Jonathan P. Baird

In honor of the Eagles Super Bowl appearance a week from tomorrow, I revised and updated an earlier piece written in 2013 about being a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Go Eagles! The piece was published under the title “Flying with the Eagles” 🦅

It is not easy being a Philadelphia Eagles fan while living in New England. You are definitely part of a minority group: a leper in Patriotland. I know there are some geographical transplants who successfully make the transition to rooting for the Patriots. This is harder when you come from Philadelphia and grew up as an Eagles fan.

Patriot fans are passionate but Eagles fans are rabid. I went to my first Eagles game in 1957 when I was 6 years old. The Eagles played the Detroit Lions at the old Shibe Park also known as Connie Mack Stadium. The Lions were led by legendary quarterback Bobby Layne.

The Eagles lost that day and I remember that I cried. It was the first of many losses to come that I witnessed. The Eagles are one of those NFL teams who have never won a Super Bowl, a fact never far from the minds of Eagles fans. In the Philadelphia mind, whatever our successes, we are still in sports hell.

I learned about football from my parents. Both were sports nuts. They were hardcore Philadelphia fans, especially the Eagles and Phillies. My dad got season’s tickets to Eagles’ games starting in the late 50’s. He and I used to park far away and schlep across the often freezing bridge to Franklin Field, the University of Pennsylvania stadium, where the Eagles played before they moved to the Vet.

I do want to mention the year 1960. There are some happy Philadelphia football memories. 1960 was the last time the Eagles won the NFL championship. It was in the era before Super Bowls. I was there with my dad, watching the Eagles beat the Packers 17-13.

Quarterback Norm Van Brocklin, nicknamed the Dutchman, led the Eagles. He was the MVP in 1960 and an eventual Hall of Famer in 1971.

I went to Friends Central School with Van Brocklin’s daughter, Karen. Norm seemed like a really nice guy. When he came to school in the afternoon to pick up Karen, he went to the school playground and he threw the football around with us kids. How cool was that! He also punted to a small army of students who wanted to receive his kicks. Van Brocklin actually was the Eagles punter, something you would never see today. There are not any pro quarterbacks who double as punters now.

Van Brocklin was surrounded by some great players. I would mention Chuck Bednarik who played both ways, center and middle linebacker; Tommy McDonald,a small, speedy and gifted wide receiver; and tight end Pete Retzlaff, a 5 time pro bowler. The Packers had Bart Starr, Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung. Ray Nitschke anchored their defense. That was a great win with Buck Shaw besting Vince Lombardi. That 1960 Eagles team was the only team to defeat the Packers in a playoff game during Vince Lombardi’s tenure as Packers’ head coach.

However, as I noted, that championship win has not been duplicated. I do not think Patriot fans can understand the feelings of Eagles fans because of all the Patriots success. Patriot fans are spoiled rotten. It is not just the Patriots. In the last decade, Boston has had the Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins all win as well. Before the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, it had been 25 years since any Philly team won a major sports championship. We are talking the 1983 Sixers with Doctor J and Moses Malone as the last winners. That qualifies as a sports drought.

After the 1960’s, I admit I lost interest in football for a long time. I was not at Franklin Field in 1968 when that famous episode in Eagles history happened: the booing of Santa Claus. It was December 15, 1968. The Eagles were 2-11 at the time. They had started the season 0-11. Still, 54,000 loyal Eagles fans showed up. The weather was miserable that day, snowing and sleeting. It was biting cold with a whipping wind chill. Fans had to clear their seats of three inches of snow and slush.

The half time show was supposed to feature Santa making an entrance on an ornate sleigh dragged by eight life-sized fiberglass reindeer. The sleigh float quickly got stuck in the field which had turned to muck. That necessitated the entrance of Santa by foot. The other problem was that the Santa who had been hired for that day was a no-show. Not clear whether Bad Santa was drunk but he did not appear. As a result, the Eagles entertainment director approached a young fan, Frank Olivo, who, in the holiday spirit, had dressed in a red corduroy Santa outfit. Olivo was recruited on the spot to step in and play Santa.

As the 50 piece brass band played “Here Comes Santa Claus”, Olivo entered the field between two columns of Eaglette cheerleaders who were dressed as elves. Olivo recalled what happened next:

“That’s when the booing started (when the band played “Here Comes Santa Claus”). At first, I was scared because it was so loud. But then I figured, hey, it was just good-natured teasing. I’m a Philadelphia fan, I knew what was what. I thought it was funny…
When I hit the end zone and the snow balls started, I was waving my finger at the crowd, saying, “You’re not getting anything for Christmas.”

Olivo says he was actually hit by several dozen snowballs. Maybe 100 were thrown. People joked that some of the people sitting in the upper deck were more accurate passers than the Eagles quarterback. Olivo commented that he was thankful for the snow. When the Eagles entertainment director asked if he wanted to play Santa the next year, he declined. “I told him, no way. If it doesn’t snow, they’ll probably throw beer bottles”.

I know the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl in 1981 under Dick Vermeil although ultimately they lost to the Raiders. I came back to football in the late 80’s/early 90’s. The names Randall Cunningham, Buddy Ryan and Reggie White come to mind. I remember the Fog Bowl in Chicago but not that much else about the team. I did go to a few games at the Vet.

The Vet itself deserves a bit of comment. It was famous for its concrete-like turf and its court in the basement. I never saw the Eagles Court. They were full service: starting in 1998, the Eagles had a court, a judge, and a jail at the stadium. Apparently, justice was dispensed quickly for drunk or unruly fans. Penalties included forcing offenders to give up season’s tickets, pay a $400 fine and sit in jail for the rest of the game. There is no Eagles Court at the Linc.

Philadelphia had so many lean years. All the losing seasons, bad coaches and bad teams are a blur to me. I do remember the name Joe Kuharich which I associate with multiple 2-12 years. Football got somewhat redefined during those years. A good year was not about making the playoffs. A good year would be defined as a year when the Eagles beat the Cowboys or Giants. To some extent, that is still true.

Then along came the Jeff Lurie/Andy Reid era. That changed the Eagles’ fortunes. From being a team of perennial losers, Reid turned the franchise around. Eagles’ fans became used to winning. For almost a decade, the Eagles were contenders and usually they were the best team in the NFC East.

While Eagles fans are typically critical of Reid and quarterback Donovan McNabb for not winning a Super Bowl, by any rational standard, this was a special time in Eagles history. They never won so consistently for so long. They made it to 5 conference championship games and 1 Super Bowl.

In his early years, Donovan was a genuinely exciting player. Besides having a great arm, he was a running threat. Repeated injuries took their toll on him but he was a tough guy. I remember him playing in 2002 against the Cardinals and throwing 4 TDs while playing on a broken ankle. Eagles fans tend to remember all the wormburners and the alleged throwing up in the Super Bowl. That is very uncharitable.

My dad used to call me on the phone multiple times during Eagles games to report on developments. That went on through almost the whole Andy Reid time in Philly until my dad died. We had some wonderful times following those games and the team. I knew a lot without watching myself because of my dad’s reports.

I am not going to say much about the Super Bowl loss to the Patriots. It could have gone the other way. It was a close game and the Eagles lost 24-21. That game was not Andy Reid’s finest hour.

One player I do want to mention – Brian Dawkins. For heart, grit, and for giving his all on the field, I would rate Dawk as possibly my favorite Eagle player of all time. I think that opinion is widely shared in Philadelphia.

Post-Andy Reid came the short-lived Chip Kelly era. Hailed as an offensive genius, Kelly had some success in his first two years. He helped develop Nick Foles into a fine quarterback. However, he made some devastatingly bad personnel moves, trading Lesean McCoy and letting Desean Jackson walk. He also let Jeremy Maclin go in free agency. Kelly became infamous for his autocratic tendencies and his lack of emotional intelligence. Jeff Lurie fired him before the end of the 2015 season.

Lurie then hired Doug Pederson, who had once been an Eagles quarterback and who was an Andy Reid assistant with the Chiefs. By any fair assessment, Pederson has done a remarkable job. Not only have the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl in his second year but they have a core of players who make them look very good for a decade to come. Here I have to mention Carson Wentz, a once in a generation player. What is not to love about that guy!

When Wentz was injured against the Rams, most observers gave the Eagles up for dead. Except the team never got that message. The defense, led by Fletcher Cox and Malcolm Jenkins, has been lights out. This team has a great vibe and resiliency, overcoming many injuries. While they are certainly big underdogs, that is nothing new. In the playoffs, they were underdogs against both the Falcons and the Vikings. The Eagles have embraced the underdog role, even wearing dog masks.

In the time since the Eagles have made it to the Super Bowl, I have heard much trash talk about how lunatic Eagles fans are. Supposedly, they are the worst-behaved fans in football. This has come from friends of mine who are Giants fans but I have also heard this from Boston TV news anchors. No doubt Giant and Patriot fans are angels but I would point to a Washington Post survey from a few years ago that looked at fan arrests at football games. Guess what? The Patriots averaged more arrests per season than the Eagles.The Giants averaged way more than either the Pats or the Eagles. No team fan base has cornered the market on bad behavior.

Before my dad died, he said, “Jonny, maybe you will get to see the Eagles win a Super Bowl.” Being fatalistic, I said, “Dad, I doubt it”. This team has made me a believer though.

Fly Eagles Fly!

Daniel Ellsberg is best known as the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers. In 1971, as a high government official, he photocopied thousands of pages of secret documents which showed successive administrations had lied to the public about the war in Vietnam. He shared the information with the New York Times and the Washington Post, becoming one of the most famous whistleblowers ever.

Unknown until recently was the fact that Ellsberg also photocopied thousands of pages about nuclear war planning. Ellsberg had had a long career at the highest levels of government before the Vietnam War. In his earlier incarnation, Ellsberg, a former Marine and protege of Henry Kissinger, worked as a Pentagon and White House consultant, drafting plans for nuclear war.

Ellsberg had passed the nuclear war planning documents onto his brother Harry for safe-keeping. Things were too hot for Ellsberg to keep the documents after the Pentagon Papers story broke. For taking the Pentagon Papers, the government charged Ellsberg under the Espionage Act of 1917. He faced a maximum prison sentence of 115 years.

Ellsberg’s brother first buried the papers in a cardboard box inside a green garbage bag in his compost pile. Worried that the FBI would come looking (which they did), Harry Ellsberg moved the papers to a hidden spot in his town trash dump in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

That summer, a near-hurricane, tropical storm Doria, hit Hastings-on-Hudson and caused the slope where the papers were buried to collapse down and over a roadway. Although much effort went into finding the papers, they were never found.

For 45 years, Ellsberg remained silent about the secret nuclear documents but now he has published a new book, The Doomsday Machine, which recounts his personal history around nuclear war planning as well as the evolution of his thinking.

The book is a revelation and it raises so many essential questions which have been very inadequately discussed about nuclear war, realistic appraisal of its consequences, and nuclear winter. Ellsberg places his discussion inside a history of the law of war since the early 20th century.

The book is appropriately named after the classic 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove. In the movie, an unhinged Air Force General, Jack D. Ripper, orders a nuclear first strike attack on the Soviet Union. The president contacts the Russian premier and finds out that they have created a doomsday device which will detonate automatically if there is any nuclear strike within the USSR.

The doomsday device cannot be disconnected or untriggered if there is an attack on the Russian homeland. The Russians advise that their device would result in a radioactive shroud which would wipe out all human and animal life and make the surface of the earth uninhabitable for 93 years.

The movie was so dead-on that Ellsberg saw it as a documentary.

A turning point for Ellsberg came in 1961, He had drafted a question for President Kennedy to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“If your plans for general (nuclear) war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

The answer came back in the form of a graph. The lowest number was 275 million. Within six months, after the nuclear attack, the number was 325 million.

Ellsberg drafted a follow-up question for the Joint Chiefs over the President’s signature. He asked for a total breakdown of global deaths from our attacks, including all countries that would be affected by fallout. The total death count was 600 million.

This was Ellsberg’s response:

“I remember what I thought when I first held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever…From that day on, I have had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan.”

Ellsberg’s revulsion propelled him into a later career as an anti-nuclear weapons activist. He came to believe the military had not thought through the consequences of nuclear war, minimizing and rationalizing the acute harm to the whole planet. Or, as he put it, they were in the grip of institutionalized madness.

The late, great sociologist, C. Wright Mills, would have called it “crackpot realism”.

In the Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg revisits episodes from the Cold War. As a bureaucratic in-fighter, he played a critical role in getting the Kennedy Administration to limit nuclear war plans. At the time, the military targetted every city in both the USSR and China with a population over 25,000 with at least one nuclear weapon.

Ellsberg argued that destruction of China should not be automatic if a war was only with the Soviet Union. The military wanted to attack China even if they had no role in a conflict. Some of our military leaders like Air Force General Curtis LeMay acted exactly like characters from Dr, Strangelove. Ellsberg did get the Kennedy Administration to exclude automatic attack on China in the event of armed conflict with the Soviet Union.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ellsberg shows how close we came to an all-out nuclear war. It was far closer than the public knew. The world barely escaped an almost unimagineable cataclysm.

Ellsberg busts mythologies like the president with his nuclear football being the only one who can launch a nuclear war. The military has many contingencies in the event communications are cut off. He shows there has been a much more widespread delegation of authority to launch. The picture is not reassuring.

Among the dangers, Ellsberg worries that a nuclear weapons launch could be triggered by a false alarm, a terrorist action, initiative by unauthorized individuals or a rash miscalculation in a military escalation scenario.

Ellsberg ends the book with a chapter on dismantling the doomsday machine. He recognizes the enormous institutional resistance to such an idea but he makes an extremely compelling argument for how it could be done. He specifies achievable reforms. He thinks it is astonishing that people will put up with more than a non-zero chance of a nuclear holocaust.

Possibly the most unsettling aspect of the Trump presidency has been the threat escalation with North Korea, a nuclear weapons state. Trump has been far too casual about the risks inherent in a nuclear war. He should not be talking about totally destroying any country or playing nuclear chicken. That is the height of irresponsibility.

The idea that a nuclear war would be limited and would not cause absolutely unacceptable consequences is folly and insane. The blowback from multiple nuclear explosions could cause a catastrophic nuclear winter where the living would envy the dead.

Have current American nuclear war planners arrived at a figure of how many millions dead would be acceptable to them? The public has a right to know the answer to that question.

Ellsberg has performed his greatest public service yet with the publication of this book.

This piece ran in the Concord Monitor on 1/14/2018 under the title “Poor is Poor”.

I read with interest John Meinhold’s opinion piece about white privilege that appeared in the Concord Monitor on December 14. Meinhold complained about the treatment of poor white folks in America. He argued that poor whites have been slurred as “white trash”. He noted the many white people who live in poverty and he questioned whether liberal Democrats have demonstrated caring about the struggles of poor whites.

I think Meinhold is right that poor whites have been denigrated and exploited. He is absolutely right that millions of white folks live in poverty. Since even before our nation’s founding, there have been masses of desperately poor white people living here. He is also right to complain that liberals, among others, have failed to sympathetically address poor whites.

Meinhold legitimately criticizes the idea that poor whites experience white privilege. I agree that is a wrong way to conceive of poor white folks’ experience.

When you are getting clobbered economically, you do not want to hear that you are somehow privileged.

I think it is a mistake to get into comparative victimology about whom has been exploited more. Poor whites and poor people of color have both been victimized by the 1%. Both compete for crumbs from the table. It is important to look at the different forms the exploitation has taken but I find the concept “white privilege” unhelpful to understanding.

The fact that black people experience compounded deprivations does not minimize the class oppression poor whites experience. It does not have to be one or the other and blacks and whites should not be set against each other as is the method of the alt-right and neo-nazis.

Those hate groups try to appeal to white people on the basis of their skin color. This is what the writer Kurt Vonnegut used to call a granfalloon, a group who affect a shared identity but whose mutual association is meaningless. Race haters are a discredited anachronism.

Both poor whites and people of color have been oppressed but the form of the oppression for each group is historically different.

Class remains the dirty, unacknowledged secret of American politics. We have been conditioned to think of America as a classless society, which is an absolute lie. Class remains a significant and often determinative fact of life.

Poor white people are not oppressed because of their skin color. Their oppression has everything to do with their class position in American society. In her book, White Trash, the historian, Nancy Isenberg, uncovers the untold story of how poor whites have been treated in America for the last 400 years.

Poor treatment is nothing new. While early American history typically highlights the Founding Fathers and their accomplishments, Isenberg explores colonial beginnings from the perspective of the poor. She shows that the great majority of early colonists were classified by the British as surplus population and expendable “rubbish”. The British hoped to use America as a dumping ground for populations they did not want.

Much public discussion of colonization in early America focuses on the quest for religious liberty. Isenberg shows that only a minority came to America for religious reasons. The British wanted to thin out their prisons and remove vagrants and beggars from their society and a forced one-way ticket to America was one way to do that.

Many poor whites came to America as indentured servants. They were forced to sign a contract by which they agreed to work for a certain number of years in exchange for the costly transportation to the new world. These contracts often lasted 4 to 7 years before they could be evaded. Other poor white immigrants came to escape debts that might have put them in prison. Many left tarnished reputations and economic failures behind hoping to make a fresh start in America.

While slavery brutally oppressed many hundreds of thousands in the late 18th century, very harsh labor conditions and early death awaited huge numbers of poor white migrants.

When Shays Rebellion, an uprising against aggressive tax and debt collection, occurred in western Massachusetts in 1786, Abigail Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson: “Ferment and commotion had brought forth an abundance of Rubbish”. Newpapers referred to the Shays insurgents as “ragamuffins of the earth”.

Isenberg traces the evolution of the terms “cracker” and “squatter”. She says the terms were shorthand for landless migrants. In early America, many poor whites disappeared into unsettled territory and would occupy land without a land title. She quotes a British officer on the subject of “crackers”: they were “great boasters”, a “lawless set of rascals on the frontier of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their place of abode”. They were recruited to be Indian fighters and they were known to be ruthless.

Isenberg says many poor whites in 19th century America lived as scavengers and vagrants. They worked as tenants and day laborers. They had no access to free soil or homesteads. They typically occupied poor quality land. Poor whites became known as “sandhillers” and “pineys” because they were consigned to the worst land.

By 1850, Isenberg says poor whites became a permanent class. She cites the infamous Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which had very negative implications for poor whites as well as for slaves. Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the majority opinion in Dred Scott, turned pedigree into a constitutional principle, finding that the Founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of bloodlines and racial stock. Poor whites were way below the slaveholders, landed gentry, and aristocrats who ruled.

The term “white trash” gained widespread use in the 1850’s. Proslavery Southerners defended the low station of poor whites as natural and a result of biology. Southern elites saw the white poor as riff raff. They feared class equality and educational literacy of both blacks and poor whites.

Later in the 19th century, the term “redneck” came into wider use, followed later by “trailer trash” and “po’ white trash”. The racist actions of some poor whites during the civil rights movement gave these slurs more of a lease on life. These terms are still with us.

Over the last 100 years, pseudo-science has also played a role in justifying the mistreatment of poor whites. Eugenics divided America on the basis of good and bad blood. The rural South of poor illiterate whites were seen as the epitome of eugenic backwardness. Eugenics offered a convenient biological explanation to justify the terrible treatment of poor whites and people of color.

The exploitation of poor whites must never be used as an excuse for racism. For all people of conscience and awareness, given American history, the struggle against racism must always be a central struggle of the fight for justice. At the same time, attitudes that belittle poor whites are equally unacceptable.

I would say, to date, no political party has embraced poor whites or has advocated for them. Republican rhetoric masks their slavish devotion to corporate power and their 1% funders. I would acknowledge the Republicans have had some success in conning poor whites as they have tried to get the vote. The Democrats, on the other hand, have demonstrated cluelessness where poor whites are concerned. The Democrats have made a minimal effort to even seek that vote. Unfortunately, many liberals remain as committed to corporate power as the Republicans.

To have a chance to attract poor whites, the Democrats need to junk their corporate-friendly worldview and they need a populist message that critiques concentrated wealth and power. Too many liberal yuppies maintain an upper-middle class snobbery toward poor whites. It is no wonder the Democrats have earned a hostile reception.

Poor whites have long maintained a place of invisibility in America. Before anything can change, we all need to open our eyes and see them.