I Bet You Gonna Find Some People Who Live in Memphis

Apologies in advance to my close friends and family, but the truth is that there is quite literally nothing in the world that I love more than Memphis.

Thanks in part to the Grizzlies' inspiring display of our city's three most valuable homegrown resources-- heart, grit, and grind-- and in larger part thanks to the countless bona fide Memphians' and their adoptees' embracing of genuine civic pride, a whole lot of people are seeing and feeling that same love lately.

My good friend, Al Bell (Memphis music legend and former owner of Stax) and I were hanging out a few days ago when he said to me: "Dr. J, folks like us have a spiritual connection that can't be explained to people who don't know Memphis.  There is so much wealth here-- not money, but music and love and culture and people and soul.  That's real wealth.  Our job is to find it and bring it out."  Al is, of course, an expert in just that sort of excavation, having marshaled Stax through its most tumultuous years in the 70's.  But as he knows, and I know, Memphis can be stingy with its resources, sometimes even blind to them, and it's historically had an almost pathological tendency towards self-sabotage.

For those of us who love Memphis unconditionally, that pathology can be maddening sometimes.  I mean, really, where else can you find a city in which the local symphony performs with the local rap icon, or you can just hang out on the street and experience this, or this, or this happens? Where the THEME SONG of the city is "All I Do Is Win"? Where we're all but over-loaded with the very best of the political, cultural, and artistic history that all but anchors the American identity?  The National Civil Rights Museum.  Stax.  Sun Records.  Graceland.  Beale Street. That's not even to get started on the flat-out divinely-inspired things we can do with a pig.   And so, the effect of the Grizzlies' unlikely revival of Memphis in the last couple of years, which has done nothing more and nothing less than make a city full of reluctant and reticent believers-- and more than its share of nonbelievers-- into a city full of evangelically loud believers, is an overdue godsend.  Memphis, it appears, will not be sabotaged any longer.

In her 1970 recording of the Mississippi River Delta-inspired song "Proud Mary," the barely-northeast-of-Memphis Nutbush-born Tennessean Tina Turner, serving as the mouthpiece for millions of present and former Memphians, said: We never do anything nice and easy.  We like to do it nice and rough. Truer words were never spoken.  Memphis could always have done a lot of things easier than we did.  But we've always elected, voluntarily or otherwise, to do it nice and rough.  Why?  Quite simply, because if you go down to the river, you're gonna find some people who live.  And real living, for the vast majority of us, is hardly ever nice and easy.  There are precious few places in this country where people so deeply and existentially understand that just living is rough-- just getting up every day hoping that it's better than the last, just finding some place to work and to make ends meet, just manufacturing the means to suffer or combat a million both tragic and mundane injustices, just finding a warm (or cool) and safe place to lay your head at night, and just finding some people to eat and laugh and love and dance with while you try to do your best at living.  It's something that requires all the heart, grit and grind a person can muster.

Heart, grit and grind don't pay the bills, though, and I'll be the first of the million Memphians to testify to that. "Proud Mary" says that you don't have to worry 'cause you got no money, people on the river are happy to give. But, truth is, Memphis is poor and not a lot of people have a lot to give.  Memphis has very real and abiding problems with violence and crime.  Memphis is and has always been deeply divided, a microcosm of the very same race and class issues that deeply divide our country as a whole.  Memphis fights with itself, which means that it loses every battle it wins, and wins every battle it loses.  Even still, as they are able and often even more than they are able, people on the river are happy to give. 

Given the right conditions, which have only just arrived, Memphis has more to give than anyone ever imagined.  Just read the testimonies, nay, the love letters showing up recently all over the web.  Red Coleman's explanation of our "grit and grind" mantra.  Apryl Child-Potter's beautiful-written genealogy of Memphis civic pride.  Chris Herrington's account of Memphis' "Norma Rae moment." Those writers, and the rest of us who never doubted, might want to cry foul at the host of bandwagon-jumpers, but we won't.  Because people on the river are happy to give.  (Don't believe me?  Check this out.)  So I'm not surprised at all, just as Al Bell told me, that we've finally found the right set of conditions to begin the long process of excavating our immeasurable local real wealth.  And I'm even less surprised that, as we say here, ERRYBODY is jumping on board.

Welcome aboard the Memphis bandwagon, y'all.  The most soulful, passionate, crazy, infectious, tasty, libidinous, musical, gritty and, to be honest, sexiest wagon around.

Here's the thing, full disclosure:  I'm from Memphis, I was raised here, and everything good and bad about this city is etched deeply and enduringly in my psyche and soul.  Over the years, I've left for longer and shorter stints elsewhere-- in Nashville, Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse, State College and Hartford-- but the inexplicably serendipitous wisdom of the Universe kept returning me to where I belong. I've always been an unapologetic fan of the underdog (see my post on "Underdogmatism") and I'm a self-appointed ambassador for Memphis (see my "Why I Chose Memphis" series, in which I solicited Memphians to give their accounts of why they chose to live here).  Locals will tell you, sometimes with gratitude and sometimes with exasperation, that Memphis is a place that won't let you go, keeps bringing you back, whether you want it to or not.  And it's true that here, like countless other places in this country, a lot of people try desperately their whole lives to break free of the grip of their hometown.  That's not true for me.  I don't want Memphis to let me go. It's let me go before, and I'm sure it will again, but I will always come back. 

My dear friend Adriel Trott (a native Philadelphian, so she knows of which she speaks) once told me that "you can't really say that you love a city until it's given you reason not to."  Of course, I know of all the reasons that people say that Memphis is unlovable.  Those people are wrong.  And they have no idea the love they're missing out on by not believing in this underdog.  There are plenty of things to be wary of when it comes to mass displays of civic pride, and I'm certainly sensitive to those concerns, but what we're seeing happening in Memphis right now is nothing short of what philosophers call the sensus communis, a binding together of individuals such that the judgment of each is consonant with the judgment of all.

For those of you who've had the Grindhouse experience, who've been one of the 180K fans raising their growl towels in the air, face-foward, proudly displaying Memphis's various messages of self-affirmation to the world-- "Grit", "Grind", "Believe Memphis", "We Don't Bluff"-- you know that you've felt the awesomeness of really being a part of something much bigger, better and greater than yourself.  You've had the experience of being a part of a genuine collective.  You've had the experience of being a Memphian.   

I can't quit you, Memphis.  I don't really want to know how.  I believe.

RMWMTMBM Restart

I'm really, truly and exceedingly happy to announce that the "restart" button has been pushed on this blog as of TODAY.   As many of you know, I have been undergoing my tenure-review this past year and, as a consequence, was advised-- more or less wisely, I'm not sure-- to minimize my "online" presence during those deliberations.  (That process is still ongoing, now in the hands of an Appeals Committee, but my participation in it is thankfully finished.)  This site has been very important to me for many, many years and, judging from the traffic it has continued to receive in my absence, it appears to have remained important to many of you.  Neglecting it has most definitely carved a noticeably felt and "public intellectual"-shaped hole in my personal and professional life in the interim.  So, I'm glad to be back.

I'll also say that the process I've undergone in the last year has provided me much time and opportunity to think about the merits and demerits of scholarly/intellectual life in so-called "new media" fora. (For the record, I think "new" is a grossly inapt descriptor at this point.)   The apex of the "public intellectual" phenomenon is largely taken to be a mid-20th-C. event, and the vitality of the public intellectual's life is understood to have declined rapidly after that short-lived peak.  Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline is a interesting study of this.  Pace Posner, who worries that 21st C. fora like blogs and social media sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) have left us with no "quality-control" on public intellectual life, I find that these media are becoming more and more obviously vetted by something very closely akin to the more traditional expert "peer-review" regulations.  Of course, it is still the case that anyone with an Internet connection can write/post anything he or she wants, but Posner et al's worry that everything that is out there is being read ceteris paribus seems to be a largely misplaced worry as we move rapidly forward in this new century.  Just in the last year, while I have been (for the most part) away from this site, I have seen an increasing number of my colleagues move to or advocate for not only "new media" scholarly productions but also "open-access" publications of more traditional scholarly output, the latter an obvious consequence of the force and influence of the former. That is to say, to borrow a phrase from one of our country's great public intellectuals: you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, 'cause the times, they are a'changing.

In sum, you can expect to see more regular posts on this site henceforth.  So please bookmark, or re-bookmark, RMWMTMBM in whatever reader you employ.  And, as ever, I look forward to the conversations.

The "Real" and "True" You

Last week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of "documentary truth."  In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib) and analyze that film in light of a couple of the assigned readings: Plato's Allegory of the Cave (from Book VII of the Republic) and a short essay by Werner Herzog entitled "On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth." In addition to the film that each student chooses from that week's list, all of us watch at least one film in common every week.  This time, our in-common film was the 2010 documentary Catfish, which tells the story of a 20-something New Yorker (Nev Schulman) who falls in love with a small-town Michigan woman on Facebook, but later comes to discover that he had been hoodwinked ("catfished") by his virtual paramour, who is in fact not  a twenty-something model/musician/artist (as she purported to be) but rather a middle-aged woman, married with four children (two of which are severely handicapped and one who is in rehab).  The film has since been transformed into a weekly television series on MTV, which follows the not-at-all-uncommon repetitions of Nev's experience.  Catfish was a particularly fertile documentary for our class, not only because it provided us an opportunity to question what sort of "truth" documentaries (as opposed to narrative or fictional films) aim to tell, but also because Catfish is itself a documentary ABOUT the search for the "truth." 

If you haven't had a chance to see Catfish yet, what follows will most definitely include a few (non-devastating) spoilers.  Here's the trailer:



Our primary reading-- Plato's Allegory of the Cave-- is a standard text in Philosophy classes that mean to investigate the truth of our experience.  It is particularly well-suited for discussing cinema, as the cinematic experience itself so closely resembles that of the cave-dwellers in Plato's allegory, who are captivated by projections of images of the "real," disinclined or unable to turn away from them, and who may (or may not) be missing out on the "truth" of what they take to be real and true. This is why, I think, so many philosophers employ films to aid them in teaching Plato's allegory.  (The Matrix is probably the film most widely used for this purpose, but others include The Truman Show, Inception, Pleasantville, eXistenZ, and 1984.) After our screening of Catfish, several easily-anticipated questions/issues arose in our discussions:  did the film present a true/real account of what actually happened to Nev?  why did Nev's catfish (Angela) create her "fake" Facebook identity?  what are the moral implications of Angela's deceit?  how can we be sure that the people with whom we interact-- as friends, lovers, colleagues, even family-- are "really" or "truly" the same as their presentations of themselves to us?

It's that last question that I was hoping students would ask, and which makes the story of Catfish so interesting, in my view.  Almost universally, I think, viewers find themselves immediately and intuitively inclined to reject Angela's "deceit" on moral grounds.  It helps that Facebook is at the center of this whole story as well, since even Facebookophiles have a tendency to parrot the standard criticisms of that social-networking site when the differences between it and "real"-life social networking are exploited. Angela created, presented and maintained a persona that was not the "real" or "true" her, or so the story goes.  But why, I asked my students (and myself), do we take our flesh-and-bones selves to be so much more true or more real than our virtual/digital selves?  Maybe there's an argument to be made for the reverse, that is, that our virtual/digital selves are just as true and real, in many ways more true and more real, than our flesh-and-bones selves.  And so, what follows are a few considerations-- undeveloped, unorganized, and incomplete, to be sure... but, still, I think, persuasive-- aimed to give you pause in thinking that Flesh-and-Bones-You (henceforth, the "material you" or MY) is truer than the Digital-You (henceforth, DY):

1. MY can only barely function in the world independent of DY.  Perhaps one of the most devastating things that can happen to anyone today is to have his or her digital "identity" stolen.  There is very little MY can do to prove that s/he is real or true without the help of DY.  The banks, the grocery stores, the utilities companies, the courts, the police, the hospitals, not to mention Facebook and Google, only know DY (and care very little, if at all, about MY).  It is almost impossible for MY to do almost anything without doing so in consort with (if not entirely as) DY.  I'm sure we all have fantasies from time to time about going "off the grid," but that's nigh close to impossible these days.

2.  DY is thoroughly, completely, and constantly archived.  The archive of DY is permanent and (for the most part) unedited, hence more "objectively true."  DY has a faaaar better memory than MY, partly because it never-- EVER-- forgets, but also because there are a host of institutions, networks, corporations, agencies and other DY's helping to contribute to the record any particular DY.  Our organic memories, just like our stories of ourselves, are incomplete and very often not completely true.  They're pruned and edited and massaged to suit MY's desire to understand itself as, to borrow Kierkegaard's phrase, an "actually existing individual."  Between DY's and MY's autobiographical accounts, though, it's hardly a contest for which is more "objectively" true in the strictest terms.

3.  In most cases, "you" are known by others more widely and operationally (i.e., to more people and to a greater functional degree)  as DY than MY.  This is, in some part, a repeat of point (1), but with superadded dimension of intersubjectivity.  It's not just that MY can't function very well independent of DY, but also that many more people "know" only DY and not MY.  I call this the "Harvey Phenomenon": you may think that your giant rabbit friend Harvey, who no one else can see, is real and true, but if you're the only one who knows Harvey, the rest of us are going to call him imaginary.

4. DY exhibits (and executes) far more of the multivalence of "personal identity" than MY can.  Because DY is not so obviously tied to a single body, at a single point in space and time, it can take on many different-- and sometimes conflicting-- identities.  What is more, DY can also operate anonymously or pseudonymously, and it is no less real or true when it does so.  Consequently, DY is able to capture far more of the "performative" sense of personal identity (see Sartre, Butler, et al), which is not as singular or uniform as our bodies-in-space-and-time are.

5.  More and more, DY shapes and forms MY as much as MY shapes and forms DY.  Thanks to companies like Amazon and Google, the constantly updated archive of DY is able to track the preferences, patterned behaviors, standards and norms of MY.  Almost imperceptibly, through the power of suggestion and positive reinforcement, DY then works to regularize MY, making it more standard and, thus, easier to predict.  We like to think that DY is an ex nihilo creation of MY, and in part it is, but more and more the reverse is also true.  DY can't (yet) create MY ex nihilo but it can create MY's patterns of behavior.  What you read or listen to, what you buy, how you filter your news, who you befriend (or unfriend) and many more elements of your life (important or mundane) are created as patterns for MY by DY.

I'm still thinking on this, and I'm not yet ready to jump the shark and say that DY is the "real" or "true" you... but I'm thoroughly persuaded that it's folly to say DY is not a "real" or "true" you.  And I'm almost persuaded to say that, in many but not all ways, DY is more real or true than MY.  What is interesting about the film Catfish is that it shows, in the end, that Angela's so-called deception of Nev was not so much a veiling of the true and the real as it was an unveiling of such, for all parties involved. As sci-fi author Philip K. Dick once wrote, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."  The great, terrible and inescapable existential truth of MY is that, one day, it will go away.  Death is MY's ownmost possibility.  Our organic, "natural" selves will cease to be real and true at our moment of death.  But, even after MY is gone, Nature herself will still be ordered mathematically-- and the real truth of DY, which is nothing but ones and zeroes, will persist.  DY, really and truly, may never go away.  Even if you don't believe it.

One last thought:  In the final scene of the film, Angela's husband (Vince) explains the film's title.  Here's what he says:



Perhaps every MY, and not just the ones whose DY we find deceitful or misleading, is a kind of "catfish."  MYs keep us agile, on our toes, fresh, thinking and guessing. And they may be our last organic stand against DYs' total claim on the real and the true.

Film of Exception: Zero Dark Thirty

I'm not sure exactly where to place the blame for the total disappointment that is the (Academy Award-nominated) film Zero Dark Thirty, which tells a based-on-real-events story of "the greatest manhunt in history."  The hunted is, of course, al-Qaeda founder and mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden.  Zero Dark Thirty is organized as a series of more or less coherently connected shorts, chronologically arranged, beginning with a black screen and panicked-voice recordings from September 11, 2001, and ending with the 2010 raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound and his assassination by U.S. Navy SEALs.  There are basically two sequences in this two-and-a-half hour film that are (cinematically, at least) redeeming: the black-ops raid at the end and an earlier scene in which CIA agents try to locate key informant Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti by tracing his cellphone activity in an urban Pakistani market.  That is to say, those are the two sequences that capitalize on director Katheryn Bigelow's strengths.  Anyone who has seen Bigelow's earlier works (The Hurt Locker, Strange Days, The Weight of Water, Point Break) can attest that action sequences are directly in her wheelhouse.  But, alas, those rare pieces of excellent direction are buried deep within a film that is terribly written, even more terribly acted, and which perhaps most terribly follows a narrative arc that flattens out almost all of the issues and questions that would make this film interesting (and perhaps even important) in favor of a reductive made-for-television melodrama about a pretty, plucky CIA agent who delivers history's most infamous terrorist his comeuppance.

I really can't exaggerate how bad the acting is in Zero Dark Thirty.  In defense of the actors, though, it didn't appear that the script gave them much to work with, as almost all of the characters are drawn to have exactly one more dimension than a corpse. The non-American characters are interesting inasmuch as they are incomplete and thus somewhat mysterious, but they are allowed to be incomplete and mysterious only to push along the clunky machinery of the plot.  The American CIA agents, on the other hand, are all utterly unbelievable noir gumshoe-cartoons, and the scenes in which they talk to one another (more often, at one another) are truly painful to watch.  The film's only mildly interesting characters are the Navy SEALs (partly because they are themselves perfectly-rendered caricatures of our collectively-imagined "good ol' boy" American heroes) and the CIA "enhanced" interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke), though almost everything that could be compelling in Dan is summarily dismissed in throwaway comments about the moral ambiguity of torture.

The real disappointment of Zero Dark Thirty, however, is not so much what it does (and does poorly) but rather what it fails to do.  There are a million missed opportunities in Bigelow's film.  First, it doesn't complicate-- and only barely addresses-- the issue of torture, which the film itself depicts as a crucial plot point in the bin Laden manhunt (and which is the cause for much of the brouhaha surrounding Bigelow's film).  As the story passes through the circa-2004 (read: release of the Abu Ghraib photos) period, Bigelow barely waves an obligatory hand at the impact of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EIT) scandal on the American public, American foreign policy and CIA operational policy.  There's one scene in which Obama's "America does not torture" interview is playing on the television in the background and a couple of other scenes in which higher-up administrators remark to their subordinates that their jobs have been made more difficult by the EIT scandal, but there is nothing in the film that compels its audience to consider those as anything more than they are depicted, that is, background noise and throwaway remarks.  The one torturer whose name we know (Dan) leaves the field and returns to Washington at one point in the film. The reason for his decision is vaguely rendered as vaguely related to his experiences with torture, but even that psychological distress is depicted as not much more complicated than your garden-variety workplace fatigue.  Although the infamous waterboarding scene is viscerally disturbing (and is accompanied by several other equally-disturbing EIT scenes), any moral disturbance the audience might experience while viewing those scenes will be a direct consequence of the moral sophistication the audience brings with them, not anything provided or provoked by the film.

Secondly, and correspondingly, Zero Dark Thirty doesn't offer much in the way of complicating the moral or political wisdom of the nearly nine-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden either, far less the moral or political permissibility of his (and many, many others') extra-judicial assassination.  As a viewer who resolutely condemns the latter and deeply questions the former, even I found myself partially succumbing to the excitement and suspense of the dramatic SEAL raid that is the film's climax and takes up the better part of its last half-hour or so.  That is a credit, I think, to Bigelow's skill as an action-film director but a discredit to the film, which never seems to take very seriously that it is "based on real events" and consequently not just another action film.  Saudis, Afghanis and Pakistanis are dehumanized, instrumentalized, tortured and killed in this film as indiscriminately as any Soviet in any 1980's action flick, and with equally minimal moral effect.  What this film really effects in its audience, unfortunately, is an even greater passivity with regard to the reality it purports to depict, including all of the ugliness and wrongness and real danger of the policies at work in what philosopher Giorgio Agamben called our Ausnahmezustand or "state of exception."

Agamben speculated that the (zero-)dark(-side) of sovereign power is that it can always extend its powers in times of crisis by declaring a "state of exception," that is, by declaring the State itself as an exception to the rights and rules that the power of the state is normally meant to protect and enforce.   Our State, the American state, has repeatedly done this since the crisis of 9/11, excepting itself from laws proscribing torture, assasination, rendition and detention, the violation of civil rights and the execution of preemptive wars, all in the name of protecting the power that secures those laws.  We citizens, vulnerable wards of our state's power, are meant to ignore (better still, accept and sanction) these over-extensions of power for the sake of our own interest.  Slowly, stealthily and inevitably-- and we have no doubt seen this development in our own country over the last decade-- the state of exception becomes not only a state policy but a civic posture.  When the citizenry begins to unreflectively adopt this posture, we find ourselves asking ourselves otherwise unthinkable questions like "is torture morally permissible?" (as we did in 2004) or shrugging our shoulders at news like this reporting that the very state that is meant to protect us can legally order our deaths by drone-strike.

Kathryn Bigelow is, of course, a film director and Mark Boal is a screenwriter.  They're not elected officials or policymakers, nor are they priests or professors, and their primary vocation is neither to influence powers of state nor to shape the consciences of moral agents.  Their primary vocation, presumably, is to make art.  But, on the whole, Zero Dark Thirty is like the strange bastard child of Art and Politics.  It seems to want to render aesthetically something like a commentary on power and morality, while at the same time excepting itself from many of the rules that make doing so meaningful or instructive.  If Zero Dark Thirty were fictional, it would no doubt be an imaginative and entertaining piece of action-filmmaking.  Connected as it is to real history and our real world, however, it fails as both art and politics.  It distracts where it should focus, it hyperbolizes where it should exact, it reductively answers where it should provocatively question, it resolves where it should complicate.  In the course of doing so, it ends up reproducing just the kind of audience that it should unsettle, and it rewards that audience for its passive dispassion. If you happen to be one of the unfortunate souls who came to the film already disturbed by the events it means to reproduce, you will either be disturbed by the film's failure or, even more unsettling, disturbed by its effectiveness at lulling you into a distracting and entertaining two-and-a-half hours at the movies.

Poverty Porn, Pre-Humanism and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Several weeks ago, I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild (adapted from the one-act play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar), the first feature-length film by director Benh Zeitlin and possibly one of the toughest films to characterize that I've ever seen.  Whatever other faults it may have-- and I will get to those shortly-- it is absolutely beautifully filmed.  That's a particularly noteworthy accomplishment in this case, given that much of Beasts of the Southern Wild's subject matter is quite ugly.  Blending both real and fantastical images, Zeitlin's film recounts a few dramatic weeks in the life (and the imagined life) of its young protagonist "Hushpuppy" (Quvenzhané Wallis, pictured left) as she struggles to survive the harsh conditions and even harsher people of a southern Louisiana bayou shantytown, called "The Bathtub," in which she lives.

The Bathtub is a community beset by abject poverty and, as a consequence, it provides the kind of organic culture that sustains many of the other social ills that almost always accompany abject poverty. Hushpuppy lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), whose sometimes casual disregard and sometimes outright abuse of her forces her to mature quickly and independently beyond her years.  Wink's parenting strategy, such that there is one, is to demand that Hushpuppy not be a "pussy," a directive reinforced by her (unfortunately named) schoolteacher Miss Bathsheba, played brilliantly by Gina Montana, though Miss Bathsheba imparts that lesson with the important addendum: "y'all learn to take care of the things smaller and sweeter than you."  Wink, on the contrary, instructs Hushpuppy on how not to be a pussy by instilling in her a ferociousness bordering on the animal-like, implicitly confirming the Hobbesian state of nature that is her world.  When the Bathtub is decimated by rising flood waters and her father slowly begins to die, Hushpuppy learns just how "nasty, brutish and short" life can really be.  But, because she is still a child, the merciless process of natural selection she experiences is filtered for her (and by her) through a vivid imaginary world.  In the end, Hushpuppy makes a kind of uneasy peace with both the real and imagined beasts that rule her Southern wild, but I suspect that how or why she does so remains somewhat mysterious for most audiences.

A pejorative that has been bandied about by film critics since 2008's Slumdog Millionaire has also been used to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild, namely, "poverty porn."  (Other alleged offenders include HBO's television series The Wire, Wayne Wang's 1993 film The Joy Luck Club and the 2002 film City of God.) Critics of poverty porn worry that its graphic portrayal of human misery and destitution, usually represented in stereotypical or clichéd images, is more exploitative than edifying.  To wit, critics argue, poverty porn ends up giving us a romantic and sentimentalized picture of privation and effectively anesthetizes audiences to the real tragedy of it.  This seems to be at least part of philosopher and critical race theorist bell hooks' scathing criticism of Beasts of the Southern Wild, though hooks is far more concerned with what she sees as a carelessly unreflective racism and sexism in the film.  I'm still a bit ambivalent about the merits and demerits of poverty porn, though I think Beasts of the Southern Wild is definitely an example of it.  Then again, so is most of Charles Dickens' work.  Literature is different from film, of course, but if the problems with "poverty porn" in film are particularly egregious because of cinema's structurally voyeuristic nature... well, I'm unconvinced that film is any more inherently voyeuristic than other forms of art.

More interesting to me than Beasts of the Southern Wild's dubious aestheticization of poverty is its intentional blurring of the line between the human animal and the non-human animal.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that the world of the Bathtub as it is depicted in the film is intensely, brutally, and unforgivingly Hobbesian through and through. That is to say, the Bathtub and all of its inhabitants are figured as decidedly pre-social-contract animals, scrapping and clawing for survival in an indiscriminately uncaring state of nature.  Throughout the film, the "beasts" of Nature and human "beasts" are metaphorically elided in Hushpuppy's real life and her imagination.  The danger that each poses to her survival are different in neither kind nor degree.  And the rules that govern the Bathtub's residents, which have far more in common with the laws of Nature than agreements of rational agents, are as simple as they are inflexible:  fight, survive, do not weep and do not fail to "beast" Nature when Nature threatens to beast you.

The following clip provides a good example of what I find both fascinating and unsettling in Beasts of the Southern Wild.  In it, we see a particularly explicit rejection of so-called "civilized" behavior (in this instance, using a utensil to open up a crab) in favor of beast-like behavior.  Hushpuppy's father, Wink, even uses "beast" as a verb in this scene-- he demands that Hushpuppy "beast" the beast-- and her transformation in the course of this act is not only striking, but disturbing.


What we see above, and throughout the film, is a steady and repetitive rejection of the idea that the world of the Bathtub is somehow different from the rest of the natural world solely on the basis of having human inhabitants.  These "people" are animals, exactly like all the rest of Nature's beasts, and the extent to which they deny that isomorphism is inversely proportional to their chance for survival.  That the Bathtub is represented as wild and untamed as the natural world surrounding it is no surprise, though that representation complicates the sympathetic identification we are meant to have with Hushpuppy.  Like her father and the other Bathtubbers, she also is an animal, though a smaller and sweeter one, to be sure.  We pull for her, we want her to survive, we wince as bigger and stronger beasts (like her father) cause her pain but, as she tells us in her voice-over narration, "the whole universe depends upon everything fitting just right" and we know that means, first, that predation always favors the strong and, second, she is not strong.  She is, by far, more prey than predator.

Does Beast of the Southern Wild "dehumanize" its characters, unfairly turning the poor and destitute into animals, as the critics of poverty porn allege?  Does it exploit age-old stereotypes of race and gender to rob Wink and Hushpuppy of their requisite dignity and humanity, as bell hooks suggests?  Yes... but perhaps in ways that are more complicated that they appear at first blush.  What is difficult to read about this film, in my view, is that it takes place in a world that appears not so much inhuman as pre-human,  if we take this thing we call "the human" to be the product of a whole host of social, cultural and political-- that is to say, strictly speaking, unnatural -- forces and norms.  What does it mean to "dehumanize" a person in such a world, where the kind of beast we are is indistinguishable from any other living thing?  What does it mean here to level the conscientious humanist's charge of racism, sexism or classism, all of which have long and documented histories of dehumanzing humans by reducing them to the moral status of the animal?  Or, to phrase the question in the manner most disturbing to most of us, what traction does any humanist critique have in the state of nature?

In one of the final scenes of Beasts of the Southern Wild, Hushpuppy stands face-to-snout with the beasts that have (metaphorically and imaginatively) hunted, haunted and threatened her survival throughout.  She is, quite literally, dwarfed by them, by their strength and size, but she looks them in the eye and articulates an expression of almost incomprehensible solidarity: "You're my friend, kind of."  Perhaps we are meant to take from this some deeply human, though sublimated, insight about our persistent attachment to the delusion that we are not, like every other natural thing, just another point in the vast, complicated web of Nature. And also that Nature does not and never has, in any way prescribed by humanism, care one whit about us humans.

Would that it were not the case that a child, so heartbreakingly small and vulnerable, must say so.

It took me several weeks of being perplexed and deeply bothered by Beasts of the Southern Wild before I could write about it, and I think that's a credit to the film.  There is still a part of me that finds bell hooks' criticisms profoundly resonant, and there is a larger part of me that finds poverty porn as a genre extremely problematic.  But, unlike other films that trade in unreflective racist and sexist stereotypes (like The Help) or exploit poverty for reductively sentimental value (like Slumdog Millionaire),  I think the very intentionally pre-humanist frame of Beasts of the Southen Wild makes it a far more interesting, and far less objectionable, film.  I often tell my students that they harbor, acknowledged or not, a whole host of deeply sedimented convictions about "human nature" that inform almost all of their views about almost everything else.  What Beasts of the Southern Wild forces its viewers to contend with is precisely those hidden presumptions.  As a card-carrying humanist, I found that experience profoundly decentering.

2012 Year in Politics

Election years are always crazy years for American politics.  They're not always Clint-Eastwood-talking-to-an-empty-chair crazy, though.  Nor are they, as a rule, "legitimate rape"- or "binders full of women"- or "fiscal cliff"- or "austerity"- crazy, that is, so crazy that one requires a Crazy-to-English translator to watch the evening news.  And although American politics is never particularly kind to women, the poor and minorities, 2012 sure made a bad situation worse for many of them/us.  In a word: Malarkey! 

This year, I've restricted my look-back at 2012 to American politics only, despite the fact that some pretty amazing things were happening elsewhere.  (See Mohamed Morsi's election in Egypt, the assassination of Hamas leader Ahmad Jabar by Israeli state forces, the escalation of violence in Syria, the rise of China's new President Xi Jinping, the devastation of typhoon Bopha in the Philippines, the "Idle No More" protest movement among our neighbors to the North, and deep conflict over austerity measures in Greece and Spain.)  There are always too many things to cover, so I grouped my retrospective picks into four categories: the War on Women, Guns, SCOTUS and the Presidential Election.  If you want to hear about the so-called fiscal cliff, you'll just have to wait until next year's list.

Here it is, the 2012 Year in Politics:

War on Women, Part I: Sandra Fluke
 Back in February, as Congress debated the merits and demerits of mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives, a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke gave a speech to House Democrats in support of the measure.  Fluke's (entirely reasonable) position was that access to safe and affordable contraceptives is not only a fundamental necessity for women's health but also a pretty hefty benefit for the rest of society, too.   Shortly thereafter, conservative radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute," claiming that her appeal for contraceptive coverage was the same as as asking "to be paid for sex."  A nation of women rolled their eyes.  I mean, this was Rush Limbaugh after all. How much harm could a buffoon like that do?  How representative, really, are his views?  Fluke weathered the storm with grace and aplomb-- she was later nominated by Time magazine for Person of the Year-- but the Fluke Affair definitely put women on their heels to start off 2012.  Oh, if only we had known then what the rest of the year was to bring...

War on Women, Part II: Legitimate Rape
 The deeply twisted logic of Limbaugh's filleting of Fluke began to make a bit more "sense" later in the year when Republicans across the nation began saying what can only be described as BAT SH*T CRAZY things about rape, pregnancy, abortion, and all manner of other issues related to women's bodies and reproductive systems.  One of the most egregious of these was the claim by U.S. representative Todd Akin of Missouri that pregnancy from rape rarely occurs in the case of what he called "legitimate rape."  (Full quote: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Watch Akin's interview here.)  Instead of proceeding quickly and calmly in the opposite direction of Akin, which would have been the not crazy  thing to do, other socially conservative Republicans flocked to him.  Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, in what I can only assume was an attempt to redeem Akin's utterly non-scientific reflections on the relationship between sex and pregnancy, acknowledged that well, yes, rape does sometimes result in pregnancy... but when it does, that pregnancy is "something God intended."  A nation of women rolled their eyes again, but this time they were a bit more aggravated.  C'mon, guys, this is twice in the same year!

War on Women, Part III: Unhappy Females
 At first it seemed like an unfortunate coincidence, then a kind of amusing debate-coach blindspot, then a little more like a regrettable faux pas, and finally like an outright conspiracy... but whatever it was, there was something definitively thematic about the way the Presidential candidates talked about the women they met "on the campaign trail."  Namely, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE WOMEN WAS UNHAPPY.  (Videos of the debates are here, here and here.)  It didn't seem to make any difference what point the candidates were trying to illustrate, they had met a woman on the campaign trail whose unhappiness was illustrative.  After the umpteenth repetition of the unhappy female trope, even I had to chuckle at it.  Did either of them ever meet a happy female? And, if they hadn't, maybe the most illustrative point they should have be relaying was that WOMEN IN THIS COUNTRY ARE UNHAPPY.  I'd like to say women across the nation rolled their eyes, which I'm sure they did, but that would just reinforce the rhetorical nonsense of the candidates.  Sigh.
 

War on Women, Part IV: Binders Full of Women
 In the second Presidential debate between incumbent President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney, Romney was asked a question (from the "town hall" crowd of undecided voters) about persistent gender inequality in the workplace and specifically the fact that women continue to make 72% of what their male counterparts earn.  Romney, attempting to demonstrate his record of concern for gender-gap issues, recounted a story from his businessman days when he made a concerted effort to ensure that women job candidates got equal consideration. When his minions told Romney that all the qualified candidates were men, he replied (his actual words): "Well, gosh, can't we-- can't we find some-- some women that are also qualified?"  The minions were stymied, so Romney went to a number of "women's groups" with the same request and, voilà!, they brought him "whole binders full of women"!  The unhappy females rolled their eyes again, but then they took to the Interwebz in full force to create one of the best memes of the year. 

Let me just go on the record as saying that the War on Women will be even harder to win than the War on Drugs or the War on Terror.  If 2012 taught us anything at all, it's that we may as well lay down arms in that one.  Unfortunately, this year also gave us several reminders of our national need to lay down arms.

Guns, Part I: Aurora Movie Theater
On Friday, July 20, at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, James Eagan Homes opened fire on the trapped crowd, injuring 58 people and killing 12.  Homes is awaiting trial on multiple murder charges. The names and stories of the victims are here. 

Guns, Part II: Sikh Temple
On August 5, at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Wade Michael Page (a white supremacist) killed six people and wounded four others.  After being shot and wounded by a police officer, Wade fatally shot himself in the head.  The names and stories of the victims are here. 



Guns, Part III: Sandy Hook
On December 14, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza killed 2o children and 7 adults, including himself, in one of the deadliest mass killings in United States history. The names and stories of the victims are here.   


Because the tragedy at Sandy Hook involved so many small children, it reignited discussions about gun rights, regulation and controls in this country.  Unfortunately, very little in those conversations seem to have bridged the deep divide that continues to rend our nation.


SCOTUS, Part I: Obamacare
President Obama's most ambitious (and likely most historic) healthcare-reform initiative, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.  The most politically charged element of PPACA is what came to be known as the "individual mandate," which requires Americans to purchase health coverage.  Opponents of PPACA have tried to repeal it in whole and in part, but when SCOTUS confirmed the constitutionality of PPACA in the Sibelius decision, a nation of uninsured breathed a sigh of relief.  Of course, the challenges didn't end with Sibelius, but it was a major victory for healthcare reform and Obama.

SCOTUS, Part II: Show Your Papers
Also in June, the Supreme Court handed down a split-decision on Arizona's controversial immigration law SB1070.  The court unanimously agreed to uphold the most controversial part of the law-- more commonly known as the "show your papers" provision-- which requires state law enforcement officials to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if there is reason to suspect that the individual might be an illegal immigrant.  But SCOTUS blocked many of 1070's other provisions on the grounds that they interfered with the federal government's ability to set immigration policy.  The immigration question certainly isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and states like Arizona are fueling the passions on both sides.  For many of us, President Obama has been underimpressive on this issue, though he did announce in June that his administration would stop deporting young immigrants if they met certain requirements.  If demographic predictions are correct, this country is getting less and less white, so there's not much time left to ride the fence on this very important matter.

SCOTUS, Part III: Fair Sentencing
Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, at the behest of President Obama, reducing the disparity between the amount of crack cocaine and the amount of powder cocaine needed to trigger certain sentencing penalties, largely because it had been shown that the disparity had a disproportionately negative impact on racial minorities.  This summer, in Dorsey v. United States and Hill v. United States, SCOTUS determined that the provisions of the Fair Sentencing Act applied to people who were convicted before the act was passed but sentenced afterwards.  Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, hailed the ruling as "another step toward racial fairness."  When the Fair Sentencing Act was passed, black Americans made up roughly 13% of the population and 14% of monthly illegal drug users, but made up 80% of people convicted of a federal crack cocaine offense.  Even under the new guidelines, mandatory minimum sentencing laws are still racially discriminatory, so there are many more steps toward racial fairness to go.

It was definitely a big year for SCOTUS, and 2013 looks to be even bigger.  Justices Ginsberg, Kennedy, Thomas and Scalia are all old and likely won't all make it through Obama's next term.  This may be the first time in a long time to shift the leaning of the High Court more to the left.  We'll have to wait and see.

Of course, the BIGGEST political story of 2012 was the Presidential election.  And so, finally, here are the highlights:  

Presidential Election, Part I: The Conventions
The two biggest events of the RNC and DNC conventions this year did not directly involve the candidates.  For the RNC convention, it was Clint Eastwood's bizarre "dialogue" with Invisible Obama.  Too hard to describe, so just watch:



At the DNC convention, former President Bill Clinton was the big star. His "arithmetic" speech reinvigorated a party embattled, embittered and loooking to recapture the hope of 2008. Here's Clinton:



Presidential Election, Part II: The Debates
The Presidential debates this election year were especially interesting-- less so for the substantive content of the conversations and much more so for the goldmine of hashtags and memes unleashed as a consequence of those conversations.  If you want to relive all of the fun, you can watch the three debates in their entirety below: 


Presidential Election, Part III: The Winner 
The real winner of the 2012 Presidential election was Nate Silver, but the person who won the Presidency was Barack Obama.   President Obama has disappointed many over the last four years, and his performance in the months leading up to his reelection was far from stellar, but the hope-and-change candidate reappeared on election night to deliver his acceptance speech.  Here's our President:


All in all, 2012 was what about one expects from an election year. Divisive, inspiring, maddening and sometimes flat-out jaw-droppingly crazy.  For the next year, I hope we'll see that we learned some lessons from 2012.  Let's end the War on Women.  Let's regulate guns and gun-owners better.  Let's replace the departing Supreme Court Justices with more judicious and compassionate men/women.  We've got Obama for another four years, so let's hold him to a higher standard.  Let's  hold all the rest of our statesmen and -women to a higher standard as well.

And let's do the same for ourselves.

2012 Year in Sports

Legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi once said: "If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?"  In spite of the many ways sports serves as an apt metaphor for life, Lombardi's sage reflection keys in on one of the important differences between sports and life.  Namely, in sports, they keep score.  On a scoreboard.  And whatever is on that scoreboard when the clock runs out gets recorded for posterity. Some of it also gets recorded on this blog at the end of the year.

The 2011 Year in Sports was a mostly "bad and ugly" one, and though 2012 had its fair share of bad and ugly stories, there are more "good" ones to weigh in the balance.  I'll go ahead and note that I'm skipping stories about the major championships this year. For the record, though, the World Series Champions were the San Francisco Giants, the Super Bowl Champions were the New York Giants, the BCS Champions were the Alabama Crimson Tide and the NBA Playoff Champions were the Miami Heat.  Of the major championships, there weren't especially gripping stories to tell, except for maybe the fact that Lebron James FINALLY got to kiss an NBA Championship trophy.  And the fact that Eli Manning DID execute a pretty impressive fourth-quarter comeback in the Super Bowl.  And I suppose it's a kind of cool story that the Super Bowl and the World Series were both won by "Giants." Still, even this year's Giant stories paled in comparison to 2012's other stories, which in many cases were truly Olympian.

In roughly chronological order, here is the 2012 Year in Sports:

The Penn State Aftermath:  It's hard to imagine any year being worse than last year was for Penn State.  But, just a few weeks into 2012, it was clear that things were already looking dark in Happy Valley.  On Jan 22, longtime Nittany Lions football coach and Penn State legend Joe Paterno died of lung cancer.  Then, in June, the long and tragic story of last year's scandal was rehashed, and a judgment finally passed, as former Assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse and sentenced to a maximum of 442 years in prison.  A month later, in July, Penn State's internal investigation yielded the very damning Freeh Report, which pointed an accusatory finger at both Joe Paterno and senior Penn State administrators for their "callous and shocking" role in covering up Sandusky's actions.  The final nail was driven into the coffin of this scandal shortly afterwards, also in July, when the NCAA delivered one of the harshest penalties in college sports history to Penn State: a $60 million fine, a four-year bowl ban, a reduction of annual scholarships from 25 to 15, and five years' probation.  The NCAA also vacated all Penn State football wins from 1998-2011, casting Paterno out of the history books as one of the winningest coaches in college football.  In sum, 2012 was the year that Penn State paid the piper... and the piper was pissed.  It will be a long and arduous road back to Penn State's former glory, both in terms of football and in terms of its reputation.  Let's hope there is a lesson learned here somewhere.

Amazing Is Amazing In Any Color Jersey: Peyton Manning is, without a doubt, one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game.  So, it came as a shock in March when the Indianapolis Colts cut Manning from their roster, on which he had served as the leader for fourteen years.  Manning suffered several serious injuries in 2011 and the Colts feared he would never return, or would never return the same.  Like champions do, though, Manning found another place to play.  Less than two weeks after being released by the Colts, Manning announced that he would be joining the Denver Broncos.  (Added bonus:  Manning's selection forced the Broncos to trade Tim Tebow.  Manning's alma mater is the University of Tennessee and Tebow's is UT arch-rival Florida.  Many Vols fans saw a kind of poetic, if not also cosmic, justice at work in these events.)  Just to put a bow on the whole story, Manning went on to be THE comeback player of the year.  On the heels of his brother's Super Bowl win in January, Peyton's story made it clear that the Manning Dynasty still reigns.

A Hit Is NOT Just A Hit:  Elsewhere in the NFL, things were not so pretty.  In March, the NFL released a report charging the New Orleans Saints (and, in particular, defensive coordinator Gregg Williams) with running a an illegal "bounty" pool, which rewarded players with cash for delivering hits that knocked players on the opposing team out of the game.  Saints' head coach Sean Payton was suspended for the 2012 season and Williams has be banned indefinitely from the league.  The Saints were also find a half-million dollars and forced to give up draft picks. Everyone knows that football is a physical, even violent, game.  But everyone should know that intentionally injurious hits demonstrate more than just bad judgment or poor sportsmanship.  With the size and speed of today's players, those hits can be life-threatening.  Shame on the Saints, and shame on every sportscaster who tried to downplay the severity of their transgressions.

A Legend Retires: University of Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt is not only a Hall of Famer, but the recipient of an Arthur Ashe Courage Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Oh, and she is the all-time winningest coach in NCAA basketball history.  Men's AND women's basketball history. In April, just a year after her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease, she announced that she would be stepping-down as the coach of the Lady Vols.  It's hard to exaggerate what Summit did not only for women's basketball, but for women's sports more generally.  She was unrelenting in her demand for toughness and discipline-- her court-side scowl was legendary-- but she inspired dedication and excellence in her players.  Championship-winning dedication and excellence.  For years, the Lady Vols were the collegiate women's-basketball equivalent of the Yankees or the Patriots.  They were a dynasty.  And they owe it ALL to Pat Summitt.

BCS Finally Makes A Semi-Rational Decision:  There's nothing that unites fans of college football more than disparaging the BCS, the governing organization that decides which team gets the title "National Champions" every year.  Officially, the team that wins the BCS Championship Bowl Game is the National Champion, but understanding exactly how the two teams who play in that game got there requires not only a dizzying command of complex algorithms, conference alignments and coaches' preferences, but also probably a heavy toke of the wacky tobacky, too.  Thus, almost every year there are teams who argue their "claim" to the National Champions title without winning (or, often, even playing in) the National Championship Game.  The truth is, organizing a playoff series for college football is complicated for a variety of reasons.  Because it's football, games can only be played once a week, so there's no cramming a 64-team playoff tournament into a few weeks like they do for basketball.  And because it's college football, you can't have a playoff series that lasts several weeks (like the NFL) anyway.  (These are students, after all, and some of them like to go to school, not to mention also home for the holidays.)  Still, there has been growing discontentment with the current system for too many years.  So the BCS announced that, starting in 2014, the top four teams will compete in a semi-finals playoff.  Of course, all this really will accomplish is to give 4 or 5 more teams grounds for complaint.  Whatevs.  I'll just suggest again my solution to the BCS woes, which has two parts: (1) The SEC Conference winner should be named the National Champion every year, and (2) All the rest of the teams can compete for the Heisman Trophy, for which SEC players will be ineligible.  Done and DONE.

Michael Phelps, Golden Boy:  In the London Olympic Games this summer, swimmer Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian in history with an impressive 19 medals.  Many people wondered whether or not the Phelps we saw in Beijing four years ago would be able to return with the same dominance.  He had fallen out of shape, gotten into some trouble and (by his own account) lost some of his passion for the sport in the intervening years.  But the worries were assuaged as soon as he jumped back into the pool, adding 11 more medals in London to the 8 he won in Beijing. It will likely be a long time, if ever, before we see another swimmer like Phelps, who announced that the London Games were his last.  Well done, Golden Boy.

London Olympics Hit By A Lightning Bolt:  Repeating his gold-medal performances in the 100m and 200m sprints from Beijing, Usain Bolt proved once again in London that he is the fastest human alive.  His performance this past August made him the first person to win 100m and 200m gold in back-to-back Olympics.  In fact, Bolt's performance in the 100m has only ever been beaten by one other person:  Usain Bolt.  If you didn't get to see it when it happened, it really is a feat to behold.  Bolt runs with ease and confidence and, of course, inhuman speed, but what really made him an international star is the endearing braggadocio that he brings to every race.  All I can say is: yeah, yeah, he's fast, but he should really be credited for his hilarious cameo on Saturday Night Live mocking Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan.  You go, Bolt. 

Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing, Baby:  Lordy, lordy, did the NFL "replacement refs" stink it up back in September!  I mean, f'realz, STINK IT UP.  Regular, professional referees catch a lot of flack for what they do, but nobody-and-I-mean-NOBODY realized how good we had it with the real zebras until the scabs showed up.  In a Seahawks-Packers game in the third week of the season, two officials made a simultaneous call in the endzone:  one called an interception, the other a touchdown.  The image of that snafu is worth a thousand NSFW words.  No better way to settle a labor dispute between the NFL and the regular officials than a blown call, apparently.  By Week 4, justice had been restored on the football field and (presumably) the refs' bank accounts.

The Mighty Falls:  For years, Lance Armstrong has been a living testament not only to how discipline, dedication and training can stretch the limits of human endurance and achievement, but also how the same can overcome the very worst that Nature deals the human body.  Armstrong won one of sports' most grueling and demanding contests, cycling's Tour de France, a record seven consecutive times between 1999 and 2005.  Impressive as that was, it was overshadowed by his seemingly miraculous victory over brain. lung and testicular cancer.  (The latter of those victories inspired the LiveStrong movement, which millions of people supported by wearing Armstrong's bracelets.)  So, in August, when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency finally stripped Armstrong of his Tour victories and banned him from the sport, it seemed hard to believe that a hero could have fallen so far, so hard and so ingloriously.  Armstrong protested that he was innocent to the very end, and beyond, but the evidence against him was overwhelming and damning.  What is more, it appears that the whole sport of cycling has been rotten to the core for many years.  Armstrong is no doubt still, and has always been, an athlete of the most elite caliber... but we finally have to resign ourselves to the truth that his impossible performances were as much a credit to doping as they were to discipline.

Notre Dame Played Like A Champion This Season:  I've never been much of a Notre Dame football fan, mostly because I don't like their we're-too-special-to-play-in-a-regular-conference nonsense, but I've always had a lot of respect for the long and storied history of that program.  For the last decade or so, though, Notre Dame football hasn't been worthy of much respect.  The 2012 season marks the return to glory for the Fighting Irish, and their first shot at a National Championship in a long, long time.  As the season drew to a close, Notre Dame caught a lot of breaks from key losses by other contending teams, but that shouldn't cast a shadow over their right to play for the title.  This is a solid team. Definitely not as solid as the 2nd- or 3rd- (or maybe even 4th-) place team in the SEC, but if it's not going to be an all-SEC BCS Championship this year, I think ND deserves to be the loser. 

That's it for the 2012 Year in Sports.  Next up: 2012 Year in Politics.  Better put your seat-belts on now.