Eric The Blue

The light closes down

The last day of baseball's regular season.  My Twins and most of the other teams have been living posthumously for weeks and weeks.  They've played more than fifty games now since everyone realized they were going nowhere.  Tonight, as the baseball world watched the Red Sox and the Devil Rays, the Twins beat the Royals, 1-0, the lone run scoring in the bottom of the ninth when Trevor Plouffe drove in Denard Span with a two-out hit: a thrilling game of no consequence.  Here's a poem by Linda Pastan that brings to life the hackneyed notion that it's all a metaphor for life:

Baseball

When you tried to tell me
baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season--
I didn't believe you.

It's just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that's it.
Yes.

The fallen satellite

A six-ton satellite falling out of the sky might seem like a metaphor for something, though if it were falling back to Earth on a trajectory aimed roughly at your garage the metaphors would presumably dissipate.  Yesterday's news was that the satellite had landed and that, as there were no reports of damage or injuries, the Pacific Ocean apparently took one for the team. 

I was struck by the following sentence from the article that appeared in the edition of our local daily sent to my e-reader:

While NASA did receive reports of people who saw lights in the sky that they thought were pieces of the disintegrating satellite, none of them occurred at a time and place where the satellite would have been passing by, and people looking at the correct time and place did not see anything.

This raises a question about what the people who were looking at the wrong place, and the wrong time, nevertheless did "see."  It wasn't the satellite.  Maybe they saw a flying saucer.  But there is an explanation for "seeing flying saucers" that's related to this general phenomenon I want to talk about.  As far as I know, there were no reports of flying saucers before human beings had at least begun to contemplate sending up our own flying objects.  It was only then that people reported seeing the flying objects of other civilizations.

It seems like what people report "seeing" can be influenced by what they expect to see.  I see no reason to limit skepticism about their reports to heavenward gazes.  In criminal investigations, for example, the testimony of eyewitnesses can surely be influenced by the way the investigators put their questions.  There doesn't have to be an elaborate conspiracy to "frame" someone.  The police need only suggest their own suspicions to the eyewitnesses, who will then corroborate the preferred theory of the crime.  The psychology of the witness is another important factor.  People who saw the falling satellite in the sky, or the suspect commit the crime, or had a "religious vision"--in every instance, isn't it a little suspicious that one effect of their reports is to make themselves at least temporarily important, candidates for fame, the object of attention?

But the people looking at the right time, at the right place, saw nothing.  That they knew where and when to look places them in a different demographic group.  They could also have been influenced by what they expected to see.  After all, they knew they were looking in the right place and at the right time. Nevertheless, they saw nothing.  Possibly this group self-selects for possessing the skeptical sensibility that guards against delusion.

Circus goers

The other day I quoted Lorrie Moore on the experience of watching the Republican presidential candidates debate: "There is always something if not a lot to learn from watching a circus--one is both amazed by and sorry for the animals."  What about the people who go to the circus?  Three debates ago--I think that was the one in which the mere mention of 234 death row inmates executed during Candidate Perry's time as Governor of Texas elicited raucous cheers from the crowd.  Two debates ago--that must have been the one in which Wolf Blitzer, of CNN, asked Ron Paul what should happen to a (formerly) healthy 30-year-old who has decided not to buy health insurance and then falls into a coma that requires emergency treatment.  Should he just be permitted to die?  "Yeah!" shouted several audience members at once.  (It seems that quite a few members of the pro-life party get a big chubby when contemplating the deaths of other human beings.)  And when, in the last debate, a question, from a gay soldier stationed in Iraq, was put in a way that made clear he supports the repeal of DADT, the audience booed him.  Also: none of the candidates rebuked the audience, none thanked the soldier in even the most perfunctory fashion for his service to our country, and Rick Santorum "answered" the question in a way that suggests he's under the impression that the military now bans heterosexuals, but not homosexuals, from having sex.  (When trying to decide who is the daftest of them all, you keep changing your mind, as each takes a turn at speaking.)

Ryan Lizza says the best approach is to try and laugh about it.  Toward that end, he solicited Tweets answering the question: Who will Republicans boo in their next debate?  For those not inclined to follow the link, here are some of my favorite responses:

@jonathan chait: Immigrant puppies with cancer
@Awberman: Bert and Ernie
@nxthompson: People who've been vaccinated against HPV
@DraneSpout: Gay, baby SEALs

Crime stories

In its Metro section today, the Star Tribune runs the following blurb:

ARRESTED TWICE IN AN HOUR
Aug. 29 A 41-year-old man was arrested for stealing a comforter from J.C. Penney at Southdale Center, Edina.  An hour later, he was arrested for stealing merchandise from Cub Foods across the street.

This is supposed to be a funny story about a hapless criminal that readers can laugh about in a self-congratulatory manner.  It would work better for that purpose if the fellow had stolen a pack of condoms from a Walgreens and then, an hour later, a lighter and some pastries from SuperAmerica. 

On the crime beat, different order of magnitude, the state of Georgia is gearing up to execute a man, Troy Davis, despite the fact that the evidence of police misconduct is considerably more compelling than the evidence of Davis's guilt.  The prospect of an innocent person being executed is horrifying.  The only way to prevent it is to abolish capital punishment.  For if capital punishment is not abolished, and justice continues to be administered by fallible human beings, then, inevitably, innocent people will be put to death. 

No one to cheer for

If I were to turn on the TV and find that Notre Dame was playing Ohio State in a football game, I'd change the channel.  There's no rooting interest when you wish both teams could lose, which is why I haven't been following too closely the Bachmann-Perry contretemps in the Republican presidential sweepstakes.  Since they disagree, it seems I might be obliged to take the side of one of them--a distasteful prospect.

Have you noticed how, when Republicans debate, they have to ask forgiveness for the only decent things they've ever done?  "Yeah, once I was persuaded that human beings are changing the earth's climate, and I therefore took some mincing steps toward adopting reparative policies, but, believe me, I've repented!"  That was the departed Tim Pawlenty.  Now Rick Perry has had to acknowledge that he erred by supporting an immunization program that will save lives. 

Well, he might have done it more to enrich his pharmaceutical contributors than to save anyone's life, so he should not feel that bad about it. 

Nothing Bachmann says surprises me.  She doesn't care what's true, only what's helpful, and God knows there are plenty of crackpots to play to.  When she finally withdraws, Romney will have to try and act more crazy than he maybe is.  His crime, of course, is that as governor of Massachusetts he delivered health care reform a la Obama.  What an outrage!

Lorrie Moore sums up the experience of watching the Republicans debate: "There is always something if not a lot to learn from watching a circus--one is both amazed by and sorry for the animals."  

Netflix: The Thin Blue Line

Sometimes (like in its Wikipedia article) called a "documentary," the film features reenactments of a Texas murder in which the wrong man, Randall Dale Adams, was convicted and sentenced to death.  These reenactments are based on the false testimony of various witnesses.  The only version never reenacted is the one the film proves to be true--namely, that the murder, of a police officer, was done by David Harris, a juvenile with whom Adams had drunk beer at a drive-in movie earlier in the evening of the shooting.

How did the investigation go awry?  Pretty clearly the problem was that a police officer had been shot, and the law enforcement establishment--the police and the county attorney of Harris County, Texas--wanted an execution.  Harris, however, was a juvenile.  Adams was prosecuted because he was an adult and could be executed.  Were it not for this strange and wonderful movie, he probably would have been.  Directed by Errol Morris, the film's total effect is augmented considerably by the Philip Glass score.  The Thin Blue Line is a significant contribution to the cinematic arts which has not, however, diminished the enthusiasm for capital punishment among the part of the population that just might vote for Rick Perry for president.

9/11: some responses

If you have a fondness for the absurd, you might like something I saw today at the New Yorker website, which has of late been compiling and publishing answers to a series of 9/11 questions put to many of their regular contributors.  The questions are:

1. What were you thinking about, or working on, the day the attacks occurred?
2. Did 9/11 change your work plans?
3. Are there places you’ve gone, or people you’ve met, that you wouldn’t have if not for 9/11?
4. Is New York a different city for you now?
5. Is there one image or scene that evokes that day for you?
6. What piece of work to emerge from 9/11 has stayed with you the most?

This morning I was reading the responses of Nick Paumgarten, who edits the magazine’s Talk of the Town section.  In a strange way, they were both predictable and compelling.  He had been in the magazine’s midtown office when the first tower was struck, and had immediately taken a taxi as far south as the cabbie would drive.  He had then seen with the naked eye a few of the events that followed.  His answer to the fifth question was:

The sight of the people jumping from the towers, one after another.  I was quite close to that.  It was horrific.

At the end of his answers, there is a single reader comment, and it goes like this: 

I just got a $829.99 iPad2 for only $103.37 and my mom got a $1499.99 HDTV for only $251.92, they are both coming with USPS tomorrow.  I would be an idiot ever to pay full retail prices at places like Walmart or Bestbuy.  I sold a 37” HDTV to my boss for $600 that I only paid $78.24 for.  I use BidsFresh.com

 I hear America singing.

Still watching the Twins

Last time I blogged about the Twins, it was the middle of June, their record was 24-39, and I noted that, as they would have to go 66-33 to finish 90-72, there was virtually no chance of them qualifying for the playoffs.  Between then and the all-star break, they won 17 of 26 games and got themselves back into contention.  The season's second half has been a long hard slide: their record tonight, as they play in Detroit, is 59-84.  In the American League, only the Orioles are worse.

But I'm still watching.  A mediocre athlete since my t-ball days, I find myself pulling hard for the September call-ups.  They try so hard but frequently appear overmatched.  There are no other athletes on television with whom I can identify.  It's not hard to understand why they play hard.  The minimum salary of a major-league ballplayer in 2011 is $414,000; minor-leaguers are paid like you and me.  There are few lines of work in which a promotion to the next level can in a single bound push your income past that of experienced algebra teachers, mid-level managers, pharmacists, corporate lawyers, orthodontists, gastroenterologists, and the president of the United States. 

I've been paying  particular attention to a Twin named Rene Tosoni.  He was up earlier in the summer, when half the millionaires were on the disabled list, so he is in my mind distingished from the herd of September strivers.  Also, Tosoni is from Canada, which is unusual, and I remember how in one of his first games the TV cameras showed  about twenty of his friends and family cheering wildly in one section of the stands when he drove in a run with a single.  I don't think he's going  to make it.  He's been getting a look, playing regularly, and in the last 10 games before tonight had gone 5-for-31, with a double, a triple, no homers, and two rbi.  He had 130 at-bats for the season and an average of .177.  Tonight, batting eighth, he made the last out in the Twins' four-run first inning and was in the game 0-for-4, dropping his average to .172.  It  can't drop fast when it's that low.  The Tigers came roaring back and won the game 8-4.  The season closed down  on the Twin regulars several weeks ago and the big-league hopes of Rene Tosoni may be closing down now.  Until quite recently he must have always been one of those guys who made other guys realize they weren't that good. 

A poem

I spent some time over the long weekend leafing around in Eighteenth Century English Literature, an anthology I had to buy in college.  It's interesting now partly because the marginalia reveals what made an impression upon me thirty years ago.  Maybe people don't change much.  The marked passages still seem to me the most notable ones. 

There is a section near the end that I looked at for the first time.  It's a miscellany of poems by unknown poets.  Naturally Dr Leyasmeyer hadn't assigned us to read any such obscure stuff.  But I kind of liked this one:

I have lost my mistress, horse, and wife,
And when I think on human life,
    Cry mercy 'twas no worse.
My mistress sickly, poor and old,
My wife damn'd ugly, and a scold,
    I am sorry for my horse.

The name of the author is lost to literary history.

I'm against it

Sometimes--frequently--I get so annoyed by stuff I hear or read that I can hardly think of anything else till I've expressed my annoyance, thereby achieving a sort of exorcism.  Thus a blog.  It doesn't even matter if anyone reads it.  I doubt the therapeutic effect could be any greater if my posts were published on the editorial page of The New York Times.

Yesterday the Star Tribune newspaper printed on its editorial page a long, pompous editorial by Mitch Pearlstein, the director of a local conservative think tank.  He really annoys me.  Yesterday's piece was about family breakdown.  Oh woe! woe! woe!  Nobody wants to acknowledge that family breakdown is a leading cause of the gap between "haves" and "have nots."  But he will trod where only big thinkers dare go.  Oh woe! woe! woe!  The sociologists all concur it's terrible!  Oh woe! woe! woe!  We must permit vouchers for private school education.  And so on.

Here's a typical Pearlstein gambit.  Having appealed to reasonable people by fussily charging "liberals" and "conservatives" of different sins on the issue of wealth inequality, he writes:

Might I respectfully add here that it is impossible for me to imagine how liberal friends could not be at least as concerned as I am from the conservative side of the aisle about the thinning of marriage and its straight line to social class rupture.

Emphasis in original.  He is so concerned.  He can't imagine why his "liberal friends" aren't.  Permit him to respectfully point out that he's better than they are.  His actual meaning would be clearer if the italics came two words later. 

You might think that the need for private school education does not necessarily follow from data about wealth inequality and family disintegration.  But Pearlstein has decided that vouchers would be a good thing and consequently every possible social observation attests to the necessity of adopting his view.  Here he is performing the pivot:

I asked [the] principal of a Catholic elementary school in the Twin Cities what her institution's mission was.  "To manifest God's love in every child," she said, or words close to that.  As educational mission statements go, this was one of the briefiest yet meatiest ever drafted.

No, it's tied with a million others for the most meaningless.  "To manifest God's love in every child" is just the empty cant of a dull nun.  It doesn't mean anything.  I hate the way we are all expected to bow down and pay obeisance soon as anyone suggests that their view is supported by religion.  I guess if you disagree with Mitch Pearlstein, then you must be against making God's love manifest in children.

Well, count me among that small group.  No tax dollars should support religious schools.  No God's love manifest in young children.  No taking time out from math and reading for lessons concerning the Virgin Mary.  I'm against it, and I'm feeling better.

Rock Springs: Richard Ford out west

Richard Ford is best known for the series of novels--The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006)--about Frank Bascombe, a resident of suburban New Jersey whose life has been blighted by domestic woe (death of a child, divorce) from which he has nevertheless emerged, sanity intact and capable of illuminating every scene with his intelligence and powers of observation.  These books, now available between two hard covers in an Everyman's Contemporary Classics edition a la Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels, deserve their high reputations.

But I like his short fiction even more--especially the stories collected in Rock Springs, which are set not in New Jersey but in the West, usually Montana, where the characters are not sportwriters or realtors but survivors, barely, of bad choices made in lives that hadn't started well, either.  (The sequence of bad choices stretches back in time.)  In the title story, a man named Earl is travelling with his girlfriend and young daughter from Montana to Florida in a cranberry Mercedes he stole off an ophthamologist's lot in Whitefish.  Here is the opening:

Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn't turn me in to the police.  I had managed to scrape with the law in Kalispell over several bad checks--which is a prison crime in Montana.  And I knew Edna was already looking at her cards and thinking about a move, since it wasn't the first time I'd been in law scrapes in my life.  She herself already had her own troubles, losing her kids and keeping her ex-husband, Danny, from breaking in her house and stealing her things while she was at work, which is really why I had moved in in the first place, that and needing to give my little daughter, Cheryl, a better shake in things.

This is not Bascombe-land.  The Mercedes breaks down in Wyoming and there is an interlude at a trailer home by a gold mine where Earl asks the sixtyish African-American woman who comes to the door if he can use the phone: much politeness and signs of trouble equal, approximately, to his own.  The Mercedes hid in the cottonwoods to the side of the road, tires sunk in soft sand, the trio get a cab to the Ramada Inn at the town of Rock Springs.  There is another interlude of food and love making, then Edna takes Earl up on his offer to buy her a bus ticket back to Kalispell.  So she's leaving in the morning.  When the girlfriend and the daughter are asleep, Earl goes outside to see about another car, and the story concludes:

I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags, one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it was riding.  I looked inside the driver's window.  There were maps and paperback books and sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans that hang on the window wells.  And in the back there were kids' toys and some pillows and a cat box with a cat sitting in it staring up at me like I was the face of the moon.  It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car.  Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different.  Though I had a funny sensation at that moment and turned and looked up at the windows along the back of the motel.  All were dark except two.  Mine and another one.  And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn?  Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared?  Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him?  Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him?  Would you think he had a daughter?  Would you think he was anybody like you?

I won't be able to give a rational account of the effect achieved by these words, at least upon me.  But I think it has a lot to do with the inventory of items in the car from Ohio, the way they suggest something different from the monochrome of distress and trouble that has preceded. "It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car." In my time hanging around Departments of English, I didn't notice that reading literature seemed to have made people more generous or humane, but this story by Ford, and others from the same volume about as good, seem like understated invitations to extend  sympathy's arc. 

You can read some of Ford's stories online.  Here is a recent one, "Leaving for Kenosha," published in The New Yorker of March 3, 2008.  Another gem.