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| Blue Whale Skeleton, Natural History Museum, London, September 25 |
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| Natural History Museum, London, September 26 |
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| Paddington Station, London, September 27 |
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| Natural history Museum, Oxford, September 27 |
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| Facadectomy, London, September 28 |
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Photographs of the Month
The Realm of Possibilities
I understand the legitimate concern over a person's reputation being destroyed by an unverifiable, scurrilous accusation. Furthermore it is not out of the realm of possibility that an individual with an axe to grind, might fabricate such an accusation, or convince someone else to do so. I can think of few worse injustices than to be destroyed by an intentionally false accusation.
Then there is the problem of diametrically conflicting stories. In jurisprudnece there is a well known phenominon referred to as the "Rashomon effect", named after the Akira Kurasowa film based upon the contradicting testimonies of multiple people who witnessed the same crime. However in the Rashoman effect, there is at least one point of agreement in the conflicting testimonies, the event itself. What happens when there is not even an agreement that the event in question actually took place? Still more problematic is when there are only two witnesses, an alleged victim, and an alleged perpetrator.
Oh yes, what happens when the alleged event in question took place decades ago, meaning any kind of physical evidence of the alleged crime has long since vanished?
Such is the case in the latest episode of the ongoing saga of the current administration, known as the Kavanaugh affair.
In case you're reading this hot off the press, you probably don't need any further explanation and can skip the following five paragraphs. However if you've come here after digging around this blog's archive a few years after the fact, you might need a little reminding.
For years the swing vote on the US Supreme Court was Justice William Kennedy who sometimes voted with the four predominantly liberal justices and sometimes voted with the predominantly conservative justices As such the Court was seen as for the most part, ideologically balanced. Upon Kennedy's retirement a few months ago, the task of submitting a candidate to the Senate to confirm his replacement as it always does, fell upon the shoulders of the president. The president selected Brett Kavanaugh, a solidly (some would say excessively) conservative judge currently serving on the Federal bench. Clearly with Kavanaugh's record, the balance of the SCOTUS would shift dramatically to the right should his nomination go through. This is especially troubling to many as a solid conservative Court could potentially review and overturn previous SCOTUS rulings, thereby revoking rights that people have held for decades, most notably Roe vs. Wade which guarantees every American woman's right to obtain an abortion with no questions asked.
This particularly contentious issue is probabaly the single biggest reason why Donald Trump won the support of tens of millions of conservative religious voters who collectively held their noses as they overlooked his many obvious moral transgressions, simply because he promised to appoint judges who would vote to overturn Roe v Wade.
With a majority Republican Senate, the president's pick is almost a certainty to be appointed justice, a job for life. Not surprisingly, Democrats are doing everything in their power to stall the nomination of this particular judge, in anticipation of the next general election a little over a month from now, where the Democrats have an outside chance of winning back the majority in the Senate. This may sound like obstructionist politics at its worst, but Democrats are simply following the precedent of the Republicans who during the waning months of the Obama administraton, refused to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland, President Obama's candidate to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. As Scalia was solidly in the conservative camp, Garland had he been approved, would have shifted the balance of the Court to the left.
The hearings to confirm Kavanaugh were going along swimmingly for him until near the end when it was revealed that a woman had come forward to accuse the potential new justice of sexually assaulting her in the early eighties when both of them were still in high school. Kavanaugh's accuser eventually agreed to make to her name public and testify before the Senate committee in charge of the appointment hearings, This past Thursday, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gave a stirring account of her accusation that thirty years ago Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her but could not, because he was too drunk to figure out how to remove the one piece bathing suit she wore underneath her outer garments. She then respnded to questions from the ten Democratic senators on the committee. Rather than question her themselves, the eleven Republican senators on the panel yielded their time to Rachel Mitchell, a Republican prosecutor from Arizona, who grilled Dr. Ford on the stand as if she were the accused in a criminal proceeding. The second half of the day was devoted to Judge Kavanaugh who gave an impassioned defense of himself, then responded to questions from the Deomocrats as well as the Republicans who used their time to heap praise upon the judge and condemnation upon the Democrats, accusing them of deplorable actions all in the attempt to discredit a fine judge.
The following day it was decided (I won't go into why, that's a blog post and a half all to itself) that the FBI would conduct a week long investigation into the matter before it goes to a vote before the full senate.
I also won't go into guilt or innocence, or the long list of social issues brought about by this case for the simple reason that these issues have been dealt with significantly elsewhere for the past two weeks.
Rather what I would like to address, is what amounts to the nitty gritty of this case, namely this: is Brett Kavannnaugh qualified to be a Supreme Court justice? As has been pointed out correctly by numerous folks, the whole confirmation process amounts to nothing more than a job interview. Granted the job of replacing the swing vote on the Supreme Court, a tenure that could last forty years or more, is perhaps the single most important job in this country. But the hearings are a job interview nonetheless.
What they are not, is a criminal proceeding. This past week, we've heard the term "due process" bandied about over and over by Kavanaugh supporters who insist that he is innocent until proven guilty and that the burden of proof of his guilt, lies with his accusers. This is nonsense. Kavanaigh is not on trial, he doesn't stand to lose his liberty as a result of these hearings. He only stands to lose his chance, at least during this go-around, to be a Supreme Court justice. Consequently these hearings which will provide guidance to the entire Senate, are not a means to determine whether or not Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape Christine Ford thirty five years ago, but rather to look at all the evidence presented, and determine if there is a credible reason there to reject his nomination for a seat on the bench of the highest court in the land.
With that in mind, I think it would be helpful to break the testimony down to all the possible conclusions that can be drawn from it. As the testimonies of these two individuals are diametrically opposed, to me there are three conceivable scenarios which themselves can be broken up further.
Let's examine each of them one by one:
Case one: Dr. Ford's accusation is true; Brett Kavanaugh while in a drunken stupor tried to rape her. If you take her testimony to be true, there are two possibilities. either Judge Kavanaugh was so drunk at the time that he cannot remember what he did that night, or he is simply lying. Is the latter case a justification for dismissing Kavanaugh's nomination? Hell yes, without question, both for the original crime committed and for committing perjury in the Senate hearings. What about the former? Again, without question. A person is accountable for his actions whether drunk or sober. If someone charged with vehicular homicide tries to use the defense that he was so drunk at the time that he didn't know what he was doing, he would suddenly find himself charged with two very serious crimes. Before the Senate committee, Kavanaugh admitted to serious drinking in high school and college but refused to admit that he had a drinking problem. He claimed to never having drunk himself unconscious. Several of his classmates at Yale beg to differ, saying he was less than forthcoming about his drinking, which was according to them, prodigious. If this is true, Kavanaugh obviously has deeper problems than not being our next Supreme Court justice.
Case two: Physical contact between the two took place, but it was not a serious as Dr. Ford's allegations claim. Since neither Dr. Ford nor Judge Kavanaugh claim having had a consensual relationship, the scenario is unlikely. However the possibility has been brought up by defenders of the judge, namely Fox News who imply that their contact was indeed consensual, so it may be worth examining for a moment. There is a recent precedent for a public figure accepting charges of sexual assault brought against him. That public figure was US Senator Al Franken who admitted inappropriate conduct with his accuser, just not the extent to which she claimed. Frankin openly called for an investigation into the matter, something his accuser, for reasons known only to her, claimed was not necessary. Faced with increasing pressure from his own party, Franken resigned from the Senate. Kavanaugh missed the boat with this possible excuse as in his sworn testimony, he unequivocally denied having had any physical contact with Dr. Ford. Should he bring up a consensual relationship with Ms. Ford up at a later date, he would be admitting that he lied under oath, which of course would be immediate grounds for his dismissal. Kavanaugh also is suspect because during the hearings he avoided the question of whether he supported an FBI investigation of the matter in order to clear his name, while Dr. Ford openly supported an investigation.
Case three: Brett Kavanaugh is innocent. If you believe him, there are a few possibilities. One is that Christine Ford was sexually assaulted as stated in her testimony, but is mistaken about the identity of her attacker. The other possibility is that she is making the whole thing up. At this point for fairness sake, it must be pointed out that fraudulent reports of rape are rare, but not unheard of. Again there is a precedent for a public figure to have been falsely accused of sexual abuse, in his case of a minor. The name of the falsely accused individual is Joseph Cardinal Bernadin, a former archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The pain that Bernadin suffered during the period after the accusation was well publicized, as was the grace of the Cardinal in his forgiveness of his accuser after he admitted that he lied. As a fellow Catholic, Brett Kavanaugh should have been intimately familiar with Bernadin's grace during this particularly painful period of his life, and used his example as a model of how to react during a time of adversity. Unfortunately he did not. It is said that none other than Donald Trump coached him on how to behave at the hearing. He told the judge to get mad. Turns out Kavanaugh was a good study, in his opening statement before the Senate subcommitttee on Thursday, Kavanaugh ranted, raved, scowled whined and pouted, throwing temper tantrums accusing the Democrats of character assassination, and conducting a "calculated and orchestrated political hit" on him. What made his mentor the proudest was no dout Kavanaugh's mention of Bill and Hillary Clinton. His remarks were filled with self-pity and indignance in the fact that a man of his stature, should be subject to such treatment. It has been a cliche of late to use this term but for lack of a better description, white male privilege oozed out of every pour of Brett Kavanaugh last Thursday, and it was ugly.
Giving the judge all the benefit of doubt, and assuming that he is innocent of the accusations against him, Brett Kavanaugh did not act like a judge the other day let alone a Supreme Court justice, During the most important job interview of his life, he acted like a spoiled rich kid. Kavanaugh responded to reasonable questions with spite, bitterness, disgust, and above all in his claim that Dr. Ford's accusations were nothing more than a Democratic conspiracy to discredit him, he displayed an unacceptable political bias for a potential justice. What more reason does one need to reject an applicant for a job? Typically when someone blows a job interview, he does not get the job. My suggestion to the members of the Senate who are in a position to hire the next Supreme Court Justice is this, look for someone else.
Then there is the problem of diametrically conflicting stories. In jurisprudnece there is a well known phenominon referred to as the "Rashomon effect", named after the Akira Kurasowa film based upon the contradicting testimonies of multiple people who witnessed the same crime. However in the Rashoman effect, there is at least one point of agreement in the conflicting testimonies, the event itself. What happens when there is not even an agreement that the event in question actually took place? Still more problematic is when there are only two witnesses, an alleged victim, and an alleged perpetrator.
Oh yes, what happens when the alleged event in question took place decades ago, meaning any kind of physical evidence of the alleged crime has long since vanished?
Such is the case in the latest episode of the ongoing saga of the current administration, known as the Kavanaugh affair.
In case you're reading this hot off the press, you probably don't need any further explanation and can skip the following five paragraphs. However if you've come here after digging around this blog's archive a few years after the fact, you might need a little reminding.
For years the swing vote on the US Supreme Court was Justice William Kennedy who sometimes voted with the four predominantly liberal justices and sometimes voted with the predominantly conservative justices As such the Court was seen as for the most part, ideologically balanced. Upon Kennedy's retirement a few months ago, the task of submitting a candidate to the Senate to confirm his replacement as it always does, fell upon the shoulders of the president. The president selected Brett Kavanaugh, a solidly (some would say excessively) conservative judge currently serving on the Federal bench. Clearly with Kavanaugh's record, the balance of the SCOTUS would shift dramatically to the right should his nomination go through. This is especially troubling to many as a solid conservative Court could potentially review and overturn previous SCOTUS rulings, thereby revoking rights that people have held for decades, most notably Roe vs. Wade which guarantees every American woman's right to obtain an abortion with no questions asked.
This particularly contentious issue is probabaly the single biggest reason why Donald Trump won the support of tens of millions of conservative religious voters who collectively held their noses as they overlooked his many obvious moral transgressions, simply because he promised to appoint judges who would vote to overturn Roe v Wade.
With a majority Republican Senate, the president's pick is almost a certainty to be appointed justice, a job for life. Not surprisingly, Democrats are doing everything in their power to stall the nomination of this particular judge, in anticipation of the next general election a little over a month from now, where the Democrats have an outside chance of winning back the majority in the Senate. This may sound like obstructionist politics at its worst, but Democrats are simply following the precedent of the Republicans who during the waning months of the Obama administraton, refused to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland, President Obama's candidate to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. As Scalia was solidly in the conservative camp, Garland had he been approved, would have shifted the balance of the Court to the left.
The hearings to confirm Kavanaugh were going along swimmingly for him until near the end when it was revealed that a woman had come forward to accuse the potential new justice of sexually assaulting her in the early eighties when both of them were still in high school. Kavanaugh's accuser eventually agreed to make to her name public and testify before the Senate committee in charge of the appointment hearings, This past Thursday, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gave a stirring account of her accusation that thirty years ago Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her but could not, because he was too drunk to figure out how to remove the one piece bathing suit she wore underneath her outer garments. She then respnded to questions from the ten Democratic senators on the committee. Rather than question her themselves, the eleven Republican senators on the panel yielded their time to Rachel Mitchell, a Republican prosecutor from Arizona, who grilled Dr. Ford on the stand as if she were the accused in a criminal proceeding. The second half of the day was devoted to Judge Kavanaugh who gave an impassioned defense of himself, then responded to questions from the Deomocrats as well as the Republicans who used their time to heap praise upon the judge and condemnation upon the Democrats, accusing them of deplorable actions all in the attempt to discredit a fine judge.
The following day it was decided (I won't go into why, that's a blog post and a half all to itself) that the FBI would conduct a week long investigation into the matter before it goes to a vote before the full senate.
I also won't go into guilt or innocence, or the long list of social issues brought about by this case for the simple reason that these issues have been dealt with significantly elsewhere for the past two weeks.
Rather what I would like to address, is what amounts to the nitty gritty of this case, namely this: is Brett Kavannnaugh qualified to be a Supreme Court justice? As has been pointed out correctly by numerous folks, the whole confirmation process amounts to nothing more than a job interview. Granted the job of replacing the swing vote on the Supreme Court, a tenure that could last forty years or more, is perhaps the single most important job in this country. But the hearings are a job interview nonetheless.
What they are not, is a criminal proceeding. This past week, we've heard the term "due process" bandied about over and over by Kavanaugh supporters who insist that he is innocent until proven guilty and that the burden of proof of his guilt, lies with his accusers. This is nonsense. Kavanaigh is not on trial, he doesn't stand to lose his liberty as a result of these hearings. He only stands to lose his chance, at least during this go-around, to be a Supreme Court justice. Consequently these hearings which will provide guidance to the entire Senate, are not a means to determine whether or not Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape Christine Ford thirty five years ago, but rather to look at all the evidence presented, and determine if there is a credible reason there to reject his nomination for a seat on the bench of the highest court in the land.
With that in mind, I think it would be helpful to break the testimony down to all the possible conclusions that can be drawn from it. As the testimonies of these two individuals are diametrically opposed, to me there are three conceivable scenarios which themselves can be broken up further.
- The first conclusion that can be drawn is that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape Christine Ford in the early eighties.
- The second is somewhere in the middle; there was physical contact between the two individuals, but the intents of the victim and the perpetrator at the time are in dispute.
- The third possibility is that Kavanaugh is innocent of the accisation.
Let's examine each of them one by one:
Case one: Dr. Ford's accusation is true; Brett Kavanaugh while in a drunken stupor tried to rape her. If you take her testimony to be true, there are two possibilities. either Judge Kavanaugh was so drunk at the time that he cannot remember what he did that night, or he is simply lying. Is the latter case a justification for dismissing Kavanaugh's nomination? Hell yes, without question, both for the original crime committed and for committing perjury in the Senate hearings. What about the former? Again, without question. A person is accountable for his actions whether drunk or sober. If someone charged with vehicular homicide tries to use the defense that he was so drunk at the time that he didn't know what he was doing, he would suddenly find himself charged with two very serious crimes. Before the Senate committee, Kavanaugh admitted to serious drinking in high school and college but refused to admit that he had a drinking problem. He claimed to never having drunk himself unconscious. Several of his classmates at Yale beg to differ, saying he was less than forthcoming about his drinking, which was according to them, prodigious. If this is true, Kavanaugh obviously has deeper problems than not being our next Supreme Court justice.
Case two: Physical contact between the two took place, but it was not a serious as Dr. Ford's allegations claim. Since neither Dr. Ford nor Judge Kavanaugh claim having had a consensual relationship, the scenario is unlikely. However the possibility has been brought up by defenders of the judge, namely Fox News who imply that their contact was indeed consensual, so it may be worth examining for a moment. There is a recent precedent for a public figure accepting charges of sexual assault brought against him. That public figure was US Senator Al Franken who admitted inappropriate conduct with his accuser, just not the extent to which she claimed. Frankin openly called for an investigation into the matter, something his accuser, for reasons known only to her, claimed was not necessary. Faced with increasing pressure from his own party, Franken resigned from the Senate. Kavanaugh missed the boat with this possible excuse as in his sworn testimony, he unequivocally denied having had any physical contact with Dr. Ford. Should he bring up a consensual relationship with Ms. Ford up at a later date, he would be admitting that he lied under oath, which of course would be immediate grounds for his dismissal. Kavanaugh also is suspect because during the hearings he avoided the question of whether he supported an FBI investigation of the matter in order to clear his name, while Dr. Ford openly supported an investigation.
Case three: Brett Kavanaugh is innocent. If you believe him, there are a few possibilities. One is that Christine Ford was sexually assaulted as stated in her testimony, but is mistaken about the identity of her attacker. The other possibility is that she is making the whole thing up. At this point for fairness sake, it must be pointed out that fraudulent reports of rape are rare, but not unheard of. Again there is a precedent for a public figure to have been falsely accused of sexual abuse, in his case of a minor. The name of the falsely accused individual is Joseph Cardinal Bernadin, a former archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The pain that Bernadin suffered during the period after the accusation was well publicized, as was the grace of the Cardinal in his forgiveness of his accuser after he admitted that he lied. As a fellow Catholic, Brett Kavanaugh should have been intimately familiar with Bernadin's grace during this particularly painful period of his life, and used his example as a model of how to react during a time of adversity. Unfortunately he did not. It is said that none other than Donald Trump coached him on how to behave at the hearing. He told the judge to get mad. Turns out Kavanaugh was a good study, in his opening statement before the Senate subcommitttee on Thursday, Kavanaugh ranted, raved, scowled whined and pouted, throwing temper tantrums accusing the Democrats of character assassination, and conducting a "calculated and orchestrated political hit" on him. What made his mentor the proudest was no dout Kavanaugh's mention of Bill and Hillary Clinton. His remarks were filled with self-pity and indignance in the fact that a man of his stature, should be subject to such treatment. It has been a cliche of late to use this term but for lack of a better description, white male privilege oozed out of every pour of Brett Kavanaugh last Thursday, and it was ugly.
Giving the judge all the benefit of doubt, and assuming that he is innocent of the accusations against him, Brett Kavanaugh did not act like a judge the other day let alone a Supreme Court justice, During the most important job interview of his life, he acted like a spoiled rich kid. Kavanaugh responded to reasonable questions with spite, bitterness, disgust, and above all in his claim that Dr. Ford's accusations were nothing more than a Democratic conspiracy to discredit him, he displayed an unacceptable political bias for a potential justice. What more reason does one need to reject an applicant for a job? Typically when someone blows a job interview, he does not get the job. My suggestion to the members of the Senate who are in a position to hire the next Supreme Court Justice is this, look for someone else.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
In the Year 2019
We watched Blade Runner the other night, the classic 1982 sci-fi thriller set in a future Los Angeles. The plot of the movie revolves around a police detective reluctantly coming out of the shadows to "retire" four replicants, genetically engineered humanoids, who had recently escaped from forced labor on a colozined planet and returned to earth, intent on causing mayhem while in search of their creator. The movie directed by Ridley Scott, was a loose adaptation of the 1969 novel by Phillip K. Dick called, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The film is visually stunning, combining old school film-noir with pre-digital special effects which hold up amazingly well 36 years after its release.
But for me the most compelling part of the film and especially the book are the moral and ethical questions raised about the implications regarding unchecked technology, and its impact on both the environment and ourselves.
That said, there was one nagging part I simply could not wrap my head around. The dystopian future portrayed in the film, takes place in the year 2019, (2021 in the book), which happens to be at this writing, next year. Now depending upon your point of view, we may indeed be living in a dystopian world at the moment, but not exactly the world of Blade Runner.
I understand artistic license and can easily see why P.K. Dick and later Ridley Scott would choose to set their stories in the not too distant future. Assuming that many of the people who would have seen the movie when it first came out would still be alive in 2019, the story has a far greater sense of urgency than were it set say, 200 years in the future. The same could be said for classic works set in a dystopian future such as George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949) As it is, these works have kind of a Dickensian poignance, harkening to Scrooge's question to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come:
The interesting thing about stories set in the future is what they tell us about the time in which they were created. Fifty years before Phillip K. Dick's novel was published, biplanes were all the rage and no one had yet dared to fly an airplane across the Atlantic. In 1969, a commercial supersonic jet made its maiden test flight. The Concorde which went into service in the early seventies, could fly between New York and London in about three hours, less than half the time it took a conventional jet liner. 1969 was also the year we first landed on the moon. Given the advances in aviation in those fifty years, there was no reason to believe that the advances in the next fifty would not be equally dizzying. But here we are fifty years later and commercial supersonic travel has been scrubbed. A human being hasn't left earth's orbit since 1972. Today it takes as long to fly from New York to London as it did in 1968, before Concorde. And if an American astronaut needs to travel to the International Space Station, he or she needs to hitch a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.
Nor do we have flying cars. No vision of the future would be complete without flying cars and Blade Runner is no exception. As with aviation, automotive technology grew by leaps and bounds during the fifty year period before the publication of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ford Model Ts dominated the roads in 1919 and would still be in production for another eight years. In the fifties, the United States built its Interstate system of highways which would forever alter the landscape of America. The automobile and the infrastructure that supported it, changed the way we lived, how we built our communities, and allowed our great centers of humanity and culture, our cities, to crumble.
For most of the Twentieth Century, The Western world was in love with technology. There was great promise in the freedom that the Machine brought to mankind, the automobile being only one example. That reverence for the Machine could be found everywhere in the twenties and early thirties from fine art to film, music, industrial design and especially architecture. Art Deco masterpieces, such as the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York are perhaps humankind's greatest monuments to the Machine Age, and the hope for a brighter future, all made possible through the wonders of technology.
But there were also detractors in the arts who were willing to burst the technology bubble during the heart of the Machine Age. One of the most popular bubble-bursters was Charles Chaplin and his 1936 film, Modern Times. The film must have seemed hopelessly reactionary to audiences of that era, not just because it was a silent film made eight years after the debut of "talking pictures." *, but also for its denouncement of technology's contribution to the de-humanization of human beings.
Here is the most famous scene from that movie:
It turned out that rather being a reactionary, Chaplin was far ahead of his time. Five years later, Europe was at war and Chaplin, still working in the United States, made his most important (if not his most beloved) film, The Great Dictator. As life would never be the same again after that war, it is appropriate that The Great Dictator marked the final appearance of Chaplin's beloved signature character, The Little Tramp. Equally telling is that for his last appearance, The Tramp finally spoke, in this case as the humble doppelganger of a brutal dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, also played by Chaplin, who himself bore a likeness, (at least in his character's facial hair), to a real-life dictator. Or was it the other way around? Anyway at the end of the film, Chaplin, who could just as well have been playing himself, gives a poignant, impassioned, gut-wrenching speech renouncing not only cruel immoral, dictators, but the abject failure of society to succeed in using technology for the betterment of humankind:
Charlie Chaplin saw before most, how technology, along with the better living it promised, might also bring us untold misery. The future would prove him right as World War Two gave us mechanized suffering and killing the likes of which the world had never seen, culminating with the droppping of nuclear bombs over two heavily populated cities in Japan, the dawn of the nuclear age. It wouldn't be long before people came to the realization that human beings would one day have the power to destroy all life on this planet.
Yet we clung to our blind devotion to technology and the promise that if we believed in it, life would only get better. World War Two was so horrible that when it was over, people fell hook line and sinker for any scheme to create a new and better world. Over the years in this space I have explored two such utopian schemes devised by world reknowned architects. Both the Swiss Le Courbousier, and the American Frank Lloyd Wright proposed we toss everything we knew about building places to work and live in the garbage and start with a clean slate. Each architect came up with a utopian scheme diametrically opposed to the other in many ways, but both relying heavily on on modern techology to bring about their ideals. Le Courbousier's uptopia, Radiant City was a densly packed urban environment where each function of the community would be distinctly separate, and everyone would live in apartment buildings reaching to the sky.
By contrast, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City was a horizontal rather than vertical plan where agrairian life would be integrated into everyday life, where each family would be given an acre of land of their own. In 1945, FLW wrote:
Le Courbousier's and Wright's vision of the future never materialized exactly as their creators envisioned, yet many of their concepts took hold and we continue to live with them today in the form of massive urban housing projects which were directly inspired by the Radiant City, and suburban sprawl, which owes its existence in no small part to the vision of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Needless to say, more than half a century later, neither housing projects nor suburban sprawl turned out to be answers to all our problems, in fact in many cases, just the opposite. For the past thirty plus years or so, we have been undoing both the Courbousian and Wrightian utopias as fast as possible, in some cases with dynamite:
I was around in the sixties when the dream to build faster cars and rocket ships able to take humans to places where "no man had ever gone before" was still the was still the most potent vision of the future. After July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong uttered the words "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed", nothing seemed impossible. Yet for all its glory, the significance of our mission to the moon could best be summed up by the words of the last man to climb aboard the lunar module to blast off the surface of that dead planet. Eugene Cernan said after he returned to earth: "We went to explore the moon and in fact discovered the earth."
It's no accident that the environmental movement got a big push after the first photographs of Earth from outer space were made public. For the first time ever, we saw our planet as it really is, a small refuge of beauty and life cast adrift in a vast sea of emptiness. Above all for the first time ever we were unequivocally reminded that Earth and all its bounties, are finite. We were also reminded that the moon was not a good option. Those photographs showed to us in a very tangible way how much we needed to rethink the stewardship of the only home we have.
Needless to say, we won't be colonizing other planets anytime soon. While the subject was not directly addressed in Blade Runner, in the P.K. Dick novel that inspired it, there was a particular urgency to relocate earthlings to Mars as the story takes place after WWT (World War Terminal), which redered Earth practically unihabitable. A recurrent theme in the book are television "weather" forcasts which predict motion of nuclear fallout clouds rather than rain clouds.
Thankfully we have thus far avoided nuclear armageddon, however there is a less dramatic, but just as dire threat to the health of our planet. The conservation of our planet by curtailing pollution and conserving its resources became a rallying cry during the seventies. The conservation part really hit home after the supply of fuel was curtailed by the oil producing nations of the Middle East causing world-wide gasoline shortages, resulting in staggering price increases. Those who were not moved by the philosophical arguments of the environmental activists, were certainly moved by the hit to their pocket books. For the first time since World War II when gasoline was rationed for the war effort, Americans understood that conservation of resources actually worked to the benefit o hte nation. In that effort, nationwide speed limits were reduced in order to conserve fuel which led to another fringe benefit, reduced highway deaths. Consequently, automotive and aviation technology since then have moved away from speed and in the direction of efficiency and safety.
Obviously, technology has not stopped advancing in the past half century, it just shifted direction. Rather than transportation, the earth-shattering technological achievements of our time involve medicine and the computer among others. As we look with hope to the future with the help of these technoligal advances, there is a caveat. We must always remember that every technological innovation is a double-edged sword. Every tool we make no matter how wonderful it may seem, can be used to benefit mankind, or to harm it. With every new technological innovation, new ethical issues arise and we must be ever vigilent to use technology wisely.
Blade Runner's vision of 2019 did not become true, at least not yet, in part because of the work of visionaries like Charlie Chaplin and Phillip K. Dick who warned us of not being blind to the moral consequences of absolute faith in the wonders of technology and progress, and to not be afraid to learn from the lessons of history.
We still have a lot to learn if we hope to prevent life from imitating art. Interestingly enough, Blade Runner 2049 came out last year. I only saw dribs and drabs of it on a recent plane flight but from what I could tell, it's even more bleak than the original. I'll be 90 in 2049, and if I'm still around, I might just have a look at it to see how much came true. If that happens, I'll be sure to keep you posted.
* Modern Times like its predecessor, Chaplin's 1932 film City Lights, has a soundtrack. But with the exception of a musical number sung by Chaplin, and the occasional mumbled commands of the all-knowing and seeing boss of the factory projected on a future-like television screen, all the dialog is conveyed through title cards as in true silent movies.
But for me the most compelling part of the film and especially the book are the moral and ethical questions raised about the implications regarding unchecked technology, and its impact on both the environment and ourselves.
That said, there was one nagging part I simply could not wrap my head around. The dystopian future portrayed in the film, takes place in the year 2019, (2021 in the book), which happens to be at this writing, next year. Now depending upon your point of view, we may indeed be living in a dystopian world at the moment, but not exactly the world of Blade Runner.
I understand artistic license and can easily see why P.K. Dick and later Ridley Scott would choose to set their stories in the not too distant future. Assuming that many of the people who would have seen the movie when it first came out would still be alive in 2019, the story has a far greater sense of urgency than were it set say, 200 years in the future. The same could be said for classic works set in a dystopian future such as George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949) As it is, these works have kind of a Dickensian poignance, harkening to Scrooge's question to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come:
Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be only?Experiencing Blade Runner today as well as other works of fiction whose future setting is now the distant past, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief, realizing that these visions of the future did not come true, at least not exactly, not yet. We still have a chance if we heed the warnings. It goes without saying that's a big if.
The interesting thing about stories set in the future is what they tell us about the time in which they were created. Fifty years before Phillip K. Dick's novel was published, biplanes were all the rage and no one had yet dared to fly an airplane across the Atlantic. In 1969, a commercial supersonic jet made its maiden test flight. The Concorde which went into service in the early seventies, could fly between New York and London in about three hours, less than half the time it took a conventional jet liner. 1969 was also the year we first landed on the moon. Given the advances in aviation in those fifty years, there was no reason to believe that the advances in the next fifty would not be equally dizzying. But here we are fifty years later and commercial supersonic travel has been scrubbed. A human being hasn't left earth's orbit since 1972. Today it takes as long to fly from New York to London as it did in 1968, before Concorde. And if an American astronaut needs to travel to the International Space Station, he or she needs to hitch a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.
Nor do we have flying cars. No vision of the future would be complete without flying cars and Blade Runner is no exception. As with aviation, automotive technology grew by leaps and bounds during the fifty year period before the publication of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ford Model Ts dominated the roads in 1919 and would still be in production for another eight years. In the fifties, the United States built its Interstate system of highways which would forever alter the landscape of America. The automobile and the infrastructure that supported it, changed the way we lived, how we built our communities, and allowed our great centers of humanity and culture, our cities, to crumble.
For most of the Twentieth Century, The Western world was in love with technology. There was great promise in the freedom that the Machine brought to mankind, the automobile being only one example. That reverence for the Machine could be found everywhere in the twenties and early thirties from fine art to film, music, industrial design and especially architecture. Art Deco masterpieces, such as the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York are perhaps humankind's greatest monuments to the Machine Age, and the hope for a brighter future, all made possible through the wonders of technology.
But there were also detractors in the arts who were willing to burst the technology bubble during the heart of the Machine Age. One of the most popular bubble-bursters was Charles Chaplin and his 1936 film, Modern Times. The film must have seemed hopelessly reactionary to audiences of that era, not just because it was a silent film made eight years after the debut of "talking pictures." *, but also for its denouncement of technology's contribution to the de-humanization of human beings.
Here is the most famous scene from that movie:
It turned out that rather being a reactionary, Chaplin was far ahead of his time. Five years later, Europe was at war and Chaplin, still working in the United States, made his most important (if not his most beloved) film, The Great Dictator. As life would never be the same again after that war, it is appropriate that The Great Dictator marked the final appearance of Chaplin's beloved signature character, The Little Tramp. Equally telling is that for his last appearance, The Tramp finally spoke, in this case as the humble doppelganger of a brutal dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, also played by Chaplin, who himself bore a likeness, (at least in his character's facial hair), to a real-life dictator. Or was it the other way around? Anyway at the end of the film, Chaplin, who could just as well have been playing himself, gives a poignant, impassioned, gut-wrenching speech renouncing not only cruel immoral, dictators, but the abject failure of society to succeed in using technology for the betterment of humankind:
Charlie Chaplin saw before most, how technology, along with the better living it promised, might also bring us untold misery. The future would prove him right as World War Two gave us mechanized suffering and killing the likes of which the world had never seen, culminating with the droppping of nuclear bombs over two heavily populated cities in Japan, the dawn of the nuclear age. It wouldn't be long before people came to the realization that human beings would one day have the power to destroy all life on this planet.
Yet we clung to our blind devotion to technology and the promise that if we believed in it, life would only get better. World War Two was so horrible that when it was over, people fell hook line and sinker for any scheme to create a new and better world. Over the years in this space I have explored two such utopian schemes devised by world reknowned architects. Both the Swiss Le Courbousier, and the American Frank Lloyd Wright proposed we toss everything we knew about building places to work and live in the garbage and start with a clean slate. Each architect came up with a utopian scheme diametrically opposed to the other in many ways, but both relying heavily on on modern techology to bring about their ideals. Le Courbousier's uptopia, Radiant City was a densly packed urban environment where each function of the community would be distinctly separate, and everyone would live in apartment buildings reaching to the sky.
By contrast, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City was a horizontal rather than vertical plan where agrairian life would be integrated into everyday life, where each family would be given an acre of land of their own. In 1945, FLW wrote:
To look at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor.To him, cities as they had been built for centuries, was rendered obsolete by new technologies such mechanized production (which would one day presumably do away with the dehumanizing assembly line that we saw in the first Chaplin clip), electronic communication such as the telephone, telegraph and radio, and of course the automobile. Beacuse of these technological advances, the centralized city would, or should be a thing of the past, replaced by sprawling communities connected by highways where people would have the freedom to travel as they wished in their personal transportation devices, which Wright envisioned one day, be able to fly, as we can see here in this rendering from his 1959 book, The Living City:
 |
| The city of the future according to Frank Lloyd Wright, complete with flying cars |
Needless to say, more than half a century later, neither housing projects nor suburban sprawl turned out to be answers to all our problems, in fact in many cases, just the opposite. For the past thirty plus years or so, we have been undoing both the Courbousian and Wrightian utopias as fast as possible, in some cases with dynamite:
I was around in the sixties when the dream to build faster cars and rocket ships able to take humans to places where "no man had ever gone before" was still the was still the most potent vision of the future. After July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong uttered the words "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed", nothing seemed impossible. Yet for all its glory, the significance of our mission to the moon could best be summed up by the words of the last man to climb aboard the lunar module to blast off the surface of that dead planet. Eugene Cernan said after he returned to earth: "We went to explore the moon and in fact discovered the earth."
It's no accident that the environmental movement got a big push after the first photographs of Earth from outer space were made public. For the first time ever, we saw our planet as it really is, a small refuge of beauty and life cast adrift in a vast sea of emptiness. Above all for the first time ever we were unequivocally reminded that Earth and all its bounties, are finite. We were also reminded that the moon was not a good option. Those photographs showed to us in a very tangible way how much we needed to rethink the stewardship of the only home we have.
Needless to say, we won't be colonizing other planets anytime soon. While the subject was not directly addressed in Blade Runner, in the P.K. Dick novel that inspired it, there was a particular urgency to relocate earthlings to Mars as the story takes place after WWT (World War Terminal), which redered Earth practically unihabitable. A recurrent theme in the book are television "weather" forcasts which predict motion of nuclear fallout clouds rather than rain clouds.
Thankfully we have thus far avoided nuclear armageddon, however there is a less dramatic, but just as dire threat to the health of our planet. The conservation of our planet by curtailing pollution and conserving its resources became a rallying cry during the seventies. The conservation part really hit home after the supply of fuel was curtailed by the oil producing nations of the Middle East causing world-wide gasoline shortages, resulting in staggering price increases. Those who were not moved by the philosophical arguments of the environmental activists, were certainly moved by the hit to their pocket books. For the first time since World War II when gasoline was rationed for the war effort, Americans understood that conservation of resources actually worked to the benefit o hte nation. In that effort, nationwide speed limits were reduced in order to conserve fuel which led to another fringe benefit, reduced highway deaths. Consequently, automotive and aviation technology since then have moved away from speed and in the direction of efficiency and safety.
Obviously, technology has not stopped advancing in the past half century, it just shifted direction. Rather than transportation, the earth-shattering technological achievements of our time involve medicine and the computer among others. As we look with hope to the future with the help of these technoligal advances, there is a caveat. We must always remember that every technological innovation is a double-edged sword. Every tool we make no matter how wonderful it may seem, can be used to benefit mankind, or to harm it. With every new technological innovation, new ethical issues arise and we must be ever vigilent to use technology wisely.
Blade Runner's vision of 2019 did not become true, at least not yet, in part because of the work of visionaries like Charlie Chaplin and Phillip K. Dick who warned us of not being blind to the moral consequences of absolute faith in the wonders of technology and progress, and to not be afraid to learn from the lessons of history.
We still have a lot to learn if we hope to prevent life from imitating art. Interestingly enough, Blade Runner 2049 came out last year. I only saw dribs and drabs of it on a recent plane flight but from what I could tell, it's even more bleak than the original. I'll be 90 in 2049, and if I'm still around, I might just have a look at it to see how much came true. If that happens, I'll be sure to keep you posted.
* Modern Times like its predecessor, Chaplin's 1932 film City Lights, has a soundtrack. But with the exception of a musical number sung by Chaplin, and the occasional mumbled commands of the all-knowing and seeing boss of the factory projected on a future-like television screen, all the dialog is conveyed through title cards as in true silent movies.
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Here We Go Again...
You can set your clock by it: the kids back in school, the days getting noticably shorter, and Aaron Rodgers having his way with the Chicago Bears' defense can only mean one thing. It's that time of year again when our president gets to fire up his base by knocking the National Football League.
It's been a particularly bad stretch for this presidency, and that's really saying something. In the past month, both the former attorney and now the former campaign manager of the current president plead guilty to crimes in exchange for cooperating with the special counsel to lessen their time in the pokey. It is widely believed that both have incriminating evidence against the president and the people around him. During that same period, this president's lack of fitness for his job has been brought to the public's attention by two major publications. And at this writing, as a major hurricane is bearing down upon the Carolinas, the president is being pilloried for claiming his response to two devastating hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico last year was an "unsung success", denying credible estimations of the death toll from the natural disasters by saying those people would have died anyway.
Given all that, Donald Trump right now must be thanking his lucky stars for the return of football, and especially that a handful of NFL players continue to kneel for the national anthem. And what must seem like manna from heaven to him, the athletic apparel company Nike, has chosen none other than Colin Kaepernick, the first NFL player to take a knee in protest over racial injustice in this country, as their spokesperson.
You didn't need to be clairvoyant last week to predict the reaction of some Americans after the first Nike/Kaepernick commercials were released. The skies were lit up all over this great nation of ours by bonfires fueled by Nike products, burned by consumers who were offended that a major company would dare to support a man who expressed an opinion they did not like.
Cries of "how could a company like that be so foolish" and "boycott Nike", could be heard all across the country from ultra-right-wing individuals to the president himself who believed that Nike was making a perilous gamble by taking sides against them.
Here's what the tweeter-in-chief had to say via his favorite medium of expression:
It turns out that the USFL had a very good case, so much so, they convinced a New York jury that the NFL was indeed a monopoly in violation of the law. But according to Jeff Pearlman, author of the book Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL, the plaintiff's main witness was Trump, whose atrocious behavior in the courtroom, from his pompous self-aggrandizing testimony to his bullying and intimidating the jury and other witnesses, didn't go over so well with the jury. In the end they ruled in favor of the USFL, but instead of the 1.7 billion dollars in damages the plaintiffs asked for, the jury awarded the USFL one dollar. As the verdict was read and the settlement announced, the owner of the NFL New York Giants pulled a dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to a stunned Trump.
After the verdict was delivered, the USFL who depended upon the settlement money to stay afloat, would never play another game. Many placed the blame for the devastating results of the trial which led to the demise of the league, directly on the shoulders of one Donald J. Trump.
Ah but that's all in the past, and I'm sure Trump has put it all behind him, (wink wink, nudge nudge). What's in the present is Trump's convenient manipulation of an obsessive concern of some, with a handful of athletes not standing for the national anthem. It's an issue at all because some people feel the act is disrespectful to our nation and the men and women who serve in the armed forces. It is a perfectly valid opinion I suppose, as no opinion can either be right or wrong. But it is a flawed opinion nonetheless, as the players themselves have emphatically denied that they have any intent of disrespecting the nation and those in its service. There is simply no good reason not to take their word for it. The players are backed up by a number of service men and women who believe that they risked their own lives in service to defend democracy and freedom, including freedom of expression, not the will of a some president to decide what is patriotic and what is not.
In case you're thinking I'm some no-good-pinko-libtard-snowflake who doesn't respect God, country and mom's apple pie because I don't have a problem with professional athletes making a political statement by not standing for the Star Spangled Banner, let me share something with you. My father was an immigrant who loved this country more than words could articulate. He was not a religious man, but he considered the solemnity of the national anthem of any country to be as sacred as anything could me. During the thousands of sporting events we shared together, back in the days before television sold the air time devoted to the anthem to advertisers, I distinctly remember him critiquing athletes' anthem demeanor. He singled out every athlete who did not stand perfectly still with his eyes focused like a laser upon the flag during the anthem. If an athlete no matter the team, did so much as chew a piece of gum during the song, he was forever on my dad's shit list. He was just as critical of the fans in the stands if he felt they did not give the playing of the anthem the gravitas it deserved.
As I grew older, I became weary of my father's unrelenting devotion to this country. Despite our many intense argruments over this country not being perfect however, I never lost respect for the playing of the anthem(s) as it was ingrained in me from a very early age.
I'll never forget the last Chicago Blackhawks hockey game my father and I attended together. By that time in the early eighties, neither of us had been to a game for several years. Much to my chagrin, a handful of drunk, rowdy fans began cheering and yelling obscenities at the visiting team during the playing of the anthem. Finally my dad and I could find something to agree upon, those "hockey fans" were unequivocally guilty of disrespecting the game, the anthem and the flag.
Well it so happened that the vulgar chants of a handful of drunken louts during the anthem caught on with a critical mass and eventually the sound of every fan screaming his or her head off during the national anthem became a cherished tradition at Chicago Blackhawks home games. The team even promotes the response to the anthem in its ads as an essential part of the Blackhawk experience. Whatever you think of the fans' reaction to the anthem at the "Madhouse on Madison", clearly this tradition is all about rooting for a team and has nothing to do with what the presenting of the colors and the playing of the anthem is all about. Granted there are folks, generally fans of the visiting team, who object to this clear violation of anthem and flag etiquette, but those people are generally dismissed as fuddy-duddy stuffed-shirted St. Louis Blues fans with a serious case of sour grapes.
But if the president were really concerned about people not giving the anthem the respect it deserves, he could make a serious case for directing his ire at Blackhawk fans and the team who supports and even encourages their behavior.
Instead he focuses on a handful of athletes who quietly and respectfully kneel instead of stand during the anthem in support of what they believe is a serious and worthwhile cause.
Why the disconnect?
Could it be that virtually every fan screaming his or her lungs out at Blackhawks games is white and virtually every athlete taking a knee at NFL games is black? You can believe anything you want but to me the answer is pretty clear.
What about the president's other assertion that "Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts"? Well it turns out that he's dead wrong on that. While Nike stock took a slight dip right after the announcement of their new spokesperson, sales of Nike products have gone through the roof since then. As for Nike stock today, well let me just say the title of this article from yesterday says it all:
Nike did not become a fabulously successful corporation (far more lucrative than the NFL for example), by making unsound business decisions. They no doubt had their marketing research people work overtime on this one, weighing the pros and cons of taking such a stance. It may have been a gamble, but it turns out it was a safe one.
They produced an inspiring epic commercial (which you can see if you follow the link above) featuring Kaepernick's voice-over describing several against-the-odds real life success stories, concluding with the former football player uttering the line: "Believe in something, even if it means losing everything."
Critics on the right have mocked Kaepernick's "sacrifice", i.e.: his willingness to give up his football career by making a stand for a cause he believes in, saying that sacrifice pales in comparison to the sacrifice of our military personnel. Perhaps that's true but then again, ANY sacrifice pales in comparison to that one. My question in return is this, how many individuals would willingly give up something they hold dear, dreamed about since childhood, and worked hard their entire lives to achieve, in order to help benefit the lives of others?
Yes, Kaepernick did sacrifice a great deal, including donating millions of his own dollars to causes for social justice. I understand why folks might disagree with his methods, but for the life of me can't understand why anyone would question Colin Kaepernick's sincerity or his character.
That said, I'm not going to run out and buy Nike gear anytime soon. While I personally agree with the cause, I also believe that the bottom line for the company aligning themselves with Kaepernick is to sell shoes. Not that I have a problem with that, but Nike has its own issues with human rights in its use of sweatshops in third world countries that manufacture its products, but that's a complicated story for another day.
What I do find encouraging in Nike's choice of Kaepernick is that it is a positive bellwether for the future of this country. By choosing to support the cause of racial justice, Nike's highly paid market research team has determined that by supporting decency and tolerance, there is no credible future for hatred and racism in this country. After all, Nike's consumers are overwhelmingly young people, in other words, the future. Despite all the grumblings of Donald Trump and his base that Nike was making a huge mistake by alienating them, sales of shoes and record stock prices have proven otherwise.
Nike's thorough reasearch tells us that the future of America is diversity, not the Make America Great Again through white hegemony that Trump's base so longs for.
As far as the future goes, Nike, putting their money where their mouth is, is telling us that Trump and his base are irrelevant.
So maybe it's possible that Donald Trump won't destroy this country after all, like he destroyed the USFL.
To that all I can say is Thank God.
It's been a particularly bad stretch for this presidency, and that's really saying something. In the past month, both the former attorney and now the former campaign manager of the current president plead guilty to crimes in exchange for cooperating with the special counsel to lessen their time in the pokey. It is widely believed that both have incriminating evidence against the president and the people around him. During that same period, this president's lack of fitness for his job has been brought to the public's attention by two major publications. And at this writing, as a major hurricane is bearing down upon the Carolinas, the president is being pilloried for claiming his response to two devastating hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico last year was an "unsung success", denying credible estimations of the death toll from the natural disasters by saying those people would have died anyway.
Given all that, Donald Trump right now must be thanking his lucky stars for the return of football, and especially that a handful of NFL players continue to kneel for the national anthem. And what must seem like manna from heaven to him, the athletic apparel company Nike, has chosen none other than Colin Kaepernick, the first NFL player to take a knee in protest over racial injustice in this country, as their spokesperson.
You didn't need to be clairvoyant last week to predict the reaction of some Americans after the first Nike/Kaepernick commercials were released. The skies were lit up all over this great nation of ours by bonfires fueled by Nike products, burned by consumers who were offended that a major company would dare to support a man who expressed an opinion they did not like.
Cries of "how could a company like that be so foolish" and "boycott Nike", could be heard all across the country from ultra-right-wing individuals to the president himself who believed that Nike was making a perilous gamble by taking sides against them.
Here's what the tweeter-in-chief had to say via his favorite medium of expression:
Just like the NFL, whose ratings have gone WAY DOWN (sic), Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!In Donald Trump's world, his war against the NFL serves at least two purposes. First as I mentioned, it is a convenient distraction from his current problems. But perhaps the main purpose is a personal vendetta, as the president has had a long adversarial relationship with the league. In the eighties he desperately wanted to own an NFL team, but was thwarted every step of the way by team owners and then commissioner Pete Roselle. So he aligned himself with the fledgling United States Football League, by purchasing the USFL New Jersey Generals. After a year and over much trepedation from other team owners, Trump convinced the league to compete head-to-head with the premier football league by playing their games in the fall as the NFL did. Needless to say, that didn't work out too well for the up-and-coming league as they could not get a network contract to televise their games at the same time as NFL games. Never fear said Trump to the league, we will sue the NFL and the networks for violating federal anti-trust laws.
It turns out that the USFL had a very good case, so much so, they convinced a New York jury that the NFL was indeed a monopoly in violation of the law. But according to Jeff Pearlman, author of the book Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL, the plaintiff's main witness was Trump, whose atrocious behavior in the courtroom, from his pompous self-aggrandizing testimony to his bullying and intimidating the jury and other witnesses, didn't go over so well with the jury. In the end they ruled in favor of the USFL, but instead of the 1.7 billion dollars in damages the plaintiffs asked for, the jury awarded the USFL one dollar. As the verdict was read and the settlement announced, the owner of the NFL New York Giants pulled a dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to a stunned Trump.
After the verdict was delivered, the USFL who depended upon the settlement money to stay afloat, would never play another game. Many placed the blame for the devastating results of the trial which led to the demise of the league, directly on the shoulders of one Donald J. Trump.
Ah but that's all in the past, and I'm sure Trump has put it all behind him, (wink wink, nudge nudge). What's in the present is Trump's convenient manipulation of an obsessive concern of some, with a handful of athletes not standing for the national anthem. It's an issue at all because some people feel the act is disrespectful to our nation and the men and women who serve in the armed forces. It is a perfectly valid opinion I suppose, as no opinion can either be right or wrong. But it is a flawed opinion nonetheless, as the players themselves have emphatically denied that they have any intent of disrespecting the nation and those in its service. There is simply no good reason not to take their word for it. The players are backed up by a number of service men and women who believe that they risked their own lives in service to defend democracy and freedom, including freedom of expression, not the will of a some president to decide what is patriotic and what is not.
In case you're thinking I'm some no-good-pinko-libtard-snowflake who doesn't respect God, country and mom's apple pie because I don't have a problem with professional athletes making a political statement by not standing for the Star Spangled Banner, let me share something with you. My father was an immigrant who loved this country more than words could articulate. He was not a religious man, but he considered the solemnity of the national anthem of any country to be as sacred as anything could me. During the thousands of sporting events we shared together, back in the days before television sold the air time devoted to the anthem to advertisers, I distinctly remember him critiquing athletes' anthem demeanor. He singled out every athlete who did not stand perfectly still with his eyes focused like a laser upon the flag during the anthem. If an athlete no matter the team, did so much as chew a piece of gum during the song, he was forever on my dad's shit list. He was just as critical of the fans in the stands if he felt they did not give the playing of the anthem the gravitas it deserved.
As I grew older, I became weary of my father's unrelenting devotion to this country. Despite our many intense argruments over this country not being perfect however, I never lost respect for the playing of the anthem(s) as it was ingrained in me from a very early age.
I'll never forget the last Chicago Blackhawks hockey game my father and I attended together. By that time in the early eighties, neither of us had been to a game for several years. Much to my chagrin, a handful of drunk, rowdy fans began cheering and yelling obscenities at the visiting team during the playing of the anthem. Finally my dad and I could find something to agree upon, those "hockey fans" were unequivocally guilty of disrespecting the game, the anthem and the flag.
Well it so happened that the vulgar chants of a handful of drunken louts during the anthem caught on with a critical mass and eventually the sound of every fan screaming his or her head off during the national anthem became a cherished tradition at Chicago Blackhawks home games. The team even promotes the response to the anthem in its ads as an essential part of the Blackhawk experience. Whatever you think of the fans' reaction to the anthem at the "Madhouse on Madison", clearly this tradition is all about rooting for a team and has nothing to do with what the presenting of the colors and the playing of the anthem is all about. Granted there are folks, generally fans of the visiting team, who object to this clear violation of anthem and flag etiquette, but those people are generally dismissed as fuddy-duddy stuffed-shirted St. Louis Blues fans with a serious case of sour grapes.
But if the president were really concerned about people not giving the anthem the respect it deserves, he could make a serious case for directing his ire at Blackhawk fans and the team who supports and even encourages their behavior.
Instead he focuses on a handful of athletes who quietly and respectfully kneel instead of stand during the anthem in support of what they believe is a serious and worthwhile cause.
Why the disconnect?
Could it be that virtually every fan screaming his or her lungs out at Blackhawks games is white and virtually every athlete taking a knee at NFL games is black? You can believe anything you want but to me the answer is pretty clear.
What about the president's other assertion that "Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts"? Well it turns out that he's dead wrong on that. While Nike stock took a slight dip right after the announcement of their new spokesperson, sales of Nike products have gone through the roof since then. As for Nike stock today, well let me just say the title of this article from yesterday says it all:
Nike stock price reaches all-time high after Colin Kaepernick ad.This should come as a surprise to no one, especially Donald Trump who won the presidency betting on this one simple assumption: "there is no such thing as bad publicity."
Nike did not become a fabulously successful corporation (far more lucrative than the NFL for example), by making unsound business decisions. They no doubt had their marketing research people work overtime on this one, weighing the pros and cons of taking such a stance. It may have been a gamble, but it turns out it was a safe one.
They produced an inspiring epic commercial (which you can see if you follow the link above) featuring Kaepernick's voice-over describing several against-the-odds real life success stories, concluding with the former football player uttering the line: "Believe in something, even if it means losing everything."
Critics on the right have mocked Kaepernick's "sacrifice", i.e.: his willingness to give up his football career by making a stand for a cause he believes in, saying that sacrifice pales in comparison to the sacrifice of our military personnel. Perhaps that's true but then again, ANY sacrifice pales in comparison to that one. My question in return is this, how many individuals would willingly give up something they hold dear, dreamed about since childhood, and worked hard their entire lives to achieve, in order to help benefit the lives of others?
Yes, Kaepernick did sacrifice a great deal, including donating millions of his own dollars to causes for social justice. I understand why folks might disagree with his methods, but for the life of me can't understand why anyone would question Colin Kaepernick's sincerity or his character.
That said, I'm not going to run out and buy Nike gear anytime soon. While I personally agree with the cause, I also believe that the bottom line for the company aligning themselves with Kaepernick is to sell shoes. Not that I have a problem with that, but Nike has its own issues with human rights in its use of sweatshops in third world countries that manufacture its products, but that's a complicated story for another day.
What I do find encouraging in Nike's choice of Kaepernick is that it is a positive bellwether for the future of this country. By choosing to support the cause of racial justice, Nike's highly paid market research team has determined that by supporting decency and tolerance, there is no credible future for hatred and racism in this country. After all, Nike's consumers are overwhelmingly young people, in other words, the future. Despite all the grumblings of Donald Trump and his base that Nike was making a huge mistake by alienating them, sales of shoes and record stock prices have proven otherwise.
Nike's thorough reasearch tells us that the future of America is diversity, not the Make America Great Again through white hegemony that Trump's base so longs for.
As far as the future goes, Nike, putting their money where their mouth is, is telling us that Trump and his base are irrelevant.
So maybe it's possible that Donald Trump won't destroy this country after all, like he destroyed the USFL.
To that all I can say is Thank God.
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