet.  Especially not Chevrolet, which, of course, cannot advertise during a soccer match.  So you can see why American sports fans prefer their brand of football, where the commercials are only sporadically interrupted by actual gameplay. 

When an NBC suit was accosted by journalists last year for excessive commercials during the Turin Olympic coverage, he retorted by saying that, for good or ill, he wasn't running a public television outfit.  That's too bad.  Hard as it is to imagine, the World Cup was once broadcast on PBS in the United States in, we assume, commercial-free glory.  Any game that can bring the corporate schmucks to crying in their Perrier is a grand old game indeed. 

Grisly men

Unsurprisingly, Roger Ebert says he got quite a few letters from angry right-wingers eager to use their talk-radio ninja skills to show what a fraud the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" must be.  I'm particularly fond of the guy who believes that, because 100 percent of scientists never agree on anything, global warming must therefore be a giant conspiracy.  I would like to take this fellow to the top of a tall building and ask him if he thinks gravity is a scientific conpiracy, too. 

Part of the natural hostility toward global warming is political.  Being still hung-over from the communist-phobia of the Cold War, Americans love their corporations like no one else, and new government regulations go down like children's Tylenol.  But environmentalism itself taps into another, specifically masculine, fear.

"Grizzly Man" is a documentary directed and narrated by legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog about Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who went to an Alaskan national park each summer for thirteen years to camp and mingle with the brown bear population.  Although the area is federally protected, Treadwell styled himself as a friend and defender of the animals from dangers unspecified.  One year, Treadwell and his girlfiend stayed in the area longer than was their custom, and were killed and eaten by an unfamiliar bear. 

There are undoubtedly people who will see "Grizzly Man" as suitably anti-environmentalist; that Treadwell was an idealistic loon who got what was coming to him for underestimating the ferocity of nature.  That's not wholly fair.  Treadwell was hardly representative of anything but himself; a self-aggradizing megalomaniac who once claimed to have been second-choice to Woody Harrelson for the bartender's role on "Cheers."  He recorded nearly 100 hours of video footage during his life in the wilderness, many times doing multiple takes of himself to get a performance he preferred.  As his fame grew, so did his beligerrence and grandiosity, and it ultimately led to his downfall.  Treadwell's Wikipedia entry says his camera was switched on (with the lens cap still attatched) at some point during the final attack, suggesting he was a showman to the end.  (In one of the film's more interesting choices, the audio of the last struggle is not played; Herzog is shown listening to it, and we get a description from a gruesomely enthusiastic coroner.) 

Herzog argues that Treadwell was a deluded ideologue for believing that nature could be made into a harmonious wonderland instead of the way he sees it; as a battleground of chaos and murder.  His cynicism, though it takes different forms, is something I have witnessed in the past.  In my days trying to become and Evangelical Christian Manly Man, I heard many tales of weeks wandering through the wilderness proving your masculinity before God, who gave us Nature as something to win dominion over.  Environmentalists impede the process by standing on the side of Nature against the oncoming tide of Almighty Man, turning all of us into cowardly femminine wisps.  For the anti-environmentalists and global warming debunkers, this is why we must be stopped.  Because nature exists to be defeated. 

Good riddance

I'm beginning to think that, if God doesn't hate hockey fans, he must at least take some pleasure from seeing them tortured. 

Witness the fact of the last two Stanley Cup finals, both won by teams from the south (which have existed in their present city for less than 25 years combined) over the two teams in Alberta.  They give us NASCAR, King George II and The Dukes of Hazard, we give them the oldest and most revered trophy in North American sports.  That's not the kind of globalization you're looking for. 

Let's just hope it doesn't erode from tobacco juice until we get it back. 

Get ye Slack

Fred Clark imagines the Left Behind video game as one of ye olde text-based adventures!

The host with the most

Using the power of Netflix to erase my serious cultural deficiency has had a two-fold effect; sure, I'm making some progress, but the road keeps getting longer.  It reminds me of the old metaphysics trick of successively walking halfway from point A to point B and subsequently never getting there.  And, I'm not even giving you my not-so-enlightening commentary very often!  (Which I mean to do, especially about Grizzly Man, which I thought raised some fascinating questions about the nature of animals and the value of environmentalism, not all of which I agree.)

Anyway, time for a queue update; I never actually completed everything on the last list, so this one's subject to change as well. 

Transamerica
Brokeback Mountain
Saved!
Ushpizin
Walk the Line
Syriana
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
North Country
The New World
Bee Season
The Weather Man
Osama
Nobody Knows
Paradise Now

You can't always get what you want

Well, the Match of the Century turned into a bit of a dud. 

Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer in the French Open final Sunday, denying the great Swiss player the consecutive and career Grand Slam.  Nadal won his second straight French Open, and his 60th straight clay-court match overall,  in a sloppily-played match in 90-degree Paris heat which saw Federer make an uncharacteristic legion of errors trying to be too precise against Nadal's boundless athleticism. 

John McEnroe, on his NBC commentary, was ready to annoint Federer the undisputed greatest player of all time if he could pull out a win today, a proclamation that seemed at least subtly shared by many.  That remains, at least for now, in some dispute, and may remain that way if Federer never manages to win the French, even if he surpasses Pete Sampras' record of 14 major championships.  Federer deserves enormous credit, however, for reinventing himself into a very good clay player, and is somewhat unlucky that, in the era of clay specialists, he has run into the Nadal buzzsaw, who is, on clay, what Federer is everywhere else. 

Perhaps it's because the peddlers of Generation War in America have largely lost interest in tennis, but it's refreshing to see a contemporary be exalted to such a level as Federer has been without bitter baby boomers dragging us down with tales of how players were So Much Tougher In The Old Days.  But perhaps I'll be tormenting your children in 35 years after this fashion.  "Yeah, the teleporting 7-footer who serves 200 mph is pretty good, but he's no Federer, kid."

The beautiful game

The Football World Cup begins on Friday in Germany with the hosts playing Costa Rica.  One great thing about the World Cup is that Germany playing Costa Rica in anything is seriously cool.  (Other geographical odd-couple matches include Sweden vs. Trinidad and Tobago and  Switzerland vs. Togo.  Another great thing about the World Cup is that I get to use the word 'football' in its proper context.  Football, football, football.  Ahh.

Gotta do something about that official logo, though.  Who knew hooligans were such comedians?