A Day In The Barmy Army

Jeld-Wen officials enshroud the Timbers Army in smoke, attempting to obscure all the middle fingers from TV viewers.

  OK, full disclosure: I should admit that I don’t have a history of being a soccer enthusiast. Nor would I try to claim to be one even now. This is due in large part to ignorance. There was no culture of soccer in my house growing up. I never played it as a kid because my friends and I were into Pokémon cards and Mario Party. Whenever soccer came on the television it was usually because I just happened to flip past it while searching for reruns of Batman.

Major League Soccer is on the rise, but the majority of Americans still haven’t bought into it. Soccer is, after all, a game about tension. Both teams poke and prod one another, searching for weaknesses before moving in for the kill. To the uninitiated, it would seem as if nothing is happening. But the tactics involved run far deeper than appearances warrant. Consider it this way: Think of football as the roller coaster ride that constantly dips and weaves at high speed in all directions, assaulting your senses with adrenaline for its duration. Soccer would be a long track that moves in one direction, but has probably three or four steep, exhilarating drops. The euphoria comes in bursts, and the excitement in the crowd builds over time before cascading over in a roaring torrent of hugs, cheers, and jubilee.

It is an electrifying buzz.

   
I only started to appreciate it after joining a city league team at the behest of my roommate at the time. I had no idea what I was doing, and I began watching soccer games to figure out how they worked. After playing in several games myself, I was humbled by the amazing levels of fitness the professionals attain. All they do is sprint for 90+ minutes and make plays on the fly.

The Portland Timbers have been around for a while, but the club only joined Major League Soccer in 2011. Their fan base is raucous and fiercely loyal. They pile into the Jeld-Wen stands with flags and scarves to spill beer on one another and launch fusillades of expletive-ridden hymns at the opposing team until their windpipes give out. This is soccer, and often there are long stretches where not much is going on, so the Timbers Army makes up for it by singing as many obnoxiously vulgar songs as possible while someone bangs away at a bass drum to keep the tempo.

Why, yes, this is a bratwurst wrapped in bacon with beer-soaked onions on a pretzel bun. Nope, I didn't eat it.*


*Lie

  It’s a brutal and unforgiving atmosphere. If any Timbers player takes a hard foul and remains on the ground for more than a few seconds, the entire stadium shrugs until he’s up on his feet. But if opposing players get the wind knocked out of them and stall the game, they receive boos and are relentlessly mocked as pussies. Chants of “There’s no pity in the Rose City,” and “Shoot him like a horse!” ring loud until play resumes.

   

So when an official makes a poor call, I can scream, “That’s fucking bullshit!” at the top of my lungs, and no one pays me any mind because they’re all doing the exact same thing – maybe with a sturdy middle finger or two held high for good measure.
    
Now, I absolutely loved being a part of the game day experience at Autzen Stadium. It was brilliant fun and will remain with me for the rest of my life. But I must say, after being on the proverbial leash of the Oregon Marching Band for five years, I took cathartic pleasure in being part of this completely unhinged form of cheering. I could never (openly) swear in uniform. I couldn’t balance a cup of Widmer Gold & Green in one hand while swinging a scarf above my head like a madman in the other. One could argue that the Autzen student section raises plenty of hell on its own. They do, but to a point. I see the Timbers Army as what a marriage between the student section and band would look like. As a band member, whenever the fans would cheer I had to play my instrument. If a particular call sucked and fans started booing, I still had to play my instrument. At the Timbers match I didn’t have to be a good sport. I didn’t have to play Mighty Oregon if something bad happened. Instead, I got to put my arm around the guy next to me and sway back and forth with everyone else, singing “Fuck’em All,” over and over again.

And my oh my, was it bliss.

Chewing It Over: Part 1

"(groan) We must be swift as a coursing river (groan) with all the strength of a great typhoon..."

During the Superbowl I watched the insanely chaotic preview for the upcoming Brad Pitt film, World War Z. It's the screen version of Max Brooks' novel, and I retched at the idea of yet another Hollywood adaptation that appears to grievously alter not only the events in the book, but the commentary and logic of it as well. So I decided that explaining my thoughts on the themes and ideas the book gets right would be a nice topic for my initial post – to be followed up with the worries I have about the Hollywood version, then perhaps later I'll fit in a review of the film upon its release.

Also, if you haven't already guessed, I'm kind of a zombie fan.

        
  Machiavellian Intelligence tells us to maximize success of ourselves in any social setting, achieving a higher level of "fitness" by utilizing the appropriate strategies as warranted by the present situation.  Following this, the protection of any success gained becomes the utmost priority.  A keen Machiavellian thinker might lie, coerce or kill their way to the social apex, all the while receiving overwhelming praise from - or instilling crippling fear in - those around them.  This ensures that no one, in any capacity, will threaten their position of dominance.  Theory of Mind describes how we think we interpret the thoughts of others, playing heavily into the two main strategies of Machiavellian Intelligence: deception and cooperation.  Additionally, Theory of Mind seeks to explain how we, as beings of consciousness and reason, often project such qualities upon objects, animals or entities that do not possess them.

             
When applying zombies to these ideas, it gives everything a refreshingly bizarre spin.  How do we humans, the most dominant species on Earth, deal with the presence of something that cannot be tricked, frightened or bargained with and whose sole purpose is to rip us apart?  And how do we project our qualities onto something that was us – that in many ways still is us – yet is definitively not us at all?

           
The novel version of World War Z explores these very questions from myriad perspectives.  It is a series of first-person accounts chronicling a decade-long struggle against the spread of an unidentified virus that, after killing its victims, reanimates them into roaming, flesh-eating monsters.  It realistically depicts the sociopolitical response that society would have to such a blatant violation of the natural world. There are elements of violence and horror, but this is primarily a book about human nature and social contract theory.

           
So, from this Machiavellian standpoint as far as zombies are concerned, the human race is pretty much fucked.  In the book, the complete collapse of civilization reduces the world's population to the vigilant and the dead, or dead-ish. These zombies do not have feelings.  They are not motivated by revenge; they are not motivated by anything.  They are, for all intents and purposes, a plague that causes a dilemma in Max Brooks' idea of Machiavellian strategy.  The walking dead being the outward threat that they are, it’s ironic that humans would turn inward and compete with one another not for increases in favor but for a better shot at survival.  

You remember what it was like, people just freaking out…boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved.  They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the…the whole shit storm that we now call ‘the Great Panic’; I think that killed more people than Zack [the zombies].

This, however, only solves the short-term goal of: “How do I survive on this day?” instead of the long-term goal of: “How do we as a species reclaim our dominance?”  The only way to achieve this is to use violence, but even here there are problems to overcome.  A human being can be dissuaded from maintaining conflict through several means: dissolution of morale, fear, and physical harm.  Aside from the destruction of the brain, zombies are immune to all of these.

Real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.  Break their spirit, that’s what every successful army goes for…But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed?  Not just won’t, but biologically can’t!

It is impossible to convince a zombie that you are not the one they want to eat, that it’s that guy over there who’s far tastier.  To this end, wiping out each and every one of them is the only way to improve social standing in a word dominated by the undead.

           
Now, getting rid of the living dead is hard enough, but learning how to cope with their very existence is another matter entirely.  After all, zombies were at one time human beings just like us, capable of thought and feeling.  What does it mean when we project ourselves onto our former selves, and can we go too far?  Are they still capable of forming thoughts like we can, even if they can’t act on them?  If they look like us, move like us but are not alive, do we treat them as objects or as creatures?

             
WWZ handles this subject in a few ways – some subtle, some not so subtle.  For instance, an earlier quote included the term “Zack”, which was used to describe the undead.  Giving the entity a name when science has none to offer is one way to control, or validate the existence of something that shouldn’t be.  The book describes another way that humans do this, though it’s a far more hellish method.

There’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation.  They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of.  Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it…It put them right over the edge.  They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people.

It’s a futile attempt at cooperating with the dominant Other, while at the same time qualifying its place in a world that at one point rejected even the possibility of its existence.  Even so, we cannot predict that zombies will act in ways similar to ourselves just because they look like us; they are an entirely different organism – husks of what they used to be and nothing more. WWZ understands that popular concepts of human interaction and behavioral psychology are warped by this fact considering zombies are ostensibly human on the outside, and thus difficult to separate from. We feel as if we should know exactly what they’re thinking, what drives them, and what they require to survive.  How humans fit into the equation might not be immediately clear at the inception of an actual zombie plague. Ultimately, though, the extent to which a man needs to socially evaluate the zombie advancing toward him will be less than the extent to which he can swing a 9 iron at its skull. We'll see if the film finds any balance between the two.