I should be clear from the start that football has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. More to the point, it has been a pleasure, a source of joy, even. As a kid, I played back yard football whenever I could, which was more often than you might think given that the closest pick-up game was over a mile way, most of which was down a long dirt driveway. When I couldn’t get a game I spent hours punting and kicking back and forth across the front yard, which wasn’t much smaller than a proper gridiron (we lived in the country). During this same period a picture of the Heisman Trophy cut from a magazine hung from my bedroom door for years. In high school I finally got to play organized football, and I can still remember the twinge of melancholy whenever our coach got us focused in practice by reminding us that these eight or nine games a year were the last football games in which almost every last one of us would ever get to play. (We weren’t bad, top ten in Delaware my last year, but Delaware isn’t Texas so only a couple of us would go on to play Division III college football, and I wasn’t one of them.) I have watched football on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall since at least 1980, the year of the first Super Bowl to enter my consciousness, XV between the Raiders and Eagles, when we still lived in Pennsylvania. (My childhood dog, Riggins, was named after the hero of Super Bowl XVII.) And now that we haven’t had a TV in nine years, I’ve still managed to watch football on Sundays at my mother-in-law’s house. And any time my favorite teams win, I get a blast of dopamine in my head. I listen to sports radio, which is at least 75% football-focused in-season or out, every day that I drive my car. I check the sports page on the internet every day, and probably 75% of the content is similarly devoted to football. Most years I have a (losing) fantasy football team. (Like sands through the hourglass, so far this year my squad, Aqua Velva, has one win to two losses.)
I once heard it said that one shouldn’t make a religion out of literature, because it is at the same time both more than and less than a religion. Without knowing exactly what that means, I would both agree and say that this is also exactly how I feel about football.
All of which is to say that for me, like tens of millions of other Americans, football matters. It has emotional heft and occupies significant chunks of the synapses in my brain. Which has made the revelation in the last several years of the brutal head trauma suffered by so many professional football players, a pattern of trauma which simply isn’t captured by the word concussion, more than a little troubling, twisting football from a pleasure into a guilty pleasure, and not the kind we mean when we say we get a guilty pleasure out of watching Jersey Shore; i.e. we don’t think “Isn’t it funny that I’m watching this,” but instead think “Maybe I shouldn’t really be watching this anymore.” And that was before this month’s epochal scandal, the video footage of Ray Rice’s explosive domestic violence, through which we have arrived at a defining moment. But the question remains: definitive of exactly what?
The phrase looping around and around in my head as I try to come to grips with the punch Ray Rice threw at his beloved is this: the compartmentalization of violence. We expect professional football players to engage in ultraviolence on the field of play, and comport themselves as gentlemen everywhere else, which means that we expect the impossible. In a schizophrenic arrangement (as the term is used colloquially), one compartment holds David Banner, the other the Hulk. Unfortunately, aggression leaks and eventually someone pisses off David Banner. There is an old saying that if you keep going to see a surgeon, eventually you’re going to get cut (i.e., it’s what they do). By the very same logic, if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit. Inside and outside the lines. (The latter of which, ironically, is the name of the ESPN news outlet which has alleged that the NFL’s league office and the management of the Baltimore Ravens have engaged in an ongoing cover-up of what they knew about Ray Rice and when they knew it, which, if true, is a topic for another day. I would only point out here that the fact that the cover up is always worse than the crime is the universe’s way of insisting that we learn from our mistakes instead of denying and/or burying them. Okay, I will also point out that I don’t know which is worse, if I am Roger Goodell’s employer: that Goodell knew the videotape of Ray Rice punching his fiancé was in the league office -note that it has been factually established that the tape was in the office- and he has been lying about it, or that the tape was in the league office without Goodell having a clue, i.e. he’s a liar or a fool, as in a commissioner from the planet Krypton who supervised underlings without expressly warning them about the possible effects of Kryptonite on their beloved boss is foolish, indeed. But I digress. Okay, okay, one more digression- Another tragic aspect of all of this is that prior to the incident Ray Rice would have been the very last Baltimore Raven anyone would have imagined punching his significant other’s lights out. He seemed to be the embodiment of the ideal of compartmentalization, lethal on the field and a model citizen in the community, an officer and a gentleman, if you will.)
If the logic of “if you hang around professional football players long enough, you’ll see someone get hit, inside and outside the lines” is valid, it would stand to reason that the arrest rates for NFL players involved in violent assault would be off the charts. When, in fact, the arrest rate for NFL players in cases of non-domestic assault is only 16.7% of the national average. (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/) So, at first blush, pro football players seem to be the kind of guys you actually would want your daughter to bring home. But that picture drastically and tragically changes when you account for domestic violence:
“Domestic violence accounts for 48% of arrests for violent crimes among NFL players, compared to our estimated 21% nationally. Moreover, relative to the income level (top 1 percent) and poverty rate (0 percent) of NFL players, the domestic violence rate is downright extraordinary.” (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-violence-arrests-among-nfl-players/)
Given that the rate at which American domestic violence cases are reported is found in research studies to be as low as less than 1% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_United_States), and given that the economic incentive alluded to above (“top 1 percent”) provides the victims of domestic NFL violence literally millions of reasons not to report, the depth and breadth of the NFL’s domestic violence problem could very well be unthinkably vast. The tendency of domestic violence victims not to report is also a stark reminder that the NFL players are, in one very grim sense of the term, rational actors in the perpetration of domestic violence; “we only hurt the ones we love” has been replaced by “we only hit the ones who won’t press charges.”
Although perhaps “rational actor” is a bit of a misnomer, implying as it does the process of conscious reasoning, when what’s really in play here is the unconscious process of displacement, defined by Norman A. Polansky in Integrated Ego Psychology as “turning one’s impulse aside from its original unacceptable target to one that involves less anxiety.” And, it goes without saying, there is certainly less anxiety involved in targeting those who won’t call the police, i.e. players’ wives/girlfriends, then everyone else they have the impulse to punch in the mouth. The classic example of displacement is the worker who takes crap from his boss all day, only to come home and take out (displace) his anger on the family dog with a swift kick. It is, then, the cruelest of ironies that the women getting punched and kicked by professional football players are also tagged by machismo locker room culture with the moniker “bitches.”
I am left wondering how to dole out the blame between the pro football players throwing the left hooks and we adoring masses. It is we, after all, who expect (and reward) the compartmentalization of violence, which is akin to expecting water to flow uphill. If we can say anything definitive about violence it is that aggression spreads. In this, it is no different than love. Violence, it turns out, cannot be compartmentalized; the closest it can come to disappearing is to be aimed at the vulnerable in the hopes that their invisibility will rub off on the violence. Which is why it is no surprise that within days of the release of the Ray Rice videotape, pictures surfaced documenting star Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson’s alleged felony abuse of his son. In the National Football League, the compartmentalization of violence is code for violent displacement onto women and children. If Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson have accomplished anything, it is the removal of every last shred of our collective plausible deniability about that. Meaning Hannah Storm’s eloquent question to the NFL can be asked of all of us who love the game and feed the machine: What exactly do we stand for?
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Sunday, September 21, 2014
When Safe is Just a Feeling
Two key markers have appeared in what is almost certainly a response to the waves of school shootings that crested first at Columbine High School and then again in New Town, Connecticut, but which have lapped steadily at the national consciousness since that fateful April morning in Littleton, Colorado: 1) We have begun the process of arming our teachers (or, as we shall see in at least one case, they are arming themselves, or at least their vice principal is), and 2) We are beginning to militarize our school police, who, it should be noted, already come equipped with the standard issue Glock sidearm.
As to #1, The Washington Post reports that “The Argyle Independent School District in north Texas has started the 2014-15 school year, as KDAF-TV noted, ‘with guns blazing’ — or, rather, with newly armed teachers who have been given the right to use them ‘to protect our students.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) The Post adds that “In fact, nearly 20 states have laws allowing adults to carry licensed guns into schools.” And where schools aren’t proactively arming teachers, individual school personnel may be taking matters into their own hands, as, per Salon, in the case of one California public school administrator:
“Kent Williams is the vice principal of Tevis Junior High School in Bakersfield, California, and ever since he got his concealed-carry permit in 2010, he’s been bringing a handgun with him to work. Until recently, this wasn’t an issue (chiefly because other school administrators didn’t know he was doing it).” (http://www.salon.com/2014/09/10/middle_school_administrator_fights_for_right_to_bring_handgun_to_work/)
The Salon article goes on to explain that while Williams is currently on paid leave while the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District investigates matters (even as Williams’ lawyer threatens a lawsuit if Williams isn’t returned to the job), Williams faces no legal recriminations, with authorities “having concluded that his permit did not have any restrictions.” (ibid)
And regarding #2 above, the militarization of the school police, The Washington Post has also reported that “some school police in Compton will be permitted to carry semiautomatic AR-15 rifles — the same kind of rifle used in a recent Oregon school shooting – in schools… ‘in response to situations that clearly evidence a need or potential need for superior firepower to be used against armed suspects.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/21/in-compton-school-police-can-use-semiautomatic-weapons/) One can only imagine the potential crossfire, and wonder as to exactly how much better off we will be when our schools are battlefields instead of killing fields, i.e. will the post-battle carnage be any less than post-massacre?
Still, we’re used to cops with guns, and, increasingly, cops with military grade weaponry; the American police state is something of a fait accompli, sold to us as the cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world, and part and parcel of the national security state. No one says “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” anymore, but we all know how to say “Yes, officer.” But putting guns in the hands of your friendly neighborhood seventh grade social studies teacher, whose private life could heretofore be politely ignored as long as the teacher’s use of social media stayed within certain unspoken boundaries but whose every sick day must now be parsed for hints of distress and/or despair, gives one pause. Does Mr. Johnson have a nasty head cold, or does his recent break up with his fiancée have him reaching nihilistic conclusions about the point of it all such that I think I will just keep the twins home from middle school for the rest of the week? How many of America’s 3.1 million public school teachers could hold it together long enough to e.g. meet the Argyle Independent School District’s requirements to “obtain a license to carry it (the gun), pass a psychological evaluation and get training in how to use the weapon,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) but who have absolutely no business packing heat on lunch duty. (Anyone who can effectively run lunch duty will have long since mastered the Jedi Mind Trick, and, it goes without saying, guns are much too “clumsy and random” for Jedis.)
When one reads, again in The Washington Post, that an Idaho State University “instructor carrying a concealed gun accidentally shot himself in the foot in the chemistry lab,” and that “students were in attendance at the time but luckily none of them were hit,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) one begins to get a sense of how misguided the effort to protect children by arming their teachers really is. One is immediately reminded of the infamous data, accessible via a quick Google search, that a gun in the house makes homicides 2.7 times more likely. (The pro-gun websites pooh-poohing this data are just as easy to find on Google, but the critiques are robustly parried here: www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm) And since there’s no reason to think that the schoolhouse is immune to all of the contingencies of the household, as exemplified by the accidental shooting in the Idaho chem lab, making it obvious to any rational observer that we don’t actually know how to make our children safe from school shootings and instead choose to place them at increased risk, then what are we really on about when we arm our teachers?
The answer, praise Jesus (or the Sacred of your chosen tradition ☺), is not that we want to place our children at increased risk, but that this increased risk is a (still deeply troubling) side effect of the adults’ own efforts to feel safe. We are pointed to this conclusion by two further Google-accessed data points. The first of the two involves a classic case of belief’s conquest of the facts on the ground; pace “2.7 times more likely,” “for the first time a majority of Americans say having a gun in the household makes it a safer place to be, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By a wide 51 to 29 percent margin, more people say a gun in the house makes it safer rather than more dangerous.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/) In other words, guns make those who possess them feel safer, even as gun ownership increases the risk of gun violence (e.g., “for every time a gun in or around the home was used in self-defense, or in a legally justified shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed homicides. That’s one self-defense shooting for twenty-two accidental, suicidal, or criminal shootings, hardly support for the notion that having a gun handy makes people safer.” (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/184209741.html))
Our second follow-up data point highlights an inverse relationship between gun owners’ feelings and those of everyone around him: “By a margin of five to one, Americans feel less safe rather than more safe as more people in their community begin to carry guns.” (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/firearms-archives/) Apparently, “2.7 times more likely” means different things to different people. The confusion even extends into the home of the gun owner:
“Drill down on the 75% of the people in gun-owning households who think it makes their house a safer place to be, which leaves 25% who do not. Of those people who live in gun-owning households, 31% do not own a gun themselves. If you make the fair assumption that almost all of the people who actually own the guns think they make their home safer, that leaves almost all of the people who don’t personally own a gun, but live in a household with one, don’t think it makes them safer.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/)
In sum, school shootings are horrifying, and teachers faced with the possibility that such an event could happen in their school and in their classroom understandably reach for the feeling of safety that comes with a gun, most likely telling themselves that the aura of safety fills the classroom, when in fact they have only ramped up the fear for the children they believe they are protecting. This process, coping with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, is, tragically, the common coin of our stunted social realm. It is elemental, to speak in the Christian idiom, to our fallenness. It doesn’t have to involve guns or even physical violence; as part of our everyday human scenery it is called blaming. I do it all the time, especially around the house, no matter that when I am whining yet again about who moved my stuff where I can’t find it almost invariably I discover that I moved my stuff. And even if it wasn’t me, big deal, let’s try for some perspective here.
Since perspective is in such short supply when one is busy blocking out pain by offloading it onto others (see the whining), I have in the last few weeks started a daily practice for some help in this area. Each morning I visit www.random.org to receive a randomized number between 1 and 59, which is how many Lojong slogans there are. These slogans are, according to the dust jacket for Always Maintain a Joyful Mind, the collection which houses all 59 slogans with commentaries by Pema Chodron, “a collection of 59 pith teachings to help… develop wisdom and compassion amid the challenges of daily living.” Random.org promises me that the numbers it provides are truly random, not, for example, like the random function on my old CD player which always cued up the same sequence of songs on Tom Petty’s masterpiece, Into the Great Wide Open. Nevertheless, in the first weeks of my new practice several of the numbers have been repeating, i.e. I am hardheaded and need to hear things more than once before getting the point. (I think the Buddhists call this ego.) Yesterday, I got #34 for at least the third time. It is a pithy prescription for those who would otherwise cope with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, i.e. for teachers who would carry guns and for forty-year olds who can’t shut up about who had the audacity to move their cell phone charger cord.
So, for all of us, #34, with Pema Chodron’s commentary in parentheses:
“Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow. (Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.)”
As to #1, The Washington Post reports that “The Argyle Independent School District in north Texas has started the 2014-15 school year, as KDAF-TV noted, ‘with guns blazing’ — or, rather, with newly armed teachers who have been given the right to use them ‘to protect our students.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) The Post adds that “In fact, nearly 20 states have laws allowing adults to carry licensed guns into schools.” And where schools aren’t proactively arming teachers, individual school personnel may be taking matters into their own hands, as, per Salon, in the case of one California public school administrator:
“Kent Williams is the vice principal of Tevis Junior High School in Bakersfield, California, and ever since he got his concealed-carry permit in 2010, he’s been bringing a handgun with him to work. Until recently, this wasn’t an issue (chiefly because other school administrators didn’t know he was doing it).” (http://www.salon.com/2014/09/10/middle_school_administrator_fights_for_right_to_bring_handgun_to_work/)
The Salon article goes on to explain that while Williams is currently on paid leave while the Panama-Buena Vista Union School District investigates matters (even as Williams’ lawyer threatens a lawsuit if Williams isn’t returned to the job), Williams faces no legal recriminations, with authorities “having concluded that his permit did not have any restrictions.” (ibid)
And regarding #2 above, the militarization of the school police, The Washington Post has also reported that “some school police in Compton will be permitted to carry semiautomatic AR-15 rifles — the same kind of rifle used in a recent Oregon school shooting – in schools… ‘in response to situations that clearly evidence a need or potential need for superior firepower to be used against armed suspects.’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/21/in-compton-school-police-can-use-semiautomatic-weapons/) One can only imagine the potential crossfire, and wonder as to exactly how much better off we will be when our schools are battlefields instead of killing fields, i.e. will the post-battle carnage be any less than post-massacre?
Still, we’re used to cops with guns, and, increasingly, cops with military grade weaponry; the American police state is something of a fait accompli, sold to us as the cost of doing business in the post-9/11 world, and part and parcel of the national security state. No one says “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” anymore, but we all know how to say “Yes, officer.” But putting guns in the hands of your friendly neighborhood seventh grade social studies teacher, whose private life could heretofore be politely ignored as long as the teacher’s use of social media stayed within certain unspoken boundaries but whose every sick day must now be parsed for hints of distress and/or despair, gives one pause. Does Mr. Johnson have a nasty head cold, or does his recent break up with his fiancée have him reaching nihilistic conclusions about the point of it all such that I think I will just keep the twins home from middle school for the rest of the week? How many of America’s 3.1 million public school teachers could hold it together long enough to e.g. meet the Argyle Independent School District’s requirements to “obtain a license to carry it (the gun), pass a psychological evaluation and get training in how to use the weapon,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) but who have absolutely no business packing heat on lunch duty. (Anyone who can effectively run lunch duty will have long since mastered the Jedi Mind Trick, and, it goes without saying, guns are much too “clumsy and random” for Jedis.)
When one reads, again in The Washington Post, that an Idaho State University “instructor carrying a concealed gun accidentally shot himself in the foot in the chemistry lab,” and that “students were in attendance at the time but luckily none of them were hit,”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/06/texas-school-district-arms-teachers-and-posts-warning-signs/) one begins to get a sense of how misguided the effort to protect children by arming their teachers really is. One is immediately reminded of the infamous data, accessible via a quick Google search, that a gun in the house makes homicides 2.7 times more likely. (The pro-gun websites pooh-poohing this data are just as easy to find on Google, but the critiques are robustly parried here: www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm) And since there’s no reason to think that the schoolhouse is immune to all of the contingencies of the household, as exemplified by the accidental shooting in the Idaho chem lab, making it obvious to any rational observer that we don’t actually know how to make our children safe from school shootings and instead choose to place them at increased risk, then what are we really on about when we arm our teachers?
The answer, praise Jesus (or the Sacred of your chosen tradition ☺), is not that we want to place our children at increased risk, but that this increased risk is a (still deeply troubling) side effect of the adults’ own efforts to feel safe. We are pointed to this conclusion by two further Google-accessed data points. The first of the two involves a classic case of belief’s conquest of the facts on the ground; pace “2.7 times more likely,” “for the first time a majority of Americans say having a gun in the household makes it a safer place to be, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By a wide 51 to 29 percent margin, more people say a gun in the house makes it safer rather than more dangerous.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/) In other words, guns make those who possess them feel safer, even as gun ownership increases the risk of gun violence (e.g., “for every time a gun in or around the home was used in self-defense, or in a legally justified shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven attempted or completed homicides. That’s one self-defense shooting for twenty-two accidental, suicidal, or criminal shootings, hardly support for the notion that having a gun handy makes people safer.” (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/184209741.html))
Our second follow-up data point highlights an inverse relationship between gun owners’ feelings and those of everyone around him: “By a margin of five to one, Americans feel less safe rather than more safe as more people in their community begin to carry guns.” (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/firearms-archives/) Apparently, “2.7 times more likely” means different things to different people. The confusion even extends into the home of the gun owner:
“Drill down on the 75% of the people in gun-owning households who think it makes their house a safer place to be, which leaves 25% who do not. Of those people who live in gun-owning households, 31% do not own a gun themselves. If you make the fair assumption that almost all of the people who actually own the guns think they make their home safer, that leaves almost all of the people who don’t personally own a gun, but live in a household with one, don’t think it makes them safer.” (http://www.mediaite.com/online/poll-guns-make-people-who-own-them-feel-really-safe-everyone-else-not-so-much/)
In sum, school shootings are horrifying, and teachers faced with the possibility that such an event could happen in their school and in their classroom understandably reach for the feeling of safety that comes with a gun, most likely telling themselves that the aura of safety fills the classroom, when in fact they have only ramped up the fear for the children they believe they are protecting. This process, coping with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, is, tragically, the common coin of our stunted social realm. It is elemental, to speak in the Christian idiom, to our fallenness. It doesn’t have to involve guns or even physical violence; as part of our everyday human scenery it is called blaming. I do it all the time, especially around the house, no matter that when I am whining yet again about who moved my stuff where I can’t find it almost invariably I discover that I moved my stuff. And even if it wasn’t me, big deal, let’s try for some perspective here.
Since perspective is in such short supply when one is busy blocking out pain by offloading it onto others (see the whining), I have in the last few weeks started a daily practice for some help in this area. Each morning I visit www.random.org to receive a randomized number between 1 and 59, which is how many Lojong slogans there are. These slogans are, according to the dust jacket for Always Maintain a Joyful Mind, the collection which houses all 59 slogans with commentaries by Pema Chodron, “a collection of 59 pith teachings to help… develop wisdom and compassion amid the challenges of daily living.” Random.org promises me that the numbers it provides are truly random, not, for example, like the random function on my old CD player which always cued up the same sequence of songs on Tom Petty’s masterpiece, Into the Great Wide Open. Nevertheless, in the first weeks of my new practice several of the numbers have been repeating, i.e. I am hardheaded and need to hear things more than once before getting the point. (I think the Buddhists call this ego.) Yesterday, I got #34 for at least the third time. It is a pithy prescription for those who would otherwise cope with fear, anger, and pain by attempting to block those feelings in ways that amplify those very feelings in others, i.e. for teachers who would carry guns and for forty-year olds who can’t shut up about who had the audacity to move their cell phone charger cord.
So, for all of us, #34, with Pema Chodron’s commentary in parentheses:
“Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the cow. (Don’t transfer your load to someone else. Take responsibility for what is yours.)”
Sunday, September 07, 2014
What's in a Name?
In the current edition of ESPN Magazine, Howard Bryant’s column delves into exactly why, in the wake of the events surrounding Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, so few professional athletes, including the many African Americans in their ranks, have spoken out. Bryant’s piece is highly recommended, touching lucidly on “fault lines of race and class,” and “the growing culture of militarism that is now everywhere in America.” But I’d like to use one peculiar, provocative element in Bryant’s column as a jumping off point for an entirely different conversation, if one that also sits unsteadily on “fault lines of race and class.” That subtle provocation occurs smack in the middle of Bryant’s report on the near-silence from pro jocks re: Ferguson:
“In the wake of curfews, arrests and tear gas, the St. Louis Rams offered tickets to the youth of Ferguson; some of the Washington football players held their hands up as they emerged from the tunnel before a preseason game, adopting the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ symbol of protest in solidarity with a community roiling.”
How ironic that virtually the only professional athletes in America willing to take the risk of making public their support for the Black folks, and especially the young Black males, of Ferguson, Missouri are the very athletes who play for a team whose mascot Bryant cannot in good conscious even mention: the Washington Redskins.
The controversy surrounding the Washington football club’s mascot has reached a crescendo during a summer which saw the team lose its trademark protection from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (a ruling the team is, predictably, appealing), fifty United States senators sign a letter urging the NFL to take action and force a name change, and the announcement this week by the New York Daily News that it will no longer include the word Redskins in its newspaper (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sack-article-1.1926865), an announcement that follows on the heels of the hometown Washington Post’s editorial page announcing that it will no longer print the word Redskins either (though the Post’s sports page will continue to refer to the team as the Redskins). (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/washington-post-editorials-will-no-longer-use-redskins-for-the-local-nfl-team/2014/08/22/1413db62-2940-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html )
But before delving into the reasons that 71% of Americans still believe the team should not change its name (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/new-poll-says-large-majority-of-americans-believe-redskins-should-not-change-name/2014/09/02/496e3dd0-32e0-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html), and that team owner Daniel Snyder has, per NBC’s Al Michaels, stated that the team will change its name “over my (Snyder’s) dead body,” some personal history is in order. I have been a Washington Redskins fan since moving within their TV broadcast territory as a 6-year old just at the dawn of the team’s golden age, a ten year burst in which the franchise would bring home three Super Bowl championships under the guidance of likable obnoxious rich guy (team owner) Jack Kent Cooke, California surfer dude (general manager) Bobby Beathard, and nascent NASCAR kingpin (head coach) Joe Gibbs. Everything about the team was fun, especially the winning, but also the nicknames (Hogs, Smurfs, Fun Bunch, etc.) and the cast of characters, e.g. the performance art of Hall of Fame running back John Riggins passing out drunk on the floor of a White House dinner after telling Justice O’Connor “Loosen up, Sandy Baby.”
But all good things must come to an end, and before long Cooke was dead, Beathard was guiding the San Diego Chargers to their first ever Super Bowl appearance, and Joe Gibbs was winning the Daytona 500. The Daniel Snyder era, with perpetual mediocrity punctuated by brief bursts of total incompetence, had begun. Not even Gibbs, in his brief second run with the team, could put things right; he got the hell out of Dodge after squeaking into the playoffs enabled him to leave with his dignity, and reputation, largely intact. It hasn’t been much fun to be a Redskins fan for the last twenty years, and without the fun to distract you, there’s that name. Just sitting there. On my 1987 Super Bowl t-shirt. On my 1982 Super Bowl Coke bottle. Talking to me. Telling me that the reason I was a Redskins fan for all the good years without once even thinking about the implications of the team’s name was because I could. Which doing things because you can without even thinking about them is the very definition of white privilege. And I continued not even thinking about it even several years into the losing, until a girlfriend (now ex) who had worked actively to change the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek mascot as an undergraduate at Champagne-Urbana, looked at me a certain way whenever I used my MBNA Washington Redskins Visa card. Which is how my ’87 t-shirt is looking at me right about now. My privilege, singing “Hail to the Redskins” without ever once thinking about the words coming out of my mouth, was undone because my girlfriend made me think. Getting white folks to stop and think, and then hopefully feel, is the only way we ever change, and was the chief strategy of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance movement.
Fast forward to 2014 and, slowly, more folks, white and otherwise, are beginning to stop and think about the name of the football franchise that represents our nation’s capital. While 71% of Americans still think its hunky dory if the Redskins keep their name, that number is significantly lower than 1992’s 89%. And, his “over my dead body” stance notwithstanding, Daniel Snyder may be starting to see the handwriting on the wall, as rumors have begun to circulate that Snyder may be willing to change the name for the right stadium deal (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/shutdown-corner/former-gm--dan-snyder-might-drop-redskins-name-for-new-stadium--super-bowl-144942689.html). But given that the latter is currently mere internet speculation, as well as the fact that Snyder and his minions have been mounting an aggressive defense of their beloved mascot, including a creepy new charity campaign aimed at select American Indian tribes, the task of answering the arguments floated in favor of keeping the name is still at hand. The four most oft repeated arguments turn out to be, respectively, false, (almost) real, stonewalling, and ironic.
The false argument, and one put forward in bad faith, is that the name Redskins is intended to honor American Indians. This is patently absurd, mirroring other lies such as segregation’s “separate but equal” and Fox News’ “fair and balanced.” In all three of these cases, the lie functions to announce the real intentions (i.e., respectively, making sport of a dominated civilization, terrorizing Blacks, and shilling for the neoliberal militarists) in a socially acceptable manner. The truth is that using and maintaining the name Redskins is just a perpetual game of Cowboys and Indians, a game that has never been about honoring American Indians, but about casting them as brutal savages to be overcome by western civilization. Cowboys and Indians is the children’s version of a ritual, here being played by grown men and women, the sole purpose of which is to absolve (European) Americans of any lingering guilt over genocide.
The only (quasi) real argument being made in favor of keeping the name goes something like this: “You’re just a bunch of uptight liberals trying to ruin our harmless fun.” Real as in honest, if only honest to a point. Honest that it is a lot of fun playing Cowboys and Indians (Redskins fans claim to hate the Cowboys, when really we’re all Cowboys fans too, enjoying with our Dallas brethren the thrill of a victory that delivered an entire continent; the only difference is that we get to play the Indian while our Dallas brethren get to play the Cowboy), but deeply disingenuous in its denial of the incalculable harm done to an entire people.
The (not quite) real argument is closely related to the argument that is used more frequently than all of the others combined, i.e. the stonewalling maneuver of stating some version of “Man, I’m not into all that political correctness stuff.” This strategy depends on the logic that 1) all reasonable people recognize political correctness for what it is- a liberal mind control device that deflects our attention from attending to matters that are actually important, 2) and therefore anything judged to be politically correct can be dismissed out of hand, 3) and furthermore the concern over the Redskins name is a classic case of political correctness run amok. Repressed and implicit in this logic is the nefarious belief that the bloody history between European colonists and indigenous American Indians, not to mention the current relations, are of negligible importance. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter because the victors have already accrued their spoils.
The final, ironic argument is perhaps the darkest: “We must keep the Redskins name because it is a source of unity for the people of the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs.” Putting aside the fact that this so-called unity is entirely non-contingent on the name Redskins, i.e. it has been just as readily provided by the Ravens in Baltimore despite the city’s historic connection to the name Colts, let us note what we are really saying when we claim that the price of the unity between Blacks, Whites, Latinos and Asians is paid with the name Redskins: It (North America) is ours now.
“In the wake of curfews, arrests and tear gas, the St. Louis Rams offered tickets to the youth of Ferguson; some of the Washington football players held their hands up as they emerged from the tunnel before a preseason game, adopting the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ symbol of protest in solidarity with a community roiling.”
How ironic that virtually the only professional athletes in America willing to take the risk of making public their support for the Black folks, and especially the young Black males, of Ferguson, Missouri are the very athletes who play for a team whose mascot Bryant cannot in good conscious even mention: the Washington Redskins.
The controversy surrounding the Washington football club’s mascot has reached a crescendo during a summer which saw the team lose its trademark protection from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (a ruling the team is, predictably, appealing), fifty United States senators sign a letter urging the NFL to take action and force a name change, and the announcement this week by the New York Daily News that it will no longer include the word Redskins in its newspaper (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sack-article-1.1926865), an announcement that follows on the heels of the hometown Washington Post’s editorial page announcing that it will no longer print the word Redskins either (though the Post’s sports page will continue to refer to the team as the Redskins). (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/washington-post-editorials-will-no-longer-use-redskins-for-the-local-nfl-team/2014/08/22/1413db62-2940-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html )
But before delving into the reasons that 71% of Americans still believe the team should not change its name (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/new-poll-says-large-majority-of-americans-believe-redskins-should-not-change-name/2014/09/02/496e3dd0-32e0-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html), and that team owner Daniel Snyder has, per NBC’s Al Michaels, stated that the team will change its name “over my (Snyder’s) dead body,” some personal history is in order. I have been a Washington Redskins fan since moving within their TV broadcast territory as a 6-year old just at the dawn of the team’s golden age, a ten year burst in which the franchise would bring home three Super Bowl championships under the guidance of likable obnoxious rich guy (team owner) Jack Kent Cooke, California surfer dude (general manager) Bobby Beathard, and nascent NASCAR kingpin (head coach) Joe Gibbs. Everything about the team was fun, especially the winning, but also the nicknames (Hogs, Smurfs, Fun Bunch, etc.) and the cast of characters, e.g. the performance art of Hall of Fame running back John Riggins passing out drunk on the floor of a White House dinner after telling Justice O’Connor “Loosen up, Sandy Baby.”
But all good things must come to an end, and before long Cooke was dead, Beathard was guiding the San Diego Chargers to their first ever Super Bowl appearance, and Joe Gibbs was winning the Daytona 500. The Daniel Snyder era, with perpetual mediocrity punctuated by brief bursts of total incompetence, had begun. Not even Gibbs, in his brief second run with the team, could put things right; he got the hell out of Dodge after squeaking into the playoffs enabled him to leave with his dignity, and reputation, largely intact. It hasn’t been much fun to be a Redskins fan for the last twenty years, and without the fun to distract you, there’s that name. Just sitting there. On my 1987 Super Bowl t-shirt. On my 1982 Super Bowl Coke bottle. Talking to me. Telling me that the reason I was a Redskins fan for all the good years without once even thinking about the implications of the team’s name was because I could. Which doing things because you can without even thinking about them is the very definition of white privilege. And I continued not even thinking about it even several years into the losing, until a girlfriend (now ex) who had worked actively to change the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek mascot as an undergraduate at Champagne-Urbana, looked at me a certain way whenever I used my MBNA Washington Redskins Visa card. Which is how my ’87 t-shirt is looking at me right about now. My privilege, singing “Hail to the Redskins” without ever once thinking about the words coming out of my mouth, was undone because my girlfriend made me think. Getting white folks to stop and think, and then hopefully feel, is the only way we ever change, and was the chief strategy of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance movement.
Fast forward to 2014 and, slowly, more folks, white and otherwise, are beginning to stop and think about the name of the football franchise that represents our nation’s capital. While 71% of Americans still think its hunky dory if the Redskins keep their name, that number is significantly lower than 1992’s 89%. And, his “over my dead body” stance notwithstanding, Daniel Snyder may be starting to see the handwriting on the wall, as rumors have begun to circulate that Snyder may be willing to change the name for the right stadium deal (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/shutdown-corner/former-gm--dan-snyder-might-drop-redskins-name-for-new-stadium--super-bowl-144942689.html). But given that the latter is currently mere internet speculation, as well as the fact that Snyder and his minions have been mounting an aggressive defense of their beloved mascot, including a creepy new charity campaign aimed at select American Indian tribes, the task of answering the arguments floated in favor of keeping the name is still at hand. The four most oft repeated arguments turn out to be, respectively, false, (almost) real, stonewalling, and ironic.
The false argument, and one put forward in bad faith, is that the name Redskins is intended to honor American Indians. This is patently absurd, mirroring other lies such as segregation’s “separate but equal” and Fox News’ “fair and balanced.” In all three of these cases, the lie functions to announce the real intentions (i.e., respectively, making sport of a dominated civilization, terrorizing Blacks, and shilling for the neoliberal militarists) in a socially acceptable manner. The truth is that using and maintaining the name Redskins is just a perpetual game of Cowboys and Indians, a game that has never been about honoring American Indians, but about casting them as brutal savages to be overcome by western civilization. Cowboys and Indians is the children’s version of a ritual, here being played by grown men and women, the sole purpose of which is to absolve (European) Americans of any lingering guilt over genocide.
The only (quasi) real argument being made in favor of keeping the name goes something like this: “You’re just a bunch of uptight liberals trying to ruin our harmless fun.” Real as in honest, if only honest to a point. Honest that it is a lot of fun playing Cowboys and Indians (Redskins fans claim to hate the Cowboys, when really we’re all Cowboys fans too, enjoying with our Dallas brethren the thrill of a victory that delivered an entire continent; the only difference is that we get to play the Indian while our Dallas brethren get to play the Cowboy), but deeply disingenuous in its denial of the incalculable harm done to an entire people.
The (not quite) real argument is closely related to the argument that is used more frequently than all of the others combined, i.e. the stonewalling maneuver of stating some version of “Man, I’m not into all that political correctness stuff.” This strategy depends on the logic that 1) all reasonable people recognize political correctness for what it is- a liberal mind control device that deflects our attention from attending to matters that are actually important, 2) and therefore anything judged to be politically correct can be dismissed out of hand, 3) and furthermore the concern over the Redskins name is a classic case of political correctness run amok. Repressed and implicit in this logic is the nefarious belief that the bloody history between European colonists and indigenous American Indians, not to mention the current relations, are of negligible importance. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter because the victors have already accrued their spoils.
The final, ironic argument is perhaps the darkest: “We must keep the Redskins name because it is a source of unity for the people of the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs.” Putting aside the fact that this so-called unity is entirely non-contingent on the name Redskins, i.e. it has been just as readily provided by the Ravens in Baltimore despite the city’s historic connection to the name Colts, let us note what we are really saying when we claim that the price of the unity between Blacks, Whites, Latinos and Asians is paid with the name Redskins: It (North America) is ours now.
Monday, September 01, 2014
Back Soon
If, like me, one’s spiritual foundation was laid down in the Christian tradition, one must reckon with a number of events which are, if one is in a religious mood, plainly miraculous, or, if one is feeling secular and (post?)modern, rather kooky. Among these are, of course, the virgin birth, walking on water, sundry healings, the resurrection, and the second coming. All of these, save the last, are in the past tense, the upshot of which leaves Christianity hanging on a prediction which can be paraphrased in two words: Back soon. Which two words, interestingly enough, are also at the center of a rather amusing passage in The House at Pooh Corner that may help sort out whether Christianity leans over into the abyss or leans back to pull us out of our own.
But, before we get to Pooh, a brief summary. Jesus’ account of the end times and his prophesy of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” i.e. the prediction of his very own second coming, appears in all three synoptic gospels. The denouement at first seems to find Jesus putting all of his chips in the middle of the table as he tells us exactly when this will all go down: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But then, one sentence later, it devolves into what can only be described as history’s biggest mixed message: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” A few verses later, the confusion is compounded: “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” “Back soon” is scrambled into a garbled mess before the ink of “Truly I tell you…” is even dry; we are seemingly left to make do with “hurry up and wait.”
It is the garbled mess which brings us to Pooh. Twice. Because the key words, “Back soon,” don’t just appear in A.A. Milne’s second volume of Pooh stories, published in 1928. They are back again, one might say with a vengeance, in the 2011 animated film, Winnie the Pooh. And strangely enough, the two different readings of “Back soon” in the Winnie the Pooh universe just might inform our reading of Jesus’ own “Back soon,” which reading, on a grand enough collective scale, just might in turn help make the difference in the direction our material universe makes as we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Seculars, etc.) stand at the proverbial fork in the road.
On our first pass we turn to the passage in The House at Pooh Corner, in which Christopher Robin leaves his garbled version of Back Soon in a note, happened upon by Rabbit:
“GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON
C. R.”
Rabbit takes the indecipherable Message to Owl, whose modus operandi is to maintain an air of deep wisdom. Since putting on these kind of airs always depends on making things up (see all of western philosophy; not that this is a knock on western philosophy, it’s actually what makes it so damn fun and helpful, therapeutic even, as long as we remember that it’s all made up), Rabbit does exactly this:
“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”
We should note several crucial elements of this passage before moving on to the return of the Backson in 2011. Perhaps most importantly, there is nothing whatsoever at all about the Backson that is threatening. In fact, Owl from the very first imagines the Backson as a friend for Christopher Robin. Completely befuddled by Christopher Robin’s garbled “Back soon,” Owl has filled in the gap with something good. But something that is no less mysterious for its certain goodness. The “Spotted or Herbaceous Backson” is a friend, but beyond that we can say no more. Even Owl must admit “I don’t know what they’re like.” (Happily, Owl isn’t quite as far gone as your standard outfit narcissistic humanities professor.)
Fast forward eighty three years, and the scene in the Hundred Acre Wood has taken an alarming turn. With boss man Disney now calling the shots, both the Backson and his back story have mutated beyond recognition. To begin with, Rabbit has been elbowed to the periphery; with apologies to Piglet, it is Pooh who brings home Disney’s bacon, so it is Pooh who has the honors of discovering Christopher Robin’s note. Apparently Pooh is now the early Michael Jordan, and has to take every big shot, making Rabbit into John Paxson. (Tigger would have to be Dennis Rodman, and I think Eeyore would make a really convincing Bill Cartwright.) This much I could stomach; would that our only problem was the celebrity cult of personality. For a moment it even seems like we’re back in safe, familiar territory, as Pooh consults Owl about Christopher Robin’s mysterious note.
But then we remember that it’s the second decade of the 21st Century and violence is the air we breathe. We should note that it’s not as if A.A. Milne wrote the original version of the Backson story in the Garden of Eden; 16 million had died just a decade before in World War I. But if violence was already the out breath then, it is now also the in breath. Where Tolstoy once wrote of war and peace, we now have war and war, i.e. wars hot and cold and a subsequent peace dividend in the form of the war on terror. And where Owl once pictured Christopher Robin “gone out somewhere with Backson. He and Backson are busy together,” Owl now informs Pooh and friends “of their new enemy. He is a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Backson) That the torture is put in Hundred Acre Wood context, the Backson is “responsible for holes in socks, broken teeth, aging, theft, catching colds, etc.,” makes not a lick of difference. Winnie the Pooh now lives in the same world as us, which is where Abu Ghraib and ISIS are. So, not surprisingly, Pooh and friends make their martial preparations for the Backson, preparing to trap it (evoking extreme rendition and Guantamo), or “to battle the beast if necessary” (evoking Iraq and Afghanistan). If this sounds daft or melodramatic, I would but ask if it is really mere coincidence that a 1928 Pooh story rewritten in 2011 includes torture as a central narrative element? (If Phase 1 of the American shift to the techniques of violence without limits was accomplished in the foundational act of the Cold War, i.e. the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima qua shot across Moscow’s bow (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-bomb-may-have-carried-hidden-agenda.html#.VASeFaCdCFI), Phase 2 began with the establishment of western democratic state-sponsored torture as the boundary condition for the Global War on Terror; in considering that the US was the first to think both of these unthinkables we should acknowledge that the first is rarely the last, and secondly hope that this week’s revelation of ISIS’ use of the waterboarding they learned from watching us (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/captives-held-by-islamic-state-were-waterboarded/2014/08/28/2b4e1962-2ec9-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html) is not a foreshadowing of a similar symmetry with Phase 1, i.e. ISIS, with its terrifying the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense stratagem, doesn’t seem likely to follow the logic of nuclear weapons as deterrent that we’ve all been clinging to, despite evidence to the contrary from 8/6 and 8/9/45.)
I would suggest that the twinned surges of relativism and fundamentalism (twins explored in the previous post, “Doubt without Doubt,” on this very blog) between 1928 and 2011 go a long way to explaining the link between first Rabbit and then Pooh’s interpretations of Christopher Robin’s “Backson” and the contemporaneous respective interpretations of Jesus’ own “Backson.” In other words, A.A. Milne and Disney were each, without knowing it, doing theology- and doing the kind of theology native to their time and place. In 1928, even after The War to End All Wars, it was still possible to believe without knowing; the Backson could be both Christopher Robin’s friend and, per Owl, something we know absolutely nothing about. And that other Backson, Jesus’ second coming, could still be understood exactly as it was described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which is to say our dear friend is on his way, he’s almost here in fact, although he’s altogether the type of fellow who’s likely to get held up at the train station for God knows how long, so we better use this time to get things in as good an order as we can.
By 2011, with relativism and fundamentalism in full bloom, one can either believe that it isn’t possible to know anything at all (relativism), or believe that one knows everything (fundamentalism); and since Christianity has by and large become the purview of the latter, Disney’s Backson is “a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” Which, natch, sounds a lot like the kind of (fundamentalist) Jesus whose “Back soon” involves the Tribulation, i.e. a “period of time where everyone will experience worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth before the Second Coming takes place.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) Except, of course, “those who choose to follow God,” i.e. the fundamentalist Christian God, “will be Raptured before the tribulation, and thus escape it.” Lucky them.
All of which is not to say that there weren’t people before 1928 who believed in the Tribulation, or that there aren’t Christians in 2011 or 2014 who believe that God’s infinite and reckless love and mercy extend to every last one of us. But it is to say that the latter has been divorced from what the word Christian symbolizes in the popular imagination, which I’d like to believe as recently as 1928 was (often) an imagining of a close friend who was nevertheless likely to appear to us as a stranger on whichever road we’re traveling. Instead, the symbol of Jesus on the cross has been reduced to a straw man for the relativists to stick their pitch forks in, and the cross itself has been inverted into the fundamentalists’ sword, whose literal reading of “I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword,” is roughly as nuanced as understanding the “Open joints on bridge” road signs as an invitation to toke up.
As C.S. Lewis once said, “if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer… Going back is the quickest way on.” In this case that means going back to The House on Pooh Corner (this being a discussion of the second coming, it is hoped that the reader will indulge ending with a bit of repetition):
“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”
But, before we get to Pooh, a brief summary. Jesus’ account of the end times and his prophesy of “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven,” i.e. the prediction of his very own second coming, appears in all three synoptic gospels. The denouement at first seems to find Jesus putting all of his chips in the middle of the table as he tells us exactly when this will all go down: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” But then, one sentence later, it devolves into what can only be described as history’s biggest mixed message: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” A few verses later, the confusion is compounded: “the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” “Back soon” is scrambled into a garbled mess before the ink of “Truly I tell you…” is even dry; we are seemingly left to make do with “hurry up and wait.”
It is the garbled mess which brings us to Pooh. Twice. Because the key words, “Back soon,” don’t just appear in A.A. Milne’s second volume of Pooh stories, published in 1928. They are back again, one might say with a vengeance, in the 2011 animated film, Winnie the Pooh. And strangely enough, the two different readings of “Back soon” in the Winnie the Pooh universe just might inform our reading of Jesus’ own “Back soon,” which reading, on a grand enough collective scale, just might in turn help make the difference in the direction our material universe makes as we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Seculars, etc.) stand at the proverbial fork in the road.
On our first pass we turn to the passage in The House at Pooh Corner, in which Christopher Robin leaves his garbled version of Back Soon in a note, happened upon by Rabbit:
“GON OUT
BACKSON
BISY
BACKSON
C. R.”
Rabbit takes the indecipherable Message to Owl, whose modus operandi is to maintain an air of deep wisdom. Since putting on these kind of airs always depends on making things up (see all of western philosophy; not that this is a knock on western philosophy, it’s actually what makes it so damn fun and helpful, therapeutic even, as long as we remember that it’s all made up), Rabbit does exactly this:
“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”
We should note several crucial elements of this passage before moving on to the return of the Backson in 2011. Perhaps most importantly, there is nothing whatsoever at all about the Backson that is threatening. In fact, Owl from the very first imagines the Backson as a friend for Christopher Robin. Completely befuddled by Christopher Robin’s garbled “Back soon,” Owl has filled in the gap with something good. But something that is no less mysterious for its certain goodness. The “Spotted or Herbaceous Backson” is a friend, but beyond that we can say no more. Even Owl must admit “I don’t know what they’re like.” (Happily, Owl isn’t quite as far gone as your standard outfit narcissistic humanities professor.)
Fast forward eighty three years, and the scene in the Hundred Acre Wood has taken an alarming turn. With boss man Disney now calling the shots, both the Backson and his back story have mutated beyond recognition. To begin with, Rabbit has been elbowed to the periphery; with apologies to Piglet, it is Pooh who brings home Disney’s bacon, so it is Pooh who has the honors of discovering Christopher Robin’s note. Apparently Pooh is now the early Michael Jordan, and has to take every big shot, making Rabbit into John Paxson. (Tigger would have to be Dennis Rodman, and I think Eeyore would make a really convincing Bill Cartwright.) This much I could stomach; would that our only problem was the celebrity cult of personality. For a moment it even seems like we’re back in safe, familiar territory, as Pooh consults Owl about Christopher Robin’s mysterious note.
But then we remember that it’s the second decade of the 21st Century and violence is the air we breathe. We should note that it’s not as if A.A. Milne wrote the original version of the Backson story in the Garden of Eden; 16 million had died just a decade before in World War I. But if violence was already the out breath then, it is now also the in breath. Where Tolstoy once wrote of war and peace, we now have war and war, i.e. wars hot and cold and a subsequent peace dividend in the form of the war on terror. And where Owl once pictured Christopher Robin “gone out somewhere with Backson. He and Backson are busy together,” Owl now informs Pooh and friends “of their new enemy. He is a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/The_Backson) That the torture is put in Hundred Acre Wood context, the Backson is “responsible for holes in socks, broken teeth, aging, theft, catching colds, etc.,” makes not a lick of difference. Winnie the Pooh now lives in the same world as us, which is where Abu Ghraib and ISIS are. So, not surprisingly, Pooh and friends make their martial preparations for the Backson, preparing to trap it (evoking extreme rendition and Guantamo), or “to battle the beast if necessary” (evoking Iraq and Afghanistan). If this sounds daft or melodramatic, I would but ask if it is really mere coincidence that a 1928 Pooh story rewritten in 2011 includes torture as a central narrative element? (If Phase 1 of the American shift to the techniques of violence without limits was accomplished in the foundational act of the Cold War, i.e. the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima qua shot across Moscow’s bow (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7706-hiroshima-bomb-may-have-carried-hidden-agenda.html#.VASeFaCdCFI), Phase 2 began with the establishment of western democratic state-sponsored torture as the boundary condition for the Global War on Terror; in considering that the US was the first to think both of these unthinkables we should acknowledge that the first is rarely the last, and secondly hope that this week’s revelation of ISIS’ use of the waterboarding they learned from watching us (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/captives-held-by-islamic-state-were-waterboarded/2014/08/28/2b4e1962-2ec9-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html) is not a foreshadowing of a similar symmetry with Phase 1, i.e. ISIS, with its terrifying the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense stratagem, doesn’t seem likely to follow the logic of nuclear weapons as deterrent that we’ve all been clinging to, despite evidence to the contrary from 8/6 and 8/9/45.)
I would suggest that the twinned surges of relativism and fundamentalism (twins explored in the previous post, “Doubt without Doubt,” on this very blog) between 1928 and 2011 go a long way to explaining the link between first Rabbit and then Pooh’s interpretations of Christopher Robin’s “Backson” and the contemporaneous respective interpretations of Jesus’ own “Backson.” In other words, A.A. Milne and Disney were each, without knowing it, doing theology- and doing the kind of theology native to their time and place. In 1928, even after The War to End All Wars, it was still possible to believe without knowing; the Backson could be both Christopher Robin’s friend and, per Owl, something we know absolutely nothing about. And that other Backson, Jesus’ second coming, could still be understood exactly as it was described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which is to say our dear friend is on his way, he’s almost here in fact, although he’s altogether the type of fellow who’s likely to get held up at the train station for God knows how long, so we better use this time to get things in as good an order as we can.
By 2011, with relativism and fundamentalism in full bloom, one can either believe that it isn’t possible to know anything at all (relativism), or believe that one knows everything (fundamentalism); and since Christianity has by and large become the purview of the latter, Disney’s Backson is “a ferocious creature who enjoys torturing others and creating misfortune.” Which, natch, sounds a lot like the kind of (fundamentalist) Jesus whose “Back soon” involves the Tribulation, i.e. a “period of time where everyone will experience worldwide hardships, disasters, famine, war, pain, and suffering, which will wipe out more than 75% of all life on earth before the Second Coming takes place.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tribulation) Except, of course, “those who choose to follow God,” i.e. the fundamentalist Christian God, “will be Raptured before the tribulation, and thus escape it.” Lucky them.
All of which is not to say that there weren’t people before 1928 who believed in the Tribulation, or that there aren’t Christians in 2011 or 2014 who believe that God’s infinite and reckless love and mercy extend to every last one of us. But it is to say that the latter has been divorced from what the word Christian symbolizes in the popular imagination, which I’d like to believe as recently as 1928 was (often) an imagining of a close friend who was nevertheless likely to appear to us as a stranger on whichever road we’re traveling. Instead, the symbol of Jesus on the cross has been reduced to a straw man for the relativists to stick their pitch forks in, and the cross itself has been inverted into the fundamentalists’ sword, whose literal reading of “I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword,” is roughly as nuanced as understanding the “Open joints on bridge” road signs as an invitation to toke up.
As C.S. Lewis once said, “if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer… Going back is the quickest way on.” In this case that means going back to The House on Pooh Corner (this being a discussion of the second coming, it is hoped that the reader will indulge ending with a bit of repetition):
“’It is quite clear what has happened, my dear Rabbit,’
he said. ‘Christopher Robin has gone out somewhere with
Backson. He and Backson are busy together. Have you seen a
Backson anywhere about in the Forest lately?’
‘I don't know,’ said Rabbit. ‘That's what I came to ask
you. What are they like?’
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson is
just a—‘
‘At least,’ he said, ‘it's really more of a----‘
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it depends on the----‘
‘Well,’ said Owl, ‘the fact is,’ he said, ‘I don't know
what they're like,’ said Owl frankly.
‘Thank you,’ said Rabbit. And he hurried off to see
Pooh.”
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