Spectator Life

When I first moved to the country, I was intrigued by the sight of people walking sheep on a leash round and round the front garden of a neighboring farmer. City girl that I am, I wondered if they were receiving some kind of special therapy. Equine interaction is supposed to help with certain anxiety disorders, why not sheep-walking for, say, insomnia? It turned out, however, that the sheep-walkers were members of the local 4-H club preparing to show their market lambs at the fair, an event I was later privileged to witness. But I was put to the blush when the judge, a tall, competent-looking man in a checked shirt and green boots, commented loudly on the fine chops displayed by the winning entrant.

Reka Gyorgy showed commendable courage this weekend for finally speaking out against the National College Athletic Association's rules regarding trans competitors. The Virginia Tech swimmer and Olympian was bumped out of a finals spot in the 500 free due to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas's participation. In a letter posted to her Instagram account, Gyorgy wrote, "It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA's decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete... [Thursday] is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes." Gyorgy is one of the first NCAA female swimmers to speak publicly about the negative impact Thomas's participation in the sport has on women.

Every time I visit Pennsylvania Amish Country, it feels a little less like Amish Country. My parents were aghast when, in the mid-2000s, they visited for the first time since the 1980s (and for the first time with me) and found a massive outlet center along the main commercial drag. When my wife and I visited in 2017 — my first time since that childhood family trip — I was dismayed to see that the field in front of the Amish Farm and House had become a Target and its attendant parking lot. (I was only a little less dismayed when the landmark Congress Inn, with its out-of-place capitol-dome sign, met the wrecking ball.

Surveying the effect of British education on families, G.K. Chesterton wryly observed in his 1910 book What’s Wrong with the World: “The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.” Little more than a decade later, the compulsory public education movement was to pick up steam across the United States, often presented as a necessity for the protection and wellbeing of American children. History, Mark Twain might say, is rhyming.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has had a busy two years. Keeping students out of schools, helping teachers fight for permanent, paid truancy, watching her liberal columnist friends write slobbering, glowing profiles of her in the New York Times — these are things that can really take it out of a woman. So, Cockburn has absolutely no patience for the right-wing internet trolls (or Russian bots, possibly?) who had a good laugh at Ms. Weingarten’s expense this week after she had a small spelling error on Twitter. “We #StandWithUkriane,” Weingarten wrote on Wednesday in a since-deleted post. Big deal, says Cockburn. She was only one letter off, which is almost as good as spelling “Ukraine” correctly. Ms.

In 2014, Sandra Y.L. Korn, a Harvard undergraduate, published a column in the Harvard Crimson, in which she denounced “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom.” Korn’s preferred alternative was what she called “academic justice.” Under this doctrine, a university would drop the silly pretense of letting proponents of dumb, bigoted or politically naive ideas have their say. Instead, Korn asked, “If our university community opposes racism, sexism and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom?’” Korn’s screed provoked a lot of attention.

The president of the University of North Texas, Neal Smatresk, said in a campus-wide email Tuesday that students who oppose medical transitions for children suffering from gender dysphoria hold "intolerant views". Smatresk's email was sent to the campus community in response to an event hosted by the Young Conservatives of Texas with Texas House candidate Jeff Younger, who has proposed banning surgical and medical interventions for children who claim to be transgender. "I know the last several days may have felt particularly difficult for the transgender members of our community, due to the intolerant views of a handful of campus members," Smatresk wrote.

In January, the Department of Justice dropped charges against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, a mechanical engineer accused of concealing illicit ties to the Chinese government early last year. United States Attorney Rachael Rollins said regarding the decision, “After a careful assessment of this new information in the context of all the evidence, our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial... Today’s dismissal is a result of that process and is in the interests of justice.” In a vacuum, this story may not be all that noteworthy — prosecutors drop charges all the time for a variety of reasons.

“The Big Game” was this weekend. A hundred million or so people of all races, genders, ages, creeds and sexual orientations from Nome, Alaska, to Key West, Florida, to Bangor, Maine, to Monterey, California, and everywhere in between were drawn together, like moths to a plasma screen TV, to tune in to “the most watched TV event in America.” What is it about the Super Bowl? Why does it cause so many of us, even those who don’t really understand the game, to suspend our Sunday scaries and partake in this most sacred ritual of pounding domestic beers, Buffalo chicken wings, and seven-layer dip, partying like there’s no company-wide conference call bright and early Monday morning?

You’d think that a restaurant named Café Habana would be a perfect fit in Miami. But when it emerged this week that the New Yorker-owned joint specializing in Cuban/Mexican fusion was “inspired by a storied Mexico City hangout, where legend has it Che Guevara and Fidel Castro plotted the Cuban Revolution,” all hell predictably broke loose. The restaurant, slated to open in downtown Miami in the spring, has since scrubbed the Castro and Che reference from its website. But no amount of damage control will appease commie-hating Miamians, many of whom are surely cooking up protest plans, pots and pans at the ready. The original Café Habana opened in New York in 1997, and like so many other restaurants before it — the famed Carbone, etc.

The Chinese Communist Party has a brilliant new propagandist in Olympic gold medalist Eileen Gu, the American-born freestyler skier who is competing for China in this year's Winter Games. Gu is a talented athlete, gifted academically, and, well, gorgeous — she has done modeling campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Fendi and Gucci and has appeared on the covers of Elle and Vogue China. She's also a traitor. Gu, who is 18, was born and raised in San Francisco by her American father and Chinese mother. She plans to attend college at Stanford University. Yet she announced in 2019 that she would represent China in the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

The media showering that China has received during the Beijing Winter Olympics has been both a national and international disgrace. NBC has been tiptoeing around how the Games are being held in the shadow of Uighur concentration camps, while athletes describe horrid living conditions including food that makes Fyre Festival’s cuisine look like a gourmet meal. But almost nothing compares to Western outlets repeating Chinese Communist Party talking points over the coerced interview confession that Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai gave to the French magazine L’Equipe this weekend. Late last year, Shuai accused a former senior CCP official, Zhang Gaol, of sexual assault in a social media post.

The thing I am looking forward to the least right now is the Olympics, and I have a colonoscopy scheduled. The only answer is a drinking game. Enough with "politics by sportscasters for those who only care about politics." I threw away my Mao (and Che) T-shirts sophomore year. We all know Beijing is not a democratic regime. So for some sort of balance, can we all agree that for every hundred references to the Uighurs, Tibet and Hong Kong, we make one to where and how Covid all began? Or will the mainstream media continue their coverage détente? Bottoms up for every reference to bats, pangolins and Chinese wet markets. Speaking of Covid, a drink every time announcers insist China's Covid crackdown is autocratic draconianism while ignoring that much of the same was done in America.

Apologies to woke athletes — Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want you to “use your platform” in Beijing. On Thursday, the House Speaker testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and discouraged America’s Winter Olympians from issuing political statements about China’s authoritarian regime. “I would say to our athletes: you’re there to compete. Do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government, because they are ruthless,” she said. “I know there is a temptation on the part of some to speak out while they are there,” Pelosi continued. “I respect that. But I also worry about what the Chinese government might do to their reputations, to their families.

Tom Brady was never the most approachable quarterback in the NFL. That would be Peyton Manning, who just last weekend brought down the house on Saturday Night Live. Aaron Rodgers is probably more athletic; Patrick Mahomes and Matthew Stafford have those cannon-fire arms. Lamar Jackson knows when to run the ball, while any number of QBs might be said to be faster. Yet it's Brady who is indisputably the greatest of all time. Somehow the geeky kid from that rookie weigh-in photo all the way back in 2000, the one who looked like he spent too much time brooding in a computer lab, blossomed into a force of nature the likes of which the professional sports world has never known.

Normally Cockburn isn't much of a sports fan, notwithstanding the occasional boozy tailgate for his local kickball team (which was disbanded years ago). But even he couldn't help but blow his whistle this morning when he learned that the Washington Football Team, formerly the Washington Redskins, had changed its name to the Washington Commanders. At first blush, the Commanders isn't such a bad choice. The franchise, after all, is based in the very seat of our military-industrial complex. Certainly it's a better choice than, say, the Washington Corporals (too low-rank) or the Washington Raytheon Lobbyists (too on the nose). And Commanders does have a distinctly DC oomph to it.

If you’ve ever read a headline along the lines of “Kardashian Family Worth Combined Zillion Dollars” and wondered how a gaggle of uneducated, tawdry, plastic people with a combined vocabulary of Joe Biden manages to account for, like, 10 percent of America’s GDP, you obviously haven’t visited a cosmetics store recently. In search of something to even out my complexion, made a little too ruddy for my liking by the harsh Pennsylvania winter and the constant firing of a gigantic coal furnace, I ventured to my local Ulta Beauty store. I just wanted a little something to temper my Rumpole-of-the-Bailey-after-a-bottle-of-cheap-claret skin tone. What I got was a heaping helping of humble pie and an appreciation for Covid masks behind which to hide my hideous mug.