"News Illiteracy," Speaking Logic to Power — and Little League

"The power of news illiteracy. At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential,

embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans

are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read.

The willingness to believe purported news stories, often

riddled with typos or coming from unfamiliar outlets, is a

liability of today’s fragmented media and polarized politics.

Even the trolls themselves were surprised at what Americans would believe."

 — Evan Osnos, New Yorker, 16 February 2018

            Since the comments I incorporate here were in an e-mail post on a "thread" that got archived I can tell you exactly when I wrote this version of one of my standard themes; it was "Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2009 6:03:57 PM GMT." I was responding to a post about Poetry Slams and went on to discuss what I call — and relevant here — "The Little League Syndrome" (a minor obsession of mine). I was pleased to learn about poetry slams since the description had them sound like the youngsters involved are getting good experience using language, and getting back to at least some of the roots of (satiric) poetry: judged competitions. Throw in competitive insults, and you're in the teen culture I grew up in and back to the Old English and Old Irish traditions, and more recent cultures in fiction and the real world.

            The most immediate poster on the thread had used a sports analogy for poetry slams, which I thought a good one. The more hopeful side would be if young people start to take seriously the serious joke among intramural sports organizers that "Something really worth doing is worth doing poorly." The downside is that adults rarely want to let the kids run things. The history is the semi-professionalization of college and then high school sports, with intramurals among high school SAC's (Social/Athletic Clubs) giving way to "the Little League Syndrome," plus varsity sports, and adult organizing of intramurals. There's a good chance well-meaning/control-freak grownups will do the same with poetry slams - and the kids will have to move on to something else.

            This is nothing new. Back in Chicago in 1961, a control-freak senior-class- ... Coordinator(?), well, Semi-Administrator accused me of "never" participating in our high school activities. I told her that I did participate but, indeed, not all that much since, "I can never be elected principal; so I put my effort into groups where I can at least have some clout." When asked by the director of a new Jewish Community Center what they could best do for the local teens, I said, "Mostly, leave them alone. Rent to them - at a fair price - but let them run their own events. Let them learn to organize."

            Alexis de Tocqueville praised Americans for the ability to organize themselves and not wait for some State official to come along and organize things. What with the Little League Syndrome in sports and probably poetry, dance, and music, things may be getting worse for civic life and civil debate. What I learned about politics I partly "absorbed" growing up in the warm, corrupt heart of the Chicago Democratic Organization, but mostly from adult-independent clubs in high school and my fraternity in college. The down sides of such groups have been rightly stressed, but even a street gang teaches important lessons, including the various means of getting your peers to do what you want (them) to do.

            When it came up in discussion — I have no idea what the context was — some of my university undergraduate students were surprised to learn that in the high schools in my area we kids organized our own sports leagues. ("Hey, we didn't build the parks! We just organized a schedule and signed up.") Some kids have never even organized a pickup basketball game.

            Earlier than that 2009 post, I wrote a piece for a newspaper guest column and guest lecturing with a suggested title something like, "Be Happy Johnny Can Talk," riffing on titles like, "Why Johnny Can't Read," "Why Johnny Can't Write." I wrote there about Little-League Syndrome and what has since been called "Helicopter Parenting." Between the two, and other influences, Americans were producing a lot of middle-class kids who make highly proficient (figurative) drones and worker bees in public- and private-sector bureaucratic hives, but not very good citizens.

            Johnny and later Jane weren't and aren't encouraged much to think critically and argue civilly.

            Not in classes in school with rote learning, machine-graded exams, and the student methodology of "cram and regurgitate." Take a moment to think seriously about that last figure of speech. Cram it down; don't "chew on a thought" — and then vomit it out as soon as possible, lest you chew on an idea too long, decide to swallow it, and then digest and assimilate it, making it part of you, maybe changing you.

            But classes are only part of school, and school is only part of kids' lives. Also part of school is "the life of the mind" on the school-yard and with friends — or lack thereof or utter contempt therefor. And home-life counts, especially with actual children.

            A friend suggests any chance you give her that American discourse has gone straight downhill since families no longer eat together and kids don't get supervised practice in arguing with one another. I stress the decline of more or less lawful kid-run activities and the increasing horror of "free-range kids." (Hitchhiking, for example, had its advantages of meeting strangers and talking with them, as well as the danger of the occasional serial-killer psychopath.)

            I suspect a crucial reason John and Jane Q. Public don't think too good is that they're not called upon that often to think much at all, combined with a media and advertising environment where they're encouraged to make decisions based on impulse, emotions, and spurious appeals. "The bigger the burger, the better the burger. The burgers are bigger at Burger King," to quote a classic commercial ca. 1967. Uh-huh. "And," as we wise-ass youngsters and young adults used to ask, "if it's a shit-burger?"

            Certainly American kids aren't asked to do much formal analysis of commercials, propaganda, political, ahem discourse, or the things their superiors lay on them.

            Coach says s/he wants "110% from each of you for the team"? Will Johnny Jock or Jane Sports-Bra get praised for a raised hand and, "Coach, you can't have more than 100%, and even 30% of our time and effort is way too much. We understand that you want a kind of blank check from us — but just how much of our time and effort do you actually want? We have other commitments." I wouldn't count on that going over very well. Worse if instead of Coach it's your boss.

            Indeed, at an older age, approaching 30, I sat next to the President of Miami University as a new, untenured, almost-assistant professor (don't ask), while he looked out the window at a campus traffic jam during New Student Week and intoned, "If we got rid of the 'No Car' Rule, we'd have a jam like that every day." I thought for a half moment — after a full moment I would've known better — and said, "Non sequitur, Mr. President; that doesn't follow." He looked at me. I replied, "Those are parents' cars for the most part; we don't know what it'd be like if the students drove up on their own … or during the year … no parents' cars around." And then some ancient part of my brain that handles survival stuff kicked through to the speech mechanism and shoved a spear into the gears, while screaming without words, "Shut up, already, you idiot! Shut up!!!" A bit after retirement, I asked our now-former President if I recalled that incident correctly — he had a phenomenal memory — and he replied that, Oh, yes, that's how he remembered it; he'd never forgotten it. Which was reassuring about my memory, and ambiguously reassuring on my suspicions on a small part of the reason it took me so long to get tenure, get promoted, get … anything.

            As Kurt Vonnegut points out somewhere, Americans are programmed less to be thinking entities than agreeing machines. Speaking logic to Power is probably not in the program.

            And it's not just our failures to be courageous or exquisitely tactful in talking to others. It's bad enough that we don't listen to other people and take them seriously enough to argue civilly with them; most of us much of the time don't even listen carefully to ourselves.

            Listen to yourselves and others with (for my example for the last few months) "everybody," "nobody," "best," "worst," and other absolutes. With "best" and "worst" and such there's an old tradition here, going back at least as far as Beowulf and other Old English heroic poetry where it's almost always "the best sword," "the best mead hall," "the worst monster" until when you get a simple assertion like "That was a good king," the line stands out. As Mort Sahl pointed out in the 1980s or so, we don't have to give "The Grimmy Award" and something doesn't have to be the worst!! to be bad. Or the best to be good. And if the assertion is about "everybody" or "nobody," it can be refuted with, "Uh, I don't" or "I do." (And if it's on something sexual, check out a porn site: what you think nobody would like probably has its own pages and a standard abbreviation.)

            One of my frosh writing students started an essay with, "Since the beginning of time, Man ___________." I asked, "Are you dating 'The Beginning of Time' from the Big Bang or the rise of consciousness, or God's creating the world or what?" And he said he hadn't thought about that at all. Uh-huh, and
Does 'Man' include boys and girls and women and …?" He was getting uncomfortable, so I said, "Let's put it very formally, what's your data-set here — just who-all are you talking about?" And he said it was "me and my buddies back in high school." And I said, "Then you should start out with "Me and my buddies back in high school" — or "My buddies and I" for a formal essay, and then get on to just what you can talk about." I didn't add, I meant talking about without bullshitting his readers, most immediately me.

            "The worst disaster to hit America in modern times"? You've heard variations on such a line. I don't think they had what we'd think of as America in Medieval Times. Does that just mean "recently"? "That I can remember?" "That me and my buddies back in the newsroom could think of off-hand?" And a worse disaster than the burning of Washington DC during the War of 1812? Worse than the Civil War? Spanish Flu? The Great Depression? The attacks of 11 September 2001? Does some bad thing have to be the worst before your audience will pay attention?

            Maybe

            So we get the sort of language-inflation and hyperbole we have gotten used to — and inured to — in advertising.

            About once a year back when I was in the Ed Biz in English, I'd write across the chalkboard in large letters, WORDS MEAN. And meaningful words should go into sentences and paragraphs in at least a vaguely coherent manner and add up a fair amount of the time as an insightful description or useful set of instructions or even a rational political analysis and sensible recommendations for action.

            Meanwhile, it'd be nice if people could as least read such discourse and differentiate it from what we can compact into a set labeled bullshit.

Teaching Americans to Argue Civilly

             In a quietly inspiring story in the USA Today network of newspapers, Gabe Cavallaro tells how Meg Heubeck of the Center for Politics' Youth Leadership Initiative (UVa) "works with teachers nationally to help students respectfully deal with the divides of our society through civil discourse, debate[,] and compromise."

            From what I've seen in comment sections of articles on line, and based in 40 years teaching courses in rhetoric, "the art of ethical persuasion," I'll suggest a broader project.

            One of the reasons so much of our public discourse is uncivil is that too few Americans know how to put together an argument and therefore fall back on personal attack. (Too few Americans can argue well privately with a spouse or other family member or friend, which is a related issue.)

            For the last three generations, middle-class kids have gotten little practice arguing in contexts they care about. Their families have fewer children, and family dinners have become rare, so young children don't get supervised practice arguing with siblings, with feedback from parents on the order of "'Johnny is a doodie-head' is not an argument!" Older children aren't routinely shooed out of the house to organize their own games, and by the time they're teens moving toward adulthood, economically-privileged kids are trapped in what I've called "The Little-League Syndrome."

            Little League Baseball and similar organizations for other sports, and grammar school and high-school athletic teams, teach kids to play the sports well, and these adult-organized and coached sports have been excellent for father-daughter relationships. They have been bad, though, for allowing American kids opportunities to organize their own activities and learn how to persuade their peers.

            On a couple of occasions, my students were surprised to learn my age cohort really didn't have Little League when and where I grew up, but teenage boys had high school fraternities and social-athletic clubs and ran our own leagues. "It's not like we built the parks and playing fields," I told my students, but we did put together teams, arrange schedules, and, sometimes, had to decide what to do with some schmucks who'd embezzled the money the clubs had chipped in for trophies.

            And there were year clubs for boys and for girls that arranged social events.

            Poorer American kids still have gangs — which look to me authoritarian and led by adults — but current fashions in middle-class American parenting and school management seem to preclude kids' organizing their own activities.

            So, one thing that can be done to improve American discourse is for parents and other adults to teach children basic manners and insist on basic decency to others — including no bullying — and to draw back a bit at a time to allow older kids to run more of their own activities and have to persuade one another to do what they want them to do.

            Little League and such teaches kids how to fit into a bureaucracy and follow orders; kid-organized activities teach democratic organizing, which includes persuasion of peers on issues kids care about (and some activities that may legitimately horrify their parents and others in authority).

            The schools need to teach things kids may care less about: argument as a kind of summation of skills, but also description and definition and analysis and other "modes" of discourse. For a slogan for this kind of teaching, we used to have "Unplug the Scantron machines!": i.e., get rid of multiple-choice tests (as an ultimate goal) and have students write out present orally descriptions, extended definitions, analyses, and finally arguments.

            Logical thought isn't exactly natural, and kids need to be taught, and adults need to be reminded, how to use evidence and present a logical argument (if one with enough of an emotional appeal to get it accepted).

            And young adults and some older ones need to be taught how to debate with one another on matters for adults, and for citizens.

            This doesn't mean just pure politics, but — obviously! — issues in the sciences, including military science and tactics, history, theology, and the arts. And it means some training in the sort of deep analysis where you can figure out why political arguments so often go in circles.

            One reasons for a "failure to communicate": Different people often use the same key words with different meanings. E.g., if a human being is essentially a soul to be saved and "ensoulment" occurs at conception, then abortion may be worse than murder. If you're not big on theories of souls and/or if you think theological issues shouldn't enter American politics — then you'll have a different view on abortion (and we haven't even gotten to historical questions on control of women's bodies!). For another example, what do we mean by "patriot"? In 1969 or so, I told an FBI agent, "Mr. N_____ is a very patriotic young man" since Mr. N_____ started out in Marine ROTC, studied US warfare in Vietnam and decided it was wrong, dropped his plans for a military career, and joined the Peace Movement, actively opposing the war. Now that is a patriot, like John Kerry, only a bit earlier. The FBI agent may have had different ideas on patriotism and, indeed, might have thought my idea of a patriot his idea of a traitor.

            The sort of rough-and-ready analysis I just did requires training, and pulling it off in the real world requires practice — a lot of practice — in controlling one's temper and getting opponents to control theirs.

            Meg Heubeck is doing important and difficult work; she deserves a wide variety of support.

Waco: Cossacks v. Bandidos / Team America: Typical More than Exceptional

"Let 'em all go to hell, except Cave 76!"

                  Mel Brooks's 2000-Year Old Man

 

"[T]he battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton […]"

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn  (1941),

alluding to a probably apocryphal quotation

 

"USA! USA!"

— US Fan Chant for US v. USSR Hockey, Winter Olympics, 1980

— US Fan Chant, Operation Desert Storm, 1991

            I tried to come up with a variation on "Hell hath no Fury like a woman scorned" that would make a similar statement about bores. Having just come from a meeting of my local Home Owners' Association, I'll try "The complainers klatch of an HOA has few bores as virulent as a sports fan disappointed." Not a great line, but it'll do to introduce a scene burned into my memory of getting cornered at a party by a drunk Cincinnati Reds fan who felt utterly betrayed that his team, against the laws of God, Nature, and probability was having so lousy a season. After listening to his complaints for, oh, let's say an eon or so, I finally said that I admired his concern for the team and his loyalty to its leadership, but clearly it was time for him to fire the manager and shake up the staff. "I can't do that," he said, sobering up a bit; "only Marge Schott can fire a manager." To which I replied, "Then the Cincy Reds is Marge Schott's team, not yours, and you needn't be so emotionally involved." And I slipped away.

            I understand, somewhat, the feelings of this fan. One time, when I was fourteen, I was at a football game with my (by God!) high school's team — the  Lake View High Wildcats — just three point behind or something like that in the last seconds of play, and our quarterback threw a secular, public school version of a Hail-Mary pass just when the cheerleaders and their boy friends were able to get our school pennant on a long pole and wave it in a great arc across our field of vision watching the field of play and we all jumped up and cheered and the ball game down … way short of the receiver and the goal line, and we lost the game.

            I felt a twinge of keen disappointment at the time, and obviously a memorable twinge — that time was nearly sixty years ago — but we loyal Lake View-ites left the stadium and bought pizza, and got on with our lives.

            A game's a game, and school was just school.

            And maybe also, Lake View High School in Chicago is in the Cubs' neighborhood, and most of our elders either became rabid fans or learned not to get too emotionally involved in games other people played.

            Well, and throw in the fact that I'd played grammar-school football but stopped growing at 5'2", and serious football (to say nothing of basketball) was definitely something other guys played.

            The Beach Boys hadn't sung "Be True to Your School" yet — that song came out in 1963, and I graduated high school in 1961 — but I was and remain pretty loyal to my high school, attending class reunions and having donated a media collection and all. But I wasn't into the idea of my high school, apparently, as much as most.

            Or at least that was the accusation of Mrs. Wilkinson, the permanent, immovable Senior Class Adviser, against me. And she had a point.

            My older sister had attended Senn High School before district boundaries were tightened up, and I was in a high school fraternity that had more members from Senn and some other North Side schools than from Lake View, so I understood that it was just where you lived that determined which school you went to, and that North Side Chicago public high schools weren't all that different.

            So "my high school" wasn't a major deal for me, and when challenged by Mrs. Wilkinson, I had to take somewhat seriously her hyperbolic, "You never participate in school functions!"

            I told her that the "never" was wrong — I was in Key Club and had done some school service stuff, especially back when I was in ROTC ("JROTC" to be exact) — but, okay, I certainly did far less than I might have.

            "I can never be elected high school Principal," I finally told her; "so I concentrate my efforts where I can be elected president and have some clout."

            More exactly, my philosophy of personal politics, as I later learned, was that of Creon in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: I wanted a situation where I could be elected president but preferred not to be; I liked being vice president of organizations. That way I had clout but could act quietly and, if necessary, pass the responsibility-buck up to the president. And if being VP meant doing occasional metaphorical hatchet-work so the president could keep his hands clean …, well, I could do that.

            My attitude was cemented in college when I joined a fraternity rather than live in the dorms. The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was and remains a very large school and something of a "total" institution: we had our own power plant, police, and fire department. I didn't want to add having the Big U as my landlord.

            In the fraternity, eventually, I could have at least a bit of influence over my minute part of the campus. Fraternity life meant taking a bit of shit as a pledge and a shitload of shit as a "neophyte" going through Hell Week. But after that I was a member of the community and would work my way up in seniority and could get elected to office.

            The University of Illinois did not offer undergraduates those sorts of option ca. 1963: you had no vote and little voice until graduation — and after graduation you were sent on your way. As I was later to gently chide my faculty colleagues who bad-mouthed fraternities, "Fraternities are a hell of a lot more democratic than the rest of the Big U."

            In the old frat lodge, I could at least decide how to paint my room. As I once said to a candidate for the U of I Student Senate, "The day Senate can determine the size of the wastebasket in the Student Senate office without clearing the decision with three deans and a vice president is the day I'll vote in a Student Senate election.

            Several years later, I become a board member of the English Graduate Student Association and then the University Graduate Student Association, but the Student Associations aspired to be like a union, not a "toy government," and we would talk about ourselves as graduate student government only if we got authority to tax graduate students and legislate campus-life regulations (which, of course, did not happen).

            My undergraduate fraternity was my fraternity in part because I had some say in its running, and also in part for reasons I will get to. The University of Illinois was "alma mater" and all — competing a bit with Cornell, where I went for an MA — but it wasn't exactly my university.

            Indeed, when the Big U came up with the title of a publication stressing "Your University," I responded with, "Oh, good! Let's sell it."

            But I do identify with the U of I, and I'm typing this wearing my new "ILLIONOIS"™ sweatshirt; and I wear an "Illini" cap from time to time, one time significant for where this ramble is going.

            I was wearing my Illini cap and was asked about it and got vaguely worried I'd be called out for the Indian name — but the guy just wanted to know if I was an Illini Football fan; and I said, "No; I'm an Illini." And he said, "You played football for Illinois?!" — see above on my size — and I told him, "No" again and said I went to school there, two degrees worth, and didn't add I had damn well earned the right to wear the cap.

            The University of Illinois both is and isn't "my" University, and it's an interesting question to whom it belongs. For three weeks it technically belonged to the attorney David Stevens, in terms of legal esoterica, and at law the University — although not the sports teams when I was there — was the Trustees. I would ask rhetorically, however, whether the University was the Trustees to the extent that they might burn down the University Library if they liked or even — in those days before e-books — disperse the collections. The collections are a national and world treasure, and the Trustees don't own them but, as the word "Trustees" suggests, hold them in trust.

            So I identified a lot with my high school and college fraternities, and more so my year club, because I had a say in running them and because many of the people in them, if far from all, were my friends. I can see identifying strongly with a sports team if you played on it (and weren't liable to be dropped or traded casually), and I identified with my high school and universities — a bit for status and more because I'd invested a lot of effort in my studies there.

            But enough about me ….

            That people identify with and feel part of small groups is no mystery: bonding with sexual mates, family, clan, and friends is rooted deeply in figurative human social and cultural DNA and ultimately underpinned by traits encoded in our literal DNA. "One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee," as Robert M. Yerkes said, and a reliable-looking website adds to that a Greek saying, "One man [is] no man." Most humans feel increasingly uncomfortable if isolated for a long time; "solitary confinement" is a serious punishment, and it's about as close as one can come to simple facts about human nature to assert "No man is an island / Entire of itself" — "no, nor woman neither" — and that human beings are social animals.

            What gets complicated and somewhat weird is identification with groups larger than a military fire team, year club, or sorority, or a platoon or clan or village. Or, for some, identifying even with a small group where you don't like the members.

            It's a joke — though a bitter one — that there are American bigots who love American while loathing 90% of Americans, and we used to joke, though with wonder (and exaggeration) more than bitterness, about guys in the fraternity chapter who "Love the house, but hate the brothers."

            Most of us, though, need "the house," the group, and it's occasionally scary how arbitrary that identification become. In the Jewish expression, there's "My schul is better than your schul": one's local synagog, or congregation, but also just "school." Was Lake View any better than Senn, or vice versa? Is 

Cornell significantly better than the U of I? Or, from the outside looking in — and ignoring what ethologists call territory and movie Mafiosi call "business"— why would the Texas motorcycle gang that Bandidos be a group one might identify with and be willing to die for, fighting against the Cossacks?

            A small motorcycle gang can be your "Cave 76," and Neolithic or Paleolithic rules might apply. But gangs nowadays, even motorcycle gangs, can get very big, and identification and loyalty beyond "Cave 76," identification and loyalty sometimes unto death, require explanation.

            Such loyalty and dedication clearly require some (apparently) peculiarly human talents, plus some indoctrination and individual effort. Apparently, humans and only humans on our planet can deal with the world with such vigorous abstraction that we can identify with symbols and react as if those symbols were human beings to whom we are bonded.

            Consider attacks upon sacred or "sacralized" symbols. There are people who will respond to the stomping on a crucifix or urinating on a Torah or lampooning the image of Mohammed or the burning of a flag or appropriating the word "Texas" as the "bottom rocker" on a motorcycle jacket with the same sort of physiological and physical reactions that they would with an attack upon one of their children.

            That is mysterious behavior and perhaps central to the larger mystery of why we can use the word "love" seriously for all of the parts of "I love my spouse, my children, my parents, my dog, and my country." Okay, we can say also, "I love ice cream," but our listeners will be confident that we wouldn't risk our lives for ice cream, not in the sense of putting our bodies between a tub of ice cream and a blowtorch. And okay, also, indeed, in combat men don't often die for their country but for their comrades and friends; but in a fair number of cases guys dying for their country — and some gals as well — got to where they were likely to get shot because of patriotic love and devotion.

            And that sort of love and devotion is for a more abstract abstraction than even a flag: a paradoxical "concrete symbol"; such love and devotion is for one's country, and that sort of love and devotion doesn't just happen: it is inculcated, or, in a nice image, instilled, i.e., added drop by drop.

            It is also reinforced by social conditions. If you're living in a neighborhood where loners tend to get beaten up or shot, it's a good idea to get other guys to watch your back, and there's strong pressure to join a gang: when the Sharks might knife you, it's a good idea to run with the Jets. When the Crips might shoot, you it's a good idea to become a Blood, and a really pressing matter if the Crips might kill you if you don't join the Bloods — and the Bloods might kill you as well.

            But for privileged folk pressures are subtler and for larger groups inculcation/instillation is a long-term process. We pick up our identity and our folkways almost as unconsciously as we pick up language. We learn how to operate in our families and neighborhoods and communities and so on outward, and we learn initially not so much "this is how we do things" but "this is how things are done." We're socialized and acculturated and that includes loyalties.

            By the time we reach adolescence, and our world expands beyond the family and — if we're lucky enough to have one — the neighborhood, then things get more complex because there are competitions for our loyalties.

            And there are people out there looking to attract our loyalties.

            Frequently, the attraction is weak and the competition would be silly if so much money and emotion weren't involved: as when we're tempted into "brand loyalties" and the fandom for sports teams or movie genres or music.

            Beyond those, however, matters are thoroughly serious, and best seen when they're deadly serious and necessarily highly concentrated, as in military "basic training and indoctrination," where instillation is something of a deluge.

            Classically, there's Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and the breaking down of a civilian and rebuilding a Marine. Part of this is the attraction of "The Few. The Proud." as the USMC slogan went — which is also said to have been picked up (or carried on) by the outlaw motorcycle gangs claiming to be "the [top] 1%" of badasses. More though is the following of traditional patterns of initiation.

            I'm confident of this assertion because I helped put together a new pledge training program for my fraternity, and we looked very carefully at child development, tribal rites of passage, and at the most basic parts of Basic Training in the US military.

            We decided that brutality was optional, and an option we rejected: we made sure pledging came with some pain — people value things in terms of the price they pay as much as for any intrinsic value — but stressing, "the little things." It's not so much Gunnery Sgt. Hartman and "I will P.T. you all until you fucking die! I'll P.T. you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk"; it's the "Sir" form of address and the saluting and the little arbitrary dip-shit rituals day in and day out, the routine drill and the drilled-in routines of the military in general and basic training strongly in particular.

            And in this way people — especially late-adolescent guy-type people — can be assimilated into a group and come to accept its authority.

            Which is not a bad thing, if, but only if, people incorporated into a group are eventually brought to consciousness of what has been done to their heads.

            Which is why I insisted that our fraternity "neophytes" had one question on their final exam before initiation that they had to answer correctly: Identifying the logic behind our more illogical rules for pledges. They had to figure out that the rules were arbitrary and that that was the point: we were requiring obedience — and the dumber the rule the purer the obedience — and thereby instilling acceptance of the authority of the group.

            Our group: that ol' frat lodge.

            Not their parents. Not the university. Not the State — or not only them; but we wanted our initiates to accept the authority of pretty much their peers before they went from a kind of mildly-indentured servant status (pledges) to part of the demos of what would probably be the most democratic institution they'd encounter. It's a pretty low bar, there, and "democracy" doesn't necessarily mean liberal democracy — note the status of ancient Athenian slaves or women or resident aliens about that issue — but we'd be more democratic than the university we were embedded in or the corporations Americans work for, or for most Americans, the government of the United States.

            We fail in America in not making enough people conscious of how their group identities get formed.

            The first national anthem, the 2000-Year Old Man, sang, was "Let 'em all go to hell / Except Cave 76!"; and that stance and way of dealing with the world is still with us, but dangerously expanded.

            The Battle of Waterloo was won in part on the playing fields of Eton because the young gentlemen of Eton were taught there and elsewhere at Eton to identify with their teams and with Eton and with the Empire. The quotation from Orwell goes on, however — war veteran, socialist, and iconoclast that he was: "Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there." That is, the British elite learned at Eton and the other "public" schools the chivalric code and snobbery that led the British officer corps in subsequent wars to make some really dumb and costly moves. Significant here is that the playing fields of Eton and American sports arenas and school stadiums are part of the system of instilling a habit of loyalty, so that a cheer of "USA! USA!" for a US hockey team can be transferred fairly easily to what Trey Parker and Matt Stone called TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (2004).

            Group identity is inevitable, necessary, and usually a good thing. But we need to understand how it operates and how it can become highly dangerous.