The Super Bowl Was Americana Supreme

The Super Bowl is an American celebration, a feast day of sorts.  I have missed out on it for several years because I have been living abroad. So I wanted to make a point of having a little family Super Bowl party last night.

I went to Kroger about an hour before game time and it was packed.  I picked up the requisite snacks and headed home. My wife and oldest son came home with the fixings for pizza.  Despite setting off the smoke alarm, we had a nice evening.  Here are my impressions of the night.

The pregame  — Queen Latifah did a nice job singing America the Beautiful.  Carrie Underwood was flat.  I couldn’t buy into Peyton Manning trying to look tough and say, “We’re back.”  He just isn’t the gangster type.

The Game — I surprisingly found myself bored during the first half.  My youngest son wanted to know why I was reading the Sunday paper.  When the second half kickoff approached, I watched with the same kind of attention a viewer gives to TV commercials. I thought I knew what to expect: same old basic kickoff.  Then came the onsides kick. I didn’t even see it; I only heard the broadcaster yell it and then I saw a bunch of bodies and chaos.  I was interested now!

What a gutsy call.  It turned the game around.   As expected, Peyton Manning made me worry the Colts would come back even though they were down by two touchdowns. (I was rooting for the Saints.)  Other than the onsides kick, the play of the night was Terry Porter’s interception, one he took  to the house. A great game. 

I missed my prediction of a Colts blowout by a long shot. I also missed some factors: Joseph Addai running wild for the Colts; key dropped passes by receivers: Drew Brees imitating Peyton Manning; last but not least — the coaching moxie of Sean Payton.

The halftime show — I couldn’t helped giggling watching The Who.  Who were those old so-and-sos up there? I told my kids that 40 years ago they had long hair and wore no shirts. What a debacle!  Get a real job. Guys, I won’t get fooled again!

The commercials -I couldn’t figure out why there were so many naked men in commercials.  What a gross out.  Most  of them were weird. I could only figure the producers were weird themselves. I usually don’t like E-trade baby commercials,  but the added characters made them somewhat humourous.

Not having a TV the last few years, and not being exposed to American culture, the Super Bowl was an immersion in and reentry to American culture.

The Madden game helps me predict the Super Bowl winner

I missed a lot of Super Bowls this decade because I was overseas and couldn’t get the telecast. So I am really looking foward to having the traditional Super Bowl fest with my boys today here in snowy SW Virginia.

The only Super Bowl I managed to watch live while abroad was the last one involving the Indianapolis Colts. I was invited to watch in the basement of a local sports pub along with the local American football team. The game finished up about 4 am and I went on to work. 

Neither of my Super Bowl picks, the Chargers or the Vikings, made the big dance, so it is time to pick again. Who will win in my view?

I have played the game seven  times using the Madden 2010 football game.  I have been playing a lot of  this game with my boys. It is a good way to bond with them, and fill the football void I feel after missing the game after all these years.

The Colts have won six  times, and the Saints once.  My results aren’t very scientific because I am not the most adept player of the game. My youngest son has become an all-pro while I am still trying to get out of training camp.  But some factors have stood out to me while playing:

Peyton Manning -he is, as Chris Collinsworth says while giving commentary during the Madden contests, the best quarterback in the game. One of the games was solely run by the computer. Neither I nor my boys participated. Although the computer made Manning look like a dunce, he stil almost brought the Colts back from a huge deficit. He just ran out of time. Final score: Saints 44, Colts 37. 

Manning is the key to this game. If he is on, you can kiss the Saints’s  chances goodbye.  Even if the Saints have a late lead, Manning will bring the Colts back to win.

Reggie Bush – I tried to feed the ball to Bush as much as possible when I played as the Saints. Unfortunately, I fell behind and gave up. He wasn’t doing very well with me as his coach. But by the  end of the game I had figured out how to throw to him and he began to light it up. It was too late, though. 

Bush is inconsistent, but he showed he could take over a game in the NFC playoffs.   He could give the Colts fits if he decides to play. 

Turnovers - in all the games I played with Madden, these were a factor.  Both defenses created interceptions and took some to the house. When I play my youngest son in Madden, he likes to use the controller to strip the ball and cause my players to fumble. He has figured out how to do that with the controller.  

The Saints defense under Gregg Williams is one that is aggressive and seeks to create turnovers just as my son does.  However, the Colts also have a defense good enough to create them.

Colts defense – as mentioned above, they have a good defense. They don’t get enough credit. If Manning has a bad day, then they could still keep the Colts in the game.

Summary and Prediction

The Colts and Saints are similar. They both have explosive offenses led by great quarterbacks and good receivers.  Their running backs are adequate. They both have good, but not great defenses. 

However, I think the Colts are superior to the Saints. The Colts are number 1, and the Saints are 1a.  Once when I was in a European city I thought of the town as a “poor man’s America”.  The city had some similar characteristics to its counterparts in the States. But it still wasn’t an American town.  It was trying, but it wasn’t there yet. This is how I see the Saints. They have some characteristics similar to the top dog Colts, but they haven’t reached equality yet.

I hate to admit this because I am a native of Baltimore and I have not forgiven the Colts for sneaking out of town in the middle of the night in the 198os. But I think they will manhandle the Saints. Manning will shred their defense. The Colts defense will create turnovers.   It will be a blowout, reminiscent of many of the Super Bowls of the past.

Enjoy the snacks. Colts 44, Saints 24.

The Von Trapp Way

The Von Trapp family grew up with music in  their household. Their father played several instruments; their children’s first mother played the piano and violin.  The children learned to play music as well, “Sometimes our house must have sounded like a musical conservatory”, says Maria Von Trapp, one of  the children of this family made famous on the 1960s movie “The Sound of Music”.

The Von Trapps became famous entertainers in Europe in the 1930s. When they fled Austria in 1938 because of Adolph Hitler’s annexation of the country, they carried on their work in the United States.  They were immigrants, but they were able to make a life for themselves as a family in their new country.  They worked together not only in music, but in supporting the family financially.

Maria Von Trapp applied for U.S. citizenship in 1944 with this declaration. Her family, working together, went on to do very well in their new country.

As de facto immigrants to America (my family and I just  came back to the States after spending much of the decade overseas), I have been wracking my brain concerning how to make a go of it back here financially.  There are six of us under one roof, and my job as an adjunct university instructor isn’t going to pay the bills.

The Von Trapps provide a model for me.  They kept their family enterprise intact when they came to the USA . They still operated as an economic unit.

Families have worked together economically for much of the history of mankind.  It is only  in modern times that forces have entered in to spread us around like so many fleas on a dog.

I hope to implement what I am calling the “Von Trapp Way” in my family soon.  In these difficult times, it would behoove other Americans to consider doing the same.

Altered State

Having just returned to the country in the last few months after most of the decade overseas, I was interested in listening to the State of the Union address of our current president. I am somewhat of a political junkie, but since returning I had pretty much ignored the going-ons in Washington. This was my chance to catch up a little bit.

So we tuned our new satellite to CNN and sat down to watch.  It was like watching the bar scene out of Star Wars. One person I was watching the show with likened it to an asylum.

My remembrances of watching presidential addresses from Congress as a kid include mental images of old, staid men sitting behind the chief executive, sometimes nodding off, sometimes looking like they were about to keel over. Yet, it conveyed a certain dignity.  These guys may be octogenarians, but they were OUR octogenerians and they conveyed the idea that we had a stable ship of state.

Watching last night, I felt as if I was watching The Love Boat.  President Obama was presidential and gave a good speech, as State of the Union Messages go. (Usually, they are long boring affairs filled with promises and stats.)  Behind him, however, we were subjected to a weird side show.

Joe Biden seems like an amiable guy.  But he is a little too amiable.  Much of the speech a wide grin was plastered across his face.  I felt like someone was telling him private jokes in his ear plugs (or maybe hair plugs). Everything seemed funny to him. Was I watching Jay Leno or the State of the Union address?

Nancy Pelosi had alternative poses. At times she looked as if she was shrugging, smiling in a funny way. This gave her sort of an Alfred E. Newman “What, Me Worry?”  persona.  At other times, it seemed she did not know what to do with her mouth. She puckered. She moved her lips around. It even looked like she was running her tongue on her front teeth with her mouth closed.

Biden and Pelosi with reasonably sober expressions. The morning after, it appears the only stills are those released by the White House.

The images coming across my TV of the assembled elites were also disconcerting.  These were our nation’s power brokers?  They looked more like a mob coming after Frankenstein than our country’s leaders. Their faces betrayed skeptiscism, amusement, and mockery.  Senator Reid was the only person who reminded me of the good old days. CNN caught him yawning.    

Our best and brightest

Give me that old time government religion which was led by old men.  They may have appeared to be close to the grave, but at least they didn’t seem insane.

The good old days

Instead of “Why Me?”, How About, “Why Not Me?”

Jack Pardee is 73 years old, yet he would apparently jump at the chance to coach college football again.  This is what he told Sports Illustrated columnist Jeff Pearlman recently. 

I remember Pardee as the coach of the Washington Redskins when I lived in our nation’s capital.  My recollection of him is that of a good and decent man.

This comes through in Pearlman’s article.  Pearlman decries the current crop of job-hopping coaches.  He sees them as mercenaries, as selfish.  Pardee’s comeback would be welcome because of his traditional values. 

Pearlman says that college  football coaching was once an honorable profession. No more. It is now populated by the equivalent of fast-talking used car salesman.  Says Pearlman, “Once upon a time, many moons ago, college programs brought in coaches who, first and foremost, were concerned with turning boys into men; with instilling values that applied to both sports and life.”

This comment hit me between the eyes. I am a burned out university teacher who has become cynical.  I have had some experiences that question the worth of my profession.

Most of these experiences have to do with the students I have encountered.  I have trust issues with my students as I see many of them coasting, even cheating.  They lack motivation.  I don’t want to teach anymore because I think I am wasting my time.  If the students don’t want to learn, then my work is without purpose.

This is difficult for me because I want my work to matter.  I don’t just want a paycheck. So getting up and going to work of late has not been easy.

However, Pearlman’s comment about old-school football coaches gives me hope. Perhaps there is a reason to drag myself off to class every day.  If as I see it, the students lack values, then like my old timey sports colleagues, I should be seeking to instill them. 

Having the task of turning boys and girls into men and women of character is a worthy task. It is not an easy one today, and there is not a lot of time in the classroom to do it. But it has to be done by somebody. Why not me?

Applying Martin Luther King’s legacy

I think until the 1980s I was still woefully ignorant of black Americans.  I encountered many of them at work though.  Two black ladies in my cubicle area changed me, unknowingly. 

I don’t remember much about the content of their conversation, but it had to do with some injustice one of them had experienced. I believe it was being turned away from a motel by a clerk because she said it was full.  My black colleague believed the claim was dubious.  

I believe my first emotional reaction was of the cynical kind.  ”It figures”, I  thought. “Here we are in the 1980s and she’s still taking every slight as a racial one.”  But then I had what one boss I had later called “an epiphany”.  I thought, “I’m going to listen to her”.

I realized she sincerely felt aggrieved.  It occurred to me then and there that African Americans, rightly or wrongly, had a deep mistrust of whites.

It was in this spirit I attended a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event on the campus of Virginia Tech tonight.  The keynote speaker was a noted black author by the name of Cornel West.  The fact that I had never heard of him showed me that although I hav improved in my willingness to pay attention to the plight of the black person in American, I still remain ignorant.  My knowledge is pretty shallow.

There must be a lot more whites listening these day because the crowd in the auditorium (and it was  pretty packed) was about half white.  I came with an open mind and settled into my chair  to listen.

Dr. West came as advertised. He was an entertaining and engaging speaker, even inspirational.  The primary message he conveyed to me was that we all have to have the courage to examine ourselves.  A secondary idea that was meaningful to me was his notion that justice was love in public.  If we love people, we will seek justice for them.  

While Dr. West’s left political leanings were obvious, he didn’t only take shots at Reagan, McCain and Palin.  He also criticized Barack Obama.  The context of Dr. West’s criticism was a portion of his speech where he was describing the state of Dr. King’s legacy in the Age of Obama. His view is that Barack Obama’s is cozying up too much to the Wall Street folks that got us into our economic mess and escalating the war in Afghanistan.  Both actions violate Dr. King’s tilt in the direction of the poor and quest for peace, he says.

Dr. West also said that Obama  had not only committed sins of commission, but also omission. In response to a question asking if Barack Obama had done enough, Dr. West’s answer was that he had not.

The Princeton professor also made points with me when he stated that the black man should not be seeking to oppress the white man as he had been oppressed.  “ We are all in the same boat, and it is leaking”, said Dr. West.

This echoes one of the messages of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”.  He also said that “we cannot walk alone”, that the white and black man needed to march ahead together.

Dr. King said in his famous speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  Over the course of my life applying this piece of wisdom has done wonders in how I have changed since childhood in my relationship with African Americans.  It is perhaps the biggest personal legacy of Dr. King.

I can recall several black Americans I have met who were people of high character. One of the best bosses I ever had, an African American woman, shot down an attempt by black trainees to claim racism when their performance was determined to be not up to standard. (She is also the only person to ever tell me HOW to improve my handwriting, not just criticize it.)

Another woman was one of the hardest working and nicest people I have ever met. She had an unprestigious position as a cleaning woman, but she did her job as if she were cleaning for a king. (I believe she was, as she was a staunch Christian). 

Then there was the American soldier I met overseas who treated my family royally on a military base. I met him later at the airport as my family was flying out of the country and we had a nice chat. He was a wonderful man.

Dr. King was certainly right in saying that the people of this nation have to march ahead into the future together.  This unity should not only involve the white and black man, but the other large minorities that have come along since Dr. King’s life and death.

Dr. West’s exhortation for self examination should motivate us to determine how we can best individually move race relations forward in this country.  Dr. King’s legacy was seeking to overcome white supremacy and aim toward a multiracial democratic society.  Ours may be different.

As Dr. West says, we all have our own legacy to leave.  We may not like the state of affairs in our nation at the moment. If we don’t we should work to change what we don’t like  in our own spheres of influence.

The event at Virginia Tech ended tonight with a choir and the audience singing “We Shall Overcome”.  In reflecting on the words, I was wondering if the song was still applicable.  After all, we’ve come a long way in terms of racial equality in the United States.

However, the message of the following stanza is still far from being implemented:

We’ll walk hand in hand

We’ll walk hand in hand

We’ll walk hand in hand some day

We’ll go a long way in being able to do this if we look past the skin color and national origin of the folks we deal with on a day to day basis and interact with them based on their qualities as human beings. We also will be able to walk hand in hand if we learn to listen to each other.

White Americans Weren’t Listening in 1968

In April 1968 I was standing on a hill in my Baltimore neighborhood watching the city burn.  Martin Luther King, Jr, had been assassinated.  Smoke rose up from the center of the city.

One recent colleague of mine also lived in Baltimore at the time. She was a civil rights worker.  She was white. This woman smuggled was out of town, covered in the back of a car.

The death of the preacher of non-violent protest had sparked one of the most violent series of riots in American history.  Over a decade later I was riding a bus through a Washington, D.C. neighborhood. Even at that time it looked like a bombed out city from World War II.

The black American had had enough.  Martin Luther King, in his 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech”, had warned of this day.  He told the throngs listening to him on the mall in Washington, D.C. and a nationwide audience:

   It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

At the same time, he warned his black brethren that even though the spirit of revolution was marvelous, this mood should not lead to physical violence.  To engage in it would strip the movement of its dignityand discipline. 

But with the murder of  their non-violent leader, how could the black American be blamed for their violent revolt?   King had discussed what he called their “creative suffering ” in his speech. Since emancipation blacks had been beaten up by police, unjustly thrown in jail, denied voting rights, prevented from living or staying where they pleased, trapped in poverty-laden ghettoes and generally segregrated from white Americans. King called blacks exiles in their own country.

Most white Americans hadn’t been listening to the cries of blacks until King’s death in 1968. King likened the African American’s experience with the American dream  to  that of a bank customer who had been issued a huge check which had been returned,  marked “insufficient funds”.   The country had broken it’s promise to provide the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to all.  People of color had been exempted.

Now many African Americans had decided the whole system was bankrupt and that they were going to burn down the bank.

What It Was Like To Be a White Boy in the 1960s

I grew up in southwest Virginia. I was eight years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous speech in August of 1963.  I don’t recall seeing it or even thinking about it.  I do recall, however, the events several months later when John F. Kennedy was assasinated in Texas.

Perhaps this says something about my state of mind as a southern white boy in 1963.  It’s not that I was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot.  I just didn’t care about race relations at my age. In addition, I didn’t have enough experience with blacks to know much about them. This was most likely due to the fact that Virginia was still segregated at this point.

There are still bits and pieces of my memory that hint at a less than admirable view toward blacks at this stage of my life, however.  I recall that the black neighborhood next to ours was called “nigger town”.  I remember that a boy from that area came driving though on his bike one day at high speed. I always  figured he was just trying to challenge us.  So there was a natural division between blacks and whites in my mind.  It was just the way it was.

Until I was 13 years old I believe I only interacted regularly with one black person: my best friend’s maid. Dorothy was kind of like a mother figure to me. My attitude toward her was that she was my friend’s caretaker when his mother wasn’t there. 

Right before I turned 13 our school was integrated, in 1967. If I recall correctly, our junior high school had three new black kids. Three.

Then we moved to Baltimore. I suddenly was surrounded by ethnicity.  I never remember meeting anyone of Polish descent until  I went to the junior high school across the street.  Then I sat next to this girl with a Polish name.  It seemed really strange to me.

The most memorable moment of my 7th-grade year though was wrestling with Tyrone.  I was sitting in gym class when the teacher instructed me to get in there and start wrestling with him.  The emotion I remember was fear. “You mean I have to touch this guy”?  In my memory there was something unclean about even shaking hands with a black person in that day and age if you were white.

I met an albino kid who asked me,”Do you think I am black or white”? I assumed he was black, but I really didn’t know.

So this is what characterized my relations with African-Americans as a child in the South: inexperience and fear-probably fear of the unknown.

The Opportunity of MLK Day: Whites Need to Reflect On the Black Experience

Slavery is the original sin of America. George Mason, a Revolutionary War patriot from Virginia, called it “that slow Poison  which is daily contaminating the Minds and Morals of our Peoples”. It was introduced to the American colonies by Great Britain and continued officially until the Civil War in the 1860s. 

Because of the approaching Martin Luther King holiday, I have begun to seriously ponder the issue of the forced importation of African Americans and the effect it has had up until today on American society.  The issue has floated around in the recesses of my brain, occasionally blitzing my synapses, and then receding back. 

Slavery ended in Great Britain in 1807, mainly due to the efforts of William Wilberforce, a member of parliament. He introduced bills 8 times to abolish it.  On the 9th effort, he succeeded.  Wilberforce was ashamed for himself and his country that Britain ”suffered this horrid trade”.  Wilberforce had ending slavery and the improvement of morals as the main goals of his life. “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large”, he said.

William Wilberforce

America missed out on this early emancipation of slaves in the British Empire since it declared its independence in 1776.  And although slavery technically ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the 1860s, Douglas A. Blackmon makes the case that it really didn’t end until World War II.

Blackmon has written a book called Slavery By Another Name which I have previewed and would like to read read in its entirety.  In the introduction to the book he discusses a black worker at the turn of the twentieth century who is arrested for vagrancy in Alabama and then through a series of legal maneuvers is forced into labor at a mine.  According to Blackmon, this man is representative of the plight of the black population of the time.  Because many African Americans died in such circumstances, he compares what he calls the re-enslavement of black Americans to the Jewish Holocaust.

Most white Americans, including this one, have no idea what the average African American has gone through to reach the level of freedom he or she has today.  The Martin Luther King holiday is a good time for whites to take a little time and think about the effect of America’s abominable sin of slavery on our society. Perhaps in doing this we will be  more motivated to become united in a time when our country is pretty fractured.

Jesus the Avatar

As a sci-fi and fantasy reader, and potential writer, I decided to succumb to the hype and go see the movie “Avatar” last weekend.  I went to a matinee that didn’t offer the 3-D glasses, but I was still struck by the artistic work done on this flick.  I’ll have to go back and watch it in 3-D some day, or hope that high definition does the trick on DVD or Blu-Ray.

The storyline is incarnational.  Jake Sully is a former Marine that has lost the use of his legs.  However, on a new planet his mind lives vicariously through a half-human, half alien body while his own body lives in something that resembles the device that measures body fat — the Bod Pod.  The indigenous aliens, the Na’vi,  call these humans ”dreamwalkers”, which is in fact what Jake is since his real body lives in the pod.  While he is comatose, he controls the alien/human body in its real time living.

SPOILER ALERT (I RECOMMEND WATCHING THE MOVIE BEFORE YOU READ MY CONCLUSION)

An “avatar” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is defined in many ways.  For most of the movie, Jake is an avatar in the sense that he is a version or variant of the real thing.  He also is similar to an electronic avatar which is manipulated by a computer. 

At the end of the movie, though, through some hocus pocus he becomes the real Jake in the real alien body.  His old body is discarded.  He no longer is Jake the earthling, but Jake the Na’vi.  He undergoes this transformation out of love for the Na’vi and love for a female.  He protects them from the Earthlings seeking to destroy them.

This sci-fi story bears a large similarity to a non fiction event we celebrate every Christmas.  Jesus Christ is an avatar in the sense that he is the incarnation of God in human form.  The Bible says that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God”.  He lives today and holds all things together. (Refer to Colossians Chapter 1 in the Bible for further study).

Like Jake, God became incarnate because he loves the world and the people in it. He came to save us from a spiritual race of demons, led by one called Satan, who seek to destroy us. 

Jake Sully as a Na’vi in the movie Avatar is a type of Jesus

While “Avatar” is entertaining and worth going to see, it is fiction. A more amazing story is told in the Bible and is even more worth checking out.