The X-Men and identity politics #4: Reconsidering Wolverine

A decade ago, I wrote a paper about the X-Men. It's been, amazingly, by at least a few thousand people, which is why I'm now turning it into a book. And which is why I'm not re-evaluating a lot of the things that I said 10 years ago. For instance:

Wolverine’s super-power also serves to essentialize his biological male-ness: he is in peak physical condition, a natural hunter with heightened physical senses and instincts (improved senses being another super-power), must constantly train to be patient and keep his temper in check, and – thanks especially to the recent X-Men movies – projects an animal magnetism that renders him irresistible to the opposite sex. In other words, his very powers reinscribe the singular, biological, and essential notion of traditional white maleness – a muscled, animalistic body that, in addition to his moral code, serves to appeal directly to the desires of adolescent male readers.

First, my apologies for the over-writing of an aspiring grad student.

Second, I over-generalized. Sure, Wolverine is John Wayne given superhero form. He's morally righteous, quick to anger, and a brute. He also sleeps with nearly absolutely every woman who's ever been associated with the X-Men. (Except for the girls who are 16ish and younger. For whom he is a father-figure. For nearly absolutely every girl who's ever been associated with the X-Men.) But that hasn't always been true.

In Geoff Klock's excellent book about Matt Fraction's Casanova, he argues that Casanova Quinn skewers, deconstructs, and refutes the need for the sort of superhero masculinity that Wolverine embodies. Klock writes, for instance, that "death surrounds Casanova, and invades him, and the resulting nihilism is what needs to be conquered when the temptation is to embrace it as part of badass masculine posturing." And if it can't be conquered? Then "why shouldn't we all escape from it?"

These are good questions: questions that need to be asked and answered, over and over, because norms of masculinity are stubborn and enduring things that aren't easily undermined or overturned. But y'know what? Wolverine had already asked them. (Or to paraphrase Jason Powell, whose own book on the X-Men is coming out later this year: Claremont did it first.)

But don't take my word for it. Here are a few examples from the Australia Era, which I've previously described as the most progressive and creative era of the comic.


Uncanny X-Men 233-234

Wolverine is implanted with a Brood egg and is transformed into a hideous alien monster. It isn't the first time - he was also implanted with a Brood egg in UXM 162 - but this time is different. It's also the first indication that something is wrong with the nigh-invincible Wolverine, who had recently and ridiculously been restored to life from a single drop of blood in UXN Annual 10. (Because healing factor.)

Unlike the previous infection, Wolverine appears to lose this one - he transforms into a Brood, even losing control of his mind. (The Brood announces "Behold, human, the shape of your world to come!" It's pretty explicit.) Of course, this is Wolverine we're talking about and as quickly as he loses the battle with the Brood, he miraculously recovers. Wolverine thinks it's his healing factor, but Claremont implies that it's actually the work of a preacher, who may or may not be a mutant himself. "I bring peace and comfort to all those out there," the preacher explains as he holds his wife's arthritic hands, as if to suggest that "comfort" is not just a euphemism. "They say I help them." It's probably not a coincidence, then, that Brood Wolverine reverts to regular Wolverine at the moment the preacher touches him.

So, Wolverine is, basically, killed by the Brood egg - an attack that he had previously survived. More importantly, though, this storyline kicks off a much longernarrative about Wolverine's mortality, which will run for at least the next two years: a series of near-death experiences that push his healing factor to its breaking point. And then break it.


Uncanny X-Men 235-237

Wolverine (and Rogue) are kidnapped and taken to Genosha, where his powers are suppressed and his healing factor ceases to work. Unlike previous power-loss narratives, though, which seemed indifferent to problems like 'doesn't it hurt to use your claws?' or 'is all that metal on your skeleton a good thing?', this one devotes a lot of time to Wolverine stumbling and coughing while Rogue - whose mind is under the control of Carol Danvers' personality - carries him and comments on his impending death.

A particularly vivid scene involves Wolverine popping a claw to pick a lock, which causes his hand to bleed profusely. And then just continue to bleed. Cue Wolverine's cool as ever gift for understatement: "No power, no healin' factor." Later, as Storm holds him and he believes his death is imminent, Wolverine still projects a Klingon-like acceptance of his impending death: "Them's the breaks, darlin'. I had a good run. If this is where it ends... ain't such a bad way to go."

So, two quick things to point out:

• Wolverine is saved, again at the last minute, through someone else's action. Carol/Rogue puts a gun to the head of Wipeout, who can remove and restore powers, and asks Psylocke to compel Wipeout to save Wolverine. So, again, Wolverine's healing factor fails him. And, again, Wolverine is granted a last-minute reprieve through the intercession of a third party.
• I may be overstating, but the pathology of Wolverine's non-mutant state - coughing, sweaty, hunched, generally sickly looking, prone to bleeding, and unable to heal - looks an awful lot like an AIDS stereotype. Applied to the most masculine, virile X-Man, no less. This is not to imply that masculine, virile men don't get AIDS, of course. But it does undercut Wolverine's own masculinity and undercut heroic masculinity more generally, yes.

Uncanny X-Men 246

Wolverine takes a leave of absence. What's important here, though, is not the what but the how.

In this brief scene with Storm, Wolverine announces that he's taking a break. And he should, because he looks like absolute hell. This is notable precisely because - outside of stories where Wolverine is getting pummeled, set on fire, blown up, nearly killed, etc. - Wolverine never looks tired. (Fun Fact: in a much later story, a major clue that Wolverine had been replaced by a Skrull was that he said he was tired. Because Wolverine doesn't tire.)

When Wolverine stares into the mirror, his hair - usually standing straight up, like the ears of a wolf - droops sadly to the sides. Normally erect and fearsome, his hair looks weak and flaccid. Sure, it's partly a joke about the Wolverine and Havok miniseries. But if this isn't also a dick joke, I don't know what is.

(Note: This style of hair reappears in Alex Ross's Earth X comics, where Wolverine has become alcoholic and obese - but denies that either is even possible - and it is painfully clear that, yes, the limp hair is a really obvious dick joke.)


Uncanny X-Men 251-253

Wolverine is beaten, crucified on a giant wooden X, hallucinates, and left for dead. It's overkill, but let's unpack the symbolism anyway. This makes sense within Claremont's larger arc for the character - every near-death experience has been more traumatic, more harrowing than the last - and also within the larger X-Men narrative, where the team has gradually become isolated and fractured, to the point that it effectively no longer exists. Basically, Wolverine is the last member of a superhero team that no longer exists.

This might seem like a win for Wolverine's masculinity - last mutant standing! crucified like some sort of mutant Christ! - but Claremont subverts that expectation in several ways. For one, Wolverine is beaten and captured by Donald Pearce and the Reavers with embarrassing ease. For another, he's saved by a 13 year old girl.

Most importantly, though, is the contrast between his outward demeanor and his interior dialogues. While Pearce is enraged by Wolverine's smugness and aloof response to his own torture, Wolverine's true torture is psychological and self-inflicted, as he sees visions of everyone he has disappointed, now dead and blaming him. He's the last one standing, sure, but only because he abandoned everyone else to die.

He's being too hard on himself, sure, but it also turns out that he's wrong. We can read this self-torture can also be read as a manifestation of his masochistic nature - he always runs through bullets, after all, when he could easily avoid them - and the masculine hero's compulsory martyr complex, since he seems to want to die as some act of penance, not because it's truly hopeless. It also reads as a meta-joke about his prominence and popularity, even in 1989: of course it's Wolverine's fault that they're dead because Wolverine is the most important X-Man ever. Of course.


Uncanny X-Men 257-260ish

This is the 'something is still not quite right' storyline that, sadly, goes nowhere. Because that Christ-like imagery from the last storyline? It didn't come with a resurrection. Wolverine continues to hallucinate - though mostly only about his old war buddies, Nick Fury and Carol Danvers - and is demonstrably slower and weaker than he should be, if he's fully healed. In a battle with the Mandarin, Jubilee's blast knocks Wolverine out even though Psylocke and the Mandarin appear merely dazed. Wolverine even collapses in mid-conversation at one point, and thereafter begins to bleed for no discernible reason. It's shocking and unsettling - Jubilee comments that "You'll be dead, you keep this up! You go an' drag me all across the world, mister-- You better make sure you survive to bring me home!"- but... nothing really comes of it. Eventually, he's back to normal. He got better.

I should add that the decision to saddle Wolverine with hallucinatory ghosts of Nick Fury and Carol Danvers is a weird but suggestive one. On the face of it, this is a sort of nostalgic gimmick (that John Wayne, thing again) that merely gestures toward the military and historical elements of Wolverine's masculinity, and there is something very old-fashioned about how Wolverine talks to his ghosts. On the other hand, these ghosts and their conversations are made to seem awfully ridiculous, especially when the hallucinations try to fight the real bad guys. Also, Jubilee thinks that Wolverine is going insane - he probably is - and the only moment in which the ghosts appear to actually do something is when Psylocke, who is tapped into Wolverine's mind and sees their bullets, psychically kills their targets. The scenes are absurd and so to, by extension, are the things that Fury and Danvers represent.

Had Claremont been allowed to follow this storyline through, it was meant to culminate in Wolverine's actual death and resurrection as a bad guy - an idea that was later used not once but twice, for The Twelve storyline and by Mark Millar. (Claremont's only plan is teased at in the scene where he's captured by The Hand, whose brainwashing of Wolverine appears to be working until it suddenly is not. Since Claremont has said The Hand would resurrect him, I'm guessing this would've been revisited.)


In closing

In Geoff Klock's book, he writes that "comic books are often cyclical, stuck in pointless repetitions of, among other things, violence, homoantagonism, misogyny, cheap and easy juvenile bullshit, and the twentieth return of Magneto, and this is what needs to be broken at the end of Avaritia, [the third Casanova miniseries] so we can get something new."

It's worth recalling, again, Magneto was reformed under Claremont, becoming the headmaster of Xavier's and fighting alongside the X-Men before concluding that death follows him everywhere and choosing a life of solitude. Throughout the late 80s, Claremont repeatedly broke with cycles and repetitions - and broke the format of the team itself. So, too, did he systematically undermine the sexy cool masculinity of Wolverine, and start to give us something new. Before the cyclical, pointless repetitions and cheap, easy juvenile bullshit got in the way.

Why everyone should have assumed Jian Ghomeshi was lying (courtesy of math)

You've probably seen some form of this critical thinking exercise. There's this description of a person. You're asked to choose their likely profession. The description usually looks something like this:

A person is neat and orderly. An introvert, the person is shy and does not easily make friends. In spite of near-sightedness, which requires him or her to wear glasses, the person also loves books and is an avid reader. Is this person a librarian or a teacher?

I probably don't need to ask what you picked: it was "librarian". Because that sounds like the stereotype of a librarian. If I had allowed you to attach percentages or probabilities, you might have allowed for the chance that this describes a teacher. You might have even said 50/50, which seems like a safe answer. And now that I've suggested it, you're probably thinking "that sounds reasonable", right? Right.

But, in fact, no. It isn't. You're wrong. You are so, so wrong.

That is to say, you're probably wrong. And you're probably wrong because you've likely paid attention to the wrong details. Rather than asking yourself "does this person sound like a librarian? or a teacher?" you needed to be asking "just how many people work in these professions, anyway?"

That being the real question, you probably already have some idea of the answer. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there were about 15,000 librarians employed in that country in 2012. But teachers? Well, if we restrict the category to only people who teach JK through Grade 12 classes, there were about 3,000,000, give or take 100,000. That's about 200 teachers for every librarian.

So, for every shy, near-sighted librarian - and even if we assume that every librarian fits this description - do we really think that we can't find more people who fit the description among a random sample of 200 teachers? And not just more but even 10 or 20 or 100 more of them for every 1 librarian? Yep, there's at least one, maybe even two magnitudes more teachers who fit this description than librarians. There's no reason for hesitation, here. There's maybe a 1% chance that "librarian" was right. You should have guessed "teacher".

There's a name for this kind of reasoning: Bayesian inference. A Bayesian inference refers to decision-making based on probabilities. We know - or at least we should know - that there are many more teachers than there are librarians. Google then confirms this and allows us to attach a factor to it. Those details about being orderly and loving books? It's really neither here nor there, since it's a decision-making process that's based on a feeling or stereotype about what a librarian is like, rather on anything we can measure or prove.

Thus, our basic assumption - our a priori assumption, given that we know little else that is useful - should be that "teacher" is the more probable correct answer.

So, where is this blog heading? I'll cut to the chase.

Last week, I started to write a blog about the Jian Ghomeshi sex scandal. I'm not going to rehash the details. If you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the allegations against the former CBC radio host. If not, here's the Wikipedia summary.

At the time I started writing, three women had accused Ghomeshi of sexual abuse and assault and each of them had been interviewed by Jesse Brown, though none allowed for their quotes to be attributed. Another women that Brown interviewed accused Ghomeshi of sexually harassing her at work. And some of Ghomeshi's own friends - mostly famously Owen Pallett - said that they believe the accusers. Also, depending on where you live and whether you shared any mutual friends or friends-of-friends with Ghomeshi, there was plenty of rumor and innuendo that supported the accusers.

Still, there were no irrefutable "facts", as such, like videos or pictures. A lot of people on the internets made comments like these:

K*** M***: Nobody knows "the whole story" except for him and the women. I am not taking anyones side on this matter. 

@pothen: Why is anyone (aside from the parties involved & personal friends) mouthing off about #JianGhomeshi? We know *nothing* so far. 

Which seems reasonable, right? We don't "know" anything, do we? It's a 'he said'/'she said' and the allegations are as likely to be true as they are false. The probability is 50/50 and we just shouldn't choose sides.

If you've been following along this whole time, you can probably guess where I'm headed with this.

As a matter of fact, we do know something. We know that women almost never lie about sexual assault. And that knowledge should inform whether we think these women are telling the truth.

So, what exactly do we know. Here are a couple details that aren't perfectly matched to the Ghomeshi case, but indicate a pattern:

• We know that it's very rare for women to go to the police and falsely accuse a man of sexual violence. For instance, multiple researchers have put the rate of "unfounded" or false rape accusations between 1% and 8%.
• As well, the rate of "unsubstantiated" criminal domestic assault cases is estimated to be around 25-40%. "Unsubstantiated", in this case, adds all of the cases that were dismissed due to lack of evidence - not that the accusation was false or malicious, necessarily, though these would be included in the number, too.

Granted, these refer to court proceedings and not unnamed accusers in newspapers, but the trend seems clear - women tell the truth more often than not. Even the most pessimistic guess would have to start with the assumption that the likelihood an accusation is true is >50%.

But we're not dealing with an accusation, are we? We also know that there were three people alleging particularly heinous sexually violence, not just one. That increases the likelihood that he did these things to at least one of them by a significant margin: that >50% becomes something more like 90+%.

Let me connect this process more explicitly with my opening example. At first, you might have asked yourself "do I think Jian Ghomeshi did this?" And so you might have made a decision based, to some extent, on what you think of him. But that was the wrong question, and it might have led you to commit the same representativeness fallacy that you fell prey to, above, if you chose "librarian". A better question would have been something more like "someone has been accused of sexually assaulting three women - how likely is it that these women are telling the truth?"

So, even before you heard any of the details, you should have thought it at least 90% likely that the accusations were correct. That's your starting point: not 50/50, but 90/10. Because while we might not know the whole story - just as we didn't know the entire life story of the person who wears glasses and loves books - we know a lot about probabilities, and that has to inform our decision-making.

And that's before you factor in the other story of sexual harassment. The letter from Owen Pallett. The stories from former co-workers or whispers from women in bars. The other six women who would come forward to the Toronto Star in the next week, two of whom were willing to be identified by name. The internal communications from the CBC that complaints had been made. The letters from journalism schools that declared his show off-limits to students because of his past behavior. The recollections of university dons that they had to keep an eye out for him. The woman who recalled a creepy encounter with him on XOJane, last year. The woman who accused him of sexual assault via an anonymous Twitter account, this spring. Or the fact that believing the accusers requires that only Ghomeshi is lying, while believing Ghomeshi requires that a dozen women and at least one journalist have orchestrated an elaborate and long-running conspiracy...

"Anita Sarkeesian Was Right"

Amazingly, I don't think I've ever blogged about video games and sexism. I suppose that I don't say much about video games because I really don't play many of them. (I mean, I've owned every Nintendo console but the Wii U, but I wouldn't call myself a gamer and I don't think that would qualify me, regardless.) But it's still a bit odd, isn't it? Anyway.

You've probably heard about Anita Sarkeesian, or are at least familiar with her Tropes Vs. Women series of videos. (And if not that, you've probably noticed that the heroes and villains in most video games are men, and that women are often reduced to the role of victim, prize, or simply eye candy. Right? Right.) For her effort, Sarkeesian has been threatened with rape and murder by dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of male video game fans, who perceive the criticism of their games as personal attacks. There have been apps that simulate beating her up, attempted hacks of her Twitter and Google accounts, threats against her family, and bomb threats preceding her speaking engagements. She's had to call the police, had a case referred to the FBI for further investigation, and briefly went into hiding, recently.

Let me spell out the irony, if it isn't already painfully obvious: Sarkeesian points out that video games are dominated by narratives of masculine violence and feminine submission; her critics, who deny the veracity of her claims, demand her submission and threaten her with violence. No, really. You can't make this shit up.

Anyway, a month ago, my brothers and I attended Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. It's a geek convention - comic books, anime, and video games, mostly - and one of my brothers wore this:

A lot of people are confused by the use of the past tense.
In true geek culture mash-up fashion, the shirt is simultaneously
an homage to Magneto, whose teenaged supporters have been
known to wear "Magneto was right" t-shirts.
So, it's a thing, not a mistake.

Needless to say, I think, this shirt is about as controversial as it gets at a geek convention. A lot of people feel strongly that Sarkeesian is right or that she's wrong. And when these people who strongly feel she's right speak up and say so? They're also sometimes threatened with rape and death.

Well, some of them are threatened, at least. When an activist named Stephanie Guthrie spoke out against the 'Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian' game, she was also threatened, repeatedly and by multiple people. And so, as my brother walked around this convention with a shirt that practically begged people to threaten him with rape and death - and almost immediately posted pictures of it to Twitter and Facebook, increasing the likelihood that the right/wrong people would see it - I wondered... would this muscular, tattooed white dude get even a fraction of the same response?

So, I gave it a month. Five weeks to see whether anyone would bat an eye, whether the guys claiming that Sarkeesian was the real sexist would prove themselves equal opportunity harassers. And our friends were curious, too. Here are the first two responses to the picture on Facebook:

The finally tally on Twitter? 419 Retweets, 1264 Favorites. Two jokes that he should ask for a refund. (Though these responses were made in response to me, not him.) One accusation that he was being a "white knight". And one threat of a "shanking". That's it - and the tweet seems to have since disappeared.

My brother also told people that he received nothing but compliments - most notably from Sex Criminals artist Chip Zdarsky, aka Steve Murray - but this isn't entirely true. Sure, everyone who spoke to him complimented the shirt. What he didn't see, though, were the sideways glares and glowers, which usually only happened after he had passed by and which I noticed because I was sometimes walking behind him. I only saw a half-dozen or so of these, but I wasn't paying exceptionally close attention. It was clear that the shirt surprised, annoyed, and/or upset some people. It just didn't surprise, annoy, or upset them enough to say or do anything to the guy who was wearing it. (I won't explicitly speculate as to why that is. I'll leave that part up entirely up to you. Give it a try. It's just as easy as it seems!)

So, the negative reactions were there. They just weren't particularly loud or threatening or... anything, really. Just deafening silence.

Amazing Spider-Man 2: Yes, You Can Reasonably Make an Electric Boogaloo Joke

1. Some quick reflections on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 following...
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

But TL;DR? ASM2 wasn't very good. Looked pretty, though.

And that Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are so good on screen together? They should hook up in real life, or something. And that's all the good, right there.

2. There's a vague 'hope' theme in Amazing Spider-Man 2, which could've been subtitled ASM2: Unrelentingly Hopeless.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

Seriously, this is an unerringly dank and depressingly film. And in the moments where it's not? It's just wrong. Having Peter bound up to the stage, with all this attitude and swagger, and then kiss Gwen in front of everyone? You can call that guy Peter Parker, but that's not Peter Parker.

3. I say "vague theme" of hope because it's hilariously forced. Gwen uses it in speech, Peter muses about it, Harry uses it mockingly.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

I mean, it's also about responsibility and doing the right thing because you're screwed either way. Or, at least, that's what it's about when Peter Parker is recognizably Peter Parker. Which he wasn't. So it really wasn't about those things. It was about "hope". Except, like I said in that tweet, it wasn't really about that, either. Even though it claimed to be.

4. But Harry's right. There's nothing hopeful about this movie. It opens with a death & there are two deaths in the climax. Sooo much dying.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

Arrgh. Sooooo miserable. Who did they make this for? People who thought that The Dark Knight was too much fun? Who wished that Spider-Man's battles should probably be as needlessly destructive as Superman's in Man of Steel?

5. And where's the redemption angle? Spider-man baddies are tragic, bad guys by circumstance who can be redeemed. No hope for that, here.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

6. Electro's heel-turn happens instantly & without a clear reason. Harry's is rushed & has no impact, since we met him just 20 minutes ago
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

Electro is up there with Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face for Absolute Worst Super-Villain in a Film. Remember this?:

Electro is a clownish, unbelievable character (is he some kind of thinly veiled shot at Spider-man fanboys? could it actually be any more mean-spirited?) with an equally unlikely transformation into Spider-man's biggest enemy.

And Harry? The less said, the better. There's just nothing there. He gets an intro, a meeting, a conversation with Peter, a conversation with Spider-man, and then he turns evil. And that sounds like a lot, but it's pretty much 5 minutes in total. And do we even have the chance to care? No, no we don't. Because the Peter and Harry relationship is built on their memories of stuff that we never saw and comes as a complete surprise. But we're still supposed to feel something when Peter refuses to help him and Harry gets really, really, unreasonably angry?

7. On the bright side, Aunt May and Gwen supply great characters & performances. Strong (Gwen leaving), subtle (May knows!) & sympathetic.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

Who's the real star of this franchise? Sally Field. I mean, Garfield and Stone are good when they're given very little to work with - the story is awful, and Peter is just awful, so it works best when they aren't trying to advance the story - but Sally Field is great and Aunt May is great.

8. Naturally, then - spoilers! - one of them has to die. Because the male hero needs motivation & they exist for him. Sigh.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

Sigh.

Why Rob Ford's rehab - if it's even occurring - will fail

I've recently decided to embrace the uncommonly-used genre of the tweet-essay. Here's an effort from earlier today. It may work as something that I can translate to the blog, it may not. (The latter would be unfortunate, though, since I otherwise can't find time to work on my blog.)

Anyway, the context here is that Rob Ford took leave from his job as Mayor of Toronto and hopped on a plane, ostensibly to report to rehab. But then he was turned back at the border. His lawyer and brother claim that he's in rehab, somewhere, but we really don't know. And have no reason to believe them, frankly.

Where's Rob Ford? Find him!

1. One hugely pertinent detail in the Rob Ford rehab story is being ignored. Twitter essay on Rob and the family Ford to follow...
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

2. Sure, it matters whether Rob Ford is actually in rehab. And Doug's remark that "he's gonna come back a few pounds lighter" is a red flag.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

3. But, in another sense, it doesn't matter. Half of Rob's problem is his family. His mom and Doug ignore the problem; Kathy encourages it.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

4. Rob Ford is surrounded by enablers who have no clue what's best. And, after 30 days of rehab (if he's actually there), he returns to them
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

5. So, getting Rob Ford into rehab is only half the battle. If you can't get the entire family in treatment, then it WILL be a waste of time
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

6. I'm also stunned that the Fords STILL can't see the mayoralty was/is a huge stressor for Rob. He can't stay on the wagon AND be mayor.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

7. And Doug now won't deny that he's interested in running for Mayor if Rob drops out. He wants the title that destroyed his brother.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

8. Rob is the tragic collateral damage in his brother's sociopathic quest for power. The Fords don't seem to actually want him to get better
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

9. And I don't mean they want him to die. I mean that they don't want him to change. They've been clear many times - he's fine the way he is
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

10. A Rob Ford who's drunk AA kool-aid, on the other hand? That's a Rob Ford who won't be on-message, who might recognize he needs a break.
— Neil Shyminsky (@neilshyminsky) May 6, 2014

Daryl Dixon and the phantom menace of his turn to the dark side

Eventually, I'll stop beating up on AMC's The Walking Dead. Eventually. Probably when it's over.

In the meantime, I want to use the last episode to pick out one of the things that show routinely does wrong. And my example is Daryl's most recent character arc. (arrrr! thar be spoilers ahead.)

So, in the season's penultimate episode, we see Daryl slowly (though unintentionally) ingratiating himself to "the marauders" and warming up to their leader, Joe. For the majority of the story, he struggles against their medieval philosophy of discipline and punishment, refuses to participate in their ethic of "claiming" ownership of property, and tells them that he's only traveling with them temporarily. That is, until Joe kills Len, the marauder who had been giving Daryl a hard time. Daryl resists the urge to cover Len's body with a tarp (oh, he's so cold!) and, later, symbolically joins the marauders by claiming a strawberry bush. The ostensible pay-off for this story is that, simultaneous Daryl's act of assimilation, we realize that the marauders are tracking a man who killed their friend. Dramatic irony alert: that man is Rick.

Now, I'm not going to complain at length about how clichéd the marauders are. Because, of course: grizzled, bearded murderers who exist in a state of nature, looking like the stock end-of-the-world bad guys that populate every narrative in this genre. (see: Waterworld, The Road, Children of Men, etc.) And Jeff Kober, as Joe, has been type-cast with hilarious predictability. So, I'll complain that it's unimaginative, but, yes, not at length.

What I want to complain about is how hilariously unconvincing I find this ham-fisted attempt to create drama and tension. We're supposed to believe that Daryl is already falling-in with this new group, both socially and, I guess, emotionally. That's he's reverting to type. That he might not be loyal to his previous group. That the way he cared for Beth (as well as the rest) is, I suppose, easily forgotten. And, most importantly for the season finale, that he might turn on Rick.

Ugh. Really?

No, really? This is how you elevate the stakes for the end of the season, by having us wonder whether one of the most fiercely loyal characters in the series will turn? Remember, this was the guy who defended his asshole brother in spite of his asshole-ishness, who diverted a horde of zombies from Beth's direction by pinning himself in the basement with almost no weapons, and who has made a habit of saving pretty much everyone with little regard for his own safety. This was a guy who, at the beginning of the season, found purpose as the community's provider and protector. And this is a guy who is, at this point, so unquestioningly one of the good guys that we ask questions like 'will he hook up with Carol or Beth?', not 'will he turn out like his brother?'

Sure, he's also surly and reactionary, but he's also one of those rogues with a heart of gold. (Which the series has seen fit to establish again and again. And again. And again.) And we're supposed to believe, even for a second, that he'd forget all of that so easily?

The only tension here is whether the show's own bad writing might turn an otherwise implausible (or nigh-impossible?) storyline into a groan-inducing reality.

AMC's The Walking Dead and the many ways in which it *ahem* bites

With the return of AMC's The Walking Dead, this week, here are my much-delayed but eagerly-awaited (or not!) reflections on why the show is terrible, and how it manages to screw up everything that the the comic does right. (Be warned! I will probably end up spoiling stuff.)

[A quick note: This is not to suggest that the comic is perfect, by any means. The prison arc drags and, more recently, characters have a habit of monologue-ing in such a way that I have to think Robert Kirkman is hoping to make some sort of serious social commentary that's well beyond his ability. But still, it's much better]

1) The Walking Dead are supposed to be the people, not the zombies

The show's biggest failing is that it thinks the zombies are the stars. It can't go an episode without a zombie sneak-attack, and it makes a zombie encounter part of every story. To pull some examples from this season:

• The story about the flu, while ostensibly serving as some sort of banal contrast and reminder of the dangers of the everyday, devolved into just another surprise zombie rampage.
• The visit to the grocery store was interrupted by bunches of zombies falling inexplicably from the ceiling. (I say 'inexplicably' not because it doesn't make sense that the roof is sagging, but because it appears they had been there for months, and somehow none of them had previously managed to fall through the roof)
• Though it was understated, even Rick and Carol's half-decent foraging episode was interrupted by  zombies who carried away and ate the new people. (But even I'll admit that this was done with impressive restraint.)
• In the latest episode, Carl is nearly bitten not just once but twice by zombies who either snuck up or sprang out from behind a door, both of which are lazy tropes that the show relies on with alarming regularity.

In the comic, the zombies have been largely reduced to background pieces that do little to move the plot forward. When they gather en masse, it's to serve some sort of symbolic purpose.

• The zombies flood the prison as an after-effect of the battle with The Governor, not because he deploys them as a weapon. 
• When a zombie herd pushes through the walls that surround Alexandria, it follows a gun-fight with outside bandits and parallels an internal struggle for the right to lead the town. When Rick is finally installed as leader, the town finally learns how to keep the zombies out.

It's not that the zombies disappear or are rendered harmless, but nor are they aggressors or malevolent. Rather, the zombies of the comic appear as a consequence of human folly - the wrath of god, a force of nature, a critique of social relations given undead form, or however you choose to explain it. And so there's a subtle moral element to it, too, at least in the past few years. Not that any particularly person deserves to be attacked by a zombie, mind you, but that we, more generally, have brought this upon our selves - and we're running out of chances.

2) Pacing

A friend of mine defended the story arc in the first half of this season by way of claiming that it was about the difficulty of re-establishing society. Which, if it were true, would've been great. Instead, having only just established the prison community in the previous year's season finale, this year's season premiere immediately introduced a mystery illness to destroy it. Number of full episodes spent showing that it's not all about the zombie attacks: 0

By contrast, the comic book spent dozens of issues in the prison and plenty of time showing that inter-personal conflict and power struggles were far more deadly than anything outside the walls. What my friend claimed/hoped the show was doing? That's what the comic book actually did. If you're going to make a show about humanity after the apocalypse, it probably behooves you to slow down and establish that they can still interact with other human beings.

3) Choreography that would make a pro wrestler blush

Again, the lazy tropes. There's a difference between the effective use of horror conventions and the poor use of them. While I expect the disorienting close-up or extreme that shields our view from a surprise, I expect what follows to be an actual surprise. When Hershel stepped slowly past a body in a dark prison corridor, I knew it would bite him. When, in the second season, Lori went after Rick in a car, I was reasonably sure that she would crash. When she held up a map and took her eyes off the road, I knew there would be a zombie in the way when she looked up. And that she would swerve. And that she would crash.

And when, earlier this season, Rick was outside the prison and got pinned against the fence, the camera angle suggested that someone was going to sneak up, unseen, from behind to save him. So, Daryl did just that:

It's one thing to anticipate a surprise, but to know exactly what that surprise will be? That's not a surprise at all. It reduces the anticipation to an expectation, and robs the scene of tension or excitement entirely.

4) The physics of sound

When they're off-screen, the zombies are remarkably quiet. Like, sooo quiet. But when they're on screen, they're incredibly noisy - gnashing and moaning and gurgling and growling.

But, you're saying, it's just that they're quiet when there are no humans around - obviously, they get noisy when there's meat in their presence.

Except, that's not what I'm saying at all. I literally mean that it's a matter of whether the camera can see them or not.

• When, in the season premiere, the group arrives at a grocery store, the scene is totally silent. But, as the camera pans up, we see and hear dozens of zombies on the roof. (Which puts that whole 'the zombies are normally quiet' theory to bed.) Now, I'm not at all certain whether the humans would've heard the zombies, but it's pretty silly that the zombies fail to hear the humans approach - especially since their hearing is acute enough to hear a crash from within the building.
• When Meghan is attacked in the Governor's RV camp, it is doubly ridiculous. Not only is it shot from directly in front, which immediately gives away the eventual zombie attack, but the zombie that she finds is standing totally stationary behind a bed sheet, of all things. A bed sheet that could, ostensibly, block both the sound of the zombie from ours and Meghan's ears, as well as the sound of the community from the zombie, who was turned in the wrong direction and thus oblivious to their presence. Dumb.
• And the most egregious example, from the end of the second season, is when Dale is standing in an empty field - which we know to be empty because the establishing shot was from a distance. Yet, somehow, a zombie swiftly and totally silently sneaks up from behind him. Which is even more impressive because the field is, itself, totally silent. Until, of course, Dale turns around and the zombie appears on camera, its mouth all frothy and gurgling. Because, of course.

5) Rick

In AMC's version, everyone hates Rick. He's a reluctant leader who's largely incapable of making decisions, wracked by self-doubt and guilt. This might be a fine archetype to employ in literary fiction, but in the hands of lesser writers, Rick is simply annoying.

The problem is, the TV version of Rick is only a small fraction of a full character. Like AMC's Rick, the comic book version of Rick also has a period of self-doubt where he's paralyzed by guilt. But that's not how he begins, and that's not where he's been for a long time.

In the first few years of stories, Rick is instead characterized by a survive-at-all-costs ethos, an angry-at-the-world recklessness, and is intensely protective of his family. Just like TV's Shane. (The comic's Shane died after only a few issues - killed by Carl, rather than Rick.) And, in the comic, he finds some solace in rejecting his responsibility to others and disappearing for days at a time, setting out alone on his motorcycle like some sort of post-apocalyptic cowboy. Like TV's Daryl. (The comic has no Daryl.)

6) Didn't we see all this before? This is what passes for character development?

When the previous season ended, The Governor wanted the prison and was willing to destroy it if he couldn't have it, bringing with him a small army to demand its surrender and knocking its gates down. When The Governor returned at the midpoint of his season, he wanted the prison and was willing to destroy it if he couldn't have it, bringing with him a small army to demand its surrender and knocking its gates down.

Ugh.

In between, we were given two episodes that demonstrated how a shattered Governor rebuilt himself in order to become the exact same person he had been before, with a more or less identical purpose - he replaced his old community with a new one, regained his leadership role, even managed to find a new daughter. And this all served what point, exactly?

7) How gender influences your chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse

I haven't fully developed this point in my head, and it deserves a longer, fuller discussion. But regardless, it's something that needs to be covered. (That I've put it number last on my list isn't an indication of priority. Instead, it's an indication that it's the least rigorously formulated.)

One of the interesting tropes in The Walking Dead comic is the clash of male egos and its catastrophic consequences. Shane nearly kills Rick before the first story arc is complete; Rick and Tyreese nearly kill each other; Rick and The Governor destroy one another's homes; a group of cannibals become a particularly unsubtle metaphor for the direction that this is all heading in. The group's most brazen and direct actions also tend toward disaster: Shane pulls a gun on Rick and Carl shoots Shane in the neck; Rick's first confrontation with the Governor is memorable for Rick getting his hand chopped off; Tyreese's pre-emptive strike against Woodbury results in his capture and execution; Rick's first encounter with Negan ends with Glenn's murder.

Consciously or not, there is a clear and obvious indictment of hegemonic masculine aggression, ambition, and hubris. But this is also a violent story with characteristically violent consequences, so all of this might seem rather unconvincing and lazy - characters die all time, most of those characters are men, and it's easy to link any one death to any one man's reckless actions.

So, let's try this, instead: apart from the characters who were introduced in the current storyline of the comic, only one man who claimed any kind of leadership role is still alive: Rick.

• Shane, who led the RV group before Rick arrived, is dead.
• So is Tyreese, Rick's other early competition for leadership of the original group. 
• And Hershel, who stepped up when Rick and Tyreese were trying to kill each other.
• Glenn was also among the group that tried to replace Rick. Also dead.
• Douglas, who preceded Rick as leader of Alexandria. 
• Spencer, Douglas' son who plotted to replace Rick, is murdered by Negan. 
• Gregory, who leads The Hilltop, is also killed by Negan.
• And the bad guys, too, like The Governor and whoever led The Hunters. It's only a matter of time until Negan dies.

Now, it's not like women don't take risks or don't die. The comic book version of Carol kills herself. (Carol is the one major exception to the general rule that the comic does everything better. But even though it seems inevitable that she'll return to the show, the way they wrote her out was awful. And just reinforces the fact that Rick is a dick.) Lori and Judith are killed in the Governor's attack, which ultimately reduces them to a story function - the cost of Rick's pride.

[Quick aside, though. The female characters on the TV show? Some great steps have been taken to build them up into strong, independent people. But there's a reason that half of the early TWD memes relished in point out how annoying they were.]

But Andrea and Michonne have survived capture and physical abuse, and have grown into leadership roles rather than having taken them by force. Necessity plays a role, too: when Gregory gives his allegiance to Negan, a disgusted Maggie effectively takes command of The Hilltop.

And this is hardly an argument for some wildly different form of feminine leadership. Michonne is no less hot-headed and independent in the comic than she is on the TV show, and Andrea is remarkable for her level-headedness and killer instinct. Maggie probably most closely resembles a recognizable feminine trope, having become something of a mother bear to Carol's daughter.

Rather, it seems to be an argument for leaders who don't aspire to hold power but earn it and will take it when they must; fighters who don't seek fights but will fight when they're backed into a corner. As it happens, these sorts of characters are all women.

Women who, I should again add, have taken very different paths and achieved very different outcomes. It's not as if the book recommends one particular way of surviving the zombie apocalypse, even if it seems to suggest that, yes, that one other particular way leads unavoidably to death.

Michael Sam and the talk about draft value

Yesterday, Michael Sam, a college football player who intends to enter the NFL draft in May, told Sports Illustrated that he's gay. It's being described as "outing", but Sam's sexuality was no surprise to his college team, whom he informed in August, and apparently "only two or three [NFL teams] didn't know" beforehand.
 

Now, the fact that this is news - that Sam would be the first out player in the history of the NFL - is obviously indicative of heterosexism. That all of the coaches, scouts, and such interviewed by Sports Illustrated confirmed that this would be a problem, that it would be a distraction to the team and hurt his own prospects is also unsurprising, and also an explicit admission of widespread homophobia. But these are not surprising findings in North American sports, even if they're still upsetting.

As recently as a year ago, baseball's Torii Hunter was saying that having a gay teammate would be "difficult and uncomfortable", and the comment - while widely criticized by media-types - was basically a non-issue among people who are actively involved in the sport. Or in all of North America's big four sports, for that matter. The NBA's Jason Collins, a mediocre player nearing the end of his career, came out in spring 2013 and has been unable to find any more work. The NFL's Chris Kluwe, considered more-or-less average among punters, became an outspoken advocate of gay marriage and critic of its enemies and he, too, has been unable to find a job.

That the NBA's only out gay player and pro sports' most vocal straight ally find themselves unemployed is not evidence of a conspiracy, but it's reflective of this fact, at the very least - homophobia is deeply entrenched in the culture of sport.

 

What makes things more interesting for Sam, though, is that he's not on the verge of retirement, (like Collins) nor does he play a relatively marginal position that's rather easy to replace (like Kluwe). Rather, Sam is the SEC Defensive Player of the Year - not just the best at his own position, but judged the very best among all players on defense among the 14 team, Division I Southeastern Conference.

So, if Sam is going to be punished for his admission, it might be useful to look at how former Defensive Players of the Year have been treated by the NFL draft:

2012 - Round 1, Pick 17 - Jarvis Jones, Linebacker
2011 - Round 1, Pick 6 - Morris Claiborne, Cornerback
2010 - Round 1, Pick 5 - Patrick Peterson, CB
2009 - Round 1, Pick 8 - Rolando McClain, LB
2008 - Round 1, Pick 5 - Eric Berry, Safety
2007 - Round 1, Pick 5 - Glenn Dorsey, Nose Tackle
2006 - Round 1, Pick 11 - Patrick Willis, LB
2005 - Round 2, Pick 33 - Demeco Ryans, LB
2004 - Round 1, Pick 17 - David Pollack, LB
2003 - Round 5, Pick 142 - Chad Lavalais, Defensive Tackle
(previous to 2003, a single Player of the Year was named, which included offense and special teams)

Even with the inclusion of 2003's outlier, that's an average of 25th pick. And Sam? The various sources I've looked at were guessing, even before the public announcement, he could go anywhere from 3rd to 7th round - the vicinity of Lavalais, the outlier, rather than the norm. Following the announcement, the consensus seems to be that he'll go even lower. That is, if he's drafted at all.

Now, Sam is considered small for his position, (he's 6'2", while DEs tend to fall in the 6'3"-7" range) which is a criticism that unavoidably, and reasonably, damages his draft value. Doug Flutie, notably, won the Heisman Trophy and was named the best player in college football, only to be drafted in the 11 round and 285th overall. So, these things matter, and it's entirely possible that he'd fall outside the first round, controversy or no. But now we're suggesting that he would likely be the lowest-drafted SEC Defensive Player of the Year, ever? That he could, conceivably, go undrafted unless a team with "a strong owner, savvy general manager and veteran coach" can "make [it] work"? (We could spend hours peeling back the layers of the language that executives have used to describe Sam. Likewise, in discussing how cowardly it is that they've all hidden behind anonymity.)

This makes it sound like we're talking about someone who is intentionally divisive, who makes his sexuality central to his public persona. You'd think we were talking about someone who wears political messages on the field, who makes controversial remarks to media, who very openly and often talks about his sexuality, and whose media profile creates a conscious "distraction." Someone like, say, Tim Tebow.

And for what it's worth? Even with that baggage and similar concerns that his game wouldn't translate to the NFL, Tebow was picked 25th.

Brief thoughts on a Conservative anti-drug radio spot

From a Conservative Party of Canada radio ad:

"There's so much I worry about as a mom. Justin Trudeau's plan to make marijuana legal certainly doesn't help. Imagine, making it available just like alcohol and cigarettes. He's sending the message that recreational drug use is okay."

Simply put, this is a terrible ad. Not just because it's cheesy and melodramatic (there's a minimalist piano backing track) but because it strikes me as both internally contradictory and totally wrong about its facts. To wit:

1) There's an implication, here, that we can/should send the message to kids that alcohol and cigarette use "is okay". I don't know if that was the intention, but it's the effect. Grouping these three "recreational drugs" together only really makes sense if you're suggesting that they should all be treated in the same way. If you aren't, it all looks a bit arbitrary.

2) If pot were available in the same way that booze and smokes are available, it would actually be harder for kids to buy. One of the things that makes pot so readily available - or, at least, made it really accessible when I was a teenager - is that the market is entirely underground. Thus, the only barrier for buyers is knowing someone who's selling. And when you're 18, finding another teenager at your school who's selling is a lot easier than finding someone who can buy stuff at a store.

Dangerously early guesses and questions about The Triple Package

Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom author, is back with a new book, co-written by her husband. And it looks like it will be unintentionally racist and blissfully unaware of social theory.

The Triple Package comes out next month, but it's easy enough to get a sense of its argument. Some "cultural groups" are more successful than other cultural groups, and this has to do with three values - a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control - that those successful cultures share. The specific groups, they revealed in an interview with Yahoo, are Mormons, Cuban exiles, Nigerian Americans, Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, American Jews, Iranian Americans and Lebanese Americans.

Now, since it isn't out until February, I obviously haven't read it. And I don't know that I will ever read it. Because it sounds plain dumb. But, rather than claim to know what it's done wrong, I'll ask some questions that are prompted by what I have seen:

1. Who came up with the eight "cultural groups", and how? The categories they've defined throw up some red flags. Some of her "cultural groups" are defined by religion, others by political status or country of origin, but categorical ambiguity isn't, itself, necessarily problematic - it's realistic, because that's how we self-identify. But I wonder whether the members of the groups would identify first as "Mormon" or "Lebanese", or about the particular contexts within which they'd do so. And with this kind of work, it is hilariously easy to create a homogenous group where none exists, to group people together based on your perception of their similarity, rather than on their own perception. Neither of the authors are trained sociologists, so it'd be interesting to see whether their methodology accounts for those sorts or risks.
   
2. What role in their success do you attribute to American society? I don't see any indication that they're accounting for American society as a whole, much less the dominant ideologies that define success. Even if we concede, for argument's sake, that the American socio-economic system rewards these three values, the orientation feels wrong - why look at who is successful, rather than those systemic features that enable their success?
   
3. That is, what about capitalism and racism? Or, put another way, you can't do this analysis without explicitly addressing the roles that capital and race (that is, whiteness) play. I don't see any mention of either of those things in the blurb on the site. For instance, your proximity to whiteness matters - there's a reason that the two white groups (alright, "Jewish Americans" are a bit more complicated than that, but I'm trying to be concise) aren't defined by their geography or nationality - it's because race matters, and the white groups aren't marked by visual difference from the American norm. Which is to say, I think it's difficult to argue that the same thing is happening to and within these groups.
   
4. How is this disproving the existence of the model minority? The blurb on the site says that successful immigrant groups become less successful over time, and this disproves the model minority theory. But this looks like a misunderstanding of what a model minority is and does. The model minority is not a person or people so much as a function within in a society. It describes minority figures or groups whose success legitimates the system ("If a schlub like me can make it, anyone can...") and its unequal treatment of populations within that society ("...which means you just didn't try hard enough, you leech."). And it actually makes sense that a given group would lose their model minority status and another gain it - because that function doesn't belong on any one minority, and it'll shift. Chinese Americans have existed for 200 years; they've only been model minorities for the past few decades.
   
5. When looking at immigrant communities, how did you avoid selection bias? I think there's probably a pretty simple explanation for why some of these groups are, on the whole, disproportionately successful. The blurb notes that Nigerian immigrants have a lot of PhDs, which strikes me as pretty common sense, given how immigration works. There's a selection bias at work: only the best are allowed to come to the country, so we'd expect them to do well. (And we'd expect their kids to regress to the mean.)

Ironically, I get the sense that this book, while claiming to disprove the model minority, is actually telling us what a model minority is, and who fits that definition, right now. Which would make it kind of useful, right?

Again, haven't read the book, and probably won't unless someone gives it to me and I'm struck by a mood. But, then, everything I've seen has me thinking that it probably isn't worth my time. Or yours.

If you're gonna name your team after real people, at least do it right

We live in a world with NFL teams like the Washingtons* and MLB teams like the Clevelands*, that celebrate a tradition of white settler racism. A world where most sports fans lie somewhere on a spectrum from oblivious to indignant, mascots are unrepentantly racist, and owners have dug in their heels in defense of horribly offensive "traditions".

[* That's right. I refuse to use their chosen names. More on that below.]

That being the case, it seems important to celebrate the teams that do it right. Teams like the Spokane Indians. From Rodney Harwood of the Indian Country Today Media Network:

"In 2006, the baseball team’s front office and the tribe collaborated to come up with a team logo not only saying Spokane Indians in English, but developed a team logo printed in the Salish language, which was depicted on the sleeve of its uniforms.

"The Spokane Indians baseball team will take that collaboration one step further, making the logo in the Salish language the main logo on the front of its home uniforms for the 2014 season."

A Salish-language logo? And it's also their primary logo? That's pretty damn cool. It also addresses the obvious concern that this is a team called "the Indians". This is a word that was applied to the Aboriginal people of North America by white settlers, who misidentified them as Asian - and then didn't bother to correct themselves. It's inherently racist.

Impressively, the team is aware of this and shares those concerns - they don't use mascots, they don't have chants, none of that cartoonish crap that the Washingtons or Clevelands use. Says team co-owner Andy Billig, “We have a very positive relationship with the local tribes. We would talk with them from time-to-time to check in and say, ‘How are we doing?’ Even if we weren’t using any imagery, the name of the team was still the Spokane Indians and we knew that could potentially be sensitive. We believe that we are still the only professional sports team to collaborate with local tribes in this way.” 

The difference, with this Spokane team, is all in the collaboration and the new/old language. In making the Salish name the one that goes on their logo, with the help of the Spokane Nation, the name is effectively reclaimed - "Indians" becomes, at best, an English translation of the actual name. And an officially sanctioned nickname for the specific people that they represent. And it will surely decline in use as people familiarize themselves with the pronunciation of the Salish name.

This, by the way, is what that logo looks like:

In the past, I've always come down squarely against every iteration of the people-as-team-mascot kind of sports team. But this one, one that Spokane elders themselves say shows them respect and bring them pride? This is one that I feel pretty good about.

Fluffy sports post for the end of the year

One of the reasons that I love sports is that I also love a good story. Unfortunately, sports commentary and writing is filled with awful storytelling. And rather than say anything substantive about sports writing, I'll use this as an excuse to post my two favorite jokes about it. Happy new year!

From xkcd.com

What would happen if baseball writers voted the way they claimed to vote?

This is a comment from a reader of Joe Posnanski's blog, though it could come from any number of sports writers and "traditionalist" fans: 

While a player on a losing team certainly can be MVP, that is a black mark on that player’s record. The point is to win games. While the Angels certainly won more games this year because they had Mike Trout, that value is diminished because the Angels were so bad. A lot of that is beyond Trout’s control, and certainly the play of the rest of the team does not diminish his contribution, it does diminish that contribution’s value. If Trout plays for the Astros is he MVP? If Miguel Cabrera’s performance is slightly below Trout’s, but he helps push the Tigers into the playoffs, isn’t that more valuable?

So, now that you've considered the situation as a hypothetical, I can fill-in the specifics that were probably obvious to everyone who's a baseball fan. Excellent Player and Mediocre Team are Mike Trout and the Angels, while Incredible Player and Good Team are Miguel Cabrera and the Tigers.

Now, I'm copy-and-pasting this not to rehash the same discussion that happens every year, among everyone who writes about baseball. Because that would be really, really tedious. Instead, I want to a somewhat different approach.

The logic expressed in that quote goes something like this: you can't be MVP unless your team made the playoffs. Rather than argue the point, I'm going to accept it. Because, hey, your criteria is your own. You want to constraint the meaning of "value" such that it can only refer to players on playoff teams? Sure.

Here's the thing, though. Whatever definition you use, you have to be totally consistent in its application. Display some integrity. Establish your criteria, and then follow it.

That doesn't sound all that hard, does it? The thing is, in practice, the folks who add this playoff stipulation are rarely consistent. Writes baseball blogger Murray Chass,

When I voted for m.v.p., I didn’t look for any definitions because there aren’t any. Each voter has the freedom to decide for himself what “most valuable” means. To me, it means the player without whom his team couldn’t have done what it did. I always felt that the greater number of outstanding players a team had the less valuable each of those players was.
If I were voting this year, I’d find it hard to ignore Cabrera. He led the league in batting, on-base and slugging percentages, the combination of the two and batting with runners in scoring position. He was second in home runs, total bases and runs batted in, tied for second in runs scored and third in hits and walks. And don’t forget, he led his team to a division title. Would the Tigers have won it without him? No.

Chass' first criteria is that the "team couldn't have done what it did" without that player. It's badly expressed, but I take that to mean "a player without whom the team wouldn't have made the playoffs". That seems more or less confirmed by his subsequent argument in favor of Miguel Cabrera. And, sure, his selection of Cabrera for American League MVP totally fits with that logic. The Tigers won the division by a single game, and Cabrera was inarguably the best player on the team. Good job.

But there's a problem, and it arises when Chass starts talking about the other league's MVP:

In this instance, I think I would be tempted to vote for Goldschmidt, but the only race his team, Arizona, was involved in after June was a race for .500. With McCutchen providing the spark, Pittsburgh was in the division race to the end and maintained its wild-card lead.

Say, what? Inexplicably, right after explaining his criteria, Chass does the exact opposite of what he said he would do. Yowza. (Unless he sincerely meant that he could define "did what they did" in totally arbitrary ways, like "finish around .500". Which I can't believe he actually meant.)

Now, obviously, human beings often don't make sense. They set one standard, then vote according to another. This probably shouldn't be surprising, but it'd be nice if these voters - who are paid to do work like this, even if only indirectly, because a) they get to vote because they're sports writers, and b) they subsequently get to write about this news, which they themselves have made - were consistent in some way, right? And if they were, what would actually happen? Well, let's play pretend.

First, any NL MVP discussion would have to immediately exclude players from non-playoff teams. Legitimate MVP contenders from non-playoff teams, guys like Paul Goldschmidt, Carlos Gomez, or Troy Tulowitzki? Sorry, Chass, they're all out.

Second, and maybe more controversially, you also have to exclude every player who comes from a team that would have won their division/wildcard without that player. Atlanta and LA, for example, both won their divisions by ten or more games - no single player comes close to making an individual contribution that could account for that gap, so Clayton Kershaw and Freddie Freeman (among others) are also out. Kershaw's a favorite for MVP, so that one especially hurts.

Following this logic, then, an AL MVP ballot looks something like this: Cabrera, Donaldson, Scherzer, Sanchez, Longoria, Ellsbury, Victorino, Zobrist, Beltre, Verlander. (The arrangement might vary, but the players should be largely the same.) 

You might notice a few auspicious absences. Dustin Pedroia, like Kershaw, is excluded not because he's not one of the ten best, but because the Sox probably make the playoffs without him. So, not an MVP candidate. Trout, Robinson Cano, Chris Davis, and Felix Hernandez are all disqualified because their teams miss the playoffs with or without him. No one actually wants to see a ballot like that - you're excluding way too many of the league's best player - but that's the price of being consistent, right? Right. Good work, everyone.

The odds that we'll ever see a ballot like that, though? Well, it's not zero. But it's somewhere close to it.

Because here's the thing. The guys like Chass, who say that you should need to be on a playoff team? Mike Trout is probably their second or third choice. Davis is somewhere in their top five, too. And Cano isn't far behind. I don't even have to ask Chass and company if I'm right about this - I know I am. And these guys should be up for consideration, because they deserve it.
 
TL;DR: No one who espouses that whole valuable=playoffs thing actually adheres to it, because it would produce terrible results. And from that I can only conclude that they don't actually believe it, either.

This is Canada, according to the folks that you/we elected

I want to write about two very recent developments in Canadian politics, two things that seem largely separate and unconcerned with one another but strike me as very much related. Intentionally or not, both say a whole lot about what and who counts as "Canadian" and why - even when that's not what they think they're saying at all.

So, this is the first. It comes courtesy of Quebec's provincial government, which has drafted a "Charter of Values" that would ban public servants from wearing "overt and conspicuous" religious symbols. In the picture below, the bottom two rows show what constitutes "overt and conspicuous", while the top row shows, I dunno, examples that are presumably covert and inconspicuous. Or something. Some of the differences are obviously arbitrary, others are entirely too ambiguous, while the rest are just demonstrably racist.

Seriously, what's the difference between the first and second crucifix? One's small and one's bigger, sure, but what's the dividing line? At what point does a crucifix stop being small enough? Is there a particular length, mass, or volume? And, because there must be some standard that pertains to one or all three of these aspects, what is it and how did you determine that it achieved the necessary level of "conspicuousness"? And will the religious symbol police carry rulers and/or scales?

So, yes, this is obviously not actually about banning conspicuous symbols or defending Quebecois values so much as it is about putting the Other in their place and demonstrating who belongs and who does not. It really couldn't be any plainer.

And not just who belongs in Quebec. Because there's something very similar happening at a totally different level of government, in a totally different portfolio. Just check out some of these images from our new passports:

I think I spotted at least one person of colour, in an RCMP image. And Heather Mallick with the Toronto Star says that, across all the images, men outnumber women by a ratio of 16-to-1. These are terrible oversights. But they're also clear indications of hegemonic Canadian "values" - just as much as that poster is - and, in particular, of who and what counts as Canadian. That is, of who can comfortably call themselves Canadian. And it gets worse.

You might be wondering why I started with that Samuel de Champlain image. It's because the passport images are effectively placed in a chronology, with Champlain serving as the beginning of Canada. 'But it says page six, so surely there are other pages!', you say. 'And what about Aboriginal people?', you ask? Well, they do earn a token appearance on the previous page:

But that doesn't make them the origin of Canada in the narrative that the passport is advocating, oh no. This isn't presented as history, but as prehistory. In the logic of the feds, these aren't people or meaningful events, but symbols, artifacts best kept in a museum, representing some long-extinct community. There are no names or places or dates, here, and the symbols themselves are stripped of all context and specificity, reducing them to something generalized, depersonalized, and thusly unimportant. (Is that a particular inuksuk? Is it someone's approximation of one? Is it clip-art? Apparently, the answer doesn't matter.)

To add insult to the injury, of course, these are important symbols. They just aren't accorded any importance in the passport - at least, not enough importance to bother naming them or placing them within the narrative of the nation. And so appropriately, and depressingly, Aboriginal people are also absent from the rest of the passport images.

And so the Quebec that the "Charter of Values" from the Province of Quebec imagines? It excludes the same people that the Government of Canada does with the new passport. Hilariously - because Quebecois separatists and Conservative federalists imagine themselves ideologically opposed - they appear to be describing the exact same place.

And it's a place that requires a certain degree of hypocrisy and willful blindness. Because the Conservative Government of Canada actually opposes the "Charter of Values", which is motivated at least partly (and cynically) by the need to keep their lead among "New" Canadians. Because English Canadians get to respond with smug moral superiority, even as polls suggest that nearly half of us think the ban is a good idea. Because, ironically, Quebec's government fails to notice and condemn the conspicuous religious symbols contained in their own flag.