An ongoing review of politics and culture

That Rotting Smell is College Sports

I’m a little disappointed that Ross Douthat, a sophisticated moralist, could look at the monstrous fiasco at Penn State and think that the compelling independent variable in all this is Joe Paterno. Douthat compares Paterno to Father Darío Castrillón Hoyos, the Colombian priest who went from humble service to the poor of Medellin to flakking for pedophile priests in Rome. You can read what Ross says about Father Castrillón, but I just want to ask: Why should we start out from the assumption that Joe Paterno and his program are exceptional in their dishonesty, their bland bureaucratic evasions of basic moral responsibilities?

What happened around the Sandusky allegations, after all, is what big-time athletic programs do – they lie; they cover up; they fudge; they condone cheating; the require cheating; they scapegoat to avoid accountability; they force crude double standards of assessment and behavior on their universities (which put up little fight); they claim flagrant zones of exemption in admissions requirements, which they often get their universities to basically waive altogether; they minimize misbehavior, often criminal, when they cannot describe it out of existence; they secure their talent in a mortifying pageant of “recruiting” in which grown men, like clumsy Casanovas, wheedle and lie to high school juniors via endless text messages; and, while these men make piles of money from their recruits, the recruits don’t actually get what you’d call “paid,” because they’re amateurs, or as their coaches sometimes say, into cameras, for national audiences, with straight faces, “student-athletes” (that the people on the receiving end of these reassurances don’t burst out in derisive laughter is grist for another rant about the funny idea of sports journalism).

Actually, this isn’t just what they do. It’s who they are. It’s how they exist, at all. The compost smell from this steaming pile of sordid practices is their smell. That smell is their steaming-compost essence. It might have been an interesting hypothetical, a month ago, even for someone with as jaded a view of college sports as I possess, whether a program defined by such a compost smell would cover up something as heinous as a coach raping boys in its own showers, thus freeing him to rape boys hand-picked from his foundation-for-boys for as long as he cared to. It’s not a hypothetical anymore. Now we know the answer.

So, when people wonder what it was about Joe Paterno, personally, that made this disaster possible, I can only shake my head and ask: Where’s your materialism, people? Joe Paterno was the nice, avuncular, highly successful, stunningly old boss of such an organization. He did what his organization wanted him to do. Proof of this is that, given the chance, his organization – from the “graduate assistant” (let’s linger over this exquisite term for just a moment: graduate assistant; it almost sounds as if his function as an “assistant” is tied in some way to his academic standing as a “graduate,” that is, a graduate in some subject in the learning of which he is now “assisting” other aspirants to this august status as a “graduate”) to his nominal superiors in the Penn State athletic department and university administration – did the exact same thing he did. They did what the organization wanted them to do.

Surely these men are not as great as Joe Paterno, and thus subject to the same great-man blindnesses that brought him low, and yet they did just as he did. They fudged, they covered up, they did the minimum necessary so as to avoid bringing a powerful man to account, they redescribed the rape of a 10-year-old boy as “horsing around in the showers,” and like college coaches everywhere when they talk to recruits and reporters about what their programs are really about, and like administrators when they describe these programs as having a legitimate or even comprehensible place in their universities, they lied. What happened at Penn State was the scheme of big-money college sports working as it was designed to work. The act of looking away, repeated by so many in State College, is the perfect emblem for the cognitive politics of the NCAA. It should be on their flag.

Focusing on Joe Paterno, and puzzling how this could happen in idyllic State College, Pennsylvania, or, conversely, snarking about the unique evil that must lurk below the surface in State College, Pennsylvania (I mean, the students rioted for their coach; students wouldn’t have done that anywhere else) are ways for everyone to advance the state of cognitive dissonance that made this disaster possible in the first place.

Let me ask a sobering question: How do we know this isn’t happening at other big-time programs, or things just as bad, or worse, or almost as bad? Just for the most easily imagined category of malefaction: How many coeds do you think have been raped by athletes over the years, at the countries’ other athletic powerhouses, and then shamed by administrators into covering it up, or just stonewalled and ignored by campus officials, or just convinced by such prospects to shut up on their own, preemptively? What number do you think that is? Or does that just happen at Penn State, because of Joe Paterno’s unique blindness as a great man? Why shouldn’t the conceit of Joe-Pa’s integrity make us wonder how much worse it is in those many college towns where the king of the dung-heap is more of a manifest scumbag? Jerry Sandusky just happened to get caught, or caught up with, thirteen years after the first sick-making suspicions arose. Clearly, these are people with stronger stomachs than you and I have. You might say they have “iron stomachs.” They can, after all, stand their own smells. So perhaps we should start widening our imaginations, to ponder how many other disgusting things they can stand downwind of, and for how long.

There's actually several children in it

I’ve been slowly working my way into the newish Arcade Fire album, “The Suburbs,” and every listen is a process of what you might call letting go. That heavy thematic foreground – um, suburbs? Are you really going to talk about the evils of suburbs for a whole album? – is a problem for somebody who, though not very fond of suburbs as a place to live or get stuck in traffic in, genuinely loathes suburbia as a target of satire and smug critical harangues. I also suspect that my loathing of the the critical trope “suburbia” has become so widely shared (I mean, everyone hates American Beauty by now, right?) as to have emerged as a tired counterpart to the suburbia trope itself – which doesn’t let Arcade Fire off the hook; it just means the topic is so overworked that saying it’s overworked is also overworked.

So it speaks to Arcade Fire’s defining charms that they can tread into these barren fields and make you think they’ve discovered something to sing about. Their sensitive-ten-year-old approach is a sort of challenge – to make yourself un-jaded enough to bewail the suburbs all over again. And since they traffic more in sorrow than in smugness, and since they’re quite good at translating their naive disappointment into a sort of churchy beauty, they do force you to drop your sophistication and resistance and get a little sad for a while about the things they’re sad about, the suburbs or, on their previous album, the war. Arcade Fire creates muscular, lovely, and often majestic pop music precisely because their animating passions are so simplistic, so close to the heart and so far from the brain.

So this is the musical force working on me, tugging on my jacket, cajoling me in the voice of a ten-year-old boy – “Hey, mister…Hey, mister…” – to let go of my suspicion that these renaissancy Quebecers are trying to teach me a lesson I haven’t needed to be taught for a long time, as I reach the sixth track on Suburbs, “City With No Children”. The Arcade Fire spell is working. I’m letting go. I’m sitting in their hipster church, suspending disbelief. And then this verse comes along:

When you’re hiding underground
The rain can’t get you wet
But do you think your righteousness could pay the interest on your debt?
I have my doubts about it

There was a really terrible band in the 90s called Live, and this verse is pretty much exactly how that band was terrible. The last line, especially, mimics Live’s method for being terrible. (I can see the little shaven-haired lead singer for Live strutting around the stage with his hands on his hips and slowly shaking his head like Aretha Franklin as he answers his rhetorical question about the patently dubious thing any decent person would have doubts about by saying oh yes, I have my doubts about it, let there be no mistake about that.) But the second-last line, that rhetorical question, is the real buzzkill, the real spell-lifter. It’s hard to describe how bad this line sounds as sung. The rousing, anthemy set-up of the song, complete with hand-claps, prepares you to experience the terribleness not just as incidental but as definitive, as the climactic appearance of a hidden essence. When Win Butler tries to sneak the five syllables of “righteousness could pay” into a space where four syllables (and preferably four entirely different syllables) should to go, my heart sinks, every time. He’s obviously really committed to that awful debt metaphor, and he really wants to stuff the unsightly flab of that word “righteousness” into that tight spot, so there’s no explaining it away. He really means to say “righteousness could pay.” He really wants to pull off that unfortunate metaphor. And if the mangled meter isn’t enough to establish the seriousness of his commitment to whatever the hell these words are supposed to mean, he goes and answers the dumb rhetorical question that contains his bad metaphor. In that moment, I realize that my allegiance to Arcade Fire has been a fragile construct built on a combination of anxiety that they had it in them to say such a thing and relief that they had miraculously avoided saying it so far. But now that they’ve said it, so doggedly, so willfully, I can’t help thinking it’s what they’ve been trying to say all along.

I had a dream about a gun

It seems an odd thing to complain about in a movie that some people have found so revelatory, but I thought Inception would have been much better with about 95 percent fewer rounds of ammunition being fired. At a certain point I started asking myself: Why, in a movie about descending through dream layers and opening secret “basements” and “safes” of the subconscious, does someone always have to be firing a goddamn gun?

And it was that inane James Bond gunplay, where the protagonists are chased in a van by eight cars full of men with AK47s, or through narrow alleys by groups of men with AK47s, and brick dust or automotive glass is exploding around the heroes’ heads, but nobody gets shot. At a certain point you concede that their not being hit is built into the gunmen’s parameters or something – “They’re just projections; projections can’t aim for shit” – and so why should you have the movie stress response regarding endangered heroes instead of just a building weariness at the literally monotonous chk-chk-chk-chk-chk-chk of gunfire that – who are we kidding? – isn’t going to hit anybody (and even if it does, it’s only the dream guy, not the real guy…sigh). In the climactic mash-up of dream-layers, several of the operatives mount a hill, on skis, and look upon a magnificent snowy vista, and you think, ah, so peaceful, respite from the endless motorized chasing and futile machine-gunning, but then this scene devolves into a chase of our heroes by men on motorized skis wielding, yes, machine guns, which they fire without pause but which don’t hit anyone because the guys firing them are just projections, and projections can’t aim for shit, apparently.

Partway through the movie I had an intelligent-seeming thought in defense of the film’s mode of portraying dreams – against critics who said its dreams were undreamlike, and in the bad way of being not weird enough, not Lynchian enough. I love Lynchian movie dreams because I think they are accurately dreamlike in their uncanny weirdness (and I have this odd idea that the secret inner purpose of movies is to be dreams, to achieve surreality, so that every filmmaker is secretly trying and inevitably failing to be either Lynch or Buñuel (I did say it was an odd idea)). But I thought, wait, these are shared dreams. People dreaming together would impose an order on the symbolic flux that lone dreamers don’t have the perspective for. The shock of another (sub)consciousness would force them to leave aside their silly, private, random tokens of dream-meaning and strive for something communicable. Shared language would be the means of ascending from sub- to self-consciousness and so, with others’ help, we could be dreaming but also awake. I had about a half-hour of feeling like the Jürgen Habermas of movie dreams, grooving on the idea of the ordering power of dream discourse, dream intersubjectivity, but then we ended up in a dream that was just Leonardo DiCaprio’s and he apparently didn’t need anybody else’s help in ordering his dream into something dumbly expository and undreamlike, styled as a kind of noir pop-psychology, the combined sensibilities of Raymond Chandler and, like, Oprah. So after all that, I ended up agreeing with the sophisticates and the snobs who were bugged by Inception‘s populist dream logic. I mean, with all those different dreams, they could have had at least one where Leonardo goes to pick up a gun but he can’t because his hands have turned into flippers, or he goes to fire a gun but he can’t because the gun barrel is sort of drooping, and then the camera goes to Leonardo’s face, which has an embarrassed but not entirely surprised look on it.

Infinite Manic Sadness: DFW's Universal Inner Child

If you’re a fan, you’ll probably find some interest in the interview transcripts with David Foster Wallace that David Lipsky published under the title Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. You’ll probably also find it frustrating that, over several days of taped conversations that would yield a 300-page book/transcription, Lipsky spent most of his time prompting poor self-consuming DFW to stew in the heat of his own building fame – the interviews were done during Wallace’s 1996 tour for Infinite Jest – and almost no time engaging him on substantive matters of literature and aesthetics. I know these interviews were for a profile (never published), and I know it was to be for Rolling Stone, but, still, you’d think just by chance they’d have drifted into at least one sustained discussion of, I dunno, books. Alas, if you want to get to literature from these interviews you almost have to do so via symptomology. For example, this curious snippet of Wallace talking, the sole excerpt printed on the book’s back jacket, left on its own, without comment, as if patently exemplary:

If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.

I know that sounds like the sort of apotheosis of the self as a therapeutic object that is widely and mostly well-derided around these parts. It even seems to flirt with something so kitschy as an injunction for us to unforget and then be nice to our inner children. When I first read it, I’ll admit I winced, too. I thought, of all the things to pick out for back-jacket immortality…. And maybe Lipsky or the publisher thought that such an apparently middlebrow and bathetic sentiment would make the recondite author more approachable. But fairly quickly I changed my mind and decided it actually gets at what made Wallace such a curiously potent modernist writer: the combination of generosity and solipsism – a sort of megalomania of the heart – that informed his outsized technical skills.

Here you have a guy who – as of 1996 – has established himself as an extreme outlier in both intellectual achievement and, well, depression. He’s been lauded as a genius in both literature and academic philosophy, and he’s done a stint at McClean Hospital – a history that might convince a person his is a uniquely grand and challenging predicament, especially when he’s in the midst of a huge literary ego-stroke. But throughout the Lipsky interviews, you see Wallace insisting on how unexceptional he is. Part of it sounds of false modesty, and part of it sounds of fear. But then you read the seemingly cornball quote above and you have to concede that at least some of it is sincere. He’s speaking in the first person plural – throwing down something like a moral injunction – but what “we” are enjoined from doing is the sort of thing that mainly only people like David Foster Wallace need to be told not to do. You can hear him speaking as a seriously depressed person who, in his dark moments, succumbs to self-laceration and -recrimination, who inflicts terrible violence on his own spirit, who is not nice to himself at all. He has to know that not everyone is depressed like he is. But when he thinks of people in general, what he sees and worries about is their vulnerability to the kind of extreme pain he lives with.

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Those shiftless indie-yuppies

Influential pop music critics like Sasha Frere-Jones, Jody Rosen, and Ann Powers have put a lot of effort, in the last decade or so, into bringing down the general critical estimation of indie music, especially vis-à-vis hip hop. Frere-Jones has flogged a theory that indie music represents a sort of cultural retrenchment by middle class white kids in reaction to the cultural primacy of hip hop, the creation of a specifically white music, or, as Frere-Jones had it, whiteness music. This mode of theorizing blew up in Frere-Jones’s face when he called Stephen Merritt a racist and got so roundly slapped down for it that he didn’t even try to defend himself. But, even as Frere-Jones and Rosen seem to be rediscovering the virtues of brainy pop music, the urge of to pose as a friend of the oppressed by hating on the white indie hipsters remains. David Prince of Billboard.com was on Marketplace the other day talking about how the recession appears in contemporary music, and, well, note how glibly he gets to an explanation of why indie music is so “elitist”:

Ryssdal: What about indie music? I mean some of the folks out there just doing their own thing.
PRINCE: You know, I think of indie music in a lot of ways as the most elitist and the most ignoring the recession and the economic realities. Because if you have the opportunity to really pursue a music career in this day and age and do nothing else, then you probably have some expendable income.
Ryssdal: Expendable income. So it’s kids who have some money, basically.
PRINCE: Indie yuppies is a phrase I think of a lot when I’m reading Pitchfork.

Really? “Indie yuppies” is a phrase you think of? Maybe you should think of a different phrase, because that one’s pretty stupid.

Is The PhD Trap a Trap? (I)

Thomas Benton’s Chronicle article on the trap of academic life describes the hopeless professional situation of graduating Ph.Ds in the humanities accurately enough, but I agree with some of the more skeptical commenters that he overstates the structural or conspiratorial aspects of the problem. To summarize his depiction of the liberal arts Ph.D. as a professional decision: Getting a Ph.D in the liberal arts is the stupidest f***ing thing a person can do. Even with a degree from an elite program in hand, a new Ph.D. faces grim job prospects (stable academic jobs are wickedly elusive, and returning to the private sector leaves you at a disadvantage against the dumb undergrads you were justing giving B-minuses to, or so Benton tells it). But then Benton puts the pedal to the vaguely conspiratorial metal:

Most departments will never willingly provide that information because it is radically against their interest to do so.

And

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students….

The implication is that graduate programs keep accepting too many grad students for financial reasons. This is a familiar line of argument by now. Grad students provide cheap labor, freeing up tenured faculty to do research and freeing universities from the budget burdens of replacing old professors. One of the problems with this line of argument is that it paints a picture of institutions so vested in these backwards practices that they will never change. But I think a key feature of the problem exists outside of this self-reinforcing circuit of material incentives and is thus amenable to the type of criticism Benton is leveling.

A big reason why academic departments maintain Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts and resist shrinking or eliminating them – beyond all the hard-headed talk about money – is that professors like having graduate students. A common selling point of jobs at “research universities” is the opportunity to “teach graduate students.” Why, given the low esteem in which we hold the sniveling grad student?

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Super Bowl Sunday Sports Post!

In his Friday column, Brooks cites “a fascinating essay” by Duke professor Michael Allen Gillespie on sports as “moral education,” and then performs a weird detour in which he thinks he’s rebutting or correcting Gillespie’s argument while actually confirming it. Gillespie spells out three dominant models of sport-as-moral-education in western history – Greek (individualized contests oriented toward instilling aristocratic virtues in participants), Roman (spectacles intended to legitimize the government, indifferent to participants), and British (rule- and team-oriented games meant to forge an imperial ruling class).

Gillespie argues, in Brooks’s words, that American college sports have historically represented a “fusion of these three traditions,” but “have [now] become too Romanized” – long seasons, huge stadiums, a “gladiator class” of athletes largely unconnected to the students they represent, coaches willing to break rules to satisfy fans and boosters. Gillespie wants to scale down college athletics to reconnect them with their original purpose as tools of moral education.

Brooks satisfies his pundit’s obligation to have at least one point only by shifting from Gillespie’s focus on the moral education of students and athletes to an entirely different one on social and political integration, but in doing so he makes Gillespie’s argument even stronger. Brooks writes that Gillespie is missing the important role that big-time college sports play in a “segmented society” as “one of the few avenues for large scale communal participation.” Crowds “roar, suffer, and invent chants….” Why, Brooks almost sounds as if he is describing sports in…ancient Rome!

Maybe I find Brooks’s rejoinder irksome and unusually glib because Michael Gillespie was a teacher of mine. Gillespie’s a brilliant political theory scholar who also, as a former college football player now deeply involved in athletic governance at Duke, knows a ton about college sports. (I seriously doubt Gillespie is “missing” how college sports function as mass events.) I’ve participated in the communal pleasures of college sports, but let’s be honest. How much more value do they have as common experiences that help integrate society and polity than, say, American Idol? We’re forced into a much more serious accounting than Brooks gives us once we realize that he’s talking about little more than the viewing fun of lots of people who just happen to all be outside at the same time, in the same place, yelling the same thing.

Avatar: In defense of the semi-defensible

A few weeks ago, I set out a threat or a promise to take up the case of Avatar against some of its many critics, especially its TAS critics. Like many things, this became harder to do the longer I put it off. Also, I began by sort of casually including James Poulos’s critiques in with the others I was addressing and then realized that they don’t belong together at all. So, there’s only a little Poulos in this, for now. (Alas, as pop-cultural themes turn into philosophical ones, I have a tendency to lapse into the sort of pedantic earnestness that won me a Poseur of the Year nomination a while back. I have to work on that. In the meantime, enjoy the pedantic earnestness!)

As we know, Avatar hews to a sort of standard Hollywood romanticism in which a nagging conflict between characters we identify with and characters we like is overcome through empathy and openness. Avatar takes this a bit far, as many have pointed out, in having Jake Sully not just become one of the Na’avi but end up ruling them. My supersensitive deep reading of this move is not that it is racist or that it shows the inherent reason-imperialism of even modern humanism, or per Brooks that it shows the inherent “condescension” in the film’s liberal message, but that a movie and an audience that invests almost three hours in its hero’s progress would find it unsatisfying to see him end up a lieutenant. Still, point taken.

But I have to lay my own cards on the table here. One of the things I find so strange about the defensiveness on the Na’vi’s behalf – that they’re the victims of condescension etc. – is that the small moments in which I noted the risk of this (the inevitability that someone would make this argument) were completely swamped by admiration and jealousy and delight in the idea of sentient beings possessed of such excellence. My first comment in defense of Avatar was actually a tweet to my TAS pals, whose hostility was already rumbling through the Twitterverse, admitting that I’m a sucker for “that hyperathletic communitarian warrior shit.” In fact, the core of my enjoyment of the movie, and those of others I’ve talked to, was this. That Jake Sully should want to become a Na’avi struck me as neither traitorous nor pomo-decadent mainly because I wanted to become a Na’avi. I hate to get into the game of spot-the-condescender, but it seems like the claim that Cameron is really condescending to them (or to some earthly sufferers) with his portrait of the Na’avi’s mad skillz and enfolding the Na’avi into an evaluative scheme whose true lesson is “White liberals number 1!” itself suffers from a degree of self-enclosure. Cameron, I’m betting, took his broader and ideologically diverse audience to be capable of seeing something his learned critics either can’t or won’t: That the distinct virtues that he imparts to the N’avi really are both distinct and virtuous. They are not ours. They are theirs. Sitting in the audience, we’re not secretly thinking, Goddamn primitives. Good thing Jake Sully’s around to help them overcome their lack of technology. We’re thinking, They don’t even need cars. This whole theme reminds me of Jonah Goldberg’s sound criticism of the tendency to find racism in movie portraits like that of the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, which is basically, wait, who’s looking at the Orcs and seeing black people? In this case, if when you see blue aliens on screen you think “black people” or “Native Americans,” why is that James Cameron’s fault? Why is your itch to protect people of color from condescension via a movie portrait of aliens from an alien planet (that people of color are digging in movie theaters worldwide) not itself condescending?

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Not an Avatar Threat, An Avatar Promise

The pop-cult polemicist in me is feeling terribly thwarted at the moment. TAS luminaries Reihan, Peter, and James have written the world’s most challenging takedowns of Avatar, a movie I quite loved and am prepared to write the world’s most challenging defense of, except that I am packing today and traveling tomorrow, to my parents’ house, a place where all mental processes slow to cryogenic status and all ambition drains into the cracks between sofa cushions. (At least my mental processes and my ambitions. My parents seem to function just fine.) Since I sort of specialize in out-of-date movie commentary, I shouldn’t worry about it and just write the thing when I get back. But Reihan, Peter, and James should worry. If I can emerge from suspended animation and remember some of what I wanted to say, I’ll be gunning for them.

Inevitable Tiger Woods post

A friend confesses that what he finds most disturbing about the Tiger Woods saga is the “Jacobinism of monogamy” on display in the public reaction. There are certain parts of his lament that I don’t share, but he nails something with this term. Not only is the current regime of American marriage quite modern, it’s utterly contemporary. The moralism that attends the idea of marriage is – per my friend – a moralism of public order. Like many other things in American life, the idea of marriage got tightened up after the 1970s. This was partly a response to the upswing in divorce, and it took on bits of concern with growing illegitimacy, especially through the 1990s, but it was also fueled by the new feminist expectations of gender equality in the private sphere. “Traditional marriage” was stripped down and then reloaded with several new and pressing ideological purposes and burdens. Stable marriages have become an explicit interest of the state – of public policy and criminal law. And, now, even evangelical marriages have to navigate expectations that originated in the feminist revolution. (Now, I’m happily down with monogamous marriage on a personal level, and I share both the conservative concerns with family breakdown and the egalitarian liberalism of the new marriage model, but an event like this makes me face some implications of this cluster of beliefs. I never thought of myself as a Jacobin.)

Anyway, it’s this that frames my reaction to the reactions to the Tiger Woods revelations. (Warning: Rank culture-studies-type speculation ahead.) People want to say that the public outrage owes to the fact that Tiger is black and his wife (and/or his roster of paramours) is (are) white (and, in the most important instance, blond!). This was a backlash that was waiting to happen. I think this is simplistic. I think the proper metaphor is not of a backlash, but of a bubble bursting. Woods was the repository of a huge number of fond thoughts and expectations. His excellence as a golfer was easy to project varieties of safeness and niceness and respectability onto (partly because he is, well, a golfer). That’s why he was such a valuable pitchman. When he got married and had two beautiful kids, that just deepened his public identity as a paragon of bourgeois virtue. He was a paradoxical ideal of normality. He was – to borrow a line from Laurie Anderson – a person exactly like you are and I am, only much, much better. This is how it would have to be in America. Just ask Tocqueville.

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100 Yards is a purely subjective measure of success

A while back Brooks wrote a much-derided column on lost stoicism of our noble forbears – compared to the epidemic of self-celebration that afflicts us now – which Jim echoed here to further derision. I tend to resist Brooksian generalities as sociology, though I enjoy them as provocation. (I usually agree with them even if I doubt they’re actually true, if you know what I mean.)

But one small moment in this weekend’s college football left me, in a Brooksian sort of way, wondering about the young people today. (Switching, herewith, to the sports present tense.)In the third quarter of the Alabama Florida-Arkansas game, Arkansas receiver Greg Childs catches a pass and heads towards the goal line, fighting off Alabama tacklers. He sheds what looked like a final tackler inside the five yard line but as he reaches the goal line an Alabama defender flies in from his right and punches the ball free. Though replays seem to show Childs losing the ball before the goal line, the touchdown call is upheld on review. (There was no goal-line camera to offer decisive rebuttal.) But the remarkable thing the replay shows is the reason the final defender is able to knock the ball loose. In basically the next step after slipping the last tackle, Childs, who has been carrying the ball in his left hand, away from the approaching defenders, begins switching it to his right hand. It is while he’s switching it that the ball is knocked loose. It is because he is switching hands that the ball is so easy to knock loose. (The announcers, oddly, were mute on this point, and praised Childs for scrambling to recover his own fumble in the end zone.) Why is he switching hands so soon, while his would-be tackler is still falling at his heels, before he has even crossed the goal line, bringing it towards the defender approaching him from his right? There is no comprehensible football reason for the switch. The only plausible reason to switch hands in that spot is to put the ball in his natural hand, so he can raise it over his head in celebration and self-display. Indeed, the replay shows him switching it to his hand and not to the inner part of his lower arm, in the manner of ball-carrying. But why start celebrating so soon? The distinction between scoring and celebrating is not even a distinction. The two overlap. The celebrating starts not after the touchdown, but as soon as the touchdown seems inevitable. Despite the perverse football consequences – a goal-line fumble or near-fumble, almost a lost touchdown – it is actually impressive how quickly Childs’s mind passes from one consideration to the next. How could he have the presence of mind to start celebrating so perversely early, in virtually the same motion as breaking that last tackle? I can only guess that it was a reflex, deep-seated, stitched into his mental archetype of a notable play: One throws off a flare of performative excess as soon as is humanly possible.

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