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David Brooks and Susan Estrich

the breakfast table
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from: David Brooks

Stocks, Soccer and Souterism

Posted Tuesday, June 16, 1998, at 10:58 AM ET

Dear Susan,

What a downer of a day to begin our conversation. The Dow falls 2.3% and the U.S. loses a World Cup Soccer match to Germany 2-0. The moods that leap out from the morning papers are anxiety on the financial pages and brutality on the sports pages. The television announcers for the World Cup match were relatively upbeat: The Germans are titans; the Americans did the best they could; all in all a respectable showing. But the print reporters are not so forgiving. For example, Jere Longman in the New York Times said the U.S. was "clinically dismantled." The U.S. was "overmatched...rusty...unassertive."

Actually, I interpret the papers' coverage as a sign that America is truly getting into soccer. The sport is all about misery. Players run down the field trying to get a goal and 99% of the time they fail. Their frustration builds and builds. Nick Hornby wrote a great book called Fever Pitch about how he and his father tried to break through the astringency of their relationship by building a common passion for the English team, Arsenal. One game, Hornby turned around and looked at the expressions on the men in the stands behind them. It was all rage, frustration, contempt and unhappiness as the players failed again and again. In Europe, soccer is an overwhelmingly male sport--players and fans--and it takes on this dark, Germanic brooding quality. When you read about the coverage of the teams in the European or Latin press, it is all savage attacks on players and coaches--even when the home team wins. You suffer all your life except maybe once or twice in your lifetime you enjoy a few moments of utter bliss when your team or nation wins it all.

You'd think this wouldn't be in the American style. We like to be happy and we like sports in which players rack up points and accomplish things. I wonder what will happen when some other nation rises up and challenges us in a sport we really care about, if China starts beating us in basketball. Maybe we will begin to see basketball as a dark barometer of national health. Maybe we'll invest in it the same desperate passion that other nations invest in soccer.

While I'm brooding, I might as well mention the story in the Washington Post about the Holocaust museum. You may remember that when Yasser Arafat came to visit the U.S. a few months ago, the State Department invited him to visit the museum in Washington D.C. The museum director at the time, Walter Reich, initially objected. It seems to me that there are good arguments on both sides of the "Should Arafat be invited?" issue. Reich doesn't believe the holocaust should be used politically. But in an incredibly gutless and craven maneuver, the museum's board, led by Vice Chairman Ruth Mandel, fired Reich. Elie Weisel called it "a gross injustice."

So the search was on for a new director, and the staff settled on a left-wing Claremont Professor, John Roth. But then the Forward found a 1988 piece by Roth that compared the Israeli government to Nazis over its treatment of the Palestinians. Roth apologized, but last week the Zionist Organization of America started faxing around articles showing that in 1980, Roth compared the election of Reagan to the election of Hitler, in 1988 he compared America's treatment of the poor to Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews, (anybody sense a trend here?). And throughout his career he has basically viewed the U.S. as a less than benign force in the world. The government pays 60% of the museum's budget and now some Republican congressmen are trying to block Roth's appointment.

My reading of Roth's writing is that he is a conventional if clich,-ridden academic leftist and my reaction to these disputes is that the left and right should form a truce. We'll let your nuts into powerful positions if you let our nuts in. We get Robert Bork, you get Lani Guinier. The way it works now, people on right and left disgrace each other and the brainless moderates get all the jobs. Life would be more interesting, and I suspect government would work a little better if there were a few more interesting thinkers thrown into the mix, instead of just wave after wave of David Souter's.

all the best,

David

the breakfast table
entries
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from: David Brooks

Stocks, Soccer and Souterism

Posted Tuesday, June 16, 1998, at 10:58 AM ET
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David Brooks is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard. Susan Estrich is a law professor at the University of Southern California.
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