Of Curses and Baseball

I’ve seen a fair amount of this lately:

The crucial difference between fans of the Red Sox and Cubs and those of the White Sox and Astros is that the latter had the decency to keep their suffering to themselves.

The White Sox have gone longer than the Red Sox went without a world championship, but did Stephen King write about their angst? Did Jimmy Fallon make a movie about their pain? Did their fans whine about some ridiculous curse? No. In fact, if you so much as bring up any nonsense about a curse, the White Sox will set you straight.

I yield to no one in my contempt for Cubs fans, but I think that this is misplaced. To clarify, I have no sympathy for fans whose identity as fans is carefully constructed around the fact that their team loses all the time. Cubs fans don’t actually want their team to win; if the Cubs won a World Series, then Cubs fans would merely be baseball fans, undeserving of the self-pity they manage to lavish upon themselves. They ought to have given Steve Bartman a parade; an actual pennant would have emptied Wrigley and gutted team revenue.

Red Sox fans are a bit different, because it was clear that they actually found their defeats agonizing. Although Red Sox fans managed to wallow in their own pit of self-pity, their commitments also carried actual pain. Unlike the Cubs, the Red Sox came close to victory on several occasions, only to lose in heartbreaking fashion. Their victory in 2004 made them a normal team, but did not undercut the identity that Red Sox fans have developed for themselves.

Now, no one has ever accused White Sox fans of the self pity that Red Sox and Cubs fans are guilty of. They have had less success than the Red Sox, but don’t have any of the “curse” mythology that has infused Red Sox support. Caple wants to applaud them for this, but I am uncertain.

The curse of the Red Sox evokes sympathy because it is undeserved. Lots of teams trade great players. Ruth is the greatest player, yes, but the sin of the Red Sox is different only in degree from that of every other team in baseball. The appropriate penalty for trading Ruth to a league rival is simply a lack of Ruth, in the same sense that the Mariners trade of Jason Varitek is simply a lack of Varitek. The Red Sox need pay this penalty only as long as Ruth remains in the league, then the price, as such, should no longer apply. The curse evokes sympathy because the ghost of Ruth is vengeful and vindictive. The Red Sox are made to pay with failure even long after Ruth has passed from the game (and this world).

This is not the case with the White Sox. The trade of Babe Ruth, great as he was, is not a crime against baseball in the same sense as the 1919 Black Sox scandal. The failure of the White Sox IS deserved; the franchise was the scene of the greatest crime against the fans in baseball history. There is nothing unfair about vengeance being visited upon the White Sox. Indeed, the failure of the White Sox is less a curse than a case of just punishment by a vengeful baseball deity.

This is why White Sox fans don’t whine about a curse. They understand, on some level, that their team has committed the most egregious sin possible against baseball. The Red Sox can justly claim that their punishment is unwarranted, but the White Sox cannot. They can only hope that whatever greater power that apportions forgiveness in baseball will smile upon them.

That said, I’m cheering for the White Sox, mostly because I hate the goddamn Astros.

Kassism At Target

Media Girl notes that Target is defending its pharmacists when they refuse to fulfill prescriptions for contraception. Great. (It is nice that Kass informed us that female contraception is particularly evil, which explains a lot; somehow I doubt that any of these pharmacists refuse on principle to work at stores that sell condoms.) And the fact that Target is willing to buckle demonstrates that the beliefs of the President’s handpicked bioethics czar about gender and sexuality are far from fringe ones. As MG says: “There are people who believe women must be punished for having sex, and now, in the 21st century, they have corporate and governmental backing, leaving women to fend for themselves when it comes to healthcare.” And, of course, making contraception harder to obtain will increase the number of abortions, but when conflicts emerge between controlling female sexuality and protecting fetal life, we all know which one gets thrown under the bus.

One thing to add about this: while Target’s defenders will talk about the “principles” of the pharmacists who refuse to fulfill prescriptions that may give women more autonomy than they consider appropriate, this issue as about anything but. People are, of course, free, to oppose contraception, despise non-submissive women, etc., if they so choose. And if their professional obligations conflict with their principles, they have an obvious choice: they can resign and find a job consistent with their principles. These people, conversely, want to be able to get paid despite not being willing to do their jobs. That’s pretty much the opposite of standing on principle. But, of course, if they resigned they wouldn’t be able to use their gatekeeping authority to inflict their anachronistic moral principles on people who don’t share them, which one suspects is the more important “principle” here.

Related: another eminent Straussian at a top American university informs us that gender relations would improve if only the 19th century would return.

…UPDATE: Aspazia reminds us (and tells us how) to contact Target and let them know what you think about this.

Friday Cat Blogging. . . Frankie

Deep Thoughts From the Land of Double Standard

World O’ Crap uncovers a real gem from University of Chicago “pro-life” ethicist Leon Kass, lecturing the kiddies in Focus on the Family’s children’s magazine, The Good Old Days When Women Were Bound. Oddly, we have yet another nationally prominent pro-lifer, endorsed by a major pro-life organization, who combines a strong belief in the state’s dominion over the woman’s uterus with mind-blowingly reactionary conceptions of gender relations, but I’m sure this is just a coincidence. s.z. does great work as always, but here are a couple key quotes from Leon:

For the first time in human history, mature women by the tens of thousands live the entire decade of their twenties — their most fertile years — neither in the homes of their fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of affairs, but most do not; resenting the personal price they pay for their worldly independence, they nevertheless try to put a good face on things and take refuge in work or feminist ideology.

Chilling but true: some women live for some period of time when they could be churning out babies without the protection and supervision of a man! I’m as shocked as you are. And the only possible explanation can be unuspported assertions that women really hate what they choose to do, and fall into feminism as an ex post facto rationalization of their profound unhappiness that they are no lonnger controlled by men. I certainly can’t think of another explanation; I mean, surely it can’t be the case that some silly hysterical women know their desires and values better than kindly ol’ Leon does.

Oh, and here’s the quote that some of our commenters would prefer not to be made public:

Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage: the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television.

Birth control (I mean, female birth control–men have to have their freedom, ya know), the ability of women to work, abortion–it’s all connected, and it’s all bad. Women’s freedom is inherently “anti-family.” But I’m sure Kass must be the only person who thinks that, and this article was printed by Focus on the Family by mistake.

Still, I think this is the most offensive passage:

Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one’s partner than for one’s mother.

Yes, society used to be constituted by a Virgin/Whore complex that would embarass Jake LaMotta (a woman who likes sex as mother of your children? That’s disgusting!)–and this was a good thing. And as for why men who avidly seek pre-marital sex can be good people and husbands while women with the same desire are women of “easy virtue” and hence of no social value…I’m sure a non-misogynist explanation is forthcoming in Part 2.

For bonus crackpottery, make sure to check out Maggie Gallagher’s feeble defenses of homophbia at Volokh. Shorter Gallagher: “Society has never been better off, except for the fact that the family (and the ‘natural’ definition of the family is what existed during the time in which women were subordinate but not quite as subordinate in marriage as they were for the previous centuries, during which the static institution of marriage was also apparently unnatural) is crumbling, which proves that the ubiquity of bourgeois marriage is critically important. And the fact that the family crumbled before same-sex marriage appeared in the United States makes stopping same-sex marriage a particularly important remedy.” I can’t argue with that logic! Actually, Kieran makes a very important point here. If you’re serious about protecting traditional forms of marriage, no-fault divorce is far more important than gay marriage, given that the latter consists of a small minority most of whom won’t get married to people of the other gender anyway. Except, of course, that tightening divorce rules might actually affect large numbers of “pro-family” reactionaries, so we don’t see a lot of state referendums trying to reinstitute tough divorce laws. It’s much easier to deny rights and benefits to a small minority, and it’s amazing how much stronger the impulse to protect “the family” becomes when it allows you to stigmatize your pre-existing prejudices. (As even Gallagher admits, “It’s true” that “many people are opposed to gay marriage simply because they despise homosexuals, or have a strong religious feeling that homosexuality is wrong, wrong, wrong.” But not her, though.) Oh, and as for my earlier comments to the effect that Volokh’s conflation of the banal claim that “people try to have sex with people who may be attracted to them” with the reprehensible claim that “gay people try to convert others to their diseased, unhealthy lifestyle” was attempting to legitimize the prejudices held by the majority of his party, I reiterate them.

Laundering Greenspan

The editor of The Economist is currently on NPR. Responding to a question from a listener about Alan Greenspan’s role in the Bush deficits, he deflected it by saying that Greenspan is just in charge of monetary policy, so it’s really on Bush, but perhaps could have used his “bully pulpit” more. The dishonesty here, of course, is implying that Greenspan has consistently opposed Bush’s fiscal policy but not loudly enough. Er, no. As the country’s Randian-in-chief is let out to pasture, let his profoundly embarrassing argument in 2001 that the possibility that the national debt would be paid off too quickly was a good reason for Bush’s unpaid-for upper-class tax cuts be mentioned as much as possible.

The Fall of Civilization

While wandering Duck of Minerva, I happened to click on this, a book called The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The Amazon summary reads:

Was the fall of Rome a great catastrophe that cast the West into darkness for centuries to come? Or, as scholars argue today, was there no crisis at all, but simply a peaceful blending of barbarians into Roman culture, an essentially positive transformation? In The Fall of Rome, eminent historian Bryan Ward-Perkins argues that the “peaceful” theory of Rome’s “transformation” is badly in error. Indeed, he sees the fall of Rome as a time of horror and dislocation that destroyed a great civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Attacking contemporary theories with relish and making use of modern archaeological evidence, he looks at both the wider explanations for the disintegration of the Roman world and also the consequences for the lives of everyday Romans, who were caught in a world of economic collapse, marauding barbarians, and the rise of a new religious orthodoxy. The book recaptures the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world, and reminds us of the very real terrors of barbarian occupation. Equally important, Ward-Perkins contends that a key problem with the new way of looking at the end of the ancient world is that all difficulty and awkwardness is smoothed out into a steady and positive transformation of society. Nothing ever goes badly wrong in this vision of the past. The evidence shows otherwise.

This struck me as a bit overstated, especially given these posts by Erik and Dave regarding the conservative appropriation of the historical record. Now, in fairness, ancient history is a hobby for me and not a profession. I haven’t read the book. Dr. Ward-Perkins may have a very good set of reasons for believing that modern historiography has gotten Rome wrong and given the barbarians too much credit. Nevertheless, given the language of the blurb above, the character of some of the reviews, and the bizarre attraction that some right wing cranks have for the ancient world, I’m somewhat skeptical.

First, I’m wondering whether the blurb is actually an accurate description of the contents of the book. The aforementioned right wing cranks will buy anything that purports to debunk “political correctness”, and I could imagine that the blurb is just part of a marketing strategy directed at increasing book sales.

If the blurb is accurate, then I really have to wonder about what the author is arguing against. It has been relatively uncontroversial since, oh, Edward Gibbon that the fall of Rome in the West was a gradual affair that involved the slow but sure replacement of a Romanized elite with a Germanic elite. The synthesis of these two cultures brought us Western feudalism. I’m not really the best read guy on the subject, but I’m not aware of a lot of material suggesting that life got better in the West when Rome fell. One of the Amazon reviews claims that Ward-Perkins sees himself as attacking a Marxist interpretation of history which claims that life got better for the underclass after the fall of the Empire. If this is so, Ward-Perkins brutally misunderstands the Marxist view of history. Curiously, that same review says that Ward-Perkins claims to be a materialist, which really would be odd when combined with an anti-Marxist agenda.

Really (and stating again that it’s possible I’m being completely unfair to Dr. Ward-Perkins) this looks to me to be less about Rome and more about contemporary politics and academia. Lousy lefty politically correct multicultural academics want to go and complicate the fall of Rome by, you know, describing it in some detail. They have to be stopped. Viewing the Romans and the Germans as different cultures is wrong; viewing the Romans as the superior culture (by some standard not, apparently, referring to their warfighting prowess) is correct, and these darned lefties would understand that if they pulled their heads out of their asses. Some cultures are right and good, while others are bad and evil.

Now, I’m not even hostile to many elements of the argument. I agree that material prosperity was greater under the Empire than in the Dark Ages or the medieval period. Technologically, the Romans were significantly more advanced than those that followed them. Living under barbarians probably did suck, although living under the Caesar’s was no picnic, either. What I don’t see is the point of politicizing any of this. But, again, it’s possible that I’m just being paranoid, and that the book is a very solid piece of scholarship and not a hatchett piece.

Speaking of hackwork, I’m really uncertain what to say about this. I genuinely believe that Jonah Goldberg is smarter than the title of this book implies. Given that, it’s clear that he’s writing it just to piss people on the left off. So, I’m uncertain whether we should grant him the satisfaction of getting pissed off about it. I suppose that I’ll limit my commentary to the following:

The fascist parties of Europe are notable not for their commitment to universal healthcare and progressive taxation, which they share with just about every political party in Europe of the time and of today, but by their commitment to virile, violent masculinity and hyper-patriotism, two qualities which modern conservative commentators most often criticize American leftists for lacking. Although American leftists are far too willing to toss around the words “fascist” and “Nazi” when describing the American right, they at least are correctly identifying a meaningful similarity between the political position of American conservatives and European fascists.

I will attempt to refrain from further commentary upon publication.

Good Question

Roger Ailes responds to the hapless Lord Weisberg:

Actually, there’s plenty of evidence that Rove and Libby knew exactly what they were doing — why else would they go to such lengths to conceal the fact that they were the sources of such information? If they thought Plame wasn’t undercover, why wouldn’t they pass along the information without demanding confidentiality and, in Libby’s case, demanding a misleading attribution?

Indeed.

Legal Links

• I don’t mean to be stubborn, but I do have one caveat to add to the important information that Harriet Miers endorsed the Coathanger Human Life Amendment. Some people have argued that it’s not important because one can believe that the Constitution should be amended without wanting Roe overturned, which is true but I don’t think terribly important. Particularly for someone like Miers who doesn’t have any kind of jurisprudential theory, there is a high correlation between political and constitutional beliefs on abortions, and it’s reasonable to infer that being pro-life makes one more likely to vote to overturn Roe. I do think it’s worth nothing, though, that it’s not clear exactly what supporting the HRA means, at least for someone involved in Republican politics. The HRA is, in theory, the official policy of the national Republican Party. But focusing pro-life politics on the HRA doesn’t so much reflect the commitment of Republican elites to overturning Roe as it reflects the commitment of Republican elites to play their base of cultural reactionaries for suckers. Because the HRA has about as much chance of passing as I do of topping People‘s 25 Sexiest Men Alive list, expressing token support for the HRA is a good way for Republican politicos to express symbolic support for the pro-life movement without actually risking any significant changes in the status quo. For this reason, I’m not sure that one can infer a particularly deep pro-life commitment on the part of Miers because of this endorsement. It’s a piece of negative information that should be considered, but I still think it’s far from certain that she would vote to overturn Roe.

• In better news, I was happy to see that a Federal District judge has issued an injunction against Georgia’s new election law, arguing that it effectively constitutes a poll tax in contravention of the 24th Amendment. The importance of fighting Republican attempts to inhibit voter turnout can hardly be overstated. Earl Warren said that Baker v. Carr–the first of a series of decisions that prevented the gross malapportionment of state legislatures–was the most important decision of his tenure, and he may well have been right. Ensuring access to the ballot box is the surest way of preventing other abuses by the state. And it should be noted that the institutional rules of most other liberal democracies, which make it easier to vote than it is in the U.S., don’t lead to any appreciable increase in voter fraud, but they do greatly increase voter turnout. The point of laws like Georgia’s, of course, is precisely to inhibit turnout among poor people. (On the broader point, see eRobin too.)

• Very interesting post by Stephen Griffin about the way in which the Madisonian fragmentation of American constitutionalism tends to limit the government’s ability to perform core functions like disaster relief. The federal government has taken on more responsibilities to do things that local governments cannot since the New Deal, but as Griffin points out “the constitutional order changed in a somewhat helter-skelter unplanned fashion” while “[t]he formal structure of American federalism remained intact. And so it is still the case that when natural disasters strike, the divided power of the federal structure presents a coordination problem.” I think that’s right.

Against Revisionism

This is a really good piece, and I think the punchline is particularly important:

That the nukes we went in to eliminate did not, in fact, exist is scandal of monumental proportions. It’s not a reason to start pretending that the Army can do the impossible if only we keep it deployed abroad long enough.

Indeed. And this has always been a fundamental problem with the arguments of pro-war liberals (or fake libertarians): not only did Bush not go to war with the primary goals these people attributed to him, but there’s no reason to think that American military force could just will a stable liberal democracy into existence in Iraq even if this was their only goal (and even if the administration was more competent.)

Philistine Corner

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Despite having never read any Harold Pinter, I’m convinced that his work is just political hackery in the form of art. Of course, this is the aesthetic supported by the NRO, but Pinter is of the left, so there you go. And I trust Terry Teachout’s judgment uncritically, except where it comes to the aesthetic merits of Harold Pinter’s work.

Shorter John Miller: It’s a scandal that people with political views I disagree with can win the Nobel Prize.

Shorter J-Pod: Harold Pinter is hardly a great artist, unlike Ron Howard or George Lucas [before he started disagreeing with Bush].

Shorter Jonah “Tu Quoque” Goldberg: “Oh, of course, my theory that art should be judged entirely by the political views of the author is bad when “The Left” does it. And they always do it, as we can easily generalize based on the unsourced anecdotes and rhetorical questions of an anonymous emailer.”

(For actual commentary, see Roy.)

A Cold Shiver Runs Through Copenhagen

Canada gets serious.

The Canadian navy is drafting a plan to acquire two large amphibious assault ships capable of transporting thousands of troops and dozens of tanks and trucks across the seas.

The idea, which merited a passing reference in last spring’s defence policy statement, is expected to go before the federal Treasury Board next year for consideration, said the director of the navy’s maritime requirements.

“We’re looking at being more engaged on a global scale,” said Capt. Peter Ellis.

“I think it’s a critical requirement, especially if we’re going to conduct operations at short notice.”

Rather than building the ships themselves, the Canadians may purchase two US San Antonio class amphibious assault vessels.

We’ll see if this actually comes through. I have my doubts as to whether this is part of a larger move against Denmark, but the ships could give Canada a bigger piece of the action in NATO and in other “coalition of the willing” operations.

Via Free Republic.

Chicken Fries?

I’m not the sort of man who avoids fried food. Nevertheless, I must admit to being really, really disturbed by Burger King’s Chicken Fries. I haven’t tried this abomination, but I’m forced to wonder if we really need another fried chicken delivery system.