Soccer and U.S. Saturnalia

So this afternoon I was listening to an enthused Ghanan holding forth on his predictions for the upcoming U.S.-Ghana soccer match in the world cup. Several times during the interview, I audibly yawned, and my mind drifted.

"Who cared?" I thought. I have my sports that I get worked up for, and I have enjoyed playing soccer as a youth, but international competitive soccer remains for me a bore.

Is this an unthinking collective engagement on my part? Maybe. But I'm not ashamed of it. American indifference to soccer is an important part of our cultural identity, and I embrace it fully. But it is not, I believe, simply one more instance of American exceptionalism, baffling and annoying the world. It is, I believe, something more.


In ancient times, many kingdoms, including the Romans had a version of the Saturnalia festival. This was an extended festival - usually about one week - that was held every so often- perhaps every seven years or when the king died, etc. The point of festival was that for the proscribed duration, the class roles of the society would be reversed. Servants would order their masters around, and noblemen would act in general subservience to their "inferiors." It must have been a rollicking good time (at least for the inferiors), and when it was over, steam was blown off and the normal, unfair order of things could return.

I think you know where I am going with this.

Worldwide resentment of the U.S. is nothing new. Despite the average American's innate isolationism and indifference to the ridiculous tribulations of global populi, the U.S. remains a world leader. Deep in our hearts, despite our nearly universal preeminence, we dearly wish that other countries would fully play by our rules so that they would be equal tradesmen and not merely "oppressed" "quasi-colonial" underlings. We really do. But since they don't, the default position is one of US supremacy.

This puts us largely in the position of the monarchs and noblemen of old. We are the masters, and the world, the servants. We remain largely indifferent to this fact, the world remains acutely aware of it, quietly (or not so quietly) seething, chafing, and waiting for their ascent to power which will never come.

Well, it is my contention that to let off this steam, we have had - for decades now - a kind of Global Satunalia, in which, for the time being, the U.S. is treated as just some other random country in universal competition, and even a suck a lowly land as Ghana is given equal or superior coverage in the context of the "universal" sport of soccer.

In what other arena would the U.S. and Ghana be seen as equal players, or even players in which the advantage was to the small African nation? None that I can think of. And yet for this moment, the boyish enthusiasm in the Ghanan commentator's voice betrayed his glee not just that his team might win, but that it might (once again) fell the mighty U.S.! And the U.S. puts up with this - largely with indifference.

I think this is wise. I think this is very wise. I think the U.S.'s mediocrity at "the world sport" is - if not a deliberate political calculation - an extremely suitable way to placate the resentments of the world. Let them feel the thrill of trampling on their master's toes for a moment- once every four years. Let it last a couple of weeks, and then let the normal order of regency restore itself. Simple as that.

That the U.S. has been doing unusually well this year (or so I've been told) does not bode well for us, in my opinion. For to require that we prove ourselves on the soccer pitch inversely mirrors our potential decline in global political preeminence. Let us hope it is not so.


Some have said that we simply need a U.S. superstar to bring soccer to life in the American psyche- A Beckham, A Jordan, a Woods to focus the celebrity receptor sites to the touchless game. But this is hooey. Deep down Americans know that soccer is the sop to the world's deflated ego. Let them have their 2-1 victories, their silly colored cards, and their penalty kicks. We know better than to get caught in the emotion and master the sport, lest the world lose its one safety valve for its groans under Uncle Sam's mighty boot.

Department of Unintended Consequences

This is a good lesson, and up until now, I've only had one pristine example of it working.

The rule is that government control and regulation does little or nothing to solve the real problems at work, and in fact can have the opposite effect and undermine acceptable (or what society deems to be acceptable) levels of public good.

The example I've been using for years has been Marijuana. Since anti-marijuana laws have become stricter, demand has not abated at all. That much is common knowledge. But on top of that, the process of punishing marijuana use and cultivation - based primarily on weight - has had the perverse effect of focusing gardeners' minds on concentrating the potency of pot into smaller and smaller plants. The result is that today's pot is orders of magnitude stronger than the stuff Cheech and Chong used to smoke in their movies. A good old fashioned doobie filled with modern day kush from Humboldt county could literally last some people a year.

This has been the gardeners' collective response to (extreme) government control of their product. Now, a non-prosecutable amount of pot could still take care of all your smoking needs for at least a week- thus making skirting the laws effectively an ordinary experience for most users. The government plan to control or (ridiculously) cease, marijuana usage has backfired, and the only "good" to come to society is increased wealth extraction by government for the sake of enforcement, incarceration, and prosecution of drug offenses.* But in general, the government actions have made pot more popular, more potent, and now completely ubiquitous. Exactly the opposite of what the laws supposedly intended.

But you probably knew all that.

The new example I've discovered, which has been sitting right under my nose, is Oil:

Years of regulation and innovation have made us better at finding, extracting, refining, and using oil. Oil might be cheap compared to its true costs, but adding those costs in wouldn’t make it unaffordable. That gets to the bigger issue, which is that energy sources are only cheap or expensive relative to one another. And the anchor beneath our reliance on oil is that, at this point, there’s nothing to replace it. (emphasis mine)

It had never occurred to me before that the massive regulations of the oil market could have had similar effects in focusing the minds of oil execs to maximize extraction techniques and minimize price- just as the pot growers do (although, due to prohibition, the pot growers have some more latitude in not reducing price). If necessity is the mother of invention, being under continual duress for a product that enjoys unlimited demand will certainly create many leaps of genius to keep the supply lines running.

Many bytes have been spilled in recent weeks, paralleling the BP oil leak, reminding us that it was government regulation that forced BP to drill so far out into the ocean in the first place. And by and large, the oil companies have done a stellar job at safely extracting petroleum in extremely difficult environments. We have to assume that the technological innovation that helped them to do that led to cost benefits across the board.

In other words, the better they had to get at extracting oil (because of government controls), the better they got at extracting oil. And the better they got at extracting oil, the cheaper the oil would be per "unit." Just as you get more bang for your buck with modern pot, modern oil extraction techniques give oil companies better access to more oil.

One can imagine a parallel history in which pot growers and oil producers were left alone for the past 40 years. Their methods of cultivation would be much sloppier and less efficient. And while we believe there may have been more societal ills along the way, in the case of oil, it seems possible that a well guided alternative would have taken hold much more easily. The investment and the government-engendered technological innovation in the oil sector has created an industrial force that is extremely competitive. The same companies in the 70s were not nearly as fierce, and it is possible that they could have been more easily competed away today without the steroids they were forced to take to keep up with government regulations.

(One could also imagine a parallel history of relatively weak cannabis that had only a mildly disturbing effect on society over the past 40 years. For the general public to learn how to safely deal with the new super-strains will likely involve a steeper learning curve with more potential for disorientation and danger as we move towards a prohibition-free society. Should there be enough cases of pot-induced trauma in a hypothetically de-prohibited culture, we may even find a more virulent backlash from the government to re-schedule the substance, thus tightening the curve of innovation further.)

Some interesting things to think about as we ponder the oil spill just as "peak driving season" is about to begin. . .


*and if you're black you might add serving the cause of continuing 1950s segregation by other methods, namely incarceration.

Reverse Flotilla Folly

I read this whole article, and the whole time I kept saying to myself- This will never work, and they shouldn't even try. It took me a while, though, to figure out why I thought that, but then I got it.

Here's why this won't work:

It's juvenile, and I'm surprised Sullivan endorses it. To me it's symptomatic of the idiocy that rules the educated mind. The notion that running a flotilla to expose Turkey's hypocricy will have any effect is ridiculous. It postulates that there is some objective arbiter sitting somewhere who will pass impartial judgment on a political situation. This is a fantasy. There is no doctoral thesis board or Poli-Sci professor sitting somewhere on the equator passing good judgment and doling out reward for good points. We don't live in a world of deans and panels, we live in a world of people. And people act based on interests not on moral gotcha points.

So the flotilla will arrive in Turkey, and what will happen exactly? All of the Europeans and the rest of the Muslim world will issue some sort of decree condemning Turkey and then suddenly take the pressure off of Israel about Gaza? This is in sane. People aren't really that mad about Gaza. It is a convenient (and largely appropriate) front for their anger at Israel in general. Israel has many, many enemies, whereas Turkey has few. And Turkey's allies will - as the US has done for Israel - largely parse and downplay the Kurdish situation there, and then get right back on the offensive against their common enemy. This silly intellectual exercise in foreign expose will yield no results. It is childish and exhibits the worst of small-minded intellectualism divorced from realpolitik. Even, heaven forbid, if they are all killed, sympathy from the larger world will be minimal, and Israel will be forced into a war which will immediately obviate any gains from the stunt.

Incentive Alignment and the Libertarian Initiative

A new post over at my raw site details Libertarianism in action. It is centrist vitriol at its best. Worth a look.

D-Blog

Campaign Finance

Well, here's the thing. This was never supposed to be a problem. Democracies are meant to work with small groups of people. In the Constitution, most Americans, to say nothing of the slaves and Amerindians, could not vote. It was only land owners who were allowed to vote, presumably since they had the highest stake in the government to protect their property and investments.

Because they had an interest in their government, they would have taken it upon themselves to suss out which political candidates would best look after those interests and throw their support behind them. Campaign contributions were not necessary, because the electorate would be doing the most active shopping, having themselves the most active interest.

This is obviously a bit of an simplification, but it is illustrative.

As democracy became more and more inclusive to include non property owners, blacks, and women interests became more diffuse, and "casual voting" became more possible. Also, given the larger numbers of represented involved, personal distance from candidates became greater and greater over time such that "access" is something one must now buy with campaign money (rather than the old-fashioned pulling up a chair at the local diner).


But what are the campaign contributions for anyway? Well, advertising, mainly. Advertising for what? Advertising to bring the representatives' messages closer to the people who will be voting for them - the "casual voter." The "interested" voter, the modern day equivalent of the old landed aristocracy will have made their own selves aware of the issues and the candidates' positions. No "interested" voter pays any serious attention to political advertising, except to see how it will likely sway the "casual" masses in their man's favor.

But rather than blaming the inherent evils of campaign contribution themselves, we ought to do what we always ought to do in a democracy: blame the demos. We, the people, are the ones who create this condition by our sloth, our laziness, and by our casualness towards the political process. We actually expect to achieve an informed opinion through television advertisements, as if these mini-flicks weren't explicitly constructed to manipulate us. The real work of researching a candidate is not even bothered with, and, since the campaigners understand that, they tend to raise hordes of money to submit advertisements to the lazy public.

Over the years, scheme after scheme has been loudly proclaimed to limit campaign contributions - especially by those who have the greatest interest and are the least "casual." These have always amounted to nothing and will continue to into the future, no matter how many cries for "reform" we hear.

But there's another solution. Stop it altogether. Don't allow *any* campaign contributions - or more precisely, don't allow *any* campaign advertisements. If people want to know which pol to vote for, they can get off their asses and find out. They can talk to their friends, they can watch the news, they can search the web for voting records, they can even turn to citizen-sponsored activist groups to educate the public on behalf of certain candidates. But none of this can be done by advertising.

This will leave the casual voter out of the equation, or he/she will vote indiscriminately in a way that will be an electoral wash across the board.

On the politicians' side, the problem of access can be solved the same way: instead of lazily expecting corporations to show up on your door to hock their wares, do your own (or have your staff do) actual research as to what is best for your representatives.

No campaign contributions - no undue influence, no undue access. Let the responsibility lie on the voters and the pols to find out who is best for them And if they're too lazy to, then they get what other lazy people get- whatever they get. And the rest of us can get on with our work.