March 23, 2006
American Chromatic Exceptionalism, Addendum Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:25 AM EST I couldn’t agree more with Frederic Schwarz’s elegant post on this country’s frequent exceptionalism and how the New Deal model for dealing with problems is dead as a mackerel. I would add one example of government overreaching in the 1970s. In the 1960s the government had required automobile manufacturers to make seat belts standard equipment. Although many people ignored them, there was little objection. Then, about 1973 or so, Congress, in order to get people to wear the belts, passed a law requiring automobile manufacturers to link the seat belts to the ignition so that the car wouldn’t start unless the seat belts were buckled. When people found out about it—usually in a showroom while they were shopping for a new car—they went ballistic. Dealers couldn’t legally disconnect the system, but local mechanics (who also were forbidden, but wouldn’t likely be caught) did a brisk business in doing exactly that. Congress, finding itself buried in an avalanche of public outrage, hastily repealed this grotesque example of no-dessert-until-you-finish-your-peas government. That experience, perhaps, is why Congress never mandated the metric system but tried to get it adopted by the camel’s-nose-under-the-tent method, which didn’t work either. One other point: I believe right-hand driving is not an American exception, but the choice from the beginning in most countries. Left-hand driving today is found only in Great Britain and most of the old British Empire (Canada being an exception), Japan, and the occasional odd backwater, such as the U.S. Virgin Islands. Much of Scandinavia (including Denmark, which owned the Virgin Islands until 1917) originally had left-hand driving, but Sweden was the last to switch over, in about 1980. For 24 hours no one was allowed to drive at all in Sweden, and then only very slowly for a few days. The only other country that I know about that used to drive on the left was Argentina. It switched from left-hand to right-hand in 1945.
March 23, 2006
Hoop Dreams Come True: A Thought-Provoking Documentary Posted by Allen Barra at 07:30 AM EST Increasingly, it seems, documentaries, or at least sports documentaries, are not so much imitations of life as B-movies. Through The Fire (Walt Disney Video, $29.99) chronicles the meteoric rise of Sebastian Telfair, the most sensational Coney Island schoolyard legend ever. The film’s promotional tag line reads, “His family gave him the dream, the streets gave him the drive. The game gave him the chance.” And happily for ESPN, which just released the film on DVD, none of that is untrue. It just seems untrue while you’re watching. Directed by Jonathan Hock—who did Imax’s Michael Jordan to the Max and has done numerous shows for ESPN, most notably Streetball—Through The Fire is a documentary structured as a feature film. The central casting is perfect; Telfair couldn’t be more charming if he were played by a young Cuba Gooding, Jr. It’s hard to imagine that even Hollywood could come up with more of an underdog scenario than Telfair’s real life story. We’re scarcely settled in our seats before Sebastian, with Abraham Lincoln High School fresh from its third league title and a state championship, calls a press conference to announce his choice of a university, Louisville, coached by Rick Pitino. In a movie, side stories would then converge on our hero. His older brother, also something of a basketball legend, would fail to make the NBA draft, devastating the family. Then, as if to underline their desperate straits, a drug-related shooting in their building would emphasize how desperately Mrs. Telfair and her children needed to get out of the project. Darned if life doesn’t cooperate and provide precisely these circumstances. Sebastian opts for the NBA and a whopping $15 million Adidas deal. But this didn’t end his underdog status; it merely heightened it. When he announced he would be available for the draft, much of the New York press got hostile, questioning whether his size (slightly under six feet and about 170 pounds) and inexperience would allow him to succeed in the NBA. In truth, these questions have yet to be answered, and it will probably take a follow-up documentary to resolve them. Telfair is currently a mediocre role player for the Portland Trailblazers, averaging under ten points a game. “Right now,” he recently told an Associated Press writer, “I don’t know who I am. I’m definitely not Sebastian Telfair.” Such doubts are absent from Hock’s film, which is one long sustained cheer for the system that helped lift Sebastian and his family out of economic despair. As you might expect from a director who has worked so closely with ESPN (the network that broadcast the high school game that first brought Telfair before a national audience), the emphasis is on the game itself, and here Hock is on steady ground. All of the basketball, from the energetic schoolyard pickups to the high school games, is so lovingly recorded, and the grace and spirit of the young men so evident, that it exposes the over-edited basketball sequences in movies like Glory Road for the studio concoctions that they are. Sebastian himself is clean-cut, smiling, and buoyant, and he handles the media with a slickness that belies his years. No doubt he has picked up a lick of media savvy from watching his cousin, Stephon Marbury. Telfair seems like the very incarnation of what the game is supposed to be about, and Hock’s camera sticks to him so close that at times you’re almost expecting a referee to jump in and call a technical. One never questions for a moment that Sebastian deserves everything that he finally gets. Unfortunately we also don’t question the larger issues that surround the Telfair story. Leaving aside the issue as to whether Sebastian or his brother (who is now playing professional ball in Greece—not such a bad life after all) would have been better off going to college, it might have been appropriate for someone in the film to address the question of how many lives have been ruined for kids who chased the carrot at the end of the stick like Sebastian but never got to bite. A friend of mine who covered high school and college basketball for 30 years once estimated that it takes at least a thousand young boys, all of them competing furiously from grade school level on up, to create the forge that will produce a single great talent. How many of them, dropping out of school to pursue basketball, get burned before they get through the fire? Through The Fire is an exhilarating watch, but you have to wear blinders to walk away from it unconcerned with all the issues it pretends don’t exist.
March 22, 2006
American Chromatic Exceptionalism Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:55 AM EST For all the virtues of using "red" and "blue" as political terms (as set forth here), it must be admitted that they are yet another example of America doing things differently from the rest of the world. Everywhere else, red means left because of its historic association with communism, and blue means Tory or Christian Democrat or what have you (though there are no true conservative parties worth mentioning in Europe). But here, for some reason, red has been assigned to the Republican party, and thus, with the present state of our politics, to conservatism. Many other practices exist in which we Americans stubbornly insist on going our own path (sometimes joined by the hybrid nation of Canada): putting the month first when writing dates with numbers; printing calendars Sunday-to-Saturday instead of Monday-to-Sunday; driving on the right side of the road; capital punishment; and, of course, refusing to adopt the metric system. I lived through the metric-system debate in the 1970s, and in retrospect, I realize that it was an important event in our nation's transition from 1960s liberalism to 1980s conservatism (a transition that Nicholas Lemann has analyzed in our pages) Beginning in the early 1970s, Americans were told that the switchover to metric units was inevitable, and that it would be beneficial and painless--even fun! Every newspaper and magazine in the country ran some sort of "humorous" piece in which maxims like "a miss is as good as a mile" or "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" were "translated" into metric. Distances in kilometers began to appear on highway signs, and with dubious precision, product labels rendered "1 pound" as "453.59 grams." Then, after a few years, Americans started to ask: Why are we doing this? Two main reasons were given: It's much easier to perform calculations with metric units, and in any event, the rest of the world uses them. But as Americans examined the issue more closely, these supposed advantages came to seem less important. Few people, it turned out, ever needed to know how many inches were in a mile, and if they did, they could either look it up or use a calculator. Moreover, when it was necessary to make a mental calculation, too many Americans proved just as incapable of multiplying or dividing by 100 as they were of doing so by 12 or 5,280. At the same time, the widespread adoption of duplicate measurements, as on the signs and labels mentioned above, was intended to pave the way for metrification, but it succeeded mainly in proving that it was, indeed, possible to use two systems of measurement at once. The idea of putting a quart of milk in a shopping cart next to a liter of soda turned out to be far less jarring for consumers than it had seemed to bureaucrats. And as the costs and inconveniences of a switchover became clearer, metrification came to look less and less attractive. By the end of the 1970s it was effectively dead--as a government fiat, that is, though many private industries adopted metric units on their own. What made the anti-metrification campaign such a milestone was that it helped put an end to the dominant pattern of American life since the 1930s, in which problems were attacked with broad, sweeping measures emanating from Washington: court decisions, legislation, executive orders, and so forth. The New Deal brought many successful examples of this approach from Congress and the President, while the Supreme Court kicked its reshaping of society into high gear with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Soon civil-rights legislation was reversing centuries of slavery and discrimination, even as constitutional amendments abolished the poll tax and reduced the voting age to 18. Perhaps the last big federal diktat of this sort was the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which barred states from making abortion illegal. As often happens with social movements, however, repeated successes made the number and zeal of the supporters grow ever bigger even as the list of easy targets grew ever smaller. At some point these trajectories always cross, and a point arrives when the momentum behind the movement becomes disproportionate to the size of the problems it's addressing. What happens next is that the leaders take a step too far, or many steps; the degeneration of anti-communism into McCarthyism is a classic example of this phenomenon. With the top-down approach to social reform, that point arrived in the 1970s, when crusading bureaucrats who had grown up on the New Deal and the civil-rights revolution were reduced to aiming their lances at speed limits, artificial sweeteners, and, as we have seen, even ounces and inches. The biggest shock to this system was the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, which seemed unstoppable and unexceptionable until opponents, most prominently Phyllis Schlafly, made the case against it. But the 1970s revolt against Washington-imposed reforms embraced a wide range of causes, large and small. Since then, the nation has continued to change in many ways, but it's hard to name a court decision, executive order, or congressional act that has been responsible for any major shift in American life (except unintentionally, as with the military communications network that became the Internet). For good or ill, the age when Washington decided where the nation should go and then led or pushed it there is over. Part of this is because all the problems with solutions amenable to this approach have been solved, but another part is because in the 1970s Americans finally decided that they'd had enough and told their government so.
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