A Reading List for the American Election

Spending too many years around academics has left me with the habit of constructing spur of the moment reading lists.  My daughter Andrée was often a victim of these spontaneous lists.  Of course, she usually politely ignored them.  At any rate, here is a short reading list for the impending U. S. election:

Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007. The one book every American should read.  Kuttner touches all the bases in this one.

Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong?,  Andrews and McMeel, Kansas City, 1992. This book, taken from a series of Philadelphia Inquirer articles, is still pertinent.

Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, Vintage Books, New York, 2007. The author examines the effects of layoffs in all sectors of the economy.

Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000. The translations of Beck’s works are not smooth reading. One suspects that the German is also a little stylistically challenged. But Beck is one of the best at attacking questions of the global economy. This is definitely worth reading.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005. I have to add a more philosophically oriented book to the list.  There are other titles from Bauman that I could cite, but this is definitely one of his better efforts.

The Rehabilitation of Barry Bonds

The Barry Bonds phenomenon reminds me of what we        Americans were taught in the days of the old Soviet Union.  In that type of Communist society, an individual could vanish, suddenly disappear.  With a change of regime or possibly on some bureaucratic whim, the same person could then reappear as a rehabilitated comrade.  ( In fact, there seems to be a certain number of contemporary phenomena which remind me of what we were taught about the Soviet Union in those days, but that is a topic for another blog entry.)  Barry Bonds has indeed basically disappeared from public memory (outside of San Francisco) except when an unhappy journalist or some fan in the thralls of unbridled moral indignation takes up the old mantra of  “cheating” in sports.  Very few observers of the baseball scene seem to want to discuss the topic of Bonds’ banishment.  There is certainly little talk about suspicions of collusion (a well known baseball term) with respect to his absence, even when it is sometimes mentioned that Team X may have benefited from a power bat in the middle of its mediocre lineup and that the absence of said bat caused the team to tank in early July.

I admit to being a Bonds fan.  In fact, Barry played for the two teams that I have liked since my youth: the San Francisco Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates.  I also admit that there is not much joy in being a Pirates’ fan in recent years.  About the best one can say about the current Pirates is that they have a great park. The Giants have come close to winning it all in recent years, but no Giant fan can forget that day in the fall of 2002 when Dusty Baker decided to take Russ Ortiz out of a crucial game to celebrate a little too early.  The current Giants provide little excitement outside of Tim Lincecum’s starts.  Decent pitching can not carry a team with as little offense as the 2008 Giants provide.  Again the ballpark is better than the team which it houses.

Despite Bonds’ virtual disappearance (we did see him at a Giants’ ceremony this year), books about him and the current situation in baseball are still found on the shelves of major bookstores.  This summer I read three of these books: Game of Shadows (Mark Fainaru-Wada & Lance Williams, 2006),  Juicing the Game (Howard Bryant, 2006) and Asterisk (David Ezra, 2008).

Game of Shadows is probably the best known of the three.  It contains the allegations about Bonds that were part of the “Balco Scandal”.  The more credible parts of the book actually deal with drug use in track and field competitions.  We get an unforgettable portrait of Balco chief Victor Conte as a sleazy con artist trying to work his way into the inner sanctums of various sports.  The description of the world of Olympic level track and field leaves the reader with the feeling that the baseball world is, comparatively speaking, a  moral paradise.  However, it is too evident that the authors also really dislike Bonds.  The spin on his character and personal life is extremely negative.  The book does not make an absolutely convincing case against Bonds and is relatively devoid of serious baseball insight.  It basically has a vendetta feeling about it: we don’t like this guy and we are going to bring him down.

Asterisk is the counter point to the baseball part of Game of Shadows. The author essentially takes all the  Balco type allegations concerning Bonds and either discredits or refutes them.  Here we are basically in the presence of an aggressive lawyer vigorously using the reasonable doubt defense.  Although the author’s style leaves a little to be desired, his argumentation is fairly solid and he adds some anecdotal evidence that is favorable to a more balanced appreciation of Bonds’ situation.

The most serious baseball oriented book among the three is Juicing the Game, which is not strictly concerned with Bonds, but rather with the state of baseball since the 1994 labor conflict.  It situates Bonds’ achievements in that broader context.  I believe that this is the correct way to approach the question of those achievements and Bonds’ supposed steroid use, especially when we consider his role in the revival of the Giant franchise in San Francisco.

First, there is the question of steroid use: did Bonds systematically use illicit substances to enhance his performance?  That question has not definitively been answered at this point.  Until Bonds admits to deliberate sustained drug use or until there is actual proof that he used these products over a prolonged period of time, any accusation of this type of substance abuse is relatively (permit me to use the word) unsubstantiated.  Anecdotal evidence or fabricated myths are not proof of actual programmatic drug use. The fact that Bonds’ body does not look like what it was when he was 18 years old (neither does Vladimir Guerrero’s or mine, for that matter) is not real evidence.  The fact that he hit home runs en masse at 40 years old is not evidence either (See Baseball Prospectus’ discussion of  “power spikes” in players’ careers in Baseball Between the Numbers, 2006).  In fact, Ezra’s book is excellent in its discussion of many of these aspects of Bonds’ alleged steroid use.

Secondly, suppose that Bonds used steroid type substances for some period of time.  The question to be asked is: what does steroid use exactly do to make a player better?  Does the player have better recuperation time, better reflexes, more endurance, more power, better hand-eye coordination?  In the case of baseball, it is said that there are certain advantages to be gained from steroid use, but there has been no real attempt (that I know of) to publicly identify a specific performance enhanced  by steroid use by a particular player in a given situation in his career.  For example, is it apparent that a particular fly ball hit by Bonds on a given day, in a given stadium, off a 90 mph fastball, actually travel X feet farther because of a strength boost from a steroid type product?  Did the Rocket throw 90+ mph further into his starts late in August because of some type of drug use?  If the allegations of steroid use were taken seriously by those involved in the game and the baseball public, these type of questions would be discussed in greater depth.  In other words, let’s have concrete examples.

We also know that steroid use does not guarantee great performances.  Most of the minor league players who were suspended for steroid use never even made it to the major leagues and most marginal or average players suspected of this illicit substance use have remained marginal or average.  And it is necessary to point out that we are in an era when the use of nutritional supplements of all kinds is common in sports. Howard Bryant points out that the Congress was actually complicit in the spread of supplement use when it deregulated the nutritional supplement field in 1994.  I was made aware of the use of protein supplements when my son started playing Division 1 baseball.  It was if the baseball coaches were more interested in weight training and the physical stature of their players than in their baseball fundamentals. Obviously, the step to steroid type drug use is a step beyond this, but the culture of the cultivation of physical stature exists in baseball: your team may not win its conference, but those players sure look good.

In my view, there must be something else at stake here.  Obsession with baseball records is one thing.  But serious baseball fans know that baseball has passed through various “eras” and that the relation between offense and pitching has not remained constant over the years.  The “dead ball” era is not only chronologically, but also statistically, far removed from the baseball of  2000.  If we refer to a time closer to our contemporary scene, the years in the 1960’s  when a player could win a batting crown with a .300 average are now also seen as anomalies.  As comforting as it is to have a sort of benchmark like 60 home runs in a season, why would that benchmark necessarily make sense in an era with small stadiums, very lively baseballs, little aggressive pitching, minuscule strike zones and bigger, stronger players?  ( Not to mention  the encouragement of strong offensive production by management to attract fans back to baseball after the 1994 debacle.  This is the place to thank Howard Bryant for a great job in putting all that in perspective.)  With the long careers currently enjoyed by some players, is it surprising that some hallowed lifetime performance records are in jeopardy?  Not only are careers prolonged by medical advances and better conditioning, but a superior player often begins a major league career at a relatively young age.

We have seen other examples of drug use in baseball.  Even my favorite team of all time, the Stargell era Pirates, were implicated in cocaine use.  It is not the drug use that surprises me the most, but it is rather the reaction of not only many fans, but also many casual observers of the sports scene, to the “steroid scandal”.  We are sometimes confronted with verbal and/or visual caricatures of Bonds that make him look as if he were one of those fabled Bulgarian weight lifters from Olympic competition and the opposing pitcher look as if he had just finished a career with some very non-competitive Little League team.  The idea here seems to be that Bonds was on steroids and the rest of the league, especially the pitchers, were cherubim or seraphim.  But, in this scenario, do we really know what percentage of those pitchers were (also) on steroids?  Should there be an asterisk only placed next to steroid Bonds/non-steroid pitcher home runs and not the others?  Maybe it comes down to a question of probability: determine the probably that Bonds vs, pitcher X was really a confrontation between two illicit pharmaceutical suppliers (sort of like legendary games of playground basketball teams sponsored by local drug lords).

There are certainly many opportunities to display idiotic behavior in the current baseball context, but my favorite is the one that simply says “all that I know is that Bonds is a cheater “, as if we were all on a playground in some primary school and he ran off with all of our marbles and we have to run to tell that to the first nun we see.  Maybe it says something about American society: cutting corners on taxes is okay, cutting (big) corners on Wall Street is okay (well maybe we are learning that it isn’t ), but the hint that a baseball record could be “tainted” or achieved by a player that we may not like (anyone remember Roger Maris?) is a moral outrage. Curiously, the same outrage doesn’t always apply to football.  Everyone seems to accept the presence of 300 pound linemen in college football as if these 20 year old mastodons were members of an organically cultivated indigenous species.  It seems that the only prohibited acts in that sport are limited intellectual property theft and creative celebrations in the end zone.

As a baseball aside, let’s look at Bonds’ 73 home run season and see which pitchers he homered against. There are only 10 of them with career ERA’s under 4.00 and three of those (Chuck McElroy, Mike Remlinger and Scott Sullivan) were essentially career relievers.  Two of them, Lou Pote and Chuck Smith had careers with less than 225 innings pitched in the major leagues.  The top of the line pitchers he homered against were: Kevin Appier (1), A. J. Burnett (1), Curt Schilling (3), Mike Hampton (2) and Darryl Kile (1). He also homered against Wade Miller(1), Woody Williams(1), Mark Mulder (2),  Chan Ho Park (3) and Steve Trachsel (1), each of whom could be considered as a respectable starting pitcher at some point in his career.  That is hardly 73 blasts against All-Star level pitching (and only two of these homers traveled more than 450 feet according to Baseball-almanac. com). But this is not an effort to disparage Bonds’ accomplishment. Years ago I did the same exercise with my son (romedawg31.wordpress.com) concerning Mark McGwire’s record home run season and, although we don’t usually agree on many things in baseball, we did agree that at least 50% of those homers were hit against second order pitching.  Now I admit that I haven’t done the same exercise for Babe Ruth, but it is not difficult to believe that exceptional hitters may be likely to take disproportionate advantage of mediocre pitching.

It is possible that we (outside San Francisco) can conclude that we can’t accept Bonds’ achievements because we simply don’t like him.  He is an arrogant black man who doesn’t fit the nice guy image of sports’ heroes that the media cultivates and many of us love.  He is not Cal Ripken.  Suppose that we leave the race issue aside (because it would lead us to another discussion about our sports heroes which would be even longer than this blog entry).  Why does a baseball player have to fit this image and be a “nice guy”? As a society, are we that emotionally deprived that we cannot distinguish between athletic performance and personality?  I may be a Bonds fan or a Randy Johnson fan (also true), but that does not mean that I absolutely want to hang out with either of them at my local café discussing Heidegger.   I certainly can’t blame players for being unhappy with journalists of the canonical “how does it feel ?” school.  And dissatisfied journalists can severely damage a player’s public image.  But, at any rate, what the player does in his personal life and  the state of his relations with the media are only peripherally interesting to me.  In Bonds’ favor (and this is that something purists should admire), we should also note that he has only played for two teams in his career.  And the respect that he shows for the Giant tradition is exemplary.

So, to return to our starting point, should American society rehabilitate Barry Bonds?  Will his image once again appear on our television screens without hints of the presence of federal marshals and dire tones of scandalized reporters?  When the proverbial dust settles on this baseball era and we look back on it with a little historical perspective, Barry Bonds will probably be rehabilitated.  At worst, he was the best and most talented player of a tainted era whose complexity we have not yet unraveled.  At best, he was simply the best hitter of his time and we owe him the respect that his accomplishments merit.  Yet in a country which still reveres Ronald Reagan (despite all the ravages that deregulation of the economy has inflected on American society) and which is in rapture of the down home qualities of Sarah Palin, I don’t sense that we will immediately see the type of critical thinking that will allow a measured evaluation of Bonds’ place in baseball.  Bonds will not be rehabilitated in the immediate future.  But he certainly deserves that rehabilitation and the fact that he was essentially forced out of baseball is indeed a travesty.

Favorites

What is the coolest dance scene in film?

I’d have to pick the scene with Arthur, Odile and Franz in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part. The dancing dwarf in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks must have been a Godard fan.

Introduction

What is this blog?

Being a reader of George Pelecanos’ fiction, I once subscribed to his on-line newsletter and was surprised to find that the best part of the newsletter wasn’t personal promotional material on his latest productions, but rather his lists of what he was reading and the music that he liked to listen to. I immediately thought that making these kinds of public lists was a very cool thing.  Since our days in elementary school, many of us have enjoyed sharing our likes (and maybe dislikes) publicly with others, even if in many cases that sharing came down to a sort of anonymous intervention in some public forum. Few of us have the notoriety that the literary pedigree of an author of the reputation of Pelecanos confirms, but the internet allows us to make public musings and comments which were previously almost always forcibly private.  Maybe this is not a good thing. There’s enough opinion and personal commentary out there now without adding to it.

I can now turn to that standard rhetorical trick of the “Yes, but on the other hand…”. There is indeed too much bavardage out there and I am, in fact, shamelessly adding to it.  What is there to say?  My only defense is to remark that it is unlikely that anything I write will be read by very many people, so I will probably not be adding to literary pollution.  I am certainly willing to accept the idea that I am actually writing for myself.  In essence, rather than simply  picking out a classy pen,  purchasing a brightly colored Clairefontaine and writing a few thoughts in a cahier  (following a relatively clichéd image that I would like to refer to, if not actually entertain), I will use this blog to do an analogous thing.  Maybe doing this is simply following the advice of my Ph.D. supervisor in the days when computer use started to become popular among non-science academics: simply open the computer and write down that thought, reference, etc. that you might use in your thesis.  Or it may be that I am trying to claim a piece of cyberspace that I can show to my friend, the poet Bobby Lietz, who has claimed a more than modest amount of that space with his poetry (and now with his photo albums).  Or it may be that I’ve tried the cahier route and been frustrated by the tearing out of pages and the unhappiness of always trying to find that unique pen that I am supposed to be using in order to ensure that the writing has that look that we see in the vintage notebooks of famous writers.

But, to now invoke an expression which I often used when faced with surprising ardor, unusual intelligence or unexpected comportment on the part of my students , this blog already makes me nervous.  Despite the fact that blogs are supposed to be personal, I am embarrassed by the overuse of the first person.  Almost all of my writing, either in philosophy or in mathematics, has tried to avoid the first person singular. In mathematics, that is not surprising. In philosophy, I always tried to maintain a certain authorial distance . Distance is necessary to let ideas organize themselves and then to push them rhetorically in the direction that they need to take.  When we read philosophy, we criticize the rhetoric (which, in fact, stands in for the author) as much as concepts. In this blog, there will be a place for both types of writing.

The other reason for avoiding the first person in academic writing is a certain type of modesty. It is annoying (to not use a stronger word) to read authors who lay out very uninteresting and and banal ideas with great feigned enthusiasm, not recognizing that these ideas are often superficial and/or du réchauffé. Academic journals are full of that type of writing.  But modesty demands that a writer respect the tradition from which he/she comes and that he/she acknowledge that it is unlikely (although not impossible) that anything he/she produces will really be all that inspiring, unique or profound compared to the founders of that tradition.

Even though this blog may combine both types of writing, it has no formal academic pretension. It is commentary liberated from the constraints of formal academic writing. There will be sections involving politics and culture, which will be more pop oriented, along the lines of the Pelecnaos lists. But there will also be more formally oriented entries that relate to philosophical topics.  For many of my teaching years I exchanged written comments with my office partner, Herr deBruyn.  There were semesters in which our schedules had minimal intersection and it was a way of amusing ourselves by communicating fairly random thoughts on politics, mathematics, philosophy and literature. Of course,  the usual unkind observations about colleagues, work relations, etc. were not excluded. After having read Wittgenstein one semester, we stocked up on discarded paper from the college print shop. This paper was often cut into little rectangles about the size of standard index cards and was meant to serve as notepaper . We immediately realized the value of these Zettel and our comments were often restricted to what would fit on one of them. Now that I no longer share an office with this distinguished colleague and friend, I would like to think of this blog as my new collection of Zettel.

Why métacritique?

To anyone vaguely familiar with European thought, critique is most often used with a Kantain overtone. Subsequently, métacritique is used to refer to the questioning of the ground on which critique is founded, to the epistemological status of presuppositions, the “positioning” of the critical instance with respect to critique. If we relate métacritique to the tradition of the Frankfort School,  we can say that it seeks to render  the social dimension of critique less opaque. ( For appropriate details, see Garbis Kortian, Métacritique, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979) This blog does not have the pretension of operating in the elevated domain of this métacritique,  but it does operate with the inspiration that the concept provides.

Who is the author?

I am a native of Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of LeMoyne College. After studying mathematics at the Ph.D level in the U.S and Canada, I obtained a M.A. in études littéraires (UQAM) and a Ph.D in littérature comparée at l’université de Montréal. I taught mathematics at Vanier Cégep (Saint-Laurent, Québec) until January of this year.