TV Quote of the Day (‘The Sopranos,’ In Which Tony Distinguishes Nostradamus From Notre Dame)

Bobby "Bacala" Baccalieri [played by Steve Schirripa]: “Mom started going downhill after the World Trade Center. You know Quasimodo predicted all this.”

Anthony 'Tony' Soprano Sr. [played by James Gandolfini]: “Who did what?”

Bobby: “All these problems—the Middle East, the end of the world.”

Tony [shaking his head, like a teacher correcting a very errant student]: “Nostradamus. Quasimodo's the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

Bobby: “Oh right. Notre Damus.”

Tony: “Nostradamus, and Notre Dame. Two different things completely.”

Bobby: “It's interesting, though, they'd be so similar, isn't it? And I always thought, okay, Hunchback of Notre Dame. You also got your quarterback and halfback of Notre Dame.”

Tony [exasperated]: “One's a f-g cathedral.”

Bobby: “Obviously. I know, I'm just saying. It's interesting, the coincidence. What, you're gonna tell me you never pondered that? The back thing with Notre Dame?”

Tony: “No!”— The Sopranos, Season 4, Episode 1, “For All Debts Public and Private,” original air date Sept. 15, 2002, teleplay by David Chase, directed by Allen Coulter

Over the last several months, I’ve been catching up on nearly two decades of TV shows on DVD—series like Foyle’s War, Monk, Game of Thrones. Last night, I started Season 4 of The Sopranos. 

In the past, watching prior seasons sometimes made me burst out laughing at its moments of dark humor, but nothing prepared me for this segment quoted here. Years ago, on a radio show, I recall Goodfellas screenwriter Nick Pileggi saying that Mafia kids in school were the type of guys who tripped other students walking toward the front of the class. 

Perhaps Tony Soprano was like this growing up, too. In fact, I’d say it was very likely.

But perhaps all those weeks watching The History Channel (before it became dominated by reality programs, mind you) improved his appreciation for knowledge. 

Who said television serves no educational purpose?

 

This Day in Sports History (Rice Immortalizes Notre Dame ‘4 Horsemen’)

Oct. 18, 1924—In the fading afternoon twilight in the press box at New York’s Polo Grounds, New York Herald Tribune columnist Grantland Rice pondered how to convey the excitement of the University of Notre Dame’s 14-7 win over Army that day, in a way that would distinguish his piece from that of talented friends on rival papers. 

Suddenly, a chance conversation from the year before and an anecdote he’d heard that week about the moviegoing habits of the Fighting Irish inspired the courtly Southerner to compare the winner’s swift backfield to a whirlwind force and to the “Four Horsemen” of the Apocalypse, in perhaps the most famous lead in the history of American sports journalism.

Rice’s dramatic opening and the importance of the game itself (a major clash of collegiate football powers) led the sportswriter’s editors to splash the piece on the front page, above the fold, of the Sunday paper. The column proved a public-relations bonanza for Notre Dame, providing one of the legendary moments in an athletic history filled with them.

In his heavily distributed column “Sportlight,” Rice was not above alluding to the Greek and Roman literature he had studied at Vanderbilt University. This afternoon, however, he referred to a piece of literature better known to religious-minded Americans, including the winning team—the Book of Revelation:

"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.”

There was some poetic license involved with this—not a surprise, really, since, liberally sprinkled among the 67 million words produced throughout his five-decade career, Rice tossed in his own verses for the sake of variety. Purists noted, for instance, that there was no way that the Army team could be “swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds,” because the field sprawled out below the precipice under Coogan’s Bluff. Moreover, for subsequent generations of English majors raised on the prose of Ernest Hemingway, much of this is sounded like purple prose.

But Rice had his share of friends and admirers, even among those who wrote in ways that differed dramatically from his. Stanley Woodward, who acted as mentor to a generation of famous sportswriters as sports editor at the Herald Tribune, observed that among Rice’s legacies to subsequent practitioners of the craft was “rhythm and euphony.” Roger Kahn, author of the masterful elegy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, noted simply that the “Four Horsemen” passage was “the most remarkable lead ever written on a football game”—one that, like the cyclone that functioned as the article’s central metaphor, “swept away all before it.”

As Rice recalled the creative process that led to this in his autobiography nearly 30 years later, The Tumult and the Shouting (excerpted in a fine football anthology just published by the Library of America, Football: Great Writing About the National Sport), after being nearly run over by three of the players in the Notre Dame backfield as he was standing on the sideline, he told a friend, “They’re like a wild horse stampede.”

But when he remembered this, Rice was in his early 70s, ailing, and, likely, forgetful about a more immediate influence on his thinking. Back in October 1924, George Strickler, then coach Knute Rockne's student publicity aide and later sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, told Rice and other reporters during halftime who were marveling over the exploits of quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller, and fullback Elmer Layden that they were “just like the Four Horsemen,” a reference to the movie the team had seen the Wednesday before they traveled east for the game: The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, starring an exotic new newcomer to Hollywood named Rudolph Valentino.

Reporting that day was as talented a group of sportswriters as may ever have watched a single game: Damon Runyon, Paul Gallico, Gene Fowler, Westbrook Pegler, Jack Kofoed, Davis Walsh, and Frank Wallace. Significantly, though, it is only Rice’s account that is still remembered.

The hyperbolic nature of his prose and the prominence given his story by The Herald Tribune accounted for much, but not all, of the reasons for this. Once Notre Dame made it home to South Bend, Strickler quickly got Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden, all dressed in their uniforms, to mount horses from a local livery stable, and made sure that the wire services received the resulting image. The photo became indelibly associated with a team that went on to win the Rose Bowl and compile an undefeated record. The power of Rice’s words, then, was multiplied by a single image.

If the 1920s represented the Golden Age of Sport, then Rice was its bard. What he did with this passage illustrated what contemporaries regarded as his greatest gift, and what many today see as his greatest failing: transforming a transitory athletic moment, place, and people into mythological status.

A couple of years ago, Tommy Craggs posted a devastating critique of Rice’s literary failings (“Why Grantland Rice Sucked”) on the sports Website Deadspin. The notion of a sportswriter comparing a minor-league baseball game to Gettysburg, Bull Run or Waterloo is, indeed, laughable.  

But at least some of this is unfair to Rice. As a onetime college athlete himself, he knew intimately the competitive instincts and stresses of those who played sports, and he was part of a writing fraternity that was not interested in exposing the peccadilloes of players. It would take a full two generations after the appearance of the “Four Horsemen” column before that laissez-faire attitude changed.

What had altered, too, was the nature of the media covering these events. For No Cheering in the Press Box, a 1974 oral history of sportswriting edited by Jerome Holtzman, Strickler mused that by then, it would have been impossible for Rice and his brethren to practice the craft the way they had before:

“Your stories today are shorter because of the economics of getting out a newspaper. Your columns are narrower. Your type is larger. And when you start to trim a Grantland Rice or a Davis Walsh, you get down to the straight Associated Press story. You trim out the little touches, the man's nuances. You trim out the man himself. So how are they going to build up another Red Grange?”

(The reference to Grange is apropos here. While Notre Dame was crushing Army, Grange was leading the University of Illinois to victory over Michigan with an electrifying, five-touchdown performance, leading Rice, in a typical bit of versification, to term him the "gray ghost.") 

The other basic change was what boosted this particular column by Rice to begin with: the image. With the rise of television—and especially the multiple cameras and instant replay that were increasingly used—viewers could now see for themselves, in real time—and repeatedly thereafter—any plays. They didn’t need the likes of Rice to talk about the action. The emphasis, then, switched to the individuals associated with the game.  

More has disappeared, however, than the romantic style of sportswriting epitomized by Rice (who, incidentally, in perhaps his best-known bit of verse, wrote: "For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks--not that you won or lost/But how you played the game"). The Polo Grounds, scene of countless legendary baseball and football contests, was demolished in 1964. 

Even the types of backs hailed by Rice could no longer exist today. The biggest of the Four Horsemen, Layden, weighed only 164 pounds. In contrast, on this year's much-ballyhood Fighting Irish roster, quarterback Everett Golson and running backs Cam McDaniel, Tarean Folston, and Greg Bryant average 200 pounds.

Words for Obama, From a Prior Notre Dame Address

“The crisis of the time is not political, it is in essence religious. It is a religious crisis of large numbers of intensely moral, even godly, people who no longer hope for God. Hence, the quest for divinity assumes a secular form, but with an intensity of conviction that is genuinely new to our politics. Central to the quest for secular grace is the detestation of secular sin incarnate, namely, the United States of America, ‘the most repressive, inhumane capitalistic-imperialistic nation,’ as the student paper of a Middle Western state university recently put it, ‘the world has ever seen.’”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Politics as the Art of the Impossible,” delivered as the Commencement Address at Notre Dame University, June 1969, reprinted in Moynihan’s Coping: On the Practice of Government (1974)

If Barack Obama and his speechwriters were casting about for models for the President’s upcoming oration at Notre Dame University, they could have done worse than studying Pat Moynihan’s speech on a similar occasion at the school 40 years earlier.

The university’s awarding of an honorary degree to Obama has caused no end of controversy from the usual subjects—the Catholic archbishops, insisting on the primacy of abortion to the near-exclusion of all other issues, and liberals, asserting with equal vehemence that abortion should hardly be on the table at all as a subject for discussion, more than 35 years after Roe v. Wade.

During the past election, Obama’s comment on the matter—that the question of when life began would be “way above his pay grade”—showed how much he wished this issue would just go away. Yet ducking the matter is not only futile, but a disquieting indication of a lack of moral seriousness.

One politician who rarely if ever avoided controversy was the late Senator Moynihan—so much so that The New York Times in the mid-Seventies dubbed him, rather snarkily, “that rambunctious child of the sidewalks of New York.” Agree with him or not (and there was much to take issue with him about), at least Moynihan paid people the compliment of having intelligence enough to listen to a provocative, soundbite-free argument.

In other words, he made you think outside the boundaries of left and right. God only knows, we could use some of that today.

Let’s start with the tension that gives Moynihan’s polemics so much of its tension and force—his belief that there were some things government could and must do and others that it couldn’t. As enumerated in his Notre Dame address, the latter amounted to this:

“It cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide a meaning to life. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide moral energies, but it cannot create those energies. In particular, government cannot cope with the crisis in values that is sweeping the western world.”

If Obama wants to create some common ground with those who opposed Notre Dame’s invitation, he might want to acknowledge what has been all too wanting in his party’s platform these last three decades: that abortion is not a matter of sexual freedom or personal privacy, but an issue of “the crisis in values” that Moynihan warned about. And that crisis lies at the heart of the issue that perhaps cost the senator the most in his career: his analysis of family life.

As a subcabinet official in the Johnson administration, Moynihan had written a report about African-American family life. The controversy that developed over his analysis of the growing crisis of illegitimacy stifled debate on the issue, leading to two decades of hardening ideological positions and, worst of all, governmental inaction.

We are facing something analogous now with respect to abortion. As a Catholic politician, Moynihan faced even fiercer pressures than Obama, a non-Catholic, does now.

The senator’s response—generally pro-choice, though he opposed partial-birth abortion as coming uncomfortably close to infanticide—pleased few people totally, though it did reflect his belief in incrementalism—a longstanding attitude that came under fire from both left and right in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The "quest for secular grace" that Moynihan noted merely replaced one form of consuming passion--religion--with another--politics. The all-or-nothing-at-all attitude carried over from one realm to another, however.

For all their differences in temperament—Obama is possessed of almost remarkable reserves of cool, while Moynihan was anything but—the President shares something of the same attitude, that politics is a work of imperfect men to bring about a better society. But he might want to consider everything else he has in common with the late senator:

* Both were born far outside the major cities that became their homes—Moynihan in Tulsa, Obama in Honolulu;
* Both provoked some unease from opponents because they were sojourners—Moynihan, drifting between government and academe; Obama, not just from place to place but even from one governmental position to another;
* Both were associated, either as graduate or academic, with Ivy League universities;
* Both had to figure out how to put together winning coalitions in their first Senate campaigns;
* Both married strong-willed women; and
* Both became famous for their writings (Moynihan, for puzzling out public policy; Obama, for puzzling out the difficulties posed by his mixed-race inheritance).

But the similarity Obama might want to consider the most is this: both men grew up for long periods of their childhood and youth without fathers. Obama’s, we know, broke up with his wife and returned to Kenya; Moynihan’s dad, an alcoholic, walked out on the family, leaving his wife to run a saloon and his son to pick up whatever he could from shining shoes.

After nearly four decades of Roe v. Wade, Obama might want to ask his audience—not just the one in the seats in South Bend, but nationally—whether wanted babies are really more of a fact of life than before; and what we, as a society, are doing to strengthen or destroy this structure.

He might ask his audience if the fact that abortion is a moral issue necessarily puts it outside the realm of governmental action at all, and might challenge his own supporters to ask whether a single-minded commitment such as that displayed by much (though hardly all) of the pro-life movement is really such a bad thing after all.

Obama’s own rise to the Oval Office testifies to the strength and worth of a single cause—the civil-rights movement. Were civil-rights activists swayed by Southern segregationist politicians who wondered why the commotion for a single cause when they voted liberal down the line in just about every other way?

And what was the civil-rights movement if not a moral cause? President Kennedy’s powerful address to the nation after Birmingham was nothing if not blunt about the nature of this issue: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

Part of the conundrum that has confused American politics over the last several decades is that Democrats, for most of the 20th century the party of economic regulation, now insist on sexual deregulation, while Republicans have moved in the opposite direction.

If Obama truly wants to move Americans out of their hardened positions on abortion, he needs to use words, directed at his supporters as much as at the protestors who so visibly annoy many in the media.

Few modern Americans believed as much in the power of words to reframe a debate as Moynihan. Three decades ago, he was profiled in a book called The Literary Politicians by Mitchell Ross. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to name another contemporary figure who sought to advance discussion of public policy as powerfully through the pen as through their office (the other subjects of Ross’ book—William F. Buckley Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Norman Mailer, Henry Kissinger, and Gore Vidal—have either passed on or are now in the twilight of their careers).

Yet Moynihan, uniquely among modern Senators, would fit in well with the brilliant intellects—and yes, politicians—who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to frame the Constitution. As he talks about the debate that has polarized Americans for too long, Obama would do well to follow the boundary-crossing, independent line that Moynihan pursued so well throughout his career.

Quote of the Day (Susan Roesgen, on Notre Dame Protestors And Barack Obama)

“Can you believe that, Wolf, they’re actually praying that God will change the heart and mind of President Obama to make him pro-life?”—CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen to Wolf Blitzer, on protestors against Notre Dame’s speaking invitation to Barack Obama, on CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, April 10, 2009

Can you believe, Susan, that a number of viewers will think that a supposedly objective journalist such as yourself can barely conceal her condescension toward the people she covers?

Fox News gets the lion’s share of blame for amping up subjective news coverage, notably through stunts such as its overkill of the “tea parties” protesting the Obama administration’s economic policies. If Bill O’Reilly is on while I’m channel-surfing, I find myself either switching faster or lamenting that I never bought earplugs.

But Roesgen’s comment has me wondering if there might not be at least one virtue to Fox: Whatever you think of their “fair and balanced” and “we report, you decide” slogans (and, for the record, I think they’re hysterical), their in-your-face lineup leaves absolutely no doubt about where they stand.

I don’t recall Ms. Roesgen expressing disbelief about a previous Presidential visit to Notre Dame, when many students wore black armbands objecting to George W. Bush’s stand position on capital punishment. (And that was before the invasion of Iraq, when many students would have even more cause to complain about his policies.)

Doubtless, many of these previous protestors prayed that he would see the light. It’s the same belief, I might add, that civil-rights activists of all faiths shared in the dark years when they hoped that an indifferent American populace—including risk-averse Presidents—would come to see that racial prejudice and the laws propping it up were deeply wrong.

No matter what their political affiliation, however, all these protestors have acted from a common belief: that a President is open enough to moral persuasion that he can be moved. What Ms. Roesgen’s comment reveals is not simply that she doesn’t share this belief—which is her right—but that such people lie outside the range of political discourse--which is not for her to decide.

Understand me: I’m not commenting here on whether or not Notre Dame should have invited President Obama to pick up an honorary degree and speak at the school. Good, decent people on both sides of this issue have made thoughtful arguments on this that should be considered.

And that’s why Roesgen’s impromptu remark is so disturbing. She has made no secret of which side she feels is wanting. As a matter of fact, her tone suggests she’s going to enroll millions of Catholics in the Flat Earth Society.

This look-what-I’ve-discovered-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon mentality is even more blatant than the comment by the late NBC anchorman John Chancellor in the 1970s about Americans with a different kind of religious experience: “Incidentally, we have checked this out. Being ‘born again’ is not a bizarre experience or the voice of God from the mountaintop. It’s a fairly common experience known to millions of Americans—particularly if you’re Baptist.”

The fact that CNN has not taken seriously complaints about Ms. Roesgen’s statement underscores the ideological blinders that can lead the cable network as well as its admirers (such as The New York Times’ Bill Carter) to believe that it’s hewing strictly to a just-the-facts approach not shared by rivals Fox and MSNBC.

This is one of the unintended consequences, I’m afraid, of newspapers and television stations shedding staff. Religion reporters have tended to be hired later than general correspondents or more established beat reporters. Therefore, they are also among the first fired when the budget ax strikes.

All this at a time when it’s more important than ever for Americans to understand other religious viewpoints besides their own.

To be sure, the mainstream media have not always made hires in this area with any discernment. After a Washington Post listing for a religion reporter several years ago said that the ideal candidate “need not be an expert in religion,” media critic Terry Mattingly noted the improbability of a similar ad for a Supreme Court reporter not being “a legal expert.”

But at least there was a chance that with regular, constant exposure to sources, a religion reporter would be aware of facts and tone. Ms. Roesgen showed no such awareness.

This is not a good time for reporting on the nuances of religion, folks. At some point, I think it would be worthwhile for me to analyze why reporting on different aspects of spirituality has failed so dismally. But right now, I think the media could go a long way toward reconnecting with their readers by acknowledging that they have gone wrong in the first place.

Consider this: Four months ago, the Indianapolis Star said it was discontinuing its 36-year-practice of printing prayers. Its editor’s rationale—“I believe that prayer is a very personal thing and that offering prayers is something for individuals and their churches”—sounds like something we all can agree with. A prayer that’s acceptable to those across all faiths tends to be pretty thin gruel, I think.

I counted myself among the skeptics, however, when I learned that the same paper would continue to run horoscopes. Star readers might be reasonably inclined to believe that the paper’s editors find a horoscope—a listing of dubious rationality—more acceptable than any expression, no matter how watered-down, of faith.

The next time that the Star editor ponders the justification for deleting God but keeping the horoscope, he might remember the continuing relevance of Shakespeare’s line in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.”