I Created a New Word For Little League Parents

Paterkinderschlagenangstentspannen (pater•kinder´schlagen•angst•ent´spannen) ¹ (noun) The feeling of dread a parent has watching their child batting in little league and the subsequent feeling of relief when they get a hit. ex: Josh was filled with paterkinderschlagenangstentspannen as the Wolvog swang the bat and hit the ball sharply past the third baseman’s outstretched mitt.

It came to me while I was watching the Wolvog at-bat. I needed a word. A word for that feeling a parent gets when watching their child bat during little league, particularly those early years of little league when they’ve taken the ball off the tee and are hurling it via a machine through the air for the kids to hit. And you can strike out. Ok, so perhaps we’re talking about a league where you get more than three strikes before you sit-down, so the training wheels aren’t all the way off, but still. It’s time to start learning that you’re going to fail sometimes. Some days you’re going to fail a lot. Just as tricky: parents have to learn that they’re going to have to sit there and watch their child fail sometimes.

Here’s something I’ve learned: that doesn’t get easier. This is the second year of baseball for the Wolvog and I die on the inside a little bit every time it’s his turn at the plate. I hope he gets a hit. I hope if he hits it right at a player from the other team, that the fielder drops the ball, or mis-fields it, or blows the throw to first base. Worse than that, I hope that if there’s other runners on-base that they tag that kid out rather than my kid. But I hope above everything else that he doesn’t strike out.

This particular fear of the strike out runs counter to current practice in major league baseball where striking out has reached all-time highs. Perhaps earning an average of $3.2 million takes some of the sting out of walking back to the dugout after whiffing. Perhaps reaching the highest level of professional sports gives them the confidence not to care very much more if they strikeout rather than pop or ground-out. An out’s an out after all. Get ‘em next time.

But for some of us (and our children) who have not achieved those heights, the strikeout is synonymous with utter failure. You even look a little foolish, swinging your bat through the air, a little off-balance, while the ball sails by unmolested. You end up looking and feeling unbalanced, awkward, exposed and impotent. That moment when you swing the bat and don’t make contact with the ball can feel like everyone at the ballpark is pointing and laughing at you in slow motion. It’s embarrassing. The greatest choreographer couldn’t come up with a movement more filled with futility, frustration and raw failure than the feeling of swinging and missing that third strike. (Sexist linguistics aside, there’s a reason a guy unsuccessfully hitting on a girl at a bar is said to have “struck out.” Failure + a dose of humiliation = struck out.)

But of course, you have to keep all of that on the inside. You need to tell your child the exact opposite. Everyone strikes out – Babe Ruth struck out all the time. You’ll get ‘em next time. Choke up on the bat. Shorten your swing. Remember to step toward the plate, not away. Keep your eye on the ball. No tears. Keep your confidence up, half of hitting is mental. There’s no crying in baseball. Which is bullshit. But in any case, learn to keep your shit together even though you’re dying on the inside. It’s an important life lesson and there’s no easy way to learn it. Sorry kid. You think this hurts, wait ’til you fall in-love.

But. If he hits the ball, it can feel like disaster averted. A call from the governor. The sun bursts through the clouds and the angels sing the Hallelujah chorus. Your child will be filled with confidence. And even-tempered, well-adjusted and sociable. They’ll say later in life that they were blessed with a happy childhood and not hate their father for making them play baseball!

There’s no word for that, so I turned to the Germans who have a word for everything, but unfortunately do not play baseball. Or at least don’t play it very well. While I was sitting and watching the Wolvog’s team in the field I cobbled together a new German word — because if they can have words like Verschlimmbesserung (a supposed improvement that actually makes things worse) and Fingerspitzengefühl (the ability to think clearly about many individual complex events and treat them as a whole) then why not a word that contains all the emotions detailed above.

Thankfully Google Translate made the task fairly easy and thus I came up with Paterkinderschlagenangstentspannen. Pater (father) kinder (children) schlagen (hitting) angst (fear) entspannen (relax).  Please send a nickle every time you use it from here forward.

You’re welcome.

Passover Amicus Brief for Gay Marriage

Last night, in the waning hours before Passover began I had this feeling of anxiety.

That’s a fairly common emotion for many Jews prior to a holiday that requires us to be completely rid of anything made of bread, anything that could be made into bread, anything with bread in it as well as anything that might conceivably be confused for bread or the products necessary to make bread (this last category particularly annoys me, but alas, for another post).

But I know our home is all set, so that wasn’t it.

Perhaps it was because the Passover ritual meal – the Seder – is a huge production with weighty decisions to make and execute regarding everything from the particulars of re-telling the Exodus from Egypt to the mass quantities of food being served. But, no. We’re attending other peoples’ Seders this year. So that wasn’t it.

Then I saw the tweet:

Just remember the deadline for “I’ve evolved on gay marriage” statements is *tonight* at midnight, EST.

— Tim Murphy (@timothypmurphy) March 25, 2013

And I remembered, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments tomorrow in the case against DOMA and Prop 8. In the past few days a rash of politicians have conveniently announced their support for gay marriage just as public opinion polls make it clear that the majority of the country now favors the right of LGBT couples to enjoy the same rights as us straight folk. As the tweet makes clear, time is running short for public figures to position themselves on what feels like the inevitable side of history — who wants to be remembered as still being on the side of “separate but equal” until Brown v. Board of Ed?

It can take time for some people to stop swimming against the tide of rising freedom. The Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for the Commonwealth of Virginia to outlaw interracial marriage in 1967. In 1983 more Americans still disapproved than approved of interracial marriage. Now 86% approve. A lot of people, over a lot of time, have changed their minds. Or at least they’ve come to understand that it is socially unacceptable to tell a phone surveyor from Gallup that you disapprove of interracial marriage. Either way, call it progress.

After all, Moses had to go to Pharaoh ten times to ask for his people’s freedom — and Pharaoh never really got behind the idea…with catastrophic consequences.

It is time for this country’s highest court to put itself on the right side of history.

Tonight we went to a family Seder hosted by one of the last members of our oldest generation. They are very traditional. At times I’ve bemoaned the fact that they continue to use an old Haggadah (the book used to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt) full of all Thee’s and Thou’s as well as the exclusively patriarchal language to refer to G-d. While I love going to this Seder, it is a large, warm, raucous family affair, I have to admit, that I find the liturgy less than inspiring. Then tonight, we came to the following passage:

Suddenly, this text from 1958 (I looked on the cover page) about an alleged event thousands of years old, struck me with the full revolutionary power of its narrative of freedom. The idea that in every age some new freedom is won. That in every age we uncover “formerly unrecognized servitude, requiring new liberation to set man’s [inset irony for patriarchal language] soul free. In every age, the concept of freedom grows broader, widening the horizons for finer and nobler living.” We are still in the desert, struggling to realize the full freedom we can achieve.

1958 — only four years after Brown v. Board of Education, 9 years before Loving v. Virginia, 15 years before Frontiero v. Richardson. 55 years before Hollingsworth v. Perry.

So, while I think it’s been pretty clear where I stand for awhile, let it not be too late for me (and for as many of you as possible) to declare that a truly free society must grant equal freedoms to its GLBT citizens. The Supreme Court should make unconstitutional any law that prevents marriage between two men or two women. We should support legislation that recognizes and codifies those rights — even though equal rights for a minority should not need to be put up to majority vote.

That’s my Amicus Brief. Happy Passover.

Continuing Obsessions: The Irish-Jewish Connection

Weekend Edition Sunday had a nice piece this morning about the Loyal League of the Yiddish Sons of Erin — an affinity group of Jews from Ireland that met regularly in New York and which over time has disintegrated as their offspring have melted into the rest of America. It is one of those quirks of history that repeats itself every so often, that Jews trying to get the hell out of wherever they’re fleeing, end up in some unlikely places: Uzbekistan, Shanghai, the Dominican Republic and in this case, Ireland.

There have been entire PhD dissertations written about the most famous Irish Jew, James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom from Ulysses (a book I’ve begun many times and never finished). Robert Briscoe and his son Ben Briscoe get trotted out from time to time as past Jewish Lords Mayor of Dublin (I actually got to work with Ben Briscoe’s granddaughter Carla when she was acting in the DC-area about ten years ago). Former Israeli President Chaim Herzog‘s father was the Chief Rabbi of Ireland. But I’ve always felt this hall-of-fame of Jews-in-Strange-places approach to Irish Jewish history missed some deeper themes which I’ve never truly seen explored.

I had proposed to study them at the end of college when I applied for a Watson Fellowship — my idea was to study the development of National Theater in Ireland and Israel. Why Ireland and Israel? Well, to be honest, they were both countries I loved visiting and have been to multiple times. But that’s not what I put in the Fellowship application. I pointed out that the countries share some very compelling similarities in their modern development as nation-states.

1) Both countries grow out of ancient cultures that were highly influential in the development of Western Civilization but only achieved independent Nation-State status in the 20th Century.

2) Both countries have a history of genocide and diaspora — the Jews, many times over the millenia and the Irish with the Great Potato Famine which reached its peak in 1847.

3) Both countries have a history of linguistic revival, although with varying degrees of success.

4) Both countries have unresolved issues of national territory that play-out very differently, but at their essence speak to a psycho-geography that extends beyond the physical boundaries of the state, and entangle them with competing claims to the land with another ethno-religious group.

5) Both countries struggle with the line between church (or synagogue) and state.

5) Both countries see themselves as victims of European history. The British in-particular play a strong adversarial role in the struggle for political independence in both national narratives.

6) Most significantly to the fellowship I was applying for at the time, both had National Theaters before they had actual Nations. The Habima Theatre began in Europe, but eventually established itself in pre-State Israel and began performing in Tel Aviv in 1929 (it wasn’t the official national theater until 1958). The Abbey Theater was established in 1904, well before independence as part of an Irish Literary revival lead by Yeats and Synge. The Irish national theater is much better known, but both played important roles in the self-definition of a modern national identity in the run-up to and following independence. As a result, the theatrical traditions in both countries are today still vitally connected to national issues and the continuing evolution of that identity. That was my thesis anyway.

I didn’t get it. Partly because the past fellowship recipient who interviewed me didn’t really “get” theater. When I tried to explain to him how theater could reflect and shape a national narrative I held up as an example Angels in America, which had recently won the Pulitzer. He hadn’t seen it, but his friend had and told him he hated it.

It also may have had something to do with the fact that after the interview I realized the fly on my pants had been down during the entire conversation. Certainly, that was a foible that Leopold Bloom would have appreciated.

Image: By RustyTheDog, via Wikimedia Commons

Commute My Sentence

I normally take the metro to work. I like being able to read, write, check my email, space-out or catch a quick nap on my way to work and since I commute from the end of the Red Line I always get a seat in the morning. Afternoons are a different story, but that’s not why I’m writing this.

Another reason that I like to take the metro to work even though it is not really faster than driving and with every year the cost differential narrows, is that the parking situation near my office is abysmal. There are a few treasured “all-day” spots on 16th Street after 9:30 am and other than that you’re left to play cat and mouse with DC’s very efficient parking enforcement goon squads in the two-hour zoned residential neighborhood around my office.

But every now and then my boss goes out of town and I get use of a reserved spot — and I feel like I’m wasting the opportunity if I don’t drive to work. It’ll be great I tell myself. I can run errands on the way to and from work. I won’t be subject to the Red Line’s whims and occasional blood-lust. I can listen to NPR and Sports Talk Radio – both luxuries that a metro commute foreshortens. So instead of driving to the metro, parking and taking my place with the other proles, I top-off my coffee, get in my car and point it south toward the District.

Sometime round-about the top of 16th Street I remember: I hate driving to work not because I hate parking at work, I hate driving to work because I hate DRIVING to work. This usually strikes me when I get to the Class-5 rapids disguised as a traffic circle (circle doesn’t actually capture it — more like a tear-drop shaped convergence of vehicular bedlam, confusion and grief) at the border between Silver Spring and the District. If I survive that Scylla and Charybdis then I get to enjoy the bottleneck that is most of 16th Street NW.

Around this time is when some hopelessly boring and obscure story comes on NPR that is so pretentious it sounds like it came out of a Saturday Night Live parody of an NPR broadcast. So, no problem, I switch over to Sports Talk Radio. And they’re talking about the Washington football team with the racist name. In March. When it’s Spring Training for Baseball. Pro Hockey and Basketball are in full swing, our decent Major League Soccer team just opened its season. March Madness is about to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. Heck, even NASCAR and professional golf are competing. Basically every sport except football is in full-effect. But they’re talking about football and who the Washington football team with the racist name should look for with their third-round pick in the draft.

And I’m feeling drowsy. My circadian rhythms are aching for that power nap I normally take between Van Ness and Woodley Park. So I reach for my coffee. But I’ve finished it.  Not only that, my bladder is very aware that I’ve finished all 16 ounces. By the time I get to Mount Pleasant and the inevitable backed-up Metrobuses followed quickly by the mandatory closed lane alongside Meridian Hill Park, I’m stressed out and gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I can’t even appreciate the gorgeous view as I descend towards U Street. It really is a great view on the mornings when I can actually enjoy it — although even though it has been twelve years, I still view the airplanes approaching National Airport with some suspicion and half expect that one day I’ll see one slam into the White House or something else awful.

This is the mood I’m in when I get to the office.

Still. Every time it’s offered I’ll fall for it. Because who can turn down free parking?

Memo to “The Americans”: Philip is Jewish

Mel and I have a new television obsession. It’s The Americans on FX and we’ve become devoted watchers. As children of the 80s, we love the whole world of the show, and we are particularly attracted by the conceit that dangerous international espionage could have been taking place under our very noses when we were growing up in our milquetoast suburbs. My only complaint with the show is that practically nothing looks like it is actually set in Washington, DC or its suburbs. They shoot somewhere in New York I guess, which is too bad because it is the only part of the show that feels inauthentic. They nail the 80s clothes, music and cars; as well as the Cold War fever-pitch that Reagan whipped the country into. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are excellent as Elizabeth and Philip — the KGB agents who are living so deep under-cover that they blend in with the rest of the suburban families in their neighborhood. But they are textured and complex characters who struggle with the line between the lies necessitated by their assignments, and the authentic relationships they have living as a family, both within their is-it-or-isn’t-it-fake marriage and their very unfake children who live life completely oblivious to their parents’ true identities. [spoilers ahead]

Like many couples, Elizabeth and Philip have differing attitudes toward work. Elizabeth is ideologically committed to her role as a KGB officer. She’s devoted to the mission and trusts in the chain of command to issue orders which she is not to question. She believes that America is a shallow, materialistic society bent on the destruction of the USSR. Philip is less absolutist in his attitude, but no less effective. He seems more motivated by devotion to people than to the advancement of a Soviet espionage agenda. He’s ready to defect during the pilot episode, but abandons that plan because the ex-KGB agent about to bring him in had raped Elizabeth during her training as an agent. Whether it is Philip’s sense of justice, his genuine love for his fake wife or something more calculated, he kills the defector, rather than follow him out of the KGB’s employ.

He is skeptical of the orders that come from Moscow. When events begin to spin out-of-control in the wake of the Reagan assassination attempt, he believes their job is to help prevent a war between the Soviet Union and the USA rather than gain the advantage for the USSR in an inevitable war. He is motivated by protecting his family and when Elizabeth tells him she’d rather kill herself than be captured by the FBI, Philip tells her that if they catch him he’ll cooperate so quickly that the Feds will be at their house within an hour — presumably to protect the kids and arrest Elizabeth. He contrasts the openness of the American press and political system with the fact that it takes the USSR weeks to even admit that the leader of the country has died. He’s a skeptic. A bit of an outsider. And that made me think, maybe he’s Jewish?

During the pilot episode we see a flashback to the moment that Philip and Elizabeth met for the first time in some drafty Kremlin office. Just prior to that scene, Philip, while waiting for the meeting to commence, considers a wallet photograph of a woman, and then after staring at it wistfully, tears it up and throws it in the trash. On a simple plot level, this is clearly some sort of love-interest who obviously will show up later in the series (this coming week’s episode in-fact). But I like to read it on a slightly deeper level. This act of tearing up the photo is a physical separation from Philip’s “old life.” Whoever he was, whatever was possible or impossible in that life no longer exists. He gets to re-invent himself.

And Philip flourishes as a reinvented American. It is a difference between himself and Elizabeth that the show emphasizes again and again. His ease in the American milieu is part of the reason he was put through a torturous mock-interrogation by the KGB to test his loyalty. Elizabeth by contrast, is subjected to some rather weak “psychological” manipulation by being placed in a closet covered with photos of her children.

I know that the idea of a Jewish KGB operative during this period is a somewhat ahistorical proposition. While there were plenty of Jewish spies earlier in the 20th Century, following the Doctors’ Trial it became pretty clear that Jews would remain outsiders in the Worker’s Paradise. It would have been tricky to find enthusiastic volunteers. On the other hand, Markus Wolf was the Jewish head of the East German foreign spy agency for many years — so it’s not impossible.  In fact, Philip may be constructed partly along the lines of Markus Wolf’s own spying methods, according to his Washington Post obituary,

Philip in “Romeo” mode

Mr. Wolf said he was likely to be remembered for his prolific use of sex to gain secrets, whether in the form of brothels to trap Westerners or by procuring wives and mistresses for loyal soldiers or by cultivating “Romeo spies” to target the lonely office secretaries and bureaucrats who had access to important, restricted documents. The intention was to steal hearts and then secrets.

So it could be that show creators Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields had Markus “Mischa” Wolf in mind when they created Philip? They haven’t been asked, but they are both Jewish and in an interview with the Jewish Journal:

both men said they were also inspired as children by stories of Jewish agents and covert operatives: for example, Eli Cohen, the Israeli who was caught and publicly hanged in Damascus in 1965, and Yoni Netanyahu, the Israeli assault commander killed in the 1976 top-secret raid on Entebbe. “I got a book of his letters for my bar mitzvah, and his story just bored into me and made me feel like he was the kind of man you’re supposed to be — an intellectual and a hero,” Weisberg said.

So maybe Philip is a Soviet version of The Man Without a Face? Weisberg is a former CIA agent who would be very familiar with Wolf and they have certainly incorporated his tactic of using sex to gain access to secrets as a standard (and steamy) feature of the show. Perhaps we’ll learn that Philip comes from a Wolf-like family, Jews who survived the Nazis thanks to the Soviet Army and became fiercely loyal in-return. Perhaps Philip has always felt distrust for the Soviet State even as he operated from the heart of an agency that was central to its identity.  Perhaps he is so successful in impersonating an American because he is the quintessential American: an outcast from somewhere else who through hard work and luck gets access to circles of power that would have been unimaginable in the “old country.”  I’ll enjoy seeing the show unravel these questions.

But we may not see them arise this season. In that same Jewish Journal article Fields said,

“We wrote a great story with a Mossad and a refusenik twist, but ultimately it didn’t pan out for this season,” Fields said. “Yet it’s stuff that’s very much on our minds, given both of our backgrounds, and in future seasons, it’s fare I’m sure we’ll explore.”

Imagine if in the end, Philip doesn’t become a double-agent for the CIA, but instead the Mossad? How awesome will that be?

Andrew Sullivan Leaves Daily Beast to Shouts of “Play Freemium Bird!”

I’m happy for Andrew Sullivan. I really am.

I take him at his word that there was something about being part of a larger site, first Time, then at The Atlantic and then The Daily Beast that was in some ways holding him back, keeping his work from achieving all he imagined it can be. So he announced today that he’s going solo. And certainly the web affords him the freedom to go and set-up whatever (free-mium? low-cost pay-hedge? pay-what-you-want-Radiohedge?) model that makes him feel entirely in-control and still provide himself and his staff with a decent living. I believe in encouraging a culture in which content is valued and that value is monetized and transmitted to the creators of said content. As he writes:

The only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.

And Andrew and his happy crew may even make a decent living doing it his way. We’ll know better a year from now.

The thing that I find more worrisome about The Dish’s move is that while it may make Andrew Sullivan richer, it will make the internet, and possibly even political discourse, poorer. I don’t say that because I agree with Andrew Sullivan’s politics. In fact, I disagree, in places quite vehemently, with some of his views and ideas. That said, I can recognize that his voice has brought value to the different debates he has engaged in over the past number of years — even if that value was in prompting those who disagreed with him to be more eloquent and vocal in their arguments with him. I worry that once he goes behind his gossamer not-a-pay-wall-but-still-you-gotta-pay-something-at-some-point mechitzah, the necessity of rebutting or supporting whatever he’s saying somehow becomes less crucial.

Remember when it seemed like every week people were writing and talking about some batshit insane thing Glenn Beck was saying on FoxNews. Now Glenn Beck is behind a paywall and apparently doing quite well for himself, thankyouverymuch. But when was the last time you heard about some batshit insane thing he said? Do you think he just stopped making batshit insane statements? Or do you think that now the only people who listen to his batshit insanity are people predisposed to agree with said batshittery? And perhaps some people who lovelovelove to disagree with Glenn subscribe just because that’s how they get their jollies. But most of the rest of us have moved on.

I’m not saying that will happen to Andrew Sullivan. He and Glenn Beck are imperfect analogies, and the nature of what Andrew does and the way he does it depends much more on interaction with the real world — through aggregation and response to other content on the web. But is Andrew Sullivan’s perspective so unique that it can continue to have an impact beyond those who are willing to subscribe? We’ll have to wait to find out.

It is either truly a new model for opinion journalism, or a detour that The Dish will take on its way to whatever “next” harbor it can truly feel comfortable in.

New Year. Resolutions.

This year I resolve to blog more. Which shouldn’t be hard if by “blog more” I mean “more than in 2012.” Why? Because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past couple of months about what my strengths are — prompted in-part by a leadership class I took with Dr. Erica Brown. Part of what I learned is that I really like to learn. We took one of those Strength Finder self-assessments and pretty much all of my top characteristics were about learning, seeking information, processing information and I don’t think I’ve given myself the space to intellectualize what I am learning each day so that it becomes retainable knowledge. Hopefully having a space to puzzle some of these things out will help.

This year I resolve to read more. Maybe not as much as this guy, but still if I read more, I can blog about what I’ve read and take me part way toward achieving the goal set out above.

This year I resolve to complete a draft of a play. I’ve been gestating and doing some research and early writing about the mayor of Memphis during the 1968 Sanitation strike — the strike dragged on long enough to get the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. who was in Memphis to lead a march in support of the strike when he was assassinated.

This year I resolve to keep off the weight I lost last year. I’ve lost between 25-30 pounds in the last year and I’d like to keep up the eating habits that allowed me to do so.

This year I resolve to do a better job of keeping in-touch with friends via a medium other than Facebook. Like picking up a telephone and actually calling one of them. Or making (and keeping) an appointment to grab a meal or a drink.

Those are five resolutions, and I probably shouldn’t push farther than that. If I can look back in 365 days and find that I’ve held true to THE FIVE, then I should be in decent shape.

See. If I ease back into this blogging thing, it just might stick.