The Books of My Life: A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

 

When my father and mother moved me and my family to Texas in the mid-1960s I remember being more interested in the adventure of moving than in where we were moving and why. The myth of Texas had no meaning for me at the time. I think, in fact, I had only barely heard of Texas as I hadn't really watched many, if any, of the Hollywood westerns that celebrated the myth of Texas. I was much more interested in the Beatles, Doctor Who, who was mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and the American version of rounders, especially one of America's baseball players, Sandy Koufax, who, like the Doctor was truly mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and who, unlike the Doctor, was actually real, though I am not sure I made that distinction at the time.

One thing I do recall from my teenage years is that the Beatles, Doctor Who, and Sandy Koufax were much more interesting to me than school, which, even though I was interested in history and politics, didn't do for me what the Beatles, Doctor Who, Sandy Koufax, and adventuring along Five Mile Creek in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas did. School simply did not engage me intellectually. The extracurricular, on the other hand, did. 

My memories today of my secondary school years are mostly extracurricular. I recall the seemingly endless rituals of football pep rallies at Browne. I recall the attempt of a small minority of us to stage an anti-Vietnam War walkout one afternoon after a pep rally, an effort that failed because the administrators and teachers got wind of it and chained us into the school with two teachers at every door. And I recall, if vaguely, that each of us at Browne had to take a mandatory Texas civics class in, if memory serves, seventh grade.

Like history in general, as I have come to realise, the civics class on Texas history and culture that was mandatory for me and my T W Browne school mates was, as I look back on it from the distance of today, mythic. It told a mythic tale of freedom seeking Texas, of Texas heroes, the Texans who fought for independence, and of non-Texas villains, the bad guys who tried to keep Texas unfree and Texans locked in the chains put there by a dictatorial tyrant named Santa Anna, who, in retrospect seems to be, in the Texas mythology of the 1960s, a Hitler before Hitler and a Stalin before Stalin. Historical presentism. While all of this mythhistory was clearly present at the time I was forced to take my Texas civics class, the only thing that I recall that I consciously remembered from that class at the time was the Texas's state song, "Texas Our Texas". Music, it seems, was central to my life at the time.

The lyrics of "Texas Our Texas", I later came to realise thanks to my increasing understanding of the empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities of our world, was grounded in mythhistory and the closely related boosterist history. History as Advertising. It was, as I came to understand, the history that the powers that be, who were less part of a conspiracy to brainwash us than accepting, consciously and unconsciously, of a set of cultural ideological myths and self-images, believed we needed to be socialised into in order to be good Texans (and presumably good Americans). It was a history that, even if I didn't realise it at the time, affected me in such a way that I felt suitably awed when I visited the Alamo in San Antonio and San Jacinto near Houston with my family, the place, in the myths of Texas, where freedom loving and heroic Texans fought against incredible odds to make Texas free and the place where the freedom loving Texans finally defeated the villainous freedom hating Mexicans winning their freedom once and for all. I had, without even realising it, been socialised into a Texas version of the battle between good and evil, between good Duddly Do-Right (the Canadian mountie symbol become American heroic icon) and evil Snidely Whiplash, running through my head affecting how unconsciously or subconsciously I read "reality". At that age I was just too literal to recognise the parody and satire in that tale of good and evil that was Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash.

This manichean version of history I was socialised into turned out to be relatively short lived in my increasingly intellectual and scientific life. Soon, thanks to rock and roll and the Vietnam War, I was among the "bohemians" and "deviants" few who had come to realise the truth, namely that mythic and boosterist history, whether it was the mythic and boosterist history of Texas or the mythic and boosterist of Big D where every house was like a palace, was just that, mythic and boosterist. When I went to college I learned that the great social scientist Emile Durkheim argued that all cultures or societies needed such myths, and needed the "deviants" who contested it, to create a common community with a common identity. I learned that this, this need for a common community, was why communities needed and had the mythic, boosterist, and heroes versus villains stories and symbols that were grounded in a binary of sacred and profane.

The social sciences, and particularly, cultural anthropology, helped me to recognise the reality of how many of the tales and stories of American (and other) culture were socially constructed, universalised, transcendentalised, or fetishised. They were, as I came to recognise, the manichean myths that societies and cultures lived by and through, including in, if more complexly and contradictorily, in the core nation societies with its large populations and multilayered economic, political, cultural, and regional systems. It also helped me recognise that the histories that societies and cultures told about themselves were also mythic and, if less so, critical, drawing, as they did, on contradictions in the societies and cultures in which they were constructed.

I went to college during an era in which consensus history and myth history was under assault. It was an era in which social history, particularly social history influenced by quantitative approaches in the social sciences and particularly sociology, and cultural history, influenced by cultural anthropology and particularly by Clifford Geertz, were becoming prominent in the history profession and bureaucracy. Donald Denoon's, Philippa Mein-Smith's, and Maravic Wydham's A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), is one of the many products of this renewed interest in ethnographically sensitive cultural history in the post-imperial, post-modern, and post-industrial historical profession.

Denoon, Mein-Smith, and Wyndham place identity at the heart of their history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. Filtering identity, an identity that is both somewhat static and dynamic, through its interactions with other social and cultural constructions including imperialism, colonisation, modernisation, nationalism (New Zealand marking itself off from Australia in binary cultural fashion, for example), industrialisation (particularly in Australia), cultural myths (the myth exeptionalism and the myths of the bush, the beach, the yeoman battler, and British gentility, for example), deindustrialisation, decolonisation, the indigeneous rights movements, and great power politics (a great power politics in which the US replaced Britain as dominant power--economic, political, and cultural--in the region after World War II), Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history provide interested readers with an excellent cultural, economic, and political history of the region and particularly Australia and New Zealand. 

Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, while a superb history of the region, is not a book for the novice or for an introductory course in the history of Australia, New Zealand, or the Pacific. It is, however, an excellent introductory text for the advanced undergraduate, history and social science graduate students, and the intelligent reader who already knows something about the history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. I, for instance, knew the broad outlines of Australian and Kiwi history and found those very helpful in expanding my knowledge of Australian and New Zealand history but was somewhat adrift in the parts of the book dealing with Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian history. Despite this I found reading the book highly rewarding and worth the effort. I highly recommend it.

A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific will, of course, not please those who prefer their history to be the history of "great men", particularly great political men, and great events, particularly great political events such as scholars like J.L. Granatstein who, while not opposed to some of the new social and cultural history, has bemoaned the killing of history, by which he means political history which he thinks should be at the heart of the historical enterprise, in his jeremiad on the subject. The historical profession, however, is a marketplace and the historical markets that are prominent at the moment are cultural and social. Nor will it please those who prefer their  history mythic, legendary, and manichean, who prefer, in other words, their history European and celebratory and filled with European saints and sinners. For these latter, the only good history is politically and ideologically correct, as they define it, history. It will, on the other hand, please those, like me, who recognise that the tales we tell about ourselves are generally socially and culturally constructed and have a tenuous relationship to empirical reality. That empirically grounded history and social science, as the culture wars that rack the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, are persona non grata in a world that generally prefers its history comic bookish and Hollywoodish means that the histories of those who can see through the myths, the delusions, and the tales of white hats and black hats, are likely never be accepted in a world where reality is almost always "reality". So much for scientific enlightenment.

Project Proposal: Lights, Camera, Movie: A History of a Journal

This is a project proposal I have been thinking about for awhile. I put it together in 2011. I submitted it to various university as a potential postgraduate research project--Princeton, Rice--to a resounding tsunami of no interest at all (don't you think its sexy? cultural capital? sorry, none) though Warwick did admit me, without funding of course, to do another PhD in History (please sir can I have no more? I have no interest on doing yet another wasted degree in a discipline which, despite the fact that it is grounded in theory, can't seem to admit its dirty little secret to itself, that it is theoretical precisely because it is grounded in primary source materials) and so gave up because I can only take hitting my head against an unmoveable brick wall for so long. I don't think the project will happen at this point--I am a poor adjunct--but I do think it needs to be done by some aspiring and enterprising young Film Historian somewhere for the reasons outlined below even if several venerable bureaucracies of higher education didn't seem to find it or me "worthy" of their generous and beneficent patronage (he bows and gives obeisance...).

Why Movie?
The rise of auteurism in film criticism and in film studies was one of the fundamental factors that led to the development of film studies both within the academy and without. Over the last fifty years historians of film and film critics have tended to focus on the role of the French film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, in the development of both auteurist film criticism and Film Studies both outside of and within the academy. In this dissertation, however, I want to focus not on Cahiers du Cinéma but rather on the British film journal Movie, which, in part, served as a major conduit for late 1950s and early 1960s Cahiers du Cinéma style auteur criticism to British and American critics and audiences in the 1960s and beyond.

In this project I want to explore the impact of Movie, a prominent film journal of the 1960s and 70s, published by Ian Cameron and for which prominent critics like Robin Wood, V.F. Perkins, Charles Barr, and Jim Hillier wrote, on UK, US, Canadian, and Australian film studies, the impact of Movie on film journals like Film Comment and Sight and Sound, and the impact of Movie on publishers like Barnes/Zwemmer/Tantivy, early BFI monographs (for example, the Cinema One series), and the Twayne Filmmakers Series. These journals and publications, I will argue, were instrumental in establishing auteurism as the dominant paradigm of film studies in Anglo-American intellectual film culture and academic film studies.

I have several reasons for wanting to do this research. I think too much attention has been paid by film historians and film critics to Cahiers and to the British journal Screen, a journal which adopted the late 1960s Cahiers emphasis on that hybrid film theory which mixed and matched Marxism, Freudianism, Lacanianism, and feminism and which has come to dominate contemporary academic Film Studies today. I hope my research will show that Movie, and particularly Movie auteurism, have been important in the rise of Film Studies around the Western world. But I don’t want to stop there. I also want to show that while Movie most certainly took an auteurist stance in its explorations of the European art cinema (Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Makavejev) and Hollywood cinema, it was also a journal that engaged the issue of genre and the role stars played in film (Laurel and Hardy, Dames, Heavies), particularly in Hollywood film. Movie, in other words, was far more nuanced and far more diverse in its approach than many critics today recall.

I anticipate undertaking extensive archival research for this project as well undertaking and collecting a number of oral histories. I intend to film as many of the oral history interviews I conduct as I can. As to the contribution of this project and the book that comes out of it I intend both as a contribution to British history, to Settler society history (the US, Canada, Australia), to Atlantic History (France, UK, US, Canada), to Film History, and to Film criticism.

Summary History of Auteurism:
The issue of authorship, continues to haunt film and its, to a large extent, bastard cousin, television studies. In this dissertation I intend to explore the rise, conquest, fall, and resurrection of auteurism from its beginnings in the 1950s to today.

Auterism, so the story goes, originated among the young turks of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s as the politique des auteurs, the auteur policy, the auteur polemic. It then made its way across the Channel in the pages of Movie, and across the Atlantic in the critical polemics of film critic Andrew Sarris who canonised the theory in reviews in the Village Voice, in his famous and infamous article in the journal Film Culture in 1962, and eventually in his influential and popular book The American Cinema. Through much of the 1960s and 1970s auteurism dominated much of film criticism and writings on film via journals like Cahiers, Movie, and Film Comment and dominated much of the film book publishing industry via publishers like Zwemmer, Barnes, Tantivy, Studio Vista (the British publisher of Movie's Movie Paperbacks), Praeger (the publisher of Movie Paperbacks in the US), Doubleday, and Indiana University Press.

Auteurism wasn’t without its controversies, however. For the most part auteur criticism wasn't controversial with respect to the European art cinema. Auteurists like Robin Wood and Ian Cameron and critics of auteurism like Penelope Houston and Pauline Kael alike agreed that filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard were auteurs, artists. What was controversial for critics of auteurism was its claim that directors in the highly entertainment oriented and collaborative studio system, directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford were the authors of their films. Sight and Sound, the influential British film magazine Penelope Houston, in fact, rejected a paper on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho by a critic who would publish extensively in Movie, Robin Wood, on the basis that Psycho and Hitchcock himself were not to be taken seriously.

In the late 1960s thanks to cultural ferment, the academicisation of Film Studies, and the revival and rise in popularity of a number of social theories (Marxism, the linguistics of de Saussure, Freud, Structuralism, Semiology, Lacanianism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstruction among them) auteurism came under attack for reasons other than the fact that the products of the Hollywood machine could not be authored. Taking a broader perspective Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, prominent figures both in the new social theoretical ferment, and both from France, accused Literary and Film Auteurism of romanticism, of raising the author (in film, the director) to Olympian status and detaching him or her, in the process, from the social and cultural contexts that surround human lives and called for the "death of the author". It was the new and supposedly improved Cahiers du Cinéma and the British journal Screen which were the conduits for much of this anti-auteurist film criticism in Europe and North America.

But the new anti-auteurism had its discontents as well. The notion that one must place authors into their social and cultural contexts, of course, was not new in the 1960s and 1970s. Marxist cultural critics had been making similar arguments at least since the 1920s. It was as fair a point than as it was in the 1970s and is today. The problem with some of this anti-auteurist criticism was that in their haste to condemn auteurism for its ahistoricism the new "radical" critics set up one thread of auteurism as its straw man, the most "romantic" of auteurisms where every film auteur was a man or woman out of time.

It must be remembered, however, that not all auteurists were the same. Auteurist polemicists who wrote for Cahiers like Godard and Francois Truffaut tended to think that the films of every Hollywood studio auteur (Howard Hawks, Nick Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Budd Boetticher) were worthy of careful study and attention and, on the aesthetic level, worthy or praise, often effusive praise. For another auteurist, Andre Bazin, the godfather of Cahiers and modern film criticism and analysis, however, not every film by every auteur, and he didn't think there were many particularly in Hollywood, was worthy of aesthetic praise. Some were simply bad movies. Even for that great boogeyman of critics of auteurism, Andrew Sarris, not all Hollywood directors were auteurists (members of his pantheon of film directors). Most, in fact, were metteurs en scene's, company men, cogs in the impersonal Hollywood machine with no observable style or point of view. It was only in a few specific instances then, for critics like Sarris, that a Hollywood director was an auteur, someone who managed to put his or her personal stamp on a mass-produced product (Sarris pantheon of auteurs included Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lubitsch, Welles, Chaplin, Murnau, Keaton, Griffith, Ophuls, Lang, von Sternberg, Flaherty).

And it must be remembered that the proclamation of the death of film auteurs may have been premature, even in the academy. Today crystal ball textualism, the notion that racism, gender bias, colonialism, and a whole host of other “sicknesses” at the heart of Western culture can be found in the text and that it is unnecessary to do archival, interview, ethnographic, or audience analysis as a result, may continue to dominate academic film studies but auteurism continues to live in the film criticism of highly regarded critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum (a American who has ties to Cahiers and the BFI) and Dave Kerr and is promulgated, in revised form, by academics like James Naremore and the recently deceased and once upon a time Movie man Robin Wood who melded critical social analysis to his Leavisian auteurist humanism.

Introduction: From Film Reviews to Film Criticism:
Early Journalistic Film Criticism (Greene, Agee, Ferguson, Crowther, Farber)
The European Art Film and Auteurism (Sontag)
Cahiers (1951-) and Hollywood Auteurism

Chapter One: Ian Cameron and the Rise of Movie:
Precedents and Links: Cambridge (Leavis, Literary Criticism, Humanism, Wood), Oxford (Oxford Opinion), Cahiers, Positif (1952-), Films and Filming (1954-1990)
Movie (1962-2000): Ian Cameron, V.F. Perkins, Robin Wood, Jim Hillier, Charles Barr, Peter Bogdanovich, Raymond Durgnat, Joel Finler, Elizabeth Sussez, Michael Walker…
Interviews:
UK: V.F. Perkins, Charles Barr, Susan Smith, Deborah Thomas, Edward Gallafent, Peter Wollen?, Laura Mulvey…
Archives:
UK: Cameron, Movie

Chapter Two: Reading Movie
Movie Movie Paperbacks (Studio Vista/Praeger/University of California Press
Cameron and Hollis Publisher/Continuum in US
Movie and Wood (Hitchcock’s Films, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman
Movie as Nuanced: The diversity of Movie
Movie and Auteurism (Art Cinema, Hollywood)
Movie and Genre (noir, Westerns...)
Movie and Actors (heavies, dames, Laurel and Hardy)

Chapter Four: Movie’s Impact
Movie in the UK
Cameron Wood at Warwick
Wood and Hitchcock’s Films
Perkins and Film as Art
Movie in Canada: Wood at Queens and Wood at York, Cineaction (1985-)
Movie Down Under: Colin Crisp, specialist in French Cinema, Griffith University, Brisbane, Tom Ryan
Movie and Auteurism
The Varieties of Auteurism
Film Criticism and Auteurism: Sarris, Sontag Simon, Kaufman, Schickel, Canby, Maslin…
Film Books: Barnes/Tantivy/Zwemmer (Cowie, Auteurs, Genre, Stars), Twayne (Auteurs, Genre), BFI and Film Book Publishing
The Ultimate in Auteurism (Faber and Faber’s Directors on Directors series)
The Expansion of Academic Film Studies (film as art, film as crystal ball)
Academic Auteurism (Indiana University Press)
Interviews:
UK: V.F. Perkins, Peter Wollen?, Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath
US: Peter Cowie, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ernest Callenbach, James Naremore, , Dave Kehr
Australia: Adrian Martin, Tom Ryan

Chapter Five: Movie and its Critics
Contra Auteurism: Houston and Sight and Sound
Contra Auteurism: Kael and the battle over Citizen Kane
Movie and the New Film Criticism
later Cahiers, Screen, Sam Rohdie
Interviews:
UK: V.F. Perkins, Peter Wollen? Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath

Conclusion: Movie in the Twenty-First Century The Inevitability of Auteurism?
Auteurists always (Rosenbaum, Kerr, Naremore, Wood)
Movie’s Next Generation (Pye, Smith, Klevan,Thomas, Gallafent, Close-Up, Warwick, Sunderland, Grant and Canada, the revival of Movie at Warwick…)
Interviews:

We Love the...Musings on Sport, Identity, and Community

I happened to catch an interview between PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley and long time sportswriter and author of books on sports and, interestingly, Miss America, Frank Deford this afternoon on PBS World. One of the things Deford said to Tavis which I found interesting and which has long intrigued me, was Deford's claim that sport helps create community even in a place like the United States which historically has had a somewhat difficult time creating a sense of national identity and national community. Sport, in other words, can and often times does play an important role in the civil religions and civic national cultures of nations, modern or traditional.

I agree wholeheartedly with Deford's general point. Sport can and often does play an important role in national identities and it can and often does play an important role in the civil religion of modern nation-states. All one has to do is look at how important football is to Brasil's national identity and civic culture, how important rugby is to New Zealand's national identity, an observation made even clear, if further proof were needed, during the 2011 Rugby World Cup held throughout New Zealand, and how important cricket is to the national identities and civic cultures of India and Pakistan, two nations with a long history of conflict and tensions with one other who faced off against each other in the quarter final of the Cricket World Cup in 2011 leading to spikes in nationalism in both nations.

Where I disagree with Deford is with respect to the role sport plays in American identity and community. When it comes to sport in the United States the US is rather parochial or exceptional. The sports that have and continue to dominate the US sport landscape and which appear in regular rotations on ESPN and Fox television and sports radio, are football, basketball, and baseball. Historically speaking all three of these sports have been played largely only by Americans, at first White Americans something that tells you about American racial history, and played largely only in the United States despite claims that baseball's championship series is a World Series and that the NFL's championship series is the Super Bowl.

I do, of course, realise, that American basketball and baseball have become more international both in competition and in participation since the 1960s but compared to football, real football, the game Americans call soccer, rugby, and cricket, international basketball and baseball competitions--there is now a baseball world cup--remain relatively minor sports compared to the world's international sports, and of relatively limited interest to Americans. This American disinterest, by the way, may change if the US football team gets into the final rounds and final games of the football World Cup given the relationship between sport and nationalism, however.

What is so interesting about America's dominant sports of football, basketball, and baseball is that the US really doesn't have a national team or a national team that really matters to most Americans despite the Olympics and the baseball World Cup. American football teams, basketball teams, and baseball teams are city based and draw their support from their cities, their states, or their regions, despite claims that the Dallas Cowboys are America's team or despite the existence of Red Sox or Yankee nation (we shouldn't forget that some places in the US have no major league sports teams or that some jump on the sports team bandwagon for a variety of reasons including winning records and we must not forget migration). They thus are grounded in city, state, or regional identities and communities. They are also often ethnocentric. Fans of the Red Sox, as the photograph above suggests, are not necessarily favourably disposed to other baseball teams or their fans particularly if the team is the New York Yankees and the fans are New York Yankees fans. So, in the end, America's dominant sports actually create tribal identities rather than regional identities.

In this American sport teams mirror or reflects, on the microsociological level, what has long been a fact of life in the US on the macrosociological level. The United States, since its inception, has been a country divided regionally between North and South and, as a result, has had significant regional identities, particularly in the South. Expressions of this Southern regional identity can be found in Southern religion and Southern sports, particularly football, the major sport in the South, a sport that is part of the Southern civil religion as the Southern mania for the SEC, the South Eastern Conference, the major Southern collegiate football conference, shows. What impact all of this has had or continues to have on a common American identity and sense of community is an interesting question that deserves further analysis.

What also deserves further study is the role sport plays in vanity identity. How was the great Jewish baseball player Sandy Koufax perceived in the American Jewish community particularly after he refused to pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series between his team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and their opponent, the Minnesota Twins because it landed on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest holy day in the Jewish ritual year? What role does Black success in a variety of sports play in Black identity in the US? How does Usain Bolt's and the success of other Jamaicans in track and field impact the Jamaican sense of self and Jamaican nationalism?

Some Concluding Thoughts on Rugby and Nationalism
One of the things, by the way, I have become increasingly interested in, partially because I have an interest in contemporary settler societies like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and partially because I have developed an interest in rugby to go along with my interest in real football, soccer, is the role the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby team, plays in the New Zealand civil religion. I offer the following as a dossier in how sport and nationalism intersect and intermix in the civil religion or civic culture of a nation, a modern settler society nation.

Exhibit number one: Neil Finn and Friends, "Can You Hear Us". “Can you Hear Us” was written and performed by Neil Finn of Split Enz, Crowded House, and Finn Brothers fame. It was written in 1999 to celebrate the appearance of the All Blacks in the upcoming World Cup. The video is full of images of the All Blacks including their famous haka, and All Black fans, including the gathering of friends and family to watch the All Blacks in the World Cup imaging themselves, one presumes, doing all they can to help their beloved team win it, thinking about past Kiwi rugby heroes (they come to the door and cary in the sofa), about NZ heroes in general (Xena, Lucy Lawless, who appears in the video is a Kiwi), and dreaming that they one day might actually be an All Black themselves. Not surprisingly the tune hit Number One in NZ where Finn himself is regarded as something of a national treasure.



Exhibit number two: Not surprisingly New Zealand and Australia are rather competitive with each other including on the sports pitch. Sometimes this competitiveness plays itself out on the rugby pitch. Rugby may be New Zealand's national sport but it is not Australia's. That honour belongs to Australian rules football. Anyway, the following promo on Network 7 for the Australian-New Zealand rugby match reveals a lot about stereotypes and caricatures Australians have about Kiwis not to mention about the role national pride plays in rugby matches between the Wallabys and the Kiwis.



Exhibit number three: Here is the TV1 news report on the All Black loss to the French during the 2007 World Cup in Cardiff, Wales. Note the sense of almost religious like devotion and the very emotional response to loss among All Black fans interviewed in Wales.



Finally, here is one of my favourite hakas. This one takes place before the All Blacks-Tonga game and reveals something about nationalism, nationalism and sports, and the role the haka and the Tongan sipi tau play in revving up excitement, much of it nationalist, just before a rugby match.

An Open "Letter" to Colin Cowherd on American Exceptionalism

There Colin Cowherd goes again. Once again the popular host of The Herd heard on ESPN Radio is claiming that the number of high achieving Americans starring in American sports prove that Yanks are more individualistic and more achievement oriented than our friends to the North, the cooperative safety net nation of Canada.

OK I admit it. This nerd likes sports. Like many of my fellow Yanks I grew up on a steady diet of your standard American sports baseball, the misnamed football (handball or catch ball would be a more accurate description for this sport), and basketball. In my youth I closely followed baseball and worshiped Sandy Koufax. In my teens I came to love football and, like many other adopted Dallasites and Texans, worshiped and suffered at the temple of the Dallas Cowboys and the University of Texas Longhorns. Me as microcosm. Recently I have developed a love of real football, the football played largely with the feet, and rugby, both on the world cup level. Me as anomaly in American context.

Because I like sports I sometimes listen to sports radio, well specifically the limited choices for sports radio we have here in the United States, Fox and ESPN. One of the things I really like about sports radio is that it is one of the few places in the United States where you can hear actual intellectual debates nationally, intellectual debates that look at sports through the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and statistical prisms that dominate intellectual and academic life, on a regular basis. Sports radio is to the 2000s what PBS's Firing Line and Dick Cavett were to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. My Fox and ESPN listening habits are limited, however. I tend to listen during NCAA March Madness week one and during the football World Cup, one of the few times, along with yet another Tiger Woods scandal (sports celebrity culture), when Fox and ESPN actually stray from talking solely about US football, baseball, and basketball.

So recently I was listening to sports radio to see if anyone was talking about the wonderful women's football world cup final between the US and Japan and they actually were but only for a day. As I was changing channels I came across the ever provocative host of ESPN radio's The Herd, Colin Cowherd, going on about what appears to be one of his treasured obsessions, American exceptionalism, this notion that American is unique and singular among the nations of the world. Fox and ESPN sports hosts have learned, as did A Current Affair, TMZ, and the Hearst press before it, that being provocative can attract, expand, and keep an audience, both critically important in a ratings centred and ratings obsessed US media culture. Anyway, according to Mr. Cowherd the US is more individualistic than either Canada or Europe and this is why there is so much more wealth in the US relative to those other places and it is why the US has the best health care system in the world and why the world's elite doctors want to and usually do practise here. Mr. Cowherd, in a kind of shades of Sarah Palin, seems to regard himself a specialist on Canada and Canadian culture and talks about the differences between the US and the Great White North on his radio show periodically because he once lived in the Pacific Northwest, not too far, in other words, from Canada's British Columbia.

While there may be some truth in Mr. Cowherd's argument there are also a number of problems with his perspective. First problem, history. The intellectual revolution that began with the Renaissance, passed through the Scientific Revolution, and gave birth to the Enlightenment (there were actually many enlightenments) with its individualism, its emphasis on liberty from tyranny, its emphasis on property, its focus on happiness, its secularity, and its fascination with the workings of free market capitalism, impacted all of Northwestern Europe, the UK, and the colonies of the UK, those settler societies of US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Little if any US exceptionalism here.

Second problem, size. Size, geographical and demographic, does sometimes matter. Compared to the nations of Europe, including the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia are huge. Compared to the nations of Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand the US, population wise, is huge. The US has 350 million or so souls compared to the UK's some 60 million, Canada's some 30 million, Australia's some 20 million, and New Zealand's some 4.5 million souls. This difference in population, of course, has economic impacts. Because of its significant size and its favourable climate and extensive raw materials, the US is one of the largest economies in the world. It is size which has made the US one of the dominant military powers in the world since the late nineteenth century. It is size which has made the US one of the largest producers of media product in the world. It is size which has made the US a place where some can get rich. There is some American exceptionalism here but it is not the product of American individualism, as Cowherd would have it, since the US shares its Enlightenment individualism with the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it is more a function of geography and population size.

There are, of course, other differences between the US, Western Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Football and to a lesser extent rugby are more important in Western Europe than they are in the US. Rugby and cricket are more important in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand than in the US. Hockey is more important in Canada, which likes to think of itself as the home of hockey, a Canadian exceptionalism reflected on Canadian sports radio and television, Russia, Finland, Sweden, and the Czech Republic than in the US. Some of this has to do with the weather.

There may be cultural factors beyond individualism which make the US, Western Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand different from each another. Recently I have been thinking a lot about Christopher Lasch's book The Culture of Narcissism (1977, Norton), a book which became a topic of intellectual conversation in the US in the late 1970s. I have increasingly come to believe that the major difference between the US and Western Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has to do with this culture of narcissism. It seems to me that with the triumph of corporations during the Gilded Age, the lionisation of the Gilded Age's robber barons, the triumph of consumer capitalism, the rise of Hollywood and its celebrity culture, the rise of a manipulative advertising and mass marketed advertising that sold sex, the rise of television, and the rise of a celebrity obsessed press trying to supply the demand of the masses for information about the intimate strangers they are obsessed with, a culture of narcissism, has come to dominate US business (greed is good), US politics (politicians as celebrities), and US media culture (celebrity culture) in a way it still doesn't in other parts of the industrial world.

I suppose Mr. Cowherd could object to all the above and argue that what he meant was that Americans are more attached to individualism than Western Europeans, Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Kiwis. But even this more nuanced argument is problematic. For instance the myths of the American frontier (the West which many Americans have long believed gave birth to American individualism not the Enlightenment) and the Horatio Alger myths are paralleled by Britain's "white man's burden" myth, the Canada's we struggled against a difficult environment myth (think Fraser in the Northwest Territories in "Due South" for a contemporary version of this myth), Australia's individualist frontier battler (think Crocodile Dundee as a contemporary example of this myth), and New Zealand's individualist Kiwi battler myth (see the faux tale of Kiwi battler Colin McKenzie in "Forgotten Silver" for a contemporary version of this myth). Little if any American exceptionalism here.

I want to end this open "letter" by addressing a few pronouncements by Mr. Cowherd that annoy me.

Annoying pronouncement one: The US, claims Mr. Cowherd, is the wealthiest country on earth. Yes, I suppose that is accurate if one looks only at raw numbers. But you can't simply look only at raw numbers since the size of nations varies. You can't compare a New Zealand of limited geographic and demographic size with the much larger US unless, of course, you control for size. When one does control for size an analysis of gross domestic product shows that Singapore and the Scandinavian countries are wealthier than the US.

Annoying pronouncement two: The US claims Mr. Cowherd, has the "best" health care system in the world. Of course, one of the problems with Mr. Cowherd's argument here is that he confuses the descriptive, a description of global health care systems, with the normative, the notion that one health care system is better than another. There have been attempts to rate health care systems empirically by looking at quality. The World Health Organisation rankings (2000), for example, looking at responsiveness, fairness, overall level of health, distribution of health, distribution of finances, ranks France number one, Italy number two, the UK number eighteen, Israel number twenty-eight, Canada number thirty, and the US number thirty-seven right below Costa Rica. According to Forbes (2008) the healthiest countries on earth are Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Denmark, Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, the US, Israel, the Czech Republic, Spain and France. Forbes rates the US the eleventh healthiest in the world despite the fact that the US spends the highest percentage of its GDP on health care.

One can, of course, raise all sorts of questions about this data. How does one determine what quality is? Is there an ideological aspect to our notions of what constitutes quality? What can't be contested, however, is the fact that most of the industrialised nations of the world have universal health care systems, that they have universal health care systems because you get the biggest bang for the buck or euro with them--the more people in the insurance pool the more you can spread the cost--and the universal health care systems they have, and these are mostly private or public/private hybrids, lead to healthier populations, as survey after survey shows, because more people have access to health care in nations with universal health care systems.

Annoying pronouncement three: The US, because of its emphasis on individualism, claims Mr. Cowherd, produces individuals who strive for excellence in a variety of domains of life while European, UK, and Canadian mutual aid societies don't. The cooperative societies of Europe, the UK, and Canada, claims Mr. Cowherd, produce citizens who are more oriented toward cooperation than individualism. As a result Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand produce fewer outstanding sports stars. Mr. Cowherd often points to a lack of Canadians among the elite in the dominant American sports of football, basketball, and baseball as evidence for this claim. The problem with this perspective, of course, is obvious. Canadians, though they have grown more interested in the holy trinity of US sports, football, baseball, and basketball, grow up with a first love for hockey, the Canadian national sport and national religion. And that is why there are lots of Canadians among the National Hockey League's elite athletes. Kiwis grow up with rugby as their first sports love. That is why there are so many New Zealanders among rugby's athlete elites. Cultural variations, in other words, do matter.