SPidge Tales

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Current State of Journalism

Today, I was reading the First Things daily blog, and Fr. Neuhaus was discussing his interactions with reporters, something that he, as a regulor commentator on religous/political issues, does rather frequently. I was caught off guard by his initial remark disparing the education typical of many of the younger journalists we come across today.

As you might imagine, I spend a good deal of time talking with reporters. I usually don’t mind it. It comes with the territory. With notable exceptions, reporters are people of good will working hard to write a story that will please their editors. It is true that they are not always the sharpest knives in the drawer. These days most of them have gone to journalism school, or j-school, as it is called. In intellectual rankings at universities, journalism is just a notch above education, which is, unfortunately, at the bottom.

I am more than well aware of the joke that is what most Education degrees are. I'll be honest, when I meet someone with an M.Ed. or M.A. in Education (and, this is not meant to put down teachers; I am one--though non-accredited and teaching at a private school with a Bachelors in a real field and a Masters forthcoming (hopefully; cross your fingers) in a real field--and most teachers I know are smart), I do not think of them as really having a Masters, such as someone with a Masters in Political Theory or History or Philosophy or Theology, etc.; i.e. "real" fields.

But, his remark about Journalism schools caught me by surprise. I am no expert, and I have done no research into it, but from my knowledge, Journalism is a strong academic field. It was for certain one of the strongest, if not the strongest at St. Michael's (I am not writing this from the "inside"; I was a Philosophy Major, and my political views were not anywhere near the Left that the journalism school at SMC is). Some of my closest friends at SMC were Journalism majors, and they got as much as, if not more, out of a Journalism degree than they would have as English Majors (and the SMC English department is strong, as well). I'm not even talking jobs, per se. Just a well rounded education. This is something I will have to look into, though. Maybe the SMC Journalism department is an abberation. A Pittsburgh Steeler fish in a sea of New Orleans Saint fish. Or, as Chris Rock would say, a Tom Hanks fish in a sea of Jude Law fish (but of course, only kidding so as not to offend Sean Penn).

To be fair to Neuhaus, his remark about the place of Journalism schools among academic departments was only periferal, more of a "let's jump into this topic with some scary background info before I hammer down my point" kind of thing. His main point was, I believe, quite insightful. He mentions an interview he did with a reporter from a national paper that he leaves unnamed. She asked Neuhaus, "Is this something new?" in reference to another instance of political corruption. "No," he replied. "It's been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden." She responded with (I kid you not) "what garden was that?"

Neuhaus then mentions an interview he did recently with a reporter on Pope Benedict's forthcoming encyclical, the first he will release as Pope (it actually came out today). Neuhaus referred to the Pope as the bishop of Rome. The reporter asked, "Is it unusual that this Pope is the bishop of Rome?"

It is possible that these two reporters represent an anomaly. It is always dangerous, as Neuhaus does here, to pick out a couple rotten apples to show that the apple tree is flawed. It would be nice to see at least a few more apples, or maybe even the tree roots, before making a judgment. But, I think this does highlight an awful cultural ignorance of religious symbols and stories. Even if one does not adhere to Christian beliefs, or Jewish beliefs, etc, it is still important to have a cultural knowledge of those ideas that shaped western civilization. There is a disconnect between people who consider themselves religous and the media, and I don't think the disconnect is mainly that the press does not agree with them, or is to the political left of them. It is that the press does not understand them, does not understand their worldview.

Obviously, there are exceptions. Christopher Hitchens is an atheist, and more than that antagonistic toward religion, yet at least he knows religous history and religious stories, and understands the religous worldview. Unfortunately, I do not believe most people are culturally educated. When Johnny Damon signed with the Yankees, and had to shave his hair and cut his beard, some joked that he may lose his strenght, like Samson. I have often repeated the joke (I love to repeat jokes :-)), but sadly am often met with a blank stare. And, it is not because they are ignorant of Johnny Damon and baseball.

To read Fr. Neuhaus' short four paragraph blog on this, go to www.firstthings.com and read the first item from January 25, 2006.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Me in a Video Game--Don't Laught, It Could Have Happened

EA Sports is coming out with a new video game, MVP 06 NCAA Baseball (click here for the official site: http://www.easports.com/mvp06/index.jsp). The game will have real college teams, with real players, minus, of course, their names, because of licensing rules. This got me thinking: If I were just three years younger, or this game came out three years ago when I was a senior at St. Michael's College and (not quite) star of the baseball team, I would be a video game character. I would be up in the Pantheon--it would go something like Super Mario, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sean Pidgeon. Well, maybe not, but it would still be pretty cool. I think I would look pretty damn good in Pixel. I could tell girls to play with me, and it wouldn't even be perverted :-).

Monday, January 16, 2006

What If I Had Made That Game-Winning Shot?

It was December 1997, I was in 11th grade, and it was basketball season. We were in the Niskayuna invitational tournament, and it was the third place game. I don't even remember who we were playing, other than that we took a big lead, and for the first 31 minutes and 57 seconds of the game, I had played about 2 minutes total. But, this was nothing new. My PT normally ranged from 1 to 10 minutes. I was about the 7th or 8th man. I don't remember why, but I was put in with 3 seconds left. We had blown the lead and were down by 1, with the ball under our own basket. The ball is passed in, I head for an open spot at the top of the key, about a foot inside the 3 point line, I get the pass. After I released the shot, the buzzer sounded. This was do or die. The ball swirled around the inside of the hoop, then popped out, swirled around again, before finally...popping out for good.

Last week, I visited a psychic. She looked sort of like Whoopi Goldberg's character from Ghost. And, no, she was not busy talking to Patrick Swayze's disembodied spirit. She got down with the task at hand. For my $20, she revealed to me how my life would have been different if I had made that game winning shot.

...The ball is passed in, I head for an open spot at the top of the key, about a foot inside the 3 point line, I get the pass. After I released the shot, the buzzer sounded. This was do or die. The ball swirled around the inside ofthe hoop, then popped out, swirled around again, before finally...falling through the hoop! We win! All the Rensselaer High people, my teammates, the cheerleaders, parents and friends in the stands, mob the court. A cute cheerleader even grabbed my ass.

The next day in school, I am the damn man. The girl I had a lil crush on who never gave me the time of day, meets me at my locker. "Hey Sean. We should go out sometime. Are you busy Friday night?" I get to work with the first team a little bit in practice. I don't start the next game, but I am first man off the bench. I score 15 points, helping us to beat Catskill. Next game, I am in the starting line up for good, and I average 13 points the rest of the way, as we win sectionals, before falling to Hammond in the regionals. I have my first girlfriend (remember, I am only 16 at the time), popularity, everything is going so well.

There are subtle changes, however. I may not have been "popular" before The Shot, but I did have a lot of friends, people liked being around me, I was the funny guy, and was nice to everybody. Now, I didn't have time for not so cool kids. I only associated with the top of the Caste system. I even dumped my girlfriend so I could play the field. Unlike in my real life story, I never do get picked for prom court, because, I may be popular, but in Rachel McAdam's in Mean Girls sort of way. But who needed to be nice, I was popular now, and cocky, to the point where I made sure to focus solely on sports and being a playa. I got that baseball scholarship to Stanford, went to the West Coast, and was drafted in the 1st round of the 2002 baseball draft, leaving early my junior year. I made it to the bigs in 2004, and will be heading to Spring Training for the start of my third season next month. People may think I am an ass back home in Rensselaer, but who gives a shit. I have money out the wazoo, a pimpin mansion, and girls in every city...

I thanked Miss Whoopie for her time. Wow, if I had made that shot, I would have lost all my friends in high school, I would have never have went to St. Michael's and met the awesome people I know there, never would have worked at Camp Guggenheim, went to grad school at Catholic U, and I wouldn't be working at St. Gregory's now. And to think, when I originally missed that shot, the only thing going through my mind was "big deal, instead of being the 3rd place team out of a 4 team holiday tournament, we are the 4th place team."

**In case you did not figure this out already, this story is fictional. Well, what happened in that basketball game is true. But, I never did visit some psychic to see how my life would have been different if I had made that shot. I think we all go through "what if's" in our minds now and then. And, that is fine. It is natural to wonder "what if." But the important thing is to recognize the gifts we actually do have in life. And, I would not change the experiences I have had or the friends I have made for the world.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Dear Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

That is quite the response* to my post Stem Cell Research--A Brave New World Indeed, and I wish that you would have left your name. I enjoy dialogue, debate, etc. I am not going to get into a discussion on abortion, per se. I know all the arguments on both sides, as I'm sure you do, and neither of us will change the others' mind. The argument I was making was not specifically Christian, or necessarily religious. One need not be Christian to oppose embryonic stem cell research, abortion, etc. There are rational arguments outside the realm of religion to be used. Likewise, one need not be secular to support stem cell research, abortion, etc.--there are religious arguments (though not Catholic) in favor of them.

Just look at the books I mentioned. C.S. Lewis, though a Christian apologist, does not use religion in his argument in Abolition of Man. He just points out that all cultures throughout history (until the "Enlightenment") believed that right and wrong are independent of what man believes--it is our responsibility to correspond ourselves to objective reality. Modernity has inverted this, and made man the measure of all things, wherein man gets to decide for himself what is right and wrong. When man thinks he is free to do as he pleases, he just ends up controlling other men. Take contraception; yes, we can control whether we get pregnant or not--but the children born after this age simply become, rather than gifts of God to be appreciated, slaves to to the whims and desires of their parents (i.e. they are only alive because their parents' wanted kids at that time).

As for your comment that God gives us free will to choose to live our lives the way we wish, this is true. However, there are right and wrong choices that we can make, and just because God allows it, it does not mean that he supports every choice we make. The point of the Garden of Eden myth is that when we use our freedom to disobey God, we end up making ourselves unhappy.Feel free to respond again. And, reveal yourself if you wish. I do not mind discussion of ideas :-)

*(Here was the response Anonymous gave to my previous post: Stem Cell Research--A Brave New World Indeed) While you are certainly correct in that we are launching ourselves into a new age of humanity- the prospects of our technology are getting more amazing and terrible by the day- you are naive to consider anything from solely the confines of religion. This is not a Christian state. No matter the religious opinions of the Commander in Chief or the most forgotten of beggars in D.C.- these are not considerations of politics. Religion is a subjective choice, not a means by which to create law. If you are a true Christian, you would understand that in giving us free will, God gave us the ability to choose our lives. Those who are pro-choice respect the same. They are not pro-abortion... who could be? It is an unfortunate and devastating occurence that no women would WANT to choose. But there are occasions, based upon the experiences of the individual alone, that result in this end. IT is neither favorable or desired. IT is just truth. And there is no one that has the right to take that choice, the agent of free will, from any other human being. IT is shortsighted to think otherwise. Your experiences are your own, and no one should tell you what to believe. Similar, no one should take away the ABILITY for you to believe and choose accordingly. Matters of God, matters of the heart, matters of the human body need to be left up to the human being his/herself.

Stem Cell Research--A Brave New World Indeed

Recently, it was discovered that the Korean doctor who claimed to have cloned embryos for purposes of stem cell research actually had not cloned any embryos yet. In a not unrelated story, Judge Samuel Alito, Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, went through three days of questioning this week before the Senate Judiciary committee. I am not a fan of Bush. I do not like the direction he has been taking the country, particularly regarding health care, social security, tax cuts, and what increasingly appears to be an un-winnable war. Yet, with issues such as embryonic stem cell research, and the albatross of Roe V. Wade weighing down state and national legislatures abilities to enact reasonable curbs on the unmitigated “reproductive rights (wrongs)” prevalent today, sometimes I am glad that it is Bush, and not Kerry, making judicial appointments. Mind you, I would rather have Kerry leading the country in just about every other area, but not here.

While I would still disagree, I could understand if all that the proponents of embryonic stem cell research were asking for was the right to create stem cell lines out of left over embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise just be thrown out. However, scientists know that, even if they used every single “spare” embryo (what happened to the days when spares dealt with bowling and tires), they would still need more for the purposes of working towards creating cures for diseases. This is why they advocate for, on top of the use of “leftovers”, the donation of eggs and sperm for the express purpose of creating embryos to use for research, and the right to begin “therapeutic” cloning to create embryos for research. What this will entail is creating life purposely to destroy it so that it can be used for other causes.

This would bring us into an entirely new era of humanity (if we could even call it “humanity” anymore). Humans have always justified killing other humans for various reasons. Other than absolute pacifists, all people have justified killing in some way or form since the beginning of civilization, whether it be self-defense, war, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, or sacrificing young women to the crop gods for a better harvest. We have all supported at least one or two of these, at the very least in certain instances (personally, I would justify killing in self defense and occassionally war). But, embryonic stem cell research brings us into a whole new world. Never before have people justified creating human life with the express intention of using the people created, killing the people created, for some other cause. We are perilously close to trying to play God. I want to see debilitating diseases such as paralysis and Alzheimer’s cured just as much as anyone, but we need to remember that the ends do not justify the means. This is an important time for us to read books such as C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Before we go forward with the newest “fad” cure, we need to ask, what will lose? In remembering the clichéd warning, “be careful what you wish for, you just may get it,” I fear that we will lose our humanity.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Former Crackhead DC Mayor is At It Again

Recently, Marion Barry, former crackhead mayor and current crackhead city councilman of Washington, DC, was robbed at gunpoint in his house. Barry is quite an impressive figure. He went to prison for smoking crack after serving three terms as mayor, and managed to get re-elected to a fourth term while out on parole. In a debt of gratitude, he bankrupt the city before the people wised up and elected a new mayor. Not one to leave the spotlight for good, Barry was elected city councilman in I think 2004, and if he had his way, the Expos never would have moved to DC.

Speaking to the press after the robbery, Barry seemed quite stunned that such a thing could happen to him. "There is a sort of unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their friend. I was a little hurt that this betrayal did happen."

I have no comments to add to this story. I think it speaks for itself. If you want to read the news article about it, click here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/AR2006010300279.html . For a pretty good commentary on it, click here: http://www.firstthings.com/ and read Joseph Bottom's second blog item from January 7, 2006.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Squids and Whales--movie review

“Who told you that you were naked?” God asked. “Did you eat the fruit that I told you not to eat?” The man answered, “The woman you put here with me gave me the fruit, and I ate it.” The Lord God asked the woman, “Why did you do this?” She replied, “The snake tricked me into eating it.” Genesis 3:11-13

“It’s not my fault—the cry we’ve made every day since Cain was born. Down somewhere in the heart, there’s always an awareness of just how wrong the world is, how fallen and broken and incomplete. This is the guilty knowledge, the failure of innocence, against which we snarl and fight: It’s just the way things are; it’s not my fault. What would genuine innocence look like, if it ever came into the world? I know the answer I am called to believe: like a child born in a cattle shed. But to understand why that is an answer, to see it clearly, we are also compelled to know our guilt for the world, to feel it all the way to the bottom.” Joseph Bottom, First Things Online Blog, December 20, 2005.

When things go wrong, when our world does not make sense, we tend to blame others, self-righteously denying the possibility that we are at fault, or we cower into a ball and soak in our own bile of self-pity. We witness the exacerbation of these reactions in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. This autobiographical fiction is the story of a broken family in 1986 Brooklyn. Jeff Daniels is Bernard Berkman, the self proclaimed heir to the writing style of Kafka, who in reality is a Brooklyn College literature professor who has not been able to get a novel published in some time. Laura Linney is his wife, Joan Berkman, with a burgeoning writing career of her own that has riled the jealousy of Bernard. Jesse Eisenberg plays their 16 year old son Walt, and Owen Cline plays 12 year old Frank.

Bernard and Joan announce to the boys that they are separating, and the boys will rotate every night living with mom or dad. Joan has had a series of affairs, leaving every possible hint for Bernard, save jumping in the sack with one of her beaus in front of him. There is no other way to describe Bernard than to call him what he is, a pretentious asshole. He blames the divroce entirely on Joan, failing to see his condescending nature as in anyway responsible for the situation. Walt gravitates toward his father, trying to emulate him and win his affection, placing the blame on his mother. Owen sees through his father, sympathizing with Joan, however is not without serious problems of his own.

Normally, we categorize characters as either too arrogant or full or self pity, or, to full of shit or drowning in their own shit. Despite the despicability of his character, we can still sympathize with Bernard because, in his own way, he manages to be both. His deconstructionist dismissal of, say, Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens”, or his categorization of Billy Baldwin’s tennis instructer character Ivan (I think every movie should have at least one Baldwin in it; and I also think that Alec Baldwin should be permanent SNL host—please taste my Svetty Balls--but that is another column altogether) as a “Philistine” uninterested in “cultured” books and movies is arrogant and condescending. Yet, we can also sense self pity in his recognition that he is not adequate enough to win his wife’s love. I think that is true of all of us, at times. We think of ourselves as superior to the men that the woman who rejects us goes for instead—the “why the hell is she with that schmuck?” line of thought. At the same time, we also wallow in sorrow at being not good enough, and reflect on our own flaws.

Walt, in trying to emulate his father, tragically succeeds. He dumps his first love for no reason other than a desire to "do better", whatever that means. He plays off Pink Floyd’s lyrics as his own in a fear of not being adequate. He even falls for the same women as his dad, Bernard’s student Lili, who has moved in with him.

The tragic figure in all of this, I think, is neither Bernard, Walt, nor Joan, but Frank. Divorced parents sharing parenting responsibilities in this movie appears sort of like what happens when parents decide to raise a child in both religions. He ends up with nothing. Lack of supervision plus witnessing his parents's problems leads Frank to seek refuge in alcohol and in finding new places (often in school) to experiment with himself sexually and leave the residue (yes, I am writing in euphemisms so that this does not get edited out of Amazon. I prefer direct language). In a way Frank’s actions are tragicomic (and this may be stretching it) since Frank is played by Owen Cline, son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates (she of Fast Times at Ridgemont High fame, whose famous topless scene is actually a fantasy sequence in the head of Judge Reinhold, while performing the same action in the bathroom that Frank performs, well, everywhere in The Squid and the Whale).

If anyone comes out a hero in this film, and I use the term “hero” lightly, it is Joan. She is not the best mother, and she certainly was not the best wife. She at least is willing to admit that she has done wrong. She wants to change to be a better mother for her children. She is willing to take her part of the blame, while Bernard continues to believe “It’s not my fault…”

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Blue, You're my boy! RIP

I recently found out some saddening news. Blue died. Yes, Patrick Cranshaw, the actor who played Joseph "Blue" Palasky in Old School, died at the ripe young age of 86. I only hope his death in real life was as memorable (and enjoyable) as his topless k-y jelly wrestling match. "Just ring the fucking bell, you pansy."

I close my eyes...only for a moment then the moments gone...all my dreams...pass before my eyes in curiousity...dust in the wind...all we are is dust in the wind...blue, you're my boy...you're my boy, blue!