Wild Geese

By Mike Corey * Other Mike Corey Posts



Wild Geese.

Mary Oliver wrote about them once, or perhaps more than once, depending on whether or not the revisions--assuming there were any--count as separate writings. But in what that writing or those writings ultimately produced, Oliver touched on a notion that has resonated with me, as I imagine it would with most who come across it.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

These words have meant a great deal to me since I first came across them 5 1/2 years ago in a poetry class at Duke University. Their meaning is clear on the surface: Bad things happen to all of us as individuals, and though our worlds may slow down or come to a halt, the world in which we live does not. What it means beyond that is not a matter of right and wrong, but of how it matters to the reader.


Different authors may intend for different writings to mean certain things--or various things. Or nothing at all. Mark Twain once wondered why his writings and words had to mean anything beyond the superficial read. Ernest Hemingway, however, thought of his writings as an iceberg, with only the top 10% visible to the reader. The rest had to be sought out.


I wonder now, as a law student, if it is a good thing or a bad thing that these two views from two great American authors also happen to represent the two views of interpreting the law: the textualist and the liberal?


There are, I'm surprised to have found, many similarities in interpreting a novel and interpreting a court opinion. There is ambiguous language; there are ambiguous policy goals; there are questions of a book's impact; there are concerns that the masses will only learn of its content through a cursory description in the media; and fears that the purpose will be misconstrued by those desirous and capable of misusing it
Up until recently, I had believed that the glaring distinction between a novel and a judicial opinion was the absence of heart in the latter. But a "final lecture" from our contracts professor has me thinking otherwise.


I should not have been so foolish. As the son of an attorney who loved the law and the way he was able to help others with it--in building companies, non-profits and so forth in what ultimately became a growing city as a result--I should have known that, at least, those who practice law are not without heart. And yet, since his passing, my approach to the law has been one of reluctance, for fear that it would require me to adhere to the bottom line rather than the greater good.


Now 3/4 of the way through my first year of law school, I fear I had become robotic and unfeeling in my approach to studying, if nothing else. It's hard not to, I suppose. There is an unending downpour of reading material, or rules to memorize and applications to master; there are nothing but bottom lines in law school. But there are relationships, and not just between people. But between students and the law. I am hopeful, then, that mine has taken a leap forward.


The best lawyers, I know, are not necessarily the ones that left law school with the highest grades, but the ones that were best able to apply that which they learned--skills more so than rules--to the people they served after law school. The cold world requires a certain level of proven proficiency, of course, but once the foot is in the door, application is what matters. Some lawyers apply those skills to dollars and sense. In a way, I suppose we all do, no matter our profession: dollars and sense are along the continuum, at some point in that future. The butterfly, after all, still beats its wings; and the farthest star still moves, if ever so slightly.


But what of me? I've come to law school with a very specific person of enabling myself to better advance society through access to education, the goal of which is to make everything better for everyone. I look at the world and I am saddened by so much of what I see; and hopeful at so much else. And I know that better education can accomplish so much in righting the wrongs I see in the world. Such anger there is, such despair.


I want to be the the kind of lawyer, and use the law in such a way, so that the despair that comes to others does not render their worlds stopped, but helps them go on.

Birthers and hating Obama

By Mike Corey * Other Mike Corey Posts

Every now and again, slivers of the American population reveal themselves as something less than that which Americans ought to be.

These slivers are omnipresent in every society, and always have been, I'm sure. They fluctuate in size depending on time and circumstance, and garner varying amounts of attention. But neither of those facts makes them any less disappointing.

Right now, that sliver has silver-tongued opinion-shapers across the spectrum of media encouraging them to believe and advance the notion that President Barack Obama is not an American citizen. It's almost too mindless to mention, but it has gained enough traction with enough people that the cacophony of crap that they're spewing has become impossible to ignore.

This sliver, which has adopted the sobriquet of "Birthers," contends that Barack Obama is yet to prove his claim to the presidency because of the constitutional requirement that the president be an American-born citizen of the United States. Nevermind the fact that he was born in Hawaii and that two local newspapers announced his birth in 1964, these people are doing their utmost to devise a contention out of thin air. The other day, for example, a document magically appeared that was purported to be a birth certificate from Kenya announcing the arrival of Barack Hussein Obama. The document was proven to be a forgery, of course, riddled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies, leaving the Birthers without a shred of evidence supporting their hyperventilations--aside from “the fact” that Obama has "taken" their country from them. Indeed, the document was so easily debunked that some of the theorists have contended that the Obama Administration planted the forgery to discredit them.

But this "Birther" notion isn't the primary concern. It's what the people who want to capitalize on the passion of the Birthers are trying to do, and are capable of inciting, that is most foreboding.

Consider Glenn Beck. He has a massive following, and has uttered malignancies like, "Barack Obama has a deep-seeded hatred of white people" in recent days. Opportunists like Beck do not seem to care about the potential consequences of their actions, only that their viewership is up. (Way up.) Indeed, before Beck followed the cavalcade down into the perdition of information, Fox News, he was just another conservative commentator, albeit a less than formidable one. Now, he impresses on his growing viewership that apocalypse looms because of Barack Obama and what he's "trying" to do to the country--and more egregiously, because of who he is.

These kinds of attacks are a troubling ramification of the themes spun by the far right in the waning months of last year's election, when Reverend Wright and William Ayers became part of the Republican noise machine's vernacular, with the vice presidential nominee repeatedly assuring her supporters that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists" and that he didn't see "America as you see it and how I see America."

(McCain did little to quiet or discourage the former Alaska governor, though when he was faced with one who insisted that Obama was a Muslim, he quickly admonished her before moving on with his politicking. Similarly, McCain's camp has gone on the record in asserting that Barack Obama is, in fact, a U.S. citizen. He remains one of the few Republican leaders to have done so.)

The result, of course, is a sliver of Americana that is unsettling. Consider the following images compiled from across the country in recent weeks, which go well beyond the "birther" movement and into a whole other category of ignorant anger.

When people believe such things, and are whipped into enough of a frenzy--and when they truly believe their country is either being led by someone that doesn't legally warrant the responsibilities of office or is using that office to undermine the country--dangerous things can happen.

Unsurprisingly, death threats against the president are up 400 percent from President Bush's tenure in the White House.

Coincidentally, gun sales have skyrocketed since Obama was elected, a phenomenon largely based on another unfounded assumption--this one being advanced by the National Rifle Association and its vendors--that Obama is going to outlaw all guns and ammunition.

"It started the day that Obama got elected," Johnny Dury, who owns Dury's Gun Shop in San Antonio, tells NPR's Michele Norris. "It is when everything just went crazy in the gun business."

Some would surely point out that lunacy is not partisan. And that is surely true. But those that believe George Bush was a war criminal were not stockpiling weapons of personal destruction, nor were their protests going unchallenged by far too many Congressmen.

It's time for Republicans to step up and lead their party and their people, and not let them be led astray into the recesses of radical hate.

On Staying and Going

By Mike Corey * Other Mike Corey Posts

She called with a pretense.

“Have you made your law school decision yet?”

The answer is complicated, and begins with a cliffhanger. “Sort of.”

It’s why my blogging has been so sparse. How paralyzing waiting can be. My quasi-decision articulated—“I’m going here, but may be going there if I sneak in off the waitlist”—she revealed her reason for calling after a few moments of silence.

“My dad may be dying.”

He had been sick for years, I knew. But a bout with pneumonia to a body long-weakened by illness can be deadly. She knew it, and had flown from one coast to another to be by her father’s side amidst law school finals because of it. And now she wanted to know if she should stay, if she should abandon her summer clerkship, if she should just be by her father’s side.

I have become a de facto authority on conundrums such as these because of my unfortunate membership in the fraternity of sons who have lost their young fathers to cancer. My dad passed away in February 2005, with a few months remaining in my senior year of college. I met this girl a few months later, after she’d read an article I’d penned in the school magazine on my father’s life and death. She just wanted to share her sympathy then; now she wanted something more.

The problem she faced was all too familiar.

“I don’t know how much time he has left,” she said. “I have to believe he’ll be here in August, and a year from now, 20 years from now. But if something happens, I have to be here.”

These words were hard to hear, particularly when buttressed by the need for advice:

“What should I do?”

The only right answer, I confessed, is that everyone has a different answer to that question. Some people cope with situations such as these by dropping everything and entrenching themselves bedside; some need distance (geographic or otherwise). But most need a balance of the two.

I had fallen in the latter camp when my father was ill. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer during the first week of my senior year, he was scheduled to have surgery that November after several weeks of intense chemotherapy. I flew back and forth between Durham, North Carolina and Columbus, Ohio all fall, and negotiated an arrangement in which I would remain home after Thanksgiving break, coinciding with my father’s surgery and recovery in intensive care. I sent in my final exams over e-mail, as well, even as my father’s healing regressed.

It was at the start of the second semester when the thought first precipitated: “I have to be here if he dies.” I had made a promise to my father that I wouldn’t go back to school until he’d left Intensive Care, but as that grew more and more unlikely, I had to make a choice to stay or go.

I remember that conversation. Sitting in an empty waiting room at 6 AM, my father’s health had suddenly deteriorated. While he was coughing up blood in the other room, my dad’s doctors and closest friends sat down with my mother and me. One by one the doctors told me to go back to school, that if anything should happen, they would keep him alive until I could fly back from Durham. I could only say it once: “I have to be here.”

Six weeks later, I was awoken by phone call from my mother in Columbus. I had continued oscillating back and forth along with my father’s health, but now I would need to return one last time. His kidneys had begun to fail.

The time between then and my arrival at my father’s bedside was ungodly. My mother put the phone by my unconscious father’s ear, and I sputtered through tears in telling him I loved him, and that I was coming. I sat miserable on an airplane with business travelers, and began to sober up on the familiar car ride to the hospital. 6 months it had been in those halls, with those noises and nurses—with my dad. I had read to him, listened to him, spoken to him, telling him everything he would need to know, everything I needed him to know. He had become my best friend in those months, knowing each other as adults, not just as a father and child, but as men.

And that is what I hoped for my friend, that she and her father could be as close as they'd ever been before he departed this world for the next. She had to have the chance to achieve that, whether she stayed by his side or returned to school and continued with the plans her father had long hoped she would make for herself.

I remember in the final hours, a priest that had never met me came to deliver a blessing over my father. I had refused to move or to let go of my dad’s hand while the prayer was uttered, my stubbornness prompting the priest to tell me that he would never be so lucky as to have a son by his side in his last moments. And then the priest said he loved me.

It infuriated me then, the sentiment seeming so disingenuous. Love isn’t instantaneous, nor can it simply be expressed. Love was what I had for my father, and in those cruel seconds when death appears and disappears, love is all that death sees fit to leave behind. To be there to witness it, to help my father make that journey, was a blessing regardless, one I fervently hope my friend may have when her father’s time comes, hopefully some distant day far away from here and now.

Pittsnogle, Run

By Mike Corey * Other Mike Corey Posts

In honor of the recent passing of John Updike, and in honor of the time of year that honors the sport he loved so dearly, I begin with one of his poems, “Ex-Basketball Player.”

~

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.

His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

~

Updike, along with his contemporary all-star author Philip Roth, have written extensively about small town high school athletes, and the decidedly different paths their lives took after exiting the stage of amateur sport. Of the many intentional and unintentional points to be drawn from their writings, I take this one away: the curtain never closes on those performers, even as their careers veer off course from the one they might have imagined. Some get up and out, of course—-East Bank’s Jerry West, French Lick’s Larry Bird, Wilmington’s Michael Jordan-—but the overwhelming majority do not, mired in memories. That tale, more than any in sport, epitomizes the ravished story of Jefferson’s old dream about an agrarian America.

Youth is defined by uncertainty and uniqueness. No two days are alike. For many Americans, the world after schooling is anything but, one day largely indistinguishable from the next. The awareness of this fact makes it all the more maddening still, a Sisyphean struggle against that which we know is coming, that which we can’t avoid. Our innate need to provide and survive compels us to plug along. It makes looking back and living through others all the more compelling, all the more necessary.

So we turn to that which is the same and different all at once: the games we play, the games we watch. And we turn to one particular game, basketball, every March. In it we see what we once experienced, what we once witnessed, what we can no longer hope to achieve: a spry body, a carelessness, a spirit, and an audience.

How soon we forget those that once captured our attention. There he was, Kevin Pittsnogle, the hometown hero from Martinsburg, West Virginia, clawing against the winds of inevitable change in the New York Times a few months ago.

There is a middle school up the hill from the McDonald’s here, and behind it are several classroom trailers, the type that are added when space gets tight and are never taken away.

Inside one of the trailers last Friday stood a tall man with a familiar face. He wore a Bugs Bunny tie and a gray dress shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. Tattoos spilled to his wrists. He spoke kindly to two of his special education students, who called him Mr. Pittsnogle.

On the inside of the door was a sign: “You are who you choose to be.”

For now, this is who Kevin Pittsnogle chooses to be.

In those same pages a few years before, he was its Rockwellian hero in leading the Mountaineers to an improbable NCAA run.

Last year the Mountaineers reached the Round of Eight before losing to Louisville in overtime. They did it with a homegrown player, Kevin Pittsnogle, whose homespun details have been well catalogued -- tattoos, trailer park childhood, bowling, early marriage, lanky 6-11 guy with tea-cup ears tossing jumpers from beyond the 3-point line.

It would sound romantic to describe Pittsnogle as representing the ancestry of the state, but he backs off any talk of a mission.

''I didn't really know too much about the basketball legacy, nothing like that,'' Pittsnogle said yesterday, adding, ''I wanted to go somewhere I could play and have fun and somewhere close where my parents would be.''

Pittsnogle displays the same quirky independence that drew people up into the Appalachians in the first place, escaping the rules and regimentation of the cities. He wanted to stay home. Nothing complicated about that. (As a news reporter in the Appalachia coal fields back in the early 70's, I learned the lesson fast. If I knocked on somebody's front door and he told me to get off his property, it was a good idea not to stand around and discuss it. Just go.) Home was special. The renaissance of West Virginia basketball has been a revelation to the players wearing the uniforms. ''We have got a lot of fan mail, a lot of people come up to us and thank us for just coming to school there,'' Pittsnogle said yesterday.

Several years ago, a survey of former Division I college athletes found that they were more likely than their traditional college peers to become obese later in life. The anecdotal answer that was provided by so many of those studied was simple: they had lost their competitiveness in the fires of the games they had once played and could not regain it in the seemingly mundane tasks of typical American life.

The games they had played drive typical America forward through the monotony of work. And yet those games claim the lives of too many of those athletes, too soon, leaving them with hands unfit for the tools they wield away from the court.

The intersection of sport and war

By Mike Corey * Other Mike Corey Posts




Since the Cold War ended, many Americans have displaced their sense of nationalism with team affiliation. This phenomenon is explained by this country's unchallenged status as a military superpower and the similarities between national identity and sports fandom.

In the meantime, other nations have rushed to replace the Soviet Union as a threat to U.S. hegemony. Ironically, it was not until the Beijing Olympics that such a successor, China, was able to convince Americans of its strength. Indeed, the presence of a rival-on the battlefield or the playing field-helps explain why so many have so seamlessly shifted their allegiances from nationalism to fandom.

Whereas athletics were once representative of our conflict with the Soviets-every four years at the Olympics, in particular-a transference of sorts has occurred. The fear and loathing of enemies of the state having been projected upon the enemies of the teams we support. Though national pride has not diminished as a result, we have divided ourselves by supporting one team or another.

And why? Because as Duke political scientist Donald Horowitz once wrote of national identification, "Allegiances are usually revived by the wartime experience." In the absence of any belligerent threat to our national power, the games we watch are the next best thing. So until our nationalist allegiances are revived-as they were briefly after 9/11-the tables will remain turned: We now tend to think of war as representative of sport.

The language of war has long been representative of the games we play. Woody Hayes, the legendary football coach at Ohio State University, had been a Navy captain before winning five national championships with the Buckeyes. He not only drew parallels to football and war on a daily basis, he became the general in the "10 Year War," the name given to a decade-long stretch of games against the Buckeyes' rival, Michigan.

But as the memory of Coach Hayes faded, and as the Cold War came to an end, America saw the rise of other militaristic coaches, none more prestigious than Duke's Mike Krzyzewski. A former Cadet at Army, Coach K has been known for winning, and for infusing war and sport.

"You fight battles, but you try to win wars, and the war ends in March," Coach K said in 1999.

That cyclical nature of sport distinguishes it from war, the unpredictability of which induces tremendous fear: the Red Scare, the Cuban Missile Crisis the unsettling dread of M.A.D. And most Americans could do nothing to prevent such a calamitous end. So these Americans turned to sport to cope with that fear.

My late father had been one such American. The son of a corner grocery store owner in Charleston, W. Va., he matriculated at Duke in 1965 as the Cold War engulfed Southeastern Asia. Fearful for his friends already dispatched to the conflict, and fearful that he too might be called to serve, he buried himself in his studies-and in college basketball.

"We got it all out of our system here," my father told me when he returned to Cameron Indoor Stadium in the Fall of 2001, toward the end of a game during Parents' Weekend. "We were accountable to nothing except the team and getting in the heads of whoever we were playing. And then we went back to reality."

Thinking about sports was far easier than thinking about that reality.

And reality has been quite different for that generation ever since. The psychological enormity of the war simply shifted to sport when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Reality for my generation has been quite different, too. We were raised during the dénouement of the Cold War, and were shaken by 9/11. The nationalism that sprung out of 9/11's aftermath has since diminished, save for those families generous enough to share their sons and daughters with the cause of freedom and security abroad and at home. And although we remember the tragedy, the ire we initially felt for our nomadic enemies in the War on Terror has weakened, our belligerent instincts concentrated upon the harmlessness of games rather than the harmfulness of war.

Pride in our country, however, remains strong. Over the years we have displayed it through our economy, our military, and recently, through our athleticism. Dominating the Summer Olympics since the Soviet sport machine crumbled, we've reveled in our superiority every four years, only to return to the athletic conflicts that enthrall us at home. In the process, we've identified ourselves more precisely, relating more closely to our neighborhood teams-high school, college, professional or otherwise-and not with the national team of diplomats and generals and soldiers leading us into battle against foreign foes.

And so it was fitting that when the United States' hegemony was challenged once again on the international stage we sent a coach to lead us in battle. Mike Krzyzewski rose to the challenge in China and helped reclaim the (basketball) glory that had long been ours. He facilitated a collaboration between NBA and college coaches, and between players of diverse talents rather than the 12 flashiest professionals he could find. The plan worked. And during the triumphant march to victory, sports pages and news pages alike were filled with reports on the "Redeem Team," while fandom and nationalism collided until the gold medal--and our good name--returned home.

Although Coach K won a battle for America, our competition with the world rages on. As we struggle through an economic downturn, and as the powers around us continue to catch up, one wonders what it will take to replicate the kind of collaboration that vaulted American basketball back to the forefront, while recapturing the sense of nationalism that has helped make this country so great.

Or perhaps we will have learned a new lesson from the games we play: The wars of sport are a much better reality than the wars we've come to know too well. The best wars are the ones that never begin.

Contributor Bio: Mike Corey

They shot the white girl first.

So it was for the first ever Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, perhaps the most iconic annual in the brief history of print journalism. But it is equally instructive in demonstrating journalism's 150-year rise and fall, blossoming before it was a sense of entertainment, and then taking a turn for the worse as muckraking and skin slowly surrounded the industry and forced the quality stuff into a virtual Thermopylae. It remains there still, fighting a massive army of cloned magazines and newspapers, indistinct and undistinguished all. But even the booby-tassled-horde that has made its living at grocery store checkout lines has begun to sag, as the internet gives readers access to more. And for free.

That plague long ago overtook television news, particularly after Rupert Murdoch decided that he didn't need broadcasters, but articulate models and actresses in order to draw a crowd, sprinkling in a few shock jocks to bring'em back for more. The Howard Stern School of Journalism.

This was once the industry I hoped to join while an undergraduate at Duke University. But during the 2004 presidential race, the indirectness of journalism dissuaded me from seeking it out as a career, and pushed me toward something that struck me as more urgent and satisfying: education. I still love to write—and am eager to do so with such a talented group of individuals on this blog—but have gone down a different path since my days as a sports and news magazine editor at Duke.

I moved back to Columbus, Ohio upon graduating, and began work at the Ohio Board of Regents as an educational consultant. This ambiguous term essentially meant that I was, euphemistically, a utility player willing to do whatever project was sent my way. I enjoyed it enough to pursue a master's in education administration, which I obtained from Ohio State in 2007. I then worked on a local political campaign for a few months, then at a non-profit called the Children's Hunger Alliance, and have since returned to the Board of Regents, where I will remain until fall when I will matriculate in law school.

Although my career has gone down a different path, I continue my writing hobby through aroundthecouch.com, a sports column for GoDuke and by being a member of the USBWA.

The rest you'll learn in time. In the meantime, enjoy the latest Swimsuit Issue. It hit newsstands Wednesday.