MARRY ME, WHOEVER YOU ARE
If there is one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on, it is that the media is biased towards the opposing view. Conservatives long ago made a cliché out of the “liberal media bias”, and any liberal worth her salt can tell you that the mainstream media is owned and operated by the same corporations for whom the Grand Old Party is transforming America into a client state. I am not interested in asking which side is right, because that is a trick question designed by both sides to ensnare those foolhardy enough to wander into the trap. Both sides of the aisle adopt the pose of media bias victim, but if they can not convince you of their victim-hood, they will settle for a debate. Because once you are affixed to the sticky-trap of the media bias debate, you are not going anywhere that either side can’t keep an eye on you. When you enter a debate that can never be won, you have already lost. And what you have lost is the ability to ask the first question that should always be asked of politicians and their parties: What’s in this for them? In this set of particulars, what do both parties have to gain by portraying themselves as victims of the media?
Avoiding such bottomless pits as the futile media bias debate is where the rubber hits the road for the body politic of a democratic America. Citizens leaping into the abyss of the media bias debate enable political entities, both right and left in orientation, to concentrate on their real ambition, the consolidation and expansion of political power. Americans wishing to hold politicians accountable to the citizenry they purport to represent must remember that a magician distracts you with his right hand so you won’t see the tricks he’s up to with his left. Conservative and liberal politicians have us all arguing about the media over here, while they are both over there dividing up what belongs to us like kid brothers and sisters measuring who gets the bigger glass of milk.
Both liberals and conservatives are entrenched in the role of media bias victim because of the political ammunition accessible from the victim role. Donning the cloak of victimization infuses a political entity with greater potency, which more than makes up for the slight cloud of weakness that lingers over the victim. The potency of the victim flows from the pall cast over the alleged oppressor from the other side of the political spectrum. Right and left are so quick to paint themselves as victims in order to smear the opposition as oppressors. The universal desire by both ends of the political spectrum to be identified as victim of the media reflects how important holding the moral high ground remains in the war without guns that is contemporary American politics (see the attempted character assassinations of Bush via dubious National Guard duty and of Kerry by way of swift boat veterans as the central acts of violence in the political war without guns; so far the conservatives have better snipers). Holding the moral high ground is the sine qua non for success in American politics, and has been ever since the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock with their own brand of moral fervor. Seizing it gave liberals desegregation and the end of the Vietnam War, just as it fueled the success of the recent conservative campaigns for war in Iraq and the Patriot Act (note that liberals most often attempt to seize the moral high ground on the coattails of social justice, while conservatives lean heavily on the American public’s belief in the sanctity of patriotism-ergo the aptly titled “Patriot Act”).
When conservatives and liberals play the media victim role they resemble nothing more than a fraudulent employee wearing a neck brace to work in order to get workman’s compensation. The employee is not really hurt, but he knows that by portraying himself as injured by his employer he will be able to manipulate the employer to his own ends. The false wound grants true power. Have you ever faked an illness just to miss a day of work? Imagine what politicians are willing to fake to get their hands on their drug of choice, power.
The breadth of the myth of political entities as passive media victims is matched only by the depth of its absurdity. Political spin doctors are the most capable and calculating manipulators of media breathing air (ad wizards give them a run for their money, but ultimately it is easier to convince someone to buy a Coke than it is to convince him that you are the right guy to run his life). The media bias debate is perfect cover for the real battle by both right and left to more effectively manipulate the media to their own respective ends, a battle now fought to the (political) death. The real question is not whether right or left are the true victim of media bias, but whether right or left is the reigning victor in media manipulation.
Of course, the two party system guarantees both right and left a perpetual bout on the championship card. In real boxing, one or two losses send a fighter into retirement or obscurity. In American politics there are no real defeats, because no matter how many times the right or the left lose, they are right back in the ring for the next championship fight. As vicious as the war between right and left is on one level, with both sides vying to play the Don, on another level the never-ending skirmish between institutionalized right and left is actually a dance. As long as the two keep up their never-ending political tango they have the dance floor all to themselves, making American politics nothing more than an infinite 1950’s dance-a-thon, where the last couple dancing wins the prize.
In order to believe in the reality of their democracy, Americans focus exclusively on the war between right and left for Big Enchalada status. The fact that almost every American, whether Conservative or Liberal, believes that their side is the victim of media bias originates from our need to believe that our democracy is real, that our participation in elections has real consequences, that the future really is at stake when we cast our ballot. To accept that right and left are ultimately collaborators taking turns as Head Honcho would be to deflate the drama of political theater into farce. The dominant cultural myth of America is the greatness of our democracy. For Americans to continue to believe in the greatness of their democracy it must be increasingly infused with the meaning of war. American democracy needs the weight of war to hold it down. Otherwise, having severed its legitimate connection to the populace by failing to offer real choices, it would float away, a farce whose plot is lighter than air.
Americans are now fighting a war to establish “democracy” on the other side of the world. The war in Iraq is something of a wedding ceremony for war and American democracy, in a courtship that is at least as old as the military industrial complex. The difference between the war-without-guns to keep democracy real at home, and the war to make American democracy real in Iraq, is that we can use real guns in Iraq. The symbolic violence enacted by American democratic theater at home is no longer vivid enough to keep the American audience in its seats. Now we must spill the real blood of brown skinned Muslims to keep the show of American democracy in production; As ever, the show must go on. This week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has begun spying on Americans at home is the first indication that the blood spilled in Iraq will not suffice, and that the marriage between war and democracy in the Homeland will no longer be symbolic. Americans sang “Over there, over there” during World War I, but will soon be singing “Over here, over here” in the War (without end) On Terror, a war whose drumbeat has become the beating heart of American democracy.
To divorce democracy from war, Americans must remarry their own democracy. But, like any successful second marriage, this reborn marriage must tell a new story the second time around. The false divide between American right and left, encoded in the myth of media bias, is the lie that undid the first marriage. Americans, no longer able to make real choices for their country through the levers of democracy, became legally separated from both the right and the left, who had in the meantime married one another. It was the ultimate marriage of convenience, like a seventeenth century marriage between rival European royal families that sewed up the map for both of the involved clans. Polygamy has now ensued, as in order to finalize their divorce with the American citizenry , the right and the left have together now married war.
For a second marriage between Americans and democracy to work, it will have to be a lot like the movie Somersby, in which the Richard Gere who returned from war to Jodie Foster became the mensch he had never before been. In fact he may not have even been the same person at all. But that’s okay, because Americans are looking to remarry a mensch this time, and don’t really care if our new democracy isn’t really our old one. Power will always be seductive for politicians, but for a second marriage to work the bond between Americans and democracy must be strong enough for fidelity to trump seduction. If we can craft such a relationship between Americans and democracy, Jodie Foster can look that new democracy in the eye and say “I never loved him the way that I love you.”
Monday, December 19, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
Front Row Seats
Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks franchise,
gets under my craw whenever I see him seated directly behind his team’s bench during games. Initially I was annoyed at Cuban for interfering with my viewing pleasure whenever I happen to tune in the Mavs. But now I am really steamed at Cuban, because when I really thought about his spotlight grabbing ways my thoughts careened off of their expected destination, which was a proper lambasting of Cuban’s WWF-Ringside-Manager courtside shtick, and landed me face-to-face with the realization that religion and I have failed one another. Mr. Cuban, I was quite happy hiding this from myself, thank you very much. But let me explain.
Unspoken etiquette dictates that professional sports franchise owners watch their team’s games from a dignified distance, in the Owner’s Box, shielded from prying eyes and difficult, at the very least, for cameras to capture. This etiquette has fallen out of fashion in recent years, with violators such as the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones (is it something about Dallas?) making his way onto the Cowboys’ sideline in the closing minutes of close games. Jones could easily be accused of using his Cowboys platform as a vehicle for his own media celebrity, and his penchant for national TV commercial spots squelch any doubts about the man’s appetite for attention. And to be fair, George Steinbrenner obliterated any standards of owner behavior twenty-five years ago upon his fourth or fifth firing and rehiring of Billy Martin. All that said, no owner has ever before had the audacity to plant his puss in our faces on game day by actually sitting with his team for the entire game. Cuban does this, and somehow no one bats an eye. Cuban takes the less out of shameless self promotion, because there is only ever more Mark Cuban.
One of the smartest ideas in professional sports was one of the first, affixing the home city’s name to a franchise. The idea is so central to professional team sports that it is unthinkable that a franchise in North American big league sports would not have its city, region, or state emblazoned on its chest. My own Baltimore Orioles are the only Major League Baseball team that does not have its home city’s name or initials located somewhere on any of its uniforms. But the Orioles reasons for omitting Charm City references from team garb dovetail with the importance of geographical identity; By omitting Baltimore the Orioles somehow believe they are more likely to attract fans from the entire state of Maryland, and beyond. The Cowboys may be America’s team, but the Orioles have a vision of themselves as DelMarVa’s Team (that’s short for Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland to all you Mid-Atlantic neophytes). Doesn’t have quite the same ring as America’s Team, but a decade of cellar dwelling puts the O’s desire to conquer mighty Delaware in perspective.
But back to Mark Cuban. The point being that the more he hogs the camera, the more he reminds us all that the Mavericks are his team, and not the great citizens of Dallas and the surrounding suburbs’ team. By now it is impossible to think of the Mavericks without also thinking of Cuban. The Yankees have a big enough mythology to contain even George Steinbrenner, but outside of the Lakers and Celtics, no NBA team could withstand Cuban’s media onslaught without being engulfed by sheer Cuban-ness. The blue road jerseys may still say Dallas, but squint and it almost looks like they say Cuban.
The more the Mavericks belong to Cuban, the less they belong to Dallas. Professional sports franchises continue to be named after places because doing so maximizes revenue streams. If it did not, and teams thought they could get away with it, you would see the Pepsi Mets, or the Sony Vikings. Teams are not shy about naming their arenas after corporations, so let’s not kid ourselves about the sanctity of team names. But pro franchises understand that an individual fan’s ability to identify with a given team, and to shell out mucho dollars in the process, hinges on the fan’s belief that the players on the field somehow represent that fan.
Baltimoreans have a collective inferiority complex. When the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2000 it was like Baltimore was Rome for a day. For a second Baltimoreans were on top of the Titanic shouting “I’m the king of the world.” Baltimore’s chosen representatives had taken on and vanquished the best of the best, and brought the NFL’s crown back to Baltimore. Our boys won the day, and we bask in their glow. At Cuban’s current pace if his Mavericks ever win a title he might be the only one who shows up at the victory parade, because it will be his boys who won the day, and the people of Dallas will be talking about their Cowboys (like Steinbrenner and the Yankees, the Cowboys are too big for even Jerry Jones to engulf).
That is the basic argument I wanted to pin on Cuban. But the more I thought about the critique, that Cuban interferes with fans’ ability to identify with their team, the more I realized that the foundational premise of that critique was flawed. Upon further review, fans do not identify with the players on the field as their chosen representatives. Barbara Mikulski represents me in the United States Senate, and I identify with how cool it is that a little, liberal lady from a working class neighborhood in Baltimore has gone toe-to-toe with Helms, Thurmond, and Lott for the past twenty years. But I don’t run half-naked through the city streets painted in her campaign colors on the night she wins re-election. Thousands of people did just that when the Ravens won the Super Bowl in January 2001. I saw them with my own eyes, as I weaved my car slowly between them on the way to a little post-Super Bowl lovin’ from the lovely Ravens fan I had met before the conference championship game (needless to say, I did not pass up the chance to marry this sexy football fan).
If you did not know the Ravens had just won the Super Bowl you would have thought that the whole city had just done some really good cocaine (having never done cocaine, the only explanation of its effects that has ever resonated with me was that it is like you just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl). Some might say that such a reaction to a football game is kind of sad or pathetic. I might agree with them if I believed that what fans do is identify with their team. But something much more powerful is taking place than mere identification. To understand it is to understand why running naked through the streets may have been the only appropriate response to the Ravens triumph (unless you were a Redskins fan on your way to get naked inside your favorite new Ravens fan’s Baltimore row-house).
Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about how rooting for sports teams is ultimately rooting for laundry. The players and coaches now seem to stick around for the proverbial cup of coffee. Ravens coach Brian Billick has been around for eight years, which gives him the third longest coaching tenure in a thirty-two team league. And Billick will be lucky to be back for his ninth. Over time the only thing a fan sees year in and year out is the team uniform, Seinfeld’s laundry. If fans were simply identifying with their teams, this constant turnover would stunt their capacity to do so. Identifying with the other rests largely on the process of propinquity, whereby the more time we spend with someone the more we come to like her, to identify with her. This process takes time, and time is exactly what vagabond professional athletes and coaches are not able to give any one city. My dirty laundry usually spends two or three months on the floor in my bedroom before I give in and wash it, but my laundry just doesn’t grow on me the way the moody diabetic administrative assistant did after a year at my old job. We never really loved our teams because the players were part of the fabric of our communities, the reigning myth in Baltimore about the beloved old Colts. If that’s why Baltimoreans loved the Colts, than they wouldn’t be filling 70,000 plastic purple seats every Sunday to watch a bunch of guys with mansions in Atlanta.
When people watch sports they do not want the team in white shirts to beat the team in blue shirts because the team in white somehow represents them. They want the team in white shirts to win because while they are watching the game they are the team in white shirts. The game is as real to the fully invested viewer as it is to the players on the field. By this I do not mean to suggest that fans have the same experience of the action on the field as do the players. Instead, I am suggesting that to be fully invested in viewing sports is to have an experience as intense, as emotionally involved, as dramatic, and as real as the players on the field. My experience as a fan is different, but no less profound than that of the player on the field.
The word spectator has a connotation of passivity, one stated overtly by Reebok’s old slogan that “Life is not a spectator sport”, and also lurking there in Nike’s now iconic slogan of “Just do it.” The company’s shared message is that consumer’s of sports entertainment are little more than couch potatoes (full disclosure: I received a stuffed animal couch potato from my grandmother around the 6th grade, by which time I was already an avid consumer of sports entertainment). Of course, both companies’ bottom lines are dependent on the very behavior they are smirking at in their ads; just check how much money each company pays celebrity athletes to wear in competition, just so their logos can be seen by the very TV sports viewer that the companies openly disparage. Apparently the message resonates with the American public. Nike would not have kept the “Just do it” ad campaign going for the past twenty years if their ad wizards could not show that it was continuing to touch a cultural nerve. Most Americans love watching sports on TV, but it appears that most Americans have also bought into the myth that watching sports on TV makes them lazy slobs, who thereby need to purchase the gear worn by the people really engaged in life, the athletes. Collectively, Nike and Reebok’s real slogan is “Get a life”, which is exactly what they are telling American sports fans to do. Do I need to add that if Americans collectively followed this advice then Nike and Reebok would soon be out of business, for if we are all out there kayaking and rock climbing we will have no time to watch Lebron James dunk in his Nikes, and will surely soon forget that we need Nikes to kayak or rock climb in the first place? Nike and Reebok really want us to just keep on passively watching ball games on TV, but they want us to feel anxious about what horrible couch potatoes we are while doing so. Because the best way to rid one’s self of that anxiety is to purchase the shoes that will jumpstart a new active lifestyle, or at least give one the image of someone with an active lifestyle. This was what Spike Lee really meant when, on Nike’s behalf, he told us all “It’s the shoes.”
It is time to redeem the American sports viewing couch potato, because there is nothing passive about what I do when I watch Tar Heel basketball on TV. To understand what really happens when a passionate fan watches a ballgame we must beat a dead horse, but one that may hopefully be resuscitated by a fresh take. The old nag in question is the dreaded “death of the author”, a onetime radical school of literary criticism that should have been called the birth of the reader, but death sells more copy than birth ever has. The death, or later, the decentering of the author sought to play down the centrality of authorial majesty in order to shed light on the important role of the reader’s imagination engaged with the text. Though attention grabbing, the whole death of the author imagery ultimately did a disservice to the movement, because the author never disappears, she just shifts from star of the show to co-star, collaborating with the reader rather than dictating to him. It was all too easy to dismiss a trendy theory that denied the author her props, because we all know that no authors equals no books. The academics who wished to kill the author in theory were probably frustrated authors themselves, expressing through their theory a repressed desire to kill real-life successful authors.
Which is a shame because the move to establish readers as full and equal partners with authors is similar to our continuing need to establish women as full and equal partners in society, in that it is both long overdue and rich in potential healing. Readers of books, audiences of drama, and, yes, spectators of sports are the forgotten half of the creative equation. This imbalance is symbolized by the shadow that falls across the audience as the spotlight shines on the stage, and the darkness that shrouds fans surrounding the blazing playing field. Our fervent celebration of authors, actors, and athletes has led to the belief that creative work is their singular accomplishment, leaving audiences cast as mere passive consumers. The secret truth of art, and sport, is that drama exists in the collaborative space between artist (or athlete) and audience. Just as no authors equals no books, no audience equals no art.
The point is not that if a tree falls it does not make a sound if there is no one to hear it. I am suggesting the more radical notion that artist and audience collaborate in the very creation of art. I will go so far as to identify the artist as the quarterback in the creative process. But in the history of football, no quarterback has ever completed a pass without a receiver, making the audience the wide receiver in the creative process. It is no coincidence that scholarly work being done along these lines is known as literary reception theory.
It is also no coincidence that this scholarly work is being done in the realm of literature. The active creative work of the audience is most apparent in the creative encounter between author and reader, though it is no less true for actors and audience, and for athletes and fans. Readers best exhibit the creative work of audience by transcribing the printed page into a living imaginative world. The reality of collaboration rests on the truth that there is not one work of art called “Moby Dick”, but that instead there are as many millions of “Moby Dicks” as there are millions of readers who have staged that drama in their imaginations. An artist can but create the potential for art. It is only when creative work is encountered and engaged by audience that it is born into art.
The spectator’s collaboration with the drama of competitive sport is the most visceral. Contrasting with the novel or the play, the ballgame’s outcome is never scripted. It is the scripted nature of professional wrestling that certifies its status as theatre and not sport. We are drawn to competitive sports by the symbolic connection between the unknown of victory and defeat, and the unknown of our mortality, of our life and death. It is often said of a passionate sports fan that he “lives and dies” with his chosen team. I live and die with the North Carolina Tar Heels. I of course do not mean that I literally biologically die when the Tar Heels lose a game. But life is full of many deaths, not limited to the biological. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe understands this: “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” I might add, to lose to Duke is to die a little.
The inability to comprehend the truth of life’s many little deaths, and to function on the concrete level of biological death to the exclusion of all other realities, is at the core of the spread of literalist religions throughout the world. At the same time, literalist religions trade in fundamental truths that leave no room for the collaboration of audience that is as central to the creation of sacred spiritual experience as it is to the creation of art. The establishment of audience as full and equal partner in the creative act is central to any hope of reclaiming the world’s religions from the grasp of literalism that does not just render them meaningless, but makes them dangerous.
Religion, when successful, draws the believer into communication and ultimately creative collaboration with the sacred. No branch of Christianity in America today is successful in shepherding this basic religious experience to its congregants (I draw on the Christian example out of familiarity, but suspect that the general pattern applies to other religions as well). The literalist evangelicals, whose churches are bursting at the seams, have no intention of empowering a collaborative religious experience. Quite the opposite, as their stock in trade is received truth. Their growth in membership is testament to the seductive nature of literalist belief, and to how great the temptation that here, at last, are all the answers. The mainline Protestants, who are struggling to hold on to their members, and who do so largely through cultural inertia, have lost their ability to connect contemporary Americans to the sacred. And contemporary Americans have, in turn, either succumbed to the temptations of literalism or drifted off into American secularism, which is really American consumerism. In either case, Americans have largely abandoned their once meaningful churches.
I am one of these Americans. I was raised Episcopalian by my father, an Episcopal clergyman, and by my mother, a PhD theologian and professor of religion. As an adult I have found myself unable to connect to the sacred through the traditions of the Episcopal church. My response to this failure in collaboration has been to abandon my church.
One statement captures the heartbreaking failure of our traditional mainstream churches and at the same time contains the seed of their revival: “I am a spiritual person, I’m just not into organized religion.” I have heard it so many times that I do not doubt that this statement lives in 90% of the people who no longer or never did attend church, and who have not succumbed to literalist religion. This statement leaves the door open for some form of spiritual life. If mainstream religion is to once more be relevant in the lives of the people of this planet, if it is to avoid being swallowed by the flames of literalism, it must find new ways to feed the spiritual hunger that its current practices have left starving in the bulk of us. I submit that the redemption of our real (ie non-literalist) religions is entwined with the redemption of the sports viewing couch potato. Both depend on recognizing, honoring, and uplifting the collaborative, creative power of audience, be they sports fans or worshipers.
No human experience is more powerful than the flash of connecting with the sacred. Real churches, synagogues, and mosques will be bursting at the seams if they reclaim their right and joyful role of facilitating this flash, and cultivating the flash into a steady light. I believe they can and will, if and when the imbalance of artist, athlete, or religious celebrant over audience is corrected. The audience is ready to gaze directly into the celebrant’s eyes, as soon as the scales are balanced.
I owe Mark Cuban an apology. I see now that he is a player on the stage, and he needs me. Now that I have taken ownership of my power as audience, I see that Cuban and I are going to do great things together.
Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks franchise,
gets under my craw whenever I see him seated directly behind his team’s bench during games. Initially I was annoyed at Cuban for interfering with my viewing pleasure whenever I happen to tune in the Mavs. But now I am really steamed at Cuban, because when I really thought about his spotlight grabbing ways my thoughts careened off of their expected destination, which was a proper lambasting of Cuban’s WWF-Ringside-Manager courtside shtick, and landed me face-to-face with the realization that religion and I have failed one another. Mr. Cuban, I was quite happy hiding this from myself, thank you very much. But let me explain.
Unspoken etiquette dictates that professional sports franchise owners watch their team’s games from a dignified distance, in the Owner’s Box, shielded from prying eyes and difficult, at the very least, for cameras to capture. This etiquette has fallen out of fashion in recent years, with violators such as the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones (is it something about Dallas?) making his way onto the Cowboys’ sideline in the closing minutes of close games. Jones could easily be accused of using his Cowboys platform as a vehicle for his own media celebrity, and his penchant for national TV commercial spots squelch any doubts about the man’s appetite for attention. And to be fair, George Steinbrenner obliterated any standards of owner behavior twenty-five years ago upon his fourth or fifth firing and rehiring of Billy Martin. All that said, no owner has ever before had the audacity to plant his puss in our faces on game day by actually sitting with his team for the entire game. Cuban does this, and somehow no one bats an eye. Cuban takes the less out of shameless self promotion, because there is only ever more Mark Cuban.
One of the smartest ideas in professional sports was one of the first, affixing the home city’s name to a franchise. The idea is so central to professional team sports that it is unthinkable that a franchise in North American big league sports would not have its city, region, or state emblazoned on its chest. My own Baltimore Orioles are the only Major League Baseball team that does not have its home city’s name or initials located somewhere on any of its uniforms. But the Orioles reasons for omitting Charm City references from team garb dovetail with the importance of geographical identity; By omitting Baltimore the Orioles somehow believe they are more likely to attract fans from the entire state of Maryland, and beyond. The Cowboys may be America’s team, but the Orioles have a vision of themselves as DelMarVa’s Team (that’s short for Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland to all you Mid-Atlantic neophytes). Doesn’t have quite the same ring as America’s Team, but a decade of cellar dwelling puts the O’s desire to conquer mighty Delaware in perspective.
But back to Mark Cuban. The point being that the more he hogs the camera, the more he reminds us all that the Mavericks are his team, and not the great citizens of Dallas and the surrounding suburbs’ team. By now it is impossible to think of the Mavericks without also thinking of Cuban. The Yankees have a big enough mythology to contain even George Steinbrenner, but outside of the Lakers and Celtics, no NBA team could withstand Cuban’s media onslaught without being engulfed by sheer Cuban-ness. The blue road jerseys may still say Dallas, but squint and it almost looks like they say Cuban.
The more the Mavericks belong to Cuban, the less they belong to Dallas. Professional sports franchises continue to be named after places because doing so maximizes revenue streams. If it did not, and teams thought they could get away with it, you would see the Pepsi Mets, or the Sony Vikings. Teams are not shy about naming their arenas after corporations, so let’s not kid ourselves about the sanctity of team names. But pro franchises understand that an individual fan’s ability to identify with a given team, and to shell out mucho dollars in the process, hinges on the fan’s belief that the players on the field somehow represent that fan.
Baltimoreans have a collective inferiority complex. When the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2000 it was like Baltimore was Rome for a day. For a second Baltimoreans were on top of the Titanic shouting “I’m the king of the world.” Baltimore’s chosen representatives had taken on and vanquished the best of the best, and brought the NFL’s crown back to Baltimore. Our boys won the day, and we bask in their glow. At Cuban’s current pace if his Mavericks ever win a title he might be the only one who shows up at the victory parade, because it will be his boys who won the day, and the people of Dallas will be talking about their Cowboys (like Steinbrenner and the Yankees, the Cowboys are too big for even Jerry Jones to engulf).
That is the basic argument I wanted to pin on Cuban. But the more I thought about the critique, that Cuban interferes with fans’ ability to identify with their team, the more I realized that the foundational premise of that critique was flawed. Upon further review, fans do not identify with the players on the field as their chosen representatives. Barbara Mikulski represents me in the United States Senate, and I identify with how cool it is that a little, liberal lady from a working class neighborhood in Baltimore has gone toe-to-toe with Helms, Thurmond, and Lott for the past twenty years. But I don’t run half-naked through the city streets painted in her campaign colors on the night she wins re-election. Thousands of people did just that when the Ravens won the Super Bowl in January 2001. I saw them with my own eyes, as I weaved my car slowly between them on the way to a little post-Super Bowl lovin’ from the lovely Ravens fan I had met before the conference championship game (needless to say, I did not pass up the chance to marry this sexy football fan).
If you did not know the Ravens had just won the Super Bowl you would have thought that the whole city had just done some really good cocaine (having never done cocaine, the only explanation of its effects that has ever resonated with me was that it is like you just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl). Some might say that such a reaction to a football game is kind of sad or pathetic. I might agree with them if I believed that what fans do is identify with their team. But something much more powerful is taking place than mere identification. To understand it is to understand why running naked through the streets may have been the only appropriate response to the Ravens triumph (unless you were a Redskins fan on your way to get naked inside your favorite new Ravens fan’s Baltimore row-house).
Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about how rooting for sports teams is ultimately rooting for laundry. The players and coaches now seem to stick around for the proverbial cup of coffee. Ravens coach Brian Billick has been around for eight years, which gives him the third longest coaching tenure in a thirty-two team league. And Billick will be lucky to be back for his ninth. Over time the only thing a fan sees year in and year out is the team uniform, Seinfeld’s laundry. If fans were simply identifying with their teams, this constant turnover would stunt their capacity to do so. Identifying with the other rests largely on the process of propinquity, whereby the more time we spend with someone the more we come to like her, to identify with her. This process takes time, and time is exactly what vagabond professional athletes and coaches are not able to give any one city. My dirty laundry usually spends two or three months on the floor in my bedroom before I give in and wash it, but my laundry just doesn’t grow on me the way the moody diabetic administrative assistant did after a year at my old job. We never really loved our teams because the players were part of the fabric of our communities, the reigning myth in Baltimore about the beloved old Colts. If that’s why Baltimoreans loved the Colts, than they wouldn’t be filling 70,000 plastic purple seats every Sunday to watch a bunch of guys with mansions in Atlanta.
When people watch sports they do not want the team in white shirts to beat the team in blue shirts because the team in white somehow represents them. They want the team in white shirts to win because while they are watching the game they are the team in white shirts. The game is as real to the fully invested viewer as it is to the players on the field. By this I do not mean to suggest that fans have the same experience of the action on the field as do the players. Instead, I am suggesting that to be fully invested in viewing sports is to have an experience as intense, as emotionally involved, as dramatic, and as real as the players on the field. My experience as a fan is different, but no less profound than that of the player on the field.
The word spectator has a connotation of passivity, one stated overtly by Reebok’s old slogan that “Life is not a spectator sport”, and also lurking there in Nike’s now iconic slogan of “Just do it.” The company’s shared message is that consumer’s of sports entertainment are little more than couch potatoes (full disclosure: I received a stuffed animal couch potato from my grandmother around the 6th grade, by which time I was already an avid consumer of sports entertainment). Of course, both companies’ bottom lines are dependent on the very behavior they are smirking at in their ads; just check how much money each company pays celebrity athletes to wear in competition, just so their logos can be seen by the very TV sports viewer that the companies openly disparage. Apparently the message resonates with the American public. Nike would not have kept the “Just do it” ad campaign going for the past twenty years if their ad wizards could not show that it was continuing to touch a cultural nerve. Most Americans love watching sports on TV, but it appears that most Americans have also bought into the myth that watching sports on TV makes them lazy slobs, who thereby need to purchase the gear worn by the people really engaged in life, the athletes. Collectively, Nike and Reebok’s real slogan is “Get a life”, which is exactly what they are telling American sports fans to do. Do I need to add that if Americans collectively followed this advice then Nike and Reebok would soon be out of business, for if we are all out there kayaking and rock climbing we will have no time to watch Lebron James dunk in his Nikes, and will surely soon forget that we need Nikes to kayak or rock climb in the first place? Nike and Reebok really want us to just keep on passively watching ball games on TV, but they want us to feel anxious about what horrible couch potatoes we are while doing so. Because the best way to rid one’s self of that anxiety is to purchase the shoes that will jumpstart a new active lifestyle, or at least give one the image of someone with an active lifestyle. This was what Spike Lee really meant when, on Nike’s behalf, he told us all “It’s the shoes.”
It is time to redeem the American sports viewing couch potato, because there is nothing passive about what I do when I watch Tar Heel basketball on TV. To understand what really happens when a passionate fan watches a ballgame we must beat a dead horse, but one that may hopefully be resuscitated by a fresh take. The old nag in question is the dreaded “death of the author”, a onetime radical school of literary criticism that should have been called the birth of the reader, but death sells more copy than birth ever has. The death, or later, the decentering of the author sought to play down the centrality of authorial majesty in order to shed light on the important role of the reader’s imagination engaged with the text. Though attention grabbing, the whole death of the author imagery ultimately did a disservice to the movement, because the author never disappears, she just shifts from star of the show to co-star, collaborating with the reader rather than dictating to him. It was all too easy to dismiss a trendy theory that denied the author her props, because we all know that no authors equals no books. The academics who wished to kill the author in theory were probably frustrated authors themselves, expressing through their theory a repressed desire to kill real-life successful authors.
Which is a shame because the move to establish readers as full and equal partners with authors is similar to our continuing need to establish women as full and equal partners in society, in that it is both long overdue and rich in potential healing. Readers of books, audiences of drama, and, yes, spectators of sports are the forgotten half of the creative equation. This imbalance is symbolized by the shadow that falls across the audience as the spotlight shines on the stage, and the darkness that shrouds fans surrounding the blazing playing field. Our fervent celebration of authors, actors, and athletes has led to the belief that creative work is their singular accomplishment, leaving audiences cast as mere passive consumers. The secret truth of art, and sport, is that drama exists in the collaborative space between artist (or athlete) and audience. Just as no authors equals no books, no audience equals no art.
The point is not that if a tree falls it does not make a sound if there is no one to hear it. I am suggesting the more radical notion that artist and audience collaborate in the very creation of art. I will go so far as to identify the artist as the quarterback in the creative process. But in the history of football, no quarterback has ever completed a pass without a receiver, making the audience the wide receiver in the creative process. It is no coincidence that scholarly work being done along these lines is known as literary reception theory.
It is also no coincidence that this scholarly work is being done in the realm of literature. The active creative work of the audience is most apparent in the creative encounter between author and reader, though it is no less true for actors and audience, and for athletes and fans. Readers best exhibit the creative work of audience by transcribing the printed page into a living imaginative world. The reality of collaboration rests on the truth that there is not one work of art called “Moby Dick”, but that instead there are as many millions of “Moby Dicks” as there are millions of readers who have staged that drama in their imaginations. An artist can but create the potential for art. It is only when creative work is encountered and engaged by audience that it is born into art.
The spectator’s collaboration with the drama of competitive sport is the most visceral. Contrasting with the novel or the play, the ballgame’s outcome is never scripted. It is the scripted nature of professional wrestling that certifies its status as theatre and not sport. We are drawn to competitive sports by the symbolic connection between the unknown of victory and defeat, and the unknown of our mortality, of our life and death. It is often said of a passionate sports fan that he “lives and dies” with his chosen team. I live and die with the North Carolina Tar Heels. I of course do not mean that I literally biologically die when the Tar Heels lose a game. But life is full of many deaths, not limited to the biological. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe understands this: “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” I might add, to lose to Duke is to die a little.
The inability to comprehend the truth of life’s many little deaths, and to function on the concrete level of biological death to the exclusion of all other realities, is at the core of the spread of literalist religions throughout the world. At the same time, literalist religions trade in fundamental truths that leave no room for the collaboration of audience that is as central to the creation of sacred spiritual experience as it is to the creation of art. The establishment of audience as full and equal partner in the creative act is central to any hope of reclaiming the world’s religions from the grasp of literalism that does not just render them meaningless, but makes them dangerous.
Religion, when successful, draws the believer into communication and ultimately creative collaboration with the sacred. No branch of Christianity in America today is successful in shepherding this basic religious experience to its congregants (I draw on the Christian example out of familiarity, but suspect that the general pattern applies to other religions as well). The literalist evangelicals, whose churches are bursting at the seams, have no intention of empowering a collaborative religious experience. Quite the opposite, as their stock in trade is received truth. Their growth in membership is testament to the seductive nature of literalist belief, and to how great the temptation that here, at last, are all the answers. The mainline Protestants, who are struggling to hold on to their members, and who do so largely through cultural inertia, have lost their ability to connect contemporary Americans to the sacred. And contemporary Americans have, in turn, either succumbed to the temptations of literalism or drifted off into American secularism, which is really American consumerism. In either case, Americans have largely abandoned their once meaningful churches.
I am one of these Americans. I was raised Episcopalian by my father, an Episcopal clergyman, and by my mother, a PhD theologian and professor of religion. As an adult I have found myself unable to connect to the sacred through the traditions of the Episcopal church. My response to this failure in collaboration has been to abandon my church.
One statement captures the heartbreaking failure of our traditional mainstream churches and at the same time contains the seed of their revival: “I am a spiritual person, I’m just not into organized religion.” I have heard it so many times that I do not doubt that this statement lives in 90% of the people who no longer or never did attend church, and who have not succumbed to literalist religion. This statement leaves the door open for some form of spiritual life. If mainstream religion is to once more be relevant in the lives of the people of this planet, if it is to avoid being swallowed by the flames of literalism, it must find new ways to feed the spiritual hunger that its current practices have left starving in the bulk of us. I submit that the redemption of our real (ie non-literalist) religions is entwined with the redemption of the sports viewing couch potato. Both depend on recognizing, honoring, and uplifting the collaborative, creative power of audience, be they sports fans or worshipers.
No human experience is more powerful than the flash of connecting with the sacred. Real churches, synagogues, and mosques will be bursting at the seams if they reclaim their right and joyful role of facilitating this flash, and cultivating the flash into a steady light. I believe they can and will, if and when the imbalance of artist, athlete, or religious celebrant over audience is corrected. The audience is ready to gaze directly into the celebrant’s eyes, as soon as the scales are balanced.
I owe Mark Cuban an apology. I see now that he is a player on the stage, and he needs me. Now that I have taken ownership of my power as audience, I see that Cuban and I are going to do great things together.
Friday, December 02, 2005
The Ghosts of Hollywood
I may be a little late getting into the game, but I would like to try to get my head around why it felt like the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston-Angelina Jolie love triangle was happening in my own family, and why most everyone else I talk to felt this way too. God forbid my sister ever divorce her eminently likable husband for an irresistibly hunky fellow grad student down at the local coffee shop, but if she did I would at least feel like I have an emotional map to follow thanks to the roller coaster of feelings I’ve been through with Brad, Jen, and Angelina.
So, why do we all care so much? They are all three pleasing to look at on-screen, Jen with a remarkable freshness, and Brad and Angelina with Hall-Of-Fame caliber bone structure, and that certainly does not hurt. But the most important trait they share, and what everything else I am about to say rests on, is that they are good but not great actors. They are good actors, but they are great stars, and that is exactly how Hollywood wants it.
When was the last time you saw a stunning Hollywood movie (for me, The Matrix in 1999 I believe it was), or watched a truly original network television show (whenever they ended Seinfeld). Exceptions pop up periodically to prove the rule, but we get a seemingly endless stream of film and television entertainment that runs the gamut from mediocre to pretty good. I submit that the two dominant media of popular art, mainstream film and television, have slumped into their current doldrums by an accident of history, and that it has been the best thing to happen to Hollywood’s hold on America since the talkie.
Our intimacy with Brad, Jen, and Angelina has its roots in the emergence of the multiplex cinema and cable television, but if you had to finger a precise moment of conception it came on the day that Al Gore invented the internet. Multiplexes and cable TV radically increased the amount of space that Hollywood (which should be read as shorthand for the entertainment industry) had to fill with creative product. But the birth of the internet was truly like the Big Bang of a new universe, with the creation of literally infinite space for entertainment content. Hollywood has just as many talented people as it ever had, if not more. It is just that before multiplexes, DVD’s, cable, and the internet, the amount of space that entertainment media was expected to fill matched up roughly with the amount of talent necessary to fill the limited media outlets with quality product.
I bet if I was a fly on the wall in a Hollywood executive’s office in the early 1990’s, when the first eruptions of the “Age of Information” were about to transform the industry, I would have seen not a few 3-Xanax panic attacks as the reality hit that all of this space would have to be filled with content. How could any producer be expected to fill that much space with content that people would actually be willing to pay for? Hollywood spreads, and there was no way to stop it from filling the virgin media. Kudos to any producer who managed not to jump off the pier in Santa Monica, for within a few short years one single concept would hook Americans into their media like crack cocaine hooked our cities in the 1980’s. That concept: reality.
The concept may have been born by MTV’s “Real World”, blossomed with CBS’ “Survivor”, and now dominates the prime-time landscape. But I am talking about much more than that phenomenon known as “reality TV”. All of mainstream film and television has become window dressing, just entertaining enough to grab our attention to facilitate the real show in Hollywood, which is the reality show of celebrities’ “real” lives. Hollywood will never be able to fill an infinite media space with compelling entertainment, but Hollywood has solved that problem by creating an assembly-line approach to the creative process; Each of our entertainments is at its core the same Model T, if you will. Hollywood does not want or need to produce original or creative dramas, because the play is no longer the thing. The play is now just a cheap come-on line, but Americans have turned out to be suckers for a cheap come-on line. Perhaps all we ever wanted was to be voyeurs. But like locking your car helps keep an honest man honest, quality mainstream entertainment helped keep the American conversation relatively interesting for decades.
In America there is only one conversation, and it is about Hollywood. This is not so because we are shallow, but because we are too heterogeneous in our makeup to talk to each other about much else. We need to talk to each other about Hollywood if we are to connect. Without it, three questions into any conversation (How was your weekend?, How’s the family?, and How ‘bout this weather?) and we’re done. I don’t want to hear about your religion, I really don’t want to hear about your politics, and don’t start with the wooden duck decoy collection.
So, we talk about Hollywood, and Brad, Angelina, and Jen in particular, because not to talk about them would leave us all collectively mute (if you don’t believe me try a little experiment: go to a workplace lunchroom, where people talk to each other who would not be hanging out together if they didn’t share an employer- I guarantee you that if they are not complaining about their bosses they will be talking about Hollywood). But, much like its predecessor God, Hollywood is dead, struck down by the information superhighway that paved into our lives these past fifteen years. The Hollywood we now consume, the celebrity reality show, is roadkill.
But if the image of Americans as vultures pecking at a squished jack rabbit on an empty road in the Mojave Dessert between LA and Vegas is too grim, there is a perhaps more comfortable imagery ready at hand. My fellow Americans, we care so much about Brad, Angelina, and Jen because they are ghosts, and as ghosts must, they haunt us. Brad, Angelina, and Jen are the ghosts of the dead American (pop) culture (they are also the ghosts of Jack, Jackie, and Marilyn). They, and their lesser cousins (does anyone else gag when they are spooked by Kenny Chesney and Renee Zelwegger?) will continue to haunt us, and we will be stuck talking to each other about them, until a new, living culture, whether recognizably American or not, rises up to re-animate this big ghost town called America.
Until I catch wind of it, though, I will continue hiding from reality in my chosen sub-category of Hollywood, sports entertainment (what could be more haunting than watching my beloved Washington Redskins miss the playoffs year after year-perhaps they are haunted by their own racist mascot?). At least that way I have something to talk to my countrymen about.
I may be a little late getting into the game, but I would like to try to get my head around why it felt like the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston-Angelina Jolie love triangle was happening in my own family, and why most everyone else I talk to felt this way too. God forbid my sister ever divorce her eminently likable husband for an irresistibly hunky fellow grad student down at the local coffee shop, but if she did I would at least feel like I have an emotional map to follow thanks to the roller coaster of feelings I’ve been through with Brad, Jen, and Angelina.
So, why do we all care so much? They are all three pleasing to look at on-screen, Jen with a remarkable freshness, and Brad and Angelina with Hall-Of-Fame caliber bone structure, and that certainly does not hurt. But the most important trait they share, and what everything else I am about to say rests on, is that they are good but not great actors. They are good actors, but they are great stars, and that is exactly how Hollywood wants it.
When was the last time you saw a stunning Hollywood movie (for me, The Matrix in 1999 I believe it was), or watched a truly original network television show (whenever they ended Seinfeld). Exceptions pop up periodically to prove the rule, but we get a seemingly endless stream of film and television entertainment that runs the gamut from mediocre to pretty good. I submit that the two dominant media of popular art, mainstream film and television, have slumped into their current doldrums by an accident of history, and that it has been the best thing to happen to Hollywood’s hold on America since the talkie.
Our intimacy with Brad, Jen, and Angelina has its roots in the emergence of the multiplex cinema and cable television, but if you had to finger a precise moment of conception it came on the day that Al Gore invented the internet. Multiplexes and cable TV radically increased the amount of space that Hollywood (which should be read as shorthand for the entertainment industry) had to fill with creative product. But the birth of the internet was truly like the Big Bang of a new universe, with the creation of literally infinite space for entertainment content. Hollywood has just as many talented people as it ever had, if not more. It is just that before multiplexes, DVD’s, cable, and the internet, the amount of space that entertainment media was expected to fill matched up roughly with the amount of talent necessary to fill the limited media outlets with quality product.
I bet if I was a fly on the wall in a Hollywood executive’s office in the early 1990’s, when the first eruptions of the “Age of Information” were about to transform the industry, I would have seen not a few 3-Xanax panic attacks as the reality hit that all of this space would have to be filled with content. How could any producer be expected to fill that much space with content that people would actually be willing to pay for? Hollywood spreads, and there was no way to stop it from filling the virgin media. Kudos to any producer who managed not to jump off the pier in Santa Monica, for within a few short years one single concept would hook Americans into their media like crack cocaine hooked our cities in the 1980’s. That concept: reality.
The concept may have been born by MTV’s “Real World”, blossomed with CBS’ “Survivor”, and now dominates the prime-time landscape. But I am talking about much more than that phenomenon known as “reality TV”. All of mainstream film and television has become window dressing, just entertaining enough to grab our attention to facilitate the real show in Hollywood, which is the reality show of celebrities’ “real” lives. Hollywood will never be able to fill an infinite media space with compelling entertainment, but Hollywood has solved that problem by creating an assembly-line approach to the creative process; Each of our entertainments is at its core the same Model T, if you will. Hollywood does not want or need to produce original or creative dramas, because the play is no longer the thing. The play is now just a cheap come-on line, but Americans have turned out to be suckers for a cheap come-on line. Perhaps all we ever wanted was to be voyeurs. But like locking your car helps keep an honest man honest, quality mainstream entertainment helped keep the American conversation relatively interesting for decades.
In America there is only one conversation, and it is about Hollywood. This is not so because we are shallow, but because we are too heterogeneous in our makeup to talk to each other about much else. We need to talk to each other about Hollywood if we are to connect. Without it, three questions into any conversation (How was your weekend?, How’s the family?, and How ‘bout this weather?) and we’re done. I don’t want to hear about your religion, I really don’t want to hear about your politics, and don’t start with the wooden duck decoy collection.
So, we talk about Hollywood, and Brad, Angelina, and Jen in particular, because not to talk about them would leave us all collectively mute (if you don’t believe me try a little experiment: go to a workplace lunchroom, where people talk to each other who would not be hanging out together if they didn’t share an employer- I guarantee you that if they are not complaining about their bosses they will be talking about Hollywood). But, much like its predecessor God, Hollywood is dead, struck down by the information superhighway that paved into our lives these past fifteen years. The Hollywood we now consume, the celebrity reality show, is roadkill.
But if the image of Americans as vultures pecking at a squished jack rabbit on an empty road in the Mojave Dessert between LA and Vegas is too grim, there is a perhaps more comfortable imagery ready at hand. My fellow Americans, we care so much about Brad, Angelina, and Jen because they are ghosts, and as ghosts must, they haunt us. Brad, Angelina, and Jen are the ghosts of the dead American (pop) culture (they are also the ghosts of Jack, Jackie, and Marilyn). They, and their lesser cousins (does anyone else gag when they are spooked by Kenny Chesney and Renee Zelwegger?) will continue to haunt us, and we will be stuck talking to each other about them, until a new, living culture, whether recognizably American or not, rises up to re-animate this big ghost town called America.
Until I catch wind of it, though, I will continue hiding from reality in my chosen sub-category of Hollywood, sports entertainment (what could be more haunting than watching my beloved Washington Redskins miss the playoffs year after year-perhaps they are haunted by their own racist mascot?). At least that way I have something to talk to my countrymen about.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
GONE TODAY, HAIR TOMORROW
I heard a fascinating interview on Diane Rehm’s chat show this week. Diane was interviewing Ray Kurzweil, who was publicizing his new book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Based on the interview alone (plus the dust jacket, which I read at Barnes &Noble today) I can say that Kurzweil is one of the great optimists I have ever encountered. Among other pending exploits, he expects modern science to cure cancer, arrest and reverse the aging process, and empower the elimination of poverty. Big deal, right? To some degree we all expect science to work some miracle cures in the future, just as it cured polio and landed us on the moon in the past. What makes Kurzweil’s optimism so breathtaking is that he says these changes will occur in the next 15 to 20 years.
All of these developments are part of what Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity”. If Kurzweil fails at everything else he can always sell that term, “the singularity”, to Hollywood; I can already see Keanu Reeves co-starring with Jodie Foster in shiny silver singlets in “Singularity: the Major Motion Picture”. But for now Kurzweil’s singularity is a non-fiction term, albeit a sexy one, in that branch of thought known loosely as futurism. While the term singularity evokes the mystical-alien/human-union-sex scene in the pool in Cocoon, if I am interpreting it correctly it is another word for cyborg, among whose ranks numbers the decidedly less sexy Robocop (although we are left to wonder if Robocop’s, ahem, masculinity is intact). Whatever term you choose, Kurzweil is talking about the merger of human and machine. And Kurzweil’s merger is not metaphor, he’s not talking about the ubiquitous strolling teenager with cell phone cupped to ear. In Kurzweil’s vision we will have the mystical-union-sex from Cocoon, but instead of having it with aliens we’ll be having it with our laptops. The singular in singularity means that my Toshiba and I will be one Singular entity.
Kurzweil’s optimism regarding humanity’s future relationship with machines is in stark contrast to the script adhered to strictly by Hollywood. Both the original Terminator and Matrix films portray human and machine’s future as adversarial, with humanity in a war for its very survival. Hollywood makes billions playing off of our fears and anxieties, and the Terminator and Matrix films are no exception in their respective riffs on our growing reliance upon and vulnerability to our machines. But Kurzweil’s task as a futurist is not to scare the pants off us, but to predict the future as accurately as possible. Kurzweil’s outrageous optimism is singularly American; Only an American could have written this book, and that fact is ultimately more reliable than anything Kurzweil has predicted for the future. Kurzweil’s vision of the future may or may not come to pass, but the fact that he has such a vision, and that his vision is broadcast unabashedly through our mainstream media, is exactly why Lance Armstrong is the most important American alive today.
Lance Armstrong is the past and he is the future, at least as we live them both in the present in America. Here is all you need to know about Lance Armstrong’s biography to know why he is such a potent figure on the American landscape: 1) He had testicular cancer, which almost claimed his life. 2) He recovered from that cancer to not only ride again professionally as a cyclist, but to become the greatest cyclist of all time, winning an unprecedented 7 consecutive Tour De France championships. 3) A cloud of suspicion hangs over his accomplishments, as seemingly the entire French media is out to prove that Lance Armstrong cheated, by way of performance enhancing doping, to win France’s beloved bike race over and over.
That he pissed off the French in winning all those races is an added bonus for Armstrong’s US popularity, but I maintain that the three elements listed above are what really account for Armstrong’s central place in the American psyche. For those three elements, conjoined in the body and triumph of Armstrong, inject Armstrong into the very space that Kurzweil clears with the ferocity of his optimism.
Armstrong’s well publicized battle with testicular cancer grounds him precisely in the past that Kurzweil sees for us. Per Kurzweil, cancer, along with myriad diseases and the aging process itself, will be erased by a stroke of technology’s delete key. The one certainty that grounds all of human existence, mortality, will be expunged from the human storyline. Armstrong’s victory over cancer, then, makes him a link to our pending human past. That he overcame testicular cancer, a disease which by attacking the reproductive organs strikes directly at humanity’s heretofore only concrete means of transcending mortality, makes Armstrong’s defeat of cancer weightier still. In American iconography, Armstrong faced down mortality’s henchman at high noon, and proved quicker on the draw.
To understand Armstrong’s connection with Kurzweil’s human future we must tread rockier, more controversial ground. I want to begin with the disclaimer that I do not pretend knowledge of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence regarding performance enhancing doping (my opinion, which of course is just that, an opinion, is that the controversy is too murky for me to have a strong opinion one way or another; Armstrong’s consistent dominant results after a bout of nearly fatal cancer do raise one’s eyebrows, but the overzealous pursuit of Armstrong by what feels like the majority of the French population, and their thus far piddling results, tip the scales slightly back in Armstrong’s favor-but then again, I too am an American). And like the ultimate validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, the truth about Armstrong’s doping innocence or guilt is beside the point I am making here. Whether the accusations against Armstrong are true or not, the cloud of suspicion that envelops Armstrong is real.
It is the vaporous nature of this cloud of suspicion that is the secret fuel for Armstrong’s overwhelming popularity in America. Remember, Armstrong plays a sport with a negligible following in America. For comparison’s sake, American Greg Lemond won three Tour De France crowns in the 1980’s, including an Armstrong-esque inspiring win after being accidentally shot in the back on a hunting trip by his brother-in-law (talk about living symbolism; NFL football games on Thanksgiving Day exist for the sole purpose of preventing in-law shootings, “accidental” or otherwise; retiring to game, couch, and six-pack has saved countless lives). And Greg Lemond’s name carries about as much cultural currency as Jan-Michael Vincent (he of “Airwolf” fame; oh how I love helicopters).
So there is more going on here than meets the eye with this Lance Armstrong & America lovefest thing. Armstrong overcame cancer and won a few bike races, but somehow he’s shagging Sheryl Crowe(can I still say shagging, or is that too Austin Powers?). Rockers date actors, not jocks. Just ask Michael Phelps, he won six gold medals, a number only one count less than Armstrong’s seven Tour wins, in a sport with at least some visibility in America, and who has he been seen snogging in public? Nobody you or I have ever heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cancer. Remember Jon Kruk, the fat first baseman/outfielder for the Phillies ’93 pennant team? He overcame testicular cancer and I don’t see Nora Jones all hugged up on him. Sheryl Crowe should be dating the new Bond guy, not Lance Armstrong. But somehow, there Armstrong was at half-time in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day, watching his significant other Ms. Crowe do the half-time performance for all of us half passed out on our couches avoiding our in-laws, right where the camera could catch him.
Americans are too tactful to ever publicly proclaim that we love Lance Armstrong so much precisely because of, and absolutely not in spite of, the cloud of suspicion that hangs over his Tour victories. In our heart of hearts Americans have absolutely no problem with improved performance via science, be it on the sporting field or in the bedroom (which brings up another looming sporting figure, one Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for performance improving steroids and appeared in advertisements for performance improving Viagra, but the task of unpacking all that is for another day). Clouds of suspicion are just fine by us, an ever more literal minded American public. Until we see some CSI-style, irrefutable DNA-based evidence, we are all more than happy to enjoy the show. For evidence of this one need look no further than the bloated home run sluggers of turn-of-the-millennium era baseball. The steroid abuse of that era was obvious to the naked eye. But that did not stop the ratings parade, and the ad nauseam lionization of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and company. America could not get enough, as long as it was just a cloud of suspicion hanging over baseball. Once the steroids testing program was implemented, and the courtroom-style evidence began to roll in, America was forced to turn off the show, like a husband re-stashing the porn when he hears his wife pull up in the driveway at the end of girls’ night out. We are a moral, upstanding people after all, and we in no way support cheating of any kind.
At least that’s what we have to say when called out on the carpet. But our actions prior to the public unveiling of the steroids scandal tell us more about what we actually think and feel about scientifically improving human performance. Lance Armstrong’s cloud of suspicion remains intact, at least until the day the French tag some uncontestable forensic data on him. Until then, America will continue to love Lance under the cover of his cloud of suspicion. Under that cover what we are really in love with is the idea of perfecting ourselves, an idea voiced under the guise of futurism by Kurzweil. Lance Armstrong, because we do not have certainty whether he used performance enhancing drugs or not, is the ideal container for America’s hopes for the future, for a time when we are liberated from our very mortality . Should it ever be proven that Armstrong was a doper, than his usefulness for the American psyche will have passed, and he will shrink from our consciousness as rapidly as Sammy Sosa’s power numbers in the era of steroids testing. If it is somehow conclusively shown that Armstrong never doped, his cultural importance will likewise fade, though not as drastically, as he will still be cast, only in the much smaller part of aging sports hero (cynically, I also believe that his ability to date A-List rockers rests on his current cultural cache-for his and Crowe’s sake I hope I am wrong about that).
Armstrong’s significance is time-limited nevertheless. For the game that America is currently playing, that of publicly decrying the use of performance enhancing drugs (a public cry voiced symbolically by the US Congress’ investigation into steroids in professional sports; There is still no better barometer of what we can get away with admitting in public as the American political system) while secretly pinning our hopes for immortality on the science that delivers those drugs, is one that can not last. Whether Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, pandora’s box is already open, and Americans will soon be able to pop a pill to hit a homerun in the ballpark with as much freedom as they now pop them to hit one in the bedroom. Our old ideas of cheating, along with the entire playbook of ethics that applied to a world bounded on all sides by human mortality, will soon be out of date, if they are not already. Mortality may never disappear, but whether it takes 20 years or 200, it will come to mean something altogether different and will need a new set of ethics to guide humanity as we navigate the changes. So at some point Lance Armstrong will probably get to go back to being a champion cyclist who overcame cancer, but maybe by then there won’t be any cancer. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I was born way back in 1974.
I will close with one final observation about the Lance Armstrong phenomenon. It struck me when I was trying to come up with something to say about the yellow “Live Strong” Armstrong armbands that were briefly all the rage. I remembered that the arm band fad that had preceded Armstrong’s was none other than the “WWJD” armband. The WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do, as most of us all know by now. One figure famous for his relationship to mortality and immortality segued into another, right on our wrists. Interesting, don’t you think?
I heard a fascinating interview on Diane Rehm’s chat show this week. Diane was interviewing Ray Kurzweil, who was publicizing his new book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Based on the interview alone (plus the dust jacket, which I read at Barnes &Noble today) I can say that Kurzweil is one of the great optimists I have ever encountered. Among other pending exploits, he expects modern science to cure cancer, arrest and reverse the aging process, and empower the elimination of poverty. Big deal, right? To some degree we all expect science to work some miracle cures in the future, just as it cured polio and landed us on the moon in the past. What makes Kurzweil’s optimism so breathtaking is that he says these changes will occur in the next 15 to 20 years.
All of these developments are part of what Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity”. If Kurzweil fails at everything else he can always sell that term, “the singularity”, to Hollywood; I can already see Keanu Reeves co-starring with Jodie Foster in shiny silver singlets in “Singularity: the Major Motion Picture”. But for now Kurzweil’s singularity is a non-fiction term, albeit a sexy one, in that branch of thought known loosely as futurism. While the term singularity evokes the mystical-alien/human-union-sex scene in the pool in Cocoon, if I am interpreting it correctly it is another word for cyborg, among whose ranks numbers the decidedly less sexy Robocop (although we are left to wonder if Robocop’s, ahem, masculinity is intact). Whatever term you choose, Kurzweil is talking about the merger of human and machine. And Kurzweil’s merger is not metaphor, he’s not talking about the ubiquitous strolling teenager with cell phone cupped to ear. In Kurzweil’s vision we will have the mystical-union-sex from Cocoon, but instead of having it with aliens we’ll be having it with our laptops. The singular in singularity means that my Toshiba and I will be one Singular entity.
Kurzweil’s optimism regarding humanity’s future relationship with machines is in stark contrast to the script adhered to strictly by Hollywood. Both the original Terminator and Matrix films portray human and machine’s future as adversarial, with humanity in a war for its very survival. Hollywood makes billions playing off of our fears and anxieties, and the Terminator and Matrix films are no exception in their respective riffs on our growing reliance upon and vulnerability to our machines. But Kurzweil’s task as a futurist is not to scare the pants off us, but to predict the future as accurately as possible. Kurzweil’s outrageous optimism is singularly American; Only an American could have written this book, and that fact is ultimately more reliable than anything Kurzweil has predicted for the future. Kurzweil’s vision of the future may or may not come to pass, but the fact that he has such a vision, and that his vision is broadcast unabashedly through our mainstream media, is exactly why Lance Armstrong is the most important American alive today.
Lance Armstrong is the past and he is the future, at least as we live them both in the present in America. Here is all you need to know about Lance Armstrong’s biography to know why he is such a potent figure on the American landscape: 1) He had testicular cancer, which almost claimed his life. 2) He recovered from that cancer to not only ride again professionally as a cyclist, but to become the greatest cyclist of all time, winning an unprecedented 7 consecutive Tour De France championships. 3) A cloud of suspicion hangs over his accomplishments, as seemingly the entire French media is out to prove that Lance Armstrong cheated, by way of performance enhancing doping, to win France’s beloved bike race over and over.
That he pissed off the French in winning all those races is an added bonus for Armstrong’s US popularity, but I maintain that the three elements listed above are what really account for Armstrong’s central place in the American psyche. For those three elements, conjoined in the body and triumph of Armstrong, inject Armstrong into the very space that Kurzweil clears with the ferocity of his optimism.
Armstrong’s well publicized battle with testicular cancer grounds him precisely in the past that Kurzweil sees for us. Per Kurzweil, cancer, along with myriad diseases and the aging process itself, will be erased by a stroke of technology’s delete key. The one certainty that grounds all of human existence, mortality, will be expunged from the human storyline. Armstrong’s victory over cancer, then, makes him a link to our pending human past. That he overcame testicular cancer, a disease which by attacking the reproductive organs strikes directly at humanity’s heretofore only concrete means of transcending mortality, makes Armstrong’s defeat of cancer weightier still. In American iconography, Armstrong faced down mortality’s henchman at high noon, and proved quicker on the draw.
To understand Armstrong’s connection with Kurzweil’s human future we must tread rockier, more controversial ground. I want to begin with the disclaimer that I do not pretend knowledge of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence regarding performance enhancing doping (my opinion, which of course is just that, an opinion, is that the controversy is too murky for me to have a strong opinion one way or another; Armstrong’s consistent dominant results after a bout of nearly fatal cancer do raise one’s eyebrows, but the overzealous pursuit of Armstrong by what feels like the majority of the French population, and their thus far piddling results, tip the scales slightly back in Armstrong’s favor-but then again, I too am an American). And like the ultimate validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, the truth about Armstrong’s doping innocence or guilt is beside the point I am making here. Whether the accusations against Armstrong are true or not, the cloud of suspicion that envelops Armstrong is real.
It is the vaporous nature of this cloud of suspicion that is the secret fuel for Armstrong’s overwhelming popularity in America. Remember, Armstrong plays a sport with a negligible following in America. For comparison’s sake, American Greg Lemond won three Tour De France crowns in the 1980’s, including an Armstrong-esque inspiring win after being accidentally shot in the back on a hunting trip by his brother-in-law (talk about living symbolism; NFL football games on Thanksgiving Day exist for the sole purpose of preventing in-law shootings, “accidental” or otherwise; retiring to game, couch, and six-pack has saved countless lives). And Greg Lemond’s name carries about as much cultural currency as Jan-Michael Vincent (he of “Airwolf” fame; oh how I love helicopters).
So there is more going on here than meets the eye with this Lance Armstrong & America lovefest thing. Armstrong overcame cancer and won a few bike races, but somehow he’s shagging Sheryl Crowe(can I still say shagging, or is that too Austin Powers?). Rockers date actors, not jocks. Just ask Michael Phelps, he won six gold medals, a number only one count less than Armstrong’s seven Tour wins, in a sport with at least some visibility in America, and who has he been seen snogging in public? Nobody you or I have ever heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cancer. Remember Jon Kruk, the fat first baseman/outfielder for the Phillies ’93 pennant team? He overcame testicular cancer and I don’t see Nora Jones all hugged up on him. Sheryl Crowe should be dating the new Bond guy, not Lance Armstrong. But somehow, there Armstrong was at half-time in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day, watching his significant other Ms. Crowe do the half-time performance for all of us half passed out on our couches avoiding our in-laws, right where the camera could catch him.
Americans are too tactful to ever publicly proclaim that we love Lance Armstrong so much precisely because of, and absolutely not in spite of, the cloud of suspicion that hangs over his Tour victories. In our heart of hearts Americans have absolutely no problem with improved performance via science, be it on the sporting field or in the bedroom (which brings up another looming sporting figure, one Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for performance improving steroids and appeared in advertisements for performance improving Viagra, but the task of unpacking all that is for another day). Clouds of suspicion are just fine by us, an ever more literal minded American public. Until we see some CSI-style, irrefutable DNA-based evidence, we are all more than happy to enjoy the show. For evidence of this one need look no further than the bloated home run sluggers of turn-of-the-millennium era baseball. The steroid abuse of that era was obvious to the naked eye. But that did not stop the ratings parade, and the ad nauseam lionization of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and company. America could not get enough, as long as it was just a cloud of suspicion hanging over baseball. Once the steroids testing program was implemented, and the courtroom-style evidence began to roll in, America was forced to turn off the show, like a husband re-stashing the porn when he hears his wife pull up in the driveway at the end of girls’ night out. We are a moral, upstanding people after all, and we in no way support cheating of any kind.
At least that’s what we have to say when called out on the carpet. But our actions prior to the public unveiling of the steroids scandal tell us more about what we actually think and feel about scientifically improving human performance. Lance Armstrong’s cloud of suspicion remains intact, at least until the day the French tag some uncontestable forensic data on him. Until then, America will continue to love Lance under the cover of his cloud of suspicion. Under that cover what we are really in love with is the idea of perfecting ourselves, an idea voiced under the guise of futurism by Kurzweil. Lance Armstrong, because we do not have certainty whether he used performance enhancing drugs or not, is the ideal container for America’s hopes for the future, for a time when we are liberated from our very mortality . Should it ever be proven that Armstrong was a doper, than his usefulness for the American psyche will have passed, and he will shrink from our consciousness as rapidly as Sammy Sosa’s power numbers in the era of steroids testing. If it is somehow conclusively shown that Armstrong never doped, his cultural importance will likewise fade, though not as drastically, as he will still be cast, only in the much smaller part of aging sports hero (cynically, I also believe that his ability to date A-List rockers rests on his current cultural cache-for his and Crowe’s sake I hope I am wrong about that).
Armstrong’s significance is time-limited nevertheless. For the game that America is currently playing, that of publicly decrying the use of performance enhancing drugs (a public cry voiced symbolically by the US Congress’ investigation into steroids in professional sports; There is still no better barometer of what we can get away with admitting in public as the American political system) while secretly pinning our hopes for immortality on the science that delivers those drugs, is one that can not last. Whether Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, pandora’s box is already open, and Americans will soon be able to pop a pill to hit a homerun in the ballpark with as much freedom as they now pop them to hit one in the bedroom. Our old ideas of cheating, along with the entire playbook of ethics that applied to a world bounded on all sides by human mortality, will soon be out of date, if they are not already. Mortality may never disappear, but whether it takes 20 years or 200, it will come to mean something altogether different and will need a new set of ethics to guide humanity as we navigate the changes. So at some point Lance Armstrong will probably get to go back to being a champion cyclist who overcame cancer, but maybe by then there won’t be any cancer. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I was born way back in 1974.
I will close with one final observation about the Lance Armstrong phenomenon. It struck me when I was trying to come up with something to say about the yellow “Live Strong” Armstrong armbands that were briefly all the rage. I remembered that the arm band fad that had preceded Armstrong’s was none other than the “WWJD” armband. The WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do, as most of us all know by now. One figure famous for his relationship to mortality and immortality segued into another, right on our wrists. Interesting, don’t you think?
Thursday, November 24, 2005
I managed to catch a broadcast of my favorite television program the other day, ESPN's "Pardon The Interruption" (PTI), a rare feat these days due to parental duties for my one year old, who has a strict No-TV policy diligently policed by the author of that legislation, my lovely wife Jennifer. During this episode of PTI, the charmingly argumentative hosts of the program, Kornheiser and Wilbon, took a break from yelling at each other about the latest happenings in the male soap opera of sports entertainment and showed a clip of our President in Beijing, China. Mr. Bush had just finished some sort of photo-op/brief press conference for the gathered media, and attempted to exit stage right. Unfortunately for Mr. Bush he attempted to exit via a large, rather ornate set of red and gold doors, a pair of doors fit for an entrance to a palace or grand ballroom. Mr. Bush reached for the first of these doors without hesitation, without a doubt in his mind that it would open for him and allow a graceful exit from the stage. But the door was locked, or perhaps as a decorative door it just doesn't open. Undaunted, without missing a beat, Mr. Bush reached for the second, conjoined door. This kind of thing happens to me all the time, I'll be entering the local 7-11 and the first glass door I try is inevitably the one locked. Mr. Bush must have reacted as we all do, we know we can get in the 7-11 if we just use the other glass door. So it was typically American of Mr. Bush to grab for that second door, only this time the second door wouldn't budge either. At this point I thought Mr. Bush handled the situation with aplomb, as he appeared to share a laugh at his plight with the on-looking media, diffusing the embarrassment of the moment and restoring some dignity as he at last found the real exit stage right, a discrete set of black curtains set a few feet to the back of the stage behind the decorative doors. Mr. Bush then got out of there post haste. Narrating the clip, Kornheiser and Wilbon had a few laughs at the president's expense, but were fairly generous in cutting him plenty of slack.
Of course, the temptation in observing this clip is to use it to make a mockery of Mr. Bush, which Wilbon gave us a taste of by comparing the moment to President Ford's memorable tendency to fall down the stairs when deplaning, a tendency exquisitely sent up by that great Saturday Night Live "Stumblebum" skit (which skit served as my primary introduction to Mr. Ford's tendency, as I was in diapers during Ford's presidency). Mr. Bush's embarrassing Beijing moment dovetails nicely with his famous/infamous deficiency in oratory. We always knew Bush was no Churchill, but we never suspected he was a Ford.
But rather than skewer Mr. Bush for his comical blunder, I'd rather do something more pretentious. I intend to view this incident symbolically, for I believe that what happened on the stage in Beijing can tell us much more than that our president is kind of dopey and gravitas-challenged. Viewed symbolically, this incident is a snapshot of the failure of Mr. Bush's most important foreign policy strategy, the war in Iraq. More importantly, it is a roadmap (to borrow a thus far empty phrase from another Middle Eastern thicket) for Bush, if he can summon the courage of leadership to emulate his wisdom on stage in Beijing.
The symbolism is not overly complex. In Beijing, Mr. Bush found himself on stage, just as his decision to pursue war in Iraq placed Mr. Bush at the center of the global stage. As I watched Mr. Bush pull futilely on those decorative doors, I could only think of the day he landed a jet fighter on an American aircraft carrier, to proclaim victory in Iraq. In the buildup to the Iraq war Mr. Bush and his administration had promised a swift victory that would both rid the world of the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and establish a model democracy in the heart of the Islamic world. Top Gun-style theatrics aside, Mr. Bush’s proclamation that day aboard the aircraft carrier was his finest hour: weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam was deposed, and for a brief moment an Iraqi democracy appeared a fait accompli, with but an inevitable series of elections to make it official.
The aircraft carrier stunt was the Bush team’s choreographed attempt to exit stage right through the doors of history with Mr. Bush off to attend a post-Oscar-style after party where he would be feted as a conquering hero. But, just like those doors in Beijing, the doors of history would not budge. And Mr. Bush, his political capital, and the US Military are stuck in Iraq to this day, where assuredly, things have not gone according to script.
If the symbolic view ended there it would be a possibly clever, but probably just cute way of criticizing Mr. Bush’s plan to triumph over terrorism via victory in Iraq. But the real value of interpreting events symbolically rests on an ability to carry the analysis into the future tense. Events have a way of unfolding that not only reflects what has already come to pass, but offers a guide for a safe, if trying, navigation of churning waters. I believe that events unfolded on stage in Beijing in precisely such a fashion, and that the value of viewing those events symbolically obtains only when we view the scene in its entirety. If Mr. Bush is to salvage his final three years in office he needs to discover a future tense in Iraq. Put bluntly, the man needs an exit strategy. On stage that day in Beijing, Mr. Bush’s own reactions will, if viewed symbolically, guide him towards a possible exit strategy, or at least an approach that would make one possible.
The key element in Mr. Bush’s reaction to his embarrassing situation in Beijing was his immediate awareness of the humor of the situation. Laughing at himself was the only way to preserve his dignity in a potentially humiliating circumstance.
Now I am not suggesting that Mr. Bush needs to find the humor in the morass of Iraq, because there is nothing funny in the daily tragedies befalling both Iraqis and American servicemen (and servicewomen). Instead I want to link Mr. Bush’s use of humor in the face of embarrassment with the quality of humility. Mr. Bush evidenced some capacity for humility when he laughed at his blunder on stage in Beijing. By laughing at himself he laughed with the onlooking media throng, instead of allowing them to laugh at him. Bush was then able to exit the stage, dignity largely intact, by way of an inconspicuous curtain at the back of the stage. Symbolically, this is the recipe for Mr. Bush to exit Iraq. He, and his administration, must exercise a capacity for humility that to this point appears to be beyond their ken. But it is only through a quantum leap in humility that Mr. Bush can summon the courage to craft an exit strategy from Iraq that will in no way resemble the glorious victory envisioned at the outset of hostilities. It is only through humility that Mr. Bush can accept that the goal of establishing a foothold for democracy in Iraq through the use of military power has failed, and that simply to avoid civil war in Iraq and get our men and women home will be all the victory we are going to get. And perhaps most importantly, it is only through a demonstration of humility that Mr. Bush can join with the American public and the world who watches us, just as he joined with the media on stage in Beijing. Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq has been one of the great acts of hubris in modern times, and it will take an even greater display of humility for Mr. Bush to balance the scales. I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Bush is up to the task, but I have no doubt that this was symbolized for us all to see on a stage in Beijing.
Of course, the temptation in observing this clip is to use it to make a mockery of Mr. Bush, which Wilbon gave us a taste of by comparing the moment to President Ford's memorable tendency to fall down the stairs when deplaning, a tendency exquisitely sent up by that great Saturday Night Live "Stumblebum" skit (which skit served as my primary introduction to Mr. Ford's tendency, as I was in diapers during Ford's presidency). Mr. Bush's embarrassing Beijing moment dovetails nicely with his famous/infamous deficiency in oratory. We always knew Bush was no Churchill, but we never suspected he was a Ford.
But rather than skewer Mr. Bush for his comical blunder, I'd rather do something more pretentious. I intend to view this incident symbolically, for I believe that what happened on the stage in Beijing can tell us much more than that our president is kind of dopey and gravitas-challenged. Viewed symbolically, this incident is a snapshot of the failure of Mr. Bush's most important foreign policy strategy, the war in Iraq. More importantly, it is a roadmap (to borrow a thus far empty phrase from another Middle Eastern thicket) for Bush, if he can summon the courage of leadership to emulate his wisdom on stage in Beijing.
The symbolism is not overly complex. In Beijing, Mr. Bush found himself on stage, just as his decision to pursue war in Iraq placed Mr. Bush at the center of the global stage. As I watched Mr. Bush pull futilely on those decorative doors, I could only think of the day he landed a jet fighter on an American aircraft carrier, to proclaim victory in Iraq. In the buildup to the Iraq war Mr. Bush and his administration had promised a swift victory that would both rid the world of the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and establish a model democracy in the heart of the Islamic world. Top Gun-style theatrics aside, Mr. Bush’s proclamation that day aboard the aircraft carrier was his finest hour: weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam was deposed, and for a brief moment an Iraqi democracy appeared a fait accompli, with but an inevitable series of elections to make it official.
The aircraft carrier stunt was the Bush team’s choreographed attempt to exit stage right through the doors of history with Mr. Bush off to attend a post-Oscar-style after party where he would be feted as a conquering hero. But, just like those doors in Beijing, the doors of history would not budge. And Mr. Bush, his political capital, and the US Military are stuck in Iraq to this day, where assuredly, things have not gone according to script.
If the symbolic view ended there it would be a possibly clever, but probably just cute way of criticizing Mr. Bush’s plan to triumph over terrorism via victory in Iraq. But the real value of interpreting events symbolically rests on an ability to carry the analysis into the future tense. Events have a way of unfolding that not only reflects what has already come to pass, but offers a guide for a safe, if trying, navigation of churning waters. I believe that events unfolded on stage in Beijing in precisely such a fashion, and that the value of viewing those events symbolically obtains only when we view the scene in its entirety. If Mr. Bush is to salvage his final three years in office he needs to discover a future tense in Iraq. Put bluntly, the man needs an exit strategy. On stage that day in Beijing, Mr. Bush’s own reactions will, if viewed symbolically, guide him towards a possible exit strategy, or at least an approach that would make one possible.
The key element in Mr. Bush’s reaction to his embarrassing situation in Beijing was his immediate awareness of the humor of the situation. Laughing at himself was the only way to preserve his dignity in a potentially humiliating circumstance.
Now I am not suggesting that Mr. Bush needs to find the humor in the morass of Iraq, because there is nothing funny in the daily tragedies befalling both Iraqis and American servicemen (and servicewomen). Instead I want to link Mr. Bush’s use of humor in the face of embarrassment with the quality of humility. Mr. Bush evidenced some capacity for humility when he laughed at his blunder on stage in Beijing. By laughing at himself he laughed with the onlooking media throng, instead of allowing them to laugh at him. Bush was then able to exit the stage, dignity largely intact, by way of an inconspicuous curtain at the back of the stage. Symbolically, this is the recipe for Mr. Bush to exit Iraq. He, and his administration, must exercise a capacity for humility that to this point appears to be beyond their ken. But it is only through a quantum leap in humility that Mr. Bush can summon the courage to craft an exit strategy from Iraq that will in no way resemble the glorious victory envisioned at the outset of hostilities. It is only through humility that Mr. Bush can accept that the goal of establishing a foothold for democracy in Iraq through the use of military power has failed, and that simply to avoid civil war in Iraq and get our men and women home will be all the victory we are going to get. And perhaps most importantly, it is only through a demonstration of humility that Mr. Bush can join with the American public and the world who watches us, just as he joined with the media on stage in Beijing. Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq has been one of the great acts of hubris in modern times, and it will take an even greater display of humility for Mr. Bush to balance the scales. I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Bush is up to the task, but I have no doubt that this was symbolized for us all to see on a stage in Beijing.
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