In the Star Trek series set during the 24th century one of the greatest inventions known to humanity is the holodeck, a room in a building or on a starship where one can recreate anyone, anything, or any setting in a virtual reality using holographic projectors. The technology itself is very optimistic in whether we’ll ever get quite that far along with virtual reality, but it’s a neat idea. If anything today, the holodeck reminds me most of Mark Zuckerberg’s idea for the metaverse. It’s a proposed virtual reality where people can escape from their everyday lives even for just a few minutes and be someone else. Software like this has been around for a long time, I remember a few years ago trying out the program Second Life, without much success. That said, as unsuccessful as my foray into that virtual world was, I nevertheless stayed up all night trying to make it work.
Charles M. Blow wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times last weekend criticizing the idea of the metaverse for denying us some basic elements of our own humanity, in particular our abilities to socially interact and on a more fundamental level to live in the moment. Yesterday evening, a full fourteen hours ago, I sat on a park bench beneath the statue of El Cid in the Plaza de Panama in San Diego’s Balboa Park. I could’ve spent that time checking my social media accounts on my phone, the most widely available version today of what could become Zuck’s metaverse. Instead though I took that forty minutes spent on that bench enjoying the sights around me, listening to the other visitors, to the intoxicating rhythms of the music being played live in the plaza, the sounds of the classic cars parading by on a beautiful Sunday evening in one of the most beautiful cities in this country.
The metaverse can offer solitary people like me a chance to live another life from the comfort of our own homes. And as much as another life is always an alluring prospect, why else daydream, I have the life I’ve been lucky enough to lead. My story is yet to be fully written, so why would I open a new virtual blank slate and start writing all over again?
This evening I had the opportunity to travel from my usual place of business in Binghamton, NY to the sunny port city of San Diego on the far side of the country and this continent. It was my first time flying on a full transcontinental route; coming from the Midwest I’ve benefitted from living almost halfway between Atlantic and Pacific until now. The experience was largely uneventful, though I’m humbled by the fact that this continent across most of which I’ve now driven (as far to the east as Boston, as far to the west as the Great Salt Lake) could be crossed in the same amount of time it would normally take me to drive west from Kansas City to that place in western Kansas where I’ve found myself within sight of the tallest clouds rising off the Rockies just west of Denver. I spent the flight reading a compelling story, checking my preferred flight tracking app, and listening to Planetary Radio.
But the greatest physical reminder of this flight and this entire day will be the pain in my ears and the sides of my head from wearing this KN95 face mask for so long. I dearly hope we climb out of this hole of a pandemic we’ve dug ourselves into, and that my fleeting escapes from mask wearing as I took a drink of water would be signs of a future when we won’t have to wear these masks to travel. And yet, I worry that our relatives and neighbors who cry wolf about these masks so forcefully that events meant to be dull, like school board meetings, become events rife with danger, that these our fellow Americans are the ones whose actions will only keep these mask mandates in place longer. After all, we’d be further out of this continuing crisis if we were as a country more fully vaccinated. Being triple-vaccinated against COVID-19 myself, I know I’m probably safe, but the best way to ensure that is the case both for myself and for all the people around me on this plane from the oldest passenger to the youngest infant are safe as well.
I worry that in the fear-mongering of the last decades we’ve lost a sense of communal spirit. We’ve become suspicious of our neighbors who once we could trust. Any statement deserves to be questioned, so I ask you now: what went wrong? When did we choose to fear others before learning to appreciate them? And why don’t we lower our pride for even a minute and let ourselves lower our guard?
We have a lot of problems facing us today. Step one clearly will mean that we’ll have to at least start by looking each other in the eye and at the very least saying hello. It’s a start.
If there was a word that could fully express a sense of regular melancholy at yet another well laid plan turning out poorly, it is my favorite expression of this sort of sighing shrug of the shoulders: shucks! It’s a word that seems well suited to resignation and repeated failure, one that speaks to the lovable loser in all of us.
I often use “shucks” to mean many of these things. It’s a way of expressing a sense of humility in the face of great odds. It is the sort of Charlie Brown inside of me, the guy who’s just living his life despite all the failures and problems that come his way. Shucks then is a word that seems friendly and warm, a relief when I’d want to cry out in frustration.
All that said, while researching this favorite of exclamations, I learned its etymology comes from a portmanteau of two of English’s more ordinary and yet colorful words. It’s a combination of two of this language’s oldest terms, the noun shit and the verb fuck. It turns out then, that my favorite melancholic exclamation originally had both a fecal and a sexual connotation. Shucks!
I often find myself trying to balance staying connected with my family and friends all around the globe and staying connected with the people I’m with in a given moment. Beyond even face-to-face conversations, even when I’m alone I find myself sometimes struggling to focus on one thing at a time and not let my mind drift towards looking up this or that thing, or to any of my social media accounts, while a routine moment in a TV show or more importantly in my work passes by.
Still, there are times when I make a strong effort at being present in the moment in which I’m living. I realized last night that I still hadn’t posted a photo of one of the sheep staring through a fence at me at the Ross Park Zoo here in Binghamton that I had taken on Sunday afternoon, with a humorous caption about the pair of us both thinking about food at once bringing chuckles to the fore for a few who would read it. While I wanted to put that picture out there on my Instagram story, in that particular moment I was far more focused on enjoying hanging out with one of my best friends who I don’t get to see all that often.
I think the question of connectivity comes down to a question of purpose: why are we in the situation where we’re in public among family and friends yet still hooked to every ping and notification that emanates from our phones? I’ve balanced that out by usually keeping my phone on silent, and severely limiting which notifications come through to buzz my wrist on my smartwatch. If the person who those notifications are meant to attract is me, then they don’t need to be heard by anyone else around me.
Further, when I’m in a situation where I really do need to focus on what’s going on in the room, say in a class or a concert or at a religious service, then I’ll turn on the “Do not disturb” feature on my watch and let any notifications that come through queue up on my phone where I can look through them after that event is finished. I’ll often do the same thing if I’m out for a meal with family or friends; in that moment they deserve my attention, not the device in my pocket.
I do think these devices serve an important purpose for all of us today. Contrary to the opinions of some eye-rollers who are my senior, I do remember a time before much of this connectivity. I remember how hard it was when I was little to call my Mom on the phone when she was traveling for work overseas. I still do write letters, on occasion, and enjoy sending postcards to a handful of people when the idea makes itself known to me. But I certainly wouldn’t go back to a life before smartphones and smartwatches.
I think as with most of these new technologies, we’re still in a sort of Wild West phase, when there are less set guidelines or rules to how all this technology impacts our lives and how we in turn use that same technology. As the devices improve, as they become more advanced, more precise in their capabilities, I think we too will refine their usage. We’re not quite to the point of replacing a smartphone or smartwatch with the communication badges found in the Star Trek shows set in the 24th century, which are almost like speaker phones in that they can be heard by people around the wearer, but those people seem to have learned to ignore conversations to which they aren’t privy when the need arises. For now, when I’m taking a phone call in public I will use my headphones, in this case a set of Air Pods, which I’m proud to say contrary to common practice I’ve yet to misplace.
We’ll get there eventually. For now though, do me a favor and turn that ringer on silent during events, and keep the speaker phone conversations to a minimum in public.
Over the last week I’ve read a number of editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post about the longterm implications of the January 6th attack, written by such a diverse group of political writers as the Jamelle Bouie and Robert Kagan, which argue that as close as we came to a full constitutional crisis, to an actual attempted coup, the events of this January can best be understood as a prelude to what might well happen in four years when the next Presidential election results are certified by Congress.
To say that this is a depressing reading topic is putting it mildly. The implications of Kagan’s essay and Bouie’s frequent editorials about January 6th and Trumpism reflect the very real fear that we may be seeing the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War playing out in front of us today. An October 2nd article by the New York Times Editorial Board makes an even clearer case, bringing in the new evidence brought to light by General Mark Milley about how serious that attack was to the stability of our global security presence, whose calls to his Chinese counterpart have struck a cord on how serious January 6th really was.
At the heart of all of these editorials and essays is one common theme. At this point in our history, 234 years after the Constitutional Convention, our republic has reached a point where many of its citizens, and notably many of its elected officials on all levels, have begun to put their party, and in particular their own political ambition, over their country. There is a clear path forward to ensure another January 6th doesn’t happen again, but the political will doesn’t seem to be there especially among Republican office holders. Robert Kagan, a political thinker with whom I generally disagree, makes a profound point in writing that Republican officials like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, while opposing Trumpism in public, have continued to “balk” at the opportunity to actually do what is needed to preserve both the republic and our democratic form of government in the face of what is fast becoming the next great attempt by the Trumpists to subvert the electoral process.
I too am a party player. I’m a registered member of the New York Democratic Party, and yes while I have voted for a Republican candidate in one instance, I’ve otherwise solidly only voted Democrat. Generally too, I’d say the last Republican President who I would’ve considered supporting was President Eisenhower, though even then my vote would’ve gone for Stevenson in both 1952 and 1956. Looking even further back, the last Republican President I would’ve actively voted for would probably have been Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. All that said, as solidly Democratic as my voting record is, I vote on policy, not on party, and generally at this point in our history the Democrats in their own diversity of opinions tend to reflect my views better than the Republicans. There simply hasn’t been a Republican candidate since that one county commissioner who I voted for when I was 18 that I’ve actually agreed with more than their Democratic challenger.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how strong loyalties tend to be among certain groups, tribes, teams, companies, and parties in this country. It’s interesting to think about how we might be best friends with someone but we can’t talk about certain topics with them because of all the hot air that comes up whenever it’s mentioned. Different sports come to mind here. I can well remember what it was like being the only Cub fan surrounded by Cardinal fans on my floor in Corcoran Hall freshman year of college at Rockhurst. It also happened to be the last time to date that the Cardinals won the World Series. This fierce loyalty has played out in our politics too: people who are politically inclined are usually either Democrats or Republicans; they’ll vote blue or red and hardly ever switch to the other team. And when they do switch sides, is it a sign of being open to new ideas or of someone who can’t be trusted because they can’t be loyal? As long as we think of our political rivals as the enemy, our whole form of government is in danger of collapse. Democracy relies on compromise to survive.
Let’s take another angle on this. We Americans have an unusual devotion to our flag. You can drive from coast to coast and see American flags everywhere, not just outside government facilities, but in front of private businesses, and even outside people’s homes. Every time there’s a sporting event from little league to the majors we always start by standing up, hatless, with our hands on our hearts for the playing, or more often singing, of the national anthem. Whenever a veteran or their family is introduced as an “honor family” or something along those lines at that same event, everyone gives them a standing ovation, as they’ve deserved.
But how honest is a person’s patriotism when if you don’t stand for whatever reason you may have, or you begin to ask questions that are deemed unpatriotic and are harshly rebuked for not being as patriotic as you should be? How honest can a person be when they’re being threatened? I worry here that the obligatory nature of these mandatory public acts of patriotism are diluting what it really means to be patriotic, to love this country and its core ideals. I worry that making the act of being patriotic, of say unquestioningly supporting the military, making this sort of act of devotion something that is required of any good American citizen is dangerous because it eliminates critical thought and the opportunity to ask the necessary questions to make our country a better place and our political system better suited to our electorate. What’s more, I worry this forced, unquestionable patriotism opens the door to a future where it will not only be socially damaging to question the need for patriotism but even life threatening. Further, as we glorify the military as the one thing that can’t be questioned, we open the door for the military to be the only real authority in this country that would be accepted by both parties in the case of a full scale constitutional crisis.
I’m frankly glad that the Joint Chiefs didn’t send the National Guard or the Army into DC sooner on January 6th. Like the Roman Republic before us, our military’s headquarters, the Pentagon, lies across the river from our capital city, far enough away from the center of civilian political power that it can’t threaten it. As far as I’m concerned, the day when we do see tanks and soldiers rolling across the Arlington Memorial Bridge into the District will be our Rubicon. The die will be cast as it was for Caesar and his legions, and there will be no going back to the republic as we knew it.
I think the example of the Roman Republic is a good one to bring my main point home. We certainly aren’t at the point where we’ll have a Caesar coming to the rescue of the republic with the military backing him. But I do think our zealous devotion to political party, in many cases over the best interests of the country, the republic, and the people as a whole, is similar to the military reforms of Gaius Marius (c. 157–86 BCE) which led to the Roman legions becoming far more loyal to their generals than to the Roman Republic itself. This set the stage for the civil wars that would destroy their republic in Caesar’s time a few decades later. I can’t say who our Marius is, but it certainly seems that millions of Americans are now more loyal to individual politicians and the parties they lead than to the republic itself. The last time this happened our forbearers fought a brutal four-year Civil War. I can only hope that our leaders in Washington will have the courage and the honor to do the right thing and preserve both the Union and the representative government it has represented all these generations.
Today after passing a major milestone in my work, my comprehensive exam, I find myself reflecting on what it took to get me to this point. What would I say to myself from Spring 2019 when I was getting that acceptance letter into the History PhD program from Binghamton amid all the other rejections?
I remember one particular moment when I was standing at my bus stop on a cold windy February morning, the Winter Sun carving with its jagged coldness into my bare face and hands. On that particular morning I received the fifth of ultimately six rejection letters. It was one I expected, to be honest, but it still hurt like all the others did. At that moment I remember thinking, “If I get turned down by all seven I’ll find something else, it’ll hurt for a long time, but I’ll figure things out.” Today though, after finally passing my comps, an experience that was overall almost as stressful as the admissions process, I feel like were I able to talk to myself from two years ago, I’d probably say, “Don’t worry, it’ll all work out in the end. Take whatever win you can, and stand on that because trust me, this doesn’t get any easier.”
Looking at where I’m at today, now halfway through my fifth semester of the PhD, with the end of my work here hopefully closer in sight than the beginning, I do feel proud about what I’ve accomplished. It’s a big deal to make it this far, no matter how challenging it’s been. If anything, I’ve come to understand where my strengths and weaknesses lie, to understand myself and both my limits and potentials better than I ever have before.
As it happens, the day after that spell at the bus stop when the rejection letter arrived via email, I got my first acceptance letter in from Binghamton. It was St. Valentine’s Day, and as worn down as I was by the whole process of applying for doctoral programs at that point, I still celebrated in my own way, knowing that I’d be continuing in this career in academia. Today feels a lot like that day, it’s a moment when I have reason to celebrate, but also a moment when I need to stop and think about all the things that led to today. How can I make these sorts of really important events run smoother in the future? And how can I succeed in what I’m doing from here on out?
That’s the beauty of life, there’s always something new out there to explore, and the potential futures can seem boundless.
On Sunday evening while I was watching the Chiefs game, I found myself putting that contest in the background and focusing instead on YouTube on my phone. One of the first recommended videos was a clip from the 2012 Steven Spielberg film Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th President. In the clip, Lincoln sits on a porch with General Grant talking about how to handle the Confederate surrender in the coming days at the end of the Civil War. It struck me, in light of all the examples of leadership we’ve seen in the last four years in this country, how humble Lincoln was in that moment, how plain and honest his directions to Grant that the Confederate soldiers should be allowed to go home.
I’ve been entrusted with a number of leadership roles throughout my life, from serving as a two-term Senior Patrol Leader in my Boy Scout troop (Troop 1, Kansas City, KS), to most recently being entrusted with heading the committee as President of the Graduate History Society here at my university. Over the years I’ve learned that as much as having the power of an office can be alluring, I’m more interested in being an equal partner with the people who’ve entrusted me with that job. I don’t know if I’d say I’m a good leader, after all there’s more to leadership than trying to be a nice guy and someone who’s easy to work with, but I try to do my best every day.
Something that’s often talked about in terms of the long memory of leadership is legacy, what will people remember your term in office for? I wonder about that with all the work I’m doing here in my twenties. When they do write my obituary in however many decades from now, what will they say about the things I did at this point in my life? Looking back on the last six years, the years after I graduated from Rockhurst with my BA, I see a life that wasn’t nearly as stable as I’d like it to be, a transitory life where I moved from Kansas City to London, back to Kansas City, and eventually now to Binghamton. It’s been a time when I’ve moved even more frequently between jobs and dreams of what I want my future to be like.
Yet now, in 2021, I feel like I’m on the verge of some of my best writing, some of my best work. Much of that will not be possible without the support of my family and friends, and you kind readers as well. I do feel constantly tired, and I always seem to have a lot to do, but I figure if I get one thing done at a time eventually the entire puzzle will be finished, no matter how frustrating the puzzling will be in the process.
I’ve always looked up to Lincoln as someone I’ve respected since I was very little. Maybe that’s something I learned at a young age living in Illinois, but of all the presidents from the 18th and 19th centuries, I always felt like Lincoln was the one who I’d like to sit down and talk to. God willing I won’t have to experience all the pain he went through in his life, both personal and through his service as President during the Civil War. Whitman’s description of him as the captain of a ship in stormy seas is fitting for the man who seemed to have aged nearly 20 years in just 4. Still, there’s something about the man, the leader, that seems much more understandable to me than many others in our history.
A picture I took of Shark Tooth Rock in Davenport, CA (13 October 2018)
A few years ago when I started working on my PhD here at SUNY Binghamton I arrived not only with a game plan in mind for getting this job done but with 4 chapters written of the sequel to my novel Erasmus Plumwood. That sequel, Plum in the Sun, follows Plumwood west to San Francisco where he’s started working on his dream job in a Silicon Valley company called Technophilia. The only problem is that when he arrives there he finds the job to be far from the dream he hoped it’d be, in particular because of a really awful boss named Don Basil who has it out for Erasmus.
I tried a few times to keep writing Plum in the Sun in my first semester in Binghamton but I found the task was a lot more difficult to do now that my mind was so squarely focused on the doctorate and setting myself up for success academically here. With that in mind I set the novel aside figuring I’d come back to it eventually. It’s only been in the last couple of months that I’ve started to think about working on it again, and while I’m certainly not going to do much of anything with it as I’m in the middle of the doctorate right now, I’m nevertheless beginning to think about working on that novel again.
The next chapter on the list to write is another of my fictionalizations of my own memories, replacing the real people who were with me in the moment with the characters populating this story. The basic premise of the chapter is that the two main characters, Erasmus Plumwood and his girlfriend Marie-Thérèse Merlinais, get more comfortable being together in California on a Sunday drive along the Pacific Coast Highway around Half Moon Bay, something my Mom and I did in October 2018 in what was one of my favorite days yet. I’m looking forward to describing the indescribable beauty of the redwoods and the coastline, the bird song and the feel of the sea breeze on my face.
But this is a story that I have to be in the right sort of mood to write. It’s not something I can do when I’m annoyed or tired or grumpy in any way, it has to be something I write when I’m in a really good mood, not all that different to how I was feeling on the day of. There’ll be some things that will be different between the real event and its fictionalized counterpart; for one thing we made that drive in October and the characters will do it in June, but considering that like it was for me it’ll be Erasmus and Marie-Thérèse’s first time seeing those sights I think my experience can still inform theirs even if I didn’t see it all in Summer.
I do intend to finish Plum in the Sun. If I’m being honest the plot and the characters are a lot stronger than the original book in what’s becoming a series. I was joking a few years ago with a friend that if I did make a series out of Erasmus Plumwood and Plum in the Sun then I might try and make it sound grandiose, if in a mocking way, and call it the Plumwoodiad. I do have a third book in the back of my head wrapping up at least this part of the lives of my characters, but considering I’m putting a dissertation ahead of Plum in the Sun on my writing assembly line, any third book in this Plumwoodiad is well further down the line and won’t be seen for a while.
So as I keep moving through my doctorate, I can’t help but smile when I think of what awaits me when I eventually do get to writing this chapter. It’ll be a wonderful few days spent intensely remembering that day and all I saw in one of the most beautiful parts of this country.
Late last week moving into Labor Day weekend I realized later than most at SUNY Binghamton that we not only had the long weekend off but also Tuesday and Wednesday for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I guess I didn’t expect we’d be in class for two weeks and then suddenly out for nearly an entire week. In any case, I knew I wanted to make the most out of the extended break, so I decided I was going to go on at least a couple day trips around the Southern Tier of New York and the Finger Lakes just to the north of here.
On Saturday then, feeling frustrated by staying too long in my apartment on such a beautiful day I got in the car and decided to drive up towards Ithaca following what I knew of the local geography and state highway system without plugging directions into my car’s navigation system. I eventually made it to the shores of Cayuga Lake, and proceeded to drive north up the western shore of the lake thinking I’d try reaching the top and take the interstates back down to Binghamton.
After Saturday, I’d hoped I could get out again on Monday or Tuesday and take another multi-hour drive, give myself some time to see the beautiful scenery of this part of the country, and enjoy a few hours of a good podcast or audiobook. I ended up staying in Binghamton on Sunday and Monday, wanting to avoid most of the holiday weekend crowds, with the goal of waking up on Tuesday and getting on the road early with no destination in particular in mind.
Still, after spending the morning in my apartment doing some much needed cleaning I finally got on the road around 13:00 EDT. This time I did set a route into the navigation system to a town I’d wanted to visit since the first time I drove by the signs on I-86 pointing to it when I moved here in August 2019: Watkins Glen. The drive was scenic and uneventful, lots of small towns and country roads. I listened to Stephen Fry’s book Heroes, his retelling of the Labors of Heracles took up the entire afternoon’s drive.
When I arrived in Watkins Glen I quickly found a parking spot across the street from Watkins Glen State Park, my destination for the day, and made my way into the park’s main gate. Watkins Glen is home to one of a number of spectacular waterfalls that mark the furthest reach of the glaciers that dug the Finger Lakes into the New York landscape during the last Ice Age, only unlike Taughannock Falls outside of Ithaca the gorge that lies at the heart of Watkins Glen State Park is far narrower and honestly an impressive feat of engineering by the people who made it a tourist attraction at the turn of the last century.
I decided to take the Gorge Trail and see where it led. Running at 1.5 mi (2.4 km) the Gorge Trail is the main attraction of the park. Its high narrow walls make the place seem otherworldly, like something that might be fitting among the tales of the Greek heroes retold in Stephen Fry’s books. It was awe-inspiring and a little frightening at the same time. The trail is made up of an elongated stairway rising up the gorge to its conclusion at a set of 150 stone steps leading to the Upper Entrance to the park called Jacob’s Ladder. I hiked the entire route from the main entrance up to the top of Jacob’s Ladder. Along the way I was dazzled by the amazing power of all the ice and water that carved out that gorge over millions of years.
This was my favorite part of the Gorge Trail.
In the first half of the hike I took a fair number of pictures and videos that I figured I’d post onto my Instagram and Facebook after I’d left the park. I didn’t stop to look at what I’d captured, as much as I want to take pictures and videos of these places I visit, more than anything else I want to experience those places in the moment that I’m there. Selfies in particular are rare among my pictures; I care less about showing that I’m somewhere than showing the people who happen to see my pictures what I got to see.
After hiking back down to the main entrance on the far easier 1.1 mi (1.8 km) long North Rim Trail with a friendly couple from the Binghamton area I got back in the car and drove back to Binghamton, figuring I’d look at those pictures once I was back in my apartment and could really focus on them alone. 90 minutes later once I was back at my desk I looked through them, picked out 4 videos and a handful of photos and initially posted them to Instagram. One video that I chose to be the first of the lot, the cover picture as I see it, ended up getting posted to Instagram as a reel. I think at the time I intended it to go up as a longer video file that I could share onto my Instagram story and it’d play automatically instead of just showing a preview frame like videos uploaded as regular Instagram posts tend to do.
I posted everything and turned to Facebook, making a fairly similar update for my family and friends who tend to follow me on that platform. Yet as the videos were uploading to Facebook I kept noticing my phone lighting up with updates from Instagram at a dizzying pace. In the first 3 minutes that reel I’d posted had gotten 40 “likes.” I texted one of my best friends (and a frequent reader of this site) to tell her what was happening, and in the process of typing and sending the message another 45 “likes” appeared. In the next minute the total number rose from 85 to 280.
As I went into the notification settings in the Instagram app to see if I could reset things so my phone battery wouldn’t be drained too quickly by so many updates so quickly the number of “likes” rose over 300. By the time I finally went to bed around 23:00 the total was at 350. At the time of writing this post that number stands at 368.
Normally a post of mine might top out at around 40 “likes” that are often from the same people. Occasionally the things I post on Facebook will top out around 100 similar reactions, as Facebook now has more than just the like button, but nothing in my experience with social media can compare with the reaction to that Instagram reel of a pan shot across the gorge at a particular placid spot. I know for the people who are actively trying to get lots of reactions and “likes” to their social media posts that the 368 that mine received might seem insignificant, but to me it’s something to write home about.
I don’t particularly expect people to view the things I post on social media. I think it’s interesting that this particular reel has a lower than average reaction from my usual viewers. As far as I’m concerned even though this Instagram reel went as close to viral as anything I’ve ever posted on the internet, I see it as a happy accident, something that speaks more so to what the video showed than anything about me personally. Sure some of the people who “liked” that reel might subscribe to my Instagram account and follow future things I post, but either way it’s not something that’s going to change how I use that platform or social media in general. If anything the speed at which the “like” count on that reel grew seemed funny to me in the moment.
In any case if I were to try to use Instagram to promote the really important things that I make, my writing, I’d need at least 10,000 followers to activate the feature that’d allow me to add links to outside webpages to my Instagram stories. It’s one reason why I think this blog has such a steadily low readership: the place where the majority of my audience interacts with me is also a place where I can’t promote this blog or anything else I write lest I direct my audience to the “link in bio.”
Social media can serve a good purpose in my life: it’s a way that a small fish like me can make myself known for the things I do. It can have a lot of downsides too, the amount of spam subscriptions I see on my Instagram account can be gobsmacking. I’ve also got some pretty sour memories of experiences with Facebook from my high school years as well that lurk in the background, but now in my late 20s as much as I may notice what the trolls might have to say, for now I’ve been lucky not to have been harassed enough to spoil the utility of the platform for me.
The idea of a rivalry and all the extra stuff that goes with it seems to be baked into American culture. Rivalries often make for the most exciting games in a league’s calendar not only for the history traditionally associated with that matchup but also for the antics and occasional brawls that break out in the process of playing the game. As a young Cub fan I always expected there’d be a fight during a Cubs vs Cardinals game or a Cubs vs White Sox game, just as any meeting between the Red Sox and the Yankees seemed sure to produce the sort of atmosphere normally reserved in North American professional sports for the hockey rink.
Interestingly, going off of what I wrote about last week in terms of regionalism, I think it’s important to recognize that rivalries often define a region’s local identity more than anything else. The two great cities of Missouri, Kansas City and St. Louis, are defined just as much by the shuttlecocks at the Nelson-Atkins and the Gateway Arch as they are by the rivalry between the Royals and Cardinals, particularly during the 1985 World Series, which ended in Game 7 with a Royals victory over the red birds. I only hope that with the introduction of MLS’s new St. Louisian team, St. Louis City SC, that we’ll see a strong rivalry between “City” as likely they’re going to call themselves, and our own Sporting.
If anything unites most American cities and their surrounding metropolitan suburbs it’s a general dislike for other cities and their metros. Often the greatest of these rivalries seem to be founded in sports: the Chicago/St. Louis rivalry for example, which certainly began as a disagreement among two of the Midwest’s greatest metropolises in the nineteenth century and developed in the last decades of that century and into the early decades of the twentieth through the birth of the Cubs in 1871 and the ancestors of the Cardinals, the original St. Louis Browns, in 1882. In the decades and generations since that rivalry has grown not only with the introduction of the Blackhawks vs. Blues rivalry in hockey but also a general sentiment that I experienced as a Cub fan going to college at a place dominated by St. Louisians; it didn’t help that my freshman year was also a year when the redbirds won their last World Series.
On a larger scale it seems like we could carry this idea of the rivalry to a geopolitical level. Sure, the US has rivals, traditionally they’d be our counterparts in Europe, in particular in the nineteenth century Britain and in the first half of the twentieth century Germany. More recently though, in the last few generations the US’s biggest global rivals have tended to be the likes of Russia and more recently China. I will fully admit to playing off of the eternal bogeyman in the American psyche by playing the sublimely stereotypically Russian theme tune to the fantastic 1990 film The Hunt for Red October every time I find myself in St. Louis when the Cardinals are doing well. In my own silly way it’s playing off of fears of the bogeyman projected on the wall in this country in communism, comparing my own Cubs’ greatest rival to that red scourge.
It’s interesting though that we have come to develop such profound senses of national pride out of how different we are from other countries, or at least how different we see ourselves from other countries. People in positions of authority, both in government and in the media, have taken advantage of this idea of rivalry to profoundly change the political discussion: we hear more banter about the creeping influences of socialism or Islam today than we do from the same people about problems that face our country internally like racism, vast inequality, and the constant threat of violence due to our overly lenient gun laws.
I’ve often thought that if anything is true it’s that a people who define themselves by what they aren’t rather than what they are will surely fall apart in the long run. Equally, a people who cry wolf at the shadow of the wolf on the wall, labelling it something foreign, when its fangs are being used by the same crier to cause chaos in the cave itself is a people doomed to falter. We’ve found ways to use the excitement of sports to infiltrate our politics and our daily lives, forcing us to adopt a mindset that it’s always us vs. them. Eventually, if we’re not careful we’re going to bring about our own defeat on the field of play, and not by anything our opponents do. It’ll be an own goal, a safety, our knives in our own back that will bring the land of rivals to its knees.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 