Heights Selected Columns

Some articles from my Opinions Column for Boston College's The Heights Newspaper

Discovery and Journalism (2014)

The human side of the Malaysia Flight 370 story is important, matters. It matters that 239 human beings are presently unaccounted for, and it is important to their families that they are discovered, whether that discovery entails them coming home or provides some sort of closure. Being entirely unaccounted for is sort of like the purgatory of living; the powers that be owe it to these people to have their ontological statuses determined, if they have the means. But from all this has outpoured a steady stream of information that has nothing to do with the legitimate human story here, and the non-human parts of the story that were initially legitimate – the plane’s location, the timeline of its demise – have been warped into the worst type of sensationalism. As is true of all yellow journalism, the stories address and present the easy, thoughtless aspects of the story exclusively to sustain the story. Just as it is easy to talk about the weather, it is easy, and ultimately ego-feeding, to go to a CNN article, find out that the search area has widened by a thousand miles, and then have that comment in your back pocket for the rest of the day so that when the flight comes up you can “continue the conversation”. I say worst type of sensationalism because it has dominated the human elements so resoundingly (this is not a joke: type in “people in Malaysian flight” on google and the headline ‘from ghostly to psychic, theories abound on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’ pops up), first, and because it has laid itself in bed predatorily with the very honorable American notion of discovery.

I mean that in two senses. First, it has made itself a part of the process of discovery by reporting on every development, every new “theory”, every new twist. These reports are delivered according to the same mental process that occurs in individual human discovery. There are hypothesis, tests, failures, theories that are wild and unconsidered, and promptly poo-poo’d – the problem is that these failures and crap-of-the-mouth theories are presented by so-called “authorities”, and because they are their product, they do not present their lesser theories as lesser. Like a human would. Would CNN ever admit that their article titled “EVERY FLIGHT 370 THEORY HAS A HOLE” is completely inane? Not up to the standard its “authority” as a news source suggests? Imagine if a person truly believed their every thought was relevant and a legitimate “discovery?” They’d be considered psychotic. Now, of course, the argument that news sources are far different from brains and to call them psychotic, well, it’s not like they have a conscious is valid, except news sources are delivering their information in a manner that is consciousness-esque, that is, in a manner that is fraught with inanities, little discoveries, and is constant. Their process isn’t overtly American, but it relates in that it sort of feels like some psychotic minstrel troupe is trespassing on our brains, and most Americans don’t treat their brains like their lawns. Overpopulation in the brain, too, is unresolved.

But the really American thing at stake here is our view of discovery in all its edifying, destructive, contradictory glory. Like it or not, aspiration for discovery is, along with city-upon-the-hill et al, one of the supporting pillars of the country. America has always been populated by people looking to discover new riches. Lewis and Clark are national heroes. We were the first nation to get to the moon, and we are damned proud of it. We thrill at being first. We are a country of pioneers. That spirit can be harnessed for bad or good, of course. In the 60’s, the race to the moon inspired nationalistic pride when, in the face of the cold war, Vietnam, drafts, Kennedy’s assassination, great and really warranted cynicism, the nation needed it. Discoveries in particle physics and energy (and the scientists who made them), however, were harnessed to create atomic bombs, which were perpetrators of the cynicism we needed the moon landing to assuage. So discovery drives the boat, or perhaps is the boat. Objectively, setting aside morality and ethics for a moment, the efforts at discovery and often the discoveries are profound American moments.

The grossest perversion of that honorable searching is this type of sensationalist coverage on CNN (yeah, this is mostly about CNN). CNN would have you believe that they are presenting “the experience” via their constant coverage, that this brings you closest to actually being the discoverer yourself, and they would have you believe this because as an American, you believe deep down that that’s kind of what you’re about; and CNN wants your clicks. But it cannot ever be your discovery. You, the reader, are not actually discovering anything by definition. Reporters report their discoveries: you are reading something someone else discovered inevitably. It gets pernicious when you realize CNN would prefer that you do not acknowledge that separation, that the CNN news-consciousness becomes just your consciousness, because once it’s there, it has you. You are discovering not with your eyes, but with theirs. Their eyes see thoughtless conspiracy theories – “EVERY FLIGHT 370 THEORY HAS A HOLE” – strictly speculative nonsense, as fascinating insight, as a “human story” to rest your eyes on.

And this has nothing to do with truth. A journal for which truth is secondary to anything else has no credibility whatsoever as a news source. Sadly, newspapers, CNN in particular, have exposed themselves as National-Enquirer-esque eye-catchers, and shamelessly so. And they’ve made discovery their bed mate to do so; they’re standing on its honorable shoulders looking not westward or skyward or inward but at click totals. Any my god, they ignored that the Big Bang was proven in the past weeks to be almost certainly (and that’s damn good) the model for the creation of our Universe. That is an American discovery to think hard about and be proud of. But CNN doesn’t want us thinking hard; it wants us looking at CNN.

Miranda Rights and the Boston Marathon Bombing (2013)

The Marathon Bombing and the shocking events of last Friday have instigated a massive outpouring of astute commentary on social media’s position throughout the ordeals, eloquent exhortations for solidarity and pride, genuine promises to rebound stronger than ever, support for those who have been injured etc., etc. etc., – the list, as those who have been following this business know well, goes on. Indeed, it seems as if some underground vein of goodwill was discovered this weekend and has been, ever since, open for public mining. There truly are many inspiring stories in circulation, and hallelujah for that – we could all use some more community benevolence in our lives. The outpouring is well-deserved and appropriate, but I still can’t help but feel that the bonhomie is glossing over darker, certainly more serious, and potentially more important parts of this whole matter.  

Why, for example, aren’t we talking about the Justice Department’s decision to delay Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Miranda rights reading (this next paragraph will be difficult if you don’t have some history, so please excuse this hideously long, grammatically dubious parenthetical: in Miranda v. Arizona the Supreme Court ruled that statements made by a defendant are absolutely only admissible in court if it can be proved the defendant knew his/her right to an attorney etc.; in New York v. Quarles, the SC ruled Miranda rights actually can be yielded in situations where public safety takes precedence over literal interpretation – in other words, crucial information concerning public safety given by a suspect during the public safety crisis before a Miranda warning is admissible in court)? The public safety exception in Miranda (see?) states that Miranda recitation can only be suspended during a public safety crisis. It initially seems, then, like what the Justice Department did was not wrong – clearly, the Tsarnaev situation was a public safety crisis – and it seems correct to say that any information he might have given while being pulled from that boat (location of other IED’s, accomplices, weapons) was crucially important to maintaining public safety, and should be admissible in court. The issue is, when Dzhokhar was arrested, the police declared the public safety threat over, and only after this declaration did the Justice Department decide to suspend his Miranda rights. The public safety exception was invoked after the public safety threat was over, which is not how the exception was described in NY v. Quarles. Therefore, his Miranda rights were improperly given, and there is a real chance that a federal court will rule none of Dzhokhar’s statements, even those made after he was read his rights, admissible in court.  

Which is frightening, yes, but not nearly as frightening as the power this could potentially give the Justice Department to determine what is a public safety crisis and what isn’t, or who is specifically a public safety threat, and who is not. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or a radical, but if courts rule Dzhokhar’s statements are admissible, it would be as if the courts were saying, “even after a public safety crisis is determined over, police may restrict rights in an effort to assuage the public safety crisis”. If that is true, and it is okay for the Justice Department to restrict rights before or after a “public safety crisis” then what’s the difference between a public safety crisis, and not a public safety crisis? The police determine whether a situation is a “public safety crisis”, it is not self-evident: so when can the police not restrict my rights? Would it not grant police the right to restrict rights indefinitely? Or is there some sort of echo of crisis, which, while it can be heard (by whom?), justifies rights restriction?

There is another faction of politicians, led by Senator Lindsey Graham, who are demanding that Dzhokhar be tried as an enemy combatant. This would mean a military court would hear his case, and not U.S. civilian court. As far as I understand it, Miranda strictly pertains only to the latter court, and thus, this seems a way around the above-stated predicament.  The issue, however, is U.S. citizens cannot be tried in military court, and enemy combatants may only be caught on a foreign battlefield. In the last few days, the White House has said specifically he is not an enemy combatant, and will be tried in civilian court.

The fact that some politicians were so quick to label him, implicitly or not, a foreigner, is, to me, extremely disconcerting. We cannot forget that this was done by a nineteen year-old who lives in the United States and is a first-hand witness to our conventions and lifestyles. Dzhokhar is, without question, a U.S. citizen. Whatever hatred or vehement discontent he might have felt, it was in some way colored by our country, those conventions, and our lifestyle. Let’s not pretend that the American system is perfect and make the same mistake our Senators made in thinking that if it was violent and senseless, it must have come from somewhere else. The United States is more than capable of breeding destructive behaviors.

This takes us to my last uncomfortable question about this whole business, which is, the levying of “terrorist” on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I cannot help but think that this, too, is a way of distancing America from the attacks. It makes the Tsarnaev brothers primarily fundamental islamists born in some region near the Middle-East, and only incidentally, Americans. Which in turn allows us to move comfortably into our whole set of post-9/11 assumptions about Islamic fundamentalist men from the Middle-East. It allows us to never think twice about why we consider them terrorists, but not James Holmes or Adam Lanza. We assumed Holmes and Lanza were “insane”, or “bullied”, and we never went to their religious institutions asking for their forgiveness, or talked about the people who might have “radicalized” them. Yes, Tamerlan posted YouTube videos about Al Qaeda, but this is a new development. People were calling the Tsarnaev brothers terrorists on Friday without any substantial evidence of it. And who is to say the brothers were not “insane”, or “bullied”? Where are the psychologists? Where I wish were standards, I only see hubris.

The Classics Major (2014)

The classics major, one of the last, is staring into the black depths of UIS. People say its ancient, UIS, but he knows that word. The word itself, the construction of it, he knows too. Latin roots are more than just SAT tips in his eyes: they’re how he sees the world. Anyway, he loves that so much of English is the great-great-great-etc.-grandchild of Latin, Greek. How many times were these words spoken, in how many different lips belonging to what unfathomable assortment of people? Ante. How did ancient spring forth Athena-like from that? Every word is its own little story, an epic one, he believes, and he sees it as just about divinely fitting that the records of their best usage are epic themselves, such profound and human tales. Odysseus and the triumph of human spirit! Achilles and the sacking of Troy! Aeneas and the founding of Rome! Grand histories, panegyrics, encomia! Sometimes he looks at the world speeding by him at megabytes/second and asks: where has that vitality gone? The ancient is more present than the present. Yet, what is presently going on is the classics major is staring into the black depths of UIS about to type “7”, hit enter, and sign up for macroeconomics, then search four more times, twice for econ courses, twice for accounting courses, and, finding them, hit enter four more times. Because despite all that he had just been thinking about, the beauty of language, the profundity of eternal spirit, the joy of knowledge, he has been consumed recently with the notion that he, classics major, isn’t exactly employee material.

What he means is this: what good is a classics major? What is the practical value of knowing Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in the original? Plutarch’s Lives? What good is “in the original” when translations are readily available? The world around him tells him one thing. It says: the world is in translation, man, welcome to the world-wide culture; the power of connection, man; translation in action, man. Which he sees the merit of, in a sense, he really does. After all, that’s how he first got interested in classics. But translation for the sake of translation is what he used to do, when he was in High School just trying to figure out what the hell was going on. No question he translates like that now, but it’s just the first step, and he feels, with every new text he reads, like that first step is disappearing, he doesn’t need it anymore, the words themselves come to him as they are. The world of the text opens up, then. There’s a connection. Sensations: it’s almost physical. It’s that moment of almost-telekinetic communication he burns for. But when he thinks about this he sighs. Telecommunication is so different. It’s just different. What about the original?

Let’s go back to where he is: he’s sitting there, and he’s about to type “7”, hit enter, etc., etc. He’s just been thinking about language, and now his mind turns to something else. If indeed he commits to his new two majors, what is he committing to? What for? It isn’t the thought of econ or accounting in themselves that make his stomach turn a little. The Latin vomitorium flashes. He has friends who genuinely care about the subjects, find them intellectually stimulating, and treat them seriously. He has no problem with that, and god, if only everyone felt that way about what they do. And sure, they’re practical, but practical in itself isn’t bad either. Somebody has to do things to run this place. It’s just that the term practical-value skeezes him out. It makes things black and white, or, it makes any value a function of practical. He dislikes that he sees it like this, but he does: if practical, then valuable, if not, then invaluable. Which doesn’t seem fair because what the hell does practical mean anyway? Never mind that the word poetry (what he feels he’s intimately taking part in in so many ways) means “a making” in ancient Greek. He gets the feeling practical doesn’t mean what practical means. He gets the feeling practical is just some concept someone with leverage uses to rope young innocent people into doing something for them on the cheap. So, he thinks, getting taken advantage is valuable? It doesn’t make sense. But what choice does he have?

He has five choices, he realizes. Five choices available to him right now. UIS stares. He plays the game he’s played so many times before. What if he didn’t switch from classics? He goes to the portal and checks his GPA, remembers it is rock solid. Which, why? He wonders. It’s not like the material is easy. By Jupiter, it is not. He thinks of times he spent up late studying, and how, amid The Clouds, or Horace’s Odes, his mind becomes some sort of whirring thinking-feeling machine but better – a mind, in other words – and how the library walls seem to drip away and he’s just lost, but lost as in Waldeinsamkeit or Wordsworth, not lost as in searching for a needle in a haystack in which no needle was certainly put. What a pleasure that is, he thinks. He thinks about how important that is to him. How valuable that is.  

He returns to an earlier question. What for? Because someone told him this is the way, he realizes, someone who might actually believe it’s the way, someone whose way this actually is, but for damn sure didn’t know what he, the classics major, was about. And what is he about? What are his values? What matters to him?

Isn’t this the time to find out, he thinks. Bravely he makes his choice.

Mixed Discourse (2014)

Discourse is a favorite term of sociologists, literary critics, linguists, and is, unfortunately, typically deployed abstractly, alongside slews of jargon, and, of course, (needlessly) highfalutin complexity. It’s discussed with a range of other, equally involuted concepts, many with Latinate or French names like semiotics and un énoncé (blame Michel Foucault, et. al). These too are about as opaque as a hunk of lead: often, not even Supermannish intellects can penetrate them. Which is all too bad because discourse is pragmatic and important.

Discourse, and this is my Clark Kentish definition, is the set of and interplay between words and tones in specific contexts. Even that’s damnably abstract, so I’ll give an example. Let’s say I drop something in a grocery store, a glass jar of jelly, and an employee swiftly arrives to help clean. When he/she is finished, I will say, if I’m not totally rude (most people aren’t), “Thank you,” and I might even include a “ma’am”, or a “sir”. If I don’t, my tone, my inflection will most like say sir or ma’am for me (everyone knows their polite, formal “thank you” tone), and I’ll use that tone because I want to convey my genuine thanks to this unfamiliar person. Now let’s say I drop a jar of jelly in my house, where I live with five of my best friends. After five minutes of being completely bashed for klutziness, one of them will help me clean up the mess. When we’re done cleaning, I’ll say, “thanks”, sort of flatly, as a matter of course and habit, if I even say it at all, and maybe “dude” after that if it’s an exceptionally annoying clean up. There’s a reason for the difference that has nothing to do with me being less thankful for my roommate’s help. My roommate and I are very familiar, we’re in the privacy of our home, and we live in in such close proximity, if we were to treat each other like grocers all the time, we’d never stop saying “thank you” in that polite, formal way. That’s exhausting because it’s not indicative of our closeness; the diction is incongruous with our friendship. Conveyance of thanks is somewhat implicit at this point in our relationship. We both know the silence is not a reflection of my antipathy. These are discourses. The former is the formal conversation between an unfamiliar serviced and servicer, the latter is the informal conversation between a familiar serviced and servicer.

Discourses provide texture to fundamental social structures for better or for worse. Discourses between college students that assume mutual appreciation of learning and bodily/emotional respect, are infused with patience, bonhomie, and open-mindedness, and are transmitted with phrases suggesting empathetic dialogue like, “I appreciate your opinion, but here’s mine,” or, “I get where you’re coming from, but here’s what I think,” are pretty obviously good. Discourses between college students that assume mutual rampant hedonism, hubris, xenophobia, general ignorance, and are transmitted with phrases like, “that’s gay,” or, “you’re weird,” are pretty obviously bad. In these above examples I’m nodding specifically to peer-to-peer, conversational discourse, the kind of communication that occurs on dorm couches, walks to class, in the Rat, because this is the most unconscious, corruptible, and for us, ubiquitous type of discourse.

Discourses can be good and appropriate in one context but when deployed in another, bad. For a relatively innocuous example, if I’d responded to the grocer helping me clean up the jelly with a, “thanks, dude,” I would deservedly be called rude or an asocial hippie. Discourses are dangerous when we fail to recognize they are being used in the wrong context, and especially sinister when there are no obvious repercussions for their use.

I feel obliged to acknowledge that I know I’ve simplified morals and ethics to simple, binary bad/good. There is a whole other discussion on racist, bigoted discourses in which moral and ethical consequences cannot be so simplified, but that’s not mine for now. My discussion for now is a good discourse bleeding out of its context and interfering with another discourse negatively. That discourse bleeding out of its context is digital, internet communication, and the other discourse is the aforementioned physical, peer-to-peer conversational discourse.

Internet communication is not inherently bad at all, in fact, it’s good within its context. The internet, by design, engenders speedy and voluminous communication. That’s its modus operandi, and we love it for that, it is useful for that. But that speed and volume, the structure as a whole, is lent to abbreviation and coded language (composed of it too as computer science majors know). Type in www.bc.edu on your browser, and you’re taking part. Whether it’s because the first users of the internet were the computer people using this abbreviation, or because typing out full sentences is more tiring than speaking full sentences, or because the speediness of the internet nudges communicators toward speed, I’m not sure, but abbreviation and coded language dominates internet discourse. It goes beyond “lol”, “np“, or “ttyl”. Thoughts get abbreviated. Self-editing is the rule. Twitter celebrates abbreviation and coding with hashtags and a character count. To convey meaning properly in this discourse, interlocutors are obligated to use the codes. When this form of discourse is massively popular, as Twitter is now, as AIM was a decade ago, everyone can use the codes and know instantly which meanings are conveyed. Meanings are tailored to translate well to a wide audience.

The issue is that because we use this discourse so often, use it as primary means to communicate with others, we use it in all conversing discourses, and most dangerously in peer-to-peer physical discourse, where these codes are meaningless. Conveying in this context is all about elucidation and elaboration, but increasingly, we’re content with speaking in an internettish, coded, abbreviated sense, and it’s as inappropriate as saying “thanks, dude” to a grocer, or “thank you, sir” to your roommate. There is no obvious repercussion for it yet (no one takes blame in our society, it’s too private) but damage is being inflicted. Conversation, clarity, intimacy are eroding.

Milton Ennial is Cold (2014)

Milton Ennial, lovingly dubbed Mill early in his college years, has just woken up, snoozed, and now is waiting for the snooze sound he loathes to blare once more, or for restless, ineffectual sleep to crawl over him, whichever comes first. But the latter never arrives because Mill Ennial, objectively cozy in his cocoon of a bed, a bed replete with high thread-count sheets and 100% cotton blankets, is thinking about the coming day. He is nervous for it, in fact. He is worried. It is guaranteed to be difficult, and, he supposes, “literally the worst day ever.” He feels a certain clenching in his stomach when he thinks about all he must do, a radiating discomfort that reinforces the small intellectual discomforts he experiences just trying to make sense of it all, this world that taketh and giveth so arbitrarily. And to make matters worse, Mill Ennial is cold.

Not just any type of cold, a grating, merciless, feel-it-in-your-bones cold. The type of cold that sneaks under your North Face and wraps around your skin like the J. Crew thermal you’re wearing is supposed to. It is the cold of a force far beyond the realm in which objectively cozy 100% cotton blankets can warm things. His phone tells him it is thirty-two degrees outside, but Mill Ennial is sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that his weather app is faulty and that weather people are god damn idiots with incredibly simple brains. They are wrong. He is thinking this as is heart struggles to pump warm blood to his frozen nether regions, nether regions which must be warmed before he can even attempt to roll out of his bed. A Mill Ennial with frozen nether regions is no Mill Ennial at all.

Two snoozes go by. Mill determines his nether regions are approaching anything but warmth and blames totally this frigidity on the cheapness of the objectively cozy 100% cotton blanket. He needs a new one, he further determines, “one that doesn’t fucking suck.” Suddenly impassioned, Mill throws his covers off, revealing his sweatpanted and sweatshirtedness, throws open his room door, and heads to the common where his $2000 15-inch Macbook pro lies on a table, upon which also lies tipped over beer cans, a veritable swarm of crumbs, and an abundance of brown tray things. He flings the screen open, still disgusted, and types in his operating system’s password. He gets a spinning wheel. Frustration mounting, Mill smacks the screen with the back of his palm. The screen goes black. “Fuck me,” Mill exclaims. He slams the laptop shut. To calm himself, and to warm his nether regions, which are practically made of ice at this point, he takes a forty-five minute scalding hot shower.

With nethers properly scalded, Mill Ennial feels a little better. The radiating discomfort, however, remains. He checks his phone and notices it is 11:30. He is thirty minutes late to his class, but feels “whatever” about it because it’s Thursday, which means cheap beer at the local dive in a hot minute. Not to mention that his tweet about Obama is absolutely goddamn murdering it. Even Melanie L. re-tweeted it, and Melanie L. has good taste in retweets, as made clear by her Amanda Bynes retweets, which, in Mill Ennial’s honest opinion are, “honestly crazy, like Amanda Bynes is crazy but fucking funny.” By the time Mill Ennial leaves his room at 12:15, after prowling his Facebook for pics of hot girls while watching SportsCenter, he even feels pretty chill.

No more than five goddamn feet out the door, Mill receives a call from his mother, Bebe Oumer (her maiden name). After some really annoyingly caring questions about his general emotional status, and some stupid thing about how she’s always so glad just to hear his voice, she asks him if he’d made any progress on the job front. As if struck and killed by a flying spear like one of those orc things in “300” was struck and killed except not literally like that but like that, like, figuratively, I guess, Mill Ennial’s heart goes dead cold. All that difficulty he had woke up thinking about comes back to him in a gust of inner chilliness. He sees as if literally before him a pile of work, like a big goddamn pile of cover letters, resumes, stupid texts you can’t even read because it’s not even English, and he thinks about the ond o’clock Philosophy core class that basically-another-language text had been assigned in, and then he thinks harder about how hard it’s going to be to not fall asleep in that class it’s so boring, a thought which crescendos into thoughts about the difficulty of writing cover letters, resumes, the absolutely terrible job market, and the utter impossibility of making a shitton of money at all in this unforgiving world that giveth and taketh so arbitrarily, the sheer injustice that you can’t just live a good life anymore, and how fucking cold it is.   

“No,” he tells his mom, “I didn’t,” and then gets her off the phone as quickly as possible because she’s annoying.

Literally crushed with job-market despair and cold fury, he returns home fuming. He flings open his computer once more. This time, he doesn’t get the spinny thing. He goes to Amazon.com and types in “warm blanket”, and with his mother’s credit card, buys the top search result.  

And on Sunday There Was Football (2013)

There is the National Football League, and then there is everything else. There is no one David to its goliath (has the allusion ever been more apt?), but several outmuscled, puny, atrophied associations and leagues and TV programs. And they’re all getting smashed in the mouth, put on their asses, and sent back to the locker room for a blow and some IV.

Let’s take a look at some all-important Nielsen ratings for the three major sports in America (sorry Hockey). The NBA Finals, site of the most intense, competitive, skillful basketball in the world – the best of the best – for the last ten years has had an average rating of about nine. The World Series has perhaps done slightly better on average, although it has seriously tailed off in the last year or so. In any case, it hovers around a nine as well. The Super Bowl has averaged a rating of 45. 166.8 million people watched a part or all of last year’s Super Bowl, a little over half of the entire country. 113 million people on average were watching it at a given time, making it the third most-watched television event of all time behind only two other Super Bowls. Rounding out the top ten most-watched television events of all time is the finale of M*A*S*H followed by six other Super Bowls. Here are the top five most-watched televised shows (by viewership) in the last week. NFL Football, NFL football, NFL Pre-kick, Football Night in America, and Under the Dome with 25.4, 25.13, 18.03, 14.09, and 11.15 million viewers respectively.

Americans love NFL football.

Here are some other stats. According to footballoutsiders.com, there have been over 7,500 injuries, minor or major, in the last two years alone, and 1,496 major injuries (lasting eight weeks or longer) in 2012. There were 170 concussions last year and a grand total of 531 in the two years prior. From CNN: the NFL recently pledged 765 million dollars “to fund medical exams, concussion-related compensation, medical research for retired NFL players and their families, and litigation expenses” as a settlement in a class action law suit against the NFL involving more than 4,500 retirees. The brain damage caused by repeated concussions often leads to a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, and was a focal point of the settlement. Symptoms of CTE are difficult to trace (they’re thought to include mood swings, general depressive symptoms), but the disease invariably moves in one direction. Autopsies often show a brain unpredictably swelled and shrunken and generally, worn and pulped like an old punching bag.

NFL football is intensely violent.

An NFL defense has a defensive “line” (short for “frontline”), a set of linebackers, and secondary whose roles, respectively, are to win territory, stop threats to territory that have broken past the frontline, and stop aerial territorial threats/act as a final defense of ground threats. An offense has an offensive line, rugged territory gainers/maintainers, receivers, aerial threats, tailbacks, ground threats, and a quarterback, often called a “field general”. There are “formations” designed to maximize a side’s ability to pierce through a line, and tiers of attacks in case the first or second line fails. A coach’s locker room whiteboard consists of tactical, swooping arrows directing x’s and o’s to charge, feint-then-charge, switch emphasis of attack, run decoy attacks, scramble defenses with misdirection, overwhelm weak opponents. It’s a game in which players “dig into the trenches” along a line of “scrimmage”, playing through injury is cultural, there is “training camp”, deep “bombs” are thrown, “blitzes” rush from blindsides and flanks, and people get “blown up” by hard tackles. It is a bitter, furious struggle for yards (“fight for every yard”, it’s said).

NFL football is a lot like war.

There is a precedent for violent, warlike games wildly adored by the public. Even in structure: Gladiatorial schools had spending limits, roster restrictions. Venues were often littered with gaudy advertisements from wealthy corporations, and huge sums of money were exchanged to host the best games. They were spectacles in every sense of the word.  The romans, with regard to the “game” itself, were a bit more literal in their interpretation of “warlike”. Amphitheaters held Punic War mock-ups. The Coliseum legendarily could be filled with water for famous naval battle re-enactments. Once barbarians began invading Rome, stadiums featured captured barbarians in simulations of the current battles. Hundreds of thousands died gory deaths in front of millions of thirsting spectators.

In my estimation, we arrive at NFL football from here. First of all, Christianity became a seriously big deal, and as it turns out, Christianity is incompatible with more than a few aspects of the games, namely with the gross amounts of money spent on what was conceived as hedonistic. Interestingly, it wasn’t until about 300 that Tertullian, an important early Christian writer/thinker, identified games-deaths as murder and an affront to Christian morality. Plus Rome was broke and really needed money. Then, for a thousand years or so, any sort of violence is performed in the name of a religion that allegedly abhors violence, therefore stigmatizing violence in a strange, teenage angsty way. The general confusion outpouring from this position was cleared up eventually, but a thousand years later and only when warfare was no longer all that exciting to watch. Lining up a few rows of people and watching them shoot muskets at each other and mostly miss just doesn’t have the same verve as watching a centurion getting stabbed in the kidney with a gladius, I suppose. But anyway, warfare, though still essentially a matter of territory and death, becomes abstracted with technologies like airplanes and bombs, strategies like trench-fighting and blanket-bombing.

NFL football is, like Gladiator fights were, a short step of abstraction away from the current ways of warfare. Shock and awe and the rise of the Quarterback. Drone strikes and Peyton Manning. Overseas battles and a TV screen.

Inspiration in a Slogan (2013)

I was inspired by a car commercial this summer. As most do, this car commercial spends the first twenty of its thirty seconds setting up a punchy phrase carefully crafted at a boardroom table, focus-grouped ad infinitum, sent to marketing, who wants a voice star, gets a star, which star then speaks softly into a silver mike in a recording space tucked into a golden LA hillside; it sets up a phrase shaped and re-shaped by all involved departments until it becomes a statement representative of an ideology the car company represents and inextricably linked to the car company’s identity per consumers. Kia works hard to come up with “Impossible to Ignore”, its statement for the Cadenza, a new luxury vehicle. What’s true of and really odd about this statement and most other company’s comparable statements is that it’s simplistic and entirely forgettable. Until you’re in front of the TV watching the commercial again, they’re difficult to recall. You can think of the car, maybe even the shots in the commercial itself, but not the words. It’s like the statement diffuses into viewers’ heads and bypasses the consciousness facilitated by its simple language and structure. It just seeps into our skulls and is wrung out only when a product name recurs in life. This is obviously intentional. It’s also, quite clearly, a very effective marketing tactic.

But this commercial didn’t do that. The set-up cinematography was largely the same (it was a luxury vehicle): night time shot of car burning rubber down a highway backgrounded in the distance by what could be any big US city lit to impress, low bumper shot of car burning through a harshly lit tunnel, slow-mo streak shots through swanky interior and dash not forgetting to include beautiful model in each pass while car ostensibly speeds down highway, etc. Someone was speaking. Male, voice finished smooth. He intoned Car and Driver accolades, vehicle specifications, and suggestive description. The statement pause arrived on cue, sign of a commercial well-built, and then I heard the satin voice say in statement voice, “Control is the essence of power”.

Which is simple, but not as simple as “Built Ford Tough”, and is not a sparkler, but not as spark-less as “Impossible to Ignore”. For some reason it resisted seepage, and found a lasting home in my conscious thought. Much to the detriment of the car company, I’ll add; I have absolutely no idea which created the commercial and somehow couldn’t find it on YouTube. Any and all sensory associations I’ve formed I outlined above. I also don’t really know how to assess the work of the mysterious car company. Is the fact that I know it came from a car commercial enough? I think not. For some reason, I only vaguely recall Mercedes when I hear “Control is the essence of power”, but if it were from an Infiniti commercial, I wouldn’t be shocked; it could easily be. I doubt Infiniti’s intentions were to send me flashing wallet to a Mercedes dealership. In any case, I hardly thought about buying anything afterward. I actually stopped and thought about the phrase in itself, independent of the car. You might say they lost me then: I thought so much about it, I decided to build an opinions piece around it. It failed, I guess, because their statement was actually pretty smart.

So I’m an English major, a Creative Writing concentrator at that, and I understand there’s a good chance I’ve overstated everything thus far. Well, so it is.

“Control is the essence of power” is basically a perfectly distilled version of everything I’ve learned about writing.  I’ll explain. What we crazy creative types desperately want is to evoke something from those who experience what we create, from you. We work towards the “ability to act or affect something strongly”, which is the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “power”. We work to gain powers, of a sort; to move you in some way of our design. And look: the OED’s definition of “control” is “the fact of controlling (my opinion: stupid definition), or of checking and directing action”. Because words are a writer’s vehicle of evocation, of “directing action”, a writer learns that each one matters tremendously, and so monitors their direction with extreme precaution. It requires knowing each one’s definition, common and uncommon usages, their connotations, and also, crucially, though it’s not a very rigorous concept, how they feel (which oddly has a lot to do with sound, at least for me). Then all those things apply again to the sentence, then to the paragraph, and so on and forth. It requires laser-like focus one hundred percent of the time. And you have to care a lot. You have to want to put in the effort.

But that’s just writing that’s just what I know. I’m convinced it’s applicable to anything. We go to Boston College because we want a lot from this world. When it’s all said and done, we want to be able to say we made something happen out there. We want powers. I think it’s safe to say that’s true of everyone here. I also say we can all do it. Control is the way.