Word that the Jackie Robinson Little League has been forced to vacate its 2014 American championship due to rules violations has predictably triggered a veritable second Great Fire in Chicago among local officials and parents. The outrage is itself outrageous. "Disrespectful," proclaimed one team member's mother in the Chicago Tribune regarding the action taken by Little League International. After asserting that "our boys not only played, they won," she went on to suggest that the action was taken because some "African-Americans exceed[ed] the expectations," so that "there is always going to be fault that is found in what it is that we do."

Not to be outdone when there's a chance for cheap, sensational publicity, Jesse Jackson has now stepped into the fray. CBS News reported that he held a press conference to ask, "Is this about [the league's] boundaries or race?" Remarkably--and insultingly--Jackson has apparently asked the Las Vegas teams not to accept the American championship title on the grounds that, although they participated fairly unlike their finalist opponent, they nevertheless "did not earn" it. Wow! And so the race card is played, and the thorny crown of victimhood is donned.

Feel bad for the team's players, sure. By all accounts, they were the unwitting victims of a scheme cooked up by adults whose interest in winning at all costs (and glorying vicariously in achievements they themselves were incapable of attaining) exceeded their responsibility for being role models and teaching good sportsmanship to adolescents. If true, they and their parents have indeed been victimized, not by the International Little League but by the coaches or other adults who engineered the original deception merely for the sake of winning.

It's not difficult to empathize with the Chicago parents' disappointment, but their anger is certainly misdirected. They seem to be immune to the notion that the Las Vegas (Mountain Ridge) runners-up played by the rules and did not inappropriately enlarge their "catchment area" to add high-skill players to their rosters illegally (which of course also simultaneously deprives other players who properly live in the league's legitimate zone from a chance to be on their local All-Star team). Nor have they acknowledged that the winning team from Japan did not cheat in this manner, nor as far as is known at the moment did any of the other teams participating in last year's World Series, all of whom could have benefitted substantially by pulling players from outside their designated residential zones -- a system designed, by the way, to promote fairness and ensure that the winning teams do not consistently originate in large cities with huge populations from which to draw.

Had the Las Vegas team followed the same practice, they might well have trounced the Jackie Robinson team. Perhaps a few moments' reflection on the values represented by their league's namesake, Jackie Robinson, might be in order before accusing everyone else other than the adults who set out to cheat in the first place. It's those individuals, and only those individuals, who victimized a group of young men and their families (including the players and families of the Las Vegas team, who now hold a "tainted" title they likely don't really want).

National Felony League?

Lest anyone should fall under the perception that the recent (2014), highly publicized spate of abuse of women (Ray Rice) and children (Adrian Peterson) has served as a corrective to National Football League player misbehavior, a short article in the New York Times on February 4 provides a clue to the contrary. As one of the paper's Sports Briefing entries for that day, the Times cites the case of Dallas Cowboys running back Joseph Randle being charged -- for the second time in less than four months -- with suspicion of marijuana possession. Immediately following that entry is another noting the arrest of Packers defensive tackle Letroy Guion on felony charges of possession of marijuana and a firearm (along with a bag in his truck containing $190,000 in cash!). Directly beneath that item appeared yet another, citing Colts linebacker D'Qwell Jackson being charged with assault after an argument over a parking space.

In case you think the NFL was merely having another of its increasingly common "bad weeks," consider that in the new year 2015, through the date of those incidents on February 3, there had already been a total of eight arrest incidents involving NFL footballers. Beyond the three noted above, there were charges for domestic violence and battery, reckless driving, running a stop sign and open carrying of a firearm, rape and confinement leading to bodily injury and battery, and drunken driving. Happy New Year, NFL fans -- your favorite players are still up to their old, lovable shenanigans!

By the way, for those who might be interested in learning more about NFL arrest records, there is the wonderful NFL Arrests Database maintained by U-T (Union-Tribune) San Diego. Dating back to the year 2000, this database catalogs 718 arrest-related incidents while offering the "disclaimer" that there are likely more that were never reported by the media.  

Generation Distracted

In another depressing sign of the self-congratulatory, psychologically needy, Internet- and video-game-raised, social-media-driven generation now emerging into early adulthood, a recent survey of 1,200 college undergraduates by the market researchers at Student Monitor reveals the degree to which that group is attached to their cell phones and websites.

Student Monitor asked those students to choose what they believed was popular or "in" on campus from among a list of seventy-seven items. The top ten choices, each selected by 48% or more of the participants, included the obvious like drinking coffee (2nd, surprisingly) or beer (7th) and working out (9th), but if you thought sleeping, hooking up, smoking pot, looking at porn, studying, or performing community service were in the top tier, you'd be wrong. On the other hand, if you thought interacting with the Internet or personal technology would be among them, you would be more than just right -- you would have hit the target seven of the ten times!!

So what were all these tech choices? Number 1 was the Apple iPhone, Number 3 was texting, Number 4 was Facebook, Number 5 was the Apple iPad, and Number 6 was Instagram -- five of the top six choices. Following these were Snapchat (8th) and Twitter (10th).

Makes you wonder what those students' parents are paying for.

Architectural Absurdity, or The Unbearable Lightness of Beams

Earlier this month, New York Times Art & Design critic Carol Vogel celebrated Frank Gehry's design for the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi art museum. "Stunning," wrote Ms. Vogel, "a graceful tumble of giant plaster building blocks and translucent blue cones…"

The accompanying artist's rendering not only belied Ms. Vogel's gushing assessment, they made a mockery of the very concept of architecture. Yes, Mr. Gehry has been innovative, even radical, with his  non-linear, non-right-angled designs: Seattle's Experience Music Museum, the Bilbao Guggenheim, and the Spruce Street tower in NYC, to mention but a few. But there comes a point where the envelope can be pushed no farther, where it tears apart from the pressure to outdo the designer's last radical design. The same way art critics seem utterly arbitrary when they turn mushy over works that many of us find meaningless if not plain silly, architecture critics seem to be tripping over one another to rate increasingly bizarre structures as bold statements of architectural vision.

A mere glance at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi's design reveals not a "graceful tumble" but a garbage can's pile of Chinese take-out cartons surrounding what looks like an overturned wicker basket and topped with what looks remarkably like a gigantic ear of corn. A strong enough wind looks like it might scatter this pile of shapes into street litter. There's nothing graceful in this mess, nothing one perceives as visually captivating or aesthetically soothing. Abu Dhabi Guggenheim demonstrates little more than design histrionics, a self-centered attempt to see how far the limits can be pushed before someone calls them on it. One can almost imagine Mr. Gehry sitting in his office, feet up on the desk, laughing at the gullibility of his audience.

Modern materials science continues to open marvelous new doors for structural design, and there's nothing inherently wrong with cutting-edge architectural design. Witness Santiago Calatrava's inspired design for the WTC Transportation Hub, Norman Foster's London Egg, or Tarald Lundevall's Oslo Opera House, each shown below.

  

But there are still limits, and Mr. Gehry's Guggenheim appears substantially to have exceeded them. Then again, given some of the other structures visible in Abu Dhabi, perhaps their tolerance for street litter is just greater than mine.

I swear….

In their relentless effort to infantilize and coarsen American culture, corporate marketers and Madison Avenue agencies have found yet another approach that no doubt garners sophomoric, Beavis-and-Butthead-like chortles from its couch-hugging audiences: the use of "near curse words." Reminiscent of those halcyon middle school years when every near-sound-alike and alternate-meaning word (e.g., abut,  abreast, erection, chit, asinine, edict, etc.) generated eye rolls and barely stifled guffaws from thirteen-year-old boys, the advertising world has reverted its catch-phrases to the level of snickering, pre-adolescent maturity.

So in recents months, Booking.com's marginal tagline, "Booking.dot yeah!" with its faint allusion (in sound and in the actors' behavior) to "Fucking, yeah!" has been joined by Verizon and Draftkings.com. Verizon's latest run of FIOS advertisements has been liberally studded with the ridiculously transparent phrase, "Half-fast," spoken with enough pacing by Mom, Dad, Sis, and little brother to make the whole family look like full asses.

Not to be outdone, the fantasy sports website Draftkings has come up with its own promise that lucky players can win a "shipload of money." More like a shit-load of hypocrisy, but certainly a phrase well-suited to the delayed emotional maturity of its fantasy-sports-playing user base.

It's apparently not enough that American television comedy has largely devolved to bathroom humor, sexual innuendo, and punch lines written by sixth-graders. That race to the bottom, with its nonstop appeal to the pre-adolescent intellect, has now invaded the commercial advertising arena as well. It's comforting to know that the unforgettable tag lines of the past--GE's "We bring good things to light," Gillette's "The best a man can get," Mazda's "Zoom zoom," Allstate's "You're in good hands," Coke's "It's the real thing," Wendy's "Where's the beef?", and Kellogg's (Tony Tiger's) "They're great!"--are being succeeded by "Fucking yeah!", "Half-assed," and "Shit-loads of money?"

Literary Fiction Authors Worth Checking Out

As I browsed through this week's "Sunday Book Review" section of the New York Times, I was struck by how long it seemed to have been since I've come across a work of serious literary fiction from an author about whose work I could truly get excited. Not just for a single book, but for an entire oeuvre, a body of work that I simply wanted to consume backwards in time and -- if not already deceased -- as far forward as that individual's literary production would continue.

Yes, I know today we have a few young lions, literary "all-stars" like Jonathan Franzen, Zaide Smith, Junot Diaz over whom the media seems always to gush when it's not busy trying to crown even newer ones (ex.: Rachel Kushner, whose The Flamethrowers proved only that flashy prose does not compensate for lack of plot and insufferable characters). Then, of course, there are a few long-timers who receive deserved adulation and have garnered by literary attention but never my total devotion: Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Philip Roth, Mo Yan, V.S. Naipul, Doris Lessing, and Chang Rae Lee, to name a few.

Finally, there are the authors whose fiction I consume with total relish, reading backward in time to their earliest works and, where relevant, eagerly waiting to get my hands on their newest releases (or translations, in some cases). Herewith, I offer to seekers like myself an alphabetized list of my favorite literary fiction writers, individuals whose entire body of work are worth checking out.

Italo Calvino

Robertson Davies

Shusako Endo 

William Faulkner

Kazuo Ishiguro

Ismael Kadare

Mario Vargas Llosa

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Haruki Murakami

Cormac McCarthy

Jose Saramago

Graham Swift

Su Tong

There are, of course, other authors whose work(s) I have admired, but not quite enough to enter my personal "pantheon." Those writers would include Yan Geling, George Saunders, Ha Jin, Michael Ondaatje, Lawrence Thornton, Yu Hua, Ian McEwen, Barry Unsworth, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I also recommend one final author, a writer of mystery stories with an unusual cultural bent: Qiu Xiaolong.

I hope a few readers will find suggestions here for new literary directions and derive as much enjoyment in some of them as I have.

How Republicans Destroy Democracy in Texas (and Everywhere Else in America)

Politics has always been a dirty game, but it used to be that most of the dirt was kept in smoke-filled back rooms. These days, no purely political act, no matter how outrageous or anti-democratic, is beyond the limits for Republicans. They simply have no shame; for them (ever since our favorite Texan pest-eradicator, Tom DeLay), politics has become war, with the aim not simply to get elected but to destroy the other party and every initiative it has ever implemented.

A recent excerpt from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" offered an eye-opening view of an abuse of power by Texas Republicans that illustrates their party's local and national efforts to disenfranchise as many voters as possible, create districts designed entirely not to represent the voters of a particular city or region, and simultaneously weaken the opposite party's ability to respond to their outlandish policies and programs. Thus, Texas is becoming a state where only a Tea Party, fundamentalist Christian would want to live, and the courts have been powerless to stop a level of electoral abuse that can only be described as "banana (R)epublican" in nature.

You may recall the infamous Texas redistricting episode in 2002, when a Republican-controlled state legislature hijacked the process, ignoring the redistricting plan established by a federal court in 2000 and causing the entire Democratic representation in the legislature to flee to Oklahoma. But for Texas Republicans, that wasn't enough -- they've been busy ever since trying to implement every conceivable law they could think of that would discourage or otherwise make it difficult for Democratic-leaning groups (students, minorities, etc.) to vote. Democracy, that bastion of American exceptionalism, the Holy Grail of Republican belief so revered that we spent trillions of dollars and thousands of young people's lives to ram down the throats of Iranians -- in Texas, it's only democracy if it leans bright Red.

So all that seems anti-American and anti-democratic enough, so much so that I long ago took a vow never again to visit the state of Texas, not even to book a flight through it (same for OK, NE, KY, LA, MS, and, of course, AZ). But I had no true appreciation of Texas Republicans' blatant disregard for democracy -- and the concept of "representation of the people" until I saw this map of their redistricting of Austin, the only liberal-leaning city in the state:

The city of Austin is in the center -- draw a small circle to represent it. In this ingeniously deceptive plan, small bits of the city have been carved off, Hannibal-Lechter-like, from the city center and married with huge swaths of suburban and rural Texas, running in some instances for dozens of miles outside the city, in order to "divide and conquer" Austin's Democratic-leaning citizens. By mating those urban segments with enough Red, rural voters over a wide enough area, those Blue voices are effectively negated. Only one district, District 9, is more or less contained within the city proper. (To see this even more clearly, watch this "Daily Show" excerpt at around the 2:50 mark for a map that makes the outrage much clearer.)

The result? Not surprisingly, a Blue city has six Congressional representatives, and five of them are Republican. And not moderate, Rockefeller-type Republicans, either. Rabid, foam-frothing, Bible-belting, science-denying, Tea Party types. A bit of gerrymandering and: Voila! Huge chunks of Democratic-leaning voters in Austin, not disenfranchised but also clearly not represented.

Thanks, Texas, for proving once again that you really do belong in Mexico, where this sort of political power abuse is considered normal.