Football, Bombs, Etc.

I saw Chuck Klosterman's collection of essays, Eating The Dinosaur, in my local library. I borrowed it and when I got home, it struck me--this isn't the guy who wrote Fight Club, that's Chuck Palahniuk (who's mentioned on page 57, by the way).

But I read it anyway and it was quite enjoyable. Klosterman writes mostly about popular culture, especially sports, music and politics. He's funny (though not hilarious) and has some insight. The thoughts may not be startling, but they're reasonably original.

His topics:

Why people do interviews.

Comparing two leaders who didn't make it--Kurt Cobain and David Koresh--and how the concept of authenticity mattered to them.

Speculations--philosophical, not scientific--on time travel. He believes the desire to time travel is a weakness, since it says you want to change everything about society and nothing about yourself. The only good reason to time travel is to eat dinosaur meat, hence the title. (Which reminds me, I was recently at a party where a friend noted he hates time travel in fiction because it's such a cheap device.  He said the only story where it works is "By His Bootstraps." He may be right.)

Ralph Sampson was not the failure so many think he was.

Voyeurism is intriguing because you don't know what to make of what you see, not because (as the movies claim) you do.

Why Garth Brooks invented Chris Gaines.

The success of ABBA.

How advertising works even though--in fact, because--people know they're being manipulated.

How people don't know how to react to Rivers Cuomo, Werner Herzog and Ralph Nader because they don't use irony, while we see everything through an ironic lens.

I left out three esssays that I want to go into a little more.

As a big fan of football himself, Klosterman notes this most successful American sport of the 20th century may sell itself as conservative, but in fact it's the most innovative, least reactionary major sport there is. (It's also socialist in monetary structure, but everyone already knows that. When you've got a popular product, no matter how the owners split the cash, they'll do just fine.)

He starts with a Michigan game on TV (I think he's rooting for the Gophers). He notes they're using the read option. Boy, do Michigan fans know about that. It's revolutionized the game, but, so far, brought nothing but misery to our team. But that's his point--this is a new style of play that's swept football. Two decades ago, you hardly ever saw it. Ten years ago, it was a desperation play. Today it's everywhere. Ten years from now, it'll probably be gone. That's how "conservative" football works. Sure, baseball or basketball will try something new every now and then--the designated hitter, the three-point basket--but football regularly reinvents itself so that teams a generation ago would hardly recognize the game.

Klosterman notes innovators are inevitably thought insane, but soon others start copying them and then everyone tries what they've wrought.

Some examples:

--realizing a four-yard pass is as good as a four-yard run revolutionized the game, which became all about passing.

--the no-huddle offense

--the Run and Shoot offense

--receivers running curved patterns rather than hard cuts

A recent innovation that seems idiotic to opponents but might yet catch is the "never punt" strategy. (And only onside kickoffs.) Think about it. A punt is a disaster. It's the equivalent of a turnover. Would you intentionally fumble, or throw an interception? The only possible advantage is the opposing team might--might--get possession with worse field position. For that you give up a chance to continue with the ball? It'd be cool to see football where punts are a thing of the past.

The other two essays I didn't think much of. One of them is about his hatred of the laugh track. In it, he says a lot of dumb things about sitcoms. But it's easy enough to ignore. The other one I really hated. Klosterman puts it at the end. Maybe he realized if it were up front people would toss the book.

It's about the Unabomber Manifesto. Klosterman evinces a lot of sympathy for it, and, though he denies it, even some for the Unabomber himself.

I read the Manifesto years ago and here's what I wrote:

I wasn't too impressed with the Unabomber's ideas, and not just because they were mostly foolish. They were warmed-over ideas, ones I'd heard expressed previously, and expressed better. He might have been a first-rate bombmaker, but he was a third-rate thinker.

His ideas are confused, but when you straighten them out, he doesn't have much to say. It's a lot of junk allegedly explaining our society and how technology makes us less free. I understand this argument, even though I think it's mostly nonsense. But the Unabomber's rehearsal of this too-widespread concept is actually pretty dull and tired.

But Klosterman agrees with him! Technology is bad for civilization, enslaving us in our ingenuity (and you can't separate good from bad technology). Klosterman won't do anything about it because he, as the Manifesto has it, is a Modern Leftist, which makes him weak, defeatist and self-hating. This is another absurd claim of the Unabomber which Klosterman is quick to embrace. I might wonder if Klosterman is being ironic, except he doesn't strike me as the type--I'd just read his essay on irony, after all. Rather, he's just whining about his life.

Klosterman sees the Unabomber Manifesto as an intellectual brother to Jerry Mander's Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television, a classic of its sort, but manifestly silly. Not just because the arguments could have no effect, but because they're pretty weak. Mander thinks TV takes away from our imagination because when we think of things, especially outside our experience, we use mental pictures from media. Well how else will you imagine things? Plato didn't like writing since he thought people would stop memorizing stuff when they knew they could look it up. This is a minor problem (if it's a problem at all) balanced against a major gain. Real things we have no experience of we wouldn't even think about unless we hear about them from others. Storytellers have been filling people's heads with notions since before written history, and they didn't impoverish us. Still, when people thought about things, they'd rely--or at least use--these stories. They add to our store of memory and open us up a lot more than they restrict us. Too much of anything can be bad, but the idea that somehow thought or people were more "real" or "authentic" when they didn't have moving pictues (they always had pictures) to aid them is a sillly notion that misunderstands what imagination is about. It's like saying we can't write poetry ourselves because Shakespeare looms too large.

The Unabomber Manifesto is an outgrowth of this Luddism. (Darn, I promised myself I'd avoid that word, but there it is.) A world run by the Unabomber would not only be uglier, poorer and harsher, it would be more impoverished in its imagination. Our world would be a lot smaller, and taken up with a lot of daily things that society has been able to help us move beyond. We'll always be limited in some ways. We can't fly. Except we can thanks to technology. We can't swim across the ocean. Except we can thanks to technology. Was our imagination of what flying would be like so much better before we had airplanes? Technology may limit our thoughts in some ways, but in most ways it frees us up, and allows us to experience more, and think more freely than we could otherwise.

That's where the glint of admiration that Klosterman denies he has for the Unabomber seeps in. Of the man who spent his adult life living in a small cabin in the woods (a cabin!--I thought he hated technology), Klosterman writes:

Had [the Unabomber] elected to embrace the trappings of the modern age, there is no doubt he could have been wildly successful--I suspect he could have been one of the Internet's architects, were that what he wanted. It wasn't that he was frozen out or ostracized--he chose not to be involved. Moreover, he was ultimately able to live separate from the electronic age as successfully as any American could expect; it wasn't tangibly impeding him at all, unless you count the occasional airplane coasting twenty-eight thousand feet above his head. Technology wasn't damaging him in any way.

Sorry Chuck, but he couldn't have succeeded in our society, much less be wildly successful. He was a crazy person incapable of adjusting, so he struck out at the world instead. If he'd just been a hermit, living in that cabin--even writing the occasional manifesto--he'd have been a harmless lunatic. But his insanity included a sociopathic element (perhaps was inseparable from it) which made him do evil things. It's bad enough you find his ideas coherent, even admirable--but really, do you think he spurned the modern world because he was too good for it? Do you honestly find anything about his lifestyle worth emulating?

It's true technology wasn't "damaging" him. He'd already damaged himself beyond recognition. If he had accepted technology perhaps he could have made something of himself, though based on his manifesto I don't think he'd have been much of a philosopher.

Chuck goes on.

His ideas were too radical, but at least they were his own.

They weren't even that.