What's in a Name?

In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, in the space of less than a half-page, uncloaks the logic behind consecutive Reagan landslides in 1980 and ‘84:

“’In other words we’ll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We’ll have a tyranny of conformist noncomformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it’s so empty makes everyone terrified- they’re small and they’re going to die, after all-‘

‘Christ, the death thing again.’

‘- and whose terror of not really ever existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt.’”

Wallace shows us Reagan as Mobius strip, a surface with only one side; Reagan was never the rebel he played on TV, and everyone knew it, making his outsider persona part and parcel of the “tyranny of conformist noncomformity.” If I am reading Wallace correctly, we elected Reagan because we hated what we wanted, the safety of the herd, and wanted what we hated, commodified dissent. In sum, Reagan made it safe to go shopping. At the end of this passage Wallace, in so many words, reformulates Descartes’ cogito for the world Reagan presided over and which we still inhabit: “I shop, therefore I am.”

Reagan’s Mobius strip was on full display in, of all places, the United States Football League (USFL), a professional football league that operated for three seasons during the peak of the Reagan era from 1983 –’85. Like Reagan, the USFL purported to be one thing, a spring time football league existentially distinct from the National Football League (NFL) by virtue of its seasonal remove, while behaving like the opposite, a direct competitor for the NFL’s star players (e.g. Doug Flutie, Herschel Walker, Steve Young, Jim Kelly, and Reggie White) and its fans’ dollars. Soon after the 1985 season and under the influence of its majordomo franchisee, one Donald Trump, the USFL scrapped its spring football formula and prepared to compete head to head with the NFL in the fall; the league subsequently folded before playing a down of fall football.

The USFL existed as the reverse image of Reagan’s one-sided deception, promising something that people weren’t ready to admit they wanted, spring football, while actually delivering a real rebellion. But when the USFL dropped its charade and owned its rebelliousness, it stepped out of Reagan’s mirror and off the stage of history. With the USFL’s move to the fall serving as an announcement of exactly who and what it was, it was as if the ’84 Reagan re-election campaign had chosen its actual guiding ethos as its campaign slogan: “Greed is good.” Instead, the Gipper went with “Morning Again in America,” continuing the winning gambit of blatant deception, the image of morning sunrise as duplicitous as that of the rebel; everyone knew that Reagan’s morning was when you had to get up to go to work, which was all anyone had time for since, under Reagan, “Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers… took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970’s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago.” (http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704miller.html)

“If an ant were to crawl along the length of this (Mobius) strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip… without ever crossing an edge.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip). We are all ants, and, clearly, we are all still walking.

The tension between Reagan’s role as rebel and his function as puppet, which tension held together our “conformist noncomformity,” is illustrated by the USFL’s sundry mascots. There were a total of 19 mascots, and if we set aside the three franchises with animal mascots (Birmingham Stallions, Jacksonville Bulls, and Michigan Panthers), we are left with 16 mascots that can be equally divided into rebel and establishment categories, with the rebels the place holders for Reagan’s fiction, and the establishment teams representing his fact, both in plain sight where the truth is almost always found.

Several members of the USFL’s “rebel alliance,” if you will, took their inspiration from the mythic “wild west,” according to which myth the ultimate freedom may well have been the freedom from government bureaucracy (which is perhaps why Reagan, the ultimate anti-government governor, was a self-styled cowboy who was frequently photographed on horseback). These teams included the Arizona Wranglers, Oklahoma Outlaws (who merged with Arizona to become the Arizona Outlaws, in a kind of proto-Brokeback Mountain-with-gay-marriage moment, which, given that homosexuality is one of the ultimate forms of rebellion, makes perfect sense), San Antonio Gunslingers, Tampa Bay Bandits, Houston Gamblers (in the image of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” a solitary voice of wisdom who brings to mind that ultimate rebel figure, Socrates, not to mention the fact that the establishment is, if nothing else, risk averse, which is why the establishment is the house, and never the gambler, given that the house always wins) and the Orlando Renegades (which Renegades, of course, rebelled against the genocide of their people, which, bizarrely, means that the White team owners were honoring those who rebelled against their (the owners’) people’s efforts to accomplish that very genocide).

Two additional teams rounded out the band of rebels. If you look up the definition of the Memphis Showboats mascot one finds that it is both a) “a river steamboat on which theatrical performances are given,” and b) a “show off.” And while the Memphis franchise had the image of the river steamboat on its helmet, the mascot was really a celebration of “showboating” on the playing field, an act that was both a) Black, and b) outlawed by the NFL after its Black players began taking too many liberties with their end zone touchdown celebrations, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s “Funky Chicken” end zone dance proving the point that for rich white men nothing is more frightening than the funky. The Memphis Showboats were a celebration of the freedom inherent to all displays of funkiness. Interestingly, by playing it conservative and putting the river steamboat on their helmets, rather than, say, a picture of James Brown, the Memphis Showboats were amplifying their echo of Reagan’s undisguised misdirection.

Bringing us to the final rebel squad, the Pittsburgh Maulers, whose mascot was the figure of a hard-hatted worker wielding his mauler, i.e. a heavy long-handled hammer used for driving stakes or wedges. The hammer is evocative of nothing other than the hammer and sickle, and the wedge the worker is preparing to drive is between the establishment and the proletariat it seeks to extract its surplus from. This being Reagan’s America, the Maulers only managed to stick around for one season. Pittsburgh was allowed to keep the NFL’s Steelers, but only after agreeing to give up the Steel industry and its jobs, proud blue collar workers being consigned to the fantasy realm of giants and fierce dolphins.

In sync with Reagan’s up-is-not- down universe, the most prominent of the establishment teams were head-rebel Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, which, of course, represented that signature American institution, the military-industrial complex. The Generals were flanked by the Chicago Blitz, symbolizing the American war machine, and the Oakland Invaders, who echoed Vietnam and presaged Iraq I, Afghanistan, and Iraq II. And since war is as much about treasure as it is about blood, the establishment teams included the Denver Gold, who also represented the Reaganite version of the golden rule: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.” Joining the Gold were the Los Angeles Express, whose mascot, evoking American Express, was a reminder that a man is no longer as good as his word, but instead as good as his credit rating.

The Washington Federals, like the Showboats, play off of Reagan’s knack for obvious subterfuge, Federals seeming at first glance a repudiation of everything the doyen of smaller federal government stood for. But, of course, Reagan, the “symbolic outsider,” was in truth the ultimate federal insider, his legacy cemented by the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, the second largest federal government building in greater Washington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Building_and_International_Trade_Center) Governments don’t erect monuments to those who mean them any harm.

The Philadelphia Stars, who later relocated to the DC suburb of College Park but were, nevertheless, renamed the Baltimore Stars, symbolize the mass media, whose job, with apologies to Casey Kasem, is to keep us reaching for the stars while never keeping our feet on the ground; any feet on the ground that aren’t army boots on the ground are at risk of organizing a union and going on strike.

The last of the USFL’s establishment teams, the Breakers, who played one season each in Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon and whose mascot was a wave breaking on the shore, would seem a candidate to join the three neutral animal squads on the sidelines. But, again like the Showboats, the Breakers name had a double meaning, and one that was explicitly linked with the Pittsburgh Maulers. If the Maulers represented labor, Boston, New Orleans, and Portland were each in turn home to the (Strike) Breakers. It is no surprise that the (Strike) Breakers took up consecutive residences in respective American hotbeds of intellectuals (Boston), artists (New Orleans), and progressives (Portland); a (Strike) Breaker always goes where the work is.

I just started my USFL t-shirt collection. As a child of the Reagan years, it is only appropriate that my first t-shirt, purchased from Amazon, which as of December of 2013 had consistently and successfully prevented any of its US workers from unionizing, features one of the rebel teams, the San Antonio Gunslingers.

All hope, however, is not yet lost. Plans for an eight team revival of the USFL in 2014 are afoot. The very first city the new USFL visited was Akron, Ohio. (http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/06/akron_could_have_a_team_in_rev.html) Akron is known as the “Rubber Capital of the World,” is still home to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, and “is considered the polymer manufacturing center in the country,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akron,_Ohio) meaning they still make stuff there, which, in post-Reagan America, is nothing short of a miracle, making it the perfect place to start a worker’s rebellion, if not a revolution. The stadium is already called the Rubber Bowl, and Akron Rubbers has a nice ring to it for a football team. Just got to be careful with the logo on the helmet. Some blatant deception, a la the Memphis Showboats, may be in order. I’m thinking rubber boots. (I also like the image below, available at http://www.awesomesportslogos.com/Montunos-Del-Interior-Cool-Tshirts-Funny-Tshirts-Awesome-Tshirts-Hilarious-Tshirts-Prodlist.html)