Foster Dickson's Blog, page 69

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #158

I was left with a question, though: what makes kids more or less willing to stand by someone who’s being attacked? Only in the last few years have researchers begun to answer that question. They’ve found that defending victims is linked to showing greater empathy, as you might expect. But it also has a lot to do with who your friends are, at least for boys.

That finding comes from an intriguing study by Dorothy Espelage, the research psychologist as the University of Illinois. In 2011, she created a map of the social networks of the sixth and seventh grades of an Illinois school. Espelage found that the boys who were in friendship groups with higher levels of bullying were less willing to intervene, even if they weren’t the bullies themselves. The upshot: prevention efforts won’t work well if they ignore the level of bullying within different social groups. “It’s blind adult hope to think that kids will just stand up for each other,” she told me. “You can try to instill in kids a sense of personal responsibility to help victims, but they’ll still look to what their peers are doing and ask, ‘Will they still be my friends?'”

– from Chapter Four, “Monique,” in Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon.

Filed under: Education, Schools, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: bullying, character, editing, empathy, High School, middle school, teaching, writing

Things.

I’m in my office, scanning a three-rack stack of old cassette tapes. As my finger runs down the middle column of the lower rack, there are Keith Richard’s Main Offender, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, The Best of the Band . . . Like everything in those racks, each tape has its own story. I can remember liking “Wicked As It Seems” after I saw the video on MTV, a black-and-white montage that featured a near-elderly Keith Richards emerging from the darkness to mumble his lyrics. I can remember discovering T. Rex after seeing that iconic image of Marc Bolan, face covered and top hat on, the look that Slash was copying. I can remember buying The Band’s album as a primer to that group I’d heard about, the one that backed up Bob Dylan in the ’60s.

And I don’t want to throw them away.

Some of the hundreds of tapes in those racks don’t even play anymore. Every once in a while, when I’m feeling nostalgic, I’ll pop in various ones of them to find that the spools won’t budge. I try flipping it over, rewinding and fast-forwarding— nothing. I try using a pencil to loosen it up manually— nothing. Then I have to make that decision: Do I throw it away? Maybe . . .

I can remember when tapes became a thing. In the early 1980s, my brother and I used to buy new music at a record store in the open-air arcade of the now-dilapidated Normandale Mall. The albums had unusual prices, like $7.69 or $8.29, proclaimed on a bright-colored sticker attached to the plastic wrap, and singles in their paper sleeves were usually a little over a buck. But you couldn’t carry an LP and a record player with you. And then came tapes! And the Walkman.

Those racks of tapes symbolize my youth. My mother bought them for me, one by one, as she grew increasingly frustrated by the piles of music laying all over my teenage bedroom. Those disparate titles testify to my changing tastes. Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil and Megadeth’s Peace Sells . . . But Who’s Buying and— oh my goodness, Danzig, with their comic-book villain doomsday metal. And Anthrax’s attempt at rap, I’m the Man. I look, and then wonder what I was thinking when I was 14 and 15. Then I went classic: Steppenwolf, Hendrix, The Doors, The Band, Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Dylan, and Van Morrison. That was 16 and 17. Then it hit: “alternative.” I’ve still got my required listening – Nevermind and Ten and Nothing’s Shocking and Hole’s self-titled album and everything Sonic Youth did up to Dirty and BloodSugarSexMagik and August and Everything After and a couple of REM albums – with some other oddities: The Dead Milkmen’s Smoking Banana Peels, My Life with a Thrill Kill Kult’s Kooler Than Jesus, and a couple of Taang!-era Lemonheads albums. Those document 18 and 19 and 20— later I settled down from grunge, let my goatee grow into a full beard, slowed down the tempo, and accepted my eclectic tastes: James Taylor and Widespread Panic, CSN and Neil Young, Victoria Williams and the Dead, Chris Whitley and Gordon Lightfoot.

And I don’t want to throw them away. Though I’m right now chuckling at the person I was when I put so much stock in those songs, those outdated relics need to stay where they are and continue collecting dust.

Because I’m not reconciled to all that yet. I may be forty-something, married with kids, and I may spend my time worrying about lesson plans and healthcare premiums, but I still haven’t made sense of the shit that went down when I was a teenager. Even though I question the quality of the music that those miles of tape contain, I also still question the events and the people and the attitudes that made me seek solace in those lyrics and those melodies and those sounds. I may be middle-aged, but I’m not dead.

Last week, my wife and I watched a documentary called The Minimalists, and in it two guys are promoting their get-happy-now theories by encouraging people to buy into a pared-down way of life. Both insist that, once they cut out all of the unnecessary things, all the clutter and stuff, true contentment came. Of course, they want people to buy their book – more stuff – and learn how to pare down, too. After listening to their spiel for a bit, I thought to myself, Maybe I’ll look around and throw away a few things, too. And that went pretty well, as I got rid of a whole paper-box full of books. I tossed The Milagro Beanfield War, a novel that I like better as a movie, and Why Priests?, a Gary Wills book whose argument I lost track of somewhere around Melchizedek. I also tossed most of the mass-market editions of DH Lawrence novels that I devoured in my twenties, a Walt Whitman-centered history of America, and some novels from grad school courses. But among those easy fixes were others that it wasn’t possible to part with: weathered copies Anais Nin’s diaries and Henry Miller’s two Tropics, my tattered and scribbled-upon copy of the British scavenger-hunt book Masquerade, an oral history of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers called Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You, a book about the VideoFreex, A Grove Press/Black Cat copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Enid Starkie’s biography of Rimbaud, and a passel of autographed poetry books.

[image error]These “minimalists,” these tiny-house freaks— what do they do about these kinds of meaningful things? I’m sorry, but my things do make me happy. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve stopped once or twice to glance at my large yellow Easy Rider poster from the Cannes Film Festival, which declares, “Un uomo e partito invano all ricerca dell America!…” I don’t even know what that means, and in twenty-five years I’ve never bothered to find out, but my high school girlfriend gave it to me at a time when I thought nothing could be cooler than riding a motorcycle across the country. Now, I think my butt would hurt by the time I reached the state line— but that poster has meaning, at least it does for me.

I agree wholeheartedly that consumer culture – our massive national habit of needlessly purchasing useless crap – constitutes a really scary and stupid trend. Though I used to spend lonely Saturdays in my twenties browsing used-book stores and leaving there with arms full of esoteric garbage that I rarely read, I’m now much more pensive about my purchases— especially since I now have a mortgage, more unsecured debt than I should have, and children who always seem to want something. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, doesn’t it, between rampant waste and obsessive austerity?

Having things isn’t so bad, but I’ve also gotten to see what becomes of all those things. As an adult, I’ve experienced the deaths of three different men who were all close to my life: my stepfather in 1999, my father in 2011, and my father-in-law last year. In all three cases, beyond the grief and the other emotions, after the funeral arrangements are made and the burial is complete, the survivors have to deal with all their stuff. The small mementos are easy – the trinkets and trifles that had some personal meaning to the man’s life – but the bulk is not. Closets full of clothes to load up and donate, and personal items to throw out: forgotten paperwork from decades past, shaving kits and toiletries, and a hodge-podge of unfashionable dishes, mismatched silverware, and scratched-up pots and pans. A few years after my father died, my stepsister brought me a box of his things, among them his high-sheen Marine Corps windbreaker. I had always thought that bright-red, puffy thing looked ridiculous on him, and after it spent a few years in my attic – out of respect – I really enjoyed throwing it in the trash.

When I go, my family will have a real task, and will probably think some of my things equally ridiculous. In our attic, I’ve got boxes of torn-out pages from old magazines like the Village Voice, Interview, and Ray Gun, Last Gasp catalogs, some of the first issues of No Depression and Oxford American, and old photographs of people they won’t know. I’ve gotten slightly less counter-culture and slightly more high-brow in middle age; now I keep torn-out pages from The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. I used to keep all of the issues, whole, but during one of those clean-outs, I talked myself into a new habit: only keeping the pages I was interested in. Though I won’t get to – I’ll be dead – I’d love to see my kids’ faces if they go through those boxes! They won’t even know which side of the page mattered.

If a person were considering one of these minimalist binges, I would recommend reading Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon first. I read that book when Doty came to Auburn University at Montgomery as a Weil Fellow in 2008, and it was the focus of his talk. Doty writes about “the adult recognition that the things of the world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest them may not persist, may be visible to no one else, that even that which seems to us most profoundly saturated in passion and feeling may be swept away.” We love our stuff, and that’s OK, as long as we understand that it isn’t actually our stuff, not permanently.

I would also encourage a potential purge-addict to think about something that Sonia Sanchez said during her reading at the 2011 Alabama Book Festival. Sanchez flowed freely between reciting from her book and conversing with the audience for about an hour, and she told an anecdote about a shawl she once had. She had been wearing it at a reading at a college and left it on the chair, forgetting about it when she left. Sanchez told us that she lamented losing the shawl, but not too much. Years later, she had an opportunity to go back to that same college, and while there she visited the woman who had hosted the reading. When she arrived at the woman’s house, there was the shawl spread across the back of the couch, and the woman proudly explained how much she liked it and was glad to have it. Rather than demanding her possession be returned, Sanchez took a different, more poetic attitude about it: what once belonged to me as a shawl, which was given as a gift from a friend, now has a new life as a couch covering, which was left behind by a poet.

Over the years, that spirit has taken hold of me, too. Once, probably six or seven school years ago, I packed up all of the graphic t-shirts that my weight-gain had made unseemly, and I spread them out on a table for my students to take. Once, I went through my bookshelves and chose for each of my senior creative-writing students one book to give as a gift, something I thought they’d like, and explained to each why I chose that book. A few years ago, I went through my stack of vinyl albums and sent about half of them to a friend in Pensacola who actually has a record player. (That worked out well, since he sent me back a bottle of Blanton’s.)

I’ve got this office where I go and work. It’s upstairs and only has one small window, which I usually leave open. Here, I’m surrounded by those tapes, a couple hundred more CDs and vinyl albums, books and old magazines, a couple of guitars and my Fender Princeton 65, and plenty of knickknacks collected over a few decades for reasons that only I know. When I come here to write, I sit in my swivel chair at my small two-drawer writing desk, which my mother bought for me when I declared that I wanted to be a writer. It came from a Bombay & Co. store that closed years ago, and is easily the most elegant thing in this pop-culture mish-mash of a space. I have two full bookshelves up here; one was made by the grandfather I was named for, and the other was given to me by my late stepfather. Despite its low ceiling and piles of literary/musical/artistic debris, this room is mine. It’s the place where I feel most at home, because no matter which way I whirl in my swivel chair, my many memories – my things – are everywhere.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Generation X, Music, Random Tagged: books, family, indie music, materialism, meaning, stuff, tapes, things

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #157

This much I will concede: Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside of ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough – at the world, in history – to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.

– from Chapter Six, “In Defense of Today’s Youth,” in In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: close reading, Critical Thinking, editing, fareed zakaria, liberal education, teaching, writing

“American Happiness,” Best Book of 2016!

[image error]I have to take a minute this week to congratulate my friend Jacqueline Trimble on having her new volume of poems, American Happiness, to be named Best Book of 2016 by the Seven Sisters Book Awards. It is available in hardcover for $21.95, from NewSouth Books.

I’ve gotten to hear Jackie read from American Happiness twice in the last year: the first time when my students and I hosted her during the Three Mondays of Poetry program last April, and again at the book release event at the Fitzgerald Museum in Old Cloverdale. Not only are the poems in the book, “written with passion and beauty,” her readings enhance them even more. Among the brief remarks under the award announcement, the Seven Sisters folks had this to say, too: “With truth and loveliness, these poems will take your breath away.”

The guidelines of the Seven Sisters Book Awards are as follows:

Books must be authored or co-authored by a woman. Co-authored books are eligible for the awards, but a female author must have played a significant role in authoring the book.

Filed under: Alabama, Literature, Poetry, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, American Happiness, Jacqueline Trimble, Literature, poetry, women

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #156

This is the 156th installment of “A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week.” For the last three years, I’ve been taking a minute each week to share a short passage from something I am reading or have read, which pertained to the work of a writer or of working with writers (editing, teaching). This anniversary seems like a good time to say, “Thank you,” to all of the people who have taken a minute of their own to read them!

And so, here’s this week’s quote:

Americans with college degrees are to the left of the majority of Americans who lack a college degree. And a new study by the Pew Research Center shows that those who have attended graduate school are even farther to the left than those who have only an undergraduate degree.

The relationship between education levels and politics isn’t modest, but it is significant, the study found.

Among those with graduate education of some form, 31 percent hold consistently liberal positions based on an analysis of their opinions about the role and performance of government, social issues, the environment and other topics. Another 23 percent hold mostly liberal positions. Only 10 percent hold consistently conservative positions, and 17 percent hold mostly conservative positions.

– from “More Educated, More Liberal” by Scott Jaschik, published in April 2016 on Inside Higher Ed

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: conservative, editing, Education, higher education, liberal, teaching, writing

Could close reading save the world?

New criticism. Close reading. Explication. Annotation. Call it what you will, but most anyone who has ever been a middle- and high-school student has done at least one of these in an English class at some point. The teacher handed out a poem or a story, probably double-spaced, and told the students to write all over it, to underline and comment on the literary devices, to makes notes on thematic passages, to dissect it like a frog in the lab and examine the working parts. You might have even written a paper to explain the whole process. And if you did this as a student, you probably hated it, resented it, and tried to get it over with.

But your teachers were trying to teach you a valuable skill, one that is vital to an understanding of language and also to citizenship.

When we do close readings in my creative writing classes, I always remind my students: lots of people can read a story and proclaim either “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it”— but few of them know why. The analogy that I like to use involves driving: lots of people can get in a car, crank it up, get to a destination, park it, and get out. But not many can raise the hood and have any clue about what’s happening under there. Most people wouldn’t know a slipping transmission from a misfiring piston, just as most people wouldn’t know a logical fallacy from a malapropism. The level of skill required for a surface-level reading is no greater than a common driver’s ability to turn a steering wheel and press the gas and brake. But the skill required to do a close reading is that of the mechanic, who recognizes what is out of whack, and that it needs to be fixed.

Anyone who has either of those skills – the ability to read in-depth or to fix a car – has something valuable. The ability to read a novel, a poem, a news article, or a contract, then get into it and derive both explicit and implicit messages— that skill will carry any reader further into comprehension than the surface-level reader is able to go. Why does that matter? Because many, many people in this world manipulate words to their own advantage – politicians, lawyers, corporations, advertisers, salespeople – and being able to see through the façade into the truth can make all the difference.

This real-world difference is what us literary types call “criticism.” It is greater than “appreciation,” which is only a surface-level experience. Though, in real life, we would rather be appreciated than criticized, when it comes to reading texts, the opposite is true. Criticism is far greater. Appreciation is a matter of getting through the text and only being able to say, “It’s good. I liked it.”

Sometimes we hear the snarky comment, “Everyone’s a critic”— No, no they aren’t. My dad used to be fond of saying, “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one, and they all stink.” However vulgar that may be, it’s equally true. Everyone isn’t a critic, because too many people resent having to read and think deeply, both of which could have been learned by participating fully in close readings in school. Making a negative comment – being critical – doesn’t make someone a critic. Without the ability to read deeply and think critically about a text or a film or a news article or a political speech, the only interpretation possible is a surface-level interpretation, one that can only take the words at face value. Believing that everyone’s opinions constitute “criticism” would be like believing that every driver on the road could pull over and tune up the car’s engine. Put simply, they just can’t.

Every year, I begin my classes by covering Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which depicts metaphorically how people who are imprisoned in the darkness (of ignorance) mistake shadows for real things. Then one prisoner gets to leave the cave, and of course, the light (of knowledge) hurts his eyes, but they do adjust. Plato lived about 2,400 years ago, in ancient Greece, but his message is still true: a person who only knows ignorance is likely satisfied with it, because he doesn’t know any different. That person’s initial transition into the light, which symbolizes learning, will be hard and painful, but once that transition is made, the clarity provided by that light will makes his life so much better. Once a person is out in the light, he or she is no longer a “prisoner.”

In general, students dislike doing a close reading. They complain that it’s hard, that it’s time-consuming, that it’s not fun— and they’re right, on all counts. But to be a competent citizen in a democracy, a person must learn to read (or listen) well, to analyze language and its usage, and to think critically about the words that have been proffered. All of those skills pay dividends far beyond the classroom. For example, these skills would be useful when we encounter charismatic demagogues who promise to reinvigorate and protect our society by doing things that aren’t actually good ideas.

Like that prisoner in Plato’s allegory, we all hesitate to abandon darkness in favor of light, often because we’re frightened of what we might see. We often take solace in “the devil we know,” clinging tightly to the myths that have sustained us— myths like the us-versus-them paradigms that establish The Other as monstrous and evil and lurking, just waiting for the opportunity to strike, destroying everything that is good in our lives. When those myths are scrutinized in the light, they’re often exposed for what they are: paranoid misconceptions that are driven by surface-level understanding. We hear the words, we don’t think about them, we just accept them as truths.

And though you may have resented your English teacher for making you do those boring, time-consuming, difficult close readings, just look on the bright side, and then you’ll know why.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, Literature, Reading, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: Allegory of the Cave, close reading, creative writing, Plato, teaching, The New Criticism, writing

“First Lady of the Revolution” @ The Capri

This coming Sunday, January 29, Montgomery’s Capri Theatre will screen the documentary, “First Lady of the Revolution,” about our city’s own Henrietta Boggs MacGuire.

If you miss the screening, check the film’s website for more dates and other information.

Filed under: Alabama, Film/Movies, Local Issues, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, Capri Theatre, documentary, film, Henrietta Maguire, montgomery, movie [image error]

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #155

[Stanford University science historian Robert] Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

It comes from agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or ‘not knowing’, and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.

– from “The man who studies the spread of ignorance” by Georgina Kenyon, published in January 2016 on BBC – Future

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Education, Teaching, Writing and Editing Tagged: agnosis, corporate, editing, fake news, misleading, Robert Proctor, Stanford, teaching, writing [image error] [image error]

Brent Cobb on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts

Earlier this week, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts featured Brent Cobb from Ellaville, Georgia. This guy is worth a listen. I haven’t really had the time to digest this little feature well enough to write about it, so I’ll just share it and leave it to you to decide for yourself.

http://www.npr.org/templates/event/embeddedVideo.php?storyId=509702519&mediaId=509717049

Filed under: Georgia, Music Tagged: Brent Cobb, georgia, music, NPR, Tiny Desk

We may be last in everything else . . .

By now, there can’t be a single college football fan in this whole nation who doesn’t know about the University of Alabama’s current stature. Though the Crimson Tide lost the big game last week, we can’t ignore four national championships in the last eight years: in 2009, 2011, and 2012 under the BCS system, and in 2015 under the new FBS system. We certainly all knew that ‘Bama would beat #4 Washington, and move on to play Clemson in the title game this year (though I doubt if as many of us foresaw a Clemson victory). But there’s more to college football in the state of Alabama than just the Crimson Tide and Nick Saban’s “process.”

Did you know that the University of North Alabama’s football team went 11-2 this year – 7-0 in their conference – which took them to the Division II national championship? Unfortunately, they also got beat in the big game, by a Northwest Missouri State team that ended the season with a 15-0 record. UNA’s only other loss was in their season-opener against another small college in Alabama, Jacksonville State— more on them in a moment. So, in addition to having the FBS runner-up, the state of Alabama also has the #2 team in Division II.

About Jacksonville State, who are an FCS team, they ended their season in early December with a 10-2 overall record, and their 7-0 record in the Ohio Valley Conference made them the conference champs. During the regular season, Jax State’s only loss was to LSU, a team that stood up to the Crimson Tide, though they were defeated by Youngstown State in the first round of the FCS playoffs. They had gone into the playoffs ranked #2 in the FCS, and ended as #6.

In Division II with UNA, the Tuskegee Golden Tigers racked up a good record too, with 9 wins and 3 losses, and finished #20 in the rankings. The team went 6-1 in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SIAC), and were ranked in the top-ten in both HBCU college football polls. The Golden Tigers also went to the Div. II playoffs, where they beat Newberry in the first round, then got beat by North Greenville in the second round.

In Division III, the Huntingdon Hawks, whose Charles Lee Field is a few blocks from my house, went 9-2 this year. The team was 6-1 in the USA South Conference, making them conference champs. After going undefeated at home, the Hawks went to the Div. III playoffs but lost in the first round. Though most people don’t follow these small schools’ seasons, to show how tough it is, that 9-2 record left Huntingdon at #25 in the rankings. (There were nine undefeated teams in the Div. III Top 25.)

Because we don’t need anyone else writing another single word about the Crimson Tide for now, I’ll ignore them and go on to other FBS teams in Alabama that had good seasons. My Auburn Tigers started off rough with losses to now-national champs Clemson and Texas A&M, then picked up for a time, but ended by losing to our two biggest rivals, Georgia and Alabama. The Tigers ended the regular season at 8-4, ranked #14 in the FBS, and played the #7 Oklahoma Sooners in the Sugar Bowl. Auburn lost that game after quarterback Sean White broke his forearm in the first half.

Then there’s the Troy University Trojans, who finished 10-3, with 6-2 record in the Sunbelt Conference, putting them in 3rd place. Troy had their best start ever as an FBS team and achieved their first ten-win season in the big leagues by beating Ohio in the Dollar General Bowl by a score of 28-23.

Among the other smaller schools in the state, the results were mixed. The University of South Alabama Jaguars’ 6-6 record sent them to their first-ever bowl game, where they got beat by Air Force 45-21. The Samford University football team finished with a respectable 7-5 record but were also defeated in the FCS playoffs by Youngstown State. Samford ended the season ranked #23 in the FCS. The Faulkner Eagles had a winning record of 6 wins and 4 losses, with a Mid-South Conference record of 3-2. They finished 3rd in Mid-South’s West Division. The University of West Alabama Tigers also did well with a 7-4 record, 6-2 in the Gulf South Conference, putting them in 3rd behind conference champs University of North Alabama. Miles College broke even at 5-5.

Despite all those teams doing so well in 2016, the state of Alabama did have teams with losing records. Alabama State and Alabama A&M both went 4-7, and then there’s Birmingham-Southern College with a dismal 1-9 record. (The University of Alabama-Birmingham did not field a team this year, but will re-start its football program next season.)

Football is a legendary thing in the state of Alabama – and all around the South – and most folks say that the mythic status has its starting point at Alabama’s Rose Bowl victory in 1926, in which the Crimson Tide traveled all the way across the country to beat the Washington Huskies. The Encyclopedia of Alabama‘s entry on the game explains:

Many southerners saw the Rose Bowl game as an opportunity to bring prestige and honor back to their region that had been ravaged by the Civil War. Even 60 years after the conflict, many older southerners remembered the war, and many more remembered Reconstruction. The South also was motivated by a national press that was critical of almost anything associated with the South, from the size of the southern brain cavity to the quality of its football.

It has been ninety years since that trip to Pasadena, and we’ve definitely shown the rest of the country that our football programs have quality. The two things that I’m not so sure about are: what beating a team from Washington state had to do with the Civil War, and whether we’ve yet to discredit that brain-cavity controversy. You don’t have to look very hard to see that the state of Alabama lands near the bottom of most national rankings in quality-of-life categories. You also don’t have to look very hard to see that our football teams often land near the top of their rankings.

I have heard people lament, “If we put the resources and energy into education that we put into football, we wouldn’t have the problems we have.” True enough, but we don’t put our best energy into things that could actually improve people’s lives. Alabamians will flood into game day, pay $25 for a team t-shirt, $50 (or more) for a ticket, and $4 for a hot dog, but those same people will vehemently oppose raising their taxes to improve state services. I say that not to endorse it, but to acknowledge the bitter pill that all would-be reformers have to swallow eventually: our culture, which values football more than almost anything, isn’t going change. We’ll keep failing at public administration, but we’ll keep winning on the gridiron.

Filed under: Alabama, College Football, Local Issues, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, College Football, Education, poverty, social justice