Paying the walking billboards
Pictured at podium: Proletariat champion Kain Colter
The sports world often takes a verbal beating in progressive circles. Then again, arenas of populist interest increasingly do. We have sports to thank for many things in the United States, and the general strengthening of labor unions is one of them. The Major League Baseball Players Association has long been one of the most powerful and influential unions in the U.S. Now, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Northwestern University football players have the right to form a union. The impact could reach far beyond college sports, and even sports in general.
The most talked about issue with this case is the potential monetary compensation for the athletes, but just as important for them should be the issue of access to health coverage and to worker's compensation. These are benefits that might have the most direct impact, particularly in an activity as physically dangerous as football.
The sham concept that is the “student-athlete” has proven to be long-lasting and ugly. The players and the public have both been told that efforts on the field of play in collegiate athletics, efforts which produce billions of dollars for individuals other than the players themselves, are being fairly compensated by free tuition, but the NLRB has found that it’s actually that tacit agreement that proves the athletes are actually “workers.” The value of college tuition has already put a price on their work. Consider this analogy: A restaurant proprietor tells you that you can have a free meal, but in exchange, you have to linger after closing time and help clean the restaurant. That meal isn’t really free, is it? It’s precisely the same with college sports.
Should college football players be paid outright? I happen to believe they should, but that’s not even the point. Maybe athletes in some specific sports shouldn’t be paid, like if they don’t generate any revenue for the school, but the point is that they are all workers, and workers in America have the right to form a union and make formal, collective demands. Maybe for some the compensation is only tuition. Schools already make decisions as to which players get full scholarships, partial ones, or none at all. Perhaps instead it would now be four years of
guaranteed tuition, instead of what we see today when “compensated” athletes routinely lose their scholarships after suffering debilitating injuries. Maybe for others it will be the establishment of a trust fund for their future financial security, or perhaps a cut of a lucrative shoe contracts. Who knows? If I’m a star athlete visiting a college campus tomorrow: “What do you got for me?”
Make no mistake, colleges are terrified of this entire idea. That’s why they’ve been misrepresenting the relationship between "student" and school for generations. If the athletes organize, it might next be the graduate teachers, and the adjuncts, and the maintenance and building staff, and then what would we have? A lot of better-paid Americans, I guess.
This ruling has the potential for loud repercussions beyond the university environment. That’s the really exciting part. Schools would no longer be able to ignore the existing uncomfortable realities—the hypocrisies—of the major revenue-producing sports, which are populated primarily, and not coincidentally, by impoverished men and women of color. Northwestern is battling their own students here tooth and nail, fearing that the NCAA and Big 10 Conference could respond punitively, cutting them off from that lucrative cable TV money that jacks up the price of your monthly bill roughly four-fold. (This is what's wonderful about the labor challenge coming from within the conference that has the most lucrative TV deal.)
We may ultimately discover that we have no legitimate need for an NCAA. The governing body has served as nothing more anyway than a no-accountability cartel substituting its own authority over that of the American legal system. We may find that the NCAA’s corporate sponsors… sorry, “Corporate Champions,” have to give money to the players, not only the coaches, if they want to associate their "brand" with the institutional team brand. In my little dream world, we may even find that the football-mad, bottom-feeding, scab states of the Southern United States would have to change their “right to work” laws if they wanted their beloved teams to be able to recruit the best players.
I'm getting goose bumps. It would be a pleasure to watch both athletes and administrators get what's been coming to them.
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The NLRB ruling is a positive development for my favorite sport also—Major League Baseball. I’m sick of taxpayers supporting free minor league systems for sports that compete with baseball, which created its own true minor league system almost a century ago.
Cultural residue of slavery?
Ta-Nahisi Coates at the Atlantic has
a must-read post about liberal (Barack Obama) and conservative (Paul Ryan) arguments regarding African-American poverty. He rejects as disingenuous the conservative argument that denies a cultural white supremacy, but rebuffs the liberal one regarding slavery and “cultural residue” as well.
Despite being culturally torn and degraded by slavery, emancipation caused an extraordinary movement among African-Americans to reunite families, and fueled a strong desire for gainful work and quality education in the years after black literacy was forbidden even by law. The Great Migration to Northern cities is evidence of this collective ambition.
“It was not ‘cultural residue’ that threatened black marriages. It was white terrorism, white rapacity, and white violence. And the commitment among freed people to marriage mirrored a larger commitment to the reconstitution of family, itself necessary because of systemic white violence.”
Playing the good little Socialist, I can’t help but point to the nationwide trend against upward economic mobility among
all demographic groups. Also, as a white man, I identify a sizable “criminal and loafing element,” to use Booker T. Washington’s phrase, or cultural degradation, among my “own people.” Across the board, it’s capitalism that's gnawing at the flesh. This is inherent.
Fred Phelps, dead. Just dead.
Fred Phelps Sr., leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, and the only man in the world that had the presence of mind to lead a protest at Fred Rogers’ funeral, died last week at the age of 84. It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees here, but anyone with a few seconds to think about it should acknowledge that Phelps and the silly antics of his congregation did their anti-gay cause a lot more harm than good. Arguably, gay and human rights supporters never had a better friend to their cause than Phelps. Even the racist Christian Identity movement agrees. Their one-time leader, Rev. Pete Peters, the man so far-right they named him twice, once criticized Phelps for pushing society "towards tolerance [of] of homosexual perverts." (Peters is dead too.) It's fun when hate groups squabble.
I have always been in Phelps’ corner—
from a legal standpoint. It’s the height of absurdity, of course, to protest adjacent to a military funeral, publicly declaring that a soldier has died because the United States tolerates sodomy, while church members hold signs that read “God hates fags,” and "Thank God for dead soldiers," but the First Amendment exists specifically to protect the rights of people like Phelps. Those that have popular opinion on their side don’t
need the First Amendment. Phelps' extreme antics, combined with the almost universal disdain that his fellow humans hold for him, might in fact be the best argument in history for the freedom of speech. May the best ideas win-- and Phelps was undeniably bringing up the rear.
In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling, finding that "speech" like the WBC's, on a public sidewalk, about a public issue, could not be liable for the intentional infliction of "emotional distress." That case was brought by the father of a U.S. serviceman killed in Iraq after the WBC protested the soldier's funeral, and it certainly became a popular cause. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, along with 40 other members of the Senate, filed briefs opposing Phelps. So did the state of Kansas and 47 other states and the District of Columbia. The Court held firm for Phelps, 8 to 1 in fact.
Phelps has been accurately evaluated as such a ridiculous, inconsequential figure of the American backwoods that no real movement seemed to arise to organize a protest upon the occasion of his death Wednesday. Also, there was no funeral to protest because, as Fred's daughter explained, their "unaffiliated" splinter church of a splinter church of a major splinter Protestant church "doesn't worship the dead." I got a kick out of the opposition group that showed up near the church in Topeka this weekend. It included two members of the post-irony generation holding an oversized sign that read “Sorry for your loss.”
Now I wonder if we’ll see Phelps’ splintered congregation, which was always made up mostly of family members, numbered about 40 at its peak, and supposedly excommunicated Fred weeks before his death, continue to engage in idiotic, but legal behavior. Since the cause was never about saving souls to begin with, it will come down to whether or not the next generation of Phelpses can collectively match Papa Fred’s otherworldly-sized ego. We're left to watch for that, and to wait for the posthumous reports of Phelps' discreet man-on-man sexual encounters during his life. Did it seem to you guys like the man doth protest a little
too much?
Of their time
Oney Judge
How often do you hear somebody defend, say, a Thomas Jefferson or a George Washington for their heinous racial views because they were men “of their time”? Or maybe it’s giving a pass to Lincoln, who made speeches during his presidency making it clear that the preservation of the Union was the goal of the Civil War, not establishing the equality of the races. For Lincoln, blacks were not his equal in "intellectual and moral endowments." His solution to the problem of race was shipping blacks to Liberia, Central America, or Haiti, an ethnic cleansing of the nation. Cutting these guys slack for their slow evolution is an insult to the men and women of their times that truly were visionary.
If Lincoln was only a man “of his time” in believing white people to be inherently superior to black people, then what does that say about these other men and women of his time that didn’t believe that? To name a few, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, the members of Brown’s army, Thaddeus Stevens, Solomon Northup, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, tens of thousands of committed Northern abolitionists, and hundreds of thousands Southern slaves who had zero political power, but clearly each possessed a personal belief in the equality of the races that Lincoln didn’t have.
George Washington is on our currency but he was far from even the most enlightened member of his household. That would likely be Oney Judge, who was enslaved at Mount Vernon as the property of Martha Washington from the time of Judge's birth, but who publicly defied the most powerful and admired man in America, not to mention the Fugitive Slave Act, by absconding to freedom in New Hampshire in 1796.
The establishment of today will always feel the instinct to defend the establishment of yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to. If you’re personally concerned with how history will remember you and your views, I suggest abandoning the conservatives and the liberals of today, and join with the radicals.
Assorted items
Do yourself a favor: Don't read a book about Whitey Bulger, Irish-American gangsters, South Boston, and the 1960's Boston busing crisis the week before St. Patrick's Day. It sort of kills the festive spirit.
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We've got Dianne Feinstein on record now: CIA spying on everybody but her, good. CIA spying on her, bad.
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Remember that long-hyped story about how America would one day be dealing dramatically with an openly-gay athlete competing in one of its major team sports? Well, less than three weeks after his debut, the story is deader than Sarah Palin's political career.
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It seems like a time-waster, no, to listen to advice on Russia from the architects of the Iraq and Afghan wars?
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Zora Neale Hurston:
"There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes."
The greatest athlete cameo in screen history
Chuck Klosterman's 2013 book
I Wear the Black Hat is worth picking up for one of its twelve chapters alone. The cultural critic
relates the evidently true story of two celebrities meeting. Jeff Ament, sideman for the popular musical group Pearl Jam, met one of his heroes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at a charity event. Kareem reportedly showed no interest when Ament shared the details of his fandom. (Ament apparently then wrote a song about Kareem called "Sweet Lew," the title a reference to the basketballer's abandoned Christian name.)
According to Klosterman's report of the meeting, "(Kareem) didn't even pretend to care... To any normal person, a facsimile of gratitude is enough; that facsimile is an acceptable amount of emotional access. When Ament met Abdul-Jabbar, all Kareem needed to say was, 'Thanks, man. That means a lot. Good luck with your life.' He would not have needed to mean any of those words. Even if he'd been transparently acting, it would have been enough to satisfy a person who had pre-decided to love him. But Abdul-Jabbar can't do that. He can't ignore the stupidity of that false relationship."
A story like this is exactly why Abdul-Jabbar, and his appearance in the 1980 film classic
Airplane! are
both so wonderful. Klosterman summarizes Kareem's long-standing relationship to public life: "He refused to pretend that his life didn't feel normal to the person inside it, and he refused to pretend that other people's obsession with abnormality required him to act like the man he wasn't." You gotta seek out this book, particularly if you want to read the theory of how this behavior contrasts with that of O.J. Simpson--
post-double murder.
Klosterman on
Airplane!:
"Kareem Abdul-Jabbar portrays Roger Murdock, the doomed aircraft's copilot. However, the principal comedic utility is that he's really playing himself (but refuses to admit it). His most memorable scene is when a little kid enters the cockpit, instantly recognizes him, and says, 'I think you're the greatest, but my dad thinks you don't work hard enough on defense.'
"It's funny, but also smart: Movie Kareem pretends to be offended by the remark, but Real Kareem clearly finds the criticism amusing (or else he wouldn't have allowed it in the script). It shows a sense of humor that he had never presented before. But the joke is bigger than that. The core of the joke is that it's ridiculous to pretend that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is anyone besides himself. You can't be a seven-foot-two character actor; even if Kareem had the acting chops of Philip Seymour Hoffman, he can't disappear into another being. He can only be who he is, and even a child can see this. So the center of the joke (better known as the unfunny part of the joke) is that Kareem is denying who he obviously is. He wants to disappear into society, and that's impossible. It's something everyone can understand in theory, but nobody accepts in practice. He is supposed to be happier than he is. He is supposed to like
being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and he's supposed to like that we like it to."
Here's
the best clip I could find online of Kareem's Silver Screen brilliance. Seriously, why would Kareem be co-piloting that plane?
Ankiel bows
St. Louis Cardinals' near-great Rick Ankiel announced his retirement today after 15 absorbing seasons in professional baseball. At SportsOnEarth.com, Deadspin founder and Cards fan Will Leitch
pays tribute to the one-of-a-kind player he calls his all-time favorite.
This 2007 Ankiel home run-- in his first MLB game
as an outfielder, on his birthday no less, and almost seven years after his spectacular flame-out in the playoffs as a phenom pitcher-- actually caused his manager Tony LaRussa to smile.
It's a cliche in baseball to say that you run everything out as a way of showing respect for the game, but when Rick the Stick cracked that homer, a night many of us will never forget, he
had to sprint around the bases.
Ukrainian Civil War
I hate to be a guy that pees all over some nostalgic anti-Russian sentiment, but the new president in the Ukraine was
not democratically-elected. Remember, he just took power via a coup? And the United States just violated its own official policy
again by recognizing the new coup-installed leader, as we did in Syria only a year ago. I'm sure we had no role in this plot as we played no role in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Venezuela, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Tibet, Cuba, South Vietnam, Brazil, Greece, Argentina, Afghanistan, Turkey, Nicaragua, Ghana, Angola, Poland, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, the Philippines, Haiti, Gaza, Somalia, and Iraq. Don't you just hate it when Russia butts its nose in where it doesn't belong?
The rule of the now-exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was certainly repressive, but the coup against him also seems to coincide with his decision to pull his country out of a pact with the European Union and strengthen its ties with Russia instead. It's going to be mighty embarrassing for the United States if the anti-Yanukovych conspirators turn out to be a collection of
fascists and anti-Semites. The nationalist Svoboda Party, after all,
is descendent of a Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera.
Good thing it's not the responsibility of the United States to solve this mess.
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Slate's Amanda Hess is
coming to the defense of Kim Novak, who appeared on stage at the Oscars Sunday twenty years after last appearing in a movie, and now having undergone extensive plastic surgery. Novak was the butt of a few jokes on Twitter evidently, and I confess that I found her appearance a little unsettling myself, yet I'm not sure exactly who Hess is defending Novak against. To me, it doesn't seem to be that male sexism is a direct perpetrator.
First of all, nobody of cultural consequence is making fun of Novak. You can find an offensive Tweet or two on virtually any subject that exists. I'm not sure that obscure comedian Rob Delaney is worth so much of our energy. And nobody is really making fun of Novak's age. It's just that the practice of plastic surgery, to some of us, is insanely hubristic at its very core, and perhaps even a worthy target of comedy. (Also of note at this time:
everything is a worthy target of comedy.) There were no jokes after the telecast about the physical appearance of Sally Field, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Bette Midler, June Squibb (older than Novak), or even Goldie Hawn, whose excessive number of surgeries clearly rivals that of Novak's.
I thought Ellen DeGeneres' joke about Liza Minnelli looking like a man came the closest to being a cheap shot, and wasn't even funny, but here we have evidence of a separate double standard I've detected-- one that is gender-based. Last year's host, Seth MacFarlane, was universally scolded for what was referred to as a "sophomoric" and "sexist" performance mainly because he fronted a musical dance number called "We Saw Your Boobs," with lyrics referencing famous actresses' nude scenes on film. To me, that's pretty mild stuff, at least on the same par with DeGeneres' joke. Fortunately they're all just jokes. But some people are allowed to tell them, and others aren't.
You could not find an entertainment blog last year that didn't pillory MacFarlane. They had already made up their minds about him, and he flaunted their dislike by singing that song. Yet the same writers fall over themselves campaigning for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host the Oscars. I love Fey even beyond our deaths, but her TV show,
30 Rock, got away with murder because of a culture pass she gets from being a female feminist. (I use that phrase because I actually consider MacFarlane to be a satirist first, and a
male feminist.) There was a joke near the end of the run of
30 Rock in which Kenneth the NBC page tells his boss (paraphrasing only a little here) that when he has a tour group of Asians, he always makes sure that they "accidentally" walk in on a blonde girl peeing. I find that to be a hilarious, culturally-inappropriate joke actually, but can you imagine how some desensitized viewers of that program would groan if the same joke was made on MacFarlane's animated program
Family Guy?
It is so bizarre anyway that we get so up in arms over evaluating matinee idols by their looks.
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Quote of the day: "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them." James Baldwin
Opponent of hunger and racism, champion of peace
Every couple years, in search of human inspiration, I re-read John Culver and John Hyde's 2000 biography of Henry A. Wallace, entitled
American Dreamer. Wallace is my very favorite American. His story is so extraordinarily progressive that historians have clearly felt the need to suppress it. But if and when they ever chisel out the Mount Rushmore that exists and re-sculpt it with improvements in mind, it would be my choice that they honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Eugene Debs, Lucy Parsons, and Wallace. My alma mater, Iowa State University, would be a strong candidate to be renamed Wallace University because of the man's work in the agricultural and global political sciences. (If Northeast Missouri State can rename itself after Harry Truman, a man forever entangled with Wallace by time and circumstance, but one best known for nuclear holocaust and mass murder, then Iowans have an opportunity to easily one-up their neighbors to the south.) As a student at then-Iowa State College during the early 1900's, Henry's family took the African-American "plant doctor" George Washington Carver into their home and it was Carver that taught the young Wallace some of his first lessons in plant breeding.
Wallace was an Iowan in the deepest sense. It was as if he grew from this soil. He is by far the most revolutionary man, the most left-wing man, to hold high public office in the United States. He served as Secretary of Agriculture under FDR during the Depression. His father had served in the same position under Republican administrations during the 1920s. His grandfather had started the magazine
Wallaces Farmer in the mid-19th century (it is still published), and that first Henry Wallace, the grandfather, lived in Des Moines late in his life in a Victorian home that still stands about 200 steps from my house. The gardens there also helped to form the keen, inquisitive, and unbiased mind of the young agronomist.
Before being tabbed by Roosevelt, Henry A. had already transformed the world by developing high-yielding hybrid corn that has since saved literally tens of millions of lives worldwide. Even in the 1990's, a quarter-century after his death, descendants of his inbred and crossbred chickens were laying almost half of the eggs sold throughout the world. In the FDR Cabinet, he introduced the concepts of food stamps, school lunches, federal land-use planning, and soil conservation. By the time he was tabbed to be Vice President in 1940, he was already, personally, a confirmed vegetarian, and at this point you probably think I'm making all this up. Why have Americans never heard of him?
Now as Vice President, he came to embody the New Deal more than any other man, even more than the President himself, who had backed off some of the original tenets of the wide-ranging program. Wallace was the West Wing's champion fighter against Wall Street and economic manipulation by large banks, against global imperialism and military aggression, against anything he believed posed a challenge to global peace. But under America's perverted political system, then and now, anybody that uses the word "peace" as routine must be ceremonially treated as a a crank, so you can probably guess what the sinister city bosses and Southern bigots of his Democratic Party thought of this scientific and unimpeachably ethical visionary of the Iowa corn fields, and what they had up their sleeves at the 1944 party convention in Chicago while the President was out of town dying. Harry Truman was nominated as Vice President instead to pacify the Southern bigots and evidently to assuade Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast's personal goal of getting one of his "office clerks" as far up the American political ladder as possible.
Backstabbed by the party hacks, Wallace ran for President in '48 under the banner of the Progressive Party. It was a remarkable campaign platform that advocated peaceful dealings with the Soviet Union. Wallace had predicted even before FDR's death that another worldwide conflict would quickly break out after the fall of the fascists if the new imperial powers, Russia, England,
and the U.S., attempted to establish and/or re-establish their empires. He was not so parochial as to believe that imperialism on behalf of the Allied nations had played no role in sparking World War II. He publicly declared that the goal of the U.S. should be to help peoples in Asia, Africa, and South America gain self-autonomy, but for the U.S. to also get
out of the contradictory business of colonialism. He felt the only role the U.S. should have over the lives of those people was to share the scientific strategies and breakthroughs he had long championed and even been directly responsible for to help end world hunger.
He was also a man ahead of his cultural times on American race relations, and his '48 third party campaign found him touring the South by bus through some extremely hostile territory. Wallace and his campaigners refused to stay in segregated hotels or to eat in segregated restaurants, opting instead to stay and be fed in the homes of African-Americans. At campaign events, he was pelted with eggs. This was 15 years before the March on Washington and seven years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
He was attacked in the press by hatchet men of the Democratic Party, by frothing columnists of the establishment right-wing press, and by the white supremacist Winston Churchill, who was eager to re-establish the grip of the dying British empire he was presiding over. Having now had a bitter separation from both the Republican and Democratic parties, it was open season on the popular Wallace and that popularity started to rapidly decline. Democrats warned voters that his campaign boosted the chances of New York Governor Tom Dewey beating Truman in the general election. Some things never change. Wallace supporters, among them celebrities like Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie, were red-baited and physically threatened. Wallace referred to the two parties as two wings of the same party and also had the balls to label them what they were fast becoming, pioneers of a uniquely American breed of fascism.
Today, Wallace is largely overlooked or forgotten in historical texts. His name appears on buildings at the Iowa Capitol in Des Moines and in Ames, home of the university. His vice presidential bust sits in the Smithsonian Museum, but even in Iowa, he seems to share his legacy with his less-controversial father and grandfather, who both shared his common sense and social vision, but steered clear during their lives of the garbage can of American politics. The establishment political structure of the United States certainly wants nothing to do with the man that would have had us skip the Cold War era entirely, and therefore miss out on that golden economic opportunity for graft, corruption, and mass exploitation. Meanwhile, Harry Truman is a man celebrated today for his service to the Empire. He's looked to with pride by a Democratic Party that, seven decades later, still flatters itself hollowly as the party of "the common man," even while Truman, nominated as Roosevelt's likely successor even against the will of rank and file Democrats in 1944, became, revealingly, Condoleeza Rice's "man of the century."
For your enlightenment, here is
an "Untold History" interview with American University history professor Peter Kuznick about the life and legacy of Henry Agard Wallace. The discussion between guest and host heard here aptly demonstrates the exactly-perfect use of the worldwide web.
