Graham Spanier interview-- Penn State president

http://www.statecollege.com/news/local-news/twohour-graham-spanier-interview-offers-new-insight,1430650/


Dear Ken,

I watched the interview of the Penn State president-- a capable person in an extremely awkward situation. I found the ex-president was very cautious, very circumspect. He seemed very bureaucratic to me and monotonal, kind of sensitive seeming and a bit holier-than-thou. He did express regret about Jerry Sandusky's crimes but indicated almost zero in the way of personal culpability. Unfortunately, I wanted to hear about his own personal experience of being abused-- but when I tried to get back to the interview it made me go to the beginning. To tell you the truth, this guy seemed like an apologist. "I never ordered a soldier to kill a Jew-- it was their immediate supervisors who did that!" He keeps referring to the volume of emails that come across his desk-- but I noticed very little detail in his responses. Maybe he knew nothing, but I sense he feels some guilt for his lack of assertiveness in the situation. I may sound like a Monday morning quarterback, we all like to think we would have done better. 

But, all in all, Penn State came off very poorly in this situation. I think these characters are very committed to protecting their jobs-- and Joe Paterno stayed too long. Should Joe have left by 1998-- when it sounds like the shit started to hit the wall? Yes, he should have. Would Sandusky have committed these crimes regardless of Joe's situation-- possibly-- but Joe made things worse by casting his huge shadow over the Happy Valley football program. A guy with too much power can create problems. And remember Mack Brown would have continued if it was his choice. So Mack's lack of judgment is reminiscent of Joe's hubris. Thanks for sharing this interview.

John

Baseball in the Fifties

Baseball is not an improvisational game. The players' actions are guided along well-defined boundaries. You cannot hit the ball until the pitcher delivers it you. You have to run within the baselines and you go from first base to second base to third and home plate. No other options exist. Basketball and football are different. Basketball involves improvisation every time down the court. Football games, dense with planned and scripted plays, have constant adjustments as the offensive plan encounters an unpredictable defense. Think Johnny Manziel being chased out of the pocket and looking downfield for new opportunities or deciding to run if that's the best choice. Baseball gives you no similar freedom.

Ted Williams, considered by many to be the best hitter of all-time, fit well into the careful science of the game of baseball. He studied hitting in all of its intricacy and programmed his body to function as a refined baseball hitting machine. Watching Ken Burns' extensive study of baseball last night, I got a kick out of Mickey Mantle's comment on his conversation with Ted Williams in an All-Star game clubhouse and the results of Ted explaining all the things Mantle could do to improve his swing. Mantle said "I went 0 for 30 after the All-Star game." Apparently, Mantle approached hitting in a more instinctive way, less formulaic way. Mantle's swing was compact, a killing machine of twitch muscle and violent beauty. Williams's swing had more poetry maybe, a loose-gaited stroke, with great extension and rhythm. Williams discussed his last bat in the Ken Burns video, a home run at the end of the 1960 season, and revealed his ability to create in the moment. Jack Fisher, the Baltimore Orioles pitcher had put a fastball past him. Williams surmised Fisher  figured he could put another fastball past the 42 year old batter. Williams waited on the fastball and blasted it into the Red Sox bullpen. The other stories related to Wiliams' last at bat, 1) the small crowd of 10,000 fans on hand that day or 2) the slugger's stubborn refusal to tip his hat for the standing ovation, pale in comparison to William's ability to stay focused and relaxed enough to engineer a great at-bat on his very last chance at the plate. Even the scientific hitter has to respond to the reality of the moment.

Two other episodes portrayed in the Fifties chapter of Burns' baseball masterpiece had much to offer about individual performance and the ability of a single play and a single player to determine the fate of an entire franchise. Willie Mays playing for the then New York Giants made the great over-the-shoulder catch against Vic Wertz, Cleveland Indians, in Game Two of the 1954 World Series and the Giants swept the series. Maybe the catch convinced Cleveland the series was over. Apparently Willie had the habit, probably unconscious, of thumping his glove as he pursued a fly ball whenever he anticipated making the catch.The Burns' video shows Willie thumping his glove on the way to making possibly the greatest catch in history. Catching an outfield fly ball while running full speed may be the closest thing baseball gets to an improvisational moment. The outfielder must move his body with balletic skill to get his body moving with sufficient speed and grace to make the play-- much like a basketball player driving to the basket around, over and through the opposing players.

The other most impressive play from the Fifties though had to be the Sandy Amoros catch, the gem that propelled the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers to a World Series victory and a world championship over the New York Yankees, their nemesis. Amoros raced towards the left field foul line to chase down a line shot hit by Yoga Berra, a sure double that would have spoiled Johnny Podres' shutout and probably turned the tide against the Dodgers. Sandy's long, brilliant run to make the catch elevated the Brooklyn team into believers and got the Yankee curse off their backs. Sandy moved with an improvisational beauty on the play, creating an opportunity where none seemed to exist. He helped the franchise with that catch as much as the other more famous Dodgers-- Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Gil Hodges and others. Maybe without that catch you don't get the championships claimed by Los Angeles in the decades to follow. I believe a single play can alter the entire trajectory of an organization-- and the lack of a defining play can hinder the less fortunate franchise.

There was significantly more footage of Willie Mays than a player like Sandy Amoros. Mays' movements down the base paths had the quality of young colt, a freedom of movement even within the great restrictions of the prescribed boundaries. Much has been said about Mays' joy for the game and Burns' video emphasizes Willie Mays' preternatural understanding of the entire field of play. Maybe this awareness freed him to move with greater confidence, comfort and relaxation.

Mack Brown-- a Tale of Two Eras

Mack Brown's first era lasted from 1998-2009.

Mack Brown brought Texas to the Promised Land-- under the winged feet of Vince Young in 2005. Confetti fell down from the rafters as Vince spread his arms wide in the cool air of a southern California night. Texas football had been brought back, revived from the post-Darrell Royal malaise-- and Mack Brown was the master at the control switch.

Mack Brown always had the gift for recruitment. He convinced Ricky Williams to stay for a senior season. Ricky won the Heisman in 1998 made Mack a winner in that very first season.

Mack recruited Vince Young. Mack always seemed uncomfortable on the sidelines but Vince reassured him that night-- never doubting even as the minutes ebbed away with Texas falling behind the mighty USC Trojans. Vince had done it before on many occasions and he did it again, brought Texas a last second victory, with the whole world watching. Texas had won its first national championship since 1970!

And after Vince, came Colt McCoy. Colt was like a young horse loosened from a small town football atmosphere and born ready for the big spotlight in Austin. Colt beat out Jevan Snead for the starting QB position. Over four years he averaged more than 10 victories per season. Something happened after Colt. The tide turned. Well the Tide, the Alabama Tide that is, knocked Colt out of the 2009 national championship football game and turned the tide of Texas football. Garrett Gilbert, a much heralded true freshman, came it as Colt's replacement and so began the long slide that brings us to the present moment-- the end of the Mack Brown Second Era.

The second era of Mack Brown goes from 2010-2013. Gilbert was no Vince Young, not another Colt McCoy. The mojo of Texas football disappeared with alarming rapidity. Was it anybody's fault? Maybe Mack Brown's fault? Had the game passed him by? Did he lack the talent for picking quarterbacks-- missing out at a time when RGIII and Johnny Manziel were graduating from Texas high schools? Maybe landing great quarterbacks includes an element of luck. Mack won twice, with Vince and Colt. He was due for a setback, according to the laws of the football gods. Mack never did anything grievous like Mike Shanahan, the Redskins coach, gambling a young RGIII's career by playing him injured in his very first year.

So give Mack Brown a measure of credit. He's a class act when the classiest act means looking out for the welfare of your players.  But his second era has been a kind of slow torture for Texas fans. Very little to get excited about-- and football fandom is all about getting excited. The football fan has no match when it comes to visceral devotion to an object of adoration, the team... with the possible exception of the stock market maven and his love of hurtling numbers-- the tumble of digits when stocks go up and down. But an adrenaline driven audience has no tolerance for long, drawn out suffering. Adrenaline wants to fight or flight. If the fight results in victory, you keep the coach. If the fight results in defeat, it's time for the coach to fly. Very little room for grey in the black and white world of the win/loss column. Mack's second era showed too many losses. And the show must go on.

Time Machine -- Aug. 28, 1972

Found a Time magazine at an estate sale from Aug. 28, 1972 with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, my fellow Greek-American featured on the cover. They had just won the 1972 presidential election but look none too happy on the cover. The story, entitled, "Once More With Feeling," seems ironic. They look so deadpan. No happiness. No smile. "Once More With Cheating" is more like it. Watergate was just ahead and about two years later, Aug. 1974, and Nixon would resign.

But I'm more interested in the aesthetics from 1972. Bet you would have a big smile from a victorious president in today's mass media. Smiling was probably considered too effeminate in those days. But let's look at the magazine. First page-- an ad for VW bugs and they cost $1,999 in those days, at least that was the Suggested Retail Price. McGovern compared the bombing of Vietnam to the Holocaust, "the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler." Time magazine felt such rhetoric was "difficult to excuse." Nowadays Obama's Healthcare plan is compared to Katrina and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So much for loose rhetoric.

Page 26 featured an article on Club Med. Around Europe "nudity has reached epidemic proportions." The article featured some topless pics from St. Tropez. Sixties revolution!

An El Al airplane bound for Tel Aviv was rocked by a bomb explosion. The bomb was brought on board by two British girls, unaware the cassette player given to them by two guys, either Iranian, Pakistani or Indian, was rigged with a bomb. Luckily the plan landed safely. The bomb exploded at low enough altitude to blow a hole in the fuselage but not bring down the airplane with 140 passengers.

Oui magazine, a Hugh Hefner product designed ostensibly for both males and females, came out with a first issue. The European style magazine lasted until 2007. Who knew?

The great Oscar Levant died at 65 years.

The world readied for the 1972 Olympics and eleven African nations declared they would not participate if white-supremacist Rhodesia was allowed to compete. Remember what happened at the 1972 Olympics in Munich-- the Black September terrorist takeover and massacre that left 11 Israeli athletes murdered along with the killing of a German police officer and 5 terrorists.

A Chevy Vega with a zinc chloride battery ran for "three uninterrupted hours," a 150 mile trip at 50 mph, an early attempt at electric car transportation.

And, on a more optimistic note than today's situation, Tijuana, Mexico "was parading a new-found reputation as a respectable, commercially solid city, frocked out in its Sunday best for a three-week international trade show called Mexpo." The article points out that the caesar salad was invented by Alex and Caesar Cardini "one evening to feed the throngs in their beleaguered restaurant." Necessity again proved to be the mother of invention!

The magazine proves our inability to see the future-- as always we have 20-20 hindsight while the future, and even the present, can barely be detected.

The Time subscription went to a guy named Sabino Pesce on Farragut Rd. in Brooklyn. Maybe Joe Pesci's uncle?

Income Inequality-- real or imagined?

Listened to Sirius radio today as I drove around my hometown of Austin, Texas. Caught a public radio discussion from New York City on the election of Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of New York.  Mr. de Blasio wants to get free pre-school education for all New Yorkers in an effort to level the playing field as regards income and opportunity inequality. He's concerned about affordable housing. Only the rich can afford to live in Manhattan these days. But he's careful not to hurl invective at Wall Street, the place oozing money and wealth and a big source of the city's economy.

Income inequality has been with us forever. Is it really that different than it has ever been before? Everybody will scream in response-- yes, the numbers indicate clearly all the gains in wealth have been made at the top of the pyramid, the "top 1%," a group nobody claims to be part of. The oft-repeated truism states all societal gains have fallen into the laps of the very rich. But, as my hero Marshall McLuhan, the media philosph, states-- "it is wealth that creates poverty."  That's not a direct quote despite the quotation marks. The level of wealth has become more visible thanks to the power of modern communications and we do not like seeing how poor we are by comparison!

The perspective of a 19th or 20th century analysis does not suffice. The digital revolution has changed the world. The Arab Spring occurred because the Middle East could see their plight more clearly and didn't like what appeared before their eyes. The dictators shivered as the citizens tweeted out their feelings and societies went up in flames. The situation is messy and painful, no doubt, but the revolution has begun. Not only is the revolution being televised... it's being streamed or tweeted or whatever.

Meanwhile back in the United States... every kid has a cellphone and doesn't want to lose that connectivity. Hence, crime rates are way down because nobody can abide by the thought of going without a cellphone in a prison cell-- no matter how great the police departments think they are doing.

The next chapter is mysterious no doubt. One expert on employment stated there are two distinct economies and employment pictures--1)  the high tech economy, where things are humming and companies need more workers, and 2) the rest of the economy, with high unemployment and people looking for work.

New York City may or may not reflect an American reality or even a global reality. Wealth will follow on the heels of knowledge and education and eventually get distributed more evenly. The extreme productivity and wealth of our society has to go somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum. Dealing with wild amounts of accumulated riches is a problem we can solve. Other, very real problems like climate change threaten all of humanity. The climate problems demands unprecedented levels of global cooperation-- a challenge posing risks more precipitous than anything previously experienced in human history.

McLuhan-- All of the Candidates Are Asleep (Part 2)

Saturday Evening Post (August 10, 1968)    p. 34-36   (Part 2)

Marshall McLuhan, from the vantage point of 1968, reveals the sources for the angst behind...the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. He explains the reasons behind the deep ideological divide in our Red versus Blue society. It's all about the stresses imposed by revolutionary change from print media to an all-electronic environment. We are is so deep we cannot see it for.... "the bigger the environment created by an environment of technology, the less aware are the occupants of that environment or technology."

Here is the second half of McLuhan’s article.

All of the Candidates are Asleep
By: Marshall McLuhan 

The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.

Radio politics produced a new race of tribal chieftains who “represented” nobody. They “put on” their public, like any star or any emperor. The media are the emperor’s new clothes, as it were. Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, F.D.R.—these men were made bby radio.

Jack Kennedy was the first TV President. He had that indifference to power without which the TV candidate merely electrocutes himself.. When a man has enormous wealth or power, his human survival depends on his indifference to these things. Anybody who pretends to want such things proclaims his inability to perceive their terrifying responsibilities. In a word, he acts like a somnambulist, a highly motivated dreamer who prefers to remain insulated from a frightening world. But the hum dimension itself has gone from power, in the satellite age. Excess make power, as such, silly and unacceptable.

The TV generation has been robbed of its identity by the establishment consisting of highly motivated somnambulists. Any new technology that creates a new environment alters the image the people have of themselves. It changes their relation to others. The gap so created can only be filled by violence. Such violence has no goal except the need to form a new image, to create a new meaning for the individual or the group.

Radio and TV both create global environments of “software.” They envelop us in radiation and information. Radio retribalized world politics, bringing people very much closer together by eliminating space and time. Great violence was released by radio technology, in the course of the pursuit of new images and identity.

The Second World War was a radio war, the first software war, the first guerrilla war of decentralized forces fighting on many fronts at once. War, now as always, is education, an accelerated distribution of data and information. It is compulsory education, especially for the enemy. In this sense war has always been a major “progressive” force, both in ancient and modern worlds. War is also a quest for identity. “Hardware” wars follow the “territorial imperative,” but this is also the quest for a corporate image.

The most creative response to radio was American Negro jazz. Jazz was a syncopated audile-tactile form of cultural gesture-language that cut across all verbal barriers, even more than radio itself. Unlike the language of private and visual culture, the auditory world of jazz is discontinuous. It is a non-Newtonian space-time world of total involvement. Only the visual sense gives detachment. Only the eye cultures, based on the phonetic alphabet, have ever achieved a visual order of civilized detachment and private individualism. Hence the present panic:

The American colonies began with print. The entire educational, industrial and political structure of the U.S.A. stem from the printed word, as de Tocqueville explained long ago. All other cultures had centuries of pre-print existence and political organization. Hence, unlike other cultures, the North American colonies began as a decentralized group and moved toward bureaucratic centralization. In the age of software this trend will reverse, and, of course, the United States has much to lose from decentralization.

An instantaneous electric environment decentralizes any structures, personal or corporate, commercial or political. The old hardware structure of road and rail and print had, by contrast, centralized and specialized all functions.

Hence the dilemma of the TV generation: The Establishment is centralized and specialized in politics, in education and in business. The Establishment is goal-oriented. The new software environment is a total field of simultaneous data in which no goals are possible, no detachment is possible and involvement is mandatory.

Faced with an educational plant devoted to separate subjects, and training in special skills, the TV generation is baffled. This applies equally to the Negro. He is asked to acquire literacy and to detribalize at  a time when the latest technology is retribalizing the entire globe. The backward individual, like the backward country, has no stake in the old hardware, the old literacy and the old specialism. He is immediately “turned on” by the new software electric culture.

By contrast, the possessors of the old hardware, the Establishment, are “turned off” by the new electric environment. Age-old habits of classification, detachment and specialism make it impossible for them to come to terms with an electric technology that offers total integration of life and knowledge.

The TV generation is dedicated to the “inner trip” and the erosion of personal identity. It can only form a new image of itself by destroying the old hardware environment. Yet destruction of the hardware environment is not a goal for the TV generation It can have no goal. It can only be involved in a struggle. The new core of the TV generation is now 12 to 14 years of age. The confrontation with the Establishment will take place four of five years hence. In the meantime, faint indications of the coming conflict are apparent at Columbia and elsewhere.

As Peter Drucker points out in Managing for Results, the bigger the environment created by an environment of technology, the less aware are the occupants of that environment or technology. The global environments created by the new software, or pervasive electric information, are such hidden services. The hardware environments of industry and print had created services such as the postal system, highways and railways. Printing, or assembly-line technology by the use of uniform movable types, became the unconscious model for all industrial activity whatever, for all educational training and all job organization. These hardware environments gave ordinary workers access to goods and services such as the wealthiest person in the world could not have provided for himself.

A vast discrepancy was created between the old image of agrarian man and the new image of industrial man. This discrepancy released a century of old struggle and wars that were necessary to form new images of identity.

Every gap is an interface, an area of friction or ferment. Hardware “communism” existed, that is to say, decades before the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The utopia of Karl Marx, like all utopias, before or since, was an image in a rearview mirror. Communism had already happened. Karl Marx was unaware of the meaning of the vast new hardware environment of communal services, as we are unaware of the global environment of software services or total and instant information.

The sort of theme and issues that the present candidates consider it necessary to mention have nothing whatever to do with what is going on in the world. Moral concern over poverty and injustice and stupidity are now steeped in a software environment of affluent images. The discrepancy between the old and the new images enrages the victims.

The child standing in his crib wallows in TV images of adult life as much as the poor are enveloped in images of physical splendor. The result is that the young TV watcher decides to bypass childhood and adolescence. The poor quite naturally decide to bypass the bureaucratic maze that denies them cornflakes.

The new software environment of images is not nearly as invisible to the victims as it is to the Establishment that witlessly perpetuates it. The effects are the same whether the causes are noted or not. For centuries the literate world in general has been concerned with events rather than causes.

The new Milton Eisenhower Commission to investigate the causes of violence will produce an inventory of violent events plus a moral exhortation. Causes will not be considered.

The TV generation has been robbed of its identity by the inventors and managers of an electric software environment of global services. These managers, it cannot be insisted upon too strongly, are highly motivated somnambulists. (The recent psychological studies by Dr. Roger Broughton at McGill University have indicated that somnambulism is a motivated condition.)

Without exception the McCarthys, the Humphreys, the Reagans, the Stassens, the Wallaces and the Nixons, the Rockefellers are men of integrity and good will who find it expedient to sleep out the current time. Why should the ld wake up merely to confront a violent struggle for new identity, which the young and the backward alike find it necessary to pursue in order to attain any image of themselves?

McLuhan (1968) predicts Obama presidency and 2013 political angst....

Saturday Evening Post (August 10, 1968)    p. 34-36   

(Part 1)

Marshall McLuhan, from the vantage point of 1968,  predicts Obama presidency and reveals the sources for the angst behind...the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. He explains the reasons behind the deep ideological divide in our Red versus Blue society. It's all about the stresses imposed by revolutionary change from print media to an all-electronic environment! 

I will follow this post with the second half of McLuhan's article-- in a few days.

All of the Candidates are Asleep
By: Marshall McLuhan 

“Would that even today you knew the thangs that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.” (Luke 19:42)

An election is a period of programmed violence, because it is a quest for new images of national identity. The present elections is a “tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.

A tragic hero has no goal. He has to find out who he is when the foundations of his world have fled. His “irrational violence” is a probing of the unknown. Like our own TV generation, he cannot “fit I” to a world that has changed radically. His tragic agon, or struggle, is a process of making, not matching. He cannot “represent” people until he has invented or discovered them anew.

The Vietnam war has taught Americans that they cannot have a hot war in a cool, or involved, age. When electric immediacy has got everybody involved in everybody, mechanized violence is no more tolerable than mechanized education or mechanized politics or mechanized charity.

The ballot box is a “hot box” that is hard to cool in an election year. An old-fashioned hot campaign is hard to accommodate to a TV public engaged in the “first world war fought on American soil.”

All wars are world wars, under electric conditions. TV brings them into our homes, and some American parents have seen their own sons killed on TV news programs. Seeing them on TV, moreover, we experience all sons as our own.

From all the present candidates for the Presidency, the TV viewer gets the impression that it would be possible to have an intelligent conversation with any one of them under conditions of privacy and solitude, during which that candidate could be allowed to learn some of the central events in the contemporary world.

The simple fact is that no such possibility of intelligent conversation exists. If any one of them wre to become aware of the actual dynamics of the 20^th century, he would at once dissociate himself from political lie. The compliance and submission needed in “practical politics,” or for any cooperation with any political machine excluded the possibility of any serious character appearing on the scene.

Now that Bob Kennedy has left the scene it is easier to see how much bigger he was than the mere candidate role he undertook to perform. His many hidden dimensions appeared less on the rostrum than in his spontaneous excursions into the ghettos and in his easy rapport with the surging generosity of young hearts. He strove to do good by stealth and blushed to find it fame. It was this (reluctant hero) quality that gave integrity and power to his TV image.

None of the candidates understands TV, either in its effect on him or on society.  If Canada’s Pierre Trudeau is a great TV image in politics, it is because he is indifferent to political power. Any who looks as if he wants to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer.

Sen. Eugene McCarthy could have come out of any Hollywood casting bureau as a small-town philosopher. His yokel quality provides a very pleasing feeling of TV involvement, which gives him a nice, modest rapport with the young.

TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional popularity contests into national mage-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like press coverage, still count on the candidate’s have a special slogan, a special issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to comment on what happened on TV.

But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.

Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological.

The question is whether we are to “go to bed” and “take our slumber” for the next four years with Humphrey’s “platform of happiness” and bubbly ebullience, or with Nixon’s “serene certainty” to “jog along” with Senator MCarthy, or to fix our gaze on loner Reagan. This question has ll the immediacy and involvement of the choice between listening for four years to the same theme songs. Are we to endure four years of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (Humphrey), I Love You Truly (Nixon), Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms (McCarthy) or As Time Goes By (Reagan)?

In merely media terms, a Negro in the White House would have the most soothing and cooling effect on both national and international politics. Negroes make enormously better color-TV images than whites, because the contour of this image does not depend upon light and shade.

In media terms, a glance at presidential candidates, past and present, reveals that “running for office” only became possible when transportation reached a high degree of development. Until the telegraph and the railway, the office had to chase after the candidate. He sat home, writing letters to the local press. Slogans were basic. Cartoons and photography began to play a large political function even before railways made it possible for candidate to enter the age of caboose and whistle-stop oratory.

The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.

Global Village

The electronic vortex (see McLuhan) whirls viciously
And we wonder where we fit and do we matter
a kidnapping in California
Chinese kids working farms in Japan
A-Rod on steroids
Glee star dies of overdose

The electronic vortex (read McLuhan) whirls deliciously
can't wait to get up in the morning
turn on the computer
images flash by so fleshily
are they me?
am I them?

Facebook friends are no friends at all
oh yes, facebook friends help me stand tall
Have we all become the Third Man
is life a film noir
What does anderson cooper think?
How about Dr. drew's pinky?

We all end up in rehab
sticker shock, computer glow dimming our eyes
dimming our prospects
But now my battery gets charged as I speak.
All is well
and the electronic vortex (nee McLuhan) understands judiciously.

Zen and the Art of Golfing

Playing golf always made me uptight. You get to the tee box and place your golf tee into the dirt. You place the little white bowl on top of the tee. It sits precariously, easily blown over by a gust of wind. You are aware of the other golfers in your group. Your breathing becomes uneasy. The ball looks small not much bigger than a marble. The distance to the flag feels gigantic. So many things can go wrong. You hit the ball with a hitch in your swing and the ball slices off the fairway. You hit the ball with the inside corner of the driver and the ball spurts sideways like a leak from a hose. Your breathing gets worse. You feel the other golfers judging you negatively but you've got to swing. Too much time passes and you are holding up the works. You exhale and try to get yourself together. You pull the club back and let the swing go. You've done it again, a terrible drive. The ball skitters a few feet and you cannot believe the anxiety levels you've achieved.

This time I played golf and it went differently. I had a great day. I went with a good friend, a nonjudgemental guy named Vaughn. He was not a big golf aficionado. I had no fear of him giving unsolicited coaching advice on my swing. I made one piss poor drive, something like the experience described in the first paragraph. Then, remarkably, things changed. My breathing relaxed. I approached the ball with a level of happiness. My swing moved in a relaxed rhythm. I stopped caring. Suddenly I made solid contact with my shots. The ball moved through the air with authority and bounced down the fairway in the right direction. I felt good. Using my old-fashioned clubs, I had a sense of comfort. It's not about the golf club technology, it's about the mental space.

I lost one of my balls and found myself using a Pinnacle practice ball. It had two thick black lines running around the circumference, reference marks I think for practice purposes. I loved the ball. The lines were easy to see. I had my guidelines. This is all practice I thought, forget the game. The golf course had very few golfers. Vaughn and I had the place to ourselves. We laughed and enjoyed the way most of the holes had a water hazard, the San Marcos River. Instead of seeing the river as a hazard, I viewed it as a reference point, kind of like the guidelines on the ball. Best day of golfing I've ever had. I have only golfed about ten times in my whole life. This experience gave me hope for a new hobby.

Younger and Stronger - using 1/6 formula

Looked back at book Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge and learned more from a second reading. Seems like you create some inflammation in your body when you exercise vigorously. The authors explain that the slight pain you inflict on your body, down to the cellular level, creates growth and creates greater strength and health in the long run. They promote the use of heart monitors to keep good track of your pulse. In general terms, the maximum pulse rate can be derived by using the number 220 and deducting your age. In my case, the age is 63 years-- so my max heart rate would be approximately 157 beats per minute. You then strive in your exercise regime to get to 65% of your heart rate, or higher with more rigorous workouts. You might even move beyond aerobics to anaerobic levels-- with rates close to 100% of your max, maintained for a minute or two-- with sprinting 100 yards or some other relatively extreme behavior, for a senior person that is. The overall result is that you start feeling better and your body maintains itself at a more youthful level from the age of 60-85 years. It's kind of a natural preservative-- like dipping yourself in citric acid to reduce your physical detoriation with an exercise habit of one hour a day for six days a week. I think of the formula as 1/6-- one hour per day/six days a week.

So far this book has been a good influence in my life. I have been combining gym workouts for strength, about 2 per week, with 3-4 days walking the hills adjacent to my neighborhood in Austin. There is a bit of cultism or self-absorption perhaps in the authors' fondness for their system-- but I am falling into line with many of their assertions. I have not bought the heart monitor, a strap that goes around your chest and signals your pulse rates to the wrist monitor you wear like a watch during the workouts. I have noticed pulse rates on the elliptical machine and other apparatus at the gym and sure enough when I hit about 120 bpm (beats per minute)-- a line of sweat forms at my brow and telltale moisture appears at the neckline of my shirt.

Jimmy Fallon-- Most Cheerful Man on Late Night

Watched Howard Kurtz on his Reliable Sources show this Sunday morning on CNN. His guest Ken Tucker discussed Jay Leno's firing by NBC, for an 8 minute segment entitled  "Jay Leno, fired and smiling." Tucker was asked whether the the late night format, a 60 year old tradition,  can be revived to something different for the future.

Tucker wondered about the wisdom of NBC's second firing Leno, this time for Jimmy Fallon, a guy he predicted will draw a smaller audience than Leno. Tucker took issue with Fallon's inability to interview heavyweight guests like Barack Obama. Fallon, he added, lacks awareness of the late night tradition and history. He predicted  Fallon and NBC will swoon in the ratings like Conan did. Tucker unceremoniously called Conan O'Brien ... "a shriveled carrot of a man... pushed to the margins, there's no buzz."

Tucker feels the Johnny Carson mantle should have been passed to David Letterman rather than Jay Leno. Letterman has more gravitas than the others. Tucker said Jimmy Kimmel, Fallon's likely main competitor, understands irony, from the School of David Letterman, but reveals nothing of himself. Letterman, unlike Kimmel, understands the late night franchise, talks about his life and has interests beyond Hollywood and the world of entertainment.

"Is Jimmy Fallon just an empty, though stylish suit, bound for low ratings?" Kurtz called Fallon "the most cheerful guy on late night" and cheerful goes a long way on television. Fallon has musical chops and can do a skit as his SNL pedigree guarantees. Kurtz and Tucker pointed out Fallon's savvy regarding the internet, Twitter and his demonstrated ability to go viral with clips. Maybe the new job description for  late night TV host has becomes or devolves to to a guy with a baton in his hand-- a symphony conductor for all things electronic.

Tucker likes Stephen Colbert, playing the real Stephen Colbert and not the twisted right wing persona, as a late night host for a major network. Colbert, however, may be even smarter, kinkier and more of a cult hero than Conan-- a prescription for limited ratings. Colbert's interviews play like standup with the interviewee serving as the straight man to Colbert's virtuoso improv. Late night hosts are supposed to be modest and must always make the guest look good. Colbert's pace is frenetic, offering little of the soporific pleasures of Late Night Starring Johnny Carson. We loved the familiar tropes and Ed McMahon's big brotherly guffaws for years until we got sick of them. Colbert does not provide the needed space. He races along, not the optimum rhythm of late night which allows some room for relaxed viewer participation. Jon Stewart is better at that.

Ken Tucker never has to make decisions with unknown outcomes. He always knows everything-- the definition of a critic. A Ken Tucker endorsement probably proves Stephen Colbert makes the absolute worst choice as late night host on network television! But I did enjoy much of what Ken Tucker had to say about the latest skirmish in the Late Night Wars.

A-Rod in the Wrong Pond

Read the New York Times recent piece on Alex Rodriguez's struggles with the New York Yankees. A-Rod was a big league ballplayer for nearly ten years, 1994- 2003, when he moved his baseball skills to the town that never sleeps. Rodriguez was signed away from the Seattle Mariners. Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks  signed A-Rod to an enormous $252 million dollar contract to play, a deal that as "big as Texas" and maybe the beginning of the end for the one of the greatest athletes to cross the the chalk white lines. I saw A-Rod play a few times in Arlington in the 2001-2003 seasons. Tom Hicks would position himself just a row or two back from the batting circle but the scrutiny did not effect Rodriguez in a negative way. A-Rod averaged 52 home runs per season and played an extremely graceful shortstop for a guy standing 6 ft. 3 in.. Rodriguez later admitted to taking steroids during the Rangers years but the enormous skills cannot be denied. What has happened in the years since has the feel of a Greek tragedy.

Rodriguez hungered for baseball immortality and legends are built in places like Yankee Stadium. The Yankees always hunger for the best that money can buy and they took the pricey contract off Tom Hicks's hands and brought the superstar to New York. Derek Jeter, a Yankee legend not to be displaced, played shortstop and so A-Rod became the starting third basemen in what should/could have been a great run of Yankee championships. Instead, the Yankees won a single championship in the near decade Rodriguez has been with the club. So what went wrong?

Alex Rodriguez does not flourish under post-season playoffs pressure. The allows two options: 1) play for a second tier team that rarely gets into the playoffs, 2) play for a dominant team like the Yankees and please fans and writers during the regular season but draw their ire during the post-season. The psychological explanation for why a player performs at unbelievable high levels during the regular season but folds into a mockery of his usual capable self is very complicated. Everybody has their level of optimum performance and many people hit a wall of fear, and possibly a collapse, a Peter-principle level of failure. The Peter-principle, though, is based on the notion that we get promoted to our level of incompetence and stay there. A-Rod's talents seems to belie any possible level of incompetence; the guy has skills unmatched by his peers. The problem, though entirely in his head, is very real.

I remember attending a Cooperstown traveling show, a little mini-version of the Cooperstown Hall of Fame museum being exhibited at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The most interesting baseball object was the thick spiral notebook compiled by baseball uber-agent Scott Boras on behalf of Alex Rodriguez, the notebook that may have closed the deal on the $252 million dollar contract. Boras compiled three entire sections of the notebook to a comparison of Alex Rodriguez's statistics to the other American League shortstops-- 1) Alex Rodriguez vs. Nomar Garciaparra, 2) Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter and 3) Alex Rodriguez vs. all other Shortstops. A-Rod, no doubt, dwarfed all the others in terms of numbers, but numbers do not tell the whole story.

Hopefully there is a happy conclusion to the enigma that is A-Rod. He may have arrived on the American baseball scene at the worst possible time-- a perfect storm of obscene money, horrible drugs and a society too focused on results. The golden years of modern Yankees history- the Fifties and Sixties with Mantle, Maris, Berra, Whitey Ford, culminating in 1961, occurred at the birth of television way before the ESPN era of sports fetishism. A-Rod maybe would have struggled with success in 1961. The Yankees had Tony Kubek at shortsop, surely no A-Rod, but he got the job done. Maybe A-Rod would have been better with an Ernie Banks career, a fantastic personal record played on the fringes of the spotlight. He could still be respected and admired, even if under-represented in World Series history. Under the present circumstances he has a Sisyphus-like struggle trying to roll a massive baseball uphill against the squawking of social media, lame-stream media and whatever psychological pressures are self-implosed. Maybe he will find a way back to a smaller pond and play another five years of a game he likely once enjoyed.

How To Win the Lottery

There are several ways to win the lottery.

1) First, of course, buy a ticket.

2) Wear blue. The color blue promotes your success with the lotto.

3) Read books. The people most likely to win the lottery are often big on reading.

4) Be generous. Leave good tips. What comes around goes around.

5)  Pick your numbers rather than go for Quick Picks. This is a proven fact.

6) Fast for 8 hours prior to buying your ticket. This leaves you in good shape should it also be the day for your annual physical and the customary blood work.

7) Visualize yourself as a winner!

The above methods are not guaranteed, suggestions only.