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October 7, 2008 - September 30, 2008

Monday, September 10, 2007

TURNABOUT. Last year I wrote about attending a Penn-Harvard game at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. I didn't tell you that Mrs. CP's experience of college football was limited to just two games involving the same schools at the same stadium. So she was entirely unprepared for the experience of Friday night when she saw her first-ever Big-Time college football game.

Some surprises awaited me, too, though I had once sat on the fifty yard line at Michigan's infamous Big House to watch the Wolverines go at it with the Missouri Tigers. My hosts were a Michigan grad student and her Brit husband, a friend of mine who had frequently ridiculed American football players for all the padding they wore. In fact, that's why I had coerced them into going to the game. We sat right behind the Michigan bench, just above field level, and the din of the line play -- giants colliding and grunting like angry bulls -- made it impossible to talk except between plays. As it happened, the first plays we saw were right at the fifty yard line, and after about three of these, my Brit friend turned to me and said, "I will never make fun of American football again." I smiled a superior American smile, of course, and congratulated myself on the fact that I'd deliberately avoided introducing him to football at the Ivy League university where he was enrolled. It's just not the same thing.

Ironically, that's part of what made the Rutgers experience so astounding. Until just a few years ago, Rutgers was a fixture on the non-conference schedules of multiple Ivy teams, scheduled (hopefully) to lose gracefully in tune-up games the same way Appalachian State was supposed to lose to Michigan last week. A sorry role indeed for the team which had played -- and won -- the first college football game in history, against nearby Princeton, thus creating the oldest and most one-sided rivalry in college football. There was a time, sadly, when the Tigers beat the Scarlet Knights 69 times in a row, and Princeton continued using Rutgers as a doormat even into the era when New Jersey's state university was at least three times the size of its snooty neighbor. That's a proof of just how little Rutgers cared about the game it had helped bring into being. One more: Mrs. CP is a Rutgers alum and a huge football fan, but as a student, it never even occurred to her to see a Rutgers game.

Those days are gone. The Scarlet Knights finished last season ranked 16th in the nation. They're big time now. As they should be. Rutgers is one of the best state universities in the United States, and it's the eighth oldest institution of higher learning in the country, founded a decade before the United States was. It's just plain wrong that so many of New Jersey's greatest athletes have been forced, for generations, to migrate to such Johnny-come-lately university locales as State College, Pennsylvania, Columbus, Ohio, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and South Bend, Indiana, where their friends, families, high school classmates, and potential future neighbors and employers almost never get to see them play. Worse, there's more of a need in New Jersey for a team the whole state can rally around than in other states, because neither of the two pro teams that split New Jersey into two opposing camps -- the Giants and the Eagles -- are even affiliated with New Jersey. It's a particularly raw part of the longstanding identity crisis that has enabled the whole country to make jokes at New Jersey's expense with nary a word said in protest. (Despite the fact, as we have pointed out here, that New Jersey really is the best state in the union.)

I apologize for the long preamble, but you have to know the history to appreciate what was so moving about seeing the Rutgers-Navy game the other night. More pleasing than the lovely New Brunswick campus, more impressive than the clockwork organization that ferried spectators to and from the dozen scattered parking lots, more stunning than the beautifully designed and spotlessly clean new stadium, more spectacular than the high-tech scoreboard, more stirring than the solid sea of red made up of students, alumni, and fans in the stands, and more potent than the talent and disciplined determination of the renascent Scarlet Knights themselves. On that night in New Brunswick I experienced, for the first time in my life, a massive and profound display of New Jersey state pride.

The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers are ours. Not borrowed from New York or Philadelphia. Not north, not south, but right in the middle, at the heart of things. We sat there with 44,000 of our fellow citizens, all of us dressed in red-blooded red, and feasted on what folks in Columbus and Ann Arbor may take for granted because they simply inherited their grand tradition. Not so with Rutgers. Here was a long-blighted tradition reclaimed and transformed in a deliberate miracle. What is no doubt commonplace at most big-time college stadiums had special meaning here -- the student body and much of the crowd actually singing along with the Star Spangled Banner, the scoreboard sound and graphics cues that invoked spectators to become a direct force in the game on third downs and critical plays, the intense focus on the game itself that's mostly absent in the Ivies and other also-rans, being present for the announcement that Ray Rice had just broken the all-time record for Rutgers rushing in the second game of his junior year, the company of colonial militia who fired the cannon from a nearby woodsy hilltop after Rutgers's frequent scores, and not least, the politeness and bonhomie of the crowd. I've never heard less bad language at a football game and never heard more 'excuse me's' as people came and went along crowded rows in a stadium filled to capacity.

It was obvious how thrilled everyone was just to be there, for this most delightful and unexpected of outcomes. Our kids -- football players, cheerleaders, dancers, band members -- looking this good and living up to their good fortune so well.

The game? I almost forgot. Rutgers beat Navy 42-24. Navy played well. Rutgers played like the ranked team they are, and the issue was never in serious doubt, but I think almost everyone was pleased that the Midshipmen weren't humiliated. There was no need for that, and Rutgers has a history that should make them wise on that score. When Navy's team ran onto the field, there were one or two boos, but more applause. As the man who stood clapping next to Mrs. CP observed, "I don't think you're allowed to boo Navy."


Rutgers has done an outstanding job, and they need no advice from me. But I do have a wish I'd like them to consider. Get Princeton back on the schedule. You know, as one of those early tune-up games. For maybe the next 70 years or so. Let the lordly Tigers get an annual lesson in humility that may be the only one they'll receive in their college careers. If the Princeton boys have the guts to learn that what goes around comes around, I'd be happy to help drive home the point for as many years as I am able.

It's the least I can do for my home state.

New Jersey.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

THE SOPRANOS TENORS. While people around the globe are mourning the death of Luciano Pavarotti, the powerful La Scala College of Tenors has been summoned to Milan to choose the next 'Greatest Tenor in the World.' Outsiders can only speculate about the politicking that is undoubtedly going on behind the ornate doors of Italy's venerable cathedral of opera. Tenors from multiple nations are said to be lobbying hard for an "anybody but an Italian" selection since Pavarotti held the post for more than 35 years. They also point to the long reign of Enrico Caruso early in the twentieth century as an indication that Italian parochialism has resulted in a virtual monopoly on the prestigious title. According to anonymous inside sources, Tenors from Spain, Ireland, and the U.S. are particularly grumpy because they believe Pavarotti should have stepped down in favor of one of their own native sons (e.g., Placido Domingo, Ronan Tynan, or Axl Rose) years ago.


Also at issue in the current election is the vital question of whether Tenors should continue the ecumenical outreach initiated by Pavarotti to make opera singing more palatable to the mass audience. A solid contingent of hardline conservatives favors the little known candidate Uggio Cantabile who, despite an admittedly mediocre voice, would ban the recording of popular songs by Tenors as well as the performance of famous arias outside the context of the operas that give them meaning. (Listen to the attached audio file above for a sample of Uggio's voice, unless it's really Michael Bolton instead.) Cantabile's candidacy is being vehemently opposed by, among others, the U.S. Public Broadcasting System, which fears that the network will be unable to raise needed revenues during pledge drives if it is no longer permitted to broadcast endless reruns of the Three Tenors and Andrea Bocelli performing saccharine crap for rich American dilettantes.

Concern about this grave threat to PBS has also brought prominent American pseudo-intellectual Bill Moyers into the fray. Moyers has written an open letter to the College of Tenors in a full-page ad paid for by PBS in today's New York Times. The letter says, in part: "Preservation of what little remains of high culture in the United States is entirely dependent upon a steady stream of mawkish pop ballads sung by famous foreign Tenors. Without the quarterly injection of funds raised by these entertainments, all the truly intellectual fare PBS offers could not be produced or broadcast because the ignorant American masses don't want it, don't watch it, and would never pay a nickel for it. Needless to say, the civilized nations of the world cannot afford the American hoi polloi to sink even lower into the barbaric mire than they already are." In his summation, Moyers nominates the commonest non-American (obviously) opera singer yet discovered, Paul Potts of Britain's Got Talent. Cynics at La Scala respond scornfully that Moyers can afford the bankruptcy of American public TV  least of all, since his own income is derived from selling DVDs and videotapes of his taxpayer-funded PBS shows for personal profit.

Meanwhile, Antonio Cantabile, the don patriarch of the illustrious Sicilian family of singers, has placed a small box ad of his own in the Washington Post, reminding the lawmakers who fund PBS that New York's Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall are both old and "molto flammabile." There's also a reference, in an apparently untranslatable regional Italian dialect, that identifies the address of Moyers's house. The College of Tenors has disavowed any knowledge of the ad or its purpose.

And so it goes. Politics as usual in the snootiest upper reaches of the classical music world. We can only hope that the electoral process doesn't turn so vicious that it obscures the marvelous career of Luciano Pavarotti, who may very well prove to have been "the last of the great voices."

May his legacy live on.

UPDATE. Contrary to our hopes, the international political pressure on the College of Tenors continues to increase. Now, Oxford's 'University of Tenors' has denounced Paul Potts as the 'Welsh Pretender' and is demanding consideration for Thom Yorke of Radiohead, who "hits much scarier high notes" and is also "of the right sort." In fact, there's open talk of schism between Oxford and La Scala. The Radiohead initiative is already being denounced by Britain's Labor Party, which contends that the World's Greatest Tenor should be low-born and unattractive in appearance, though "not a wog, of course." Their nominee is Phil Collins, who -- despite being old and past his prime -- "isn't as old as Pavarotti was," and "besides, ALL the talented low-born Englishmen are frightfully old now anyway." Britain's highly influential 'Gay Regiment' has issued a press release declaring that age and death are irrelevant in the context of gay genocide and have launched a vigorous campaign on behalf of the late Freddie Mercury.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance, (backed, of course, by N.O.W.) has separately nominated Melissa Ethridge in protest against the straight patriarchy's oppressive definition of 'tenor' as an exclusively male voice.

International ANSWER has announced plans for a "possibly violent" demonstration at La Scala in support of the candidacy of Che Guevara, who did everything better than anyone else.

Canada's getting into the picture, too, insisting that Neil Young's rendition of Vesti La Giubba puts Michael Bolton's to shame, besides being higher than a dog's range of hearing. But, as usual, no one is paying the least bit of attention to them.

Back in America, some drunk old white guys are trying to figure out how to vote for Meatloaf.

And some even older drunk white guys have made a bonfire producing tons of white smoke they say means that the Greatest Tenor in the Whole History of the World is Roy Orbison.

In the interest of full disclosure, we have to admit we're partial to Mick, at least for the first few bars.

It's getting ugly.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

LOVE YOUR DOCTOR? Freedom? Liberty? Isn't that what the Democrats tell us they're for? Don't believe it. Scratch the rhetoric and you'll find that just under the surface they're pure totalitarians. Get a load of this from the John-Boy Edwards camp:


I'm sure a lot of you think this is nice and a good thing. Some of us, though, work hard to stay completely the hell away from doctors and the whole medical care system. Ramses the Great of Ancient Egypt managed to live into his eighties without taking a single pill and without ever having some quack know-it-all shove a telescope a foot up his rectum. Most of the advances in average life expectancy since then have to do with reducing the incidence of infant and child mortality. You could look it up. You could also spend a minute or two pondering the additional regulations that will probably accompany mandatory preventive care: government control of your diet, your vices, and your leisure time activities. All for your own good, don't you know. While you're at it, take just a second to consider the beneficence of government-mandated mental health checkups. Now tell me again how worried you are about the Patriot Act.

If this is the future, count me out. I'll be the lunatic up in the tower, armed with the biggest arsenal of the biggest guns anyone ever saw. And I'll shoot the first bastard who tries to come near me with a tongue depressor.

Just so you know.

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