I’ve covered a fair amount of sports as a journalist over the years. I saw Tonya Harding’s first professional fight. I saw Mike Tyson’s almost-last. I’ve watched English football with long time supporters and interviewed a jockey or two in my day. It’s been no surprise to learn that the athletes are all individuals and as different as any of us are one from another. But the ceremony of sports and sports fandom has always struck me as having something singular and binding about it, a ritual designed to accomplish bigger ends than merely a final score.

This piece ran in Eighteen Bridges a number of years back.

***

David Brooks wrote a sports-related column in The New York Times in February of this year. I took special note of it because I was thinking a lot about sports at the time. In fact, days before the Brooks piece was published, I’d been in Boston watching the Super Bowl with rabid New England Patriots fans. I was watching them watch the game, in effect. Brooks happened to be writing about basketball, NBA star Jeremy Lin specifically. But he would have been wide of the mark no matter what sport he was talking about.  “Jeremy Lin,” he wrote, “is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.”

Since religious pro athletes are literally everywhere—the NFL playoffs themselves had for a time been dominated by coverage of the Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, whose take-a-knee moments of prayer had spawned their own epi-phenomenon referred to as “Tebowing”—Brooks got dogpiled online for being a pencil-necked geek who obviously didn’t understand anything about pro sports. Deadspin blogger Tom Scocca replied to Brooks with a post headlined: “David Brooks has written the dumbest Jeremy Lin column so far.”

But what my visit to Boston had proven to me was that Brooks’ bigger error was his central thesis, which came a little further down the column. “The moral ethos of sports,” Brooks wrote, “is in tension with the moral ethos of faith.”

I had to sit back after I read that, because I found myself wondering if Brooks had ever spent time with real hardcore fans. He certainly couldn’t have done what I had just done, sitting with those Pats fans in the blue and flickering light of The Fours bar in the Gardens area of North End Boston, all of our faces upturned to the hanging monitors above the bar as they meted out the information we craved about the very immediate future. What will happen? Brooks couldn’t possibly have spent any quality fan time in The Fours—or in any of the other sports bars scattered through the area: McGann’s Irish Pub, Boston Beerworks, Hurricane O’Reilly’s—because if he had he would have seen that sports in fact reveals and arouses something deeply and innately religious in fans, something that has nothing to do with the world’s official religions, with Tebowing, or with thanking your preferred saviour after hitting a three-pointer to win. In The Fours, what was reflected in all those upturned faces was something small “r” religious in structure, something crystallized in what is asked of fans and what they get back for their allegiance, hunkered over burgers and beers in sports bars and living rooms across the world. All holding their breath.

Of course, sports bloggers might well take offense with this idea, too. But I’m convicted, ladies and gentlemen. I went to The Fours, and I believe.

 ***

 Boston wasn’t my first whiff of this idea, that sports might reach past reality into moments beyond. It had been simmering for at least a decade, during which time I’d written dozens of magazine pieces about sports, from boxing to football (soccer, that is) to auto-racing. In fact, the very first time I sensed something inherently religious in sport was in October 2000. I was at the Mohegan Sun Casino, in Uncasville, Connecticut, watching a fight: heavyweights Kirk Johnson and Oleg Maskaev. Johnson was a gentle-voiced and mild-mannered fighter from North Preston, Nova Scotia. I’d spent a little time with him over a couple of days, in sidebar conversations between the ritual waypoints  that precede a prize fight: the press conference, the weigh in, the pregame routines, the hand taping, the silent moments before the fighter’s names are called when, if you watch closely, you’ll see the combatant retire to an inner place where he is more truly alone than perhaps anyone who has not been a prizefighter will ever understand.

Johnson was a riddle in pro boxing at the time. At 6’2 ½” and 232 pounds, with enormous shoulders and long muscular arms, he was remarkably fast, able to combine punches in flurries more like a lightweight than a heavy. Yet something lingered over his reputation, a sense of “reluctance” in the words of ring announcer Jim Lampley just prior to the bell. When I button-holed famed boxing analyst Larry Merchant before the fight, he told me, “Johnson just seems like the perennially promising heavyweight. But people are waiting to see him beat a real, significantly ranked opponent.”

Oleg Maskaev fit the bill. Johnson had a couple of pounds on him and a few inches of reach. Maskaev’s numbers weren’t legendary either at 20 wins and 2 losses, with 15 knockouts to his credit. But the Russian born fighter, living in West Sacramento, had fought better opposition than Johnson. More importantly, he seemed to be improving. Less than a year before, he’d fought the 31-1 Hasim Rahman (a man who’d once KO’d Lennox Lewis). In the eighth round of his fight against Rahman, Maskaev, behind on the score cards, knocked Rahman clean out of the ring, through the ropes, where he crashed onto the ringside press tables in a pile of papers and computer monitors and scattering journalists.

Maskaev was proven tough, in other words. And he looked tough, with muscles like plates of armor and a head like an artillery shell. Merchant didn’t have anything bad to say about Johnson, but he spoke of Maskaev in graver tones. The 35 year HBO veteran told me, “Maskaev is exciting. And I took one look at that jaw and thought: here’s a guy you cannot knock out.”

Of course, boxing is supposed to be fifty percent mental. Cus D’Amato, who trained Mike Tyson in the early years when he was unstoppable, famously said: “In the last analysis, mind triumphs over matter, and the will to win is more crucial than the skill to win.”

In other words, Johnson could win if he desired it enough. But when I talked to him after the weigh-in, that seemed like an open question. He told me he was nervous. More than that, he was scared. “Oh yeah,” he said. “It goes up and down to the fight. Sometimes I just want to throw myself off a bridge.” He’d been praying twenty hours a day, from the time he got up until he went to bed. And when it came to strategy, Johnson merely shook his head and said, “Well I can’t slug with him. No way I’m going to knock him out.”

We went through the tape up. I watched that strange and intimate action between Johnson and his trainer Curtis Cokes, both men staring fixedly at the hands that might or might not do the job. And when Johnson knelt in the corner of his enclosure to pray one last time, a thin sheet hanging for this final privacy, I felt real anxiety. I liked the man for his honesty, his kind demeanor, for the way he pulled a younger family member close for a few words, those taped fighter’s hands so huge and ungainly as they shaped themselves for the hug. I was worried for Johnson’s family, who were there in large numbers. But I was more worried for Johnson.

Out into the thunder of the event itself, into the glittering shards of light, the strobe of cameras, the hail of noise and cries, boos and cheers, a maelstrom, a dervish, a tornado of senses. The first three rounds I stared so intensely from my seat at the press tables that I wasn’t sure I was even taking any of it in, although the story itself was plainly unfolding: Johnson was losing. Maskaev was stalking and closing, out-jabbing Johnson, snapping his head back with chopping right hands. When Johnson returned to his corner between the third and forth rounds, Cokes scolded him: “I need a little more work out of you!” To which the bewildered-looking fighter responded like a chastened schoolboy: “Okay.”

Out they came for the fourth and the sense was strong that the final punch was on its way. And it came quickly: short and sharp and brutal. Only it wasn’t a right hand in the end, but a left. And it wasn’t thrown by Maskaev, but by Johnson, fifteen seconds into the fourth round. A two-three combination, speaking technically, that is an overhand right hand then an upwards carving left hook that Johnson landed with laser precision to the tip of Maskaev’s massive jaw. But I doubt a single person present actually experienced it as a technical accomplishment. It was an event made instead of different stuff than training or mechanics, physical strength or mental calculation. It was something Johnson had created, forging it with brute will power out of literally nothing.

Bang-bang. The bullet proof Russian was down. He bounced up quickly, furious. He was still Oleg Maskaev, after all. But Kirk Johnson had become someone else. And that person stepped in and finished Maskaev, backing him up to the ropes, swarming him. Maskaev undone: unconscious first, then blown through the ring ropes, just like his victim Hasim Rahman those short months before. Maskaev crashed down through the collapsing press tables, papers flying, computer monitors toppling, only saved from hitting the concrete floor by a photographer who caught Maskaev and held him, the Russian’s head cradled almost tenderly in his arms.

Johnson stood in the ring with his arms raised, haloed in light, transfigured, transformed.

 ***

 What on earth had we just seen? Transformation. Something not quite of this earth, but visited upon it: something previously impossible made possible. A moment beyond.

That interpretation is plausible or absurd, depending on your world view. Cus D’Amato, who clearly believed in the potency of the human will to bend the future to its purposes—more specifically, the potentially lethal human agency embodied by the young Mike Tyson—would probably give you a different answer in this regard than American philosopher Alex Rosenberg, whose new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is surprisingly germane to the discussion of what exactly is being experienced in watching sports and what it means to identify yourself as a sports fan. Rosenberg’s book isn’t only the latest title in a growing canon of new atheist writing, it’s the culmination of that canon, in that he blows past the hedging of previous atheist tracts and states the matter plainly: the universe is wholly and unapologetically material. Everything is matter, fermions and bosons specifically, and every event preceding or following us is explained and governed by the inviolable laws of physics in a way that is both causally closed and causally complete. Rosenberg’s universe, in other words, is wholly deterministic. Reality is nothing more or less than physics at work in all its glory. And physics just is. As a predetermined set of phenomena, past and present, none of what any of us are doing, or anything we experience, has any purpose or meaning. And given that, can there be free will or individual agency? “Not a chance!” writes Rosenberg.

Sports fans, religious or otherwise, might sense a difficulty in the brilliantly closed circle of this world view. Is it coherent? It is indeed. Rational? Supremely, I’d say. Does it, however, accommodate any of the fundamental particles of fan experience? Here we might have some problems. In a determinist universe, it’s not only free will that is a fanciful illusion. So too is desire, inspiration, even anxiety at the possibility of a bad outcome. Each of these is mere fancy in a world where matters are predetermined. Indeed, why talk at all of what is “possible” and “impossible” when the future is set? We are the billiard balls and the big bang was the break. What is possible this nanosecond is merely what was made possible the nanosecond before. Every particle, and so ultimately every planet and every person, moves in lockstep along this causal chain. There’s no swerving from the path much less any chance of creating new possibilities that didn’t exist previously. To argue otherwise, to believe that the future can in any way be affected by our conscious choices in the moment, is an essentially religious habit of mind, as Rosenberg takes pains to point out. It’s a world view dependent on nonmaterial particles, those which cannot be found in the physical realm, a crucial one of which, familiar to sports fans, would be hope.

Not all high-profile atheists measure up to this rigorous materialist standard, it has to be said. Christopher Hitchens clung to the idea of personal morality, if not absolute then relative. He even argued for the “moral necessity” of atheism. Hitchens was passionate in his views, another state of mind familiar to sports fans. But that he would think one set of ideas is better than any other, and that he would be gripped with the conviction that minds could be changed through persuasion, reveals a lingering faith in agency, reason and the possibility of change. Hitchens was never a pure enough atheist to understand what Rosenberg exhorts us to understand: that passion is pointless, that hope is a waste of time, that morality and sacred codes are a fiction, and that there are no moments beyond.

***

I wasn’t always a sports fan. I recall speaking up once when a junior high gym teacher berated our class for not signing up for intramural sports teams. I said: “Well, you know, not all kids are into sports. Some of us are more into academics.” That teacher carried a grudge that lasted the rest of my middle school years. “I’m going to give some team news now,” he’d say, glowering at me. “Feel free not to listen if you’re more into academics.”

Nevertheless, arriving at Queens business school some 10 years later, I suddenly discovered sports. The New York Giants, no less, who played out of Rutherford, New Jersey. They had a blue collar reputation and a blood and guts approach to the game. They were defined at the time by a linebacker named Lawrence Taylor, 6’3” and 245 pounds, who anchored a defense known as the Big Blue Wrecking Crew. Taylor was known for a cocaine problem and a frightening game-day intensity that allowed him to shred through offensive linemen enroute to tearing the opposing quarterback’s head off.

Queens B-school circa 1986 didn’t have much of a Lawrence Taylor vibe. It was the era of button-downs and power ties, ribbon suspenders and tassel loafers. And of course business students, especially finance students, were supposed to be too busy for sports anyway. But something had happened to me, arriving at Queens. I’d realized I didn’t want to be there. And I was acting out my disaffection. I was skipping classes, reading more fiction than finance. I was living way north of Princess Avenue (Kingston code for “wrong side of the tracks”) a detail about which I grew lopsidedly proud as  time when by. And that pride illustrates the relative game I was playing. Somehow out of step with the culture of B-school, I was opting to define myself contra B-school. But by revealing a keen interest in what other students thought about me, either way, the contrarian strategy was no different than being a copycat.

The decision to suddenly start caring about sports, I now understand, came about in exactly the same way. Only in sports there was an added catalyst: a new roommate. Like me, he was a B-school student just slightly out of step. But unlike me, at least in my mind, he carried this off with great élan. Against the pretensions of the era, he advanced an everyman persona on all fronts. He wasn’t going into finance (despite being a near-savant in math). He wanted a job in sales. He liked Creedance Clearwater Revival, dive bars, bourbon, and poker, which (believe it or not) was seriously infra dig in the mid-eighties. He was also, crucially, an NFL fan.

The truth doesn’t always flatter on the topic of desire. To think that we catch our interest in sports like we might a common virus seems somehow demeaning. But it’s quintessentially human. And here we’re in debt to the thinking of French philosopher and historian Rene Girard, a retired Stanford professor (now one of the 40 “immortals” who make up the elite Academie francaise), who argues that all non-instinctual desire is mimetic, or triangular. There is a subject (ourselves) and an object. But there is also a model, whose own interest in the object is what ignites the flame of our desire. In his seminal book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard lays out how all the great novelists seem to have understood this dynamic: Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevsky. None of those writers wrote much about sports, as far as I’m aware. But the same principles apply.

My roommate liked the Chicago Bears, as I recall, whose awe-inspiring team had stomped their way to winning in Super Bowl XX the year before. But in the 85/86 season, the New York Giants were the story. And what a season they had. Taylor was sacking everything in sight. Tight end Mark Bavaro was proving himself to be the toughest man on the planet, at one point playing half a game with a broken jaw. I remember a game late in the season when Bavaro caught a pass from quarterback Phil Sims, then dragged seven San Francisco defenders down the field twenty yards, including future Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott.

How could any of these events have mattered to me? My thirteen-year-old self would have said they simply didn’t. My twenty-three-year-old self, I now realize, had started to see the benefits of allowing yourself to care. By submitting to mimetic effects – specifically my absorption into a communion of likeminded fans, bonded by these arbitrary cares – I had freed myself from the straight jacket of determinism that must otherwise have rationally prevailed. The sports fan embraces irrationality. I wouldn’t have said it that way at the time. But I think even then I appreciated that I was at a moment in my life when I was singularly disinclined to be rational.

So I was mimetically absorbed into that society of fans, I was assimilated into an essentially religious habit of mind that does not accept that passion is pointless, that hope is a waste of time, that sacred codes are a fiction and that there are no moments beyond. Fans screaming in their living rooms all over North America were not accepting a determined future. They were living instead in a universe shaped by non-material particles that, while undetectable in even the Large Hadron Collider, nevertheless responded to the force of human will. Events on those distant gridirons did indeed matter to me, they had meaning, but only because the guy who’d been raised a sports atheist had become a believer and had in the process, unconsciously or otherwise, accepted the utility of hope. And so I gathered weekly with fellow members of that society, ritually restating each Sunday morning of the season that we did indeed believe.  I gathered with others around that flickering flame of theoretical hope – Will Simms complete the pass? Will Bavaro make the score? – and so was wordlessly reassured that broader hopes in my life might have some grounding. Specifically, that business school might just possibly not be the end of my story.

French sociologist Emile Durkeim wrote: “There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas which makes its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.”

He was talking about the religious impulse. But I read that now and find myself thinking about a series of Sundays in 1986, all leading up to one really big game.

 ***

Of course, Super Bowl XXI was a great game: we won! We, because I’d absorbed the Giants’ desire to win and it was now my own. I was one of them. And what drama. We trailed the Denver Broncos 10-9 at the half but came storming back. There was a fake punt and a quarterback sneak. There were touchdowns for Bavaro, Joe Morris, Ottis Anderson and Phil McConkey. Simms came through big time, throwing for thirty second half points and completing eighty-eight percent of his passes (a Super Bowl record that stands to this day). I distinctly remember the feeling afterwards: it was as if order had been restored. As if in the frenzy of the contest there had lingered (all season and in that final game) a profound threat of the future going wrong. With John Elway’s Broncos vanquished—players literally lying on the turf, like union soldiers on the slopes of Bunker Hill—it felt both deliciously good and incredibly right. All Giants fans would have been joined in that moment.

Years later, Bill Parcells’ described the locker room feeling of that win in sacramental terms: “It’s like a blood transfer. You get theirs and they get yours.” The metaphor is intense, but perfectly apt. Sports are indeed a matter of the blood, but in two distinct ways. There’s the blood of the fans and the team, mingled through identification. Then there’s the blood of the opponent which must first be spilled before the mingling can deliver its communal benefit.

Girard is helpful here again as he points us towards an anthropological truth: that in virtually every ancient culture of which we’re aware, communities maintained internal harmony through the use of sacrificial rituals. Turning on one victim united everyone else and therefore served to keep the peace. Of course, we cringe to think about that today because we understand scapegoats to have been innocent of any real crime. Sacrifice offends our modern sense of individual freedom and equality, and concern for victims has arguably become the single moral certainty of our day.

But if we can’t use sacrifice and we don’t replace it with something, how will the blood of the community be mingled? How will we keep the peace? How will chaos be prevented? Girard argues that chaos isn’t being prevented, or not very well. History is getting more violent and conflicts more intractable around the world, in part because the efficacy of those archaic sacrificial rituals has been destroyed. Girard doesn’t want to re-invoke them. But others have certainly considered it. Hobbes, Nietzsche and Machiavelli each worried in their own way that the modernizing mind, while unleashing a sense of individual equality and freedom, also rendered ancient peace-keeping mechanisms (like sacrifice) ineffective. These thinkers believed that modern concern for victims was the legacy of Judeo-Christian narratives, something Girard agrees with. But unlike Girard, they also harbored ideas for a man-made solution to the problem of this inheritance. Hobbes’ absolutist monarchy, Nietzsche’s assertive superman, and Machiavelli’s bid to return to paganism shared a common root in this regard: they were bids to restrain the evolving modern mind, to keep its chaotic ideas about individual freedom and equality somehow in check, in order that the community might be more accepting of the rituals required to bind it.

That concept—the restraint of something modern in us which carries the seeds of chaos—has a name in mythology: the katechon. The Egyptian god Horus was called katechon drakonta, the binder of the dragon, an image that also shows up in the Old and New Testament of the Christian Bible. A katechon is, in essence, a mechanism that deploys episodic violence to contain the chaos that might result if ritual were lost entirely. A katechon, in this analysis, replaces sacrifice. The Spanish Inquisition was a katechon, as Dostoevsky discloses in The Grand Inquisitor, showing a church turned aside from a (politically anarchic) Christian message of individual freedom and equality, embracing instead a realpolitik of manipulation and control. The Roman Empire, Charles the Great, the 21^st century War on Terror…each of these have had a katechonic function, cathartic violence deployed (in cycles of increasing rapidity and seeming pointlessness) with the idea that peace might somehow be restored despite our modern tendency to turn aside from the rituals that previously sustained it.

This returns us to Bill Parcells’ blood transfer, which can’t complete itself without the spilled blood of the enemy. It will seem blasphemous to many to suggest that sports offers a secularized katechon to fans, serving up some kind of Sacrifice 3.0., but I think it does. We vilify the enemy in sports, something outsiders often observe as they watch fans watching the action. Chelsea fans scream abuse at Wayne Rooney just as MMA fans will know the feeling of hating a man who is in the process of pounding your favorite fighters face into a bloody pulp. That hate is not metaphoric. It’s real in the moment. It’s real and, more to the point, it’s permissible.

As Humber College philosophy professor and Girard scholar Kent Enns pointed out to me in an email: “Sports is one of the few domains where it is understood as intrinsically good to triumph over opponents/rivals…One need only imagine a (literary) author proclaiming himself to be ‘the best’ to glimpse the flip side of a culture that is simultaneously skeptical of excellence and (over-)achieving and which views the embrace of victims as one of the defining features of its morality.”

We still need our sacrifices, in other words, but we need them subtle. And in that, we reveal the surviving religious impulse. Girard writes: “Play has a religious origin, to be sure, insofar as it reproduces certain aspects of the sacrificial crisis. The arbitrary nature of the prize makes it clear that the contest has no other objective than itself, but this contest is regulated in such a manner that, in principle at least, it can never degenerate into a brutal fight to the finish.”

That sense of peace I felt after the Giants win in 1986 wasn’t permanent. My life hasn’t been, since then, governed by a sense of conflict resolved, balance restored, my actions and devotions aligned in perfection and perpetuity with a central purpose or community. But it was for a moment, perhaps even a day. Life was perfectly stable for as long as the sacrificial spell of the event lasted, until the rightness of my (our) victory was dispelled and made arbitrary again by the return of the world and my modern sense of self, free to desire, to envy, to dispute and escalate, to will myself into my own individually chosen chaos.

 ***

 The ritual depends on secret codes. And codes are always cracked. The Grand Inquisitor eventually lost his grip. Hobbes’ absolutist power was deployed in variations all over the world. But it’s a hard sell, lately, without brutal force, cracking in places we never thought it would, crowds of socially-networked free individuals marching through the world’s Tahrir Squares, a sense of justice and concern for victims flowering and spreading like Moon Vine and Morning Glory.

Sports, insofar as they depend on belief, will face oddly similar pressures. Not from the new atheists, or at least I doubt it. The determinist universe challenges our fascination, mocking human agency, aspiration and hope. But it’s so technical a construct—and quantum physics is adequately understood by exactly how many of us?—that sports fans will continue to live as if human will and autonomy do exist, no matter what the brightest and largest pulsing brains among us try to sell in books billed with all due humility as our “Guides to Reality.”

For some sports, instead, it will be that concern for victims that threatens the ritual. Brain scans will tell us that football and hockey players and boxers (and potentially MMA fighters) are dying from brain damage later in life, and I think most fans will immediately agree that the ritual is not as important as the individual. Legislation will change these sports. Meanwhile, all sports will continue to be decoded and de-ritualized by commerce. I almost hate to write that, so easily is it mistaken for the agenda of Naomi Klein, Kalle Lasn and Occupy. Corporations are not the guilty parties here, in my analysis. We’re all far more culpable that the Voltarian reading of consumerism allows. We all partake, through our own mimetic desires, and in doing so, we hold out our wrists for the cuffs those nasty corporations would snap into place. The more crucial undoing of sports by this means will be de-sacralization. If sports were ever sacred, ever able to mingle our blood with others, those powers will be undone by our uncanny current-day ability to turn any locus of human attention into a marketplace. You can’t have money lenders in temples. They tend to dissipate the sense of deeper meaning, of joined purpose, that ineffable (and religious) air of common spirit.

Phil Simms sensed that when presented with the new Disney campaign in 1986. He declined for weeks, remembering his resistance later: “That was messing with the football gods, the karma of the game.” But when the Giants won, the cameras were waiting. Simms said the words, again and again and again, his pretend-enthusiasm flagging: “I’m going to Disneyland!”

Everybody knew he wasn’t, which was no problem at all for Disney. But it was for sports fans, as the game was desacralized one increment further. Don’t blame Phil Simms. The world was moving around him. Go to a hockey game now and you can hardly see the ice surface for the thicket of sales messages. I remember interviewing Chelsea fans in a pub off Kings Road in London in 2005. They lamented the passage of the game from tribal to commercial (I was evidence of the commercial, we all understood—a Chelsea fan from half a world away). At the same time, one fellow noted, “… in the old days the stands were full of garbage and piss.” Plus, they could all agree, being bought by a Russian oligarch (no deep West London family connections there) was about to give them the first title they’d seen in fifty years.

What was unsaid, of course, is that the spectator endlessly lambasted from all sides with player salaries and trading prices, team payrolls and television viewership statistics, cannot help but come to interpret the game in easier and more material terms than previously. The blood transfers and moments beyond quietly fade. The ritual itself fails as it becomes a transaction. And when the community understands itself to be merely a customer, the jarring outcome may still produce intensely mimetic effects, but these won’t be positive. The blood will not be mingled. And in those moments we might well expect to see more generalized violence going forward, to see seemingly inexplicable bursts of all against all. Mailboxes through department store windows. Police cars burning outside the Vancouver Post Office.

In 2003, I went to Memphis to see Tonya Harding’s first professional fight. She stepped into the ring with Samantha “Booker” Browning, top fight on an undercard opening for Mike Tyson’s last win. A cheap transaction, that one. No ritual in it. But, in a way, I was glad to be there, to have the bookend experience to the one I’d had in the Mohegan Sun Casino three years prior. There were no believers in the Memphis Pyramid. We hardly blinked when Harding got her ass handed to her by the gal from Mantachie, Mississippi, who looked like she could handle herself well enough in fights that didn’t involve rings and gloves. Afterwards, Harding stood in the hallway talking to the smirking members of the press corps, and her thin lips trembled white with rage and indignation. She never believed the story would turn out any differently. Transformation had never crossed her mind or ours.

I visited with my ex-roomie from Queens that same trip to Memphis. He’d landed in the South, as I suspect he always wanted. He was perfecting a good ol’ boy routine and a mean technique for slow cooked brisket. We reminisced a bit, not overly. But we did touch on Super Bowl XXI. My ex-roomie remembered an interesting detail. He recalled how after Mark Bavaro’s touchdown, the tight end touched his knee to the endzone in a moment of prayer. The memory did not please my ex-roommate who said: “I never liked him after that.”

My admiration remains undimmed, however, as I think of that knee touch as something that all fans do internally anyway, whether they turn their face skyward to a god whose name we’ve heard or to some trace element left in the universe that still grips us, those non-material particles.

After B-school, I fell out with the NFL and the New York Giants. I missed entirely that the Giants won Super Bowl XLII in 2008 in a thriller that crushed Patriots fans, whose team would have finished the season an unprecedented 19-0 if they’d won the trophy. The game revolved around what surely would have been a “moment beyond” for those watching live at the time: the so-called Helmet Catch by reserve wide receiver David Tyree. Down 14-10 with just over a minute remaining, quarterback Eli Manning slipped three tackles before spotting Tyree up the middle. The pass was high, but Tyree climbed up and snagged it with one hand, pressing the ball to his helmet as he crashed to the turf. The drive was alive and New York went on to win 17-14 in what was considered an upset.

But this past season, I started watching football again like a lot of other non-active fans, because an overtly religious Tim Tebow grabbed the headlines for a while. Tebow took Mark Bavaro’s quiet moment to a whole new media-saturated level, irritating some, thrilling others. To me, he merely served as a reminder of what I think still struggles to be the heart of these games, despite safety concerns and the impingement of the commercial explanation: that act of the human will against what reason tells us the universe is supposed to allow. That we matter. I also noted, of course, that Tebow was a Bronco, that long ago foe whose defeat had once seemed so righteous and proper and personal.

The playoffs un-folded. Super Bowl XLVI rose on the horizon. The field winnowed out to two teams: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. Once upon a time there would have been no question where to go watch with the hardcore, on-the-ground fans. But by 2012, I hadn’t been a New York Giants fan in 25 years.

So I went to Boston, where the fans pack in around the Gardens on Pats game days, into bars like McGann’s Irish Pub, Boston Beerworks and Hurricane O’Reilly’s. I went to The Fours, once rated Best Sportsbar in America by Sports Illustrated, where the history of Boston professional sports hangs on the walls and ceilings. Photographs and rowing shells, and jerseys of course, those talismans of careers gone by: Larry Bird, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, Cam Neely. Before the game there was impressive craziness in the streets, a Celtics game just out and the most watched game in American television history about to begin. The police were putting up barricades already that would gate and corral us after the game down designated streets and away from any area where a large crowd could gather.

I took a seat at The Fours bar, ordered a burger and beer. I waited for the mimetic effects as they might unfold within me. Would I become a Pats fan, energized by the excitement of the fans around me? Or would something in my psyche recall 1986 and channel the requirements of that long ago moment?

Neither, as it turned out. Instead, it ended up being the strangest sporting event I think I’ve ever watched. I was not particularly vested. I was not bonded mimetically either to the desires of those around me or those 360 kilometers away to the south. But I was more alive to the force of human will than I’d ever been, released in a way by not being mesmerized myself. I could feel the will more purely somehow, for my own hopes not being aroused, my own blood not overly mingled.

You probably know the outcome, so I won’t dwell on recounting it. Only this: as the fourth quarter began, the Patriots ahead 17-15, there was in The Fours a palpable fear. Quarterback Tom Brady, who will surely go down as one of the great quarterbacks in NFL history, had been here before, leading the Giants in the fourth quarter in Super Bowl 2008. The question hung in the air, in each face turned upwards, reflecting that flickering blue light of the monitors: will history be overturned, or has some rigid pattern in history just now been detected? The room pulsed with the collective will for the future to be different this time than it was those four years prior. But it wasn’t to be. A turnover, a punt, another punt. And Eli Manning had the ball in his seemingly favourite position: deep in his own half with time running out.

The Giants won. I felt the moment for them, remembered the feelings I would have felt. But I didn’t cheer. I walked out with the defeated instead into the cold Boston air. Back across the North End to the Fairmont Battery Wharf where there was a Super Bowl party winding down, women in pearls and men in corporate casual, quietly considering how the future had eluded them. This time.

Manning was giving his interviews, telling people he was off to Disney, as I sat down to a lobster roll at Aragosta. The bartender said, “Yeah, we’re on suicide watch about now.”

I walked down Hanover Street later, taking the air. I heard voices all round me, strangled and angry. Someone yelled, an inarticulate garble of rage. Someone else. And then someone else. It was real, the air alive with genuine anguish. The voices were joined in the moment.

An hour later, the air had turned. Quiet descended. Peace and restoration. I thought of Kirk Johnson in the glittering halo of ring lights, transformed. Boston, in its loss, was transfigured, too. Super Bowl XLVI had passed. The new season had already opened ahead with its new potential for passion, for the mystery of its embedded codes, for hope. There was hope there in the smoky Boston air. New hope, from nothing.

This March, I join my fellow citizens in the never-festive season of taxes—but what most people find familiar is actually quite novel to me. Since I quit my last real day job at the Toronto-Dominion Bank in 1991, you see, I have been an independent corporation. I have paid taxes, just not much on my personal income. That changed when I took a faculty position at the University of British Columbia last summer. For the first time in nearly twenty-five years, I started receiving an actual paycheque with deductions. March now has a weightier feel.

Weirdly, I relish it. Maybe it’s just because Canadian politicians, whom I find myself despising almost universally at this moment, all tell me that I should resist paying taxes. If Harper says, more or less, “No tax is a good tax,” and Trudeau and Mulcair have both ruled out tax increases for the middle class—as in ever—well, there must be something good about them.

That contrarian logic may lack robustness, but such is the state of our politics today. Virtually nobody campaigns on tax policy beyond saying taxes are bad. Here I find myself in agreement with a thoughtful new book of essays edited by Canadian civil servant and academic Alex Himelfarb and his son Jordan. Tax Is Not a Four-Letter Word attempts what could be among the hardest of hard sells: convincing people that they should be prepared to at least discuss taxes in the service of fairness, preservation of social programs, and ongoing economic health.

I might as well come clean here, at the top. From the standpoint of the conventional left-right spectrum (arguably defunct, more on that later), I’m not always on the same page as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, several of whose leading lights have contributed to the Himelfarbs’ book. At the risk of over-disclosure, my high school yearbook recorded my then pet peeves as “poodles, math, and socialists,” each of which I regret naming, though for different reasons and in varying degrees. However, I’m happy to concur with the ccpa in principle on this issue: we need taxation to become part of the agenda. My agreement with those experts, which defies the very idea of a political spectrum, draws attention to a critical point. Taxes represent more than just a political and economic discussion; they form part of a larger cultural one.

Cut taxes not defense,” read a sign that Alex Himelfarb once saw in the background of a Tea Party demonstration. Change “defense” to “education” or “health care,” or “snowplowing,” and you can Canadianize the sentiment and highlight the paradox in play: people have decoupled taxes from the services they receive. They no longer view taxes as payment but as punishment. It was not always this way, as ubc economist and tax expert Kevin Milligan points out; a complete sea change has occurred over thirty-odd years in how taxes are perceived by the public and used by government.

Himelfarb argues that it all began with economic neo-liberalism, as popularized by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations and later by Brian Mulroney in Canada—the principles we now all know: smaller government, lower taxes. I can testify to their seductive power, because I was studying economics at the University of Alberta during those very years. I have a distinct memory of the Laffer Curve first being trotted out for a political purpose. In a press photo, Stanford-trained economist Arthur Laffer stands with President Reagan in front of a blackboard with x and y axes plotting tax rates against revenue, the graph illustrating that tax increases only generate higher revenues up to a certain threshold, after which the relationship inverts.

Laffer did not put forward one magic, optimal tax rate. He suggested a theory, uncontroversial really, in which the taxable citizens, companies, and transactions in our economy resemble anything else in life on which we place demands—our knees, our spouses’ patience—in that increasing demand only raises returns up to a point, after which further increases result in your getting a lot less.

This was not implicitly an idea of the right, it should be noted. Laffer said he got it from the legendary British economist John Maynard Keynes, who is typically associated with the left, but this just shows that neutral concepts can be weaponized in politics. Reagan used Laffer to justify generalized tax cutting, part of the neo-liberal economic agenda to minimize government in favour of the market, and the concept hit what can be seen in retrospect as a political sweet spot. Margaret Thatcher won in 1983, pulling away with a 73 percent voter turnout. Ronald Reagan won in 1984 with one of the highest popular votes in American history. Meanwhile, in Canada that same year, Mulroney was elected with over half of the popular vote and no other party reaching fifty seats.

Neo-liberalism eased smoothly into the discourse because people welcomed it there. Western economies were in stagflation, and Canadian taxpayers were paying a quarter of every tax dollar toward interest on the national debt. In positing the antidote, which Himelfarb himself refers to as a “counter-revolution,” neo-liberal economics overturned an understanding of the relationship between citizens and their countries that had existed since World War II.

“In the decades after the war, taxes were the hinge that connected us to a common purpose,” Himelfarb says. “We were building a new society. Social and health policies came about during this time. Income inequality, which was huge before the war, was decreased. We created a middle class and progress both individual and collective was assumed.”

We defined an optimistic, progressive Canada during those postwar years, in other words, and Himelfarb would have us believe that with the dawn of neo-liberal economics we began to dismantle it.

Part of me wants to dispute the charge. As a young economics student—during a time, let’s say, when I hoped economics might explain everything—I was persuaded by the elegant simplicity and individualistic ethics of neo-liberal ideas. Yet I cannot deny the negative aspects of our situation today that derive from the three-decade project to get government out of our lives and rely as exclusively as possible on markets. Chief among these would be an endemic distrust and cynicism about political engagement. Admittedly, it is impossible to prove that big government, 1970s-style, would have avoided this outcome (even if we could have afforded it), but neo-liberal economics has proven to be an undertaking that eats itself on the occasion of its triumph. Tell people that government is evil for long enough, that it is wasteful and inefficient and obstructs our freedoms, and eventually they will believe you so thoroughly that it will impinge on the ability of you or anybody else to govern.

The economic legacies are perhaps even bigger concerns. While we are aggregately richer, the data is clear on the distribution of this greater wealth: real median incomes hover at around 1980 levels in Canada, and though low-income earners are probably no worse off than they were thirty years ago, the distance between them and the wealthy has grown vastly. Does income inequality matter? Well, for a long time conventional wisdom said it didn’t; pursuing income equality via redistribution was thought to reduce overall economic efficiency. Still, it is notable that the International Monetary Fund disagreed recently, writing in a 2011 report that “equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth.” As well, the research clearly shows that income inequality, to the extent that it contributes to poverty, has negative consequences on children and their futures.

In the end, intuition can probably guide us here. Sure, income inequality can serve as a motivator. It proves on one level that people can get rich under the right circumstances, and data does support the point that more poor people manage to become rich now than in, say, the eighteenth century. Eventually, though, income inequality contributes to a sense of futility, which neo-liberal economic thinking tends to exacerbate with its hard stance on how government and its redistributive efforts are a waste of time.

Here is where middle-income earners could contribute to the discourse, being neither fatalistically poor nor obliviously rich. Unfortunately, they are discouraged from doing so by the politics of our day, and by their own economic stagnation, which predisposes voters to reward politicians who offer tax breaks. Consider, suggests Milligan, that in the last federal election the Conservatives won on a suite of “boutique tax cuts”—for seniors, for working families, and so on—none of which meant much economically to either the government or the people receiving them, but all of which earned the Conservatives crucial votes. “A triumph of targeted political marketing,” Milligan says. Of course, everybody knew what the transaction was all about, and faith in government for the common good fell still further from the dubious toward the ridiculous.

And so we arrive at the contemporary paradox, a “social trap” in Himelfarb’s analysis. When pollsters call us, 72 percent of high-income earners will agree that, sure, we should probably pay more tax to narrow the income equality gap; 89 percent of us will agree that we should look at something like a millionaires’ tax; and 60 percent will answer yes over the phone to whether or not there should be a carbon tax. Nevertheless, on election day, in the privacy of that voting booth, we will all do the same thing we did last time: vote for the government we think will cost us the least.

How telling is it that right after admitting to smoking crack, Toronto mayor Rob Ford pledged to get back to work “saving taxpayers’ money,” as if amid all of the chaos there could be no more ardent statement of his commitment to his constituency. It was neo-liberal economics in tragic, red-faced emblem: a tyrant denying his abuse and wagging his finger at the straw man of big government. Promising, promising, while the ground shakes and the house burns down around him.

It is a pretty compelling formulation, yet one of Himelfarb’s own comments leads me to think that we require another dimension to describe the situation. Taxes were the hinge that connected us to a common purpose, he says, cutting to the heart of what they represent versus what they are, strictly speaking, collected to do. We pay taxes to build roads, to hire teachers and firefighters, to fund EI and income assistance. But we also pay to play, and the game in question is citizenship, membership, community. Surely nothing could highlight our vanishing willingness to meaningfully engage with one another in these ways than the experience of implementing the hst and carbon taxes in British Columbia, where Milligan says he encountered resistance, even among those who would receive full compensation.

“They would literally get a cheque every quarter reimbursing the taxes they had paid on coffee and gas,” he says of people who remained bitterly resistant. “What ratio of reimbursement to taxes paid would earn support? Three to one? Eight to one? ”

These were clearly not economic positions being staked; they were cultural statements about the willingness to contribute at all. Here is where, neo-liberal or Marxist or whatever we call ourselves, we should not be surprised. Citizenship, membership, and community are collective conceptions of the self, and our steady drift toward more individual self-conceptions has been underway for far longer than neo-liberal economics, and in ways that have nothing to do with the economy.

Viewed through the widest lens, we are in the late stages of what philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the great disembedding,” a process whereby we increasingly define ourselves independently of formal obligation to any matrix or hierarchy. Perhaps the writer who speaks most emphatically to this dynamic is Alexis de Tocqueville. In his nineteenth-century book Democracy in America, he directly addresses how these impulses played out in the North American context. He observed Americans to have a belief in “indefinite perfectibility,” which arose from their sense of equality. However, he also observed that in a society where all are equal and autonomous and endowed with a belief in self-improvement, we inevitably become less and less able to see ourselves as part of a larger narrative, one that involves our fellow citizens, as well as ancestors and descendants.

Tocqueville was not recommending a return to aristocracy, despite coming from Norman nobility himself. He recognized the potency of what was flourishing in America, with Canada not far behind as our links to the monarchy grew ever more symbolic: the will to seek individual freedom and attainment. What was alive in the souls of Americans and Canadians during that heady postwar run that Himelfarb understandably remembers with wistful fondness? A common purpose stimulated by the horrors of a recent war, yes, but also a surging, empowered individual, with newly acknowledged human rights and freedoms, and the seemingly boundless capacity for improving the world. Indefinite perfectibility. The 1960s and 1970s in particular, just before the neo-liberal counter-revolution, were a time of intense optimism and assertive individual flowering. Yet it would be a mistake not to connect the dots from the freed individual with inherent rights and value, to the me generation and onward, to such possibly perverted conclusions as “Greed is good,” or even the hyperbolic Thatcherism “There is no such thing as society.” The mistake is to ignore the Tocquevillian conundrum: that these impulses toward individual freedom and attainment also contain the seed of a selfishness that isolates and confines us, cutting us off from one another and from generations past and future.

In the earliest years of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, that selfishness may have seemed like the necessary fuel to power us out of economic malaise. Perhaps at that moment in history, a set of economic ideas was allowed to hijack the boat on which social justice might have otherwise sailed, but the evolution was not simply a shift from left to right. The culture as a whole was on the move across social as well as economic dimensions. Around the time that the Laffer Curve was first dusted off for political use, an epic hyper-liberalizing of both the self and the economy was underway, both born of the same impulse for freedom.

Maybe having a child has shaped me here in a way that my economics and business education could not have anticipated, linking me to something intergenerational, making concrete the idea of obligation, causing Tocqueville to resonate. Almost certainly, my time in the Canadian Forces had an effect, acquainting me (perhaps temporarily, but unforgettably) with how the civilian values of individual freedom and attainment both repudiate and yet paradoxically depend on the core military values of duty and sacrifice. You can’t have the former without the latter, as World War II proved to Alex Himelfarb’s generation.

Therefore, it would seem like an easy bit of reductionism to now blame Wall Street for everything (or poodles, or socialists), and what is easy is rarely best. An urgency exists here, I would argue, as we face something like a Tragedy of the Commons 2.0. Just as, in the original version, cattle farmers were observed to over-graze a shared field while sustainably using their private plots, we are failing to sustain a resource over which we no longer feel any obligation, that part of ourselves that was once embedded in citizenship, membership, and community. What is common among us—the environment, the education of our kids, just treatment for all citizens, the very idea of being Canadian—finds itself starved of investment. The damage, meanwhile, is there to measure: income inequality, a stagnant middle class, mounting distrust of leadership, and a corrosive, cynical political machinery that now competes for votes in a manner that is only semantically different from buying them.

We are good at individual rights and freedoms. We’re not so hot at duty and sacrifice. And that is not simply because of neo-liberal economics. It is because Tocqueville was right 100 years before Arthur Laffer was born.

Unfortunately, we can’t look to the past for solutions, because at no point in history have we been the people we are today. We can’t devolve socially and re-embed into constraining hierarchies, and we shouldn’t want to. Justin Trudeau’s admiration of China’s “basic dictatorship” is execrable on that level. Likewise the mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson, for praising China’s ability to quickly implement environmental policies with the comment “You can question how worthwhile democracy is in a lot of countries right now.”

Trudeau and Robertson may question it, but we shouldn’t. Instead, we should urgently commit to thinking about how free, autonomous individuals can yet reconstruct the common good, such that citizens feel a genuine obligation to it, and that will entail putting taxes back on the agenda. We need to pay, but we also need to be ready to play.

The good news is that this is already happening, in a scattered way. The Himelfarbs have released their book. Susan Holt of the New Brunswick Business Council has recently called for the province to increase hst and corporate income taxes to help reduce the deficit. Last September, Missouri governor Jay Nixon vetoed a piece of tax-cutting legislation in his state that he argued would harm schools and mental health services. In California, Proposition 30 passed last November, permitting new taxes to fund education. Meanwhile, over at the Patriotic Millionaires website, you can find 100-plus people earning over $1 million a year who join billionaire Warren Buffett in calling for President Barack Obama to increase taxes on the rich, including themselves. Which returns us to obligation. None of this works if we don’t figure out how to feel the debt that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted we would struggle to feel.

“He willingly sets himself duties towards both [generations before and after]…and he frequently comes to sacrifice his personal pleasures to these beings who no longer exist or do not yet exist.” That’s Tocqueville on the citizen under aristocracy, something we might consider trying to duplicate using our necessarily more individualistic motivations. It may well seem like a stretch—a cultural change, an awakened sense of duty almost certainly reliant on a political leadership now non-existent—but then, nobody said this indefinite perfectibility business would be easy.

This appeared in the March 2014 issue of The Walrus.

Not a lot of RIP Paul Walker posts in my various feeds this morning, despite the Fast and the Furious lead having died a grisly death on Saturday. I guess Walker doesn’t have a big profile in the literary scene. His films were middle brow. His acting wasn’t overly nuanced. So he died in the burning wreck of a Porsche, I can hear the collective consciousness murmuring. Wasn’t that kind of in the script?

Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows anything about death but the dead? But I did meet Walker once. So I can talk about the guy I met, who surprised me.

I was working for Toro Magazine at the time, Canada’s upstart Esquire clone that burned through a few million of a prominent Toronto real estate developer dollars before everybody came to their senses. They sent me to LA to interview him in early 2006, just pre-Flags of Our Fathers. Some PR genius set up the meet at the Peterson Automotive Museum (cars, get it? Fast and the Furious? Like a theme interview.) We walked around looking at old cars owned by other actors for awhile, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen. Walker was unimpressed because he raced cars himself. He’d piled a GT3 into the wall at Willow Springs the week prior. No big deal because he’d use it as a parts car. (Chilling a bit to note that he was a passenger in a GT when he died, but I digress.)

I gave him a break from cars and we found a booth in the deserted museum cafeteria. We got talking and were there for a couple of hours. And a very interesting person emerged: a guy who hated Hollywood, disliked being a public person, and spent half his time plotting an escape from both that he never ultimately made.

You can read the article here and decide for yourself what you think about him. But one part of the interview that didn’t make the article sticks with me most. It was the moment Walker realized that I didn’t cover Hollywood for a living, that I wasn’t part of the machine, and that was the moment he suddenly got very candid.

We were talking about the film he’d just produced called The Death and Life of Bobby Z, starring Walker and Laurence Fishbourne (who Walker hugely admired)…

Walker: Everyone was rock solid. And I just hope to God it comes out all right. Because it was just good people all around. Olivia Wilde is just awesome. She was on OC, she played what’s that Misha Barton… Is that her name?

TT: I don’t know.

PW: You’re worse than me. Even I know her name. But I don’t watch any of her shows. You watch TV at all?

TT: Nah.

PW: (Long pause.) Me either. Do you have a TV set up?

TT: Yeah, it’s set up…

PW: But you don’t watch it.

TT: No.

PW: You watch movies?

TT: I do watch movies.

PW: (laughs, shakes his head) You’re like me. I don’t know who anybody is. You don’t know who anybody is down here. (laughing)

TT: No I don’t know Hollywood at all. I didn’t know who you were. I had to look you up.

PW: (really laughing now, long pause) That is awesome!

[At which point Walker started to open up and eventually we get talking about life in Hollywood.]

PW: Honestly? I like my job, but I can’t stand the people. I hate LA. It’s misplaced priorities. Everyone’s got their head up their ass. No one gives a shit about anybody. Relationships are disposable. They play like they want to be your friend, but only because you’re the hot piece of ass.

TT: I suppose it’s because there’s a ton of money involved.

PW: Sure. Yeah. Wherever there’s money involved it’s gonna be like that. In big corporate America it’s probably the same thing. You know they want to be buds with you and shake your hand, but there’s no real loyalty. It’s pro sports. It’s anywhere. And I don’t want to live that life.

TT: But let’s be honest, you’re involved.

PW: Yeah but who wants to live that life? You can’t go anywhere without people going hey, hey, this or that. You lose your anonymity.

TT: So what’s it like for you walking down Wilshire.

PW: It drives me crazy! It’s bad. I mean you hear these stories about how certain people are such assholes. And there such pricks when it comes to it. And I find myself doing it sometimes. I’m doing the same thing. Earlier today, when somebody came up to me. I’m just eating my damn burger and it’s like I don’t want to be bothered, I’m sorry. I gotta run. I gotta go meet this guy. Dude, I had 25 minutes. I was just down the street. I thought, surely I can just get this and get out. But you want to know why I was late. Because the entire staff of the [burger joint name] had to come out. And I just wanted to go [throws up his hands]. But the only reason I didn’t is because I don’t want to be known as the Dick. That’s the only reason I stayed. But what I wanted to do is go: leave me alone I gotta go! I’m running late, you understand?It’s such a weird deal. It’s not grounded in anything.

TT: Does this underscore your desire to get the fuck out of Dodge?

PW: Yeah. But then no. It’s like: can you have a normal life and still do it? Can you eliminate all the pricks. Can you surround yourself with people you know are good people. Every one of those guys I worked with on Bobby Z? What comes first and foremost? Their families. They’re out there the whole shoot, and they’re not banging the hair stylist and then fucking an extra the next day. There are morals. There’s a morality. You know? But there are still certain days when I really feel, I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

***

RIP Paul Walker. You got away, only not in the way you wanted and no in the way I had hoped you would since our now-long-ago conversation. Peace to the Walker family.

My article about cooking incredibly difficult food from the most insane cookbooks of the year is running over at Cooking Light.

1 Ordinary Cook, 35 Impossible Recipes (“Can a home cook learn anything from the supercomplicated cookbooks of the world’s most celebrated chefs? We asked Timothy Taylor to dive into the deep end and throw some dinner parties for friends.”) 

Marina Dodis shot the pictures for the magazine. Here are some outtakes I shot myself. Random preparations and plates.

11 Madison Park Radicchio and Mango Salad with Basil Gel

Blanched basil leaves

Juiced basil

Set up with agar-agar

Assembly, note re-pureed basil to make gel

A pretty plate. Basil gel necessary? YMMV

NOMA Dinner with Heston Blumenthal dessert, by far the most massive undertaking I’ve ever attemped in any kitchen, anywhere.

Obsessive planning paid off, in the end. Couldn’t have done it by memory.

Beets and blood oranges for the jellie

Parsley Oil

Apple gel for discs

Shallots marinating in blueberry juice

24 hour oxtail reduction

Improvised “dirt” for the NOMA vegetable field

Shocking veggies

Plating the app: Blueberries and Onions

Spectacular dish. Amazing flavours.

Plating the vegetable field: mashed potatoes, shocked veggies, top with dirt and carrot greens.

Et voila. Oh man. Goo-ood.

A hit.

Apple discs for the main

Apple *gel* discs

Oxtail, oxtail reduction with verbana leaves, apple garnish

Oxtail with reduction, apple, sunchokes and crisp verbana leaves

Blumenthalian Jelly.

Buster, Buster.

A lot of people have been through the loss of a pet. I’ve been through it before. Now, as of this past Tuesday January 29^th, I’m going through it again.

His name was Buster. He was a Chocolate Labrador. In just under 12 years, he became so involved in the life of my family, that we’re grieving him as if a person had died. How did we get to love this animal so much?

You could argue it’s irrational. That it makes no sense to bring these animals into your life knowing they won’t live much past a decade and will break your heart on leaving. You could argue it’s insanity to embed a pet into your daily routine – bringing him with me to work every day, for example, spending almost every hour together when I wasn’t travelling – only to have that routine, that grooved in set of habits, blown apart at the seams when they die.

It was cancer. Being a Lab, he didn’t say anything about it, despite what must have been mounting discomfort. He was happy, happy, happy. Then he dropped without saying as much as “ouch”. Into Emerg. Bleeding profusely internally. We could have gone into surgery, removed the offending spleen, which had by that point ruptured. But given how the cancer had spread already inside him, we’d be buying him days or weeks. Win the lottery and he’d live a couple of months.

Maybe he would even have been happy for some of that time. But we would have been waiting for the axe of cancer to fall. We would have been waiting for him to go through the whole ordeal again only this time knowing it was the end.

We walked around the park outside Animal Emerg. Buses were passing. Routines in progress, unaltered by the implosion of our own.

A Lab is a Sporting Breed and Buster was from a sporting line. We never hunted him. We never had him compete at retrieving events. A whole part of his genetics was either wasted or suppressed, depending how you look at it. But he ended up with a job, nevertheless. And after a few years of maybe wondering if he’d gotten into the right family – these were the bouncing-off-the-wall years, from 4 weeks to about 4 years – Buster settled into his job and then never stopped getting better at it.

His job was to inspire kindness. I watched him do it, over and over again. On the street. In the park. People would get down into a crouch in front of him and cup his head, look into his eyes. It used to annoy me when strange men kissed him (hey, that’s where I kiss him). But I knew what was going on. He was doing it in our house, 24/7.

Buster enacted a Kantian imperative (I suspect he was unaware of this). He inspired kindness in people with whom he came in contact, by merely being who he was.

Can we be kind without pets? I’d like to say: of course! Though I’m careful to be so sure. All I’m sure of is that animals give us a chance to practice.

You left us far too soon, pal. But you were great at what you did. We let you go now for your good service, with respect and memories. And yes, no question: love.

Happy hunting.

First published in Canadian Art Winter 2013

At 82 years of age, photographer Fred Herzog doesn’t move quite as quickly as he used to. But then, few people ever did. In his younger days, Herzog was the kind of guy who’d jump on his Norton motorcycle after lunch and ride back roads to the top of Mount Baker, 180 kilometres south in Washington state, then motor home in time for supper. “Not always at the speed limit,” he says now, with a sly smile.

When he wasn’t making a literal blur across the landscape—and when he wasn’t working full time as a medical photographer at the University of British Columbia (UBC) or raising his family—he shot pictures on the streets. And rather a lot of pictures, we now know, as a result of a series of high-profile solo shows in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, New York and Berlin over the course of just the past five years. Asked to estimate the total number of pictures he’s taken in his life, Herzog will admit to more than 85,000. Of course, those are only the ones he’s kept.

“I suppose I’m a bit of a workaholic,” he says, with a self-deprecating chuckling and a glint of mischief in his eyes. But then, immediately, he’s back to scanning the world around him. “Here,” he says, voice low. “Let’s look up this alley. There are often things here.”

We’re in Strathcona, Vancouver’s oldest residential neighbourhood, just east of the downtown core…

To continue reading, please visit Canadian Art

I set out to find wild elephants. That was my big idea. I pitched the story that way. I left on the plane with only that in mind.

I got much more.

In a couple months, the article about my trip to the Yunnan Province in southern China will run in EnRoute Magazine. I don’t want to give anything away. But let me quickly hit a few of the highlights.

We started in Lijiang, in the long cool shadow of Jade Dragon Snowy Mountain, holy peak of the Naxi people. Yulong, as it’s locally known, has never been climbed to its summit, though legend has it that many star-crossed young lovers have lept together to their deaths from its cliffs, diving into the third kingdom to gain acceptance for the love forbidden them in this world.

In Lijiang there are roof cats, who draw wealth and fortune into their mouths.

There’s gorgeous food:

And then there are these, which are marble and expensive, or I might have taken some home.

From Lijiang we moved on to Shangrila, where a Tibetan woman named Sanam showed us around. She brought us to the Songzanlin Lamastery.

To the market.

She took us to the house of friends of hers, who sat us down around the blackened stove and gave us fresh yak’s milk cheese, yak butter tea and tsampa.

We sat in their living room under amazing carvings.

We said goodbye to Sanam and travelled down into Xishuangbanna. We went to the Mekong, where a woman with a pink umbrella sang by the shoreline.

We went up the river, past a large pagoda on the far shore.

We went into the jungle.

We saw gibbons and hiked past tea terraces.

Later, in town, we ate 1,000 year old eggs and roast chicken at a restaurant where they played MahJong for what appeared to be large amounts of money.

And the elephants. Did I see any?

The whole story runs in EnRoute early next year. Let’s just say for now that it ended up being bigger than the animal, that story.

Bigger, and weirdly better, than I could have expected.

Gone for a few weeks to China on a gig for EnRoute Magazine. Spotty to nonexistent internet while I’m gone.

Taking: 2 blank notebooks, 5 pens, a knapsack, and zero preparation.

Returning with: 2 full notebooks, a crucially necessary new attitude, and photos of elephants.

Enlightenment is an outside possibility.

From Vancouver Magazine Fall Issue 2012

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Note: I was inspired by the always-fascinating work of Eric Falkenstein (at Falkenblog) in my application of Batesian Mimicry to consumer behaviour.

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It will have escaped nobody’s notice that Vancouver is a top-ranked city in at least three categories. We’re always high on those “liveable city” lists. We have the most expensive real estate on the continent. And, of course, we’re also among the urban zones most addicted to the roasted seeds of an epigynous berry found on Asian and African shrubs known as Coffea Arabica.

Yeah, we love our joe in this town. We’re boffo for coffee. Two Starbucks per intersection never struck us as ridiculous. A friend from Montreal, visiting for the first time in the early 90’s, described his first experience of Robson and Thurlow. “There were a bunch of bikers at this one Starbucks when I entered. I saw them finish their coffees, get on their motorcycles, and then CROSS THE STREET and go into the other one.”

That’s Vancouver in a nutshell or, in this case, a roasted endosperm.

Of course, most residents also realize that our relationship with the brown bean hasn’t been static. We weren’t born this way. Don’t anybody try to claim that Jack Khatsahlano greeted our city forefathers with high-altitude, shade-grown juice served out of a Belgian gold-plated vacuum coffee siphon. My point being that fine coffee isn’t in our blood. It is a choice we’ve made, socially and economically. And as such, it offers a portrait of, if not who we are, then at least who we think we are.

I found myself considering all this over the past month as I sampled my way through a list of cafes and fine bean roasters in Vancouver recommended to me by my most ardent coffee-loving friends. But I found it brought into absolutely crystal focus while sitting in the boardroom of the Doi Chaang Coffee Company on West Hastings Street downtown. John Darch, the company’s founder and 50% owner (the other 50% is owned, notably, by the Akhi hill tribe in Thailand who farm the beans) had just served me up a cup of their single-estate espresso, which (not to give it away, but…) would prove to be the best cup of coffee I drank during this whole experiment, and our conversation had turned to civet coffee.

You may have heard about this stuff already. The civet, a svelte mammal whose musky body scent is used in perfumery, also happens to be a bit of a coffee fiend. Only, they eat the fruit. The cherry, as it’s known. What emerges from the other end of the civet then, in due course, is the seed of this fruit – the coffee “bean” – neatly de-fruited by that point and (connoisseurs maintain) enhanced in flavor as only possible by exposure to the enzymes in a civet’s digestive tract. It’s coffee scat, essentially. But what Darch wanted me to understand that Doi Chaang’s particular brand of civet coffee scat was special. Sold at $55 for 50 grams, which works out to $1,100 a kilogram, and carried by both Harrod’s and Dean & DeLucca, Doi Chaang’s civet coffee isn’t made using farmed civets who are inhumanely force-fed coffee cherries and whose poop is then combed for seeds. It’s made by wild Thai civets who rove the coffee plantation nocturnally and voluntarily, eating in the manner and pace of their choosing.

“Garbage in, garbage out,” Darch says of other brands. “Our civets are choosing their own cherries. And of course that means they choose only the best!”

It’s a great story. (I’ve been telling it ever since.) And perhaps that is the key point here. Coffee these days is very much about having a great (and ideally heartwarming) story. Google up any of the major players in Canadian independent beans these days, in fact – Ethical Bean, Kicking Horse, Salt Spring Coffee, Doi Chaang – and you’ll find such consistency in the stories it’s hard to believe they weren’t centrally coordinated. No, nobody else boasts of having wild Thai civets custom processing beans for them. And I’m not talking about the product being “organic” or “fair trade”, either, which should be considered the bare minimum entry requirements in this field.

I’m talking instead about other initiatives intended to humanize these companies to the point that they don’t sound like corporations at all and more like non-profits. These are companies touting projects to build schools in Central America (Ethical Bean), or to recycle coffee grounds and bags (Salt Spring), or to funnel financial support to the Canadian Nature Conservancy and local food banks (Kicking Horse). Doi Chaang, whose founder gave half the company to the Thai tribe where he sources his beans is perhaps only pushing farther down the same virtuous avenue. Did he have to? Not legally. But to make a mark in coffee, it was a very savvy move.

“Of course people won’t buy crappy coffee,” he says. “But nobody has a story like ours.”

And as if to underscore that point, he describes how sales of Doi Chaang’s coffee “struggled” for the first two years. Not because of quality. Critic Ken Davis, whose ratings in Coffee Review have become the Parker Points for the beverage, tells me that Doi Chaang coffee is in the top 10% of coffees he has “cupped”, rating around 89-91, where your typical cup of Starbucks is 83-84, and Folgers instant crystals comes in around 60. No, the struggling was story-related, in the sense that not enough people knew about what Doi Chaang was doing. Sales only exploded following the airing of a Global TV documentary on the company’s “Beyond Fair Trade” partnership with Akhi peoples. In one year sales tripled and haven’t looked back.

Which is a curious market feature, when you think about it. We don’t refuse to use Hootsuite unless Ryan Holmes builds a school in Honduras. We don’t boycott Burrowing Owl if they neglect to build their brand around high profile environmental donations. Why then do coffee consumers demand that people in the coffee space go beyond making good juice – and here I mean both wholesalers and retail cafes – and also somehow commit to making the world a happier and more egalitarian place? What the hell is in this stuff other than caffeine, some kind of ethical, high-minded pixie-dust?

Doubtful. I think the answer is, in fact, a lot more scientific and less flattering to us individually. It’s Batesian Mimicry at work, folks. Species copy each other, mimicking high value features, like stripes and spots that signal venom and discourage predators. Perhaps the most famous example is the entirely harmless Scarlet King Snake who copies (not perfectly, but pretty well) the markings of the very-poisonous Eastern Coral Snake, securing for itself a protection that it didn’t actually earn.

Consumers do the same thing, in waves, mimicking high value ideas to secure the returns that they have observed other consumers earlier receive. So the first generation of Starbucks users were able to signal to the world a powerful knowledge, positioning them advantageously relative to coffee drinkers who’d come before. Starbucks consumption indicated that you didn’t drink the watery, flavorless, institutional coffee that had prevailed prior in North America. You’d travelled to Europe. You knew the truth about craft and quality and the way coffee really should be done.

As status accrued to those early adopters, a billion mimics followed, displaying the logo in obedience to the evolutionary code written within: signal what the successful species signals. The cups proliferated. Competitors to Starbucks responded by darkening their own roasts. Starbucks responded by growing, growing, growing. They became a mega-corporation. They started selling breakfast sandwiches and their “cafes” started smelling like cheese. The line-ups grew. And at some fateful tipping point, the exclusivity of the brand collapsed.

Which is exactly what happens to Coral Snake populations when too many Scarlet Kings mimic their markings and dilute the results.

Starbucks may still be profitable. (John Darch observes: “Starbucks changed people from being willing to spend 10 cents on coffee to being willing to spend $2 or $3.”) But they’ll never regain what was lost: exclusivity, the trust of consumers that a status message could be reliably communicated by the simple act of holding one of their cups. That business has now passed on to another wave of merchants and consumers who now position themselves advantageously relative to the Starbucks drinkers who’d come before, signalling that they know the truth about craft and quality and the way coffee really should be done. Only in this iteration of the story, importantly distinguished from the Starbucks version that preceded: humanized, small-scale, socially conscious, non-corporate.

And still expensive. $3 plus still prevails for an Americano, of which Lloyd Bernhardt of Ethical Bean assures me only $.25 or so is actually the cost of coffee. But for that $2.75, we’re getting back the story that we originally craved, the one that distinguishes people on both sides of the Clover.

Has Batesian Mimicry followed? Go read the websites of the major coffee wholesalers and most popular cafés decide for yourself. They all look like Coral Snakes and Scarlet Kings to me. Will there be another bursting of bubbles? A migration of opinion, perhaps very suddenly, away from that which grants status to geeky mustachioed guys in undershirts hunched over pour-over gear and the earnest customers who watch their every move?

Count on it.

In the meantime, sample yourself from what is on offer, and ask yourself how much of the brand promise is in the story told versus the coffee delivered. Highly subjective, of course. But I can start the ball rolling with my own informal survey. I made a short list of cafes to try based on beans served and recommendations from friends. I asked for small Americano in each case. (Except for the civet coffee, which I made myself at home.) Here are the results. I list them in the order sampled for you to dispute, dismiss, or to use in hand-crafting a coffee-story of your very own.

THE ROOMS AND THE BEANS:

Elyssian Room on 5^th Avenue: A jazzy place with geek-chic baristas and dressy clientele. Seen: red lizard wedge hi-heels. Overheard: “What a beautiful necklace!” The Americano: $3.25. Toffee notes, not burnt or oily, but also not particularly rich. Rating: medium good.

Milano on 8^th opposite Jonathan Rogers Park: roast their own beans. Spacious, modern room with superb outlook across the park to downtown. Lovely staff. Seen: software dudes. Overheard: “We have to strategize.” The Americano: $2.65. Blech. Watery, barely coffee-flavoured. A dumbfounding let-down given the room and service and number of recommendations. Rating: bad.

Kafkas on Main off Broadway: Herkimer beans from Seattle. Serious-coffee vibe: siphons available, tasting flights. Eclectic furniture and clientele. Seen: curated art work on the walls. Overheard: somebody growling over a plucked guitar. The Americano: $3.25. Deep molasses and chocolate-y notes, vegetables too. Rating: interesting juice, would try again.

W2: Salt Spring Coffee. Seen: women doing dance gymnastics dangling on bungee cords in the atrium under the Stan Douglas. Overheard: Metric. The Americano: $3.00. Smooth but not heavy or oily, distinct light choco-caramel/tobacco notes. Rating: superior, will return.

Nestors, Woodwards. Ethical Bean Coffee. Drip only available. I tried two: Rocket Fuel and Classic. $3.36 for two cups. Sipped standing outside on Abbot Street with the cups balanced on a newspaper box. Seen: ladies cooing over a Labrador puppy. Overheard: garbage truck backing into an alley. The coffee: hmmm. In a phrase: truck-stop two ways. Rocket Fuel burnt and Classic more or less tasteless. Not, one suspects, how Ethical Bean would want their stuff featured. Rating: bad coffee, though kind of right for the time and place.

Ethical Bean Express in the Granville Skytrain station: giving EB a second chance, I went to their own outlet. Seen: people in a rush. Overheard: the bowels of the city. The Americano: $2.41. Dark to tarry flavor, very intense. Rating: medium.

Matchstick Coffee Roasters at Fraser and Kingsway: roast their own. Aging Brooklyn hipster vibe. Seen: bike hats, grizzly beards, antlers on the wall, subway tiles. Overheard: “Skype me this afternoon.” The Americano: Veering to the black tar end of things, but balanced and rich. Rating: good.

Kranky Coffee on East 4^th off Main: Kicking Horse beans. Eclectic east side vibe. Seen: old books, blue French country style painted counters, bead curtains. Overheard: Beth Orton. The Americano: $2.85. Some acids and fruit, but also deep oily notes. Rating: medium good.

49^th Parallel 4^th Avenue: roast their own. Seen: counter guy in dirty sleeveless undershirt out of which sprouts copious body hair. Brill cream. Siphon on display, seemingly never used. Overheard: EDM. The Americano: $3.00. Disgusting. Oily, burnt, bitter. Rating: threw it out.

Doi Chaang Civet Coffee: made this myself at home according to meticulous instructions found online: bodum, medium grind, 85 degree water. The first cup was weak, without much of a flavor profile. The second, ground finer, steeped longer before the plunge, much stronger. Interesting depth of flavor with no bitterness or oily notes. Way over-priced at $15 a cup for home use, but interesting juice.

Doi Chaang Single Estate Espresso: made for me at Doi Chaang’s office by Tanya Jacoboni, the company’s VP Business Development, served without pretense in a mug I think my grandmother used to own. The Americano: rich, balanced, fruit notes, no oiliness or bitterness. Rating: superior coffee.

A Facebook friend, Canadian television host Carolyn Weaver, posted a link to a fascinating 60 Minutes episode in which CBS correspondent Scott Pelley interviews “Mark Owen” (pseudonym), a retired Navy SEAL who was in the room when Osama bin Laden was killed in his compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan. Owen has just published a book about his experiences during the raid. It’s called No Easy Day.

Although I didn’t really have the time (deadlines!) I ended up watching the entire thing, and I’m glad I did. The story may be familiar from its wide coverage in the press at the time it happened. And Owen himself doesn’t reveal anything he considers to be secret. So there’s no real insight into intelligence operations that preceded the raid or even much about the tactics used by SEALs when the hit the ground on assignments such as this one.

What CBS has done instead – on purpose or by accident – is offer an insight into the psychology of these ultra-elite hand-picked soldiers. Owen isn’t cold, exactly. But he is incredibly controlled. In one passage, he describes how the movies get it wrong by always depicting operations like the one in Pakistan as loud and fast. Instead, he tells us, when SEALs do their jobs, they do it slowly and quietly.

“We have a saying,” Owen remarks at one point: “Don’t run to your own death.”

While all that is fascinating, I found watching that I experienced something like mounting dread. Working on a piece about PTSD for Harpers has perhaps put me in this mindset, but I could not help but wonder at the toll his work would ultimately take on Owen.

He betrays very little, it has to be said, until almost his final words of the program. In that moment, he’s describing the emotion he experienced in visiting the 9/11 memorial in NYC. Pelley comments: over three thousand people died there. Owen nods. He’s well aware of it, of course.

The raid avenged those people, Pelley suggests. And here Owen agrees.

It is a chilling moment. Because we sense that Owen’s awareness of the raid as an act of vengeance may not sit with him quite as easily as it appears to sit with Pelley, who makes the comment as if to balance the books, as if to establish that in the wake of the raid, ammends had been made, peace restored.

Owen, to my eye, does not seem so sure. He says instead that he realized in that moment, at the memorial, that it was time for him personally to move on. And then he says the words.

“Full circle,” the former Navy SEAL says, with no trace of satisfaction.

How rich, insightful, and devastating is that casual formulation. The full circle, of course, returns us to the site of our departure, as if we had never left. What will Owen do with this understanding? I can’t speculate, only to say that it seems to me, in that room, he glimpsed the expediency and (maybe) even the practical necessity of an act that would yet necessarily only perpetuate itself in further violence, further requirements for vengeance, further full circles spinning on up into the unknowable future. Spinning and escalating.

But maybe the more important question is what should we do with that understanding?