Category Archives: Culture

On Monday night, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, in the course of what appeared to be a routine tackle, received a hard hit to the chest. He got up from the turf, stepped backward, then collapsed.

Since his fall, the public has fixated on Hamlin’s condition. By the time the game was officially suspended with 5:58 left in the first quarter, it had become the most watched “Monday Night Football” game in ESPN history. The story was front page news on the New York Times for three consecutive days, matching the coverage devoted to the vote for House Speaker and the war in Ukraine . Hamlin’s online toy drive, which had a goal of $2,500 before his collapse, soon topped $8 million in donations. President Biden called Hamlin’s parents to offer support, then tweeted about it.

Why the fascination? Damar Hamlin is a well-respected and well-liked athlete, but he hardly qualifies as a superstar. He was a 6^th round draft pick in 2021, and was used sparingly in his rookie year. He did not win a starting position until September, when his teammate Micah Hyde suffered a neck injury.  It is safe to say that before his collapse, few sports fans outside Buffalo knew much about him. Yet he has become a national celebrity, with millions of people, including many who do not even follow football, keeping up with the daily medical updates and praying for his recovery.

The answer may lie in the trade that we strike with the superbly conditioned men and women who entertain us by playing professional sports. They are our heroes. But they are not our gods. The distinction is important and relevant to the trade.

My wife, who rises earlier than I do because she has the morning dog-walking duties, woke me the other day to tell me that Thatcher was not moving.

Thatcher is a Goldendoodle or “Groodle,” a species developed in the 1990s by crossing a Golden Retriever with a Poodle. She joined our family about the same time our youngest child graduated high school and headed off to college. Thanks to Thatcher, we did not become empty-nesters.

The previous day, my wife had taken her on a five mile hike. That night, she lay by my feet in the living room, asleep by the fire, while I binged on White Lotus. When I got up to go to bed, I stepped over her carefully and wished her a good night. Sometime that night, she had stirred, moved to our bedroom, lain down, and died quietly without disturbing us.

When my wife woke me, Thatcher was lying beside our bedroom door, facing toward the patio. It appeared that she had been thinking of going out. Instead, she died as she had lived, causing no trouble.

She was just shy of 13, a long life for a dog.

Thatcher had the sweetest disposition an animal could have. She was visibly overjoyed when anyone – friend, relative, postman, deliveryman — rang the bell. She raced to the door to welcome the visitor and to ascertain by a hurried nasal inspection where he had recently been, whether he had pets, and whether he was carrying treats. She held a firm conviction that any creature walking on two legs was put on Earth to play with her.

Unless you are a hermit, you have probably listened to a “land acknowledgment.” These are short statements uttered before social gatherings, acknowledging the prior possession of the land on which the events are taking place by indigenous peoples. Originating in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, they have become popular in the United States, and are now regular features in theaters, sports arenas, academic conferences, college commencement ceremonies – and even private family gatherings.

Land acknowledgment details may differ depending upon the event and the attendees, but certain characteristics apply more or less consistently. The statement is delivered in solemn and serious tones. The Indian tribe or tribes identified in the statement are portrayed as innocent victims, and their land described as “ancestral” or “unceded,” thus implying that the non-Indian attendees are trespassing. For the most part, the statements are gentle. Few go as far as the Northern California ACLU, whose website advises readers that land acknowledgment statements help us “confront our own complicity in genocide.”

These statements do carry educational value. They remind us that the conquest of the North American continent by settlers of European heritage was accompanied by massive, often monstrous mistreatment of the native peoples. And learning about the people who earlier inhabited one’s place of birth or residence is always a laudable undertaking.

Yet at the same time that land acknowledgments have proliferated, so have criticisms.

Thirty two years ago, a San Jose State University English professor named Shelby Steele published a short book entitled The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. Steele perceived an unholy bargain between white and black Americans. Under its terms, whites, burdened with guilt for their history of discrimination, would exercise the power to bestow preferential treatment on blacks, and in return blacks, commanding the asset of innocence, would exercise the power to bestow absolution on whites.

Steele deemed the bargain harmful for both sides, but especially so for blacks:

I think the reason there has been more entitlement than development is … the unacknowledged white need for redemption – not true redemption, which would have focused policy on black development, but the appearance of redemption which requires only that society, in the name of development, seem to be paying back its former victims with preferences. One of the effects of entitlements, I believe, has been to encourage in blacks a dependency both on the entitlements and on the white guilt that generates them.

Last month, in a letter to the “Members of the Harvard Community,” President Lawrence Bacow announced the release of a 134-page report documenting the history of Harvard’s “extensive entanglements” with slavery. At the same time, President Bacow  announced a $100 million commitment to implement the authors’ recommendations on “how we as a community can redress – through teaching, research, and service – our legacies with slavery.”

Is this an exercise in true redemption? Or is it an engagement in the kind of superficial trade-off that Shelby Steele analyzed three decades ago?

Sigmund Freud, pop psychologists, and even Mel Gibson have pondered: What do women want? This post explores a different but equally important question: What do men want?

Conventional wisdom holds that men want sex — and plenty of it. Also wealth. And fame. And power. And then more sex, please.

Of course, men want those things. But there is something else they want even more. Something less physical, less palpable, but prized all the more for its ethereal value. Every man wants to see reflected upon his beloved’s face a look of pure adoration. Men want to see what we may call the “Ilsa Face.”

This is the face that Ingrid Bergman, as Ilsa Lund, casts upon Paul Heinreid, as Victor Laszlo, in Casablanca.

To discover the Ilsa Face, one must turn to the 40-second “La Marseillaise” scene. Here is a link to it.  Readers may wish to take the time to watch before we move on to explore what men want.