We crash out; the French-born; a movie for the family

Congratulations to the Senegalese, who outplayed and beat us.

The Dutch outplayed and beat the Senegalese.

We outplayed the Dutch but unluckily didn’t beat them. So, we crashed out.

(All three countries outplayed and beat the Qataris by the same number of goals.)

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This four-year-old Vox video is truer than ever. The French talent pool is deep. France supplies the rest of the world with players: especially, the African teams.

This time, France is without some of its top stars; but the reality is, it could field half a dozen decent teams in a single World Cup – teams so competitive that on a good day, a “B” or “C” French team could beat the “A” team. This afternoon, Tunisia, with ten French-born players on its roster, beat France-proper. Tunisia was unlucky not to qualify out of its group.

If Senegal defeats England – which isn’t beyond imagining; it will be a bruising game for the English – Senegal could face France in a quarterfinal. A largely French-born, French-trained team could knock out France.

(Click to enlarge.)

This raises interesting questions for the French constitutional principle of laïcité, which explicitly concerns itself with religious identity but often is interpreted as applying to other forms of identity. “France does not refer to its citizens based on their race, religion or origin. To us there is no hyphenated identity,” the French ambassador to the U.S. famously said after the 2018 World Cup. What, then, to make of French citizens who try to defeat the French team in the name of Senegal or Tunisia? Do they not belong to the French nation? (Legally, they surely do.) Or, by French cultural lights, do they not truly represent those other countries? Do the ambassador’s words imply that the Tunisian team is a cultural sham?

I have no very firm grasp of how the French themselves would answer these questions. (Not that I’d insist that only the French are entitled to decide what it is to be French, even if they are entitled to decide who is French.) But it does seem to me that French national identity has different sorts of conditions than, say, U.S. national identity. This should give pause to identity activists and theorizers. In this era of identity politics, national identity is too often overlooked, or it’s taken for granted as a fixed part of the background. But it is not equally fixed by the same variables everywhere, even if, everywhere, the law helps to fix it; and its significance and function vary from nation to nation.

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Tonight our family took a break from watching murders. Instead, we watched Minions, which, many years ago, was either the first or the second movie that Karin & I saw together in a theater. Samuel walked around repeating Minion-gibberish and catchphrases like “Respect, power, banana!” Daniel, who was still wearing his oversized Ecuador shirt after yesterday’s game, himself looked like a little yellow Minion.

The Netherlands 1, Ecuador 1; 1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 57: Walking and talking

Ecuador dominated the Netherlands. The teams drew, but it felt like the famous headline: “Harvard Beats Yale 29–29.”

The Netherlands took an early lead, but Ecuador fought back and scored at the end of the half. I yelled and celebrated. Samuel and Daniel cried. Then the goal was disallowed because a static player in an offside position was adjudged to have “interfered with” the goalie. (He didn’t.)

When Enner Valencia scored the tying goal, a little after halftime, I didn’t yell or celebrate. I don’t think I shall, anymore.

The final score barely mattered. Ecuador was breathtakingly good. I was very, very happy and proud.

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This is what the World Cup has taught Samuel to say:

“A Visa card.”

“Adidas shoes.”

“Dior.”

“Westin.”

“Hilton. For the stay.”

“Medio tiempo presentado por T-Mobile.”

“Only on Peacock. A Peacock original series.”

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Karin put on a couple of Beavis & Butt-head YouTube videos, and now Samuel goes around asking to watch “Beavis and Buff-head.”

“Maybe when you’re older,” I tell him. “Maybe when you’re twenty-five.”

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Walking and Talking

This review is a nod to Anne Heche, who died this year. She and Catherine Keener play lifelong friends in their early thirties who stumble through relationships with men and with each other. “Bleak,” Karin kept on saying, and then in the second half of the movie she laughed a lot.

The funniest situations are carefully built up over many scenes. One first-class joke is about the removal of a mole. (It struck a chord with Karin & me: early in our marriage, we worried about a particularly suspect mole.) In another remarkable scene, the Heche character dreams or hallucinates or has a vision of the mole, leading to a pointless quarrel with her boyfriend.

Physical insecurity is treated with shrewdness. The theme recurs in other movies directed by Nicole Holofcener, e.g., Lovely & Amazing and my favorite, Please Give. Her characters worry about everything from skin blemishes to general ugliness to cancer and dementia. The women are touchy about these things, but so are the men.

It’s good to have movies like this, with not-that-much-better-than-average-looking people whose attitudes about their bodies are true to life.

The director John Stockwell (Crazy/Beautiful, Blue Crush, Into the Blue) is good at making his actors look really, really hot. His movies are masterpieces. But it’s good of Holofcener to provide an antidote. Man cannot live on eye candy alone.

The key to dealing with insecurity, Holofcener demonstrates again and again, is self-respect. This is different from thinking yourself beautiful, which can be a trap because (a) beauty fades, and (b) you end up worrying whether you and your friends are beautiful enough. Rather, if you are self-respecting, you have no truck with people who are willing to denigrate you because of your physical appearance. Paradoxically, self-respect is outward-, not inward-looking: it has to do with not selling yourself short in your comportment with others. The self-respecting character in Walking and Talking is a nerdy video-store clerk (Kevin Corrigan). Most people would write him off as a loser, but he is a mensch.

The other characters are more fragile, and they are often thoughtless and even cruel. But there is hope for them. They are learning.

This is a funny and good-hearted movie.

Thanksgiving poems; World Cup group games 3–16

Paul Laurence Dunbar, “A Thanksgiving Poem”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The sun hath shed its kindly light,

Our harvesting is gladly o’er

Our fields have felt no killing blight,

Our bins are filled with goodly store.

From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword

We have been spared by thy decree,

And now with humble hearts, O Lord,

We come to pay our thanks to thee.

We feel that had our merits been

The measure of thy gifts to us,

We erring children, born of sin,

Might not now be rejoicing thus.

No deed of ours hath brought us grace;

When thou were nigh our sight was dull,

We hid in trembling from thy face,

But thou, O God, wert merciful.

Thy mighty hand o’er all the land

Hath still been open to bestow

Those blessings which our wants demand

From heaven, whence all blessings flow.

Thou hast, with ever watchful eye,

Looked down on us with holy care,

And from thy storehouse in the sky

Hast scattered plenty everywhere.

Then lift we up our songs of praise

To thee, O Father, good and kind;

To thee we consecrate our days;

Be thine the temple of each mind.

With incense sweet our thanks ascend;

Before thy works our powers pall;

Though we should strive years without end,

We could not thank thee for them all.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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Robert Herrick, “Grace for a Child”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Here, a little child I stand,

Heaving up my either hand:

Cold as paddocks though they be,

Here I lift them up to Thee,

For a benison to fall

On our meat, and on us all. Amen.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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I am thankful for the World Cup, to which I awake at five each morning. I’ve now seen each team play in one game – even Portugal and Ghana, who played while we were traveling to Fort Wayne for our holiday gathering (I watched them on my phone). These teams seem best: Brazil; France, hugely talented but not clinical enough; England, utterly businesslike; and Spain, the slickest and most ruthless team so far.

Argentina and Germany already have lost (to Saudi Arabia and Japan, respectively). Croatia and Uruguay have drawn – respectably enough, to my way of thinking. Denmark, Portugal, and the Netherlands won or drew in more underwhelming fashion. Serbia was dominated by Brazil but impressed at least as favorably as these other teams. Similarly impressive, and most surprising, was Saudi Arabia.

Ecuador will play against the Netherlands tomorrow.

Ecuador 2, Qatar 0; England 6, Iran 2; tornadoes

I had to wait twenty years to see Ecuador play for the first time in a World Cup. I lived through five World Cups before Ecuador ever qualified for one. Oh, the shame and helplessness of those years.

Samuel and Daniel saw their very first World Cup game yesterday, and Ecuador played in it.

Ecuador scored the first goal after three minutes. Stephen and I jumped up and yelled and celebrated. Samuel and Daniel were startled. They cried.

Then the goal was disallowed because a player was offside.

Stephen and I couldn’t see the infraction – not even after the replay was shown. I gather that 99% of the world couldn’t see it, either. That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Offside is decreed by technology now. Good thing, because if a human referee had decided that we were offside on that play, FIFA and the host nation would have lost all credibility.

In any case, fútbol-wise, Qatar was doomed. Ecuador was better by about ten miles. The only question, at that point, was whether the referee would permit Ecuador to win.

Then, after twelve minutes, he awarded Ecuador a penalty kick. (He couldn’t have done otherwise, really.) He should have shown Qatar’s goalie a red card, but, understandably, he let the host nation off the hook.

Enner Valencia, who had been missing his penalty kicks in recent games, calmly scored. Stephen and I were quiet this time.

The rest of the game was a walk-through for Ecuador. The Qataris were rattled and simply awful. The Ecuadorians were more cautious than I should have liked. Valencia scored again later in the half, and then Ecuador rested. Or tried to; Qatar kept on fouling.

The Ecuadorian supporters could be heard cheering. Many Qatari supporters left at halftime.

In this video, one of the soberer analysts on U.S. television describes the Qatari exodus. Some of the numbers he cites seem off, but the lesson is clear enough.

How valuable was this victory? We got the points. We regained some confidence after a series of lackluster practice games. Our main scorer regained his form. Were we good? Impossible to say. Qatar was so, so bad. We could have tried harder to score more goals, but it was crucial to rest and calm down. The games against the Netherlands and Senegal will be very hard.

This analysis is fair.

For one day, we led the whole world in the standings – something which also happened during the 2006 World Cup. Then, this morning, England beat Iran 6 goals to 2. Iran looked miles and miles better than Qatar.

Here is Un mundo inmenso’s take on this World Cup.

Now, something different. Samuel asked to watch more tornado videos, so I put on Netflix’s series Earthstorm. It has the best tornado footage I’ve seen. I highly recommend it.

Pre-tourney gripes

As if we needed more scandal, the rumor spread on Twitter that supporters of Qatar bribed several Ecuadorian players to lose the opening match. The rumorer, a British-based Bahraini journalist, has been identified and discredited.

Still, it irks.

Meanwhile, The Guardian takes pot shots, as it has been doing since Russia and Qatar rather than England and Australia were awarded the hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The paper now claims that this World Cup is a ruse for the host nation to be glorified through the Argentinian, Brazilian, and French players employed and rested by Paris Saint-Germain. (The club is owned by Qatari investors.) True or not, the criticism is silly. Is it really unfair that PSG should give Messi some days off before the tournament, when other clubs – and entire leagues – could protect their stars if they so chose?

Other criticisms of the host country, and of the social and political evils of global soccer, are more serious. Of these, some are better supported than others. The Guardian’s tally of deaths of foreign workers is especially contentious, yet it is cited without qualification by other mainstream publications, such as The Atlantic.

There is a lot of noise.

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I listened to an analysis by the Anglo-centric YouTube channel Tifo Football that got Ecuador’s tactics and personnel pretty wrong. I’m not saying we’re world-beaters or that we play the prettiest soccer, or even that we’re better than Qatar or Senegal or the Netherlands. But it’d be nice not to be slandered. When we lose possession, we don’t immediately stack our players behind the ball; on the contrary, we fight to quickly regain possession high up the field. And it’s Moisés Caicedo who attacks and Carlos Gruezo who drops back, not vice versa. Anyone who watches knows this. (This mistake would be less irritating if the analyst hadn’t just name-dropped Caicedo – a Premier Leaguer – as if he knew whom he was talking about.)

As regular readers know, this is the time when my thoughts and blogging are pretty well filled up by the World Cup.

Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751

I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.

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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:

Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1

Platte County is the outlier.

“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)

Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.

Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.

Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.

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This month’s body-text font is Primer.

This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)

A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.

Anglophilia, pt. 55 BC

No one ever thought that 1066 and All That was All That, but that book turns out to have been a Good Thing after all. But to understand this, it helps to imagine the book read aloud by Internet wonder Philomena Cunk. This week, the Internet discovered that Cunk has been on the BBC for many years. She has become famous for wondering: “What is clocks?”

She ponders history as well as the “centuries of millenia” of architecture (“buildings”), as well as time. Not only is she an historian, she is a philosopher, or perhaps an idiot. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wondering. Cunk, in her questioning of “experts,” makes us wonder who it is who would waste time on wondering. And yet, we cannot spend enough time inquiring along with Philomena Cunk.

(Has she ever interviewed Timothy Williamson? He would be almost ripe for it.)

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I checked out Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman for Karin. Rickman is her idol. Karin worries that the diaries will spoil Rickman for her.

She needn’t.

He is – was (R.I.P.) – a good diarist and a decent guy. He clearly was fond of the Harry Potter kids.

I promised Karin I’d read Harry Potter 1 and 2 by May 1 so that we could watch those movies together. She’s reading Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? so that we can watch the Britbox series of that book.

We are punished

Less than a fortnight before Ecuador is due to play in the World Cup, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (TAS) has ruled on the Byron Castillo case.

Castillo’s Ecuadorian citizenship has been reaffirmed, for the obvious reason – cited earlier by FIFA – that it’s up to the Ecuadorian government whether Castillo is a citizen. It was legitimate for Ecuador’s soccer team to field Castillo. No points earned in the 2022 World Cup qualification tournament are to be deducted. Ecuador will play in this World Cup, as scheduled.

But the TAS also has ruled that Castillo was born elsewhere and earlier than his passport says. So, although his citizenship and his eligibility to play are not objectionable, his documentation is. What is more, the TAS explains, the Federación Ecuatoriana de Fútbol (FEF) “is liable for an act of falsification … even if the FEF was not the author of the falsified document but only the user.”

The TAS grounds this on FIFA’s Disciplinary Code (the 2019 edition, presumably), article 21, paragraph 2:

An association or a club may be held liable for an act of forgery or falsification by one of its officials and/or players.

As punishment, Ecuador will be fined and must begin the next World Cup qualification campaign with a three-point deficit. That’s the equivalent of a three-draw or single-victory head start for each of Ecuador’s competitors. (Goal differential – and other tiebreakers – aren’t affected.)

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How sensible is this ruling? For argument’s sake, assume that Castillo – or his parents or other representatives – indeed gave false information so that he could obtain his citizenship papers.

The TAS’s ruling is consistent with the letter of FIFA’s Disciplinary Code. But a lesser punishment, or no punishment, also would have been consistent with the Code. An association may be held liable, the Code says. That is, punishment is optional; it should be determined on a case-by-case basis (and, eventually, by precedent).

Now, to take the word “may” so seriously is to interpret the Code rather literally; but then, a ruling against Ecuador depends on a severely literal reading of the Code. (Think of this as a “pound of flesh” sort of case.) As it is written, the Code says nothing about whether it matters if the party in question deliberately “used” a falsified document. But it seems that deliberate “use” was the Code’s target: it’s what the rule-makers evidently wished to discourage or punish (see paragraph 1 of the Code’s same article). And the TAS hasn’t determined whether Ecuador intentionally “used” a falsified document – at least, this isn’t stated in the ruling.

It behooves the authorities to be lenient on this occasion. The TAS is now imposing a harsh punishment for what hasn’t been proven to be anything worse than an unintended error. But this sets a fearsome precedent. How many other clubs or countries might be found similarly liable for failing to reject a false claim in this or that player’s papers? More than a few. And if this case becomes a precedent – as it must, if judgments are to be consistent – other cases would demand punishment than those involving “uses” of eligibility-determining falsifications. The present ruling makes it explicit that Castillo took the field eligibly. Ecuador’s punishment is for falsification, full stop – not for falsification-in-order-to-field-an-ineligible-player.

For insance, precedent would dictate that:

If a player lies about his birthday (height, weight, address, criminal record, etc.) but not his parentage, birth country, or any nationality-determining facts;

and if the falsehood is printed on his papers;

and if his country’s soccer association, acting in good faith, or in compliance with its national government, treats those papers as proof of the player’s citizenship;

then the soccer association must be harshly punished.

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There’s at least one other, perhaps more egregious, problem with this ruling. Again: FIFA’s Disciplinary Code only states that an association may be held liable for the offense of falsification. The Code doesn’t require FIFA to hold an offender liable; precedent, or some other consideration, would have to be adduced to generate such a requirement. Indeed, in its June ruling, FIFA refrained from holding Ecuador liable.

In so doing, FIFA acted in conformity with its Code. As far as I can see, then, without precedent, there is no basis for a higher court to overturn FIFA’s ruling; it was within FIFA’s discretion to rule as it did.

Web bots, pt. 2; a birthday weekend

Quickly, a follow-up to the previous entry. A reader tells me about this announcement on the Canon Press website:

(To enlarge the image, click on it.)

No wonder the Web bots led me to The Case for Christian Nationalism.

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Thank you, well-wishers and gift givers. I turned forty-one upon a day of classic “John-Paul” weather, as gloomy as all get-out (and windy). For my birthday supper, we drove to my in-laws’ house in Granger. The traffic was dense – Notre Dame was about to host a game – and, along much of the route, the power was extinguished; intersections had to be negotiated in the manner of four-way stops. We passed some accidents. We arrived safely.

“Meat loaf and cheesecake,” Karin’s mom said, afterward, when we were stuffed. “What good choices, John-Paul.”

“Karin chose them,” I disclosed.

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Stephen visited today; we watched the first leg of Barcelona’s championship series against Aucas. Barcelona lost 0–1 and didn’t deserve better. The concluding leg will be played next week. I can truly say, I’ll be glad for Aucas to join the list of title winners.

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In this photo, Moisés Caicedo celebrates his birthday with the other Spanish speakers of Brighton & Hove Albion FC. There are three Ecuadorians, an Argentinian, a Paraguayan, and a Spaniard.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all but the young Paraguayan were chosen for the World Cup.

I meet a politician; the Golden Rule; one thing leads to another

Political ads have been landing in our mailbox, and today a candidate came to our house. I stepped outside to talk to him.

(Samuel wanted to go outside, but I wouldn’t allow him to. He stared out the window, howled, and made a piteous face. Daniel chugged his milk.)

The candidate wore a U.S. Marine Corps baseball hat. The flyer he gave me didn’t say which party he belonged to, but it named and criticized a certain Republican candidate, so I figured he was a Democrat. He unenthusiastically confirmed this. “I’m running as a Democrat because I was raised as one,” he said, “but I’m against the extremists in both parties who are tearing our country apart.”

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R.I.P. Harry J. Gensler, the Jesuit philosopher who wrote a helpful (if expensive) “Golden Rule book for everyone.” You ought to treat others as you’d like to be treated, the Rule says. In most societies, this is regarded as common sense. But is it philosophically defensible? How, exactly, should the Rule be interpreted, formulated, and applied? And what is its place in an overall picture of morality and value? One could do worse than to begin with Gensler’s book.

Incidentally, if you use Amazon to search for books on the Golden Rule, you’ll be led to authors affiliated with the Templeton Foundation. I don’t object to Templeton; but if you click on too many Templeton Golden Rule products, you’ll soon be shown items from Douglas Wilson’s Canon Press, with titles like The Case for Christian Nationalism. Gensler cites examples of Golden Rule reasoning due to Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and concludes that the Rule’s appeal is “bipartisan.” Alas, the Web bots suggest otherwise.