With the al-Qaeda trials moved to New York City and the United States not dealing with these killers as a military matter, we find ourselves carrying out a purpose that is based in denial: denial of the nature of human being. A lot of questions are raised which you can read about here. Is this the ultimate exposure of the anti-life nature of the Obama presidency? It may be.
What happens to a human being that causes him to go to war against another human being? What is the change that occurs in his mind? Although we think of war as a social phenomenon, at root it isn't. We as individuals are at war with people and ideas all the time. It is part of living.
War occurs when a person comes to see another person not as 'human' in the sense that he has values, desires, feelings, defeats and triumphs and walks around in the neighborhood where you live. Rather he is seen as the embodiment of a purpose that is destructive of one's own life and the lives of those one loves. In other words, this other person or group's existence, as he/they are living it is a threat to one's life.
Since a man must possess at least some remnant of a purpose in order to have an 'alive' life - i.e., anything than other as a dependent on life-support provided by someone else - the issue is that he should not have a purpose but that it should be such that it is aligned with life and not objectively threatening to others' lives. (By being objectively threatening, I mean that an action is physically damaging or threatens to damage a human life. We are not talking "words, just words" here. We are talking about actions which deprive one of the freedom to live - things which physically take or damage a life or that life's property, the material things in the world that possesses and uses to live.)
War is the recognition that one sees a person's or group of persons' purpose, and his/their actions as evidence of such a purpose, as life-threatening and as a consequence needs to take action to stop those actions. It requires a declaration that one has placed them into that status in relation to himself. (If one does not declare the state change of the other person, group or country, then to fight them is to engage in the behavior of the terrorist -a person at war without a declaration of war. I do think it is possible to do this so long as one is conscious of the state change in his own mind. And, in fact in a state of war, it may be valuable to operate underground. But I believe these are strategic questions.) Once war has been declared, the rules for dealing with that person are completely different, night and day different. Reason and persuasion are no longer the tools one can use. One must use force to stop the initiated or potential initiated force.
The focus no longer becomes acting in a way that works for getting along with other people. In war, the focus becomes about acting in a way that destroys the other person or group's ability to carry out its anti-life, specifically anti-my-life, purpose.
It is said that war dehumanizes people. That depends. It depends on where one is standing. If one approaches war as an action treating people not as the embodiment of a purpose but as ordinary human beings living in some non-threatening way, then yes, it would be senseless and dehumanizing. If one approaches war for what it is - fighting an enemy's ability to carry out its life-destroying activities, then it is not dehumanizing. Rather it is life-enhancing and life-ennobling. It is the ultimate stand for life - putting one's own life on the line in favor of life.
People who are pacifists and display signs "War is not the Answer" in their front yards, without specifying the question, are people who act against the nature of human life itself. They pave the streets with gold for the arrival of the evil person by removing their resistance to him. It's my experience that the only thing they really get mad about is if you challenge their view regarding peace. "War is not always bad" is usually sufficient.
I notice Obama speaks like ministers speak. Ministers do not understand the distinction of war and the valid, life-enhancing purpose of war. They seem to always be trying to get people to deal with each other as regular folks in a socially and ideologically non-challenging world, whether that is appropriate or not. They try to make us feel guilty because there is no peace all the while unable to grasp the validity of war. Thus they are forever unable to be a cause for peace.
The thing they all deny is greatness. They treat life as a "boy next door" phenomenon. Humility, turning the other cheek, always being nice, engaging in socially non-challenging activities like gardening, dusting and discussing arcane philosophical ideas.
Greatness in the full sense of the word is a function of purpose. Because a minister likely does not understand purpose (And without reading the Purpose-driven Life, I suspect he doesn't understand it either.) and its requirements, he more often than not undermines the concept of purpose and thus undermines robust, healthy human life. Rather than talk people out of having a purpose and creating a guilt-trip every time they exhibit one, a minister and a lot of other people in the humanities need to get a grip on human nature. A man cannot reach his full potential as a man without a purpose. And yes, he is capable of choosing an anti-life purpose.
It's ironic that Obama who denies man his nature so morally justifies himself in the name of human life. (This contradiction is another topic entirely.) America, at least in its remnant, is a nation of people with strong and powerful purposes. We have been reared in the bosom of freedom where it is up to every man to forge his purpose and go forth in the world. Thus every time Obama says anything, he goes against the grain of who we are. I hear fingernails dragged across my black board.
Obama and his band of anti-life men attract all those who think that being in favor of life is to be nice, not say anything that is not PC, stand up for the little guy and the traditional victims, and strive to fit in rather than have a purpose which some people may oppose. It is because one buys that view of life at some level rather than the true, life-rousing one of purpose that they gravitate toward Obama. He, after all, is going to provide everything that a man without purpose, a man who has given up on the cardinal characteristic of life, self-generation, needs in order to be on life-support. He (and the likes of John Lewis) urges them to become dependent. To be such is a right one is entitled to, they say.
Obama hopes that his band of resuscitated bodies will have just enough energy to vote.
(PS: I am watching the public reaction and the way of reacting to the rise of Sarah Palin. It's my hypothesis that a person's response to Obama and to Palin are polar opposites and that they key on one's sense of life. Is one a prime mover in his life or not. Depending on one's deepest conviction, he will respond to either Palin or Obama, but not both.
These two are opposites: Palin is a woman of the frontier embodied with the spirit of one who isn't waiting for someone else to do the job. If the government is corrupt, clean it up. If we need energy, "drill, baby, drill." If someone besides who you say gets to decide whether you get medical treatment, they are your "death panel." If someone is a part of the al Qaeda gang who plotted 9/11, "hang 'em high." She has shot the moose and dressed him for dinner. She has fished the waters for winter's bounty at the table. She knows who she is. Her political power comes not from the power gods, but from the people's recognition, from that bubbling spring within of which they cannot speak, of who she is. Thus she is powerful.
Obama on the other hand is a man who has been pissed off and slighted from birth. He wears those slights as badges of honor. Every one is a sore which he picks and uses to gets someone to do what he wants. He had "smarts" and people saw this so they supported him, groomed him and lifted him up as their offering to the gods of political power. The power gods liked their offering and so they granted them power. But being a product of those who did his work for him, he is unable to lead. He cannot take a position, he cannot vote, he cannot fashion a rule which keep people from fighting. The gods of power speak too loudly into his ear and he knows that they can remove him from power whenever it looks good to do so. Thus he is powerless.
Showing posts with label powerful purpose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label powerful purpose. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
The Necessity of Wandering in a Desert for 40 Days and Nights in an Age of Abundance.
America seems to be in a phase of self-hatred. It has been going on for 40 years, starting small and growing into the current crescendo. Out of the 60s came people who thought America was a bad place - all dominating and treating people badly around the world. These stories have advanced to absurd proportions and at last, we have elected a president who is an expression of what I call, the American Distortion. President Obama holds up as the ideal before the United Nations "No nation should dominate another." (Since domination appears to occur quite naturally among all life, there's nothing like trying to create an anti-life vacuum. This is soooo Obama.) He then apologizes for America's dominance. He doesn't see much of anything that has been accomplished by America as a great thing. He, as I have said before, prefers sores to pick which naturally blinds him to accomplishments. So far as I can tell, he considers everything that America has produced a product of an evil system which causes evil men. He then feels perfectly justified taking property from one and giving to another, rearranging businesses to his liking and all of the kinds of actions that despots and tyrants throughout history have taken. (Hmm. Did he include himself as a product of America?)
Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.
To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.
There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.
But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.
So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.
Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?
Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.
Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?
(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)
A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.
All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.
In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.
In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."
Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."
But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.
And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.
*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.
To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.
People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.
A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity
Given that abundance has been all about us, why suddenly have people taken to making it wrong? If you notice, President Obama has done nothing to stimulate the economy. He's said he wants to use money to do that but then he passes it out to his cronies to insure his reelection. Almost no jobs have been created so he has taken to emphasizing that some have been 'saved', although no one knows how to measure that. Clearly President Obama and his Administration have a completely different view of man and what is appropriate for a man's life than I do.
To me this left turn into the desert is uncalled for and even mean spirited, but what if there is something underneath it that needs to be recognized. What if there is a lesson to be learned here.
There are two kinds of men - the one who knows who he is and knows where he is going, and the one who is lost and doesn't know where he is going. It is a much noticed phenomenon that rich kids are often lost. They have had everything and so they never had to figure out what is important. In relation to purposeful human beings, they appear as robust weeds in an otherwise naturally ordered garden.
But now we have a different phenomenon. Man has risen to the level of material abundance such that we have a society of rich kids. Thus we are seeing all kinds of thing that we have never seen before. We see kids who lose their lives to a computer game, never knowing what it is like to live in a real world rather than a virtual one. We see ordinary people weighing 300 pounds. With food so plentiful, they cannot resist the pleasures of food. They have not figured out how to reshape their values such that they use their resources for other things that will yield new pleasures and rewards.
So, how does one figure out what is important and make something of his life? Given that by and large human kind has handled the matter of his physical existence and we depended on going after those values to keep us true to what life requires, we are realizing that if that matter is largely handled we no longer have that truing-up mechanism to keep us present to what life requires. What we took for granted before can no longer be taken for granted. We are realizing that there is something deeper that we have to take care of. We cannot merely keep ourselves alive; we have to keep ourselves vital.
Or said another way, given that we have handled the material side of life, how do we reform the spiritual side of life given that vitality is a function of one's spiritual notions?
Clearly this problem can be handled two ways. One is to not see it as a problem and every time things get too good, arbitrarily create a situation such that one strips himself back to basics so he learns those lessons and knows who he is. In the vernacular of my upbringing, "Whenever a man get too cocky, he needs to be brought down off his high horse." The other is to embrace the progress and see this as a problem which progress itself brings.
Rather than all the preachers getting up on Sunday and telling people how evil they've been to have allowed themselves to be seduced by abundance and therefore gotten soft and lazy, what if they congratulated their congregations on their great achievement and then began the process of discovering the nature of living now that they have achieved that?
(And what's even worse about someone trying to solve the problem by damning the present and taking a person back to a previous solution is that it does not advance the knowledge required to handle the problem at this level. This suggests to me that the moral principles as formulated in old-time religion are not going to work for where we are now and that we need to look at this matter newly.)
A man to be effective must know his values. Further, he must know the ranking of his values. There are many choices made that are bad choices because one acts for a lower value and gives up a resource that he should have used to gain a higher value. If a dad is writing a book to earn a living and has children, chances are both are values high on his list of values. But which is higher? Writing the book or being with the children? If he chooses to be with the children, he gives up the time he could use to write the book. Likewise, if he spends his time writing the book, he gives up time he could be with his children. If his wife urges him to be with the children and he does so to please her, that doesn't work either. Who is he anyway? These are the questions that trouble men's souls.
All of these troubles fall into the category of forging oneself into a mighty purpose. To do that one has to know who he is. He has to know his values, what captures his energies such that he causes something to happen. Then he must rank them in a way that he knows supports the life he wants to live. After he has discovered this for himself and knows who he is, he is a force to be reckoned with. He becomes as a piece of steel that was once liquid but has now taken shape in a particular form.
In the Bible, Jesus went to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. Why? I say, to sort himself out. He had to learn the ranking of his values and come to know who he was -- what was most important for him so he could design himself true to himself.* Thus, he made himself into a man who could be responsible for his own vitality.
In the Age of Abundance, if man is to advance, he must put in this sorting process. When living is not that hard, one isn't required to put forth much effort to obtain the values he needs to just keep himself alive. He can live well easily. But, in the doing of that, he has to watch that he doesn't give up the most important thing of life - his vitality - his life and what he could have made of himself. No one wants to die with that "On the Waterfront" line: "I could have been a contender."
Unless we tackle this problem, it grows and creates wild distortions in culture. We have parents who never sorted themselves out and are scared to death of alone time with only themselves for company. In raising their kids, they won't let them settle down into this sorting time because it threatens them, the parents. They can only see it as "something is wrong here."
But what if nothing is wrong? In fact, what if it is what the requirements of being human ordered? This is the opportunity hidden in the Age of Abundance. How does one sort through his values and craft them into a clear cut code such that he is able to use the resources he has in the best way he is able? This is the challenge of abundance and it is the challenge of political and personal freedom. This is a challenge we take up one at a time. Until we learn this, we, as a culture and society and as the leader of men to the full bounty of political freedom, are going to fall back into the old ways. Eras will be dedicated to learning this lesson until we master it and are able to go through it and beyond it.
And, we know what those old ways are. Our leaders tell everyone "There is something wrong here. We have sinned. Now it is time to exact punishment for those sins." Today how they do that is tax us within an inch of our lives and give it to their friends. Is this an uptick from how the Catholic church did it? Come in for confessions and leave your offering. You remain poor, we put our riches into the churches and institutions to take care of us. Hmmm. That's another seminar.
*When I say design himself true to himself what I'm saying is that there are two levels of things going on in man. At one level, he is determined by his nature. He possesses a life force which came with being born a living thing. That life force in a human being has a particular nature. It seeks to live and maintain itself and it has to do it a human way. Inside that, it will do it according to its particularity as an individual human being. Exactly what this nature is is part of what a man must discover about himself.
To be true to himself, he must act consistent with not only his nature as a man, but also consistent with the particular traits and aptitudes that he was born with. A successful design for one's life is mounted with full knowledge of oneself on that basic template. The truth? No one has full knowledge of himself at any point in time - ever. So what I mean is that one's mind is properly related to the facts one discovers about himself such that he is able to integrate and build on them.
People get into forcing themselves to be a particular way at the expense of their nature. The character of this is that they will not face a particular painful event that happened to themselves and integrate the facts of their lives. Consequently, there is a distortion in their personality which is shaped by this avoidance of anything which hints at that event which they have shaped themselves to avoid. (Character is not something that can be developed, I assert, until one has cleared out all of the generating factors of this distortion. Character is something one must develop by choice and it cannot be counted on until it is developed and held by choice.) Given this, they cannot discover their nature - their talents, the things they love, all the things that they cannot relax and enjoy because of the fear that has shaped their evaluations of their perceptions.
A big part of forming oneself is discovery. If one is not getting the things he wants in life, then he has to discover why that is so. He has to discover the misalignment of his values. He has to notice when he sacrifices himself (acts on a lower value and sacrifices a higher value) and why he doesn't like himself right then. This can be an involved process where at first one doesn't have many tools available to do it. But with an increase in the powers of inspection, he gains those tools. Once he understands what is going on, he is in a position to rearrange his values and cause a different outcome. And above all, he is in a position to design his own character. Once that is done, he becomes a force to be reckoned with. Until then, he's mere flotsam and jetsam, floating on the surf of humanity
Friday, August 15, 2008
The New Hero
Only the heroes of the human spirit are able to take the circumstances as they come and mold them into triumph. Morally certain of their talent, their dedication and their right to be great, Olympic champions are true heroes.
Phelps Faces the Strain Of Making Waves
By Sally Jenkins. Sports columnist, Washington Post
Photo credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
BEIJING
After a while this gold medal thing can wear on a guy, even one with Michael Phelps's seemingly non-biodegradable constitution. It suddenly all seemed tiring, the cycle of eat-sleep-swim, the ice baths, the thousands of meters of warm-ups and warm-downs, the constant carbo-loading. Phelps stood in the pool after winning his fourth gold medal of the Summer Games, ripped off his water-filled goggles and chucked them over his shoulder as if he was sick of wearing them. He looked at the clock, unsmiling, and grabbed at his side under the water, as if the race had given him a stitch, instead of the all-time mark for Olympic bullion.
It was Phelps's fifth straight day of competition at the Water Cube, and suddenly the strain showed. It was apparent that this pursuit of eight golds is not as automatic as we, watching with our feet propped up, might think. With one goggle mishap, Phelps could have seen the end of his Olympic record quest through a pair of bloodshot eyes.
As soon as he dived in the water at the start of the 200-meter butterfly, his goggles tore away from his face and water poured into them. "They filled right up," he said.
By the 150-meter mark he couldn't see the wall. Phelps had won three previous gold medals by eclipsing world records in each, and he had every expectation of doing so again in the 200 fly. He has owned the fly record since 2001, when he was a slack-jawed, mouth-breathing teenager who had to ask his coach, Bob Bowman, "Who is this Mark Spitz guy, and why does everybody keep asking me about him?"
But Phelps wasn't thinking about a world record as the chlorine stung his eyes. "I was just hoping I was winning and hoping I could get my hand to the wall first," he said.
For the first time in the Beijing Games, he swam as if it was effortful. Half-blind as his goggles sloshed with water, he searched for the black T on the bottom of the pool, and tried to gauge his distance to the wall by counting his strokes. His time of 1 minute 52.03 seconds barely clipped Laszlo Cseh of Hungary (1:52.70) at the touch. It was his closest individual finish so far, and a second slower than he wanted, and he was clearly dismayed. "It's fine," he said unenthusiastically.
This is the point Phelps has reached at these Olympics: He is now discerning between great gold medals, and the merely mundane ones.
It was only when Phelps's irritation at the goggle malfunction had worn off, and he stood on the medal podium with yet another ornament slung around his neck, that the realization hit him: He had just broken the all-time career total for Olympic gold medals with 10, surpassing the nine held by the likes of Spitz and Carl Lewis.
"I was in the awards ceremony for the 200 fly when I started thinking about it and that's when I started tearing up," he said. "To be at the top with so many great athletes who have walked in the Olympic Games, it's a pretty amazing feeling."
Phelps's relentless rhythm of excellence is in danger of robbing him, and us, of proper appreciation for what he might accomplish here. The goggle mishap was evidence of just how fragile his quest really is, all of his painstaking preparation and magnificent effort could have been undone with one fluke.
But it was also evidence of what a towering mental giant he is. It was 10:23 in the morning when got out of the pool with a sour face after swimming the fly. At 11:20 he hopped back in it for the 4x200 freestyle relay -- and won his fifth gold medal of the Games, this time with the sort of lofty world record performance he wanted. Phelps swam the leadoff leg in a spectacular collective assault on the world mark with Ryan Lochte, Ricky Berens and Peter Vanderkaay, who combined to shatter it by 4.68 seconds. That's no typo. Phelps, Lochte, Berens and Vanderkaay swam nearly five seconds faster than any team ever, cutting so fast through the water that the other teams seemed to be swimming in another pool.
Phelps won his first gold five days ago with a world record in the 400 individual medley that is widely regarded as one of the great swims of all time, a collectible. From then on, something spectacular has been expected of him every day -- his teammates have predicted that he is on his way to an epic meet. "He's gonna be on fire now," Aaron Peirsol said. "He'll be hard to stop."
As record after record has fallen, evidence has mounted that he could be on his way to the greatest Olympics ever -- a tsunami of records that will wash over and eradicate all other accomplishments. "And it ain't over yet," said Eddie Reese, the U.S. men's swimming coach.
Phelps is now more than halfway to the eight, and his greatest individual challenge has been a pair of busted goggles. We're beginning to take his performances for granted, to expect the same from him that he expects from himself. The trick, as Phelps turns the corner in his chase for eight golds, is to properly admire his last few attempts. Let's not forget to sightsee along the way, to stop and stare at an athlete who is one of the great wonders of the world. Otherwise, we won't fully realize what we got to see.
Phelps Faces the Strain Of Making Waves
By Sally Jenkins. Sports columnist, Washington Post
Photo credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
BEIJING
After a while this gold medal thing can wear on a guy, even one with Michael Phelps's seemingly non-biodegradable constitution. It suddenly all seemed tiring, the cycle of eat-sleep-swim, the ice baths, the thousands of meters of warm-ups and warm-downs, the constant carbo-loading. Phelps stood in the pool after winning his fourth gold medal of the Summer Games, ripped off his water-filled goggles and chucked them over his shoulder as if he was sick of wearing them. He looked at the clock, unsmiling, and grabbed at his side under the water, as if the race had given him a stitch, instead of the all-time mark for Olympic bullion.
It was Phelps's fifth straight day of competition at the Water Cube, and suddenly the strain showed. It was apparent that this pursuit of eight golds is not as automatic as we, watching with our feet propped up, might think. With one goggle mishap, Phelps could have seen the end of his Olympic record quest through a pair of bloodshot eyes.
As soon as he dived in the water at the start of the 200-meter butterfly, his goggles tore away from his face and water poured into them. "They filled right up," he said.
By the 150-meter mark he couldn't see the wall. Phelps had won three previous gold medals by eclipsing world records in each, and he had every expectation of doing so again in the 200 fly. He has owned the fly record since 2001, when he was a slack-jawed, mouth-breathing teenager who had to ask his coach, Bob Bowman, "Who is this Mark Spitz guy, and why does everybody keep asking me about him?"
But Phelps wasn't thinking about a world record as the chlorine stung his eyes. "I was just hoping I was winning and hoping I could get my hand to the wall first," he said.
For the first time in the Beijing Games, he swam as if it was effortful. Half-blind as his goggles sloshed with water, he searched for the black T on the bottom of the pool, and tried to gauge his distance to the wall by counting his strokes. His time of 1 minute 52.03 seconds barely clipped Laszlo Cseh of Hungary (1:52.70) at the touch. It was his closest individual finish so far, and a second slower than he wanted, and he was clearly dismayed. "It's fine," he said unenthusiastically.
This is the point Phelps has reached at these Olympics: He is now discerning between great gold medals, and the merely mundane ones.
It was only when Phelps's irritation at the goggle malfunction had worn off, and he stood on the medal podium with yet another ornament slung around his neck, that the realization hit him: He had just broken the all-time career total for Olympic gold medals with 10, surpassing the nine held by the likes of Spitz and Carl Lewis.
"I was in the awards ceremony for the 200 fly when I started thinking about it and that's when I started tearing up," he said. "To be at the top with so many great athletes who have walked in the Olympic Games, it's a pretty amazing feeling."
Phelps's relentless rhythm of excellence is in danger of robbing him, and us, of proper appreciation for what he might accomplish here. The goggle mishap was evidence of just how fragile his quest really is, all of his painstaking preparation and magnificent effort could have been undone with one fluke.
But it was also evidence of what a towering mental giant he is. It was 10:23 in the morning when got out of the pool with a sour face after swimming the fly. At 11:20 he hopped back in it for the 4x200 freestyle relay -- and won his fifth gold medal of the Games, this time with the sort of lofty world record performance he wanted. Phelps swam the leadoff leg in a spectacular collective assault on the world mark with Ryan Lochte, Ricky Berens and Peter Vanderkaay, who combined to shatter it by 4.68 seconds. That's no typo. Phelps, Lochte, Berens and Vanderkaay swam nearly five seconds faster than any team ever, cutting so fast through the water that the other teams seemed to be swimming in another pool.
Phelps won his first gold five days ago with a world record in the 400 individual medley that is widely regarded as one of the great swims of all time, a collectible. From then on, something spectacular has been expected of him every day -- his teammates have predicted that he is on his way to an epic meet. "He's gonna be on fire now," Aaron Peirsol said. "He'll be hard to stop."
As record after record has fallen, evidence has mounted that he could be on his way to the greatest Olympics ever -- a tsunami of records that will wash over and eradicate all other accomplishments. "And it ain't over yet," said Eddie Reese, the U.S. men's swimming coach.
Phelps is now more than halfway to the eight, and his greatest individual challenge has been a pair of busted goggles. We're beginning to take his performances for granted, to expect the same from him that he expects from himself. The trick, as Phelps turns the corner in his chase for eight golds, is to properly admire his last few attempts. Let's not forget to sightsee along the way, to stop and stare at an athlete who is one of the great wonders of the world. Otherwise, we won't fully realize what we got to see.
Monday, August 11, 2008
The Man Who Led Our Olympic Team
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2008 This article is from TIA Daily • August 10, 2008 • If you choose, subscribe here.
Thanks, Mr. Tracinski, for this inspiring article. I recommend following the links he included as they flesh out the story. The ones about Mr. Lomong are all inspiring.
Who We Are
Lopez Lomong Represents America
by Robert Tracinski
Amid the gargantuan spectacle of Friday's opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, there was a much smaller detail that really caught my attention: the story of the man whom the US delegation chose as its flag-bearer for the Parade of Nations.
Who We Are
Lopez Lomong Represents America
by Robert Tracinski
Amid the gargantuan spectacle of Friday's opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, there was a much smaller detail that really caught my attention: the story of the man whom the US delegation chose as its flag-bearer for the Parade of Nations.
I don't begrudge the Chinese their desire to put on a spectacular display. China has achieved a remarkable transformation in the past 30 years, raising itself up from the abject poverty of a nation brutalized by its Communist dictators, to become one of the world's fastest-growing economies with an increasingly vibrant culture.
And I was particularly encouraged by the way in which China chose to celebrate its moment at the center of the world's attention. Like most Olympic opening ceremonies, it was a sprawling event without much in the way of a connected narrative, but it seemed to be mostly built around two themes. The first theme was the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China: paper, moveable type, gunpowder (represented by fireworks, of course), and the compass. The second theme was China's openness to the rest of the world, a theme emphasized when the ceremony's pantomimed overview of Chinese history skipped forward from the silk road and the 15th-century sea voyages of explorer Zheng He to the opening up of China to the global economy in 1978—skipping pretty much everything in between, including Mao Tse Tung and Communism. This is perhaps no surprise, when you consider the background of the ceremony's director, filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who as a young man suffered through the lost decade of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
My impression is that the people of China are not eager to remember the horrors of Mao's rule, because they are looking forward to the better life they are beginning to enjoy. And China's rulers are not eager to remind their subjects of that history, because it does not reflect well on the moral legitimacy of the Communist Party.
So the upshot of the opening ceremony could be boiled down to: China wants to be a thriving part of the world again. It was as good a message as you could expect.
Yet there is a contradiction behind that message, and America sent its own messenger to remind the world of this fact.
The Chinese people as a whole are no doubt sincere in the aspirations they projected at the opening ceremonies. But the relationship of China's rulers to the world is not nearly as benevolent. China's government has maintained what one analyst calls a Zombie Empire of failed and dying dictatorships. Like the zombies of folklore, these states are kept in a state of artificial animation by Chinese support—in exchange for doing China's bidding. And one of the zombies in China's empire is Sudan, which has been shunned by every other civilized nation for its complicity in mass murder and war crimes in its province of Darfur.
That is why the US Olympic team made such a profound statement by choosing as its flag-bearer the middle-distance runner Lopez Lomong. China made its statement to the world last Friday with masses of people—2,008 drummers, 2,008 Tai Chi masters, and so on—while America answered it, quietly, with a single individual.
Lomong's story is a both heartbreaking and inspirational. He was one of the famous "Lost Boys of Sudan." Stolen from his family by Sudanese Muslims as part of their war against Christians and animists in Southern Sudan, he was taken to what was basically a death camp for children—if you can imagine such a thing, which I hope you can't. With the help of some older boys from his village, he escaped and ran for many miles to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he lived in squalor for ten years until he was brought to the US by an American charity.
This is the bare outline of a story that is told movingly in Lomong's own words and in many other reports in the past few weeks (see here and here especially).
It is a story full of details no one would dare to make up in a Hollywood movie—like this one, from a Washington Post report: Once, in Kenya, he was given five shillings for watering cows. It was his only money but he never spent it, keeping it for the right moment. He heard others talking about the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and how, on the only TV set in the area, five miles away, they might watch it. So Lomong and friends walked five miles to the black-and-white TV only to find out that, for each event you watched, you had to pay—five shillings.
That day, Lopez Lomong saw sprinter Michael Johnson run and win, stand on the podium in a US uniform and cry as his anthem was played. "I want to run as fast as that guy," Lomong says he thought. "And I want to wear that same uniform."
What stands out most from the story is Lomong's gratitude to and love for America. Lomong became a US citizen last year and told reporters, "Now I'm not just one of the 'Lost Boys.' I'm an American." The Lost Boy has been found. "Before, I ran from danger and death," he says. "Now, I run for sport. It would be an honor to represent the country that saved me and showed me the way." And describing what it means to him to carry his new country's flag, Lomong says, "The American flag means everything in my life—everything that describes me, coming from another country and going through all the stages that I have to become a US citizen. This is another amazing step for me in celebrating being an American."
If you want to know why Lomong loves America so much, check out a terrific interview with his foster parents, Robert and Barbara Rogers.
There has been some discussion about whether athletes at the Olympics should try to make some kind of political statement about causes like Darfur or Tibet or China's record on individual rights. But Lomong makes the most effective statement of all. He makes a statement just by being who he is—and by what he implies about who we are as Americans.
An estimated four billion people watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and in every broadcast in every country around the world, the broadcasters would have had to explain, as Lomong led the American delegation into the stadium, who this person was, why America is represented by a young black man from Sudan, and how it is that in America a lost and penniless refugee can become an elite athlete who is chosen by his peers to represent, as one athlete put it, "the epitome of the American dream."
It is a story that says everything about the freedom and opportunity we enjoy in America, and about the benevolence and generosity that follow from it. And one could not imagine a more pointed or effective contrast to the policies of China's rulers.
And I was particularly encouraged by the way in which China chose to celebrate its moment at the center of the world's attention. Like most Olympic opening ceremonies, it was a sprawling event without much in the way of a connected narrative, but it seemed to be mostly built around two themes. The first theme was the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China: paper, moveable type, gunpowder (represented by fireworks, of course), and the compass. The second theme was China's openness to the rest of the world, a theme emphasized when the ceremony's pantomimed overview of Chinese history skipped forward from the silk road and the 15th-century sea voyages of explorer Zheng He to the opening up of China to the global economy in 1978—skipping pretty much everything in between, including Mao Tse Tung and Communism. This is perhaps no surprise, when you consider the background of the ceremony's director, filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who as a young man suffered through the lost decade of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
My impression is that the people of China are not eager to remember the horrors of Mao's rule, because they are looking forward to the better life they are beginning to enjoy. And China's rulers are not eager to remind their subjects of that history, because it does not reflect well on the moral legitimacy of the Communist Party.
So the upshot of the opening ceremony could be boiled down to: China wants to be a thriving part of the world again. It was as good a message as you could expect.
Yet there is a contradiction behind that message, and America sent its own messenger to remind the world of this fact.
The Chinese people as a whole are no doubt sincere in the aspirations they projected at the opening ceremonies. But the relationship of China's rulers to the world is not nearly as benevolent. China's government has maintained what one analyst calls a Zombie Empire of failed and dying dictatorships. Like the zombies of folklore, these states are kept in a state of artificial animation by Chinese support—in exchange for doing China's bidding. And one of the zombies in China's empire is Sudan, which has been shunned by every other civilized nation for its complicity in mass murder and war crimes in its province of Darfur.
That is why the US Olympic team made such a profound statement by choosing as its flag-bearer the middle-distance runner Lopez Lomong. China made its statement to the world last Friday with masses of people—2,008 drummers, 2,008 Tai Chi masters, and so on—while America answered it, quietly, with a single individual.
Lomong's story is a both heartbreaking and inspirational. He was one of the famous "Lost Boys of Sudan." Stolen from his family by Sudanese Muslims as part of their war against Christians and animists in Southern Sudan, he was taken to what was basically a death camp for children—if you can imagine such a thing, which I hope you can't. With the help of some older boys from his village, he escaped and ran for many miles to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he lived in squalor for ten years until he was brought to the US by an American charity.
This is the bare outline of a story that is told movingly in Lomong's own words and in many other reports in the past few weeks (see here and here especially).
It is a story full of details no one would dare to make up in a Hollywood movie—like this one, from a Washington Post report: Once, in Kenya, he was given five shillings for watering cows. It was his only money but he never spent it, keeping it for the right moment. He heard others talking about the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and how, on the only TV set in the area, five miles away, they might watch it. So Lomong and friends walked five miles to the black-and-white TV only to find out that, for each event you watched, you had to pay—five shillings.
That day, Lopez Lomong saw sprinter Michael Johnson run and win, stand on the podium in a US uniform and cry as his anthem was played. "I want to run as fast as that guy," Lomong says he thought. "And I want to wear that same uniform."
What stands out most from the story is Lomong's gratitude to and love for America. Lomong became a US citizen last year and told reporters, "Now I'm not just one of the 'Lost Boys.' I'm an American." The Lost Boy has been found. "Before, I ran from danger and death," he says. "Now, I run for sport. It would be an honor to represent the country that saved me and showed me the way." And describing what it means to him to carry his new country's flag, Lomong says, "The American flag means everything in my life—everything that describes me, coming from another country and going through all the stages that I have to become a US citizen. This is another amazing step for me in celebrating being an American."
If you want to know why Lomong loves America so much, check out a terrific interview with his foster parents, Robert and Barbara Rogers.
There has been some discussion about whether athletes at the Olympics should try to make some kind of political statement about causes like Darfur or Tibet or China's record on individual rights. But Lomong makes the most effective statement of all. He makes a statement just by being who he is—and by what he implies about who we are as Americans.
An estimated four billion people watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and in every broadcast in every country around the world, the broadcasters would have had to explain, as Lomong led the American delegation into the stadium, who this person was, why America is represented by a young black man from Sudan, and how it is that in America a lost and penniless refugee can become an elite athlete who is chosen by his peers to represent, as one athlete put it, "the epitome of the American dream."
It is a story that says everything about the freedom and opportunity we enjoy in America, and about the benevolence and generosity that follow from it. And one could not imagine a more pointed or effective contrast to the policies of China's rulers.
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