Here are some comments on the passing scene and what are the cultural processes that go to explain these incidents concerning a football player, a Speaker of the House, and a Pope.
When I saw the hit by Damar Hamlin, a safety. against a big bruiser, I thought him very brave and willing to sacrifice himself for his team. I was surprised that the players and commentators were so surprised and shocked at what had happened., as if they didn't know, as some commentators said, this was a rough sport. It was quickly added that there were any number of medical experts on the sidelines to deal with traumas, including heart specialists and equipment, even though most injuries are orthopedic. That showed, supposedly to their credit, that they were prepared for everything. But that goes against the idea that they were surprisedI don't think the commentators were just giving the NFL party line of denial.. It struck me that they were football fans and so wanted to believe that football was as safe as possible given how much people like to see hard hits rather than touch football. The difference between football players and gladiators is that gladiators were going to die and that was part of the pleasure and excitement while NFL fans shy away from that even though they know ex players are crippled with arthritis and brain injuries and told to stash the money you make in their three year careers . Mothers know better. Arlington High, in Massachusetts, where my grandchildren went, can barely manage a football team and has no junior varsity because parents prefer their children to play soccer and baseball. The NFL just keeps making its money until it ends because there is no way to make football safe.
The perception that there is a conflict between the attractions and dangers of football reached the attention of the New York Times yesterday. So this sense is, so to speak, in the air, and so is both a prediction and a realization at the same time of what I( call a change in “a cultural moment”, which refers to sentiments, beliefs and practices that seem obvious and inevitable until things change, whatever the new sentiments, beliefs and practices to be themselves being now obvious and inevitable, an amnesia descending about the prior cultural condition and so requiring history to do the work of reclaiming what has now become an alien and ancient experience. We did that with duels and pantaloons. Here are some other examples. Walter Cronkite came home from a visit to Vietnam and predicted and helped make possible on his weeknight national broadcast that the Vietnam War was over other than to end it. His remarks were not excoriated but said to reflect the general tenor of the time even if only some pockets of opinion had said so previously. This was now the common wisdom and those who wanted to have the war even further escalated were now considered the outliers. The population, individually and collectively, had changed in a wink, like the Cossacks realizing in a wink that they would not challenge the workers, as Trotsky spells out with great clarity and drama, even though the underlying forces to explain that had been building for a while, as Trotsky also made clear.
Here is another example of what is a more gradual change that also involves people each on their own and also in collaboration changing a deeply held perspective. Somewhere in the late Forties, perhaps because of the Second World War in that more ex-soldiers had become more sophisticated by having been in military service, or because of motion pictures like “Pinkie” where Jeanne Crain played a Black woman who could pass, or because of Jackie Robinson, people dropped the derogatory designations used about Black people and so were regarded as another of the American peoples rather than a despised and subservient caste. It happened when the kids on my block changed the nursery rhyme from “Catch a nigger by the toe” to “catch a tiger by the toe”. I presume it was happening everywhere, some people not willing to give up what they thought a more accurate terminology for placing black people, true to their own now previous things, but coming to understand that past usages were now considered distasteful. The same kind of change took place with regard to women. An uncle in the Fifties said to me that his high school daughter should go to secretarial school after she graduated because only boys needed to go to college, but was very proud when she matriculated into a four year college. Women who were lawyers in the Forties were considered as very unusual people while many girls in their Fifties planned to become lawyers.
But the road to a cultural flip is not that easy and consists of important decisions about what stance is to be taken toward that change. Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to have his followers regarded as heroic even as they were also victims of oppression so as to counteract the idea that young Black men were hoodlums, a legacy only partly diminished by Al Sharpton’s chicanery with Tawana Brawley and Michael Brown who was a hoodlum in Furgeson, Missouri who was treated as a martyr. The Me Too movement emphasized the victimization of women, however correct are the facts of the matter when it comes to sexual matters, but that is different from the heroism whereby earlier women broke one or another glass ceiling. As to Damar Hamlin and his being for the moment the leading figure in the issue of the dangers of football as a sport, the story on the media was that when Hamlin awakened enough to ask which team won the game, the doctor said Hamlin won, because he won back his life, that turned Hamlin into a hero over health difficulties rather than a victim of football. I cannot outguess history as to whether hero or victim will play into the dangerous and possibly now unacceptable dangers of football.
Here is a second recent event in the passing parade. I have been riveted to watch most of the votes in the House of Representatives attempts to elect a Speaker of the House. Commentators and politicians say that this protracted process is disgraceful and makes the government ineffective. I feel otherwise. It seems to me that the House is doing its writ, showing divisions in the Republican Caucus, and all in accord with the legitimate procedures whereby a decision will be made. Members are generally decorous though there are reports that members have been cursing at one another in the cloakroom. People sit next to one another peaceably. That is different from what happened before the Civil War when a Southern congressman beat Sen. Seward with a cane. That might seem a very low bar but in light of the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol and given that half the Republican Caucus still think Biden was an illegal President. Maybe the good news is that even the Republican crazies are willing to follow procedure rather than engage in violence. Maybe they've lost the taste for violence and are just wanting to forget what happened without disowning it. Also, four days for picking a Speaker is not very long. There is no national or political crisis. When a Speaker is named the House will go back to usual, which means the Republicans will investigate Hunter Biden and be obstructionist about most legislation. I share Michael Moore’s view that the House should be disorganized for as long as possible because the Republican caucus remains overwhelmingly Insurrectionist and so do not deserve any respect.
The best way to appreciate the fight over the Speakership is to recognize it as a primitive Greek drama at a time when no one had yet emerged from the chorus to offer speeches but only some of them offered gestures. There is already a unity of space and time. The space is the House chamber, the 434 members (one congressman having died after the election in November) milling about on the floor. It is unified by time because it continues in real time, with the exception of adjournments, until its work is concluded and adds up in hours to a major mini-series. Every once in a while, people come in from off stage to tell, through the commentators, what is going on offstage, as also happens in Greek tragedy. The plot is elemental. The members of the chorus go through one roll call after another, each one announcing which candidate they vote for, and there is suspense in who will shift and what will be the result, all resulting through the tenth ballot, as I remember it, with the same twenty one holdouts against Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. The rep-etition of the names of the representatives elect provides a kind of monotonous “music” to accompany the proceedings. And then the dam breaks and on the fourteenth ballot, McCarthy is just one vote away from the Speakership, makes a personal appeal to Matt Gaetz to give in, Gaetz refusing and then a few minutes later relenting, at which point McCarty runs to the dias to ask for a change in the vote to move for adjournment, now that he has the vote, and calling for another vote so as to get the majority he needs, all this in gestures, however commented on by television pundits. Very well developed drama with a build up, a stasis, and then a breakthrough that arrives the story to a close.
Any drama generates the following considerations by an audience who has seen the play. In this case, the tv commentators provide the exploration into these issues. First, what are the characters of the main figures? Was Oedipus arrogant and rash or just doing what the fates had called him to do? Was Hamlet pathologically unassertive or very cunning? The commentators at MSNBC are certain that McCarthy is an opportunist who has no principles and some in the chorus agree that, as one put it, he lies to you and then he lies about you. What about the so-called rebels who resisted McCarthy? MSNBC regards them as Insurrectionists and therefore not to be taken as morally upright political views, something to which I agree. The second issue for commentators on a drama will draw out is the setting or context of the story. Was Thebes already scarred or deficient and so was appropriately chastised by making Oedipus King? What was really rotten in Denmark when Hamlet went back from Wittenberg? The last few roll calls happen on the anniversary of Jan. 6th and so commentators rush to say the drama unfolding in the House Chamber is an extension of the Insurrection even though the members seem remarkably orderly, only one few second physical altercation, because these people still believe in their insurrectionary beliefs but no longer think it wise to promote their views. What is left, as with any drama, what the future portends. What happens after Fortinbras takes over? Will he anoint a new Danish King? Willthe House go back to its usual Republican practices of blocking legislation and going into vile and mean spirited investigations or will it be like what has already happened, continue in semi-organization, the Speaker subject to constant recall and committees unable to function effectively? We will see. People rewrite Shakespeare to make it better and the House can be replied to see if it is altered by what has transpired.
A third event in recent days was the death and burial of Pope Benedict XVI. I thought many of his obituaries misjudged his legacy partly because they dealt with what he did in his Papacy, such as not clean the stables of the sexual abuse scandal and also because he had resigned as Pope, something that hadn’t happened in six hundred years. I would have highlighted other events. First, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was the one who kept Vatican II from refilling the drive to reform Catholicism about issues having to do with sex, whether about potential alterations of celibacy, birth control and the role of women, matters at least discussed when Pope John XXIII was in office. Ratzinger held true to his principles but some movement towards these more enlightened matters were stymied. Second, and in accord with his same conservative principles and his own theological acuteness, Benedict drew a clear line between Christianity and Islam, saying that Christianity had embraced Greek reason as an essential part of the Christian point of view rather than just what was a cultural fad that happened to be there when it was created, as happens when, for example, the Church can modify and slowly assimilate pagan practices when it is moving to assimilate a people converting to Christianity, or otherwise recognizing various customs of national churches. For Islam, Benedict thought, islam regarded itself as not subject to reason in its theology because it proclaimed that God could do anything it wanted but Christianity thought that God could only abide with reason, notwithstanding supernatural interventions. This theological division was of practical significance. He announced it at the time when Turkey was thinking of entering into the European Union and would therefore become its most populous member. Erugon took what Benedict said as an insult and decided to remain independent, furthering his own course, and so allowing Eirope to remain a Christian/secular continent. As was the case when Pope John Paul II went to Poland, the Vatican still commands many divisions. And third of all, Benedict, as some people remarked, was a great theologian, someone who cared about the essence of his beliefs, and that is worth admiring. I was particularly taken by his book about Jesus, an answer to those who want to reduce the Gospels to being rewritten as just about politics and pushing aside miracles. The miracles are part and parcel of what Christianity was and is about.
Why did the obituaries play it that way? It is because, like all journalism, a first draft of history, and all history is present minded even if it tries to be past minded, which would mean trying to convey the original feelings and ideas and customs of a time, Lincoln unfolding a way through the morass of having within his nation an enslaved people, rather than a teleologically driven sense that the inevitable outcome was to make slaves into full citizens and equal human beings in this nation. So we look into the dynamics of today as explaining the dynamics of yesterday and so Benedict is still enmired, as the Catholic Church might and should be, on child abuse by the clergy rather than the issues that animated Benedict, which was the role of reason and the so deeply embedded beliefs concerning gender and sexuality. History, after all, is a species of drama, and so tries to illuminate how inevitable forces are at work in the stories as they unfold, whether to sports figures, who are even so frail, or political leaders, who are often arrogant, or Popes, who have their own preoccupations alongside the preoccupations of the historians and obituary writers who comment on them.