Put Me In, Coach

This is interesting.

I don't know if it'll be a positive or a negative or most likely a neutral factor for a Cowboys organization that's not exactly healthy at the moment, but compared to most reality TV shows out there it seems like it could be compelling TV without being embarrassing either to the viewer or the contestant. I also appreciate that despite the pitchline of using "football neophytes" they're actually, it seems, going to focus on guys who played college ball but for some reason or other didn't make it to the NFL, so there's some shot that the winner, having secured a slot in training camp, but actually be able to hope that he could possibly make the cut for the season roster (unlikely, though).

However, I do wonder at the selection of positions for the contestants. There'll be six wide receivers and six defensive backs (the guys who are more or less responsible for defending wide receivers). The offense/defense thing makes sense, and wide receiver/d-back is one of the more glamorous positions out there; an extremely casual fan like myself can certainly name more receivers than offensive linemen. But of various positions on the football field, wide receiver seems like one of the least likely ones at which you could find a body of guys with NFL level ability who haven't already got a cup of coffee in the league. Everybody in the NFL is surprisingly agile for their size, but NFL wide receivers are freakishly quick considering that the prototype right now is probably about 6'4", 215 lbs. Plus they can jump really high. I would think you'd be much more likely to be successful if you were looking for, say, tight ends, who are about the same height (trending taller) but need to weigh something like 250 lbs. An NFL tight end needs to be faster than the average guy his height and weight, but not to the explosively quick degree a wide receiver does; after the sheer bulk requirement, it seems like one of the less demanding positions in terms of the physical restrictions needed to be competitive. There's just a lot more big guys who can hustle quick and hit hard than there are NFL-quality greyhounds.

Actually, I'd expect that there's also a lot of NFL-caliber quarterbacks floating around. Pro teams are notoriously bad at being able to project who will or won't be a successful quarterback, and rely on a lot of physical data that's marginally relevant at best. I'll bet there are a lot of guys who are good enough to be a backup QB in the NFL but aren't because they're 5'10" or had a shitty Wonderlic* score or something like that.

* I took the Wonderlic, which is some sort of weird intelligence assessment test, when I signed up with a temp agency after graduating from college. I don't know what my results were, but maybe I should consider that they never called me for work evidence that I don't look too impressive on a Wonderlic. It was a weird test, but my best understanding is that it tries to measure decision making and pattern recognition under considerable time constraints. That seems like a valuable skill for QBs to have but there are a bunch of great ones who've famously done poorly on the test, and frankly I think the intellectual aspect of being a QB is oversold. Football in general is a pretty heady game considering all the hitting that goes on, but just because the QB has the ball in his hands doesn't mean he's got the most intellectually challenging job. Basically he needs to see the open man and recognize if a defensive back is trying to bait him into making a pass. The guys who actually score highest on the Wonderlic are offensive and defensive linemen, which is funny given stereotypes about football players, since they're by far the biggest men on the field. The adage is that the closer to the line of scrimmage you play the smarter you need to be (at least smart in the ways the Wonderlic cares about) and it makes sense, because the o- and d-lines are always shifting and trying to fool each other into misrecognizing what's going to happen once the play starts. The ability to instantly perceive what's actually going on and put your considerable bulk in the best position to thwart it is what makes a great line, and a great o-line can make mediocre "skill" players look like Pro Bowlers (and a great d-line can make them look like chumps).

The Next Day

The post right before this is even sloppier, more incoherent, and poorly edited than the usual longer rambles I post here, and probably not worth reading in its current form. Having somewhere to put those thoughts and reactions without having to directly impose myself on somebody else's attention is 65% of why I'd like to keep blogging, but my general process - write the thing in one long go and hit publish, because I don't have the energy or inclination to revise it for coherence and grammar - makes me kind of dejected. Oh well. I have a few other brief comments in mind but I'm going to try and split them up into discrete posts over the course of the day rather than doing my usual Bimonthly Digest schtick.

What You Think You Know...You Don't Know

One of my college roommates was a huge fan of Alias and in turn he made me into a huge fan of Alias, and the title of this post was one of our favorite lines. This is not a post about Alias.

Now that The Wire is gone from TV, it's pretty commonplace to say that Battlestar Galactica is the most politically relevant show going. Even when The Wire was on, there were many who would say that, and I'd be one of them.* This is not a post especially about the ways in which Battlestar is politically relevant, but rather about how I think it treats of one universally important idea.

*(The Wire's political concerns were as immediately relevant to the 90s as they were to the 00s, and the series drew heavily from David Simon's reporting on the police beat c. twenty years ago. Baltimore on The Wire was at least as much the Baltimore of the late 80s and early 90s as it was the Baltimore of today and also an Every City standing in for Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Newark, Gary, St. Louis, etc. The Wire's political social relevance exists on a much longer timescale than the Bush administration, and really covers everything from the 60s into an unknown future; it's not, thematically, a show that's grounded in the time it was made. Battlestar's political/social questions are going to be worth consideration at any historical moment, but they particularly resonate with the last seven years; there are basically no Americans who are worried about the ethical status of torture or the proper way to think about violent resistance movements who were equally concerned about those topics ten years ago.)

We are, essentially, fundamentally ignorant, of the world around us and of the people we interact with and, maybe most damningly, of ourselves, and this ignorance binds us into blindly held ideological stances we can't see our way out of. One of my perpetual bete noirs is "the idiot plot" - classically, a story which is only made possible by the characters behaving like idiots. This is extremely common on sitcoms; the other day I happened across a Friends rerun in which 90% of the plot was generated by the consequences of Chandler not wanting to admit to Joey that he wrecked one of their recliners, and of course this only makes things worse, or if you will, hilarity ensues. If you think about the sitcom as a genre, you'll realize how much of what we see onscreen relies on one character not sharing information with somebody else for no good and understandable human reason. What bothers me more is when similar things happen in dramas, but what I find incredibly frustrating as a viewer is when a character is simply ignorant for no good reason, and the plot relies on the consequences of his ignorance. This is maybe a failing of mine as a viewer: I find the experience of watching something like this so violently frustrating on a personal level that it disrupts my enjoyment unless that ignorance is elevated to a thematic level.

In the last two years especially Battlestar has absolutely expanded on and expounded on the consequences of ignorance - wholly understandably and justifiable ignorance, no less - both of self and of other. Tonight's episode of the show was entirely about people being ignorant (well, and one example of Adama being very clever, but).

If you step back a few episodes, to the last episode before the long hiatus, the humans and the cylons are engaged in what was, frankly, a ridiculous standoff. D'Anna looked the most ridiculous because she had the most reason, since she'd been out of action for at least six months of in-show continuity-time. She instantly took command of the situation despite being the least caught up of anybody on the status quo. Her justification for the ridiculous standoff was that "The humans will never forgive us for what we did to the twelve colonies." This is actually perfectly logical, and maybe accurate, but the level of her self-absorption is so extreme (and realistic) that it doesn't occur to her that this is actually reasonable of the humans - why should they forgive an attempted (and almost successful) genocide? She also says, "we attempted cooperation on New Caprica, and it failed" - in what frakked up universe can she believe that New Caprica was a cooperation? It was an occupation, by force, and D'Anna's blinders almost led to further catastrophe and possibly the completion of that genocide. She can see that she can't trust humans, but she can't see the human position or understand that she could actually be wrong. She's trapped by her ignorance, and it makes her worse. She has to know that by spacing one hostage every fifteen minutes until the "Final Five Minus One" are released into her custody she's doing something abominable, because she has to know that the humans don't have any control over what the F5-1 do, since she has to know that the don't know who the hell they are. She's pretending to negotiate while actually trying to goad the F5-1 into revealing themselves in the way most convenient to her, all without actually being able to project how the F5-1 might feel about the situation - this capable, intelligent woman is actually surprised that Saul Frakking Tigh would expose himself to the people he loves rather than give in to her demands?

And (applicable both to that episode and to this one) the humans. Good lord. Tory, who I think had the least reasonable response to finding out that she was a cylon, said the smartest thing when she asked Roslin to consider that if she didn't know Tory was a cylon, she ought to wonder what other things she'd been wrong about. This is a question everybody should ask themselves on this show. The funny thing about the last two years especially, when (I think to the show's detriment) the "secret"/"mystery" aspects were hyped beyond their real importance to the overall story, is that the audience is in a state of hungering to know what's really going on and being pained by its ignorance, but we know VASTLY more than the characters do about the world they inhabit, and we can synthesize the new information MUCH better than they can. The human race has in a very short time period (I think the show covers about three years) received a number of completely staggering revelations:

(1) That there are humanoid cylons, the provenance of which remain unknown
(2) That some of these cylons can be programmed as sleeper agents who do not know that they are cylons and are absolutely invested in their fictional biographies and in their very real human relationships
(3) That cylons have completely valid emotional lives
(4) That individual cylons can choose to side with the humans and be trustworthy
(5) That there are models of cylon which the cylons know exist but do not recognize
(6) That these last cylons turn out to be people they've been friends with for years
(7) That the cylons have internal disputes so severe that they resulted in a shaky alliance in which one group helped the humans to a staggering military victory with profound consequences for the development of the cylon race.

And yet with very few exceptions on the part of the people closest to these events (and often not even them), none of the above matters because once the cylons attempted genocide, no new information can be allowed to complicate human hatred and mistrust of cylons. If you don't watch the show - and nobody I know reading this watches the show, I believe - then I'm surprised if you made it this far because a lot of this probably looks impenetrable without a thirty minute primer. But trust me when I say this is tragic, tragic shit going down, and the apparent direction of at least the next few episodes, where it looks like the human fleet is going to erupt into civil war over the issue of whether, essentially people who have risked their lives to fight alongside the humans can actually be trusted and actually, if we're talking about Gaeta, and really most of the humans in the fleet, whether they can even be worth a modicum of shared sapient decency...The commonplace joke about the racist is that he'll say "Black people can't be trusted," and when you ask him about Bob from work, he'll say "Oh, Bob's different, he's a great guy." The tragedy is that all too often, as right now on Battlestar, Gaeta finds out that Tigh from work is a cylon, and this doesn't complicate his thoughts on cylons, it just makes him hate Tigh, who really had no fucking say in the matter and has done nothing but risk his life for the sake of humanity since finding out the truth, let alone his years of honorable service before.

But what goes around come around, right? Because Gaeta sits down with Starbuck and reminds he that she sat on a secret tribunal which nearly executed him for collaborating with the cylons because, essentially, they were being ignorant fools. This was a horrible thing and wrong, and Starbuck to her understandable discredit, can't really hear him on this. Because he feels the need to point out the irony that as it turned out, that tribunal was full of cylons and people who were married to cylons (even though exactly nobody knew it at the time). But does he consider his own ignorance now, does he respect the things he doesn't know? Of course not, he can't, because he's too full of hate at the way the universe has treated him, and all he has is bitterness, so he can't learn from his own mistreatment; he must seek out a way to visit it on others.

I'm fond of saying things like: I'm humbled by the universe, I'm humbled by everything I don't know, by the scope of existence and how far it is from my grasp, etc. I find it, for one thing, a valuable corrective influence on my native intellectual confidence. But I also think it's truly valuable shit to believe those things. The weight of our ignorance should bend our backs from time to time as a reminder to be humble in our doings and our judgments of each other. But - and the thing to remember is that every piece of text I produce which makes it this long is ultimately about my own dissatisfaction with the nature of humanity, because given enough space and time I'll always become a misanthrope - we never do. We're never humbled by our own ignorance, only emboldened by it. Battlestar has an immediate cultural relevance but a universal resonance, because there are going to be many times in our history when we should be open enough to resonate with the horror of two peoples gearing up to destroy each other because they're nothing more than ignorant fools and blind.

Counterpoint

In lieu of my ill-formed attempt at recounting a conversation with my father about the value or detrimental effect of symbolism in the political sphere, I instead offer for consideration, without explicit or even implicit attempt to align or distance my own thoughts with or from content or symbolism, the following:

It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank—we want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We're just telling you to follow what we're doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now these are some practical things we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

And later:

You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"

And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood—that's the end of you.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

-4/3/68, Memphis, Tennessee