I Worked With Richard Russell at Horizon Air, and I Understand Why He Did What He Did

I was surprised to wake up last Saturday morning to the headlines. Not completely shocked, but surprised nonetheless. I was a ground service agent at Horizon Air for the better part of 2016, and I worked alongside Richard "Beebo" Russell [ed. who stole and crashed a Horizon Q400 turboprop]. As ground service agents, we handled luggage, walked through planes for final inspection, and pushed them out onto the taxiway.

We weren’t close, barely acquaintances, which seems odd considering the tight quarters and the foxhole mentality that is required to work in these particular roles. But with the high turnover (if you follow Horizon Air jobs, you will know they are always hiring that position for SeaTac), it’s not that hard to imagine.

Day-to-day survival on The Ramp (the area between the terminal and the taxiway, where passengers are loaded and unloaded, baggage is handled, planes fueled, etc.) requires a lot of sacrifice to keep the planes moving. It would be difficult enough if the inadequate break room didn’t always resemble a crowded, sweatbox college party—but without any drugs or alcohol, and nobody having fun. Brought your lunch to save spending $10 buying a meal in the terminal? Sure hope it’s still in the fridge when you get your lunch break. Nasty emails directed to anonymous lunch bandits were a common occurrence. There was a locker room, but not enough lockers for everyone. Think about how many layers are required to work in the weather in Seattle, and then think about where you might put your jacket, gloves, etc., when you don’t need them without them getting stolen, if you don’t have a locker. These things aren’t luxuries; they are a basic part of work life.

Going into the job, I knew that there was a sharp disconnect between the shiny happy side of the terminal, and the grit on the ground. What I didn’t realize was how much like a military base it was run. Which makes sense, historically, and which is why Horizon and other airlines recruit heavily from military bases. I went through initial training with a guy who had just spent 10 years in the army.

"How was that?" I asked him.

"Well, I didn’t blow my brains out," was his reply.

So I supposed working at Horizon was an upgrade for him. When a lot of your supervisory staff and co-workers are ex-military you begin to realize what being expendable is. I believe Beebo was acutely aware of that—because we all were. It's the kind of dehumanizing situation that could lead to what happened on August 10.

If the environment itself isn’t enough to persuade you that you are nothing more than a cog to the upper management/shareholders, there are plenty of other, even more exasperating reminders. You are making around $3 less per hour than anybody else at SeaTac (including other airline employees, restaurant employees, car rental employees, bus drivers, etc.), although there are benefits! Health insurance and stock options might be nice, but they don’t pay the rent. However, a vast majority of the ground service agents are men under age 30, so insurance and stock options mean nothing to them. They become empty gestures from a management who knows you’ll never use them, and thus cost the company little.

But that's only one part of the picture. To be clear, the people I worked with were dedicated, hard working, safety-conscious, attempting to be loyal—all of the things that are supposed to get you ahead in America. But the workers on the ground and our immediate supervisors could barely keep our heads above water. As a subsidiary of Alaska Air Group, Horizon Air is the proverbial red-headed stepchild. It is glaringly clear to everyone who works there that cost-cutting by the executive team(s) in order to keep the shareholders happy is the main goal, and Horizon is the first stop on the belt-tightening train.

We the lowest level employees knew that when the record quarterly earnings report came out there wasn’t going to be any trickle down. When I worked for Horizon, we were cursing our low-wage fate in the break room, while Alaska was spending $2.5 billion acquiring Virgin America (gotta keep up with Delta), and then investing another $2.5 billion upgrading their turboprop airplane fleet to jets. Acquisitions and sexy new jets play well at the stockholder meeting; increased labor costs do not.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news about a plane being stolen by a Horizon employee was, "Ah yes, the end of summer. Of course." Summer is nearly constantly as busy as the holiday season.

My summer of 2016 kicked off with a new schedule (we bid on shifts every 3-4 months), which as it turns out was literally generated by a computer program. X number of flights, X number of employees, some advanced mathematics, and poof! Perfection. Except the schedule that summer was so out of touch with what was going on on the ground that a handful of veteran employees went to management and successfully lobbied for a "do-over," because the schedule as presented was unrealistic, and featured far too many new employees at a given time compared to experienced ones.

An important perk are monthly bonuses, which can range from $50-200 a month depending on whether "target numbers" are hit. About halfway through my summer tenure at Horizon Air, we were informed that the bonus structure was being revamped. It now included delays caused by weather and Air Traffic Control, circumstances completely out of our control. This was described as "more realistic to the situation on the ground." It was more like a morale murderer.

This is all to say that I can understand what could drive a normal person to do what Richard Russell did: He saw his chance for relevance—to be simply acknowledged as an individual human being—and grabbed it. I don’t condone it, and wish it would have turned out with a spectacular landing that he could've walked away from as a folk hero to some (myself included). I'll leave the question of exactly how he did it to the investigators.

Richard's situation was not unusual for what has morphed into a wage-slave economy. The fact that he had access to a plane makes it sensational. There are plenty of people out there making not-enough money, and they keep plugging along, not stealing multi-million dollar aircraft and crashing them.

by Todd Bunker, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Dave Allen/Getty

Pain Town

Agent-based modelling offers opportunities to explore the complex social interactions at the heart of the addiction crisis.

With the tip of her syringe, Brandi pokes at a grey lump of heroin in a spoon. It’s a new variety of the drug that has shown up on the market in the past few days, and Brandi likes it. “I feel this more, I feel more of the pain resistance,” she says.

Once it has dissolved into a liquid, she injects it into her arm, then uses a fresh needle to inject the skinny arm of another woman. “She does it better than the hospital,” the woman comments.

“I’ll help anybody who needs it,” Brandi explains to public-health researcher Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco, who has been filming the entire process.

Ciccarone’s team has embedded with Brandi — whose name has been changed for this story — in Charleston, West Virginia, documenting her interactions without judgement or interference. Later, the group will analyse this video, in addition to half a dozen other videos of drug users from across the city, logging details big and small. Brandi does not heat the solution on the spoon, for instance, and that may increase the likelihood of spreading viruses such as HIV. And tests reveal that what she’s taking has been laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.

The researchers will plug these data into powerful computer simulations of Charleston, populated by thousands of virtual Brandis — heroin users and dealers going about their daily routines. They will watch these digital agents buy more heroin as their tolerance increases, form networks with sellers and users and, in some cases, accidentally overdose.

Ciccarone’s is one of several groups using agent-based models to understand what is driving the US opioid epidemic — the dramatic rise over the past two decades in the use of opioids, including prescription pain medications and illegal drugs such as heroin. By studying the motivations and practices of real drug dealers and users, the researchers hope to build agents whose behaviour in the virtual world mimics that in real life.

Agent-based models promise to provide a more granular view of the opioid crisis than standard modelling, which is based on average populations, and to capture some of the complexity of the driving forces. This could prove important for demonstrating the effects of opening or closing methadone clinics or needle exchanges. The models allow scientists to compare interventions at almost no cost and could help policymakers to decide how to proceed in the real world. “It’s a very classic and useful way to try and see where is the best place to deploy an intervention to have the biggest effect,” says John Brooks, a medical adviser for the division of HIV/AIDS prevention at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

Although such simulations have long been used to model disease outbreaks and have, in some instances, guided public policy, their track record with more complex social behaviour such as drug use is limited, largely owing to sparse data and the breadth of parameters to consider. (...)

To create an agent-based model, researchers first ‘build’ a virtual town or region, sometimes based on a real place, including buildings such as schools and food shops. They then populate it with agents, using census data to give each one its own characteristics, such as age, race and income, and to distribute the agents throughout the virtual town.

The agents are autonomous but operate within pre-programmed routines — going to work five times a week, for instance. Some behaviours may be more random, such as a 5% chance per day of skipping work, or a 50% chance of meeting a certain person in the agent’s network. Once the system is as realistic as possible, the researchers introduce a variable such as a flu virus, with a rate and pattern of spread based on its real-life characteristics. They then run the simulation to test how the agents’ behaviour shifts when a school is closed or a vaccination campaign is started, repeating it thousands of times to determine the likelihood of different outcomes. (...)

In response to the opioid epidemic, Bobashev’s group has constructed Pain Town — a generic city complete with 10,000 people suffering from chronic pain, 70 drug dealers, 30 doctors, 10 emergency rooms and 10 pharmacies. The researchers run the model over five simulated years, recording how the situation changes each virtual day.

During this time, the patients’ drug tolerance increases, leading them to find different ways of acquiring drugs. Their behaviour is driven by variables such as the chance that a doctor will increase their prescription, or the likelihood that a dealer will have enough heroin. At a certain threshold, patients become addicted or more likely to overdose. Bobashev’s early data suggest, for example, that requiring doctors to track patients’ medication history can be effective over the long term, but not immediately.

The model contains many assumptions and simplifications, Bobashev says. For example, it doesn’t capture the fact that the rate at which people develop tolerance and addiction can depend on factors such as genetics, and that whether a person switches from prescription drugs to heroin can depend on the relative availability of the two drugs.

But researchers can adjust models such as Pain Town to test various interventions, such as increasing access to emergency rooms, arresting a dealer or equipping police with naloxone (a drug that reverses opioid overdoses), to see how the system reacts and whether it affects the number of deaths over time. And as models become more sophisticated, the researchers may be able to incorporate more factors, such as people who are not taking pain medications but are susceptible to trying opioids for the first time. (...)

Data drought

The models face numerous challenges before they will be ready for widespread adoption, primarily data gaps. Marshall says that researchers struggle to get access to data on opioid prescriptions that are held by manufacturers, pharmacies and law-enforcement agencies. It is also difficult to obtain government information on drug cartels and the type and rate of drugs flowing into the country. Other data simply do not exist in usable form: agencies may record deaths due to drug overdose, for instance, but fail to specify which drug was responsible.

Observing drug users such as Brandi can provide certain types of information more quickly and accurately. “Drug users know their chemicals intimately,” Ciccarone says.

Lee Hoffer is a cultural anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who studies heroin markets and collaborates with Bobashev. He says the ethnographic data that his group and others are collecting could help to fill some of the information gaps: “We’re trying to enter their world as interlopers to see how they see their life.” After an initial awkward period, he says, drug users tend to become more honest with the researchers, telling them crucial information such as how they form networks with dealers and the cost of drugs.

Understanding the psychology of drug users is also crucial, says Epstein. Most decision-making models assume rational behaviours. In reality, emotions, misinformation and irrational calculations play a major part. “When you put them together you get collections of dynamics that are very dysfunctional.”

by Sara Reardon, Nature | Read more:
Image: Jerome Sessini/Magnum

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

New Tom Petty Video Blends Old Photos With Fan Submissions

The Other Side of “Broken Windows”

In the nineteenth century, British researchers began studying the variation in crime rates between and within cities. Some of these studies offered relatively simple accounts of the variance, in which concentrated poverty led to higher crime. Others went further, asking what explained the disparities in crime rates among poor neighborhoods. Most of this work “offered theories,” the University of Pennsylvania criminologist John MacDonald wrote in a recent paper, “but did not attempt to provide guidance on how to curb crime.” He compared this tradition, unfavorably, with the work of British health scholars, most notably John Snow, whose research on cholera “noted the importance of the spatial environment,” and who “suggested the separation of sewers and drinking water wells to prevent water-borne diseases.”

Of course, social scientists have long influenced crime policies. Consider the “broken windows” theory, which the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson and the Rutgers criminologist George Kelling introduced, in a piece in the Atlantic, in 1982. According to Wilson and Kelling, criminals perceive broken windows and other forms of disorder as signs of weak social control; in turn, they assume that crimes committed there are unlikely to be checked. “Though it is not inevitable,” Wilson and Kelling argue, “it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped.”

“Broken Windows” is one of the most cited articles in the history of criminology; it’s sometimes called the Bible of policing. Since the nineteen-eighties, cities throughout the world have used Wilson and Kelling’s ideas as motivation for “zero tolerance” policing, wherein officers monitor petty crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, public intoxication, and even panhandling, and courts severely punish those convicted of committing them. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” the former Los Angeles and New York City police chief William J. Bratton has said. (Bratton has also applied the theory in overseas consulting work.) In practice, this meant stopping, frisking, and arresting more people, particularly those who live in high-crime areas. It also meant a spike in reports that police were unfairly targeting minorities, particularly black men.

Broken-windows theory always worked better as an idea than as a description of the real world. The problems with the theory, which include the fact that perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area, are numerous and well documented. But more interesting than the theory’s flaws is the way that it was framed and interpreted. Consider the authors’ famous evocation of how disorder begins:

A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

Things get worse from there. But what’s curious is how the first two steps of this cycle—“A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up”—have disappeared in the public imagination. The third step—“a window is smashed”—inspired the article’s catchy title and took center stage. Debates about the theory ignored the two problems at the root of its story, jumping straight to the criminal behavior. We got “broken windows,” not “abandoned property,” and a very different policy response ensued.

But what if the authors—and the policymakers who heeded them—had taken another tack? What if vacant property had received the attention that, for thirty years, was instead showered on petty criminals?

A few years ago, John MacDonald, the Penn criminologist, and Charles Branas, the chair of epidemiology at Columbia University, began one of the most exciting research experiments in social science. Branas is a leading scholar of gun violence, having become interested in the subject while working as a paramedic. He met MacDonald in the aughts, when they were both working at the University of Pennsylvania, in a seminar on gun violence at the medical school’s trauma center. Both were frustrated by the science that linked crime to neighborhood disorder. “A lot of it, from ‘broken windows’ on, was just descriptive,” Branas told me. “You didn’t know exactly what counted as disorder. And it wasn’t actionable. Outside of policing, which was obviously complicated, there wasn’t much you could do about it.”

The two began meeting on campus. While they were brainstorming, Branas was invited to discuss his research at a conference in Philadelphia. During his presentation, he briefly mentioned his interest in running an experiment on the physical factors related to gun violence. “When I finished, someone from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society approached me,” Branas recalled. That person was convinced that vacant properties—Philadelphia had tens of thousands of empty lots—were driving up violent crime in poor neighborhoods. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, or P.H.S., had incredible data, and offered to help.

Branas and MacDonald were excited about the idea. There was, after all, an established literature on the relationship between abandoned properties and crime. In 1993, the criminologist William Spelman published a paper showing that, in Austin, “crime rates on blocks with open abandoned buildings were twice as high as rates on matched blocks without open buildings.” In 2005, the sociologist Lance Hannon showed that, in New York City’s high-poverty areas, the number of abandoned houses in a given census tract correlated with homicide levels. But Branas and MacDonald wanted to draw from an even deeper study, which required collecting an enormous amount of data and designing an experiment. They invited more scientists to join them: a health economist, a professor from Penn’s Department of Emergency Medicine, and a medical anthropologist.

On a warm and windy day in September, I visited Philadelphia to observe the sites that P.H.S. had remediated. Keith Green, a P.H.S. employee with a salt-and-pepper beard, picked me up in his blue Ford pickup truck, and told me that we’d begin by driving to West Philadelphia, where P.H.S. maintains 2.3 million square feet of vacant land. Green, who grew up in a part of Philadelphia that’s so gray it’s known as “the concrete city,” started working at P.H.S. twenty-one years ago, first as an intern and then on community-garden projects. “I never thought I’d be doing this for so long,” he told me. “But I found my niche when we started fixing up abandoned property.”

As we drove, Green told me about one of his first jobs. “The city asked us to clean up a two-block area in North Philadelphia where there was a flea infestation. We got there, and it was like the entire area had turned into a jungle. Weeds, tall grass, messed-up trees. People were using it as a dumping ground.” The team ended up treating a hundred and twenty-five empty lots. “It was a horrible job, but when we finished you could tell that the neighborhood was going to be different,” he said. “And people were so happy. I’d have kids running up to my truck, yelling, ‘Mr. Keith! Mr. Keith! Can you come back tomorrow?’ They treated me like I was Mister Softee.”

Green drove slowly up Fortieth Street, on the west side of the city. “You’re gonna want to keep your eyes open,” he said. The area looked a lot like Englewood and North Lawndale, neighborhoods I’d studied in Chicago, where row houses and apartment buildings, some empty, some well-kept, sat adjacent to large, open lots that were thick with weeds, debris, and six-foot-high grass. “See that?” He pulled over at a corner lot with a low-lying wooden fence, two benches, trimmed trees, and a neatly cut lawn. “That’s one of our treated sites. You can tell because it’s so well maintained.”

We got out and walked through the pocket park to a vacant house and large lot a few steps away. There, the grass had grown both high and wide, so that it came through the sidewalk and out to the curb. “Now this—this is a disaster,” Green said. “It’s probably got an owner who wouldn’t let us work here, or someone we couldn’t track down. If you live here, you’ve got to deal with all the problems this attracts into the neighborhood: pests, insects, garbage, crime. And you know it’s gonna make it hard for new development to work here. People see that and they want to run.”(...)

Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”

The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.

Green and his colleagues at P.H.S. suspected that fixing up the empty lots and buildings was improving Philadelphia’s poor neighborhoods, but they weren’t certain. Branas and MacDonald had a more specific hypothesis: that remediation would reduce violent crime nearby. “It’s not simply that they are signs of disorder,” Branas told me. “It’s that the places themselves create opportunities for gun violence; they take what might just be a poor neighborhood and make it poor and dangerous.”

The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.

Compelling theories, as critics of broken-windows policing know all too well, are often betrayed by evidence. That’s why Branas was so surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots. These are extraordinary numbers, at a level of impact one rarely sees in a social-science experiment.

Equally powerful, Branas said, was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years, making the benefit far more sustainable than those of other crime-reduction programs. “Honestly, it was a bigger effect than we’d expected to find,” he said.

For Branas, the results pointed toward a new approach to crime prevention. Early in his career, he worked on what, in hindsight, he views as a failed experiment—conventional anti-violence research that focussed on the people most likely to commit crimes. “When I started at Penn, we had been working hard to reduce gun crime in Philadelphia. We had the interpreters, the social workers, the community leaders,” he said. “Some of them were amazing, and we had some successes. But they were always short-lived. . . . In the end, it wound up helping only, I don’t know, about fifty kids, just the ones who were there at the time.”

To this day, most policies that aim to reduce crime focus on punishing people rather than improving places. The President has called for a national “stop and frisk” police program; the Attorney General wants more severe sentencing; advocates of “law and order” are resurgent. We invest little in housing and neighborhood amenities like libraries, senior centers, and community gardens, which draw people into the public realm and put more eyes on the street. And we spend even less to address criminal “hot spots”—the empty lots and abandoned buildings that, according to Branas’s team, account for fifteen per cent of city space in America.

by Eric Klinenberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela

The Problem With ‘Hey Guys’

“Okay, guys,” a female coworker of mine recently began, as she addressed me and a female colleague. Then she stopped herself, said she was making an effort to use more gender-neutral language, and carried on talking.

It was a small self-correction, and a glimpse at the conflicted feelings stirred up by one of the most common greetings in the English language. Guys is an easygoing way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion—a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves "guys."

My coworker is one of many who have started editing themselves in response to this exclusion. In the course of reporting this story, I heard from teachers who wanted a better way to get students’ attention, an ice-cream scooper who wanted a better way to greet customers, and a debate coach who specifically encourages his students to use y’all. These are representatives of a broad coalition of people who have contemplated, and often gone through with, excising guys from their vocabularies.

There are, of course, plenty of people—including many women—who have no problem being addressed as “guys,” think the word has evolved to be entirely gender-neutral, and don't see a reason to change their usage. But others aren’t so sure. “I think there's a really serious and welcome reconception of gender lines and relationships between sex and gender going on,” says John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University and has written several books about language. He says “something has crested in particular over about the past 10 years”—something that has people examining their everyday communications.

In my reporting I heard from several people who said that the word is particularly troubling for trans and gender-nonconforming people. “As a transgender woman, I consciously began trying to stop using guys some years ago,” says Brad Ward, a college counselor at a high school in Atherton, California. She added, “When I’m included with a group that is called guys, there’s some pain, since it takes me back to my male days in a way that I’d rather not go.”

I also heard that guys could grate on women working at male-heavy companies. In tech in particular, some told me they saw the word as yet another symptom of a female-minimizing industry. “There are a lot of guys in tech and ‘guys’ is used all the time in my work and social environments by both men and women, but since it doesn't resonate with me anymore, I do feel like I'm not part of the group,” says Amy Chong, a 29-year-old user-experience researcher in San Francisco.

In some workplaces, people have used technology to gently push back against the gender-neutral guys so that they themselves don’t have to speak up. A group of government employees wrote a custom response for the messaging app Slack that would have a bot ask questions like “Did you mean friends?” or “Did you mean you all?” whenever a user wrote “Hey guys”; a Spotify employee embraced the idea, and the professional network Ladies Get Paid has a similar feature in its Slack group of some 30,000 members.

As these examples indicate, there’s additional scrutiny these days on communications that happen within or emanate from organizations. This is likely why, after I put out calls for opinions on guys, I heard from many people who worked in education or customer-facing jobs. I heard from one teacher who switched to using folks after thinking about the inclusive-learning environment he’d like to create, and another who opted for peeps or scholars. Similarly, an employee at an outdoor-goods store told me that her company’s human-resources department had encouraged the use of more-inclusive terms when addressing customers. “Folks and y’all were determined to be more acceptably neutral and you guys was asked to be toned down,” she said.

Many people are trying to phase guys out of their vocabulary in social settings as well as at work. Coby Joseph, a 26-year-old urban planner currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me that he no longer uses the term after considering “how much of our language centers men”; he found guys “lazy and inconsiderate” and stopped using it four or five years ago, except in cases when he’s communicating with people whom he knows identify as male.

This crowd of guys-objectors is not alone historically. People have been resisting the term for decades, and perhaps the most passionate opponent of the word is Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a 2002 essay in the journal Qualitative Sociology, she wrote about the problem with male-default terms such as “chairman,” “congressman,” and “mankind.” Kleinman saw them together as “another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which ‘man’ in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women.”

She reserved a special disapproval for “you guys,” which she considered the “most insidious” of these phrases, and with the help of former students made a small card that anyone could print out and, for instance, leave behind at a restaurant to communicate their dislike of the term to a waiter who had used it. “When you’re talking to a group of customers, gender doesn’t really matter, so why not replace ‘you guys’ with ‘you all,’ ‘folks,’ or ‘y’all,” it reads in part.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:

Image: DI Studio/Shutterstock/The Atlantic

Much Ado About Nothing

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson confirm high-stakes, winner-takes-all match

The story broke—if you want to use that word—late last week: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are negotiating to play a $10 million “winner-take-all” match. The reason “winner-take-all,” is in quotation marks is because you can be sure that, if the deal comes off, both players will make money. The prize money might be winner-take-all but there will be plenty of money for both players in appearance fees and, perhaps, a percentage of the TV rights and the corporate money that would be on the table.

Here’s another thing: It’s meaningless, unless you think that exhibition golf is something to pant over the way one online golf writer did when he wrote this past weekend: “This will be the golf event of the year.”

No, the golf event of the year will be the Ryder Cup. Right behind will be the four majors. Then the PGA Tour playoffs and all the real events on tour where there’s actually something at stake.

That doesn’t mean the event won’t get a high TV rating—it will because sports fans love big names and because there is still a fascination with everything Woods does among most of the golf media and many golf fans.

There’s nothing wrong with exhibition golf—it’s been part of the landscape forever. Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf—especially the old version with Jimmy Demaret and Gene Sarazen doing the announcing—was, in fact, wonderful. The old CBS Golf Classic, when the late, great Frank Chirkinian came up with the idea to mic the players, was a lot of fun to watch during the winter when there was snow on the ground outside.

Even the Skins Game was worthwhile at the beginning because of the big names who came to play. When it died though, it did so for one major reason: People realized there was really nothing at stake; corporate America was paying the players. It wasn’t as if the other players were taking out their wallets to pay Fred Couples off on the 18th green.

There were also the Woods prime-time exhibitions played against guys like David Duval and Sergio Garcia when he was TIGER WOODS. Those mercifully ended after a couple of years.

Woods and Mickelson have both said they want to play for an amount that makes the other one “uncomfortable.” How is it uncomfortable if you aren’t playing for YOUR OWN MONEY? Remember Lee Trevino’s line about pressure? He always said real pressure was having to make a putt for $1,000 when you had about $10 in your wallet. That’s pressure.

If Woods and Mickelson each put up $5 million—even though that amount wouldn’t come close to breaking either one—there would be some real pressure. But they’re not going to do that and both will get paid to show up.

So where’s the pressure? (...)

Woods’ return this year has been a mixed blessing for golf. His presence has certainly spiked ratings, especially in those events where he’s contended on the weekends. But it has also meant that a lot of very good stories—like the two guys who have won majors this year—have been largely overlooked.

The irony in this is that if Woods and Mickelson had ever had a REAL rivalry, an exhibition like this wouldn’t be looked at as that big a deal.

The fact is, Woods—who is five-and-a-half years younger than Mickelson—had already won eight of his 14 majors by the time Mickelson won his first of five. The two never really battled down the stretch man-a-mano at a major. There was never a Nicklaus-Palmer playoff like at Oakmont in 1962 or Nicklaus-Trevino at Merion in 1971 or the three classic Watson-Nicklaus duels (Masters ’77; Open Championship ’77; U.S. Open ’82).

The rivalry was more about their differing personalities and about the very real fact that they didn’t like one another. Now, they’re buddies. Or, at the very least, two businessmen who get along well enough to know a gold mine when they see it.

by John Feinstein, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

[ed. See also: $10m Tiger Woods v Phil Mickelson showdown would be in poor taste.]

What I Miss: A List

by Liana Finck, Catapult | Read more:

Image: Liana Finck
[ed. See also: The Moment Your Life Crashes and Burns: On Divorce, Injury, and Questions Without Answers.]

Brett Amory, Waiting 222, 2014
via:

Hume the Humane

Socrates died by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by the people of Athens. Albert Camus met his end in a car that wrapped itself around a tree at high speed. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity after weeping over a beaten horse. Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced, never took off.

While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’.

When the end came, Dr Black reported that Hume ‘continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness … He died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it.’

In his own lifetime Hume’s reputation was mainly as a historian. His career as a philosopher started rather inauspiciously. His first precocious attempt at setting out his comprehensive new system of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), published when he was 26, ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’, as he later recalled, with self-deprecating exaggeration.

Over time, however, his standing has grown to the highest level. A few years ago, thousands of academic philosophers were asked which non-living philosopher they most identified with. Hume came a clear first, ahead of Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein. Scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume. Even the biologist Lewis Wolpert, who says philosophers are ‘very clever but have nothing useful to say whatsoever’ makes an exception for Hume, admitting that at one stage he ‘fell in love’ with him.

Yet the great Scot remains something of a philosopher’s philosopher. There have been no successful popular books on him, as there have been for the likes of Montaigne, Nietzsche, Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Stoics. Their quotes, not his, adorn mugs and tea towels, their faces gaze down from posters. Hume hasn’t ‘crossed over’ from academic preeminence to public acclaim.

The reasons why this is so are precisely the reasons why it ought not to be. Hume’s strengths as a person and a thinker mean that he does not have the kind of ‘brand’ that sells intellectuals. In short, he is not a tragic, romantic figure; his ideas do not distil into an easy-to-summarise ‘philosophy of life’; and his distaste for fanaticism of any kind made him too sensible and moderate to inspire zealotry in his admirers.

Hume had at least two opportunities to become a tragic hero and avoid the cheerful end he eventually met. When he was 19, he succumbed to what was known as ‘the disease of the learned’, a melancholy that we would today call depression. However, after around nine months, he realised that this was not the inevitable fate of the wise but the result of devoting too much time to his studies. Hume realised that to remain in good health and spirits, it was necessary not only to study, but to exercise and to seek the company of friends. As soon as he started to do this he regained his cheer and kept it pretty much for the rest of his life.

This taught him an important lesson about the nature of the good life. As he later wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): ‘The mind requires some relaxation, and cannot always support its bent to care and industry.’ Philosophy matters, but it is not all that matters, and although it is a good thing, one can have too much of it. ‘Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit,’ says Hume, ‘and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you.’ The life ‘most suitable to the human race’ is a ‘mixed kind’ in which play, pleasure and diversion matter as well as what are thought of as the ‘higher’ pursuits. ‘Be a philosopher,’ advised Hume, ‘but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.’

In 1770, Hume was also presented with an opportunity for martyrdom, in somewhat bathetic circumstances. The Nor’ Loch in Edinburgh, where Princes Street Gardens now stands, was being drained as part of the expansion of the city. Walking across it one day, Hume fell into the bog that still remained. He cried for help but unfortunately for him, the women who heard him recognised him as ‘the great infidel’ and were not inclined to save him. Hume reasonably pointed out that all Christians should help anyone irrespective of their beliefs, but their understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan was not as up to scratch as his and they refused to save him unless he became a Christian there and then, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the creed.

A Socrates would perhaps have refused and died in the name of truth. Hume, however, was not going to allow the stupidity of others to cut his own life short, so he did what any sensible person should do: he went along with their request without any intention of keeping his promise.

In this he was following the example of the only other philosopher to rival Hume for all-time greatness: Aristotle. Here is another thinker whose stock among cognoscenti couldn’t be higher, but who has failed to capture the public’s imagination (although Edith Hall’s recent book Aristotle’s Way (2018) is trying to change that). Not coincidentally, I think, Aristotle also refused to play the martyr. Like Socrates, he was condemned to death for impiety. Also like Socrates, he had the opportunity to flee the city to safety. Unlike Socrates, that is exactly what he did. So while everyone knows how Socrates died, few know that Aristotle, like Hume, died in his 60s, probably also of stomach cancer.

It is somewhat perverse that the attractiveness of a philosophy seems to be directly correlated with how miserable its author’s life was. However, that is not the only reason why there are few self-ascribed Humeans outside academe. Hume’s philosophy does not add up to an easily digestible system, a set of rules for living. Indeed, Hume is best known for three negative theses.

by Julian Baggini, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Petra Eriksson at Handsome Frank
[ed. See also (recommended): Defining Philosophy.]

The Millennial Socialists Are Coming

In May, three young progressive women running for the state Legislature in Pennsylvania, each endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won decisive primary victories over men heavily favored by the political establishment. Two of the women, Summer Lee, 30, and Sara Innamorato, 32, ousted incumbents, the distant cousins Dom Costa and Paul Costa, members of an iconic Pennsylvania political family.

Elizabeth Fiedler, 37, announced her run three months after giving birth to her second child, and she had a nursery in her Philadelphia campaign office so other parents could drop off their kids before canvassing shifts. Talking to voters, she spoke of depending on Medicaid and CHIP for her kids’ health insurance, and of the anxiety she felt during two weeks when their insurance lapsed.

Lee was open about the more than $200,000 in student loans that have weighed on her since graduating from law school, which gave her a visceral sense, she told me, of the “need for free, quality education for everybody.” (An African-American woman running in a largely white district, she ended up with 68 percent of the vote.) Innamorato spoke about how her father’s opioid addiction had pushed her and her mother from the middle class. “I’ve lived the struggles of my district,” she told me.

Their races were part of a grass-roots civic renewal that is happening across this country, something that is, for me, the sole source of optimism in this very dark time. Marinating in the news in New York City, I’m often sick with despair. An authoritarian president of dubious legitimacy and depraved character is poised to remake America for generations with a second Supreme Court pick. The federal government is a festival of kleptocratic impunity. Kids the same age as my own are ripped from their migrant parents.

But all over the nation, people, particularly women, are working with near supernatural energy to rebuild democracy from the ground up, finding ways to exercise political power however they can. For the middle-aged suburbanites who are the backbone of the anti-Trump resistance, that often means shoring up the Democratic Party. For younger people who see Donald Trump’s election as the apotheosis of a rotten political and economic system, it often means trying to remake that party as a vehicle for democratic socialism. (...)

On Twitter, Trump has fantasized about a red wave that will sweep even more Republicans into power in November and reinforce his rule. But the real red wave may be democratic socialism’s growing political influence, especially among young people. “She really showed that you can run on these issues and win,” Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, said about Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, which includes Medicare for All, abolishing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and a federal jobs guarantee.

The D.S.A., to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs, is the largest socialist organization in America. Its growth has exploded since the 2016 election — when, of course, avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary — from 7,000 members to more than 37,000. It’s an activist group rather than a political party, working with Democrats in the electoral realm while also agitating against injustice from the outside.

Many of the D.S.A.’s goals, reflected in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, are indistinguishable from those of progressive democrats. But if the D.S.A. is happy to work alongside liberals, its members are generally serious about the “socialist” part of democratic socialist. Its constitution envisions “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”

Talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones. It plays a lot better with the young; one recent survey shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18 and 34 view socialism positively. The combination of the Great Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health insurance and the growing precariousness of the workplace has left young people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all around them. (...)

Indeed, while there’s a lot of talk about an ideological civil war among Democrats, on the ground, boundaries seem more fluid. In Pennsylvania recently, I met with moderate suburban resistance activists who’d volunteered for Innamorato, thrilled to support a young woman who could help revitalize the Democratic Party.

Barry Rush is a 63-year-old retiree who used to vote for both Democrats and Republicans, but who, horrified by Trump, now devotes himself full time to a liberal group called Progress PA. His main concern is electing Democrats — “I’m gonna pull the Smurf lever till this gets fixed,” he says of voting blue — and he knows that the Democratic Party needs young people. He was heartened by all the millennials at Innamorato’s victory celebration: “There were 500 kids there!” he said. It gave him hope for his grandkids.

The young members of the D.S.A., meanwhile, are hopeful because their analysis helps them make sense of the Trump catastrophe. They often seem less panicked about what is happening in America right now than liberals are, because they believe they know why our society is coming undone, and how it can be rebuilt.

“The Trump disaster is that everyone feels threatened individually, and feels like they have to fight Trump and fight this administration,” Arielle Cohen, the Pittsburgh D.S.A.’s 29-year-old co-chair, told me as I sat with her and two other chapter leaders in a small coffee shop in the city’s East End. “And socialists are saying, this has actually been going on for a long time. It’s not just Trump. It’s not just who’s in office.”

There is a strange sort of comfort in this perspective; the socialists see themselves as building the world they want to live in decades in the future rather than just scrambling to avert catastrophe in the present.

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Seth Wenig/Associated Press

[ed. I wonder how many people who profess to be against socialism actually understand the differences between it and communism (or capitalism for that matter). See here and here and here. It's the natural yin to neoliberalism's yang.]

Contemplating Woman Machine by Server Demirtaş
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Iggy Pop and Anthony Bourdain
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[ed. Bonus:]

How to Completely Delete Facebook From Your Life

[ed. It ain't easy.]

Buh-bye, Facebook. It's been real.

So you've had it with endless scrolling through the News Feed, notifications that wake you up in the middle of the night, memories that remind you how little your life has changed over the years, and groups that are just too big and you don't even know why you joined in the first place.

In short, you want to delete Facebook from your life.

It's a big decision, and it can be pretty scary, but we assure you: It can be done.

Before you start, though, think long and hard on whether you want to delete or merely deactivate your Facebook account.

Deactivating Facebook is fairly easy and painless. If you do it, your Timeline and other info will disappear from Facebook — but only until you reactivate your account. Yes, this means all your data will remain stored somewhere on Facebook's servers.

Deleting Facebook means you can never access your account again or retrieve any of your content or data. That means you need to take additional steps to remove traces of your Facebook data (as well as preserve it for yourself) before you delete your account.

To deactivate your account, follow these steps:

1. Click on the down arrow in the upper right corner of Facebook and click on Settings
2. Click on General
3. Click on Manage Account
4. Click on Deactivate your account
5. Enter your Facebook password and confirm deactivation

Yup, it's that easy. You're now gone from Facebook, but as we said, it's just a temporary measure that doesn't really delete your data on the service. You've just deactivated your Facebook account. To permanently erase yourself from Facebook, you'll need to delete your account altogether.

But, before you do that, it's prudent to take a few additional steps.

You may be done with Facebook, but you probably want to keep the data you've amassed on the service. Think about it: Posts, photos, videos, messages, likes, list of friends — it's all potentially valuable, and it really doesn't hurt to preserve it. To back up your data, do the following:

1. Open Facebook settings
2. Click on Your Facebook Information
3. Click on Download Your Information

Here, you'll be able to choose the date range, what types of data you'd like to backup, and media quality. Our advice: Just keep it all, and leave the media quality on high.

You can also choose between a HTML format, which will make the file easier to view, and JSON format, which will make it easier to import the data into another service (yes, it's quite possible that there will be another popular social network after Facebook one day). Now, click on "Create File," and store the resulting file safely.

This may sound a little paranoid, but getting rid of any trace of your existence on Facebook is harder than you think and requires more steps than just hitting that delete button. So before you do so, we suggest you do the following three steps, and an optional fourth step:

1. Remove associations between third party apps and Facebook
2. Turn off Facebook platform
3. Check how much of your data is held by third party apps
4. Clear your Facebook history

Parts 1) and 2) are easy, and consist of the following:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click Apps and Websites,
3. Check all apps and then clicking "Remove."

To turn of Facebook's platform, do this:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click on "Edit" under "Apps, Websites and Games"
3. Click on "Turn Off."

Important: Facebook might be the only way you can log in into some third-party apps (such as Tinder) and websites. Make sure you check those services and switch to a different type of login (email and password, for example) before you cut all ties to Facebook.

Check how much of your data is held by third-party apps

Now comes the tough part.

by Stan Schroeder, Mashable | Read more:
Images: Stan Schroeder and Bob Al-Greene
[ed. I can see real value in some kind of app that would do all this for you. Probably be sued out of business in a micro-second.]

The Mozart of Fly Casting

As the competitors in the 2016 Flycasting World Championships arrived at their hotel in Nelijarve, Estonia, some noticed a 12-year-old girl jumping on the hotel’s trampoline.

The girl, Maxine McCormick of San Francisco, was not a tourist. She was their competition.

Maxine was competing in four events in the biennial championships of this niche sport, in which the world’s best handlers of flies and rods test their skills in a series of accuracy and distance competitions. Maxine, instead of tinkering with her equipment ahead of the competition or fretting over the wind, spent most of her time on the trampoline, jumping or lying down and reading on it. Once, she fell asleep.

Then she trounced every other woman in the competition’s most popular event, trout accuracy, in which competitors cast into a series of rings. Her score was also higher than those of all the men except one: her coach, Chris Korich. She placed third in the salmon distance event, using back muscles honed by hours of tree climbing to propel her line 127 feet.

“She’s the most efficient fly caster on the planet,” said Korich, who has been coaching Maxine since 2013. “I don’t know anyone in history that can claim to be better.”

In the five years since Maxine began fly casting — which she describes as “fly fishing without the fish” — she has become the sport’s youngest champion. And this weekend, at 14, she defended her accuracy title at the world championships in England with a score of 52 in the women’s division — 21 points clear of the second-place finisher. She also won the salmon distance category.

“I never knew I would become this good at anything,” Maxine said in a recent interview.

Anita Strand, the nine-time world champion caster from Norway who took silver in the 2016 accuracy event, recalled watching in awe as Maxine pivoted between two existences — world champion fly caster and child.

Now, she is no longer the tiny girl on the trampoline. She’s a teenager, taller and stronger, favoring fashionable clothing instead of the utilitarian outfits of most of her competitors. At practice, she’s focused and quiet, and when she starts casting, her dark eyes narrow to a frown as she attacks her target.

Maxine’s speedy journey to casting supremacy began when her father, Glenn McCormick, took her to the Golden Gate Angling & Casting Club in San Francisco in 2013. Like most people who come to the club’s pools, he simply wanted to become a better fisherman.

He didn’t know about the sport of casting, which began in the United States 150 years ago and flourished during the first half of the 20th century, when casting competitions took place at Madison Square Garden. The sport has faded into obscurity, but there is still a robust community of local clubs around the country, as well as national and international tournaments sanctioned by various governing bodies.

It’s a tiny sport, but the clubs offer people a chance to improve the distance and accuracy of their cast, which leads to more productive fishing. About 75 people compete in the yearly national tournaments, and there are about 150 elite competitive casters throughout the United States.

Maxine’s gift quickly became apparent. In the same way that tennis prodigies are somehow able to get extra spin and power on the ball from their first days on a court, Maxine could make the fly come off the tip of her rod with a zip and efficiency that young casters rarely have, her father said.

She also had access to local clubs that counted world champions as members, including Korich, an 11-time world champion. Temperate weather also helped, allowing year-round practice. By the time Maxine was 10 she was regularly outscoring all the women at national tournaments.

Equipment could be an issue. Waders didn’t fit. Korich had to sand down her rods to fit her strength levels. Korich, 59, who has two daughters of his own, balanced his instruction with frequent breaks for playing in nearby creeks, and often found himself standing under a tree, praying that Maxine wouldn’t fall out of it.

He also let her come up with names for the fundamentals she was learning. The wrist muscles she needed to activate while casting became her “magic rainbow bands,” in honor of her hobby of making rubber band bracelets. While practicing her back cast, a move that requires a thrusting backward motion, she imagined poking a giant in the eye with her rod. To remind herself to keep her movements close to her body to conserve energy, she pictured herself in a giant egg she didn’t want to crack. Korich has even learned how to use Snapchat to communicate with her.

With Maxine dominating the juniors, Korich told her she should focus on beating the sport’s Michael Jordan — Steve Rajeff, 61, considered the best fly caster of all time. Maxine agreed.

by Shelby Pope, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joshua Lott

Why Can’t We Just Play Ball?

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a sports fan. As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the military. Until recently, I experienced those as two separate and distinct worlds. While I was in the military -- I served for 20 years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force -- I did, of course, play sports. As a young lieutenant, I was in a racquetball tournament at my base in Colorado. At Squadron Officer School in Alabama, I took part in volleyball and flickerball (a bizarre Air Force sport). At the Air Force Academy, I was on a softball team and when we finally won a game, all of us signed the ball. I also enjoyed being in a military bowling league. I even had my own ball with my name engraved on it.

Don’t misunderstand me. I was never particularly skilled at any sport, but I did thoroughly enjoy playing partly because it was such a welcome break from work -- a reprieve from wearing a uniform, saluting, following orders, and all the rest. Sports were sports. Military service was military service. And never the twain shall meet.

Since 9/11, however, sports and the military have become increasingly fused in this country. Professional athletes now consider it perfectly natural to don uniforms that feature camouflage patterns. (They do this, teams say, as a form of “military appreciation.”) Indeed, for only $39.99 you, too, can buy your own Major League Baseball-sanctioned camo cap at MLB’s official site. And then, of course, you can use that cap in any stadium to shade your eyes as you watch flyovers, parades, reunions of service members returning from our country’s war zones and their families, and a multitude of other increasingly militarized ceremonies that celebrate both veterans and troops in uniform at sports stadiums across what, in the post-9/11 years, has come to be known as “the homeland.”

These days, you can hardly miss moments when, for instance, playing fields are covered with gigantic American flags, often unfurled and held either by scores of military personnel or civilian defense contractors. Such ceremonies are invariably touted as natural expressions of patriotism, part of a continual public expression of gratitude for America’s “warfighters” and “heroes.” These are, in other words, uncontroversial displays of pride, even though a study ordered by Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake revealed that the U.S. taxpayer, via the Pentagon, has regularly forked over tens of millions of dollars ($53 million between 2012 and 2015 alone) to corporate-owned teams to put on just such displays.

Paid patriotism should, of course, be an oxymoron. These days, however, it’s anything but and even when the American taxpayer isn’t covering displays like these, the melding of sports and the military should be seen as inappropriate, if not insidious. And I say that as both a lover of sports and a veteran.

I Went to a Military Parade and a Tennis Match Broke Out

Maybe you’ve heard the joke: I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out. It was meant to poke fun at the fisticuffs in National Hockey League games, though these days there are fewer of them than in the “glory days” of the 1970s. An updated version would, however, fit today’s increasingly militarized sports events to a T: I went to a military parade and a baseball (football, hockey) game broke out.

Nowadays, it seems as if professional sports simply couldn’t occur without some notice of and celebration of the U.S. military, each game being transformed in some way into yet another Memorial Day or Veterans Day lite.

Consider the pro-military hype that surrounded this year’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Not so very long ago, when I watched such games I would be transported to my childhood and my fantasies of becoming the next Nolan Ryan or Carl Yastrzemski.

When I watched this year’s version of the game, however, I didn’t relive my youth; I relived my military career. As a start, the previous night featured a televised home-run derby. Before it even began, about 50 airmen paraded out in camouflage uniforms, setting the stage for everything that would follow. (As they weren’t on duty, I couldn’t help wondering why they found it appropriate to don such outfits.) Part of T-Mobile's "HatsOff4Heroes” campaign, this mini-parade was justified in the name of raising money to support veterans, but T-Mobile could have simply given the money to charity without any of the militarized hoopla that this involved.

Highlighting the other pre-game ceremonies the next night was a celebration of Medal of Honor recipients. I have deep respect for such heroes, but what were they doing on a baseball diamond? The ceremony would have been appropriate on, say, Veterans Day in November.

Those same pre-game festivities included a militaristic montage narrated by Bradley Cooper (star of "American Sniper"), featuring war scenes and war monuments while highlighting the popular catchphrase "freedom isn't free." Martial music accompanied the montage along with a bevy of flag-waving images. It felt like watching a twisted version of the film Field of Dreams reshot so that soldiers, not baseball players, emerged early on from those rows of Iowa corn stalks and stepped onto the playing field.

What followed was a "surprise" reunion of an airman, Staff Sergeant Cole Condiff, and his wife and family. Such staged reunions have become a regular aspect of major sporting events -- consider this “heart-melting” example from a Milwaukee Brewers game -- and are obviously meant to tug at the heartstrings. They are, as retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich wrote at TomDispatch back in 2011, propagandistic versions of "cheap grace."

In addition, Budweiser used this year’s game to promote "freedom" beer, again to raise money for veterans and, of course, to burnish its own rep. (Last year, the company was hyping "America" beer.)

And the All-Star game is hardly alone in its militarized celebrations and hoopla. Take the 2017 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York City, which I happened to watch. With John McEnroe in retirement, tennis is, generally speaking, a quieter sport. Yet before the men’s final, a Marine Corps color guard joined a contingent of West Point cadets in a ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. Naturally, a by-now-obligatory oversized American flag set the scene -- here’s a comparable ceremony from 2016 -- capped by a performance of “God Bless America” and a loud flyover by four combat jets. Admittedly, it was a dramatic way to begin anything, but why exactly an international tennis match that happened to feature finalists from Spain and South Africa?

Blending Sports With the Military Weakens Democracy

I’m hardly the first to warn about the dangers of mixing sports with the military, especially in corporate-controlled blenders. Early in 2003, prior to the kick off for the Iraq War (sports metaphor intended), the writer Norman Mailer issued this warning:

“The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives... [D]emocracy is the special condition -- a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military, and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.”

More than 14 years later, that combination -- corporations, the military, and mass spectator sports, all wrapped in a gigantic version of the stars and stripes -- has increasingly come to define what it means to be an American. Now that the country also has its own self-styled strongman president, enabled by a spineless Congress and an increasingly reactionary judiciary, Mailer’s mention of a “pre-fascistic atmosphere” seems prescient.

What started as a post-9/11 drive to get an American public to “thank” the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts -- stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude -- has morphed into a new form of national reverence. And much credit goes to professional sports for that transformation. In conjunction with the military and marketed by corporations, they have reshaped the very practice of patriotism in America.

Today, thanks in part to taxpayer funding, Americans regularly salute grossly oversized flags, celebrate or otherwise “appreciate” the troops (without making the slightest meaningful sacrifice themselves), and applaud the corporate sponsors that pull it all together (and profit from it). Meanwhile, taking a stand (or a knee), being an agent of dissent, protesting against injustice, is increasingly seen as the very definition of what it means to be unpatriotic. Indeed, players with the guts to protest American life as it is are regularly castigated as SOBs by our sports- and military-loving president.

Professional sports owners certainly know that this militarized brand of patriotism sells, while the version embodied in the kinds of controversial stances taken by athletes like former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick (cashiered by his own league) angers and alienates many fans, ultimately threatening profits.

Meanwhile, the military’s bottom line is recruiting new bodies for that all-volunteer force while keeping those taxpayer dollars flowing into the Pentagon at increasingly staggering levels. For corporations, you won’t be surprised to learn, it's all about profits and reputation.

In the end, it comes down to one thing: who controls the national narrative.

Think about it. A set of corporate-military partnerships or, if you prefer, some version of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has enlisted sports to make militarism look good and normal and even cool. In other words, sports teams now have a powerful set of incentives to appear patriotic, which increasingly means slavishly pro-military. It’s getting hard to remember that this country ever had a citizen-soldier tradition as well as sports teams whose athletes actually went almost en masse to serve in war. Consider it paradoxical that militarism is today becoming as American as baseball and apple pie, even as, like so many other citizens, today’s athletes vote with their feet to stay out of the military. (The NFL’s Pat Tillman was a noble post-9/11 exception.) Indeed, the widespread (if shallow) support of the military by so many athletes may, in some cases, be driven by a kind of guilt.

“Collusion” is a key word in this Trumpian moment. Even though Robert Mueller isn’t investigating them, corporate-owned sports teams are now actively colluding with the military to redefine patriotism in ways that work to their mutual advantage. They are complicit in taking a select, jingoistic form of patriotism and weaponizing it to suppress dissent, including against the military-industrial complex and America’s never-ending wars.

Driven by corporate agendas and featuring exaggerated military displays, mass-spectator sports are helping to shape what Americans perceive and believe. In stadiums across the nation, on screens held in our hands or dominating our living rooms, we witness fine young men and women in uniform unfurling massive flags on football fields and baseball diamonds, even on tennis courts, as combat jets scream overhead. What we don’t see -- what is largely kept from us -- are the murderous costs of empire: the dead and maimed soldiers, the innocents slaughtered by those same combat jets.

The images we do absorb and the narrative we’re encouraged to embrace, immersed as we are in an endless round of militarized sporting events, support the idea that massive “national security” investments (to the tune of roughly a trillion dollars annually) are good and right and patriotic. Questioning the same -- indeed, questioning authority in any form -- is, of course, bad and wrong and unpatriotic.

For all the appreciation of the military at sporting events, here’s what you’re not supposed to appreciate: why we’re in our forever wars; the extent to which they've been mismanaged for the last 17 years; how much people, especially in distant lands, have suffered thanks to them; and who’s really profiting from them.

by William J. Astore, TomDispatch | Read more:
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Kate Wadsworth
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Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Bananas Still Life, N/D

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Xue Liang, Little bird on a rock in a bamboo grove N/D
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