Everybody's doing it: The decline and fall of American sport

The Russians did it.

They didn’t act alone, it wasn’t planned, and they had no idea the chain of events they were setting in motion when they did it, but I’m going to blame them, even so.

I blame them for the steady decline in the credibility of American athletics since that day in the summer of ’72 that referees – whether out of confusion or bias or something else – gave the Russians not two but three chances to defeat the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team in the Olympic finals at Munich, West Germany (for those of you too young to remember, there was still a West Germany then).

It all came to a head for me on nearly 45 years later, when the New England Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI(e). I added that lowercase Roman letter after the uppercase Roman numerals to illustrate a point: American sports have lost credibility with me, because a team built by a couple of cheaters won the biggest game on the biggest stage.

I’m not suggesting that the Patriots cheated to win this particular game; there’s no evidence they did. But they did cheat by videotaping signals used by the New York Jets defensive coaches back in 2007, and a report suggests they recorded 40 other games played by opponents starting as far back as 2000 in what’s now known as the Spygate scandal. The subsequent Deflategate controversy pales in comparison to that, at least in my mind, but it’s another example of the same team breaking the rules in order to get an edge.

The funny thing is, the Patriots didn’t need that edge most of the time. They could have probably won without it, as they did against the Falcons on Sunday. Or did they? That’s the thing: You never really know. The Patriots have already fooled us twice and gotten caught. Shame on us. How many other times have they fooled us without anyone even knowing?

In fact, that’s an argument I’ve heard used by more than one person defending the Patriots: “Everybody does it; they just happened to get caught.”

Maybe, maybe not. But if so, it only validates my current feeling of estrangement from American sports, because if everybody’s doing it, why bother? What do the results really mean, anyway? That one team is better at cheating than the other?

That seems like the logical conclusion to me.

Hackers and users

In the month before the Super Bowl, Major League Baseball fined the St. Louis Cardinals for hacking into the Houston Astros’ computer database, penalizing them a couple of draft picks and banning the hacker for life.

I wondered at the time why the NFL hadn’t banned Patriots coach Bill Belichick for life in response to Spygate, but the answer appears obvious: Does anyone know the name of the Cardinals hacker before the Astros incident, or was he just another Star Trek redshirt who could be vaporized without anyone really caring?

Belichick, the most successful coach of the most successful team in the NFL, was a different matter. Ban him, and it would reflect poorly on a league whose mantra is to “protect the shield” – supposedly referring to the NFL logo. Don’t let that fool you, though. It’s really about protecting the cash cow behind the shield.

At the same time baseball was doing the right thing in banning the St. Louis hacker, though, Hall of Fame voters were waffling on the idea of giving their blessing to various players linked to steroid use in the 1990s and 2000s.

Players such as Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds – a pair referred to by one writer as “the pharmaceutical daily double” – both received 54 percent of the votes in 2017 after getting just 35 percent three years earlier. You need 75 percent to make it into the Hall, and they’re trending in that direction. The consensus among journalists seems to be that they’ll both get in.

The excuse, again, is that “everybody was doing it,” so to deprive them of a place in Cooperstown would be to, essentially, condemn an entire generation of baseball as illegitimate.

Unfortunately, it was.

The suspicion that everyone was doing it doesn’t make it more legitimate, but less so – except, apparently, in the minds of the majority of Hall of Fame voters.

The turning point: 1972

Scandals are nothing new to American sports, but the way we deal with them is. This is where the Russian debacle of ’72 comes in. Americans were so incensed that they began a campaign to allow pro basketball players to compete in the Olympics. We’d show those no good, cheating sons of Boris and Natasha! We’d assemble a “dream team”of the NBA’s best, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.

That’s exactly what we did. And, I’ll admit, I was standing right there cheering the process along. Karma might be a bitch, but Michael and Magic and Larry were basketball gods looking down from Mount Olympus on those puny humans hiding behind their iron curtain. The Russians didn’t stand a chance.

Neither did we, though, because when we decided to beat those commies over the head with our capitalist might, we ushered in an era of the almighty dollar in sports. It probably would have happened anyway, but it’s fun to blame the Russians, don’t you think? Besides, the 1972 game serves as a convenient dividing line between the era of small-time athletics and big business sports.

We’ve been boiling like frogs as we’ve gone from zero tolerance to zero credibility. Consider:

In 1919, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned Shoeless Joe Jackson for life based on the mere accusation that he helped throw the 1919 World Series. A jury acquitted him, but it didn’t matter to Landis, who decreed that Jackson never play again and never be eligible for the Hall of Fame. Modern Hall voters, by contrast, are likely to let Bonds and Clemens in. What the heck, right? Everybody was doing it.

In Green Bay, the last bastion of the small-town American football dream, the Packers play in a stadium built 60 years ago and are owned by the city itself. Meanwhile, the money-grubbing owner of the Chargers turns his back on the city of San Diego because it won’t give him hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to replace a stadium built a decade after the Packers built theirs.

The Rollerball prophecy

All in all, the NFL itself is looking more and more like Rollerball every day. For those of you who don’t remember that 1975 movie, let me refresh your memories: It centers on a then-futuristic sports league that puts corporate greed ahead of everything else and self-destructs in a vain attempt to keep its most popular player from undermining the “brand.”

The film is set in 2018. Its hero, portrayed by James Caan, plays for a team based in Houston that’s owned by the Energy Corporation. Flash forward to this year’s Super Bowl, which was played in Houston at something called NRG Stadium.

Hmmm.

Rollerball destroyed itself by making its players expendable, allowing them to maim and kill one another in bloodfests and looked more like gladiatorial combat than sport. The NFL hasn’t gone quite that far. But many players have paid a heavy physical and cognitive price for the steroids they used and the head injuries they sustained during their careers. In one study, researchers found evidence of degenerative brain disease in 76 of the 79 players they examined.

College football, meanwhile, has become a cash cow for “educational” institutions that rake in money hand-over-fist from bloated TV contracts. The schools lucky enough to be in elite Power 5 conferences don’t want to share much of that money with the less fortunate, though. They’ve transformed schools that used to be called mid-majors into irrelevant minors, denying them a seat at the championship table – and the cash register.

It didn’t used to be that way.

Backlash and fatigue

Maybe our collective patience is starting to wear thin. San Diegans refused to finance the glitzy stadium that owner Dean Spanos demanded. The NFL’s television ratings fell 9 percent during the regular season and 6 percent for the playoffs. Fewer people watched the college football championship game, too. Fantasy football participation, which has driven much of the NFL’s growth the past few years, plateaued.

None of this means that the NFL, the Power 5 or big-money sports in general is on the verge of imminent collapse. Far from it. Still, more and more of us have grown tired of it all. We pay through the nose for cable access or box seats. And for what? To watch one group of cheaters play another group of might-be-cheaters? To pay for the fat cats to operate their assembly line of athletes, so many of whom wind up disabled or brain damaged for the sake of the almighty dollar?

I’m not on some holier-than-thou crusade here. I’ve loved watching sports all my life, and I don’t feel the least bit guilty for that. But I woke up the morning after the Super Bowl and realized I just don’t love it anymore. I’m not even sure I like it. I’m not trying to claim any moral high ground, I’m just not sure I care.

I’m not saying I’ll never watch sports again, but I seriously doubt I’ll ever enjoy it the way I used to. In an era where “everybody does it,” there’s no one left to root for. Except maybe the Green Bay Packers.

I always did like cheese.

We let the trolls out, and now they're running the show

“Don’t feed the trolls,” they say.

Good advice, but it’s not that easy these days.

Our lives have become a Facebook group, a Twitter feed, a Reddit thread. We haven’t just immersed ourselves in those things; it’s more pervasive than that: We’ve started to rebuild our society in their image. Welcome to the social media experiment of the 21st century.

It’s an experiment we started without any clear plan to prove our hypothesis. Hell, we don’t even have a hypothesis. We’re flying by the seat of our pants into a radioactive “social laboratory.” Whether we’ll make it out in one piece is anybody’s guess.

The new reality

Mass communication has always played a huge role in defining us as a society. We’ve read our daily newspaper, gathered around the radio for fireside chats, watched newsreels and fantasies at the local theater and vegged out in front of the TV. But this is different. Those media — with the exception of the occasional letter to the editor — were all passive, and that allowed us to keep the trolls safely tucked away under their bridge, where they belonged.

Social media have changed all that because they’re, well, social. Who let the trolls out? We did, and they’re not confined to chat rooms and message boards anymore. They’re running around loose in the real world, wreaking havoc and doing their best to tear our social fabric to shreds.

Take this Milo Whatshisname, for instance. This self-described “dangerous faggot” goes around the country on a speaking tour designed to piss people off. The more outrageous he is, the more outrage he provokes. People get angry and protest, which leads to media coverage and — voila! — the attention he’s been seeking. Game over. The protesters are playing right into his hands.

But in an era when trolls are running amok, having escaped the confines of the computer screen, do they really have much choice?

The troll’s game

Imagine you run a social media group. You set some ground rules, start sharing ideas … and inevitably, a troll finds his way in.

He hasn’t been there long before he starts causing trouble. He rails against you for refusing to delete something he finds offensive. Then he accuses you of censorship when you delete one of his posts – ignoring the fact that it violates your ground rules. That just means (according to him) those rules should be changed. In fact, he says, he could do a better job of running the group, and he lets everyone there know it.

Now imagine you can’t block the guy, and members of the group can’t leave. He’s got a captive audience, and even though a lot of members tune him out, a lot of others start listening because he’s so loud and insistent he’s hard to ignore. He finds out what they’re angry about, and he tells them he’s angry too; then he takes that shared anger and directs it at you.

It isn’t long before the guy dominates the group’s discussion. Ideas don’t matter anymore. All that matters a single question: Are you for the troll or against him? The question has to be resolved, so the group decides to vote on who should be in charge, you or him.

In fact, however, the vote doesn’t really resolve anything. Whoever wins, the other side feels alienated. But remember, no one can leave. The troll doesn’t really care who wins: All that matters to him is that he’s the center of attention, and he’ll still be the same attention-seeking drama king regardless of the outcome.

The group, meanwhile, has become dysfunctional and paralyzed. As long as it’s spending all its time talking about him, it can’t be bothered to discuss actual ideas. To look for innovation. To work toward solutions.

A world without rules

“Wait a minute,” you might object. “That stuff doesn’t really happen on social media. There are safeguards. You can block people. You can leave groups.”

And you’d be right.

But this isn’t about social media anymore. It’s about what happens when you take the culture of social media and apply it in the real world, where those safeguards don’t exist.

In the real world, trolls can get elected, and you can’t leave – unless you’re wealthy enough to emigrate, and assuming you want to abandon the place you’ve called home all your life.

It’s easy to avoid feeding the trolls when they don’t have power. When they do, it’s a different matter entirely. Do we ignore them, knowing they’re just in it for the attention? Will that rob them of their power? Or do we actively oppose them, fearful that this very thirst for attention will motivate them to keep pushing the envelope … until it falls off the table into the rubbish heap?

Social media aren’t to blame for this dilemma. The fault is ours for thinking we can apply the rules of social media to real life when we can’t.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve systematically imposed the social media template on the real world. We’ve created a culture in which break room conversations sound like rhetoric from Reddit; where science and pragmatism take a back seat to ideology; where politicians decide to campaign (and govern!) via Twitter.

And where the trolls are running the show.

They’ve escaped from under the bridge and want more than anything to put us there instead. It’s a bridge we built ourselves using social media, and if we’re not careful, it’s going to come crashing down on all of our heads.

Chargers in L.A.: A marriage of inconvenience

I’m known for being diplomatic – even overly subtle – and I don’t like calling people names, but I’ll come right out and say it: Dean Spanos is an idiot.

Only an idiot would use a bad deal as leverage to get a better one, and that’s what Spanos did with his Los Angeles gambit. When the better deal didn’t come through, because San Diego didn’t want to pony up millions of dollars to keep the Chargers, Spanos probably had no choice but to follow through on his threat and move to L.A.

San Diego called his bluff, and instead of folding, he decided to pull his bid off the table and leave in a huff.

Nice.

Now he’s stuck in a city that doesn’t support losing teams – which the Chargers most definitely are at the moment, having lost five in a row to finish 5-11. Not only that, he’ll be playing second fiddle to the Rams, who have won even fewer games (4) than the Chargers did this past season.

The Rams sold a lot of tickets in their first year back, but thousands of those ticketholders stopped bothering to show up when the team’s fortunes took a nosedive. That’s how it works in L.A. People have better things to do than to sit around and watch bad teams play bad football. Fans there have attention spans shorter than the last movie trailer they saw … which they probably don’t remember, anyway.

I spent six years in L.A. back when the Dodgers were a baseball powerhouse, regularly contending for the National League championship. Even then, the joke was that fans would show up at Dodger Stadium in the third inning and hang around a few innings, then hightail it for the exits at the seventh-inning stretch. And it wasn’t far from the truth.

(The Chargers new logo, incidentally, is a blatant ripoff of the Dodgers'.)

Supply, but no demand

Even with all that, it might have made sense to move the Chargers if there was a yearning among Angelenos to make the team their own. But there’s not. There was significant support for the Rams to move back, but no one I know of – except Mr. Spanos – seems to care about having the Chargers in the City of Angels. To quote one old car dealer’s vintage commercials, “Nobody, but noooooobody.”

Spanos probably feels like he has to move because San Diego voters turned down a ballot measure that would have thrown millions of public dollars his way to finance a new stadium. Now Rams owner Stan Kroenke will be paying for the move instead: Under the deal, the Chargers will pay $1 in rent to use Kroenke’s brand-spanking-new Inglewood stadium when it opens.

You have to hand it to Spanos. At least he’s consistent: He always wants someone else to pay for his failures.

The problem is, with no support in L.A., he’ll ultimately be on the hook anyway, even with the sweet rent deal. There’s little doubt that the metroplex will turn up its collective noses at the Chargers, who have virtually no history there and even less history of winning.

The one season they did play in Los Angeles (1960) was actually one of their best: They actually made it to the AFL Championship Game. But that wasn’t good enough to interest L.A. fans back then: The Chargers’ crowds were so sparse they wound up moving to San Diego the next season.

Now they’re back. But what makes Spanos think a losing team will do any better this time around – even if the team is more established, and pro football is a far bigger deal than it was back then?

Artless dud

You might think a businessman like Spanos would know a bad deal when it hits him over the head, but you have to remember that Dean inherited the team from dear old daddy, the guy who really made the family fortune.

And the current fiasco only proves the younger Spanos’ ineptitude as a businessman. Forget “Art of the Deal,” this was one artless dud.

First he alienated Charger fans by threatening to move – to such an extent that attendance fell significantly this past season. Memo to Dean: When you’ve got one foot out the door, you’re not a very attractive suitor. After support in San Diego (predictably) withered, he had little choice but to take that other foot and step out of the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

But if fewer people wanted him in San Diego than before, fewer still want him in L.A.

Winning is the only way

The Chargers are a team without a country, and they're likely to remain so unless they become very big winners very fast. The former San Diego Clippers will always play second fiddle to the Lakers in Los Angeles, even though they're winning these days and the Lakers have spent the past couple of seasons at the bottom of the NBA barrel.

Spanos should have been paying attention.

None of this matters now, though. Spanos has made his decision to pack his bags for Los Angeles, and all the pieces are in place for the Los Angeles Chargers to become the biggest football flop since Vince McMahon’s XFL. It took just a little more than a decade for the Raiders to hightail it out of L.A. and back to Oakland; I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happen here.

And considering how Dean Spanos has treated the fans of San Diego, I hope I’m right.

Postscript: I fully expect we’re at the end of that era when NFL owners are able to demand massive public funds for shiny new stadiums every 10 years. San Diego said, “No.” And with the NFL’s TV ratings down an average of 8 percent in 2016, cities may soon have a lot more leverage than they do now. Stay tuned …

"Rogue One" is no Force to be reckoned with

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

This time, the Empire has no clothes.

Critics and fans seem to be enjoying the latest Star Wars movie, with 85 percent of critics and 89 percent of fans on Rotten Tomatoes saying they enjoyed it.

I’m not sure what movie most of them are watching, but I’m not sure it was the same one I saw on New Year’s Day. The one I watched featured two-dimensional characters, hackneyed dialogue, a parade of clichés and action scenes that seemed interminable.

It’s almost as if fans were so relieved at how good The Force Awakens was, they were willing to assume Disney would roll out the same level of quality in its second visit to the Star Wars universe.

No such luck.

Rogue One fell flat for me almost from the outset. The backstory for its main protagonist, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), seemed all too familiar: The Empire sends its goons to an isolated outpost to disrupt a family that’s apparently minding its own business. Jyn’s mother, inexplicably, leaves her daughter (who looks like she’s about 6 or 7 years old) out in the middle of nowhere to run back and confront a heavily armed group of men intent on taking her husband away.

Bad idea. It might have made sense if she had some command of the Force, but as it was, all she had was a gun and her misplaced bravado wound up getting her shot and killed – leaving her husband to be carted away and her daughter an orphan without food or shelter. I don’t know whether I’d nominate her for a Darwin Award or cross her off my Mother of the Year list first.

I hoped that the ensuing script would develop Jyn into a complex character I could root for, but that never happened. She seemed to little more than a pale imitation of Rey, the protagonist from The Force Awakens … but without any Force to awaken. In fact, there’s only one light sabre in the entire movie, and the Force seems largely relegated to the sidelines. It appears most often in empty pseudo-religious references, none more annoying than blind martial arts wizard Chirrut Îmwe’s (Donnie Yen) frenetic repetition of the mantra “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.”

I found this as annoying as many people found Jar Jar Binks.

The saying could have been employed with some gravitas at high-tension points to show the character focusing his resolve. But instead it seems to have been inserted almost randomly, and at a 78-rpm speed that makes Imwe sound like he’s channeling the Chipmunks. The result is that he seems more distracted than focused.

Beyond that, the Force takes a back seat to machine-gun shootouts and a space battle that seems tedious minus Luke Skywalker’s piloting prowess.

Boredom at breakneck speed

How can a viewer get bored with so much going on?

It can happen, believe me. The movie sets a frenetic pace but winds up taking us almost nowhere not fast enough. It starts out by hopscotching from planet to planet like a manic Bugs Bunny in space – without Marvin the Martian as comic relief. (There’s very little comedy in the movie, which is another of its failings; most of the humor involves throwback references to other Star Wars films.) And it ends with an overly long space battle in which X-wing fighters are really doing little more than providing cover for the really important stuff going on down below.

The writers seem to have been so absorbed with their action sequences that they ran out of time for meaningful character development. Forest Whitaker offers a hint at some complexity as Saw Gerrera, a radical who has broken with the Alliance to fight the Empire as a terrorist. But the conflict between this approach and the more cautious course charted by the Alliance is never explored fully (beyond the decision of Jyn and company to fly off to Scarif against the council’s order’s). Meanwhile, Gerrera himself chooses to stay behind and get crushed by an earthen tidal wave rather than trying to escape. In essence, the character acts against his own survival instincts and passes up the chance to continue a fight to which he has dedicated his life.

It makes zero sense.

For some reason, the writers ate up valuable screen time with a meaningless flashback early in the movie, a “feel-good” cameo by C3PO and R2D2 that had no relevance to the script and several “appearances” by a CGI version of Peter Cushing – who was reanimated (he’s been dead for more than two decades) to reprise a role that could have been left out of the script without being missed. Better yet, the writers could have used Darth Vader in a more central role, given the fact that Vader’s voice – James Earl Jones – is still very much alive and his armor requires zero CGI. But maybe that was the point: The filmmakers wanted to show off their CGI prowess, and if you think whiz-bang special effects are what made the Star Wars franchise interesting, that’s exactly what you’re likely to do.

And yes, the special effects are part of it. The climactic scenes on and above Scarif are dazzling, but the scene – with its palm trees and tropical setting – reminded me of the climactic scene of Men in Black 3, which played out similarly with a tense encounter atop a high tower, and to much better effect. Then again, I challenge anyone to argue that Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones or Josh Brolin wouldn’t have made Rogue One a better movie.

Killing spree

If you’re introducing new actors and new characters, it’s hard to care much about them when they’re getting killed off left and right before we get a chance to really know them. George R.R. Martin may dispatch beloved (and hated) characters with gleeful abandon, but at least he lets us get acquainted before they die. The same can’t be said for the characters in Rogue One, virtually all of whom perish before the carnage is over – even a reprogrammed imperial droid. The scene in which Jyn and nascent love interest Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) die on the beach at the end fails to elicit much pathos because there’s not enough time for their relationship to develop any depth.

Killing everyone off, to be sure, saves the writers from explaining why they don’t appear in the series’ “next” movie, chronologically speaking (the original Star Wars), given the fact that it was released nearly four decades ago.

Maybe CGI could have solved that problem for them, too. Thankfully, they knew better than to monkey around with a classic.

And a classic is one thing Rogue One is not. If you're expecting a film on a par with the original trilogy, this is not the Star Wars you're looking for. No offense to those who enjoyed it, but if The Force Awakens injected a new hope into the franchise, this installment did the opposite. My personal hope is that Disney returns to the Rey-Finn storyline launched in the 2015 film and dispenses with further prequels, which always seem to be more disappointing than the movies in the series that advance the story chronologically.

I’ll go see that movie. Rogue One didn’t kill my enjoyment of Star Wars, even though it tried its best.

Electoral College: a living monument to slavery's folly

I told myself I wasn’t going to blog about politics again for a while, but since I didn’t tell anyone else (until now), I’m safe, right?

Even if I’m not, I don’t care, because this Electoral College thing is really sticking in my craw – and not because of how it affected the current election. That’s over and done with, but the E.C. is still with us, enshrined in the very Constitution it contradicts (more on that later) and giving rural voters a built-in advantage over those of us in big states and big cities.

I live in one of those big states: California. And the most common argument I hear in favor of the E.C. runs something like this: “We wouldn’t want those people in California deciding the next president, would we?”

Being one of “those people,” I take offense.

Oh, sure, it’s fine the give tiny Vermont and Iowa an outsized say in who gets nominated. Aren’t they cute little states? Don’t they just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? But if, as a Californian, I object that my general election ballot is worth less than half a Wyoming voter’s vote, I’m a big bad bully.

Geography vs. democracy

For comparison’s sake, imagine that each vote cast in Alice Springs, a town of 27,000 in Australia’s central desert, was worth more than a ballot filled out in Sydney, where 21% of the country’s people. Or that a vote in northern Russia was counted more heavily than one cast in Moscow (assuming Putinland had a functioning democracy) just because Siberia covers 77 percent of that nation’s land area.

Unfair is unfair, no matter where you happen to live. And we’re talking about the United States, here, the self-described beacon of democratic freedom.

It can be argued the E.C. was never about democracy. Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College was meant to reflect “the sense of the people” while entrusting the actual selection to “men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances of favorable deliberation.” He wanted to make sure no one would ever become president unless he was “endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

But if that’s what the founders wanted, they don’t have it now. The modern Electoral College neither reflects “the sense of the people” nor does it allow for any analysis or deliberation. Many electors are compelled by law to vote for candidates based on the popular vote, eliminating any check against an unqualified candidate winning office while, at the same time, potentially forcing them to participate in the election of someone who doesn’t reflect the overall sense of the people.

So, the modern Electoral College is a failure on both counts.

What it does succeed in doing is thumbing its nose at the concept of one person, one vote: the principle of equal protection guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The argument that it’s meant to reflect geographic influence only amplifies the problem. Geographic areas aren’t people, any more than corporations are, and granting them de facto voting rights makes about as much sense as scheduling a debate between Mount Lassen and Old Faithful.

A Constitution at odds with itself

Defenders of the E.C. try to explain that the Electoral College protects “rural America” from being buried under an avalanche of votes from the big cities. It preserves “geographic diversity,” they say – as though that’s the only kind of diversity that exists in this country. Never mind racial diversity, religious diversity, cultural diversity and so forth.

But wait. Say you want to try inflating the value of a person’s vote based on any of those factors. You can’t, because the 14th Amendment won’t let you. It was put in place expressly to prevent that from happening. Otherwise, there would be nothing to keep people in the majority from depriving African-Americans (or anybody else) of their right to vote, just because they happened to feel like it. The way the old South did.

Nothing, that is, except for the Electoral College. Under this system, votes in predominantly white rural areas do count more than votes from inner cities in densely populated states … where more African-Americans, Latinos and other minorities just happen to live.

Hmmmm.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, because the E.C. was created largely for the benefit of slave owners in Southern states who wouldn’t allow blacks to vote but also couldn’t stomach the idea of being badly outnumbered by free-state citizens in a straight popular vote. The Electoral College allowed them to have it both ways: They could count each slave as a fraction of a voter (three-fifths, to be exact) – even though those slaves didn’t actually vote. It was either ingenious or diabolical, depending on your point of view.

As James Madison put it: "The right of suffrage was much more diffusive (or widespread) in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes."

The Electoral College gave them that influence. Along with such contrivances as the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was designed to balance the interests of free and slave states, often by bending over backwards to placate the latter. Even so, the goal ultimately proved unattainable.

The house of cards came crashing down when the South seceded and started the Civil War. Then, when the North won, it granted African-Americans the right to vote and passed the 14th Amendment, enshrining the principle of one man, one vote in the Constitution. Everything that had been put in place to preserve the power of slave owners was swept aside.

Except the Electoral College, because it was already in the Constitution.

The E.C. remained in place even though it could no longer fulfill the purpose for which it was created: to help slave states. There no longer were any slave states. Or slaves. Just a bunch of pissed off former slaveholders who – despite the 14th Amendment – sought to keep blacks from voting by imposing things such as poll taxes, literacy tests and a host of other barriers later deemed to be unconstitutional.

Definitions of diversity

Here’s the upshot: Thanks to its place in the Constitution, the E.C. not only outlived its relevance, it preserved a power structure designed to bolster slavery – which was, most people would agree, an inherently unfair social system.

Is it any surprise that the E.C. is itself inherently unfair?

Rooted in an era before equal protection, it preserves the very framework that propped up the antebellum South. It’s a living relic of the slavery era that still manages to accomplish what poll taxes and literacy tests cannot: maximizing the rural white vote – just as it was intended to do. The Electoral College isn’t about preserving geographic diversity, it’s about constraining the kind of racial and ethnic diversity one finds in urban areas of highly populated states.

Embedded in the Constitution, the E.C. flies in the face of the 14th Amendment – which is part of this very same document.

It’s all but immune to reform, because the Constitution designed to be difficult to change (even when it contradicts itself). We citizens only seem to question it when it doesn’t match the popular vote, and the people it raises to power in such circumstance have less incentive than anyone else to challenge it.

I’m not saying you are a racist if you defend the Electoral College. What I am saying is that it was created in part to perpetuate racial inequality, so we shouldn’t be surprised if it does so. You can be resigned to it or even argue for it, but please don’t pretend it’s either fair or democratic. Land masses don’t vote. Slaves couldn’t, either.

As for California, it never was a slave state, but it and other urban centers remain chained to a skewed system that was designed to perpetuate a slave culture.

The moral of the story: If we want to be a free society, we should damned well start acting like one.

Christmas is the story of our lives

I’m going to wade into the “war on Christmas,” but it’s not what you might expect.

I like Christmas, and I always have. In fact, it’s probably my favorite holiday. That’s no earth-shattering revelation, because millions of people like Christmas, and it’s almost certainly the most popular holiday on the calendar.

What is surprising, and a bit sad, is that so many people have become so concerned with why we like (or should like) Christmas.

One person’s reasons might not be the same as another’s, and that’s perfectly okay.

For me, it’s not for any religious or spiritual reason: I actually find the whole “war on Christmas” thing pretty tedious. If you want to be offended by “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” all I can ask is, “Aren’t there more important things in life?” I mean, seriously. We could always emulate the British and compromise with “Happy Christmas,” but isn't the whole point to give and receive good wishes, no matter what words we use?

Should we be forced to acknowledge that the pine tree in the living room or the yule log on the fire were borrowed from European paganism? Should we worry too much about the fact that a springtime birth for Jesus was far more likely, based on biblical accounts, or that a December date was likely chosen to correspond with the winter solstice? Should we be forced to give Santa the cold shoulder because he’s become an object of cultural affection that "should" be reserved for that babe in the manger?

(I have a hunch cold shoulders don’t work too well on someone who lives at the North Pole; maybe we should all just chill instead.)

Then, there’s the gift-giving. I don’t like Christmas for any love the commercialism or any desire to brave the Mongol hordes on Black Friday and bring home a flat-screen TV for half the normal sticker price. I like a good sale as much as the next person, but I don’t like traffic jams, long lines or commercial pitches. And I don’t like that unspoken pressure to buy something of a certain value just because I’m afraid the person on the receiving end of my gift might be giving me something more expensive.

A lot of people love Christmas because they spend it with family (and a lot of people who aren't on good terms with their families don’t love it for the same reason). Me? I’m the only son of an only son who passed away a few months ago. My mom’s been gone for more than 20 years, and I’m in touch with precisely one of my extended blood relatives, whom I haven’t seen in person for years. So, the “time with family” aspect of the holiday really doesn’t apply to me – apart from the fact that I get to spend more time with my wife and that my stepson, whose company I enjoy, comes for a visit.

No, what I like about Christmas are the traditions. Some of them are no more than memories now, but those memories are sweeter than the cranberry sauce I used to eat with my turkey before the Type 2 diabetes kicked in.

Thanks for the memory

I remember when Christmas was a televised songfest, an excuse for crooners like Perry Como and Bing Crosby and Andy Williams to sing the songs that helped make them famous, or for younger talents like John Denver and Karen Carpenter to start new traditions that ended far too soon when they died far too young.

I remember Bing singing The Little Drummer Boy with Bowie, and I remember John Lennon turning an old ballad into a Christmas song with an anti-war message. I remember when Bob Hope sang Thanks for the Memory, when Dick Clark narrated the Times Square “ball drop” at midnight on New Year’s Eve and when Guy Lombardo’s orchestra played Auld Lang Syn.

I remember when I thought trolls were singing yuletide carols and “ ’round yon virgin” referred to the fact that Mary was rotund – because she was expecting a baby. And I remember wondering why old acquaintances should be forgot and what anyone would do with a gift of seven swans a-swimming if they didn’t happen to have a pond handy.

I remember Charlie Brown picking out that same forlorn little Christmas tree year after year, about the same time the residents of Whoville were making the Grinch’s tiny heart grow three times larger. And I remember Burl Ives and Jimmy Durante going all animated on us with annual TV tales of Rudolph and Frosty, respectively. (Ives’ animated character, Sam the Snowman, may have looked a little like Frosty, but he narrated Rudolph’s story.)

I remember the gift requests Santa fulfilled for me as a child, from a Slinky dog one Christmas to a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots set another year. I remember the large, wooden castle I assembled at my aunt’s house when we spent Christmas morning there, and I remember how my grandmother always got more gifts than anyone else … because she had more close relatives than anyone else!

I remember riding down Christmas Tree Lane in Fresno every year with my parents. Traveling at 5 miles per hour with the headlights off, I’d marvel at the strings of colorful lights that turned the street’s towering Deodar cedars into living Christmas trees, and I’d smile at the hundreds of decorations that transformed the houses on either side into treats for the eyes.

I remember caroling with some of my friends in high school and hanging those special family ornaments on the tree.

Christmas as chronology

But Christmas isn’t just memories. It’s the fact that the list of memories keeps growing, just like Santa’s list. There are new neighborhood decorations to explore, new gifts to wrap and open, new traditions to create. (Ever tried Irish cream in eggnog? You should. If you’ve got a sweet tooth, it puts the old rum standby to shame.)

“Wait a second,” you may be saying. “Didn’t you say you were joining the ‘war on Christmas’? Everything you’re saying seems very much in the holiday spirit.”

That’s actually my point: Christmas belongs to all of us. It’s not just a religious holiday or a reason to run up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. It’s not even merely an excuse to gather with family or drop a few dollars in the kettle by the supermarket door. It’s more than all those things. Christmas is, in a very real sense, a living chronicle of all the things that have come before, from waiting up all night as a child to spending that first Christmas with your sweetheart to spending that last one with your parents. At times, it’s joyous; at other times, it’s bittersweet, very much like life itself.

Christmas tells the story of our lives, and perhaps it’s because I’m a storyteller that it holds such appeal to me. But regardless of the reason, I know I’m not alone. I’m wading into the war on Christmas because I want to end it. Let's stop bickering about why we like Christmas and just enjoy the season, because when it comes right down to it, we don’t need an excuse for peace on earth and goodwill to men (and women, too, of course).

We just need to express it, to make it happen. That, to me, is the spirit of Christmas.

May you have a joyful one.