Ninety-Plus of Blue here again—some thoughts on the Philadelphia match to tide you over before Portland tonight. On what exactly we mean when we talk about our "evolution" and why these three matches could be a turning point.
On Evolution: NYCFC vs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached...they had been reared in the atmosphere of such heroic struggle that the stock must have been toughened somewhat. Left alone in that terrific orphanhood, they had clung together, supporting one another…and developing unknown powers in the stress of new necessity.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
The evolution metaphor has to be among the most overused, least considered, and potentially most pernicious of any common figures of speech in American culture. So I invoke it here carefully here in reference to NYCFC. The problem with the metaphor is that it’s rarely specified to include the absolute chance mutation that defines actual evolution, having been replaced, apparently, by the Pokémon1 version.2 It’s an even more peculiar version of evolution that Charlotte Perkins Gilman concocts in her 1915 novel Herland, a utopian novel in which a society of women who (re)produce parthenogenetically develops over the course of thousands of years, in the absence of men, into a perfectly functioning socialism. read more
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