Eric The Blue

Sportz talk

Heard by chance on the car radio this morning some Wisconsin sports talk. Two guys competing with each other to be more scornfully dismissive than the other of the local team's effort. In their eagerness the Badgers are guilty of every sin, including mutually exclusive ones. It's sort of like Fox News. The new variant is a fake! But if Trump were president he'd have a vaccine for it! The vaccines don't work!

#schadenfreude

Wisconsin lost four football games (so far) this season—to Penn State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Minnesota. They've got a nice club, but, assuming they want to take a step up and join the elite, they're going to have to find a way occasionally to beat a perennial power. 

#skiumah    

 

Robert Bly, 1926-2021

 

The picture is of two American poets, Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly, in a Manhattan eatery sometime in the 1970s. Bly is the one leaning forward and pointing, quite possibly a characteristic posture, judging by his poems. By the time this picture was taken he had already co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War (1966) and won a National Book Award (1968) for the poems collected in The Light Around the Body. One of the poems is called "Three Presidents," which is about (sort of) Andrew Jackson, TR, and JFK, but it's JFK's successor who makes the longest shadow in the book. Another of the poems is "The Great Society," the title referring to President Johnson's domestic program but also to the state of the union according to Robert Bly. It begins:

Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain

The whole poem is here. One section of The Light Around the Body is called "The Vietnam War." You might think that poems about current events would inevitably decline in significance; Bly would have been familiar with “Drum Taps,” the section within Leaves of Grass about the Civil War, and must have been trying to do for the Vietnam War what Whitman had done for the one he lived through. Whitman's war poems are full of tenderness; the tone is of modulated sorrow. Bly's are savage. Here is one of especial regional interest called "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings." (Bly grew up on a farm in Lac Qui Parle county, near the town of Madison in west central Minnesota.) The very best, I think, are characterized by a kind of restrained fury, like "Counting Small-Boned Bodies":

Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keep-sake forever.

Bly, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's for about a decade, died Sunday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 94. 

The title picture in the Big Ten West

After last Saturday's college football games, I thought the Gophers were out of contention for the Big Ten West title. Iowa was 6-2, we were 5-3, and there was one game left in the regular season. We could tie Iowa, but we couldn't finish ahead of them, and they held the tie-breaker, having defeated us in Iowa City a couple weeks ago. Checkmate (I thought).

But I know now that was too simple and that the Gophers have a nontrivial chance of representing the West Division in the Big Ten championship game. It's a little complicated, but let me try and explain: if nothing else, the exercise might clarify things for the author.

My error was in thinking of us as a potential co-champion with Iowa only. But for us to tie Iowa, we have to beat Wisconsin, and the Badgers, like the Hawkeyes, currently stand at 6-2. So if we beat Wisconsin, and Iowa loses their game at Nebraska, all three teams will be 6-3. We cannot tie with Iowa only. That alone doesn't do it for us, however. The tie-breaker, in the event of a multi-team tie, is your record against the other co-champions. We lost to Iowa but would have just beaten Wisconsin. Iowa beat us but lost to Wisconsin. Wisconsin beat Iowa but would have just lost to us. All three teams, then, would be 1-1 against the other two. The next tie-breaking mechanism is record in all games against Big Ten West foes. Wisconsin is so far undefeated in the West, so their only blemish would be the loss to the Gophers, and they would advance to the Big Ten championship game.

But wait! Purdue is also 5-3 and their remaining game is against last-place Indiana.  A 4-way tie atop the division is therefore more likely than a 3-way tie. Purdue beat Iowa but lost to us and Wisconsin. In the event of a 4-way tie, that would make us and Wisconsin 2-1 against the other co-champions, and Iowa and Purdue, both 1-2, would be eliminated. It's between us and Wisconsin, and we beat them. We're in!

To summarize, then. The Gophers will represent the Big Ten West in the conference championship game if three of Saturday's contests turn out right for us. We have to beat Wisconsin. Nebraska has to beat Iowa. And Purdue has to beat Indiana. 

Anything can happen, I know, but Indiana is a doormat, and I think Purdue will probably hammer them pretty good. Nebraska has only one Big Ten win—56-7 over Northwestern. But their seven losses include a 9-point loss to Ohio State, a 5-point loss to Purdue, 7-point losses to both Minnesota and Wisconsin, and 3-point losses to both Michigan and Michigan State. They've played everyone tough, and will be at home, in Lincoln, against the Hawkeyes. I almost feel like a sucka for holding out hope, but if Minnesota can play a strong game and beat the Badgers, our chances of playing in the Big Ten championship game aren't much worse than 50-50. 

If the Gophers aren't your team, but you're still interested, I hope I've said enough to indicate all the possibilities. Executive summary:

If Wisconsin beats Minnesota, they're in, because only Iowa could tie them and the Badgers won the Iowa-Wisconsin game. 

If Minnesota beats Wisconsin, Iowa's in so long as they beat Nebraska. 

If Wisconsin loses to Minnesota, they could still stumble into the championship, but it would require Iowa losing to Nebraska AND Indiana upsetting Purdue.

A 4-way tie makes the Gophers champion. The path for that, again: Minnesota over Wisconsin, Nebraska over Iowa, and Purdue over Indiana.

Purdue can finish in a tie for first but has no path to the championship via tie-breakers.

Ugh, I just saw that Nebraska's quarterback, Adrian Martinez, is injured and won't play in Saturday's game against the Hawkeyes. Hurts Gophers chances considerably.

The game Saturday against Wisconsin is high stakes. A win could propel us into the Big Ten championship game. A loss would mean we finish just 5-4 in conference games despite a favorable schedule—no game against Michigan, Michigan State, or Penn State. We will have lost again the border rivalry games against Iowa and Wisconsin. And we will have befouled our home field in the homecoming game by losing to . . . Bowling Green. 

Red Dirt Girl

 

"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is the title of Neil Postman's meditation on the Zeitgeist, and I'd say I have a pretty good start. Though "amused" might come up short as a description for how I feel about the above YouTube video, which I've played around a dozen times today. The couple look almost as if they walked out of the frame of "American Gothic" to cover this great song by Emmylou Harris.  The woman, however, is too young and feels the music too much. I thought Mr Cornflakes was just there to play guitar, maybe a little too fast, and it's lucky I was sitting when he joined in the singing. He's like the Joe Friday of backup vocalists: "Just the facts" (of a dirge). I'd say the effect made by the space between, on the one hand, the meaning of the lyrics and his partner's voice, and on the other his businesslike accompaniment, is indescribable—because why try to describe it, you can just watch.

Here is Harris performing it herself (below). The majority of her own recordings are covers too and it's America's loss if she could have been writing more songs as good as "Red Dirt Girl." I think every state has a state bird and a state flower but maybe only Alabama has a state soil: red, because of the oxidized iron. 

 

 

 

Notes, political and legal

POLITICAL

Though not one to watch while into and then through morning's wee hours a Republican bloviates on the floor of the House of Representatives, I feel inspired to evaluate the evaluators of Kevin McCarthy's all-night performance. Bronze goes to AOC who, according to Jamie Raskin, with whom she was watching the show, shouted "I did!" after McCarthy averred, "No one elected Joe Biden to be FDR." The silver goes to Raskin himself. Having contemplated the visages of stern-faced old white men sitting directly behind McCarthy, he tweeted, about the same time over-served revelers were considering their transportation options:

We are hearing rumors that the front row of GOP hostages behind Kevin McCarthy are asking whether they can just be censured instead.

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) November 19, 2021

Gold goes to Washington insider Stuart Rothenberg. Here's his tweet:

Watching Kevin McCarthy “speech,” I’m struck by the fact that he lacks Mitch McConnell’s charisma.

— Stuart Rothenberg (@StuPolitics) November 19, 2021

 

LEGAL

If the verdict in the Rittenhouse case was in line with the law and the evidence, then what follows from that? Suppose a BLM protester had shot Rittenhouse just as he was pumping the fourth bullet into his first victim. I think that protester would have had a stronger self-defense claim than Rittenhouse did. The person he shot, unlike Rittenhouse's first victim, was armed. He would have been observed shooting someone four times at close range with an assault-style rifle. What might he have done next? A lawyer could have advised this defendant to say on the stand "I shot Mr Rittenhouse in order to stop the threat" and it would have been at least as plausible as when Rittenhouse said it.

It seems that when there is a dispute and neurotransmitters are bombarding the synapses of people bearing guns, anyone is justified in shooting anyone, because everyone for good reason feels threatened. Who wants to live in such a society? The governmental end of promoting public safety has been cashiered so that wing-nuts can have their strained interpretation of the Second Amendment.

 

Hung over Greeks

I'm reading Plato's Symposium and am sorry to say that it looks as if the high point is going to occur near the very beginning. This is the dialog in which Socrates, out walking, stumbles upon an acquaintance, Aristodemus, who's on his way to a dinner party. Aristodemus invites Socrates to come along. As they approach the host's house, Socrates falls behind Aristodemus and, at the door, has gone altogether missing. Aristodemus reports to the host that he was just here! A servant, sent to reconnoiter, reports that Socrates has been located, "in a fit of abstraction," on the neighbor's portico. This is apparently fairly typical behavior and the decision is made to just leave him be: eventually he'll snap out of it and let himself in. Supper is served and Socrates indeed does appear when it's about half over. Then comes the passage I love:

Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanius said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday's potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: how can the drinking be made easiest?

I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.

I think that you are right, said Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus; but I should like to hear one other person speak: Is Agathon able to drink hard? 

I am not equal to it, said Agathon.

Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or abstain, and will not mind, whichever we do.) Well, as none of the company seem inclined to drink much, I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday's carouse.

I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the same. 

It was agreed that drinking was not to be the order of the day . . . .

I feel I've been in these conversations, like on the second day of out-of-town weekend softball tournaments, only the talk was not so elevated: similar subject matter, dissimilar word choice. ("I am not equal to it," confesses Agathon, who, we may conclude, "feels severely the effect of yesterday's potations.") Is it a stilted translation or is this the way the ancient Greeks talked about their hangovers?  Maybe they were trying to supply Monty Python with material 20-some centuries hence. It could just be a case of projection, but it seems to me the point of the otherwise pointlessly elaborated passage is to show that no one wants to drink and also that no one is eager to reveal to masculine friends that they are set against drinking.  I say "a case of projection" because I remember adopting a secret strategy of lying low on Night 1 so that I might then have a chance of keeping up on Night 2. Youth is wasted on the young.

Also like the parenthetic observation on Socrates's habitual willingness to go with the flow. If you want to know what Socrates was like, you come up against the problem that the source for  information is Plato's dialogs, and, especially on philosophical matter, it seems likely that there's a lot of Plato in Plato's characterization of Socrates. The incidental droppings might well be the more trustworthy biographical bits, so it's fun to see that, when the question at hand was whether or not to "drink deeply,"  Socrates's friends assumed he would if they would. 

College towns and vaccine efficacy

The anti-vaxxers are still beating the drum, and it seems the only drum they own pertains to the phenomenon of breakthrough infections, which are rising as a percentage of all cases. (But they should google "base rate fallacy.") Of course, if everyone were vaccinated, then 100 percent of cases would be of vaccinated people, and the Big Lie of vaccine effectiveness would be obvious to all. Anti-vaxxers should get vaccinated so that the scandal would be revealed even to the less perspicacious among us!

The accompanying map from The New York Times shows the average daily coronavirus caseload per 100,000 population over the past week. The epidemic has receded in Dixie, causing its benighted apologists to claim that the region's casual approach has been vindicated. This seems to me roughly analogous to a football fan crowing, after his team's been drubbed 56-10, that "we played 'em tough in the fourth quarter."  

Yeah, right, great.

A kind of fatalism has been a sidelight of the anti-vax case. One form of this argument is that there's nothing to be done since the epidemic follows a "seasonal" or "climatological" logic that's impervious to human intervention. I don't know what it would take to cause this argument to be withdrawn. It was advanced by President Trump in the early spring of 2020. "The disease will vanish with the warm weather and the churches will be full on Easter!" This did not come to pass. That it's now near winter and Minnesota and North Dakota are faring worse than Dixie has encouraged some to reassert the argument, which conveniently elides the fact that the hardest hit states currently include New Mexico and Arizona. There are a lot of strong arguments if only you resolve to ignore their weak points!

One cool thing about the above map is that, at the actual site, you can zoom in on particular areas. The above screen-grab of the whole country provides a national overview of regional differences, but it disguises differences within states. I'm always curious about university towns, which are often in mid-sized or smallish cities, with the result that you have a county with a prevailing liberal culture, created by the university, surrounded by very rural and conservative counties. What might this mean for coronavirus infections?  Well, here's what the map looks like around Dane County, home to the University of Wisconsin, in Madison:

Here's a portion of the map in eastern Michigan. The University of Michigan is at Ann Arbor.

Now we're in Indiana. IU is at Bloomington.

Central Pennsylvania. The borough of State College, home to Penn State University, is in the southern part of the county labeled "Pennsylvania," just across the border from the county with an even lighter color. 

 

It's not just a Big Ten thing. The below map is for a portion of upstate New York. Cornell University is at Ithaca.

The differences are stark, but I'm pretty sure they'd be even starker if not for the fact that universities have strict testing regimens and their counties therefore end up detecting a higher percentage of all cases than the surrounding ones do. Of course, the universities also have vaccine requirements, and a county populace inclined to get vaccinated whether it's mandated or not. The vaccination rates in the university counties are high compared to those in the surrounding counties, where coronavirus disease is also much more prevalent. In a different view of the map, you can see vaccination rates by county, so check my conclusions if you're dubious. The fact is that the vaccines work. If everyone were vaccinated, then as I said every case would be a breakthrough case (obviously)—but the total number of cases (as well as hospitalizations and deaths) would be a small fraction of what we're still experiencing, unnecessarily. 

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky

Came to the end this morning of Crime and Punishment. Since Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are regarded as among the world's best novelists, and were alive and writing in Russia at the same time (middle of the 19th-century), it's become customary to think of them together and to profess a preference for one over the other. Tolstoy gets my vote, on the ground that I'm more interested in normal psychology than abnormal psychology. Also, I think they share a weakness that is comparatively obscure or hidden in Tolstoy: both are sentimental, or pious, about people who are below them on some kind of human status meter. 

Tolstoy came from one of the richest families in Russia. His characters are from the aristocracy, but the scope is so wide, his ambition so high, that ultimately just about everything in the world attracts his attention. (Someone facetiously criticized War and Peace for not having included a single boat race.)  Peasants therefore make their appearance, and, when they do, everything that's wonderful about everything else dissipates into worshipful stupidity. Their lives are simple and beautiful. They are guided by religious faith and folk wisdom. They are sturdy and morally upright. One speculates that very occasionally one of them might have too much to drink, or cheat for profit, or be cruel to a spouse, but one does not learn about this from Tolstoy. He never even tries to develop one as a character; the peasantry exists only as a monochromatic class of humanity. Thankfully, he doesn't dwell on them. Back to Levin and Kitty and Anna and Vronsky, et al. 

With Dostoevsky, it's different but kind of the same. He wasn't rich. His novels are so long partly because he was chronically short of funds and therefore always racing toward publication and a payday. He didn't have time for editing, and besides, was sometimes paid by the page. His novels are filled with people who are brilliant and tortured, like him. But then there are these other characters, the Sonyas and Alyoshas, saints who are idealized well beyond the point of being believable as people. These are the characters who to me seem to be in the place of Tolstoy's peasants, but, unlike Tolstoy's peasants, someone like Sonya is close to the center of Crime and Punishment. Her simple and unquestioning faith is what's recommended, and the extolling of her  virtues, which begins before she appears on stage, never relents. It's wearisome.