Meanderings, 14 December 2024

May your weekend be a gift to you and all around you!

Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash

Oxford’s Word of the Year: “brain rot”

(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.

Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year: “polarization” (really, I ask, “a -zation word?!”)

The results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election rattled the country and sent shockwaves across the world — or were cause for celebration, depending on who you ask. Is it any surprise then that the Merriam-Webster word of the year is “polarization”?

“Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s announcement. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.”

The election was so divisive, many American voters went to the polls with a feeling that the opposing candidate was an existential threat to the nation. According to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, about 8 in 10 Kamala Harris voters were very or somewhat concerned that Donald Trump’s views — but not Harris’ — were too extreme, while about 7 in 10 Trump voters felt the same way about Harris — but not Trump.

The Merriam-Webster entry for “polarization” reflects scientific and metaphorical definitions. It’s most commonly used to mean “causing strong disagreement between opposing factions or groupings.” Merriam-Webster, which logs 100 million pageviews a month on its site, chooses its word of the year based on data, tracking a rise in search and usage.

Thank you, Charles Marsh:

In the decades since he was executed in Germany for crimes of high treason, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become one of the most celebrated religious thinkers of our time, inspiring many of our era’s most influential leaders, intellectuals and artists, from Desmond Tutu and Vaclav Havel to Jimmy Carter, Angela Merkel and U2’s Bono. He is a model to millions more who confront the blood-stained face of history with courage and conviction.

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge summed up how this brilliant pastor-turned-conspirator against Hitler became a hero in widely disparate religious traditions: “Some words Gorky used about Tolstoy come into my mind: ‘Look what a wonderful man is living on this earth!’”

But with the adoration of Bonhoeffer’s legacy comes sharp disagreement over its meaning and political uses.

A quick Google search of Bonhoeffer — or better, “Are we living in a Bonhoeffer moment?” — will put the reader directly into the crossfire between liberals and conservatives, each laying claim to the great Christian martyr’s moral inheritance. The relative dearth of explicit political discussion in his writings has made it easy for those with differing theological and ideological stances to cast Bonhoeffer in their own image.

In fact, Bonhoeffer’s political views, as gleaned from his biography, don’t map neatly onto today’s American left-right divides (nor onto the political map of the 1930s America that Bonhoeffer twice visited).

When today’s progressives laud him, they rarely cite his posthumously published book “Ethics” that called abortion “nothing but murder.” Nor do they recall his preference for monarchy over democracy, his dismissal of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as the mere “gnawing away of otherwise healthy people’s confidence and security” or his sartorial extravagance. His privilege as a golden child of Berlin’s posh Grunewald district, which he wielded freely and without apology, tends to go unremarked among those who prize his “view from below” and solidarity with the poor.

On the religious right, a new generation of activist theocrats has convinced the rank and file that life under any Democratic administration will become a Fourth Reich and have turned Bonhoeffer into a political avatar. Who would not wish that a person we so greatly admire would have seen the world as we do?

Except that MAGA enthusiasts such as author and radio personality Eric Metaxas have transformed Bonhoeffer with little basis in fact. Ignoring biographical features he doesn’t like and inventing new parts he needs, Metaxas has recast Bonhoeffer’s story as a battle cry for conservative Christian activism in every American presidential election since the first Obama administration. He goes to such an extreme as to suggest moral equivalence between the political assassination of an American Democrat with Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to kill Hitler.

Thank you, O. Alan Noble:

This school year marks my tenth year in the English Department at Oklahoma Baptist University. I taught as a graduate student at Baylor and Antelope Valley Community College before that, but I really began to teach literature here at OBU ten years ago. During that time, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances across the country leave academia for various reasons. I have even had students ask me why I continue to teach. It’s a good question for anyone in higher education right now, especially Christian higher education. The infamous “demographic cliff” is coming; AI is making cheating harder to detect and easier than ever, while also potentially replacing some of our essential labor (grading papers); the humanities are constantly under attack; students demand more assistance keeping track of assignments (probably due to a combination of COVID and over-use of learning management systems in high school); respect for higher education and academics seems to be declining socially; and the pay in education has never been that good. Challenges like these caused English professor (and beautiful prose stylist) to explore the question in the latest issue of Plough Magazine: “Does Teaching Literature and Writing Have a Future?” Like him, I’m going to answer in the affirmative, but offer some different, more personal reasons.

So after ten years, why am I still here? Why am I still teaching The Sound and the Fury and Dante? Nobody with any ambition stays at a teaching-first institution like OBU unless they love to teach¹. I see my calling as helping students follow Paul’s command in Philippians 4:8: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” I am a teacher because I get the blessing of helping people love what is lovely in a world that is often distracted, ugly, and hopeless.

Ohio State’s proposal has a better solution than going into the world of felonies. Win.

If an Ohio lawmaker gets his way, teams attempting to plant their flags in the middle of Ohio Stadium during Ohio State games will be dealing with more than just pepper spray.

Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams introduced a bill Tuesday that would classify flag planting at Ohio Stadium around Buckeyes football games as a felony.

The O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act, authored by Williams, comes in response to Michigan's attempt to plant its flag after a Nov. 30 win at Ohio State, which set off a brawl between the teams. Police employed pepper spray to separate players and other team personnel. Ohio State University police are investigating the incident, which involved multiple law enforcement agencies and resulted in an injury to an officer.

According to Williams' bill, "No person shall plant a flagpole with a flag attached to it in the center of the football field at Ohio stadium of the Ohio State University on the day of a college football competition, whether before, during, or after the competition. Whoever violates this section is guilty of a felony of the fifth degree."

A fifth-degree felony is the least severe in Ohio and carries a penalty of six to 12 months in prison, up to a $2,500 fine and up to five years' probation.

Williams, a Republican, represents Ohio's 41st district, near Toledo and the Ohio-Michigan border, where many Buckeyes and Wolverines fans intermingle. He told ESPN that the Ohio Stadium incident, along with several other college football scuffles around flag planting during rivalry weekend, caught his attention.

"After it happened at five separate games during Rivalry Week, and seeing that there was no immediate movement, I thought it was necessary to send a signal to our institutions of higher learning that they need to come up with policies to prevent this in the future so it doesn't risk harm to our law enforcement officers or student-athletes or fans," Williams told ESPN. "[Ohio State-Michigan] is the No. 1 rivalry in all of sports, not just college sports, and to see it devolve all the way down to this level, it just disrespects not only the institution, but the college programs themselves. More importantly, it provided a true safety hazard."

I really enjoyed this story about Caitlin Clark.

The momentum and magic Clark helped create in women's college basketball hasn't waned, especially in Iowa City. Last year, at the height of Clark mania, the Hawkeyes sold out their 15,000-seat ticket allotment for the first time. This year -- with Clark in the WNBA and the Hawkeyes entering the season unranked for the first time since her freshman year in 2020 -- Iowa sold out again.

"I still have people wanting to borrow my [season] tickets," said Ashleigh Determann, of DeWitt, Iowa, who brought her niece, Addison, to the WSU game. "As you can see, it's carried on this year."

The transition to life without Clark running the show hasn't been seamless. The Hawkeyes committed 30 turnovers -- their most in a game in 22 years -- in Saturday's 78-68 loss to Tennessee in the inaugural Women's Champions Classic at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The Lady Vols scored 42 points off those turnovers to pull away in the fourth quarter, handing Iowa its first loss of the season. Still, the nationally televised doubleheader, which also featured Louisville against second-ranked UConn and Paige Bueckers -- the favorite to succeed Clark as national player of the year -- sold almost 10,000 tickets.

And a final word from Alan Jacobs:

I hate pushing books to the back of bookshelves — I like them lined up neatly along the front edge of the shelf. But now I am forced to push them back. Why? It’s Elon Musk’s fault. The SpaceX Rocket Development and Test Facility is in McGregor, fifteen miles away, and sometimes when they’re testing everything in the house rattles. (Locally this is called “SpaceX Thunder.") I have become genuinely afraid that my bookcases will topple and crush me, as happens to Leonard Bast in Howard’s End. So I’ve adjusted their weight distrubution in the cause of safety. Damn you, Elon!

How about gifting a subscription to my Substack?