The National Collegiate Almighty Association

“While the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems/It would be easier sometimes to change the past.”                                       --  Jackson Browne

What is the most powerful force on our planet, or maybe the cosmos?  Evidently it’s the NCAA.  Apparently they have two powers no other earthly body has: they can change the past and they can punish the dead.  Yes, the old Soviet Union and many other dictatorships have tried, airbrushing out the now-out-of-favor from photographs, altering historical records, and such.  Countries try to change the past: Turkey insists it never practiced genocide on the Armenians.  But there’s always someone, often the world’s majority, to call them on it.

In ancient times – what we used to call the Dark Ages -- some nations and religions would dig up corpses and drive stakes through their hearts, burn, or hang them for purported misdeeds.  You’d think we’d be beyond such primitive thinking. 

But the NCAA has borrowed from the playbooks of the Inquisition and the Stalinist era in its sanctions against Penn State.

True, sports authorities have sometimes changed the past, but with great inconsistency.  Sign a wrong scorecard in golf, and you either get the poorer score you signed, or forfeit if you signed a better score than you made. So your birdie is now a par, your par a bogie.  But that’s in the rulebook.  For decades, almost every sport refused to change a wrong call in the immediate past, except for umpires in tennis over-ruling line calls.  Now we have instant replay in one baseball event, and many football, basketball, and hockey situations.  But baseball refuses to correct an obviously wrong call, even when it costs a player a perfect game and does not alter the game’s outcome in any way.  And soccer absolutely will not sanction corrections, even though its referees have an impossible real-time job.

Sports also change the past when a violation has been discovered that falsifies the game’s outcome – ineligible players, drug enhancements, etc.  Of course they do this with total inconsistency too:  Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire still hold over a dozen home run records despite steroid use, while cyclists and Olympic athletes are stripped of their titles for the same infraction. 

In the so-called real world, very few democracies change the past because of later discoveries.  Imagine if they did: Colin Powell stripped of his rank because he later told the UN that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction on railroad cars.  Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s names removed from all airports and other public buildings if future documentation proves them complicit in Iran-Contra.  Let’s not even mention J. Edgar Hoover.

One fundamental principle in our civil and criminal society is that the dead cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds. When Ken Lay died in prison, his conviction was vacated, not because of any new evidence, but because his appeal had not run its course.  You can’t try a dead person, so you can’t convict him.  Innocent until proven guilty, especially in the afterlife.

Now we come to Penn State.  Because of allegations that involve one deceased coach and one former coach, a team loses thirteen years of games that it once won, perhaps the largest reality alteration in the history of sports. Who can doubt that the punishment is aimed primarily at the late Joe Paterno, condemned in the Freeh report post-mortem by the testimony of the indicted and disgraced living?  During the years of the forfeits, Penn State players won two Butkus awards (Lavar Arrington and Paul Poslusny).  If they made no  tackles in those years, do they forfeit the awards as well?  Does every Penn State player who was drafted in those years get undrafted because he did nothing during his college days?

            This is not to excuse anything done by Joe Paterno or anyone else at Penn State.  As Marc Antony said of Caesar, “If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath [he] answered for it.”  But to pursue a man beyond the grave serves no rational purpose: does the NCAA really think we need to deter future sports programs from similar behaviors?  Does it claim that if Penn State had turned in Sandusky in 2001, when the crime occurred in the athletic facility, its football program would have been devastated retroactively to 1999?  Do we benefit as a society by punishing the dead and by imagining that a declaration can alter history, even the small history that is college sports?  I think not.  The best thing about the NCAA decision is its fine of Penn State and designation of the money for abuse prevention.  Most of us hope we can change the future: only time travel movies try to do it by changing the past.

For the Birds

            No, I don’t spend all my time indoors reading and carping.  Sometimes I turn my curmudgeonry toward the natural world, especially out here on Martha’s Vineyard.  Last year, for example, I squirrel-proofed my bird feeders by stringing them (the feeders, not the squirrels) from thin wires between the house and a tree – six or more feet high. With no tightrope wide enough for their skills, the gray robbers are content to pick up what the birds drop, like the family dog lying under the chair of the sloppiest eater among the children.

            Victory – but short-lived.  After a week or so, the colorful array of finches, cardinals, bluejays, redwing blackbirds, chickadees and others were almost entirely driven off by a large and growing mob of grackles. 

Note to the pedantic: there is no term of venery for grackles as there is for owls (parliament), quail (bevy), starlings (murmuration), or, most hyperbolic, wrens (herd? Who thought that up?).  One blogger has suggested flash mob, which does capture their abruptness, but is much too pleasant.  I think they should be put in the lineup with their bigger cousins: a murder of crows and a mugging of grackles sounds about right to me.  Subnote: the British use “grackles” to refer to mobs of tourists – one of the best Britishisms since “bumph,” which means both toilet paper and any tedious pile of paper that requires your reluctant attention.

            But back to quiscalus quiscula. (The dictionary makers list this odd name as “of uncertain origin,” and suggest a possibility that it comes from the Spanish quisquilla, worthless fellow.  Sounds apt to me – maybe it all goes back to the Latin “who” as in “Who the hell are these birds anyway?”)  I called my good birding friend Peter Tacy in Connecticut, who advised me on these Mafiosi -- the black and purple combo suggests a similar fashion sense, doesn’t it?  Peter explained that grackles shift from insects to seeds after mating, that they do indeed take over feeders, and that they can not only chase off smaller birds, but also add them to their diets.  His suggested cure was to put out unattractive food, such as nyger thistle seeds, which worked well, except that almost no one else liked the seeds either and they got wet and clogged up the feeder.

            Fast forward to this June, when I opened up my wallet for a specifically designed nyger feeder (the little birds seem much happier with this one, especially a mated pair of finches who often dine together), and a large-bird-proof feeder that shuts down when anyone heavier than a cardinal tries to eat by perching on its ring.

            At last we have a winner, and a source of great entertainment.  The jays stop by occasionally, but give up almost instantly.  Everyone else dines successfully.  But best of all is watching a grackle spend several minutes trying to beat the system. 

            First he lands and tries a feeder hole, but it’s closed.  He studies it, then moves to the next hole. (There are six.) Still no joy.  He glances up again at the tube, where he sees plenty of seed.  So he looks into a hole, which of course is not a hole as long as he is perched.  Around the perching ring again a few times.  Now he stretches high up to stare right into the cylinder.  Looks like seed from here too, he must think.  Around the ring again, checking holes, up to look at the seed.  Then (for he doesn’t worry about predators as do almost all the other birds), he looks around for the culprit.  Am I being punked?  Where’s Ashton Kutcher?  Around again, check the holes, check the tube.  Then straight up as if imploring the Great Grackle in the Sky for help.  For a good five minutes I watch him, as smaller birds perch on the wire, balancing caution and hope.  Finally he gives up.  I turn my head to watch him fly, and when I snap back to the feeder, the house finches are already dining. 

            Ah, sweet triumph!  Anyone know a parallel strategy for the mob feeders at Morgan Stanley, Barclays, etc., etc.?