War plans; an inauspicious debut

From The Atlantic. If you can access it, read it. It describes shocking security breaches, callous disregard for human life, reckless emoji use, etc. Also shocking (but not surprising) is the current administration’s hatred of … Europe. Someone should force the Vice President and his cronies to turn off their phones, sit still, and watch some alluring travel videos by Rick Steves. …

This has been the wildest news story of the week.

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I take it back. Wilder, if less consequential, was Ecuador’s decision to start 17-year-old Darwin Guagua against Chile tonight. The boy hadn’t even debuted at the senior level for Independiente del Valle, his club.

The soccer federation appears to be trying to show off young Ecuadorian players so that European clubs will buy them. Federation officials probably are cutting backroom deals with local clubs and then pressuring the national team’s coach to field certain players.

Guagua had been about to enter Friday’s game as a late substitute. But when the Venezuelans scored, our coach, Sebastián Beccacece, left him on the bench. So, tonight, Guagua got to start. (I doubt it was what Beccacece wanted.)

The Chileans ate Guagua alive. We effectively ceded our left flank to them for half of the game.

Apart from that, our performance was … good. Kind of awesome. Unbalanced though we were, we contained the Chileans until halftime and dominated them afterward. The result was a goalless draw. Enner put the ball into the net but was narrowly offside.

We remain in second place. No other team gained ground on us this week, except Argentina.

Incidentally, guagua, in the indigenous languages of the Andes, means baby.

Quarterfinals 1 and 2 – the best day of the World Cup; December’s poems

I am in awe of the Croatians. They are BALLERS. I doubt I could think more highly of a soccer team.

Brazil, not so much.

The key contest was between Casemiro and Luka Modrić. (Casemiro is Brazil’s grownup.) Modrić outduelled Casemiro all game long, including during the building up of Croatia’s goal.

Other pundits have highlighted Marcelo Brozović, whose job it was to subtly close off Neymar.

The Brazilian fans sang and danced, and I was like, don’t you understand that your team is getting schooled? That the Croatians are better than the Brazilians with the ball (and, certainly, better without it)? That they are doing what they like to do, which is strenuous and sophisticated: doing it with steel and style: and the Brazilians aren’t?

Great soccer nation or not, these colorful fans are just that: fanatics.

The second quarterfinal, between Argentina and the Netherlands, was made wild by some erratic refereeing, as well as by the Netherlands’s launching long, high passes into the box in a desperate attempt to even the score. It worked; but the Argentinians, who were briefly unsettled, gathered themselves, seized control again, and won the penalty shootout.

Messi is right to complain. The ref hurt Argentina. Even so, the Argentinians used the ref to mess with the Dutch. Their breaches of etiquette – deliberately handling the ball, kicking it into the Dutch bench – were so brazen, the ref didn’t know what to do about them, and the Dutch were put out of sorts. It behooved the Dutch, who were down by two goals, to put the Argentinians out of sorts, and they did, but then the Argentinians made sure the Dutch were put out, too, and the Dutch came out worse.

Two of the day’s goals – one scored by Neymar, the other assisted by Messi – were exquisite. The Dutch worked a stunning free-kick goal.

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This month, the poem is by me.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Sometimes, it’s hard to be a daddy

He changes diapers all day long

He changes Danny’s

He changes Sammy’s

And, as he does, he sings this song

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Apologies to Tammy Wynette.

I had to change a diaper while Morocco and Spain contested their penalty shootout in the octavos de final. I did a wipe, watched a penalty kick, did a wipe, watched a penalty kick …

All right, that wasn’t much of a poem, so here is one from The Atlantic: “Ode to Not Watching the World Cup.”

I am not convinced …

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.

Harlan Coben’s Netflix

I continue to hunt for free books, resolving – ruefully – to borrow more from the Internet Archive. Yes, this will require me to read from a screen. But the books on that website are free.

Maybe I’ll stop carrying four or five volumes to bed with me.

My mother reads from a screen. Today I showed her how to search in the Internet Archive. We quickly found a few cherished books that she hadn’t read in years.

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One guy I won’t be reading onscreen is Harlan Coben. No need: his books are in the library.

And I don’t like them.

Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve been fascinated with Coben, or the idea of Coben, since I read this Atlantic article fifteen years ago.

He was popular then; now, he’s stratospheric. He and Netflix have contracted to turn fourteen of his books into different shows. Fourteen. How does such a thing occur? Netflix has been transposing these stories to England, Poland, France … just about anywhere outside of New Jersey, which is to Coben World what Britain is to Middle Earth.

The good news is, the shows are a hoot. Safe was all right. I liked the family of strivers who, out of sheer social panic, keep a body in their freezer. But the series that hooked me was The Stranger, with its “good kid” teenagers who go on a candy-colored drug trip and cut off an alpaca’s head.

Right now, Karin & I are watching Stay Close. Why are so many scenes set around a huge statue of a skinny, white head – a statue reminiscent of a certain Pink Floyd album cover? Why has this statue been erected in a clearing in the forest? Why do the characters not seem to notice it much? (Who writes this into a crime show?)

Why is the grizzled lead detective saddled with his ex-wife as his investigative partner? How could their boss allow this? And why does the boss look like he’s twelve?

And how does the ex-wife get away with letting her son ride around in the back seat of the police car? (“Childcare issues,” she vaguely explains.)

Why do so many perfectly manicured middle-class marriages have ridiculous secrets? How are the wives and husbands so oblivious to one another’s pasts? Why do these pasts involve things like embezzling and stripping and committing manslaughter?

How do such outlandish tropes get repeated in story after story?

Karin & I get a kick out of all this.

Coben World – the Netflix variety, anyway – is different from any I’ve encountered.

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Today, I started to read Babbitt. This year is its centennial.

I am mistaken for a celebrity; or, rather, the celebrity is mistaken for me

What with this pandemic, I haven’t seen a barber since June or July, and my hair has gotten bushy. Today our family went to a bookstore so I could use up some gift cards. While I was finding my books, Karin perused the greeting cards with Samuel, and he came upon a photo of Bob Ross.

“It’s Daddy!” Samuel said.

I wasn’t expecting to hear that anytime soon.

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I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, but after I clicked on all my free articles this month I wanted to read the rest of the current issue so I could keep learning how U.S. democracy is on its last legs. Happily I was able to order a hard copy through my library branch. It was the first Atlantic hard copy I’d seen in years. The magazine is now typeset in teeny, tiny Adobe Garamond, which, like the text in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, is elegant enough to admire and puny enough to bemoan.

Very interesting to you, I’m sure.

Leaves migrating south for the winter

Temperatures got up to the high forties (F) today. Had it not rained, Samuel and I might have kicked a ball around on a field near our house. Instead, we did some napping.

I have told Karin I won’t buy any more books this year, at least not out of pocket (i.e., without gift money).

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The Atlantic has been publishing a special series about U.S. democracy. Online, that is. The articles will reapper in the January/February print issue. That’s why some of them talk as if we already have come to the anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack, though that attack took place on January 6 of this year.

The Atlantic must not be the only medium that is talking like this. One of my right-wing Facebook friends, who wouldn’t be caught dead reading that magazine, posts:

The fact that January 6th is even a topic of conversation anymore, let alone the object of extensive judicial inquiry, is mind-boggling.

My mind is boggled that his mind is boggled, though by now the mutual incredulity is predictable. I have no great point to make about this. Why mention it, then?

In one of my favorite Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown overhears Lucy explain to a very young Linus that in the autumn, leaves fall off trees because they are migrating south for the winter.

“My stomach aches,” Charlie Brown says.

For many of us, engaging opponents, listening to opponents, has become well-nigh impossible because it’s just too stomach-churning. Not because of mutual contempt, name-calling, etc., though those things are bad, but because facts and plausible interpretations of those facts are treated contemptuously, while ludicrous interpretations and lies are treated as truth.

So, if we want to talk politics, we talk with people who agree with us. Or we attend to those on the other side to get a perverse pleasure from what they say. But, in the long run, those things also are stomach-churning. They’re like eating stale food, or like eating junk food that gives us a quick high and then leaves us ill and out of shape.

Maybe the best course is to be like Charlie Brown and not have any friends, only enemies; to lament that they are our enemies; and to live, as fully as possible, with the constant stomach-ache.

Chiefs 31, 49ers 20

Last night’s was an exceptional Super Bowl, what with the Chiefs scoring 21 points in the last 6 minutes to defeat the 49ers. It took the Chiefs fifty minutes to unlock the Niners’ defense, and then it was like, BLAM, BLAM, BLAM. Mahomes, who’d thrown poorly in the third quarter, marshaled the late raid and was the MVP.

Over the years, I’ve tended to root against the Chiefs, but I do like this version of the club. I was especially happy for the Chiefs’ coach, Andy Reid, who won his first Super Bowl after having led NFL teams for 21 years. Reid is about as affable a big-time coach as there is.

You can tell it from this article in The Atlantic, written in 2008 when Reid was coaching the Eagles. It describes him analyzing the historic 1958 NFL championship game. It’s a good read (no pun intended).

Eminent historians

Staying at home while Karin goes to work is just terrible. Oh, I have job applications and other writing projects to do. But most of the day, I’m bored out of my brain.

I’ve also been too restless to read much – from print sources, that is. Somehow, the computer screen keeps me glued to it all day.

I’ll mention a few recent readings and then be done.

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My dad linked to this article by Gregory H. Shill in the Atlantic about how U.S. law unjustly favors driving. The article is a condensed version of this much longer paper, also well worth a look.

(There was a time when I wanted to write a philosophical polemic against driving, or at least against law that encourages it, but I doubt I could improve on the work of Prof. Shill.)

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On a totally different subject, the eminent British historian Richard J. Evans has published, in the Guardian, a savage obituary of the eminent British historian Norman Stone.

A student of Stone’s replies here, and the Spectator, while not exactly disagreeing with Evans, defends Stone here.

Long ago, Stone himself published a savage obituary of the eminent British historian E.H. Carr in the London Review of Books. Here is a quotation:

In 1961 [Carr] delivered six lectures to [his Cambridge] Faculty on the theme ‘What is History?’: it may count as his most successful book, for there is a keen appetite in schools for this boring subject, and the paperback volume is frequently reprinted. It is probably as much a mistake to ask a working historian to discuss this theme as to ask a painter to give his views on aesthetics. Carr had not much more to offer than a version of Fifties progressivism: history teaches respect for the present, or, better still, the Soviet present. In places, it read like a Marxist 1066 and All That. It does, however, begin well, perhaps even brilliantly.

I have a copy of What Is History: it has always vexed me that I don’t know what history is. I also have Evans’s In Defense of History, because I don’t know what history is for.

Stone may or may not have been right that a working historian isn’t especially able to tackle the philosophical questions. But I wonder if his own refusal to tackle them was, fundamentally, what divided him from those he criticized and who now criticize him.

R.I.P. Rachel Held Evans

Her earthly race is all run.

RHE – blogger, book author, speaker – ecumenical Episcopalian, ex-evangelical, biblical anti-literalist, feminist – U.S. Southerner, Bryan College alumna, daughter, sister, wife, mother – and much more – has suddenly died at thirty-seven (my own age). Her body seems to have reacted severely against routine treatment for infection and flu.

I used to read her blog when I lived in Ithaca. I liked watching her wrestle, in near-real time, with difficult questions of biblical interpretation, theology, and practical ethics. I liked the humility with which she responded to critics. I liked how she made room on her blog for respectful Q&A sessions with representatives of different faith traditions.

The last couple of days, I’ve been skimming through entries that I missed after I stopped reading her blog around 2013.

She wasn’t formally trained in the topics she wrote about, but she was a persistent student. We can see this from her notes on Justo L. González’s The Story of Christianity, vol. 1 and vol. 2. Reading the latter volume, she learned that …

… at a time when Christians were condemning, expelling, and killing one another over doctrinal differences, a guy named Georg Calixtus had the crazy idea that perhaps one could hold to one’s convictions (his were Lutheran) without condemning as heretics those with whom one disagrees. He argued that there was a difference, after all, between heresy and error. This made far too much sense, and Calixtus was largely written off by his contemporaries. But he sounded cool to me so I gave him hipster glasses and a hat:

(Yes, alas, this sometime Proverbs 31 aspirant normally clothed herself in hipster garb. But she wore it lightly.)

Since few of us are professional scholars, it was valuable to have someone publicly exemplifying what she did, which was to approach serious questions with candor and humility, as a confirmed amateur, untainted by the presumptions of the guilds …

… which she skewered, graciously, in another blog entry, “Why a Seminary Degree Doesn’t Have to Make You a Jerk.”

She wasn’t afraid to take authoritarians to task. She was a skillful gadfly, judiciously choosing her targets, as we can see from her entry “The Bible Was ‘Clear’ …”

Playing the gadfly brought her enemies, maybe especially from among the Southern Baptists. Here is what one of them says. Without spelling it out, he insinuates that RHE has been sent to hell.

I’m not nearly so pessimistic. Whether her race was well run is for God to decide; but, having read much of her blogging, I have reason to hope that the best for her is still to come.

I’m terribly sad, though, for the husband and two young children she leaves behind.

(Photo by Dan Evans)

Update: Here are three of the better tributes to RHE, all on one page. (Hat tip to David Swartz.)

Update: Here’s a merciful conservative Christian reaction to RHE’s death. (Hat tip to my pastor.)

Update: One more article (this one from the Atlantic).

A visit to Bethel

The snow is gone, and with it – at last – the LimeBike that obstructed my sidewalk all winter long.

This is hardly the end of our trouble with LimeBikes. On the contrary.

Not long ago, Karin & I noted a LimeBike that had been abandoned halfway up a narrow outdoor staircase.

To view South Bend’s grim future with LimeBikes, look no further than to China.

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Yesterday, I visited the man who was my boss when I worked in the library at Bethel College. We had lunch together in the cafeteria. He insisted that I finish the Ph.D., and he asked me to regularly send him my dissertation drafts. It was most kind of him. I wonder if this will help me to finish the degree.

I greeted the other faculty that I saw in the cafeteria. Some were pleased that I was there; others weren’t. I can tell when they aren’t pleased because first they pretend not to notice me, and then they coldly ask, “What brings you to campus?”

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All last week, I was sick; and now I worry that Karin has caught the bug.

Optimisms

PART ONE: The Optimism of Fools

PART TWO: The Optimism of the Wise

Ecuador lost. But I’d like to point out:

(1) This is the best Uruguayan team in several decades.

(2) Until we Ecuadorians managed it, no other team had been able to score against the Uruguayans in Montevideo.

(3) Felipe Caicedo’s was a real golazo.

(4) Renato Ibarra, who assisted him on that golazo, was a terror all game long.

(5) Ibarra is a mere substitute. Our regular starter, Antonio Valencia, is an even greater terror (when healthy).

And (6) we’re still in the top half of the standings.

So: there’s no cause for alarm. I was quite happy when the whistle blew, because we were playing well.

On Tuesday we’ll be at home against the Venezuelans, whom we whipped soundly the first time around. I expect the Colombians to fail to win against Argentina, and so we’ll climb back up to into third place.

Please pray for Ecuador to win.

PART THREE: Trumpie, Again

My sincere hope is that Trumpie will turn out to be a good president. Regarding all the outrageous things he’s said, one writer at the Atlantic suggests: “Take Trump Seriously, Not Literally.” (This article, and the SNL video of Part One, I got from the Facebook wall of the same professor whom I criticized in my previous post. I don’t like everything about that professor, but at the same time I like quite a lot about him. One must take the bad along with the good.)

A BONUS

Mexico defeated the U.S.