Over at Grantland yesterday, Brian Phillips went all in on the sports figures as heroes trope, comparing the Big Three in contemporary men’s tennis to some of the warriors in Homer’s Iliad:

One of the great things about this era of the game, though — it goes along with the cruelty we were just talking about — is that it feels almost epic. That’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in sports, but I mean it literally here. Think about, say, The Iliad. It’s a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They’re not even in danger. There’s absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it’s not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you’ve been primed to think they’re invincible.

Isn’t that basically the state of tennis today? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won every major tournament but one in the last seven years. The occasional Jo-Willie Tsonga crack-up aside, those three and Andy Murray are practically guaranteed to meet in every semifinal. They spend the early rounds of the tournament scything down ranks of lesser players, and when they finally play each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense it is. They’re all larger than life. They all seem essentially invincible.

It’s undoubtedly true that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic are incredibly good at playing tennis. It is hard to imagine that anyone other than these guys will win a major championship. But that’s precisely where the comparison breaks down.

Achilles and Hector — and to a lesser extent Ajax and Diomedes — slash and cut their way through countless opponents without much trouble, but it all leads to the showdown between the two great champions that will have a decisive impact on the Trojan War. And when that showdown happens, it’s a let-down; it doesn’t resemble the epic struggle between Nadal and Djokovic at all.

Hector sees Achilles running toward him across the plain … and he takes off in the other direction. Hector has no chance in a fight against Achilles and he knows it. Indeed, the only reason he stops running is because Athena tricks him into thinking that one of his comrades-in-arms has come to help him; with the odds thus seemingly improved, he decides to stand and fight. But the odds haven’t actually changed at all, the battle ends very quickly, and Achilles in his savagery attempts to desecrate Hector’s corpse for weeks thereafter. There’s no six-hour match between two evenly-matched champions in the Iliad.

And this ties in directly with the part of the comparison that is the least apt:

Neither Achilles nor Hector seem at all invincible. They’re fragile human beings, just like us, and — as such — what is most interesting about them as heroes is that we know they both lose.

The larger-than-life struggle between Achilles and Hector cannot possibly end well for either; as any high school student well knows, both champions will meet their fates in this confrontation with one another. Hector cannot possibly survive his confrontation with the demigod Achilles, irrespective of the courage he displays prior to their meeting. Achilles, on the other hand, will emerge victorious from this battle but there is a prophecy that he cannot survive the war against Troy if he chooses to fight.

In this sense, the warriors of the Iliad are even more compelling than the Big Three because we already know a) how things will end and b) that things will end badly. Watching the drama unfold, watching the choices that each warrior makes in the waning hours of his life, serves as a powerful reminder for all of us that our own choices are desperately important because, like those great warriors, we too are finite beings with finite choices to make.

I was wondering what my day was missing and then I saw that Joe Lieberman referenced Dr. Seuss today in the Senate:

Sen. Lieberman did not want his bill to become like Thidwick’s antlers.

I wholeheartedly support more Dr. Seuss references in politics.

(Source: zachvaughn)

The Jerusalem Post published as an op-ed today a piece by Erika Dreifus — whose work I must admit I’ve never read — that describes a serious problem she faces. She’s an American author who has to keep unsubscribing from email lists, unfollowing other authors on Twitter, and declining to join petition campaigns because they all become “a reliable source of condemnation for Operation Cast Lead,” “condemning Israel for enforcing the Gaza blockade,” or some other such thing.

She writes, “In defending Israel, you risk alienating friends, editors and critics. As open-minded as these ‘liberal or leftist’ circles claim to be, they are as quick as their analogues at the other end of the spectrum to judge and scorn. There is no place for centrists.”

I had a difficult time with this op-ed, for a whole host of reasons. The most obvious problem is that the author just doesn’t seem like a centrist to me. She says, toward the end of the piece, that she’d like to gain “the ability to acknowledge [Israel’s] flaws publicly,” but nowhere does she explain why she feels she can’t do this now. What she really seems to be saying is that it deeply offends her whenever anyone else — Jewish, non-Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, or American — brings up a single flaw with Israel.

What’s more, all of the examples she gives of things that have forced her to resign, unfollow, and unsubscribe seem like relatively reasonable complaints, ones that a centrist would understand and be able to discuss in a reasonable manner. Indeed, I consider myself a centrist and I often have public conversations about Israel, the Palestinians, and precisely the criticisms that Dreifus felt were so over-the-top that she needed to resign in protest and horror. Indeed, if you look back through the past two years of my blogging here, you’ll find plenty of places where I’m able both to defend and to criticize Israeli policy. The same is true of the way that I write about American policy.

Indeed, it’s possible to care about a country, to hope for the best for its citizens, and also to continually hold its leadership to standards of respect for human rights and international law. The opposite position to that one isn’t centrism; it’s the nationalist “My country right or wrong” sort of thinking that forces someone to cover her eyes and ears whenever there’s challenges to her view of that country as perfectly virtuous and good.

If Dreifus really cares about the way that Israel is perceived, it’s important for her to enagage in dialogue with people who have a different perception of the country. But it’s also desperately important for her to take a good look at the country she loves because it’s often the case that caring so much blinds us to problems that have arisen. Think, for example, of people who care deeply about — and therefore end up enabling — a drug addicted friend or loved one.

Indeed, if a person cannot recognize problems with Operation Cast Lead, if she cannot stand to hear — even from those who support Israel — that the Gaza blockade is bad policy, then it seems clear to me that she’s either not the centrist she believes herself to be or else she simply doesn’t know enough about the country she loves. Perhaps she knows more than she lets on in the op-ed, of course. But, as it’s written, it’s nothing more than a sad lament from someone who claims she wants to find “a place where I can be an American writer and a Zionist” but whose Zionism seems to preclude finding that place.

Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman’s notebooks, manuscripts, essays, letters, journals and key contextual resources into an integrated and user-friendly website. In 2007, the Archive moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and under the co-direction of Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, has made exciting developments into both the public understanding of Whitman, as well as the potential for digitization in the future of academia.

…

“We’ve been going around to more than 30 different libraries and other kinds of repositories around the country and to some extent around the world. We’re gathering all of those poetry manuscripts, purchasing high-quality scans of them, putting them up on the web, transcribing those sometimes very messy manuscripts, and then providing annotations, explaining them and dating them.”

This process is laborious, to be sure, but represents what is likely a massive switch in scholarly research. In Price’s mind, the advent of technology allows machines to zero in on linguistic, cultural and textual patterns we were previously unaware of throughout history.

Mary Beard, writing in the New York Review of Books, looks at the state of the classics and of the cottage industry of bemoaning their decline:

What drives us so insistently to examine the “state” of the classics, and to buy books that lament their decline? Reading through opinion after opinion it can sometimes feel that you are entering a strange form of hospital drama, a sort of academic ER, with an apparently sick patient (the classics) surrounded by different doctors who can’t quite agree on either the diagnosis or prognosis. Is the patient merely malingering and really fighting fit? Is a gradual improvement likely, but perhaps never back to the peak of good health? Or is the illness terminal and palliative care or covert euthanasia the only options? But why are we so interested in what’s going to happen to the classics, and why discuss it in this way, and fill so many pages with the competing answers? There’s something a bit paradoxical about the “decline of the classics debate” and the mini publishing industry that appears to depend on large number of key supporters of the classics buying books that chart their demise. I mean, if you don’t give a toss about Latin and Greek and the classical tradition, you don’t choose to read a book on why no one’s interested in them anymore.

…

[T]he overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for.

It’s a fascinating piece and it leads me to wonder whether anyone out there is actually interested in the classics or whether it’s just something that a handful of university professors discuss because we happen to make our living this way.

Since Professor William Easterly is now actively posting to a new Tumblr blog, I thought it would be fun to link to a book review by Nick Kristof of Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (and several other aid-related books that came out around the same time, back in 2006).

Maybe my favorite quote from Easterly’s book:

It seems strange that bureaucrats and politicians would focus on the input—total aid dollars spent. The Hollywood producers of Catwoman, which won an award for being the worst movie of 2004, would not dare to argue with moviegoers that the movie wasn’t so bad because they had spent $100 million on making it. We can understand the emphasis on aid volume only as reflecting the pathology that in aid, the rich people who pay for the tickets are not the ones who see the movie.

If you haven’t read anything by Easterly and didn’t read his former blog, Aid Watch, I recommend picking up a book of his or perusing the archives of the blog. And, of course, you might follow his Tumblr blog. As Kristof rightly notes, “Easterly and a few other authors are shaking up the aid establishment and making us all think about what works and what does not. That’s painful, but also essential.” This isn’t an argument for doing away with aid; it’s an argument for aid that works.

The irony, as they say, is delicious:

Atlas Productions LLC announced today its plan to replace more than 100,000 title sheets appearing on the Atlas Shrugged Part 1 DVD and Blu-ray versions sold through major retail outlets. These retail versions were packaged with an inaccurate synopsis of Atlas Shrugged. Not affected were the “Special Edition” versions sold online at AtlasShruggedMovie.com.

The 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is known in philosophical and political circles for presenting a cogent argument advocating a society driven by rational self-interest. On the back of the film’s retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie’s synopsis contradictorily states “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…”

…

Harmon Kaslow, CEO of Atlas Productions and Producer of the film stated “As we all well know, the ideas brought to life in Atlas Shrugged are entirely antithetical to the idea of ‘self-sacrifice’ as a virtue. Atlas is quite literally a story about the dangers of self-sacrifice. The error was an unfortunate one and fans of Ayn Rand and Atlas have every right to be upset… and we have every intention of making it right.”

Oh, indeed.

(via Max Fisher).