cheese it, the cops!

i don't much like rush limbaugh, of course, though he can be pretty funny. but the whole race/nfl/mcnabb thing is a model case of what's wrong with a painfully p.c. culture. what he argued was that donovan mcnabb was kind of overrated, and that people hesitated to criticize him because he's black, rarer in nfl quarterbacks even five years ago than it is now. well, you know, perfectly plausible, i think. firing and banishing limbaugh for it only precisely illustrates his point.

there are many true or even obvious things that many people actually believe that simply cannot be uttered. is that any way to run a culture? and i well understand the impulse to find those things and say them: a necessary task, and one for which we cannot turn to al gore.

i don't really understand the criticism of obama for trying to sell chicago to the ioc in copenhagen. hey the outcome was genuinely uncertain, and he gave it a shot. why not? what was he actually gonna do for healthcare in that 24 hours or whatever?

shootin hoops this mornin at the new freedom playground. a maybe 5-year-old girl was playing tennis with her family, looking like it was the first time she had a racquet in her hands. precise quote: "it looks 3-d! wait! it is 3-d! for real!"

my maryland terps, uniquely i believe, his year beat both teams who are in the championship: unc and michigan state. pretty impressive, as the terps were not particularly big, not particularly fast, and not astoundingly talented.

been watching a lot of women's college basketball, which i love. a brief comparison to the men's game. despite the 30-second clock, the game is slower and, obviously, played exclusively below the rim, although the athleticism seems to intensify every year, unlike the men's game, which plateaued long ago. it's somewhat more of a team game, although the men's college game is far more team-oriented than the nba. the passing is perhaps better overall, with fewer amazing no-look-type assists; but there are fewer players who can break you down off the dribble. there are fewer dominant rebounders, and the guards rebound more in the women's game, and probably it's more guard-oriented than the men's game. they are just as good, or better, shooting the three-pointer, but they will miss shots from elsewhere worse; there are a lot more bricks and airballs, even on layups (not too surprising in a way given that they're not dunking or dropping the thing in from above etc). this too is slowly improving as more girls shoot more younger. they react differently to getting hurt; they'll actually sob rather than merely grimace.

but whatever. the women are magnificently competitive, and there are transcendent players; like marissa coleman last night for maryland (and coleman can shoot with absolutely anyone), or candace parker, or epiphanny prince (playing right now for rutgers), or maya moore.

ps the maryland/vandy game was one of the best women's basketball games you'll ever see. md down 17 in the first half, win 78-74. marissa colemen had 42 points and 15 rebounds.

nice piece on the magnificent kristi tolliver, playing point guard in a few minutes for maryland vs. vanderbilt: both schools with which i have a connection.

terps beat blue devils, win ACC women's basketball tournament in ot!!!!!!!

ecstasy!: terps 88, #3 tar heels 85, ot!

continuing to collect names from women's basketball (installmet 1 was shavonte zellous), how about china threatt of depaul?

I kind of collect cool names. One of my favorites these days is Shavonte Zellous, a star basketball player for Pitt, who recently beat my beloved Female Terrapins.

has anyone noticed that the nbc sunday night football theme is "i hate myself for loving you"? kind of my theme song too. i'd recommend the ferocious joan jett version. the last thing you want to hear is faith hill on that shit, though as she screeches "nbc!" you hate yourself for watching network television, which provides an important insight. be that as it may: go skins.

speaking of jane (8): her soccer team (spain) won the league championship this evening!

so i'll be buried in skins/giants tonight (hail to the redskins), and politics will be wedged between the important stuff.

i love totalitarianism.

so the chinese wouldn't let the actual little girl singer sing at the opening ceremony, because she had crooked teeth. tell you what. after our athletes have returned triumphantly, let's just nuke beijing, where the regime combines the most repellant aspects of the disney channel, wal-mart, and francisco franco. on the other hand, maybe they just have different, groovier values. like all good people, they value appearance over reality, and because of their amazing solidarity, they are courageously willing to bring an infinite totalitarian state to bear in order to humiliate a little girl, who, after all, is only an individual, and therefore barely exists at all.

here's what i'd ask the collectivists or brooksian communitarians: how, if each person is nothing, can you add them all up and get something?

can this be right? (from washpost):

The worst-case scenarios appeared to have been prevented by a combination of luck and Chinese authorities' own efforts. They mounted an all-out campaign to control the weather -- planting chemicals in the sky to control rainfall-- and buttoned down the city with a massive police presence.

state control of the weather gives a new and lovely meaning to 'totalitarianism.' dude, we are so fucked.

watched pieces of the olympic opening ceremony last night, and couldn't help thinking about triumph of the will, with better color. and at least as far as i heard, nbc was doing the leni riefenstahl: watching and representing the nationalist and militarist festival of brotherhood with breathless enthusiasm and a complete simulation of naivete.

Olympic security official forcibly remove student activist Christina Chan from the equestrian arena in Hong Kong after her attempt to display a Tibetan flag. Photograph: David Hecker/AFP/Getty Images

all the protests around the olympic torch in various countries are not as damning to the chinese state as is its enthusiastic welcome by the government of north korea.

Vick, Loyalty, Race
By Crispin Sartwell

When a star athlete gets in trouble, as Michael Vick has done recently, one thing that commentators often say is that, out of a sense of misplaced loyalty, the athlete (often from a poor, black background) has hung onto the wrong friends and the wrong values.
     I do not think that Michael Vick's troubles are due to the machinations of the white power structure. Rather, they're due to his brutality. But this particular response - call it the anti-loyalty objection - has racist undertones and deploys a horrendous set of distorted values, revealing if nothing else the moral blankness and slavish viciousness of, um, white people.
   We've seen it dozens of times - for example, when Carmelo Anthony participated in a anti-snitching video, or when Alan Iverson got busted with a gun in his home state (and Vick's) of Virginia.
    Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post: "Vick was so concerned with staying true to his roots that no amount of paternalistic lecturing from Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank could persuade him to dump his old associations. . . . He never really got away from the place he grew up."
   I don't mean to pick on Jenkins; her approach is typical. Like many sports writers, she sticks scare-quotes around "keeping it real," and calls on young wealthy gifted black men to transcend their pathetic past, and, I suppose, accept white "paternalism". Now that they've got money, they should, I suppose, also buy new friends, new families, perhaps race-change surgery.
    But a life without loyalty is neither possible nor desirable. It is not recognizably human. The fact that you grew up poor, black, surrounded by crime does not mean that you have fewer connections or debts of gratitude or less love for the people you grew up with or who helped you grow up. Quite the reverse.
     It may seem obvious that there are good people and bad people and that if you grew up with good people in a good neighborhood you should show those people loyalty, while if you grew up with bad people in a bad neighborhood, you should escape and never look back.
    The truth is always more complicated than that. All of us were raised in morally mixed circumstances by and with morally complex people. If we are loyal to them anyway, that only shows that we retain some fundamental decency.
    You might not like the look of an entourage of large black people who dress flashily and speak ebonics. To a nice white lady like Sally Jenkins, these folks may seem threatening and thuggish, uneducated and potentially criminal. But you don't know what these people have gone through together, or what connections there really are between them. You don't know what they owe each other.
    It may seem obvious that we want children and the adults they grow into to buy into the structures of authority that surround them. We want them to tell those authorities when their friends are committing dangerous crimes, for example. Some schools maintain drop boxes for anonymous denunciations.
    But when you get down to it, every decent person hates a snitch, for very good reasons. Life would be intolerable if everyone was reporting everyone's minor transgressions. Banding together to withhold information from authority unites groups of people, and if it didn't happen, every little school and every little town would be an absolutist nightmare.
    Loyalty has to include not reporting people for breaking various rules or laws, up to a certain point of seriousness. As I say to my students, any college kid who reported every instance of underage drinking that she sees would deserve at a minimum to be ridiculed and left friendless.
     People who cover up other people's crimes may cause great damage. But people who effortlessly identify with the authorities and their rules are the merest Eichmanns. It's hard to decide when your friends have gone too far, but institutions and governments and laws go too far as well.
    And if you put institutions and laws ahead of family and friends, you are a moral nightmare , and you are preparing us all for further nightmares.
    So Michael Vick's problem is not that he is too loyal to his friends, or even to some features of the lifestyle in which he grew up. It's that people - wherever they're from - shouldn't torture dogs.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy bat Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA.

    

"You have given lessons with your manly performance." thus prime minister maliki on the (amazing) iraq victory in the asian cup footbal tournament.

for some reason i've been thinking a lot about the michael vick case, from a variety of angles. i'll do an animal-rights-issue-type op-ed. but i think you probably need to understand, let's say, the cultural context. one thing is that vick, who's from a hardscrabble virginia background, i would imagine feels that he is, by dog fighting, maintaining a kind of allegiance to the place and circumstances he's from, if you get me. this is a very ghetto-type thing to do. well, we should all have some loyalty to our origins, like dolly singing "tenessee mountain home." vick gets paid large and lives in a media circus where he's supposed to mutter cliches like an old white coach: he has to live the act of the pro athlete: underneath he's still the same guy. that's good. only don't electrocute dogs, asshole. anyway, you see this same dynamic in, let's say, allen iverson, and when it does not eventuate in real prodigies of sadism etc, it is in itself an admirable quality, even if it brings with it entourages and marijuana.

How to Stroke the J
By Crispin Sartwell

As I age (not without a certain panache), I begin to feel the obligation to convey my wisdom to the next generation: to teach lessons learned over a lifetime of suffering, both the suffering I've experienced and the suffering I've inflicted.
     At fifteen, our Sam is, as we say, becoming a man. And so the moment, the rite of passage, had arrived. I thought long and deep and then delivered the goods.
     OK, I told him, in one-on-one, you have two basic options: back the dude down, or face him and show him the ball. If you back him down, you can try to spin out and go to the hoop, or shoot a hook or fadeaway. If you face up, you try to get him leaning the wrong way, cross the ball over, and go to the rack.
     Now I would like to make these into, let's say, management lessons. Maybe you can read them as a profound set of metaphors. But they're not. This is me, telling you, how to play one-on-one basketball. And now that I have reached what I think of as the twilight years, that's what I think was most important in my life.
    I know a lot about existentialism, card tricks, country music, the Constitution, 17th century Dutch realism, and love. But on all these matters, Sam is on his own; he will succeed or fail without the benefit of my astonishing wisdom. My legacy is exclusively hoops.
     And Sam's going to have to be satisfied with that because I'm broke. I don't have much to give you, son. But I offer you this.
    Work incessantly on layups. But try to develop the outside shot; you want to stab in with the dribble and get the dude moving and then step back and go straight up, stroking the j at the apex.
      At any rate, I'm not sure that I've enjoyed anything in this life as much as basketball. It comes with less emotional baggage than sex, fewer morning-after recriminations than substance abuse, more beauty than modern dance, less cheating than country music, clearer resolutions than philosophy. It's just the pleasure of running around with some actual object in view, a purpose to lend shape to your random gesticulations.
      Probably you're figuring that someone who feels this way about basketball must have played in college, or at least high school. And someone who boasts about their bball wisdom as I have done and takes to himself the task of passing it to the next generation must really have game.
     Not at all. I'm 5'7", 49 years old, twenty pounds heavier than necessary. Every time I play, I get some kind of chronic injury that keeps me from playing for the six months that follow. And to be honest, though I had some flash when I was twenty, I had a six-inch vertical and I always missed the shots and lost.
     But I do know this: Never give up your dribble until you flow directly into a shot. Work on going left. Never call a foul unless you're absolutely mugged; calling fouls is for pussies.
     My greatest protege was my daughter Emma, now 19, who played point guard for her tiny parochial middle school. The Baltimore Hebrew Congregation day school team finished the season 0-11; I'm trying to recall whether they ever actually scored.
     But I tortured all my kids on the court until they got bigger than me; then I quit in rage and despair. Hayes reached the point where his strategy was to throw the ball as hard as possible off my shins, check the ball up and then do it again. If we played now, he'd break my ego, leaving me a drooling, twitching idiot, though that would be redundant.
    But we've got a seven-year-old named Jane and last week we installed a new hoop in the driveway. I'm betting that I can take her to the cleaners, posterize her, give her a facial. She's so cute when she's whining.
      And as I'm making her whine, I will be conveying to her the lore of her ancestors.

deep inside, black people are, it turns out, just white people: clean, articulate leaders of men. and black people are just as intelligent as white people, a devastating indictment of both races. at any rate, now that black people have achieved whiteness, our long national nightmare of racism has ended. that is official. par-tay!

allen iverson is the most electrifying basketball player i've ever seen, and i have watched a shitload of basketball since before i was born. seriously: the answer's probably my alltime hoops hero, with the possible exception of buck williams, who was an undergrad at maryland when i was. (buck should be in the hall: take this on board: he had 13,017 rebounds in the nba.) still, the sixers got an amazing deal for him: andre miller, (md great) joe smith, the electrifying julius hodge (?) and two first-round draft picks for a player who is pretty late in his career. here's what i think: maybe people think he's a ball hog etc. i think he desperately wants to win, and that he will actually be relieved to complement carmelo anthony, which i believe he will do beautifully. even with what they gave up, i think the nuggets might be championship material. they will no doubt score a lot of points. but iverson will commit to defense too, even as a skinny sixfooter. at least they didn't give up littleman earl boykins.

official form of suffering of the turin games

strange people dramatize the tragedy of tension headaches during the opening ceremonies at turin.

takedown

this is about as beautiful a piece of ridicule as could readily be imagined.

Who knows what anguish, misery and torments she has endured the past four years. I was so worried for her that there were times when all I could do was smoke and brood, and walk my little dog. At meals, I could eat nothing more than a single smoked oyster.

i've been waiting for this, cause i do think our species is not completely hopeless. andy roddick thought a serve by his opponent, called out by the ump, was in, so he himself made the call (and lost the match).

Roddick was leading 5-3 in the second set and had triple match point when Verdasco appeared to hit his second serve just long. The line judge called the ball out but Roddick said the ball was in after checking the mark left in the clay, giving Verdasco an ace.

"I didn't think it was anything extraordinary," Roddick said. "The umpire would have done the same thing if he came down and looked. I just saved him the trip. He's working hard up there."

this dude is my alltime hero now. can you imagine (let's say) an nfl receiver saying: no i trapped it etc: his own teammates would turn on him like a pack of vicious dogs. anyway, i really hope that were i in that situation i'd make the same call. when we used to play pickup basketball on the streets of dc, we had to call our own fouls. now who would you despise? the dude who never committed a foul by his own account: the dishonest, rationalizing fuckhead. andy roddick: you rock.

 

hall of fame

hoist an extreme beer to brian mitchell , the great kick returner/running back who retired officially today as a washington redskin. rarely has a man played so hard and talked so well. second to jerry rice in all-purpose yards in nfl history. i recall a game against philly when they injured most of our team, including our first 3 quarterbacks. mitchell finished the game in the fog at qb and played beautifully. for heaven's sake put him in the hall of fame.

steroids suck. but so do rats .