Saturday, January 3, 2015

New Year 2015


We begin this year on a couple of sour notes.

First, our beloved 49ers lost no time in parting company with their head coach Jim Harbaugh, following the last game of the current regular season.

To review Harbaugh's career, in brief, his tenure with the team lasted from 2011 to 2014. During that four year span, his combined record (the team's) was 44-19. For rookie coaches in the NFL, this is almost without precedent. Only one other head coach I can think of--x-49ers head coach George Seifert, who went 98-31, taking over Bill Walsh's team at the end of the 1980's, bears comparison, but with a very large caveat--particularly when you remember that Seifert took over a powerhouse, while Harbaugh came to a team mired in a decade of mediocrity.  

Jed York

A little history tells a pertinent story. When Eddie DeBartolo lost control of the 49ers, in 2000, the reigns were passed to his sister Marie Denise York. She and her husband, John York, a research pathologist, knew nothing about running a professional football team, and proceeded to mismanage the franchise into a 12-year slide, without a winning season. In 2008, the Yorks appointed their son, Jed, President of the team. Jed York, a finance and history major graduate of Notre Dame, had had no experience in sports, as a player, or a coach, or a sports teams manager. Nevertheless, he made a lucky choice in his new head coach in 2011, hiring Harbaugh away from the Stanford University Cardinal--and thus began the current four year run of winning. 



However, not long after beginning of the 2014 season, there were "leaked" reports from 49ers management, that there were severe disagreements between the team's management (York, and his assistant General Manager Trent Baalke), and Harbaugh. These began when the team's early season record was still very positive. The year before, Jed had "tweeted" a public apology for the team's failure to advance beyond the NFC championship game to the Super Bowl, "This performance wasn't acceptable." 

By mid-year 2014, a series of crippling injuries to some major stars on the team, as well as some poor offensive coaching schemes (an apparent wrong-headed attempt to turn scrambling quarterback Colin Kaepernick into a "pocket passer"), led to a series of losses, which in retrospect seem to have been, at least in part, a response to the very obvious mid-season attempts by York and Baalke to undermine Harbaugh's authority and reputation. The reported issue was Harbaugh's "abrasive" interpersonal style, a quality which would seem to have nothing whatever to do with the team's potential, or with the head coach's abilities as a field commander. In retrospect, it almost seems as if Harbaugh, and the team in general, had been deliberately "cut loose"--so that management would have a public "pretext" for replacing him, and turning over personnel at season's end. 

The Yorks have shown themselves to be rank amateurs in their management of the 49ers organization. Abandoning San Francisco, for a new stadium in San Jose, 30 miles south of their namesake city center, they've showed contempt and selfishness in all their dealings with the city, the media, and their own players. Ignoring the success their new head coach had brought to the team, they summarily dismissed him, in effect in mid-season, just to strut their power and hide their own incompetence--as far as anyone can surmise, simply because Harbaugh wouldn't kiss up. 

At this point, no one knows what the Yorks have in store. With Harbaugh now gone (to Michigan), it's expected that several high-profile veteran players will either be let go, or will themselves simply retire. After three trips to the penultimate play-off contest, and one unfortunate season, the 49ers are right back where they started under Jed York. It's a sad denouement to a relationship which had brought glory and gratitude to a team longing for respectability after a decade of shame. Jed York has proven, once and for all, that he's just a spoiled rich kid playing with lead soldiers in the converted nursery room. 

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Second, yesterday marked the effective beginning of the year for California State legislative measures. 

Right at the top of the list was a new law allowing "Undocumented [i.e., illegal] Immigrants" to acquire valid California Drivers' Licenses. As far as I know, there have been no legal challenges to this law, which is causing unprecedented backlogs and slowdowns in DMV offices around the state, clogged with Mexicans filing the new applications. But it is clear that this new provision conflicts directly with Federal immigration laws, which forbid illegals from maintaining legal presence in the U.S., without going through the legal process of obtaining visas, or applying for citizenship. 

How can a person residing illegally in the U.S., acquire a legal identification and driving permission, without triggering a pursuit by the U.S. Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, or Homeland Security? It's as if the State of California is setting itself up as a competing jurisdiction to our Federal Government, offering a kind of quasi-ersatz-American citizenship status, in direct violation of our nation's laws governing residence, citizenship and all the privileges pertaining thereto. 

As an American citizen, I would regard it as my right and duty to inform about any illegal whom I encounter in my work or daily life. If citizenship is to mean anything, it must be at the grass roots level, where ordinary law-abiding citizens stand with authorized law enforcement to prevent crime and violation. Granting foreign nationals a "free pass" to claim the rights and privileges which rightfully belong only to American citizens, is neither fair, nor acceptable. If you are here in the U.S. without papers, don't show up on my doorstep, or try to conduct business with me, because I'll report you. 



6 comments:

Curtis Faville said...

Posted by Conrad Didiodato:

"If you are here in the U.S. without papers, don't show up on my doorstep, or try to conduct business with me, because I'll report you"
Curtis,

firstly, Happy New Years to you and family;

secondly,perhaps Max Scheler can help us out of this problem of just how to respond to the presence of the 'other' at our borders. This seems to be a transnational phenomenon.

Is there, as the great phenomenologist says in The Nature of Sympathy, not always available to us a 'fellow-feeling' or 'vicarious understanding' of the plight of others (the homeless, dispossessed, persecuted) whereby response to them doesn't have to be of the "stay away from my borders or else" kind? Even in the absence of benevolence or love, can there not be open to the human heart at least a minimal identification with them.

I'm proposing a view of love that has nothing to do with 'feelings' but rather with duty to act (and I don't mean to sound Kantian in the least). It is possible to be actively engaged with people whom one may happen to find personally abhorrent and yet still work towards an amelioration of the problem.

I'm just trying to inject a little optimism into an otherwise pretty bleak 2015 New Years blog post.

Curtis Faville said...

Conrad:

I don't know whether Canadians see this immigration problem differently than we do down here.

Our media is incrementally being taken over by the pro-immigrant lobby, so that all we hear now is how beset these Central Americans are, and how we must open our hearts and our borders and our wallets up to them.

I'm no buying it. I think it's just greed and covetousness and lawlessness disguised as "asylum" and "refugee-ism".

I've never been "anti-" Mexican or anti- anything. Every man I meet I try to respect and regard as a potential friend. That goes for people I meet every day in my life.

But as public policy, I am a hawk on immigration. I'm a zero population advocate, and immigration is one very bad source of excess population growth. I can't help the rest of the world with their populations problem, but as an American I have every right to insist on controlled growth, and controlled immigration, hence I'm opposed to any policy which encourages it--no matter where people are coming from, or for what reason.

In my view this is not a humanitarian issue. It's a public relations campaign.

I ain't buyin' it. But I still consider myself a liberal humanitarian.

Ed Baker said...

most likely the advantage goes to the California government./ laws enforcement... a driver's license with a photo, and an address AND a tracking number ...

will be harder for one to remain "underground"

it 'feels' like this is mostly about getting votes,
and cheep workers .... who can be followed all the way to the Ca, State income tax counter ?

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Curtis,

by "liberal humanitarian" or "humanitarianism" I presume you mean a social ethic committed to things like aid to developing countries (Doctors without Borders, Homes for Habitat), UN peacekeeping (at which Canada once excelled), NGOs and other humanitarian relief efforts across the world. If you do, clearly your views on the Mexican refugees is inconsistent.

Scheler, who is credited with having first introduced the idea of humanitarianism (as part of a phenomenological analysis of 'affective relationships' in general)would never --as you have--separate "liberal humanitarianism", one of the greatest legacies of the contemporary Western world, from any concomitant notion of "public relations". He would have found the distinction abhorrent (as I do). He clearly makes any sort of humanitarianism tantamount to an act of love (even if the object of love looks suspiciously like special interest lobbying).

I guess what I'm saying, after Scheler, is that you ride slipshod over any notion of 'fellow-feeling', in fact denying the personhood of the suffering migrant workers. You've dehumanized by relegating them to the status of tools of some crass government propaganda campaign consonant with the views of the Obama administration. It's a short step from this to abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide etc

McAleer says it best in his Introduction to Scheler's work: "Public policy that lists persons as items in a utility calculation has inverted the value hierarchy and turned away from what has highest value, love and persons."

Curtis Faville said...

Posted by Conrad Didiodato:

Curtis,

by "liberal humanitarian" or "humanitarianism" I presume you mean a social ethic committed to things like aid to developing countries (Doctors without Borders, Homes for Habitat), UN peacekeeping (at which Canada once excelled), NGOs and other humanitarian relief efforts across the world. If you do, clearly your views on the Mexican refugees is inconsistent.

Scheler, who is credited with having first introduced the idea of humanitarianism (as part of a phenomenological analysis of 'affective relationships' in general)would never --as you have--separate "liberal humanitarianism", one of the greatest legacies of the contemporary Western world, from any concomitant notion of "public relations". He would have found the distinction abhorrent (as I do). He clearly makes humanitarianism tantamount to an act of love (even if the object of love looks suspiciously like special interest lobbying).

I guess what I'm saying, after Scheler, is that you ride slipshod over any notion of 'fellow-feeling', in fact denying the personhood of the suffering migrant workers. You've dehumanized by relegating them to the status of tools of some crass government propaganda campaign consonant with the views of the Obama administration. It's a short step from this to abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide etc

McAleer says it best in his Introduction to Scheler's work: "Public policy that lists persons as items in a utility calculation has inverted the value hierarchy and turned away from what has highest value, love and persons." If this is what you mean by "public policy" you cannot call yourself a "liberal humanitarian".

Curtis Faville said...

Conrad:

I don't know that it matters so much what we call ourselves--only that we believe in a coherent system of beliefs that can account for the important opinions we hold about significant issues.

With respect to humanitarian acts, any nation's foreign policy may include aid of various kinds, either in the service of a self-promoting interest, or as a purely altruistic gesture.

But immigration is a separate issue, fraught with complexities that mere "foreign aid" doesn't address.

I'm not joining humanitarian spirit with the spirit of advertising (or public relations). I do see this liberal humanitarianism being exploited by cynical foreign constituencies in an attempt to sway public opinion towards the benefit of foreign nationals, not because there is any new and sudden crisis, but simply because there are large numbers of people who simply want to come to America, and reap the benefits of our economic largesse.

There is nothing unusual about wanting to do that, and there is nothing objectionable about understanding the clear causes of that desire, which include poverty, corruption, social decay, crime, etc. (And none of those things are in any sense "new" or recent, with respect to Mexico or its neighbors to the South.)

This long ago ceased to be a context of "migrant workers". It hasn't been an agricultural seasonal phenomenon for decades. It is now a full-fledged refugee wave upon wave of lower middle class Central Americans seeking to secure American citizenship through the back door--through amnesty--not simply to be able to work, but to have all the fruits of a prosperous economy, and an orderly law-governed society.

I have no political bones to pick with respect to the Obama Administration. It does what it thinks is prudent and necessary. The real campaign has occurred through the American media, which has increasingly been taken over by apologists and promoters of Central American diaspora. They want open borders, and unlimited flow into America. They want America to fill up with immigrants, as soon as possible.

They evoke our guilt and so-called racism and selfishness, to move us to lower our immigration standards, so this can occur. And it's working. Public opinion has been turned around in the last 20 years, and Americans now are being convinced that we "need" millions of new Central American and Asian immigrants to "revitalize" our nation.

It is perfectly possible to "love" and cherish people, without wishing that our nation should fill up with the world's poor and bereft. Wanting to help a nation with its health crisis does not mean we want to "adopt" several hundreds of thousands of its citizens, as if they were orphans of the storm. Wanting Mexico to solve its economic and social welfare problems does not mean simply transporting its population into America. That isn't a solution; it's a recipe for massive social dislocation and trouble. Refugees cause enormous problems for a host country.