The other day, the Minnesota State High School League decided the public is ready for instant replay at some high school basketball and hockey games. High schools using television replay to fact-check the referees is unheard of, yet at their meeting last week, Minnesota coaches, officials, and athletic directors all patted each other on the bottom for a good idea, well done. That should show you just how seriously we adults take our children’s sports. But it may also indicate a problem worse than bad calls—the unhealthy obsession we all have with the most outward sign of athletic achievement: winning. Then again, if truth is the ultimate goal, and a humble admission of human fallibility is truth’s collateral damage, well, then, this could be one of those teaching moments coaches everywhere are so fond of.
If only life itself had instant replay, a sort of TiVo for reality. The death of Eugene McCarthy on December 10 took us back months, years, decades. The honorable U.S. senator from Watkins, Minnesota, is remembered for engineering one of the most tumultuous moments in modern political history. He was an early and loud opponent of the Vietnam War who, in 1968, electrified the anti-war movement at a time when rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans alike were withering in the public eye for their sheepish support of an unwinnable ideological war on a distant continent. McCarthy splintered the Democratic Party and, in the process, foiled President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes of re-election. Hubert Humphrey won the party’s nomination, was defeated by Richard Nixon in the general election, and the rest is a lamentable tale of criminal misdemeanors at the highest levels of government. Those events also ushered in a long-term identity crisis on the left. McCarthy’s life in the years since became a sort of repeating leitmotif; he was the poet-philosopher who traded political influence for truth. It was a childish truth—war is wrong—yet childish truths are usually the most inarguable.
President Bush has got his dander up lately. He is accusing his critics and “antiwar protesters” of “rewriting history.” Naturally, he’s irritated that certain critics are saying the administration spun intelligence reports and facts in a way that justified a predetermined course of action. In other words, the president’s adversaries contend, the White House conformed the facts to their hawkish plans. We don’t need instant replay to remember that the international community did not support those plans, and that the “facts” were in dispute from the beginning. (And for good reason; they were false.) Nor do we need to reconsider the near-unanimous view that pre-emptive war ought to be initiated for only the most solemn, irrefutable, and righteous reasons. What we would like to revisit, though, is precisely why so many latter-day congressional critics were cowed into following, when they should have been leading.
We frequently refresh our screens at MNSpeak.com, a companionable Twin Cities blog. Its headmaster, Rex Sorgatz, recently realized that the photos adorning the site’s masthead were out of season—lush midsummer shots of uptown tiger lilies, the downtown skyline on a sultry August afternoon, and a view across the Stone Arch Bridge on a spring morning. Here in the deep of winter, Sorgatz said he found those images “oppressive,” and he invited readers to submit something a bit more seasonal. Last we checked, readers remained firmly and comfortably planted in the oppressive past.
Like a Homeric hero, our old friend Will Steger has returned to Ithaca. His particular life cycle took him on a fifty-year odyssey to both the North and South Poles, but last month he moved back to the Twin Cities. He assures us he is here only “for a couple years”—to raise awareness that the climate is warming much faster than anyone thought possible—the results of which he witnessed, to his horror, on his expedition through the Arctic last winter. The people up north don’t need to be told; they can see the evidence for themselves. It is the people in the cities (particularly one city: Washington, D.C.) who seem to require infinite repetition on the subject of global warming.
This is the time of year when we look forward. It’s good to make resolutions for the next twelve months. But we think a part of the tradition ought to be a quick look in the rear-view mirror, and a trip back in the time machine. We are an amnesiac nation, so those few who actually learn something from the past may be doomed to repeat themselves, until the rest of us get the call right.
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