Meals From The Marketplace

            Six years ago next month, my father celebrated his ninetieth birthday.  He was still mentally vigorous at the time.  Indeed, he was still practicing medicine in his own old-fashioned way.  (His patients loved him and begged him not to retire, which he did six months later.)  He died the following year at the age of 91, possibly a victim of the loss of purpose that retirement sometimes brings to those much younger.

            Last week, my mother celebrated her ninetieth birthday, and we had a little party of family and close friends.  She is also mentally vigorous, although she did officially retire from her position as a medical office administrator about a decade ago.  In the years since, she has read scores of books, watched hundreds of old movies and enjoyed the affection of her four children and five grandchildren.  She will become a great grandmother next month.

            When I reached my sixty-fifth birthday last month, I pondered the significance of achieving that milestone with a mixture of confusion and acceptance.  Witnessing my mother’s birthday celebration brought out different feelings and, perhaps, a different perception.

            A highlight of the party was the video that my older son had prepared.  He had poured over thousands of photos that spanned my mother’s entire life, finally choosing several hundred to create the montage to which he added a musical score.  It was a real tear-jerker, all the more so for those of us who knew the story it told. 

            In it we saw my mother as an infant in her mother’s arms and as a toddler seated with her parents and brother.  There were photos showing her as a young school girl and then a few of her as a fetching teenager. 

            In later shots, she could easily have passed for a movie star or a fashion model, so strikingly beautiful was she in the years of her young adulthood. 

            And then there were the family shots of her and my dad with the four of us, their progeny: me, my brother and my two sisters, born in that order, all two or three years apart.  My parents practiced planned-parenthood before it was fashionable.

            On into her forties, as her children successively left home for college, my mother passed almost imperceptibly into middle age.  The photos betray only the most nuanced signs of aging, but they also reflect the burdens that life had thrown her way: squabbles with her husband over money and control, a health scare, a mid-life crisis, two of her children in failed marriages, another (me) in a mid-life crisis of his own.

            She emerged from those years—“emerged” isn’t the right word—she evolved over the span of those years—into a more fully developed individual.  Always an intellectual, she went back to college after turning 50, finally completing the requirements for the bachelor’s degree she had started at 16 (only to put it on hold when, at 18, she married the young med student who would be my father). 

            As soon as she received that degree, she began to pursue another, this one a Master’s in medical office management.  She completed her work on that one at the age of 55 and thereupon embarked on the career that she maintained for a quarter of a century.

            That twenty-five year span came when many people have either retired or are wishing they had.  But she kept working, enjoying the challenge and the sense of fulfillment it gave her.

            But at some point, she had become old.  The svelte model’s figure that she maintained well into her sixties finally gave way to the more matronly look of a seventy-something.  The athletic dexterity and buoyant energy that had kept her youthful even when arthritis and other musculoskeletal issues arose finally slowed her down.  At 80, she still looked ten years younger, but she was now old.

            And over the last decade, the aging process has become more pronounced.  A hip now needs replacement, and whether to risk the surgery and the subsequent period of recovery or endure the pain and loss of mobility is the principal cloud on her otherwise cheery disposition.  She reads mystery novels and historical fiction (sprinkled with returns to the classics—Jane Austen in particular) and watches old movies on cable channels that specialize in them. 

            She reads her New York Times every day and wonders how the Republicans can be so stupid, proudly displaying the “Vote Democrat” stamps that herald the party she once despised as socialistic.  She remains vibrant, if less passionate, involved, if less committed. 

            Her life is an accomplishment, as all lives are.  But hers has the added benefit of longevity, for which she was congratulated by those at her party as if the mere fact of surviving for ninety years is an accomplishment in and of itself.

            And, of course, it is.  Whether it be by luck or by hard work or by some combination of the two, the mere fact of surviving is an accomplishment.  And to survive and to be able to appreciate your survival is an even greater accomplishment, again, whether that ability to appreciate is a matter of luck or hard work or some combination of the two.

            And, most certainly, to survive, to be able to appreciate your survival and to have lived a full, rich and rewarding life, is perhaps the greatest accomplishment we can have (whether the reward of such an existence is a matter of luck, hard work or some combination of the two).

            My mother has had such a life.  My father did, too.  They lived day by day as we all do, and they did the best they could with the cards they were dealt, as most of us do.  And in the end, they mattered, as some of us hope we might.

            Turning sixty-five was a relatively big deal.  I was mildly impressed with my attainment of that age.  But seeing my parents turn 90 was a real eye-opener.  I’d like to live that long, but more than that, I’d really like to feel the life I lived was as full, and rich and rewarding as theirs.

by Keith Telfeyan

As a fan of basketball, it is painful to see the threat of cancellation loom over the upcoming NBA season. As a critic of capitalism, it is downright depressing.

That a simple game like basketball can suddenly vanish from the cultural pantheon merits serious critical attention. If players don’t play the games, fans can’t go to see them. If fans don’t go to see them, the arenas that house them are shut down, wasting millions in taxpayer dollars that saw them erected.

If arenas are shut down, local businesses surrounding those arenas lose business, and must then lay off workers, who in turn struggle evermore to support of their families. Suddenly, there is deeper unemployment, more children of out-of-work single parents lacking a decent upbringing, more crime in emptied-out downtowns, and more and more, our country resembles a post-industrialized, dying nation. 

Of course, a lost NBA season doesn’t immediately turn Cleveland or Sacramento or Memphis into a broken city, but the implications are there, and it’s what we must address, ideally in the form of national policy.

Ultimately, we must decide how to run our sports, how to run our economy as a whole, and how to run our country. It starts by seeing clearly how things operate currently. As it stands, those with the money have the power. They decide everything. Thirty men own the NBA. The owners own everything – the team, the players, the arenas, the concession stands, the tickets, the TV rights, the uniforms – everything. They charge $1000 for good seats, $10 for cheap beer, and pay their star players as little as possible. 

No one cares about the owners. It is rare to see an owner on the front page. It is difficult to name more than a handful of them. Like those on Wall Street, they are effectively invisible monarchs, profiting off all of us. It is true – some teams aren’t turning profits. Like works of art to collectors, not every franchise provides consistently growing value.

Sometimes franchises are purchased at too high a value and then held as that value falls. Such is the case currently, with many franchise owners holding onto depreciated capital. The owners—profit-minded as they are—want to make money, even when their business isn’t profitable, so their goal is to take money from their players. 

It’s easy to scapegoat the players. We know that they make a lot of money, that they live luxuriously, that they are better off than we are. But we tend to look past these facts because of their heroic athleticism and passion, which become ours vicariously. And for that we lavish them with attention and riches. But we need not lavish the owners, and yet we do. We pay their insane ticket and concession prices, thinking it goes to the players. (Less than half of it does.) We tolerate their cold-hearted, backstabbing ways as they trade away players, relocate teams, demand more money from cities. I guess it’s because we love the game. 

But basketball is just a game. Some rich, opportunistic men have constructed something called the National Basketball Association around this game, but the game can exist without it. Like FedEx or McDonalds or Six Flags, the NBA is a business, except that mail and burgers and roller coasters still exist without those businesses, while the NBA happens to have a monopoly over high-end basketball.

The owners are currently holding our sport hostage. And it is our sport. We cheer for it, read about it, pay to see it, wear it and feed it with our money and attention. It makes sense that all the best players in the world flock to one league, so as to maximize our shared enjoyment of the spectacle. But if these 30 random billionaires can’t quietly and efficiently operate a league, why don’t we run it instead? Why don’t we elect a commissioner? Why doesn’t each city elect its own head office? Why don’t each city’s fans have a say in how a team is constructed and operated? The teams and the game would truly be ours, if we were to socialize professional basketball. 

The massive Neo-conservative agenda has made socialism a bad word, but tell that to Green Bay, Wisconsin, which publicly owns its sports franchise (and runs it quite effectively). Must every human endeavor be turned into profit? Is that what truly defines the spirit of the United States?

Already, the building of arenas is socialized – the costs are shared with government municipalities (and its taxpaying citizens), but the profits aren’t shared. If the National Basketball Association was actually just that - national - the people would have likely prevented this current lockout, or at least be actively engaged in resolving it.

As it stands, it is difficult to even learn what is happening. The journalism that reports on our sports is itself owned by profit-minded corporations (ESPN, Fox, Yahoo, etc.). Thus, we are continually left with stories about player greed, or irreconcilable differences, when the fact the headlines should make most clear is ownership greed. Once again, it’s the 1% versus the 99% (actually, much less than 1% in this case). 

The NBA lockout mirrors the contemporary financial trials of the United States. A few very wealthy people are holding the rest of us hostage, feeding us the rhetoric of sacrifice and The American Way, while they sacrifice nothing and live like kings within our so-called democracy. We struggle to afford the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed while the opportunities and perks of a thriving nation are stripped away from us.

What might things look like if those in control deeply cared about people and community, instead of being driven solely by their own selfish business interests? What if all NBA owners weren’t just profit-minded capitalists, but were, rather, fans who wanted to see great basketball?

If that were the case, I’m sure we’d be watching the games instead of reading about the owners’ lockout.

            “There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

-Stephen Stills

            I was a sophomore in college in 1965 when I encountered my first protest.  It was staged by a handful of my college’s hippie students.  They were protesting the Viet Nam War.  I laughed at their seemingly impotent action as I refused to take one of the pamphlets they were handing out and went to my biology class.

            Four years later, I was part of a much larger anti-war protest in Washington, D.C.  By then, the idea of protesting the Viet Nam War had become a national movement that changed the course of the nation’s history in ways that extended far beyond the ending of that particular war.

            The Occupy Wall Street protests had a similar beginning when they first began a month ago.  At first the protests didn’t even have a name.  A small band of young people who looked like throwbacks to that hippie era of the ‘60s staged a protest in lower Manhattan, right on Wall Street to be precise. 

            Predictably, the police over-reacted, mace spraying some of the entirely non-violent protesters, who were refusing to disburse.  Within New York, they became a news story.  What were they protesting, a few curious reporters wanted to know.  Did they have a message they wanted to convey?

            The answer was a fairly non-descript expression of anger at the country’s most wealthy individuals and corporate entities.  Unlike the tea party movement, which coalesced around antipathy to government spending, these protests were directed at the mega-rich and the corporations that, in the eyes of the protesters, are responsible for the demise of the nation’s economy.

            Protest movements often start this way; where they end up can be an entirely different story.  The Viet Nam protests are a fairly recent example, as they not only forced the end of the war but also ended the military draft and led inexorably to the end of the Cold War.  (Richard Nixon took the first steps, Ronald Reagan took a few more, and Mikhail Gorbachev opened the door to its ultimate demise.)

            But the examples go back much farther.  Consider the original tea party activists.  They were only concerned with the British government’s tax on their tea.  But the protest they staged led to an awareness across the colonies that British rule was no longer viable.  The Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War soon followed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

            As a movement still in its nascent stages, the Occupy Wall Street protests have already become more than a side show.  The bare-breasted young women and the bongo-playing hippie types have given way to a more substantial, if not sophisticated, amalgam of disenchanted every-day folks.  And the single staging area outside of the New York Stock Exchange has also expanded considerably.  By last weekend, the number of similar protests had grown to over 1300 worldwide, with the number of protesters growing exponentially.

            So, what are they protesting and where might it all lead? 

            At its core, they are protesting the loss of control over their own destiny.  Or, put another way, they are protesting the failure of America’s version of capitalism.  To be more specific, they are protesting soulless corporate power.  “Corporations are not people,” reads one of the signs at the protests.  The significance of that slogan must be understood if the protests are to have any larger effect.  What it means is that American capitalism has become soulless; unfettered greed has led to an economy in which one percent of the country’s citizenry is amassing most of the wealth, while the other 99 percent is barely holding on.

            The country’s middle class, once its preeminent economic and political strength, has become less potent as a marketing force and less attainable as a product of the economy.  This reality is both the cause of the movement and the way to understand it.

            Capitalism works best when there is open competition, between companies for profits, and between individuals for a share of the financial pie.  Anti-trust laws, which prohibit monopolistic control by a single company of a specific market, are a recognition of the need to keep competitive balance, or, in another sense, to keep opportunities available.  The idea is that if one company gets too big, it controls its particular market to the detriment of the overall vitality of the economy.

            Similarly, when the wealth of the country is concentrated in the hands of a small number of the nation’s citizens, overall competitive balance suffers.  The few who have most of the wealth no longer concern themselves with those who are beneath them.  Instead, they look for ways to maintain and even increase their wealth.  And those who don’t have the wealth are less able to gain it.  The analogy to the corporate monopoly in this circumstance is plutocracy, wherein the society is ruled by its wealthiest individuals.

            Seen in this light, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and its spread to a worldwide protest, makes complete sense, even if the individuals who started it may not have understood the theoretical basis of their protests.

            In the end, human beings do not adapt well to subjugation, either of the political or economic variety.  Politically, the Arab spring represented the reaction of a wide array of people to tyranny and governmental corruption.  If governments refuse to tend to the needs and will of their populaces, those populaces will revolt.

            Economically, the Occupy Wall Street movement has the potential to reverse the plutocracy that American capitalism has become. 

            If the movement is to be successful, it will likely follow this course: As it gains momentum, leaders will emerge who speak truth to power.  The most threatening of them will be vilified, even to the point of being labeled traitors.  The super-rich will view the movement with disdain, as will their political surrogates.  Police power will be used in an attempt to beat it down.  Martyrs may even be created. 

            From there, the course of the movement will depend on the vitality of the political system.  And then, things could really get interesting.

            On the last night of the regular season last week, with two playoff spots yet to be decided, baseball fans across the country got to experience what has already been dubbed the sport’s greatest night.  And, as one with memories from my youth of trying to hear the scratchy broadcast of a late night game from halfway across the country on a transistor radio, it was made all the more great by the veritable wealth of media now available to witness it all.

            For those who don’t follow the sport or only follow it until the football season starts, here’s a summary of what took place.

            The night started with both the National and American League wild card spots tied.  In the NL, the Cardinals had come from ten and a half games back a month earlier to tie the slumping Braves.  In the AL, the Tampa Bay Rays had done the same thing, closing a nine-game gap against the Red Sox.  One-game playoffs were already scheduled in both leagues if the ties were not broken as a result of the games to be played that night.

            Those games had the Cardinals playing the lowly Houston Astros in St. Louis, the Braves hosting the NL Eastern Division champion Phillies, the Red Sox playing the last place Orioles in Baltimore, and the Rays hosting the AL Eastern Division champion Yankees.  Only one of the four games was a blowout (the Cardinals shut out the Astros 8-0 early, and then waited out the Atlanta-Philadelphia contest).

            The other three games were nail-biters, the kind that would be considered great games had they been played in the middle of July.  That they all occurred on the last night of the season, with so much at stake, was the stuff that only sports fans can truly appreciate (a point I’ll come back to).

            In Atlanta, the Braves took a 3-2 lead into the eighth inning, only to have the Phillies tie it in their half of the frame.  The game went into extra innings, and the Phillies finally won it (breaking the tomahawk-chopping Atlanta fans’ hearts) on a hit that barely made it out of the infield. 

            The American League games were just a tad more dramatic.  In Tampa, the Yankees opened up an early 7-0 lead.  The score stayed that way until the eighth inning when the Rays rallied for six runs.  It was an amazing comeback, but they still trailed by a run when they batted in the bottom of the ninth.

            In the meantime, in Baltimore, the Red Sox nursed a 3-2 lead into the seventh when it suddenly started to rain heavily.  Play was halted for over two hours.  The game finally resumed at around 11 PM.

            By then, the Yankees and Rays were into their extra-inning game.  This one came about when, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and with two strikes on him, the Rays’ Dan Johnson, a scrub who was hitting a ridiculous .108 for the season (including one hit in 45 at-bats with two strikes), stroked a fly ball just inside the right field foul pole for the tying home run. 

            Meanwhile the Red Sox and Orioles resumed their game, with Boston staying ahead by that same 3-2 score.  In the ninth they had their premier closer, Jonathan Papelbon, on the mound.  He got two quick outs and had two strikes on the next–and hoped for last– hitter but then gave up two straight doubles that tied the score, followed by a line-drive single that scored the winning run. 

            Four minutes later in Tampa, in the bottom of the twelfth inning, Evan Longoria hit a game-winning homer that completed his team’s dramatic comeback in the game and in the season.

            How improbable were these finishes? The New York Times’ statistical guru, Nate Silver, famous for his FiveThirtyEight Electoral College blog, put the odds at one in 278 million that the wild card races would end in these ways. 

            Whether that figure is absolutely accurate or only a general approximation, for a baseball fan, it was a night to behold, a night to savor, a night to cherish.

            And that brings me to the subject of this column, which is that the true fan can now experience all of it from just about anywhere.  My story is perhaps not typical, but certainly not uncommon.

            I began the night watching all four games on TV.  I have the major league baseball package on my satellite system.  It allows me to watch every game played all year in real time. But then, because I had some late work to complete for my classes at McGeorge the next day, I drove to the campus (about 20 minutes from home) to work in my office.  No problem; I also have XM radio in my car, which allows me to listen to the broadcasts of every game played all year.  On the way, I heard the end of the Phillies comeback against the Braves. 

            When I got to my office, I followed the two AL games on my computer.  Major League Baseball has web sites for all 32 teams that carry all games (pitch-by-pitch) in real time.

            And, so, on the greatest night in baseball history, I used all three systems.  And then, when I got home, I watched the replay of the conclusions of the AL games on my DVR.  When it was all over, my head was spinning, realizing that I had witnessed a very special (one in 278 million) night.

            And that’s the thing about sports in general, and baseball in particular.  It provides the kind of excitement that no other form of entertainment can produce, because it’s all unscripted, and, uniquely in baseball, there is no clock.  Nothing will end the game but the winning run or the last out.

            The baseball playoffs are now in full swing.  They won’t likely match the drama of the last night of the regular season, but, if you have a pulse and like to feel it beat with excitement at the unfolding drama of life, they are still most definitely worth your attention.