This was not a good jobs report. Certainly not one that suggests a shift into a higher growth gear. The Two Percent-ish economy crawls on. The US economy added 142,000 jobs in August — much less than 225,000 expected — as the unemployment rate ticked down to 6.1%. But the jobless rate fell only because the labor force shrank by 64,000, notes economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics. The alternative household survey found employment increased by only 16,000 last month. Also, payroll gains in June and July were revised lower by 28,000, although those downward revisions were all in government. Private payrolls were actually nudged up, according to RDQ Economics. And consider: There are just 1.2 million more private jobs today than January 2008 despite 15.6 million more non-jailed, non-military adults. While the unemployment rate has dropped by 1.1 percentage points over the past year, the employment rate is up just 0.2 points. …
One more thing: Wages are still a problem, with average hourly earnings up just 2.1% the past year. Check out this ugly chart (via the WSJ) from Joe Brusuelas, the chief economist at McGladrey:
Not that the number should be so surprising. The anemic economy is generating jobs at the top and bottom, not so much in the middle. “Average is over” as economist Tyler Cowen has put it.
Pethokoukis is being a cockeyed optimist in comparison with the reality of his first two commenters:
The real unemployment rate is closer to 18% not the 6.1% reported. It is time to be more honest in these communications. Americans know it; time economists and politicians to stop kidding themselves!
With the current manner of computing, the lower the labor participation rate, the lower the unemployment rate. At this rate our labor participation rate could drop to who knows how low, and we’d have no unemployment. WTF?
Another commenter states plainly what must happen, though the majority of American voters apparently are stupid enough to vote for more of the same crap (see Clinton, Hillary):
The jobs and wage growth are in the same place as uninvested capital – waiting in the wings for some sanity to be restored to the American economy. The liberal Democratic distortions such as restrictive regulations, uncertainties about health insurance, energy cost and other cost inputs, higher taxes, and threats of unrealistic minimum wages have discouraged all businesses from investments and growth that would create new jobs and stimulate the economy. If you want to see the free market in action, producing negative results under a liberal regime and positive results under a conservative regime, you need look no further than California and Texas.
If a Republican were presiding over this economy, Democrats would be lining up impeachment votes.
Right Wisconsin passes on the Wall Street Journal editorial that proves that correctly reasoned opinions cannot be found in any Wisconsin daily newspaper’s unsigned opinions:
Under campaign-finance law, express advocacy is speech that explicitly supports the election or defeat of a candidate for political office. Ads by independent groups are generally identified as express advocacy when they use words like “vote for” or “cast your ballot for.” Those ads count toward a group’s percentage of political activities for the purposes of tax exemption and are considered to have a “political purpose” under the law.
Issue advocacy encompasses the rest of the universe of independent groups’ speech on policy. Issue ads by an environmental group might say, “Our power plants are polluting, call your Senator and tell her it’s important to protect our planet.” Another issue ad might say, “The drug war is incarcerating too many people, tell our Governor to veto this bill.” While issue ads frequently share the priorities of a politician, they focus on a policy issue, not on the election or defeat of a candidate. This distinction is critical because while express advocacy is considered speech that can be regulated, issue advocacy is speech that has the highest level of constitutional protection. The right of citizens to petition their government and to rally friends and neighbors to a cause is at the heart of what the First Amendment is intended to protect.
Which brings us to “coordination.”
Under the law, coordination between a political campaign and an independent group is illegal only if it is the functional equivalent of a monetary contribution to the campaign. Imagine a candidate who calls an independent group and says, “hey, we’ve made an ad we’d like to run in the Milwaukee suburbs, but we’re a little short on money. Can you do it?” That arrangement amounts to a contribution to a candidate, raising the risk of quid pro quo corruption, the standard the Supreme Court has said must be met for regulating political speech.
Short of that, neither collaboration among independent groups nor communication between independent groups and a political campaign is illegal. On the contrary, it is speech protected by the First Amendment.
All of this explains why the John Doe investigation by Democratic Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm has been rejected in court: His conservative targets never engaged in express advocacy. As John Doe Judge Gregory Peterson wrote in his opinion quashing subpoenas, “The only clearly defined political purpose is one that requires express advocacy” and “the state is not claiming that any of the organizations expressly advocated” so the subpoenas “fail probable cause.”
Wisconsin prosecutors claim Mr. Walker was “coordinating” fundraising with the Wisconsin Club for Growth and thus the group’s activities qualify as in-kind contributions to the Walker campaign. But as Judge Peterson explained, “Before there is coordination, there must be political purposes; without political purposes coordination is not a crime.” …
The real in-kind campaign contribution here has been from prosecutors to Mr. Walker’s Democratic challenger Mary Burke. Their efforts have hobbled fund-raising at many of the most effective conservative independent groups and forced them to spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers to defend their rights in court. Ms. Burke has made the probe part of her campaign and it has helped her get close in the polls.
The prosecution brings to mind the abuses against the late Ted Stevens, who was convicted of corruption in office only weeks before an election because prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence. In Wisconsin the prosecution has used a secret probe and selective leaks to make legal fund-raising appear illegal.
The Journal adds this slam upon the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Daniel Bice, who never met a conservative he could treat fairly:
In a recent online chat, a reader asked Daniel Bice, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s go-to reporter for prosecutors, why his articles failed to explain the difference between “express advocacy” and “issue advocacy”—a crucial distinction in the law on coordination between political campaigns and outside groups.
“The reason we don’t go into great detail on express advocacy is that you can’t discuss it without going into great detail. As you just did,” Mr. Bice responded. So Mr. Bice admits that he leaves out crucial information because it’s all so very complicated. We’re sorry if campaign law has become so complex that the relevant details can’t fit in a newspaper article, but allow us to give it a try.
Many of my fellow conservative columnists have lamented in recent weeks that the troubling trend of Western men voyaging to the Middle East to become terrorists has its roots in the stultifying boredom of life in modern capitalistic society.
“One reason that liberty can be difficult to preserve is that it so often lacks the romance, the heroism, and the sense of involvement that so many appear to crave,” Cooke wrote.
The suggestion that was implicit in each of these columns is that this American life is kinda boring. That’s troubling, and a little like saying marriage is boring. Yes, too many marriages are boring, but that’s often a failure on the part of individuals, not an inherent flaw in the institution. If we do it right, our marriages and lives should be full of purpose and romance. We could say the same for modern life in the West. The fact that our society is too often absent adventure and excitement, that too many lives are bogged down by mundanity and routine, is due to a failure on the part of individuals, and is not necessarily an indictment on the system itself.
Look, people have an intuitive — some would say God-given — drive for purpose. They want to be called to something big. Some of us are lucky enough to experience that, at work, at home, or elsewhere. For others, life fails to deliver on their big dreams. Most learn to accept it. But a terrible few are driven to extremism. That might mean following a charismatic cult leader like Charles Manson, or it might mean becoming an Islamic terrorist.
This lack of purpose is a real problem, and popular American culture has long been all too content to offer the masses bread and circuses rather than purpose and meaning.
This isn’t dissimilar to the phenomenon that drove the 1960’s counterculture movement. As Baylor University Professor Barry Hankins notes in his book, Francis Schaeffer And the Shaping of Evangelical America, the famed evangelical leader believed that
once a society has jettisoned a Christian worldview and any notion of ‘true truth,’ as he called it, there was nothing left but personal peace and affluence. From time to time he said that the hippies of the 1960s looked at their parents’ lives and saw only these two values instead of answers to the deep longings of humankind. With no hope of real meaning and only personal peace and affluence to look forward to, the hippies dropped out of mainstream middle-class culture and turned to drugs or joined the New Left in a violent revolt against mainstream society. [Francis Schaeffer And the Shaping of Evangelical America]
People have an inherent drive for meaning. That’s why George W. Bush was so criticized for not summoning Americans to make big sacrifices after 9/11 — people wanted to do something, and they wanted it to matter. But we live in a me-me-me world where politicians don’t want to ask us to make sacrifices. Our churches don’t want to ask us to make sacrifices. Even our parents don’t want to ask us to make major sacrifices. Doing so seems antithetical to the “do what makes you feel good” culture that seems evermore pervasive in the West. But for many, that life ends up feeling meaningless. …
Sometimes asking people to do things that are hard fills them with purpose. But we rarely do that in modern America.
Going back to ancient times, young men have craved honor and glory. But when there’s no communal higher calling, and no Wild West frontier for those afflicted with wanderlust to conquer, they’re left empty. Playing video games isn’t enough.
It’s not that my fellow conservative commentators aren’t largely correct about why so many angry young men are fleeing the staid comforts of the West for the violent excitement of the Middle East. It’s only to say this: The American Dream needn’t be inherently boring. Ours is a society build on a sense of destiny, sacrifice, and adventure. If we’ve gotten away from that, well, maybe we as a people need to figure out how to get excited again, to recapture the exploratory adventurers’ spirit and national spirit that so animated Americans in generations past.
But even if our American life is kinda boring these days… well, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. Comfort, routine, steadiness — this lack of excitement should not equate to a life of quiet desperation. A people who believe in shared values, who have a deep faith, who care about their community and fellow citizens, who work hard to take care of themselves and their families, and who believe in the concept of being good neighbors, employees, and citizens — well, it needn’t resemble Revolutionary Road.
CAPT. JEAN-LUC PICARD: A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.
RALPH OFFENHOUSE: You’ve got it all wrong. It’s never been about possessions. It’s about power.
PICARD: Power to do what?
RALPH: To control your life, your destiny.
PICARD: That kind of control is an illusion.
RALPH: Really? I’m here, aren’t I? I should be dead but I’m not. …
PICARD: This is the twenty fourth century. Material needs no longer exist.
RALPH: Then what’s the challenge?
PICARD: The challenge, Mister Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.
(For those readers who roll their eyes at this self-satisfied morally superior dialogue: This is actually from one of the best episodes of TNG’s generally poor first season, if you can get past the pseudosocialism of the second series at all.)
I tend to squirm when I start hearing of calls for you to sacrifice by those who have no personal stake in that sacrifice. It seems to me that 13 years after 9/11, Americans have sacrificed a lot of their freedom, both in personal and economic ways (gas prices are more than double what they were in 20o1), and not for good reasons or with good results. (Three letters: TSA.) It wasn’t clear to me then, and it’s not clear to me now, what kind of sacrifice George W. Bush should have called on Americans to do. It’s also not clear why Americans should sacrifice to make up for politicians’ past bad decisions. I notice no member of Congress voluntarily giving up their salaries and lush benefits in response to our $16 trillion in debt, for instance.
Said calls for sacrifice always require a followup question: Why? Because we use (someone’s definition of) too many resources? Because Americans are arrogant (by someone’s definition of that word)? Because our freedoms make someone who doesn’t have those freedoms feel bad or angry? Here I thought Barack Obama was supposed to deal with that American-arrogance thing. Apparently those who voted for that were mistaken.
It’s been fashionable for several years to institute some form of national service requirement for young adults. The first response I always have, because this proposal usually comes from people who never did military or any other national service, is: Great idea! You first. (And, by the way: Now, not 40 years ago.) This is supposed to inculcate some drive for service within the mandatorily volunteered. (On the other hand, most drafted servicemen of the Vietnam War era are not likely to have fond memories of their mandatory service, whether or not they went to Vietnam.) Nothing prevents someone from joining the Peace Corps or local volunteer efforts on their own, without the mandatory service hammer.
There is some blame for what Lewis describes upon society as a whole in one specific area, though who knows when this began. This society of ours is increasingly risk-averse. Read the online depictions of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s — you know, kids’ playing all day all over the neighborhood until the streetlights came on, drinking water out of garden hoses, etc. — and 2010s readers wonder how anyone survived a world without air bags in cars and bike helmets. If, as is claimed by quoted authors, young men have a natural drive for adventure and need for meaning, our safety-obsessed society, which reinforces on a daily basis that the world outside your property line is a dangerous place, has worked hard to squelch it. At the same time, our societal obsession with children’s self-esteem at the expense of actual accomplishment has a role too, because that emphasizes that you’re a great person just as you are, with no expectations that you do better and not do the wrong things.
(Here’s an example: Christians are condemned as judgmental when they point out someone’s sin. Their critics say that Jesus Christ didn’t judge, so Christians didn’t either. Those critics have a selective reading of the Bible, because in the cases they bring up — for instance, the woman about to be stoned for adultery — Christ’s statement to the sinner ends with a statement like “Go and sin no more.” Somehow that gets omitted in the story.)
More than anything else, though, if young men are doing bad things, other than blaming their bad decisions on themselves, it’s probably their parents’ fault. I’m not referring to the problems of single-parent families and the crisis of absent fathers, though that has a huge role in our society’s problems.
Parents are their children’s role models, whether the kids want to admit it or not, and their children’s first and longest lasting teachers. Consider what we get from religion — a sense of belonging, a sense that the world does not revolve around you, and, yes, a call to serve others, to use three secular examples. Kids don’t get any of that if they don’t go to church. And, yes, parents must sometimes do the hard thing and force their children to do things the kids may not want to do. If “sometimes asking people to do things that are hard fills them with purpose,” and that’s not being done by society or government, then it’s up to the parents to teach those lessons.
It’s also not an accident that the diminishing interest in the Boy Scouts has a role here. Parents of boys: Which of the 12 parts of the Scout Law — trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent — would you not want your sons to emulate? Or, for that matter, the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” and slogan, “Do a good turn daily.” And yet, thanks in part to the Scouts’ ban on gay leaders, but also due to men having other things to do, Scouting is on the wane nationwide. There is nothing good about that trend.
Parents are supposed to teach their children to do the right thing(s) because those are the right things to do. But parents need to teach by example. No lesson, except a lesson about power, is taught by telling a child to go out and shovel someone else’s snow. A lesson is taught when children see their parents helping a neighbor or even a stranger. A lesson is taught when children see their parents going out and doing things outside of work, particularly for the benefit of others, instead of sitting in front of a TV or computer being mindlessly entertained.
An “11–86” is California Highway Patrol radio code for a bomb threat.
Which is the best description I can find for this, from Deadline:
EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros has set Dax Shepard to write, direct and star in a screen version of CHiPS, that TV series that ran from 1977-83 and featured two officers who patrolled the highways of California armed with motorcycles and the tightest khaki cop uniforms in television history. Shepard will play Officer Jon Baker (played in the original by Larry Wilcox), while Michael Pena is attached to play Frank “Ponch” Poncherello, the role Erik Estrada originated. Rick Rosner created the NBC series.
This is the most serious Warner Bros has been in turning CHiPS into a film. The studio tried it years ago, after That ’70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama showed up in the office of exec Greg Silverman (who’s now running production at the studio). Dressed in the signature tight-fitting uniform, Valderrama merely said, “Funny, right?” — and he walked out with a deal and an intention to play Ponch. Apparently it wasn’t funny enough because while TV shows from that era such as Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes Of Hazzard got movie transfers, CHiPS stalled. The new take is envisioned as much in the tone of Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon than a comedy.
First, some explanation for younger readers: “CHiPs” was a late 1970s TV series about two California Highway Patrol motorcycle cops.
The first thing viewers had to do, of course, was suspend disbelief. The CHP didn’t assign motorcycle units as teams. The story in the pilot was that Poncherello was a screwup whose sergeant assigned Baker to keep him out of trouble.
So the two patrolled Los Angeles-area freeways keeping the good citizens of the Southland out of trouble without once drawing their guns. (Which is not impossible, but unlikely given some of the bad guys they encountered.)
The two were, of course, eligible bachelors. Poncherello lived in a motor home the first season before the two moved into an apartment complex whose rent might seem out of reach for police officers, but hey, this is TV. And they seemed to have an unusual amount of disposable income for, again, two police officers.
So what was the series really about?
The series was about getting 13-year-old boys to watch, such as myself. Of course I watched it. For that matter, when we went on vacation to California in the fall of 1978, you cannot imagine my thrill from seeing a real live CHP motorcycle! (It was at a crash scene on an L.A. freeway.)
As is usually the case with such series, the series worked because of the on-screen interplay between the lead characters. (As opposed to, from what one reads, how Estrada and Wilcox got along, or didn’t, off screen.)
There was one instance where life affected art.
Estrada missed several episodes while recovering from his crash. I recall that being really big news at my middle school.
Later, “CHiPs” had its own jump-the-shark moment when Wilcox left the series, replaced by, as usual, an inferior actor who, based on the titles, had every recreational toy in the book.
What’s stupid about this is that there already has been a remake, with most of the original cast:
The producers of CHiPs: The Film say they don’t want to do a parody, like the mostly disastrous “Starsky and Hutch” movie, but something more in the line of the Lethal Weapon or Bad Boys movies, which means they are going in the direction of the “SWAT” and “Miami Vice” movies. None of these, nor the big-screen remakes of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” were calling out to be made, and every one of them has been a flop. That also ignores the other inconvenient fact, which was that “CHiPs” wasn’t exactly “Roots” either, as one Facebook post puts it:
This was probably the worst (non-Aaron Spelling) show ever perpetrated on the Law Enforcement community. Think of it… it had offhand rhetoric that passed as ‘humor’, fakey crash scenes involving literally dozens of $300 cars, all attended to by a toothy latino ego-freak, a smiling blonde guy, all watched over by an incredibly inept Sergeant… oh, and I almost forgot… it also had…. DISCO.
I’ve weathered two eps. From my experience with a few CHP friends during my 30 years in California, the three leads should have been fired halfway through the first episode, and ‘Ponch’ perhaps deported after doing five years at Corcoran for serial sexual harrassment.. Kidding.
Makes ADAM-12: ‘The Rambler years’ look like Masterpiece Theater.
This happens because today’s producers, directors, writers and studio executives are either creativity-challenged or risk-averse. It’s possible as well that studios owned by big corporations, as opposed to being run by the likes of the Warner brothers, Columbia’s Harry Cohn or Universal’s Lew Wasserman, are concerned with the bottom line to excess.
It’s also got something to do with nostalgia. If you’re not on Facebook, you would not believe how many groups are on Facebook about fond memories of entertainment of the past. Many people bemoan, rightly, the sad state of today’s TV and movies, though some forget that TV of the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t always “Gone with the Wind” either. Studios are trying to figure out how to tap into that nostalgia in an era of diminishing viewing of TV and movies.
They have yet to successfully figure out that characters and writing, not cranking up mayhem and undressing of actors to R-rated standards, is what makes people fondly remember the original “Starsky and Hutch” and “CHiPs,” such as they were. Characters develop over the course of several seasons of a TV series, and that’s difficult at best to do in a two-hour movie.
Every season since 1989 the UW Marching Band has performed at Lambeau Field. NFL Films photo
The Packer football season begins in Seattle tonight, but you knew that.
The Badger football season started in Houston Saturday night, but you knew that too.
I predicted an LSU win over Wisconsin because the Tigers are not an opponent Wisconsin is ready to play. It’s one thing to look good for a half; it’s quite another to finish, and the Badgers certainly didn’t.
The loss prompted some pretty wild sturm und drang throughout e-Badgerland. There has been speculation that running back Melvin Gordon didn’t play much in the second half because he demanded that Joel Stave replace Tanner McEvoy at quarterback. (Gordon later was reported to have a hip injury, which appears to have come as news to Gordon.) The point is moot given that Stave apparently still has an injured shoulder … except that, as we now know, Stave doesn’t have an injured shoulder; he has the football quarterback version of the golf putting “yips,” or Steve Sax Disease. (For younger readers: Sax was a second baseman who developed a strange problem throwing from second base to first. Former center fielder Dale Murphy started his career as a catcher but got moved to the outfield because he couldn’t throw the ball back to the pitcher.)
I even read a Facebook friend compare Badgers coach Gary Andersen to Don Mor(t)on, quite possibly the worst UW coach of any sport in history, if not the worst coach of any sport in history. One way Andersen does not compare to Mor(t)on is that Andersen passed up Mor(t)on’s career win mark, six, last season, and he got UW to a bowl game, something you can guess without researching that Mor(t)on was unable to do.
There is one similarity between Mor(t)on and Andersen that is potentially troubling. Mor(t)on, you’ll recall if your mind remembers traumatic things, came to Madison with the veer option offense. The option used to be the kind of offense a coach would install if he lacked players for a more conventional offense — that is, big and/or fast players. The service academies have used the option because their players are usually small (offensive line-size players don’t fit into cockpits of fighter jets), but disciplined. Mor(t)on had coached the veer (two split running backs) option at North Dakota State and for two seasons at Tulsa, and figured it would fit in just fine in the Big Ten, once he got option quarterbacks and smaller but quicker linemen.
Somewhere along the way to Mor(t)on’s master plan, UW got flattened, of course. (The fact the BADgers had terrible defensive players didn’t help. Today’s UW–Whitewater team probably would have beaten the late ’80s BADgers teams without too much trouble.) Fans forgot that former UW coach Dave McClain came from Ball State to Madison running the option, too. McClain, however, junked the option after he replaced an option quarterback, Jess Cole (who engineered wins over Michigan and Ohio State in 1981), with Notre Dame transfer Randy Wright, a drop-back passer, and went to a more conventional offense. Perhaps they figured Mor(t)on would realize the error of ways and change his mind about the veer. Mor(t)on didn’t, though he really didn’t get the chance to decide since UW chancellor Donna Shalala hit the eject button on his career after three wretched seasons.
Andersen does not run the veer, and the Badgers have been incorporating more option elements before Andersen arrived in Madison. (For evidence, look at the 2012 Big Ten championship game, Bret Bielema’s last as UW coach.) So have, for that matter, other Big Ten teams, notably Ohio State.
The fear someone still ticked off about Saturday’s game mentioned earlier this week is that Andersen will revamp the roster for players to run his kind of offense, fail and get fired, leaving behind, as when Barry Alvarez arrived in 1990, a roster full of players incapable of playing in the Big Ten. If you forgot Mor(t)on, and no one would blame you if you had, look east to Michigan, which hired Rich Rodriguez from West Virginia for his offense. Rodriguez blew up the Michigan roster, and then Rodriguez got fired after three seasons and a 15–22 record. (It’s amazing Bo Schembechler didn’t jump out of his grave and shoot Rodriguez for what Rodriguez did to Michigan football. Before Rodriguez’s first season, 2008, the last Michigan coach to have a losing record in any season was Bump Elliott, in 1967. Arguably Michigan is still recovering from Rodriguez.)
That assumes in part that the offense Andersen replaced was great. It wasn’t. UW hasn’t really recovered from the loss of former offensive coordinator Paul Chryst, who managed to confuse, through formations and motion, opposing defenses enough that the standard running plays UW has been running since Alvarez work much better. With the exception of the two seasons Scott Tolzien and Russell Wilson were UW’s quarterbacks, the forward pass has been about option number 10 in Madison for as long as anybody can measure. The Badgers have gotten decent quarterback play from Wright, Darrell Bevell, Brooks Bollinger, Jim Sorgi and John Stocco, but other than Tolzien’s and especially Wilson’s single seasons, the quarterback position should be renamed Handoff Specialist at UW. Wilson is the best quarterback UW has ever had, and he was in Madison for one season.
It’s not as if UW is ever going to emulate Texas Tech under Mike Leach. But you have to have a quarterback who can win, not merely not lose. Andersen is apparently trying to recruit two-way quarterbacks, who can run the option and throw. To me, the most important part of the quarterback position at any level is the ability to pass, not run, because there are between one and three running backs available to run at any time. There are quarterbacks who can pass well, and there are quarterbacks who can run well. Getting one who can do both well is hard enough, and well nigh impossible at Running Back U because of UW’s history of running the football to the exclusion of everything else.
The fault, of course, is not merely behind center; it is the fact that, dating back to the days of Lee DeRamus (that would be the 1994 Rose Bowl team, young fans), the Badgers have had one, and only one, capable wide receiver at a time. Apparently whoever has been successfully teaching UW offensive linemen to steamroll defenses hasn’t been teaching UW offensive linemen how to pass-block either.
I admit to having never played nor coached football, but if I were a defensive coordinator coaching against Wisconsin, my strategy would be to line up everybody between tackle and tight end(s), with the exception of one cornerback per split-out receiver, and dare UW to throw the football. That was basically LSU’s second-half strategy, and you’ll notice that after UW got its 24–7 lead, the scoreboard operator’s job was half-done for the night.
If the question is who should be the Badger quarterback, McEvoy or Stave, the correct answer is: No. Dan Dierdorf, then of ABC-TV’s Monday Night Football, once looked at the Detroit Lions’ three-quarterback shuffle and proclaimed, “If you have three quarterbacks, then you really have no quarterbacks.” And that is where UW is. Neither McEvoy nor Stave are Big Ten-quality quarterbacks. Neither, apparently, is Bart Houston, temporarily elevated to backup with Stave’s issues, and previous history suggests there’s no reason to think freshman D.J. Gillins is either.
The good news is that UW will become bowl-eligible merely by showing up the rest of the season. Eight wins is the floor for this team given its rather easy schedule the rest of the way, and they could win up to three more toss-up games — at Northwestern, home against Nebraska, and at Iowa. In most of those games it really won’t matter who lines up behind center — hand off to a running back, and UW will overwhelm whoever is in the way. That is not, however, a recipe for long-term success, once a UW opponent figures out that if you stop the run, you stop the Badgers.
Which brings us to tonight and the Packers. Readers know that there are really two separate NFL seasons — the regular season and the postseason. The postseason can wait; the regular season starts tonight with, most likely, a Packer loss, since Seattle is one of the most difficult places to play in the NFL.
The question going into this season is whether the Packers have fixed the defensive problems that have plagued them since Super Bowl XLV. Losing B.J. Raji won’t help, though getting Julius Peppers did. It’s reasonable to conclude that Peppers will be energized by playing for a winning organization and will have a good year this year, though beyond that is an open question.
The one thing that’s pretty certain is that the Packers have more than enough offense, even with questions at tight end. The upside of losing quarterback Aaron Rodgers for several games last year is that the Packers found a running game with running back Eddie Lacy. But championships are won with defense, and whether going smaller and quicker is preferable to big and slow (i.e. Raji at defensive end, Ryan Pickett) remains to be seen, and the answer may not come tonight.
I look at the schedule and see an 11–5 record. Their home schedule looks more difficult than their road schedule, with the Patriots and Falcons coming to Green Bay on consecutive weeks, vs. a likely loss in New Orleans. That will probably be enough to win the NFC North given that there are no other Super Bowl contenders out of that group.
University of Virginia Prof. Mark Edmundson is the author of Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game:
Football is a warlike game, and we are now a warlike nation. Our love for football is a love, however self-aware, of ourselves as a fighting and (we hope) victorious people.
Until the end of World War II, it was possible for us Americans to think of ourselves as warlike only by accident. Europe pulled us into World War I. Many Americans wished to stay out. And when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, we had no choice but to fight.
The soldiers who returned from the war by and large believed the United States was finished with conflict, at least for a long time to come. The United States was a peace-loving nation, and it had earned the right to peace.
Then came Korea, Vietnam, three wars in the Middle East and no end of flare-ups around the world. One may think our military engagements have been justified and necessary. But it is no longer really possible to think America is a deeply peaceful, or even a peace-loving nation.
That kind of thinking smacks of the era when the national game truly was baseball. That game is skill-based, nonviolent and leisurely. Grunting effort has almost no part in baseball: It’s about subtle prowess, well deployed. You can win a baseball game without hating your opponents: In fact, too much passion will probably undermine your skills.
But in football, as skilled as its players are, you had best hate your opponent, or at least simulate some hatred for the space of 60 minutes of play.
Football is urban, tough and based to a large degree on the capacity to overwhelm the other team with sheer force. Football is a tank attack, a sky-borne assault, a charge into the trenches for hand-to-hand fighting. Football is following orders and sticking to the strategy. It’s about acting as a unit and taking hits for the group.
Football is generals (coaches) and captains (quarterbacks) and the enlisted guys who play on the line.
Football is about destruction. Sure, you win by getting more points than the other team, but to get more points, you generally have to slam the life out of your opponents. You try to do away with their skill players — by violence. Knock out the first-string quarterback and chances are you willwin.
It is beautiful, to be sure. The wide receiver competes with the ballet dancer in grace and style. The runner recalls the flashing leopard, the tiger on the move. It’s lovely to watch. War can be beautiful, too, one understands. The bombs create a memorable light. The crack of rifles is its own music.
The rise of football over baseball is about a change in America’s self-image. We’ve been ready to fight always (ask the Indian tribes or the Spanish who controlled much of the Southwest), but we haven’t been ready to admit it. Now it’s harder to escape the truth.
When people are willing to get publicly enthusiastic about football, they are showing a willingness to get enthusiastic about struggle and strife — maybe even about war, if they feel it is necessary. Granted, almost all games are sublimations of war. But no game is as close to war without slipping over to war as football is.
Aristotle thought the purpose of a violent spectacle was to purge dangerous feelings from the audience. Tragedy discharged the excess of pity and fear that built up in individuals. They left the theater feeling clean.
But Plato says something different. Plato fears we become what we behold. See violence enacted on a stage and your capacity for violence will increase. To Plato, football would feed a national capacity for violent action and be fed by it in turn.
From this point of view, football and war could enter a mutually energizing relation with each other: the more football, the more war; the more war, the more football.
If the modern world is truly a place where a nation must be ready to fight constantly to survive, then perhaps football serves a general good. But whether the only way to thrive as a nation and a people is through the capacity for warfare, one can certainly doubt.
The poet William Blake looked forward to a day when the wars of swords would be over and when men and women would hash out their differences through argument and imagination, through what he called the arts of mental fight.
May that day come soon.
I’m not sure if Edmundson’s close is an indictment of just war or football as well. Chess as a spectator sport is unlikely to become popular, in the latter case. Edmundson’s quoting Plato is belied by the fact that football does not come close to the amount of off-field violence that has been found in soccer. (Including the Futbol War of 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras, which started with, yes, a soccer World Cup qualifying match, and ended with 3,000 dead Salvadorans and Hondurans in 100 hours. American football also has nothing in its history like the 1985 European Cup final, where 39 people died and 600 were injured before the final, and the match was played because of fears of more violence had the match been canceled. As far as football, Aristotle tops Plato.)
I also think Edmundson’s depiction of football as “urban” is inaccurate. Other than big cities in Florida and Texas, football is more a small-town sport. There are no football-power high schools in Milwaukee or Madison, though there are in the Milwaukee suburbs. The urban sport is really basketball. But come to a small town in Florida and Texas, and even in this state, and you will see where football rates.
It should be obvious that the modern world is truly a place where a nation must be ready to fight constantly to survive. It also should be obvious that, unless you think that such concepts as freedom and self-determination are unimportant enough to fight those would take those away, yes, the only way to thrive as a nation and a people is through the capacity for warfare.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 