Hurricanes

No, not the University of Miami.




Hurricane Irene has made landfall in North Carolina as a category 1. The cable news channels are covering this like its Katrina revisited. I realize the damage may be great, but we will not have an idea of how much until the storm passes. I know this is one of the really slow news seasons but there is Libya to cover. It is as if they had never been through a hurricane. I have been through five, one full-blown (Agnes), four that were remnants (Camille, Doria, David, and Frederic). It is not worthy of 24/7 coverage.

Sports Violence

So there was a small riot in the stands during a preseason (fake) football game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders. Why am I not surprised? The behavior of American football fans has been deteriorating to the level of the English in recent years. There are numerous reasons not the least of which is overall moral decay. But what has aggravated this? Unfortunately, the dear old tailgate party is a culprit. These have become little more than excuses for massive drinking binges. But there are other perpetrators: the National Football League and the media. During any football game, there is the standard shot of some "fan" who has obviously made the supreme effort to be seen. This glorification of attention-getter is counterproductive. As for the NFL, their glorification of violence and the hype surrounding it, is just fuel for the fire.

Heartbreak

The East Coast earthquake yesterday was quite a surprise. While I am thankful it appears no one was seriously hurt, the damage done to the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral are painful. The Cathedral lost the top of its spires and some angels. The irritating thing is there was no insurance. Way to go Diocese of Washington!

Baseball

G. Edward White. Creating the National Pastime. (1996)

Baseball did not spring from the brow of Zeus as America's pastime. As Ed White details, it was created through the trials and errors of the men who had the most impact on the game in the period 1903-1953, the Owners.
Mostly it appears to be the errors. Slow to recognize the value of newspapers and radio, reluctant to end the color barrier, owners stumbled into a great moneymaker. This is a history of the business side of baseball and is very entertaining.

Election 2012

The candidates should heed the advice of the Clinton campaign of twenty years ago: "It's the economy stupid!" Anything else is merely a distraction.

College Football

First, I must preface this by stating that I received my graduate education at the University of Alabama. Granted this was in the mourning period for Bear Bryant but being at Alabama was a football education in itself. I am not, however, going to write of the glories of the Crimson Tide. Instead, I will focus on the general stink that is College Football circa 2011.
A week does not go by where there is not news of some football program under investigation for some sort of rules violation by some major program. USC has had to forfeit a national title, Ohio State fired its head coach and so on. Now we have revelations and accusations about the University of Miami, the "U". Miami has one of those programs that has long tiptoed around the border of compliance. The most recent accusations do not look like tiptoeing, but, rather, obliteration. Payoffs to large numbers of players, prostitutes, abortions, and so on. If the accusations are validated, it would make SMU's violations of the mid-1980s look juvenile.
What is the solution? The usual suspects call for stipends to be paid to players and end the folly of amateurism. This does not solve the problem. There will still be boosters willing to give bonuses.
There is one alternative that no one dares mention.
BLOW IT UP!
End big-time athletics. It all goes back to the basic question: what is the mission of the university? Is it to be a farm system for the National Football League? Let the NFL spend some of its billions on a farm system and let universities get back to their priority.

Religion and Culture

Having finished Philip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics, I decided to read Harold Bloom's The American Religion for a different take on the same subject. I will leave my critique of Bloom's work to another time. But the two books have prodded me into thinking of the relationship between Religion and Culture. More specifically, is a particular style or form of worship part and parcel of an appreciation of certain art forms? For example, if your church has a choir that sings works by Bach and Mozart, are you more likely to listen to their secular works?