The Indicator Online

Behind the spectacle of the Beijing Olympics and the record setting performances of Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and many others, a brewing controversy over the exploitation of young athletes was muffled in the interests of athletic excellence, national pride and international harmony. Not that these aren’t worthy goals, even arguably outweighing the consequences of continued indifference towards unhealthy expectations in this particular circumstance. But the unavoidable truth of the matter is that the issue needs to be forcefully dealt with before this phenomenon becomes the status quo.
The obvious example is the questionable ages of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team, which has been largely derided for the competitive advantage it gave the Chinese. More troubling, however, is the lifestyle that these athletes led before arriving at the Olympic stadium as 14- or 15-year-olds. Taken from their parents as toddlers, these children spend their formative years undergoing a grueling training regimen in a setting that resembles a cross between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and ancient Sparta. Historical and literary comparisons aside, a vocational school (for children who are so young that they probably don’t understand what they’re being trained to do) should raise some eyebrows. The damage inflicted on these individuals is immense. Physically, the dangers of extensive training for gymnastics (or any other sport) at an early age are well documented. Of course, there are the bumps and bruises associated with most sports, but there are also concerns about stunted growth or even permanent paralysis, as was the case with China’s Sang Lan at the 1998 Goodwill games.
Moreover, beyond the physical risks, it seems horribly unfair that these children are exposed to these risks while their peers play happily with their friends and develop many of the life skills for success in the world outside professional sports. Moreover, it seems likely that this singular focus on athletic success would create significant problems for the athlete’s emotional and social health. Many of them do not remember a life outside of their academy and, when their gymnastics careers inevitably end, they are left with a profound loss of purpose in their lives. Too often, Olympic athletes who spend the bulk of their lives preparing for their moments on the podium end up jobless and in need of psychiatric help within a few short years of retirement.
Sadly, the problem extends beyond the Chinese gymnastics program. Perhaps blinded by nationalistic pride, many Americans don’t realize the prevalence of unhealthy physical training in young American children. Though the individual cases in the United States are less severe than in China, there is little substantive difference, in terms of the social, emotional and physical tolls, between sending a child off to six hours of daily practice and sending him off to train at a boarding academy.
In a way, there are even more dangers in the American system of raising athletes, where nearly every child has an opportunity to reach the upper echelons of professional sports with enough grit and determination–for example, the Williams sisters. Both are admirable traits, but at times, they are developed to a fault. Despite the valuable lessons competitive sports provide for young athletes, they often fuel self-destructive behavior that will hinder their success later in life. Several scenarios that can result from the intense pressure on children to succeed at the highest level in sports. Most obviously, there is the dumb jock stereotype where athletes are so focused on excelling in sports that their studies suffer; this outcome is certainly not desirable, but far from the worst. The real concern is when young athletes, so driven to succeed by the message sent to them by their coaches, parents and peers, might push themselves to excess. This type of behavior most commonly manifests itself in the use of performance enhancing drugs or playing through debilitating injuries to seem “tough.”
The use of performance enhancing drugs has been well documented, but the sometimes foolhardy insistence on “soldiering on” has not. This isn’t to say that individual athletes shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions regarding their health and their ability to compete, but when a persistent self-destructive mantra encourages young athletes to take enormous risks, something is clearly wrong. An obvious example would be the National Football League, a quintessentially American institution. Every Sunday the nation is affixed to the bold sacrifices and otherworldly accomplishments of men often hailed as heroes. But many don’t realize the debilitating injuries these players sustain to entertain us, to provide examples of selflessness, dedication, perseverance and ultimately, to serve as role models for children. Hall of Fame safety Willie Wood can’t even walk anymore because of the damage that playing professional football inflicted on his body. Even current players occasionally push themselves too far, like San Diego’s Shawne Merriman, who risked permanent disability by attempting to play on two torn ligaments in his knee, until he wisely decided to shut himself down.
These acts can be called courageous, heroic and even legendary, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that they are dangerous, foolish and set a worrisome example for the thousands of children that idolize these athletes. At some point, the true reasons behind participation in competitive sports need to be reevaluated and reemphasized. Winning is important, but it should never come at the expense of the physical and emotional wellbeing of athletes, especially those too young to understand the sacrifices they are making.

I am conflicted in my criticism of our new Center for Community Engagement. On the one hand, it was only through a fellowship with the Center that I was able to spend a month in New Orleans this summer working with Habitat for Humanity, and it was good work. Inasmuch as I was directly helping someone to rebuild her life, the effort seems to justify itself and, in some sense, to lie beyond the sometimes abstract business of general criticism. On the other hand, I find myself strangely apprehensive about the sudden preeminence of the Center at the College, and the seemingly undisputed way in which it has assumed a central part in the Amherst experience. I worry that we never took the question of whether the Center really belongs at a liberal arts college quite seriously—that instead, the whole thing slipped in rather unnoticed, and that the significance of its arrival has, since, been precariously underestimated. I suspect part of the reason the question hasn’t been raised is that the answer seems too simple to make the effort worthwhile—of course a Center for Community Engagement belongs at the College—but to look into the relationship between engagement and the liberal arts will never be a simple thing, because to deal with that relationship is, in a basic way, to deal with the more general (and more persistent) question of the liberal arts as a whole—of its basic purpose and of its promise to the surrounding world.  For instance, let’s assume for a moment that performing a service for an individual in need of that service, and without payment, is a good thing. Simple enough, I hope, but if we accept this premise, we become obliged to take a more critical look at the liberal arts education we receive from the College (not a bad thing), and try to determine if the “good” it affords is as good as the “good” of the community service. In other words, if we accept that Habitat work is good, then the question becomes whether reading John Donne is as valuable to the individual (and through the individual to society) as working for Habitat for Humanity? Or if not John Donne, any sort of academic study at Amherst College? If our answer is no–which, perhaps, at first it must be–we then have to ask ourselves, what it is about reading John Donne, or even coming to the College in the first place, that justifies our being here for four years and not being in New Orleans rebuilding house. There seem to me to be three immediate options. On the one hand, it is conceivable–though bizarre–to accept Habitat work as “good” without feeling an obligation to engage the problem of affordable housing. If short-term self-interest were the guiding force in our lives, we might see the suffering of the people in New Orleans, be aware of our potential to relieve some of that suffering, and, because the cause did not immediately concern us, we might still feel no need to travel to the place and help. On the other hand, we might clearly see our potential for doing good work (being the robust twenty-somethings that we are) and perceive that potential being wasted in the slow and more introspective movement of the liberal arts education. In other words, we might conclude that, yes, John Donne has written a very many pretty things, and even that we enjoy reading them, but that our reading them represents, in some fundamental way, an indulgence–an accident of our privilege–and, as it is only pretty rather than helpful, that we have no real right to our inheritance and should leave the books for various hammers.  On the last hand, and differently, we might have had some experience at the College—perhaps, here:
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did till we loved ? were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly….
That, though it seemed unrelated at the time, and centuries apart from the storm-beaten city, lent something to us, in access to ourselves, that made more vivid both the suffering we would come to witness and our obligations entangled therein. It seems true that each hand has his indulgence and that the burden of the original problem must be shared across all three, for the problem is complicated: it is that I could tell you, had I never read a word of Donne, that I would not have seen New Orleans as vividly, but I cannot show you what the difference is, what it feels like, or what its different mandates are–only that I went, and it seemed to me upon return more and more certain, that our sympathies will only ever be keen as our imaginations, and that imagination is elsewhere than our service won.  In any event, it is no longer a question of whether we should have a Center or not. We have a Center, and presumably (barring some great scandal!) the effort spent on the Center was not done so provisionally. I believe, for better or worse, it is here to stay, if for no other reason than that the vague intentions of a vague majority have, historically, sunk deep roots. However, we should all at least realize that a serious commitment to a Center for Community Engagement (and if we are to commit, it should be seriously), if accepted, must represent a significant redirection of the resources of the College (resources, in the most general sense)—perhaps towards progress, possibly elsewhere, but at least away from what has been a bedrock commitment to the measured, contemplative, and imaginative growth of the individual. The commitment would also represent a revision in our understanding of the purpose of our own education: whether it is to prepare us for the immediate cries in our world, the hungry now, and poor, or whether some withdrawal from the world–which might also be, originally, a commitment to that world–is necessary at intervals in our development, in order that we might hear cries clearly and feel their purpose deeply.

Students began to arrive on campus the morning of August 24. New to the area and bleary-eyed, they looked around at the new students and buildings that would surround them for the four years to follow. The occasion for this mass of first-year students? “First year orientation.” These words don’t sound unique to Amherst at first—in fact, two weeks ago students everywhere in America were driving up to college, setting up their rooms and meeting hundreds of new people that very same morning. But the Amherst orientation experience is much more distinct. Instead of merely giving new students an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the school before beginning classes, Amherst provides freshmen with the opportunity to return to a sort of childhood and attend something similar to summer camp.
Amherst prides itself on having one of the longest college freshmen orientations in the entire country (I surveyed friends at other schools to test this claim; for the most part, their orientations only lasted from one to five days.) About ten days from start to finish, the Amherst orientation schedule is jam-packed with various summer-camp-like activities for first-years. Whether they went to every single activity or didn’t even attend the mandatory ones, most freshmen would agree that the nine days of orientation felt incredibly long. I have heard plenty of conversations in which, first-years seemed surprised to learn how little time had passed since their arrival (“It’s only been a day? I feel like it’s been a week!”). So not only was the Amherst orientation already twice as long as most other freshmen orientations, but it also felt much longer than it actually was—almost like a month-long summer camp.
First off at Camp Amherst: meeting with “camp counselors” (read: our RC’s, and later, our squad leaders). There were all sorts of things to do for “campers”—music, fun and games, meeting people, making friends—all in the context of a laidback, lazy summer atmosphere. Performances like the RC show and the SHE skits presented at the new student breakfast revealed a staple summer camp strategy: restless new campers who have yet to get to know each other are better able to break the ice if they can laugh together at their counselors. Our Squads provided even more icebreakers and name games (Phenomenal Phil and Spunky Sebastian stand out in my mind, though I’m pretty sure I’ll forever be known as K-razy Kaytee by my squad).
Aside from activities and meet-and-greets, the program included trips to Boston and Holyoke Mall, day hikes and three-day trips with either FOOT or CEOT. The FOOT trips were like the “wilderness camp” option of summer camp, including activities such as hiking, canoeing and rock-climbing. On my FOOT trip, our group played games like Mafia and Frisbee, bonded over washing dishes in the dark, made s’mores around a campfire and camped out under the stars (all very similar to a camping trip I went on the summer after seventh grade). We arrived back to campus after what felt like one or two weeks full with fun experiences and new friends.
Not only were the activities of orientation reminiscent of summer camp, but the atmosphere on campus also mirrored those of summer camp. At camp, campers are thrown together for a few weeks to a month, opening up and bonding quickly with the people around them to the point where they become “besties.” At Amherst, a similar phenomenon of accelerated bonding has occurred: roommates have become attached at the hip, huge groups of freshmen tavel around in packs and, perhaps most illustratively, there are already several freshmen couples on campus. And all of this was made possible by the summer atmosphere of Camp Amherst.
It’s actually ironic that Amherst Orientation was like a summer camp in middle school. For many, college represents getting away from home for the first extended period of time, a symbol of maturity and an opportunity to explore adulthood. And yet, the first week of college was very similar to summer camp: freshmen on the verge of adulthood threw “maturity” to the wind to play icebreakers and name games. Though college is a definite step into adulthood, for some reason the adjustment tactics still haven’t changed. Actually, they may have even regressed, considering the middle-school-like aspects of the Camp Amherst experience.
It’s interesting to consider the reasons for this apparent regression. The reason for the freshmen orientation’s likeness to summer camp could just be the fact that beginning one’s freshmen year at college and going off to camp are similar experiences. Both events entail leaving home without parental guidance for a long stretch of time. College and camp both involve making friends with unfamiliar people, adapting to new teachers or counselors, and learning to be resourceful on one’s own. Because of these similarities, it may just be natural that freshmen orientation at Amherst would seem like a summer camp.
Or maybe the regression is a result of some resistance to maturity in today’s youth. Parents are encouraging this trend through their increased amount of protectiveness—fifty years ago, a parent would not have even thought twice about allowing their child to walk alone to the playground and play without supervision. These days, some “helicopter parents” are so overprotective that they supervise their children at all times, sometimes even hovering over their teenagers’ every move once they leave for college. This only causes the young person to remain a kid for longer, unable to learn how to fend for himself in the world beyond his childhood home. So, while intellectual maturity may be higher than ever (probably due to the vast amount of information available through the internet), traditional maturity and responsibility are being postponed until later and later in life. Camp Amherst, which serves as a blast to the middle school past, goes along with this trend, encouraging a summer camp atmosphere that allows us to postpone actual adulthood further—which, in my opinion, is actually a good thing (my opinions on helicopter parenting are another story). We worked hard to get into Amherst, so it’s nice to have a fun respite like orientation to give us time to make friends and settle into the collegiate atmosphere. Or maybe I just like postponing responsibility.

In 2005, five high school seniors agreed to open every facet of their lives to our country’s prying eyes. Perhaps this summary of American Teen would be more exciting if it weren’t roughly identical to the taglines of 90 percent of MTV’s afternoon programming. Although this latest foray into teenagers’ hidden lives is earnest and funny, it often reads as a mash-up of pop culture’s greatest hits.
The high school in question is Warsaw Community High School in rural Indiana, which seems appropriately all-American for the film’s purposes. Nanette Burstein, the film’s director and producer, ran rigorous auditions to find the perfect subjects—and find them she did. The five main teenagers have been carefully selected to fill five well-known stereotypes: There’s Colin, the jock; Hannah, the rebel; Jake, the nerd; Megan, the princess; and Mitch, the heartthrob. To help out moviegoers who never saw The Breakfast Club, the film’s trailer superimposes these labels over the teens’ images.
It isn’t hard to see how these kids got Burstein’s stamp of approval. They are enthusiastic, fresh-faced and sympathetic—even snotty Megan, who takes revenge on her enemies in increasingly horrific ways, finds some redemption. It must have been tough for Burstein to find five teens that are interesting enough to watch for an hour and a half, but unspecial enough to be accessible—but she seems to have succeeded. These teens aren’t prodigies or jetsetters, future billionaires or Nobel Peace Prize winners¬¬. In a summer of Miley Cyruses and Nastia Liukins, the Warsaw kids are extraordinarily average.
The extent to which their normalcy has been engineered by editing is unclear, since this film is slickly cut and ruthlessly well-organized. But these teens put on a good show of fitting into the niches Burstein assigns them—and why shouldn’t they? Although no one acknowledges as much, this documentary constitutes half the ticket out of Warsaw. (The other half of the ticket is college, a storyline that the film does track.) These teens are champing at the bit to get out of their dead-end hometown, and Burstein promises them an introduction into the film industry, a glamorous summer of promoting the movie and a devoted Facebook fan base—all they have to do is let Burstein follow them around for a year. They demonstrate their appreciation of such a sweet deal by revealing just about anything to the camera.
You get the sense that such permissiveness is meant to shock. But a lot has changed since Burstein began shooting. Reality television has inured us to the most horribly intimate details of teens’ lives, whether the latest young wannabe is getting a bikini wax from her soon-to-be mother-in-law or confessing her six-year-long crush on her best friend. MTV’s grittier entry into the genre, True Life, boasts episode titles such as “I’ve Got Baby Mama Drama” and “I’m Addicted to Crystal Meth.” (Though these are interspersed with the somewhat less sensational “I’m Having a Summer Romance” and “I Own a Summer Share.”)
In comparison to these weighty topics, American Teen’s revelations about sordid teen life are somewhat anticlimactic, especially if you’ve ever been through high school. So although you can practically hear the filmmakers gasping with delight as the teens unveil a handle of vodka, in the theater the sounds are mostly yawns. Underage drinking reigns supreme, but no other drug use is shown. For the most part, the subjects are morally grounded, honor their mothers and fathers and avoid the principal’s office. Megan does seriously nasty stuff, courts suspension and induces offended yelps from the audience, but she’s the anomaly and by far the biggest troublemaker: In the film’s Breakfast Club–knockoff posters, Judd Nelson’s “criminal” character has been replaced by “heartthrob” Mitch.
Although this wholesomeness can become cloying, it’s also what gives the film a niche in the blur-tool-fueled reality circuit—and what makes it relatable. As it becomes clear that there will be no murderous rampages or study-hall orgies at WCHS, the film accepts that the interesting story is not the filmmaker’s quest to learn some insidious secret of high school, but instead each teen’s attempt to contrive his or her own path out of Warsaw.
At first, those journeys seem to come pre-packaged in 90-minute story arcs, as lazily generic as the movie’s title. If Colin doesn’t get a college basketball scholarship, he’ll have to enlist in the army. Hannah sets her sights on California, but a three-week string of absences threatens her diploma. Jake just really, really wants a girlfriend. But the film is marked with family nuances that keep these stories absorbing—such as Colin’s Elvis-impersonating father, who advises him on basketball while wearing a sparkly jumpsuit; Hannah’s fears of inheriting her mother’s manic depression; and Jake’s introduction to drunken shenanigans in San Diego, courtesy of his older brother.
For a film that clearly gorged itself on John Hughes’s oeuvre, how eerily perfect that all of the teens’ lives are shaped so concretely by their family situations! If these sequences, especially Megan’s, closely mirror Breakfast Club’s style of gradual revelations about each kid’s troubled home life, or Pretty in Pink’s rich-versus-poor look at socioeconomic division—well, fine. As should be pretty obvious from the number of times Breakfast Club has already come up in this review, American Teen is not a movie striving for subtlety as it builds connections to the 1985 hit.
The easy response is that Burstein is just trying to capitalize on the nostalgic niche that John Hughes occupies in the hearts and minds of our generation—a generation anxious for inclusion in the hip ’80s, despite that our best memories of that decade were sponsored by Gerber’s and Pampers.
But let’s be a little more optimistic. Maybe Burstein’s trying to prove that the transition from child to adult is as humiliating and impossible for teens today as it was for every other generation. True, as messages go, it isn’t that original. Your parents could have taught you the same lesson in the time it takes Jake’s taxidermy collection to scare off yet another potential girlfriend. But your parents wouldn’t have been as hilarious as Jake’s pick-up lines, or as exhilarating as Colin’s final basketball game for college scouts, or as alluring as Mitch wearing a dinosaur costume for Hannah. Oh, Mitch. What a heartthrob.

As good a place to begin as any: on a bench, on the campus of fictional Winesburg College in real Ohio, with our hero ruminating on the new clothes he bought for college—in large part because he has just vomited all over them in the dean’s office—which clothes he bought in the first place so as to resemble the collegiate fellow from the picture in the course catalog. You know the one. Marcus Messner, then, ostensibly staring at his shoes:
Those were the clothes that I wore while I sat in chapel trying how not to learn to lead a good life in accordance with biblical teachings and singing to myself instead the Chinese national anthem. Those were the clothes I’d been wearing when my roommate Elwyn had thrown the punch that had nearly broken my jaw. Those were the clothes I was wearing when Olivia went down on me in Elwyn’s LaSalle. Yes, there’s the picture of the boy and girl that should adorn the cover of the Winesburg catalogue: me in those clothes being blown by Olivia and having no idea what to make of it.
What to make of it?
Philip Roth’s new novel Indignation takes its title from the lyrics to the Chinese national anthem mentioned above, in what amounts to an ironic-in-the-worst-way joke on the innocent, and therefore doomed Marcus. For that and other reasons more immediately obvious, these latest 233 pages of Roth’s published work are of surprising relevance to, well, us—the collegiate generation of the present day. Roth hasn’t written anything so apparently salient to the nineteen year-old maybe since Portnoy’s Complaint, and even there the teenage reader hears the message which echoes through Roth’s fiction of middle and old age: “You may think it’s bad now—just wait.” Well, there’s not much to wait for by the end of Indignation, and poor Marcus is indeed as innocent and doomed as they come.
Marcus Messner, age 19, sophomore transfer student, is far from his Newark home. His self-inflicted transplant amounts to a flight from his father’s suddenly overbearing reign of locked doors and fearful lectures. Mr. Messner, a kosher butcher—more on that later, notes the trained reader of Philip Roth—is more than ordinarily paranoid about the fates that may or may not await his son. It’s not entirely clear why, nor is meant to be, but for one thing it’s 1951, the Korean War is killing American men by the thousands, and the Messners have already lost two elder cousins to the Second World War. Exit Marcus.
Marcus is unprepared for everything that Roth’s young Jewish men are usually unprepared for: the Midwest, academia, authority figures and young non-Jewish women. Notably, Marcus is unusually naïve in the ways of sex and women writ large (does this have something to do with History? Perhaps naïveté in 2008 is of equivalent interest to um, intrepidness in 1969, the year of Portnoy). Never mind women, Marcus is exposed to horrors more unexpected and unprecedented—except, come to think of it, in Philip Roth’s novels. (Sabbath’s Theater and Zuckerman Unbound. Hint.) After such an exposure, Marcus is debriefed by an older boy, Sonny Cottler, Cleveland Jew:
“There are such gargoyle people, Marcus, and you have now run into one.” “But this isn’t love—that’s absurd.” “Lots about love is absurd,” Cottler told me.
That’s marvelously restrained understatement, which sounds pat, unless you know what just happened, but here I confess I have reached my prudish limit. I simply will not tell you.
It isn’t long before Marcus has met Olivia Hutton, the unsettlingly promiscuous doctor’s daughter with a scar on one wrist—that, at least, is all Marcus needs to know. Roth has a way of letting secondary characteristics supplant personhood in secondary characters—one starts a novel with the usual cast, and by the end you’re down to one or two human beings confronted with a bunch of legged and limbed synecdoches walking around. Yes, Olivia has that one scar, and it’s there for exactly the reason Marcus (and his mother) assume. But this wouldn’t be any fun unless Roth made something of that wrist you weren’t expecting, except (this is your moment, trained Rothian) that you kind of were: that Olivia tried
to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law.
It would temper the horror and certainly ruin a good time to mention that no, she wouldn’t have, unless she also had a cloven hoof and chewed her cud. But Olivia is anything but kosher, which is problematic, though not nearly as much as the catalyzing happening in the roommate’s car—the night of their first date—which is the point of departure for the slide of the novel into tragedy.
But let’s leave the sex aside for a moment and wonder why it’s still fun to read Philip Roth. Surely his winding, booming voice is still there, and so is his attention to the smallest detail you never thought any sane person would take up (and wouldn’t). When Roth shouts in that voice it’s hard not to listen. In a novel with Indignation for a title you might expect more rather than less of that sort of thing, and there’s plenty of it, but there are moments like this, too:
It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.
“My mother had muscles” is nearly enough, but (forgive the pun) it’s Roth’s muscles I find compelling here—small ones, less a butcher’s than a typist’s.
There is plenty of the former in the novel, and those big muscles are still the ones to watch. If we turn back to History for a moment, and note that this is a novel of wartime published in wartime, at a moment when the nation’s college campuses that most resemble Winesburg (Hint.) are sheltered from the bloodbath overseas by fortune and good fortune, we’ll hear a blast from the pulpit that could as easily be delivered from Johnson Chapel as page 217 of Indignation. Speaking is the president of Winesburg College, Albin Lentz, and whether you attribute his thoughts to the author or not, the voice is Roth and in full throat:
…history will catch you in the end. Because history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times! Most sickening of all is that it is just that kind of ignorance that you are purportedly at Winesburg to expunge. What kind of a time do you think you belong to, anyway? Can you answer? Do you know? Do you have any idea that you belong to a time at all?
This is late in the novel, which by now is accelerating. As the novel swells by sleight of hand to its close, and even though we’re told repeatedly of the looming disaster, and for all the talk of the Korean War, even experienced readers of Roth’s fiction might find themselves a little surprised to be taken there. One sad last butcher joke and then the last pararaph of Indignation inflames things to where they often end in Roth’s hands. Read it slowly.
Where does that leave us? It might be (here comes History) that we’re in Roth’s Late Period—his recent novels bear some of the traits of Minor Tragedies, and this one recaptures the mood that made Roth great in Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, albeit in a smaller portion: the despairing realization that one’s internal composition is inescapable, and with it one’s parents, one’s people and one’s predilections. What Roth does to Marcus in Indignation is akin to what he does to Coleman Silk, to Nathan Zuckerman, Mickey Sabbath, Swede Levov—the heroes of his major tragedies. And as for them as well as plenty in Indignation—Olivia’s wrist, Mr. Messner’s sanity, Elwyn’s car, Marcus—it’s all ritual slaughter, offered up on the altar of the ineludible past. No less than those four Rothian heroes is Marcus Messner a victim of his misguided romp away from home. Ritual slaughter—that’s the easy pun that’s also the easy thing to say about Indignation and Philip Roth.
Broad statements about Philip Roth usually embrace a few major qualities, of which most attract nowadays (as ever, though the targets have moved) plenty of scorn and belittling criticism. Roth is male, Roth is provincial, Roth is Jewish, Roth is an exhibitionist. As far as saying anything useful about his talents or failures as a novelist, it might be helpful to dispense with all that. Is Roth’s fiction Jewish? Only to whatever extent we would call Homer an author in the Pagan school. Is Roth’s fiction male? Well, so are about half of us, a respectable percentage when it comes to identifiable traits exposed in fiction, but I think too that on closer inspection a lot of the qualities that get criticized for “maleness”—insecurity, desire, frustration—aren’t, and deserve better from those who will universalize almost anything. Is Roth’s fiction exhibitionist?
Well, I should hope so. Fiction would be awfully boring if it weren’t. Roth’s happens to force prurience on the reader, and it occurs to me that it’s actually helpful to operate with a kind of sustained innocence when reading Roth’s novels, sustained thoroughly enough still to register a shock when the sexually outrageous takes its turn. What seems simple restatement in Indignation of sexually adventurous spirits and corresponding terror is more than just that—it’s of another era, one before Portnoy and before the sexual revolution, when automotive trysts seem actually to have happened. They don’t much anymore, as the nearest college-age person likely can tell you, but the nerves, the discomfort—what we call “awkwardness,” awkwardly—and the obsessive attention to detail with which Marcus confronts the driver’s seat of the LaSalle have hung around long after curfews and mandatory chapel passed mildly away. Other than one discordant moment in a hospital room, of unfortunate significance to the plot, Marcus Messner is that bewildered innocent thrown up against another creature more thoroughly of Roth’s universe.
What’s hard to say about Indignation has always been hard to say about Philip Roth, which perhaps is the cause of all the interpretive crutches described (and, I fear, used) above. It isn’t just that Roth arranges his syntax a little differently from others (“I importunately…”), or that these days he uses “back of” in place of the preposition “behind” at every opportunity. Philip Roth can turn a phrase, and Philip Roth can shout, and when he does he can be read aloud to real effect. What’s more, he can tell a joke. His best are dead serious.

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera once wrote, “is an unhappy person.” Judging by the resignation of two prime ministers in the past year, Japanese political leaders have found their historically stable nation, with the world’s second largest economy of $4.7 trillion, in a despondent state. A politically unmanageable condition has dishearteningly thwarted all attempts at internal cooperation. The resignation of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on September 1 was preceded by the halt of Japan’s longest post-World War II economic expansion. This development was instigated by debilitating quarrelling between Fukuda’s consistently dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the steadily rising Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).
Unlike his youthful and nationalistic predecessor Shinzo Abe, who resigned on grounds of “ill health” in 2007, Fukuda directly targeted government entanglements as his primary, if not only, justification for resignation. Lacking sufficient economic reforms, Japan’s GDP has gradually fallen, while inflation has crept onto the laundry list of pressing threats. Astonishingly, even with Fukuda and Abe’s absent-minded and dysfunctional administrations, Japan has yet to be harmed by the credit crunch and housing market crisis plaguing the United States, its economic step-brother. Japan’s economic woes can instead be traced to its large national debt and aging population.
In his sudden and unanticipated announcement of resignation—of which his wife was not even aware—Fukuda averred damage caused by a “political vacuum” in Japanese politics created by the LDP’s dynastic prime ministers and the DPJ majority in the Parliament’s Upper House. Fukuda blamed Parliament for his abysmal approval rating (which sank as low as 20 percent), as the DPJ, led by Ichiro Ozawa, constantly blocked his proposed bills. The rancor between Fukuda and Parliament reached its apogee in April when Parliament issued a nonbinding censure against Fukuda—the first time since WWII Parliament has taken this action against a prime minister. Fukuda’s controversial plan to increase healthcare payments for elderly citizens as well as his botching of over 10 million pension plans legitimized this censure. Wrangling between Fukuda and the Parliament became so severe in 2007 that for three weeks the position of Central Bank Governor was abandoned, spawning fiscal chaos. But it was most likely Abe and Fukuda’s continued support of the wildly unpopular Indian Ocean project to refuel ships bound for Afghanistan that put the final nail in their political coffins.
From the beginning Fukuda was doomed to fail, but his resignation was unforeseen, abruptly following his announcement of a $17 billion economic stimulus package. After keeping an almost identical cabinet to Abe’s—for which he was criticized—Fukuda reshuffled his cabinet only a month ago, garnering additional criticism and unfavorable comparisons to his flippant predecessor. Abe and Fukuda have damaged the LDP’s reputation so greatly that there is even speculation that Junichiro Koizumi, who served as Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006, may come out of retirement to realign Japan’s political factions.
“I’ve decided to quit,” pouted the stone-faced Fukuda in his speech, “it’s time for someone else to take a turn.” By this, Fukuda implicitly means that another member of the LDP will rise to the occasion on the September 22 election, most likely Taro Aso, the LDP’s Secretary General and Japan’s former Foreign Minister. Fukuda won the position of Prime Minister with 330 parliamentary votes to Aso’s 197 in the 2007 election following Abe’s resignation. The trend regarding Japan’s prime ministers closely resembles a relay race, with one member of the LDP passing a baton to another with worsening splits after each lap. The appointment on September 22 will mark the third in a row decided completely by the right-wing LDP—there will not be a popular election until at least September 2009. In the past 50 years, the LDP has ruled Japan for all but eleven months.
Interestingly, Fukuda’s biography is unnervingly similar to Abe’s. Born into a family of politicians (his father Takeo Fukuda also served as prime minister), Fukuda was highly educated and enjoyed a moderately successful career in the private sector working for an oil company, but eventually left to work for his father in government. Never a notably enthusiastic politician, Fukuda turned down an offer to vie for LDP leadership in 2006. During his brief stint in office, Fukuda accomplished little, if anything. He was briefly lauded for hosting a productive G8 summit and had a strong reputation as the longest serving Chief Cabinet Secretary prior to becoming Prime Minister. An enigmatic and solemn individual, he refrained from revealing his resignation until ten minutes before his emergency press conference.
In many ways the LDP is as much a vestige of post-WWII Allied diplomacy as the Marshall Plan. In 1990 it was revealed that beginning in 1955 (when the party was founded) and continuing throughout the ’70s, the US Central Intelligence Agency pumped millions of dollars into the LDP in order to prevent Communist opposition parties from taking hold of the nascent democracy. With time, the LDP will weaken and a more democratic balance of power will take hold, as shown by the success the DPJ has had in recent Parliamentary elections. But right now we are witnessing the most exciting and progressive age of politics in a Japan that has been stagnant throughout the post-War era. That is, of course, aside from Yukio Mishima’s fanatical act of political seppuku.
With its urban culture being devoured by hungry big-name business and its cities expanding unceasingly, Japan is a country in transition. But even in an age of economic development and political turnover, Japan has retained relatively stable levels of growth and its economy has not been hurt as much by the prime minister crisis as may be first assumed. Like West Germany, Japan exhibited the strength of its national willpower by making an almost impossible social, political and economic recovery following WWII with an unrelenting effort to establish a stable middle class.
Despite an initial negative reaction to Fukuda, he should not be burned in effigy in Japan nor lambasted by Western intellectuals: He was submerged in an arduous situation that would have been near-impossible for even the lithest politician to escape. Similarly, the LDP cannot be held completely responsible for its recent failure, because although much of its prowess is gained from underhanded patronage, much of it is attributable to the weakness of opposition parties—especially the DPJ. If the DPJ were more organized and centralized, then Japan could wean itself off of a top-down political system.

For years, I’ve followed politics very closely. I can probably name more members of Congress than can most Americans. Yet even I had never heard of the obscure Alaskan governor whom John McCain had suddenly catapulted onto the national stage.
As my dad filled me in, and as I later read about her online, I, as a Democrat, breathed a sigh of relief. For the past week, I had been terrified at the possibility that McCain would choose Colin Powell as his running mate, a man whose extensive foreign policy experience, respect and popularity across the political spectrum and potential to siphon African-American votes away from Obama could have posed a serious threat to the Democratic ticket in November. In choosing this nobody, McCain seemed to have all but sealed his defeat.
That was probably a premature assessment. Nonetheless, there is definitely a certain risk in McCain’s choice, though perhaps not exactly the one I expected. By now, much has been said by political commentators about the strategic pros and cons of McCain’s choice. Some say Palin will attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters, while others insist that she won’t because she is staunchly pro-life, inexperienced, and, above all, not Hillary Clinton. Indeed, many Clinton supporters who might have defected and voted for McCain may be turned off by this transparently cynical move, insulted by his apparent assumption that Clinton supporters will vote for just any woman. Some analysts have said her socially conservative “family values” record will energize the Republican base, whose support McCain has so struggled to solidify, while others believe it will merely seem hypocritical in light of her 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy. But the biggest risk in choosing Palin may be that her recent entry into the public eye will make her the prime target for media sensationalism and Internet rumor-mongering in these final weeks leading up to the election.
Obama made the right decision in choosing Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate because Americans learned about all of Biden’s various embarrassing missteps quite a while ago––including his unattributed paraphrasing of a British Labour Party leader in a speech during his 1988 presidential bid, and his reference to Barack Obama as “articulate.” This is old news.
Palin, on the other hand, having just come onto the national political scene, is a prime target for scrutiny by political operatives and the media. Indeed, as I write this, AOL.com is swarming with headlines regarding new revelations about the Alaskan governor. Her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Rumors are going around on the Internet that she faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her daughter. She’s being investigated on allegations of abuse of power in firing Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, a scandal now being referred to as “Troopergate.” Her husband was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. A video is circulating on YouTube of her talking about God’s role in the Iraq War, along with videos of her pastor’s radical statements. The list goes on.
This same phenomenon of new political faces getting all the media attention plagued Obama in the long primary battle. Remember Reverend Wright––another controversial pastor? Remember Michelle Obama’s “proud of America for the first time” comment? Remember when 12 percent of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim? (Oh, wait, they still do.) All these controversies were products of his relatively recent appearance on the national stage. Why didn’t Clinton suffer similarly because of what her husband did while he was president? Again, that was old news, so the media were not reminding voters of it constantly, and therefore voters were probably less likely to be thinking about it in the voting booth.
There are few things Americans love more than a good scandal. We may not realize it, but we love to be shocked, appalled and disgusted. The ratings-obsessed media pander to these basest human instincts, and websites like YouTube ensure that we can always get our daily dose of public figures (whether politicians or celebrities) saying or doing something stupid, dishonest or offensive. But we also have a very short attention span, and once the videos of Reverend Wright shouting “God damn America” had been replayed three or four times on the evening news, the shock value wore off, and then it’s on to Hillary’s “sniper fire” misstatement.
The net result of all this is a political climate in which elections are never won, only lost. If you’re the candidate with the fewest and least recent nasty rumors floating around about you, the fewest minor scandals and the fewest statements taken out of context and replayed ad nauseum in political ads and on YouTube, you win.
In the coming weeks, we’ll probably learn a lot more about Sarah Palin, most of the information of the sordid variety that we’ve come to expect from our sensationalist media. And with election day rapidly approaching, voters may be more likely to vote against the woman with the pregnant teenage daughter than against the guy with the pastor who hates America, because the former is the thing they’ll remember.

As NBC broadcast the impressively choreographed opening ceremonies to the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, most of the world’s attention was focused elsewhere on something graver than the spectacle of 400 shirtless men drumming in perfect harmony. Footage of Russian tanks rolling into Georgia disturbed the serenity of the ceremony and seemed to suggest a broader significance for the Olympics. In addition, China, as the host, was given an opportunity to overcome some of its difficult history. Despite the politics in the air around the Games, it seems to me that the Olympics are given too prominent a place on the international stage. The marketing for the Games wants to speak to the contrary, but I still don’t see the Games as anything more than it has ever been—a global athletic contest.
To elaborate on this point, I think it is worth comparing the Olympics to another huge sporting event that took place this summer. The European Football (soccer) Championships were held this past June, showcasing the top 16 national teams from that soccer-crazed continent. Despite the obvious absence of a US contingent, ESPN still broadcast the entire tournament live from its location in Austria and Switzerland, ostensibly because it provides such fascinating entertainment.
Although the Olympics and Euro Championships are quite clearly distinct types of sporting events, the contrast between the two highlights what I find so lamentable about the former. The Olympics arrive every four years with a new batch of superstars ready to hoist an entire nation on their shoulders and capture the world’s attention for two weeks. However, many athletes will only don their country’s uniform for one competition, and the sheer number of athletes for each country eschews any traditional notion of a “team.” To be fair, teams such as USA Basketball or repeat-champions in beach volleyball Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh embody and embrace the team mentality. Yet there clearly exists no concrete Team USA as we are often led to imagine it: fencers standing shoulder to shoulder with tennis players, synchronized divers next to marathoners and so on, all draped in American flags and belting the national anthem while tears trickle down their cheeks. I doubt even Bob Costas and the whole NBC crew believe in that abstract notion anymore.
In sharp contrast, every European national soccer team has forged a singular identity over the years. The players and coaches for the 16 competing nations live in the spotlight year-round, subject to endless media attention, scrutiny and the burden of unreasonably lofty expectations. This year Spain emerged victorious from the tournament, overcoming what can only be described in American sports terms as a Chicago Cubs-like propensity for failure. But the real joy was not in watching the smooth and consistent Spaniards finesse their way to glory; it was truly a marvel to behold the way in which each team characterized an entire nation.
ESPN ran ads prior to the tournament that alluded to this concept. The words “Engineered to Win” supplemented a montage of Germany’s past victories in one ad, while another read “Come Dance with the Portuguese,” highlighting the country’s predilection for style over substance. Yet the most telling ad was for the defending champions: “Greece is Back to Defend Their Cup—11 Million Strong.” In promoting the idea that Greece, not just the squad of eleven men on the field, is competing against the other top European nations, the ad illustrates the entire country’s investment in the outcome.
The ad also highlights one of the tournament’s finest facets—its parity. Greece won the tournament four years ago, to the general shock and dismay of the rest of Europe, but finished statistically dead last this time around. It is no exaggeration to say that every nation enters the tournament with a legitimate shot at winning the title, with soccer lightweights Turkey, Croatia and Russia all exceeding expectations and advancing further than more traditional superpowers this summer. For further evidence see England, the country where soccer was born, whose national team infamously failed to even qualify for this year’s tournament.
While it is admittedly more difficult to measure success in the Olympics due to the vast quantity of events, there is never doubt as to which nations will be raking in the most medals overall. It was clearly the US-China show in Beijing, with (shockingly!) Russia coming in comfortably in third place. And overall interest appears to rise in correlation to a country’s success, as larger nations such as this inextricably linked trio place heavy emphasis on the final outcome as a reflection of themselves. In Beijing, Michael Phelps would get pumped up listening to a Lil Wayne song, swing his disproportionately long arms a couple of times and then swim a few laps of the pool faster than anyone else. Yet his performance was treated as a national spectacle by the news media and the public at large, as if there existed no better indicator of America’s power than this one man’s flawless dolphin kick. I don’t mean to belittle his achievement (and I certainly don’t deny watching every race with bated breath or letting out a yelp when he won the 100m Butterfly by a fingernail), but with his Olympic performance he became the symbol of American dominance, more of an ambassador than even our own President or either presidential candidate.
I find it regrettable that we should read so much into any sporting event in the first place, but I also don’t foresee the importance of athletics diminishing any time soon. All of the Olympics’ pomp and splendor, in addition to the inherent promise of worldwide peace and harmony, bombards viewers with grandiose patriotic messages. Isn’t it only natural to be excited as one’s country asserts its athletic dominance on the rest of the world? Well, yes, if you happen to live in the US. And yes, as long as “athletic dominance” means nothing more than simply that.
The teams competing in the Euro Championships are in essence representatives of their respective countries, but nobody would claim Spain’s victory as a harbinger of the nation’s rising continental supremacy. Soccer is still just a game. However intense it may seem, it is no more than a game, constantly changing and often unpredictable. I only wish I could enjoy the Olympics in the same way, as an athletic competition stripped free of any grand significance.

As Amherst students were justly celebrating our return to prominence on the US News & World Report’s listings (which is awkward, considering how we declared them meaningless last year), another of the Five Colleges was being placed on Radar Online’s list of worst colleges in America for being the “biggest ripoff” in academia. (Radar, for those of you not in the know, is an up-and-coming magazine for the well-to-do 25-40 year old demographic. At its best, it’s clever and insightful. At its worst, it reads like Vanity Fair staffed by CollegeHumor rejects). that at its best is a breath of fresh air and at its worst answers the question “What would happen if Vanity Fair were staffed by CollegeHumor rejects?”). Radar writes:
[“For just $47,190 a year, you get not only a school ranked second-to-last on U.S. News' list of liberal arts institutions, but also the prestige associated with being the Princeton Review's number one choice for Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians."]
This paragraph more or less sums up Radar’s criticism of our Five College comrade. It also nicely encapsulates why Radar’s article is, as one Hampshire student diplomatically put it, “total bullshit.” The first reason is shoddy and inaccurate reportage. Take a look at that US News and World Report ranking. Second to last on the list of liberal arts institutions! That would be pretty bad, if it were true. In reality, Hampshire was only second to last of the “Top Schools” tier of the US News ranking in 2007-08 (and it has climbed in rank since then). Hampshire still ranked well above a couple hundred other liberal arts schools.
Whether lazy or malicious, this mistake is just the tip of the iceberg (ironic for a site that often delights in Daily Show-esque fact-checking of the “Gotcha!” variety): At one point, Radar mockingly refers to classes called “Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored” and “Jews Without Money.” However, neither were Hampshire courses—the first is a book by British psychoanalysist Adam Phillips, the second is an autobiographical novel by journalist Michael Gold. Both are, however, within a few lines of each other on the Hampshire Dspace, an online reserves database that apparently looks a lot like a course catalog when you’re a Radar writer.
Another example is when Radar mentions the 47 percent four-year graduation rate, then snidely comments:
[“The figure is troubling even before you remember that the school doesn't have grades. (And far more alarming, we imagine, for the 53 percent of parents who can look forward to shelling out another $50,000 or more.)”]
Not quite. It’s unclear where that 47 percent figure comes from (Hampshire’s website currently claims a 65 percent four-year graduation rate).  However, the 53 percent of students who “don’t graduate in 4 years” includes, for example, all students who transfer out. The more important statistic is the percentage of students in a graduating class who finished in four years—that number is 80 percent, with 10 percent finishing in under four years, and 10 percent finishing in over four.
But what’s so great about statistics anyway? Radar certainly does, assuming that the lack of SAT scores, as well as “grades, statistics, and quantitative measurements” leads to slacking. It isn’t as though quantitative grades were handed down on stone tablets on Mount Sinai, with the distinctions between As and Bs objectively set out. Radar Online’s precious SAT composites and percentages are arbitrary and subjective. To their credit, Hampshire students are much less dogmatic about their preferred way of learning than is Radar Online. Ivan Ulchur, a third-year at Hampshire, mentioned that “It’s really hard to call the school a rip-off when you consider that you’re paying for access to five schools’ worth of education. I see Hampshire as a sort of supplement to the education provided at the rest of the colleges.” This view stands in stark contrast to Radar’s scorn for experimental education and its practitioners.
As Radar dismisses Hampshire students as hippies, there’s an uneasy echo of Rudy Giuliani at the RNC. Giuliani was unable and/or unwilling to understand what it is a community organizer does, so he just mockingly repeated the words over and over in an amazing display of ignorance and arrogance. That’s how Radar’s entire article feels—Radar doesn’t understand and isn’t particularly interested in finding out about the people it’s talking about. First-year Jacob Bornstein, for example, doesn’t fit their stereotype of a rich slacker at all. He speaks about how he’s “extremely grateful for the financial aid package he receives” and that “it seems like only 50 percent of students pay full price—and that’s just to finance the other 50 percent.” He loves to get up at 6:30 a.m. to tend the communal garden from which he gets his lunch—and says that he literally cried on the first day out of happiness. If anyone resembles the stereotype of young, well-off intellectual sloths, it seems like it would be the staff at Radar.

The sticker affixed to the front of Float (Side One Dummy, 2008) brags that The Alternative Press considers it “one of the most important records of the year, if not the decade.” That’s somewhat of a stretch, but there’s no doubt that Flogging Molly’s latest release is its most mature and significant. What little the record lacks in the brash, raucous fun that used to define the band’s sound is more than compensated for by a marked increase in the quality of songwriting.It’s unfortunate that a group this good needs an introduction, but for most of Massachusetts, Flogging Molly is probably known as “that band that sounds like the Dropkick Murphys.” Following the (not undeserved) commercial success of the Murphys in the wake of “Shipping Up To Boston’s” memorable scene in The Departed, it’s easy to forget that Flogging Molly has been around just as long, has more authentic Irish street cred and is a better band. Formed in the mid-’90s by Irish expatriate Dave King, the septet has released four albums of consistently high quality and endeared itself to legions of fans by virtue of their relentless enthusiasm onstage.Yet I’ve always wondered how this band can peacefully coexist with its more popular doppelgänger—the two groups have the same number of members, very similar instrumentation, the same infectious blending of Celtic melodies with punk-rock speed and intensity and the same affinity for rolling 12/8 rhythms. During a recent trip to Newbury Comics, I noticed that Float and DKM’s latest release, The Meanest of Times, were right next to each other on the best-sellers rack, and was taken aback for a minute by the redundancy. But Float, whether deliberately or not, clearly delineates Flogging Molly’s presence in the Irish-American rock sphere as different from that of the Murphys. The Meanest of Times proves that the Dropkick Murphys have mastered their signature sound, but that sword cuts both ways; while a lot of fun to listen to, it’s unmistakably the product of a band trapped by precedent and expectations. [Read more →]