Why the NFL is rigged: thoughts on Trump

So we’ve all heard the allegations: the NFL is fixed.  Refs make shitty calls at decisive moments tilting the balance in favor of whichever team Roger Goodell has selected to win.  Why else do the play reviews get routed back to New York and NFL headquarters?  Along with college football nearly $100 million are bet on NFL games – you think outcomes are left to chance?

What?  You haven’t heard of this?  Well I’ll admit it is not an open and shut case – no Bill Hicks’ “case-fucking-closed” on the idea that the winner of each NFL game is predetermined.  I’ll admit that.  Yet, my mind can’t help but jump to such conclusions.  This is based on a few things, like Brian Tuohy’s work and things I’ve seen: those fucked-up calls/no-calls that even the announcers feel the refs and reviewers get wrong.  But my idea that the NFL is rigged is also based on an overall impression; something arrived at by the gestalt of weird calls, built-in vagueness of the rulebook and the disheartening slavish devotion of the fans.  It just feels like something is not right and I find watching games difficult (though I still watch sometimes – it is entertaining, goddamit).

Let me now translate this to the negative views many people have of Trump.  As my views of the NFL may seem irrational so too – to me and others – do the reactions people have to Trump.

Let me be straightforward with two things.  One, I pay a lot of attention to foreign policy and foreign relations.  And secondly, I have a penchant for world-changing, dare I say, cataclysmic events.  So my hands-off Trump policy, which was decided on mostly subconsciously, has keyed on things Trump has said about foreign policy to a great extent.  And he gets passing marks, in this regard.  My approval springs from the hope that the pain and suffering being inflicted by the US on other parts of the world right now may perhaps be brought to an end.  You still with me?  Let’s let other countries defend themselves and Jesus Christ let me turn a blind eye to the fact that the reason we are over wherever is not simply to intervene in a squabble amongst other nations but because we have financial and strategic interests in those countries.

So maybe you can see, for the above two reasons, why I’m not super freaked out by Trump.  On those issues.  (Hillary destroyed Libya and bragged about it – case fucking closed and that is why it would have been unconscionable for me to even consider voting for her.)  You probably can’t, though, and that is what is fascinating to me: for some folks Trump is the devil incarnate. 

What is this dog whistle?  That is the crux.  For some folks there is something that is just not right with Donny Tinyhands.  On paper I get it but I do not have the visceral reaction so many seem to have.  Perhaps to belittle all involved, this is analogous to my NFL feelings, that something is just not right.  I know he said some shitty things in the run up to the election – I think this is what a lot of people are reacting to.  And those controversial statements didn’t bother me at all.  Our reactions are crafted in our hearts and not in our minds.  To be honest I get that “something is just not right” feeling about our whole country at times.

Why Donald Trump is already a more liberal President than Obama

Congratulations America, we did it!  Same thing could be said after any Presidents’ election.  Left, right, center, fascist, libertarian, liberal, we are all in it together.  “It is what it is” as they say, a phrase I’ve been hearing more and more people say these recent years.

And I’m not condoning anyone.  I’m not excoriating anyone that was in contention for election or that did get elected.  If there is a problem it lies in what we, as a population do.  Or the problems lies in what don’t do.

Who was the last liberal president?  Well, many would perhaps say Obama.  On the right this perceived liberalness is a source of ire.  On the left Obama’s liberalism is a source of pride.  But let me report the observation of a few political observers that Richard Nixon was our last liberal president. Yes, Richard Milhous Nixon, Prez No. 37.  Our last liberal president.

First we have good old Noam describing Nixon as the last liberal president.  Talking about the current minimum wage debates Chomsky stated, “It’s a shame that it’s taken so long to even be a discussion.  As for support, we may recall the last major program for helping families at the level of survival was under Richard Nixon. In many respects Nixon was the last liberal president”.  Nixon signed an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act which raised wages more than 40%.

Then we have Chris Hedges.  “Who was the last liberal president we had?  It was Richard Nixon.  Not because he was a liberal, but because he was frightened of movements.”  Hedges recounts a scene from Kissinger’s memoir where Nixon had parked buses end to end to block protesters’ access to the White House.  “They’re going to break through the barricades and get us,” Kissinger recalls Dick saying to him.  And for Hedges, that is right we want to have the powerful.  Does it feel that way today?

And now Donny Tiny Hands is in office.  I can’t truthfully say yet that he will be a liberal president in this contrarian sense but the movements have started.  We will see what we get.  The last eight years had Occupy and that was a big deal.  But for the most part people kind of chilled out with Barack in the White House.  And there was reason to be critical.  I’ll let Hedges conclude:

We will begin to build forces that will pressure power to respond.  And I think that’s what we’ve forgotten.  We have to begin to make the power elite terrified of us.  And occupy did that by the way.  They were terrified of Occupy . . . and they had to destroy it.  And let’s remember who destroyed it: Barack Obama destroyed it in a coordinated federal campaign.  Because the people most frightened of Occupy were the Democrats which is why they tried to co-op the language.

The Lion of Idaho series: Borah and the end of US neutrality during World War I

At the outbreak of World War I, the United States was a neutral country wondering: “Should we go to war?”  At issue was the sinking of the RMS Lusitania (sunk May 7, 1915) which claimed the lives of 128 Americans.  Was the US now involved?  Senator Borah urged his fellow legislators to take a hands-off approach.  He begrudgingly accepted the US’s invasion of Mexico during the coincident Pancho Villa Expedition and felt that the Lusitania did not merit breaking neutrality.

More importantly concerning whether to stay neutral or not was the selling of weapons to European belligerents.  In tail-wagging-the-dog fashion then – as today – the role of weapons manufactures was in question.  Is it a breach of neutrality to sell weapons to other states involved in war?  Borah’s Senate colleague Robert La Follette, a remarkable statesman in his own right, took up this issue.  “It is repugnant to every moral sense,” La Follette said, “that governments should even indirectly be drawn into making and prosecuting war through the machinations of those making money by it.” (197)

The war drums were beating steadily by this time.  Calls to go to war were made in the name of patriotism.  And the weapon sales that La Follette was arguing against were already taking place.  Although in 1914 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had “advised bankers that loans to belligerents would be inconsistent with our ‘true spirit of neutrality’”, the US government decided on the laissez-faire option.  And war became good for business:

[T]he Government announced that it would not approve or disapprove credits made by American banks for the purpose of facilitating belligerent purchases in the United States. […]  So much prosperity arose from the purchases made by the Allies in the United States that in August, 1915, the Government of the United States agreed that the belligerents might float public loans in this country. (198)

JP Morgan & Co. positioned the United States to support the Allies which “fueled charges the bank was conspiring to maneuver the United States into supporting the Allies in order to rescue its loans”.  The bank funded Russia, France and England.  After the war Morgan & Co. managed the reparations from and loaned money to Germany.

Borah eventually voted for joining the war saying, “I make war alone for my countrymen and their rights, for country and its honor” (203).  Was Borah picking one current among many leading to war that he deemed acceptable, running with it, arguing for it almost as a proxy?  Liberty is quite the concept to fight for but can also serve to blind one to the complexities of many situations, especially ones involving world politics.  Near the end of his life, as the next world war was breaking out, Borah infamously said, “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler – all this might have been averted,” garnering scorn.  But who knows what would have happened if Borah could have addressed the German as men discussing pure concepts of liberty, etc.

I feel that in the events of war Borah maintained his integrity: another post could be the topic of his relation/opinion about banks.  I will let Claudius Johnson conclude with these stirring words re: Sen. Borah:

By inheritance, by instinct, by environment, by education, and by profession Borah is an individualist.  By the same token he has always stood for national individualism.  Political isolation and political isolation only, will, in his opinion, give us peace and the opportunity to work out our own democratic destiny.

Populism, democracy, aristocracy and dictators - post-election thoughts/complaints

The Bernie bumper stickers are fading.  All the hopes and dreams represented by a candidate are now forgotten as we move forward in our new reality.  This is the forgetting of the casually involved, those who activate their attention/have their attention activated for them only for the duration of the presidential election process.  Others remain involved: “the involved minority” always active on the periphery.

How much do you research politics and economics?  Oh, if you’re like me do you (sometimes?) spend more time reading about sports than you do about topics that actually matter to your life?  And keep in mind these ideas of state are debated by motherfuckers who study this shit full time.  Which means your part-time, exclusively tuned-in only during the months around the election research amounts to a drop in the intellectual bucket.

What is the right way?  Kaleidoscopic, myriad interests.  Fundamentally different moral bases that people operate from.  Different levels of intellect demanding different levels of stimulation.  What are the foundational ideas of a nation?  Of a people?  Of a family?  How do you debate merits of a presidential candidate when you cannot agree to common definitions of words you debate with?

Is it not time to reach a consensus on fundamentals instead of the clusterfuck of interests that our distracted attention spans so cloudily focus on for brief periods of electoral time?  Can we not cede – if we do not already in practice do – the responsibilities of deciding our interest to those who are more intelligent?

We do cede decision-making powers to others since our government, fed-state-local, is representative.  How do you decide what being intelligent is, though?  That is a big question and recently I was considering the work of Jose Ortega y Gasset in this light.  Basically, let an aristocratic class solve our problems – this has been the state of affairs in so many times and places throughout history.  Heck, you may even say that it is the case today, though we celebrate some kind of ideal of democracy.

Everyone is equal and gets to have a say.  Mob rule.  Isn’t this the ideal?  Is this possible?  Desirable?  I’ll be honest: based on the way my fellow Americans behave I would like a beneficent dictator to take over.  Remember, dictator did not always have a negative connotation.  If only those that rule today had the interests of the people in mind . . . um, never gonna happen, right?

Efforts toward perfection

There’s your choice: no fucking choice . . .  Sad, what are our options?  I am firmly ensconced in the choices I’ve made – happy, really – in a redoubt of familial obligations, duties by choice.  This limits, in my mind, what I can do, what I should do.  Also this redoubt jibes with the idea of primarily changing oneself.  First yourself and then the world and how goddam true that is.

We want the United States to change but ignore that role in ourselves – a bit ingenuous though.  I will say that some of those out acting (striving, being activists) have made the turn, have changed themselves, are the change they want to see.  Good.  A single man as I once was might live simply – ask a lot of questions – and go forth as an agent of change, go fight for what is right.  That is what some of those activists are.

But back it up a minute.  What change is on offer?  You took to the streets for Trump but didn’t do anything during Obama’s time?  Whoa, whoa, whoa, I need to slow down and back up a minute myself.  Think Standing Rock.  Yes, people have been involved.  The structures run deep and the Standing Rock people are experiencing what a challenge to these structures gets you: attacks by dogs, acoustic bombardment to achieve psychological disruption, being sprayed with water while it is fucking freezing out.  Oh, and even more insidious: you get to stand up for a cause while most of the nation carries on in ignorance which allows the powers that be to continue with their sundry mistreatments/criminal acts.  That is the cruelest thing of all.

And it is what any person questioning any system must face: How docile has the status quo rendered the great masses of people?  How has this docility been countered?  By protesting?

I want to say that if on an individual basis everyone examined their lives we would have a populace that would have moved past fossil fuels for rational and spiritual reasons. And perhaps that is assuming too much.

But there is this idea of mass man, of mass society and it is undeniable and it stares one in the face every day.  In deciding tactics, this fact of mass society must be considered.  In deciding whether or not to even act, this fact of mass society must be considered.  The bull is still caged.  The bull writhes and bucks, relaxes then violently kicks.  What good to stand outside the cage and attempt to dictate right action to the bull?  One must prepare for and contemplate what to do once the gate is opened and the bull emerges.

In talking about mass society, Ortega y Gasset (OyG) contrasts the mass of people with minorities, minorities being groups where each member must “separate himself from the multitude for special, relatively personal, reasons”.  Minorities used to run the world, OyG argues.  But now the majorities have stepped forward and live as an unquestioning, non-deciding mass that follows rather base pleasures and who live unexamined lives.

Striving is what separates the two groups, as OyG elucidates:

For there is no doubt that the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.

Damn.  Never mind, it’s off to Standing Rock for this chap.  But again, hold on a minute: is that my “effort towards perfection” as OyG states?  It sure as heck would involve “piling up difficulties and duties”.  Après election and being in this world in general I will at least keep asking questions.  And read some more Ortega y Gasset as well.

Not Really, Literally

I believe my first exposure to the word/concept of “literally” was in an academic setting, used in a class or as a word to remember for spelling.  And that definition was something like: “adhering to fact or to the ordinary construction or primary meaning of a term or expression”.  To my mind, simply put, the term literally was used in cases where a common figure of speech or colloquial saying actually happened.  For example: you would say “It’s literally raining cats and dogs” only if an airplane carrying cats and dogs exploded in the sky creating such a downpour.

Alas, literally has seemed over the last decade or so to mean the opposite of this cherished definition.  Now, in a crazy downpour, you are likely to hear someone say, “It’s literally raining cats and dogs”.  No cats.  No dogs.  Literally is used for emphasis, it is an intensifier.

The benchmark of critique of this apparent change in usage is David Cross’ bit about the word.  How galvanizing that was in my critical view of the word: “[B]ecause when you misuse the word literally you are using it in the exact opposite way it was intended.  When you fuck that up you fuck that up so bad it’s not like a little goof, it’s not like when you said penultimate and meant ultimate where you’re off by one, you completely fucking misuse it.  You should stop using the word, forever, until you figure it out.”  Excoriating.

But, inevitably, things change.  I remember my Linguistics prof in college saying that the task of language was to get across meaning.  If what you say conveys what it is you meant to convey then you are correct.  If tend to agree with that.  So, I thought, let’s not be so critical of the misuse of literally.  Apocryphally, I heard somewhere that the definition had changed since the misuse is now so common – fair enough.

But when I went to track down proof of the change of the definition of literally I came to a stunning discovery: the definition, for as long as the word has existed could mean BOTH.  I should have known.  Merriam-Webster’s definition No. 2: in effect : virtually.  Shucks.

Still, to not let it go.  I would say definition No. 1 is the dominant definition.  The feeling is that those not familiar with the intricacies of language have co-opted the word.  In an unknowing fashion.  That is the what the critique of its No. 2 use is picking up on, whether or not it actually is correct be damned.  Does it represent a decline in national literacy?

Metaphorically, I see the misuse (yeah: misuse.  Why not, let’s be a militant grammarian.) as a sign of people’s need for certainty.  They need concretize what they are saying, to disambiguate what they are saying.  It is a running away from the horrible vicissitudes of life, the gnawing sensation that reality is not what it seems.  There are questions that people have about life – and especially life in the United States right now – questions which they cannot quite formulate.  Metaphor is shunned.  What is on the surface is simple, graspable.  I feel like using the word literally (misusing) is a code for all these feelings.

Post election observations, or, Fuck you mainstream media

My joy in this election result comes from sticking it to the mainstream media.  Apparently ridicule can only go so far, or loses its efficacy once the insult has been cast and the laughing has subsided.  A liberal media?  Fuck that.  The mainstream media are basically the cheerleaders of Corporatism and ignorance – don’t think motherfucker, consume.  How long has it been since the mainstream media has served the people instead of simply serving the people to advertisers?  (There are some bright spots in the press: Democracy Now, The Intercept . . . Russia Today – really a Russian news agency that does a better job than most American outlets.)

And joy from watching the election coverage as the commentators grappled with the idea that not everyone is a college-educated bandwagon-rider who benefits from the system (i.e. enviro-destruction with a green face, off-shoring of jobs, militarism, and finance, finance, finance) like they are.  Fuck them!  And really a fuck you to the average American whose wagons are ridiculously tied to this bandwagon so mindlessly, emulating those they actually have only a tenuous connection to – most of that connection comes from laughing at the ridicule heaped on those who want to change the system.  Wake up!   Where do you truly get rewards from?  Who is making you throw your goddamned God-stamped morals out the window?  Don’t you realize it?  Break the fucking spell!

And to see the reaction by media pundits, anchors and show host: what is it that you decry in this election result?  What garners such looks of disbelief and shock and your outraged responses?  Surely not your complicity in the system that has steadily impoverished the average American?  Surely not you lack of coverage of the increasing wealth gap, the freezing of any increase in real wages over the last 40 years?  Surely not your lack of covering the link between policy and arms manufacturers?  Surely not calling out the bullshit companies that make so-called “food” and that you so hungrily accept advertising money from?  How can you criticize someone newly elected president who has not done anything with the office yet while at the same time have such a damning laundry list of misdeeds and inaction hanging around your neck?  Fix that goddamned problem first.

Trump may prove to be whatever, whatever, etc. – we’ll find out soon enough.  And his average follower is most likely a fucking moron – that typifies Americans supporting both of the candidates this election anyway.  But, to my sources of joy:  hooray! for the sentiments of change and hooray! to the ridiculous confusion of mainstream culture.