Apocalypse

That’s right, never thought it would happen in my years at Stanford: we beat Cal AND USC. In the same year, no less. Jim Harbaugh is officially amazing; no questions asked or answered.

I may or may not have stayed up ‘till 4:30 in the morning for the final result, and it was all worth it. Good job, team.

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Outside of my little corner of the college football universe, the Apocalypse has descended on the BCS system. Actually this is a hyperbolic lie. In reality, we’ve seen several such situations in the past few years: dare I enumerate? I do. Ask Auburn, LSU, USC or Michigan (well, back when the system was screwing them) how they feel about the assertion that this year is the final offense against decency and good sense. The BCS is a building built out of shoddy materials: it keeps on rotting further and further, and there are some spectacular cracks and breakages, but the whole structure somehow, improbably endured despite its too-soon dilapidation. It needs a fix-up; that much is for sure.

This is obvious to most who follow the game and even most who don’t really follow the game that much either, so most of the debate now is marked by polemics of the “WHY WON’T THEY CHANGE? ISN’T IT OBVIOUS?” variety. The assumption of the polemics is true, but they assume that change is a much easier thing to achieve than it really is.

Right now, if you surveyed experts on any number of issues, you could find huge numbers of petty stupid inefficiencies and grand blunders whose solutions are relatively obvious: Besides the BCS, you’ve also got the War on Drugs, payroll taxes, the DMV, plastic bags (seriously!), voting, high fructose corn syrup and on and on and on. We’ve got our share of intractable problems in the world—hate, race relations and another infinite list—but sometimes it seems as if we could pull ourselves forward if only we had the will. That is the implication of those polemics at least.

The problem is that in any given system for it to survive long enough to be utterly exposed, must also serve someone’s interests, such that they would actively work against its disappearance or reform. So it is with the BCS: the contracts with the bowls and the university presidents have interests in keeping it around. Sure, it’s easy to say that the general welfare would be improved by casting it aside, but the problem is making the power structure’s grip on the system untenable.

One of the distinctive features of the present is that as the number of institutions multiplies in scope and complexity, so too does the number of people with vested interests, and their positions in society becomes progressively more obscure and hard to reach by ordinary means. Like, I bet you didn’t know that there was a powerful plastic bag lobby, huh? Behind most of these really dumb policies is some obscure retail group. And how are we supposed to redress our wrongs with them? No wonder some people have an obsession with the Trilateral Commission; they’ve got the wrong target but the right idea.

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I broke down. I went to McDonald’s. I haven’t had really, really good junky fries in a while. I apologize. I wish I could justify it in terms of an anthropological exploration or something—I mean, I can as I’m going to write about it as you can see with a quick glance down the page—but I mean, it’s McDonald’s. I didn’t even go for the free WiFi.

The MacDo’s (as they are referred to by the French) are well-patronized; it isn’t uncommon to see a phalanx of French kids, all toting huge bags traveling down the street. Profit-wise, I bet they’ve got a pretty good thing going.

But their interiors are curiously antiquated. Most of them look like holdouts from the 80’s—some of their menus are hand-lettered without electronic backing lights. Furthermore, the lines are really, really slow, and the tellers really patient—one guy talked on his cell phone for two minutes straight before actually, you know, ordering.

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It’s started to rain the past few days. The rain falls heavy and seems to dampen your entire body. The wind blew, today, from south to north, so that when I walked back with my dinner, I had to walk against the gusts of wind. It rained so much that my paper bag became sodden and wet, so much so that my drink fell through the bag when it became too weak.

I have this to reassure me: it’s no Rochester, NY winter, and thank god.