The Classroom Conservative

Maxim's Poor Etiquette

Maxim magazine is enduring a rough ride these days for its premature review of the new Black Crowes album, Warpaint.  Now, I have to tell you that I do not immediately associate Maxim with CD appreciations, and it is not the publication to which I turn when I want information on music.  But the fact that it printed a lukewarm “review” of an album long before advance copies of the disc were available should be of concern to anyone who does.

 

I spent a long time writing music reviews, as I have said before in this space, and I have to admit that I am pretty skeptical about the whole thing.  I would listen to something in a rush, try to connect my observations with the biographical material I was given, and publish a brief appreciation to deadline.  Now, the last thing I want to suggest is that is impossible to write well about music.  We all know that it can be done, and some people are very skilled at it.  But we also know that our appreciation of music we like deepens over time.  After playing a record a few dozen times, I likely think differently of it than I did after a first, hasty play.  In the wake of my entertainment writing career, I did meet people who told me they enjoyed what I wrote, but what they really meant was that they shared my musical interests.  And, having determined that they might like what I liked, initially, they could be enticed to try something they had not heard but I had.

   

This is a valuable service, but it is something that is done very well on the internet today.  I have subscribed to music services that, based on a list of my favorite artists, can recommend new artists to me.  This is as imprecise as you might imagine, though I have occasionally discovered something really interesting this way.  I download various podcasts that play and discuss new records.  And, of course, iTunes will play me 30 seconds of anything I might be interested in downloading.  When you consider how long in advance print reviews of anything may have to be filed, the problems for the genre are compounded.

   

What, then, might be the value of the print review for music?  Unlike a book review, where the opinion must be more considered – after all, it takes a longer time to read a book than to play a song – and the subject of the review seldom endures repeated exposures, the record review catalogs a fleeting impression.  It does little more for me, in my reading, than establish the existence of something I might not know had been recorded.  It could, however, also suggest a general trend for me: “Bob Dylan’s latest record continues his invocation of a bluesy heritage,” or “Thom Yorke’s solo work is more melodic than Radiohead’s music.”  While I can say with hand on heart that I would not buy something based on any such recommendation, I might hesitate if “trending” information troubled me.

 

In the case of Maxim’s two-and-a-half out of five-star rating, the reviewer judged that the Crowes “sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces.”  After a seven-year layoff, the band might have a hard time attracting new fans based on such an observation.  The magazine’s editor is now suggesting that the piece was to be an unrated “preview,” but for a publication that is not known for objectivity – consider “Ten horrendous television shows that deserved to die” and “These five men turned the White House black” – the claim seems quite ludicrous.  While I do not accept that their discussions of music are of much value to the artists or to the audience, they are usually humorously opinionated: they just need to be written from genuine knowledge and not from the hackneyed generalities of the unskilled reviewer.

Tom Cochrane and My Year at The Newfoundland Herald

I had, by the summer of 1988, completed my first year of university and had been (due to extreme bashfulness) submitting anonymous record reviews to The Newfoundland Herald in St. John’s. Indeed, some of the things I reviewed were still on vinyl. I was so concerned about what Geoff Meeker, its talented editor, would think of me that I dared not sign my name. Due to a disagreement about the influence of advertising staff on editorial content, Mr. Meeker left the magazine, and there was tremendous upheaval amongst its editors and writers. I promptly left school, dropped the nom-de-plume “Tim Finn” or “Tim Flynn” – I could never keep them straight! – and found a place for myself on the masthead of the magazine, eventually crawling up to the role of “Assistant Editor” for something like $7 or $8 an hour.

I thought I was in heaven. My professors at Memorial University were less thrilled about losing what they thought to be a fairly promising student to an entertainment magazine, and after a year I resigned and crawled back to the classroom. As you can see, I never again left it. But the experience of a year as a paid writer on deadline was an important one. I really enjoyed the positive reinforcement that came with writing regularly. Most Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I could count on at least a couple of people telling me how much they enjoyed what was coming off the press. (Of course, it was crushing when no one could muster any enthusiasm about my adolescent prose.) The downside was that I had to find something to write about each week, and with all the contacts you can imagine a shy boy from Conception Bay South would have accumulated in two years with a driver’s license, the task was not always easy.

I was allowed to keep up much of the entertainment writing once I joined the staff, formally, but I did not have the flair that Mr. Meeker brought to the job. When I left, Bob Hallett (of Great Big Sea fame) took over and tapped into a network of connections only a practicing musician could possess. Although I was never allowed to write book reviews, during the last months of 1988 and the first months of 1989, I enjoyed going to some concerts and even talking to some musicians. Then, as now, Warner Brothers Music was a behemoth that did not need to go out of its way to promote itself to a magazine in Newfoundland. But some companies, like PolyGram, for example, would arrange telephone conversations for me with third-string musicians from bands like The Cult and Hothouse Flowers. It would be much more common to speak to Canadian artists from all labels, many of whom were planning trips to St. John’s. The least pleasant interaction I ever had with a musician was with Andrew Cash, who had been signed to Island Records some time before. Apparently, Mr. Cash had answered many times a question about his relationship with his record company, and he shut me down before my pedestrian little enquiry got out of my mouth. It made for an uncomfortable subsequent fifteen minutes, I can tell you. Although I have obviously not forgotten this after twenty years, I can hardly fault the man for losing patience with someone so ill-prepared for an interview. I gather that Mr. Cash is now a journalist, himself, and I hope he has never gotten the brush-off he gave me!

There was one Canadian music celebrity that distinguished himself by the compassion he showed a mousy little entertainment reporter from Newfoundland, though: Tom Cochrane. I had grown up listening to Red Rider, and they were one of a few bands who could be counted upon to play St. John’s now and then. Mr. Cochrane was emerging from the band by this time; their albums had started carrying the “Tom Cochrane and Red Rider” billing, and the man himself was on the telephone with me to discuss Victory Day. (I believe they were coming to play the old Thomson Students’ Centre at Memorial, and as it turned out my tickets for the show were never reserved. I was thus fated to be escorted from the venue in yet another humbling journalistic embarrassment.)

The Newfoundland Herald is owned by the same folks who run OZ-FM and NTV, and each week a production assistant would come across the parking lot from the radio and television station with the chart from Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” to be broadcast the following Saturday. Anyway, “Big League” was the big single from this album, a rather dark bit of pop fare, to tell you the truth.  But as I stared down at the chart that was handed to me by the production assistant, I saw that, somehow, improbably, it was Number One. “Whoa,” I thought, as I started to ask Mr. Cochrane a question about his big American success. Back then, the pressing issue was always about what Canadian acts would "break" in the United States. Today, we have Avril Lavigne and Michael Buble and Nickelback, entertainers who seem to appear in multiple markets at the same time, but back then we wondered if Blue Rodeo or Luba or The Tragically Hip could ever mean to Americans what they already meant to us. “So,” I blundered on, “how does it feel to achieve this incredible success south of the border?”

Mr. Cochrane paused. It seems to me, thinking back these twenty years, that he paused for about an hour, but I am sure that he paused for only a second or two, tried to measure the insanity of the young man down the line, and without missing a beat proceeded to answer by talking about hard work and ambition, his hopes for his music career. Little did either of us know at the time that I had been given the local music chart by mistake, a list of the most requested songs in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This was, of course, hardly the prize that having the best-selling single across North America would be. But, no matter: Mr. Cochrane talked of international success as if we were measuring it by the ability to sell out a small club in upstate New York. Once I found out my mistake, I was mortified, but I was also deeply grateful to a successful musician who had the generosity of spirit to give a pass to a reporter who should have double-checked his facts. I have, obviously, never forgotten the gesture, one that taught me a great lesson about both preparedness and patience with others.

The last two decades have been very kind to both Mr. Cochrane and me. I am pretty sure that he never did get the most popular song on “American Top 40,” but in that he is touring Canada right now with John Mellencamp, I think everything worked out okay for him. I notice he’s up for a Juno in April at the ceremony in Calgary. Rufus Wainwright’s Release the Stars was my favorite “Adult Alternative” Canadian album this year, but you know I’ll be cheering on No Stranger, nonetheless. Little things can make us fans for life, after all.

If This Is A War On Terror, Where Are The War Measures?

The rhetorical value of a “war on terror” is tremendous.  In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American politicians resurrected the phrase to describe undertakings to secure the United States from further attack.  The global goodwill in support of these efforts was matched only by an unimaginative approach to war, however.  In practical terms, a conventional conflict has been waged in Iraq and Afghanistan while, on the home front, there have been efforts to “secure the borders” to prevent terrorists from undertaking further atrocities on American soil.  In the meantime, citizens have debated whether surveillance programs have eroded personal liberties.

 

We will know the West has won the war on terror when we are all secure.

 

But what does security mean, exactly?  Al-Qaeda did not use 9/11 to launch an invasion of North America.  What the attack was intended to do was undermine the economic well-being of the United States, and that is why the American government encouraged everyone to keep shopping in the weeks and months afterwards.  In fact, we were told that the terrorists “win” only when our lifestyle is disrupted.

 

This seems to me to be a dramatic departure from the sacrifice usually demanded of a populace during times of war.  We have forgotten about drafts and rationing, public investment that belies the accumulation of short-term comforts.  If this was a war like those of the past, the infrastructure used to assemble battlefield equipment would be available during reconstruction for peacetime industrial production.  Instead, we have been asked, all over the continent, to support the war effort by going into debt buying imported goods.  And as more and more Americans wake up to the reality of real sacrifice on the home front, as their home equity shell games are revealed and their lines of credit dry up, they see the true cost of these war measures.  What is left, instead of a state-of-the-art manufacturing sector, are households filled with plasma televisions.

 

Security means not the freedom to buy such junk but, instead, the nobler goal of North American energy independence.  The war on terror can never be won as long as an explosion in the Straits of Hormuz can cripple American energy supplies and much of the economy of the Western world.  What was sold as patriotic duty has actually left us more vulnerable to those people who would see us living out our lives in Taliban rat holes.

 

Can we find enough of the outrage that animated us in 2001 to demand public investment in sustainable energy?  Can Western governments make the investment in every imaginable form of energy from oil sands to solar to, yes, even nuclear resources to achieve something that looks like victory in the war on terror?  If we are willing to demand such a thing of our leaders, would we be able to forego many of our luxuries to pay for the necessities our governments can no longer afford?  Could we ever redefine our lifestyle in these more modest terms?

Moving Lethbridge Further From Calgary: More Magic From Air Canada

When called upon to be a booster for the University of Lethbridge, I always talk about Calgary: two hours up the road is a perfect distance to have between our two cities.  I will not lie to job candidates and tell them that they can get all their shopping done here, and we attract about the same number of entertainment spectacles as St. John’s did when I was growing up.  But there is a world-class city just a quarter of a tank of gasoline up the highway – and, if you save up your chores, you can have a nice day out once a month in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.  In the meantime, you do not have to deal with ninety-minute commutes and junkies on the sidewalk in front of your house.  (I know: we kept an apartment in a nice part of Calgary for two years, and actually living in the city brings with it many problems.)  When you combine all this with accomplished colleagues and generous institutional support, the University of Lethbridge competes pretty well even with those idyllic little eastern schools I love so much.

 

The sad reality, however, is that Lethbridge is moving further away from Calgary.  No, I am not talking about some plate-ripping natural disaster; I am talking about the result of decisions taken by the unfeeling behemoth that is Air Canada.  When I first flew into this city in April 1997, Lethbridge had a little airport serviced by Air Canada and Canadian Airlines.  Over the past ten years, the city has grown with some robustness and the university has doubled in size.  Still, Lethbridge has a little airport, serviced primarily by a smaller number of Air Canada flights than were available a decade ago!  Currently, our “national” airline has seen fit, due to “pilot shortage,” to sever the link between Lethbridge and Calgary after dinner each evening.  As a result, if you want to come home, you need to make sure your connecting flight from, say, Denver, Toronto, Vancouver, or Winnipeg hits the tarmac at good old YYC by 5pm.  If you cannot get to Calgary before then, you had better be prepared to stay in a hotel and try to get back to Lethbridge sometime the next morning.

 

Look at this inefficiency.  You are now left with the choice to abandon your business or vacation destination so early on your travel day that you can get back to Calgary by late afternoon, or you can sacrifice some of the subsequent day to fly the last leg to Lethbridge.  And if you choose the latter option, you must add the cost of a hotel stay in lovely northeastern Calgary to your itinerary.  The other option, and one I am often forced to take, is simply to drive to Calgary to catch a flight.  You get the benefit of a greater range of itineraries and airlines, but you have to make your way over the highway and pay an exorbitant fee for parking.  Trust me, the last thing you want to do after a twelve-hour, white-knuckle day of delays and poor service is drive your car home.

 

Now, if you are a left-leaning NDP voter, you will trust the government.  The government was supposed to look out for little cities like ours when we lost Canadian Airlines.  Perhaps you believe that we should make Air Canada fly into Lethbridge repeatedly through the morning, noon, and night.  That is actually what the government does in our neighboring state of Montana to ensure air service to its myriad of little cities.  Imagine that: big government asserting itself in a place where a Democrat could not get elected dogcatcher.

 

If you trust the market, you hope that government leaves business alone to solve this problem itself.  What are the various regulatory impediments preventing, say, little Integra Air here in Lethbridge from flying into Calgary to connect with WestJet’s schedule?  Are there any, I wonder?  Government red tape stopped Integra from flying into Edmonton’s downtown airport, limiting the convenience of that once wonderful choice.  (Integra flights are still booked solid: the market working against Air Canada’s indifference to us.  Air Canada’s response is more indifference.  They can make much more money with thirty minutes of jet fuel going between Calgary and Edmonton than going between Lethbridge and Calgary, after all.)  I understand that tragic decisions made by our fathers and grandfathers keep us today from taking a train to Calgary.  But what are the regulatory impediments keeping someone from running an efficient coach service between Lethbridge and the airport in Calgary?  Are there any, or is it simply that there is no money in it?  When I lived in England, travelling regularly from Oxford to London, someone had a reasonably-priced bus service that put to shame the less efficient and more expensive rail connection to Heathrow and Gatwick airports.  It was a license to print money.  If one was forced to try to get to Lethbridge by coach from YYC, today, in some act of desperation or masochism, you could be driven to despair by all the connections and sundry stops at every little hamlet along Highway 2.

   

We are told, constantly, that the world is growing smaller.  We are subject always to discussions about big government versus the free market.  But the sorry state of transportation in and around Lethbridge, Alberta belies these platitudes.  We are told that Air Canada will now review their schedule each month.  If I hold my breath long enough, I might be able to float to Calgary.

The Re-Quiz: One of Life's Second Chances

A couple of weeks ago, I gave my class its first reading quiz of the semester.  Now, I know that some of you will claim, and claim with some validity, that reading quizzes are unscholarly tools of evaluation.  I know that you will argue that experienced students in senior classes are demeaned by having their reading habits challenged.  But the sad truth of the matter is that students sometimes have to be challenged to do their reading closely and on time.  In the relative anonymity of even a medium-sized class, where they are free to participate (generally) only when it strikes their fancy, it is possible for students to coast through a session by taking notes and nodding at the appropriate (and obvious) places.  The problem, of course, is that if no one does the reading, no one ever participates.  If a class runs, in part, on interaction between professor and student, poor reading habits can drain all the energy out of a class.  And if the professor changes tack to eschew participation that had been anticipated, all is lost.

   

Generally, the readings in my courses are difficult.  This is a sure-fire way to encourage attendance.  I think students benefit from going through assigned stuff with me.  But there is no doubt that class goes best when they try to plow through it on their own, initially: this is where my quizzes come in.

   

For the first exercise, I decided to take it easy on them.  I gave them a matching assignment based on some concepts, some names, and some works in a reading on modernist poetics.  There were eleven questions and fourteen possible answers.  They would be expected to know, for example, that Sigmund Freud wrote Totem and Taboo, that surrealists admired the “illogical” in art, that Eugene Jolas saw a “basin” and not an “envelope” as an appropriate trope for discussing the mind.  On the principle that no one is perfect, I mark these assignments out of ten.  Still, the average grade was something below thirty per cent.  As an experiment, I gave the same quiz to three folks that work in the Dean’s Office.  Obviously, they did not do the reading, but they, too, scored about thirty per cent.  While this is hardly a vote of confidence for my introductory material, it is clear that my class performed at about the level simple chance would suggest.

   

What to do?

   

After some thought, I decided to give them the same quiz again at the beginning of the subsequent class.  I reasoned that if that had been me, if I had obviously bombed a quiz, I would have left the classroom and marched right home to read the bloody essay that had so humiliated me.  If I was not that interested in the course, I’d probably move on and read the next essay (or not) without any thought to consolidating past material.  In the re-quiz, almost all students scored better, and a couple of students who had done poorly achieved perfect scores.  I told the class that I would count their best result of their two tries.

   

I am always arguing that although the material I teach may not have obvious and direct applicability to the world at large, the entire course is an examination of how the world organized itself through the twentieth century.  How was this act of mercy a reflection of the “real world,” though?  Well, I would never suggest to students that they can rely on second chances.  Sadly, there are few times when we are given a legitimate “do over.”  But when that opportunity does come, it often comes unexpectedly, and successful people need to be able to seize it fully and enthusiastically.  The students who did remedial work in my class had no expectation that they would be rewarded directly for doing so, and it was a pleasure for me to be able to offer them some reward. Sometimes we get the chance to organize our little corners of the world as we would like the whole world to be.

   

The postscript to this story is that I just handed back the second reading quiz of the semester, and the results were better than either the first quiz or its rewrite.  I hope that the message of reading closely and on time has gotten through loud and clear.  That would be the best result.

James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand

James Howard Kunstler is as important a public intellectual as we have today.  Many people will know Mr. Kunstler from The Long Emergency (2005), his influential examination of the likely effects of peak oil on life in the United States.  The study demonstrates how contemporary Western society relies heavily on a cheap and reliable supply of fossil fuels and how increased global competition for scarce resources will undermine all that we are and all that we have.  Mr. Kunstler is skeptical that any combination of alternative sources of energy will allow us to sustain an economy based, largely, upon the consumption of inexpensive imported goods.  In the meantime, the luxuries we finance with credit cards and the imagined wealth of home equity continue to erode the environmental foundation of our well-being.  The onset of a permanent crisis may be as close as another terrorist attack or natural disaster that seriously disrupts oil imports from the Middle East.  The picture is bleak.

   

Much of what Mr. Kunstler says is also being said by other people, of course, but what differentiates his work from that of other writers similarly concerned with the state of contemporary society is the synthesis he achieves in his thought across fields as disparate as geography and political science, geology and sociology.  He traces our predicament to the tragic investment of modernist wealth in suburban sprawl.  A society of over-extended “homeowners,” holed up in castles of particle board and vinyl, relying on roads and highways, on the behemoths of private transportation, has grown ever-more isolated and ever-more dependent on a world over which it can exert less and less influence.

 

But even if you know all four of Mr. Kunstler’s works of non-fiction on these themes, you might not be aware of his long achievement as a novelist.  World Made By Hand, a new work of fiction to be released by the Atlantic Monthly Press in March, gives him an opportunity to imagine fully what life may be like during a permanent crisis.  It is every bit as gripping as the “Living in the Long Emergency” chapter from his previous book, but as a story World Made By Hand embodies a genuine narrative momentum unavailable to the essayist.  Mr. Kunstler portrays skillfully the community of Union Grove, drawing on his own extensive knowledge of Washington County, New York.  He introduces very early in the text a conflict between town citizens and Wayne Karp, a former trucker who runs the disreputable salvaging operation from the dump beyond the edge of Union Grove.  This is amongst the narrative’s widest arcs, resolved only at the novel’s end.  The secondary conflict is between wealthy landowner Stephen Bullock and Dan Curry, the corrupt merchant who controls business in Albany, and it broadens effectively the range of Mr. Kunstler’s social criticism.

 

But the story, itself, really belongs to the first-person narrator, Robert Earle, a former software executive who moved from suburban Boston to Union Grove after a West Coast terrorist attack closed all ports and thus choked the American economy.  His family is splintered by the long emergency: wife Sandy and daughter Genna have died without antibiotics and state-of-the-art medical care; son Daniel has left home to see what is left of America beyond upstate New York.  Fortunately, Robert has carpentry skills and more than a little residual ambition, awakened by the arrival of the “New Faith” religious sect that uses the abandoned high school in town as its new headquarters.  There is delicious tension between these strident evangelicals and the passive congregationalists that make up the faithful in Union Grove.  Until the arrival of Brother Jobe and his crew from the South, religion seems little more than a surrogate for collapsed state and city governments.  But even the fire-and-brimstone of the New Faith is tempered with civic practicality and the no-nonsense might of former soldiers who assert themselves in their new surroundings.  As if to balance the ambitions of the newcomers, the livyers of Union Grove shake off the lethargy that befell them after their initial accommodation to crisis.  Mr. Kunstler here recognizes that ideological conflict should give rise to compromise and innovation in healthy societies, in contrast to the political schisms that have arrested our progress today.  In a world made by hand, community is more important than anything else, and it is true that individuals thrive in Union Grove based on their ability and willingness to collaborate with their neighbors.  There are long passages describing the bounties of an earth relieved of much of its industrial burden.  Mr. Kunstler takes great pleasure in describing food and drink, the acoustic music that defines what little leisure time is available to a people drawn back into agrarian living.  Still, I shudder to read that Aaron Moyer, a professor of art history at Bennington College, must take a job as a laborer.  With the university system in ruins, Mr. Kunstler takes steps to redefine beauty (and our appreciation of it) beyond the long emergency.

 

There are many clever touches throughout.  Intermittent flashes of electricity animate old radios long enough to broadcast exhortations from hysterical preachers.  There is no press, though references to broadsheets brought by traders suggest the American federal government, having fallen apart after various attempts at martial law, has been unable to reassert itself.  The two-day odyssey to Albany, accomplished in less than an hour today by car, employs the “road trip” to show the suffering of outliers and the dishonesty of commerce that tries to proceed as if globalization is soon coming back.  There is no rubber for tires or footwear, no refrigeration, no proper anesthetic.  One cannot read this novel without appreciating how fragile life will be without the essentials whose existence we have smothered underneath our luxuries, and, yet, this remains a remarkably optimistic book.  Mr. Kunstler is criticized always for his gloomy writings, as he imagines for example the class riots we will suffer once the lumpen realize, once and for all, the American Dream will not be theirs.  But Union Grove will not here tolerate delinquency, and in a population already thinned by the Mexican Flu epidemic, citizens who are careless about themselves and others simply do not survive.

 

I appreciate the thought that has gone into reconsidering new challenges to the family.  How will gender relations change when women who may have children are no longer valued for the diversity of views they bring to the corporate world?  What role is there for children in an agrarian society that offers only rudimentary schooling?  What complicated living arrangements may emerge when many husbands and wives are taken, prematurely, from partners who expected the ease of divorce, and not the onset of epidemic, to be the biggest challenge to their marriages?  Similarly, the plantation run by Stephen Bullock and the compound constructed by the New Faith sect suggest old ways of organizing ourselves that may be reasserted.  The former offers limited hydroelectricity if one only embraces a feudal model; the latter is built around a mystical seer who suggests that unexplained wonders still pulse beneath the din of our iPods.

 

I think I expected to read how our world fell apart when I picked up this novel.  Mr. Kunstler must provide some explanations, of course, and so his characters are permitted a limited amount of reminiscing, though readers are reminded constantly that nostalgia is deadly in a world made by hand.  Similarly, young Sarah Watling is introduced as a character to whom Robert is obliged to explain something of how they got where they presently find themselves.  But if you want to know what Union Grove had to survive, you can always read Mr. Kunstler’s non-fiction.  You are not very far into this book before you start wondering what happens when winter comes, and the problem is no longer the humidity but the cold, itself.  A gravity-based water system allows something like modern plumbing: what happens when it freezes?  Who trains the next generation of doctors and dentists, whose presence is still vital in a world made by hand?  The New Faithers wandered by in search of a more peaceful life, but it is suggested that new citizens and old will seek to accommodate each other going forward.  Will this multiculturalism on a small scale fare better than it has for us?  To leave you with such questions is, I believe, the mark of a fine novel.  I am not puzzled by what happened as much as I am eager to imagine what happens next.  If this is truly a world made by hand, it is one made most vividly by the labors of an accomplished and confident author.

 

A reasonable question that lingers is one about timeframe.  Robert has been widowed nine years by the time the novel begins.  The long emergency has likely been on for more than a decade.  Mr. Kunstler makes passing reference to Esther Callie’s mother, an elderly woman who has just died.  She was 97 years old and had, apparently, been a nurse in the Second World War.  Now, if we imagine that she had been drawn to the profession through the Bolton Act, whose youngest Nurse Cadets were seventeen, she could have been born about 1928.  That puts the events of this novel at 2025, and Sandy Earle died of encephalitis in 2016.  The narrator had a number of years in Union Grove before she got ill, and so my best guess is that the United States begins to unravel, in Mr. Kunster’s imagination, within five years.  If we have so little time, we can only hope to create for ourselves a world as fine and as fair as the Union Grove of Mr. Kunstler's mind.

A Letter of Resignation to the New England Patriots

Robert Kraft, Owner

New England Patriots

One Patriot Place

Foxborough, Massachusetts

U.S.A.  02035

 

Dear Mr. Kraft:

 

It is with deep regret that I write today to request that my association with the New England Patriots be downgraded from rabid, devoted fan to interested spectator.  I do not think you will miss me.  In terms of official merchandise, I have only a mini football and a branded cooler.

 

To my shame, as an educated, reasonably sane adult, I got too caught up this year in the team’s so-called “quest for perfection.”  I was stung, you see, by the heartbreaking loss to the Indianapolis Colts in last year’s playoffs, and I took too seriously promises that I should “wait for next year.”  When the team beat San Diego early in the regular season, in the midst of the “Spygate” controversy, I began to buy into the idea that fate had something special in store for us all.  I suffered through all those gut wrenching, fourth quarter wins late in the year, but I was still unprepared for the cruelty of yesterday’s defeat.  To win eighteen times in nineteen games is a fine achievement, but it does not justify the considerable emotional investment for which I can now claim absolutely no return.  I have tried to play the “Pollyanna” game and look for something in the last six months that makes me “glad,” but I have come up empty.

   

Some people will call me a sore loser, but this is not so.  I actually admire the New York Giants franchise a great deal, and I often root for them in NFC matches.  In fact, my association with the Patriots goes back to my childhood, when the only American football I could see in Newfoundland was regional coverage from the NBC affiliate in Bangor, Maine.  Those Patriots teams were usually awful, so I believe I earned my share of the successes the team had since 2002.

 

You see, during the wonderful run you had in 2001-02, I found in the story of a rag-tag collection of underdogs considerable encouragement in my own life.  That team exemplified for me principles of selflessness and ingenuity that can be admired, universally.  During the 2003-04 and 2004-05 seasons, it seemed almost that you could rely on the Patriots to win: I did not even need to follow along that closely.

 

But something did change last year.  When the team was leading the AFC Championship 21-3 over the Colts, I left a restaurant in Calgary to drive home to Lethbridge.  I arrived in time to see the end of the 38-34 loss.  It was all I could do to even think about football for next couple of months; I went cold turkey, even eschewing my practice of easing off my high by watching the Arena League.

 

I will have to take some time to think about how I got drawn in so deeply this year.  I do think Tom Brady is swell, and the idea that the team spent the necessary money to arm him with a better supporting cast was intriguing.  I am also plenty tired of listening to how the 1972 Miami Dolphins, as unlikeable bunch of fellows as you will ever hear, are the greatest team of all time.  The idea that a team could go undefeated in the era of the salary cap is a bit like the impending arrival of Halley’s Comet: something you might see once in your lifetime.

 

Well, Halley’s Comet was cancelled last night.

 

It is some indication of my charmed life that last night’s loss is something like “Number Six” on my “Personal Top Ten of Worst Things to Ever Happen to Me,” and I recognize that nothing actually happened to me other than developing a sick feeling in my stomach and having my blood pressure spike ten points.  But it felt a little like finding out your best girl is stepping out on you or that there is no Santa Claus.  Sporting events are supposed to be spectacles of vicarious experience.  I can feel loss today instead of undergoing genuine tragedy, and I am thankful for that.  It is the same reason why we go to horror movies, I suppose.

 

But I love football because I love the fundamentals of the game: the strategy.  I like watching a long pass play; I like a long run.  I am happiest when I can admire good playing regardless of the result.  I envy the person who can appreciate what the Giants did last night.  For the longest time, I told people that I just loved the game, that I had no team.  I was always told that the highs were higher when you followed someone in particular, that the lows were more poignant.  I bought into that, but I am feeling only the latter, today, and my heart is broken.

 

I’m done with all football for some time.  I hope, eventually, to get back to my channel surfing on Sunday afternoons, seeking out good matchups.  Inevitably, the Patriots will be involved in some of them, and I’ll be hoping for you to do well.  But I also pledge never again to hang so much, personally, on the success of a collection of multimillionaires who, in reality, say nothing to me about my life, as Morrissey used to sing.  After all, it’s not like I am Gisele Bundchen.