Las Vegas and the literature of rejection

October 2, 2017

I was working on a story about Emily Katz Anhalt’s new book, “Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths” (Yale University Press), when I decided to take a break with The New York Times online. The headline hit me in the gut:

“At Least 58 Dead and 500 Hurt in Las Vegas as Gunman Rains Bullets on Concert.”

The suspect, Stephen Craig Paddock, 64 – and, according to Las Vegas Police, also dead by his own hand – was described as a quiet, unassuming man with no criminal history by his understandably defensive brother. Of course, he was. The president called for peace and unity. Of course, he did. ...

Achilles in Boston and Charleston

June 26, 2015

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has apologized for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.

“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering I’ve caused you, for the damage I’ve done – irreparable damage,” he said in court Wednesday. “I’m guilty of it. If there is any lingering doubt of that, let it be no more.”

Is he truly sorry, and does it make a difference? Should we expect the same from Dylann Storm Roof, charged with the murder of nine in the Charleston church? Fat chance. That one will probably go to his grave Timothy McVeigh-like.

“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. told the Boston court, quoting Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” “‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So it will be for Dzokhar Tsarnaev.” ...

Achilles in Sayreville

October 23, 2014

Sports are all about numbers, and the numbers in the “game” being played out in Sayreville, N.J. are particularly brutal.

Seven: That’s the number of students who’ve been suspended from Sayreville War Memorial High School and charged with hazing and sexual assault. Four: That’s the number of teammate-victims and the number of incidents. Five: That's the number of coaches with tenured teaching positions who’ve been suspended (with pay pending the outcome of the investigation) and have seen their coaching stipends cut in half.

Numbers, however, never tell a whole story, and they can’t tell this one – of a season lost, of football scholarships rescinded, of futures in jeopardy and of a football-proud town divided between the victims and their supporters, who are seeking justice and truth, and the alleged perpetrators and theirs, who wish the whole thing would just go away so they can get back to lives lived under the Friday night lights.

It’s interesting that the school is named after a World War II memorial and the team is called the Bombers.

“Every game resembles war,” Mark Edmundson writes in his sharply observed new “Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game” (The Penguin Press, $26.95). “Tennis, soccer lacrosse: You might say they all domesticate violence…. Of the games I know, football comes closest to war without falling over the border and becoming war pure and simple.”

There are those – including many who connect the dots between Sayreville and the NFL’s domestic abuse crisis – who say that football has crossed the line. The wives and children who’ve been beaten, along with freshman boys who were held down, kicked, punched and anally raped, are casualties of the gridiron wars. ...