COMING THIS XMAS TO AN XBOX NEAR YOU

Compliments of the US Army, and Redstorm Entertainment. www.truesoldiersgame.com

Posted this link on my theological blog without comment, but here for some reason (possibly just to round out what I had to say about football a few weeks ago) I feel inspired to add my two cents worth.

For most of human history, the experience of warfare has been made up mostly of months and months of campaigning: two armies marching around the countryside at a speed of a few miles a day, each looking for an opportunity to bring its enemy to battle on a ground of its own choosing. The battles themselves might last as long as dawn to dusk, and mostly consisted of two large groups of armed men trying to stab one another with sharp weapons or maybe shoot each other with arrows. Most of the casualties generally came late in the day, after one side had broken down or been outmanuevered, and the guys who could afford good armor and fast horses (and had been watching from the hilltops all morning) got to chase after the other guys (who had thrown away their weapons and were running away as fast as they could) and chop their heads off from behind. Meanwhile, their counterparts on the other side jumped on their fast horses and rode off into the sunset to fight another day.

And as bloody as these slaughters could get, most of the actual casualties in warfare still generally came from disease brought about by months and months of camping out in the countryside with thousands of other guys -- rotten food and a lack of clean water, poor sanitation, crowded conditions, foul weather....you get the picture. But for a relatively well-to-do young man on the winning side, it could sure seem like a helluva adventure. And of course, these were the guys who also got to live to tell the tale to their children and grandchildren.

Nowadays, of course, things are a lot different. Our soldiers in Baghdad can eat burgers and pizza if they choose, take hot shows and crap in real toilets, phone home, watch TV, surf the web, even play video games. They commute to the battlefield in armored vehicles, possess the most advanced weaponry technology can produce and money can buy, and the best medical care in the world is only moments away. But if anything, the experience of warfare in the 21st century is worse than it has ever been.

We think we have sanitized warfare because we can now kill each other by remote control. But the constant stress of daily life in a combat zone, and the intimate knowledge that one is there to kill and can be killed without warning at any moment, has serious psychological consequences that we are only slowly beginning to understand and grapple with. Combat is an inherently stressful and unnatural activity. The question is not whether it will affect our soldiers, but how and when.

High tech kevlar body armor and superb battlefield medical care haven't really reduced the number of casualties our soldiers suffer; they've simply changed the ratio between the killed and the wounded. And then there is always the issue of morale. Patriotism and the power of positive thinking can only take us so far in justifying an activity sustained by lies and inherently without meaning.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing but the greatest respect and gratitude for the young men and women who have volunteered to put their lives on the line to do the important and necessary job of defending our country from armed attack. And if anything, I have even more admiration and respect for the somewhat older and more mature men and women who have committed their lives to training and leading these young people: giving them the skills they need to do their jobs well, and attempting to keep them safe and bring them home alive and unharmed by making good decisions under fire.

The folks I CAN'T abide are the cynical and ambitious civilian leaders who have thoughtlessly put our soldiers in harm's way in order to enrich themselves and their croneys, settle old scores, prove to their mothers that they are just as good as their fathers, and consolidate their hold on political power for another generation. Their own children sit safely in the elite bastions of power, untouched by the horror of warfare, and waiting for their turn to rule the world. Because they are the "winners." And everyone knows that the army is for "losers."

And it makes me sick. Because war is not a game.

And neither, frankly, is politics.

Hangin' Out to Dry

OK, it's just a silly little visual, but it made ME smile.

Why I Hate Football

For five minutes and thirteen seconds yesterday, the Oregon Ducks looked like they could do no wrong. Moved the ball practically at will, scored an easy 39 yard touchdown on 4th and 3; added a two-point conversion when they caught the Wildcats napping at the line of scrimmage, then intercepted a pass, ran a clever reverse that took them down to the 3 yard line, and looked ready to score again when the ball caroomed off of receiver Derrick Jones' shoulder pad and Arizona safety Nate Ness made an athletic interception and ran the ball back to nearly midfield. 90 seconds later the Wildcats scored a touchdown of their own to pull within a point. Oregon got the ball back on the kick-off, and had driven down to the Arizona 15 when with six minutes and six seconds left in the first quarter, Heisman Trophy candidate Oregon Quarterback Dennis Dixon tried to plant his left foot, felt his injured left knee give out beneath him, and was out for the game, and probably the season, and quite possibly the rest of his football "career." The Ducks kicked a field goal to bring their score to 11, but from that moment forward it was pretty much all-Wildcats for the next 45 minutes, until the Ducks finally managed to score another touchdown midway through the 4th quarter. Too little, too late. Arizona prevails 34-24, and Oregon's hopes of a national championship evaporate in the dry desert air.

I don't really "hate" football; actually, I played football as a kid, and it has certainly given me plenty of pleasure and entertainment over the years. But there is also an awful lot about football that I really don't care for very much, and crippling knee and head and spinal cord injuries are three of them. Football is basically a wargame - the fundamental idea is to "dominate the front line down in the trenches and gain ground" - but what I really hate is the way that football also trivializes the idea of combat, and contributes to thinking of war itself as a sport. Every war has casualties, no matter how safe or stylized we may try to make it. The problem is not that we need better equipment. The problem is fundamental to the nature of the activity itself.

For every kid who ever gets a chance to "play on Sundays" and pull down the big bucks (for an average of only 3 years), there are hundreds of thousands who play at the college, High School, and even pee-wee level, not to mention all the informal "sandlot" games that take place any time a handful of kids get together to toss around the pigskin. In 2006 there was one direct fatality related to football, and an additional 16 "indirect" deaths due to things like heat stroke or other heart-related problems, 4 of which were children as young as 11 and 12. Since 2001 there have been a total of 27 direct fatalities. Approximately 180,000 kids visit the emergency room each year with a football related injury. Statistically, 20% of the kids who participate in youth sports will suffer some sort of injury, and one in four will be considered "serious." That's an awful big price to pay just to give grown-ups an excuse to drink and gamble on Sunday afternoons.

Professional football in particular (and don't kid yourself: with the exception of the small detail that they don't actually bother to pay the players, NCAA Division I college football is "professional" in every sense of the word) is little more than a televised spectacle: 21st century America's answer to the gladiatorial contests of the Roman Collesium. It is an unapologetic celebration of competition itself; and what happens during the game is often only incidental to the real competitive struggle between big corporate organizations -- to acquire and train the right players, put in place the most effective coaching staff, develop the right "game plan," and (of course) "execute" that plan down on the field. And yet often the outcome of games often just boils down to which team can cause one of the opposition's key players to "go down" with an injury, and thus "knock them out of the game."

And then of course, there are the steroids.

I sure wish I could find in one convenient place reliable statistics of how many concussions, spinal cord injuries, torn ligiments, heat stroke episodes and the like actually occur over the course of a single football season. It seems like they keep track of everything else, so why can't I Google that? I would also like to know how many adults (like me) are still limping around decades later because of something that happened to them out on the gridiron. I think if we could just see this information, all laid out in black and white, we would be horrified. But enough of my rant. Let's just hope that Harvard beats Yale tomorrow....

Numba One Duck

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I guess this one says it all. This is a very exciting week for Oregon football. Now let's just pray that they can win out....

I ain't up here ta' read!

The other day I saw a link on another blog which allowed you to check the "reading level" of any particular blog against against the benchmarks educators use to evaluate the reading levels of their students. And since I now have eight different blogs I post to periodically, I figured I'd better test them all.

As one might have expected, most of my blogs (four out of the eight -- Rev Tim's (mostly) Annual Holiday Circular Letter, Hilsen fra Danmark, The Eclectic Cleric FRS and The Eclectic Cleric FPC) all tested out as "College: Undergraduate." My original The Eclectic Cleric blog only came in at High School reading level however, while for some inexplicable reason, the archive of sermons I preached on Nantucket (The Eclectic Cleric ACK) pulled down a "Genius" rating. No wonder they liked me there so much.

My mother's memoir, Betty Jo Remembers, (which also contains the texts of my younger brother Erik's eulogy and my memorial homily) was rated at "Jr High" reading level. But the blog I'm proudest of was this one right here. If you want to benefit from the wisdom of ol' Obi Wannabe Kobe here, all you need is an elementary school education!

About the title of this post: There's an annecdote about a young Henry Aaron, who came up to bat in the 1958 World Series with Yogi Berra catching behind the plate. Berra noticed that Aaron wasn't holding the bat with the trademark facing up (an indication that the grain of a wooden bat is properly aligned to hit the ball most effectively and prevent the bat from breaking), and pointed this out to the younger ballplayer.

"You'll want to hold the bat with the label up," Yogi said.

"Yogi," Hammerin' Hank replied, "I came up here to hit, not to read...."

(Aaron hit .333 in that Series, 9 for 27 with 2 doubles and 2 RBIs. And still the Damned Yankees came back from a 3-1 deficit to win the fall classic that year...again....)