By official I don't mean just a soccer referee. I mean any person charged with being objective and fair and rendering decisions.
My wife, as a pre-school director, comes as close as anyone I have ever seen.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bomv-6CJSfM Or she works harder at it than anyone have ever seen because she is charged with such a critical responsibility: the introduction of families and children to schooling. If kids and families don't feel they are being treated fairly in their first moments of schooling then, well, all can be lost. You can never given up on seeking the ideal.
But nobody is perfectly objective and fair.
Still, we tend, particularly with kids and sports, to suggest there is a perfect and fair judge out there somewhere, a big Daddy, in quasi-psychoanalytic terms, that will set things right. Our culture constantly reinforces this for kids. Things turn out well enough for the little lion prince in the end, for example, nasty Uncle or no. Daddy, Mustapha, even turns up after his death, to help out little Simba. Julie Taymor, the director of The Lion King, is a terrific Shakespearean director, too. She is shrewd Freudian critic of a play like Hamlet where the hero looks to Dad for guidance.
The Titans win no matter the racist officials; so does the Hickory team in Hoosiers -- the hometown referee ultimately a mere blip on the road to American sports' purity.Whose your Daddy? says Denzel, Mustapha, and Gene Hackman.
Does this mean that we teach our kids to be perpetually suspicious or cynical about judging and refereeing? Of course not. This would cripple them, too, every bit as much as suggesting there is a Mustapha out there to solve Simba's problems in the end. In the words of former UK prime minister Tony Blair (another kind of Brit altogether), there has to be a "third way."
We are ready to teach them that talking or yelling at a ref may hurt their own cause. That's a step, I think, in the right direction.
There is a distinction in classics between the Greek philosophers and the Greek sophists or rhetoricians. The word rhetoric has fallen on hard times. We use it to mean empty sayings, but it actually refers to the art of persuasion.
Kids need to think more "rhetorically" -- that is, they need to think not so much about what is true or not true (philosophy) but what is persuasive and what is not persuasive (rhetoric). We are teaching them to be persuasive with referees. Can't we, then, to borrow Cookie's interrogatory cadence, push up a bit further? Girls are way better at this boys in the way that women are way better at it then men. Affect, the simple, visceral, but powerful feeling you get from someone, matters every bit as much as what is true or not.
Let's go back to Max and Len.
From one perspective, Max is the bad guy here who loses his temper and yells at the ref, this after trying to whip up the crowd to turn against the ref!! And in the last moments of the clip he ends up defending the stunning and physically gifted Hope Solo while drumming down poor Chaz who has overcome so, so much -- including being placed in the wrong body -- in life (talk about not fair! particularly in comparison with Hope whose physicality wows a world in all sorts of ways). Along the way Max also insults Len for being old. When Len says, "I have been doing this for 50 years" Max quickly responds "Maybe it is time for you to go" (Max is much sharper and quicker than he looks -- wish I could say the same for Karina). Carrie Anne, the girly girl judge, gets very upset: "you are being disrespectful."
From another perspective, Len was especially sharp in his remarks. He was rather obviously trying not just to assign a point total but to tell an audience that Hope really blew it. That is, Len was trying to persuade an audience rather than just judge. When Max starting whipping up the crowd, then, it was because Len "lost it" or forgot himself, not Max. Len was stepping outside his role as a technical judge. Max is perfectly entitled to get fan support in this competition. It is all, as they used to say in The Wire, in the game. When Len appealed to his own authority --" I have been doing this for fifty years" -- he was confronting the seemingly frustrating (for him) fact that he is not the sole judge in this competition. There is the voting audience (and, of course, the insufferable Carrie Anne and the weird little dude who fakes an Italian accent).
In brief, Len is not the sole authority -- although I suspect he does know a lot more about dance and dance competitions than anyone on the show. There is no big Daddy and Len is not it. And this clearly bugs Len. Old white men really, really hate to have their authority challenged. It may be particularly true that an old white man who started dancing relatively late (age 19) to recover from -- guess what? -- a soccer injury-- might have a particularly hard time with a girl soccer player and her coach talking back!!
Max was challenging his authority by whipping up the crowd and also reminding Len he is not considered sufficient to be the judge. Democratic procedures -- that is where lots of people vote and have a say -- is really, really hard. It challenges all our notions of expertise. If Len knows that much about dancing shouldn't he have the final say? Not in this country and not in this interactive century. Nobody would watch. Game over.
The game itself -- DWTS -- was threatened in a flash.
In calling out Len by so visibly whipping up the crowd Max reminded all of the limits of this game, its imperfection, its imperfect judging. All involved showed authentic, rather than TV, emotion for a second. This includes Hope, who was indignant at Len's judgement as she was at World Cup referee's who called her for moving prematurely on a penalty kick.
If the game is not fair it is not a game. It is an argument. It is a fight. And it is good for kids to know this.
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