False Consciousness of the American Narrative

Narratives are important to people. Most obviously humanity uses mythologies to explain creation and our grand purpose, but we also rely on narratives to define much more—family values, religion, and the country we live in. Through the songs we sing, idioms we know, and shared interpretations of history, societies develop culture. And predictably over time this culture changes, but the narratives remain largely the same.

I think becoming an adult is largely a process of discovering the falsity of our narratives and designing new ones that we want to live by. This occurs for most individuals, but it’s antithetical to the nature of a country or nation.

The narrative of the United States that I was raised to believe in had two parts:

America is a benevolent super-power in the world that has a responsibility to root out evil globally.

In America, you can believe anything you want and behave however you like, as long as you and your ideology don’t physically harm anybody.

The Iraq War has severely weakened any argument that the United States is a benevolent power internationally. In the eyes of seemingly every non-American I’ve talked to, the Iraq War was started by George W. Bush to change politics in the Middle East and gain control of more oil. The price for this has been hundreds of thousands of civilian lives (the vast majority not actually killed by American soldiers of course).

I think this analysis of the Iraq War is too simple, but I think it’s closer to the truth than, say, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In this time, the idea that the United States has a global responsibility has also lost support. According to Pew Global Research’s December 3, 2009 article, 49% of Americans think the US should “mind its own business” in international affairs, up from 30% in 2002. People like Thomas Friedman are arguing for “nation-building at home.” Obama had to appease this shift in public opinion with his Afghanistan strategy. His escalation of troop levels was packaged with a promise that they would come home in less than two years.

And while America has never been as welcoming to immigrants as our mythology would lead us to believe, I am still shocked when I read statements like that of former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo in his message to a convention of Tea-Partiers:

“People who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, [and his] name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

I suppose it’s a relief that Tom Tancredo didn’t include homosexuals in his hate message.

Our narrative is very far from reality. For me this creates something of a quagmire because I was quite a fan of the country I was raised to believe in, which increasingly puts me at odds with the country I actually was raised in. I’m a sort of patriot without a nation.

I wish America were a more benevolent global power, the kind that would be investing in education and scientific research instead of invading foreign countries. I wish we used whatever mandate of global responsibility we possessed more selectively, and with more wisdom. And I wish that fewer people in my country were xenophobic, racist, and hostile to other faiths and worldviews.

The narrative we wrote for ourselves was morally ambitious and naïve; no country on earth could achieve it. Still, it’s sad that the reality is so far from the fiction, and too few people even see the difference.

Super Bowl XLIV Reflection

Monday was one of the best days of my life. At around 5am I witnessed my hometown New Orleans Saints execute a complete victory over the favored Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. I trace the game’s outcome to an essential strategic difference between the two teams, in a game that reflects how the NFL has changed in the last generation.

First, the Colts coaching staff managed the clock poorly. With two minutes left in the first half, the Colts successfully stopped a Saints scoring drive and gave the ball back to the MVP, Peyton Manning. Up 10-3, the Colts could have gone for a two-minute drill to make a ten or fourteen point lead at the half. Instead, they chose to run out the clock, even though the Saints had all three timeouts remaining. The result is that the Colts ended up giving the ball back to the Saints with excellent field position. The Saints took advantage and went into the half with three more points and newfound momentum.

Peyton Manning made a similar management error late in the game. Down two scores and with two minutes remaining, the Colts quarterback called a time out that he immediately wished he had back (really, he tried to pretend he hadn’t signaled for it). The timeout meant that if the Saints ever got the ball back, the Colts wouldn’t be able to stop the clock for all three downs, so a successful onside kick was now absolutely necessary. The Colts’ chances at 31-17 weren’t that good, but Manning’s error basically cut them in half.

By contrast, the Saints won because of an aggressive, attacking strategy. With two minutes left in the first half and down by seven points, Saints coach Sean Payton elected to go for it on fourth down, even though the Saints really could have used the three points from a chip-shot field goal. To start the second half, the Saints attempted an onside kick, and they got it—probably the biggest play of the game. Compare that to the Colts’ aforementioned choice to run out the clock in the first half and Coach Caldwell’s decision to send Matt Stover for a failed 51-yard field goal, rather than let Peyton Manning go for it on fourth down. Colts coach Jim Caldwell had so much faith in his team that he didn’t think he needed to take risks, but really he should have believed that his team could succeed at those risks.

This game also solidified Drew Brees as an elite quarterback in the NFL. Drew Brees’ statistics over the last four years have been as good or better than Peyton Manning’s and Tom Brady’s in almost every category, but he still lacked a championship. Now Brees has as many rings as Peyton Manning (and one fewer loss). His 114 quarterback rating was the best by any winning quarterback in a Super Bowl in fifteen years. In his three playoff games this season, he threw for eight touchdowns with no interceptions, recording a quarterback rating over 100 in all three contests. Only hall of fame quarterbacks have had postseasons as good.

I expect that next year people will discuss the NFL as having three “best” quarterbacks: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees, in an order that will be debated endlessly around water coolers and across dinner tables. And if next year, Brees’ production is as good as it was this year, I expect that he’ll finally be rewarded with an MVP trophy.

Finally, Super Bowl XLIV strikes me as a flashpoint in NFL strategy and personnel. The tired axiom of football is that a good running game and good defense wins championships. Now all you need is a Pro Bowl quarterback. Neither the Colts nor the Saints had a thousand yard rusher this season. They didn’t have Top-5 defenses either.

One can see this in football over the last ten years. Every year sports writers choose the best players from the NFL for the All-Pro team. This team includes two running backs, but only one quarterback. Of the last eighteen All-Pro running backs (nine years), only two have been on teams that went to the Super Bowl. In the same time period, four of the nine quarterbacks selected to the All-Pro team have made it to the Super Bowl. Algebraically speaking, quarterbacks appear to be four times more important than a running game in getting to the championship.

Unfortunately, this trend is decreasing the number of ways to win in the NFL. As a result, the league is becoming less versatile, less competitive, and more hierarchical. Teams with an elite quarterback can win the Super Bowl, and everyone else is just waiting until they can draft an elite quarterback. It seems to me that the NFL usually has around ten good quarterbacks at any given time, which means 2/3 of the league doesn’t have much of a chance—I think that’s a bad thing.

It’s unfair, but more importantly, it undercuts the strength of the NFL: competitiveness. In the Premier English Soccer League and in the Turkish Soccer League, there are only a handful of teams who are guaranteed success every year because of their large pocketbooks. Everyone else is competing for fifth place. The NFL is becoming that way because of the pre-eminence of quarterback play.

That said, if quarterbacks are what matter most in today’s NFL, then I’m damn glad my New Orleans Saints have one—that and a Vince Lombardi trophy.