The Baseball Creation Myth

More than any other type of story, the "creation myth" may loom the largest.

Every time we talk about our forefathers at "the birth of our nation" or celebrate the birth of Jesus, we are celebrating creation myths. These stories are important because they are founding moments. These are the moments where a person, movement or country defined itself first.

Why do you think we care so much about where Superman came from? Or about the first time Christopher Columbus landed in America?

For whatever reason, we are drawn to these stories. We can say for sure, "this" started "then." We can draw far-reaching conclusions from the circumstances of beginnings.






















Lo and behold, another essay problematized some shit for me.

Stephen Jay Gould, in 1990's Best American Essays (also Natural History Magazine) writes about baseball's creation myth.

Some broswinforever readers may have been told at a young age about a man named Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York.

Abner Doubleday had, in 1839, interrupted a marbles game behind the tailor’s shop in Cooperstown, New York, to draw a diagram of a baseball field, explain the rules of the game, and designate the activity by its modern name of “base ball” (then spelled as two words).

Doubleday, a celebrated Union General in the Civil War, was for many years recognized as baseball's founder. A blue-ribbon commission of two senators, prominent businessmen and historians confirmed the fact. It was in history books. The Baseball Hall of Fame was constructed in Cooperstown.

The trouble was- it was only part of the story. Rather than starting in one time and place, baseball evolved over time in many different iterations. Ultimately though, the game came from Britain as a variation of cricket.

Working people played a different kind of stick-and-ball game, existing in various forms and designated by many names, including “rounders” in western England, “feeder” in London, and “base ball” in southern England. For a large number of reasons, forming the essential difference between cricket and baseball, cricket matches can last up to several days (a batsman, for example, need not run after he hits the ball and need not expose himself to the possibility of being put out every time he makes contact). The leisure time of working people does not come in such generous gobs, and the lower-class stick-and-ball games could not run more than a few hours.

The evidence for Doubleday is scant, and historical clues point to a complicated evolution. So why do we still recognize the name Abner Doubleday? Why do we still have baseball ceremonies in Cooperstown?

Too few people are comfortable with evolutionary modes of explanation in any form. I do not know why we tend to think so fuzzily in this area, but one reason must reside in our social and psychic attraction to creation myths in preference to evolutionary stories—for creation myths, as noted before, identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism. Still, we must remember—and an intellectual’s most persistent and nagging responsibility lies in making this simple point over and over again, however noxious and bothersome we render ourselves thereby—that truth and desire, fact and comfort, have no necessary, or even preferred, correlation (so rejoice when they do coincide).

Narratives offer meaning, but can too often offer false meaning. In the words of Joan Didion, they can "flatten and distort" a complicated mess of facts. Yes, it's nice to be able to identify beginnings. But our desire to make our world more manageable and less confusing does not mean we have to ignore facts.

Does it?

Story Time

People at my work talk a lot about "narrative."

A campaign's message must be narrative-driven. When an organizer sits down with a new volunteer, they tell their "story."

This is a relatively new approach for campaigns, though community organizers and advocacy groups have framed their strategy in this way for years. Marshall Ganz is the prophet of the religion of narrative. A professor at Harvard, a veteran of United Farm Workers strikes, SNCC voter registration drives and other bright spots in progressive organizing history, he found acolytes in the Obama field organization. Some of his Harvard students and trainees went on to take substantial roles in the campaign.

Cesar Chavez and Marshall Ganz

Talking points are pooh-poohed. Yes, you can talk about health care. But the way you do it is very personal. You tell your story about health care. The choices you make in the story reveal your values. Your values ultimately determine where you stand.

Of course, people just don’t tell stories about themselves. One thing that leaders- political or otherwise- have the power to do is define the story of a people. If you think about it, Barack Obama has sought to tell the story of America in all his speeches. One of our largest campaign mailers had the words “His story is the American story” in big letters.

Stories are powerful. They shape the way people think about themselves, their country, their town, their leaders.

I have been totally bought into this idea. Why not, right? It’s intuitive, and it’s an approach that makes me feel good about the work I do. I’m not selling a candidate. I’m telling an empowering story, etc., all the things above.

This was all problematized by something I read the other day by Joan Didion (On a side note- oooh! Look at me! I’m reading Joan Didion!).

She writes a beautiful, tragic account of “The Jogger” in Central Park in 1989. This was before any of us read newspapers, but apparently it was a huge national story. Six young black and latino kids were accused of brutally raping and murdering a white investment banker Wellesley grad. A big teachable moment that everyone- New York Times columnists, the Mayor, the tabloids- weighed in on.

This was a moment where people came together, took a stand, and said no to crime. Nights out against crime were held. Major speeches were delivered. The message was essentially that this woman was brave, these kids were monsters, and no, we will not let this happen again.

The accused

The truth was more complicated, and the whole long essay gets into the murky details, but what struck me most was this-

The insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance, is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, 8 million stories in the naked city; 8 million stories all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

Joan Didion is right to be wary of narrative. There are, after all, bad stories. Hateful stories that have misplaced heroes and enemies. There are dishonest stories.

Narrative is not inherently bad. Mostly, her trouble is with convenient narratives, those that seek only to confirm our suspicions and organize our confusing world into manageable, banal lessons.

Ultimately though, stories are the way people come to understand one another. People don’t interact with other people as much as they used to. Civic organizations are dying. At this point we need more social glue to bring people together.

Maybe what we should be pushing for is not more or less stories, but better stories. More complicated, honest stories that don’t flatten or distort, but enrich our understanding of other people. That, at least, is what I will tell my co-workers. Whether or not they listen to my long-winded story is an open question.

Why had I never heard of this man?

Chris Morris.


The Awl alerted me to him yesterday. The clip above is from a different show, but the same guy. Below are full episodes of Brass Eye.

Animals.

Drugs.

Crime.

Decline.

Science.

They're all insanely good, but drugs and decline are my favorites. On a side note, he is now working on a "satire based on a group of Islamist terrorists in the North of England."

"Window on Chinese Armed Forces": Chinese Military Online

China's Defense Ministry's first website, in both English and Chinese.

Bros Watch Forever: Religion and TV

From American Public Media's Speaking of Faith, an hour-long radio show about religion and television:

Diane Winston appreciates good television, studies it, and brings many of its creators into her religion and media classes at the University of Southern California. In what some have called a renaissance in television drama, we examine how TV is helping us tell our story and work through great confusions in contemporary life. And, we play clips from The Wire, House, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica.

Let me tell you, this Diane Winston loves Battlestar Galactica. And for that I love her. That she also loves The Sopranos, Dexter, Lost, makes me like her even more. I think my real job calling is a television studies professor.

Speaking of Faith: Link

Goodbye America!

While I was talking to my family about flying to China, they said they hoped that I wouldn't crash and that I would get there safely. So great, my family loves me, but their well wishes made me start thinking about LOST. Cause you know, flying from Chicago to Shanghai, I must fly over some exotic Pacific islands that could be magical. And if I did, I would sure hope that I would have the good luck of the magnetic field of the island causing my plane to crash but for me to magically survive.

Turns out my hoped for flight path was the opposite of where I will actually be flying above. As you can see by the map below, I won't be flying over the Pacific at all. More likely, when I look out my window, if I see any body of water it will be the Arctic Ocean. Now, at first I was rather dejected, no LOST LARP for Alex. But then I thought, "Alex, it's the Arctic Ocean!"

So, what does the Arctic Ocean hold in store? Will there be a crash? Other's? Perhaps they are they legend Eskimos!? I will report what I see in the arctic once I'm in Shanghai.

BSG Episodes 2.1-2.5

At the end of last season’s finale, I had the general gist of the next few episodes figured out. Adama was dead, but the other pieces should be easy to pick up: Starbuck will return with the arrow, this and Adama’s death will prompt the military-government feud to end, a rescue ship will get Gaius and company off of Kobol, and basically everything will be back to normal in the first twenty minutes, in time for them to counter whatever new thing the Cylons throw at ‘em.

The lesson here is that I’m terrible at predictions. Now, what actually happened:

Episode 2.1
Damn, are we getting our asses kicked. I didn’t really understand the problem with the jump coordinates—can they not just follow the old set? Or if that’s destroyed and, as I understand it, they use some sort of jump-detection to find out where the rest of the fleet went, why can’t the Cylons do the same thing?

My favorite part of this episode was Gaeta’s bathroom epiphany: wait, if I move these bars of soap closer to each other, they’re more effective together. What if I do the same thing to the computers? Of course! Networking! At least that’s what I assume he was thinking.

Anyway, cool fight scene that I imagine would have been cooler if I watched this on a TV. For the first time since the pilot, the Cylons remember that they have a ton of missiles. Things go okay despite this, but a mysterious new ship crashes into the Battlestar. If this were Star Fox 64, the good guys would be going to the less cool level next.

Episode 2.2
And sure enough, it’s a pretty lame episode, despite the reasonably exciting premise and threat of total annihilation. This might be because, again, low resolution made everything hard to see, especially since the lights were out most of the time. Apparently the only way to kill a toaster-style Cylon is when it’s distracted by someone else. Lots of setup for good-guy-accidentally-shoots-other-good-guy-who-surprised-him, but for once a cliché is subverted. Hooray!

On Kobol, people we don’t really know are dying left and right. It’s a little sad.

Episode 2.3
This was a pretty good episode. Lots of infighting amongst Team Kobol, and the plan works out basically as you’d expect after the last episode: nobody actually fights Cylons head-on, because they’re super tough. It’s interesting how much humanity is sticking to rank, when so much of the time it’s clear that the people in charge are too hotheaded to make good decisions. This is realistic, I guess. Anyway, there’s some good drama culminating in Crashdown (Wikipedia tells me his real name is Alex Quartararo) getting killed by Gaius, of whom No. 6 is super proud. Everyone is stunned, even though they all totally wanted it to happen.

Meanwhile, Col. John McCain goes into full-on dick mode, Ellen Tigh (I’ll always giggle at that) is clearly evil, and the President spills the beans on her illness and connection to the prophecy.

That last bit is kinda interesting. It’ll be neat to watch as more and more characters realize the obvious truth that, yes, the prophecy is real. For some reason there are always Jack-like characters that dispute that fate exists, even when preposterously unlikely things happen that were predicted by ancient scrolls. But by season 5 of Lost, basically everyone was in full-on fate mode, embracing what they knew was destiny. This worked out well for the show, since they just started running towards the action instead of trying to live in peace. How long till the BSG crew does the same?

Episode 2.4
I’m not sure why I didn’t find the main plot here interesting. Martial law is declared, military-citizen tensions escalate further, and Roslin escapes, but none of that really grabbed me.

Can we talk a bit about the Cylon models? I originally thought there were twelve total, and at the end of the pilot that basically there were three each of four different kinds (Blond, Asian, Foppish, and Grizzled). But with No. 8’s revelation that there are 8 Cylons aboard the fleet, are we to understand that there are twelve different-looking models, and multiple copies of each? If so: damn. (And the next episode seems to confirm this.) But at least it suggests what I hoped was true, that nobody can suck as much as Ellen while still being human.

Meanwhile on Caprica, Starbuck and Helo meet up with some professional Quidditch players, and we remember that, more than anything, this show will always be about love at first sight. Maybe Starbuck/Anders and Billy/Dee can have a joint wedding!

Episode 2.5
Captive in a hospital! Excellent. The Caprica subplot is for the first time pretty cool-slash-terrifying. I like how even after Starbuck figures out that her “doctor” is a Cylon, she still waits for him to slip up and call her by his call sign, which she never told him. Then she kills him, so that his final thought can be “Damn, I wish I watched more movies so I didn’t make such a rookie mistake.”

The ovary farm is pretty horrific so I won’t write about it. I do like the idea that two people can only conceive if they’re in love. Would that this were true! Amiright, guys?!

The rest of the episode sets us up for Starbuck reuniting with everyone else soon, which I’m totally okay with. Will everyone we care about finally be in one place?

Oh, and Adama’s alive. Wee!

I know this is already long, but I wanna end by talking about the overall goal of finding Earth. Um… why are they doing this? So far the fleet has been entirely unsuccessful at staying away from the Cylons for any length of time. Why lead them to the only known safe haven for humans? Here, I even made a payoff matrix to show why this is dumb:

Figure 1

As you can see, the dominant strategy is given in row 2. Stop looking for Earth, guys! Show solved.

Test

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.

Bros Watch Forever: Recon Mission

I tried to create a jump—but failed—so that I could show the end of season 3 of Battlestar without giving anything away to those who didn't want to see it. It's awesome in the flying through space while masturbating category of awesome.

And this is why I hate blogger. What blogging tool doesn't let you easily create jumps. And by easily, doesn't require you to edit the HTML code!?

BROS WATCH FOREVER: BSG Season 1 Concludes

Episodes 9 - Finale

Episode 9
This episode, one of my favorites so far, treads the line between psychological thriller and comedy of manners. It's tight, funny and suspenseful. It also lets us know that Jamie Bamber (Lee Adama) makes for an excellent straight man--his reaction shots are some of the best things here. Starbuck walks in on Baltar's mind sex! Tigh's estranged wife arrives on Galactica, tempts him with booze, and puts lies in his brain. She may be a Cylon, but she definitely SUCKS. Adama also comes under Roslin's suspicion, but so much evidence is stacked against him in the first 20 minutes that you know he's actually innocent. In an earlier post, Tom mentioned that Grace Park's acting sometimes isn't at the level of her co-stars, and in episode 9 Park gives us the series' best bit of bad acting so far:

- Helo: You never get tired!
- Caprica-Boomer: It's...ADRENALINE!

Episode 10
How is news disseminated across the fleet? Can you transmit radio broadcasts in outer space? I wonder this with every press conference BSG features. Episode 10 is about as different from 9 as BSG episodes get, structured almost like a military procedural. Edward James Olmos (Adama) grows like a total badass as the fleet prepares to attack a Cylon stronghold for fuel, and then Apollo blows their shit up after shutting off his targeting system Skywalker-style. This episode also examines how Starbuck, Galactica's star pilot, handles being grounded as she recovers from injuries suffered earlier.

Episode 11
Baltar's ability to b.s. ended up saving the fleet in episode 10, and here the breaks keep coming: after observing his popularity, Roslin selects Baltar to run for vice-president against ex-terrorist d-bag Tom Zarek. On Caprica, Helo discovers that Caprica-Boomer is a Cylon, and she insists she's still in love. At episode's end, viewers are tempted with thoughts of Olmos busting out some Zoot Suit moves.

Episode 12 + 13
Good god dude, they crammed everything into these ones. The two-part season finale contains a whole season's worth of big moments, including: Baltar and Starbuck do it! Massive Cylon attack! Crash landing! Roslin's drug-induced prophesysin'! The president's aide grows a pair! Starbuck-Apollo fight! Adama's military takeover! Apollo's mutiny! Starbuck vs. 6! Galactica-Boomer meets other Boomers! Galactica-Boomer nukes 'em! Caprica-Boomer pregnant? Baltar a father? And IS ADAMA DEAD? (Regarding the last item: there are rare moments when something will literally make my jaw drop, and I'll remember that one's jaw dropping is a figure of speech in the first place because ocassionally it actually happens when a person sees or hears something that totally freakin' shocks them.)

On Justin Timberlake as Green Lantern

Last night the news broke online that Justin Timberlake had screen tested for the upcoming Green Lantern film, and is in serious contention for the role. Timberlake would play Hal Jordan, the Earth member of a galactic peacekeeping force who fights evil with a magic ring controlled by willpower. (The character might be harder sell to movie-goers than most superheroes.) Jordan was created in the early sixties as a square-jawed, no-nonsense test pilot, and is as bland as his heroic trappings are outrageous. Some argue that the character doesn’t really work outside of the sixties context, and the best Hal Jordan story in memory is the retro-leaning New Frontier. Unlike Iron Man’s Tony Stark, a genius/arrogant cad, or Spider-Man’s Peter Parker, a vulnerable screw-up, there has never really been enough to the character to make for reinvention or contemporary relevance. Which is why if the JT stunt-casting happens, it could elevate Green Lantern from a generic action film to something else entirely.

During my years as a dedicated weekly comics-buyer (grades 5-7, approx.) I followed Green Lantern from month to month, but it wasn’t Hal Jordan stories I was reading. Midway through the ‘90s, DC comics replaced the title’s central figure with Kyle Rayner, a hip, sarcastic graphic designer meant to attract younger readers. And, it worked, at least for relatively new fans like me. Meanwhile, DC editors had Jordan go insane, kill off a number of his colleagues, and try to rearrange time and space. In a nutshell.

Today, Hal Jordan is again at the center of the Green Lantern comics, after the folks at DC effectively hit the reset button and returned the title to the status quo of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. (They’ve recently done the same thing with the Flash, another hero who had been replaced with a younger, more complex character.) It was a move –one of the moves, perhaps- that betrayed the conservatism deeply embedded in mainstream superhero storytelling, and evidence of why there are probably more forty year-olds than fifteen year-olds reading DC books right now.

The possible casting of Timberlake is important partially because there’s so little to the Jordan character to begin with—unlike Robert Downey Jr. and Tony Stark, a pair that makes intuitive sense, putting an entertainer like Timberlake in the role could make for, well, nearly anything. Assigning an international superstar’s brand to this lesser-known superhero property potentially erases the baggage that comes with Hal Jordan. I have little doubt that if he’s cast, we’ll be getting Justin Timberlake, the Green Lantern, for better or for worse. At the very least, it would be a fantastic kind of mess.

[EDIT: Well, looks like it's Ryan Reynolds. Who's starring in Deadpool too, actually. Bro's gonna be busy. What might have been, eh?]

Battlestar Galactica Sex Appeal

Captain Apollo, with human civilization destroyed, it's obvious where you now spend most of your time. At the gym!

DC-related unintended double entendre of the day. Overheard on the train:

"He's deep in the annals of power."

Shameless Self-Promotion

Don't got enough friends yet, Mark Zuckerberg? Need more? Pathetic.

Bros Watch Forever

Battlestar Galactica Eps. 4-8

With only a foot into a long television series, or a novel for that matter, there’s always the temptation to extrapolate four or five hours of initial material into a thesis for the entire work. Sometimes the stretch works; the entire 80 plus hours of the Sopranos never really delves beyond the dark and family-focused boundaries that the first two episodes mark. Shows like the Wire and Lost though seem to have a case of plot ADD, never able to spend more than a season on a single story or group.
So indulge me for a single paragraph while I set forth my extrapolation of the entire four season plus webisodes series.

Battlestar Gallactica is an inquiry into what it means to be human cloaked in a sci-fi series. As the series progresses, the differences between the Cylons and the humans will only grow more and more bleary. The humans’ resolve will steel while the exact nature of the Cylons will become clear and they will be shown to have souls even though they are machines. The first eight episodes feel like Lost season one having seen the rest of the series. What you see is not what you get. Battlestar Gallactica is not a show about jet fighters and battles for supremacy between the humans and the Cylons. Instead, the series will try and answer exactly what makes humans unique and human when there is an identical race that is clearly not human.
OK. No more musings and speculation. Onto summary.

Episodes 4 and 5
Episodes four and five form one continuous episode bridged with a To Be Continued… in the middle. Has there ever been a To Be Continued so early in a series? I don’t think so.
The episode begins with a party for one of the battle pilots celebrating his 1000th landing. During the celebration, an accident occurs and a bomb blows up killing many of the fighter pilots. Because of this loss of skilled pilots, Commander Adama asks Starbuck to train a new set of fighter pilots.
The request to train new pilots brings up bad memories for Starbuck. You close watching watchers will remember that she passed Zak Adama through his flight training—the Commanders son and Apollo’s bro—because she was sleeping with him and not because he had the chops. It turns out she was not just sleeping with Zak, but they were engaged (and also having some steamy sex). In order not to have a repeat of this, she summarily flunks every new flight recruit Adama sends her.
Lots of discussion and drama ensues. Commander Adama finds out that she cheated Zak through training, kicks her out of his office, and tells her to train the god damned pilots. She says “Yes, Sir.” On the first of the new flights out, a Cylon fighter squadron is spotted, and in her remorse, Starbuck takes them on alone, killing them all, but also terminally damaging her fighter. She rockets down to a nearby planet.
Back at the fleet, Apollo and Adama are feeling guilty that they might have caused Starbuck to suicidally take on the Cylon fighters. They order the entire planet to be searched for her. President Roslin puts a stop to the search because it is endangering the entire fleet and wasting fuel. Apollo and Adama admit they are being too emotional, but WAIT! At the last possible moment, Starbuck reappears, flying a Cylon fighter she found on the planet!
Episode 6
Kaboom! The Cylons are infiltrating the Galactica and wreaking havoc blowing up stuff, and just who was the negligent crew member who allowed them in? In an attempt to allow for the rule of law, Adama with the consent of the President calls an independent tribunal to investigate who failed to prevent the Cylon from boarding. What at first is an orderly investigation fast morphs into a which hunt with Adama himself being called before the tribunal and accused of negligence. Adama dissolves the tribunal, but he realizes that he must tell the rest of the fleet that the Cylons now look just like humans. We learn that it was actually Deck Crew Chief Tyrol who let the Cylon in… or perhaps his Asian lover and secret Cylon Boomer. Boomer doesn’t know she is a Cylon, but her actions are starting to draw suspicion.
Episode 7
Gaius and Number 6 (the Blonde) get into an argument about whether there is a single god or multiple gods. It quickly becomes clear that Gaius doesn’t believe in either, and Number 6 vanishes from his head. She then pops up in the command center, as a defense specialist claiming that Gaius blew up key defense computers right before the Cylon attack. Gaius eventually repents dedicating his future life to God as long as he is allowed to survive. With his admission, Number 6 goes back into his head, Adama frees him.
Episode 8
The humans have captured a Cylon! And he is a slippery, mind-playing one at that. Because of her no-nonsense reputation, Starbuck is assigned to interrogate him and find out where he has hidden a nuclear bomb within the fleet. She tortures him but feels no remorse because he is not a human. They talk about theology, he professes to see the future and know the universe; she claims he’s a toaster oven. President Rosalind gets involved and at first appears abhorred that he has been tortured, but in a pretty cool scene she coldly orders him tossed into outer space. Unlike the Prez, Starbuck witnesses the Cylon’s death and is wracked by doubt wondering if he might indeed have a soul. The episode ends with Starbuck praying to the God’s for the Cylon just in case he does have one.
I’ve neglected to mention anything happening on Caprica with Boomer and that other guy. It’s a pretty lame plotline, we’ll update you if anything becomes of it.