3 May 2022

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

In his Afterword to Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber says he wanted to write “a big, sprawling, scholarly book” of the kind people didn’t write anymore. [393] From a background in anthropology and ethnology, Graeber felt he had an advantage entering territory more typically covered by historians and economists. He was neither beholden to the predetermined models of the economist nor the “resolute” empiricism of the historian. He also had inspiration from a little known giant in his field, Marcel Mauss.

Mauss, Graeber says, was the first to explode the myth of barter that plagued the economics field at the time–and even up to Graeber’s. (Mauss may have been a brilliant thinker, but he was disorganized and a poor publicist. He never published his manuscript.) Accordingly, Graeber starts his book, chapter 1, with “The Myth of Barter.” He systematically lays out the critique, but allows Caroline Humphrey to make the closing argument for him: “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there has never been such a thing.” [29] Graeber goes farther. Not only did barter not precede monetary economy, it almost certainly followed it. Empirical analysis shows that virtual money, with its variety of credit systems, millennia before Visa, came first. Hard currency came “only much later, unevenly, never completely replacing credit.” [41]Only after coinage could barter systems arise, “an accidental byproduct of coinage and paper money, among people already used to cash transactions,” such as in 1990s Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mauss was also, Graeber says, the “first to recognize that all societies are a jumble of contradictory principles.” [395] They are not always what they say they are or seem to be. They are more or less full of contradictions and resist simplification. Armed with this insight, Graeber perceives patterns and inconsistencies others overlook; he packs his “big, sprawling” history with startling revelations and provocative analyses.

Here’s one: Communism “is something that exists right now–that exists to some degree, in any human society, although there has never been one in which everything has been organized that way, and it is difficult to imagine how there could be. All of us act like communists a good deal of the time.” [95]

Stated the other way around, we do not always (or even usually?) act like the rational, self-interested creatures of the classical economic model. We give to each according to what we see as his needs; we expect from each according to what we perceive to be her abilities. Graeber is intent on breaking the term from the more politically charged definition we inherited from the likes of Marx and the Soviet Union. He sees complexity–“a jumble of contradictory principles”–in human social arrangements, and he spends much of his book steering our attention to it. “We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.” [114]

Here’s another: “Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate your liberty, at least temporarily, endures. …The violence is pushed out of sight. But this is largely because we’re no longer able to imagine what a world based on social arrangements that did not require the continual threat of tasers and surveillance cameras would even look like.” [210]

The violence Graeber refers to is that of the chain and the whip. Through careful yet wide-ranging discussion of the ancient historical record, Graeber makes clear the historical connection between debt and slavery, a global phenomenon that long predated New World sugar/indigo/tobacco/cotton plantations. Yet, he argues forcefully that slavery is not a precondition for some sort of economic evolution toward higher form, viz., capitalism. Graeber culls the archaeological record for examples of cashless economies built on social currencies. In these societies, typically, all citizens are both borrowers and lenders. With the arrival of monetized economies, suddenly we get harder lines between debtors and creditors. Only then do we get men selling wives/daughters/sons to pay off what in the end can never be paid. Only then do we get creditors coming for the debtor himself and making him what he always was: a slave.

The Axial Age (which Karl Jaspers defined as covering the years 800 to 300 BCE and which Graeber extends to 800 CE) saw the rise of empires in the Mediterranean, China, and India. These empires required armies to extend themselves and money to pay for armies. (Free citizens made better soldiers. Paying thousands of itinerant warriors in oxen, say, was impractical.) In a vicious circularity, empires needed conquest to pay off debts which only grew as a result of its operations of conquest. In the end, military expansion could only delay the inevitable: default (an observation that cuts a little too close to home).

The Middle Ages, another global phenomenon in Graeber’s telling, saw the retreat of hard currency along with the decline of empire. Credit economies revived, and slavery waned. The rise of capitalist empires in the fifteenth century brought the return of both coinage and slavery, both entwined in European expansion into the Americas.

Capitalism and empire have flourished into modern times, yet slavery has not. How does Graeber account for this? He points out that while the most brutal forms of slavery have been outlawed, many of its essential features continue. Think of college graduates who spend half (or more) of their working lives paying off student loans, a modern form of debt peonage. Think of the working classes who, if they don’t actually sell their freedom, can be said to rent it when they “spend [most of] their waking hours working at someone else’s orders.” [354]

The link between debt and slavery is made explicit in Graeber’s book. Debt gets its sinister fingers into all aspects of our economic and moral lives, making all of us, debtor and creditor alike, less free as a result.

Capitalism is the world-historical engine driving the empire-debt-slavery nexus, and, as such, comes under close scrutiny in Graeber’s analysis. Exhibit A: the case of Hernan Cortés. Before he was a conquistador, Cortés was a debtor, a dandy living beyond his means. The contemporary diarist, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, described him wearing “a plume of feathers, with a medallion, and a gold chain, and a velvet cloak trimmed with loops of gold.” [316?] Debt drove Cortés to Tenochtitlán in search of plunder to maintain his lifestyle. Leading perhaps the most lucrative military heist in history, Cortés, we learn, had the audacity to charge his men for weapons damaged in the assault and for the medical care they required when wounded in his service.

So it was that the conquistador passed on his own debt to his underlings, who, in turn, took out their resentment on the local populace. Only when we consider this fact, Graeber says, does the sadism of the rank-and-file conquistadors become intelligible. As Graeber says, debt gives the debtor “the frantic urgency of having to convert everything around [him]self into money, and rage and indignation at having been reduced to the sort of person who would do so.” [325] Here he is not just speaking of sixteenth century conquistadors. He is addressing the rest of us in the post-industrial West.

Graeber turns his pique on classical economics, as well, a field, he says, that deems it “perfectly natural to assume that, if the price of silver in China is twice what it is in Seville, and the inhabitants of Seville are capable of getting their hands on large quantities of silver and transporting it to China, the clearly they will, even if doing so requires the destruction of entire civilizations. Or if there is a demand for sugar in England, and enslaving millions is the easiest way to acquire labor to produce it, then it is inevitable that some will enslave them.” [314] There are alternatives, examples of which Graeber patiently enumerates in his book.

He critiques Adam Smith taking a similarly empirical tack. “It’s not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” [335] Smith famously intoned. But Graeber insists that, at the time of their publication, those words were pure fiction. “Most English shopkeepers were still carrying out the main part of their business on credit, which meant that customers appealed to their benevolence all the time.” Empiricism and realism matter to Graeber, and he wants them to matter to us, too. Smith, he avers, was merely describing an ideal vision, “an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore free of guilt and sin.” This purified vision has infected our thinking ever since, with pernicious effect, in Graeber’s view.

Over the next two hundred years, powerful men both spouted his ideas and worked to turn his idealized vision into reality. However, they could not keep sin and debt from infecting that reality. They spread, and, according to Graeber, “began to take a profound hold” on those who were able to elevate themselves above penury. These so-called ‘respectable’ working classes internalized the attitudes of their (former?) oppressors. They “often took freedom from the clutches of the pawnbroker and loan shark as a point of pride.” [354]

Thus, as a society, we (almost) uniformly condemn debt while at the same time are (almost) all, in fact, debtors. Graeber cites the statistic that the average household debt in 2010 was 130% of income. That statistic sends most of us shaking our heads and clucking our tongues, inciting moral revulsion to rise in our chests. But Graeber’s entire project is to have us question these reactions and the assumptions that cause them. He says, trenchantly, that “very little of this debt was accrued by those determined to find money to bet on horses or toss away on fripperies.” He then allows his own assumptions step to the fore: “Insofar as it was borrowed for what economists like to call discretionary spending, it was mainly given to children, to share with friends, or otherwise to be able to build and maintain relations with other human beings that are based on something other than sheer material calculation. One must go into debt to achieve a life that goes in any way beyond mere survival.” [379]

A book that began as wide-ranging and scholarly becomes more pointed and political by the final fifty pages. Also more personal. Graeber is not afraid to reveal his own motivations for his inquiry and its resulting radicalism. As the son of a working class family, he says, “I can attest to the degree that, for those who spend most of their waking hours working at someone else’s orders, the ability to pull out a wallet full of banknotes that are unconditionally one’s own can be a compelling form of freedom.” [354]

After building his case against the pernicious effects of debt, Graeber ends by turning his focus on debt’s opposite: freedom. To the extent that debt “reduce[s] us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money,” [389] to the extent it renders failed or reluctant pillagers to the status of “undeserving poor,” it undermines human relationships and human freedom. Graeber reminds us debt, for a large swath of the population, “is simply a matter of survival” and, he says, reaching his peroration, “it is useful to point out that for real human beings survival is rarely enough. Nor should it be.” [380] Radically, Graeber proposes we stop making money our highest value and turn it back on human sociality. For, “what else are we,” he asks, “except the sum of the relationships we have with others”? [387]

13 Apr 2022

Always Look on the Dark Side of Life

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Middle Grade Nonfiction | 0

Krista Tippet’s radio show “On Being” was a little too earnest for my tastes–or perhaps it was just her voice, or the connotation from its original title, “Speaking of Faith.” Still, I discovered by accident (on early Sunday morning grocery shopping trips) that it could be provocative in best way. The episode titled “Time Management for Mortals” with Oliver Burkeman was not especially so, but my ears pricked up when Tippett plugged his latest book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. S has often urged me to get help finding a brighter outlook, but I, yes, I can’t stand the positivity of self-help books. This one seemed written just for me.

I checked it out of the library.

Burkeman is a journalist specializing in psychology with a column in The Guardian titled, “This Column Will Change Your Life.” For The Antidote he traveled the world to meet leading thinkers of the “negative way to happiness” and to experience their methods for himself. Each of his chapters focuses on a different tradition or issue: stoicism, Buddhism, goal-setting, the self, insecurity, failure, death. I found myself in each chapter, with qualifiers of course

Stoicism

Forget Seneca. Shakespeare said it best through Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I found myself most clearly in Burkeman’s paragraph on the “double-edged” nature of reassurance: “When you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won’t occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All too often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.” [34] When things were at their worst for our son, S would look to me for reassurance and expressed frustration that I didn’t provide it. Without having read Burkeman or Seneca, I already, somehow, understood the idea explained above. I understood there is no guarantee of ease, resolution, happiness. One can only forge ahead knowing that pain will eventually come–and pass on, too.

Buddhism

Burkeman goes to a meditation retreat in central Massachusetts. For a week, he and his cohort of meditators live in silence, doing a few chores, eating and sleeping, of course, but otherwise meditating, in half-hour segments, alternating between sitting and walking. The purpose of the experience, and of the practice of meditation generally, is to cultivate non-attachment: nonattachment to the self and to one’s thoughts. I need hardly say I am far from attempting any such practice. Leave me with my thoughts for a few moments, and I become desperate for a book, a magazine, a podcast (Wordle!) to occupy them. When I am forced to live with my thoughts I invariably direct them in a “productive” direction. No emptiness of mind, here.

Nevertheless, a quote from a this chapter rang true for me. Burkeman quotes a psychiatrist on the intersection of Buddhist nonattachment and the Oedipus myth: “The quintessential point…is that if you flee [your fate], it’ll come back to bite you. The very thing from which you’re in flight–well, it’s the fleeing that brings on the problem.” Using his own words, Burkeman avers that many of us who seek happiness are really “running away from things of which [we] are barely aware.” [56-57] Meditation is a way to stop the running. Though I have known the frustration (desperation?) of seeking an elusive contentment, it has been years since I did. If I no longer flee my fears, meditation has had nothing to do with it. More likely it has been that quintessentially Western contribution to the field of human betterment: psychotherapy.

There was another notable quote, too, this from a meditation guru: “Many western therapeutic methods focus on trying to successfully manage or modify our feeling states. The underlying assumption is that if our feelings can be altered [or] reduced, we will be more able to live meaningful and effective lives; that it is our feelings that hold us back.” He goes on to say that feelings are like weather, out of our control, even if we can dress accordingly and expect that it, too, shall pass. I have long since come to accept dark periods of sadness or discontent as a fact of life, something to accept, not rail against.

Goal-Setting

Burkeman doesn’t need to caution me against the downsides of goal setting. I’ve rarely done it. (There are notable exceptions both from the distant past and from more recent years.) I never thought it a virtue to passively accept what came my way, but apparently it was (is). In any event, it is later in the chapter, when Burkeman invokes the idea of uncertainty, that I became most interested.

Ever since 2009, when I lost my job and, at the same time, read extensively about Maynard Keynes, uncertainty has been a key notion for me. How much can we really know about the effects of our actions? We must expect uncertainty and learn to live with it. As Burkeman quotes psychiatrist Erich Fromm: “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.” To which Burkeman adds: “Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities–for success, for happiness, for really living–are waiting.” A more positive role for uncertainty that I had previously considered.

Overcoming the Self

I agreed with David Hume, quoted early in this chapter:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long as I am insensible to myself, and may be truly said not to exist…. [108]

Such is the materialist view, which I share. I well understand that my self is an illusion. Given the opportunity to consider it, I would recognize that the same applies for everyone else, too. And yet. Though I understand my actions as a product of “perceptions” and chemical interactions, I still judge myself harshly for errors and faux pas, still cringe at the memory of them and struggle to forgive myself. As if my self actually mattered.

I have not yet tackled the central task outlined in this chapter: dis-identifying my self from my thoughts. “You are not your mind,” teaches Ekhart Tolle. [113] “Become a witness to your thoughts,” writes Burkeman. [116] These are attitudes/practices I have yet to internalize.

The Hidden Benefits of Insecurity

Change is the one constant.

“The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life,” writes Alan Watts. “To be secure means to isolate and fortify the ‘I,’ but it is just this feeling of being an isolated ‘I’ which makes me feel lonely and afraid.” Madness is when we “circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl” trying to avoid “death, pain, fear, or hunger.” Better to approach life as a dance, “and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.” [147-149]

Failure

Here’s a $10 word: kakorrhaphiophobia. (“Do you have kakorrhaphiophobia, Charlie Brown?”) I am not sure I have an unhealthy fear of failure. On the other hand, memories of past failures have an outsize influence on my present thoughts and actions. In at least three domains, perceived failure has led me to wall off that part of my life–the people, the pursuit–and live as if it never existed. Mine is more antipathy than fear of failure. Besides, fear can serve a useful function. Fear of heights, acrophobia, may keep a sufferer from experiencing the awe-inspiring vista of a mountain summit, but it will also keep her safe–and what’s wrong with the view from down on the ground?

Burkeman devotes several pages to explain the dichotomy between “fixed theory” and “incremental theory,” innate ability and learned ability. (False dichotomy: we all fall somewhere on a continuum between the two, he says.) “An incremental outlook is a happier way to be , even if it never results in any particularly outstanding success.” The “only precondition” for such an outlook, he writes, “is a heartfelt willingness to lose.” [175] As J. K. Rowling told the Harvard class of 2008 about her own failures: “I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive. Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.” [178]

Memento Mori, or Death as a Way of Life

At 20, I couldn’t quite relate to Woody Allen’s obsession with death. This is odd because the year before I saw Annie Hall I read the book Alvy Singer picks off the bookstore shelf, Ernst Becker’s The Denial of Death. I had spent a lot of time contemplating death just a few months before. But then I got a girlfriend, and I became too obsessed with life-affirming activities to contemplate my own demise, or anyone else’s. In middle age, due to a sequence of unfortunate events, death became ever-present again, in fact, a near-daily preoccupation. More recently, it seems to have resolved into a more appropriate awareness of mortality without the accompanying dread.

In this chapter, Burkeman urges his American readers, especially, to take death more seriously as an inextricable part of life. He quotes philosopher-psychotherapist Lauren Tillinghast who suggests we look at life “like going to a really nice restaurant. You take it as a fact that the meal isn’t going to last forever. Never mind if that’s the way it should be, or whether you feel that you’re owed more meal, or you resent the fact that the meal isn’t eternal.” [192]

My own go-to metaphor is strikingly similar. Where others assume extending life is always the highest value, I like to think I am grown up enough to accept death, when it comes. Or, as I like to say, I will be able to leave the party before it ends.

Negative Capability

Burkeman tells us we don’t have to become wandering stoics or meditative monks to benefit from the ideas in his book. He concludes by sharing the small, doable ways he has found to practice negative capability in his own life. To make his position clear, he writes

The point here is not that negative capability is always superior to the positive kind. Optimism is wonderful; goals can sometimes be useful; even positive thinking and positive visualization have their benefits. The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of ‘doing’ in how we think about happiness, and that we chronically undervalue negativity and the ‘not-doing’ skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.

His project is one of balancing the scales. In it, he succeeds…unfailingly (so to speak).

5 Apr 2022

Year of the Three B’s

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Personal | 0

Buckeyes. Bearcats. Bengals.

It was a great year to be a football fan in southwest Ohio. The combined record of what I came to call the Three B’s was 37 wins to 11 losses, or a .771 winning percentage. All told, local fans were treated to nearly six months of thrilling plays; exciting, last-second wins; and that strange phenomenon unique to sports fandom, the ego-boosting rush of national attention: Hey, who’s got a championship team this year? In southwest Ohio, in 2021-22, we came close to having more than one.

None of this was anticipated. The Buckeyes might make another appearance in the College Football Playoffs, but would they acquit themselves better than their previous appearances? The Bearcats might put together another undefeated season, but playing in a non-Power Five conference, would it lead to anything more than an invitation to the Peach Bowl? The Bengals might hope for a winning season, but could they expect to make the playoffs? (Under their new coach, Zac Taylor, the Bengals had won all of six games in two seasons: 6-32. They hadn’t reached the playoffs in six years and hadn’t won a playoff game in three decades.)

Bengals

Yet the opening game of the 2021-22 season gave reason to hope. Evan MacPherson kicked his first game-winning, walk-off field goal in overtime against the Vikings. It would not be his last. Like most of the other regular season games this year, I saw only the opening and closing minutes of the game because of my weekly go club. So I saw the kick but not the questionable call by the referees that set it up. It was the Bengals’ first lucky break of the season. It would not be their last.

One data point does not a trend make. So, while the opening day win was encouraging–They found a way to win!–I wasn’t about to pin my hopes on it. Even a win against arch-nemesis Pittsburgh in week 3 failed to move me. The turning point, as I saw it, came in their week 4 win against the Jaguars on a Thursday night. It was not a game I saw, but, at the rehearsal dinner for my daughter’s wedding, we received periodic updates from the uncle-in-law who chose the Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium over a free Italian meal at Buca di Beppo. As I feared, winless rookie Trevor Lawrence had his breakout game and was on track to exact revenge on his college rival, Joe Burrow. But the Bengals clawed back and won on another MacPherson last-second game-winner. The Bengals were 3-1, and the season looked bright.

Bearcats

The wedding–and the build up to it–left me and my wife exhausted. We would lay low the next day. I, for one, wanted nothing more than to sit on the couch with an IPA and watch the Bearcats play the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. It would be sheer pleasure to watch from opening kick-off to final play, with nowhere to go and nothing else to do. Just sit and cheer on the home team. UC had already won four games, but this was the first against a ranked team, a top ten team. A victory in South Bend would give the Bearcats the quality win the CFP committee demanded.

UC-Notre Dame is the one game for which I was unable to access highlights (Notre Dame jealously protects its brand and doesn’t give up its TV rights lightly.) So, the following depends on my memory enhanced only by a few data from the line score, The first quarter was hard-fought but scoreless. Cincinnati scored 17 in the second quarter, mostly, as I recall, coming on turnovers forced by the defense. The Fighting Irish fought back in the second half to pull within one score. For a while, it looked like we might miss the end of the game in order to make our dinner reservation. But Desmond Ridder, under pressure, the game on the line, led his offense down the full length of the field for a decisive touchdown. We could go to dinner knowing the Bearcats had clinched the win, a quality win under a national spotlight.

Buckeyes

While the Bearcats were impressing a national audience, the Buckeyes were disappointing their rabid fan base. In the season’s second week, they lost at home, in the Horseshoe, to Oregon. By the time my mind was freed up enough from wedding planning to notice, UC was ranked higher than Ohio State in national polls. The Buckeyes were no longer the best team in the state–our own Cincinnati Bearcats were!

But after their loss to the Ducks, the Buckeyes won the next six games, against lesser opponents, by an average of 37 points. I finally tuned in at Halloween for the game against Big Ten rival Penn State. And what an embarrassment of offensive riches I discovered: C.J. Stroud’s poise, mobility, and laser arm; TreVeyon Henderson’s ability to pound the line and also bounce outside for big gains; and the jaw-dropping trifeca of Chris Olave, Garrett Wilson, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba, with the quickness to get open and the sure hands to bring in the ball.

Penn State gave the Bucks a game by holding them to one red zone touchdown in four trips. But the home team still impressed with big plays on the ground, in the air, and on turnovers: Buckeyes 33, Nittany Lions 24.

The next week against Purdue brought both big plays and red zone touchdowns. Buckeyes tallied 45 points before the end of the first half and 59 by the end of the game. I was feeling the pride.

But they made their loudest statement yet against Michigan State the next weekend. The Spartans were truly embarrassed by Ohio State’s offensive riches, which chalked up a ridiculous 49-0 lead at halftime and a 56-7 score at game’s end. Shock and awe. The Buckeyes had a genuine shot at the National Championship. That week–Thanksgiving–OSU moved passed UC in the polls and became my avowed favorite among the three B’s of 2021. The Bearcats had yet to beat another quality opponent, and the Bengals had been blowing hot and cold.

Bengals

On the hot side, they had a perfect record against division rivals Pittsburgh and Baltimore, 3-0. On the cold: losses to lesser Cleveland and lowly New York Jets. Every win would be followed by a loss. A pair of wins would be negated by two subsequent defeats. On the heels of a dominant performance against the Steelers at the end of November, they came out like the Bungles of old against the Chargers: an early sack-fumble gave the visiting team three points; a goofy interception that was almost completed for six turned into a touchdown for the other team. The ball was not bouncing their way, but what’s one game?

A week later, the Bengals gave the Forty-Niners 10 points on two fumbled punts in the first half. The bungling was, indeed, becoming a trend. Yet, Cincinnati clawed back to send the game to overtime, only to lose on a field goal to the Niners’ touchdown (which I returned home in time to see). I am not embarrassed to say that I gave up on the Bengals that day. I resigned myself to reality: their season of hope would end unfulfilled.

Buckeyes

I was down to one B, for the Buckeyes had failed to secure a win in their conference championship against Michigan.

It wasn’t just the loss but the way they lost. The Wolverines manhandled them. Sure, the Buckeyes were in the game in the first half, even had the lead for a couple minutes. But their high-octane offence was running on low-grade ethanol. The Michigan D-line gave Henderson no running room, Stroud little time to throw, his receivers little time to get open. The snow and the hostile crowd didn’t help. The balance on other side of the ball was worse. Ohio State’s defense looked undersized and completely over-powered. Running back Hassan Haskins pounded the middle for consistent eight-yard runs, even when it looked like he would be stopped for one. It was a disappointing 27-42 loss, but easy to accept because the better team (on that day, at least) won.

Bearcats

UC, on the other hand, did exactly what they needed to win their own conference championship. After the Notre Dame game, UC had won a pair of blow-outs and a string of less convincing wins against lesser opponents. The AP coaches poll had kept them in the all-important top four position, but would the CFP committee keep them there at the end of the season? The question would be moot if they couldn’t beat Houston and maintain their undefeated record.

The ESPN production team descended on Clifton, and I thrilled to see UC’s classy stadium on national TV–the stadium I have passed by and around so many dozens of times without actually entering for a game. Houston looked damn good in the first half, and I’ll admit I was worried. That I had to miss the second half was partly a relief, just to escape the tension. When I received the text from my brother (in Spain!) that the championship belonged to UC, I was elated. 21 points in the first eight minutes of the third quarter put the outcome beyond doubt. Barring the unforgivable, the Bearcats would play in the College Football Playoffs. Indeed, a few days later their historic accomplishment was confirmed and the entire city was given a jolt of civic pride.

Bearcats-wear proliferated around town, especially as the New Years’ Eve playoffs approached. “Go, Bearcats,” I would call to anyone wearing a Bearcat logo in UC red-and-black. The sports channel at the gym advertised the big games, putting the names of the four contending teams in bold sequence on the screen: Alabama, Michigan, Georgia,…Cincinnati?! Now that’s recognition. We Queen City denizens were basking in the vicarious glory of our hometown team.

We were paired against number one seed and perennial powerhouse Alabama. I told myself (and others) it didn’t matter what happened in the game. The Bearcats had made the playoffs. Everything else was gravy. Saying it aloud didn’t make it true, and I suspected (feared?) it might not be.

It wasn’t.

Though the Bearcat offense showed potency on its first drive, an early Alabama timeout effectively shut it down. It never regained anything close to the same strength. Cincinnati kept themselves sort-of in the game through the first half, but the writing was recorded boldly on the wall. They were outmatched in every category. The final score, 6-27, was not as bad as it might have been, and not as bad as Michigan’s defeat against Georgia, but it was a bitter pill to swallow, as I should have known it would be.

Buckeyes

So bitter, I was reluctant to watch the Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl the next day. The thrill of the three Bs’ season was reaching an anticlimax. I resigned myself to disappointment.

Yet, it was New Year’s Day and the Rose Bowl. S had made Killer Dip and set places in front of the TV. Who was I to resist? Inertia carried me to the sofa for a second bowl game in as many nights.

I had picked up a troubling storyline in my paper: an unmotivated Ohio State team, its seniors sitting it out to avoid pre-draft injury, against a pumped Utah team, playing in its first ever Rose Bowl. I couldn’t imagine the Buckeyes would need motivation in a Rose Bowl game, but they did come out flatter than an Ohio cornfield, while Utah flew as high as a Wasatch Mountain peak. The Bucks trailed 0-14 before their big-play offense finally kicked into gear. Problem was, in a carry-over from the Michigan game, the defense couldn’t make a stop. Every time the Buckeyes looked like they would reduce the lead, Utah would come up with a big play. 50-yard touchdown pass to pull within 7? Rendered meaningless by the 97-yard kickoff return. Another 50-yard TD? Erased by a Utah 60-yard run that should have been stopped for four. What looked to be a third 50-yard touchdown completion in as many possessions was mooted when a Utah defender stripped the ball from behind. The Bucks still trailed by 14 at halftime, 21-35. Coach Day called it “ridiculous” amount of points to give up. (The Michigan State coach knew his pain, and then some.)

I was thinking of going to bed, partly to escape the tension or partly to avoid the disappointment of a second loss in two days. But S expressed her incredulity…and her disdain. So, I stayed for the second half and am grateful that I did. It was the most exciting two quarters football and most satisfying win of the year.

On the opening drive of the half, Stroud made his first mistake of the game, forcing a pass in the end zone that was intercepted. But the Utah punter dropped the ball and Ohio State got the ball back inside the red zone, a big break that allowed the Buckeyes to cut the lead to seven. After exchanging field goals (what are those?!), the Buckeyes finally pulled even with ten minutes remaining. Then they took the lead for the first time in the game with four minute left. When Utah quarterback was knocked out, it looked to be a boon for the Buckeyes, but the backup QB led the Utes to a tying touchdown just inside the two-minute warning. That gave the Buckeyes more than enough time to march down the field and kick a field goal: 48-45 Buckeye win. The New Year was off to a great start.

Bengals

The next day, go club gave me an excuse to miss the Bengals game against the Chiefs. Three games in three days seemed a bit much, so I was pleased to have an excuse to miss it. Besides, I doubted they could beat the hottest team in the league. No matter what happened it could only be a letdown after the Buckeyes’ stunning Rose Bowl win. My doubts prove justified when, after watching the opening minutes, the Bengals fell behind 0-14. If the score was familiar, so was the futility of the team’s defense. The defense had no answers to the Mahomes, and I had no confidence the offense could do what the Buckeyes’ did the night before.

And yet they did. Still trailing by 14 at the half, they held Mahomes and the Chiefs to just 3 points the rest of the way and won in the final seconds. I was getting updates from the woman next to us at Panera while I played go. What’s the score? How much time left? Who has the ball? What yard line? Those last two questions flummoxed her. She didn’t understand their importance and apparently didn’t know how to find them out.

The data that filtered through made little sense. Some of it came, weirdly, by text from my brother…in Spain. He was becoming almost as big a fan of the three B’s as I was. I What’sApp’ed him after go club from the parking lot, asking him to explain what he knew. Apparently, the Bengals had tried a fourth-and-goal from the one (twice!), failed both times, yet still scored and won the game. Penalties gave them the extra chances, which ended with a game-winning field goal as time expired. I still couldn’t fathom it until I saw the video highlights online. Here’s the timeline:

6:00-ish left in fourth quarter: Chiefs tie 31-31

3:13: Burrow to Chase for first down on 3rd and 27 (!)

2:20: Bengals third and inches from inside 2

2:00: First and goal, inside 2

1:55: Second and goal after Chiefs’ timeout

1:46: Third and goal

1:10-ish?: Fourth and goal, offsetting penalties

0:50: Fourth and goal, incomplete, defensive penalty, new set of downs

(I infer they used up clock by Burrow taking a knee on another play or two.)

0:04: Game-winner as time expires, 34-31

The Bengals had pulled a rabbit out of a hat. They had come back from a 14-point deficit, managed the clock and the ball in the final six minutes, keeping it out of Mahomes’s hands, and had clinched a playoff spot. They had found a way to win, the defining quality of a winner. (Not a tautology!) In the greatest of Christmas gifts, the most auspicious start to a New Year, the Bengals were turning us long-beleaguered Cincinnati fans into believers. The 2021-2022 season had more excitement in store.

A lot more, as it happened.

Watching the highlight reels in preparation for this post, what most hit me was the hard-fought nature of the wins (and one loss) of these four games. There were times (one time, in particular) when a lesser team might have given up the fight. The Bengals tacklers fought as if every foot mattered, whether on gains of 2 yards, 8 yards, or 28. They played as if their unflagging determination mattered–and it did. They never gave up.

Luck mattered, too. Some bad breaks made them dig deeper. Many good breaks put them in position to win.

The talk over that first post-season week–when it wasn’t about the winning attitude Joe Burrow brought to this Bengals team–was about the thirty-year drought without a playoff win. Even the national media were all over story. Win or lose, the story line was all but written for them.

After falling behind on the opening drive, 0-3,the Bengals built a lead against the Raiders they never (but almost) relinquished. They led by four, then seven, then ten, then back to seven. They held a fourteen-point lead for few minutes in the second quarter, and a ten-point lead with six minutes to go in the fourth. And still the Raiders had a chance to pop the Bengals’ balloon. With first-and-goal and forty seconds on the clock, quarterback Derek Carr had four pass attempts to send the game to overtime. The first three dropped incomplete. The fourth was intercepted on the one-yard line. The joy in Mudville was too great to contain. Mixing metaphors, the 31-year-old monkey leapt from the Bengals’ back and looked for other shoulders on which to perch.

In the schools where I work, a second Friday in a row was set aside for Bengals wear and Bengals pride. Students, as well as teachers, were catching the fever, shedding their hesitation to back a loser, showing their spirit. Every Friday for four weeks in a row I wore my Bengals cap to school, the only Bengals gear I owned, a gift from my brother that I had been almost too embarrassed to wear for three years.

In the second round of the playoffs, the Bengals would play the Titans, a better team than the Raiders, and on the road. I, for one, had a bad feeling.

The Bengals challenged my doubt right away when Jessie Bates intercepted Ryan Tannehill on the opening play from scrimmage. They showed that luck was still on their side when a delay-of-game penalty on themselves negated a 13-yard sack on Joe Burrow, kept them in field goal range, and allowed them to take an early 3-0 lead. More sacks and a second trip into the red zone ended in another field goal, 6-0. (Burrow overcoming nine punishing sacks would become the biggest story of the day.)

When Tennessee scored a touchdown, another Bengal technical infraction (too many men on the field) gave the Titans the ball on the one and an (apparently) irresistible chance to go for a two-fer PAT. The Bengals line held and another timely penalty (on themselves) was turned to their advantage. When Higgins fumbled the ball right into Chase’s hands on the next possession, luck seemed to be fully in their camp.

But the Bengals created opportunities, too: Mike Hilton’s amazing swatted ball interception, their D-line stopping the driving Titans on 3rd-and-one and again on 4th and-one, and Logan Wilson’s decisive interception with 0:20 on the clock. Not to mention Ryan MacPherson’s game-winning 52-yard field goal as time expired. Said the CBS commentator: “The Bengals’ mantra has been ‘Why not us?’ And they are right!” This team was becoming America’s team.

But the AFC championship game was against Kansas City. Was it too much to ask they beat the Chiefs two games in the same month? And this time at Arrowhead Stadium? I was sure it was, and I was prepared for defeat.

I was not prepared for the shellacking they took in the first half. In the middle of the second quarter, the Bengals trailed 3-21. In three tries, the defense had yet to keep the Mahomes-led offense out of the end zone. I had lost whatever hope I might secretly have held. But the Bengals put together a touchdown drive on the strength of a 40-yard Perine run, putting them “only” eleven points behind with 1:30 to go in the half.

Too much time for Mahomes.

With the help of a pass interference penalty, the Chiefs had a first-and-goal from the one with nine seconds left. The first pass attempt was denied. The second was completed in the flat but stopped just short of the goal line, no time left on the clock. The Chiefs’ decision to go for the knockout blow, when a field goal would have sent their opponent reeling, gave the scrappy Bengals new life going into the next round. No one could know it at the time, but it was the costliest mistake of the game and probably of the Chiefs’ entire season.

For, somehow, the Bengals defense forced the Chiefs to punt on their next two possessions. (Maybe the passes were slightly off, but, to my eyes, they were straight out drops. Luck was playing its part.) The Bengals were not cruising on offense, either, but they did manage a field goal to make it 21-13. Then, as Mahomes looked to regain his mojo, lineman B.J. Hill blocked his pass with two raised hands, which then caught the ball as it fell. Touchdown and 2-point conversion gave the Bengals a tie in the final seconds of the third quarter. What a turn of events! I began to believe.

Ironically, as soon as the Bengals were back in the game, Burrow made his first mistake, an interception that gave Mahomes a chance to make him pay. But the Bengal defense didn’t give. They started harassing Mahomes and got the ball to their offense with the score still tied. And that’s when Burrow turned to his feet. In two third-and-sevens in a row, he scrambled for first downs, slipping Houdini-like from lineman’s arms, leaping Balanchine-like to escape their diving swipes. Even so, the team needed the machine-like reliability of Evan MacPherson–52 yards!–to give them the lead with six minutes to go.

The tables were almost exactly turned from their first meeting four weeks earlier. Now Kansas City had the ball with the task of managing the clock and scoring the points to win the game. All was going the Chiefs’ way, until it wasn’t. The Bengals defense refused to allow them six points even when they had first-and-goal from the five. They stuffed a run, kept receivers from getting open, and chased Mahomes around the backfield, eating up clock. In one of the craziest plays of the entire playoffs, a Bengals linebacker (?) rushed straight at Mahomes a full nine seconds into his scramble, forcing a fumble that was unhappily recovered by his teammate. A field goal forced overtime, 24-24.

The Chiefs won the toss, which seemed unfair. Hadn’t our defense been on the field for six minutes already? They didn’t let it matter. They held Mahomes to third-and-seven when the Hall-of-Fame-bound quarter back threw a long interception, and the Bengals never looked back. They drove efficiently and convincingly into field goal range, commentator Tony Romo showing his increasing excitement with each play. “Don’t say it. Don’t say it,” I kept yelling at the TV, not wanting him to jinx the hope that was already bursting in my chest. But when MacPherson chipped the ball through the uprights from twenty yards, I let it all come out, jumping up, lifting my arms: “The Bengals are going to the Super Bowl!”

The word “surreal” gets thrown a lot these days, usually meaning “crazy” or “strange.” In this case, I think the word’s fuller, dictionary definition applies to my experience of the next two weeks: “having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic.” Yeah. That’s pretty much it. Leaving aside “hallucinatory,” the experience was absolutely disorienting. The Bengals in the Super Bowl? That brunt of bad jokes during three decades of futility? The Bungles? It was all so sudden, so unexpected. For the next two weeks, the immensity of the moment would hit me at odd moments. When I was near someone I knew (and maybe a few times when I wasn’t) I would turn and utter in disbelief, almost as a question; but also state aloud as if pinching myself to make sure I was not dreaming: “The Bengals are in the Super Bowl.” As I said: surreal.

The game itself had a different feel from the other playoff games. How could it not? It was the Super Bowl, after all. The hype, though much of it about the Bengals’ “story,” somehow managed to minimize it. Even after the game started, there was something slightly off. (The six other people in the room watching it with us might have had something to do with it.) There was nothing unusual about falling behind two scores early. But the trick play touchdown pass from Mixon to Higgins had the air of a play held in reserve for the Big Game. The interception in the end zone near the end of the half was becoming standard Bengal fare. But who was that man in street clothes and a towel celebrating with the players on the field? The water boy/man?! The ensuing 10-yard penalty dampened the elation and may have kept the Bengals offense from turning the INT into points. The long bomb touchdown pass on the opening play of the second half might have been one more example of Bengals magic–until it was revealed on instant replay that Higgins had blatantly facemasked the defender. Kinda took the thrill out of the moment, adulterated the joy, maybe even tarnished my image of my team.

Though the Bengals led almost the entire second half, they needed a score in the final 1:25 to either tie or win the game. Burrow, Chase, and Higgins quickly had the Bengals at midfield. I was surprised to see a handoff to Mixon up the middle until I realized they needed a yard to make a first down. Only they didn’t get it. With half a yard for a new set of downs, the Bengals chose to pass. Only Rams’ tackle Aaron Donald slipped through the line faster than a Jamar Chase spin move, and before I had a chance to contemplate it, the game was over. The season: over. So suddenly. Anticlimactically. Crushingly. I had been anticipating a win all along.

But what’s so surprising about that?

* * *

I am not embarrassed to admit I got caught up in the hype of three B’s this season, as the five thousand words above attest. I am as susceptible to the irrationalities of sports fandom as the next guy or gal. (“Fan” is the root of “fanatic,” after all.) My cats can attest it, too, what with all the times they had to bolt from the room in startlement at my shouts. I see the images on the TV screen: the crazed fans, dressed in team colors, leaning toward the camera, screaming as if the outcome of the game depended on the intensity of their vocal participation–as if, even, the outcome of the game mattered at all. How can so much adrenaline flow through the veins of so many thousands not even on the field, the vast majority having never played the game they are now so invested in? (Never mind the hundreds of thousands watching on TV, miles from the action.)

I am fascinated, too, by the geography of fandom. As a kid I scorned rooting for hometown teams the way grownups seemed to do. I rooted for Brown whenever they came to town against Cornell. (I was born in Providence, which probably undercuts my thesis.) I liked the Dallas Cowboys. All the better that they were from Texas. That I was, as an upstate New Yorker, also a Yankee and Rangers fan seems to belie my alleged fan free-agency. Still, I believe what follows is accurate on the whole. For, I see the same impulse in today’s middle and elementary school students. Until recently, at least, Bengals shirts have been outnumbered by the “team” known as Everybody Else (Patriots, Eagles, Seahawks, Vikings, etc.). For these kids, fandom is a chance to assert their identity–their individual, separate-from-the-crowd, identity. Why waste it by rooting for the Bengals with everyone else?

It’s different for us old folks, at least for me. When I moved here thirty years ago, rooting for local teams became a way to confirm my new identity as a Cincinnatian. I adopted them all with enthusiasm, none more than the Bearcats basketball team. UC had made the Final Four the year before I arrived (bad timing!) and the Elite Eight in my first March Madness as a Cincinnati resident. I lived and died by their fortunes in the 90s, and the deaths were more painful for being so-close-but-no-cigar, none more than 2000, when Kenyon Martin’s fluke broken leg shattered the Bearcats’ very real chance at a title. My brother, who lived outside Baltimore, had a strong University of Maryland team to root for, especially when they won it all in 2002. In the strange illogic of sports fandom, Baltimore (Maryland) had it all over Cincinnati. My twin had bragging rights, though he never cashed them in.

The same dynamic held in our pro football fandom. While the Bengals floundered for a decade, the Ravens, playing in the same AFC North division, built a Super Bowl champion by 2001. When Cincinnati hired Baltimore’s defensive coordinator as head coach, the Bengals finally began to compete. Between 2005 and 20015, they made the playoffs seven times, but never actually won a playoff game. Bragging rights for Cincinnatians remained far out of reach.

Until now. Now my brothers–in Spain as well as in Maryland–were giving me the attention. (C even sent me an AFC Champions T-shirt that arrived not-quite-in-time for the Super Bowl.) I felt civic pride when the TV camera panned the Cincinnati skyline on Super Bowl night, and when the announcer mentioned that local schools had been given a post-Super Bowl day off.

It is odd that I felt more intense patriotism for my city in a football match than I did for my country in its so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. But not really. Athens’s democracy was a city-state, after all. The modern nation-state has always struggled to build the ties that bind its citizens. If I have developed a strong sense of identity in my city (Cincinnati) and state (Ohio), the local football teams have played no small part in the process. Now that I have tasted a Cincinnati Super Bowl, I imagine I will care less fervently whether local teams actually win a championship. Yes, I will root for them, but I will be satisfied as long as they can just be competitive.

At least, that’s what I say now.

22 Mar 2022

The Fruits of Collaboration

by Andrew Speno | posted in: Middle Grade Nonfiction | 0

The Dawn of Everything “began as a diversion from [the authors’] more ‘serious’ academic duties: an experiment, a game almost, in which an anthropologist and archaeologist tried to reconstruct the sort of grand dialogue about human history that was once quite common in our fields, but this time with modern evidence.” The resulting book was serious indeed–and could have been significantly longer but for the author’s determination to keep it manageable–but the text retains an almost playful, experimental, conversational, collaborative spirit.

Chapters are broken into manageable chunks with lighthearted headings such as, “In Which We Discuss Marshall Sahlin’s ‘Original Affluent Society’ and Reflect on What Can Happen When Even Very Insightful People Write About Pre-History in the Absence of Actual Evidence.”

The authors’ wide-ranging, deep-diving, playful collaboration leads to some eye-opening observations.

On the educational path to administrative power, then and now:

Does the kind of esoteric knowledge founded at Chavin [de Huantar, Peru], often founded in hallucinogenic experience, really have anything in common with accounting methods of the later Inca? It seems highly unlikely–until, that is, that even in much more recent times, qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration. It’s only important because it’s obscure. Hence in tenth century China or eighteenth-century Germany, aspiring civil servants had to pass exams on proficiency in literary classics, written in archaic, even dead languages, just as today they will have to pass exams on rational choice theory or the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The arts of administration are really only learned later on and through more tradition al means: by practice, apprenticeship or formal mentoring. [474]

On the symbolic basis for administrative power, then and now:

…the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his license to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine. [366]

On the relationship of random violence and sovereign power, then and now:

Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in gunning down random passers-by. [Are they referencing Trump’s notorious campaign boast?] Yet the very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that ‘High Gods’ are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings. [395]

The authors’ use of frequent parentheticals contributes to the conversational tone of the text, allows them to qualify assertions, and provides opportunities for humorous asides.

On the excavations at Shimao, China: “Here we sense a much livelier political scene than was ever imagined in the annals of later courtly tradition. Some of it had a grisly aspect, including the decapitation of captured foes, and the burial of some thousands of ancestral jade axes and sceptres in cracks between great stone blocks of the city wall, not to be found or seen again until the prying eyes of archaeologists uncovered them over four millennia later. The likely intention of all this was to disrupt, demoralize and delegitimize rival lineages (‘all in all you’re just another jade in the wall’). [325]

On the rise and decline of Teotihuacan, 300-1200 CE:

Over this longer span of time, what was the legacy of Teotihuacan and its grand urban experiment? Should we view the whole episode as a passing deviation, a blip (albeit an extremely large blip) on the road that led from Olmec hierarchy to Toltec aristocracy and eventually Aztec imperialism? Or might the egalitarian aspects of Teotihuacan have a distinct legacy of their own? Few have really considered the latter possibility, especially since early Spanish accounts of the Mexican highlands provide some extraordinarily suggestive material…. [345]

Blog Full

6:00-ish left in fourth quarter: Chiefs tie 31-31

3:13: Burrow to Chase for first down on 3rd and 27 (!)

2:20: Bengals third and inches from inside 2

2:00: First and goal, inside 2

1:55: Second and goal after Chiefs’ timeout

1:46: Third and goal

1:10-ish?: Fourth and goal, offsetting penalties

0:50: Fourth and goal, incomplete, defensive penalty, new set of downs

(I infer they used up clock by Burrow taking a knee on another play or two.)

0:04: Game-winner as time expires, 34-31

…the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his license to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine. [366]