accustom

Iowa State women's basketball: Alexa Middleton balances fundamental and flash

For the past several days, Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly has texted his team at precisely 10:30 a.m. His message is not a motivational quote or encouragement for an upcoming game, rather it’s something much more practical.

“Tip-off,” the text says, as Fennelly tries to accustom his team to their morning game at Oklahoma on Wednesday. The Sooners (6-11, 2-12 in the Big 12) and No. 20 Cyclones (19-6, 9-4) will play in front of a crowd of elementary school kids on field trips during the contest, which tips off at 10:30.

“It’s definitely be different. It’ll feel kind of like AAU days,” senior point guard Alexa Middleton said.

The last time the two teams met, on Jan. 19, ISU ran OU out of Hilton with a 104-78 rout. The Cyclones were especially sharp offensively that game, with the exception of taking care of the ball: ISU turned it over 18 times.

In the seven games since then, the Cyclones have turned it over just 11.1 times per outing. For the season, ISU is averaging 13.7 turnovers.

Fennelly attributes his team’s ability to take care of the ball to the two people who control it the most: Middleton and senior star Bridget Carleton.

“We always say, make the simple play, make the easy play. Don’t make the ESPN highlight play, and when players buy into that, I think that’s better,” Fennelly said.

Fennelly may preach fundamentals, but — as she has since her AAU days — Middleton sprinkles in highlight-reel plays here and there. The Cyclones' flashiest player, Middleton has made full-court passes, behind-the-back dishes and no-look dimes all season long.

“We’ve talked about it a few times on the bench,” Fennelly said about Middleton’s showy play with a laugh.

An example of that came during Saturday’s 89-67 win over Oklahoma State, when Middleton crossed over a defender, faked a pass to the corner that fooled another defender and finished a layup. It was dazzling, but it wasn’t dangerous.

“You can still make an ESPN play in a fundamental way. It doesn’t have to be done where you’re trying to create stuff that isn’t there,” Fennelly said last week.

Middleton is fourth in the Big 12 in assists per game (4.9), and eighth in turnovers (3.1). Recently, she’s been statistically even better: over her last seven contests, she’s averaging 6.8 assists per game.

Her playmaking ability is a balance of fundamental and flash, risk and reward.

“(Fennelly) knows how good I can be when I play fundamental, and I know that, too,” Middleton said. “It’s just one of those things, where some of those ‘crazy’ passes, as people call it, I’ve made those since I was in eighth grade, so it doesn’t really feel that risky to me.”

Overall, the Cyclones have done well in taking care of the basketball, and Fennelly noted that Middleton has improved in her ball security.

Plus, he admitted that exciting, attention-grabbing plays can be energizing.

“Certainly those plays are fun for our fans, and for the kids, too,” he said. “You’ve gotta have a few of those plays that lead to a layup, lead to a 3, because it’s not an alley-oop and someone dunks it. Those kind of plays are important in the flow of the game, as long as they’re done at the right time.”

The Machine Stops

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but that she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.

I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up. I stopped at a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains go by, and after a few minutes Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What are you waiting for?” I said that I was waiting for a steam train. Liz looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There haven’t been steam trains for more than forty years.”

I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops,” in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told. Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact. One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology, “I want to see you not through the Machine. . . . I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space. . . . We have lost a part of ourselves. . . . Cannot you see . . . that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?”

This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.

As one’s death draws near, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created. Here, at least, one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.

But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one’s best in return, is itself threatened. Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life, and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.

Such fears have been expressed at the highest intellectual and moral levels. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, is not a man given to apocalyptic thinking, but in 2003 he published a book called “Our Final Hour,” subtitled “A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—on Earth and Beyond.” More recently, Pope Francis published his remarkable encyclical “Laudato Si’, ” a deep consideration not only of human-induced climate change and widespread ecological disaster but of the desperate state of the poor and the growing threats of consumerism and misuse of technology. Traditional wars have now been joined by extremism, terrorism, genocide, and, in some cases, the deliberate destruction of our human heritage, of history and culture itself.

These threats, of course, concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

Nonetheless, I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth. While some see art as a bulwark of our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour. ♦

Where can you go in Pakistan and scream?

“Political power,” Mao says, “grows out of the barrel of the gun”. It means that no one can fancy grabbing the political power without having access to guns to violence. Since every state owns these means it claims to have a monopoly over violence – considered legal, hence justified.

Does it give the state a right to use these weapons at its whim? Those who hold the guns find one justification or another to use them. The irrationality of their logic does not impede the act but multiplies it. History bears testimony that these means of devastation were used more frequently and freely when peaceful options were still on the table. The idea is to accustom people to the culture of coercion. The process of this stylized barbarity does not remain limited to the sphere of labor but goes all the way to one’s hours of leisure.

The violence in the media from obscene language to uncultivated behavior is a systematically planned move to dehumanize the human thought. Once accustomed to the cultural barbarity, people become immune to the brutality the totalitarian state wants to inflict upon them.

The state stems from the concept of domination. Its main aim is to create a semblance of balance between the capital/capitalist and the labor/worker, which in its essence is self-contradictory, hence it has to resort to some form of coercion. Pakistani state is no exception but its tactics are different.

Soon after partition, the ruling elite of Pakistan realized that the founding argument on which the state came into being does not offer a sufficient reason for its maintenance. To overcome the national question arising from various nationalities living in Pakistan, the Hobbesian pill of an overdosed Islam was considered, a hackneyed but face-saving remedy though Jinnah had flirted with both secularism and religion.

It is fascinating to note that despite having a thorough knowledge of Bengali situation and old rivalry between Jinnah and Fazlul-Haq, the former opted to enforce Urdu upon those who long before partition had fought to secure their national language as their identity. From that moment onwards, coercion became the cornerstone of the national policy – toppling of provincial governments, incarceration of people as traitors and street battles against political opponents as subversive agents became a routine.

No one learns from history, hence condemned to repeat it – a tragedy unique to history. The massacre in Bengal, the persistent warfare against Baloch, and the devastation brought upon Pashtuns – first through an imported jihad and later by denial of their rights – was probably still not enough. The state has now launched a crackdown on unarmed people agitating for their basic rights. Brutality has no religion; once it tastes blood it does not stop until it vanquishes or is vanquished.

In the historical context, every struggle, regardless of its name, is a class struggle. It can be as distorted and regressive as the one led by the Taliban who are fighting under the banner of religion or it can be a national struggle for freedom from a hegemonic power or an emancipatory Marxist struggle for freedom of humanity from the might of capitalism. In all these struggles, one objective remains common – economic freedom. That is, freedom from a base life with the specter of scarcity and shadows of uncertainty lurking around.

In the historical context, every struggle, regardless of its name, is a class struggle. It can be as distorted and regressive as the one led by the Taliban who are fighting under the banner of religion or it can be a national struggle for freedom from a hegemonic power or an emancipatory Marxist struggle for freedom of humanity from the might of capitalism

It is interesting to note that in recent times whenever the Pakistani establishment created an artificial force to curb a genuine class movement, not only did it fail to undermine the latter but  the former in its dialectical relationships with the state too found itself struggling to attain the same objectives through circuitous way. The state ends up fighting a double- edged sword, the one that people snatch from the establishment and the other provided by the state to its auxiliary force which now has turned against its mentor.

In Pakistan, class contradictions have reached its acme and so has the state coercion. The complex the economic crisis becomes the stronger the national question will be. Since the largest province dominates the superstructure, it is easier for other nationalities to pinpoint the source of injustice. It is an unfortunate situation since the majority of people in the dominant province are equally oppressed. Yet it does not absolve the common people of the dominant province from their responsibility of joining hands with the oppressed communities to fight a final battle with the oppressor.

The battle is underway. The lines are drawn. Unarmed non-conformists are lining on one side and a totalitarian state with its might on the other. In the line of fire are the innocent protestors.  Barring the show of might and terror a state can go to pulverize its people there is nothing new in the tragedy of Sahiwal where a thirteen-year-old girl with her parents was slain in blatant violation of every law and the killers went scot-free. The lynching of Mashal was a message conveyed to the progressive forces to mind their limits. A year earlier Naqeeb’s murder and now Arman-Luni’s death allegedly a ‘target killing’ by police are violent attempts to bridle the nascent progressive forces demanding their basic rights.

A break has occurred. People “are reduced to that frankness, which no longer tolerates complicity (Marcuse). “Where can you scream, it is a serious question, where can you go in the society and scream?” The question posed by Laing remained hanging in long the air for when “sufferings become unendurable cries are no longer heard” (Brecht). Those who have lived to the point of tears have morphed their cries into a refusal, “their very existence has become an act of rebellion” (Camus).

“Justice”, Sartre says, “is a human issue and I do not need any God to teach it to me”. “Humanity will need another blood bath to abolish many of these injustices,” Gramsci heralds “and then it will be too late for the rulers to be sorry they left the horde in that state of ignorance and savagery they enjoy today”.

Times have changed, and people are not prepared to listen “to the reason of those who possess most tanks” and consider themselves “rational enough to build them” while demanding the people to “be rational enough to yield to them” (Horkheimer). People have realized that “If life exists on the other side of despair” now is the time to seek the other side.

While writing the obituary of the missing persons and the ones losing their lives in the struggle against infernal living conditions, for those pointing the barrel of guns Fanon has this advice: “in the time of helplessness”, he says, “murderous rampage becomes the collective unconscious of the colonized”. “Beware”, Sartre warns, “we have sown the wind”, they are “hurricane”. It seems they have realized “the secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life, is to live dangerously”. They are making sure, as they offer their lives, that their battle cry reaches to some receptive ears and some other hands reach out to take up the fluttering flag of their struggle.

In writing their obituary, beware, we may not be writing our own swan song as once we wrote in Bengal, in our former eastern wing.

Published in Daily Times, February 12th 2019.