Classic lit for soldiers, football players and journalists

British boys schools and American military academies assign Homer as must-reading for plebs.
Soft young minds need the bloody joint-crunching of the Trojan War to juice up the impulse to wage war for queen and country or for flag and country.
Classical literature stands as the best military field manual ever written. How violent is the species human. Always has been.
Hand-to-hand combat starts in the mind that transforms what otherwise would be the anti-romantic, organized maiming of enemies into socially acceptable pretense of civility.
War is what Carl von Clausewitz called diplomacy by other means. How politically correct-sounding.
The NFL is gladiator society that will do until we next demonize another foreign enemy and set upon him with spear or pike or bayonet.
We have to be taught to hate, says a line in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Nah.
We have to be taught to transform hatred into battle and to settle between wars for their somewhat milder alternative, American football.
All the tactics and strategy and attempts to intellectualize the game -- or the battlefield -- cover up the effort to hurt the other guy before he can hurt you.
So I'd simply give freshmen and cadets chapter one of The Blind Side by narrative journalist Michael Lewis.
Journalists should read the passage to see the less banal side of sports and to envy the style of the writer. His timing and controlled release of information condenses the violence of pay-for-view bone-breaking into 12 white-knuckle pages.
They begin: "From the snap of the ball to the snap of of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five."
And the opening is prelude only -- a back story of how the left tackle position evolved to fend off the  bonecrusher Lawrence Taylor and his imitators coming after quarterbacks. By extension the account  explains how Michael Oher rose from impoverished obscurity to protect the blind side of his own Achilles every Sunday.
Everyone knows the book, because they saw Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock in the soft and sweet movie.
The flick is good. But the more serious, blood-spurting book is great narrative journalism (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009, ppb., 339 pages, $13.95), the kind that explains what you didn't know enough to ask about.
Oh, the ancient Homer is stick-to-the-ribs more filling as a writer.
But for bustin' up those ribs and teaching soldiers to soldier and players to play and writers to narrate, Michael Lewis produces a modern classic in war, uh, ahem, sports journalism

What media mean by Olympian glory and what that says about war and politics

Russia picked a fitting time for her little national aggression against Georgia – the Olympics.
What two better examples of nationalism run amok can you name than war and The Games?
When the media do their hype of combat to increase patriotic audiences, we call it “yellow journalism.”
Track and field and swim frenzy by reporters and editors and producers deserves as much scorn.
USA Today started the patriotic frenzy with banner headline worry over the “gold mining” on opening day.
CNN closed The Games two weeks later by fretting the USA merely had a higher overall medal count. China won more gold.
No less a legendary sports writer than Grantland Rice reminded us The Great Scorer will come not to write who won or lost but how we played the game.
Nowadays we are derided if we merely admire the lithe, smooth bodies of dedicated athletes doing their best in the global glare to make their athletic mark, any mark.
Nope. Gotta bring home the gold. Or don’t bother
Dorothy Rabinowitz, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist in The Wall Street Journal, condemned those of us mesmerized by the Olympics for their own value and not for “the national interest.”
She labeled as “Olympics-babble” the view that humanity has a higher standing than nationalism.
That WSJ scold especially chided actor Morgan Freeman for his warmly human Visa ad. Freeman called on us to root for athletes – not for the flag on their backs but “simply because they are human and we are human and that when they succeed, we succeed.”
Only the prophet Isaiah said it better when he pronounced we will study war no more.
The value of the Olympics is to glorify youth in peace instead of deadly conflict. Sports jingoism by the press cheapens The Games into a way to bide time until a real war comes along.
Armed conflict will come soon enough, as Russia proved. One reason is nationalism in the media.
Would I prefer a lack of patriotism? No. I’d prefer real national pride that doesn’t have to prove itself as Russia felt pushed to do in the Caucasus or as USA Today and CNN and Dorothy Rabinowitz measured for us by medals slung around Americans necks.
Now we’re leaving China for the national conventions in our domestic politics, another free fire zone. Politicians and some members of the press in that arena play on our patriotic fear at election time.
Unworthy anxiety forms the real basis for nationalism, not healthy self assurance.
Sen. Barack Obama – the Democrats’ great hope – recognizes our cultural weakness in his autobiographical Dreams from My Father: “Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped.”
We don’t have to think when we operate out of national fervor, only feel. We let the animal out of ourselves.
I’d prefer the media call us to live life gloriously, not revel in human failing by an enemy either at war or at The Games.