James M. Redwine

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Yea! Football Is Back!

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“The crisp autumn air. The dry brown grass. Sweaty pads and the exhilaration of combat without weapons. The kind of battle where one can experience the thrill of having been shot at and missed without even being shot at. Football. Ersatz war. Clashes of pride, power and cunning.”

Echoes Of Our Ancestors: The Secret Game, p. vii

James M. Redwine

Baseball may be America’s Pastime but football is America’s Passion. The only thing more endemic to the American psyche than football is politics and I am sick of politics. If, “politics ain’t bean bag”, it ought to be. Any sporting event from ballet to boxing is healthier for our country than political conventions and cable news. Heck, even a good old-fashioned fist fight often results in life-long friendship versus contemporary political campaigns in which social media is used much as small pox was allegedly used against Native Americans by the British colonial soldiers in 1763.

The difference between sporting contests of all types and modern national politics is glaring. When I think back to those times my erstwhile adversaries became my current friends via a skirmish over some forgotten controversy, I long for those days. My friends and I spent no time accusing one another of being a liar or a murderer or even a traitor to our country. We would just drop our baseball gloves or kick our opponent’s marbles out of the way and start the shoving process. Every now and then we would even throw a punch. I will not name those who bloodied my nose or tore off my T shirts but we buried our hypothetical hatchets immediately after each fray. Our politicians and news anchors could learn something.

Another thing we learn from sports versus politics is that the pain of physical injuries almost always goes away whereas the sickness of false comments can grow fatal to our body politic. There is something liberating from a sweaty fight or a sweaty game. But often permanent harm results from accusations of venality and planted stories of misdeeds.

Anyway, I am glad football and other games are coming back and I hope we will soon be able to engage in them and/or enjoy watching them in good health. I leave it up to each community and every individual to decide whether they feel comfortable participating in or watching in person any sporting event. Peg and I certainly want the right and ability to decide such highly personal matters for ourselves and we will afford the same right to others. However, the lessons from sports are easily learned and, unlike high school Algebra, one will always remember them. In fact, as I think of the fist fights and sporting contests I engaged in it now seems to me I never lost and I have gotten a lot faster, stronger and more talented as the years have transpired.

It’s Not Opinion; It’s Fact

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Once upon a time one could read a newspaper or listen to the radio or watch television and get information on current events. One might hear a report about our nation’s involvement in a war for example. I was born in 1943 so my first war memory is from Korea. Perhaps Korea might provide war tocsin again.

Anyway, I recall news reports about General MacArthur and President Truman. I do not recall anybody calling anybody else a liar for expressing their views or positions. Issues as raw and visceral as Commander-In-Chief versus commander in the field were discussed and analyzed without resort to epithets. About the worst MacArthur ever said about Truman was he was only a captain in WWII and about the worst Truman ever said about MacArthur, even as he relieved him of command, was that MacArthur failed to salute him.

The conversations and arguments as to the relative merits of civilian control over the military and the authority of Congress to declare war were presented as honorable people with differing views. I do not recall my parents or my teachers in school using ad hominem arguments instead of evidence-based analysis. In other words, each side accepted their views were merely opinions based on facts, as were the opposition’s views. Neither side was so sure of its own omniscience and the other side’s venality as to assert its own opinions were synonymous with unmitigated facts.

While I was not sent to Vietnam I did serve in the military during that war. When I returned to my college campus after receiving my honorable discharge, the country was embroiled in a bitter and divisive argument about the draft and the war.

When Vice President Hubert Humphrey came to IU to present the Administration’s position on the war, students protested but without violence and without accusing the speaker of false motives. Most students were against the war and our government was supporting it. It took millions of arguments and another several years but finally we left Vietnam. I never heard Humphrey call any students liars nor did I or any of my fellow students attempt to prevent him from speaking. We certainly felt free to disagree and to loudly say so.

The media reports of the latter half of the 1960’s and first half of the 1970’s were often hard hitting on the recitation of facts with which President Johnson was confronted. But I never heard a national news figure say about the President, “He flat out lied!” Such argument quashing language was reserved for pool halls and bar room brawls.

So, assuming I may be at least somewhat correct in my impressions that our civil society is now just a society, how did we get here? You probably have a thought or two on this topic. If so, you probably have plenty of friends and family who never let you voice them. I know I do. Thank goodness I can get my views published in several newspapers. Well, at least, I think that’s a good thing.

 

Safe Language

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“Love” and “hate” have become meaningless. Not too long ago, say before the pervasiveness of cable TV, most humans, especially male humans, reserved “I love you/it/them, etc.” for those few special people and things we actually did love. “I hate you/it/them, etc.” was only applied to those rare persons and things we had a personal reason to hate.

Now everyone “loves” everything from certain soft drinks to ball teams and “hates” everything else. Love and hate are applied like a coat of paint to everything that we used to “like” or “dislike”.

And when it comes to commenting on the words or actions of others, say public officials, the national news media no longer takes the effort to produce facts which might prove a statement careless or incorrect, now the shortcut is to assert all statements are “false” or “lies”.

This deterioration in communication is probably due to our human need to keep others in those places we believe they should stay. And since we may no longer beat down our opponents with ad hominem appellations, i.e., politically incorrect terms, we just say they speak with forked tongues. This development was an unintended consequence of the p.c. movement.

No one may be publicly denigrated or even described by gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, physical attributes or age without exposing the speaker to a cacophony of boos from the political correctness police. I say good! As one who grew up in a legally segregated state at a period in history when only Anglo-Saxon males were judged worthy, I say America has taken several steps forward since World War II. It is instructive that our notions of acceptable speech now make it unwise to set out, even in a newspaper column condemning prejudicial slang, examples of such hurtful words as …. Well, you may supply your own.

However, we humans appear to be incapable of not ascribing bad motives to those with whom we disagree. And now, since we cannot rely upon demeaning terms as short-hand for those we despise or even just disagree with, we have turned to saying we hate them, they are liars, their premises are false and their motives are suspect. For some sociologically implausible rationale, it is reprehensible to refer to persons by catch phrases but perfectly fine to assert they are motivated by avarice and evil designs or have the morals of Wylie Coyote.

The national news media of today would never use politically incorrect terms for public officials but also seldom report what the officials say without gratuitously stating it is false. Setting out the facts and leaving it to the viewer or listener to come to her/his own conclusions does not seem to occur to the national media. One need only turn on the nightly news on any given evening to see how we have progressed in politically correct speech and regressed in consideration for differences in opinions.

Another interesting phenomenon has been the gradual merging of male and female speech. Until social pressure forced men to speak less paternalistically and chauvinistically, women were rarely heard, at least publicly, engaging in demeaning terminology. However, if one observes the plethora of female news anchors on today’s airwaves, venomous attacks, often factually unsupported ones, pour out without regard to the gender of the anchors.

And it is not just the media. Many of us, at least it seems to me, are now so bereft of acceptable demeaning terms for those unlike ourselves, we must seek to bring them down to our level by other means. We are uncomfortable not being able to differentiate “us” from “them”.

This phenomenon has been years in the making and is not the province of just one sociological group or political party. I recall when Congressman Joe Wilson, who still represents South Carolina, during President Obama’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress in September 2009 publicly yelled at the president, “You lie!” And I find it difficult to watch CNN anymore as they assert virtually every statement by President Trump is, “False!”, without giving any supporting data for their accusations.

I do not wish for a return to those Jim Crow days when any group one claimed to be a part of felt comfortable denigrating any other group. However, perhaps we have exchanged politically incorrect speech for terms every bit as demeaning to individuals and perhaps even more dangerous to our democracy.