Archives for September 2017

As the twentieth century in America sprang forth, so too did the nation’s obsession with sports. A brief fifty-four years before 1900, professional baseball was born. It was at the ethereally-named Elysian Field in Hoboken, New Jersey where the New York Baseball Club defeated the Knickerbockers 23-1. Twenty-three years later, in 1869, the first formal football game took place between Princeton’s Tigers and Rutgers’ Scarlet Knights. Again, this time in nearby New Brunswick—about an hour away from Hoboken—the garden state sowed the country’s second sport.

Both football and baseball thus spawned (from Anglican ancestors, no less, much as we), they rooted and flourished in a country eager for competition and for the glories of victories. They changed the cultural conversation in America almost immediately. Attendance at their contests swelled and their outcomes dominated workaday small talk. The games, be they professional or collegial, were to become something more than a mere pastime; they became a changing society’s passion.

No sooner did this new century and these new sports breathe their first breath, when the Galveston Hurricane struck Texas’s gulf coast. This eerily relevant event, in light of the recent and deadly hurricane’s to have struck Texas, Florida, and then Puerto Rico, claimed the lives of over eight thousand people. One year later, in 1901, the deranged anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley. The nation held out hope for the languishing president, but the doughty McKinley proved no match for his wounds.

Shaken by the stinging realization that nearly ten thousand countrymen had just died and a third sitting president had been killed in too few years, Americans sought stability. As never it does when needed most, it wasn’t to come any time soon. The nation was shaken further still, and rather literally, when on an early April morning in 1906, the Earth’s plates danced beneath San Francisco. The seismic event resulted in an earthquake that to this day remains the nation’s worst; three thousand died in the jaws of the quake. And with an explosion at a West Virginian coal mine eight months later, the first decade of this new century saw tens of thousands of Americans die by natural and accidental and homicidal ways. These devastating events occurred, we know well, just over a decade before America’s entrance into World War I. There, in the fields of France alongside the Triple Entente, incalculable casualties awaited.

Needless to say, baseball and football—our unique and emerging sports—were welcome distractions for many Americans during these years. Football, the newer of the two, enjoyed immense popularity in the college circuit, with most of the preeminent northeastern schools outfitting teams. The game, though, was very different then from what it is now; in the 1900’s, football was a veritably barbarous affair. In those days, American football was the rambunctious child of a virile marriage between rugby, soccer, and wrestling, in whose crib there was fostered little decorum. The British refer lovingly to their rugby as a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen, and their soccer as the very opposite. In making the sport their own, Americans seemed to have omitted all things gentlemanly that redeemed the other two.

Just how ungentlemanly was it? In the year 1905, eighteen young men died while playing this primordial style of football. The frequent post-mortems reported death caused by internal hemorrhage, head trauma, and broken spines. The game hadn’t yet introduced the forward pass (this was to come in 1907, when Pop Warner’s Carlisle Indians invented the airborne assault that would leave opponents flat-footed in awe—and, as a consequence, in defeat). Instead, players would scrummage, kick, and claw, and would deliberately assault an opponent’s top player if only to gain a slight advantage.

A tipping point occurred when a Union University player died of a cerebral hemorrhage on the field, combining in one horribly premature death two of the three pathologies described above. The young Union University man was attempting to tackle a Columbia University ball-carrier. He was mangled in the process and breathed his last right there on the field. Understandably aghast at having lost a young man, both schools decided it best to shutter their football programs. Thinking this to be a prudent move, Duke and Northwestern Universities followed suit. Others threatened to do the same.

It was at this point that President Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the mix. Roosevelt, the famously strenuous soldier-turned-politician was—not unlike most men in his day—enthralled by the sport. He lauded football as being “the greatest exercise of fine moral qualities”, of which he listed things like “resolution, courage, endurance, and capacity to hold one’s own and stand up under punishment”. The Rough Rider liked “rough, manly sports” and he didn’t “feel any sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal—so long as it is not fatal”. He said this to a crowd in 1903, two years before the sport claimed its eighteen deaths. Teddy would now be made to face the one condition he made explicit—the condition of fatality.

Surely, he was disconcerted by the sport’s death toll and by the thought of losing so many blue-blooded young men, but it wasn’t until his own son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., sustained a gruesome injury that the president decided to act. Theodore Jr. was playing for his father’s alma mater at Harvard University when he sustained a gnarly cut above the eye. The gash occurred only during a practice, but the sanguinary event caused in the president and doting father quite a stir. What’s more, Theodore Jr. later broke his nose during a freshman game against arch-rival Yale University.

For what it’s worth, it might be noted here that Theodore Jr. was by no means a frail and effete politician’s son. Later in life, the young Roosevelt served as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (a role his father once held), Governor of Puerto Rico and of the Philippines (again, a role his father held before, only as Governor of New York in his time), and an infantry commander during the invasion of Normandy at Utah Beach during World War II. As an aside, all of President Roosevelt’s four sons served in the wars: one was wounded, two died (Kermit committed suicide and Quentin, a pilot, was shot down), but ironically, Theodore Jr. emerged from his assignments unscathed. The son who was so frequently injured by sport made it through the storming of France in one piece. However, he wasn’t to make it back stateside; Theodore Jr., aged fifty-seven, died of a heart attack one month after the invasion.

But enough was enough. President Roosevelt would no longer sit idly by while his son, and his nation’s sons, continued maiming one another on the gridiron. He decided to meet with the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale in 1905 to address the issue and chart a course forward. Teddy sought to “reduce the element of brutality” in the game, which—upon reflection—seems not to be asking for too much. Because the gathered universities were private institutions, President Roosevelt couldn’t coerce them to change. At the very least, though, he raised this important issue to the powers at be and forced the nation to take notice.

Acting in part on President Roosevelt’s plea, the university directors decided to make a change. In the following years, no less than sixty university presidents gathered to decide on the game’s future. They ultimately agreed upon the establishment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, in 1910. Thus implemented, the NCAA was able to regulate play and make football much safer than it had ever been before.

We now fast-forward to the present day. Much like it did in 1905, football again finds itself in a crisis. And as before, it’s a predominant talking point in the sport-loving public’s mind. Concussions, and their consequent CTE (or, chronic traumatic encephalopathy), are imperiling not only the players, but the game itself. Evidence linking the sport and the chronic, often-fatal condition is irrefutable. The NFL, first as a business and secondly as a group stakeholders concerned with matters of player health and welfare, have dallied but can no longer deny that this is the truth.

In their own ways, the past and current presidents, just like Theodore Roosevelt before them, have addressed this formidable question facing football today. President Obama, in 2014, hosted a “Youth Concussion Summit” to raise awareness about the issue. Whether or not it was efficacious is tough to gauge. The summit earmarked a shared $30 million investment from the Department of Defense and NCAA to conduct a comprehensive clinical study of concussions in sports. The NFL also pledged an extra $25 million to the cause.

President Trump seems less keen to explore the issue. At his speech in Alabama two weeks ago, he lamented the days of yore when the game was more brutal than currently it is. He recounted watching two players making a “beautiful tackle” and then, “boom…fifteen yards”, as if to say they were penalized for their fine hit. He said that those trying to temper the tough, highlight-reel hits are “ruining the game”. The players “want to hit” after all, but penalizing them for doing so is “ruining the game”.

Although one might prefer Trump be more forward-thinking on the issue, like President Roosevelt in his time and Obama in his, it isn’t all that surprising that he feels as he does. These are the words of a seventy-year old football fan remembering fondly the game with which he fell in love many years ago. He longs for the Dick LeBeau’s and the Ronnie Lott’s who made high-impact collisions seem quotidian. I daresay any man from his generation might long for and hence say the same thing. He is the president, though, and his sentiments—no matter how widely shared amongst his fellow septuagenarians—carry added import. He’d only be helping the cause, as Roosevelt was pushed to do over one hundred years ago, if he were in some way able to reframe his thought—and maybe save the minds of these players.

Is America’s cultural and political balkanization complete? Have the cracks and corrugations—once deep but navigable and mendable—broken down into unbridgeable gaps? Can these two institutions of culture and politics hope to be reconciled? Can they be redeemed? Can they return to a bygone time when they lived at a distance, yes, but in comfort and at ease? The answer to every question above is an unequivocal no. Most lamentably, yet most resoundingly, the answer is no.

President Trump’s recent feud with the NFL has proven as much. In its wake, the political and the cultural worlds within which we’ve come to nestle ourselves and define our differences have become irreconcilable. If the NFL couldn’t remain immune to the daily political vitriol and the incessant fractionalization we’ve seen emanating from L.A. and D.C, no cultural institution could be expected to remain in one piece. While Hollywood has all but forsaken its attempt to conceal its predilection for the left, the NFL was supposed to be impartial. So far as politics was concerned, it was terra incognita. The NFL hadn’t yet been charted by one side of the aisle nor claimed. It was the apolitical last bastion of a uniquely American ideal, one in whose confines all generations of Americans would eagerly go to seek refuge from an endless storm. Families would immerse themselves in the sport, happy—if only for a few hours—to retire from the indecorous politics of the day and the banalities of a quibbling life. Sadly, we mark today sport’s expiry. It no longer stands outside of politics and culture, but straddles both.

During a speech in Alabama, President Trump—during a famous divagation—touched on the topic of football players kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. Speaking jauntily off-topic to a football-crazed crowd, Trump imagined a scenario in which NFL owners (who are largely white, one should note) would toss the “sons of bitches” (the players, who are mainly black) off the football field for “disrespecting the flag”.

The comment seemed not to have been born of racial animus, but the subtle hints doubtless lingered. It’s my understanding that most Americans see this form of protestation by way of kneeling before the flag to be something inherently repugnant and unrelated to the player’s race or creed. That these players taking to a knee are spoiling the sanctity of the game (and not that they happen to be black) is a feeling strongly held by many Americans not only on the right but on the left. We must assume, then, that Trump’s remark and his use of the phrase “sons of bitches” was nothing more than red-meat for a football-crazed red-state. Being that they’re gourmands as much for the gridiron as they are for the barbecue, the Alabamans to whom he spoke certainly agree with Trump’s take on the matter.

It’s not only Alabamans specifically or southerners more generally who agree with President Trump. Everyone from Yankees in the north, to Latinos out west, to Rust-Belters somewhere in between once shared in taking in Sunday’s football traditions. But the recent politicization of the sport has had an adverse effect on our enjoyment of the game. What was once a galvanizing sport now forces thousands to tune out. A JD Power survey conducted this summer confirms as much. The survey revealed that more than any other issue (of which there were many to choose), fans cited this incipient trend of kneeling during the anthem as the main issue that they’ve turned away from the game. They chose this over such alternatives as the league’s troubling epidemic of its players being charged for spousal abuse or its pandemic of players succumbing to the burgeoning tragedy that is chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

President Trump thought it proper, then, or perhaps simply popular, to echo everyone else’s shared feelings about what’s become of the league. Prior to this, Trump’s only meaningful foray into football was as an owner of the short-lived New Jersey Generals. His team was one of eighteen playing under the United States Football Leagues’ fugacious banner. The league lasted a mere three seasons, from 1983 until 1985, and Trump’s ownership lasted only a third of that time. But you can’t say the venture was in vain; Trump snatched from the NFL’s grasp the incomparable Herschel Walker to be the Generals’ and the league’s boast. Sadly, though, the USFL was forever fated to be little more than a poor man’s NFL. There is something strangely foretelling, though, when one considers Trump the executive running a team of generals (as he does with Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly today).

Sensing that it had been attacked, the league’s response on Saturday was vociferous. Its many players, of whom most had taken no part in the kneeling demonstrations previously, expressed their exasperation on Twitter. Trump wontly doubled down and had this to say: “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL he should not be allowed to disrespect our great American flag (or country) and should stand for that National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”

The president followed this by tweeting, “If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our flag and country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend!”. He further pointed out that “NFL attendance and ratings are WAY DOWN. Boring games yes, but many stay away because they love our country. League should back U.S.”. I could go on, as Trump did go on, but these three tweets provide for you the main thrust.

Trump reliably referenced the league’s ratings, which is his go-to gauge for measuring anything’s success. While he’s not necessarily wrong to say what he did, there is a scintilla of impropriety in his saying it. The intimation was that a private company, like the NFL, should fire employees who act in a manner disagreeable to the Commander-in-Chief, an elected official by way of the American public. The president has made a habit of inveighing against private businesses in a manifestly public way. Most recently, he and his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee-Sanders did so when they responded to Jemele Hill, a black commentator at ESPN who called the president a “white supremacist”. Of course, Hill’s remark wasn’t as circumspect as you’d perhaps expect from such a well-regarded personality, but Trump shouldn’t have responded in the way that he did. He called immediately for her ouster, but as an elected official, that’s not his call to make nor is it the pressure he should deign to exert.

Roger Goodell, who as league commissioner has been maligned and beleaguered since his tenure began (a misfortune he shares with Trump) responded to the president by saying that “The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture”. He pointed his remarks more directly toward President Trump when he continued to say that “divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent”.

Shahid Khan and Robert Kraft, owners respectively of the Jacksonville Jaguars and New England Patriots and noted munificent contributors to Trump’s 2016 campaign, had blunt words for the man whose political success they helped fund. Khan called it a “privilege” to stand (or kneel) in solidarity with his players on the sideline following the “divisive and contentious remarks made by President Trump”. Kraft, whom Trump considers a dear friend, said he was “deeply disappointed by the tone of the comments made by the president on Friday”. Kraft perspicaciously added that “there is no greater unifier in this country than sports, and unfortunately, nothing more divisive than politics”.

So said the owner, but what of the players on the field? Conjectures swirled about how they would respond on Sunday afternoon. The presentiment was that most would kneel, but not for the same reason that Colin Kaepernick once did when he sought to draw attention to the plight of young black men who were being brutalized quite discriminately by police.

Kaepernick’s message, whether or not you thought it misguided or messianic (you’ll surely agree that from the outset, it was always bound to be controversially received) is now irretrievable. On Sunday, countless players imitated Kaepernick’s taking of the knee, but few if any reflected his more authentic position. Most players weren’t kneeling to see to a grievance’s redress, nor to push an issue like police misconduct and the injudicious murders of blacks forward in the public sphere. They were kneeling for no other reason than to rebuke President Trump. They did so to spite the president—fighting pettiness with pettiness.

Yet not everyone took to a knee. There were a few broader-minded teams and front offices who chose instead to stand with arms locked in solidarity. This display showed that Trump’s message was received, but reverently so and with the flag’s sanctity sustained.

The unintended consequence is that, after having overtly rebuffed the president, it is actually the kneeling players who find themselves on the losing side. No matter how you break it down, this situation is an unequivocal “win” for President Trump—one of few marking an otherwise unproductive first year. The situation rings of Charlottesville, when Trump transmogrified his “very fine people on both sides” remark into a conversation about the need to preserve Monticello and the Washington Monument. He eventually came out on top of that debate too. Anyone who decried Lee and Jackson’s right to survive recoiled at the thought of Washington or Jefferson’s removal.

This debate over the flag and standing for the national anthem is much the same. Americans overwhelmingly believe the flag deserves our unconditional veneration, and that it would be objectionable and insolent to disrespect the stars and stripes. President Trump isn’t concerned with the nuance underlying the reason Kaepernick chose to kneel. He has detached any such concern and sees only what is on the screen; professional athletes disrespecting America’s flag. It just so happens that this is also what most of America sees. President Trump stands on the side of respecting the flag above all. This isn’t a difficult position to defend, but it’s quite a challenge to make him look the worse for maintaining it.

Alas, again as before, America finds herself in a binary position. If you kneel for the anthem, sit on a bench till the singing is through, or choose only to stand when the flag is out of view, you needn’t say a word; your defiance has spoken more loudly than any explanation could. You’re obviously anti-Trump and, as such, a hero to the left. If, on the other hand, you stand tall with your heart in one hand and a helmet in the other, you’ve made your allegiance just as blatantly clear; you’re for Trump, and for all the divisiveness and perhaps latent racism therein. You’re a hero to the right. Between these two, there exists no in-between.

Who would’ve thought that football, our most barbaric of sports, would be the last battle of civility? That politics and culture would tear the pigskin apart?

Along that plunging lake in Eastern Illinois, whose wellspring calls home Canada and whose furthest reaches tickle the American north, a city lies nestled on its beach. Known affectionately by locals as Chicago, by unacclimated visitors as Siberia (or Antarctica, or Patagonia, or some cruel and intemperate combination of the three), the days between the late autumn and the early winter in that formidable city can downright paralyze you. With inhospitable temperatures and uncongenial winds, the city just about beats you down as you crumble beneath the weight of an insufferable freeze. Yet there’s one thing that vivifies this forever frost-bitten town. That eternal light, that incandescent warmth that sustains and nourishes every thick-blooded Chicagoan’s heart is, of course, the Bears.

Soldier Field is the house within which these aptly-named brutes and behemoths play. Christened in 1925, Soldier Field has been the last bastion of life in a city whose winter can stop the heart and suck the marrow dry. Less a stadium than a stage, it’s the place upon which Gale Sayers—legendarily fleet of foot and taciturn—leaped and pranced. Succeeding him some years later was the inimitable Walter Payton, who for far less time but with much more panache, did very much the same. It’s the field where William Perry, whose nickname was Chicago in its quintessence, amended all conceptions of just how a big man is supposed to move. And, under the immortal gaze of Ditka and Halas (of whose initials the latter now accouters every player’s jersey on the sleeve), these men and these Bears became an archetype for American sport.

As noted, the field was given its name in 1925—a date resigned to the annals of sporting antiquity so far as we’re concerned. Thus, the stadium was christened, “Soldier Field”, but its earlier, baptismal name was something far more banal. Before it was known then as now as Soldier Field, it was called the “Municipal Grant Park Stadium”. A name more suitable to house a men’s softball team than an NFL squad, it needed to change. It was an uninspiring and, more importantly, an unintimidating name to be sure, but I can’t help thinking there was something appealingly frank and quaint about it. I like how humble and forthcoming the name is. It wasn’t too much for its founders to acknowledge the toiling Chicagoans upon whose taxes and patronage their future prospects and their stadium relied.

But re-named the field was, and it forevermore gave to the Bears a place to call home. The new name, “Soldier Field” was chosen not on a whim, nor at the insistence of some corporate sponsor in mind, but out of a remarkable combination of patriotism and pith. Two qualities, one might add, uncommon in American sports today, where stadiums are named after jeans (Levi’s), razors (Gillette), and hucksters (Enron). It was named to commemorate the nation’s returning WWI veterans, amongst whom a few NFL players could count themselves. These still young G.I.’s returned stateside from Wilson’s war and from the final scenes of the most calamitous, sanguinary international row that the world had yet seen.

Indeed, that War to End all Wars culminated seven years prior to the naming of Soldier Field with the Treaty of Versailles, but the wounds to which American military families tended were still fresh. Though surely football couldn’t make them forget the carnage bespattering the trenches at places like Ypres, Verdun, or the Somme, it could help—as Warren G. Harding promised—to return this country to normalcy. Football was the prescription and it was to do the trick.

All-American and heart-warming though it is, I paint this picture not to exalt the Bears and their storied past. My intention rather is to contextualize one part of our current events, as they pertain to sports, in the shadow and the story of Soldier Field. Of course, the current event is that conflagration enflamed days ago by President Trump. At a campaign-style rally in Alabama, he took the opportunity to lash out against the NFL and its players for kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. In so doing, along that many-sided instrument that is the American soul, he struck a chord. Like him, a plurality, if not a majority of Americans find kneeling during the singing of the anthem distasteful. Some send their ire even further, thinking this irreverent genuflection is nothing better than a wholly odious and grotesque middle-finger to the flag.

As Trump made his opinions known, the NFL players responded in turn.

The Dallas Cowboys, anchored by their aging though omnipresent owner Jerry Jones, kneeled in Arizona before collectively standing for the anthem. The Oakland Raiders, before a primetime audience in Washington D.C., no less, kneeled through the song’s entirety. Playing an early-morning game in London, players from the Jacksonville Jaguars and Baltimore Ravens took to kneeling during “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only to stand afterward for the playing of “God Save the Queen”. No doubt Francis Scott Key, were he alive to see the day, would be horrified by such a scene. He might awaken to think that Fort McHenry had actually fallen and that the War of 1812 was by the British won.

And then there was Soldier Field. There, on its hallowed ground we glimpsed perhaps no image more ineffaceable than that of a lone player standing at the fringe of the turf while the national anthem played. This lone, and at first glance, seemingly dissident player was Alejandro Villanueva, a twenty-nine-year-old towering left tackle of the visiting Pittsburgh Steelers. The rest of the Steelers team, at Coach Mike Tomlin’s behest, stayed in the locker room whilst the anthem played. Tomlin preferred to have his team, save Villanueva, abstain from taking the field altogether. That way, he reasoned, the players wouldn’t be made to feel compelled to take a polarizing stance one way or the other as the eyes of the nation watched. It was a broad-minded attempt by Tomlin to be apolitical and to obviate the issue at foot.

But there Villanueva stood, and resolutely so. However, the thing to know about this imposing man is this: Villanueva was a patriot long before his career as a professional athlete began. The son of a career military man, Villanueva was deeply inspired by his father’s mettle and his sacrifice. Studying, as do many children of military parents, abroad in Germany and Spain, Villanueva went on to West Point University, from which he graduated in 2010. Diploma in hand, he went on to fulfill his commitment to this nation by serving three tours in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. Completing that which was demanded of him, Villanueva was then honorably discharged and awarded the Bronze Star.

He returned to civilian life and picked up exactly where he’d left off—on the line of scrimmage of the football field. During a regional showcase for those among us who might best be described as unrecognized talent, Villanueva was spotted by a local scout. This, mind you, was not only four years after he’d played his last down, but four years of having been station in the arid and inhospitable confines of the Middle East. But heat and pressure make diamonds, and he was one found in the rough. The Philadelphia Eagles took note of his potential, salivated over his height, and awarded him a spot on their roster.

Yet all of this laudable back-story was forgotten because during the national anthem at Soldier Field, without his teammates by his side, he decided to stand. He quickly became the center of attention and the source of division—neither of which he intended to be. Pundits jumped on his pertinacity and went so far as to assail his character. Most notably Shannon Sharpe, a former player in the league, a Chicagoan, and a current analyst on television said that Villanueva should have followed the team’s “protocol” by staying in the locker room. He spoke of an NFL team’s “military mentality” and how Villanueva strayed from the “all for one, one for all” ideal.

If one commentator’s reproach of Villanueva’s wasn’t disheartening enough, Villanueva’s statement following the controversy made up for whatever lacked. During a press conference Monday morning, which is a time and platform generally reserved for the previous day’s skill-position stars to talk about their performances the previous day, Villanueva addressed the issue at-length. He contritely said, “I see that picture of me standing by myself and I’m embarrassed to a degree, because unintentionally I left my teammates behind…every time I see that picture of me, I feel embarrassed”. He continued to say that he didn’t intend to be seen as the sole contrarian of the team “stepping forward” and away from the rest. He simply thought that by standing—in the tunnel and, as he hoped, inconspicuously, no less—he could find “some middle ground where nobody would see me”.

The problem is, we’ve lost all conceptions of what this middle ground might look like. It simply doesn’t exist. Not even for a veteran, a patriot, a gentleman, and a hero standing in honor of his flag at Soldier Field.

President Trump arrived in Alabama Friday night armed, as is his wont, with any number of barbs, jabs, and blandishments. Some were fresh bones to pick, others, old slights. Above all, the president was there to toss his support behind “Big” Luther Strange, the towering incumbent junior Senator from the Yellowhammer state. Sounding as though both first and surname could be peeled directly from the panel strip of a Marvel comic, Luther Strange has been Alabama’s senator for the past year. An unelected congressman, he’s held the position since Jeff Sessions’ promotion to Attorney General at the beginning of this year.

Alabama’s governor at the time of Sessions’ promotion, Robert J. Bentley, chose to fill the vacancy Luther Strange. He was considered to be a safe, stalwart conservative in the image of a McConnell or a Ryan. Prior to this appointment, Strange served as an attorney general for the state of Alabama. He did so with a kind of an antebellum ardor—a reactionary bent that’s uncommon outside of Alabama’s borders. Several times Strange sued the federal government and the Obama Administration for matters pertaining to transgender students, the Clean Power Plan, and ExxonMobil’s recompense for the Deepwater Horizons oil spill. Prior to that, he was a lawyer in private practice in the state’s capital at Birmingham. Earlier still, he was a lobbyist for the Transocean Offshore Drilling Company working in D.C.

Thus far, his has been an auspicious and industrious career. However, that doesn’t guarantee his future success in politics. The republican nomination of Senator (for which he now openly contends) has been from the outset well contended. His opponent, after an original field of nine was whittled to two, is the notorious “Ten Commandments Judge”, Roy Moore. His nickname, unlike Strange’s, leads to natural conclusions about the former’s sanctimony rather than the latter’s tall stature. Judge Moore’s notoriety is grounded in his fundamentalism, his recalcitrance, his religiosity, and his zeal, all of which when combined have hampered his judicial duties.

When he took his office as a state supreme court judge in 2001, Moore declared imperiously that “God’s law will be publicly acknowledged in our court”. Apparently, in Moore’s opinion, that “wall of separation” made famous by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists was insufficiently high. The good judge saw no impediment in building back up the city of God atop the secular society within which it exists. Further, by “God’s law”, one has to assume that Moore meant not that of Vishnu, nor Woden, nor Saturn, but rather that of our capricious Yahweh. This much goes without saying when dealing with such a holy American man.

It’s one thing to flaunt one’s religiosity, quite another to apply it in public matters. His intention, unsubtly framed, was to subvert or at least provoke the Constitution’s establishment clause. This most essential clause, enumerated first in our sturdy Bill of Rights, proscribes the establishment and consequent promulgation of any national religion. Seldom is the argument made, but it’s worth pointing out that the Constitution says nothing in regard to the establishment of a “state” religion. So long as the federal government doesn’t try to disseminate its own creed, the strict constructivists and interpreters of the Constitution will say that Maryland can be officially catholic, Massachusetts officially protestant, and so on as you will. One can be sure this archaic argument wasn’t lost on Moore.

Esoterica aside, Moore found himself the subject of controversy for other reasons. He defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v Hodges, the case whose ruling awarded for the first time same-sex couples a right to marry and to have that marriage recognized by federal and state governments. Hitherto, the recognition of such invidious marriages was confined to the states in which they were permitted, while the federal government had no role.

Because of his obstinacy, Moore was reprimanded time and again. Eventually, these slaps on the writs led to his suspension as Chief Justice of the Alabama supreme court. Curiously, this hadn’t an effect on his popularity amongst Alabamans, which remained consistently high throughout his ordeals. It’s not hard to imagine why this is.

Moore is the kind of brazen bible-thumper so many in this deeply religious state adore. He’s seen as the last bastion of religious expression, the dying breath of a Jesuit fever. It’s for this reason, by and large, that Moore leads Strange in the senate-race polls; the margin has never dipped below double digits. And if the lessons of history are to guide our future inferences, the winner of the Republican primary will likely win the Senate seat. The last Democrat to be elected to the Senate from Alabama happened in 1992, and he no sooner defected to the Republican Party a mere two years into a six-year term.

All that being said, and with most polls pointing to a Moore victory and a Strange defeat, President Trump’s support for “Big Luther” during these past few months seems…strange. In fact, it appears only to have strengthened as the poll numbers look ever more unpropitious. It’s difficult to understand Trump’s support for Strange, as clearly he seems to be picking out of the starting block an ill-fated pony. Perhaps, though, Trump knows something we don’t. After all, he knows better than anyone that polls aren’t always and blindly to be trusted. Trump must think intuitively that Strange has a good shot at winning. Hence, Trump made it a point to speak to Alabama’s voters before they took to the polls.

Landing at Huntsville, a prosperous town in northern Alabama along the banks of the Tennessee River, Trump gave a rambling, ninety-minute speech to a fervid group of Strange’s and, more likely, Trump’s supporters. Trump, in the unrestricted time allotted him, took the opportunity to stoke flames of old and kindle controversies of new, all while doing little to move the needle for Strange. It was supposed to be Trump’s stump for Strange, but it devolved—as it customarily does—into an unfocused, desultory diatribe about the life of a besieged head of state.

Donning a pink candy-cane-striped tie, Trump stood in front of thousands to talk about topics new and trite. Under the heading of the latter, the president continued to bemoan the calamity that is NAFTA, to exalt the return in droves of American jobs stateside, and to assure us of the boon that will most assuredly be “clean” coal. As for the new, the president took an original swipe at North Korea while hurling an unprovoked offensive against the NFL.

In one of many divagations marking the evening, President Trump spent some time talking about North Korea. He called Kim Jong Un, the DPRK’s irascible autocrat, “Little Rocket Man”. Trump for the first time added the diminutive “Little” to his earlier insult of Kim Jong Un made first at the UN summit in New York. Since that time, a veritable war of the words has ratcheted up between the Donald and the despot.

Because no slight, no matter how sophomoric, can bounce off paper-thin skin, Kim Jong Un quickly responded to Trump’s first insult at the UN. Kim did so by calling Trump a “mentally deranged dotard” and a “political heretic”. The first dig quickly became an Internet meme and had those unacquainted with the more common term dotage or the language of Bacon, or Boyle, or Shakespeare scrambling for a definition and a lesson in the Elizabethan tongue. As for the second remark, I don’t imagine many Trump detractors, nor supporters for that matter, will consider it an insult. In fact, those opposed to Trump will likely agree with Kim Jong Un’s “heretical” attribution to this president; his supporters, on the other hand, wear it like an apolitical badge of honor as they chant like a mantra, “drain the swamp”.

While North Korea, by its own doing, is securely “in” the political arena, and thus expecting of and open to Trump’s punches, professional sport generally isn’t. The NFL was dragged into the political brawl, however, when the president decried those players who take it upon themselves to kneel during the singing of the national anthem. Said players are relatively small in number, representing only a small percentage of players on the field, but their sign of irreverence has consumed attention. Seething at the idea of players being so disrespectful as to kneel before the image of the flag, Trump imagined an idyllic scenario in which NFL owners (many of whom are white) would toss the “sons of bitches” (of whom most are black) off the field for “disrespecting the flag”.

Immediately interpreted as a racist remark, the media was quick to impute racial animus on him again. I don’t think the president said what he did with a racist edge, but this sort of a conclusion unfortunately lends itself more readily to him and his administration, both of whom have fallen embarrassingly short on issues pertaining to race in the past. More than anything, his statement about NFL players being tossed off the field for their protestations looked to me little more than red-meat for a deeply red state—and a football-crazed one at that.

He finished the night by turning back to topics of old. He covered his lamentation of Hillary Clinton and he touched on Melania’s heels that she’d worn during the hurricane. After that, he had enough fuel in the tank to talk about the ever-evasive border wall and that oh-so pesky issue of healthcare. The one needs building—the other to be broken down. He gloated about the economy and said that he felt like an Alabaman at heart—something of a consanguineous, kindred spirit returned to an adopted Southern home.

But turning the attention from Trump to others, an impracticable task, admittedly, it wasn’t clear if Strange was any better off for having hosted the president. The “Trump bump” didn’t come as anticipated, or at least not as drastically as some in the Strange camp would have hoped.

The Senate has embarked on its latest and, if we can hope to be so lucky, last attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Named uninspiringly the “Graham-Cassidy Healthcare Bill” (it would appear as though, at this point, the senate has been bled of its ability to conceive creative nicknames), it will be Congress’s fourth attempt to both nullify and substitute Obama’s eponymous 2010 healthcare law with something altogether new. Leading the charge and lending their names to this newest bill are Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA). With the help of Senators Dean Heller (R-NV), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and former Pennsylvania Senator and two-time presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, the group is determined to push through with a final thrust a piece of legislation that sticks.

These four horsemen of the senate, with the addition of an alumnus in Santorum, have worked to craft a bill that might prove itself palatable yet. It’s well-known that all foregoing attempts to deconstruct Obamacare have failed. This Graham-Cassidy bill will be the fourth attempted in nearly as many months. It was during the waning days of spring when the House of Representatives first proposed what came to be its ill-fated “American Health Care Act”. After initially being struck down on the floor, it found itself later re-introduced to a more receptive crowd. For its cause, it won enough votes (by the slimmest of margins) and was able to proceed from the House of Representatives to the Senate. There, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s direction, it was altered in various ways. Large swaths of the House’s proposals were cast aside in favor of improvements thought better of the Senate.

As such, McConnell begot the “Better Care Reconciliation Act” in late June and it was brought to the floor thereafter in July. It failed in a 43-57 vote, a frustrating end to an issue that had become the nation’s summertime cause célèbre—debated from every water cooler to every barbeque grill. Reeling in their lost opportunity, a few Republican senators regrouped to attempt again a last-ditch effort for a legislative win. At month’s end, in late July, senators voted on the slightly modified “Health Care Freedom Act”. This penultimate measure, named “skinny repeal”, for its piece-meal approach, died of emaciation when Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), and John McCain (R-AZ) withheld their votes. Pertinaciously, the three Republicans stood against their party line to ensure this bill’s demise. It was during this vote that McCain cast his dramatic, crepuscular thumbs-down that ultimately sent skinny repeal to its grave.

But like an importunate Lazarus, whose resuscitation is less impressive each time he breathes anew, the Senate’s Obamacare-repeal bills won’t die. Republicans are now touting the Graham-Cassidy Bill, which is set to stand for a vote at any moment in time this week. Concisely put, the Graham-Cassidy Bill seeks to dismember the ACA, condense all the federal funds it provided into one pot, reduce the size of said pot, and dole this lump sum of money out to the states. The states would then have the unprecedented discretion to allocate the money to those beneficiaries most deserving or in need.  Relying on the issuance of block grants, the states and not the federal government would begin responding more directly to their own citizens’ healthcare needs.

If implemented, the Graham-Cassidy bill would see the federal government loosen its exclusive license on Medicaid standards and services, which would then be transitioned to the states. Important to note is that Medicare (which is an altogether separate entity from Medicaid—the former dealing less with the indigent and more with the geriatric) would not be immediately affected. In overseeing the distribution of healthcare dollars through Medicaid, the onus would fall squarely upon the states. Unmolested by the bureaucratic strictures of Washington D.C., this would hand to the states the control of healthcare markets they’ve long sought. Now, it becomes theirs and not the federal government’s decisions to set terms for their beneficiaries (or those at the receiving end of Medicaid’s expenditures) and to fund the program affectively.

It would provide states with the ability to opt out of the ACA root and branch, or to keep any number of regulations that they’ve come to find useful. In this way, the Graham-Cassidy bill is amenable to each state’s particular desires. To achieve the best healthcare outcomes at the cheapest prices, such a state could forsake the ACA completely, retain it entirely, or conserve whichever portions best suited to their ends. The theme of the bill was put best and perhaps most sardonically when Vice President Pence said that “If you like your Obamacare insurance, you can keep your Obamacare insurance”. This tongue-in-cheek reference to President Obama’s promise about keeping one’s doctor sums up well that which would be the states’ prerogative under the Graham-Cassidy Bill.

This bill’s potential appeal to local and state governments lies not only in its repeal of Obamacare. More than that, it breathes life into the all-but forgotten idea of federalism, wherein the state has some sense of agency and determination of its fate. Simply, it gives the state the opportunity to choose and removes the compulsion to fall in line.

Given this choice, it’s likely that the politically unpopular but financially essential “individual mandate” of Obamacare would become a thing of the past. As it stands, the ACA mandates that all eligible Americans, or all those uncovered by Medicare or Medicaid, purchase health insurance either within or without the Obamacare marketplace. Resentment and contestation to this aspect of the law was fervid. This, after all, is a country of liberality and of the freedom of choice, not of edict and obedience. Nevertheless, having seen its day in the Supreme Court, the ACA’s legality was upheld under the Commerce Clause—now a blanket resort for any issue. Individual rights enthusiasts and younger, healthy Americans bristled against the mandate and its having been ruled constitutional. After all, the mandate was constructed not for a younger American’s benefit. It was to be his unwitting subsidization of his elderly kin that would keep the program afloat.

The McConnell bill nominally scrapped the individual mandate, but placed in its stead a fine for any person trying to obtain insurance after a six-month coverage lapse. By any other name, this fine amounts to a mandate. Improving on that is the Graham-Cassidy Bill.  The latter dismisses both Obama’s mandate and McConnell’s “fine”, so long as the interested state deems them superfluous. If not, the state could just as quickly impose them. It would become a provincial decision.

To forgo the mandate would be to change the entire process by which insurance companies and, by extension, healthcare providers are compensated for their service. In negotiating with insurance companies, states could allow the insurance companies to charge up to five times more for the coverage of an elderly individual than a younger person. People tend to bristle at the mere idea of this, thinking it predatory, exploitative, or blatantly gerontophobic. They think it an avaricious grab of our elders’ wallets by wealthy healthcare executives, but it’s nothing more than a centuries-old matter dollars and cents. The issue, if one is to think of it as such, ineluctably boils down to risk. Of course, insurance companies must be allowed to charge their older clients higher premiums to account for their policy-holder’s increased risk. A nonagenarian, it’s clear, carries with him far more risk of ill health (and thus a costly hospital tab) than does a twenty-something year-old in the vigor and verve of his youth. In one’s dotage, one pays more than in one’s nonage, and this is the only economically sensible approach. An insurance policy, whether it be for health, flooding, or a vehicle, works in the same way. All are produced from an evaluation of risk. Much like an opulent home built along the beach or a lead-footed motorist driving a Ferrari should expect to pay more because of their heightened risk of damage and injury, the pricing of healthcare should reflect one’s risk. In an open market, those of us more liable to maladies will pay more for protection. Those less prone, will pay less.

The ACA attempted to adjust this calculus so that older individuals could be charged only three times as much as younger people. Possibly, in the future, this may well remain a viable option. As the Graham-Cassidy Bill points out, the state is the ultimate arbiter about the factor of three or five. The state will decide by just how much more grandma will be charged than granddaughter.

These are some of the biggest implications of the Graham-Cassidy Bill. There are others, including a freeze on Medicaid’s reimbursement for Planned Parenthood for at least one year, diminished access to cost-sharing reductions, and new definitions for what counts as an essential health benefit. The bill would also compel states to reconsider implementing high risk pools. Prior to the ACA’s adoption, thirty-five states offered these pools. Their purpose was to group together and subsidize the costly care of chronically sick people beset with various co-morbidities. These pools were unnecessary under the ACA because those who met the “high-risk-pool” criteria were automatically guaranteed health insurance, irrespective of their pre-existing conditions. If pre-existing conditions are no longer covered universally, the high-risk pool will step in to subsidize the inflated premium an insurance company is likely to charge.

The Graham-Cassidy Bill also provides more laxity for health savings accounts. Republicans have long touted this approach as a way to shift the status quo and potentially save a buck in the process. It would transition us from a system heavily reliant on governmental largesse to one that emphasizes individual frugality. In a word, the health savings account is a personal tax-exempt fund that can be allocated specifically for one’s medical care. Essentially, it is an untaxed investment in oneself. The ACA constricted how much an individual could contribute to the account in a given year. The numbers have yet to be released, but the Graham-Cassidy bill will doubtless allow individuals to contribute more to their health savings accounts than did the ACA, a boon for the free market and for the lost concept of personal responsibility.

Succinctly put, under the Graham-Cassidy Bill, states henceforth will be able to decide what they want to do with healthcare within the confines of their borders. Surely reason to cheer for the newfound spirit of self-determination, this comes at a cost; the states will have less money from the federal government to fund Medicaid. In exchange for the old prodigality of the federal government, the states will win their liberty. Unless, like so many before it, this proposed bill doesn’t pass. Then, it’s back to square one.