w/r/t the first poem, maybe he really did mean ‘cameo’ shorts, as if he was making a one at the gym as a ‘meat head.’

in the second poem, he writes, “Falcons are flying for pray,” and once again, it’s as if his misspelling creates more meaning than what he probably intended.

what’s interesting too is his obvious attention to brands, naming Adidas, Ipod and Nike in just that short bit.

But seriously, I think the more general point that your comment highlights is the importance of context in how we interpret what constitutes winning. It’s not that we only see Michael Oher as successful because of his background (I think most of us would interpret anyone who is able to solidify a spot on an NFL roster as successful), but it would probably be hard for even the best Hollywood writers and directors to make a compelling movie out of the life of the average offensive lineman.

Similarly, I talked a little bit about Michael Vick in the interview, and isn’t it odd to think that even though some people will always hold his past against him, his outstanding performance this past season wouldn’t have impressed people so much if his career hadn’t been interrupted by a prison sentence? These different paths to becoming a winner – Oher the underdog, Vick (perhaps) the comeback story – are among the nmany aspects of this cultural obsession which Duina discusses in his book.

In getting back to Obama, isn’t it also interesting to consider what his speech might have sounded like if we weren’t behind in some of these areas, if we didn’t have this apparent catching up to do? What would our aim be? To “maintain the future”? I think the winning/losing language can be an easy out – rather than truly acknowledge the complex problems facing our society (problems which have little to do with how our economy ranks compared to others), it makes it sound as if everything will be better if we’re better than everyone else. If it is true that many Americans would benefit from better math and science education, it’s not because we could then compare ourselves to China and India and give ourselves a pat on the back. It’s frightening to think that our interactions with others (and I mean both us as individuals and us as a nation) might actually be driven quite often by this desire to win for winning’s sake.

it should have read

“A reality that none of us should be proud of.”

I should stick to research…

I was thinking about your podcast yesterday as I was listening to the an interview on NPR/Talk of the Nation with Michael Oher–the NFL players depicted in the movie “The Blind Side.” I guess he just wrote a book called “Beating the Odds” that is the story of him coming out of the foster care system. I have yet to see the Blind Side, but it was interesting in the interview how Michael Oher uses the language of wining to describe his path out of foster care, getting adopted by what sounds like was a white and privileged family, and eventually coming to play professional football. As he describes it, ever since he was 7 years old he knew he wanted to be the best at everything that he did, and that this ethos of wining helped him to large degree succeed while many around him didn’t. In the interview he said he remembers looking up to Michael Jordon in particular when he was 7 whom he tried to infuse his own identity. While he acknowledges the support and advantages that he received from his adopted him, and consequently helped him along, he seemed to imply that to a large part it was his spirit to win that carried him to his success.

After the interview I thought about the relevance of his story to the idea of wining so ingrained in our culture. In one way, Oher’s story is the perfect type of story that we love to hear–of how a kid who had so much against him, nonetheless searched deep within himself to find the winner that he really is. While his story is indeed inspiring, it’s also a bit depressing. Indeed, he is successful only in the backdrop of what are really stark inequalities of growing up poor and black in the US. That is, we only see him as a winner to large degree, because there are so many non-winners to compare him with. While his story should incline us to celebrate his success, it should perhaps be also a reminder of the inequalities that make his success/winning possible. We reality that we shouldn’t really be proud of.

Here’s Dennett’s comment on the famous church in Barcelona:

In the case of La Sagrada Famiglia, there was an “intelligent designer,” an individual, Antonio Gaudí, who did have a guiding vision and did draw up plans; the control of the building flowed from the top down, through verbal representations to subordinates and thence to their subordinates. The design and construction could not have proceeded without elaborate systems of symbolic communication.

I understand he’s keeping this reference short and sweet for the sake of space and the nature of the comparison he’s making, but in effect it downplays the historical nature of the cultural process. Culture is not just a collection of symbol systems, but a symbolic process occurring in time.

Gaudí’s vision was almost too expansive; as you can see from the cranes jutting into the sky behind the spires in this picture, (taken by my friend Brendan), the project was still under construction when I was there 5 years ago, and will probably not be finished for at least another 15 years.

Its construction has been quite the saga. Gaudí, (not even the original architect , it should be noted), died in 1926 with the project barely begun, and some of his plans were destroyed when Spain was ripped apart by the bloody civil war a decade later. The work has been shared over several generations of architects, leading some to question the building’s faithfulness to Gaudí’s design. Advances in technology have dramatically accelerated the pace of construction, which will still have taken a full century after Gaudí’s passing to complete. And as of a few months ago, an underground train tunnel runs beneath the foundation of church, raising concerns about its stability.

And who knows how many thousands of workers have fed their families thanks to this perpetual construction, or how many donors, large and small, have financed the work. How does one objectively describe the centuries of architectural, artistic, and religious heritage that are distilled in those spires? The point is, central as those “elaborate systems of symbolic communication” are, that’s hardly the whole story.

As for “pan,” the word for bread arrived in Japan with bread itself, brought by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century. Rice was the staple food, and bread was largely ignored until the late 19th century. The word does involve a slight change – the Portuguese is “pão” – but overall this historical explanation is pretty straightforward, though I find it interesting. Here’s a list of some of the many Japanese words of Portuguese origin, and here’s a link to the Japanese entry in the Cambridge History of Food.