Category Archives: Americana

“A date which will live in infamy.”

Americana, Psychological Musings, War

About fifteen years ago, when the Serbs were trying their best to be the alphadogs of the region, before we were worried about global jihad and the GWOT, the Serbs  justified attacking Kosovo because it was of major historical importance to them. Major historical importance because of the Battle of Kosovo in which Serbia got their ass kicked in 1389.

In the build up to the Clinton”11week air campaign that forced Yugoslavia to accept a Western peace plan for Kosovo” – to quote someone – we were pretty much anti-Serb and, among other things, their 1389 Battle of Kosovo fetish was used as as a reason they couldn’t be trusted. I remember reading a newspaper article – or maybe it was a magazine article – that said something like In The Balkans, the past is never dead, they still remember this loss like it was yesterday. The article was very critical of the Serbian personality that would remember a loss and not a win.

But we are all like that. Certainly we Americans are. We remember the Alamo, and remember Pearl Harbor. Here, in California we even have a special license plate for Pearl Harbor. We don’t have a special license plate for VJ Day or VE Day, or our smashing the Japanese at Iwo Jima or at Guadalcanal which may have been the roughest fight the US has ever been in.

I’m not going anywhere with this except that I find it interesting and I suspect it is pretty much a human trait.

 

 

Sunday night NFL

Americana

Michele and I watched Sunday night football last night – the first non-title NFL game I have seen in years, probably twenty years – and it was a shock. By way of background, I used to love football. I was a huge Raider fan with season tickets on about the twenty yard line and watched them – starting when John Rauch was their coach and continuing through the John Madden years – become a dominant team. The Raiders personified – for me – the American dream of a group of outcasts coming together and being more than just the sum of their parts.

But that was a long time ago. Even before Superbowls were marked by Roman numeral. The first shock was how jingoistic football has become: it is now America’s game. The second shock is the irony of America’s game being the Hyundai Sunday night game with the Toyoda halftime show. Huh? America? Hyundai? Toyoda? I am not very comfortable with the hyper-nationalism that requires everybody to wear a flag pin, but, What the hell! I like Hyundai, I like Toyoda, and I love irony.

The game hasn’t changed much, sure there is more passing -as an aside, I once watched Kansas City beat the Raiders in a title game, when both their wide receivers were hurt, by passing only three times during the entire game, end aside – but the game still seems to be controlled at the line of scrimmage; everybody is bigger and faster and more skilled, but the cornerbacks are still covering the wide receivers and the linebackers are still getting burned if they commit to the run too early.

The coverage – TV coverage, not linebacker coverage – however is really different. The ability to isolated individual players and make everybody else disappear is great, seeing both the line of scrimmage and the first down line as lines on the field is very handy, and the video-photography is outstanding. And, the constant flow of huge amounts of information is much more helpful to somebody like me who doesn’t know any of the players.

However, the whole time I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a like a roman circus. A distraction to keep our minds off of Afghanistan, off of house foreclosures, off of the country slowly changing from the American Dream to a new jingoistic America keeping us in line by keeping us scared. I hope I am wrong but I don’t think so.

 

The gray lady is becoming a hot chick

Americana, Web/Tech

I don’t think it is a good idea to trust the New York Times as your only news source. (When I saw New York Times, I don’t mean the dead tree edition, but the living WWW edition.) In some areas it is wonderfully neutral, in some areas it is Liberal and other areas it is Conservative: Conservative in that it is for the status quo and against change. So, if you want accurate reporting on Occupy Wall Street, don’t go to the New York Times, but if you want to read about stuff that is not controversial, that is not threatening to the status quo,  the NYT is your go to place.

It does a great job – and I mean this in the best possible way – on reporting on the latest trends in cat shows, or on new women comedians breaking taboos. It is the place to go to see photos of cricket in Johannesburg, or read a blog on almost anything. And it is doing an even better job almost every day. When I go to an article on smart phone cameras, for example, a little goodie pops up in the lower right corner of my computer that says More in Personal Tech (2 of 14 articles) App Smart: For Thanksgiving….In the article on women comedians, the article references Phoebe Robinson, a petite comedian from Cleveland, and the link takes us to a bit by her on You Tube site.

Going to the site, I get the feeling that I could spend a week there and not see it all: start but not have time to finish eight page article on sex education at the private Friends’ Central School in Philadelphia, read book reviews not covered almost anywhere else, see a video on Libya ’s oil industry. The site is alive and getting better almost every day – with lots of color pictures of course. Just don’t expect an balanced look at Occupy Wall Street.