George Orwell and High School Sports

You would think that George Orwell and high school sports are two subjects that would never come together on the same page, and you would probably be right most of the time. But these are strange times, and the British author would easily recognize many of his favorite themes that have shown up in an official effort to level the high school playing field known as “competitive equity”. This term refers to a practice promoted by the California Interscholastic Federation, now common in many areas of state, of taking historically successful teams and making them compete in play-off competition against higher competition and taking less successful teams and lowering their level of competition. Nothing very earth shattering, to be sure. Yet, when put into practice it often creates a system that punishes a sports team for working very hard and being successful by making them compete against much larger schools, and, in turn, rewards some less successful teams from larger schools by letting them compete for championships against smaller schools. This is the type of Orwellian logic that the author outlined in his depictions of totalitarian thinking in both 1984 and Animal Farm. I coach a small, rural high school girl’s basketball team. Despite our small numbers, we were very successful for a long period because we worked very hard and adhered to a policy of hard work, commitment, and vision that helped us to produce ten section championships. Then the local CIF office stepped in and decided that we had won more than our share of championships and decided it was time to make us compete at against larger schools. (We have always played stronger programs, but we now were made to compete for the championships against them.) We graduated six veteran players off of our last championship team in 2010. The next season, we were forced to compete against a team from a school with twice our school population and were knocked out of the section play-offs in the first round for the first time ever. The following year we made it to the second round of play-offs but were then eliminated by a school three times larger than ours. A similar sized school in our league, which we had beaten twice, made it to the finals of our old division. The CIF referred to this idea of having a different team winning the championship in our old division as “writing new stories”. Our new story was that our team was forced to watch from the stands during last two year’s play-offs because of our success in previous years. In our dealings with the CIF, we have often run across such terminology as “there isn’t any language” in place for an appeal, or “ your appeal doesn’t meet the criteria”. This is Orwellian double speak at its finest. They consistently fail to recognize the irony involved in the fact that they placed us into a division that we do not naturally belong and where we cannot compete successfully (our subsequent record more than proves this), wrote the language for such placement and set the criteria for appeal, and then deny us a fair opportunity based on the language and criteria they themselves created. Orwell started out with strong Marxist leanings. He was then exposed to the perfidy of Stalinist thinking during the Spanish Civil War where he was almost killed for not going along with the plans. He left Spain a committed opponent of totalitarian thinking and of the idea that soulless bureaucracies have the capability to solve social injustice. He put his views down on paper in a searing indictment of the negative consequences of what happens when bureaucrats try to make people equal on paper. The result is “paper equality” where another person or group must penalized for having strong work habits, better organization, and success. This has been proven the case in the sport’s arenas in our area. In championship play, many large urban schools have been granted opportunities to beat up on smaller rural schools and programs that have had a history of success were eliminated from competition because they had to play much larger schools. The true irony of the situation is that the idea of fairness and true equity of competition is at the center of the CIF mission. Yet, for three years now, my team and others like us have systematically been denied a fair chance to compete against other schools of similar size. This has hurt us in our efforts to get the younger kids to come out and commit to the rigorous training involved to win championships, it has also hurt our program financially as we no longer get to host or participate in play-off games, and it has undermined my player’s trust in the core belief that all their hard work and commitment will be justly rewarded come play-off time. I find personally find it offensive that the officials of our local office of the CIF can hypocritically extol the virtue of fair play when they have obviously have so little understanding of what it means.

Dylanesque?

  My daughter recently wrote a cd review in which she described a very nice piece of lyric as having dylanesque qualities. Being her seventh grade English teacher, as well as a life long Dylan fan, I immediately offered her some unsolicited advice about not over using that particular way of describing someone's lyrics. I went on to tell her that it is perfectly okay to describe a nice bit of writing as being just that, a nice bit of writing without imposing the heavy burden of the lyric having to meet a nearly impossible standard. I finished by telling her that the adjective dylanesque has, in my opinion, been very much abused.

     The discussion that ensued has caused me to do a great deal of thinking about the way that so many people think that any great word painting set to guitar music is dylanesque. My first realization was that the impulse to compare another musician's work to Dylan's is extremely subjective. Just as we all hear, feel, understand and respond differently to Dylan’s music, our opinion as to what compares to that music is our own. 

     Dylan is nothing, if not unique, all of his own musical influences not withstanding. To classify something as unique means it stands alone, there is nothing that is the same. People are, however, prone to make such comparisons because we love to categorize things, and even more, we love to show everyone else that we "get it".  Being able to appreciate true genius and to recognize it in others, and then to explain why we feel that way, enables us in a small way to share in that genius.

     This is nothing too dangerous or earth shattering, most of us are guilty of it, but this impulse causes a lot of people to express some very bad opinions. The most egregious, in my eyes, was the rush of so many music critics to label Bruce Springsteen as the new Dylan when Springsteen first started to garner attention outside of New Jersey. He plays a guitar; he paints pictures with words. The similarities begin and end there. Comparing the young Springsteen to Dylan is like comparing the early Lennon-McCartney work to Sgt. Pepper's.

     This is not knocking Springsteen or even aspiring young artists. Springsteen has written great music, and he never asked for the comparison.  There's a good chance he threw up a little in his own mouth when he read those first reviews, recognizing the intellectual laziness they represented, and the unfair burden of expectations that those critics placed upon him at the early stages of his career. To his credit, he has proven himself worthy on his own merits.

     This has led me to the conclusion that the adjective is completely misused when applied to the idea of an artist being the “next Dylan”. This description of an artist or song is best when applied to the end results of a career and not the embryonic stages.  I would argue that Springsteen’s career is more comparable to Dylan’s at this stage of his career rather than at the beginning.

      Another thing that adds to the problem is that success breeds imitation. Many of the current folk musicians not only try to copy Dylan’s brilliant word play, they also often feel the need affect the tremulous, nasal quality of his voice and his unique phrasing. Dylan’s much maligned vocal abilities are an important part of his music. The shaky urgency of his singing is like a plea. It often enables the simple majesty of his words to penetrate to the core of the listeners. However, the efforts of some lesser artists who attempt to emulate this type of wavering, gravelly vocal is about as appealing as an amputation on a Civil War battlefield.

   Even worse, is that a some of these aspiring singer/songwriters feel that they, by the nature of the job, have been charged to save the world. Dylan arrived at a particular moment in time that amplified the importance of his lyrics. It is well known that later he rejected the role of the Pied Piper as being too restrictive and with some consideration to the idea that he wasn’t up to the job.

    Many of these newcomers missed that part of the story. It is obvious that they relish the idea of being the spokesman of the age despite their lack of any real insight or knowledge of history.  Too often nowadays, donning a pair of scruffy jeans and picking up a guitar is felt to imbue the singer/writer with the all the worldly wisdom and political economic savvy as Jesus, Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger put together.

     I don’t say this to disparage the young, nor am I saying that a new “voice of a generation” will never emerge from the ranks of these modern troubadours. You can be sure it won’t be the voice of someone consciously trying to fill those shoes or someone who is “trying” to be like Dylan. That role will devolve on a person who seeking to express their own voice, and that voice happens to be in tune with the times.

     I eventually arrived at the conclusion that to be truly dylanesque can only mean that an artist inhabits an area on the same mountain peak and at least breathes that some of the same type of rarified air as Dylan . This is, like I said, a very subjective opinion, but it is also a very serviceable definition and does manage to limit the use of the word in way that it would be unlikely to be used to describe the overwrought musings of every scruffy folksinger who manages to catch the public’s eye.

     With this in mind, I’ll attempt to put down a few cases where the adjective might be used correctly.

     The Beatle’s A Day on the Life is probably as close as a song comes to being dylanesque. Often deemed to be one of the most influential rock songs of all time, it also undisputedly possesses the strong lyrical content that Dylan’s greatest work embodies.  Ironically, it was Dylan, supposedly, who first turned the Beatles on to smoking marijuana, and it was, by their own admission, marijuana that fueled their creative juices when making Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.

     The only problem with this comparison is that the Beatles occupy their own mountain peak in the Olympian pantheon of rock music. Is it right to compare one type of genius to another? The Beatles were obviously inspired by Dylan’s music when they created Sgt. Peppers. The result was arguably the most influential album in the history of rock music.

      As far as individual artists go, I would offer up Al Stewart, the Scottish singer/songwriter best known as the creator of one of the most perfect pop songs ever crafted The Year of the Cat. Like Dylan, Stewart started out as folksinger and later shifted into rock. It was the historically themed and generally overlooked album Past, Present, and Future where Stewart left behind his folk roots for good.

      The album features several brilliantly written songs that set Stewart apart from most of his contemporaries. The Road to Moscow is as chilling in its execution and subject matter as Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll.  The Last Day of June 1934 may very well be the song that future historians discover and use as the best evidence to refute the claim that all of late 20^th and early 21rst century American culture was one vast sewer. The song juxtaposes a lover’s picnic, a pre-war aristocratic party, and the death of Ernst Rohm whose death freed Hitler to take over the German Army and commence both the Holocaust and World War II.

     On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out


     In the rolling Bavarian hills
 

     And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters


     Grown strong like the joining of wills

     Oh echoed away like a roar in the distance


     In moonlight carved out of steel


     Singing "All the lonely, so long and so long


     You don't know how I long, how I long


     You can't hold me, I'm strong now I'm strong


     Stronger than your law

Among contemporary American singer/songwriters, the artist most likely to be described with the term dylanesque would have to be the former mailman from Chicago, John Prine. Often labeled as the” the next Dylan” early in his career, Prine has the distinction of being mentioned as one of Dylan’s personal favorites. Singing in gravely nasal twang, like Dylan, Prine’s songs have been extensively covered by many other successful recording artists.

   Some might ask how someone who injects so much good-natured humor into a lot of his songs might be included in the same breath as Dylan, but the answer would be that he is also the same guy who wrote Angel From Montgomery, Souvenirs, and the absolutely lovely lost-love ballad Far from Me.

     Prine’s anti-war song Great Compromise is one of the most brilliant uses of allegory ever put into song.

      Well you know I could have beat up that fellow

      But it was her that had hopped into his car

      Many times I'd fought to protect her

      But this time she was goin' too far

      Now some folks they call me a coward

      'Cause I left her at the drive-in that night

      But I'd druther have names thrown at me

      Than to fight for a thing that ain't right

     When I started writing this, I knew it would probably generate a lot of disagreement. This is all well and good. As I stated at the outset, the conclusions I have reached are very subjective, and all that I wish, is that the article leads to some deliberation on what the adjective dylanesque truly means, and hopefully to a more selective use of the term when one is tempted to deal out an excessive amount of praise when describing every scraggily dressed young man or woman with some fancy words and a guitar.

Big Things in Small Packages

    Thirty-one years ago today I sat in a hospital room in Hanford in a state of almost total stupefaction. In my hands I held what most people refer to as a "bundle of joy". Don't get me wrong, babies are a bundle of joy, but the feeling I most remember is the anxiety of knowing that party was over; it was time to grow up.
     I was in the room when she entered into this world, and I was in something of a trance. Birth is amazing. Walking down the hall way to tell her grandparents, I felt like a 100 lb. bag of feed had been placed on my shoulders. It had to have been that heavy or I would have floated off.
    We named her Haley for some reason, (Haley Mills, I suspect) it means "the game changer" in the mother tongue. I entered the hospital that night a scared teenaged boy masquerading as a twenty-seven year old man. Walking out the door that morning, I took the first real steps on my path to manhood. I had help bring something rare and wonderful into the world and was given the task of nurturing and protecting it.
    Because I wanted to do what's right, I quit my wastrel ways. Because I didn't want her to be ashamed of her father, I went back to school and got my degree.  She has changed my life more than any other factor.
    Babies don't come with instruction manuals, and  they are often dropped willy-nilly into a world where almost any moron can take one out for a test drive. I know that haven't been the best father in the world, but it isn't from a lack of trying to do what's right. More often than not, I have so many times,  not really understood what I was supposed to do.   Looking back on my life, the advice that I would give a new parent to avoid making the mistakes I have made is, "Love your children with all your heart, and let them know all the time that you do."

Heads Gotta Roll!

    When Dante Alighierie wrote the Divine Comedy back in the fourteenth century, Hell was probably roomy enough. But surely, the ensuing seven centuries must have created a need for larger accommodations.  If the ninth circle was reserved for the fraudulent and those who were guilty of serious betrayal, how much deeper into the abyss would we have to journey to find a place for those who have killed their fellow man because they were texting while driving?
    This has not only created a new gold standard for stupidity, as well as a serious need for an addendum to one of the world's great pieces of literature,  it has also has enlarged our vocabulary as it has expanded the definition of the word ironic - "Killed by a driver who was texting." How much more ironic could it be to get  up one morning raring to go, get in a car, and then get murdered by a moron who was texting, "Duh, LOL"?
    I think this calls for the perpetrator to spend eternity in something like the 23rd circle where they would be embedded for eternity up to their neck in the frozen firmament with the their cell phones placed two feet in front of them, and miniature demonic versions of Snooki and the Situation gnawing on their fingers.
  Somewhere, someone has to be keeping score of this stuff. As Americans, we tend to think that none of  our stupid behavior really matters, but it is getting harder to ignore that we are getting a bit worn down at the edges. The whole country has become a tad bit manic. It used to be guys like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda who were the Everyman, now it's Dennis Leary and James Wood.
   Someone has to be observing us somewhere with a clipboard and pencil stuck behind their ear, clucking and nodding sagely without explanation every time we exhibit some new form of idiotic behavior, and the thing is,  he/she has gotten progressively more and more jaded as we have gone from stuff like slavery, racism, mobsters, genocide, etc to ever more abstract forms of deviant behavior.
   This person would have been outraged at first while watching the Dutch bargaining for Manhattan with their fingers crossed behind their back and $24 worth of plastic beads. Then, they would have sobbed uncontrollably as they witnessed a passing fashion trend bring about the near extinction of the American buffalo. By now, however,  it has probably gotten to a point where they merely roll their eyes as the rest of the world struggles with the vagaries of human existence, and America sits in a overstuffed easy chair, beer in one hand, remote in the other, drooling while the people from TMZ laughingly discuss how one of their minions ambushed Jimmy Kimmel at his uncle's funeral.
  Getting back to Snooki. What must the rest of the world think of this country when someone, whose greatest creative achievement lies in the art of passing gas, is hired to speak at one of our most prestigious universities? We have become so used to having our distaste in these matters voiced by some eastern brahman type with a tweed suit with brown patches on the elbows, speaking with a nasally Harvard drawl while dangling a pipe to make his point. We always start to listen but end up saying, "Who gives a crap what this guy is saying."
   But in this case, it's the guy down taking down the Christmas (winter holiday if you prefer) decorations for the city who should be outraged. Our college students should also be outraged. Our beautiful college students, who so readily paint signs in bold day-glo colors screaming "No War for Oil" as they blithely ignore the fact that they drove a car to the protest. "But it's a hybrid", they say in defense pretending to believe that their mother's Prius runs on some mystical, magical blend of used coffee grounds, recycled sewage, and love.
  They did what? No, that couldn't be. I am stunned. Our college students wanted this? I couldn't see this coming. I mean just because they have taken what used to be a holiday associated with ultimate sacrifice, salvation and hope and changed it to mean in our current vernacular, "A time to vomit on friends and strew beer bottles and used condoms on Mexican beaches", surely does not mean that the best and the brightest that our country has to offer believes for one moment that Snooki has ever in her life said something that was worth $80,000.  If that was really the case, what would they pay to hear the winner of the Kansas's Ninth Region Championship Belch-Off?
    Then there is always someone masquerading as the responsible adult in the room who offers up a weak justification. "We are just giving them what they wanted." As if  trying to be cool is the new  get out of jail free card of the Internet Age. It's not enough. If these kids want to mate with primates while rolling down the freeway in stolen shopping carts, would if be our job to raid the Rite-Aid parking lot and bribe a corrupt security guard at the zoo?
 In the words of Robespierre, "Heads need to roll!"

"And Now a Shout Out To My Homies at GM and Ford"

    I just watched a documentary on Joe Stummer and the "only band that mattered", and it disturbed me a little .  I have been more than a disillusioned lately by the state of American culture in general. I am also living under cloud of my own making which has something to do with whether or not I'm going to be able to keep up with the speed of transition in this interconnected world.

   On one hand, I am bloody amazed and excited by the potential to expand our knowledge  of the universe, but, on the other hand, I am worried by the fact that, in the past, such change has usually been the harbinger of overwhelming death and destruction. I am so more than a little bit worried about the lack of intelligence that some of my fellow humans seem quite happy to exhibit.

   Back to Strummer movie, I have always been a little bit amused when an musical artist is willing to shout out a few bits of anticapitalist  ideology,  how many fans are willing to turn off their brains and fall groveling at the artist's feet and painting them as modern day Robin Hoods.

To me, it is a bit pretentious. I am always reminded that there were no great rock bands coming out of Russia under communist rule. There are none from China. There are some good rock bands in Iran, but if they get caught playing rock music, they are imprisoned. Most of them would love the opportunity to be able to get up in front of an audience and bash the restrictive nature of the regime, but it would probably cost them their life.

  I wish that just once, one of these Robin Hood minstrels would at least offer a disclaimer, "We are going to sing our next song "Kill the Greedy F####g Pigs", but first, we would like to acknowledge the role of the free enterprise system in helping to create an environment of free speech where artists like us can say what we think to people who have absolutely no concept of history and have those same people buy our music."

   Nothing more than that. I am not asking that Bono quit strutting around like he's a better dressed Ghandi or for Rage Against the Machine to go and promote free speech in Venezuela. Just a disclaimer, that's all.

Dog-paddling in the Sewer

 I recently read  a blog that my daughter wrote regarding the surrealistic circus that has become American culture. I agreed with most if it. I took exception to her statements about Casey Anthony. I know she wasn't defending the baby killing mother (my opinion), but I felt she leaned a little bit overboard in criticizing the America's fascination with the case and the outrage over the verdict. My own opinion is that everything that Anthony did leads me to believe with a certainty that she committed the crime.  Babies don't usually end up in a garbage bag with duct tape over their noses while their mother is out dancing in a club. All the talking heads who maintained that the verdict proves that the American justice system works are one of the more glaring symptoms of our malaise. We lend morons the weight of expertise when most of them couldn't find their bottom with an hour's head start and GPS. Is America right be outraged with the verdict? Definitely.

However, I agree overwhelmingly with the gist of what my daughter was saying. Our culture, especially anything that comes out of Hollywood, is a river of sewage. TMZ is my special peeve. If God were to put America on trial, all the prosecution would have to do is trot out the ratings for this piece of garbage to prove that God should reopen the floodgates.  The fact that we have people hiding in the bushes outside of restaurants, shopping centers, bars and airports trying catch celebs with their mouths open while they chew proves that we have sunk to an all time low.  And heaven help anyone who gets caught in the locust swarm of the 24 hour news cycle.

What is frightening is that ever since we were first warned about television's ability to reduce society to electronic barbarism, we have not heeded a single word. What further debasement awaits us in the future?

Even Roots Change

It is my 59th birthday today. The first thing I did this morning, other than the treadmill, was listen to the youtube video of my daughter singing a song she wrote for me, "Even Roots Change". It has one of my favorite lyrics. Goes something like this, "Even roots change, Even roots grow. Even skyscrapers sway when the wind blows." There it is. Even freaking skyscrapers move when the wind blows!

It conjures up images of swaying skyscrapers, smiling statues, and flowing rivers. No, skyscrapers dancing slightly off beat, like a nerdy white boy, to Dylan's "The Times They Are A Changin".  Snapping their fingers trying to look cool to impress the female skyscrapers even though deep down in their basements they are self conscious of the fact that they are swaying in the wind and not steadfast and frozen like their fathers before them.

The song is my pick-me-upper. It inspires me and encourages me to face the hero quest before me. In the last year of my fifties, I go forth ready to rumble, Achilles like (if you can imagine a old wrinkled up gray haired Greek super hero, if not, scratch that and think of a fatter version of Don Quixote), ready to joust with the shades of death, ex-wives, memories, and paper hangers. 

Go Dogs!