Correspondence
Correspondence MISSING LINCOLN I ATTENDED the unveiling of the Abraham Lincoln statue in Richmond on April 5, 2003, and found the statue's opponents to be more sinister than Andrew Ferguson...
...This, in turn, would result in a tighter schedule with more high quality match-ups...
...Only over the past decade have we begun to move beyond these notions in a meaningful way...
...RICHARD DINARDO Stafford, VA MY LEFT FOOTBALL IT IS NOT ENOUGH for Jeffrey H. Anderson, in his "Tocqueville and College Football" (Dec...
...Losers often write the history of wars, because they have so much more to explain...
...A college playoff, of course, would reduce greatly the value and significance of pseudo-sophisticated computer rating systems, such as that devised by Anderson...
...The other example would be the Spanish Civil War, where again the literature consists generally of an unending series of paeans to the Stalinist dupes who made up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade...
...They were: The eastern theater was the only one that mattered...
...If garbage comes out of a computer, it is because some computer programmer put garbage in...
...29, 2003 / Jan...
...Nor does Anderson tell us how he has determined that fans want a "panel of experts" to determine team standings...
...I didn't hear anyone say the statue looked small, but, then again, it was hard to hear anything at the moment of unveiling because of the yells and catcalls of the statue's opponents...
...The advantage of writing first is that it allows those writers to frame the issues...
...5, 2004...
...W WALTER HEARNE Alexandria, VA I HAVE SEEN many authors stretch to make some quote of Tocqueville's relevant to a thesis, but Jeffrey H. Anderson takes the cake...
...the union prevailed solely by sheer numerical superiority...
...EDWIN A. KILBURN Scottsdale, AZ...
...What the sportswriters and college coaches brought to the balloting for uSC as the number one team at the end of the regular season was something impossible for a computer to exercise—namely, judgment, which has nothing to do with politics or majority rule...
...The airplane towing the "Sic Semper Tyrannis" banner circled the park for over an hour, and one hard-looking young man, who made sure he was in the front row of spectators, wore a T-shirt proclaiming John Wilkes Booth to be an "American Hero...
...Robert E. Lee was a military genius with a Christ-like personality...
...29, 2003 / Jan...
...In fact, a playoff would likely make for a better regular season...
...But he brings up the subject of a potential playoff only to dismiss it, too, as symptomatic of the supposedly unique American tendency to ignore unintended consequences—in this case, a less dramatic regular season...
...Two other examples of history-by-losers are World War II in Europe, where an endless stream of memoirs by former German generals created the image of the tactically flawless German Army being done in by Allied material superiority and by Hitler, who, being conveniently dead, was blamed for everything that went wrong...
...In fact, it is only in the next-to-last paragraph of his article that he discusses what fans really want, as indicated by USA Today's polls: a playoff...
...But the problem with this truism is that, more often than not, it isn't true...
...These themes exerted great influence on many of the earlier scholarly students of the war, most notably Douglas Southall Freeman...
...Correspondence MISSING LINCOLN I ATTENDED the unveiling of the Abraham Lincoln statue in Richmond on April 5, 2003, and found the statue's opponents to be more sinister than Andrew Ferguson describes in "When Lincoln Returned to Richmond" (Dec...
...and, with Lee so elevated, his second-in-command, James Longstreet, had to be made the Confederacy's Judas Iscariot for his criticism of Lee's tactics at Gettysburg...
...BURRUS M. CARNAHAN Vienna, VA IN ANDREW FERGUSON'S "When Lincoln Returned to Richmond," Brag Bowling, one of the chief opponents of the Lincoln statue's unveiling, resorts to the old truism that "victors write the history...
...In the case of most ex-Confederates (there were some exceptions), all of these literary exertions, printed mostly in the pages of the Southern Historical Society Papers, Century magazine, and an endless stream of memoirs, was to develop four major themes...
...It's quite a stretch when he cites Tocqueville to defend the BCS computer program that put oklahoma into the national championship game, notwithstanding the fact that the Sooners had just been thrashed 35-7 by Kansas State for the Big 12 Conference championship...
...In the case of the Civil War, much of the initial writing after the war was done by former Confederates, who had to explain how a virtuous, God-fearing people, fighting for a righteous cause, could be whipped by a bunch of Yankee hirelings...
...5, 2004), to simply disagree with critics of college football's BCS system...
...instead, he must enlist a famous political philosopher in his effort to ascribe his opponents' arguments to defects in the American character...
...Most fans want a college champion to be determined in a manly fashion, on the field...
...It would lessen the pressure a team feels to go undefeated, and thus lessen the incentive a school has to pad its schedule with patsies...
...Anderson should consider the possibility that fans might well make the reasonable tradeoff of a less dramatic regular season for a more dramatic postseason with a genuine, undisputed champion...
...Not even Tocqueville can make that compute...
...It should go without saying that it is not possible to be the number one team in the country if that team is not at least the number one team in its conference...
Vol. 9 • January 2004 • No. 18
