Category Archives: Television

Granite Flats: A Review

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BYU-TV has national ambitions, unlike KBYU, which is BYU’s public television station. BYU-TV wants to go national, be available on cable.  My folks in Indiana get it, for example, through their local cable company–that’s where they watch General Conference.  And so BYU-TV created their first fictional series, an 8-episode, hour-long TV drama, Granite Flats, which concluded its first season on Sunday.

My wife and I figured we’d watch it, give it a chance.  It wasn’t terrible.  It’s also not very good, though not good in what strike me as interesting ways. If I had to describe it, it would be a cross between The Andy Griffith Show and Twilight Zone, written by a big fan of the Encylopedia Brown books.  With, occasionally, just a hint of Twin Peaks.

It’s set in the late ’50s-early ’60s, soon enough after the Korean War that those memories are still raw for some of the characters.  Granite Flats is a town in some unspecified state, probably in the West.  Beth (Annie Tedesco), a nurse, has moved there with her 12-year old son, Arthur (Jonathan Morgan Heit), following the death of her husband, a military test pilot. Arthur befriends two other kids, Madeline (Malia Taylor), and Timmy (Charlie Plummer).  The kids are all science nerds, and they eventually decide to form a kind of kid detective agency.  They’re like a cross between Encylopedia Brown and Harry, Ron and Hermione, with Arthur (the outsider) as Harry, and Madeline as Hermione (bookworm brainy girl).

Granite Flats seems to be, at times, small town America, nice shops, a central Church.  But it’s also apparently a military town, with a local military base and hospital.  There doesn’t seem to be a non-military hospital in town, for example, though there pretty much would have to be.  Anyway,  Beth works at the hospital, where she becomes friends with a mysterious patient, Frank Quincy (Scott Christopher), who seems to suffer from really strange momentary lapses in memory.

Meanwhile, Timmy’s father, John Sanders (Richard Gunn) is the Granite Flats chief of police, where he interacts somewhat uneasily with the head of military police, Slim (Brandon Molale). And when a mysterious explosion at the base kills a private, an NCO, Sergeant Hershel Jenkins (Peter Murnick) appears to be responsible, and in fact confesses to having committed murder.  Sergeant Jenkins soon-to-be orphaned son, Wallace (Ethan Ross Wills), is informally adopted by another hospital nurse, Regina (Jessica Wright).

But in fact, the deadly explosion seems to be related to an event witnessed by Arthur, in which some mysterious celestial object flew over the town, shredding some kind of debris.  And the kids decide to investigate it, even inventing a home-made metal detector.  And they find all kinds of misshapen metallic objects along the flight path of the whatever-it-is.  Which Timmy then tells his police chief Dad about, who then expands the search.  And why are FBI agents skulking about town?  What’s going on?

So basically, the show follows four main stories.  1) The three kids and their detective activities.  2) the chief of police, the metal objects he finds, and the FBI’s interest in him and them, 3) Sergeant Jenkins, in prison, insisting he committed (and be executed for) a murder we’re pretty sure he didn’t commit, and 4) Beth’s relationship with Frank Quincy of the strange memory lapses.  I would add 3a) Regina’s relationship with Wallace, this poor sad kid with the father in prison and school reputation as a bully.  Also, all these characters profit variously from the advice and counsel of Pastor Todd (Mitchell Fink), a kindly young clergyman who refers to God as ‘the Guy Upstairs’ and consoles his parishioners with his famously terrible lemonade.

Re-reading this description, it seems like there’s a lot of interesting dramatic stuff going on, and that it could be a compelling and enjoyable TV series.  But it doesn’t really work very well, and I think know why.

In their advertising for the show, folks at BYU-TV kept saying that they wanted to make a family-friendly TV series.  And that’s fine, that’s a laudable goal, I suppose. The LDS critique of contemporary popular culture is that it’s too sexy, too violent, too profane.  The lament is, ‘why can’t we go back to the time when good entertainment didn’t have all that sex and violence?’  This show is an attempt to do just that.  But it seems defined by what’s essentially a negative aesthetic.  By insisting on creating an entertainment that doesn’t have certain elements, they haven’t really defined what they want to do instead. As a result, the show seems peculiarly undramatic.

To take the story thread with the kids, for example.  When we meet the kids, they’re fascinated by this flying object that soared over their town shredding debris.  They build a metal detector, they define its flight path by the stuff they find, they map out the direction it came from and they identify where it might have landed, and they go looking for it.  That’s all really interesting stuff.  But it’s as though the producers or writers then went ‘wait a minute, why are these kids traipsing around unsupervised.  That doesn’t show Good Family Values.  They should tell their parents and turn over their investigation to grown-ups.’  Which is exactly what happens–Timmy tells his Dad, and the kids stop looking for UFOs.

The kids go from there to solving the mystery of a missing cat (completely uninteresting), the mystery of a missing baseball mitt (totally uninteresting), and then, wow: they learn that someone’s been embezzling cash from the local hardware store.  Hey, my wife and I thought, not bad, they’re actually solving a crime.  It wasn’t a great mystery–my wife and I figured out who-dun-it in about four seconds.  But it was pretty engaging for a few minutes there. They solve it, kudos all around. Then one of the kids’ classmates asks if they’ll help her figure out the identity of her secret admirer.  It’s as though the writers went, “oh my gosh!  The kids’ story-line is dangerously close to becoming dramatically compelling!  I know, we’ll bring in this lame secret admirer thing.  Whew!  Crisis averted!”

Same thing with the FBI story thread.  Chief Sanders has this collection of twisted metallic debris, and then one day, the FBI steal it from his cupboard, and take him to an abandoned warehouse or something.  He’s sitting in a chair across a table from a head FBI honcho, the room illuminated by a single light bulb.  He’s interrogated.  It’s all very tense and dramatic.  Well, we obviously couldn’t have that.  So the head FBI guy affably says “hey, here’s what’s going on, let’s work together on this,” and from that point on, he and the chief are best buds. Again, it’s like someone went ‘conflict?  We can’t have dramatic conflict!?!?!’

Same with the Sergeant Jenkins story thread.  He’s in prison, charged with a murder he did not commit, facing the death penalty.  Slim, his jailor, won’t let the chief even come see him.  Jenkins has, in fact confessed to the murder.  He’s been given a lawyer, the worst, most weasely and incompetent lawyer ever (can’t figure out from IMDB who played him).  So, okay, there’s some real dramatic potential there.  Maybe they’ll have a powerful and interesting trial scene or something.  Nope.  Instead the chief talks to his FBI friend, who tells the judge about the mysterious flying object (a spy satellite, it turns out, though why is it Soviet in origin?), who drops all the charges.  Jenkins is in danger of his life!  And then pfft.  The whole conflict goes way.

Oh, and Sergeant Jenkins’ confession? To a crime he didn’t commit?  Turns out all that came from his guilt over men he commanded who died in Korea.  He ‘wants to die.’  The scene where he admits to that could have been interestingly dramatic too, so the show makes sure to zip through it as quickly as possible.

I mentioned Twin Peaks, and the show has a little of that going on too, but I don’t know how intentional it is.  It has some of Twin Peaks’ slow pace, awkwardly long and pointless conversations, the way the camera lingers on some otherwise innocuous object in a room.  But I don’t know if that’s an attempt at Lynchian weirdness, or just not-great direction.  They never seem to know when to end scenes, for example, all the cuts being either a half-second too fast or too slow.

And the research seems off, though of course I may be wrong.  But Beth’s husband (and Frank) both seem to have come from ‘Edwards’ which makes sense.  Edwards Air Force base in the Mohave is famously where test pilots field-test new aircraft.  If Beth’s husband was actually a test pilot, Edwards is where he’d have been stationed.  But ‘Edwards’ is consistently referred to as an Army base.  The local base in town is an Army base, as is the hospital.

It is true that Edwards was once the Muroc Army Air Field, but the Air Force took it over and changed the name in 1949, well before the period of this TV series.  Also, the FBI chief honcho guy is played by an African-American actor.  Which would be fine today.  But under J. Edgar Hoover, it was a national disgrace how few African-American agents there were, and there were no supervisors.  Minor anachronisms, I know, but they bugged me.

It was sort of fun playing ‘catch the continuity errors.’  Or arguing with my wife over which is the worst actor in the cast.  And it’s always fun to see a show shot in Utah, and seeing local actor friends get work.  It was fun watching my old friend Colleen Baum get arrested for embezzlement, for example.  But I wish there were more local actors in the show.  Most of the actors in this show were jobbed in from LA, and that seemed to me a shame.  It’s not just civic pride to insist that Utah actors are as good as actors anywhere–it’s simply my professional experience, in a lifetime spent doing theatre.

I don’t know if there’s going to be a second season of Granite Flats.  I suspect there might be.  The first season ended with a cliff-hanger, after all, and we still have room to suspect that all may not be well in Granite Flats.  Of course, based on the first season, I suspect they’ll find a way to squander the dramatic opportunities they’ve set up for themselves.  But I’ll watch at least the first episode.  It’s a show I keep rooting for, even when it disappoints.

 

The Arias case, blood atonement, and continuing revelation

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Until this morning, I hadn’t really been following the Jodi Arias case. I almost never do follow these big, Nancy Grace/CNN-full-coverage murder trials.  Anyway, the Jodi Arias case is the latest, apparently, the latest car wreck we all are compelled to rubberneck at as we drive past.  Jodi Arias murdered her boyfriend, Travis Alexander.  Stabbed him, slit his throat, shot him thirty times.  And the trial was lurid enough, with grisly photos to look at, and recorded phone sex to listen to, and allegations of abusive behavior by him.  (Which, frankly, I kind of believe).  And her testimony, which apparently went on forever and got pretty strange and contradictory and unbelievable.

No, I wouldn’t bother myself with this case at all, really, except for this:  the Mormon blood atonement angle. Travis Alexander, it seems, was LDS.  And was having a rather kinky affair with Arias.  So, according to Brian Carr, a friend of Arias’, we blood-atoned him.  Says Carr, “If Jodi went on the stand and said that it wasn’t her and that the Mormons did this, then they will go after her and her family – their lives are on the line so she is covering up with her story.”  We murdered him, ’cause he was being naughty.

I totally remember doing that kind of thing, don’t you?  When I was sixteen, freshly ordained as a priest, I remember our duties: we had to prepare the sacrament, collect fast offerings, and murder adulterers.  Ah, the memories! Sneaking around, truncheon and dagger in hand, waiting for those vile sinners to fall asleep, then slipping into their homes and driving a blade through their black black hearts!  Halcyon days!

My initial reaction to this preposterous nonsense was to laugh at it.  But this is potentially damaging to the Church.  Not that anyone’s going to believe that we go around murdering folks who sleep around.  No, my fear is, folks read it, wonder what’s going on, google ‘Mormons blood atonement,’ and find stuff that makes us look, at least historically, kind of loony.

One way we could get in front of this would be to just flat out denounce blood atonement. I remember Orson Scott Card once, tongue firmly in cheek, defining blood atonement as “something Mormons have never preached, especially Jedediah M. Grant.”  In other words, yeah, it was a thing.  Obviously, the Church has repeatedly issued statements saying we no longer practice blood atonement; that certainly helps. It’s no longer part of our doctrine or practice.  But it was once, and was defended, by, among others, Elder McConkie, and as recently as 1978. And we’ve never just flat out said ‘it’s a thing some LDS leaders used to teach, but it’s crazy and they were wrong.’

To orient ourselves, this Wikipedia article is generally pretty accurate. It’ll be one of the first things folks will find.  Church authorities taught it, including Jedediah Grant. We believed that some sins are sufficiently heinous that Christ’s atonement was insufficient–that sinners, to gain full forgiveness, needed to allow their own blood to be shed. We didn’t, you know, kill people, but we did teach that hanging was an inappropriate punishment for murder.  It’s why Utah still allowed the death penalty via firing squad well after other states had all gone to lethal injection.

And see, that last part is the one that bothers me.  I don’t particularly care if Jedediah M. Grant said kooky things 150 years ago.  I don’t particularly care if Brigham Young taught this nutty doctrine.  I do care that their beliefs continued to influence public policy in the state of Utah in my lifetime.

And I care a lot that Elder Bruce R. McConkie, a General Authority that I remember with great fondness from my youth, continued to defend blood atonement as a doctrine as late as 1978.

Now, let me hasten to say that I don’t actually speak with any kind of authority on this.  I think blood atonement is weird and creepy.  I think the ‘infinite atonement’ of Jesus Christ means just that; it’s infinite.  I think this notion that you have to have your blood spilled to personally atone for wrong-doing is doctrinally, uh, bewildering.  But that’s just me, just my opinion.

But there’s a reason that something wacky that a few General Authorities believed and taught in the 1870s was something Elder McConkie felt obliged to defend in the 1970s.  It’s because of what I consider a misunderstanding of the doctrine of continuing revelation.

We believe that there are prophets on the earth today, that the leaders of the LDS faith receive revelations.  And a popular folk doctrine insists that everything spoken by any General Authority from the pulpit in General Conference, is automatically scripture; the word of the Lord, the will of the Lord. If Jedediah M. Grant was an apostle (and he was), and if he spoke of blood atonement from the pulpit at General Conference (and he did), then we are obliged to believe in it today, and defend it, even if our current prophet no longer insists that we practice it.

By the same token, General Authorities, from the pulpit, insisted that plural marriage was not just something we practiced, but absolutely central to our entire belief system.  And General Authorities, from the pulpit, insisted that black members of the Church were in some very real sense inferior to white members of the Church, and that that was a justification for denying them the Priesthood.  And General Authorities, from the pulpit, insisted that homosexuality itself was a mortal sin regardless of practice; not just engaging in gay sex, but wanting to.

The Church no longer teaches any of those things.  But we can’t quite bring ourselves to repudiate them either.  We can’t quite manage to say what nonetheless seems obvious; that some talks, once spoken from the pulpit in General Conference, explored ideas that we no longer regard as true. That the doctrine of ‘continuing revelation’ is, at times, superceded by the doctrine of ‘line upon line, precept on precept.’  That, at times, further light and knowledge received, not only by revelation, but also from reason and science and research, renders the ideas of the past irrelevant, or offensive, or untrue.  That new knowledge trumps old knowledge, even for us, at least some of the time.

I believe in God and I believe in continuing revelation.  But for me, praying, seeking answers to prayers, listening to the Spirit, all of that is incredibly difficult.  It’s about feelings, thoughts, impressions.  And I have reason to believe that it’s just as difficult for General Authorities too.  This wonderful article describes the endlessly difficult process through which President Kimball received the revelation on Priesthood.  The hours of contemplation and prayer, day after day.  That accords with my experience.  And while it’s certainly possible that that process is easier for General Authorities than it is for me–and absolutely certain that they’re worthier and more spiritual than me–I actually think that we may misunderstand an apostolic calling.  It may not be about having the right to receive revelation.  It may be more about an obligation to pursue it.

Just once, I would love to hear a talk in which some doctrine that the Church once taught and that no one teaches anymore is just flat out repudiated.  Blood atonement seems like a pretty good candidate for that.  In the meantime, it’s our responsibility to read, study, pray, use our minds and use our spirits, to never quit struggling toward the light.

 

 

The NFL Draft

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I spent three hours last night watching what has to be the most incomprehensible TV program possible for anyone outside the loop.  The loop, in this case, is hard-core fans of the National Football League, and while our numbers are legion, we’re not ubiquitous; football haters likewise abound.  And not to get too gender-cliche-y, the NFL draft does strike me as a potential battlefield in the war of the sexes.  It’s a guy thing.  Guys like football, action movies, and NASCAR; gals like gymnastics/ice skating, chick flick romcoms, and mini-vans.  Of course there are also lots of exceptions–girls who like football, for example; not to mention Danica Patrick.  But cliches exist because they have some basis in reality.  ESPN has both male and female anchors, and yes, Chris McKendry does draft analysis, just as Linda Cohn is a hockey expert.  Still, I watched the draft last night, and while my wife was exceedingly awesome about it, she conspicuously didn’t watch with me.

Anyway, the NFL draft.  Boy, is it weird.  I’m sort of a football fan, even, and I get how weird it is.  So here’s how it works: college football players are put into a pool of candidates, and NFL teams take turns choosing which ones they want; they then have exclusive rights to sign their selections to a contract.  Yes, it’s exactly the same system used to pick sides in junior high school gym class: “I’ll pick Bobby; okay, I pick Sam.”  Imagine that every person who graduated from college in Accounting were then meticulously ranked and underwent accounting skills tests and interviews, and then every Accountancy firm in America got to pick, in order, which ones they wanted to hire. That’s the basic principle.

I watched last night because of Ziggy.  Ezekial Ansah, who played football at BYU this past fall.  Ziggy is from Ghana, where he played a little basketball, but no football at all, ever.  He joined the Church, came to BYU, and then was persuaded by roommates to try out for the football team.  The roommates thought maybe Coach Mendenhall might find some use for a guy 6’5″, 275 pounds, who was also a fantastic natural athlete–incredibly fast and quick.  And, by all accounts, a heck of a great kid.  Coach worked him out, and couldn’t believe what he saw.  My favorite Ziggy story–apparently at one point, he told his roommates that he thought he’d quit the team.  He liked it and all, enjoyed the camaraderie, liked the coaches and his teammates, but he came from Ghana, after all, needed to put his education first.  I mean, it’s not you could make any money at this football thing, right?  Right?  (Ziggy was drafted fifth, by the Detroit Lions. Last year, the fifth pick in the draft signed a contract for 18.5 million dollars.)

I am a deeply conflicted football fan. I probably would not have allowed a son to play high school ball, for example; not that either of my boys wanted to.  It’s a dangerous, violent game, with serious health consequences for way too many players.  It’s also beautiful, with an occasional athleticism that takes your breath away, and the guys who play it professionally talk about how much they love it, and miss it when they can’t play anymore.  And I look at the NFL draft, and part of me is thrilled for these guys, for the bright (and wealthy) futures their drafting portends.  It’s about opportunity–an opportunity for guys to do well, but also an opportunity for teams to improve themselves.  That’s why we watch–we want to see who our favorite team drafted, and fantasize about how great they’re going to be.

But you also can’t help but notice another resemblance–to a slave auction.  Before the draft, there’s the NFL Combine, where all the players run and lift weights and jump and undergo interviews and take intelligence tests.  Are weighed and prodded and examined.  And the top physical specimens are then selected, without having any choice in the matter.  Ziggy Ansah blew everyone away at the Combine–he’s a sensational athlete.  He also has less football experience than anyone else in the draft.  He’s seen as a ‘project,’ with a ‘high ceiling.’  For that potential, the Detroit Lions will be gambling 18-20 million dollars. And Ziggy will have no choice but to move to Detroit.  He’s from Ghana.  Perhaps he would find a gentler clime more congenial.  Tough noogies–it’s Detroit or nothing.

Now, if he’s a slave, he’s an exceptionally well compensated one.  The draft exists to ensure competitive balance–bad teams get the best players.  And nobody is forced to participate–either in the Combine or the draft. You can choose to do something else with your life.  But if you want to play professional football. . . .

And this is on television? Yep.  The teams select players in ten minute increments. So what happens is that a team picks a player, announced by Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, and the guy who got picked comes up and poses for a picture with him, and then these ESPN talking heads analyze the choice.  Chris Berman (aka Boomer) starts off, but defers to the real experts, Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay.  For years, Mel Kiper was the draft guru.  He was employed by ESPN at what I have to assume is a preposterous salary just to do this, just to work, basically, one day a year.  And, my gosh, the guy really is an expert, with an encyclopedic knowledge of essentially every player on every team in all of college football, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they fit the needs of the NFL teams considering them.  Then, the last couple of years, ESPN hired McShay, a second guy to do the same job.

And it’s one of the highest rated shows on television. Hour after hour, we watch.  Imagine high school graduation.  Imagine, then, that the principal took ten minutes between announcing each graduating kid.  Imagine that your basic high school graduation ceremony took three days to complete. Now imagine it being televised, and getting a twenty share.

Also, if you’re a fan, you’re a fan of one team, right?  I’m a 49ers fan; I root for the San Francisco 49ers.  Obviously, for a kid in Indiana, I would root for sports teams from the Bay area.  Anyway, I was rooting for Ziggy, but after he was drafted, I kept watching.  I wanted to see who my team picked.  And I had opinions!  On who they ought to pick!  I was hoping for a defensive end, a cornerback, or a safety.  They picked Eric Reid, a safety from LSU.  I knew a lot about the guy; fast, good tackler, could be the next Ronnie Lott.  I liked the pick.  And I am, at best, a casual football fan.  In other words, I watched TV for three hours, tension building, anticipation mounting, for one moment that lasted maybe ten seconds (“The San Francisco 49ers, with the 18th pick in the NFL draft, select Eric Reid. . . “)

It is, a lot, like graduation, where you wait in uncomfortable chairs for that moment when your kid gets her diploma.  Or, like, her 3rd grade play, where you know she’s playing the crucial role of Third Tree, and you sit there waiting for her one line (“Trees also provide shade”).  Which you already know, because you drilled her on it for, like, days.  That’s what you’re there for.  You could give a darn about all the other kids.

It’s complete, utter insanity.  The NFL draft, its massive popularity and the fantastic ratings it gets on TV, it’s completely crazy.  It’s not just the most boring show on television, it’s the most boring show you can imagine anyone ever putting on TV.  And I’m, at best, a casual fan of the sport; mostly, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep  watching football.  Let alone a show about sorting young wizards into their respective Houses (Mel and Todd arguing about who Gryffindor drafted). Neither of them wearing a Sorting Hat.

And I watched it for three hours last night.

And it’s on again tonight.  And I’ll probably watch it tonight too.

Guys, let’s face it.  We’re nuts.  Why on earth do women put up with us?

 

 

 

Reinhart/Rogoff.

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How about, just for grin and giggles, we talk some macro-economics?

So in 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard economics professors (they’re both at Harvard now; she was at Maryland when she wrote the paper), published a major study. “Growth in a Time of Debt,” about the relationship between debt and economic growth.  To summarize; they argued that whenever a nation’s debt rises above 90% of GDP, it slows economic growth–destroys it, in fact.  This paper proved very influential–was cited all over the place, especially by politicians suggesting that our number economic priority had to be deficit reduction.  Reinhart/Rogoff was laid the the intellectual foundation for European austerity measures.  David Cameron cited it, in Britain.  Paul Ryan did so as well back here in the US of A.  It was a Very Big Deal.

Most other macro-economists disagreed with it, and are on record opposing both the paper and the policies it spawned.  Paul Krugman was prominent among them.  But it took a grad student to completely blow Reinhart/Rogoff out of the water.

Guy named Thomas Herndon.  A grad student at the University of Massachusetts, Herndon was taking a class in Applied Econometrics.  For his term paper, he suggested replicating Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings. This story describes what happened: his profs almost didn’t approve it.  It was too simple, they said.  Just basic math.  For a graduate level class, they suggested he do something more challenging.  But he kept pushing, and they finally let him do it.

And Herndon discovered that Reinhart and Rogoff’s entire thesis depended on a spreadsheet error. That they’d made a simple mistake, probably because they didn’t know how to use Excel.  That economic growth, according to their own statistics, for countries with debt exceeding 90% of GDP, wasn’t negative .1 percent.  It was 2.2 percent, positive.  That they had basically gotten all the math wrong. Because they didn’t know how to use the most popular and user-friendly spreadsheet program in existence. Why had no one caught it before?  Because the initial publication of the most influential paper in macro-economics in my lifetime had not been peer-reviewed.  That the first peer to review it was this kid.  A grad student.

Nightmare.  Some kid caught you.  You’re a university professor, tenured and respected, and you’ve published a lot, many articles, and you write something really significant, something people pay lots of attention to.  And some whippersnapper comes up to you and says, “uh, prof?  Seriously, you can’t use Excel?  Wow. Here, let me show you.  You made this simple math error.  It invalidates your entire argument.”  Marketplace of ideas, indeed.

True story: many years ago, I was a grad student, and I had a paper accepted at an academic conference.  I went, and my dissertation advisor invited me out to dinner with some of his friends.  It was me, another grad student, and five of the most distinguished theatre historians in the world.  Completely terrifying.  We went to this incredibly nice restaurant in New Orleans–I couldn’t have afforded anything on the menu, but the profs kindly offered to get the check–and it immediately became clear that the two grad students were on trial. They were grilling us: I was holding my own.  But I had just gotten the seventh edition (may have been the sixth), of Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre.  And there he was, in the flesh, Brock himself, the great Oscar Brockett, right there at the table.  And I’d read the book that night, preparing for the dinner, and caught a mistake.  Not a little mistake either–he’d gotten Shakespeare’s birth year wrong.  I mentioned this, and the look on Brockett’s face was priceless.  As was the ribbing he got from his colleagues at the table.

Could have been worse. He could have had Stephen Colbert making fun of him/them. But it is great for the grad student who catches the big boys.  If you catch a big enough prof in a big enough error, Stephen Colbert will put you on his show.

The Colbert clip with Herndon is great, mostly because Stephen Colbert has so much fun with it.  But I loved this fact: Herndon wondered, initially, if he could have possibly gotten things wrong.  So he had his results peer-reviewed.  He showed ‘em to his girlfriend.

It’s certainly possible to feel a bit bad for Reinhart and Rogoff.  But I’ve gotten to feeling a lot less sorry for them since Herndon’s paper was published. Their reaction has been wholly defensive, insisting that their basic conclusions were basically right even when the evidence supporting those conclusions has gone pooft.  Oh, and they admitted that they deliberately left out counter-examples.  Australia, New Zealand and Canada had inconveniently robust growth despite massive debt; R/R excluded them from their data.

The fact is, these two became policy wonk celebs, testifying before the House Budget Committee and the British Parliament and the EU General Council.  Anytime anyone talked about austerity, it was Reinhart/Rogoff they cited, unless they decided to put the guy’s name first, and call it Rogoff/Reinhart.  Now they look like bozos.  Caught by a kid.  (Who now replaces them as policy wonk celeb du jour.  By, among other things, going on Colbert.)

The thing was, as Keynes pointed out in his General Theory, austerity is always going to be puritanically attractive.  When an economy stalls, it’s tempting to see that failure in moral terms.  Our spending was too extravagant, too luxurious; our debt suggests profligacy and imprudence.  We need to cut back.  We need to punish ourselves, tighten our belts.  Look at government, wicked, evil government!  I wouldn’t run my family finances that way!  When I want to buy a new car, by gum, I save up for it!  We’re on a national (look at the moral implications of this language) spending spree.  And we need to stop.

Except none of that’s true.  Everywhere I look, I see a federal government where basic functions are endangered because they’re underfunded.  Say that to people, and they’ll go on a tirade about wasteful government spending.  And sure, there probably is some.  But mostly what needs to happen right now is more spending, stimulative spending. We’re in a Keynes moment, and Keyne’s basic IS/LM model has actually performed superbly in this crisis. R and R published a paper that was deeply and obviously flawed, and they got away with it for three years because it said something policy makers wanted to hear.

So the whole thing would be pretty funny, if it weren’t also serious.  People are suffering out there.  Unemployment is too high and underemployment rampant.  Europe is really struggling.  Austerity has been tried and tested and found wanting.  We know what works and we know what doesn’t work.  Peer review, turns out, works good.  Austerity, not so much.

 

 

An intriguing suggestion about LDS music

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Out to dinner with a friend last night, we got to talking about the LDS General Conference just concluded.  (Sorry, folks, this post is going to be really Mormon-y).  We basically agreed on which talks really moved us (both of President Uchtdorf’s, Elder Holland’s), which ones we could have lived without (that one by that one guy), and so on.  And, of course, we talked about the Historic Moment, the first woman to say a prayer in General Conference.  Which, we agreed, was something both remarkable and unremarkable, both simultaneously.

And then my friend made what struck me as a most interesting suggestion.  We were talking about the Tabernacle Choir, and that one, uh, interesting ensemble the gals wore, the Pepto-Bismal pink outfits, with the identical costume jewelry.  And my friend said, “what if, instead of a visual backdrop of a choir, wearing identical (unattractive) outfits, we saw empty choir chairs.”

Here’s his thinking: the music in Conference is always, always provided by choirs from Utah.  An MTC choir, a BYU choir, a multi-stake choir; the Tab does most of the music, supplemented by other choirs from Utah.  And usually, the ‘other choirs’ are always much more interesting visually, because they don’t worry about the dresses all being the same.  I mean, I get TV producers wanting that uniformity; all that pink behind the GA seats.  But it’s kind of dull, and the message it sends is maybe a bit unfortunate.  Here’s President Uchtdorf:

Sometimes we confuse differences in personality with sin. We can even make the mistake of thinking that because someone is different from us, it must mean they are not pleasing to God. This line of thinking leads some to believe that the Church wants to create every member from a single mold—that each one should look, feel, think, and behave like every other. This would contradict the genius of God, who created every man different from his brother, every son different from his father. Even identical twins are not identical in their personalities and spiritual identities.

To paraphrase: diversity rules.

And diversity rules even more now, as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints becomes increasingly international.

I remember a Daily Show some years ago, during the Olympics, when Jon Stewart did a ‘this is Utah’ bit.  We saw a visual of the Tabernacle Choir singing at General Conference, all those white faces and then one lonely black guy, as a voice-over intoned ‘Utah is a state of great diversity.’  It got a big laugh, as it should have done.  To be sure, the Choir has gotten more diverse, at least ethnically/visually, in recent years, but uniformity remains the norm.  But in fact, I live in Utah, I live in PROVO, and in my neighborhood and my ward, I see a lot of diversity.  I think it’s awesome, particularly since nobody makes any big deal of it.

But here’s my friend’s suggestion: why couldn’t one session of General Conference feature music by a choir from Brazil?  Why couldn’t another session feature singers from Ghana?  My friend has, as it happens, spent some time in Ghana, and he tells me that the music in their meetings is terrific–Ghanians are not afraid to really sing.  (That could not really be said of my ward, unfortunately.)  A choir from Ghana would be terrific.

Now, I can see how there might be some financial difficulties with flying 300 singers in from Ghana.  But that doesn’t matter anymore, does it?  The technology to broadcast a choir from Ghana isn’t even all that complicated. Folks in the Conference Center could certainly see that Ghanian choir on the CC video screens, and cutting to Ghana for the Church-wide broadcast would be child’s play.  The only objection would be visual–the long shots would show empty choir seats.  Big deal.

For the Saints in Ghana, or South Korea, or Japan, or Brazil, or Mexico, the opportunity to sing in a choir in General Conference would be an experience they would never forget.  As for the image of the Church, it’s completely win-win.  The reputation of the Church is ‘white-bread conservative Western-American church.’  Which just is flat-out not true anymore.  More LDS people read the Book of Mormon in Spanish than read it in English–the future of the Church is international.  Which is exactly as it should be. You know, ‘stone cut out of the mountain without hands’ and all.

It’s possible that the television producers involved with conference might object.  The conference broadcast has a certain recognizable visual style, one that folks are used to.  The very slow tracking shots sweeping across the faces of the altos fading to three-shots, cross-fading to medium shots, cross-fading to the long shot they use for establishing. The lighting glancing off the bald foreheads of the tenor section.  There may be objections to shaking things up.

But the advantages of actually demonstrating diversity (which exists, which actually does describe where the Church really is these days) surely outweigh what amount to aesthetic objections.  I’ll grant that it’s difficult to make Conference look like good television.  Livening things up with a choir from Brazil could only help.

Everything that’s wrong with college sports

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I don’t know if you’ve seen this video. If you watch ESPN’s Sports Center, then you have. It’s Rutgers University head basketball coach Mike Rice abusing his players.  He verbally abuses them, he throws basketballs at them (including hitting one kid in the head), he pushes, shoves and kicks the players on his basketball team.  It’s contemptible, and yesterday, he got fired for it.  Which is weird, frankly, because the school’s known about the behavior captured in this video for months.  They did nothing, except fire the assistant coach, Eric Murdock, who released the tapes.  Rutgers athletic director Mike Pernetti has now said that his initial decision, to put coach Rice on a brief ‘rehabilitative’ leave of absence was mistaken; that they should have fired him back in December, when they first saw the video.  Ya think?

But, okay, one coach with anger management issues, that’s regrettable, and awful for the kids in that program and their families, but it could be seen as an aberration.  Surely to say that Mike Rice abusing his players isn’t Everything That’s Wrong with College Sports.  I mean, it’s just one guy.

So, let me go all nostalgic and geezer-y on you.  When I was a kid, Boy Scouts got to go to Indiana university football games for free.  We wore our uniforms, and we served as ‘ushers.’  I was twelve; I knew nothing about ‘ushering,’ but I did like going to see college football games for free.  And that was back when Indiana had a good time.  They even won the Big Ten championship, in 1967, behind (I remember so well), quarterback Harry Gonso, running back John Isenbarger, and receiver Jade Butcher.  Gonzo ended up going to law school, and becoming head of the IU board of trustees. The team was fun to watch, and winning the Big Ten that year was a Very Big Deal.  It meant a lot, to the community, to the university (where my father taught), to the state.  It was a point of pride. We Boy Scouts were part of it.  We got to run around on the field after the games, and we got to help the cheerleaders put away their megaphones and pom poms.  I was a twelve year old boy.  I got to help (blonde, beautiful) twenty year old cheerleaders.  I have, uh, positive memories of the experience.

In those days, conferences meant something–they were important.  The Big Ten schools were the finest in the Midwest. They were as outstanding academically as they were athletically.  Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana; those are really really good schools.  I have a PhD from Indiana–that means something.  Northwestern is a tremendous school.  Purdue is known for its outstanding engineering and science programs.  A ‘Big Ten’ school was prestigious.  And the universities were crown jewels in American higher education.  And yes, they also played football, but ‘student-athlete’ wasn’t a sick joke–it was something to aspire to.  Harry Gonso wasn’t just the quarterback of the football team, he was an academic All-American, a member of the National Honor Society.  A guy who went straight from the gridiron to Law School.

Conferences had a history, an identity, a tradition.  The Pac-8 included USC and UCLA and Stanford and Cal.  Stanford and Cal Berkeley; two of the finest universities in the world, as excellent academically as athletically.  Filling out the conference were two great rivalries: Oregon/Oregon State, Washington/Washington State.  The Texas schools competed in the Southwest Conference, the South meant the Southeast Conference, and the Great Plains meant the Big 8, which meant perhaps the greatest rivalry of them all, Oklahoma/Nebraska.  The conferences even meant different style of football–the Big Ten meant the Power-I formation, the Big 8, the Wishbone. And the WAC, where BYU competed, was about passing the football. October and November meant conference football season, and January and February, conference basketball season.  You recruited locally, and state pride rose and fall with the local college’s athletic fortunes.

Was it corrupt?  Was there a seedy underside to college athletics, back in the golden age of my youth?  Of course there was.  Boosters openly paid players. Players received all kinds of special benefits. John Wooden built the greatest dynasty in the history of college basketball at UCLA.  John Wooden was a tremendous coach, and a good man.  But John Wooden had to know that the fancy new cars his players were tooling around LA in had to come from somewhere.  In fact, as Wooden surely knew, they came from Sam Gilbert.

But the traditions of college athletics, the rivalries and the regional conference affiliations, they did mean something.  Schools played football and basketball to build school pride and state pride and local pride.  Schools were part of their communities, and if civic minded business people occasionally took their support for the local school team a little, uh, generously, well that happened.  And it shouldn’t have, and it was bad.  The NCAA did police things, a little, arbitrarily and badly.

But now?  I honestly don’t know anymore what schools belong to which conferences; I really don’t.  I don’t know who’s in the Big Twelve, or the SEC.  The Big Ten added Penn State without becoming the Big Eleven or something–now it’s the Big Sixteen, or Big Eighteen, or Big Fourteen–I honestly don’t know how many schools are in the conference, or which ones.  Pretty sure Nebraska’s now in the Big Ten–its ferocious rivalry with Oklahoma now a thing of the past.  So there’s that; the University of Nebraska, a Big Ten school.  Academically?  Seriously?  Michigan and Northwestern and Indiana and Purdue and . . . Nebraska?

And in December, the President of Rutgers, Robert Barchi was told by Rutgers Athletic director, Mike Pernetti, that a video existed showing the men’s basketball coach physically abusing the players on his team.  And recommended a leave of absence.  And Barchi agreed.

Why?  Simple.  Last November, Rutgers applied to join the Big Ten.  In a late November vote, that application was accepted.  Here’s what Barchi said back then:

“The Big Ten includes America’s most highly regarded academic institutions, known for both their athletic success and academic achievement.  This is exactly the right conference for Rutgers. Our university is one of the nation’s leading research universities and our student-athletes excel in the classroom and on the playing field.”

Codswallop.  Here was the Big Ten response, from Iowa President Sally Mason:

“When considering the full spectrum of academic, athletic and research prowess, Rutgers clearly makes for a perfect fit as one of the premier public land-grant institutions on the East Coast. We are excited to welcome them within our ranks, and look forward to collaboration and competition with yet another great Big Ten university.”

Malarkey.

Here’s what Rutgers joining the Big Ten means, aside from the reality that the Women’s Volleyball team from Nebraska is now going to have to take a bus ride from Lincoln to Newark for their away matches.  This isn’t about the students and it isn’t about education and it isn’t about academic standards and it isn’t about athletic competition and it isn’t about anything but money.  The Big Ten has a cable network, the Big Ten network.  It’s lucrative–it’s pouring a lot of money into Big Ten universities.  The Big Ten network would very much like to expand into Eastern markets.  And Rutgers is in New Jersey.  Oh, the Big Ten also added Maryland.  Same reason, same rationale.

So Rutgers will now get Big Ten network money, and the Big Ten network will get lucrative TV contracts in east coast markets, which means more.  None of which any college students will see, of course.  Football teams hemorrhage money for their universities; cable money is a band-aid.  Universities are committed to spending more and more on athletics, and that money has to come from somewhere.  One place to cut costs is insurance–football and basketball scholarships are not guaranteed, and injured kids who can’t play can be released from their scholarships, their families stuck with their medical bills.  Did you see Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware’s horrendous broken leg?  Last weekend, right?  Did you know there’s a chance Kentucky could get away with not paying his medical bills?

But you can also maximize revenues, and the best new source is cable.

So in December, the ink barely dry on Rutgers’ Big Ten contract, President Barchi is told that a video exists. Terrible time for a major scandal, right?  So apparently, Barchi asked not to see it.  Giving himself plausible deniability.  And Pernetti, the AD, the fair-haired boy who had negotiated the whole Big Ten deal (leveraging geography for cash) fires Murdock, the whistle-blower assistant coach, and tries to sweep the whole thing under the rug.  The plan was always to fire Mike Rice, the coach–Pernetti apparently didn’t think he was good enough to compete in the Big Ten.  But then Murdock went public with the video, and forced Rutgers’ hand.

In other words, the allure of cable money meant that a university President and Athletic Director were willing to let a coach get away with abusing his players, to sweep it under the rug for months, rather than jeopardize the dough. A coach kicked his players, punched them, threw basketballs at their heads, and called them the vilest homophobic slurs.  And the university knew about it, and did nothing, because there was too much money at stake.

And these cable deals, they’re happening all over college sports.  Haves and have-nots; the schools without lucrative conference cable deals are the ones left behind.  Rich schools are going to get richer, and the professionalism of college athletics intensifies.

So okay.  Let’s go there.  Ed O’Bannon, the former UCLA basketball star is heading up a class-action suit against the NCAA, in behalf of all former players.  His argument is that colleges are profiting immensely from the kids who play college sports, and that the kids don’t get a dime.  And should.  And the case is winning; working its way through the appellate courts one victory at a time.  What’s at stake?  As Sports Illustrated puts it, nothing less than the entire college sports business model.  Very hard for me to see how that could be a bad thing.

The Oscars

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It was a great year for movies, 2012, and the Academy responded appropriately, by honoring lots of them, instead of lavishing a bunch of major awards on one, as sometimes happens.  I love movies, have strong opinions about them, and am usually the most partisan Oscar-watcher ever, alternately furious or smug as awards are announced.  This year, though, I was pretty Zen.  Best Supporting Actress?  Meh.  Anne Hathaway or Sally Field?  I thought they were both terrific. I was delighted for Hathaway for winning, but was saddened that we weren’t going to get to see if Sally Field could outdo ‘you like me, you really like me!’ There was a tie, in fact, in the vote for Best Sound Editing, which I didn’t remember having seen before, but once it happened, I was delighted, and started rooting for more of them.

I thought Seth MacFarlane was just fine as Oscar host, and I sort of liked his back and forth with Captain Kirk (visiting from the future), which allowed him to alternatively introduce the wonderfully tacky song-and-dance number “We saw your boobs” with, uh,  more respectful offerings (all of which I completely forgot as soon as they were over.)

What else?  There were many many musical numbers.  Wow, were there musical numbers.  And this led to the most tiresome annual Oscar tradition–they artificially inflate the program with completely unnecessary musical bits then spend the last hour making lame jokes about how long the whole thing has gone on.  We get it–it’s very late.  So why not just cut the endless Chicago tribute?

Anyway, I have some awards of my own to offer:

Achievements in bad sound mixing: for every single musical number all night.  It was ‘orchestra drowning out the singers’ night.  They drowned out Adele!  How do you overpower Adele?!?!?!?

Also, the award for making a big deal out of the one nominated song anyone actually cared about and that everyone and his dog knew would actually win: Adele again. You notice that; they make a big out of Adele singing her Bond theme song, then do a quick ‘oh, there were also these other songs nominated’ montage.  Adele also gets the award for us finally learning the last name of a previously single-named celebrity.  Atkins, who knew?

Classiest Oscar acceptance speech: Daniel Day-Lewis.  The Brits, man, they are so good at this.  Funny, smart, believably humble; DDL nailed it.  Plus his wife’s adorable.

Every costume designer in the room simultaneously thinking ‘you know, it can’t just look good, the actor has to be able to move in it’:  Jennifer Lawrence’s dress, which may have been the bomb, but which she couldn’t climb stairs in.

Sally Field award for Annual Best Actress meltdown speech: not won this year, in a break from tradition, by Jennifer Lawrence, who did just fine, considering that she’d just, like, fallen down in front of a billion people.  No, this year it was a tie, between Quentin Tarantino, and Chris Terrio.  Odd that the two writing awards winners both gave gosh-awful acceptance speeches.  Tarantino, however, gets extra chutzpah points for suggesting that fifty years from now, he’s the only guy there anyone’s going to remember.  Even though that’s probably true.

Horrendous unconscionable grotesque miscarriage of justice gratuitous slap in the face to one of the great writers of this or any other generation award: I feel rather strongly about Tony Kushner not winning.

Worst unnecessary, show-momentum-killing under-rehearsed badly performed musical number: Tie: all of them.

The ‘I think she, uh, may have had some work done’ award: to Renee Zellweger, whose face looks molded from plastic anymore.

Charming surprise winner:  Ang Lee, absolutely.  Life of Pi was a wonderful film, and it was great to see it get so much love from Oscar.  And his acceptance speech was terrific.

You can even survive Gigli award: To Ben Affleck.  Hollywood loves redemption stories, and what’s more redemptive than winning Best Picture for a guy who was in the desert five years ago.

In a year with no single obvious winner, spread the awards wealth award: Lincoln won Best Actor, plus Production Design; Argo won Best Picture, plus some technical awards, Life of Pi won Best Director, plus well deserved awards for cinematography and SFX, Django Unchained won Best Screenplay, plus Supporting Actor, and Les Mis won Costumes, plus Best Supporting Actress, and Silver Linings Playbook won Best Actress.  Zero Dark Thirty was surprisingly shut out of major awards–it was maybe just a bit too torture-y for Oscar.  Beasts of the Southern Wild was entirely shut out, but just getting nominated was a big deal for that little film, and teeny-little Quevenzhane Wallis was the cutest cutaway shot of the night.

You’re a professional actress, dear–try to look at least a little excited to be here award: to Kristen Stewart, who managed to look both contemptuously bored and terrified out of her mind. Both simultaneously.  She did win two Razzies last night, though, so there’s that.

Worst presenting couple: Jack Nicholson and Michelle Obama. Jack, looking even more seedy and disreputable and gleefully Satanic than ever, introducing . . . the First Lady? Wha. . . ?

Best speech about the power of film as an art form: Michelle Obama’s speech, though, was great.

Proudly raised middle finger to cultural conservatives:  Hollywood’s been under attack lately, more even than usual, because of conservatives re-directing attention from guns to Hollywood as explanations for gun violence. And Hollywood is often accused of leaning very left politically.  So, Michelle Obama?  As an ‘in your face?’  Or also, giving an Oscar to Quentin Tarantino?

Overall: I enjoyed the evening, despite interminable musical interludes and lame comedy bits and the overall smugness and self-congratulatory ego-stroking that makes Oscar Oscar.  I wanted Lincoln to win, but Argo was a really good movie too, so okay.

Oh, also, Twilight: Breaking Dawn won the Razzie for Worst Picture.  Bad choice.  Hard to see it, in a year that also featured Taken 2.

 

 

 

 

State of the Union

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“They deserve a vote!”  That’s what I came away with–”They deserve a vote.”

It was the best theatre of the SOTU.  The blocking is always strange–the President stands there, with the Vice-President just off his right shoulder, and the Speaker of the House off his left.  So we end up focusing a bit on their reactions, though of course the cameras also cut back and forth to the audience and their reactions. But mostly, it’s Biden and Boehner.

My goodness, Joe Biden has wonderful teeth.  The man’s past 70, but he looks like he’s in terrific shape, and his teeth are pearly white.  Not sure about John Boehner’s teeth; never saw them.  But the poor man was clearly occupied with passing a kidney stone–it’s amazing he was even there.  No, actually, the look on Boehner’s face said eloquently, ‘the next two years are going to suck.’  Or the next two months, really.  The President spoke with his usual eloquence proposing all sorts of very very popular things that Republicans are just never going to support.

The macro-economic reality is that our country has two big problems, unemployment and budget deficits, which the federal government actually can do something about, but only sequentially, not both together.  To decrease unemployment, stimulus spending is needed, which will increase the deficit short-term; to lower the deficit will require some combination of tax increases and budget cuts, both of which will harm the recovery and increase unemployment.  Conventional Beltway wisdom is that deficit reduction should come first.  Every opinion poll shows that the public disagrees–that most citizens are more worried about unemployment.  In this case, the public is right.

You’ll hear guys on the talk shows saying things like: ‘when we’ve solved the budget deficit, that will increase business confidence and the economy will boom.’  Paul Krugman has lots of fun with that idea; that the confidence fairy is just waiting for spending cuts to sprinkle our economy with growth-dust.  Krugman is right, though–that idea is utter nonsense.  What would happen, though, if we had full employment, is that government revenues would expand.  Might not need budget cuts at all.  So we have two problems, and they need to be solved sequentially, and the sequence we should follow is obvious: unemployment first, then budget.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a single macro-economist who wouldn’t agree.

But the Republicans are all in when it comes to spending cuts.  And frankly, the Beltway commentariat pretty universally agrees.  I’m not sure which economists President Obama listens to, but it sure as heckfire ain’t Paul Krugman.  And yet, the President talked about doing both–passing his jobs bill, while also cutting spending.  This is pretty well guaranteed not to work, but it’s probably the best we’re going to get.

After the fiscal cliff deal a few weeks ago, Boehner was on the Sunday talk shows saying ‘that’s it, we’re not giving in another inch on the revenue side.’  The President apparently doesn’t much care–all the language was about ‘closing tax loopholes’ and ‘a balanced approach,’ code for more revenues.  I happen to think he’s right about that, but what it means is–the next fight is going to get really ugly, and the sequester will probably happen.  Too bad; the sequester is a truly terrible idea.

Lots of small programs suggested, very few of which have a chance of passing.  I loved the manufacturing innovation institute thing The President talked about in Ohio.  He wants funding for fifteen of ‘em.  Sounds good to me.  I also loved the fact that “70,000 structurally deficient bridges” was an applause line. Yay, us!  Our bridges suck!  (I think what Congress was applauding was the idea of, like, fixing them.  Which I’m in favor of.)

But the gun thing; that was terrific political theatre.  And he’s absolutely right.  We need to reduce gun violence.  And there, in the House chamber, were Gabby Giffords and that heroic cop and the Newtown parents. I don’t have any magic mind meld with The Founders, but I do believe that they would have been appalled at the idea that any bill dealing with a nationally significant issue (like guns) would never even come to a vote.  What I don’t get is why the President didn’t turn around at that point, look his Speaker prop in the eye, and say ‘I want your assurance, right now, that a guns bill will make it out of committee, to the House floor, for a vote.’  THAT would have been theatre.

Marco Rubio is running for President, and got to give the response.  Those guys always look bad in comparison to the President; standing in front of a flag and some curtain thing, they look petty and puny and insignificant.  And Rubio’s speech was horrific.

And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his (Obama’s) solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.

This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.

And the idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers – that’s an old idea that’s failed every time it’s been tried.

This gives the flavor–usual conservative nonsense about the ‘size of government.’  But the middle section above, that’s the key.  “A housing crisis created by reckless government policies.”  Conservatives love that narrative–the housing crisis was caused by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the Community Reinvestment Act.  It has the unfortunate deficiency of being utterly and completely untrue.  I’ve read maybe twenty books about the World-Wide Financial Crisis–it’s the most carefully studied and researched economic event of my lifetime.  And there’s Marco Rubio starting his speech with . . . well, I’m not going to call it a lie.  That’s unkind.  Let me say instead ‘utter and complete hogswallow.’

Also, let me repeat–the man is running for President. (He hasn’t formally announced or anything, but come on; he’s a Senator from Florida who spends half his time in Iowa and New Hampshire.  He wants it so bad he can taste it.)  He wants to be head of the executive branch of the United States government.  So why was the whole speech about what a terrible thing government is?  It’s bizarre, really.  My daughter is looking for a job right now, and she interviewed at a real estate office.  Rubio’s speech was the equivalent of my daughter, in her interview, saying ‘by the way, I really hate real estate.  I just think it’s really a terrible idea.’  It’s like someone applying for the job as CEO of General Motors saying ‘you should know, by the way, I hate cars.  Seriously, I think cars are awful.  Would never own one personally.’

Rubio’s whole speech was like that.  ‘Here’s one thing government does badly.  Oh, and here’s another one.  Wait, it also stinks at this.’  Rubio made up a bunch of hooey about Obamacare–because his base loathes Obamacare–and then accused the President of bad faith.  My favorite moment was his faux outrage over the very suggestion that Republicans favor rich people.  I mean, maybe he’s serious in thinking that tax cuts for rich guys create jobs for poor guys.  Maybe he really believes that.  Was a time, I believed in the Easter bunny.

Oh, and note to Marco–nobody cares about Solyndra.

And did you catch his solution to student loans?  I mean, this is a real problem.  Kids borrowed money to go to college, because that’s how you get a good job.  Now they’re graduating (or have recently graduated), and wow, no jobs.  It really sucks, and I think that’s maybe the biggest driver of the Occupy movement.  Here’s Rubio’s proposal: “Today, many graduates face massive student debt. We must give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.”  That’s your help?  Some heartless analysis of why someone shouldn’t have gone to grad school?  A wag of the finger to you, irresponsible student borrower!

My gosh, his speech was a disaster.  The only good thing about it is that voters will have four years to forget it ever happened.

At that, it was better than Rand Paul’s Tea Party rebuttal speech.

Ron Paul’s kid is also running for President, chip off the old block.  And there’s something sort of fun about his ‘pox on both houses, I’m the only honest man in the room’ pose.  It was, however, intellectually and factually dishonest in ways even Rubio disdained.

The President’s massive tax hikes and spending increases have caused his budgets to get ZERO votes in both houses of Congress. Not a single Democrat voted for the President’s budget!

Liar liar pants on fire–this’s just flat not true.  I can’t find the link this morning, but Jake Tapper of ABC News had a great story that explained it well.  Here’s a Huffington Post story instead.  What happened is this: Jeff Sessions, R-Ala, put forward a fake budget, which he called “President Obama’s budget.”  Federal budgets are hundreds of pages long–Sessions’ was like five pages.  It was an election-year stunt, and yes, it got no votes in the Senate.  Republicans all voted against it, and Democrats did too, because it was just this joke budget–it didn’t mean anything.  Then the Washington Times ran with the story, as did Fox News, as though it were actually, you know, a thing.

For Rand Paul to bring it up in his speech is just reprehensible.  This is contemptible behavior.  Most listeners wouldn’t know the facts of the case, and explaining it takes awhile–took me a whole paragraph above. I don’t care if he was playing to his base, this kind of lie can’t be condemned strongly enough. I tuned out the rest of Paul’s speech, which I read this morning and which was just the usual libertarian economic nonsense.

President Obama’s SOTU was a good speech–he always gives good speeches.  Liked his proposals, liked the general direction he’s taking us.  But House Republicans have dug in their heels.  It’s going to get ugly, and the ugliness starts soon.

 

 

 

Theology of the read option

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The feature story in this week’s Sports Illustrated asked this provocative question: Does God care who wins the Superbowl?  What followed was a very interesting journalistic take on religion and sports, in the best balanced, well-written SI tradition.  But the question itself seems to me an interesting one, with two (at least two) possible and different answers deeply rooted in Christian tradition.  No, of course God doesn’t care who wins the Superbowl.  Why would God care about something as trivial as that?  And also, of course God may or may not care about who wins the Superbowl, because God already knows who is going to win it.

First approach: God may not care about the outcome of sporting events, but He does have an ancillary interest in the participants in those events.  He cares if players get hurt, he cares if they become despondent after a loss, or so elated after a win that they cheat on their wives, or do drugs, or otherwise celebrate in inappropriate or sinful ways.  God loves all the players equally, as well as their wives and children and coaches and fans, and while He may not love them more or less during a championship event, He does understand that people behave differently most of the time than they behave in extremis.  So it’s even possible that God, knowing and loving us all equally, cares for us differently depending on our circumstances.  Differently when we’re in despair after missing that field goal, differently than when filled with overweening pride after catching that touchdown.

Second approach: God knows everything.  He knows every sinew, every muscle, every brain cell and synapse in all the players on both teams. He knows, precisely and exactly, not only the arm strength of that quarterback, but his arm strength when tired, when being chased, with his legs firmly planted on, perhaps, somewhat degraded turf.  He knows where that pass is going, precisely, exactly.  He knows every variable of the receiver’s foot speed and hand-eye coordination and ability to concentrate.  God’s omniscience is all encompassing.  He knows who is going to win, and by what score, precisely.  What we’re watching is merely an illusion of athletic competition.  The outcome is pre-determined.

The difficulty of this purely deterministic way of looking at it isn’t just that it makes the game a lot less fun.  If the whole outcome is entirely decided, entirely mechanistic, then the question arises: why do we even need a God?  If the winner or loser of the game has been decreed in the heavens, why do we watch?  Why, indeed, do we make any choices, at all, if we only have the illusion of choice?  Why bother praying?  If God knows already if we’re going to pray, and what we’re going to say when we do, then why go through the exercise?  And what good does God do?  Why bother with Him?  If our decisions, to sin or not to sin, are already known to Him, is it fair of Him to punish or reward us?  Can justice be real, can mercy exist?  Can heroism, or courage, or determination, or cleverness, or willpower, do any of those words have any meaning at all?  Doesn’t this make the Superbowl suck?

As a Mormon, do I believe in the omnis?  Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence: are those words descriptive of the God I believe in and worship? It seems to me that Mormons must necessarily reject those concepts, if our theology is also to embrace agency.  Plus, an omni-fied theology becomes, necessarily, entirely deterministic and mechanistic, in which case, why bother with God at all?  If He can’t affect change, why pray, if we can’t maybe possibly even occasionally surprise Him, then why are we even here?  And if mortality is a testing ground, then the test must be real, must be something we could possibly fail, or, preferably, pass.

Or, to look at it another way.

The Superbowl starts in about four hours. The 49ers bread-and-butter play is the read option.  Let’s look at it theologically.

In the read option, the 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, stands in the Pistol formation, about four yards behind the center, with Frank Gore, the running back, four yards behind him.  On the other side of the ball is the Ravens’ outside linebacker, Terrell Suggs.  The ball is snapped to Kaepernick, and the line blocks for a running play, the center and guard and tackles opening up a hole for Gore.  Suggs is not blocked; in fact, that’s the key to the play.  By not blocking Suggs, another blocker is freed to block other defenders; the hole more likely to open.  Kaepernick’s main read is Suggs, who has two choices.  One is to step up into the hole that the line has opened up, where he will easily tackle Gore.  If he does that, though, Kaepernick fakes the handoff to Gore, and runs directly to the space that Suggs just vacated. And Kaepernick is very fast–he’s faster than any other player on the 49ers offense, and faster than all but one Ravens’ defender.  Suggs has another choice, however–not fill the hole, stay where he is.  In which case, Kaepernick hands the ball to Gore, who has a nice big hole to run through.

Suggs has to make a choice, and either choice is basically wrong. But the better choice is to stay put, and let his teammates deal with Gore; trust that one of them will be able to shed a blocker and make the play.  Kaepernick also has to make a choice, based on what Suggs chooses. But of course, he has to read it correctly; if he doesn’t, Frank Gore could get clobbered by Suggs.

Choices and consequences and accountability.  The play, the read option, strikes me as a microcosm for mortality.  We read–we assess, we figure out what’s going on–and we then have options.  And they’re real options, real choices, with real-world consequences, with serious amounts of potential pain involved, and we’re held accountable for those choices.

But it all comes down to this: is Terrell Suggs genuinely free to choose?  Is Kaepernick genuinely free to choose in return?

Terrell Suggs has been playing football, playing linebacker, since 1996, his freshman year in high school.  Linebackers fill holes. That’s what they do, that’s what coaches have been shouting in his ear for most of his life.  When you see a hope open up, you run to that hole and you tackle whoever comes through it.  He’s a star, an exceptionally fine player, precisely because he is very very good at filling holes.  The read option relies on him following his instincts, on making the wrong call, on pro-actively trying to tackle Gore instead of staying home and shutting off Kaepernick’s run option. That’s why the read option is such a diabolically effective play; the defender’s instincts betray him. In a purely mechanistic universe, wouldn’t sheer experience and muscle memory cause him to get it wrong, to step up into the hole?  But Terrell Suggs is a very intelligent young man, and also very well coached; I think he’ll play it well.  I’m anticipating what will happen, obviously, in a game coming up later this afternoon, but I expect that he’ll make the right call, and stay at home.  But I think that because I believe in agency.

I believe in agency.  I believe that the choices we make are real ones, that they are not pre-determined, that we can actually decide to do things or not to do them.  I believe that the outcome of the Superbowl has not been decided.  That’s why I’m going to have people over to watch it with me; we think it’s going to be fun.  I’m not sure God cares all that much about who wins. Colin Kaepernick, when he scores a touchdown, kisses his own biceps, on which he has Bible verses tatooed–he’s a devout Christian, and he thinks God is on the side of the 49ers.  Ray Lewis, the Ravens star, has, after each playoff victory, shouted ‘No weapon against thee shall prosper,’ a Bible verse suggesting, to his mind, that the players on the other teams are ‘weapons’ against God, and won’t prosper, because God wants Ray Lewis to win.  I think Ray Lewis and Colin Kaepernick are kidding themselves, and that God’s actual response to their hubris is probably to be amused by it.

But I do think the final score is unknown, to God or to the unfeeling universe.  The key to my theology is agency, not omniscient omnipotence, which I reject.  I think we can act courageously, nobly, inventively, honorably, and that those terms have real-world meaning and consequence.  I think we can surprise God.

49ers stories

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The Super Bowl is this weekend, and I’m pretty excited.  I know a lot of my readers aren’t into sports–I’ve spent my life in the theatre, and a Venn diagram of ‘theatre people’ and ‘football fans’ wouldn’t necessarily show much overlap.  And of the major North American team sports, football is my least favorite.  It’s violent.  It hurts people, sometimes permanently.  But the guys who play it tend to love it, and tend as well to be thoroughly aware of the risks. I played a lot of football growing up, though never in any formal organized way–just playing in our back yard, otherwise known as our dog’s favorite bathroom. Dodging dog poo–ah, the memories.

Plus, it can be beautiful, it really can. A perfectly thrown pass, a beautifully executed play.  Wonderful athletes, leaping and running. So: torn.  But still planning a Super Bowl party.

And this year, my favorite team’s in it.  I became a San Francisco 49ers fan because, heck, growing up in Indiana, why wouldn’t I?  And I thought maybe I’d see if I could humanize the sport a little: tell some stories about the guys who play it.

So: Alex Boone.

The 49ers right guard.  He played college football at Ohio State, where he won the kinds of awards you win as one of the best linemen in football.  He showed up at the NFL combine in 2009, 6’8″, 340 pounds, chiseled, a terrific athlete.  Strong, quick, powerful.  And a drunk.

Boone say he started drinking in junior high, would sit with his Dad and drink beer and watch football together.  He would pound forty beers a night as a fifteen year old. He was arrested for drunk driving as a high school kid.   He finished his college eligibility without a degree, and went to the NFL combine (a big pre-draft workout, basically, attended by scouts from every NFL team), and the buzz was that he would be a first-round draft pick–ten million dollar signing bonus territory.  It didn’t happen.  He wasn’t drafted at all. No one wanted him. No one wanted to gamble 10 million dollars, or even one million dollars, on an alcoholic.

He was out of control.  He head-butted people.  He went to a frat party and beat a guy up.  He went to a party in California, went to a mall parking lot, and got it into his head to jump on the roofs of parked cars until the roofs collapsed.  For fun.  He was arrested for trying to destroy a tow truck. He was drinking every day, completely out of control.  And nobody in the NFL was interested.

Except the 49ers.  They interviewed him, said they would draft him as a free agent (for miniscule money), but with two requirements.  His technique sucked, because he’d never had to listen to coaches.  He had to work with La Charles Bentley, a former NFL lineman who had a camp for budding linemen.  And Mike Singletary, the coach, told him he had to stop drinking.

Boone went to AA.  He’s been clean and sober for three years.  He’s married, and a Dad.  He’s very heavily involved in charity work.  And he’s the starting right guard for the Super Bowl Niners. He’s turned his life around.  And is today one of the most intelligent and thoughtful guys on the team, bright and quotable.

Bruce Miller:

Every year, college football players await the NFL draft, which will determine their futures.  The worst team in football gets to pick first–getting a first shot at the best college player in the country.  The best team picks 32nd, and so on, for seven rounds.  There are always all kinds of speculation about who will be the number one pick, and if you’re a fan, you have strong opinions over who your team should use its precious picks on. And teams can trade picks, and do.  In the 2011 draft, due to trades, the Niners had three seventh round picks.  At that point in the draft, you’re not going to get a superstar, but as a fan you hope your team at least can get a useful player.  And with the last of those three picks, the Niners drafted Bruce Miller.

Miller played his college ball at Central Florida, not a powerhouse school.  But he was a good player there, a defensive end, probably the best defensive player in the school’s history.  Problem is, he was 6’2″, 245.  And at the professional level, that’s just too small.  So he waited, desperate to fulfill his lifetime goal of playing football professionally, hoping someone would take a chance on him, hoping they’d want him for special teams or something. Anything.

So he got the phone call; the Niners welcomed him to the team.  And told him they wanted him as a fullback.

If you don’t know anything about football, that won’t mean much, but you can hardly find two positions with less in common than fullback and defensive end.  For one thing, fullbacks block–that’s their main job.  Defensive players tackle.  All his instincts would be off. It’s like, I don’t know, getting cast as Mercutio and then you show up for your first rehearsal and they say, sorry,  we want you to play Juliet. Here’s your script.  Good luck.

Plus, when they drafted Miller, the Niners already had a fullback, a good one, Moran Norris.

So Bruce Miller shows up to Niners camp, ready to start practice, ready to learn a brand new position.  But the NFL was in the middle of an incredibly nasty labor negotiation, and players weren’t allowed to practice as a team.  Alex Smith, the Niners quarterback, was organizing some informal practices, so Miller went to California from Florida, crashed on Smith’s sofa, and asked the other guys to show him how to be a fullback. And, by all accounts, completely worked his butt off.

It wasn’t going to matter, that first season.  Norris was the starter, and Miller, as he’d hoped, was going to play on special teams.  When the labor problems ended, and the coaches finally showed up, Miller got some more instruction, and was making good progress.  Turns out, his size wasn’t good for a defensive end, but it was pretty well perfect for a fullback.  And Miller had played football all his life.  A season spent sitting on the bench, learning from a respected veteran like Norris would be good for him.

On the third play of the season, Moran Norris blew out his knee.  And his career was over.  And Bruce Miller had to step up and play.

And he’s been great. If you watch the Super Bowl, watch Miller. Miller’s easy to spot–he’s number 49, on the 49ers.  Often you can learn more watching him play than you can from watching the quarterback.  If the Niners make a big play, a long run or a long pass, Bruce Miller’s blocking will have had a lot to do with it–he’s a perfect fullback for the Pistol offense, which the Niners use a lot of the time.  If he’s really lucky, he might even catch a pass. Turns out, he’s great at that too.

Kwame Harris:

It’s hardly news to say that national attitudes towards our LGBT friends have changed tremendously.  Marriage equality now enjoys majority support, and laws forbidding discrimination on housing or employment have been enacted in Salt Lake City, with LDS Church support.  One barrier that has remained unchanged, however, is professional sports.  Olympic athletes, tennis players–wonderful, brave Martina Navratilova– even soccer players have come out in recent years.  But so far, at least, no major team sport athlete has come out as gay.  The old Dodgers’ outfielder, Billy Bean, came out after his retirement from baseball.  But football has remained, at least publicly, entirely straight.

Which is actually hilarious, given the many many homo-erotic overtones of basically everything about the sport.  Still, there has never been an active, out player.

The Forty-Niners play in San Francisco, and are generally reckoned the most gay-friendly team in the NFL.  In August, they became the first NFL team (and remain the only NFL team) to produce an “It gets better” video aimed at LGBT youth.  I love the video, in part because who appears in it–there isn’t a tougher football player alive than Donte Whitner, other than perhaps Ricky Jean Francois.

The Niners now have their first out player.  It’s a sad story, really: Kwame Harris, who played right tackle for the team from 2003-2007 was arrested on domestic violence charges after a fight with a former domestic partner turned ugly. Harris is, by all accounts, a very quiet and reserved guy.  Because they were fighting about what seem like trivial issues–soy sauce on rice, and underwear–the story seems comical.  But a man was badly injured, and another may serve jail time for it–that’s not funny.  No, what’s great about the story isn’t Kwame Harris’ sad legal difficulties, or a relationship turned sour–what’s great has been the response of the Niners’ players.

There are guys on the team at the Super Bowl who played with Kwame Harris.  There are 4000 reporters covering the Super Bowl–Harris has come up. And they couldn’t care less.  Delanie Walker, Brian Jennings–they’ve been asked about Harris, and they say ‘he was a great football player, and a teammate and friend.  His sexual orientation’s irrelevant.’

So remember all that talk about ‘guys in a locker room, they’re not going to put up with a gay teammate?’  Based on the 49ers response, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue.  Obviously, some guys might–the thought that some professional football players may be homophobic is hardly startling.  But for the most part, as Brian Jennings put it: “we’re here to win football games.” And every day that passes, some progress is made. . . .

And then, right after I wrote this, Chris Culliver made some astonishingly homophobic comments, and was promptly blasted for it by Mike Wilbon.  So maybe not that much progress. . . .

Every guy on a football team has a story, and the stories can be fascinating.  Another reason why, despite my very real reservations about it, I remain a football fan.  And go Forty-niners.