Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 143

Is Baseball A Religion?

As October nears, George Will answers the question this way:

Part of the beauty of baseball, and sport generally, is that it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s valued for itself. Now, it can be the pursuit of excellence. It is competition tamed and made civil by rules. It is aggression channeled in a wholesome direction. These are all virtues. They tiptoe up to the point and stop well short of giving baseball meaning. It’s a game. It’s a very pretty, demanding, and dangerous game.

I do think that baseball satisfies a longing in people, particularly urban people. There is a vestigial tribal impulse in all of us. For instance, when you get on the L and the cars begin to fill up with people wearing their Cub blue and you’re all going to the same place for the same reason, for about three hours a little community exists. It disperses after three hours, but it will come back tomorrow.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about what he called the “liberal expectancy.” He said that with the coming of modernity the two drivers of history, religion and ethnicity, would lose their saliency. Sport caters to this and entertains this desire for group identification. But there’s nothing transcendent about baseball.

(Photo from 2012 Giants-Padres game by Joel Henner)

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Poor Choices

Linda Tirado, author of Hand To Mouth, explains why the poor often make terrible decisions:

I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing?

Dreher, who was initially sympathetic to Tirado, had second thoughts after a reader dug up a 2013 hit piece on her. In an interview with Danielle Kurtzleben, Tirado defends herself against such attacks:

DK: You were accused of being a hoax after that “Poverty Thoughts” essay came out. Is that flaring up again now, with your book coming out? What’s your response to all that?

LT: I’m a published author at this point, and The Nation did a very, very good job of reporting on that. But most of the criticism I’ve seen centers around my decision-making processes. What I see a lot of is people talking about like things I have to explain — like why did you do this or why did you do that? A lot of people are confused about how I couldn’t, for instance, feed myself when I could pay my electric bill.

The Guardian also caught up with Tirado:

[Q.] Were you expecting what happened after your essay was published?

[A.] Oh, God, no! I was just on a message board. I was just talking to my friends the same way I’d done for many years. Then I went to bed, and then I went to work. It took me about two weeks to realise I was awake because I was pretty sure I was having a really fucked-up dream. There is no processing what happens when the internet looks at you and says: it’s your turn. It was insane: people were outside my house, they were calling my elderly relatives, I got 20,000 emails in a week. I still have no idea why it was this piece at this moment; it’s nothing me and my friends haven’t been saying for years. I don’t understand why it was controversial. Period.

Meanwhile, Andrea Louise Campbell, author of Trapped In The Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle, shares another harrowing story of poverty:

In February 2012 my sister-in-law Marcella was in a car accident on her way to nursing school, where she was working towards a career which she hoped would catapult her and my brother Dave into middle-class security. Instead, the accident plunged them into the world of American poverty programs. Marcella is now a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down. She needs round-the-clock personal care and assistance.

The only source – public or private – for a lifetime of such coverage is Medicaid. But because Medicaid is the government health insurance for the poor, she and my brother must be poor in order to qualify. (Medicare does not cover long-term supports and services, and private long-term care insurance is time-limited and useless to a 32-year-old who needs decades of care). Thus, Marcella and Dave embarked on a hellish journey to lower their income and shed their modest assets to meet the state limits for Medicaid coverage.

To meet the income requirement, my brother reduced his work hours to make just 133 percent of the poverty level (around $2,000 per month for their family). Anything he earns above that amount simply goes to Medicaid as their “share of cost” – a 100-percent tax.

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Face Of The Day

A man takes a picture with his mobile phone of a pro-democracy protest on Nathan Road, a major route through the heart of the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, on September 29, 2014. Police fired tear gas as tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators brought parts of central Hong Kong to a standstill on September 28, in a dramatic escalation of protests that have gripped the semi-autonomous Chinese city for days. By Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images.

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Take It As Unread

Mallory Ortberg kicks off a Toast thread by coming clean about the books and TV shows she’s only pretended to know:

I will get the ball rolling: I have never seen The Wire. I have seen the pilot for Friday Night Lights three times and the pilot for The West Wing four; I have never seen any other episode for either show. I have never gotten more than three chapters into Lucky Jim because it wasn’t funny and also I hated it. At least two separate friends have lent me their cherished copies of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and I have returned their copies to both of them unopened. I have never read Octavia Butler and I’ve gone for so long without admitting it, I don’t know how I’ll get on after confessing. …

I have read two Chelsea Handler autobiographies. This is not germane to the topic, but I felt the need to confess. I read the first half and the last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov but skipped most of the important stuff. I do not know if I have ever read Camille Paglia. I have a vague idea of who she is — in my mind she is a little bit connected with Fran Leibowitz? — and I know a lot of my friends get mad about her. That’s pretty much it.

I have never read Infinite Jest. I have done my best to give the impression that I have in conversation without ever actually making outright claims, but I have not read even a single word of David Foster Wallace’s fiction. I have never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and I do not believe that I ever shall.

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The View From Your Window

Washington, DC, 2.52 pm

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The Case For Slow And Steady

Olga Khazan explains why being in a hurry can be so counterproductive:

Do you park in the first spot you see, even if it means a longer, grocery-laden walk back from the store later? When unloading the dishwasher, do you quickly shove all the Tupperware into a random cabinet, thereby getting the dishes-doing process over with faster—but also setting yourself up for a mini-avalanche of containers and lids?

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, Pennsylvania State psychologists coined a new term for this phenomenon: Precrastination, or “the tendency to complete, or at least begin, tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra physical effort.” … Why do we do this? Holding a goal in our minds taxes our working memory, the authors write, and just doing something—anything—allows us to dump that memory faster. Last year my colleague Julie Beck explained how this works with unpleasant experiences: We’ll want to get it over with faster in order to lessen our feelings of dread.

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The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Two columns and a revealing concurrence between MoDo and Krauthammer. The Friday Krauthammer piece was one of those larded with barbs at Obama but effectively ends up endorsing the anti-ISIS policy. I mean – how often do you read Krauthammer saying the following?

If Obama can remain steady through future fluctuations in public opinion, his strategy might succeed.

I know, right? But after a while, you see why Krauthammer is suddenly backing Obama. Because he reminds him of Netanyahu:

What kind of strategy is that? A compressed and more aggressive form of the George Kennan strategy of Soviet containment. Stop them, squeeze them, and ultimately they will be defeated by their own contradictions … Or to put it in a contemporary Middle East context, this kind of long-term combination of rollback and containment is what has carried the Israelis successfully through seven decades of terrorism arising at different times from different places proclaiming different ideologies. There is no one final stroke that ends it all. The Israelis engage, enjoy a respite, then re-engage.

Here’s Modo on the same page:

The president should just drop the flowery talk and cut to the chase. Americans get it. Let’s not pretend we’re fighting for any democratic principles here. America failed spectacularly in creating its democratic model kitchen with Iraq. So now we have to go back periodically and cut the grass, as they say in Israel, to keep our virulent foes in check.

I just want to note that America has become Israel; and Iraq is becoming our Gaza. And I’m not the first person to make that analogy:

The Israeli modus operandi that became obvious during the war in Gaza—using Israel’s technological edge and superior air power to “crush” Hamas (a term that Netanyahu used quite frequently during the military campaign) while cooperating with local partners (Egypt, in the case of Israel) to pressure and isolate the enemy and create a more favorable balance of power—may become the model for American military operations on Iraq and Syria in the coming years.

So if you cannot—or are not willing to—defeat them, then “crush” them with drones, missiles, and air power, and try through ad-hoc cooperation with the occasional partner (the Jordanians), proxy (the Kurds), and even rival (Iran) to put pressure on the enemy du jour (al-Qaeda; ISIS). In the make-believe world of spin and media, in the meantime, try to market the outcome of your policies as military wins and pretend that all of this will create the conditions for a diplomatic solution. At best, it will tilt the balance of power in your favor; at a minimum, it will help maintain the status quo and contain the perceived threat.

And at worst, without an Iraqi government that can actually represent the Shi’a, you have Gaza: bombing one extremist group, while creating countless more, and slowly turning into what Israel has become – a barricaded country, with less and less legitimacy, fomenting Islamism as potently as it attempts to “crush it”. Or, when the civilian casualties mount, and victory seems elusive, the logic for another ground invasion – like Israel’s many into its neighbors – becomes inescapable.

This weekend, we talked of the formality (or lack of it) of the virtue of friendship and how it sometimes fails in middle age. I loved Ferdinand Mount’s rather brilliant contra-Hitch assertion that “everything poisons religion.” We aired the discipline and routine of great writers; how emotion fuels memory; sex and Leonard Cohen; and the possible non-pacifism of the disciples. Plus Marilynne Robinson on the body and the poetry of Jean Valentine. This Face Of The Day won’t leave me.

The most popular post of the weekend was Chart Of The Day on who is benefiting from the recovery; followed by A Cloud Of Unknowing.

A huge thanks to Jessie Roberts who has helped create our weekend coverage and to Matt Sitman who finds and elevates much of our religious content. This really is a team effort. To help us keep this show on the road, please subscribe if you haven’t yet. You alone make all this possible.

See you in the morning.

A Poem For Sunday

“The Blind Stirring of Love” by Jean Valentine:

I rub my hands my cheeks

with oil my breasts

I bathe my genitals, my feet

leaf and bark

redden my mouth to

draw down your mouth

and all along

you have been inside me

streaming

unforsakenness . . .

(From Door in the Mountain: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2003 © 2004 by Jean Valentine. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Photo by Takumi Yoshida)

When Friendships Falter

Growing up, David Zahl noticed “how friendship didn’t seem to be an overwhelming priority for people in their 30s and 40s, men in particular.” Now that he’s approaching middle age, he finds this passage from Tim Kreider’s essay “The Referendum” an apt account of why this might be so:

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home… So we’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning…

Zahl riffs on this insight:

In other words, the real reason certain types of relationships tail off during middle age is because these are the years when we are doing most of our “achieving”, when our capacity for comparison is arguably at its zenith, when the discrepancies are most pronounced. Not surprisingly, the Referendum is exacerbated rather than assuaged by erstwhile closeness.

Meaning, we can and do spend plenty of (happy) time in middle age with peers with whom we don’t share many natural affinities–the difficulty comes with those with whom we once did; the degree to which we identified with someone in college or high school will be the degree to which their current trajectory makes us feel uncomfortable. That goes for the church they attend and theology they espouse just as much as the car they drive. Not exactly rocket science, I know, nor the only reason why people grow apart, but a prevalent factor nonetheless, and perhaps part of what accounts for the U-Bend of Happiness.

Kreider takes things a little further, though, claiming that our once-and-future comrades represent alternate versions of ourselves. The “control group” in the experiment of our life–scary! I can only speak for the ministry-nonprofit side of this equation, but the dynamic is as widespread as it is transparent–which is to say, embarrassingly so. It’s occasionally even used as a bludgeon against those closest to us (i.e. “if you only knew how much money I left on the table when I signed up for this” or conversely “I gave up my dreams to support you!”). I’m sure social media is not helping things, especially when it comes to Marriage and Kids, which Kreider locates as the biggies.

Making Sense Of Seneca

In a review of a pair of new books about Seneca, Mary Beard explores the less-than-virtuous life of the famed philosopher Seneca, claiming that the “contradictions in this career are obvious and they troubled many ancient observers, just as they have troubled many later ones.” She reconsiders the Roman Stoic’s perspective toward his death:

In his suicide, fighting against the recalcitrant frailty of his own body, he met unwaveringly the death to which he has been cruelly sentenced [by emperor Nero]; and he turned it into the ultimate lesson in how to die (not for mere show was he dictating his last philosophical thoughts on his long-drawn-out deathbed, but for the true edification and education of future generations). This is presumably the message of Rubens’s famous painting, which shows Seneca standing almost naked in his small bath, in a pose strikingly reminiscent of the suffering Jesus in many Ecce homo scenes from medieval and later art: so suggesting triumph over death, not defeat by it.

Yet as both [Dying Every Day author James] Romm and [Emily] Wilson in The Greatest Empire insist, it is impossible not to see some ambivalence, at the very least, in Tacitus’s version of Seneca’s last hours, and in his evaluation of the man more generally. Romm focuses in particular on that phrase imago vitae suae (“the image of his own life”), which was to be, as Tacitus put it, Seneca’s bequest to his followers. Roland Mayer has argued that we should detect here a reference to the kind of imago that was displayed in elite Roman houses: one of those series of ancestor portraits intended to spur on future generations to imitate the achievements of their great predecessors. That is very likely one resonance of the phrase: Seneca was offering a positive example to be followed in the future. But, as Romm rightly observes, “Imago is a multilayered word,” and like “image” in English, it also suggests “illusion,” “phantom,” or “false seeming.”

(Image of The Death of Seneca by Rubens, c. 1615, via Wikimedia Commons)