Todd Richardson's Blog, page 2

BREAKING THE INTERNET

Amy Schumer proudly posted her photo by Annie Liebowitz for the Pirelli calendar, featuring the Trainwreck star in nearly all her glory.  She described herself as “Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless.”  The press coverage has been positive, with emphasis on the beautiful, strong, pretty, sexy, flawless part, though no doubt she’s faced some backlash from the gross, fat, ugly, disgusting side.  The paradox of her self-assessment pretty well captures the mixed signals women in general tend to struggle with.

 

I believe women typically look at themselves quite differently from the way men look at them.  I speak as a straight male, without special insight into the perspective of other types of humans, and indeed cannot claim to represent the viewpoint of the entire diverse membership in my gender and orientation.  But I think my observations are pretty typical.

 

Women often evaluate themselves on a deviation-from-perfection scale, starting with a concept of ideal beauty and then deducting points for every feature that falls short in comparison.  Men, on the other hand, tend to regard women as perpetual sources of amazement.  They may be common as ants, but when one walks by it’s like a unicorn sighting.  Have you seen a dog being astonished by a magic trick?  That’s men: “Wait a second!  What’s going on there?  How’d she do that?”

 

Women may feel bombarded by images of slender waifs in fashion magazines and Hollywood productions, and perceive societal pressure to conform to a literally narrow concept of beauty.  The problem with men, though, is not that they impose an exacting standard to which a female must adhere in every particular in order to be deemed attractive.  To the contrary, the problem with men is they are apt to say I like that one, and that one, and that one, and that one, too.

 

Almost everyone feels insecure about their looks.  But you have to have faith in the compelling power of the basic design.  If you see a pair of leopards, you don’t say that one’s nose is a little longer, the other one is much more beautiful.  You regard them both as gorgeous creations.  After all, a man is capable of getting turned on by a potato, if it has a shape vaguely reminiscent of a female torso.  If a woman has the standard components in the conventional configuration, there’s a strong likelihood some guy will think that’s pretty interesting.

 

Does that mean everyone is equally beautiful?  Or that individuals don’t have particular preferences?  Of course not.  It’s not a constitutional right, or subject to commands and policies.  And it goes without saying there’s a lot more to sex appeal than the contours of physical appearance – attitude, grooming, carriage, wit, dress, smarts, expressions, heart, and much more.  All women are beautiful the same way every day is important.  Within a range, you can do a lot to make a given day count more.

 

There’s no accounting for taste, and no predicting who will click with whom.  I believe anyone looking for love will eventually find a special someone who is just right.  Some people are luckier than others, just like some are taller, smarter, funnier, more talented, and yes, better looking.  But compared to monkeys, we’re all pretty lucky, tall, smart, funny, talented and beautiful.  I happen to be the luckiest, on an absolute scale, because my wife is undeniably the most beautiful and the very best one is every respect.  But the Amy Schumers of the world have no reason to be ashamed, and little to hide.

 

DONALD TRUMP IS NOT THE PROBLEM

The problem is not Mr. Trump himself. It’s the disturbing excess of Americans who seem convinced that he would make a terrific President.  That’s the problem.

 

As a candidate, Donald Trump has been a subject of abject fascination by the press, a glorious windfall for comedians, and a rich vein of source material for vivisection by political analysts.  For decades, he’s been an icon of arrogance and narcissism, famous primarily for conspicuous opulence and shameless self-promotion.  He achieved some political notoriety by putting a bounty on President Obama’s birth certificate, apparently convinced there could be no proof of genuine U.S. citizenship, demonstrating a propensity for elevating a hunch into a proclamation of personal conviction.  When he announced his candidacy, with bluster and animosity towards Mexicans, it seemed a passing spectacle, much like a circus with an undercurrent of cruelty to elephants.

 

Then something happened: he rose in the polls, pulled in crowds wherever he spoke, kept himself firmly in the middle of the news cycle, and showed staying power.  At first he was dismissed as a sideshow gimmick, then the coverage shifted to his surprising traction among potential voters, and ultimately he became a story about how he doesn’t seem to be going away.  He went from basically entertainment news covering his latest outrageous pronouncement, to a shakeup factor troubling the Republican establishment, to a dominating figure slapping around the likes of Jeb Bush.

 

The focus of attention has revolved around two centers of gravity: Trump himself and the problem he presents for the traditional Republican power structure.  It’s hard to take your eyes off the man.  What’s he going to say next?  Who’s he going to insult and offend now?  From Mexican rapists to Syrian refugees, feuds with Univision and Fox News, asking a fan to vet his hair, demonstrating how his belt won’t stop a knife, claiming he saw thousands of Muslims in Jersey City cheering on 9/11, mocking a reporter’s disability, endorsing the registration of Muslims – you just can’t look away.

 

Meanwhile, there’s quiet panic among the Republican power brokers.  A guy like Scott Walker can’t fly into the primaries even with the financial imprimatur of the Koch brothers, yet a dangerous renegade like Trump is sailing into frontrunner status and cruising past the crash-and-burn prophecies.  Surely the right wing establishment will rally behind a more sensible candidate and the process will reassert a measure of sanity – except, that hasn’t happened.  It’s looking increasingly likely that he’ll last deep into the primaries, perhaps threaten a brokered convention, and then the institutions of conservative politics will descend into madness and bedlam.

 

All of which, of course, is gripping drama and full of intrigue.  But what’s getting lost in all the maneuvering and tactics, all the frenzied controversy that surrounds the orange madman, the real story here is the horde of supporters who seem convinced that he is our next great leader.  Who are these people and where did they come from?  Have they been here all along, just waiting for a spokesman to screech their frequency?

 

For the Republican mainstream, it’s embarrassing enough that a billionaire hype machine is announcing his divisive views and associating them with right wing, conservative, Reaganistic GOP doctrine.  The true horror lies in the unmistakable conclusion that he’s connecting with a broad base of Republican voters.  He’s giving voice to all the anti-Latino, money-worshipping, xenophobic, anti-feminist, religiously intolerant, plutocratic, cruel, selfish insecurities that Republicans have spent generations of rhetoric trying to deny, and he’s finding an enthusiastic audience.  He’s exposing a repellent id in red-leaning voters that the more genteel practitioners on the R side of the aisle generally take great pains to avoid acknowledging openly.

 

Take all the Trump enthusiasts and add in the crowds flocking to Ben “Chance the Gardener” Carson, Carly “Dickens Orphanage Matron” Fiorina and Ted “Ten Kinds of Crazy” Cruz, and you’re looking at a sizable constituency backing what in a civilized society should be at worst a fringe perspective.  In light of comment sections on websites, you know there are troubled souls out there, but you’d rather not think in such numbers.

 

When Trump and his stripe put out the call, there are far too many across the country raising their hands.  I still have faith we won’t see Trump in the White House come January 2017.  But the mean current of intolerant malcontents, who see in the Donald an invigorating tonic for their frustrations, they’re not apt to be mollified by whatever pale substitute carries the Electoral College.  They will still be around for years to come, thinking their thoughts.

 

HERO WORSHIP IN MODERN SOCIETY

People look back at the ancient Greeks, who were supposed to be so clever and advanced, and wonder how they could believe all those stories about Olympian deities and mythological heroes.  How smart is that, to base your religion around ancient demi-gods who supposedly killed some monsters and wreaked havoc in battle?  We tend to shake our heads, too, at “primitive” cultures that worship ancestors and engage in polytheistic rituals.  But if we think we’re much different today, try to imagine how some distant or future culture might view our own habits and beliefs.

 

I once visited the home of a casual acquaintance in western Indiana, and he asked me with a bit of a gleam if I was a fan of Bobby Knight.  Now, Coach Knight is a legend in a lot of Hoosier circles, steeped in lore, a bringer of victories, a larger-then-life personality.  The fellow took me to his den, which was devoted to IU Hoosier memorabilia from the Knight era, photos, framed newspaper articles, game paraphernalia, an autograph from the man himself in a position of central prominence.  The care in the arrangement, the lighting, the sense of tableau – the scene can only be described as a shrine.

 

That kind of thing is not uncommon, in varying degrees, with the dynamic and inspiring figures of sports, film, music and political celebrity.  How many people have beatific portraits in the heart of their homes of MLK, or JFK, or Bono, Princess Di, Nelson Mandela, Elvis?  Okay, so there’s a degree of reverence towards modern icons, bordering on idolatry, but that’s still different from treating mythological heroes as pervading spirits with the capacity to intervene in human affairs to the benefit of devotees.  Isn’t it?

 

I recall an NFL game where the Bears were playing on Walter Payton’s birthday or anniversary of his death, I forget which.  It came down to a field goal attempt as time expired, and a Bears victory was sealed with a block.  The player who tipped the ball said in the interview afterwards that he felt like Walter was there, helping to lift him up.  Post-game hyperbole?  Fervent imagination?  A genuine mystical experience?  It doesn’t matter – the point is this is the kind of story that still flies today, an instance of a nudge from a fallen hero.

 

After Dale Earnhardt crashed at Daytona and died in 2001, you’d see occasional bumper stickers showing his tilted “3,” white on black, with a yellow halo over it.  To a segment of his fan base, he was a continuing presence, the great Intimidator, maybe tapping bumpers from up on high to clear the way for true believers.

 

But does all that really have a religious dimension, akin to the animal-sacrificing rites of ancient pagans?  Perhaps not the blood sacrifice part, but a world densely populated with invisible spirits capable of hearing prayers: that still enjoys widespread support in modern society.  Not to pick on Catholics, but consider the rich world of canonized saints.  What do they have in common?  They were all once people, they’re all dead, they’ve performed miracles, and they are listening to your thoughts and are prepared to render aid and comfort in your time of need.

 

In broader Christian terms, many denominations embrace the concept of angels, possibly the spirits of godly humans, with powers to grant grace, or peace of mind, or in some instances to unleash the wrath of God.  How many people continue to have conversations, aloud or in private thought, with departed loved ones?  We yearn for a connection with our deceased family members, we want them to go on sharing our experiences, we listen for their voices.

 

For those with a literalist interpretation of the Bible, there’s an intriguing passage in Genesis describing the proliferation of humanity, where “sons of God” saw “daughters of men,” found them fair and took them as wives.  The daughters of men bore children to the sons of God, and they were mighty men of old, men of renown.  The same passage also remarks, in passing, that “there were giants in the earth in those days.”  This is, notably, at the mythological end of the Bible, the same chapter that introduces Noah.  But it doesn’t seem so different from Herakles, Theseus and Akhilles.

 

Is the point here that modern Christians are as superstitious and silly as those who worshipped pantheons of gods and demi-gods thousands of years ago?  Not at all.  To the contrary, the lesson is that humans throughout the ages have had a universal aspiration to comprehend a spiritual realm beyond our immediate senses.  We seek to transcend the physical and perceive the mystical.  We draw inspiration from the exceptional, and warm our souls with the shining spirits who dwell among us for a time and linger after they’re gone.

 

I can’t say, over history, whose concepts of the world of spirits are right or wrong.  But it’s myopic to regard the religions of old as naïve and primitive.  Someday, someone far removed may look at us the same way.  And they, too, will probably have their own version of hero worship.

 

PARIS AND PHILOSOPHY

Following this week’s Republican debate, I decided to write a piece about the value of philosophy.  Besides Marco Rubio saying welders make more money than philosophers and we need more of the one and less the other, both Ted Cruz and John Kasich treated philosophy as a term of insult.  I was on Facebook calling them out on it before I saw any of the subsequent philosophical backlash, but even after the defenders of philosophy rose up in polite rejoinder I thought there was more context to add.  Then the attacks in Paris occurred, and suddenly it seemed trivial to debate political views on the merits of majoring in philosophy.

I was a philosophy major in college, and can attest to the material as well as the less tangible dividends it has paid.  I understand Rubio was off on the economics, even if you just look at philosophy instructors as a profession.  But the central skills of philosophy as a discipline – critical analysis, deductive logic, reasoning from principles, building up arguments and tearing them down – have broad application in a variety of fields.  For me, it was excellent preparation for law school, as it involves the same mental rigor I use when writing an appeal brief.  Tech companies apparently hire a lot of humanities majors, probably because successful articulation is an asset in many arenas.  Add in fabulously wealthy philosophy majors like George Soros and Carly Fiorina, and it’s hard to make a case against it in monetary terms.

That’s the tenor of the rebuttal I’ve seen to the new War on Philosophy, but lends too much credence to the premise that success is measured solely in dollar impact.  Even law school is mediocre as vocational training, with little emphasis on the basics of operating a law practice, and instead the typical point is that law school teaches you to “think like a lawyer.”  At a higher level of generality, philosophy teaches you to think like a human being.

For example, every political campaign has a team of policy analysts and speechwriters.  What they do is exercise the basic skill set of philosophers.  I’m not sure what that pays as a career path, but apparently it’s important to the success of a political candidate.  The Founding Fathers, too, thought philosophy had value; the political philosophy of John Locke in particular contributed several pillars to the ideals of the American experiment.

In the broader context of another angle, this wave of philosophy-bashing falls in line with a grand tradition of anti-intellectual Republican rhetoric.  How many times have you heard a right wing politician complain about the intellectual elite?  “Elite,” so used, is not a compliment.  Spiro Agnew once decried the “effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”  At least he could turn a phrase.  Nowadays, “intellectual” is shorthand for “liberal” and deemed wrong without further proof.

Now, I went to a fancy university, and was surrounded by intelligent, motivated people determined to make something of themselves.  It is not intuitively obvious why education would be regarded as a badge of cluelessness.  Mind you, it is a mistake to equate formal education with intelligence, and I agree with Rubio that vocational training should not be stigmatized.  But it is also a fallacy to romanticize a lack of formal education as inherently a bounty of practical wisdom.  Very few parents want their children to fail in school.

So obviously, I went ahead and wrote about philosophy and politics, despite the horrific events in Paris.  In the face of that kind of incomprehensible brutality, it seems insensitive to take offense at a slight to your college major.  And yet, the circumstances indicate why the fundamental precepts of philosophy matter in today’s world.

The questions that naturally present themselves are philosophical in nature.  How can things like this happen?  What does it say about humanity?  How can civilized society react to such an outrage?  Where can we find meaning in the sacrifice of innocent lives?  Is it wrong to lash out in retaliation, when the immediate murderers have already been killed?  What is the alternative to perpetuating the cycle of violence?

I wish there were some formula of philosophical principles that would provide a clear path to understanding, or a simple set of aphorisms that would enlighten us all going forward.  But life is complicated and we shouldn’t expect easy answers.  Philosophy doesn’t tell us what to think, or how to feel, or what to do.  But if you think, and feel, and act, and you try to comprehend, and you care about what’s right, you’re engaging in philosophy.  It’s an element of humanity.

IT STARTED EARLY

You watch the tawdry spectacle of modern politics, and can only imagine with embarrassment what the Founding Fathers would think about it.  Here’s an autocratic demagogue slandering foreigners, there’s a dysfunctional House of Representatives no one wants to lead, a circus of campaigns is railing against the media, and the politics of personality overshadow the issues of substance.  What would the Framers of the Declaration of Independence say, those dignified patriots with their philosophical ideals?  Actually, if they could peer into the future of today, they’d likely sigh and say not much has changed.

Consider the elections of 1796 and 1800, which both pitted John Adams of Massachusetts against Thomas Jefferson of Virginia.  You can’t get more Founding Father than that, two of the three members of the Declaration of Independence committee (Ben Franklin was the other).  Was it a principled discourse on how best to achieve ordered liberty in a representative democracy?  Not hardly.

By the end of George Washington’s two terms, the nation was already polarized into two political parties.  Adams was a Federalist, Jefferson a Democratic-Republican.  You can’t really line those parties up with modern Democrats and Republicans.  Federalists, like today’s Democrats, believed in a strong central government, but also supported a large military budget and were somewhat conservative in adhering to the British model.  The Democratic-Republicans, like modern Republicans, advocated small government and state’s rights, but also tended to be more idealistic and progressive.  Regardless of the particulars, they fought like cats and dogs.

When Jefferson challenged Adams as excessively pro-British and monarchist, Adams made it personal by charging Jefferson as being too French and loose in character.  Much as now, regional politics carried sway, with the northeast favoring Adams and the south Jefferson.  Adams won the first election by a narrow margin, and under the rules of the day Jefferson as runner-up became Vice President.  It was not an internally complacent administration.

When they ran against each other again in 1800, Jefferson got nasty.  He retained a journalist to publish incendiary pamphlets attacking Adams, who retaliated in kind.  It was a smear campaign that would make Lee Atwater blush.  Adams was described as a “blind, bald, crippled, toothless man who is a hideous hermaphroditical character”; Jefferson was called the “mean-spirited, low-lived” offspring of a “half-breed Indian squaw” and a “mulatto father.”  The Federalists were painted as anti-immigrant due to their support of the Alien and Sedition Acts.  The Democratic-Republicans were depicted as bloodthirsty radicals sympathetic to French revolutionaries.

This time, the Democratic-Republicans won out, but Jefferson ended up with the same number of electoral votes as Aaron Burr.  The battleground shifted to the House of Representatives, still controlled by the lame-duck Federalists.  For thirty-five ballots there was gridlock.  Finally Alexander Hamilton, the arch-Federalist and political enemy of both Jefferson and Adams, convinced his coalition to support Jefferson as the lesser of two evils.  That’s why Aaron Burr is not on Mount Rushmore.

As a post-script to how hardcore the politics was in those days, Burr later, while Vice President, shot Hamilton dead with a gun.  It sounds more dashing to describe it as a duel, but they shot at each other with handguns and Burr took out Mr. Ten-Dollar Bill.  Can you imagine Joe Biden doing that to, say, Mitch McConnell?  Burr was charged with murder, but was never prosecuted.  The sensibilities of the times were sensitive enough, though, that his political career was over.

Yes, the process remains undignified, and unscrupulous, and at times downright detestable, and everyone is annoyed by attack ads, partisan media hysteria and snide personal insults.  But at least the candidates are no longer shooting each other with guns in broad daylight.  We’ve come that far.

MAKE MINE MARVEL

To those outside the community of comic book enthusiasts, the distinction between Marvel and DC doubtless takes on the absurd cast of extreme geekiness.  After all, they’re both just brands of comic books, right?  Peddling fungible iterations of the super-hero genre, featuring variations of negligible substance to anyone not polarized by irrational brand loyalty?

Wrong.  You might as well say Protestants and Catholics adhere to functionally equivalent brands of Christianity, or that Democrats and Republicans are interchangeable units of American politics.  The camps we choose to define our alignment, however, are not so arbitrary or trivial.  They harvest our allegiance and foster tribal impulses, not for want of content to fill the vacuum of our identities, but because their fundamental characteristics innately appeal to distinct constituents.

And so it is with Marvel and DC, among the initiates versed in the circumstances.  The basic differences have been ingrained throughout their histories, and run deep in the blood of their fans.  Marvel is the superior product, more sophisticated, more engaging, more innovative.  If someone says they’re into Marvel, chances are it’s a cool person.  When someone prefers DC, I tend to feel embarrassed on their behalf.

Undeniably, DC got there first.  The super-hero comic was invented in 1938 with the introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1, and Batman followed a year after that, the twin pillars of the DC empire.  It was not until several months later that Marvel Comics #1 hit the scene with the early Marvel stars, the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch.  From the beginning, they adopted different approaches.

The DC protagonists were flawlessly heroic, icons of moral rectitude, and rather bland in personality.  Superman was an alien with boundless power, masquerading as a mild-mannered reporter wearing glasses, and Batman was the crime-fighting alter ego of a fabulously wealthy socialite living in a mansion with his butler.  They resided in fictional cities, Metropolis and Gotham, characters removed from ordinary experience in a setting removed from reality.

The Marvel characters were a different breed.  The Human Torch was an android unable to control his destructive powers, feared and hunted as a menace.  The Sub-Mariner was a vengeful prince of an undersea race, with a hatred of humanity and a tendency to launch invasions.  When they met in an epic battle in 1940, they damaged actual landmarks in New York City like the Empire State Building.  The first issue of Captain America was released a year before Pearl Harbor, at a time when popular opinion was sharply divided on whether America should stay out of the war; it featured Cap smashing Adolf Hitler in the jaw.  Marvel heroes were intriguing, confounding, controversial.  They lived in the real world and tackled real world issues.

As anyone familiar with comic book lore well knows, the genre was revolutionized by Marvel in the 1960s.  The new wave of Marvel heroes were nuanced characters with real problems.  The Fantastic Four bickered and disagreed like an actual family.  Iron Man had a serious heart condition.  Thor’s alter ego walked with a cane, Professor X was in a wheelchair and Daredevil was blind.  The Hulk and the Thing were horrified by the monsters they’d become.  In one issue, Spider-Man was threatened with legal action by three hoods he stopped from breaking into a jewelry store, insulted by one of them, soundly defeated by a super-villain, wounded while trying to sew up his costume, bawled out by his boss, snubbed when he had to break a date with a girl, punished for daydreaming in class, humiliated by his classmates, and hated and feared by the general public.

Marvel also wrestled with social issues and matters of consequence.  In 1963, Gabe Jones was a black member of Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos, fully integrated as a team member but a focus of racial tension externally.  The Black Panther was the first mainstream black super-hero, a proud African prince.  Marvel characters faced bankruptcy, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, political corruption.  From time to time, supporting characters actually died.

But reading Marvel comics was neither a maudlin inspection of troubled souls nor an exercise in social conscience.  Most of all, Marvel was fun – full of action, plot twists, high drama and, more than anything, an abundance of humor.  In characterization, vocabulary, intricacy of storytelling, Marvel aimed at the older reader, high school, even college age.  Generations before the advent of social media, Marvel cultivated interaction with its fans, publishing and responding to letters, including a gossipy Bullpen Page in every issue, creating clubs like the Merry Marvel Marching Society, hyping the month’s offerings in the Mighty Marvel Checklist.

Did DC stand still while Marvel conquered the comic book world?  Of course not.  Indeed, over the years there’s been so much cross-migration of artists and writers that you can’t really differentiate in quality on that basis, at least past the Silver Age of the 1960s.  But from that point, Marvel was established as the innovator and DC much more a trend-follower.  To this day, DC is still clunking behind Marvel’s lead in establishing a cinematic universe.  And DC remains moored to its platform of fictional cities and a too-powerful Superman.

So don’t dismiss me as arbitrary or capricious when I say Make Mine Marvel.  It’s the Apple to DC’s PC.  And don’t get me started on Quisp versus Quake.

ASSAULT OF THE FANTASY FOOTBALL SITES

There’s a lot not to like about the bludgeoning onslaught of fantasy football websites and the emerging business model they represent.  Here are my top ten reasons to view this trend with disgust.

The pervasive saturation of television commercials is a downer when you’re trying to watch a game. Where did DraftKings and FanDuel come from, and why are they suddenly dominating the airtime?  It feels like they’re shouting at you.


It all revolves on the dollars. The entire pitch is how you can cash in on the millions and millions being paid out every week.  It has nothing to do with being a fan, or enjoying the game, or engaging in a friendly rivalry with your acquaintances.  You could be betting on anything.  It has all the football appeal of a slot machine.


It’s a sucker bet. The chances of making money are comparable to winning the lottery.  Testimonials from winners are misleading – sure, seems like a regular guy, could be me.  But if they interviewed all the losers, it would be around the clock coverage on every channel.


There’s reason to question the fairness of the wagering. They rely on extracting a massive flow of dollars from a broad swath of the populace wanting to get in on the action described in all those advertisements, but the winnings are skewed heavily in favor of a small cadre of repeat hitters.  There are ongoing investigations, and one of the disturbing allegations is that employees of FanDuel and DraftKings are winning big on each other’s sites.


The league is complicit. The two main sites are not owned by the NFL, but there are saucy endorsement agreements and a ton of paid advertising during televised games.  Dollars are flowing back, at least indirectly, to team owners.  This is turning into a very lucrative side business for the league.


It’s already engendering a secondary wave of parasitic escalators. Once you take the step of giving a daily fantasy site a try, the coaxing begins to increase your investment.  Helpful experts line up to provide you an edge with their tips and advice, for a fee.  Yes, you can play a low-stakes round, but for just a little higher ante you can play for a much bigger pot.  You’re encouraged to chase your losses with more expensive efforts to increase your chances for a larger payoff.


It infects the game coverage. The game-time updates that rotate on the screen no longer focus on which teams are winning, by how much and in what quarter.  Instead, it’s packed with stats about the fantasy-relevant performers for each team.  If you miss the five seconds they show the actual score for a game you care about, it’s ten minutes before it rolls around again.


It skirts the edge of legality. Gambling is at least regulated if not illegal most places, and this quacks like a duck.  I understand online betting on horse races is prohibited, though that similarly involves judging the anticipated performance of athletic competitors, where sophisticated bettors seek out the undervalued and make calculated wagers on longshots.  Betting on the outcome of football games, too, is unlawful, though apparently there’s a loophole for gambling on the constituent components that add up to an entire game.


It poses a risk of undermining the integrity of the game. With this much money revolving on circumstances that are only tangential to the outcome of the game, and the league engaged in fostering its market penetration, it’s not hard to envision the manipulation of fantasy stats infecting decisions on the field.  In the fourth quarter of a lopsided game, do the starters stay on the field?  Makes a difference to the fantasy spreadsheet.


It takes the fun out of a harmless pastime. I played in a fantasy league with some colleagues awhile back and enjoyed it a lot.  We were all football fans.  It made me care about some games that would otherwise lack interest.  It was fun to see who came out ahead each week, and as the season progressed.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  But it’s sad to see a group activity of such unoffending stripe become the cynical platform for a money-sucking industry fueled by a blitzkrieg of hard-sell TV commercials.

THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING, AGAIN

One of the enduring strengths of the zombie genre – beyond the incarnation of death, the taboo of cannibalism and the horror of humans without souls – is the depiction of an apocalypse.  Unlike the typical vampire or werewolf story, the menace of zombies lies not only in the peril and terror experienced by the individual characters, but further in the ultimate collapse of civilization and end of life as we know it.  That dimension of societal cataclysm and even human extinction taps into a root fear that haunts our collective id.

I don’t recall a time when there has not been some imminent threat, in real life, presenting an immediate risk of global destruction.  In grade school, in the waning years of the Cold War, we learned civil defense and survival skills for the nuclear winter.  With a chill of doom, we’d hear about how many times over the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia could kill everyone on the planet, and it always seemed it would only take a trivial international incident to trigger a tragic escalation to mutually assured destruction.

As fear that humankind would end by nuclear war started to fade with glasnost and perestroika, the social consciousness was hit by a threat of disease and the prospect of apocalypse by epidemic.  The chilling spread of AIDS served as a grim reminder that we remained susceptible to devastating pathogens, and could not count on medical science for timely salvation.  The progression slowed outside high-risk populations, and was impeded by the transmission mechanism, but it wasn’t hard to imagine a more contagious strain, or a new virus, that would wipe out everyone.

The end of the dinosaurs used to be a subject of debate, and there was a sense of resolution when the scientific community coalesced around the asteroid explanation.  But the idea that a rock the size of Maryland might fall out of the sky and crash into the earth with such devastating force that over two thirds of the species on the planet would become extinct was, at the same time, rather disturbing.  The more we learn about the random clutter of space and the dynamics of solar flares and the like, the less secure we can feel that the end is not hurling our way at this moment through the blackness.

And now, of course, there’s a growing comprehension that we may ourselves have poisoned the atmosphere to a tipping point of apocalypse by climate change.  Politicians who assert they are not scientists and refuse to hear the tolling bell of fate can offer little comfort in this, the latest portent of the end of times.

The coming end is nothing new.  There are flood myths in many cultures.  The Vikings had a vision of Ragnarok.  For Christians, there’s the Book of Revelations, the Second Coming, the Rapture, the Final Judgment.  There was a widespread belief that the year 1000 would bring the end of the world, which was a major selling point in the conversion of the pagan north to Christianity at that time.  The Black Death struck like the terrible judgment of an angry deity.

Before Christmas was celebrated, the pagan holiday of Yule was observed in late December.  Why then?  Because that’s the first point when you can tell the days have stopped getting shorter and are starting to get longer.  I suspect from very early on, people watched the gradual disappearance of sunlight with trepidation, imagining a continued progression to death in the cold darkness.  Each year, the turn of the corner with lengthening days came as a tremendous relief, apocalypse averted one more time.

Some doomsday scenarios are more plausible than others.  But maybe the bonds of social structure that bring order to our lives and the ecological balance on which our very existence depends are indeed so fragile and delicate that we survive on the precipice of a perpetual cliff.  One thing is sure: the insecurity of losing it all is deeply entrenched and we can expect the fear that civilization will collapse and humanity will be extinguished will trouble future generations to come.

The delightful paradox of human psychology is that the horrific prospect of Armageddon is recognized as an obsession and exploited for its entertainment value.  Consider the hysteria surrounding Y2K, where everyone was glued to the television on New Year’s Eve, eating metaphorical popcorn while waiting to see if computer glitches would crash power grids or cause missiles to launch themselves.  Or 2012, which had the right panache for a Hollywood disaster movie.  Sure, you could discount Nostrodamus or the Mayans as reliable guides for what to expect, but with two independent dubious sources agreeing on a particular year there remained a sliver of doubt that there just might be something to it.

Which brings us back to zombies, whose world-ending escapades are a source of delight for hordes of fans who know full well nothing like that is actually going to happen.  Unless, of course, a zombie apocalypse might be a possibility.

THE INFINITE REGRESSION OF SHAMING

“Shaming” has become a thing.  I don’t mean the use of social ridicule to induce guilt in individuals or groups for some specified conduct or characteristic.  That kind of shaming has been around since the invention of society, and has always been a thing.  The more recent development, though, involves use of the word “shaming” to express criticism for an offensive instance of ridicule.

That use of “shaming” is typically preceded by a hyphenated subject reference, like “fat-shaming” or “slut-shaming.”  The context is regularly in the nature of a scolding, calling out someone for insensitive or hateful words that inappropriately target, say, someone else’s appearance.  In defense of the person being unjustly persecuted, the speaker is accused of “shaming” and by that label is identified as cruel, vicious or otherwise wrong-headed.

Call it shame-shaming.  The practitioners often do not appear to be conscious they are themselves engaging in second-degree shaming.  That is, they are saying “shame on you” to others for the act of shaming.  They are calling on the audience to scorn the shamer.  Like the offender, they seek to invoke social pressure to induce a sense of guilt and to elicit a consensus that the conduct in question (the instance of shaming) is unacceptable.

For those who speak in terms of the dictates of Society, as in Society forces women to adhere to a narrow definition of beauty, shame-shaming stands as a counterweight.  Outside of some extremes like child pornography or torturing kittens, Society rarely endorses a singular position or articulates a unified view.  More often, there are conflicting voices with a chaotic array of opinions, competing to attain ascendancy in the public consciousness.  Shaming is a tool of social conditioning, and shame-shaming equally serves that function in shaping the judgment of Society.

“Shaming,” furthermore, seems to be trending into a pejorative epithet, in the vein of “bashing,” which is rarely used in an approving sense.  But not all shaming is nasty and unjustified.  Ask the dentist who killed Cecil the lion.  Or Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund guy whose company bought the rights to a cancer/AIDS drug and jacked up the price from $13.50 to $750 a pop.  For a more nuanced example, suppose someone chews out a cousin who shows up intoxicated to a family reunion.  Is that drunk-shaming?  Does the propriety of the shaming depend on the status of alcoholism as a disease?

That’s not to say, of course, that shaming is always justified or shame-shaming is never the correct reaction.  Nicole Arbour stirred up a controversy with her infamous rant against fat people.  The manner of presentation was as a comedy piece, which certainly can be a vehicle for biting social commentary, and it’s not necessarily wrong for a comedian to be offensive.  The problem is the diatribe wasn’t funny.  Funny doesn’t justify everything, but without funny it’s clearly not out of line to call her out of line.

As a practice, shaming is neither inherently abusive nor invariably legitimate.  It typically denotes a split in perspective, because someone occasioned the reaction in the first place and the shamer is expressing a contrary pronouncement in the form of a community determination.  That in itself is apt to provoke retaliation where the public is divided.  Shame-shaming, then, reflects competing visions for what “we” really think.  And it’s a debate at a remove, a reaction to a reaction, mirror on mirror.

To the extent I’m challenging the push to turn “shaming” into a dirty word, this is an exercise in shame-shame-shaming.  Anyone care to shame me?

MONSTER ARCHETYPES IN THE ODYSSEY

The horror genre reaches back into the primeval fears of our psyches, the demons buried deep in the collective subconscious, the fundamental terror of the human condition.  But how much have people changed over the course of recorded history?  The faces of ancient times are such distant shadows of our own experiences, so alien in culture and superstition, what themes of dread and fright could we expect to share in common with the inhabitants of a world so far removed from our modern frame of mind?  The answer, actually, is quite a lot.

One of the most ancient works of surviving literature is The Odyssey, the epic verse recounting the tale of Odysseus and his decade of wandering as he tries to return home after the fall of Troy.  Attributed to Homer, it was set down in writing somewhere around the 8th century B.C., but almost certainly reflects an oral tradition already old at that time, describing events on the order of four hundred years earlier.  So at, say, three thousand years in the past, the tale of Odysseus provides an insightful window into the sources of terror haunting our earliest antecedents.

Of course, The Odyssey is not predominantly a horror story and has a lot more to it than a parade of monsters.  The fearsome creatures encountered by Odysseus exemplify the extremes of his trials, serve as foils for his ingenuity and determination, and illustrate the terrifying threats lurking in the terra incognita beyond the edges of Greek civilization.  But key passages do work as straight-up scary stories, and I don’t think that dimension was lost on the audiences of the time.  The ancient Greeks knew how to spin a good yarn, and clearly could appreciate the chills and jolts of a decent monster story.

The most famous is Polyphemus, the dreaded Cyclops.  Massive, brutal, strong enough to heave huge boulders from the shore at a departing ship, and, best of all, with the iconic single eye in the center of the forehead.  You just have to hand it to the Greeks for classic imagery.  This creature is humanoid, able to converse, but happy to dash the brains of a few sailors against the rocks and consume them in front of their terrified companions.  This is a monster who would function in the same horrifying capacity in a modern horror film.  With the mass, strength, homicidal urges and an element of facial deformity, Polyphemus is not unlike the grisly protagonists of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the Thirteenth.

Of a similar stripe and equally horrific are the lesser known Laestrygonians.  These are a seemingly civilized people with a village, a chief and a marketplace, yet contrary to the basic laws of hospitality they respond to a polite greeting by attacking and devouring Odysseus’s men.  The appearance of social order, masking bloodlust and cannibalism, is a regular hook in modern horror, from vampire stories to Children of the Corn.

There’s a pretty good witch in The Odyssey, Circe, a seductress who turns the sailors into pigs.  Another shape-shifting element is the demi-god Proteus, who transforms into various creatures in an effort to escape a wrestling grip.  Witches are standard Halloween icons now, and shape-shifters like werewolves and vampires are common horror staples.

The sea is a fertile source of horrific predators, and The Odyssey features several examples.  The Sirens hypnotize sailors with their compelling song, drawing them in to wreck on the rocks.  Scylla is a classic six-headed sea monster.  Charybdis is a consuming whirlpool, a colossal personification of nature’s fury.

On top of all that, there’s a visit to the Underworld, mixing the torments of the damned (including Tantalus and Sisyphus) with creepy ghost stories.  There’s a chilling passage where Odysseus journeys to the dark edge of the beyond and fills a trench with the blood of sacrificial sheep, drawing the bloodthirsty shades forward to drink: “And now the souls of the dead who had gone below came swarming up from Erebus – fresh brides, unmarried youths, old men with life’s long suffering behind them, tender young girls still nursing this first anguish in their hearts, and a great throng of warriors killed in battle, their spear-wounds gaping yet and all their armor stained with blood.  From this multitude of souls, as they fluttered to and fro by the trench, there came a moaning that was horrible to hear.”  That, droogs, is real horrorshow.

Put it all together, and you’ve got a decent cross-section of the same kind of creatures that haunt modern visions of horror.  Recognizing that the primary thrust of The Odyssey is not to frighten the audience, it is nevertheless apparent that the scary parts of the story retain their force three thousand years later.  And I bet in another three millennia that will still be true.