Legacy

Over the last week I've been reading my last book of the summer, Outliers, The Story of Success. It's a book that makes the argument that all of us, whether we know it or not, are products of our background. That we owe far more to our legacy and that legacy contributes as much to our personal successes as any special talents or work ethic we may have.

It makes an illustration with Asian commercial pilots. There was a time when Korea had some of the most unsafe airlines in the world. That's because their culture dictated deference to authority. The pilot did his job and his decisions were always respected and adhered to. Those beneath his command, like his engineer or first officer, would not question him or risk embarrassing him. That meant that when he made a mistake, that mistake would go unchecked and lead to another mistake, then another, then another, until seven mistakes later, there was a crash. The culture itself created a situation where pilots found it difficult to be effective because what could have been three sets of eyes on the control panel became just one. 

It had nothing to do with the skill or the work ethic of the pilot, but everything to do with the intricacies of that particular culture. 

In the same way, the book talked about how southerners tend to get red hot angry. The Appalachians were originally settled by herding people from Scotland, Northern England, and Ireland. They had lived in difficult terrain in the old country and had only been able to rely on their families and their clans for protection and support. They had to protect their herds with force, otherwise others could come in during the night and steal their livelihood. In this way, personal honor became very important to them. They were fierce, battle-hardened people because they had to. They formed strong bonds with their community because they had to.

So these same people settled in the Appalachians in the American South and that culture of honor is still there today. A study was actually done on what happens when you call a southern boy a certain seven-letter word (I'll let you try to figure it out) compared to what happens when you call anyone else that name. The result? The Southerners' testosterone levels were up and they were in fight mode. The others generally laughed it off. It had nothing to do with lineage. Many of the Southerners had no ancestry from Scotland, England, or Ireland, but they were influenced simply from having grown up in the South. The Southerners, though they may not know it, were still being influenced by hundreds-years-old cultures, from a land thousands of miles away.

It made me wonder just what legacies affect me and affect our communities. It's easy to see the legacy in Halstead and Buhler and much of the area around Hutch: German Mennonites. The Old Country still isn't that far away. Many communities in this area remain strong despite relative rural seclusion in no small part because the old settlers relied on community so much. Some people think I'm crazy, but I swear I can hear the faintest hint of a German accent from some of Halstead's older citizens.

My direct ancestry seems to have two predominant characteristics: Very German, and very Lutheran.

The Lutheran bit is easy enough to spot in my family (seeing as how my dad's a Lutheran pastor and all). Appreciation for classical music has always been strong, especially for Bach who's probably the most influential Lutheran of all time next to David Hasselhoff.

The German bit is interesting as well. I was always taught to be proud of my German heritage, although that usually didn't go much further than occasionally eating dumplings. That being said, I DO know the words to O, Tannenbaum.

But there's a very slight sense of separation from those who aren't Volga German, and part of me thinks that stems from the persecution the Volga Germans faced while in Russia. They became distinct groups with different experiences than other German immigrants and remained separate and prideful. The whole persecution bit very possibly made some socialists out of some of our ancestors. At least that's the family story, anyway. Maybe that's why we have a fair amount of moderate liberals in the family. 

Having lived in three separate states (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas) I tend to wonder how much I've changed as I've moved from one place to another. My older brother still lives in Texas and he's still steeped in Texas culture whereas we're definitely midwestern now. Part of me cheers for Sweden just because Christina went to a Swedish college. The weather isn't just polite conversation but a serious matter that affects the livelihood of an entire farming community. Oh, and no one likes Missouri. In fact, there might be a few that still believes Missouri will burn Lawrence again.

Oh, Missouri v. Kansas. Now THAT'S a legacy to talk about. 

Book List Part 2

I was going back over my list from last week over my favorite books of all time. As I said in that post, if you asked me on three separate days what my favorite book is, you would likely receive three different answers.

But looking over my list, I started to notice that the vast majority of my choices were from the fantasy or adventure genres. Plus, it wasn't even all that complete. I started to come up with a few other options and I realized that I needed to add to my list.

I'm going to acknowledge right here that this list and my previous list only covers works of fiction. I'll probably make a non-fiction list at some point, but I'm going to try to keep this at least respectably concise.

Saint Maybe - I love this book, and it's different from the typical book I read because it's so focused on domestic life. The story follows the life of Ian Bedloe, who inadvertently causes his older brother's suicide and then must care for his now-orphaned nieces and nephew. Ian throws himself into his "burden" of raising the children and forsakes all the earthly pleasures he would have likely pursued had he not done his horrible deed and sought repentance. Seeing how the author, Anne Tyler, develops her characters over the course of several years makes the book so much more satisfying than if it had covered a short period of time.

The Shining - The first Stephen King novel I'd ever read. And it's not nearly as similar to the movie as I thought it would be. It was the first time I'd been introduced to such painful foreshadowing in a novel. King purposefully projects almost exactly what will happen in the novel right from the beginning, and it carries the force of seeing a steamroller approaching a cripple from a mile away. It's horrible. You know it's coming. There's nothing you can do to stop it but watch it happen.

Lonesome Dove - Oh those sad, sad, cowboys. Being a cowboy must have been fun, right? A glorified herder despised by most of society. And yet McMurtry pulls at the ol' heartstrings following Gus and Call on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Reading this book is a bit of an epic undertaking, and McMurtry treats it like an epic journey. This was assigned in a college course titled Literature of the American West and was the most exciting work for me that year.

Pretzels, commercials, and Peyton Manning

It's just about that time of year again. Time for me to draft for my imaginary football team in a league featuring 11 other guys I know mostly from high school and college. All in the name of fulfilling my childhood dream of winning a superbowl right from my own home. It should be pretty magical.

My team's name? The Potter Muggles.

There is a spirited debate within my family and among some close friends about whether fantasy football is awesome or lame. On the one hand, I have paid much more attention to the NFL since starting a fantasy team. Keeping tabs on the players on my team has forced me to keep tabs on divisions outside the AFC West.

On the other hand, this also causes a perverse situation for die-hard fans. Some actually start to actually care more about their fantasy team than their real team. A Kansas City Chiefs fan might find himself cheering for Denver if he happens to have Peyton Manning on his fantasy team. And that's. Just. Wrong.

This leads me to wonder: What is it exactly that draws us to sporting events? Is it the actual sporting event? Or is it all the extra "stuff" surrounding it? I'd like to think most people truly want to see a good game and that that's the primary reason they go. But owners and league officials have a tendency to take the focus more and more away from the actual game.

Take football for example. Logically, with 15 minute quarters, a professional football game should feature an hour of action. Throw in timeouts and clock stoppages, it would take a little over two hours to complete a game.

But in the first seven weeks of 2011, the average NFL game time surpassed three hours. There are several reasons for this. Commercial breaks. Flags being thrown by officials. Commercial breaks. Pass-happy offenses. Commercial breaks. It's becoming just a little bit ridiculous.

Last year Christina and I went with my family to the Alamo Bowl (my brother Matthew lived in San Antonio) and that game started at 8:00 p.m. but went until about midnight during a 67-56 game. It was a high-scoring game. Know what that means? We spent about half our time there watching the players stand around while the networks went to commercial break. What's sad is that this was an exciting game featuring future NFL stud Robert Griffin III. It would have been even better if we didn't have to sit around for an extra hour.

Now that's not an issue with the fans, really, but the owners and league officials. There has got to be a better way to sell ad space than stopping the action for two minutes of commercials. Heck, they could do what soccer does: sell ad space on the jerseys if you have to. But don't stop the action.

I have a similar issue with baseball. Not because of the amount of time the game takes, really, but because of how slow the action can sometimes be. According to the New York Times: 

"The average time of games has ballooned from 2 hours 33 minutes in 1981 to 2 hours 58 minutes in 2013 — tying the 33-year high — even though a recent study by The Wall Street Journal found that the average game has only 18 minutes of actual action." 

Think about what's going on during most of the game: A new pitcher is brought on and he needs his warm-up throws. A batter steps up to the plate and winds up. The pitch comes in. Ball one. Batter steps out of the box so that he can tighten his wrist straps he just fastened 90 seconds ago. He takes  a practice swing. Then another. Then he steps back to the plate. The pitcher looks. Takes his stance. Then throws to first to try to catch the runner. He's safe. Batter steps out again and repeats the process. Seven-year-olds in the stands start asking for popcorn. 

You go to a baseball game and what do you see? Fans playing solitaire on their phones. Texting. Reading books. Drinking beer. Now, it's nice to hang out at a baseball game with friends and get some fresh air, but that's not something that's related to the game itself, is it? That's part of the "extra stuff." 

Certainly there's always the history and mythology of the game. It always will be "the Great American Pastime." But for me, anyway, that's something that's more likely to get me to go outside and play catch or go watch a baseball movie rather than watch a game on TV. The running joke with my brother Michael is that whenever a baseball team loses it's because "they didn't BELIEVE enough."

The Rookie was actually filmed 10 minutes from where we lived in Texas at the time. 

There's a bit of complacency by fans when teams do poorly, as well. Your team might lose, but that's no reason to have a bad time. After all, "there's always next week." Or, "there's always next year." Heck, you got to buy a jumbo bag of peanuts! How cool is that? Dang, these peanuts can be tricky to open. Better take my eyes away from the batter warming up to get at these little buggers...

Part of me wishes there was some sort of punishment for teams that play awful, but the opposite is true more often than not. Underperforming teams get the first pick in the draft. Some owners that don't invest much in the team have proven that they can still turn a profit, maybe even a bigger profit than if they'd shelled out money for better athletes. The incentive is gone. And as long as fans are happy just going out and "having a good time" then that's not going to change.

I have no idea what I'm advocating here. I don't know how exactly you change an entire culture, but I think I am lamenting how often the focus of sports turns away from the action and turns towards anything else. Keep in mind that I love football, baseball, basketball, and a host of other sports as well. But if I find myself focusing more on pretzels, commercials, or Peyton Manning before the Chiefs, it's not a fantasy that something is wrong with this picture.  

No more papers, no more books, no more teacher's dirty -- WAIT, no more books!?!? WHY?!

I'm in the midst of a new book series, A Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Martin. The book series spawned the HBO program Game of Thrones. 

I've quickly become completely worthless. Good books have been known to do that to me. The lawn needs to be mowed? I'll get to it after this chapter. It's time to eat? I'll skip lunch for now. I haven't talked to my wife in three days? I'll give her the book when I'm done and then we can talk about it together.

The book has reminded me how much I love the fantasy genre. I haven't gotten this engrossed since I finished Lord of the Rings. In fact, it's given me this maddening urge to buy as many large bookshelves as I can and make it my life's mission to fill them all as my own personal gigantic library.

But what would I have in that library? What would be on my own "top picks" shelf?

Growing up my parents had a family rule that the TV could not be turned on in the evening, so after 7:00 it was usually off. I still can't remember a time when my brothers and I went to sleep with the TV still going.

That time was usually spent reading, whether it was on our own or Mom pulling out a book and reading a chapter a night. Reading to children requires an amount of skill to it and Mom had it mastered. I used to think everyone was expected to read that well but now I think it's a bit of a requirement for teaching at an elementary school.

We tackled quite a few books, and not all of them small ones, either. Little House in the Big Woods, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and The Hobbit were just a few of our conquests.  

These evenings gave me a love for reading that's still with me today. My only regret is that I wish I could read faster. Christina has finished three Doctor Who books in the time I've read one and a half. Granted, my books are a bit longer, but still, she's speed racer. I think she's cheating.

Anywho, (anyhoo..anywhoo...whatevs) this all made me contemplate just what would be in my list of favorite books of all time? In all probability, if you asked me on three different days what my favorite book is, I would probably give you three different answers depending on my mood. So I came up with a list that I tried to make cover as many genres as possible.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - Harry Potter has got to be my favorite series, and Half-Blood Prince is my favorite book in that series. Harry finally actually starts coming of age in this book while in all the others he's just sort of "approaching" manhood. He's more mature and less whiney than in the previous book. Rowling makes this book much more concise and straightforward that some of her other plots in the series, which tend to meander.

Dune / Starship Troopers - Science fiction adventures. Both of these feature the human race colonizing planets in the distant future. Dune actually features a planetary feudal system (think monarchs in charge of planets) while Starship has the human race fighting alien races for galactic domination (and the humans in general are winning).

World War Z - A post-action oral report on the "last great zombie war." It's a social commentary on what's wrong with everything from our military to our celebrity culture.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King - The finale of one of my favorite series, but really I would throw all three of Tolkien's books in here.

Rainbow Six - Tom Clancy's best book (although Executive Orders is pretty neat as well). Eco-terrorists try to wipe out all human life with a super virus. An elite counter-terror team sponsored by NATO is all that stands in their way. When I read it in 6th grade it was the longest book I had ever finished.

Watership Down - Cute wittle wabbits FIGHT TO THE DEATH FOR THEIR FRIENDS AND FAMILY IN THE NAME OF THEIR HOMELAND. These rabbits form their own ideal society... and they're just adorable.