It is not often that I would find a straight-line connection between an article in Sports Illustrated magazine and an essay on creativity and musical composition. But such happened recently when I first read a nice profile on arguably the NFL’s best tight end, Tony Gonzalez (August 3, 2009 issue). Gonzalez comments about his experience last football season as a member of the Kansas City Chiefs. The team lost a franchise record fourteen games against only two wins in 2008: “you do learn the most about yourself, you grow as a person, when you go through tough times.” Perhaps that sounds like fairly pedestrian wisdom, but most of us know the deep truth in it.
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“After spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don't. I force myself to remain still, to follow whatever I'm reading until the inevitable moment I give myself over to the flow. Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”
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Since September 11, 2001, there has been no shortage of scholarly attention focused on root causes and contemporary challenges posed by Muslim immigration patterns in Europe. The topic of western engagement with radical Islam has also been the subject of countless books and essays. I would think these topics should be of more than passing interest to all Americans, especially in light of our nation’s highly contestable and costly responses to terrorism. The implications of the Islamic immigrant tidal wave in Western Europe remain unclear but surely will affect US foreign policy and American cultural life well into the future.
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