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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
gerontion72
Published Letters: 42 Editor's Choice: 11
It's misleading to proclaim the NFL's players vastly superior to the those in the CFL. For one thing, the different rules attract and produce different kinds of athletes. The plodding quarterbacking of someone like Drew Bledsoe would not survive in the CFL, which typically demands more mobile quarterbacks to handle the larger field and the loss of a down. In this sense, the CFL was ahead of its time, breeding scrambling QBs long before the NFL embraced this model (consider Argo great Condredge Holloway - http://www.argonauts.ca/Argos/History/HallOfFame/Condredge_Holloway.html, or Eskimo great Warren Moon).
Flutie, for example, was a legend in the CFL because he was built for that league, and because the NFL snubbed him after he chose to play in the USFL. Other, taller pivots, such as Jeff Garcia, have emerged from the CFL and become top quarterbacks in the NFL (a few years ago, Garcia was one of the best rated QBs in the NFL).
One thing the NFL does well to ensure people believe its athletes are the best in the world, and not simply the best suited for the NFL's rules, is promote the players as unparalleled. You almost never hear an announcer of an NFL broadcast say something critical about a player. Every player is described as the "best" at something, or the "most underrated" at something else. It's smart marketing, and it seems to work.
Mr. O'Hehir's article reflects some of the hubris that characterizes the American Left and Right. While I don't condemn him for mistakenly presuming no one outside New York has seen, or will see, The Power of Nightmares, I must say his sense of shock and awe over the revelations in the documentary reveal something of how insular segments of America can be, whatever their politics. Keep in mind that the story contained in the documentary was reported in the British press upon its release in Britain. This is how I heard about its argument, through an online British newspaper.
The Power of Nightmares aired in Canada on CBC in April 2005 (http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/powerofnightmares/one.html). In September 2005 I was speaking with a very prominent and left-leaning American academic, explaining the findings of the documentary, and he had not heard of it. In fact, he still believed Al Qaeda was more than just a few lunatics transformed by the US government into a collaborative global network of ideologues bent on destroying America. I was surprised to see such an astute observer unaware of the fundamental lie of the "war on terror" -- that there is an enemy of coordinated size and strength, and not simply an idea of resistance being adopted by disparate parties -- and it made me feel like the center of the political spectrum in America was so far to the right that even the left couldn't see the horizon anymore.
But this is, of course, just one documentary, and once some Americans get a chance to see it they will understand yet another quality of the terms by which they have been hoodwinked.
Mr. O'Hehir's comments on the film are better late than never. He concludes, quite rightly, "As long as these two quasi-religious ideologies are locked in Manichaean combat, playing the endless game of devils and angels, their devotees will reap the benefits -- and the rest of us will remain prisoners to their nightmares."
Along those lines, I recommend LSE professor John Gray's book "Heresies", which contains some of his essays on Iraq and his post-humanist critique of ideologies like neoconservatism and liberal humanism.
Normally, I don't care what a movie adaptation does with a book, as long as it's a good movie (consider how The Shining is a brilliant film because of Stanley Kubrick, whatever its relationship to King's book). What I find annoying about the type of revisionism Fattore is discussing is its knee-jerk solace in romanticism. It's okay to have some movies that smack of humanist delusions about romantic love, but why must the overwhelming majority of our entertainments be saturated with the myth of humanist romanticism?
Look at March of the Penguins, a documentary film whose narration betrays a completely false impression of the emperor penguin mating ritual simply to satisfy the desire of many humans to see animals inhabiting the mythical world of romantic love.
Why can't anti-romanticism prosper, whether in Jane Austen films or somewhere else?
I'm surprised Mr. O'Hehir says he had not seen Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech prior to "Why We Fight." Wasn't Eisenhower's speech the preface for Oliver Stone's "JFK"?
For that matter, isn't the MIC and its origins part of most introductory political science courses, usually accompanying C. Wright Mills notion of the "power elite"?
Just wanted to show support. I'm not sure why Cintra Wilson thinks the host of the Oscars is going to curse a blue streak and insult everyone in the room. He "stayed within himself," as the baseball players say. And the commercial parodies and the bit with Tom Hanks were funny.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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