Where Gritty Politics And Sweet News Mix


Thursday, August 23, 2007

Tiger Woods might be great but is he really the greatest?


If Pope Benedict XVI was a golf fan, Tiger Woods would already be a saint. Yet deification for the world's best player cannot be too far away if the reaction to his victory in last Sunday's US PGA Championship at Medinah is anything to go by. Indeed, one excitable American sports columnist was driven to describe Woods as the greatest individual athlete of all time. As is the way of the provocative columnist, he then asked readers to send in their votes. The ballots are already being counted (on ESPN.com for anyone who is interested).

As futility goes, surely nothing beats such an exercise. Who is the greatest athlete of all time: Tiger Woods or Muhammad Ali? Babe Ruth or Stanley Matthews? Steve Redgrave or Shergar? Rod Laver or Franz Klammer? You might as well ask what is the most useful item on the shelves of a Tesco supermarket: McVitie's chocolate digestives or Daz washing power?

Yet an intrinsic part of being obsessed with sport is being enthused by pointless comparisons between athletes who share little in common other than their brilliance. Much as I would like to tell you I have spent the four days since Woods won the 12th major of his career pondering the civil liberty implications of profile screening passengers at international airports, the truth is I have spent them wondering if Woods really could be the greatest ever.

I was lucky enough to spend Sunday afternoon following the world No1 around Medinah and can report that he certainly looks the part. Great athletes all have stage presence and he is a Mount Rushmore of a man. Poor Luke Donald, his playing partner for the day, was dwarfed beside him on the tee. The Englishman is an exceptional golfer but looked like a 12-handicapper when measured against Woods.

For all its apparent omnipotence, television does not fully capture the experience of live golf. Its two dimensions magnify the mundane while diminishing the difficult. The most impressive thing about Woods is that he is at his best when required to perform a difficult task. His second shot to the first green was a perfect example. Facing a downhill lie, to a pin that was so inaccessible it might as well have been planted in the middle of the bunker guarding the front of the green, he feathered his ball to six feet, and then rolled in the putt for birdie. Tournament over.

In a purely athletic sense, Woods's effort in the final round was easily the greatest single sporting performance I have ever seen. I can fully understand why so many people agree, but I still cannot comprehend the urge to anoint him as the greatest athlete of all time. That's because I have always taken the view that great athletes become truly great when they use their status shape the society in which they live. When it comes to tennis, I would always take Arthur Ashe over Pete Sampras, even though Sampras was clearly the better player. Ashe was a brilliant as well but he was also a fearless campaigner on issues like racial intolerance and the treatment of Aids patients.

By this measure of social involvement Woods falls short. On the positive side, at least he is not as detached as his great friend Michael Jordan, who once declined to criticise a nasty, racist politician called Jesse Helms on the grounds that "Republicans buy sneakers too". And Woods recently built a learning centre for under-privileged kids in California - a step in the right direction, definitely, but still a long way short of the late Earl Woods's claim that his son would one day change the world.

Maybe he will one day, but until then I will stick by the man who I will always consider to be the greatest athlete of all time: the former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. A great athlete and a man who really did change the world in which he lived.

By Lawrence Donegan

The Politics of God


The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

An example: In May of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent an open letter to President George W. Bush that was translated and published in newspapers around the world. Its theme was contemporary politics and its language that of divine revelation. After rehearsing a litany of grievances against American foreign policies, real and imagined, Ahmadinejad wrote, “If Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?” This was not a rhetorical question. “I have been told that Your Excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth,” Ahmadinejad continued, reminding his fellow believer that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.” There follows a kind of altar call, in which the American president is invited to bring his actions into line with these verses. And then comes a threatening prophecy: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of political theology — yet that is what we find hardest to do. Reading a letter like Ahmadinejad’s, we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics.

The problem is ours, not his. A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.


Understanding this difference is the most urgent intellectual and political task of the present time. But where to begin? The case of contemporary Islam is on everyone’s mind, yet is so suffused with anger and ignorance as to be paralyzing. All we hear are alien sounds, motivating unspeakable acts. If we ever hope to crack the grammar and syntax of political theology, it seems we will have to begin with ourselves. The history of political theology in the West is an instructive story, and it did not end with the birth of modern science, or the Enlightenment, or the American and French Revolutions, or any other definitive historical moment. Political theology was a presence in Western intellectual life well into the 20th century, by which time it had shed the mind-set of the Middle Ages and found modern reasons for seeking political inspiration in the Bible. At first, this modern political theology expressed a seemingly enlightened outlook and was welcomed by those who wished liberal democracy well. But in the aftermath of the First World War it took an apocalyptic turn, and “new men” eager to embrace the future began generating theological justifications for the most repugnant — and godless — ideologies of the age, Nazism and Communism.


It is an unnerving tale, one that raises profound questions about the fragility of our modern outlook. Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was possible in the advanced West, if we can hear political theology speaking in a more recognizable tongue, represented by people in familiar dress with familiar names, perhaps then we can remind ourselves how the world looks from its perspective. This would be a small step toward measuring the challenge we face and deciding how to respond.


By Mark Lilla
Professor of the humanities at Columbia University.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Black American and Immigration: Pure Economic Cents


More immigrants are admitted under the "family-reunification" policy than for any other reason. Unfortunately, the impact of the family-reunification quota, especially the harm it's done to African-Americans, is shrouded by the American phobia about thinking honestly about race. This purportedly idealistic smokescreen is actually concocted by the clever in order to wage class war on the clueless. Maybe not intentionally, but isn't it funny how people tend to come up with ideals that are in their interests?

Serious discussions of immigration reform have been off the table for years in America precisely because the current immigration policies provide America's verbal elite with a new, improved servant class at no cost to themselves in terms of greater competition. Mexicans may be flooding into the U.S., but they are not taking jobs away from American lawyers, media people, politicians, business executives and the like. The Mexicans with the verbal skills to do these jobs stay home in Mexico speaking Spanish. Instead, small, brown, diligent, and submissive immigrants have displaced large, black, unmotivated, and surly native Americans as our auto mechanics, waiters, gardeners, cleaning ladies, child-minders, and the like. We consumers of these services get better workers for less money.

The African-American elites go along with this scheme. They sell out the black working class on immigration because more immigrants means more pressure for identity politics and multiculturalism (i.e., quotas, jobs as diversity sensitivity consultants, ethnic pride educators, etc.), which means more easy money for the black verbal elite.

There are two prominent intellectual positions on immigration: The extremely unpopular one is that ethnicity matters, and that immigration policy should not be used to change the current ethnic makeup of America. The much more popular view, which dominates both the liberal and conservative media establishments (e.g., the Wall Street Journal editorial page), argues that high immigration is good for the country, and we should be color-blind in our immigration policy, because America is a "proposition" nation (e.g., "All men are created equal", etc.) rather than a nation of blood and soil.

The first view appears to be a political nonstarter, because of the nonstop indoctrination of whites against them personally feeling any ethnocentrism.

The second view, colorblindness, hits all the right notes in today's American zeitgeist but, as we've seen, its effects are hardly colorblind: the current system hurts Americans on the left side of the bell curve in order to help those on the right side. It damages African-Americans and, at least economically, Mexican-American citizens. For example, Cesar Chavez volunteered his United Farm Worker staff to patrol the border to keep out the Mexican immigrants who were driving down the wages of the Mexican-American stoop laborers in his union. By cutting down the supply of farmworkers competing for jobs, Chavez managed to drive up their wages during the Seventies. But the Mexican economic crisis of the early Eighties and the lack of any real effort to keep new immigrants out overwhelmed his efforts under a flood of cheap immigrant workers. Stoop laborers' wages stopped growing in 1981.

On the other end of the bell curve, however, are highly intelligent whites with outstanding verbal skills, who face little immigrant competition (other than from the occasional immigrant English magazine editor), but who desperately want the government's help with their servant problem.

I'll propose an alternative to these two ideas, based on American patriotism. Let's set up America's immigration system to maximally benefit the people of whatever ethnic group who are American citizens as of today. Further, the bias in the system should be toward helping those Americans less able to compete intellectually with future immigrants.

To my mind, the fundamental goal of immigration policy is to maximize the benefit to existing citizens, just as the fundamental goal of a public corporation's management is to maximize the wealth of its current stockholders, not of people who might buy stock later. Think of the U.S. as an employee-owned corporation like United Airlines. Immigration policy is thus like United's hiring policy. The goal of United Airline's hiring policy is to optimize the benefits to the existing stockholder-employees by hiring the new stockholder-employees who have the most to contribute at the lowest cost. Similarly, the goal of America's immigration policy logically ought to be to brain drain the rest of the world of the people who can contribute the most to the welfare of current American citizens.

Thus, we should be actively recruiting the most intelligent and most entrepreneurial -- they'll produce the most new wealth and new jobs in America, and the Americans they'll be competing with can best afford the new competition. In contrast, we should be diligently keeping out run-of-the-mill would-be immigrants who would merely add to the competition faced by our less intelligent citizens, since lower IQ American citizens can least afford additional wage competition.

The most important part of our current immigration law, family reunification, is the equivalent of United Airlines letting its newest employees nepotistically determine its next hires. Obviously, UA would never even consider such an absurd policy, but that's what the USA does.

The second largest contributor of new immigrants under the current law, the need of American corporations for particular skills, has worked well in itself, but when combined with family reunification it just ends up lowering wages for African-Americans and others who can least afford it. Say, Intel imports the next Andy Grove, who soon begins creating new jobs for Americans through his brilliance. However, Mrs. Grove2 is allowed under the law to bring over her sister, who brings her husband, who brings his deadbeat brother, who brings his nothing-special daughter, who is married to Mr. Nobody, etcetera etcetera. Regression to the mean takes its terrible toll. Eventually, we've brought in a bunch of people of no particular talent other than they will no doubt work harder for less money than current blue-collar white and black Americans.

This will keep down wage inflation, which today seems to be automatically assumed to be a Good Thing. But shouldn't one of the goals of America be to see the wages of the bottom half of our bell curve rise over time?

Monday, August 20, 2007

World's Best Blueberry Pancakes


INGREDIENTS

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 stick butter or margarine, melted and cooled
Approximately 1 cup whole milk
1 cup fresh blueberries (about 8 per pancake)
Vegetable oil or butter, for cooking

Serving suggestion: maple syrup and additional butter


DIRECTIONS

  1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. In a medium bowl, lightly beat the eggs then whisk them into the flour mixture. Combine the butter and 1 cup of milk in the medium bowl then gradually whisk this mixture into the batter. The batter should be slightly thicker than heavy cream. It the batter is too thick, add a little more milk.
  2. Heat a seasoned griddle or a large heavy-bottomed skillet over medium heat. If the pan is not well seasoned, add a little oil to prevent the pancakes from sticking. Spoon or pour about 3 tablespoons of batter onto the griddle to form a pancake. Repeat forming only as many pancakes as can fit on the griddle with 1-inch or so of space around each. Drop 7 or 8 blueberries on each pancake. Cook until bubbles form on the pancake surfaces then flip and continue cooking until the second sides are golden, about 3 minutes longer.

Why isn't Barack Obama black enough?


Over the past few months, one question has loomed over Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's head: "Is he black enough?" Any query attributing to Obama's blackness in many ways parallels to the proposition that Bill Clinton is America's closest thing to having a black president. Even if the public doesn't necessarily know what this question means, common sense still makes them aware of its implications. The persistence to which Obama's blackness has been questioned, so early in the 2008 presidential campaign, reflects the white media's relentless interest to define blackness, as much as it unveils an underlying political agenda.

Those who consider themselves spokespeople for the black community have maintained a dignified front by neglecting to provide the media with any type of answer. However, as people of color see through this question's racially divisive nature, media correspondents continue to breathe air into the topic. Nobody is supposed to answer the question, "Is Barack black enough?" with any definitive answer. This question is not really a question at all, but an accusation to which the public is expected to provide a counter question; "Why wouldn't he be black enough?" The counter question contains the meat of the red herring, playing right into the media's hands, and allowing them to present the black community with an already compiled list of insulting, though unsurprising responses.

Why isn't Barack Obama black enough? To the socially conscious, this sounds like an idiotic question because it is. In fact, the question is so absurd it's impossible to approach without considering who is asking it in the first place. As much as the press has feigned the topic's all-inclusive importance, it remains a discussion isolated to whites in the media. Most Caucasian news correspondents relate to Obama as a charismatic, charming and rousing speaker who pronounces his t's and d's with an effortless grace and panache they don't think they've witnessed since the heyday of Sidney Poitier.

Anybody wondering why Obama isn't black enough to quench the media's desire to define his blackness doesn't need to dig too deep before finding the serious insinuations of, say, a Joe Biden, who described Obama as being the "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Biden's comment actually helped put the political double speak into perspective, as it shed a light on the message political pundits like Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, regardless of their personal perspectives, have long been hinting towards: The National Interpretation of Blackness.

Statements such as these only justify racial stereotyping that keeps America's cultural tensions alive and well. While the topic of Obama's blackness is covered on every news channel from MSNBC to CNN, Americans still owe it to the assurance of their own integrity to ask what being black, or white, or any race for that matter, has to do with being the President of the United States? At some point, Americans are going to have to look beyond the myopia that allows racial generalizations to become fodder for political news stories. Is Barack black enough? Maybe? There's no right answer. When it comes to race, culture, and identity, everybody's got an opinion and we all think ours is more justified than the next. When posing the question of racial identity against a presidential candidacy, it reaches a point where distinguishing who is right from who is wrong is simply no longer relevant.

Perhaps Obama isn't black enough for CNN, and maybe he's too black for CBS Evening News. This may appear to be an inadequate conclusion to the politically correct, but focusing on the mitigating factors around an individual's ethnic identification misses the point. The question America should he asking has nothing to do with who is a black enough candidate to be the first black president of the United States of America. The real question for 2008 is this: Does Barack Obama have the chops to stand up as a competent Commander-in-Chief?

This will be the U.S.'s most important election in nearly two decades, and we American citizens owe it to ourselves to concentrate on finding an answer without any distractions.

By: Allison Harvey

www.vibe.com