Month: August 2012

Brian Phillips pits the national anthems against one another:

A series of grueling heats has whittled this number down to 10 finalists, who will compete in four different events:

1. Transcendence of Historical Suffering (Freestyle)
2. 200m Inculcation of Hard-Won Optimism
3. Compulsory Tingliness
4. Volksgeist, the Expression of the Spirit of the People

The above video features the anthem for Montenegro:

How does a nation of 632,000 people — roughly a quarter the size of the borough of Queens — produce an anthem that … I mean, if a mountain range woke up one day, unfolded itself into a race of giant stone men, and marched off to war, each step crushing houses and splintering the Earth's crust, this is what they would sing while they marched. Are you planning to kill Superman? THIS IS YOUR LAIR MUSIC.

Last year the Dish ran an extensive six-part series on the "The Star-Spangled Banner".

Kashmiri Muslims pray at the Shah-i-Hamdaan shrine during the second Friday of Ramadan in Srinagar on August 3, 2012. Islam's holy month of Ramadan is calculated on the sighting of the new moon and Muslims all over the world are supposed to fast from dawn to dusk during the month. By Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images.

It began long ago:

Our relationship with tools dates back millions of years, and anthropologists still debate whether it was the intelligence of human-apes that enabled them to create tools or the creation of tools that enabled them to become intelligent. In any case, everyone agrees that after those first tools had been created, our ancestors’ intelligence coevolved with the tools. In the process our forebears’ jaws became weaker, their digestive systems slighter, and their brains heavier. Chimpanzees, genetically close to us though they are, have bodies two to five times as strong as ours on a relative basis and brains about a quarter as big.

William Davidow doesn't believe we're capable of resisting the pull of today's gadgets:

I’m reminded of an observation made to me a while back by John M. Staudenmaier, a historian of technology who is also a Jesuit priest. He pointed out that the quickest way to end a deep and meaningful conversation was to glance at your watch. What would he say today about our ever more tempting smartphones?

Sean Wilentz addresses the subject in a review of Michael Kazin's American Dreamers, a history of the American left:

Alienated novelists, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and songwriters, Kazin argues, as well as muckraking journalists and left-wing historians, have influenced many more Americans than would ever embrace a radical political movement. From Harriet Beecher Stowe to Bruce Springsteen, he finds a persistent radical artistic imagination that he believes has been the left’s mightiest weapon. To understand American radicalism’s humanizing power, and how the left changed the nation, it is less important, in Kazin’s view, to consider how Americans voted than to consider what books and magazines they read, what plays and movies they attended, and what songs they heard and sang.

In a penetrating essay on the history and ambiguities of the sustainability movement, Joshua Yates dissects the tensions the concept has from its origins:

The term only rose to international prominence … as part of a grand synthesis (or compromise) between environmentalists and development experts within the United Nations system. That synthesis found its now classic articulation as "sustainable development" in "Our Common Future," the 1987 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (colloquially known as the Brundtland Report). This landmark report linked sustainability with development in order to harmonize tensions between advanced industrial nations increasingly concerned with environmental problems, on the one hand, and the need for economic development that bedeviled newly decolonizing countries, on the other. In this way, the rhetoric of sustainability was birthed as a policy rubric intended to bridge opposing constituencies in an international context of postcolonialism, Cold War geopolitics, and the beginnings of economic globalization.

Get immersed in the ink:

(Hat tip: Bonnie Wertheim)

Tom Freston meets Joshua Blahyi (aka "General Butt Naked"), the man behind Matt and Trey's Book of Mormon character, previously profiled here. The former general headed a militia that fought naked and by their own admission "sacrificed young children, ate their hearts, and drank their blood" before battle. Blahyi now runs a ministry that tries to rehabilitate child soldiers:

He described his conversion as a moment in battle in 1996 when he had just sacrificed a "peaceful, kind, three year old girl." He had bloodstains on his hands and heard a voice behind him speaking in his dialect. "I saw a man in white linen, but he was so bright—brighter than the sun. And I discovered later that that man was Jesus, who told me finally to repent and live—or refuse and die." Ralph asked him if he had known anything about Jesus. He said no, but that a group of Christians, an "evangelistic ministry," came to teach him, embraced him, and let him stay in their pastor’s house. After 54 days of struggle, he finally accepted Jesus as his savior, and General Butt Naked became Joshua Blahyi the evangelist—a conversion noted throughout the country. Joshua said it gave Liberians hope because they figured, "If God can change me, He can also change your children."

Speaking of Mormon, Tod Kelly just got around to seeing the musical and came away "feeling uplifted about the world, humanity and – yes – religion":

The villagers in the Book of Mormon did not need the Lord God to come down from heaven to convince them that horrible acts of evil were, in fact, horrible acts of evil.  Nor did they need to study advanced philosophy, that they might reason out over time that this was so.  Instead, the knowledge of what was good was inherent inside of them, just as plainly as was the desire to do wrong.  Cunningham’s stories did not speak to the villagers because they were divinely inspired (at least we assume); they spoke to them because they contained truths they already knew in their hearts.

W.H. Auden famously wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Elaine Scarry argues precisely the opposite, that there is an "ethical power" to poetry, and literature more broadly, that has helped tame our capacity for injuring others. Here she discusses the power of beauty:

Contact with the beautiful has one additional effect. Diotima tells Socrates who tells Plato who tells us that coming into the presence of a beautiful person or thing gives rise to the desire to bring children into the world. Diotima says contact with the beautiful also gives rise to the desire to create poems, legal treatises, and works of philosophy. Modern philosophers such as Wittgenstein have said the same. Recognizing our own capacity for creating is again a prerequisite for working for justice: while beauty can be either natural or artifactual, justice is always artifactual; it always takes immense labor to bring it about. So anything that awakens us to our own power of creation is a first step in working to eliminate asymmetries and injuries.

William Sieghart, who is behind the "Winning Words" campaign seeking to highlight poetry during the Olympics, describes the consolations of verse:

I have always found poetry to be a magnificent companion through the most difficult moments of life. My project Winning Words has installed inspirational poems at many of the Olympic venues; for the book, I have selected 160 or so poems, from the ancient to the modern, that I believe can inspire and help the reader through the tribulations of daily existence, by providing a sense of complicity and understanding. Recently I was able to test this out when I ran a Poetry Prescriptions tent at the Port Eliot festival. To my surprise I found a lengthy queue of people seeking my help – and, best of all, a dramatic response when I managed to prescribe effectively.

In our increasingly alienated modern lives, an appropriate poem can be more helpful than many forms of therapy. We love our poetry but are often intimidated by it. Yet we consume more greetings cards than any other nation, enjoy our chants on the football terraces and have contributed significantly to the canon of rap music. Poetry is all around us, and as our great cultural legacy to the world it deserves to feature in the Olympic park and celebrations.

(The book-spine poetry of Nina Katchadourian via Sadie Stein)

Louis Menand ponders the cultural significance of the Olympics:

Modern societies are still obsessed with these secular rituals, in part because almost all of them have become successfully commercialized. Maybe they offer an illusion of permanence and continuity in a world characterized mainly by mobility, change, and uncertainty. No matter what happens to us next year, there will be a Super Bowl. Or maybe they feed our tribal instincts, stimulate the irrational basis of loyalty to our community or our country. Even the most cosmopolitan American viewer of the Olympics has a hard time not rooting for the American. If you watch, you don’t just want to see how it comes out. You care who wins.

On a related note, Eliza Williams praises Errol Morris' new ESPN documentary on fan devotion:

The film, titled Team Spirit, features friends, family, tombstone makers and undertakers talking about real fans who requested that their fandom be reflected in their funerals, alongside one living fan who discusses plans of what she'd like when she dies. Morris tackles what could be a sad or potentially mawkish subject with a sensitive and confident hand, creating a film that is full of fascinating stories of the lengths that people will go to for the love of sport.

A portion of film is seen above.