Why is Everything so Happy?

A conversation I had with a friend a few days ago forced me to think all the way back to a class discussion from the beginning of the semester.  The debate between my friend and I, came about from discussing the most recent Sherlock Holmes movie.  In the end of the movie, spoiler alert, it appears as though Holmes has sacrificed his own life for the greater good of humanity, but, miraculously, he reappears very much alive in the last scene.  This is very similar to the most recent Batman movie, in which our main character, The Batman, heroically sacrifices himself to save Gotham from a ticking time bomb.  Again the movie ends with shock that he isn't actually dead at all.

For whatever reason, money for the movie makers, or for the preferences of audiences, I think American movies too often have forced happy endings.  As Kurt Vonnegut said when discussing the graphs of stories, in America you would never see a story like Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", where the main character never gets onto the good fortune half of the graph at the end of the story. If you need a refresher on Vonnegut's talk it can be found here.

If you think about movies like "Marley and Me", I think its pretty clear that a lot of times a story is better off with a sad ending.  Okay so it doesn't feel good when the dog dies, we all hate to see it, but the movie would  not be as good if it had a standard American dog-is-magically-still-alive ending.  It wouldn't do as good a job at stirring up emotions or completing the story.  I think it would be great to see more movies that don't blindly follow the tradition of forcing happy endings, even when they don't make sense to the story.

Are We Rome?: The Fall of the Gladiator and the Future of Football

Yesterday in class we had a long discussion about football and its fate due to all the injury issues of the recent past.  This discussion reminded me of Cullen Murphy's book, Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America,  which compares modern day America to the Roman Empire.  I think this comparison can be extended to football and the gladiator games.

Both are very centered around violence, which is obvious in football considering there used to be a show that's sole purpose was to show the most excruciating hits of the week.  Also, both of the images shown here seem to me to have a similar sense of tension.  No violence is occurring in the moment in either one, but in both the viewer can tell that it is eminent.

So then what happens to football? Well gladiator battles began their decline while Christianity was becoming popular in the Empire, and the battles were outlawed shortly after Christianity was made the official Roman religion.  The adoption of Christianity brought with it a new set of morals that abhorred gladiator fights, leading to their slow demise.  Likewise, I think the only thing that could make Americans let go of football is a significant change in morals.  With our current way of thinking America's favorite sport is staying for a long time.

A Sad Day for American Music

 A few days ago I was reading the obituary of one of my favorite musicians and someone I consider an American hero, Dave Brubeck.  The obituary, which can be found here, contains a section about Brubeck's fight against racism.  While I was reading this it really struck me how as a whole, jazz musicians were so far ahead of their times regarding race issues.  People like Jelly Roll Morton in the 1920's and Benny Goodman in the the 30's led integrated bands that performed publicly, something unheard of in their days. Even today in Chicago, which is generally a very segregated city, if you go to the jazz showcase you will see both audiences and performing groups that are very evenly integrated.  All this really made wonder about why this might me true.

The most logical reason that I could think of comes from the origins of jazz.  Jazz was born out mixture of many musical styles.  Much of jazz comes from African American spiritual music.  This later developed into things like blues and ragtime, both hey ingredients in jazz.  However, jazz also takes a lot of influences from minstrel show tunes, music created by solely white artist which comes from European folk music.  So jazz is a unique combination of very culture centered White and African American music.  I think that because of this one can't really properly play or understand jazz music unless they can fully comprehend and respect how all of its cultural influences can be combined, leading successful jazz musicians to be very tolerant to race differences.

The Abdullah Brothers

Last week I was walking past the TV when a section on Rock Center caught my eye.  In this section, shown below, Brian Williams discusses the story of two brothers, Hussain and Hamza Abdullah, who left their NFL football careers this year to make the Hajj to Mecca and support their Muslim beliefs.

I thought the way in which this story was portrayed was fascinating.  In the first sentence of the description of this story, found on the Rock Center website, it is called an "American dream story".  You'll also notice if you watch the beginning of the video above that Brian Williams uses the word "American" twice in the first three seconds.  Later in the same sentence however, he admits that it "runs counter to just about every message our society sends out".  Personally, I found this juxtaposition very confusing.  How can something be American if it goes against the messages of our society?  In my opinion, it can't.  Isn't American defined by the messages of our society and what we believe?  I would argue that what these brothers did was very un-American.  They were on the path of an American dream and chose to step off of it.

Why then would would Rock Center be so adamant about portraying this as an American story?  My guess is that is was an attempt to make sure the brothers were seen as heroes by the audience.  I would absolutely agree that they are heroes and great role models, but I don't see any reason why they can't be heroes and role models supporting un-American values in the US.   I am not at all questioning these brothers' loyalty to their country. In fact, if you start watching the video at 5:30 you will see that they call themselves patriots.  All I am saying is that their actions, leaving professional football to make the Hajj, are not American, and show that un-American heroes can exist in the US.

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