Author: admin

After the initial tremors of the Penn State sexual scandal had rippled away I realized that a little retrospection revealed a somber analysis that is unfortunately not surprising at all.  The actions of a perverted coach, while egregious in the extreme, were not the main scandal here; the cover-up that enabled him to destroy so many lives is unfortunately wrapped up in the “culture” of football, which has a history of circling the wagons and seeking to protect its own.   While this is true of most team sports with their familial philosophy, football’s sacred position receives protections denied elsewhere.

In grade and high schools across the country football players gain a revered status and often a free pass for such reprehensible attitudes as misogyny and gay-bashing, which are not only condoned but even celebrated in some quarters.  The pre-eminence of football exhorts the entire school community to participate in the pageantry of weekly games, yet how many coaches and players attend the annual school play or chorus and orchestral concerts?   The sports culture that dominates our society begins early and then spreads its tentacles across our modern American ethos.

All the chatter about steroids in baseball obscures the fact that high school football players are popping pills with alacrity in a mad rush to ascend the high altar of American idolatry—football stardom!  High school coaches turn a blind eye to such abuse as long as the team competes, and this deliberate ignorance envelopes everything else—poor grades, chauvinism, racist attitudes, etc.   That’s where the slippery slope begins, for if we celebrate those successes we are accessories in the cover-up!

Anything that threatens the finely woven threads of the web holding us together is viewed with suspicion and distaste.  In this testosterone-filled climate the perversions of a gay child-molester is viewed as such an aberration and affront to the very essence of our sporting life as to be ignored in the hope that it will just disappear.   To think that the events at Penn State are an anomaly is to be disturbingly clueless about the state of the union and criminally naïve and negligent in the way we care for our children!   The measure of a society may be taken in the way it treats two of its most ignored populations—prisoners and children.  If we disregard the latter with such disdain what chance do we have of rehabilitating the former?  In the case of Penn State the two populations seemed to have merged—they were at-risk children!

Perhaps the national shock and outrage at these events underscored a profound sense of personal loss; that somehow we all shared not just in the grief but also in the guilt of that cover-up.  And if we didn’t feel that, maybe it’s time we did.  For as long as we permit the violent culture of football (and other sports) to permeate our lives, and seek to enshrine and protect its central players; as long as we relish their success vicariously and find collective glory in their exploits, we must also face this uncomfortable truth—We are Penn State!

I’ve been watching October baseball these last few weeks.  Now I will admit that I didn’t grow up playing the game or even watching it; I’m a cricket and soccer kind of guy.  The first time I watched baseball was in 1985. I was in Bahrain and the World Series between the Cardinals and Royals was on Telly.  I watched all seven games, trying to understand the difference between a walk and a single or a ball and a strike.  Without the internet or Wikipedia there wasn’t any immediate resource available and of course TV commentators rightly assumed that their viewers knew the game (fortunately, there wasn’t an infield fly rule invoked or I might have smashed the Telly; or maybe there was one and I just didn’t notice).

I understood the controversies at second base that favored the Cards and the famous one at first that benefited the Royals and by the end of seven games I had a somewhat sketchy knowledge of the American pastime.  I even remembered forever the name of Bret Saberhagen who pitched a shutout in Game 7 after his heroics in Game 3, I think it was; I didn’t remember any of the other players, but the names of the managers stayed with me—Whitey Herzog and Dick Howser (I forgot who was which team’s manager).  I was intrigued by the fact that the managers played such an important role in the proceedings; cricket is managed by the captain on the field and soccer is all about the team on the field!!

Over the years I’ve grown to love the game, even as I’ve watched its popularity wane in favor of football.  One can look for reasons why this is happening, but one never really knows—football’s immediate impact, the violence, speed, etc; baseball’s slow pace, its dominance by Latin Americans, etc.  If I were to make a generalization my guess would center on that old cliché—immediate gratification; we want speedy, bang-bang games, filled with adrenaline and the promise of blood.  Baseball is almost intellectual.  As I’ve written elsewhere, the essential struggle in baseball is in the pitcher and batter trying to outwit each other as they try to guess what the other one’s thinking—curve or slider, high and tight or down and away; or maybe right down the middle to surprise him.  And the catcher calling the game sets the stage.  Then there’s the manager in the dugout signaling instructions—a whole committee of men determining each pitch, a fascinating choreography of hand gestures based on experience, statistics, past performances, and guesswork, all occurring within a few seconds—risk management in a microcosm. I wonder what an actuary would make of it.  What’s not to like?  But it is no longer the national game—even in October!  What happened?  I hesitate to draw an insulting inference here, but is the contemplative nature of baseball too tiresome for our modern sensibility? Are we becoming an anti-intellectual nation?  And is this reflected in other ways as well?  Txt msgs have replaced complex sentences, blogs are more read than novels, snap judgments instead of reasoned analysis, sound bites, video games, on and on…poetry? What’s that??!

But baseball does seem to be strangely un-American.  We have always coveted winning more than anything (it’s everything, isn’t it?) and this game is predicated on failure (hitting 30 percent is the standard of excellence; unless of course we consider that a pitching victory)!  Is there a coincidence that baseball’s great popularity occurred during the twenties and thirties and then in the fifties and sixties, those “hard times” characterized by the Depression and a post-war reconstruction when failure was woven into our country’s tapestry and introspection forced itself into our national consciousness?  And these were the eras of great pitchers as well.  Then declining sales brought in the Designated Hitter in the seventies, which led to more hits, which led to the steroid era in the eighties and nineties, the Age of Greed and Wealth, when batters dominated, home runs flowed aplenty, and modern baseball regained its popularity and lost its innocence!  And I just don’t understand the DH rule, which reduces the game to an ordinary line-up of power hitters rather than a team, a series of players to pitch around or walk, thus banishing so much of what makes baseball fascinating—strategy, anticipation, and, yes, thoughtfulness.

Now football is the unquestioned king of American sports. Somehow, sadly, that makes sense—its inherent violence appears to resonate in our current evolving national ethos; its predictability, lack of complexity, and 10-second segments of brutality seem to reflect the tenor of the times. And yes, I do know that the play-book has several combinations of patterns and integrated routes, but from a spectator’s point of view very little of that matters.  I am also not suggesting a lack of appeal; on the contrary, it can be very seductive, this fast and furious game of destruction.  It requires no viewer patience and lends itself easily to video games.  These are the times in which we live!

How easily we turn people into messiahs.  Steve Jobs was an innovative genius who professed Buddhism yet pursued a relentlessly material career, creating such a fanatical culture in quest of excellence that many Apple employees were estranged from their families.  Here’s what he once said: “You’d be surprised how hard people work around here.  They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”   Buddhism doesn’t mean walking around barefoot (as Jobs reportedly did), anymore than Yoga means doing a few exercises to stay healthy.  Both of them are profoundly spiritual ways of living, characterized by a ceaseless struggle to find a way to radiate inner peace into the world.  CEOs by definition live in a cutthroat world of competition, lawsuits, and petty maneuverings.  Jobs was no exception; Apple shrouded itself in mystery, prevarication, misinformation about impending products, even some shady business practices.

For all his unquestioned business savvy and cutting edge technological advances, this is a man who carried a lifelong  grudge against the birth father who abandoned him and didn’t acknowledge his own daughter!  Refusing to face an unwanted pregnancy is NOT just a “youthful indiscretion,” as it has been described; it is an egregious breach of honor!   People who criticized the company were punished and some employees were afraid to run into him.  Of course he should get credit for the millions of applications (including medical and charitable programs) stemming from his inventions; undoubtedly, he was a brilliant engineer; yes, he was among the vanguard that reduced the size of the world; but to hail him as a messiah is foolish, particularly when some have described him as a tyrant! And his abrogation of Apple’s philanthropic programs together with his own stated rejection of philanthropy to “make the world a better place by making better products,” leaves more questions than answers.

Several articles state that he made the world a better place.  Really?  Better than what?  Better how?  I look around me and I see a shambolic mess–fractured international relations, wars and skirmishes, students who can text at the speed of sound but can’t spell and haven’t read a single book of note; smartphones that have ironically destroyed the art of meaningful conversations; sterile ways of “keeping in touch;” bloggers (like me, I will admit) with opinions that are cheaper by the dozen; a digital age that permitted facile high-speed financial transactions that at least in part led to our economic meltdown.  Easy and fast doesn’t always mean better!

Perhaps it’s appropriate to see Steve Jobs as a brilliant digital engineer and innovator, like so many others–some equally celebrated, some less.  But a Buddhist in the true sense he didn’t appear to be; nor was he a messiah, however reclusive he might have been!  And are we better off in the long run for all our technological progress?  I guess the jury will return its verdict next century!

Every so often the debate is revived about the vast amounts of money in college sports, particularly football and basketball, and whether or not college athletes should be paid.  The billions of dollars generated in revenues every year (The University of Texas ostensibly made a profit of $68 million on football alone last year) from ticket sales, concessions, memorabilia, and gigantic TV rights, coupled with so-called scandals of athletes accepting gifts from boosters even as their schools and coaches pocket vast sums of money each year, have called into question the definition and nature of college athletics.  Perhaps a more fitting debate needs to center on the definition and nature of American economics and our own brand of capitalism.  College sports, indeed all sports and the way they are conducted are deeply rooted in our national psyche, in the way this nation was built and the way we think of ourselves.

American Wall-Street trickle-down economics derives from the rugged individualism engendered in the spirit that founded the country, the so-called immigrant work ethic which promised rewards only if we worked ourselves to the bone and were completely self-reliant!  We set ourselves apart from the “home country,” from European social capitalism which included profit sharing, handouts, and in some cases unabashed welfare!   The sad truth for us is that by at least trying to be inclusive (yes, they don’t always succeed and, yes, they have their own problems) Europeans are moving towards a more progressive society as we either lag behind in a state of inertia or are regressing into more segregated communities on many levels.  Asian, South American, and African societies may not be as progressive as Europe but they have the same sense of collectivism that may ultimately save them; witness India and China.

What has this to do with sports, and particularly college athletics?  Simply this: they are conducted along the same lines as our economic and social agendas—let’s get what we can when we can for ourselves and the devil take the hindmost!  The top colleges say to themselves, “we built these programs by ourselves for ourselves; why should we care about anyone else?”  Thus Notre Dame can sign individual TV contracts with NBC and other universities are courted by Nike or other corporations and the rich get richer.  U-Conn’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun once defended his salary by arrogantly proclaiming that he could do the math, for his program brought in millions to the university.  This seems to be the standard answer when talking about coaches’ salaries and the contributions of athletics programs—they make millions!  What it doesn’t take into account, however, is that there would be no university were it not for the toil and talents of several generations of professors, staff, and students who built the academic programs to attract millions of students.  Only a tiny percentage of students enroll at a university because of its successful football or basketball programs (although they might hear of the school because of them); and the work of the students, faculty, researchers, administrators, and staff over decades is the reason a university can have an athletics program.  Therefore, all successes are dependent not only on the work that went before, on the sacrifices other people made, but also on the continuing commitment of the academic community of the institution.  If you go back and look, you will see that every athletics program came into being because of budgetary sacrifices made by personnel outside athletics!  To view athletics programs outside this context is naïve, shortsighted, and unjust!

Even as universities and the NCAA fill their coffers, they insist on enforcing the most rigorous amateur rules for the athletes, claiming that scholarships worth thousands of dollars is reward enough. Most athletics programs were instituted along the Athenian model of mind-body consonance—this was the ideal, something to strive towards; athletics would work together with academics to create complete human beings.  At some point we moved away from that standard, segregating one from the other until we created a mutually exclusive two-headed monster, each one fighting for a place at the trough, each one nipping at the other!  The NCAA rules of eligibility prevent basketball and football players  from becoming professional immediately after high school so most of them go to college once they meet minimum entrance standards, then cluster into majors favorable to their Saturday schedules, and bide their time to become professionally eligible.  It really isn’t about studying anymore and the sad fact is that 98 percent (who never make it to the pros) will have squandered their chance at an education!  So, when a university willingly spends more than fifty percent of its academic scholarships on athletes who waste them, and the majority of its other students pay a fortune in tuition, what does it say about our priorities when it comes to education?

Unfortunately, the sharing of wealth is considered anathema by our capitalist system.  We think of ourselves as individuals working towards our own ends; anything else (despite numerous examples of government and public funding) is deprecated as socialism.  If profit sharing is a constant source of debate in American professional sports imagine how much more impossible it would be for blue chip college programs to share the wealth across the board among other schools—that’s un-American!!  So what chance do athletes have of getting even a piece of the pie they themselves have baked?!

I am not advocating salaries or stipends for athletes—I think the question is far more complex!  It isn’t whether we should pay our athletes (what about then paying every student who brings prestige to the university in one form or another?) but whether athletics in their current forms should be part of a university.  The US is probably the only country that feeds its professional leagues from college ranks (except, to some extent, baseball); other nations have a tiered structure of minor divisions leading up to the major league.  This allows college sports to be what they were originally designed for—a way to develop the body along with the mind.  And that should be their only place in the academy!  Until we can find a way to incorporate that into our system, until we can return to some of our former ideals about education, college athletics will continue to be dominated by economics and marked by academic scandals, hypocrisy, and a slow degeneration of educational ideals.

At what point do we become enablers of a broken system?   Worse, when will we start to realize that “the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings” being abused by guilt and misguided fealty to a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy?   How long will we continue, like battered spouses, to stay in a dysfunctional relationship that eviscerates our self-worth, pits us against one another, and destroys our hopes, dreams, and ideals?  Does participation in a putative democratic system begin and end solely with the act of voting?  Why can the act of staying away from the General Elections, accompanied by loud protestations and other actions (mentioned later), not be seen as a courageous referendum by a disenchanted and disillusioned electorate against gridlock and inert government?

Every four years we are herded like sheep to be slaughtered in the abattoir of hustings and ballot boxes, to rubber stamp the coronation of politicians bought by corporate entities and special interest groups; every four years we drift further away from democratic ideals as greed triumphs the public good and more people join the ranks of disenfranchised communities even as we continue to abet plutocrats in their quest for power!   Every four years we bemoan the fact that there’s little to choose between our two major political parties, which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing except that what we mean is that both parties are inefficient and corrupt.  If approval for Congress is less than 13% (probably the only people happy with them are their families) why would we continue to vote them into power?  Remember how Einstein described the act of doing the same thing over again and expecting different results?

Whenever I raise this issue I’m told that voting is a privilege.  No, it’s not!  Running for office is a privilege, or it should be when it isn’t purchased; voting is a right fought for and obtained after much anguish, at least as far as universal suffrage is concerned, but still a right we could choose not to exercise.  But if the act of voting itself becomes an endorsement of the privilege to run for office then may not abstinence in some circumstances stand as a rejection of that license?  Surely it is the only way we can truly check “none of the above!”   Another caveat popularly attached to “voting privileges” is the admonition that we cannot complain if we do not vote.  The right to complain is embedded in our democracy, protected by the First Amendment; the right to vote is actually not even explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, and indeed throughout our history access to the booth has been denied to various constituencies based on the tenor of the times; this has led to the aura of privilege that now surrounds the act of voting.

For me to suggest that we abrogate that privilege would appear to some tantamount to heresy—after all, if so many people in history and currently around the world are denied that privilege how can we so callously cast it aside?   The answer to me is clear—voting implies a choice, it suggests that we choose someone we believe in, someone who offers us clear paths of leadership.   Surely we need a more evolved society, one in which it isn’t enough just to vote but in which we are permitted to make informed choices between good and better, not between bad and worse!!  How can we in good conscience say on the one hand that we have no faith in politicians and on the other hand that we will vote for them?   How can we watch from the sidelines as hordes of legislators, in our name and on our behalf, hijack this so-called democracy?

At some point the battered spouse must break the shackles and stumble from the house to denounce from the rooftops the abuse suffered and with as much pride as can be mustered proclaim, “Basta!  Enough!  No more!”  Every time we fulminate against policymakers let us remember that we rage against ourselves for we gave them the power to destroy us!  As long as we continue to participate in a tainted system we cannot sit back and criticize “them” without also leveling blame at ourselves, whether we voted for them or not!  It’s too late to claim ignorance as a virtue, for in our tacit acceptance we gave birth to this monster and nurtured it to adulthood!

Of course, the system will continue regardless—but only for a short time.  If only 13% of us approve and 87% abandoned the polls, not in silent protest but with a deafening clamor (we have more outlets through which to sound our disapproval than ever before) it would shake the roots of this republic.  They will have to take notice.  One can argue that the lack of turnout at local elections hasn’t deterred anyone.  But those tend to happen outside the glare of media spotlights; they have become deeds done in the dark!

It is time to grow a new democracy.  It is time to reach into our local communities and reshape the conversations.  To reject the system altogether would be as irresponsible as enabling it.  Local elections, where important public policies are implemented and where national civic leaders are grown, occur without the participation of most citizens.  That’s where we need to focus our energies—mayoral, municipal, school board, sheriff, etc.  That’s where future national leaders are born and where we can demand the tough answers before they have learned the art of spin, prevarication, and double-talk, where we can separate the wheat from the chaff and put would-be politicians on notice.  It takes time and effort to read and understand platforms and backgrounds; and it takes time to attend town meetings and local debates, which probably explains the exiguous turnout.  But democracy is hard; creating a new republic demands focus and immersion in the process.

But why reject the general elections?  Simply because it would be dishonest to continue to choose between unacceptable candidates, and picking third-party aspirants is a cop-out if we select them out of pique or frustration or by default—our ballots are too precious to waste!   Besides, we need to send a clear signal to Washington that government is a fraud if it isn’t of, by, and for the people!   At this moment we are bystanders at the dismantling of a structure that once held so much promise; we watch with mild frustration as generations of politicians blithely ignore the realities of the street as they pawn our futures for a pittance.  It is time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!!

One of my dear friends in India Clarissa Fernandes passed away last night, robbed of more possibilities by the sudden outburst of cancer.  Through the numbness in my heart I am suddenly overcome by a lack of knowledge–how do you mourn someone you haven’t seen in 10 years and who lived on the far side of the world?  There is no immediate removal of her presence from your presence, no sense of physical loss, no funeral closure; the friendship maintained over the years by thoughts, feelings, and the occasional email seems to continue like a swan upon a river, outwardly serene yet furiously paddling beneath the surface, battling harsh undercurrents to stay upright.

You go to work when you should take the day off to mourn the silent passing of kindred spirits, and the crisp summer air outside belies the dark clouds within your soul.  This is the worst part of being an immigrant for you leave bits of your heart trailing behind to guide you back, and on every journey back you leave some more of you –and then one day you have to say, “guide me back to whom?”  And you know with a sense of foreboding that there are more to come, more locked doors behind you, more return journeys you will not travel, more lagging crumbs of your heart that fatal birds of prey will pluck away with their sharp beaks!

So for now you celebrate in silent sadness a life well spent and a relationship that enriched you beyond measure.  Rest well, Clarie.  I will miss your amused smile, the drinks and meals we shared, and how we revived each time the lost art of delightful conversation.