The National Hockey League lockout is now 93 days old, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight, at least not with both owners and the NHL Players Association turning to the legal system to maneuver through negotiations. That is certainly bad news for owners (the NHL is losing an estimated $20 million a day), for players who aren’t being paid, and for people who just want to spend their winter watching hockey.

It’s also bad news for Canadian food banks and charities, who are starting to report that their donation levels are down heading into the holidays. Many charities in Canada benefit from food drives run by teams and by bars and restaurants around arenas, but the lockout has prevented many of those food drives from happening, the Canadian Press reports:

“We’ve received calls from 23 different businesses, mostly sports bars who last year collected food for Sun Youth and this year, because of the strike, they have to lay off people,” said Tommy Kulczyk, director of emergency services at the Sun Youth community centre in Montreal.

“They’re not in the mood to do any kind of collection.”

He also noted that wives of Montreal Canadiens players had in past years organized a successful food drive at a Habs game tapping a potential 21,000 donors.

“It’s not going to happen this year.”

The obvious reaction here is to yell at players and owners to set aside their differences and get back on the ice, but I don’t think it’s useful or accurate to paint labor disputes in sports as simple fights between spoiled millionaires and billionaires. There are important issues at stake, particularly for the players who gave up so much in a lockout just eight years ago, and the outcome of a labor dispute is important whether it takes place in the NHL or at a construction company.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the nature of the sports industry means labor disputes and work stoppages can have huge impacts on people whose livelihood depends on the games being played, from arena workers to front office staff to people who depend on donations to charities. And when those games aren’t being played, it isn’t just the owners and players who have to deal with the consequences.

After Adam Lanza shot twenty young children and six of the teachers and administrators who helped educate them in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, the massacre renewed the long-dormant national debate about gun control, and sparked a complementary—and in some cases diversionary—discussion about mental health funding and treatment. But it’s also revived another old conversation, about whether video games are too violent, and whether they play a role in encouraging, desensitizing, and even preparing mass killers for their rampages.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the outgoing independent from Connecticut who has long crusaded against video game manufacturers, said in his appearance on Fox News Sunday that “The violence in the entertainment culture—particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera —does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent…Doesn’t make everybody more violent, but it’s a causative factor in some cases.” Obama senior strategist David Axelrod tweeted “”In NFL post-game: an ad for shoot ‘em up video game. All for curbing weapons of war. But shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?”

As Annalee Newitz reminds us in a valuable post at io9, there is no conclusive evidence that consuming violent games, movies, or comics leads to violent behavior in the real world. And at the Washington Post, Max Fischer ran the numbers on video game popularity in countries with much lower rates of gun violence, and found no correlation between game play and real-world violence. And there’s something deeply sophistic, in the absence of that evidence, about pivoting away from questions of effective gun control to proposals for video game regulation or condemnation. At least discussion of the mental health care system is part of a reasonable tapestry of efforts, including gun control, that we ought to be considering, if not a substitute for conversations about magazine capacities and the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. Blaming video games or any other kind of violent media for causing violence in the real world is a dodge from policy solutions. And it’s a dodge from the conversation we actually need to have about the state of our popular culture, and the profound fears about justice, disempowerment, and the state of civil society that are reflected in it. Video games are easy to target. The things that actually, truly frighten us are much harder.

One of the things I’ve been turning over in my mind in recent weeks is why the renaissance in our television is so specifically concerned with, as NPR’s Linda Holmes put it, “avoiding being violently killed” to the exclusion of other concerns like finding a satisfying place in the adult world, a loving, complimentary partner, doing good, honorable work, or being a good citizen in difficult circumstances. But as much as I feel somewhat burned out by the gouts of violence on my television, it’s true that questions about deploying violence, avoiding it, and its moral and immoral applications, permeate our political culture and lived experience today.

If you’re a woman in the United States, you’re taught from a young age that you have to be careful to avoid having sexual violence visited upon you. I cannot imagine being African-American and considering how to speak to my child about the possibility that his or her interactions with law enforcement may become deadly, or that in some areas of the country, people may feel entitled to shoot them dead on slight, and imagined, provocation. There are people in this country for whom the best way to pay for college is to enlist to be sent to a protracted war that carries with it a considerable risk that they will return maimed or brain injured. We are waging a war from the skies in which our political leadership appears to accept the deaths of children as a reasonable level of collateral damage, and where 17 percent of the pilots who actually have to carry out our drone strikes are considered “clinically distressed” by their work. As many commentators have usefully pointed out, the massacre in Newtown is deeply disturbing in part because the community was not afflicted by a constant blight of gun violence like the one that spread like rot over Chicago this summer. We’ve lived through a political election in which obvious references to the lynching of the first black president were excused away as jokes.
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The bridge is yours.

-The family gamer gift guide.

-Maureen Ryan on the characters in Homeland as drones.

-We’re getting a Zorro TV show because why not.

-How pro wrestling’s storytelling fell apart.

-More Studio Ghibli movies!

This post discusses plot points from the second season of Homeland.

“Why do I feel like this?” Carrie asks Brody as he walks off into the woods, in pursuit of a tentative hope of redemption, at the end of the second season of Homeland. “‘Cause you gave it up to me,” Brody tells her. “Completely,” Carrie confirms to him. It’s a sentiment I share about this show, which I loved without reservation in its first season. But my sentiments at the finish of this one are somewhat more complicated than “Goodbye, love.”

I thought in many respects, this episode felt like a deliberate punting of issues down the road. First, Quinn declined to kill Brody, and then, when it seemed like the episode might be setting Brody up for self-murder, a suicide that would end only his own life, and the continuing prospect of shame to his family, sent him off to have his name cleared. The show appears to feel very little regard for the fact that Brody murdered Vice President Walden. And though Brody cleared the way for Mike to take care of his family, it doesn’t seem to me like Homeland is prepared to jettison Brody’s family and clean the slate, given Dana’s miraculous deduction that her father did, in fact, intend to be a suicide bomber, and the release of Brody’s suicide tape, whether by al Qaeda or by the mole.

It seems relatively obvious at this point that Saul must be the mole. His off-hand offer to Carrie to accompany him to Abu Nazir’s send-off, combined with the close-up shots on his wary face as the bomb at the CIA exploded the moment after Brody realized that something was wrong, but before he made the connection as to what it could be, seems to confirm that, and to set up the conflict for the show’s third season. But it’s unclear to me what his motives are. Does he hate Estes so much? His joy when Mira told him she would return from Mumbai in the wake of the bombing, that almost greedy “Yes. Please,” was a lovely character moment, but this is an awfully complex way for Saul to try to heal his own broken homeland. I expect we’ll learn more about who Saul is, but I suspect I’m going to have a difficult time making the shift from understanding him as Carrie’s devoted mentor, and a man with a particular, ethical view of American intelligence, to seeing him as a criminal mastermind who says Kaddish for his victims out of a kind of twisted guilt.

I think I also have some trouble with the idea that this is going to become a show whose primary means of moral interrogation is the emotional torture of Carrie Mathison. It would be enough for me, rich, and touching, and terrifying and joyous enough to simply let Carrie try to figure out how to be a whole person as she was in the first, and best, episodes of this season. “She told my dad she was going to CVS, and she never came back,” Carrie tells Brody during their brief respite at the cabin, the only night they have together as a true, and genuinely loving couple. “He has what I have,he just wouldn’t get treated…There’d be a message in the stars and we’d have to buy a camper and drive out to the Great Lakes for the miracle.” That tragedy of her father’s mental illness is stakes enough, particularly when it expresses itself in Carrie’s self-denial. “I understand,” she explained of her mother’s decision. “Living with that can eat you up.” Her fear of what her mental illness might do to Brody, and of what it might mean to give her whole life to the CIA, would be enough to carry a season of the show for me. “Maybe I’m just not giving it away to this place,” she told Saul. “Maybe I want other things.”
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