Ron’s latest.
Sports . . . arenas . . . shills . . . mind pablum
A coupla hundred years ago the primary activity for ordinary humans was finding ways to survive, to acquire shelter, food, safety.
For many reasons, especially in remote areas, sports were of little interest except to children with their various games involving toys or balls or dares. Entertainment consisted largely of watching predators catch and eat the OTHER guy.
Today’s sports have evolved into a substitute for what once was a survival mechanism of loyalty to the tribe, the leader, the way of life that seemed to work while entertainment has become political propaganda and product endorsement.
As Rome began to decay and collapse from almost constant war, alien intrusions, debit spending, and internal corruption, emperors took people’s attention away from reality by providing them with spectacles in various arenas and coliseums.
A chariot race, a gladiatorial match, a parade of exotic animals . . . none of which brought any benefit except momentary distraction from reality, but which drew energy and resources away from more important issues, such as infrastructure.
Today’s NFL, or NBA, or MLB, or “World Cup” games set up useless heroes and meaningless tribal loyalties in place of village or strong-man loyalties once established for the common defense or resource management.
European football (soccer) fans engage in riots and massive destruction of property over loss in a match with a rival. Neither winning nor losing a game directly affects the city’s or nation’s food supply, border security, or mineral wealth. But men actually die and public areas are destroyed in the name of “sports.”
American guys can recite the ERA or pass-completion figures or free-throw shooting stats for their favorite player, but most of them can’t name their Congressional reps, their senators, or more than a judge or two on the Supreme Court.
Young men, and an increasing number of young women, finish high school with barely adequate grades for acceptance to a college or university where they will live in special dorms, have special tutors, live special lives, and have proxy test takers while they learn nothing more than how to kick, catch, throw, hit, or bounce a ball.
Most of those, especially the males, never succeed in pro careers in the NFL or NBA or WTA or USSL or MLB or PGA, and since they learned nothing of marketable value while in school they become disabled drains on various social-support systems while still in their 30s or 40s, many even dependent upon drugs and crime for pain and/or income.
Most professional athletes couldn’t describe the 3 branches of our government and how they’re designed, much less identify who runs them. Very few could tell you which document begins with “Four Score and Seven Years Ago” or “When in the Course of human Events” or “We, the People,” much less list all the provisos of the First, Second, and Tenth Amendments.
Knowing how many interceptions their team’s center linebacker has made, or how many triple-doubles their team’s 7-foot pituitary freak has had, or how many dingers their team’s clean-up batter has hit is FAR more important than whether abortion is even MENTIONED in the Constitution, much less guaranteed by it. The reason for and workings of the electoral college are not part of their universe.
As Ronnie Raygun said, if an alien power did that kind of brainwashing on our children, we’d see it as an act of war. But full-grown men congregate in corner bars to celebrate a 1-O victory in a 3-hour kickball contest between two cities hundreds of miles apart with very little in common except public debt and crime statistics.
Jefferson was a staunch proponent of having what is called the “informed electorate” choose civic-minded patriots to manage the nation’s international commerce, interstate trade, border security, and disputes between the individual sovereign states.
He most CERTAINly didn’t mean informed about pass-completion stats or birdie-to-bogie ratios or “G-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-A-L!!!”s. And I’m confident that making Congress a career and becoming a millionaire as a public servant never entered his mind.
I see a direct relationship between television, with its obsession on sports as a mindsop for males and soap operas as geedunk for women, and a lowering of behavioral standards as well as physical fitness in the US. The NFL serves as a blow-up sex doll for guys while Y & R is a mental dildo for gals.
This all began in the 50s and expanded like that spray insulation for tight spaces in attics during the 60s, eventually taking over much of the airways in North America like kudzu took over the power lines in Georgia.
Almost overnight we stopped getting our news and information from faceless voices on radio and silent sentences in newspapers and began allowing commentators and comedians direct us nonverbally with eye-rolls and strategic pauses and voice inflections in the direction they wanted us to go on controversial issues.
The classic example of that is Walter Kronkite, perhaps the most trusted face on TV in the 60s, and his almost fanatical opposition to the war in ‘Nam, going so far as to deliberately mislead his audience by innuendo and spin and attitude into believing that we were losing when in fact General Giap was on the verge of surrender.
Today we’re willing to let professional entertainers form our opinions on issues through late-night satire and convince us that we need some entirely unnecessary and often impractical product simply because they have a face that’s familiar to us, therefore reliable and trustworthy because we’ve seen them in movies or sitcoms.
People like Kronkite and Rather and Colbert make our political decisions for us while actors and singers like Marie Osmond and Alex Trebeck and Liz Taylor shill for insurance or weight-loss or cosmetic products.
They read lines prepared for them by psychologists, make eye contact with us through the camera, and tell us why the system or device or sparkly thing they’re endorsing is better than someone else’s diet program or financial plan or doodad. If some total stranger from another neighborhood or town tried that, we’d throw the bullshit flag, but since we recognize the face as someone familiar from stage or screen, we buy into their carnival-barker spiel.
Meh . . . what do I know? Maybe I’m just an old disappointed relic who wants to revive past glories and live in a passed world, but it just seems to me that before TV Americans were made of sterner stuff. I seem to remember more common sense, more personal accountability, fewer gimmegrants, no food stamps, less Welfare.
For some reason I got this memory of an America which invented things, fixed things, built things, a place where guys held open doors for ladies and gave their seats to mothers on buses and patriotism wasn’t a target of satire and ridicule.
I’d be hard to convince that what Kronkite and Kimmel and Colbert and Camerota and Cuomo spit out has improved things at all, and I just don’t see Acosta and Stelter and Lemon and Jeong contributing anything positive to the discussion.
No, I believe that if we reduced the pressure to get one’s face on prime time and went back to relying on radio and print for a coupla years – and clearing out the deadwood in D.C. with a nice “fire” – we’d wind up better off.
I shudder to think what the long-term impact of social media will turn out to be down the road 30 or 40 years from now. But I’m confident there will still be large, tall, ignorant, dark-skinned, obscenely rich men with body art hitting, throwing, kicking, and catching various types of inflated spheroids, and that will keep men entertained between commercials in which movie stars and game-show hosts and lip-synch singers sell women stuff they don’t need.