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A certain event this past week made me think about the amazing multitude of small, seemingly insignificant, ways in which the State manipulates us mentally to its enduring advantage. The
event: “Herb Brooks,” who coached the American hockey team which
improbably won the 1980 Olympic gold medal in Note:
I’ve placed this man’s names in quotes to emphasize the fact that,
like the vast majority of people familiar with that name, I did not know
him personally. I, like most
of you, know only his media image: his name, his photograph, some of the
teams he coached in his lifetime. Like
most of you, I’ve seen him only on television and read about him in
newspapers and online, and we must remember that nothing I write here
has anything to do with him personally or with the reality of that
man’s life but only with this media image.
My thoughts here concern not First
significant concept: sports
and its prominence in the minds of American men.
After all, what occupies them more than sports?
The average local news broadcast consists of three parts: news,
weather, and sports. Most
men, and many women, can recite on command all the teams in the
particular sports he or she favors.
On weekends, the televisions networks specialize in sports,
especially on Sunday afternoons when, on an average summer day, for
instance, you can watch golf or auto racing or baseball.
Everyday, radio features call-in shows in which men discuss
various aspects of various sports as if 1) they know something
substantial and interesting about it, and 2) their discussion actually
mattered. We
should not find this surprising, of course, given the nature of men and
what modern society has done to that nature.
Technology has come close to eliminating the need for men
whatsoever. Society no
longer needs men’s physical strength.
Women can get Power, protection, and financial support for their
children from the State. And
with the technological development of cloning, soon not even a man’s
sperm will have any value. As
a result, most modern American men lack any sense either of personal
power or of independence, partly because so few of them work for
themselves or create their own lives in any tangible way.
Accepting modern society means, for most men, almost total
dependence. It means working
for, and thus submitting to, someone else.
Wendell Berry writes in his essay Feminism,
the Body, and the Machine that “most men are now entirely
accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses . . . .
They do as they are told. They
are more complaisant than most housewives have been.
Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern
helplessness. They have
accepted almost without protest, and often with relief, their
dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of
economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses.
They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy
and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and
self-employment, to the disintegration of families and communities, to
the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued
abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly
abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it.
These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves
or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are
told. They know their
ability to be useful is precisely defined by their willingness to be
somebody else’s tool. Is
it any wonder that they talk tough and worship athletes . . . ?” Lewis
Mumford writes of this phenomenon of sports and its relation to the
State in his 1934 book Technics
and Civilization. “There
is within modern civilization,” he says, “a whole series of
compensatory functions that . . . only serve to stabilize the existing
state – and finally they become part of the very regimentation they
exist to combat. The chief
of these institutions is perhaps mass-sports” (p. 303).
Sports heroes, he says, represent “virility, courage, gameness,
those talents in exercising and commanding the body which have so small
a part in the new mechanical regimen” (p. 306).
The sports hero “is handsomely paid for his efforts, as well as
being rewarded by praise and publicity, and he thus further restores to
sport its connection with the very commercialized existence from which
it is supposed to provide relief – restores it and thereby sanctifies
it.” As a result, sport,
“which began originally, perhaps, as a spontaneous reaction against
the machine, has become one of the mass duties of the machine age.
It is part of that regimentation of life – for the sake of
private profits or nationalistic exploit – from which its excitement
provides a temporary and only a superficial release” (p. 307). Second
significant concept: television.
Very few people actually attended that single game in February
1980 that turned Herb Brooks into “Herb Brooks.”
The Olympic Center had a mere 6,000 seats.
And every one of those 6,000 people who actually, physically, sat
in that Olympic Center that day (it began at 5 PM Eastern time) saw, in
a very real way, a different hockey game.
They each literally had a different point of view, a different
angle, a different take on the game.
They each saw and heard different things and then interpreted
them in their own unique and individual ways. Everyone
else saw it on television. Ah,
television – the great homogenizer: the device that Americans love
beyond all others, that injects our waiting, willing, empty and needy
brains with requisite images of power and plenty, of triumph and joy.
These millions saw it on tape in prime time (providing,
therefore, no suspense, since people knew before hand that the American
team had won). Further, they
all saw it from the same point of view, from the same angle and received
the same take on the game – as well as the same commercials).
They all listened (some more attentively than others, of course)
to the same commentary, a feature wonderfully lacking when you attend a
game in person and have to depend on your own devices, given by a single
individual of the thousands who attended – given by a highly paid and
well-known employee of a major commercial television network.
They all heard his now-famous game ending cry, “Do you believe
in miracles?” which apparently came from a Fleetwood Mac song recently
popular (had this game taken place ten years earlier, the announcer’s
media-savvy script might well have read “Do you believe in magic?”
after the Lovin’ Spoonful’s hit song).
They all saw the crowd waving American flags and chanting “ For
the vast majority of Americans, then, this hockey game was just another
image implanted by television and subsidized by its commercial sponsors.
We have to keep in mind when we think about television that those
images have no objective reality for the viewers.
For those who watched on television, that hockey game had as much
objective, tangible reality as a rerun of I
Love Lucy. Just like
Lucy, and just like her husband Ricky and their friends Fred and Ethel,
that game exists in our minds, in our inner world – a world now partly
created and mostly controlled by the media and by the corporate
interests which operate them. It
exists in essentially irrelevant memories created by Power, and solely
for their benefit. Neil
Postman traces the beginning of this irrelevant inner world to the rise
of the telegraph in the early 1800s, and I have written of it myself,
quoting Postman’s work, in an
earlier essay. Postman
explains in Amusing
Ourselves to Death how the telegraph “made a three-pronged attack
on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale
irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence” (p. 65).
Before the telegraph, says Postman, “the information-action
ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being
able to control some of the contingencies in their lives.
What people knew about had action-value.
In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of
potency was lost” (p. 69). Third
significant concept: patriotism,
which has a very tight and powerful connection to the modern American
concept of sports. Every
four years, the State and their lackeys in the media do their best to
connect the performance of the State’s athletes in the Olympic Games
with the State itself. Noam
Chomsky talks in several instances about a realization he had in
high school: “I
suppose that’s also one of the basic functions (sports) serves in the
society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from
trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I
presume that’s part of the reason why spectator sports are supported
to the degree they are by the dominant institutions. “I
remember very well in high school having . . . asking myself, why do I
care if my high school football team wins? I don’t know anybody on the
team. They don’t know me. I wouldn’t know what to say to them if I
met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team
wins and all downcast if it loses? “.
. . the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of
meaningless community is training for subordination to power . . . .
All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of
human psychology . . . emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by
spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power
systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact,
it’s hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to
authoritarian attitudes than this does . . . .
So if you look at the whole phenomenon, it seems to me that it
plays quite a substantial social role.” Sports,
then, combines with television to implant in the inner mind a connection
between the game, the players, and the State.
This becomes even stronger with an Olympic contest pitting one
“nation” against another because this allows, as happened at Lake
Placid during that game in 1980, the home crowd to chant “USA, USA”
and wave American flags from the stands. Significant
question:
why, exactly, is this such news?
The media reports it the way it has because of its symbolic
usefulness to the State (not that they necessarily think of it in those
terms). It gives the State
yet another opportunity to impress upon the people its own overriding
importance, and the incessant succession of these moments, this
never-ending drumbeat, helps implant the idea of the State, of the
“nation,” of “the United States of America,” themselves all mere
concepts and constructs of the inner mind, so firmly and powerfully in
the minds of the public. The
media tells us that the victory of that hockey team more than 20 years
ago was so much more that a mere game – they tell us that it
represented a victory over the dreaded Soviet Union, our great enemy.
They tell us that it gave us hope again, that it made us all
believe in miracles, that it brought us together.
It makes us hear the chanting crowd, see again the goalie wrapped
in the flag looking for his father, feel again the pride of improbable
victory over all odds. All
these ideas, all these concepts and interpretations, come to us, like
the game itself, from the State’s lackeys in the media, whose
well-compensated assignment, as ever, is simply to say the right thing
so that we’ll think and thus do the right thing. The State doesn’t primarily bind people to it with significant major events like wars and elections; the State primarily binds people to it with insignificant minor events like sports and television because once it has you in all those little mindless things, it will have you in the big mindful ones, too. |
