In a provocative but flawed Grantland column about the deflated balls controversy currently swirling around Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and the New England Patriots, Charles P. Pierce explains that “as soon as the story broke about the possibility that the Patriots had been up to some shenanigans with the game balls while they were obliterating the Indianapolis Colts, 45-7, in the AFC Championship Game, the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject.” (http://grantland.com/the-triangle/brady-belichick-and-great-balls-of-fire-a-front-row-seat-for-the-foxborough-farce/) Pierce, here, is exactly right, i.e. there isn’t an ounce of hyperbole in his description of our collective response to “DeflateGate” (a generic and clichéd label for a scandal, yes, but still preferable to the other label being tossed around, “Ballghazi,” which is too uncomfortable in its implicit linkage of professional football, that proxy for war, with the Global War on Terror, that proxy for what Woodrow Wilson once described as “normalcy.”) Case in point, yours truly, who despite moving house this week has devoted approximately 30,000 of my 50,000 thoughts per day to DeflateGate (with another 10,000 reserved for monitoring the chance for snow).
But while Pierce grasps the breadth of this latest scandale du jour, he has no sense of its depth. Ignoring its depth, Pierce writes “The whole thing is flatly hilarious.” (ibid) And while the dramatics are not without their comic elements, the affair’s tragic elements are at least as prominent as the obvious comic surrealism. Although I would note that Pierce’s explanation of what exactly is so funny about all of this is more than a little bit troubling: “The whole thing is flatly hilarious. The way you can be sure of this is that the ladies of The View pronounced themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots on Thursday morning. Rosie O’Donnell wanted them booted from the Super Bowl. (Trolling or insane? Our lines are open.)” If you’ve been listening to sports talk radio all week, as I have, you’ve heard one sports pundit after another pronounce themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots, some of whom have also suggested that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl. But what almost all of these sports radio personalities have in common is that they’re men. But given that “the ladies of The View” lack the prerequisite equipment between their legs, any opinions they might offer necessarily reduce the discussion to hilarity. Is it mere coincidence that O’Donnell, who famously has no interest in the equipment between men’s legs, is singled out by name? Does Pierce not even realize that a few paragraphs before he dismisses O’Donnell for the audacity of suggesting that the Patriots be disqualified from the Super Bowl, he writes that “Serious people in serious media venues have proposed disqualifying the Patriots from playing in the Super Bowl against the Seattle Seahawks”? Seriously, Charles P. Pierce? In short, Pierce is saying loud and clear that the scandal is reduced to mere “farce” (the exact word used in the title of his column) precisely because women feel entitled to express their own opinions about it. Pierce goes on to say the following: “This is what I think: Once a scandal starts being discussed on The View, it stops being a scandal and becomes a sitcom. I think this should be a rule.” Memo to Charles P. Pierce: The notion that women are not to be taken seriously has been a rule for thousands of years. It’s called patriarchy.
Just as troubling is Pierce’s repeated assertion that the public reaction to the scandal has been so intense “because we are a nation of infantilized yahoos.” Infants, of course, can’t think for themselves. But I would suggest that the “the country proceeded to lose its freaking mind on the subject” because of a very well reasoned, and deeply felt, line of thought. Let me briefly sketch how the thinking goes. The Patriots have had the great good fortune over the last fifteen years, an eternity in pro football, to have arguably the greatest football coach of all time (Belichick) partnered with arguably the greatest quarterback of all time (Brady). And they got there by hiring a guy who got canned from his first gig as an NFL head coach and by drafting a guy in the sixth round, i.e. a quarterback prospect who was just as likely to get cut as he was to make the team. The Patriots essentially hit the football equivalent of the Powerball lottery. Because it turns out that Belichick is one of the maybe three or four authentic football geniuses who ever lived, and Brady is an assassin.
So, when you have the greatest coach of all time and the greatest quarterback of all time you already have every advantage a football team is ever going to need. And everybody knows this. The combination is not unprecedented, having occurred at least once before in the tandem of Bill Walsh and Joe Montana on the great San Francisco 49ers teams that won beaucoup Super Bowls in the 1980s. The interesting thing is that nobody hated the 49ers the way they hate the Patriots. Sure, you might have rooted against the Niners because you were tired of them winning all the time the same way that you might have rooted against Roger Federer when he was winning every time he stepped onto a tennis court, but no one truly hated the Niners or hated Federer because you can only develop so much antipathy towards simple greatness. Greatness might breed a certain amount of envy but it also breeds respect, and there is no respect in the level of animosity we all feel towards the Patriots. Because, beginning with the Spygate scandal in 2007, when the Patriots were first caught cheating red handed, the Patriots have come to represent something altogether different from greatness: gaming the system for an advantage you don’t need. The Patriots, who in the persons of Belichick and Brady have everything, (Belichick’s brains, Brady’s looks, success, wealth, fame, and supermodel wife) are the 1%. The Patriots, like the 1%, embody the paradox of already having everything but still wanting more, and, moreover, trampling the rules that everyone else is expected to follow in order to extract that paradoxical surplus from those who have little to nothing precisely because they follow those very rules. How interesting that on the very same day that the DeflateGate story broke, Oxfam released its report detailing that the 80 richest people on the planet have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion combined, and that by 2016 the richest 1% will have more wealth than all the rest of the 99% combined.
Pierce, then, is dead wrong in labeling us “infantilized yahoos” for “losing (our) freaking mind on the subject” of the New England Patriots’ deflated balls. A more telling critique is to press those, like me, who couldn’t stop thinking and talking about Belichick and Brady gaming the system for an advantage they manifestly don’t need, but who, like me, heard about the Oxfam report on the radio while my sports talk radio station was on commercial break, and quickly forgot about it as soon as ESPN radio’s Mike and Mike in the Morning came back from break to joke about Seinfeld’s “shrinkage” episode in re: deflated balls. If denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, then projection ain’t just how Belichick and Brady watch game film. The problem in projecting everything onto Brady and Belichick, of course, is that at least we get to watch those two squirm during their respective DeflateGate press conferences (which turned out to be little more than exercises in plausible deniability), while the 1% are as hard to find in their piles of money as a needle in a haystack. Note that we have yet to hear about DeflateGate from the real money behind the New England Patriots, team owner Bob Kraft. Perhaps the most important element of being rich these days is that money talks, so you don’t have to. And we only make it easier for them (the 1%) when all we talk about is football, even, as in the case of DeflateGate, when we are really talking about them. This doesn’t make us “infantilized yahoos,” but it does make us unwitting accomplices. Nevertheless, I hope they boot Brady and Belichick from the Super Bowl, i.e. I’m with Rosie O’Donnell.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Saturday, January 17, 2015
"Democracy" and its Discontents
I was walking in my local grocery store parking lot this week when I saw the following bumper sticker: “Re-elect no one!” Now, this being the parking lot of that progressive enclave known as Whole Foods, it might be tempting to dismiss this expression of political disenchantment as little more than liberal whinging. But pace the cherished caricature of whiny effete leftists which enables us to get on with the masculine business of getting our hands bloody, kvetching about the United States’ Congress spans the entire political spectrum. Gallup polls indicate that “In 2014, an average of 15% of Americans approved of Congress,” and, more importantly, that “The same percentage (15%) of Republicans and Democrats approved.” (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) Gallup does note that congressional approval percentages are lower when the chambers of Congress are split between the parties, as they were in 2014, but even when Congress was undivided, as it was most recently in 2009, approval still maxed out at a mere 30%. So, depending on the year, anywhere from 70 to 85% of Americans are kvetching en masse.
If Congress is getting consistent F’s from we the people, it is clear that we expect more from our representative body. The dynamic is one of “You work for us, but this isn’t working for us.” With this as our unstated or implicit consensus, it then becomes a matter of uncovering just why Congress isn’t getting the job done. So, for example, we might look at the gerrymandering of congressional districts: “If a substantial number of districts are designed to be polarized, then those districts' representation will also likely act in a heavily partisan manner, which can create and perpetuate partisan gridlock.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering) But if gerrymandering dates back to at least 1812, when the word was first coined in honor of gerrymandering Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, then how do we make sense of the fact that “over the past four years, Congress' approval ratings have been among the lowest Gallup has measured”? (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) I would suggest that things begin to make sense when we accept the fact that Congress is getting the job done, it’s just that they don’t work for us anymore.
Support for this suggestion comes from a recent research article authored by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin I. Page. Gilens, in an interview with Sahil Kapur, describes their methodology thusly:
“What we did was to collect survey questions that asked whether respondents would favor or oppose some particular change in federal government policy. These were questions asked across the decades from 1981 to 2002. And so from each of those questions we know what citizens of average income level prefer and we know what people at the top of the income distribution say they want. For each of the 2,000 possible policy changes we determined whether in fact they've been adopted or not.” (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview)
Survey says!:
“Contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests.” (ibid)
But a few factors make the obvious handwriting on the wall into more of one of those doctor’s office eye test Snellen charts. In addition to the aforementioned “decades of political science research,” there is the intense emotional investment that Americans have in our small-d democratic self-image; asking an American whether they live in a real democracy has, since 1776 (or since the Civil Rights movement, if you don’t happen to be white), been the equivalent of asking if the Pope’s Catholic or if bears shit in the woods. Add to this the fact that the voting polls are still open, and that elections are still fiercely contested between two seemingly opposed political parties (only seemingly, given that they both dance to the same twin tunes “of economic elites and of organized interests”), and the idea that the United States is no longer a democracy begins to shrink down to the illegible font size at the bottom of the Snellen chart.
All that to say that the American public is likely to express its discontent with Congress by kicking Democrats and Republicans out of congressional majorities on a rotating basis for the foreseeable future. And it is almost certain that they will maintain record low approval ratings for Congress regardless of which party holds the majority. The former behavior is invested almost entirely in maintaining the illusion of democracy, i.e. it is a blatant form of that primitive defense mechanism, denial (“acting as if a painful event, thought or feeling did not exist” (http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-defense-mechanisms/0001251)), while the latter behavior ventilates the rage of our unacknowledged loss. In other words, having lost our democracy, we are stuck in the first two stages of grief, denial and anger.
Since we need our democracy back, lest civilization devolve into hell on earth over the next few decades (time is of the essence!), I would also suggest that we don’t proceed out of anger and denial through the other three stages of grief: bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead, we need to cut the denial, and, necessarily but at great risk, work with our anger. The risk is that our anger will burn out of control, taking the form of what is known in America as domestic terrorism, and that the repression of this violence will be more violent still, and that our nascent police state will emerge from the other side of all this, enabled by previously unthinkable invasive technologies, in a position of total and implacable domination. Even given this risk, anger at the loss of our democracy is the only possible catalyst for resistance. But that anger must be yoked to the recognition that while war may very well be the continuation of politics by other means (politics having thus far been our saccharin substitute for democracy), peace is the actualization of an authentic democracy-yet-to-come. All of which makes me wonder if our late poet-prophet rock star, Kurt Cobain, was thinking of democracy when he wrote these lines:
“Come as you are, as you were,
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend,
As an old enemy.”
If Congress is getting consistent F’s from we the people, it is clear that we expect more from our representative body. The dynamic is one of “You work for us, but this isn’t working for us.” With this as our unstated or implicit consensus, it then becomes a matter of uncovering just why Congress isn’t getting the job done. So, for example, we might look at the gerrymandering of congressional districts: “If a substantial number of districts are designed to be polarized, then those districts' representation will also likely act in a heavily partisan manner, which can create and perpetuate partisan gridlock.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering) But if gerrymandering dates back to at least 1812, when the word was first coined in honor of gerrymandering Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, then how do we make sense of the fact that “over the past four years, Congress' approval ratings have been among the lowest Gallup has measured”? (http://www.gallup.com/poll/180113/2014-approval-congress-remains-near-time-low.aspx) I would suggest that things begin to make sense when we accept the fact that Congress is getting the job done, it’s just that they don’t work for us anymore.
Support for this suggestion comes from a recent research article authored by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin I. Page. Gilens, in an interview with Sahil Kapur, describes their methodology thusly:
“What we did was to collect survey questions that asked whether respondents would favor or oppose some particular change in federal government policy. These were questions asked across the decades from 1981 to 2002. And so from each of those questions we know what citizens of average income level prefer and we know what people at the top of the income distribution say they want. For each of the 2,000 possible policy changes we determined whether in fact they've been adopted or not.” (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview)
Survey says!:
“Contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests.” (ibid)
But a few factors make the obvious handwriting on the wall into more of one of those doctor’s office eye test Snellen charts. In addition to the aforementioned “decades of political science research,” there is the intense emotional investment that Americans have in our small-d democratic self-image; asking an American whether they live in a real democracy has, since 1776 (or since the Civil Rights movement, if you don’t happen to be white), been the equivalent of asking if the Pope’s Catholic or if bears shit in the woods. Add to this the fact that the voting polls are still open, and that elections are still fiercely contested between two seemingly opposed political parties (only seemingly, given that they both dance to the same twin tunes “of economic elites and of organized interests”), and the idea that the United States is no longer a democracy begins to shrink down to the illegible font size at the bottom of the Snellen chart.
All that to say that the American public is likely to express its discontent with Congress by kicking Democrats and Republicans out of congressional majorities on a rotating basis for the foreseeable future. And it is almost certain that they will maintain record low approval ratings for Congress regardless of which party holds the majority. The former behavior is invested almost entirely in maintaining the illusion of democracy, i.e. it is a blatant form of that primitive defense mechanism, denial (“acting as if a painful event, thought or feeling did not exist” (http://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-defense-mechanisms/0001251)), while the latter behavior ventilates the rage of our unacknowledged loss. In other words, having lost our democracy, we are stuck in the first two stages of grief, denial and anger.
Since we need our democracy back, lest civilization devolve into hell on earth over the next few decades (time is of the essence!), I would also suggest that we don’t proceed out of anger and denial through the other three stages of grief: bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead, we need to cut the denial, and, necessarily but at great risk, work with our anger. The risk is that our anger will burn out of control, taking the form of what is known in America as domestic terrorism, and that the repression of this violence will be more violent still, and that our nascent police state will emerge from the other side of all this, enabled by previously unthinkable invasive technologies, in a position of total and implacable domination. Even given this risk, anger at the loss of our democracy is the only possible catalyst for resistance. But that anger must be yoked to the recognition that while war may very well be the continuation of politics by other means (politics having thus far been our saccharin substitute for democracy), peace is the actualization of an authentic democracy-yet-to-come. All of which makes me wonder if our late poet-prophet rock star, Kurt Cobain, was thinking of democracy when he wrote these lines:
“Come as you are, as you were,
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend,
As an old enemy.”
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