Dilly Dilly!

Sir Brad is ready to begin the Pit of Misery tour

Wild Card Weekend was wonderful. It was much too cold to go outside Saturday and Sunday here in Maine, but there were two football games between high-level teams to watch both days. What’s not to like? Next weekend will be similar: two games Saturday — including one with the hometown Patriots at Gillette Stadium — and two more on Sunday. Tremendous athletes at the top of their abilities will compete and I’m a football fan again.

Readers of this column know I’m a political junkie, studying the latest developments for at least two hours every day. I watch Sunday morning political programs on at least two networks, but when afternoon comes I don’t want any more politics. I want to watch football. This season, however, politics creeped into the game during the national anthem and that put a damper on Sunday afternoons for millions of us. It wasn’t good for the teams as they saw lots of empty stadium seats. It wasn’t good for TV networks or the NFL either because they lost viewers. I kept watching Patriots games but some of the shine had gone.

Mainstream media gave national anthem sit-downs and kneel-downs plenty of attention at first. Then it all backfired after President Trump weighed in and accused players of lacking patriotism. Many fans agreed and voted with their feet by staying away from games. They voted with their remotes by refusing to tune in at home on their TVs. Revenue declined. After that, media stopped their political coverage by refusing to film the playing of the national anthem before gametime. Politics went out the exits. Football fields went back to being exclusively athletic arenas and politics didn’t make the playoffs. Hurray for that.

When my family was young there wasn’t time to watch football, but by the Tom Brady era our nest had emptied and suddenly there was time. I could again experience total immersion in a sea of testosterone. Football is a male world and I hadn’t realized how much I missed it. Don’t misunderstand; I love women. I’ve been sleeping next to one for almost forty-seven years. I have a mother, four sisters, three daughters, two granddaughters and love them all. I also spent thirty-six years in education — a female-dominated profession. Even our two family dogs were females. Can I be forgiven if sometimes I prefer the exclusive company of men? Too bad if I can’t.

It’s not just the football that I enjoy. Televised games are full of commercials aimed at men too. They’re mostly ads for pick-up trucks and beer and some are very funny. In one, various people bring gifts of Bud Light beer to a medieval king, who thanks them by saying, “Dilly dilly!” Others present raise their bottles in toast and repeat: “Dilly-dilly!” Then, an unfortunate fellow puts some mead before the king, who is displeased. The king looks at him and says: “Please follow Sir Brad. He is going to give you a private tour of the pit of misery.” As the king’s torturer, Sir Brad, drags the poor guy away, others hold up their beers in toast, chanting: “Pit of misery! Dilly dilly!

The commercial doesn’t sound funny in the least, right? But somehow it is. There’s no explanation beyond that it probably reminds men of ridiculous things they’ve done and laughed about while drinking beer together. It’s 21st century code for, “Eat, drink, and be merry!” It’s completely unserious and beckons others to join the mirth. If “dilly dilly” has any real meaning, nobody can find it.

So what’s the purpose of football? What’s the point of eleven men carrying, throwing, catching, and kicking an oblong piece of inflated leather a hundred yards down a field while eleven other strong, swift men try to stop them? It’s a guy thing, like war without the killing. It satisfies something in the male psyche, but it’s not unrestrained violence. It has rules all participants must obey or be penalized, even ordered to leave the field. Players are judged by their physical ability which is remarkable, their mental acuity under pressure, their teamwork, perseverance, and heart.

And there’s nothing new in all this. The earliest Olympic Games in the 8th century BC were exclusively for men as I learned when visiting the site in 2014. Married women were banned both from competition and from viewing as well, but “maidens” were allowed. Why that distinction was made our guide didn’t say. Perhaps the “maidens” were an ancient equivalent of today’s cheerleaders. Perhaps it was because the men competed while oiled and naked, but then homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece by some accounts. Maybe it was that.

Whatever the reasons for men wishing to spend time away from women once in a while, they go back a long way. It may have become politically incorrect in the 21st century, but it’s not going away.

Signs of Decline

“Vote For Your Grandchildren,” proclaimed the bumper sticker I’d walked by many times. Thinking about what that might mean, I considered our growing national debt of $18 trillion+, which is expected to equal our entire Gross Domestic Product soon, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Others claim we’re there already, but that isn’t a campaign issue I’ve heard anything about in the 2016 race for president. Why is that?

Some of my grandchildren

Rather, we’re hearing about Greece’s national debt. Greek debt to GDP was at 100% ten years ago, but now it’s 175% and Greece is telling the world two things: One, that it has no intention of paying it back, and two, that it wants to borrow more money. Talk about brazen! Greeks want to retire at fifty with full benefits and they want the rest of Europe to pay for it because they don’t like paying taxes. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal: “Greeks consider taxes as theft,” said Aristides Hatzis, an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Athens. “Normally taxes are considered the price you have to pay for a just state, but this is not accepted by the Greek mentality.” Taxes are also the price of civilization. It’s not accepted by nearly half the US population either, who pay no federal income taxes.

By the time he leaves office, President Obama will have raised our national debt more than every other president combined. He will have doubled it to about $20 trillion. Do we hear about this in the mainstream media? No, we don’t. What do we have to show for all that money? I don’t see anything, do you? No infrastructure improvements, no projects that were supposed to have been “shovel ready” when he rammed through his $864 billion “stimulus” in 2009.

Do Americans intend to pay off our growing debt? Doesn’t look that way. Like the Greeks, we keep on spending money we don’t have and passing the bill onto our grandchildren. Are we going the way of the Greeks? Seems like it, but there are differences. The entire Greek economy is only about 2% of the European Union economy. If it went belly up, it shouldn’t affect the rest of the EU or the world. But what if we went bankrupt? The whole world would likely go down with us.

Wife Roseann and her niece Christina on Athens Street

Traveling around Greece last year, what I remember most is graffiti. In Athens, it was everywhere! There were layers and layers of it on virtually every vertical surface reachable by a human hand holding a can of spray paint. There were countless acts of people using someone else’s property as an easel, as a billboard, to display whatever notion was in their mind at the time. Owners of the property must then expend time, energy, and money to clean it up. It was evident that they couldn’t keep up. It’s vandalism, plain and simple, not unlike that of the original Vandals who assaulted Rome and helped bring down Roman civilization with their wanton pillaging. 

Off Congress St. Portland, Maine

Attempting to clean up

Layers of spray paint don’t bring down a civilization. Rather, they’re a symptom of the underlying decay that brings it down. They’re a sign that those who work to maintain a semblance of order are losing out to those who spread anarchy. As I travel around North America and Europe, the presence or absence of graffiti is my way of taking the temperature of whatever city or country through which I’m traveling. Presence of graffiti is a measure of decline. Lack of effort to clean it up is a measure of cultural despair. Greeks thinking they can live the good life on someone else’s nickel, and thinking they can spray whatever they want on someone else’s property are similar. There’s a connection.

Congress St. Portland, Maine

I’m seeing graffiti in more and more places around Portland and it worries me. First it was  on boxcars. Watching a train covered with it pass by depressed me. Clearly the railroad company had given up. I used to see it here and there along Forest Avenue and Congress Street, but it wouldn’t remain long before someone cleaned it up or painted over it. Now, however, it’s staying on longer and even being added to. I’ve been seeing the same graffiti for nearly a year and that’s not good. Property owners are responsible to remove it and if they don’t, they’re subject to penalties and fines. But, the will to remove it or to enforce penalties is clearly waning. As the saying goes: The handwriting is on the wall.

As a sixty-four-year-old baby boomer, I was born into a country that had just saved the world from German and Japanese totalitarianism. For that we can thank our parents’ generation, which went on to build the most prosperous, most powerful country the world had ever seen. Unfortunately, my generation began tearing it down, and some of us fear the process can’t be reversed. We cannot be proud of what we’re passing on to our grandchildren.

Magouliana, High In The Peloponnesus

It was while we were burying my father-in-law, Ted, at Arlington National Cemetery eighteen months ago that my wife’s family started organizing our trip to Greece. Ted was a disabled veteran of WWII whose father immigrated from Magouliana (Mah-GOOL-yah-nah), a small, high-mountain village in the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece. Ted never wanted to visit there even though he could have afforded to, but his wife did. He was proud of his Greek heritage, spoke the language, and attended a Greek Orthodox Church in Lowell, Massachusetts. He liked to hang out with other veterans at the Greek/American Club in Lowell, but he considered himself an American. Like his father, wanted to cut ties to the old country. His widow, however, did not consider a trip there to be disloyal to America.

Roseann at her father's grave in Arlington, VA

The only road in to Magouliana

Four days into our Greek tour, we were leaving the area of Mycenae from where King Agamemnon set off to conquer Troy. We drove inland to Vytina, a mountain ski town closest to Magouliana and big enough to have a few hotels. There we stayed the night. Nearby Magouliana has only one tavern and no hotels. There’s only one road in and out and it has the highest elevation of any inhabited village in the Peloponnese. The views are spectacular from inside a high semicircle cut by nature out of a mountainside. I wondered why they built their houses so far up instead of in the small valley below. Then, surprisingly, I discovered the village was originally built even further up around the very top of the slope. That village, however, was destroyed by the Turks when they invaded in the 15th century. They forced villagers to rebuild it on the present site. Turks occupied Magouliana and the rest of Greece for four hundred years until they were driven out in the mid-nineteenth century. I learned later that the war for independence began right there in Vytina and Magouliana. Now I have an idea about where my wife’s sometimes fiery nature may have originated.

High in the Mountains

Beautiful setting

Our licensed guide was an older woman from Athens named Dora. She’d been guiding groups around Greece for forty years and had never heard of Magouliana. Neither had she heard of my wife’s maiden name of Kosiavelon. A clerk at Ellis Island had substituted the “n” at the end in place of the original “s” when her grandfather, Athanasios Kosiavelos was processed through in 1902. There are still people by that name living in Magouliana and they’re relatives. Ted’s widow had done extensive genealogical research and contacted some of them. One branch lives in Athens but maintains a vacation house in the old village. Although they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Greek, we were able to communicate through our guide, Dora, who was wonderful. The language gap didn’t seem to matter much though. Warm feelings went back and forth in spite of it.

What language barrier?

Dora helps translate

Greek mountain hospitality

We were all treated to a mega-dose of Greek hospitality at their home high on the mountainside. They fed us three kinds of meats, homemade baked goods, vegetables, desserts made from walnuts grown on their own trees, and wine they made from grapes they also grew themselves. We were all quite moved by their warmth and graciousness. There had been about 2200 people in the village when Athanasios Kosiavelos left for New York via Naples, Italy in 1902, but fewer than 300 now. Athanasios had four brothers, but only the oldest stayed, inheriting whatever property the family owned. We found the house where Athanasios lived, which is only partially occupied now and had formerly housed a grocery store run by his family.

Roseann at her grandfather's house

Checking out her grandfather's church

Dora explains why so many young men left around 1900

My wife, Roseann, wasn’t sure what to expect and feared finding a poor, backward village with similar people, but that wasn’t the case at all. It appeared quite prosperous and the spectacular location enhanced the charm of the people still living there. The emotional greetings of the Kosiavelos relatives moved me in ways I did not expect because I’m only an in-law. They opened up the now unused church and school so we could see where Athanasious worshiped and became literate. There’s another church in use now and the village’s two remaining students are bussed to Vytina. 

Referring to the family tree

Magouliana in 1900 when Athanasios left for America

In the center of town was a statue of the man who led the mid-nineteenth rebellion against the Turks from Magouliana, but I couldn’t decipher his name because it was printed in the Greek alphabet. Much of the fighting in the Greek civil war following WWII also took place in the area, a struggle which ended in victory over communist forces. The village, like the country, had seen many changes in its long and storied history. I was proud that my children and grandchildren are descended from the warm and courageous people who called it home.

Historical Reckonings In Democracy's Birthplace

(This column ran last week in the newspapers. Didn't have time to post it while traveling.)

Flying over the Peloponnesus on the way to Athens from Rome, I was struck by how mountainous it was below me, much more so than New Hampshire or Maine. Zig-zagging switchback roads climbed even the biggest mountains. Some serviced the numerous windmills and cell phone towers up there, but others led to high villages on steep slopes. One of the smallest, called Magouliana, is the one from which my wife’s grandfather emigrated to America in 1902. More about Magouliana later. It needs its own column. “Wow!” I thought from the plane. “That’s rugged country.” This impression was confirmed when, two days later, we began our tour of the huge peninsula called Pelopponesus, the largest in Greece.

Roseann and Me at Parthenon
(That's a bra for the camera around my waist)

A small Mercedes bus met us at the airport near the sea on the outskirts of Athens. There were nine in our party, all members of my wife’s extended family making the trip. My first feeling was sadness because of the graffiti I saw defacing virtually every vertical surface as we drove to our hotel downtown near the Acropolis. The hotel was nice but a four-story building across the street was unoccupied and not well maintained either. Wherever I travel I notice how much graffiti there is because I see it as a barometer of civilizational decline. Thankfully, there was none visible at the Acropolis itself, a very impressive site, especially considering its antiquity going back three thousand years.

Parthenon from our hotel dining room in early evening

Impressive columned temples built up there by the Mycenean Greeks were destroyed by the Persians after the Battle of Thermopylae, then rebuilt during the Classical Period after 480 BC. I was impressed that people like Socrates, Plato and the Apostle Paul walked those same streets upon which I was strolling. I’d grown up reading and hearing about them over and over. It was from Socrates’ methods that I developed the teaching style I used for nearly my entire career.

People we met in Athens were friendly and most spoke English, a good thing since none of us spoke very much Greek. They made eye contact on the sidewalks, unusual for inhabitants of a big city in my limited traveling experience. Our tour guide was an older woman from the city named Dora, who had been doing that job more than forty years and spoke five languages. 

What happens when the EU closes the Euro spigot

After two days in the Athens, we headed for the Peloponnesus via Corinth, a city on the isthmus connecting to mainland Greece. All along the way were unfinished buildings: concrete skeletons with steel rebar sticking out, some with building materials stacked inside and bleaching in the sun. They were projects begun and never finished after European Union funds dried up. Many older buildings were abandoned too, some residences, but mostly businesses. Graffiti covered them. It was depressing to see it everywhere as we proceeded down the highway. Some evidently was political. Some was sprayed on in support of soccer teams. I recognized anarchy symbols and native Greeks I questioned explained symbols of soccer teams. Most, however, was mindless. Past Corinth, in rural areas of the Pelopponesus, there was considerably less of it.

Roseann, Christina, graffiti as we walk back to our hotel in Athens

My wife’s niece, Christina, who was living in Greece and visited us in Athens, told me the official unemployment rate there was 28%, but the real rate was double that. Our guide, Dora, said the economy had been depressed for about three years. As she explained it, the socialist government under Papandreou promised to eliminate poverty and for twenty years, it borrowed and spent. He knew the bill would come due eventually, but it wouldn’t be until after he was dead. I got the impression that her politics had morphed rightward as she apprehended the process Margaret Thatcher described: “Socialism works until you run out of other peoples’s money.”

Real markef forces are asserting themselves in Greece now as they inevitably must anywhere. The adjustment is quite painful, but necessary for a real economic recovery. It reminded me that we in the United States will soon run out of other people’s money as well. We’re putting off that reckoning with our “quantitative easing” policies of money-printing, but that cannot go on forever either. Postponing the inevitable only makes it more painful to bear when it finally comes. I used to think that would be after I was dead too, but now I’m thinking it will be here sooner, and I will have to watch as American decline accelerates. It will be a test of our polity. Can we withstand the crisis to come? Will the veneer of civilization keep hold over the seething mass of humanity?

Our guide was a scholar and offered perspective on Greek history though from Myceneans, to Dorians, to Persians, to Romans, to Byzantines, to Turks, to Nazis. After “periods of decadence” as she put it, come periods of decline and suffering. Greeks have endured it many times, but their history is so much longer than our own. As we toured Athens, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Olympia, Delphi, and Kalambaka, we were shown how, for millennia, people at each locale endured tumultuous reckonings after those “periods of decadence.”

Can we forestall that suffering here in the United States? In the face of mounting evidence that it may be too late for us, I continue to choose optimism. I don’t want to spend any more time than necessary in the state of mind produced by its opposite.

What Was That?

Lately I feel like I’ve betrayed my older male friends somewhat. Since I got my very expensive hearing aids about six weeks ago, their wives are elbowing them and pointing at me. “See? He did it,” they declare. “Why don’t you?” My friends respond with a grunt and a looking away. For years, my responses were identical to theirs. Loss of hearing is slow and insidious. The increments are so small we don’t notice it, but the people around us do.

Then wives would question me about what finally made me go to an audiologist. I wasn’t sure what the final straw was, but it could have been when my three-year-old granddaughter, Lila, said something to me and I said, “What?” Then she said it again and I said, “What?” again. The third time, she said it in measured cadence: “Can. We. Go. Out. Side. And. Ride. Bikes?” Yeah. I think that’s when I knew I had to do something.

Lila

My first awareness that there might be something wrong was four or five years ago when I was still teaching. At a forty-minute meeting with a handful of other teachers I heard myself say, “What?” nearly a half dozen times when nobody else did. Clearly I was the only one not hearing whatever was being said. After that, I noticed how often my wife asked me to turn down the television. Soon she was gently suggesting that I get my ears tested.

Sometime later I mentioned it to my doctor at my annual physical. “There’s no wax in your ears,” he said. “It’s not uncommon for someone your age to experience some loss of hearing.” When I asked what I should do about it, he said, “Do you want to wear hearing aids?” I said no, it wasn’t that bad. “Okay then,” he said. “Live with it.” I did for a couple of more years.

Then my wife said she heard beeping down in the basement of our South Portland house. “You don’t hear it?” she asked. I didn’t. When I went down there though, I did. Water comes into that basement after a storm sometimes and there’s a battery back-up for the sump pump that sends an alarm when it’s time to add distilled water to the cells. That’s where the high-pitched beep was coming from. I added water and it was fine, but the experience revealed another dimension to my hearing issue. What if I were by myself? I might have had to replace the battery. A hundred bucks — not too big a deal. But I began to think about it more and what other safety issues might be implied by what happened.

When I finally went for a hearing test, the audiologist told me I had moderate to severe loss with higher-frequency sounds. The hearing aids I purchased reopened that world for me. The first thing I noticed was that I could hear myself breathing through my nose, and realized I hadn’t heard it for years. Then I went outside and the birds were very loud.

Mornings are my favorite time of day. I like to sleep with the windows open during this time of year and let the birds wake me. I like to smell fresh morning air, then watch the day fill with light. Nobody else would be up but me and the world would be mine alone. But I’m sleeping in lately because I haven’t been hearing their high-pitched sounds loudly enough to wake me. That isn’t going to change because I take the hearing aids out at night and put them on the nightstand with my glasses. I still have my own teeth, but if I live long enough I may be taking them out too someday. Then I’ll need a bigger nightstand.

One of my older male friends took me aside afterward and asked me a few questions about my hearing aids and I patiently answered him. After one more experience such as what I described above, I think he’s going to make the jump and go for a test himself.

And I’m visualizing women out there saying to their husbands above a certain age: “Honey? Here’s an article you should look at.”

I'm in Greece and having difficulty finding wifi connections, so this is an abbreviated post.