Mel-Anon

Friday night light$

King Kaufman this week has a story taken from the Austin American-Statesman (one of the best newspapers in the country).  You may want to be sitting down for this one because, it turns out, high school football coaches get paid more than teachers, and by a wide margin. 

Interesting as that is, it shouldn't be surprising. In fact, Texas high school football coaches making more money than teachers might be the ultimate "Dog bites man" story. Coaches, unlike teachers but like their better-paid brethren in college football, run a lucrative business in which the workers work for free. There's plenty of dough left over to make sure a good coach doesn't go generate revenue for another company.

Sorry, I mean another school's athletic department.

A defense that comes up in the comments is that the extra pay is justified since coaches can be fired more easily for "underperforming" and thus have less job security.  This only causes further misguidedness because of what the standard for performance is in these cases.  Coaches are not paid for their contribution to education or to the formation of young minds.  No one has ever said "I learned so many life lessons from my coach, even though we lost every game because he never tried a forward pass." 

I went to Indiana University, of course, where the foibles of the long-time men's basketball coach were consistently overlooked as long as he continued to win 20 games every season.  Though the small high school I attended didn't have a football team, it was nonetheless sports-crazed, and there was more than one "teacher" in the faculty who was obviously there expecting coaching would be his only real job.  (There were exceptions to this, but that's as much because every teacher on staff coached something or other at our school.) 

Americans console themselves over their obsession with scholastic athletics with the story of "well, the kids are gettin' a good ejukation, so it's all good." They feign horror at other countries where athletes attend specialized acadamies whose purpose is only to teach them their trade in athletics, or when teenagers forego school entirely and turn professional.  I was in a class once where someone, trying to explain the influx of European players in the NBA, whined "but they have acadamies where they do nothing but play basketball!"  It's true.  And in the Canadian Hockey League, the youth system which produces much of that nation's pros, kids as young as 15 can play upwards of 7o semi-professional hockey games in a season.  They seem to come out sufficiently well-adjusted, and all without siphoning off resources from institutions supposedly dedicated to education.

What a country!

All hands on deck

The FDA last week approved the over-the-counter sale of the so-called "morning-after" pill for the first time.  Pop the champaigne corks; we on the pro-death side finally win one!

What's that, you say? Plan B doesn't actually terminate a pregnancy?  Well, that would mean all those nice people talking about the "circle of life" and whatnot shouldn't have any reason to be concerned, should they?  As this commenter says; "Yesterday, they said life begins with conception.  Today, they say life begins with intercourse.  Tomorrow, they will tell us life begins with dinner and a movie."

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you?  If the Dobsonites were truly consistent (hahahaha!....ahahahaha!) they would be just as concerned, if not moreso, about the untold millions of fertile people of childbearing age who remain staunchly pro-choice on the matter of not being baby-poppin' machines. 

But squelching human life is not their concern, as long as it has taken me to accept that realization.  Opposing the HPV virus and the morning-after contraceptive belies their real interest in preserving, however artificially, their antequated source of morality.  God says unapproved sex is bad, so we must blindly seek out theocratic measures to uphold this dictate even when progress makes the traditionally-convenient pitfalls of sex obselete.  This is a traditional tactic taught to future members of the religious right; take a biblical prooftext and dress it up with a cursory nod to common reason. ("But you shouldn't have sex, you'll get pregnant/STDs/AIDS!")  That emperor is losing his clothes, but as of yet he isn't running for the fig leaves. 

Demoted!

After a week of top-secret meetings of the International Astronomers Union in Prague (wonder what's on the buffet at these things?), the sentimentalists have lost.  Pluto will no longer be considered a major planet.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets," similar to what long have been termed "minor planets." The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun — "small solar system bodies," a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.

Something like a war (only not)

Two weeks ago, upstart pol Ned Lamont knocked off incumbent senator Joe Lieberman in a much-hyped Democratic primary.  On election night, Lieberman, who owes his defeat to having his mouth firmly attatched to Genghis' "war on terror" policies, announced he would running as an independent, saying "I will not let this result stand."  Contempt for the democratic process is apparently another thing he shares with our neocon overlords. 

Afterwords, Dick Cheney, Ken Mehlman and others trotted out the predictable talking point of how the loony peaceniks are jeopardizing our freedom by exercising their suffrage privileges in a decidedly unapproved way.  This doesn't surprise anyone who figured the Global War on Terror was little more than a political gambit designed to cash in on the leeway wartime legislators are typically granted by creating a perpetual "war" to drag out this goodwill indefinitely.  However, it made me think about something we were bombarded with back in the early, primitive days of the GWOT. 

Specifically that this was going to be a "different kind of war," not a levee en masse battle between two factions that comes to mind when you think of the word (and it comes to mind because that definition is what a war is; you can't have a war against a tactic, but I digress). But if it is a "different kind of war" tactically, why do they expect to be granted the same political privileges from the population?  It is not a 'war" at all, of course; no fundamentalist Muslims are going to occupy the US government and repeal the Constitution, nor were any terrorists involved in passing the PATRIOT Act.  Despite the tiresome cliches about threats to our liberties, I'm hard-pressed to come up with any freedom we've lost as a direct result of actions by fascists of the Muslim fashion. 

Fascists of another kind, on the other hand....

Harvesting

The US Open is upon us in a week, and the NY Times' sports mag "Play" has a great article on Roger Federer. 

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body. 

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Spain’s mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man’s man for you — he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations. Plus Nadal is also Federer’s nemesis and the big surprise of this year’s Wimbledon, since he’s a clay-court specialist and no one expected him to make it past the first few rounds here. Whereas Federer, through the semifinals, has provided no surprise or competitive drama at all. He’s outplayed each opponent so completely that the TV and print press are worried his matches are dull and can’t compete effectively with the nationalist fervor of the World Cup.

Wallace spends some space later in the article debunking the "racket technology ruined men's tennis" canard (see also this Atlantic article), which, given the circumstances, one has to wonder if it all amounts to an excuse for the absence of American contenders. 

Elsewhere in the Times, "Snakes on a Plane" flops at the box office (comparative with the endless hype, you would have to say.)  There was a clever bit of studio spin attatched to this movie; it was not screened for critics, according to New Line, ostensibly because they wanted the internet fanboys to be the first people to see it.  Actually, studios bypassing the traditional review process is becoming increasingly common, usually on films such as raunch comedies, horror movies or other lowbrow fare that are likely to give salivating critics easy target practice.  The value of film critics can be debated, of course (A.O. Scott had an interesting piece a few weeks ago that's behind the Times archive wall now), but it's always great to see the faceless corporate suits take full advantage of the unabashed spinning options available to them. 

Jesusland

"If you're going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh; otherwise, theyll kill you." -George Bernard Shaw

CSA:  The Confederate States of America  (*****)

Kevin Willmott's film CSA is a mockumentary set in an alternate history where the Confederacy wins the Civil War, annexes the North and turns the whole of the United States into the Confederate States of America. 

"What?  That's alternate history?" says me. 

Well, exactly.

The film, made by Kansas film professor Willmott on next to no budget, is inhabited entirely by a straight-faced British documentary which, after much controversy, is finally being aired on American television with a disclaimer that it's content may not be appropriate for "children and servants." It introduces us to a world where the Confederacy's Jewish Secretary of State, Judah P. Benjamin, convinces the British and French to enter the war and turns the tide against the Union Army*.  Abraham Lincoln is exiled to Canada, where he lives forgotten and disgraced.  All non-Christian religions are banned in the 1890's, and a Bible reading on modern American television comes from Ephesians 6:5, "Slaves, be obedient to your masters."

The documentary is interrupted occasionally for "commercials," often hilarious parodies that, despite being outrageously racist, are based on real-world products (like "Sambo's", "Darkie Toothpaste" and blaxploitation acts) that existed only recently in actual history.  The similarities between this faux-history and ours is the overriding theme of the movie.  On December 7, 1941, the CSA launches a surprise attack on the Japanese fleet in the Pacific (we never fought Nazi Germany, of course, though when Hitler visited the country, we talked him into making the Jews slaves instead.)  Willmott recalls being approached by someone who found this bit unbelievable, since America would never launch a pre-emptive strike on another country. 

Yeah, about that...

Where have all the liberals gone?  To Canada, naturally, where abolitionist terrorists from the "John Brown Underground" carry out occasional attacks.  Faced with a different kind of Cold War, the CSA government does what any good xenophobic and authoritarian state would do;  build a wall.  In this case, the "Cotton Curtain" spans the length of the Canadian border. 

There is a narrative running around, mainly in libertarian and neoconfederate circles, that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with "states' rights."  Notwithstanding the Confederate Constitution's language on slavery, the idea of the CSA as a paradise of "states' rights' would have been snowed under the second that hardliners and fundamentalist Christians seized control of the government (which would have been inevitable).  "State rights" issues are, in conservative language, what happens when you can't get the feds to pass the Federal Marriage Ammendment.

Everyone knows about the now-famous "Jesusland" map that made the rounds on the internet after the 2004 election, proving "CSA'"s point of how little some things have changed since before the Civil War.  Of course, people in the 21st century always believe they would be on the right side of history if those events played out today.  Defenders of "intelligent design" fashion themselves as modern-day Galileos, in spite of the fact that Galileo was arguing against mindless adoption of archaic religious tradition, not for it.  And in 1965, a minister named Jerry Fallwell said "preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winnners," which he apparently believed when the issue at hand was civil rights.  Perhaps they should be less certain about the clarity of their hindsight.

 

*How close was this to really happening?  The film claims the South only needed a key military victory to prove it could win.  Others say the South overestimated the value of cotton to its would-be European allies, and with the Union blockade, they decided it could be had easier from other sources. 

"When the terror alert is severe"

Liquids on a Plane!

2006 FDR

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!"

Sodom, South Georgia

Echidne of the Snakes has been doing some great data-mining lately trying to decrypt the fascinating question of why Bible Belt states often have higher divorce rates than the liberal states they so often accuse of dragging down American moral values.  There are a couple of tiers in play here, so I suggest going and reading the whole thing, but I want to take a poke at it with my own stick as well. 

Something you'll find if you live around a place that you might classify as part of "Wingnuttia" (to use Echidne's parlance) is that, for lack of a sharper phrase, there's a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.  Although there may well be a large churchgoing population, a healthy percentage of it consists of people less concerned with religion than a comforting and self-assuring piety that holds up an otherwise debaucherous and virtue-light existence.  (See Rush Limbaugh, who frequently appeals to religiosity but is thrice-divorced and otherwise shows no dedication to religion himself.)  American conservatism may be the ideology of the self-righteous and devout, but it also holds the gleefully politically incorrect, who find it within their duty to do and offend whatever and whomever they please, so long as no Laws get broken.  (See Knight, Bobby)

But, as Echidne points out, the higher divorce rates in "Wingnuttia" can't just be atributed the the profaners; George Barma's polling reveals that "born-again" Christians are just as likely to have been divorced as non-believers, and moreso than believers in other faith traditions.  The quick solution here is that these are the people most likely to marry young, a low-percentage play by anyone's common sense.  Part of this is cultural; once you reach a certain age in these parts you're expected to be married, so you find somebody else without a chair and you go get a marriage license.  However, I am also one of those with the opinion that keeping the forbidden fruit of sex off-limits puts undue pressure on young folks to hurry up and get the act done so they can jump in the sack with Jesus' blessing. 

Now I'm aware that some would say that a low divorce rate in Massachusetts, for example, "doesn't count," because a couple that would be sleeping together or cohabiting in that state would have to be married in the Bible Belt.  What's interesting about this is, despite how much the Dobsonites crow about their "valuing marriage" so highly, when those they accuse of being decadent and promiscuous decide to marry, they are more likely to stay that way.  It makes one wonder who values marriage more; those who gobble it up as soon as they are legal, or those who enter it after they have experienced each other to the point they realize it's the step they're ready to take. 

Lead us not into temptation

"Osama," released in 2003, was the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and although it's tempting to cave to those who would see it as vindication for the righteousness of American imperialism, it would be unfair to grant them a bigger part in this movie's audience than they deserve.  "Osama" is a warning couched in real experience about the danger in giving a theocratic cabal uninhibited power.  As any good low budget movie, it is succinct and visceral, even if the foley audio doesn't always sync up with what's happening on-screen.

The Taliban, of course, were the de facto rulers of Afghanistan who decreed, among other things, that women must remain completely covered in pubilc, lest they arouse men into sinfully sexual thoughts.  This sounds eerily familiar to what I knew in college, where Good Christian Men insisted that their chaste sisters in the Lord must clothe themselves more fully if they didn't want to send them sinking into confessing the Devil-abiding existence of sex.  I imagine that my former GCM comrades would dispute that they intend to make women wear burkas or cover their ankles.  But the difference, I think, between the Taliban and American fundamentalism is not in objective.  They share much of that, from suppressing gays and women to demonizing the "worldy media." 

There's an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which a Ferengi (before they were abandoned as a comically-bad antagonist) approaches Tasha Yar, (before actress Denise Crosby quit the show) disbelieving that the humans clothe their females, thus, in his mind, encouraging others to conceive unclothing them, "the very depths of perversion!"  Good Christian girls aren't wearing burkas because there is some line of demarcation at which they no longer represent a sexual temptation.  Any sufficiently horny man could visually undress a woman if she were mummified in concrete.  Patriarchal religious zealots, unable to come to grips with their own sexuality, have merely passed the blame by limiting the freedom of women. 

Whatever is stopping them here had better hold.