Category Archives: Culture

05.17.13
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Lykkelig syttende Mai og gratulerer med dagen

Today is Syttende Mai, the 199th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of Norway. (Which makes today more like our Constitution Day, Sept. 17, than Independence Day, July 4.)

Lake Region State College Prof. Sam Johnson explains the significance of Syttende Mai:

Having been a Danish possession for four centuries, Norway was handed over to Sweden following a military defeat of the Danes by Sweden in 1813.

The Norwegians strenuously objected to the arrangement in which they had no voice, and on April 10, 1814 they elected by popular vote a National Assembly of 112 officials, merchants, and farmers to meet at Eidsvold, Norway outside Christiania (now Oslo) to draft a constitution inspired by the American Declaration of Independence and the French Constitution.

As one representative described the assembly:

“Here was to be seen a selection of men from all parts of the realm, of all ranks and dialects, men from court circles as well as landowners, who came together in no set order for the sacred purpose of laying the foundations for the rebirth of the nation.”

Six weeks later on May 17th, the National Assembly completed its work on the Norwegian Constitution, and on the same day closed its proceedings by electing Prince Christian Frederik as King of Norway and declaring Norway a “free, independent kingdom, united with Sweden.”

Sweden’s King, Karl Johan, accepted the Norwegian Constitution of May 17, 1814 as the basis for a political marriage of convenience with Norway. He had several reasons for doing this.

One of these reasons was that he hoped the new union might be strong enough to play a role in French politics because Napoleon Bonaparte had abdicated the throne just a month earlier on April 18.

Another reason was that he dreaded the prospect of a winter war with Norway, which seemed imminent should he not recognize their document.

Therefore, he accepted the Norwegian Constitution as an appeasing gesture, though he clearly intended to take back many concessions after he was crowned monarch of the dual kingdom in 1818.

In fact, King Karl Johan deliberately began trying to restrict the constitutional powers of the Storting (Norwegian parliament), and went so far as to extend his royal prerogatives in an attempt to bind Norway closer to Sweden.

However, the Storting defended what had been won in 1814, and well into the 1820′s, the common rallying cry “Guard the Constitution” was heard at national day processions.

At best, Karl Johan was able to maintain a constitutional monarchy.

By 1830, Karl Johan gave up the idea of revising the Norwegian Constitution, as did his successors, and “Syttende Mai” celebrations became genuine festivities that included a solemn procession of elders as well as a joyous children’s parade signifying hope for the future — a tradition that continues to be a special part of “Syttende Mai” celebrations in Norway today. ..

Although Norway’s union with Sweden continued for nearly another century, the Norwegian people kept up the pressure for separation and true independence.

Finally, in 1905 with the support of virtually the entire Norwegian populace, the Storting officially dissolved Norway’s union with Sweden, and Sweden was forced to recognize Norway’s complete independence.

To this day, the exuberance of “Syttende Mai” celebrations are evident not only in Norway, but also in Canada, and the United States where more than 4.5 million Americans trace their ancestry to Norway. …

Americans of Norwegian heritage mark this special day in much they same way as they do in Norway — with music, flag waving, lots of good foods and treats, and singing the national anthem ”Ja, vi elsker dette landet” (Yes, We Love This Land) with lyrics by Norwegian poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson :

“Yes, we love this country,
as it rises forth,
rugged, weathered, above the sea,
with thousands of homes and families.
Love, love it and think
of our fathers and mothers
and the saga nights that sends
dreams to our earth,
and the saga nights that sends dreams to our earth.”

The Norwegian national anthem is not this …

… it’s this:

My varied ethnic background is one-fourth Norwegian. My grandfather (from whence comes the name “Prestegard,” originally spelled “Prestegaard” or “Prestegård,” meaning, depending on whom you ask, “animal farm,” “priest’s farm” or “rectory”) was born in the Owatonna/Blue Earth area of southeastern Minnesota before his parents died and he moved in with cousins in the Brodhead area. His father, Oscar, was born in Crawford County before moving across the Mississippi River to Minnesota at some point. Oscar’s father is the original immigrant, Peter, who was from Stavanger, Norway. So I am part of the fourth Prestegard generation, or the fourth generation of these Prestegards, on this side of the Atlantic. (Similar to my mother’s side of the family; my great-great-grandfather, Paul Wellner, came here from Brackenheim, Germany.)

That is pretty much all I know about my Norwegian background. (My ethnic background is so varied that to figure out our kids’ genealogy for a school assignment required us to divide into 42nds.) Norwegians settled all over Wisconsin, proof of which can be found in this weekend’s Syttende Mai festivals in Stoughton and Westby. (Those cities’ high school teams are named, respectively, the Vikings and Norsemen.)

My grandfather visited Norway a couple times before his death in 1994. It would be interesting to know why his grandfather, Peter Prestegaard, decided to depart Stavanger — which, being on the southern end of Norway, has the warmest weather in Norway, with average temperatures above freezing all year — for a place where the average temperature never gets above zero. Fahrenheit. (I exaggerate for effect.) But I suppose instead of castigating my great-great-grandfather for his poor weather choices, I should note that, like every immigrant to this country, he had the initiative to leave what he knew for a new land where he thought he would have more opportunity.

I don’t know a whole lot about Norway without doing some research, either. (I did a paper about Norway when I was in grade school.) Norway also was invaded by Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. The Nazis conducted heavy water experiments in Norway to develop their own atomic bomb, until the hydroelectric plant was destroyed by Norwegian commandos, known forever as the Heroes of Telemark.

As an added bonus, when the Nazis decided to move heavy water production to Germany, Norwegians sank the ferry carrying the heavy water. Norwegian civilians died in the sinking, but imagine the horror of Adolf Hitler with atomic bombs.

The wrong side is represented by Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician who engineered a coup d’etat when the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940. Quisling has the honor, if you want to call it that, of having his name become a noun — traitor. After the correct side won World War II, Quisling was executed. (Quisling’s American cousins started the Quisling Clinic in Madison, which employed my pediatrician, who correctly diagnosed my appendicitis on Valentine’s Day 1983.)

Unfortunately, Norway often seems to pale in comparison to its better known neighbor, Sweden, even though Norway has the second highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. Sweden made cars. The industry of Norway generally has not included automobile manufacturers.

This is the Troll, 15 of which were built in the late 1950s. Wikipedia claims the Norwegian government wouldn’t allow more to be built because of a deal for Norwegians to buy Soviet and Eastern European cars in return for the Warsaw Pact’s purchase of Norwegian fish products. Apparently good government wasn’t,  or perhaps isn’t, a hallmark of Norway. (When Norway became independent of Sweden in 1905, voters chose a monarchy over a republic. The first king was Dutch.)

Norway is trying to create an electric car industry, although the main manufacturer went (surprise!) bankrupt and is now owned by Russians. Norway heavily taxes cars powered by fossil fuels. (See the last sentence of the previous paragraph.)

Norway gets international sports attention only during the Winter Olympics in skiing-related events and for curling. Soccer is popular in Norway, but Norway has been in the World Cup exactly three times,  never since 1998.

One of the more interesting aspects of Scandinavian culture is the increasing popularity of authors of Scandinavian-based crime fiction — Henning Mankel, creator of Swedish detective Kurt Wallander; Stieg Larsson, creator of The Girl Who trilogy (and there won’t be any more because Larsson died after three books); Karin Fossum, Norway’s “Queen of Crime”; and Anne Holt, a former Norwegian justice minister. There was also a movie set in Norway, “Insomnia” …

… remade with Al Pacino and Robin Williams. (Neither of whom are Norwegian. The later “Insomnia” substituted Alaska for Norway. On the other hand, the lead actor of the original “Insomnia” is Swedish.)

The list of popular Norwegian music does not include ABBA, but it does include A-ha:

There are probably only two Norwegian actors you’ve heard of, figure skater-turned actress Sonja Henje and Liv Ullmann, the latter only if you like the films of director Ingemar Bergman (who isn’t Norwegian either).

If you’re being an authentic Norwegian, according to Wikipedia (and you know Wikipedia is always correct), you should celebrate today with a Norwegian feast of lutefisk (whitefish soaked in water and lye), rutabaga, meatballs, cranberries and lefse (flatbread). (I have eaten at the famous Al Johnson’s in Sister Bay once; it served Swedish meatballs with lingonberries.)

The only authentically Norwegian food I have eaten is rømmegrøt, a porridge. Mrs. Presteblog once made it. It’s very good; it can be, in my mind, breakfast or dessert. Given its ingredients — wheat flour, sour cream, heavy cream, butter, salt, sugar and brown sugar — the health fanatics might wonder how Norwegians didn’t drop dead from instantly clogged arteries after eating it.

05.13.13
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How to change the culture

Jonah Goldberg:

… a couple of weeks ago I was on a panel at Hillsdale College. It was sponsored by my friends at Liberty21, a scrappy new think tank.

The topic: “Can Conservatives Reclaim the Culture?”

First, I am not sure that conservatives ever claimed the culture in the first place. Sure, in retrospect it almost always seems like the past was more conservative than the present. But that doesn’t mean the conservatives were dominating the culture in the past. It might mean that we’ve just gotten even more liberal since then.

But we can debate all that another time. The thing I wanted to get to is that I think the way the Right talks about popular culture is deeply flawed. If conservatives are going to persuade non-conservatives to become more conservative — which is nearly the whole frickin’ point of the conservative movement — then going around wagging our fingers at every popular movie and TV show is probably not the best way to do it.

One way you persuade people to become more conservative is to explain to them how conservative they already are and build out from there. Persuasion is hard when your main argument is: “You’re a complete idiot and everything you think you know is ridiculous and/or evil.”

Moreover, there’s a Jedi-like Manichaeism running through youthful liberalism: The Light Side is liberal; the Dark Side is conservative. It’s like with little kids; tell them some food is good for them or that some dish has vegetables in it, and they’ll preemptively hate it and refuse to eat it like a jihadi at Gitmo dodging a spoonful of peach cobbler. Tell college kids that something is conservative and they’ll immediately assume it’s not for them. We can spend all day talking about how stupid this pose is, but that won’t do much for the cause.

The better way is to identify things that are popular and celebrate the conservative aspects of them. For instance, as I’ve written before, whenever a sitcom character gets pregnant, the producers make sure to talk up the character’s “right to choose.” But, at least since the painfully unfunny show “Maude,” the character always chooses to keep the baby, and once she does she acts like a pro-lifer. She talks to the fetus. She cares about what she eats. While NARAL considers what is in her belly to be nothing more than uterine contents, the mother-to-be gives those contents a name and acts like it’s already a member of the family. I understand a big part of the pro-life agenda is to make abortion illegal. I get that. But if you could get more people to think abortion is wrong it would A) be easier to make it illegal and B) less necessary to do so.

Or just think about crime. Going by what liberals say they believe about the criminal-justice system, never mind the War on Terror, they should be denouncing vast swaths of what Hollywood churns out. Cops play by their own rules. Good guys use outright torture to get valuable information in order to save lives. But with the exceptions of 24 and Zero Dark Thirty I can’t think of a time when the Left seriously complained about any of it.

Now if you point this out to some liberals, they’ll say that’s because “it’s just TV” or “it’s just a movie.” But you know that if a TV show or movie came out demonizing gays, they’d be screaming bloody murder.

My point is that the Left has quietly surrendered the argument over big chunks of the popular culture, and because they don’t complain about it, conservatives don’t press our advantage. We spend too much time reacting to liberal bait and liberal cues. We act like the opposition, being more against them than for anything of our own. One small place to start is to understand this is our culture too.

05.10.13
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The most important meal of the day

Good morning. Hungry?

Well, if you’re not, you will be after you read this post, the inspiration for which came from Facebook and Imgur: Breakfasts of the World!

The problem with the concept of this post is that the breakfasts depicted here take time to prepare, and time is something you usually don’t have on weekday mornings.

For most of my life, breakfast at least occasionally has been an obscure product, CoCo Wheats, which according to its manufacturer dates back to 1930. CoCo Wheats, according to Wikipedia (and you know Wikipedia is always right) is “chocolate flavored breakfast hot grits.”

My mind was temporarily blown by the idea that I’d been eating chocolate-flavored grits all these years, but that is not correct. Grits are made of ground corn. A product named CoCo Wheats obviously is not made of corn. CoCo Wheats should not be confused with Cream of Wheat, which is also made of wheat farina, but by a different company.

(How did I know I’d met the right woman to marry? Because she and I share the same tastes in breakfast and toothpaste (Colgate). In fact, Mrs. Presteblog is the only unrelated-by-blood person I know who likes CoCo Wheats.)

Wikipedia goes on to say that CoCo Wheats competes with chocolate-flavored Malt-O-Meal. That is interesting, because MOM Brands purchased CoCo Wheats in 2012. The difference, according to their nutrition labels, is that CoCo Wheats contains “wheat farina, cocoa [and] natural and artificial flavor,” while chocolate Malt-O-Meal also contains sugar, malted barley and assorted other ingredients. So if you have an urge for malted barley in your chocolate breakfast cereal, I guess Malt-O-Meal is your choice. (And to confuse matters further, yes, Cream of Wheat now has a chocolate flavor. Don’t you love free enterprise?)

The biggest issues with CoCo Wheats, Malt-O-Meal or Cream of Wheat are (1) cooking it and (2) cleaning it up. It’s very easy to boil it over in the microwave, creating a mess you have to clean up. And whether you cook by stovetop or microwave, cleaning up the container in which CoCo Wheats was cooked is like trying to move concrete after it’s set.

If you don’t have the time to make CoCo Wheats, there are numerous choices in breakfast cereal. Our cousin stayed with us a couple of times when I was growing up in Madison, and she was always amazed at the numbers of different boxes of cereal Mom purchased for us. Apparently her house had fewer than seven choices.

Growing up, my cereal tastes were somewhat less sugary than Calvin and Hobbes’ (well, Calvin’s) favorite Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. The three sugariest were probably Count Chocula (which came and went), Sugar Pops (which became Sugar Corn Pops and then just Corn Pops), and Sugar Smacks (which now are Honey Smacks). More often, I would eat Corn Flakes, Frosted Mini Wheats, Special K, Product 19 or Wheaties. (Often accompanied by Pop-Tarts.)

Some of those cereals are from Kellogg’s, the best known breakfast cereal maker in the U.S. I am part of a finite group of Americans because, on a vacation to Michigan, our family toured the Kellogg’s plant in Battle Creek, Mich. I am part of a finite group because Kellogg’s discontinued cereal factory tours in 1986. (The plant tours have been replaced by something called Cereal City USA.)

The rest of this really has to do with weekend breakfasts, or brunches, when you have time to prepare and/or eat more than a bowl of cereal or toast bread or bagels. My regard for breakfast is such that when I go to a weekend brunch, I usually make breakfast, not lunch, selections. Except for prime rib and carved ham, and chicken if that looks good, and shrimp cocktail since shrimp is my favorite food, and of course dessert.

The first brunch I recall was at, of all places, a hotel (possibly a Sheraton) somewhere in Los Angeles during our California vacation in late 1978. (It was somewhere between Rancho Palos Verdes, where my aunt and uncle lived, and Diamond Bar, where my great-aunt lived.) It was the first time I ate chocolate mousse. Three, to be precise.

If you live remotely close to Appleton, you should end up at the Radisson Paper Valley Hotel’s Sunday brunch. Tables and tables and tables of food.

I have fond memories of the University Marriott in Salt Lake City, Utah. We went there intending to spend four days for the Ripon College basketball game against the University of Utah. Except that our three days became one week because the airport we flew out of and into, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, was hit by 18 inches of snow during the basketball game, pushing our Sunday flight to Wednesday. Happily, the Marriott not only gave us the same room rate we had paid for the first four days, but that room rate included a daily breakfast buffet. The first big decision of the day was whether I should have a(nother) Belgian waffle.

Imgur posted photos of what it claims is the prototypical breakfast in a variety of countries, beginning (I decide) in the United States:

My favorite non-buffet restaurant breakfast is pancakes, preferably with real maple syrup (which my in-laws make every spring from real maple trees), and bacon. In our previous home, where the schools opened one hour late on Wednesdays, that became Pancake Day, first made by me, and then by our sons. Our daughter likes chocolate chip pancakes. Between pancake or baking mixes and paternal ingenuity, I came up with a chocolate chip oatmeal pancake recipe.

The best bacon on the planet, as far as I’m concerned, comes from Weber Meats in Cuba City. According to its website, Weber’s sells sliced bacon, pepper bacon, maple bacon, cottage bacon, bacon ends and Canadian bacon (which is more like extremely salted ham than bacon).

The other homemade breakfast I like is eggs — not just eggs purchased from a supermarket, but brown eggs purchased from a farmers’ market or similar place. If you’ve never had them before, there is simply no comparison. The yolks are bigger and practically orange.

One egg option is sunny-side up over a bed of some potato product. (Say, potatoes fried in the aforementioned bacon grease.) The egg yolks leak nicely into the potatoes. Another option is scrambled with cream cheese (an idea of Mrs. Presteblog), which makes the eggs pleasantly creamy.

Sometimes pork products aren’t available for breakfast. So I have been known to substitute the previous night’s main course — fish, pork chops, and so on — to go with the eggs and potatoes. Not usually steak or roast beef, though, because I prefer those in salads.

(For those wondering: I now weigh less than I weigh when we got married 20 years ago, though I still regard the word “diet” as spelled D-I-E with a T added. The trick of weight loss is for activity to exceed caloric intake. We won’t mention how much I weighed before I discovered this.)

Elsewhere …

Great Britain is not known for the quality of its food. However, it’s probably hard to mess up “Sausages, bacon, eggs, grilled tomato, mushrooms, bread, black pudding and baked beans. Knocked back with a cup of tea.” Although I’m not sure about black pudding (defined as “a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal, flavourings — and blood (usually from a pig).”

My Polish relatives apparently would eat “Jajecznica,” defined as “scrambled eggs covered with slices of kielbasa and joined by two potato pancakes.” Straightforward, although I’m not sure of the purpose of all of the greenery. (I enjoy salad, but not for breakfast.)

Related to the previous two is Canada …

… and pierogies, “boiled, baked or fried dumplings made from unleavened dough and traditionally stuffed with potato filling, sauerkraut, ground meat, cheese, or fruit. Then you’ve got some sausages and toast to mop it all up.”

My great-aunt (maiden name Merchlewicz, who was not Canadian, sister of the aforementioned Diamond Bar, Calif., relative) made pierogies. The last time I saw her, I ate, I believe, six of them.

Elsewhere in the gastronomic family tree is Germany …

… with, of course, “Wursts, local cheeses and freshly baked bread, all washed back with a strong coffee.”

This is, apparently, beef tips, chilequiles and other assorted goodies,” with “nachos, cheese and beans,” found in Mexico.

The rest of Imgur’s list is less than appealing. I understand different cultures are, well, different. It’s not that I wouldn’t eat some of these; they just don’t seem particularly appealing or filling as breakfast; for instance …

… Cuban bread dunked in coffee …

… stuffed croissants in Portugal (though it depends on what’s inside the croissant) …

… Venezuelan empenadas, filled with some combination of cheese, meat, vegetables and beans …

… Bolivian saltenas, described as “a bit like empanadas crossed with Cornish pasties … usually filled with meat and vegetables, and slightly sweetened with sugar” …

… Thai pork porridge, with “Chinese doughnuts, beansprouts, pork intestine stuffed with peppery pork mince, sliced pork heart, stomach slivers and blood pudding,” described as “a bit more interesting than toast and jam anyway” …

… toast and Vegemite or Marmite (both yeast extract paste) in Australia …

… croissants in France or Italy …

… Chinese breakfast, which apparently is pretty much like Chinese lunch or dinner …

… and Ghana’s favorite, waakye, “basically rice cooked in beans.”

The last — actually first in chronological order — requirement for breakfast is coffee. This is because (1) I work in journalism, which is powered by caffeine, and (2) I am clinically dead before the alarm goes off. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 4 years old, even though my mother warned me it would stunt my growth. I am 6-foot-4 and I weigh 190 pounds. I guess she was right.

05.08.13
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Holy entertainment media, Batman!

Christian Schneider has, shall we say, an interesting theory:

One year ago, before facing a recall election, Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker traveled to Chicago to give a speech to the Illinois Policy Institute. Following his talk, Walker fielded a question from a woman who, citing a recent movie on education reform, asked whether Walker was the “Superman” she was waiting for. Walker chuckled, then said he was more partial to Batman.

With this admission, Walker stepped squarely into a debate that takes place exclusively in the dark corners of the Internet, where politics nerds and comic book dorks meet to clandestinely debate the political ideologies of superheroes. Which superhero a given politician idolizes may actually tell us a little bit about his or her political philosophy, given one undeniable fact:

Superman is a liberal, and Batman is a conservative.

As noted in Glen Weldon’s superb new book “Superman: The Unauthorized Biography,” the Man of Steel has deep roots in FDR’s New Deal era. Just start with a comparison of the two heroes’ professions: Superman’s alter-ego, Clark Kent, is a member of the dreaded liberal mainstream media, and his father, Jor-El, was one of Krypton’s most noted academics and scientists. Bruce Wayne is a Scarlet Pimpernel-esque billionaire playboy whose father made his money in the real estate market before the economy collapsed (sound familiar?) and whose company, Wayne Enterprises, manufactures military weapons. Superman hangs out with reporters; Batman’s best buddy is a cop. …

Sometimes, Superman gets directly involved in Democratic politics – in the early 1960s, he befriends President John F. Kennedy and trusts him enough to divulge his real identity. Kennedy goes so far as to disguise himself as Clark Kent to fool Lois Lane while Superman rushes off on a mission. (In 1986, Superman meets Ronald Reagan, but the storyline makes Reagan seem like a buffoon.)

Batman, on the other hand, is less of a believer in the inherent good of man. In the early Bob Kane comics, Batman was cruel, often mutilating his opponents before killing them.

And Batman’s opponents are illustrative, too. Ra’s al-Ghul is an environmentalist who wants to destroy humanity and its inherent decadence. By fighting him, Batman is essentially defending wealth and free markets. Other notable Batman foes include a who’s who of lefty bad guys, including another tree hugger (Poison Ivy), a college professor (the Scarecrow) and an occupier with a respiratory problem (Bane).

The most recent slate of Batman movies from director Christopher Nolan are seen by many as sympathetic to Republican politics of the past decade. In “The Dark Knight,” Batman is reviled by the public as he wages a “war on terror” to keep Gotham’s citizens safe. (Nolan might as well have called the hero “Bat W. Man.”)

In “The Dark Knight Rises,” Batman takes on a gang of filthy hippies who occupy the stock exchange and fight for the “oppressed” against the 1%. We find out that Gotham fell into disrepair because Bruce Wayne’s profits were down and he didn’t have enough to spend on charitable activities to keep at-risk youths out of trouble. Batman cherishes order; his opponents relish revolution.

(What if you’re a reporter who hangs around cops? What’s your ideology then?)

On Facebook Schneider added to his righty-superhero list industrialist Tony “Iron Man” Stark and Spiderman. He added today:

First, it is true that each superhero morphs over time.  Different writers and illustrators bring different sensibilities.  As Glen Weldon points out in his book, by the 1950s, Superman had morphed from an FDR New Dealer to more of an Eisenhower Republican. (Known these days as a “Democrat.”)  By the 1970s, Superman was seen as part of the “Establishment,” and his writers struggled to keep up with the revolutionary times – often attempting ridiculous storylines dealing with racial issues.  In the days of counter-culture, Superman was the “culture.”

But that doesn’t change the fundamentals of who each character is and how their origin stories depart.  There are simply too many political differences between each superhero for this all to be mere coincidence.

And then Superman switched from being an Eisenhower Republican to a Kennedy Democrat. Really.

Schneider quotes the New York Times’ Ross Douthat:

Across the entire trilogy, what separates Bruce Wayne from his mentors in the League of Shadows isn’t a belief in Gotham’s goodness; it’s a belief that a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch. This is a conservative message, but not a triumphalist, chest-thumping, rah-rah-capitalism one: It reflects a “quiet toryism” (to borrow from John Podhoretz’s review) rather than a noisy Americanism, and it owes much more to Edmund Burke than to Sean Hannity.

My personal favorite, of course, comes from journalism as does Clark Kent, but at the top of the management chart:

05.07.13
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The risk we take by not taking risks

Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

When the economy was last this bad for this long — back in the dreaded Jimmy Carter era — there was one upside: While inflation raged and unemployment stayed troublingly high in America’s big businesses, a lot was going on in America’s garages. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak werestarting Apple, Bill Gates and friends were starting Microsoft and a variety of other new entrepreneurial ventures were lining up for takeoff.

So you might hope that there’s a similar silver lining in today’s economic Slough Of Despond. But so far, that hope would seem to be unjustified.

At any rate, the latest data indicate that start-ups are becoming rarer, not more common. A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well. …

One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%” ” about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.

Countries where those attitudes prevail tend not to produce as much entrepreneurialism, so it’s perhaps no surprise that as those attitudes have gained ascendance among America’s political class and media elite, we’ve seen less entrepreneurialism here. …

Some people, of course, will start businesses no matter what politicians and pundits say, and will do so even in the face of hostile legal and regulatory climates. But their numbers will be fewer, and so will be the numbers of jobs generated. As millions of Americans are unemployed — while millions more have dropped out of the workforce entirely — perhaps it’s time for our political class to think harder about the messages it’s sending. And perhaps it’s time for voters to send the political class a message of their own.

That message, by the way, is grossly overdue in Wisconsin.

 

05.03.13
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Why the microbrewery

One of the most salutary developments in American business is the growth of the microbrewery.

Tom Acitelli explains how the growth of microbrewing proves the converse of the phrase “if you want less something of it, tax it”:

Today there are more than 2,300 breweries in the United States—where beer production is second only to China’s—but it wasn’t long ago that American beer was an international punch line. Embodied by yellowy lagers in aluminum cans, nearly all domestic beer was made by a handful of breweries like Miller and Anheuser-Busch. As recently as 35 years ago, there were fewer than 50 breweries in the whole country, and the fastest-growing type of American beer was light, which Miller introduced in 1975.

The story of the U.S. ascent to the top tier of world beer began in the late 1970s, when brewing was liberated from government taxation and regulation that had held it back since Prohibition.

In 1976, Henry King, a gregarious World War II hero whose favorite drink was a whiskey-based Rob Roy, trained the attention of his U.S. Brewers Association, the industry’s biggest trade group, on Congress. The brewing industry had been trying unsuccessfully for years to get Washington to lower excise taxes on beer produced by smaller brewers.

King was determined to change things. In an impressive feat of bridge-building, he lined up support from the industry’s labor unions as well as its owners. Steelworker and glassworker unions called in favors; the big brewery owners wrote personal checks. These owners, whose excise taxes would remain the same, figured that by helping their smaller brethren, they would ultimately help themselves by inspiring more beer consumption in an American alcohol market suddenly awash with California wines.

Brewer Peter Stroh—whose family name was a mainstay of Midwestern beer—lobbied a fellow Michigander, President Gerald Ford, to sign the bill that King’s efforts finally steered through Congress. H.R. 3605 cut the federal excise tax on beer to $7 from $9 per barrel on the first 60,000 barrels produced, so long as a brewery produced no more than two million barrels annually. (There were few breweries that did, which was another reason King’s association went to bat for the tax cut.)

The tax cut unleashed a revolution in American brewing. Hundreds of smaller breweries began to open across the country selling what came to be called craft beer. But as significant as the numbers was the rise of American brewers and consumers as the industry’s tastemakers. …

Some of the stars of American craft beer, such as Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada and Sam Calagione at Dogfish Head, got their start with home brewing—an activity that until the late 1970s was illegal in the U.S.

The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 legalized home winemaking, but, because of an oversight, did not legalize home-brewing of beer. Stores that sold supplies for winemaking also sold supplies for making beer at home, and the government did little to enforce the anti-home-brewing law. …

Gradually, though, the secretive home brewers grew bolder. In the 1970s—about when Henry King was lobbying Congress to cut the beer tax—home-brewing clubs in California, where America’s craft-beer revolution began, joined with trade groups representing the winemaking shops that sold home-brewing supplies. They lobbied California Sen. Alan Cranston to introduce legislation legalizing home-brewing at the federal level.

Cranston introduced legislation that was reconciled with a House bill in August 1978. President Carter signed the law that October, and it took effect the following February. Home-brewing of up to 200 gallons a year per household was suddenly permitted.

Following the federal example, state legislatures also began rewriting their bans on home-brewing, and it is legal now in every state except Alabama. The result: Home-brewing took off, helping to spur the movement toward craft beer that had been touched off by the beer tax reduction.

Keep all this in mind the next time you read about a state legislator wanting to increase alcohol taxes. Keep this in mind as well when you read calls for higher taxes, as Acitelli concludes:

The rise of American beer wasn’t an accident. It was spurred by efforts to cut taxes and regulation that unleashed entrepreneurship. Too bad Washington doesn’t raise a toast to that idea more often.

Or Madison.

04.22.13
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Green news on Earth Day

Back in my business magazine days, at the behest of higher management I created a section of the magazine I called “Green Business.”

As you can imagine from the title it had to do with environment-related businesses or green-related business issues. I insisted, however, that the section be about more than jumping on the green fad, that it show how businesses could make more money (as in higher revenues or lower expenses) through “green” things.

Perhaps “green” isn’t a fad, except that the environmental movement keeps damaging its own credibility with hysterical end-of-the-world predictions, such as those chronicled by FreedomWorks around the first Earth Day in 1970:

  1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”  — Harvard biologist George Wald
  2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
  3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Timeseditorial
  4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
  5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
  6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
  7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
  8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
  9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
  10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
  11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
  12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
  13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

Making a profit is the first responsibility of a business, after all, and maximizing profits for the owners is the fiduciary responsibility of a business’ management. If a business can make more money by, for instance, energy efficiency or figuring out how to use less water during a product’s manufacturing process, that’s sustainability.

So here on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday — I mean Earth Day — the Property and Environment Research Center shows which green is more important:

Extrapolate global average GDP per capita into the future and it shows a rapid rise to the end of this century, when the average person on the planet would have an income at least twice as high as the typical American has today. If this were to happen, an economist would likely say that it’s a good thing, while an ecologist would likely say that it’s a bad thing because growth means using more resources. Therein lies a gap to be bridged between the two disciplines.

The environmental movement has always based its message on pessimism. Population growth was unstoppable; oil was running out; pesticides were causing a cancer epidemic; deserts were expanding; rainforests were shrinking; acid rain was killing trees; sperm counts were falling; and species extinction was rampant. For the green movement, generally, good news is no news. Many environmentalists are embarrassed even to admit that some trends are going in the right direction.

Why? The underlying assumption is that pessimism is what drives change. But great innovators from Archimedes to Steve Jobs generally lived in the richest parts of the world in their day. Driven by ambition, not desperation, they changed the world for optimistic reasons.

Pessimism should no longer be a prerequisite for being an environmentalist. It can be counterproductive because it is a counsel of despair. People do not respond well to being told disaster is unavoidable. Instead, the environmental movement should try optimism.

There is a wonderful chance that the current century is going to be a golden age for nature. Not everything is going to go right, but it is possible that by the end of the century we will have more forests, more wildlife, and cleaner air. …

The “forest transition”—the point at which a country stops losing forest and starts regaining it—is happening all over the world: Forest cover is increasing in Bangladesh, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, France, Gambia, Hungary, Ireland, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, Scotland, South Korea, Switzerland, the United States, and Vietnam. …

Why are environmental trends mainly positive? In short, the gains are due to “land sparing,” in which technological innovation allows humans to produce more from less land, leaving more land for forests and wildlife. The list of land sparing technologies is long: Tractors, unlike mules and horses, do not need to feed on hay. Advances in fertilizers and irrigation, as well as better storage, transport, and pest control, help boost yields. New genetic varieties of crops and livestock allow people to get more from less. Chickens now grow three times as fast in they did in the 1950s. The yield boosts from genetically modified crops is now saving from the plow an area equivalent to 24 percent of Brazil’s arable land.

What is really making a positive dent in the environmental arena is the unintended effects of technology rather than nature reserves or exhortations to love nature. Policy analyst Indur Goklany calculated that if we tried to support today’s population using the methods of the 1950s, we would need to farm 82 percent of all land, instead of the 38 percent we do now. The economist Julian Simon once pointed out that with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness.

It is not just food. In fiber and fuel too, we replace natural sources with synthetic, reducing the ecological footprint. Construction uses less and lighter materials. Even CO2 emissions enrich crop yields. …

Catastrophic climate change might undo us. Yet moderate climate change will only help with land sparing. Moreover, the empirical data increasingly support the probability that climate change will be mild and slow for many decades. One should be more concerned about the effects of climate change policies, which are horribly land-hungry and harsh toward nature. This includes biofuels, wind power, hydroelectric power, and the refusal to back fossil fuels for the rural poor, which results in the continued exploitation of forests for fuel. In other words, when it comes to climate change, the cure might be worse than the disease.

Organic farming is another example of ecologically good intentions that would pave the road to environmental hell. Organic farming is nice enough as a local fad, but if it were pursued on a global scale it would require a doubling of the amount of land devoted to agriculture, because organic yields are necessarily much lower than those using synthetic fertilizer. In effect, organic farmers have to grow their own fertilizer as “green manure” or dung from livestock, which takes up far more land than making fertilizer in a factory. If the world were to go organic, it would require a renewed and massive assault on forests, wetlands, and nature reserves to feed the global population.

Paradoxically, economics has done more for nature than ecology has. Yet, as discussed at PERC’s recent forum, there is still much that both fields can learn from the other. Economics could learn something from Charles Darwin and ecology could evolve from revisiting Adam Smith. Indeed, Charles Darwin read Smith, so there is an ancestral connection between the two fields: they both stress the emergence of phenomena rather than their direction from above. And, there is much activity in evolutionary biology and ecology that is parallel to what is occurring in economics and vice versa.

How does that work? Watchdog.org:

On April 22, in cities across America, some environmental activists will celebrate Earth Day, claiming only increased government control can protect the environment. Those celebrations will expose a couple ironies.

First, many activists will arrive in a Toyota Prius, which has become the symbol of environmental consciousness. Ironically, however, the Prius is not a triumph of political planning but of the free market. In the 1990s, while California was requiring “zero-emission” vehicles, leaders at Toyota and Honda saw an opportunity to sell cars to people who want to spend less on gasoline, drive a car that emits less carbon dioxide, or both. Thus was born the hybrid vehicle. Even though it did not meet California’s regulation, it sold well, causing Golden State politicians to change the law.

Jumping on the bandwagon, politicians began to give preferences to hybrids. Politicians did not lead, but followed the innovation of the free market. Most Prius drivers, however, don’t know that history and some will spend Earth Day opposing the free-market policies that created the car they are so proud of. …

Across the country, the parts of the nation that most consistently support free-market candidates are those surrounded by stunning natural beauty. The most vocal environmental activists — who are quick to lecture others about caring for nature — tend to live in cities, where nature has been thoroughly controlled, constrained and paved. …

Environmentalism has become trendy and a way to show you are a good person, rather than actually helping the environment. Environmental activists and politicians choose government-mandated approaches not because they help the environment, but because the policies make them feel good about themselves and make them look good to others. …

In fact, a strong concern for the environment is part of believing in personal responsibility and the free market. Conservatives believe people have freedom, but must take responsibility for the impact they cause. If you commit a crime, you don’t get to blame society. A reason conservatives live near nature is that we love to hike, hunt, fish and marvel at the awe-inspiring natural beauty with which our nation is so blessed.

Finally, the free market is the greatest system for allocating scarce resources and doing more with less, both of which are at the heart of a true environmental ethic.

Rather than forcing behavior change, conservatives promote technological solutions that respect the freedom of individuals while reducing environmental impact. Rather than falling for the latest trendy environmental policy, conservatives demand that the government measure success or failure.

04.18.13
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About the latest obscenity

The term “breaking news” isn’t supposed to apply to weekly newspapers. Until it does.

Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing strikes me as similar to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the Olympic Games.

I remember seeing that live. I was watching the Olympics (far too late at night) because my wife was in Atlanta as a volunteer. (She spoke Spanish and, in one instance, Portuguese. All I can do in Spanish is order beer.) She walked through Centennial Olympic Park to and from the Omni for indoor volleyball. In the pre-cellphone days, I woke up everyone in the house she was staying in, 90 minutes from Atlanta, to make sure she was all right.

And, of course, any time you hear about mass casualties, 9/11 comes to mind.

Facebook Friend Steve Spingola passed on some insight about how police are investigating the bombing:

Could they find fingerprints? It is possible; however, when constructing the devices the perpetrators probably used latex gloves. Moreover, had they not worn gloves (doubtful), fingerprints are simply perspiration deposited on a surface. The heat and the blast itself might have altered touched surfaces.

A better investigative tool is DNA. The only sure fire way to destroy DNA evidence is fire, which, it appears, likely occurred during the blast. Forensic investigators might be able to find on some DNA remnants, though, because only microscopic particles are needed to test.

I believe the key here is public and private security video. These bags were strategically placed. The event was probably swept by bomb sniffing dogs prior to the start of the marathon. This leads me to believe the devices were placed after the police had cleared the area. Unfortunately, video can be defeated when a person’s face is concealed by a hoodie and sunglasses. Technology, which might be online now, that is a part of the FBI’s $1.2 billion Next Generation Identification system, does make use of 3D partial facial recognition construction. This is done using biometrics (measurements of noses, ears, eyes, and faces) with data obtained from our new driver’s licenses and existing booking photos. If you’re interested in learning more about high-tech detection, checkout Wisconsin privacy researcher Miles Kinard’s e-magazine expose, “American Stasi: Fusion Centers and Domestic Spying” (you can find it at Amazon.com).

As you may or may not know, I am a person who believes the billions of dollars the government has spent on surveillance initiatives has done little to actually prevent terrorist attacks. High-tech initiatives failed to detect the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber. A vendor actually tipped-off the NYPD about the SUV in Times Square. The underwear bomber was on the no-fly list, but his name was off by one letter and the software failed to flag him.

Surveillance may or may not assist law enforcement after the fact, but, I believe, it does little to deter suspects who might be willing to die to carry out a plot. The best methods to suppress terrorism are similar to the best practices to suppress criminal activity–proactive, boots to the ground police work and after the fact investigation, coupled with tough penalties to deter those contemplating future attacks.

Tim Nerenz adds on Facebook:

One of the most disturbing things to me about the Boston Marathon bombing will be that many people will actually be happy about who did it. They will celebrate because it will fit their biased political narrative and advance their own power-trip agenda. It doesn’t make any difference to me if the freak was a jihadist, white separatist, PETA, anti-abortion, occupier, communist, mental patient, or just some bored worthless slug. The evil ideology that unites all of these acts of sensational mass violence is the idea that the ends (you pick ‘em) justify the means. Nothing ever justifies the intentional taking of innocent lives – nothing.”

(I got to witness the result of the “intentional taking of human lives” yesterday. And as people in West, Texas, probably knew before yesterday, the unintentional taking of human lives is as tragic to those affected.)

The point seems banal in the wake of suffering,  but it requires repeating: If you live your life in constant fear over what might happen, you lose. (Note I did not use the cliché “The terrorists have won.”) I maintain, as Spingola may agree,  that we have sacrificed too much to try to prevent another 9/11-style attack, when preventing terrorism is a moving target. Monday didn’t involve airplanes; it involved pressure cookers and shrapnel. And many of our elected officials appear perfectly happy in shredding our constitutional rights to prevent (or so they think) the next school shooting.

As powerful as elected officials think they are, they can only punish, not prevent, evil.

04.17.13
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The Obama bill, paid for by Generation Y

Victor Davis Hanson:

It is popular wisdom that President Obama’s progressive social agenda is predicated on widespread support from the younger, hip generation. Certainly, concerns like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, the DREAM Act, gun control, women in combat, and blocking gas and oil exploration and pipeline transportation all get a lot of play on campuses and in popular culture. And these wedge issues supposedly represent the future direction of the country — a wise agenda for liberals eager to cement a majority constituency for decades to come.

But aside from the common-sense recognition that people become more conservative as they age and mature — and start paying taxes, and become financially responsible for their own children’s future — there is just as much likelihood that Barack Obama may inadvertently be building a conservative youth movement. Indeed, the new liberalism in all its economic manifestations is reactionary and anti-youth to the core. The administration seems aware of the potential paradoxes in this reverse “What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome of young people voting against their economic interests. Thus follows the constant courting of the hip and cool Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lena Dunham, Occupy Wall Streeters, and others who blend pop culture, sex, youth, energy, and fad — almost anything to avoid the truth that today’s teenagers are starting out each owing a lifetime share of the national debt amounting to more than three-quarters of a million dollars. …

University tuition has soared well beyond the rate of inflation, increases brought about by an inexcusable surge in administrative staffs, the reduction in teaching loads over the last few decades, the costs of subsidizing overly specialized and esoteric research, all sorts of costly new race/class/gender explorations, and a general expansion of non-teaching support staffs. Justification of such escalating costs was always based on the truism that college degrees represented a wise lifetime investment that ensured increased salary and better job security. That may still be true — in the long run — but bleak immediate employment prospects for those under 25, along with ballooning college loans, will eventually prompt a reexamination of such received wisdom. …

Apart from the elite of the Ivy League, most indebted students no longer look back at their professors and administrators as paragons of virtue or avatars of social change; instead, they see them as part of an establishment that sold them a bill of goods, one more interested in getting ever more customers than in finding jobs for those who bought their product on credit. The latest job figures show that among 20-to-24-year-olds, unemployment has risen (alone among various age cohorts) to 13.3 percent. For those in their prime working years (e.g., 25 to 34) unemployment is still high, at 7.4 percent. National debt per person has soared to over $53,000, a $20,000 surge in just the first 50 months of the Obama presidency. Most of the borrowing — both the Obama administration’s new borrowing and the older borrowing for payouts to those receiving pensions, Medicare, and Social Security — was the property of the Baby Boomer cohorts.

Those over 50, who mostly run the nation, have popularized something called “internship,” a non-paid or low-paid apprenticeship that might or might not eventually lead to employment, but that typically does not even pay the room and board of the worker in question. Fifty years ago such “jobs” would have been the source of labor unrest, as thousands hit the streets to argue that they were little more than indentured serfs, and their employers virtual feudal lords. Yet few complain today because these interns are largely middle class, and they have been told that obedience and subservience are just the sorts of traits that employers appreciate. …

Tomorrow’s public employee is not likely to receive a generous defined-benefit retirement plan — but will still hear whining from his far-better-compensated superiors as to how unfair it is to question whether their own compensation is sustainable. And far fewer in the future will so easily land a government job at all: In California the unsustainable cost of the public work force is due not to overstaffing, but to too few younger taxpayers to meet the state’s existing obligations, given the lucrative compensation and retirement packages of a select elder few, who somehow believe that their own privilege is proof of their egalitarianism. Forgotten in the national acrimony over unfunded defined-benefit retirement plans for public employees is that the divide is not public versus private sector, or left versus right, but older versus younger. …

The offspring of well-connected journalists, politicians, academics, professionals, and celebrities assure us in their documentaries and op-eds, and through their parents’ voices, that conservatives have lost the war for America’s youth. They certainly have, at least for a while, at in-the-news, private liberal-arts campuses. But for the vast majority of the state-schooled who have no such connections, little if any expectation of an inheritance, and lots of accumulated debt, there is nothing liberal about the values inherent in the present economy.

Given a choice between gay marriage, legalization of pot, and the banning of so-called assault rifles on the one hand, and, on the other, a good job with lower taxes, most young people will quietly prefer the latter. For that reason, conservatives should not outbid liberals to appear cool to new voters, but simply explain that a fair economy for all generations is no longer on the liberal agenda.

 

04.05.13
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The most esoteric Final Four post you will read this year

I haven’t written about the NCAA men’s basketball tournament since it began in part because my bracket did as well as you’d expect given the few minutes I spent on it.

I managed to pick none of the Final Four teams. I had three Elite Eight teams, but I picked the wrong Duke–Louisville winner, and I missed Gonzaga’s and Miami’s missing the regional-final weekend.

I’m not sure what prompted Grantland’s Wesley Morris to write this analysis of basketball coaches’ appearance, but he did:

For an event that’s nicknamed the Big Dance, has a round called the Sweet 16, and is annually desperate for a Cinderella story, the NCAA basketball tournament should involve more coaches who look ready to go to a ball. It’s true that we ought to be thankful for the little things: no shiny fabrics, no pocket squares, nothing too outfit-y. But little things are all these guys seem to give. …

No one wants to see versions of Bruce Pearl, the former Tennessee coach — not on 64 teams, anyway — just a couple of men willing to go all out, as Pearl once did, maybe in sherbet-orange suspenders and blazers and ties. You don’t want someone to put your eyes in a state of sugar shock. You want someone like Bob Knight to appall you with his certifiable slovenliness or John Thompson to soothe you with perfectly tailored, avuncular classiness (his son is coaching Georgetown now, and it’s always too much suit).

Instead, we get someone like Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, who claps and wails and sweats on the sideline like Jimmy Swaggart. He does so in gray and brown businesswear and patterned ties. There’s nothing wrong with it — he seems, finally, to have found a flattering hair color. But you wish he’d find clothes to complement his coachly theatrics. Or we get men like Temple’s Fran Dunphy, who always looks to be in need of a pack of Rolaids. His hair does, too. Two years ago, he famously shaved off his mustache and appeared the way a lot of men who shaved their mustaches do: like a skinned animal. He hasn’t looked back since.

Rick Pitino would appear to be a proper answer to the question of what to do. He’s 60 now, but his hair still has the shape and volume of one of Frankie Valli’s Four Seasons. If you believe in that hair, it’s only because he does. Watching the tournament from home, you realize, year after year, that almost no one else has his kind of certainty and confidence or star power. During Louisville games, the broadcasters like to cut to him because he looks important. Pitino knows he’s Rick Pitino, and that knowledge gives him the confidence to storm the sidelines in ivory and in lemony yellow. …

My guess is that some coaches look at Pitino and think, All that flash, all those colors? They’re too much, they’re too mobby. These guys are more at home in the warm-up jackets and sweats they wear to press conferences than the suits they wear to games. They might say, “What Pitino’s doing is great for him, but I’m not the point, basketball is.” That’s how you wind up with the literalism of Marquette’s Buzz Williams, whose hair is as long as most Ramones songs.

Shaved heads and baldness so predominate that you sense that the men with hair have it defensively. Tom Crean of Indiana is an if-you-got-it-flaunt-it coach. There’s something moneyed about him. He looks comfortable in his suits, even the ones that don’t fit. But that hair of his — usually a matte chestnut, frequently parted up the middle — can only be described as boastful. It’s long for the sake of being long. It’s long in a way that’s not entirely embarrassing on a man in his latish 40s who’s not also playing bass in a Dire Straits cover band. But it’s also long in a way that’s worn not for style but for men like Buzz Williams. It’s saying, “Doesn’t all this hair look good on me?” It’s singing, “Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah nyah.” …

Setting aside his legend at Duke, Mike Krzyzewski still has the hair of certain Legos. Neither the length nor the color appears to have changed in decades, which gives him a kind of dolorous boyishness. It’s the most important hair in professional sports, for what it says both about the primacy of youth and the obsessive maintenance of its patina. He could change it no more than Anna Wintour could open up her curtaining bob. … Coach K would be tinkering with the myth of an institution and its notorious sense of majestic immortality.

At this point some visuals are required, in order of mention in what you’ve read, for a few of the more remarkable examples:

Former Tennessee and UW–Milwaukee coach Bruce Pearl, in Creamsicle — I mean Tennessee — orange.

Former Indiana coach Bob(by) Knight in his late ’80s sweater days …

… which followed his ’70s plaid jacket days.

Rick Pitino, wearing, yes, all white.

Marquette coach Buzz Williams’ hair could be said to be …

… the opposite of his predecessor, Tom Crean, now at Indiana.

There used to be more variety in basketball coach style. Tom Izzo’s predecessor at Michigan State was Jud Heathcote, who made a point of wearing something green for each Spartan game:

Jud Heathcote with his assistant and successor, Izzo.

Former Iowa coach George Raveling wore a sweatsuit for a while. The Internet has failed to provide a photo of that look.

Former ABA, NBA and college coach Larry Brown had an interesting, shall we say, look in his ABA days, though he wasn’t alone:

Brown (right) with assistant Doug Moe, who also coached in the ABA and NBA.

Apparently Brown couldn’t decide what color to wear one day, so he decided to wear all of them.

Brown on, what, Farm Night?

Doug Moe, once he became a head coach.

The suit and turtleneck look of NBA coach Kevin Loughery (who coached too many teams to name) isn’t as interesting as Loughery’s hair.

Norm Sloan won a national championship at North Carolina State and coached at Florida.

The only way in which Wisconsin basketball coaches have been style leaders is in wearing red, most recently Dick Bennett …

… and Bo Ryan:

Both were predated by, probably among others, hockey coach Bob Johnson:

(Note the red banner on the wall. The, uh, head Leckrone Legionnaire has worn a red blazer and white turtleneck for decades.)

It’s unclear to me why anyone looks to coaches for a certain style. Coaches are usually physical education graduates. Name the last well-dressed phy ed graduate you’ve seen. That’s like asking a journalist for style tips.